Guild Wars 2

TLDR: WvW needs significant improvements to castle/tower defence to make it interesting again (suggestions at end).

Heroic castle battles used to involve small numbers of beleaguered defenders holding their castles against overwhelming numbers. That’s what those huge battlements were for. To take a castle, an attacking army had to go into the field, exposing themselves to counter attacks by the defending garrison and relieving armies. Meanwhile, a much smaller number of defenders could hold the much larger force at bay until overwhelmed, relief arrived or the attackers gave up. The result was a rich combination of siege and open field warfare.

But design problems and recent changes have dismantled what little of this there remains in WvW, and in doing so have made WvW even more of a mindless zerg v zerg environment.

Specific problems:

• Rewards for defending are so low that it’s far more lucrative to be outside attacking than inside defending.
• Castles/towers that previously could only be attacked from the field can now be attacked from the safety of other castles/towers.
  (In history, castles/towers that became vulnerable to this sort of attack were scrapped and rebuilt in locations without this fundamental weakness.)
• Castles walls do not give an effective combat advantage to defenders (killing a single target on the ground from a castle wall currently requires multiple coordinated defenders).
• GW2 combat mechanics mean that Zergs can be effectively immune to damage directed at them from castles/towers.
• Defenders have only two effective tactics: counter zerging and arrow-carting choke points (all except the front of gates which often can’t be reached – another fundamental design flaw).
• Running through enemies and dodging over wards means attacking forces must zerg to have any hope of blockading the gate when besieging a tower.
• Being able to WP in to defend a besieged castle removes the value of divide attacking forces to cover multiple gates and concentrates attackers back into a single zerg.

And now it looks like trebuchets may also drain supply in attacked towers/castles, trivialising defence even further.

Instead of driving rich combinations of field and siege warfare, WvW’s towers and castles now act merely as pause and choke points for zergs. The result is that WvW has deteriorated to . There’s negligible incentive for intelligent battles in the field and little to no opportunity or value in intelligent siege or defence (except perhaps for SMC).

If we want WvW to be more than zerg v zerg with objective flipping then we need to recreate the value of tower and castle defence. In particular:

1. Provide meaningful rewards to players who defend a tower/castle against attack (the defend event you get if someone smacks the gate as they run past doesn’t cut it).
2. Fix trebuchet range so that towers/castles can be attacked only from the field.
3. Give defenders on a wall bonuses when attacking enemies on the ground.
4. Redesign gate entrances so that defenders can cover them effectively from relative safety.
5. Upgrade corner towers to better cover of walls and better protect defenders/siege in those towers. (For balance, upgraded towers could be beaten down again by siege.)
6. Implement double gates where those are part of the design (e.g. Bay north gate) and make double gates an upgrade option.
7. Remove castle WPs or block them properly so that defenders cannot WP in to a castle under attack.
8. Provide traps that make gates unusable for a fixed period.
9. Provide unblockable knockback attacks on defensive siege to break up attacking zergs.

Good post, but I don’t think it will all be implemented.

For me, removing player damage to gates and reducing treb range would work wonders.

I agree I always felt that defense was lacking in WvW. However, Anet wants players to be able to join in at any time and get a feel of accomplishment as soon as possible. That’s why towers can be flipped so darn quickly.

Where’s the defensive version of the breakout event when outnumbered?

As you’ve described, there aren’t enough defensive counters. How does a group counter a treb that is at a higher vantage point? You don’t, you sit there and let the tower fall apart around you. Trebs take the fun out of WvW IMO, especially when players can take supply from other maps to build them.

I had a good laugh when I saw this image on The Queen’s Speech page.
https://d3b4yo2b5lbfy.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/c27c905-Trebuchet.jpg

If Anet solves the defense problem, they will solve the zerg problem. Once a tower is captured, there is almost no reason to stay there and defend it. Servers should have to be attacking and defending more than one area of the map at once or risk losing everything.

I would like to see all walls and gates become weaker, but give the players the tools and weapons needed to defend it well. Make it so that when no one is defending, a tower would become paper, but when people are actively defending, it becomes a fortress.

What if we could build a weapon that shot treb shots out of the sky, but only worked at a high angle?

What if a flame ram could break down a gate in five hits unless someone on the other side was activating the gate’s barrier at the right time to reinforce it?

What if the gate’s barrier could be damaged by catapults?

What if catapults were very weak to player damage?

The last time Arenanet tried to buff defence we had the whole arrow cart debacle.

Reward defenders – yes please.
Buff defence – no / reconsider.

Buffing defence makes objectives even harder to take which in turn encourages zergs to form up in order to overwhelm the extra layers of defence.

Usually when the gates are up, the defenders (even when they have greater numbers!) will generally turtle and won’t PvP until the gates are open.

I say: PvP is the fun bit – walls and gates delay PvP – let’s get them open so we can fight.

The main issue is that you want an objective to be difficult to open/take when there overwhelming numbers outside (e.g., 80 outside vs 15 inside) – but easy to open when there are smaller (5 vs 10) or even numbers (18 vs 22) outside.

The only way I could see that happening is to buff the hit points on walls/gates based on the map or radius population. When a huge zerg floats into your borderlands and drops 3 omegas on your keep then you want those gates to be rock solid because you are outnumbered greatly. On the other hand, if you have 20 defenders v 20 attackers then it’s going to be an even fight and you want those doors open quick to get the PvP happening before a float zerg arrives. If you have a 5 player guild group attacking a tower against 10 defenders then you want those gates open ultra quick so the guild group has time to PvP against double their numbers and then cap the objective (assuming they win) before the float zerg arrives to wipe them.

TL;DR: Need to be careful about buffing/nerfing – lots of unintended consequences can result.

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

The last time Arenanet tried to buff defence we had the whole arrow cart debacle.

Reward defenders – yes please.
Buff defence – no / reconsider.

Your idea of reward is very different to the average zerglings idea of reward.

Zerglings won’t defend if they don’t get any monetary/Wxp/xp/karma rewards from it.

Kasei.8726:

I had a good laugh when I saw this image on The Queen’s Speech page.
https://d3b4yo2b5lbfy.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/c27c905-Trebuchet.jpg

Artistic freedom I guess. I challenge the designers to make an exciting video of typical trebuchet use against that tower.

The typical use of trebuchet against the lake tower is building it on hills corner tower. You build it at very edge of the all to make it harder to reach by elementalists. Then you sit there for 10, 20 or 30 minutes lobbing burning rocks into mist far below. Seeing floating numbers on screen is the only evidence of your progess. Until finally seeing the numbers no more tell you that the wall is down. Fun times.

Zenguy.6421:

• Being able to WP in to defend a besieged castle removes the value of divide attacking forces to cover multiple gates and concentrates attackers back into a single zerg.
  <snip>
• Remove castle WPs or block them properly so that defenders cannot WP in to a castle under attack.

I recall the brief availability of waypoint between siege timers has been acknowledge as something they want to fix by ANet. (can’t search for the thread as the Forums search tool is not working) I would imagine the fix would be keeping the waypoint unavailable couple of extra seconds after a siege timer hits zero.

EFWinters.5421:

Good post, but I don’t think it will all be implemented.

For me, removing player damage to gates and reducing treb range would work wonders.

yes that pvdooring and thieves tagging the gate to contest wp is ridiculous atm. having trebs using supply in keep favors zergs that build a treb in open field and u cant countertreb and have to wait helpless inside till zerg trebs walls down and storms in.

anet should improve defense for keeps and towers. atm a zerg gan just take everything in minutes. omega golems are hard to counter as noone can really be o the walls if a 60 man zerg hits keep. there should be viable counters to all that, but hey we got treb mastery and next update it will be golem mastery that will destroy wvw for good.

how about new upgrades for towers and keeps?
how about making it harder for the enemy to get to the keep. trebs are hard to counter like the ones from smc and the ones form woodhaven to garry. they can hit you, but u cant hit them.
treb mastery could make things worse and i see a new “ac-like disaster coming up”

selan.8354:

EFWinters.5421:

Good post, but I don’t think it will all be implemented.

For me, removing player damage to gates and reducing treb range would work wonders.

yes that pvdooring and thieves tagging the gate to contest wp is ridiculous atm. having trebs using supply in keep favors zergs that build a treb in open field and u cant countertreb and have to wait helpless inside till zerg trebs walls down and storms in.

anet should improve defense for keeps and towers. atm a zerg gan just take everything in minutes. omega golems are hard to counter as noone can really be o the walls if a 60 man zerg hits keep. there should be viable counters to all that, but hey we got treb mastery and next update it will be golem mastery that will destroy wvw for good.

how about new upgrades for towers and keeps?
how about making it harder for the enemy to get to the keep. trebs are hard to counter like the ones from smc and the ones form woodhaven to garry. they can hit you, but u cant hit them.
treb mastery could make things worse and i see a new “ac-like disaster coming up”

Zergs cannot take everything, if they are stopped by a group more coordinated, skilled, and tactical than the zerg.

The Zerg can only achieve victory against small groups they outnumber, in which makes sense to me. Why should a group of 5 people be able to hold off 60 people. I have seen groups of 15-30 contain and/or kill entire zergs of 60+.

Using only their skill and knowledge of the game’s combat system.

If you are refusing to join a dedicated WvW guild, the most you can do is man an arrow cart if they refuse to have you on their voice comms. If they allow you in the voice comms, join in and be part of the action.

bradderzh.2378:

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

The last time Arenanet tried to buff defence we had the whole arrow cart debacle.

Reward defenders – yes please.
Buff defence – no / reconsider.

Your idea of reward is very different to the average zerglings idea of reward.

Zerglings won’t defend if they don’t get any monetary/Wxp/xp/karma rewards from it.

Que? As it says in your quotation of me, I am pro rewards – money, karma, wXP – defenders should get that stuff.

After seeing how much ACs have ruined small scale ops on walled/gated objectives – I’m totally against buffing supply camps, towers, keeps and castles.

PredatoR.5247:

selan.8354:

EFWinters.5421:

Good post, but I don’t think it will all be implemented.

For me, removing player damage to gates and reducing treb range would work wonders.

yes that pvdooring and thieves tagging the gate to contest wp is ridiculous atm. having trebs using supply in keep favors zergs that build a treb in open field and u cant countertreb and have to wait helpless inside till zerg trebs walls down and storms in.

anet should improve defense for keeps and towers. atm a zerg gan just take everything in minutes. omega golems are hard to counter as noone can really be o the walls if a 60 man zerg hits keep. there should be viable counters to all that, but hey we got treb mastery and next update it will be golem mastery that will destroy wvw for good.

how about new upgrades for towers and keeps?
how about making it harder for the enemy to get to the keep. trebs are hard to counter like the ones from smc and the ones form woodhaven to garry. they can hit you, but u cant hit them.
treb mastery could make things worse and i see a new “ac-like disaster coming up”

Zergs cannot take everything, if they are stopped by a group more coordinated, skilled, and tactical than the zerg.

The Zerg can only achieve victory against small groups they outnumber, in which makes sense to me. Why should a group of 5 people be able to hold off 60 people. I have seen groups of 15-30 contain and/or kill entire zergs of 60+.

Using only their skill and knowledge of the game’s combat system.

If you are refusing to join a dedicated WvW guild, the most you can do is man an arrow cart if they refuse to have you on their voice comms. If they allow you in the voice comms, join in and be part of the action.

sorry but i have to disagree with this. i am in fact in a coordinated guild and our server has very coordinated groups and great commanders. we have wiped zergs way bigger than our numbers, but the current meta is terrible, because u die to 1 million conditions within seconds, while the biggerzergs masscleanses their conditions.

last time we built 20 ac’s, 15 ballistas, 8 trebs, 5 catas and even defensive omega golems at inner and the 60+ zerg still took it very quickly. believe me we know how to turtle up, but 15 people will not be able to stomp 60. u can fire blast, portal chain all u want. unless it is 15 hammerwarris or 15 necros doing the same attacks at the same time i see very little chance to survive vs 60 aoe, necrowells, chainstuns, knockbacks, interrupts, meteorshowers, guardian staff autoattcks and sneaky permasteaththieves .
unless they are super uncoordinated, there is not much u can do

Correct me if I am wrong but:
on home borderland, attacking servers can have double numbers you have. I dont know correct numbers but if it is 50×50×50 it means that without waypoints you are screwed.
50 man can attack your hills and 50 man can attack bay. But you will have numbers to face only one enemy at the time. Currect situation is: few players got to second keep and with siege they try to slow attackers so main party can wipe first attackers and move to second keep.
At least this is what happened on our borderland yesterday, at sunday at saturday. And probably will happen again today.

Removing waypoints will make this not possible in time, thus defenders will be disadvantaged by game mechanics.

Although I agree with the problems, I don’t agree with all of the proposed solutions.

If you remove tower to tower siege the zergs will mostly sit in towers until one decides to come out to build an open field treb, at which point the defenders will rush/suicide the trebs and then return to turtling. Forcing an active defense reduces turtling. Also, most trebs in range of another tower can be countered from the outside or after breaching the outer walls, forcing defenders to engage instead of allowing them to turtle forever. Aside from 3rd floor SMC trebs, some of which are uncounterable without practically taking SMC, treb range is fine. As for the upcoming treb mastery, I interpreted the supply draining ability as only affecting players and not tower supply; I haven’t seen any official explanation on what it takes supply from.

As for actual defense, walls need to be thicker so that defenders can actually stand up there and defend without getting destroyed by zerg AoE, and there probably needs to be a counter to point-blank catapults so that a defender can get in more than 2 hits before getting nearly AoE’d to death by the zerg below.

Contesting and waypoints also needs to be worked on for multiple reasons (easily contested, waypoint rushing, etc). But I imagine those changes would require significant tampering with other systems in the game, so it would take a while to implement any changes.

From an offensive standpoint, increase the credit area for sieging a location, so that players don’t have to all stand and rush to the same location in order to get credit. That would encourage people to do other things during a siege besides being 1 of 30+ people standing around the catapult/ram. The size and location of the actual cap area remains the same.

Roy.7405:

If you remove tower to tower siege the zergs will mostly sit in towers until one decides to come out to build an open field treb, at which point the defenders will rush/suicide the trebs and then return to turtling.

People won’t turtle for long if the rewards only come from defending towers/castles that get attacked.

Roy.7405:

Forcing an active defense reduces turtling.

Yes, we want active defense. But right now that’s not what happens.

Roy.7405:

Also, most trebs in range of another tower can be countered from the outside or after breaching the outer walls, forcing defenders to engage instead of allowing them to turtle forever. Aside from 3rd floor SMC trebs, some of which are uncounterable without practically taking SMC, treb range is fine.

But right now this is back to front. Attackers aren’t forced to commit to the field where they’re exposed to siege and open field counter attacks. No, the attackers can set up their trebs in a secure tower/castle and don’t have to risk entering the field until after their opponents gate/walls have been breached.
- To illustrate how back to front things are: Bay defenders have to field deploy arrow-carts within easy sally range of Garrison’s west gate because its the only way (short of a full-on assault on Garrison) they have of stopping the Garrison trebs destroying their walls. The Garrison attackers get all the defensive advantages right up until they decide to finally march on the already breached Bay.

Roy.7405:

As for the upcoming treb mastery, I interpreted the supply draining ability as only affecting players and not tower supply; I haven’t seen any official explanation on what it takes supply from.

Either way, it makes defense even less useful than it is now.

Roy.7405:

As for actual defense, walls need to be thicker so that defenders can actually stand up there and defend without getting destroyed by zerg AoE, and there probably needs to be a counter to point-blank catapults so that a defender can get in more than 2 hits before getting nearly AoE’d to death by the zerg below.

Absolutely.

Roy.7405:

Contesting and waypoints also needs to be worked on for multiple reasons (easily contested, waypoint rushing, etc). But I imagine those changes would require significant tampering with other systems in the game, so it would take a while to implement any changes.

Simple solutions would be delete the WPs or disable the upgrade that grants them while the timer rolls over. Failing that, moving them to the outer area would help.

There’s another issue as well: whereas attacking is dynamic, tower/castle defense is boring because defenders don’t have much they can do until a) they have the numbers to counter zerg, or b) attackers breach the outer walls and come into range of any back-up arrow carts/balistae.

EFWinters.5421:

Good post, but I don’t think it will all be implemented.

For me, removing player damage to gates and reducing treb range would work wonders.

Yes, with the new treb mastery its going to be insane. Already on my server we know if we have lost keep the best, quickest and easiest way to that is siege up one of the towers near it (Langor for example) build 2 or 3 trebs and you can easily knock both inner and outer walls down.

A few defensive siege like AC to protect yourselves from zerg attacks works great as well.

This sort of gameplay should NOT be required and it will ONLY get worse with all these buffs to Trebs

The big problem is its no reward for defense, this morning we took SM with was paper and it took about 3min to capture it and we got over 25% on 1 lvl in WXP, if you had defended SM and manage to stop then you would have got 0.5% off one lvl if even that.

Only solution I can se is lower reward a lot on capture building that have no upgraded/defense, and then the better a place is defended the better reward you get for taking / defending it.

The solution someone else wrote about scout get tick off 50WXP / 5min when your in a building that is not attacked can also work, problem is AFK players then, how do the server know if your afk or just watching.

After facing the kings of the defensive turtle (Viz, every one of them drops an AC as soon as they stop moving..), trebs that can hit your catapults or trebs but you cannot hit as they are tucked in corners of the tower, 70+ defenders and as many AC as it is possible to build within the space, the thought of buffing defences isn’t particularly appealing.

Would be good to buff tower defences somehow – maybe the solution is to make normal gates last 1 minute no matter how many rams are hitting them, and reinforced gates 3 minutes (or some other time period) so that defenders have a chance to react to a zerg attack on your towers- because at the moment gates melt way too fast against huge numbers (6 superior rams melt a gate in seconds).

And never been a fan of trebs being able to be built inside any structure – in real life the sieging army would have to build the siege out in the open.

Unhittable inside structure type trebs don’t make the game much fun, when you can destroy an upgraded wall without any fear of being attacked.

Zenguy.6421:

To take a castle, an attacking army had to go into the field, exposing themselves to counter attacks by the defending garrison and relieving armies. Meanwhile, a much smaller number of defenders could hold the much larger force at bay until overwhelmed, relief arrived or the attackers gave up.

The difference being that in the middle ages, nobody had waypoints. Plus, it didn’t take less than a couple of minutes to shift an entire zerg from one map to another.

Oh, and allies couldn’t just pop stability/invulnerability/invisibility and stroll into the tower to lend a hand with defence. As it stands, if an attack on a tower doesn’t succeed within a very short time, it’s all over for the attack.

Anything making it easier to defend with just a couple of scouts in each tower simply adds to the number of players free to join the zerg.

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

The main issue is that you want an objective to be difficult to open/take when there overwhelming numbers outside (e.g., 80 outside vs 15 inside) – but easy to open when there are smaller (5 vs 10) or even numbers (18 vs 22) outside.

This is the heart of the problem. You want to make it possible for 10-20 players to be able to make a decent attempt at defending against a blob of 80, because zerging down T3 keeps in under 2 minutes is both boring and stupid. But if you do that, you make it basically impossible for any smaller groups to ever successfully attack a defended keep.

IMO, all that’s needed is a cap of damage-per-second on gates (and walls). Make it so gates can’t take any more damage than (for example) 3 rams (4-5 golems) worth. This means that a group of 20 is just as much of a threat to a tower as a group of 80.

Some other change they can do is instead of 1-2 damage spots on west wall on garrison it is 10 and it is the hole wall not just part off the wall, that way if you have 5cats shooting they have to hit the same spot otherwise they will damage different part off the wall, more do so if you shoot to short/long you do 0 damage to wall, only “aoe” damage is to the sides and should be much lower, say 100% were you hit and 10% on the nearest wall part left/right. Then the repair cost must be about 20-30% off what it is now per wall part.

That way you cant shoot a treb from garrison to Bay, they hit 5-10m in front off the wall.

Ragnar.4257:

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

The main issue is that you want an objective to be difficult to open/take when there overwhelming numbers outside (e.g., 80 outside vs 15 inside) – but easy to open when there are smaller (5 vs 10) or even numbers (18 vs 22) outside.

This is the heart of the problem. You want to make it possible for 10-20 players to be able to make a decent attempt at defending against a blob of 80, because zerging down T3 keeps in under 2 minutes is both boring and stupid. But if you do that, you make it basically impossible for any smaller groups to ever successfully attack a defended keep.

IMO, all that’s needed is a cap of damage-per-second on gates (and walls). Make it so gates can’t take any more damage than (for example) 3 rams (4-5 golems) worth. This means that a group of 20 is just as much of a threat to a tower as a group of 80.

Sounds interesting, but they would need to tone down ac’s now that you need to spend longer in those dangerous spots or we wouldn’t see many rams/golems and people would just cata/treb everything for the increased safety those provide.

Overall I don’t find the ability of players to defend a tower (or whatever) to be lacking. It does require good defensive siege placement though (which is a good thing).

Korgov.7645:

Zenguy.6421:

• Being able to WP in to defend a besieged castle removes the value of divide attacking forces to cover multiple gates and concentrates attackers back into a single zerg.
  <snip>
• Remove castle WPs or block them properly so that defenders cannot WP in to a castle under attack.

I recall the brief availability of waypoint between siege timers has been acknowledge as something they want to fix by ANet. (can’t search for the thread as the Forums search tool is not working) I would imagine the fix would be keeping the waypoint unavailable couple of extra seconds after a siege timer hits zero.

Man BP would be in trouble if they did this

PredatoR.5247:

Why should a group of 5 people be able to hold off 60 people.

Well, if a keep or a tower is fully upgraded, I think it shouldn’t be easy to take no matter how big the zerg trying to take it. It’s way too easy to take a keep if you have enough Golems as the gates melt in seconds and there is no way you can defend against a huge zerg at the moment. Paper gates and walls should melt in secons, but not fortified walls and reinforced doors. That’s just ridiculous and stupid.

This is a great topic and I hope some day defending towers and keeps will be made possible and more rewarding. ANet better take notes!

Ragnar.4257:

IMO, all that’s needed is a cap of damage-per-second on gates (and walls). Make it so gates can’t take any more damage than (for example) 3 rams (4-5 golems) worth. This means that a group of 20 is just as much of a threat to a tower as a group of 80.

This is a very good idea, especially as it will work on both high and low population WvW matches.

Victory.2879:

Unhittable inside structure type trebs don’t make the game much fun, when you can destroy an upgraded wall without any fear of being attacked.

That’s the problem. The biggest step backwards in WvW has been the increase treb ranges so they don’t have to be deployed in the field anymore.

Jus wait for Treb Master, pretty sure there will be a 25-50% damage boost just like cata to make taking things even quicker~

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

The main issue is that you want an objective to be difficult to open/take when there overwhelming numbers outside (e.g., 80 outside vs 15 inside) – but easy to open when there are smaller (5 vs 10) or even numbers (18 vs 22) outside.

actually, i have an idea for how they could go about this. remove any visible signs of an area being contested on the map/minimap. large groups have the luxury of being able to go in the front door. small groups, however, need to ninja. the trouble with trying to ninja a place is that there’s a visible alarm that goes off when you do, the white swords. remove the white swords, and small groups are viable to operate, and even become a very potent threat if utilized properly. if servers don’t have any defenders somewhere, that place becomes easy prey for the small groups. which means that full queue uberzergs would be a liability, since they can’t be omniscient anymore. devon already said that they’re looking into removing the waypoints, so that means the uberzergs won’t be omnipresent anymore as well. then you can safely shorten treb range and make it so players can’t damage the gates. then if a server wants to set up trebs, they have to do so in the open field, giving the defenders the option of going out to attack them. making for a much better experience for all involved.