WvW strategy: Things to work on

These guys say otherwise.

Can we have less zerging on our side please?

I honestly don't understand why we encourage stacking on tags even when we are completely drained on people/ going head to head with the SF zerg. We've been trying this for months and safe to say it doesn't work. What we need is more people partying up and working together as small units.

Me and some of my guildies have been testing this out in SFBL and it genuinely works. 5 of us are able to hold multiple camps simultaneously against SF in their own BL. Granted we have the same core group so we work well together, our approach isn't even hard. We just follow things others posted already. (travel compact, ignore sentries, Don't chase strugglers. Also use NPCs, when defending, stay in the camp with them. When attacking, draw the defenders out. AND, Ctrl+T.)

We know they'll zerg us. Let's make them work for it then. Take camps far apart, quickly and efficiently. In the rare occurrence that they split up and take camps separately, you're getting a fairer fight, and if you lose, you lose. If they don't and you do get zerged, you now know where they are. Use that to your advantage.

And that's just camps. We haven't even tried holding towers yet, but i'm sure we've all seen vids of small parties holding out against zergs in towers.

Now if 5 guys can do that, why can't 10 do better? We need to start using their strengths against them. The points we gain from this won't be much, but our current system is leaving us with 0. What do we have to lose?

tl;dr We aren't Zerguson's very often. When we can't get a karma train rolling, we should fight smarter.

It's a great idea to work on overall strategy and skills, but I don't see a lot of talk about the little things that could help as well. We have a lot of awesome people on our server who love playing this game, and sometimes it's just a matter of getting the word out when things need to be improved. (As for the in-fighting it's gotten really old, it's childish, and it is counter productive. I offer an open invitation to any one of that in-fighting crowd: Either grow up, or leave.)

Some things I've noticed. Just my two cents. Your mileage may vary.
1. Guilds claiming but not leaving buffs. As tiny as my guild is, I never claim something without leaving a buff. Yet we have huge guilds with enormous amounts of influence never leaving buffs. Something as simple as a zerg all carrying 15 supply instead of ten can help when siege needs to be quickly built. And some buffs (like Magic Find) are just nice gestures, making the game a little more fun. And every little bit of fun helps when you are getting steamrolled every day.

2. I agree wholeheartedly with Wuze on the small groups. Small groups are important. They can do a lot of damage and provide a lot of support. We have some large guilds who could easily field a couple of small groups. It's just a matter of organization and planning and goals.

3. Refresh, refresh, refresh. So often I watch people run past siege with no one bothering to refresh. There is no such thing as refreshing too often. Also, it helps if someone is leaving to just announce what siege they are leaving behind. There are those of us who will make an effort to go refresh siege if we know it's there.

- I hear a lot of commanders complaining about the troops not following orders, not knowing how to play the game, not following the strategy. I have to agree that a lot of times it seems like you are trying to herd cats, and that has got to be really frustrating. But sometimes it's not us. Sometimes it feels like the commanders are running around without a plan and it is really hard to keep up when that happens. As a solider, I need to know which commander I am following, and what our plan is. Otherwise, I'm likely to go off on a plan of my own.

4. A never-ending source of frustration is the lack of defense. And I have to put this one squarely on the commanders. Every time our map is fully red, we have certain commanders who immediately take everyone to another map. Then the handful of us who are left behind to defend towers that aren't upgraded, with supply from camps that aren't upgraded watch in frustration as our map turns green because 5 people can't defend things that are not upgraded. There's no glory in defending. I get that. Those of us defending aren't getting gold, or drops, or karma. But it has to be done, and there are a bunch of commanders who just don't support defending. Don't get me wrong, there are a few who do support and encourage defending, but they are few. So please, before you take everyone off of the map - check to make sure towers are upgraded, defense siege is built, camps are at double supply, quags are ours, and there are more than 5 people who will stay and defend (and not the same ones who always defend. Personally, I would love to join you on the other maps but I rarely can because I know the other 4 defenders need me.)

5. Commanders - You have to communicate, and not just on your guild channel. I will do anything a good commander tells me to do, but the minute you leave me behind because you decided to retreat and not tell anyone except your party or your guild is the last time I will follow you. Also, take some time to listen to the people who have been on Ferg forever. If I tell you that it is not a good idea to treb Lake from Hills if Hills is not fully upgraded and sieged, you need to listen. Trebbing Lake is an open invitation to whomever the big dog server is at the time to bring as many people as they can to Hills. How do I know this? Been there, done that, under more than one commander who didn't want to listen.

We are never going to win the numbers game. But I truly believe we can win the strategy game. And I think if we keep talking strategy and putting into practice all the really good ideas that people present, I think we can win a lot of battles and have a lot of fun.

couple things --

1. in addition to "dont place random siege": if you are placing it just because you have it and want to empty the slot, instead consider giving it to the nearest commander. you can drop it on the ground in wvw with your weapon swap button and it will be free for anyone to pick up. commanders will know how and when to place it for you, and you save them tons of badges and/or gold when you crowdsource siege that probably wont get used anyways. all siege is important, they will never say no. i know i wouldnt because its soooo easy to go through 250 badges worth of siege and not even have 50 badges again by the time i use all the siege.

2. often i see us going to camps where there is 2-3 mins left on righteous indignation. the zerg gets dragged there, and stalls out for a couple minutes while making no progress anywhere. there are a couple things we can do about this:

-leaders, keep an eye on the map for recent flips, or ask / pay attention to map chat for righteous buff timers. its ok to walk by a camp and send 3 people to backtrack in < 5 minutes.

-if you absolutely must take a camp before moving on and refuse to do otherwise:
> dark fields + projectile finishers. in a group of 20 people, there are always necros and thieves. get people to hold the supervisor in a shadowhome or well and use tons of ranged attacks. (however, im fairly certain lifesteal combos arent exactly intended to be able to damage supers and this will probably eventually be fixed.)

> light fields + blast or leap finishers, or other retaliation. have your group bunch up on the supervisor and rez the inevitably downed players while sitting around getting hit for retaliation procs.

by doing either (or both) of these things you can at least try to down the super before his buff runs out instead of just having a dance party in a camp you dont own!

Saw this in map chat, and thought i would come and visit the site. I can agree with some of the above points, also there are some more you can add/or think about.

Thieves: I tend to do this a ton on my thief: when we have enemy siege deep within say Greenvale (those pesky trebs they like to place by the houses) you can stealth in and go crazy on the trebs. There is on average always 2 trebs (if not more) and they tend to have either no guards or just 1 or 2. Now this is essential for any thieves going in to do this, keep an offhand dagger on your weapon swap at all times. There are a lot of chickens and pigs (all one hit kills) that you can get infinite stealth to keep yourself alive. Doing this i have pulled off several zerglings off the siege to come and try and kill me. This buys the defenders time, keeps the trebs from not firing (cause they tend to freak out and try and kill me) and helps thin the zergling herd. You can usually pull at least 15 or so off the herd since they get ravenous for a kill.

Cross-class combinations: these can help you more than you think. Now i have seen several glamour mesmers and Epidemic Necromancers on our side, and if you can combine those two easily (be random pugs working together) or guild/or just friends parties you can actually wipe those zerglings (or at least make them peel off the herd for a bit). Most zerglings are stuck in Tunnel vision, so they tend to not notice things till too late.

Condition Utilization: Now from what i have seen most like to have the burst builds, where you have big numbers from your attacks. But if most of you have noticed, many of our enemies (even fellow FC's) tend to not run as much condition removal as they should. We can exploit this, and cause enemies to melt. Not advocating everyone switches over to conditions, but we can explore this tactic more.

Confusion + Retaliation: These two can be extremely deadly when used in the right hands, and when your enemy forgets to turn off auto-attack/or is stuck in tunnel vision. I have become extremely attached to these two since i picked up my Engineer again, and i can spam retaliation and confusion on the enemy as i watch them melt from auto attacking me.

Sorry for long post, i tend to get a little long winded. But i am always looking to help in WvW, and can help teach people different tactics if they want to roam solo/or defend.

I'm no commander (I'm just.. well, vocal and whiny, possibly a bit arrogant, I dunno) but I think it would also help to note what individual members bring to the table. For instance, I'm almost always running with Healing Spring up with a drake on standby for AoE blast-heals, but I'm pretty terrible at removing my own conditions and got notably frustrated when having to deal with even a single necromancer.

Gotta help each other out

There's actually a regular commander on our server who runs a full-signet Warrior. He jumps into every large zerg, does his thing, and leads the group astray for the nearby camp/Dolyak when the real commanders try to make the push for the keep. And when said commanders ask him to please turn off his tag? "fak u." Exact quote