An organized zerg attacks your keep off-peak: what build to bring for defense?

[jaif.3518]

This is not a complaint, just a discussion.

I'm curious what builds people think are most effective when pugs have to defend against a superior, organized force?  Obviously at some point it becomes untenable, but that aside, what are good builds that could do something useful in defense?

I know I can look up meta builds in any number of websites, but a lot of those rely upon the fact that they are part of a cohesive team, not an ad-hoc collection of people.

[Dawdler.8521]

Against a boonblob it doesnt really matter what build you bring except your brain. You're either bait or part of the pack trying to get anything down in the rear that was too slow on a move. You're not really gonna corrupt them or even put a dent in them when stacked.

But granted it helps not being a useless lump of baggage such as a zergling firebrand or something. Bursty, evasive and preferably with pulls is better when you're outnumbered and have 0 chance at fighting them head on. If your group can get one of them downed without dying well you only need to repeat it 50 times easy peasy.

[bq pd.2148]

any build you might need for this you can find on the websites or tweak them to your taste. you just need to consider when to bring roaming builds or group builds, support builds are also rarely seen in a cloud.

 

if your server usually has much better PUGs and you are not outnumbered, you wont need much organization to roll over them with the same builds you would otherwise use in a larger group.

another option would be to cloud the enemies with a mix of roaming and ranged zerg builds and hope that annoys them enough.

lastly you can also try focusing on siege play and supplies , but even that wont matter against determent opponents. for siege play the build you run doesn't matter much, except for some minor interactions: classes with on demand unblockable like warrior, ranger or reaper can use that with a siege disabler so it cannot be blocked/reflected. teleports or mesmer/thief portals can be used while placing supply traps, they will still be placed at the initial location while you finish the channel in safety.

if its not upgraded you might aswell not defend but place reusable siege at the various towers/keeps to keep flipping back at a similar pace. for if you defend each object long, by the time the enemy is done many of those things will be upgraded and a bigger pain to retake. adjust your build for your group size or combat situation.

[ArchonWing.9480]

1.)  The Annoying Wall Fly.

You forego all attempts of harming the blob, which is really hard anyways if nobody follows up. Your goal is simply tankiness, mobility, and devote all other resources to CC. You may do Cele gear if you want to pick off the tail but this is optional. Immob spam works because people think it's a hard CC and spam stunbreaks/stab and by the time they notice, you can do other things. Stealth. The more people you pull off so that your teammates can knock them out, the better.

Examples: Trapper Rune Dragonhunter, Willbender with Sanctuary or Signet of Wrath (!), Defense Warriors, Any mobile ranger build with muddy terran/entangle;

My personal favorite is just the signet mesmer. Save one slot for blink, maybe illusion and then pull/moa random people so they make threads about you.

Stealth is also pretty funny because it lets you put supply traps on the zerg if they're idling. And disblers from the ground level, since doing it from the wall is difficult.

Also pay attention to the geography. If it is superior (you have the high ground), then knock them off.

I consider this the default option, as it is easy to execute and also easy to get results.

2. Kill stealers

Basically your goal is to save your allies from being finished off. Some of the weaker blob groups always employ a pirate ship strategy where they range cleave out the downs instead of pushing on top of them. The bigger the guild, the greater the tendency. In this case you want to deny them the kill. Any class with a res signet can do this, but some are more efficient at pulling them out of danger.

Again, Mesmer is really good at this because of Illusion but sometimes people are too stupid to realize they've been illusioned. Tempests scrolling in and out of the fight helps a lot. And there is support specter for your thief enjoyers.
Also, transfuse. However, you will get yelled at if you screw it up so i don't recommend it unless you know some of the tricks, like porting downed people down terrain or something.

Even if you fail to stop the blob, it'll deny them bags/kills and they may get bored and leave.

3. A PvE build, but with mobility

If you are truly incompetent and melt when the zerg looks at you, then you should just take the camps and towers behind them to make reinforcements more difficult. Your goal will just be to kill the enemy lords asap before anyone can do anything.

4.. Siege Monkey

So okay, you don't know how your skills work and can't do damage worth a kitten. Then there is this. Build like you would as no.1 but throw shield generators just out of reach of the zerg. Don't actually build them but make sure they have to move to destroy your blueprints. kitten, do not waste your time on arrow carts unless they are prebuilt as they tickle the zerg. At least shield gens will protect your allies. This is espeically effective on desert BL keeps since you can run around indefinitely

Note that disciplined groups will not fall for this ruse, but I've brought quite the end to some groups just because they went around killing them. 😗

5. Yolo suicide bomb!

Not recommended, because it requires actual skill and more importantly for people to follow up on it. Essentially you want the enemy group to relax and try to hit their tail with as much explosives as you can. Typical choices include gunflame or scorched earth warriors, reapers, holosmiths, trap dhs. You must go full damage on this, none of this celestial thing because sustain is irreelvant when your expected life span is 10 seconds. If you have a friend dropping warbanner that'd be nice, and you should really have unblockable attacks. Note that if you screw up, not only will they just res their downed but you will probably just end up dying.

You must have other people willing to do this with you.

6. The Wall Pew Pewer

Despite it's popularity, it only feeds bags via pulls and projectiles are not useful against zergs. This should never be a sane option. Go unblockable or bust, and don't use the wall unless they are not committing.

7. Complain about it in team chat.

This is if you want to be completely useless. However, since it's so popular, I wanted to list it. Remember to pinging the keep in team chat but don't say anything besides it's under attack.

None of these tactics will succeed without a decent enough group on your end, or at least another group counterattacking an enemy objective. If your enemy does not care about PPT and just wants to farm bags, then it is better to just vacate the keep and let them karma train nothing. However, these tactics will at least confuse and frustrate the enemy; in general the amount of salt whispers and siege burials done to you reflect your relative success.

tl;dr I think Mesmer is best when you're entirely on your own and it's just chaos, but Guardian and Ele tend to be better if you have some people to work with. Warrior probably, but I haven't really played it recently.

Edited August 3, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[Arianth Moonlight.6453]

perma-stealth>siege disabler

repeat as many times as needed.

[Riba.3271]

Siege gameplay was rather balanced slightly before Heart of Thorns expansion. Since then they did following changes:

1. Reduced gate/wall maximum hitpoints
2. Introduced shield generators to game
3. Made golems affected by boons
4. Halved siege vs siege damage (in patch they made siege affected by crit and condis but siege doesn't crit)
5. Reduced supply costs
6. Guild siege and golems are cheaper (You now afford 5-10 times as much golems in hour of playing)

Now defenders do have more supply, tactivators, lord hitpoints and defending stats available than back in the day. In addition to this keeps and castles upgrade several time faster. But all of these are pretty much worthless at stopping larger group from getting in.

Essentially balance now is following: Objectives are terribly balanced siegewise (massive attacker advantage) and combatwise (massive defender advantage). All siege defenders can use are countered by shield generators, and before anyone suggests disabling the shield generators: What if enemy uses shield generators and reflects to defend their shield generators?  And even if you manage to disable, the attacking siege is so overly tanky and damaging that you can't possibly deal with both at same time.

So my advice is, just transfer to higher populated server that matches your preferred timezone. The balance just ain't good. All attacker needs to do is build 50 (Ridiculous!) supply golems and shield generators and you can't stop them. They will be in a t3 objective within 1 minute, so before you can react. Then it is just up to EWP and numbers you have online.

Regarding builds: tempest, catalyst, reaper, firebrand and willbender are busted within keeps. Warrior, rev, engi, mesmer, ranger and thief specs tend to get mowed over.

Edited August 3, 2023 by Riba.3271

[Chips.7968]

A cup of tea and a pack of biscuits.

[Mell.4873]

Generally seeking I find it's large siege with its ability knock people back being the real winner. You can basically Treb your own walls pushing player off their siege. 

The other thing that I find really helpful is cripple and roots stacks. Anything that can slow the zerg down will have a tendency of capturing some players which will allow you to kill them if they don't get resurrected. 

[ZTeamG.4603]

The only thing that stops a bad guy with an organized boonblob is a good guy with an organized boonblob.

[cyberzombie.7348]

For keep/garrison defense I personally use a heavy brusier build. Since I'm not gonna go toe-to-toe in that situation; counter sieging, disabling, and laying supply traps is my priority.

For towers I like to roll max mobility with armor that doesn't stick out. So I can sneak behind them and setup a ballista (As crazy as that sounds, I often prevented breaches from that tactic)

[ArchonWing.9480]

57 minutes ago, cyberzombie.7348 said:

So I can sneak behind them and setup a ballista

Yea that can be very decisive. Usually best if you can convince people to come flash build it for you.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

if you want to do dmg the best solo pugs vs zerg build imo is staff ele. it pumps out a lot of dmg, cc, and is fairly mobile. if you want to pick off stragglers most things will do but mes/ teef is probably your best bet

[Cyninja.2954]

Depends on number disparity and time of day and organization of the enemy squad. Best case you can deter the enemy from taking the objective, worst case you are absolutely useless.

Numbers disadvantage means you won't win any strait up fights based around player numbers (unless we are talking similar defenders to attackers, or at least a sufficient fraction of defenders to actually pressure the enemy blob). As such, poking or attacking the enemy players is useless.

The thing you want to target in this case is the siege. It's limited for attackers and defenders, can be taken out with 1-2 skilled disablers and cleared with defensive siege in most cases.

The second thing you want to target is the enemies ability to siege, in case you are successful in dealing with their first siege.

A well informed or skilled enemy knows this and commanders will call damage to siege and walls usually. Stealth is a huge advantage to have, as is mobility because you certainly aren't killing your enemy the conventional way with some dps build. You only chance: make sure those walls hold, so the enemy can't take advantage of their numerical superiority.

Disablers, supply removal traps, fire fields from mortars, etc. the whole shebang. Knowing which too use when though is the tricky part. It's amazing how a couple of defenders which know what they are doing can slow or even halt an objective capture, even against a larger force.

Meanwhile, all those lemmings which pew pew into an enemy blob, make the best use of them: if you see some of these players go up one side of the wall, engage from the other side with a disabler or so, that lemming is soon going to die, but he might make for a good distraction for actually something useful to be done.

[Nanogrid.7283]

Dragonhunter with Marauder/Berserker stats for me.

If I'm on wall, longbow has decent single target damage, some aoe damage and cc. I also have several self-stability skills I can use to prevent them from pulling me out of walls.

If I'm on ground I try to pull, into my traps, low self-stability classes in their backline.

In the end, it is a number game. But you will feel less frustrated/hopeless if you manage to kill a few before they capture the objective. 

Edited August 4, 2023 by Nanogrid.7283

[Kirevey.5079]

If you wanna have a chance of doing some dmg to the bad ppl of the group, you want to bring power dmg, range dmg and hopefully not a lot of projectiles. Power DH, Staff Weaver, Power Mirage shine really good on that. Other things you may want to check is if the group is running a lot of projectiles, in that case, something with a lot of reflects like Mesmer or a FB do really well. Against most pug zergs, even if organized, having a couple of burn guards is really strong. Dropping reflects on lord npc or gates/siege when u have at least 2 burn guards can be really effective.

Last, If the group is really well organized and you don't have at least similar numbers, is going to be really, really hard to beat them once they are already in. Best thing at that point is to get on a bursty class and try to single down stragglers as fast as possible. 

[Lipton Ice Tea.3580]

Pull their commander off a wall/cliff 😇usually the entire zerg follows him

[TheGrimm.5624]

19 hours ago, jaif.3518 said:

This is not a complaint, just a discussion.

I'm curious what builds people think are most effective when pugs have to defend against a superior, organized force?  Obviously at some point it becomes untenable, but that aside, what are good builds that could do something useful in defense?

I know I can look up meta builds in any number of websites, but a lot of those rely upon the fact that they are part of a cohesive team, not an ad-hoc collection of people.

If you really mean organized, short answer is you need a radio and backup that will response. So any one that can make a good scouting report with helpful information has access to an EWP before they breach the last line of defense, and players that will response with enough to counter the other side. Else the answer is nothing really. Now since its lunch and don't have time for a more rambling response will leave the longer answer till later since I can see this to be a fun and interesting thread since organized is not the same as disciplined so there are options, though will need more time to enjoy Archon's points and try and not double make any points. 🙂  

[babana.7521]

once they are in, close the gate behind them, kill the siege, get they strays, stall as long as possible, use the tactics - dragon banner and/or air conditioning. Make sure you have people coming to help before you pull the emergency waypoint. 

know where all the structural siege are, some of them can hit the lord's room. etc etc. 

[Absurd.2947]

Strips, pulls, burst power damage.

[Ashantara.8731]

On 8/3/2023 at 10:46 PM, jaif.3518 said:

An organized zerg attacks your keep off-peak: what build to bring for defense?

I would recommend one that makes for a speedy escape. 😁
 

Edited August 6, 2023 by Ashantara.8731

[Knighthonor.4061]

bunker and siege. People seem to not know how to use sieges for defense

[aspirine.6852]

On 8/4/2023 at 2:11 PM, Lipton Ice Tea.3580 said:

Pull their commander off a wall/cliff 😇usually the entire zerg follows him

So engineer it is then 😄 

[TheGrimm.5624]

1 hour ago, aspirine.6852 said:

So engineer it is then 😄 

Or a friendly Mez never hurts. 

[Thomas.2564]

Against a blob of ppt zombies? Playing of peak. Best def? That's ez. Leave and dont flip anything back. 

 

Edited August 8, 2023 by Thomas.2564

[oatsnjuices.1698]

A firebrand, tempest, vindicator, and two carpet bombers (pick any of about ten). Last night I watched a savvy commander take 10 players and make it miserable for what seemed like a map que. It was glorious.