Guild Wars 2

In my opinion players damage against gates should be limited to melee damage only.

Here are my reasons:

1. Gates currently allow for 3-4 Fire Rams to be placed in front of them in most cases. By limiting or removing player-trash damage you effectively put a cap on how fast a gate can be breached.

That way a 40 man zerg won’t be significantly faster at breaching a gate than a 20 man zerg and a counter-zerg should have a few more valuable seconds to react to an “inc”. It’s problematic to react to “incs” when a gate can be breached within 30 seconds.

2. Melee damage vs. gates is dangerous given all the splash damage coming through gates and the threat of burning oil. It would make it easier for defenders to deny attackers their keep by destroying their siege and keeping the melees at bay.

Yet it still allows for attackers to beat down that last 10% manually should the situation require it.

3. It gives melees a clear role to play during siege. Ranged cover the walls with AoE while melees contribute to beating down the gate.

4. Realism – Ok this is fairly irrelevant but it doesn’t make sense for arrows or projectiles to cause any serious damage to a gate. Historically all “manual” gate-breaching was done is melee range.

5. It slightly reduces breaching speed. Currently I’d estimate ranged contribute roughly 60% of all gate-trash damage. So removing that would ever-so slightly increase the time needed to breach a gate, thus giving the opposition more time to react and a higher probability of actual combat taking place. This increase will probably be off-set by the ram-specialization tree but something is better than nothing.

I close my case.

Yup and 50 man zerg will not be able to simply kitten down the gate from out of arrow cart range (the ones behind gates, im assuming the ones on walls have been cleared already) if their siege gets destroyed at 10%. Good idea. This would really help with defending outmanned as attackers would have to either get into melee range and eat damage or give defenders a breather by resupplying to build a catapult or some other ranged siege option.

Dee Jay.2460:

In my opinion players damage against gates should be limited to melee damage only.

Here are my reasons:

1. Gates currently allow for 3-4 Fire Rams to be placed in front of them in most cases. By limiting or removing player-trash damage you effectively put a cap on how fast a gate can be breached.

That way a 40 man zerg won’t be significantly faster at breaching a gate than a 20 man zerg and a counter-zerg should have a few more valuable seconds to react to an “inc”. It’s problematic to react to “incs” when a gate can be breached within 30 seconds.

2. Melee damage vs. gates is dangerous given all the splash damage coming through gates and the threat of burning oil. It would make it easier for defenders to deny attackers their keep by destroying their siege and keeping the melees at bay.

Yet it still allows for attackers to beat down that last 10% manually should the situation require it.

3. It gives melees a clear role to play during siege. Ranged cover the walls with AoE while melees contribute to beating down the gate.

4. Realism – Ok this is fairly irrelevant but it doesn’t make sense for arrows or projectiles to cause any serious damage to a gate. Historically all “manual” gate-breaching was done is melee range.

5. It slightly reduces breaching speed. Currently I’d estimate ranged contribute roughly 60% of all gate-trash damage. So removing that would ever-so slightly increase the time needed to breach a gate, thus giving the opposition more time to react and a higher probability of actual combat taking place. This increase will probably be off-set by the ram-specialization tree but something is better than nothing.

I close my case.

1. You completely forgot about Golems. You can stack 50 golems on a gate if you want to. Player dmg is not what is allowing zergs to breach the gates fast, melee or ranged. It’s Superior siege and Golems. Have you ever tried to man mode a gate with a huge zerg? Reinforced gates take a long time to man mode even with a big zerg.

2. Ranged dmg on gates is dangerous too. Arrow carts have much greater dmg then player range.
Again you completely forgot about Golems. Omega Siege Golems use range to attack. Your change would render them completely useless for siege.

3. Melee already have a clear roll to play during siege. Stack on the rams to help limit dmg on the people manning the siege. Block the portal during a push. Attack the gate. Man siege.

4. Let me pull out my realism helmet for a second and think back to the days of castle siege. I seem to recall mages throwing fireballs at gates and doing lots of damage. Also when they manifested fiery beasts to attack the gates they did a lot of dmg too. The hordes of undead minions where quiet effective as well.
Breaching was not done in melee range because of swords and hammers. It was done in melee range because rams needed to be carried into position.
You mention melee being better then arrows. A dagger would do exactly nothing against a massive gate. A broad tip arrow would be much more effective to a gate then a dagger.
Lets not forget that traditional Melee Weapons in this game have nothing to do with melee range. Range is more dictated by the class roll. The Mesmer GS is a Ranged weapon. Necro’s Axe’s are a medium ranged weapon. Rangers Axe’s are ranged skills.
Thiefs short bow has clusterbomb. An arrow with a bomb on it would probably do a ton of dmg to a gate. Engineers rifle has shotgun type skills that would do a good dmg to a gate. Should I go on?

5. Lets assume your estimate(which is completely baseless) is accurate. That 60% of trash dmg is a drop in the bucket compared to the dmg of superior rams. Sup rams dmg gates for over 12K and thats not counting the Vulnerability dmg from Flame Ram mastery.
People blowing through gates isn’t because of all the ranged doing dmg. It’s because they stacked flame rams or golems.

There is no reason to not allow Ranged to dmg gates. It would make more sense to either have no one do dmg or make it so only certain attacks do dmg but that would be a nightmare to program. If they wanted to control who could dmg gates it would make more sense to take a Shadowbane approach. You had to have a siege wepon equipped to dmg walls/gates but that would be a horrible change to this game.

Dee Jay.2460:

1. Gates currently allow for 3-4 Fire Rams to be placed in front of them in most cases. By limiting or removing player-trash damage you effectively put a cap on how fast a gate can be breached.

I have seen as many as 7 superior rams on 1 gate. It gets to be a bit ridiculous.
Also, I agree that there is a problem here, but getting rid of siege would not at all be a good solution, and is one that and won’t even consider, considering how wvw is centered around supply/siege. Instead, they should increase the health of gates/walls, limit the amount of rams able to be thrown down on a single gate to 2, and double the amount of supply that it takes to build a golem.

I think an argument could be made that doors AND walls should upgrade at T1 and T2 and T3. Walls and doors should probably have more effective HP as well, but removing ranged damage seems unimportant.

If your enemy is throwing 50 Golems at you then that’s quite an undertaking and doesn’t necessarily have to have viable counter.

But most sieges don’t involve Golems. They involve roughly 3 ram used to breach each gate accompanied by player trash damage.

I’m not trying to fix all the siege problems in GW2, but I believe this fix would be fairly simple and a step in the right direction.

Spoken like a true member of the warrior/guardian melee train meta- let’s make ranged squishies even more useless! yay!

If you stack in your heavy armor self healing melee ball at the gate you can melt t1 gates very quickly.

The solution to gates melting is not to exclude ranged damage from players, it’s to cap the amount of total damage a gate can take per second.

t1 gate should last a minimum of 2-3 minutes, no matter how many rams/players are hitting it, which gives enough time to react and get some defenders there. Add a minute for each upgrade level (there should be 3 levels).

In high tier matches 6 superior rams is nothing unusual and gates melt so quickly it’s not funny- and then the total cost of repairing a gate after a battle is so high in terms of supply that gates really don’t last long- but then that is deliberately a part of the game design.

Actually, I think doors should follow the same rules as walls and make so that only siege equipment can damage them.

There is nothing more frustrating then when a zerg just facerolls on your tower door and you can’t do anything to stop them. You can siege up your tower, have it manned, have early warning due to scouts, destroy every piece of siege they place with your prepared siege and still fail in defending because they will just dps the door down with superior numbers. You can’t wipe them since they grossly outnumber you, you can’t slowly kill them as anybody who gets downed will get instantly resurrected by his allies and you can’t outrepair their damage to gates hoping for reinforcements.

Now THAT is what needs changing.

Why should players be able to damage a gate at all? If you want to damage something, use siege. If they feel players should damage stuff, they should have to equipt siege weapons (crowbars, burning arrows, etc) and risk having these weapons still equipped when they have to repel attackers.

Siege Weapon — Uses your normal attacks. Deals 10% of damage to gates. 5% damage to walls. 1% damage to players.