Guild Wars 2

Reading other forum posts it does appear that the more hardcore players have already come to the conclusion that defending the walls is pointless, and that the best strategies are to build up siege weaponry behind the door for when they break through and to send everyone out to attack the enemy from the side/rear.

This is a shame, because I really love the keep defence aspect of WvW, it feels like a real medieval siege, with arrows raining down on the attackers and great siege engines rolling up to the doors. Its not as fun to sit behind the door waiting for the enemy to knock it down.

Zorkinian.7389:

Long story short – build your siege to handle the inevitable door break, not to push them off from the walls.

This is certainly a very effective tactic. Unfortunately it is easily countered by attacking multiple gates at the same time. Without any defenders on the walls, the attackers are free to drop flame rams on 2 or more gates, bringing them down in a minute or two then swarming the courtyard from multiple directions. I guess a skilled commander could use the splitting of the attacking force to their advantage, possibly with a well timed sally but this does require a lot of coordination.

Richard.8207:

Get some support players to drop heals or bubbles where people are defending on the wall. Throw down abilities that make the melee back up or die (ranger traps, elementalist meteor storm and earthquake thing, etc.) and then get back to safety. Have mesmers work together to clone attack the same target, then hide while the clones get busy. And most important, get a coordinated group to flank the attackers. You shouldn’t be able to defend a keep against far superior numbers, so getting a reinforcement group to flank those attackers is key.

Unfortunately the aoe heal effects are nowhere near powerful enough to negate the damage of an aoe attack. As a ranger I will immediately drop my aoe heal on a group of defenders, but it only ticks for a few hundred healing which is nothing compared to the amount of incoming damage.

Also, melee are not the issue here. An attacking ranger or elementalist need only walk into range of the defenders for a few seconds to drop an aoe attack on the walls. This is a short enough amount of time that they don’t need to worry about the aoe attacks dropped by the defenders. This also makes clone attacks redundant as the attackers are rarely in range for more than a few seconds.

A coordinated group attacking from the side is definitely the best strategy, but it should not be the only viable defence.

This is not meant to be a rant, more of a constructive criticism.

In my experiences of both attacking and defending keeps in WvW, it is extremely difficult to defend the walls of a keep when the opposing team can drop 50 aoes on the walls reducing defensive siege to slag in seconds and wiping out the wall defenders.

The problem is that in order to be able to hit the attackers, the defenders often have to crowd up against and even jump on top of the walls to get in a shot, which concentrates them in a small area and makes them extremely vulnerable to aoe attacks. The attackers simply have to rain down their aoe attacks on the small region of wall that is within range of the gate while the defenders have a target that is much more mobile and spread-out, and hence not as susceptible to aoe.

In order to make keep defense more realistic, the walls need to offer more protection to the defenders. Firstly they should grant a range advantage due to their height. Secondly they should add a defensive buff so that the defenders can actually get more than one shot off before being nuked by multiple aoe attacks. Another solution might be just to give the range advantage and increase the height of the walls such that AOE attacks cannot be placed on top of the wall.

I don’t agree with banning low level players from WvW. Some people do not have as much time to commit to the game as others and hence have not yet reached 80; I don’t think they should be punished for this fact.

I do think however that the difference in power between a well-geared lvl 80 and a well geared low lvl character is too large. There should be some difference, yes, but not to the point where they can 2- shot you while you are stun-locked; this is just boring and frustrating.

Zhaitan.2578:

The innate durability a warrior/guardian just makes up for the fact that, by nature, it will receive more focus than an elementalist since a warrior has to be in the front lines to do its damage.

You missed the point the OP was making. So-called ‘ranged’ professions have the ability to fight using melee weapons, for example rangers can use greatswords, swords, off-hand daggers, as well as spears. The game is very flexible in allowing us to choose a fighting style that we enjoy but the large differences in HP and armour penalizes us unnecesarily for making those choices.

One solution would be to make all armour classes give equal protection and give everyone the same base HP. Then give melee weapons extra vitality and toughness on top of their existing stats to compensate for the fact that the melee fighter has to wade into the thick of things.

I was just about to report the same issue. I just completed the lich fight (Flower of Death?) for the vigil and the audio for several of Caithe and Trehaine’s sentences did not play.

Gods I hate being jumped by invisible zergs.

I imagine it happens because the server has to send a bunch of information about each of the characters, then the appropriate textures have to be loaded and displayed.

An easy fix would be to show a simple model without any of the detailed features while the model loads. It could even be a simple humanoid mist shape in the colour of the enemy team – this is the mists after all! This should be visible at any distance up to the max draw distance.

The polar bear’s F2 skill is one of those on a delay. It should be very useful at slowing down fleeing enemies in PvP but the fact the bear stops in his tracks to play the animation means it never actually hits the target. It only works against static targets, but in these situations a movement speed debuff is useless anyway!

I really want to like the longbow but it just feels so weak compared to the shortbow. It should shine in long-range fights, but until you get to 80 and spec marksmanship the range is the same as the shortbow (I believe) and the auto-attack fires agonisingly slowly. Also in WvW the arrows travel so slowly that only 1 in 5 shots actually hit moving enemies and you can only get a few shots off before they move out of range. Obviously the 2-5 skill slots are very useful (love barrage) but the auto-attack is terrible and puts me off using the longbow apart from in static scenarios like keep defence where the relatively large damage-on-hit is quite effective at discouraging people from lingering near the walls.

Speaking of poor pronunciation, in one of the dialogue scenes of my Silvari personal story, one of the NPC voice-actors pronounced the word ‘quay’ as ‘kway’ rather than the correct pronunciation ‘key’. It totally jarred me from my immersion in the story. If they are going to spend so much money on voice acting, the least they could do is check the pronunciation.

- If not already fixed, please fix the loot scaling on jumping puzzle chests. The puzzles are fun but become pointless when you have out-levelled a zone.

- Please allow us to add ‘favourite’ tags to gear in the inventory so that we can quickly pick out our favourite weapon choices on the hero tab. It will also reduce the likelihood of us accidentally selling/salvaging these items. Perhaps add a check when we attempt to sell/salvage a favourite item.

- Please allow us to create a mail as a right-click option on player names in the chat window. This will facilitate easier donations in WvW.

-(edit 1): Please display all currently active dynamic events for all explored regions of zones on the world map. I really enjoy doing DE’s but finding them relies too much on luck – you end up spending ages running around fruitlessly trying to find an event to participate in.