Today on Guild Wars 2, I did all my dailies in the competitive World vs World (WvW) arena. I probably should have done them in the new clockwork chaos update, but that content is so hard to play with a group that I couldn’t do it and hang out with my friends. I decided to save that content for later and contribute to the global player vs player conflict.
At this point I must confess that I can not process WvW. I understand the idea behind it is to have servers play against each other, and I understand that it is conquest style, so you have to take multiple control points, but beyond that my knowledge of the strategy is pretty limited. Today all that changed.
My newfound knowledge about Guild Wars 2‘s WvW came from a change in tactic. Normally I log on and hope that I can find a massive zerg to run around with so that my contribution matters as little as my ignorance. Today, though, I went through the map with my guild and I had our leader speaking to me in voice chat. We were a small band of only ten warriors, but we did remarkably well considering our tiny size. What my leader explained was that with a force that size you can’t take keeps and flip points very effectively, but you can cause a lot of trouble.
Our ‘causing trouble’ tactic was what my leader described as ‘tapping.’ We would run up to keeps, but instead of trying to break in we’d just get a hit in on the gate and run away to kill defenseless caravans or tap another fort. By tapping the gates we were making it look like they were being sieged so that the defenders of that castle were distracted by our little band instead of the big zerg they needed to pay attention to. We were just an annoying fly, but we were an effective one. Rarely did a bunch of players from the other team come from nowhere and just murder all of us. We were staying out of the way and playing our own devious little game.
This made me realize there may be other strategies I don’t understand. When I run around with the zerg and pay no attention, I wonder what else I’m missing. People hide. People use portals creatively. People go invisible. Even a game I think I know, like Guild Wars 2, has a lot of layers for me to still uncover.
If you want to teach me any other useful strategies, leave them in comments.
