Guild Wars 2

It seems every design choice in WvW is made to favor the zerg or bigger number side, and Swirling Winds is no different.

Here is a scenario that happened recently. Undermanned side, 5-7 defenders in a tower. The tower is perfectly sieged up defensively, with arrow carts and multiple catapults to cover any common attacking siege placement.

Zerg shows up of about 20 attackers. Without regard to this topic, this is a defensive position that the 5-7 defenders, though outmanned can and should be able to hold out for a very long time if they defend properly. The attackers still have a natural advantage, and can likely win through attrition and starving supply. This is fair. But just maybe the defense will hold out long enough till some reinforcements show up, or the attackers will get discouraged.

But what happens via swirling winds, 3-4 eles camp under the siege build sites, attackers throw up 3 catapults, and have a near invincible ‘in’ to the tower in short order. The defenders land a lucky odd hit here or there, but not nearly enough in time to stop the 3 catapults taking down the wall, despite proper siege defense.

Going outside to confront the zerg is not an option 20 people are going to slay 5-7 fairly easily in any normal circumstance. And even if you stealth kill an ele or two, they get rezzed.

This is not skilled gameplay. Sitting on one’s rear in one location simply hitting an easily timed skill when a giant rock descends is not improving the gamemode, and is actually cheapening the core mechanics, and value of siege vis-a-vis offensive vs defensive placement, which should favor the defense behind walls.

It almost feels at times as if this game does not want you to bother if you are on the undermanned side.

I’ve said already that reflect/absorb projectibles shound’t be able to block catapults and trebuchets (Arrow Carts and Balistas are OK)… But people just say it would turn elementalists useless and blahblahblah. So i had enough of trying to discuss that topic… I’ve been away from WvW for a while anyway…

I do think this ability adds some strategy to WvW. But you do make a point about it being yet another favor to zerging.

The team with most Elementalist always win… As they can destroy siege on the walls with gigantic AoE zones, or protect their sieges from enemy sieges.

Swirling wind makes zerging even more appealing, stack ele and you get constant ranged and siege protection. Taking it out will make defending against zergs a much better experience.

pot.6805:

I do think this ability adds some strategy to WvW..

Not much its a pretty brain dead easy tactic. Even pug zergs can pull this off now. Call 3-4 eles, tell them to put on their focus, and step forward when its their turn.

What you lose is far more than you gain, and what you lose is having to care at all about where you place your offensive siege. If you have more Ele’s, and numbers, plop stuff down anywhere. But without this ability siege placement actually has some strategic complexity as you have to use your head to figure out a weak spot in a strcuture’s defense, where can I sneak up a cata where the defense can’t hit it. Or can we quick build a ballista maybe to take down some of their siege so we can get a ram up.

The zerg is usually going to win in the end anyway, but this speeds things up many times over and just helps a zerg overrun an entire map that much faster, and this is not desirable. Not for competition of a match, not for population in WvW, and certainly not for defending being worth a darn. Anet wonders how to get more people to defend or to reward them, first step would be allowing defenders, even out-manned to have the high ground siege advantage that should be inherent in this type of warfare.

The advantage to having your siege behind high walls is that the attackers can’t hit a lot of it. That is why you have a darn fort in the first place. This lets the attackers have the exact same advantage. I’m standing in the middle of an open field, but somehow my siege is entirely protected as well as being in the fort, doesn’t make sense.

To cordinate 4 eles to time SW (min needed to defend properly aganist one incoming siege) is not that simple, to say it take no skill mean a person understand very little of it and how to counter it, if a tower is well defend as one claims, then it should have access to to more than one cat/treb, which 2 or 3 people can easily use to get passed SW if properly time.

Battle of attrition is not any more skilliful anyways and boring as hell, all your doing is turtling in a tower and waiting on your own zerg to wipe out the enemy, you should be happy that you only need a group of 20 people could take a heavly defended tower,
Either that or 50 plus people bushing their faces in to the door.

Correct me if I’m wrong but swirling winds don’t block balistas and arrow carts so you have a counter for this tactic.

gabal.4520:

Correct me if I’m wrong but swirling winds don’t block balistas and arrow carts so you have a counter for this tactic.

In an undermanned vs zerg situation though, building ballista on the edges of your structure is almost never going to work in most towers and keeps, because it is too vulnerable.

Arrow carts sure, but their range is so small, most zergs will not be dumb enough to place cata/trebs in range.

The poster above that said basically be glad that this speeds up the zerg winning… Err what. Why don’t we just count which team has more on the map, and call the winner based on that then. The zerg does not need more advantages such as this.

Fight fire with fire I say, have ele’s of your own doing the same thing. Infact now, if i start seeing my shots being blocked, I’ll test how often it is blocked and I can determine just about how many ele’s they might have. I’ll build more siege to counter it, and i’ll have my guys mix shots, from cows to rocks, just random. Make them use up their SM.

True story here, defending Hills, and the enemy built several trebs on supply cliff edge, I couldn’t damage them i figured they had at least 6 ele’s stacked blocking the trebs from mine. I finally got off the treb, told my crew to keep firing. I ran and came in from the north entrance of the supply camp, as I figured they were watching the south side closest to hills. I went invisible with all my invis skills i had on my mesmer, and came right up to the edge of the rock all the ele’s was standing on, and pulled them right off the cliff. One shot later from the trebs all their trebs were dead. I was laughing so hard, that made my day.

Godfather.8217:

Fight fire with fire I say, have ele’s of your own doing the same thing. Infact now, if i start seeing my shots being blocked, I’ll test how often it is blocked and I can determine just about how many ele’s they might have. I’ll build more siege to counter it, and i’ll have my guys mix shots, from cows to rocks, just random. Make them use up their SM.

Well yeah the ability is fair with even numbers. In that case if one side is just able to organize it and the other isn’t, that’s just tough luck.

But the issue is when you have a big numerical advantage on one side, it is a major (overly so imo) force multiplier for your siege. That basically puts the onus on the defenders to have to go outside and defeat a greater force to blow up attacking siege, because they can’t do it from inside their structure, which is kind of the whole point of holding a fortified position.

In the example I gave, we didn’t even have an ele in the tower, and if we did have 1, well one against 4, easy to see who wins. Besides which ele’s have to go outside to protect the bottom of walls with swirling winds, where they will just get eaten up by the zerg.

The fact remains that a group of 20 people who were coordinated enough to intelligently place siege and then organize a defense of it with swirling winds certainly deserves to take an objective defended by 5-7 people. It’s not like this is an OP maneuver that lets a braindead zerg take objectives in 5 minutes, it still took the attacking force time and effort to succeed. It favors coordination, not merely numbers.

It still takes a long time to catapult down walls, during which time your 5-7 people can be attempting to counter during the holes on swirling winds coverage, suicide on the siege taking them down tic by tic, or calling allies from other maps to aid you if this location has had such investment of siege and upgrades in it.

O.o;;

what next, normal attack that attacks more than one target is favoring the zerg. .

This really needs to be looked at, considering how powerful preventing cat/treb shots really is, on top of the enormous aoe and small cooldown.

Thor.1756:

The fact remains that a group of 20 people who were coordinated enough to intelligently place siege and then organize a defense of it with swirling winds certainly deserves to take an objective defended by 5-7 people. It’s not like this is an OP maneuver that lets a braindead zerg take objectives in 5 minutes, it still took the attacking force time and effort to succeed. It favors coordination, not merely numbers.

It still takes a long time to catapult down walls, during which time your 5-7 people can be attempting to counter during the holes on swirling winds coverage, suicide on the siege taking them down tic by tic, or calling allies from other maps to aid you if this location has had such investment of siege and upgrades in it.

You just don’t get it, do you? Here, the point is this: swirling winds made the fight trivial.
I sorta like the idea of mages blocking siege. It looks cool and makes some sieging situations a lot wizards interesting, but it’s true it has the unfortunate side-effect of enpowering zergs.
Maybe make it so that trebutchet has a 30% chance to ignore the swirling wind, superior one bypassing it 50% of time, or something.

Sovereign.1093:

O.o;;

what next, normal attack that attacks more than one target is favoring the zerg. .

Well no, but when people are limited to how many people their AoE hits…..

5-7 people could rush 3 catas and destroy them before dieing if there were 20 attackers!

I am an ele and can understand why this is annoying. Simple fix that wouldn’t bother me one bit: make it last 3-4 seconds (same 24s cooldown). That is still plenty time to block a shot by timing, but now you require 8-6 eles coordinating a boring task – not gonna happen perfectly. Alternatively, SW could just block up to X projectiles. I am not sure how this changes the balance of the focus for other purposes (is SW useful outside of WvW? I only use focus for SW.), but seems fair.

You cannot blame one skill from one class for a basically broken game. As Pendragon said:

“That basically puts the onus on the defenders to have to go outside and defeat a greater force to blow up attacking siege, because they can’t do it from inside their structure, which is kind of the whole point of holding a fortified position”

Exactly the thing that has been bothering me since day one. As a defender you should have double if not tripple range from atop the walls to start with and alot better protection. And taking terrain into account, be able to drop aoe almost anywhere you want within reasonable range. Not having to manouvre the walls, exposing yourself to enemy fire and pulls and pan your camera around to get that one tiny spot from where you can just barely drop your full barrage or meteor right in front of the gate.

Make that so, double hitpoints on gates and put a cap on the number of rams that can be placed in front of the gate. Siegewarfare is lethal for the attackers and alot less so for the defenders. That should be reflected into the game. Yes, numerical advantage will still most probably win in the end. But with decent defense they might not because they simply dont want to commit or are 13 year old ragequiters who never heard of tactics and commiting yourself to a goal. But think zerging is all there is to "online"warfare. And unfortunatly unless Anet does something about it, they are right. Untill Anet fixes it and they get smashed in the face so hard Youtube will be flooded with ragequiting, keyboard destroying 13-15 year olds because they died trying to take a keep defended by 5-10 players only. Really looking forward to that day lol

I wonder what the next QQ would be.

You were not “perfectly sieged up defensively”. Nor does your position sound like it was fortified. Otherwise, you would have held the position.

From my perspective, If S.W. goes, WvW will go down with it. It’s a pivotal skill that is required. Unfortunately, WvW is design as all area’s of combat are designed. To keep an effectively high turn over rate to induced an adrenaline response in the player. Thus, if you think Zerging is bad now, just wait until you have no way of stopping treb’s. The sensation of everything being paper or disposable will just go up and up.

Trust me, as a T1 Ele who’s ‘defended’ walls for easily an hour straight, it’s not that easy. S.W. is also not rewarded in game for the individual. The world as a collective makes out on the PPT.

kuora.5402:

I wonder what the next QQ would be.

T8!

Honestly, the only thing that would be really effective in discouraging zergs are friendly fire, and that doesn’t fit with GW2 at all. :p

Jeknar.6184:

kuora.5402:

I wonder what the next QQ would be.

T8!

That nobody gives a kitten about

I’m sorry but can someone explain to me again:

What’s the difference between server vs server and battleground if not for the size of the zerg?

In spvp you capture objectives, hold it for as long as you can til reinforcement arrives

In wpvp you capture keeps and towers, hold it for as long as you can til reinforcement arrives

The only difference is the size of the zerg.

So really, when you signed up for wpvp, you’re actually getting what you signed up for – a zerg fest where people zerg left and right and whoever has the bigger zerg pretty much wins. (unless they’re terrabad.)

Discouraging zerg would be like discouraging the entire point of wpvp, and I really don’t think Anet is and should be going down that path.

Swirling Winds can be used to a small group’s advantage too provided they’ve got a good amount of eles. The way you’re arguing this can be said about everything in the game. Even the AoE cap removal people pine for gives the zerg more of an advantage. There’s little even the devs can do. More people means more everything.

Dual.8953:

Swirling Winds can be used to a small group’s advantage too provided they’ve got a good amount of eles.

Well that’s the problem, isn’t it.

A 40-man tower attack group will surely have 6 elementalists just incidentally — plenty to provide full time protection to a nice sized patch of field.

A 5-man tower defense group will probably have 1 elementalist if they’re lucky, and 1 elementalist can’t even protect 1 siege engine, especially when there’s multiple siege engines shooting at it.

Not that I think 5 should defeat 40 but it would be nice if you could at least slow them down or force them to do something more clever than build catapults within plain sight of the walls, especially when the tower defenders have had plenty of time to prepare and have ample siege of their own.

It is an intended mechanic. If they are building the cats in range of an arrow cart quickly build an arrow cart to tear them up. if they are building them out of range of an arrow cart use multiple catapults/trebuchet to counter. Trebuchet splash is large and you can aim it right to left to try to splash the catapults by landing the shot outside of where the winds are stacking.

If you forced your enemy to use cat at range you have ALREADY delayed them significantly. Notifiy friendly forces to come to your aid.

Pendragon.8735:

But the issue is when you have a big numerical advantage on one side, it is a major (overly so imo) force multiplier for your siege. That basically puts the onus on the defenders to have to go outside and defeat a greater force to blow up attacking siege, because they can’t do it from inside their structure, which is kind of the whole point of holding a fortified position.

That’s why most real-world fortifications have sally ports. Defenders having to go outside the fortifications at times is an intrinsic component of siege warfare.

Nerf swirling winds for all I care, it just means I can salvage my focus and won’t have to spend hours inside a structure catching treb shots. Fine with me.

I am pretty certain almost every ele out there would be happy if swirling winds was nerfed even though it currently is the only reason to ever use a focus.

it take 2-3 ele to stop 1 treb at long range, it takes more to stop a single cata. if the enemy got 4-5 ele, build a 2nd cata and alternate fire, problem solved. defender still has the advantage in terms of efficiency per player. 2 cata > 4 ele 3 cata >6 ele, etc etc. the opponent pays double the price to get what they need to defend against urs. just dont expect ur 1 seige to go through 5 player spending their time doing swirl sole. it not only removes their combat potential massively, its 5 person to counter 1 person on seige sounds reasonable.

also, skilled seige user would vary the shot little by little to try and dodge through swirl and half the time pugs are… a little slow on realizing the fact and u get a few hit in. while the advantage is on the swirl side, it still requires skill on both side, there are just 2 many idiots who just repeat the same power/direction on seige and then QQ about swirl without even trying.

Why does everything favor the zerg?

Because when you have more players, you can do exponentially more things. That’s why in your example, more than 2 v 1 odds, they win. IF they have 4 eles in the group who have half a clue.

It’s not the skills that make this possible. It’s the extra 10 people they have to keep you from stopping them from doing ANYTHING they want. An extra 10 people is a LOT of people. If anything, it the keep design that makes this scenario favor the zerg. It should take hours to burn down a wall. The gate should be the only real weak point unless you have tons and tons of siege.

But my point is no matter how they design the skills, a group with twice your numbers to the tune of ten extra players will find a way to wipe you out, even in a tower. No mater HOW they design the skills.

If you had 3 extra eles you could swirling winds the walls and stalemate. See? It’s the leverage that you cant’t fight them toe to to and you can’t keep more than 10 at a time busy.

And if you weaken swirling winds, then trebbing from keeps is insta win anyways.

Like I said… that many more people, yes. You are going to lose unless they a not very good, or you are RG (Redguard guild who routinely can do stuff like defend a tower with 6 people for hours.)

When this happens and you don’t have anyone willing to suicide their siege down, you should prepare for your gates/walls to be taken down and build inner siege appropriately (for example, a few ballistae near the guild claimer and arrow carts out of harms way). Once inside, the enemy force still needs to make their way through multiple choke points in order to actually take any tower or keep. Plan accordingly!

I’ve used Swirling Winds many times to protect counter-siege and stop forces that easily out man the few defenders inside. Its utility goes both ways. You may be happy to know that with so many of their elementalists using a focus, they have very little CC capability and reaching their siege may be a bit easier.

Jeknar.6184:

The team with most Elementalist always win… As they can destroy siege on the walls with gigantic AoE zones, or protect their sieges from enemy sieges.

They are also one of the best 1v1 classes and have very high mobility. They are the Mary Sue of GW2.

Move along folks. Nothing to see here but a silly complaint. People won’t be happy until everything becomes about as useful as hitting or blocking someone with a feather.

Pendragon.8735:

This is not skilled gameplay.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Sooo. 3 Ele’s working together to chain their Swirling Winds is not skillful play? Buuuut, sitting in a tower and spamming a siege engine mindlessly is?

And i see a lot of people use the word “favor” these days. Im not sure you people know what that word really means…
They are commiting 20+ people to take your little tower, which is only holding 7 of your people. Where are the other people from your server?

I mean for god sake, you were outnumbered 3 to 1! What do you expect, that you can just hold it easily for a long time? Then it would be pointless to ever attack anything.

Getting kinda tired of all these “X clearly favors zergs!” and then seeing people post a load of nonsense or the obvious. Whats next? Going to complain that more people kill a keeplord faster?… ow wait, im sure someone already has…

Always ignoring the obvious that people are a resource in WvW, and when more people are faced against less people thats the other server concentrating more of its potential in that place. Meaning they will have less people in other places… hint… hint…

covenn.7165:

I am pretty certain almost every ele out there would be happy if swirling winds was nerfed even though it currently is the only reason to ever use a focus.

Tell your Thieves to stop slacking and use Smoke Screen. Also blocks siege.

This same idea can be applied to anything.

Autoattack on 1 favors zergs. More people autoattacking means more damage,ergo, zergs are favored.

The only thing one I can buy is the AOE limit favoring the zerg. If 50 people stand on a spot and I nuke that spot, all 50 people should suck up the damage. That’s why it’s Area Of Effect.

I think people are missing the point of this. This isn’t about zergs, this is about a skill that completely nullifies all projectiles, most siege included, in a huge AoE for 6 seconds with a 30 second (24 seconds traited) cooldown. The fact that you only need four elementalists to completely negate projectiles in a large area is a huge imbalance, rivaled only by culling-abusing mesmer portals. Countering siege just adds insult to injury. Thieves, guardians, and any other class that may have some siege prevention skill compared to swirling winds lacks AoE coverage, duration, a short cooldown, or all three. The zerg only makes the problem blatantly obvious.

I think I’m definitely missing the point. So the problem is profession skills function differently, coordination brings success, or that the counter requires some non-projectile based attacks (which all classes have)? Don’t you think there should be some kind of counter/delay to getting sieged or do you like that towers can be trebbed from inside the safety of adjacent towers?

Honestly, you can see such powerful coordination with 4+ of any profession: 4 guardians could prevent anyone without stability/teleport from getting through a choke point, 5 traited mesmers could keep feedback up indefinitely, 4 thieves can stealth 20 people for 15 seconds, 5 warriors could stunlock and explode any player, etc.

Just about every profession brings something unique to the table – do you want them to have the same skills just with different names/visuals? Or do you just want them to remove defensive skills altogether?

Lord Yoshi.6738:

This isn’t about zergs, this is about a skill that completely nullifies all projectiles, most siege included, in a huge AoE for 6 seconds with a 30 second (24 seconds traited) cooldown. The fact that you only need four elementalists to completely negate projectiles in a large area is a huge imbalance

You need 5 Ele’s working together perfectly. Secondly, it has a limited range. Huge? Hardly. The splash from a treb or cata is quite wide. Wide enough to hit you while the projectile lands outside of SW.
If they have 5 Ele’s blocking then you need 2 pieces of siege to cover the different impact points. Seems balanced to me…

While on the subject. Smokescreen. also blocks Siege projectiles and lasts 7 seconds! With a 30sec cooldown that can also be traited down to 24.
So SW is only argueably better. Larger coverage vs Higher uptime.

You seem to want to compare protecting Siege, provided you have half a dozen people coordinating. To bypassing walls/siege/everything. Even sneakily, and inducing horrible culling issues. Quite an exegeration…

After testing the trebs in the mists, I found the AoE radius to be 300 units from the point of impact. Swirling winds has a radius of 400 units. Even if the siege unit had a hit radius of 200 units, That would require you to aim a shot from however far away and hit the equivalent area of two standing characters next to eachother, hoping that the elementalist doesn’t move to compensate. See the attached image for a visual representation of its “limited” range. Also, it doesn’t require much skill at all to determine which elementalist will cast next when you just tell that one to step forward. Even more, comparing swirling winds to smoke screen, a wall skill that barely covers anything compared to a circular AoE. Smoke screen is absolutely horrendous at blocking siege.

ur comparing the splash range of a cannon to a treb.. or at least ur screenshot shows the radius of a cannon.

i can tell u for a fact that treb splash radius is bigger then swirling winds. i been on swirl duty, just swirling on top of a seige does not protect the seige. it can be hit even when the counter seige land outside swirl range. if it wasnt the case, swirling would be such an easy job except, nop good seige users vary the shot so u have to move around to make sure ur swirl blocks it.

The mists lobby treb and cannon have the same impact AoE, but the treb doesn’t have a radius tool. By all means, try it out yourself! I’d test a treb in WvW against random mobs, but our server doesn’t have a single one set up at the moment. Also, post numbers instead of simply saying the AoE is bigger. What is the impact AoE radius of a catapult and treb in WvW? How did you figure it out?

showatt.9413:

I’m sorry but can someone explain to me again:

What’s the difference between server vs server and battleground if not for the size of the zerg?

In spvp you capture objectives, hold it for as long as you can til reinforcement arrives

In wpvp you capture keeps and towers, hold it for as long as you can til reinforcement arrives

The only difference is the size of the zerg.

So really, when you signed up for wpvp, you’re actually getting what you signed up for – a zerg fest where people zerg left and right and whoever has the bigger zerg pretty much wins. (unless they’re terrabad.)

Discouraging zerg would be like discouraging the entire point of wpvp, and I really don’t think Anet is and should be going down that path.

They’re doing it now. The game is approaching 1 year old fast and really what have we got out of it a dead zone, a dead dungeon with a dead mechanic a bunch of seasonal fluff and finally after nearly 8 months a quick fix to plug a finger in the hole thats draining its player base the (imo) overly hyped “turning off culling” that if it backfires will surely spell doom for a huge portion of their player base.

I’ve seen it used to save a treb in a tower that was being attacked by 2 enemy trebs that were quick built by a large force. The tower had like 10 defenders, so it isn’t just favoring the “zerg”.

I haven’t seen it be OP, I’ve seen it used to slow the destruction of siege but it isn’t an instant defensive win. What could help is if ANET made the balista siege shot 4000m range, so you could quick build one and at least hit catas. Forces enemies to get close to the keep/tower to get the balista, which maybe has AC cover/support. And just that balista shot, not the other 2 used on infantry.