Guild Wars 2

People have asked me ingame what’s a hay bale
Here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Round_hay_bale_at_dawn02.jpg

1) Removed the unbalanced sky canon event
2) Removed the pesky barricades
3) Undercroft area was changed a lot by removing a lot of ceiling and some cliffs in the north
4) Palace area can be traversed easier because a lot of the jumping air things have been replaced with regular terrain

Any other changes?

Lol so it doesn’t let me place it on the ground to build it, but it let’s me interact with it, nice.

Wow, what a bug? But how do you get the skill bar if you can’t use the shield generator?

If the solution is shield generations, it might as well not be.
Like I said I don’t have HOT and I don’t intend on buying it since it hasn’t improved WvW in any way.

Hey,

So which one is close, the treb, golem or shield generator?

I’m not being coy, I just don’t want to reveal my solution and have those on the offensive side find a counter to my counter.

Can I try to guess at least?

• Treb hitting the wall from the inside and somehow it reaches the catas behind. This can be countered by placing the attacking catas a bit further back
• I know omega golems reach carts up on the wall because of the weird arc. Can they also reach downwards?
• Shield generators do some crazy stuff. Unfortunately I don’t have HOT so I can’t test that.

My problem with the “only siege can destroy siege” is if the enemy has a well placed catapult or treb you cannot go YOLO it with a few people to get it dead.

Actually you can but you do it with a different approach. Instead of melee`ing the catas to death, you go with shadow refuge/veil to a certain spot, instantly build one or more ballistas and put 2-3 shots and one cata is dead. Ballistas are very under-used and this will start to make them viable.

Therefore you are looking at 240+ supply for four superior or guild catas , which is at least 16 players until people begin to get +5 supply buffs. If it is just one catapult per inner/outer wall you have ample time honestly.

This thread is not about the time of losing your objective being too short. It’s about being able to do something about proxy catas with the cart you have on the wall, without the help of the cavalry.

As a scout I can direct our zerg to the big fights. I do it with our guilds all the time.

Then scouting is a wrong word for someone that is defending an objective. The proper word should be “defender”. What you describe is someone afk’ing in a tower/keep. When I do defending I upgrade (used to, now it’s auto), escort dolies, take nearest camp, build siege inside, repair gates/walls and of course call for help when needed.

The roamers get the enemy stragglers, clean up flipped camps and sentries, duellers do their thing for 10 minutes, then join the map, and the farmers get their lewt by following the tag.

So roamers always complain that new bl maps are too hard to find duels and there’s too much pve, barricades punish them etc.
Blobbers complain about the new bl map being to hard to learn and get quickly too objectives, no waypoints to move quick, lord too powerful, auto-upgrades too good for defense, fortified gates, etc.
Farmers always complain about the lack of rewards in wvw, no real purpose to farm even with the new skill points, map too hard to learn because of a lesser loot/hour ratio.
Defenders (scouts) complain about proxy catapults being too powerful, some complain about auto-upgrades (I don’t).
So arena.net must choose to which to cater to and focus on that. They seem to incline to the zerg population, but who knows.

he whole tower is literally vulnerable, but the enemy comms will need to combine distance, cata bubbles and siege spacing to get the wall down if there’s no easymode wall where defenders have no recourse.

No need for that. A smart commander will build a cart and destroy everything on the walls and continue to put pressure while the catapults do the work. What’s the downside for the commander: -40/50 supplies for the cart and a better coordination.

if you have a defense team of a few you can hold off 15-20 people provided you have siege, didablers, supply traps, door trebs and the like.

That’s what I’m trying to say. All that effort in the supply traps, door treb, upgrades etc, goes to wait when they kill your cart with meteor shower and use proxy catas.

dnt u think u ruined the game enough with your buffed ac’s and unbreakable walls? how about one guy just defending the whole bl by himself?

Dude, you’re missing the point. They just need to make sPvP with 50vs50vs50 and shift delete WvW. They either focus on something or close it down.
Roamers want to duel, zergs wants to gvg or blob fight, scouts want to defend (myself included), farmers want to farm. We can’t all have the same slice of pie.

If you watch the video, you’ll see that there are several places where proxy catas can go down that can’t be hit by anything except an arrow cart that’s in range of meteor shower.

If you know how to defend an objective you also know how to attack it. So if you know that there’s one wall that you can defend with a very good cart then you probably don’t want to attack one. For example Academy has the SE+E walls defended by a cart on those wall stairs, but the SW+W walls have very vulnerable carts where meteor shower will kill them.

So what do you do as an attacking commander? Attack SW/W when going for academy. Each tower/keep has vulnerable cart spots. This thread is about being able to defend your vulnerable walls too against proxy catas.

Lol I guess you guys haven’t watched my guides https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduHbZPbtobHjIvdoZtd_99Y2ZFJpbFAx

ACs can be placed in a lot of spots that can’t be hit with AE to defend vs. catapults.

This is true only for maybe 1 or 2 walls for the entire objectives of EBG+BL combined. Most of the time your cart will get destroyed by meteor shower. Note “meteor shower” not regular aoe skills.

I can’t Remember the last time we have actually attacked an enemy tower to cap it for ppt. This is they way most wvw guilds operate.

If this is what people want, then they might as well close WvW completely and change sPvP to allow 50vs50vs50 people, make a new map with some capture the flag objectives (they could use a compact version of EBG or even EOTM) and be done with it.

This will make everyone that like the playstyle you’re describing (and I know a lot of people that like this too) very very happy. Also arena.net no longer needs to put up with all our winning about WvW, because it’s basicaly sPvP (their beloved child that aims for Esports)

They are ment to be an object to force servers to fight each other. The walls are just there to slow the enemy down so the defenders have time to respond.

Then you might as well play spvp with capture points. I’m playing wvw because I want the objectives to matter.

5 people successful defending against 50 is not and should not be a game mechanic.

Then it should be. If the 50 men group just hammer their ba||s on the gate I just be able to repel then with a treb. If they go for proxy catas I should be able to do the same with carts on the wall. I consider these 2 approach more like ninja attacks and only successful if the enemies isn’t paying attention and is taken by surprise. Then the 50 men blob deserve the victory because no capable defender was around.

If on the other hand that 50 man blob knows that there are 5 capable defenders inside, then they should strategies and come up with catapults hidden behind a rock, trebs further away or even catas with chained bubbles.

If this change I’m proposing destroys your farming dream then they could leave EOTM and EBG like it is right now and only change the Borderlands.

Planning ahead and building the defenses at your rear fortifications and defending the front ones for as long as possible makes defense much more viabl when u dont’ have to worry about porting back to refresh those siege weapons or leaving them there and having to getoff for the night

But what’s the point of fully sieging an objective, when they can easily meteor down your cart on the wall and take it by proxy catapults?

There are very few people that care about PPT, so once the server identity gets removed by the mega server, players will only care about fights. If that will be the case then I hope arena.net is implementing an emperor system like ESO has.

Who has the most rank (determined by kills, etc) gets a new line of skills that does something. Kind of like revenant with Coalescence of Ruin is right now. They could also bring in kill streaks from Call of Duty or other mainstream stuff.

/sarcasm off

Wait for wvw mega-server or transfer to T1 servers

You appear to want to be able to defend effectively with only 1 or 2 people.

Against people that just place catas and cast meteor shower where-ever I should be able to deny them the fast capture.

If they were chaining cata bubbles or using a shield generator or hitting multiple spots at once or taking down counter siege with ballistas from vantage points…that would be a different matter. That would be a true game of play and counter-play.

Like Sviel said. It doesn’t mean they can’t capture the objective, but at least force them to get creative instead of complacent. Make them think for a second, deploy siege tactics, carts to counter carts, treb to bomb treb inside, divide in 2 teams and attack 2 points at the same time. Something else, than just placing catas FTW.

What is required is to make defence rewarding but anet will apparently never do that.

I may be the only person on Earth, but the reward I get from defending is something personal. Don’t need any carrot on a stick or virtual pixels to increase my self-worth and grant me instant gratification. I get a rush when I know I have repelled an enemy zerg because they were too dumb to get creative. Check this video where I deny a map jump zerg an easy cap – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NghKfPczkgU&list=PLduHbZPbtobGpF6P9Xb2qO00ZguZN4DjX&index=4#t=6m19s

Like I said defence is easy if you even have half the numbers of the attackers and the keep is properly sieged. If anything its too easy since ACs are so strong.

This makes me doubt you ever scouted an objective from paper to T3 to getting captured. Depends a lot on the enemies. If they know what they are doing (some guilds on T1 servers) then all your defensive siege inside the objective falls down on that lonely cart on a wall.

Once they easily take it down with meteor shower and place proxy catapults then you are done. As a scout, you can now log off or go to another objective to defend, but what’s the point? You spent hours to siege it up and upgrade it and some guys come in, kill your cart, place catas and destroy the wall.

Some can say, well, you yell in CAPS LOCK on the chat for commanders to come. If that’s the case then why are sieging it up in the first place, what’s the point, if they can destroy that cart so easily? You might as well sit there for reporting to commanders when enemies are nearby. There’s no need for you to do dolly runs, repair walls, build siege etc. Might as well be a bot and check for the defend event poppin at the top when the objective is hit.

Well a normal ballista only costs 30 supply, so it’s cheap to take down siege.
It’s also funny that you can’t kill the trebs for the gates, so you storm in, capture the objective, but the trebs are still there. So you can wait for them to despawn or kill them with carts or ballistas. It would be funny for someone to hide inside and use the treb to attack the gate from the inside

I thought a lot about how you can make carts on the walls not that vulnerable.

• If you prohibit aoe on the walls then you can exploit that by trying to fight on the walls knowing that you can’t use aoe.
• If you make the walls very high then the carts will be out of range
• If you make the wall very wide then the walls will look very ugly and they have to be so wide that a meteor sower can’t hit which is kinda` ridiculous.
• If spikes are placed at the base of the wall the enemy still has range to aoe. You might not be able to place proxy catas, but you will place them as close to the spikes as possible and still the same problems remain.

Making that siege and gates/barricades can only be damaged by siege will make the zergs slower and now the defenders have a better chance succeeding.

The enemies will only be forced to spend an extra 40/50 supplies for a cart to take down the defending carts. So it’s not such a big deal for them, but at least it’s something.

We all know that to play defense/scouting is almost impossible. Even if you put a treb for the gate, carts on the walls for proxy catas and trebs inside for attacking catas/trebs, the enemies can still quickly take your beloved T3 objective fully sieged/repaired/scouted/etc.

How?
Proxy catapults. They cast aoe skills on the walls, then all arrow carts on top of the wall die and then they place catapults, hit the wall and cap your tower or keep. There’s nothing you can do about it, even if there are 20 ppl inside and the enemies are 30-40.

What can arena.net do?
Make siege only killable by siege. You want to kill an arrow cart, then you better have a cart of your own. While we’re at it it’s best to make gates and barricades only vulnerable to siege, not normal player skills.

What do you think?

I wonder how many months it needs to pass in order for the Academy tower to have its mortar in the correct position. It’s probably like that since closed HOT alpha.

Can anyone that played ESO pvp explain how do guilds organize when a new campaign starts? Do they always play the same campaign and alliance?
Also is there a TS server for a certain alliance/campaign?

I imagine there will be a lot drama when the server system will be replaced by the alliance ESO like system. Like I said earlier I do think it’s a good change, but the main problem is the already forged communities, TS servers, websites, etc.

The only way to see this working is if they fix all the bugs, improve the WvW game mode in a better direction and everyone is so happy that the alliance system will be the only thing that people will complain. This will deter players from leaving and at some point they will adapt to the alliance system.

My greatest fear is that it will be a messy launch, like guild players not being able to join, disconnects, lags, on top of all the current bugs that will probably still not be fixed. And to top it all of, probably the Academy tower from the new map will still have its mortar up on the barricades, unusable. I wonder how long do we have to wait for that.

@Xilllix
So if arena.net takes the server system from ESO it’s a good thing. We will have a more compact population without the server separation.
Losing the server identity might be bad at first, but I think it will be replaced by Guild identity. There’s no more server SFR vs DESO, it will be the guilds IRON vs VoTF or something like that. Or even a group of guilds vs another group.

People joining campaigns & alliances instead of being stuck on one server will give everyone the experience of a T1 server. This means lots of action, roaming and blobbing, whatever you like.
I find this to a be a good thing.

Once something’s full, it’s full, and a new map/campaign is created. Meaning there was no reliable way to get into the same map as others — and most certainly if it’s guild controlled, those single/random/pugs will be left without the team they worked with the past three years.

So if ESO’s campaign/alliance system doesn’t work, what’s a good solution to merge WvW servers then?

If these alliances are a future reality then I foresee at least 5 campaigns for each language: ENG, SP, FR; maybe 2 for ENG and FR and 1 for SP.
Probably each server will coordinate like SFR will choose one of the 2 ENG server and also an alliance like RED.
I’m still curious how the teamspeak communication will work. If both SFR and FSP decide to go for 1st EN server and team RED how will we communicate?!

There’s a reason ESO RvR failed.

Even things that “fail” have good ideas. If you borrow those, then you are on a good path.

When ESO was launched, arena.net quickly adopted the mega-server concept for PVE.
Now they are taking the 3 alliance campaigns from ESO Cyrodiil and implementing them into WvW.
These are great ideas actually.
This means that everyone gets to have some action in WvW. The downside will be that there’s no more “server” identity.
Maybe in the future they also implement the 30days campaigns, the 14 days , etc, not just the 7 days one.

Less QQ and learn the map.
DONE

Everyone that played EBG (BlobBG) are still playing the same thing.
But somehow most expected that somehow the new BL maps will be so great that EBG will be a thing of the past.
EBG = blobs
BL = more ninja, more gvg, less blobbing

Than accidentally found EB and spent 1 week in there having a lot of fun even if outnumbered all the time. I think that resumes the overall feeling.

Because EBG is like crack cocaine while Borderlands are like a coffee. It has always been like that.

You can’t attribute the decrease of players to the desert borderlands.

• A new expansion has come with big promises to wvw and people are still disappointed which can be a reason for not playing.
• Also you need to grind a lot for your guild and I know one guild that only does WvW and since the expansion was out they do more farming in PVE than ever to rush to the +5 supply upgrade of the guild.
• The new maps are challenging for commanders cause they need to go solo for 4-6 hours and figure out the map and then start leading people. But most don’t do this and they just follow the roads and end up in dead-ends, fall off high cliffs and die, get stuck in barricades, etc. So commanders blame the map for their incompetence and followers blame it too cause that’s the easiest thing to do.
• Old borderlands were not that popular back then either and people still prefered EBG. On SFR you would always had a 30ppl queue for EBG while the home map had some people, but the other 2 maps where kind of deserted. Some exceptions were made when a new season would start or the reset night.

Same for auto-upgrades.
People keep asking to bring back the alpine borderlands and expect for auto-upgrades to go away.
They are present in EBG too, so even if they bring the old maps back you still have the same bugs, same auto-upgrades, guild claiming, etc

What I really like about the new desert maps is that are new. Of course there are a ton of bugs and quirky cata spots but it’s part of the fun (discovering them and figuring out how to counter them)

1. Not really. You want to have a situation where a small team can use the terrain against a blob and annihilate it with choke points, portal bombs, stealth etc. Bland plain maps are boring.

2. Learn the map

3. If by PVE you mean shrines, well, just forget about them and do your own thing. Why care?

4. No. That’s sPvP. I think you’re in the wrong forum

Learn the map guys. Chaba posted videos on how to get to objectives and I have posted videos on how to attack/defend the 4 towers.

Take a couple of hours on a Saturday and just roam the map. If you see an enemy let him be, just focus on the exploration, forget about defending rampart, repairing walls, blob with the blob for bags, forget about everything. Roam the map for 4 hours and you will learn it.

The amount of time you spent complaining about ho hard the map is to learn on these forums, you would have already learn it by now. Be productive

LEARN THE MAP

And it will be more fun!

No, because I had a closer look at it basically everyone knows about treb at the gate for rams and carts on the walls for proxy catas. The kill siege with meteor shower is pretty standard too. The most interesting spots are the sneaky catapults and safe trebs and this is a small fraction of the entire video.

What I am doing instead is a video about the best spots to attack each objective. More like a definitive guide for commanders on how to take a tower/keep and what they have to watch out for.

I have been commanding for a while on my server and I have most of the footage so most likely next week I will make that video.

I can’t believe they haven’t introduced a wall buff or defender buff yet.

There are some tactics that make walls/gates invulnerable for a set duration, but no one has grinded enough to achieve guild level 999

There are 3 veterans:
1) Wurm – in the desert area on top of undercroft, east side of the flame shrine
2) Warg – next to the south camp
3) Harpy – when you go from depot to palace on those high cliffs, instead of turning right to go to the middle air shrine just go forth and you will find it.

All 3 of them have the event thing in the top left corner. If you’re not seeing it then you’re not killing the right veteran.

I really love how they changed the WPs. Having them in the spawn tower was kinda` pointless. Now at least if you own your keep you get to attack the north side much quicker

Interesting how no one thought about gliding from higher cliffs inside the keeps/towers.
Ohh I forget WvW is all about face vs face. Objectives are there to fill the map.

I can almost take an SFR seriously when they talk about nerfing golems, while keeping in mind the nightly 12-omega trains to our garrison…

I’m a rare breed on my server. There’s a ton of farming and gvg mentality.
Honestly I don’t care for the PPT, I don’t even look at the points and I don’t care if our server wins or not. I’m only interested in the siege warfare. An achievement for me is to take a T3 fully sieged and fully defended objective.

In the old days I would get a rush from being that one player that prevented a 50 blob to cap an objective. But SFR climbed the ladder and when we started playing with vizuna (THE MASTER RACE OF SIEGE) then my efforts felt pointless. And when the catapult skill 5 bubble was implemented I switched from defense to offense.

And yet, I havent seen a single Omega golem for a month. Or a regular golem for that matter.

It goes hand in hand with the people not playing problem. This means there’s no need to spend good money on golems when you can PvD you’re way around and on the extreme ocasions proxy catas work wonders too.

I think if anyone wants to still play the wvw game mode , should stay positive and focus on the current state of it and not dwell on the shoulds and coulds.

The easiest way to fix blobs is by making wvw completely separate like spvp is. No farming, no blobs, no more complaining about rewards.

Anyone of SFR that plays wvw for siege warfare and not just fights? Maybe we can band together to do stuff together.

I disagree. I’m not saying that any random pugs that don’t what supply is should successfully defend an objective, but if there’s one active scout that eats WvW as his breakfast playing 11 hours a day and knows all the good spots for siege, he should be able to defend against the infamous proxy catapults with successful arrow carts. It’s the same way as he can defend from rams with trebuchet at the gate.

This doesn’t mean a zerg can’t do anything against it, but it forces zergs to not be lazy and go for more time consuming attacks like catapults further aways or trebuchets. This gives more time for the defenders to call for reinforcements.

It’s a very powerful feeling when you know that one person can repel 100 enemies. It’s one of those 300 movie moments and will make more people scout/defend objectives. Like I said, enemies can still capture stuff with catas/trebs, but punish them if they go for quick dirty means like rams and proxy catas.

This is mostly why I stopped defending/scouting. I prefer to capture stuff since I know all the good spots. It’s much more rewarding.

Don’t know if this is the case on all servers, but on SFR we have commanders that refuse or are too lazy to learn the map so they tag up as usual cause people follow them, but they are just leading people into dead-ends and always take the super way around things to get to an objective. Then people start complaining how this map is so bad when they don’t even know it.

To get a feel of what I explained above, imagine the alpine borderlands and in order to get from hills to cragtop you would go through the garrison water-gate then up to sunnyhill, reach north camp and the go south to cragtop. That’s how people get to Palace when they start from Rampart Hilarious!!!

If they come with rams you can place 2 superior trebs and deny everything at the gate. Oils and canons are worthless against zergs

If they come with proxy catapults no matter how many carts you put on the walls they can have carts too and destroy you.

We are matched against vizuna quite often now and no matter how good I siege up a place I always know that if they destroy my puny cart on the wall and place 4 superior catas I’m done for.

Easy solution to this: make walls wide enough so carts placed at the end of wall don’t get sniped by other carts or meteor shower. Done.

This will make it that proxy catas and rams are both vulnerable and should only be tried if there’s no one defending or no good siege placed. This forces the enemy into building catapults in spot where mortar/trebs can’t reach or trebs further away. This makes capping with zergs much slower and will make players blob less cause they have to wait.

I’m glad golems are slow for everyone. Omega golems are the most over-powered siege machines and with higher walls hopefully they can no longer snipe carts on the walls.