Guild Wars ２

This guide is meant to cover the situation where one medium to large sized group is assaulting a keep that is being defended by a medium to large sized group but has been drained to zero supply. The types of encounters that will occur around Keeps are going to vary wildly, so I want to emphasize that the points here are meant to apply primarily to this situation; though I believe that the core idea can be adapted to a wide variety of situations.

This is an important strategy for raid leaders to understand and consider executing. Raid members should read and understand so that they're familiar with the maps should a raid leader call for them to cover a choke (ideally, he or she would ping the map to show them exactly where to go). If you play WvW mostly unorganized, or alone, this guide will not help you, but even those who run in small parties might find it as a useful strategy to keep in their arsenal.

The word "melee" in this guide is not limited to describing certain professions such Thief, Warrior, Guardian

Guild Wars 2 gives all players the flexibility to choose the playstyle they enjoy most whether that's a Warrior using a rifle or a Ranger with dual axes. Melee in this guide describes a player who prefers to play up close, regardless of profession.

Players who prefer to melee in WvW are often faced with the question: What do I do during a keep siege if I'm not manning a siege weapon and I prefer to melee?

Put my preference aside and equip a ranged weapon. This is a valid response, as using a ranged weapon to attack defensive weapons such as oil and cannons is very important at the start of a siege. After those are dead, it's still valuable to have a ranged weapon so you can harass enemy defenders on the wall, however it's unlikely that ranged attackers will be able to consistently kill these players - the goal should be to have enough ranged attackers to deter them from building additional defensive siege.

The most common response though, especially when playing in unorganized public groups, will be simple: bash the door. However, once a siege becomes organized, it only takes a few simple calculations to see that the value of melee bashing on the door is an inefficient use of resources.

For the first beta weekend, melee attackers were doing anywhere from 20-50 damage per attack, depending on the speed. As a conservative estimation,

and given that damage will increase with better weapons and equipment, we can set an upper limit at about 170 dps. After release and more data gathering, we can update this approximation but let's use 170 dps for now for easy calculations.

So what can we do with 40-80 players? There are many possibilities; in this guide we'll cover choking off reinforcements. In the situation of sieging a defended keep that has been supply sapped,

One defender bypassing a Keep siege may not seem like a big deal but let's think about the possibilities. If a small number of players bypass the siege they could repair gates or walls and delay the siege, which is not a huge problem. However once a handful get by, they will have enough to build siege weapons like ballistae and arrowcarts that can be costly and time consuming to deal with during a siege. In the worst case, if a medium to large number of defenders slip by, they could be carrying enough supply to drop down enough siege weapons to defeat the offensive siege

Stage 1 means outer gates, Stage 2 means inner gates: