Guild Wars 2

http://www.tentonhammer.com/preview/guild-wars-2-desert-borderland-first-impressions

Please explain me how it appears as viable decision to you to split up a zerg in order to move faster or be more effective.
Last time i checked, small groups were just as fast as zergs, measured in swiftness-uptime. The only difference is that small groups have less of a tail, and single players even tend to be slower than both, unless their class offers perma-swiftness.
What will happen is that the zerg gets active on your border around the oasis event, roflstomps the few defenders there, and then rushes the next keep. And on their way out they swoop the towers as well. If you want to defend, you better bring a blobb of your own, because they’ll just drop omegas / rams and chew trough these shiny new (and now damaged) T3 gates.
It really doesn’t matter how long travel-times are, since running supplies from camps still takes way longer than the zerg would need to re-approach it, so you’ll eat up your keep supplies, until it’s empty, which is where the gates go down, along with your lord, regardless how “engaging” his mechanics might be.

Every mechanic introduced on these borderlands hurts small groups even more than zergs. So if anything, these maps promote zerging rather than making it less viable.

Congratulation on eating up a stress-test-spot so you could enjoy the landscape, and thank you for the positive press. But please don’t pretend to understand the mechanics on the map, when you clearly don’t.

As soon as I read this line, I realized the author of this article probably doesn’t really understand the game mode or the actual challenges facing it:

I would personally consider two of the biggest problems facing World versus World to be the existing map size and “zerging”.

Just a hype article sponsored by ANet without any actual meaningful insight or substance, which can only be provided by actual WvW players. A cute advertisement for non-GW2/WvW players, but irrelevant drivel to everyone else.

Arantheal.7396:

Please explain me how it appears as viable decision to you to split up a zerg in order to move faster or be more effective.
Last time i checked, small groups were just as fast as zergs, measured in swiftness-uptime. The only difference is that small groups have less of a tail, and single players even tend to be slower than both, unless their class offers perma-swiftness.
What will happen is that the zerg gets active on your border around the oasis event, roflstomps the few defenders there, and then rushes the next keep. And on their way out they swoop the towers as well. If you want to defend, you better bring a blobb of your own, because they’ll just drop omegas / rams and chew trough these shiny new (and now damaged) T3 gates.
It really doesn’t matter how long travel-times are, since running supplies from camps still takes way longer than the zerg would need to re-approach it, so you’ll eat up your keep supplies, until it’s empty, which is where the gates go down, along with your lord, regardless how “engaging” his mechanics might be.

Every mechanic introduced on these borderlands hurts small groups even more than zergs. So if anything, these maps promote zerging rather than making it less viable.

Congratulation on eating up a stress-test-spot so you could enjoy the landscape, and thank you for the positive press. But please don’t pretend to understand the mechanics on the map, when you clearly don’t.

Small groups can move as quickly, they can’t however have as bigger impact on the game mode when they do reach their destination. A group of 5 is hardly capable of flipping a Keep quickly in comparison to a large one. By introducing a larger map size with multiple layers, large groups of players will have to split into smaller ones to be effective (instead of being a blob of 20, they might have to be two blobs of 10 or fewer). The impact being positive for the game mode as it’ll reduce zerging, encourage smaller fights and mean that Keep defence or capture is much different than it is now.

Lewis Burnell.2493:

Arantheal.7396:

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False. Compared to the current borderland, where towers are attackable from multiple sides, keeps have several gates / walls, and supply-routes coming from multiple directions, there is already enough incentive to split up in multiple groups and try to take objectives parallel.
Why do people not do it currently?
Because a blobb of players is so much stronger and has higher success chances, due to the high supply-count they bring to chew trough a single gate/wall. Small groups suffer from 1-chance symptoms, being forced to retreat much faster once their supply is depleted. Small groups suffer from higher incomming dmg from defenders, due to their lower numbers, and therefore less protection from the Aoe-cap. Sieged up and decently defended places are almost impossible to break for a small group, unless they can suprise the defenders with omegas or elevated ballistats to snipe their eige, and even then they only buy a time-window until defenders got up the next defensive siege from the supplies inside a tower.
Blobs don’t care. Blobs rezz downed allies much faster, blobs can keep pressure on a object much longer due to the high supply-count, blobbs can chew trough defenders extremely quick when the walls/gates go down and kill/cap the lord in seconds.

So even if the current borderlands would reward a smart approach in theory, in practice a blobb outperforms small havoc groups by a great margin.

So, what will the new Borderland change?
- All keeps are harder to approach. This affects both blobbs and hacov groups, but specifically the sandstorm can be a deathtrap to havoc groups, given the shrine got flipped after they moved in there. A blobb just stampedes trough that, in case it happens.
- All keeps will have elevated safe-zones for defenders (lava in case for the fire-keep). A havoc group may gets picked up one by one from the pressure from above, while trying to defend their attack point & siege. Blobs will just set up offensive AC’s and bring a abundance of rangers/elementalists/necros to keep deadly pressure on these -in fact very exposed – locations.
- All lords have engaging defensive mechanics, helping out the defenders in the lordroom. While a blob -again – just chews trough the lords health bar (unless he has invulnerability-cycles, like the earth-lord suggests), a havok group may fail here, even if they out-man the defenders 2v1. Practice will show that, but it will indeed be harder for smaler groups to kill a lord, including the tower-lords (stealth-teleporting ogre, isn’t that fun!?).
- The oasis event will dmg enemy gates every 3h. Again, a blobb will just temporarely split up, flood the center to decide the even for it, and then jump the next keep, while a havoc group is not even guaranteed to make this event, and due to the fact that gates all together have now elevated platforms around them, will not have the abundance of supplies to set up offensive AC’s, and the needed abundance of elementalists, rangers & necros to chew trough these damaged structures.
- shrines allow for powerful defensive mechanics. There is not a single server out there that ONLY has zone-blobs, so while the blob is aproaching the keep, they flip all 3 shrines for the stat-boosts, leave their roamers back, and then storm the keep, calling in their roamers just in time to get the cap as well. And defenders will simply not be able to deal with defending 4! spots at the same time, unless they call in a defensive blobb of their own, first clearing the attackers, and then pushing off the roamers.

Permanently splitting off into small groups is a dumb move, unless you need to defend. And these new borderlands don’t change anything about that.
My source: Playing WvW since 2 years, and knowing exactly what a blob & havoc group is capable off or not.

While lower tiers will enjoy the new maps in the way they are meant to be played (due to low WvW population), the common and most effective tactic on higher tiers will be blobing. It makes small groups even less viable, due to the great buff for defenders, coming from the PvE on the map, the towers/keeps layout, and the coming – borderline OP – guild-upgrades for towers. Especially the later will be the only real anti-blob-mechanic they have introduced IF it is powerful enough. Else it will just promote blobing more, since havoc groups certainly can’t deal with that on top of everything else.

Lewis Burnell.2493:

Small groups can move as quickly, they can’t however have as bigger impact on the game mode when they do reach their destination. A group of 5 is hardly capable of flipping a Keep quickly in comparison to a large one. By introducing a larger map size with multiple layers, large groups of players will have to split into smaller ones to be effective (instead of being a blob of 20, they might have to be two blobs of 10 or fewer). The impact being positive for the game mode as it’ll reduce zerging, encourage smaller fights and mean that Keep defence or capture is much different than it is now.

What is your WvW rank? I’m interested to know.