Tips to fight against overwhelmingly strong guilds?

There are pug zergs.And then there are average guild groups.And then there are skilled guild groups.And then there are extremely skilled guild groups.

Naming a few extremely skilled guild groups currently active, in no particular order, that are tough to kill and relentless when they push (subjective according to what I've experienced, and not all-inclusive), we have guilds like:

• Violent Resolution (VR)
• Tempest Wolves (TW)
• The Black Tides (TBT)
• Giam Chye Cha Loti (AHMA)
• Contrast (CRT)
• Etc.

So my question is...apart from 'get good' or 'git gud' which will take time for all the other guilds to progress to that 'extremely skilled' stage, what are the tips to take on these guilds?Tips in the form of group composition, rotation, build, engagement strategies etc.Should we bomb them from range? Charge into them? Pick on their stragglers?What should less skilled groups do to stand a better chance against them? What are they weak against? What would break them or force them to retreat?

One good tactic is make big swords, wait until enemy come defend and teleport in spawn.

@Junkpile.7439 said:One good tactic is make big swords, wait until enemy come defend and teleport in spawn.

There's nothing good about that...

You can do this two ways:

• Cloud around them with ranged builds (rangers, deadeyes, hammer revs, gs mesmers) and poke from all sides. However, the chances are they will just ignore you, insta rez everyone who gets caught and just avoid running into you. You're also pretty useless if they decide to attack you inside objectives or in any choke point.
• Get much bigger group. You'll have to be really bad to wipe with 40+ against 20. Take as many aoe classes as possible, preferably scourges and heralds. Lots of CC helps too, so ele, spellbreaker and chrono should always be a part of your group. Basically a regular meta squad.

If they are tough to kill it just means that you provide no pressure. It's quite easy to overheal a group as a full healer (scrapper and tempest for example) when you take low pressure.

It's fun when they run defend and won't get any kills. :D

@Junkpile.7439 said:It's fun when they run defend and won't get any kills. :D

Fun laughing at your own, garbage server. Noted. No wonder why game mode is practically dead outside of few matchups.

There are two ways to build a strong guild.

1. Stack good players, reject bad players. Sound elitist? Sound non-contributive? That's how it is. The only difficulty in this method is the initial stage of getting a group of good players to join you. It isn't hard to overcome this difficulty if you have played for awhile and you know people, and people know you.
2. Train players. This method doesn't give you absolute result and furthermore, it takes 6 months to a year. Let's be real here. Most guilds don't do this, otherwise they won't be stacking. They don't have good enough commanders to train people either.

To kill good guilds.

1. You can overwhelm them with numbers but let's be real here. They won't be fighting overwhelming numbers.
2. You can cloud them and let's be real here too. You too need decent players to cloud, you can't cloud with bunch of newbies, they don't know how, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself it is simple thing to do.

@Junkpile.7439 said:It's fun when they run defend and won't get any kills. :D

Ahahahhahah!!!

People just don’t read your signature... don’t take any more breaks please.

Really depends on the numbers we are talking about, yes.

A <10 man guild can generally be clouded down by around the same numbers - especially if they are just meta scourges/fb/revs and lack good focus and the pugs have good roamers. Within these numbers even a single good player can make a huuuuuuge difference. Not to long ago we engaged an 8 or so man guild with just 6 pugs (4 there for the initial fight). It was a several minutes kiting slog until we got one of them down and... they all just melted and we could mop them up. Because the ones that werent initially in the fight arrived and one of them happened to be a full zerker reaper lol. TL;DR we won because they ran as a meta zergball like good little boys.

When we go >25 however it all change, because they're so many you're gonna have a serious problem clouding them down. Plus with that many the problem is anything they target dies instantly, they dont need to chase people down like a smaller group. Unlike the smaller group they can easily hide their dps among the ranks. At that point you just need many more people (50%+) or an equally skilled guild group, ignoring obvious bad guilds where you can pug down a larger force. Much depends on who is commanding the squad - some dont actually care about the backline ("it's their own fault they had no fb and got pulled!") and those groups you can slowly, very slowly, wear down. Once they loose the dps, only the frontline remain and they can be kited with relative ease while ranged continue to pummel them. I have seen long guild fights basicly being 20% time spent killing the backline and 80% time spent just lobbing damage into a melee group that take no damage until they eventually fail their cooldowns and someone dies, in which case it's everyone pile on top just to kill him lol.

Just raid with 30+ like the top EU guilds do. They're so big, you barely notice the pugs and the gankers around them.

@steki.1478 said:

@Junkpile.7439 said:It's fun when they run defend and won't get any kills. :D

You can do this solo against some servers. Hell, if I want the outnumbered buff, all I usually need is 5 mins, I can't help how comical the predictability of some servers are.

@Hoon.1524 said:Just raid with 30+ like the top EU guilds do. They're so big, you barely notice the pugs and the gankers around them.

What? Are you delusional? Which guild runs 30+????? Not to mention you said, top EU guilds? No top EU guild even has 30 active people in a guild....

Top guilds, 2018, LOL.

walk forward.

stacking is so 2012. and if you're still stacking in 2018, that means you didn't and haven't discovered the hidden tactics in the span of 6 years.

Thinking any guild is good in 2018 :#

TBT and CRT are dead, so you win by default there.

VR is the best guild on your list, they run sustain heavy and crack to constant pressure and corrupt spam. If nothing is dying try single target focus.

TW is [redacted so my post doesn't get deleted] goodn't, they run a bunch of zerk weavers that die if you breathe on them and a bunch of damage soaking potatos that dont do anything. Don't push into meteors in chokes and don't play their ranged game, instead either finesse their meteors, push straight through as fast as possible and sit on them, or just kill the weavers.

I haven't seen AHMA run closed in a while so I assume you're referring to Cookie's zergs? Unless you're a good guild the only way you're killing that is by also having a map queue and catching them somewhere that they can't find a choke to hold.

Hope that helps, you just have to observe what a group is doing and do something to counter it

Wait, bag denying till they run proper numbers isnt meta? Nah, nothing much to do, git gud or wait for the next mmo. It was bad like that too in warhammer, youd get matched up in a scenario with pugs and the guild would show up. welp, nothing to do but leave scenario. To be fair, you can fight once or twice to be nice, give it your best, but after fighting guilds where theres a clear discrepancy in skill. I would rather go play something else. I kinda wished the maps could hold 150-200 one of server. Call me a moron, but i enjoyed DAOC's massive zerg fights and the little elite guilds picking off the edges rather than being the main force like this game.

Wrong forum for this discussion.

@"EremiteAngel.9765" said:So my question is...apart from 'get good' or 'git gud' which will take time for all the other guilds to progress to that 'extremely skilled' stage, what are the tips to take on these guilds?Tips in the form of group composition, rotation, build, engagement strategies etc.Should we bomb them from range? Charge into them? Pick on their stragglers?What should less skilled groups do to stand a better chance against them? What are they weak against? What would break them or force them to retreat?

Look at their average numbers and build a group that is slightly larger. Not overwhelmingly so but 10-20% larger. Good guilds are confident to fight superior numbers up until certain breaking points. It also gives you some wiggle room to sustain longer against them and learn from that. They are still likely to beat you more often than not but you create a good learning environment where you don't get onepushed. Everybody benefits from that since you create content by being able to stand up to them to some degree while you learn.

Look at their comps and try to build simple things that counter it. Comps usually have a balance and you can create simple counters by tilting one way or the other. Again, it gives you something to use and learn around one step at a time. It gives you a fighting chance but it is not a better comp in any way. You will not win most fights and you may end up weaker against other groups but it gives your group a purpose to practise around that will land you occassional wins against better groups.

Fairly similar to 2, build a slightly cheesy and safe comp. As with the other comps it may not necessarily give you many wins but it will give you a fighting chance and a foundation to learn from. It gives you a chance of taking fights versus much better guilds and learning from those fights. The best way to "get good" is to fight "the good" and learn from the environment that creates. As you improve you build more risk into your comp and you will see drastic improvement in performance. There are too many guilds however who try to copy the comps and builds of good guilds without being able to handle them - those guilds rarely learn how to play those comps because they get flattened before they have time to learn from playing them.

Those are the three things I could think of spontaneously.

Get the right attitude, that is the most important. Content is about taking and giving, winning and losing. In order to win you have to prepare to lose and you have to try and try again. The reason few new groups come up to challenge older groups these days is that they do not try as much and the fewer groups who try the fewer other groups who are also in learning phases will there be to fight. That's one issue that stems from having a nice casual and social game, when people enter competetive (ish) game modes they are not used to losing and do not see the positives in it. That's why we have threads like the recent "why do you try when you can't beat me" thread. The answer is quite simple, trying means content, content means fun and challenging yourself to have fun is a good learning process to grow into more fun since the better you get the larger is your envelope with things you can do or take on.

Do it the YB way. Sit in a tier 3 thing and siege up. If you meet them open field. Siege that up too.

@SloRules.3560 said:

@Hoon.1524 said:Just raid with 30+ like the top EU guilds do. They're so big, you barely notice the pugs and the gankers around them.

We have 30 to 40 people in our guild runs.. but we're far from the top ;)

like previous ppl have said, cloud formation or twice as big.

if not and you are stuck with even or less then numbers, then your best bet is to lure them to a choke. you need heavy damage aoe classes and boonstrip. unfortunately you will need these ppl to be good and coordinate. good guild groups can survive 2 or 3 bombs, cuz 2 or three dodges. so you need at least 3 well coordinated bombs. optimal thing is 2 winds of disenchantment, 2 meteor shower, 2 herald 3 times in a row. gotta wait for them to regroup and hit them there, using the bombs too early will mean they are likely to evade them. too late same deal.

You dismiss git gud out of hand but that's really what it boils down to. All the suggestions given here, even the ones you mention yourself, are variants of that.

I find it odd you think a pug group deserves to have a chance against a better organized group without doing the common sense things some of these guilds have been doing for years. A solid chunk of the WvW game is having the right comp and people who know how to use it to it's best advantage operating on voice coms. None of those are things your typical herd of pugs are going to posses. It's a minor miracle, or a really popular pin, if you can get more than 10 people in coms. Then you need a second miracle that they all listen to the commander, much less comping up.

VR, because they are the ones I'm most familiar with, take a lot of heat sometimes for being elitist and playing the way they do. But only fools and noobs argue against proven results.

I main and prefer to play on a class/build that isn't meta in WvW. Pretty much every current meta build is boring game play to me. But when one of my guilds, or a commander I care about, want to comp up – outside of some good natured griping – my next words are "what do we need?" not stubbornly sticking to a useless class/build.

There's plenty of times where I just wanna play my main. But that's for roaming, or off nights, or after the raid.

And unless you are a true new player with no friends or guild to help you, it's not that hard to put together a functional comp build. All the voice comm program clients are free downloads. Headphones are cheap and ubiquitous. you don't need a microphone to listen. The top tier stat options all have poor people versions.

Quit and uninstall the game and let the alliance system fail along with all the guilds that will stack it just like they did to servers. The only way to beat GW2 is to quit because you can't win at MMORPGs that by design never end.

@"getalifeturd.8139" said:Quit and uninstall the game and let the alliance system fail along with all the guilds that will stack it just like they did to servers. The only way to beat GW2 is to quit because you can't win at MMORPGs that by design never end.

Yea, can't win vs the Immortals.

lel.