There have been a lot of complaints going around about the place of melee characters in WvWvW – the consensus being that ranged dominates large-scale combat. While this may be true on a few different levels, melee professions still have a valuable role to fill. OkuRaku at Team Legacy has thrown together an excellent guide geared towards raid leaders and guild leaders and ways they can properly utilize all of their forces in a keep siege. Even if you don’t plan on leading dozens into battle, it’s worth a read!

Problem: Reinforcements Carrying Supply
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 and possibly end the attack altogether.  

Solution: Choke Off Reinforcements
These potential risks can be mitigated by investing a small amount of ram time to allocate players to stopping reinforcements.  Specifically, each Keep has particular choke points that should be held by a small to medium number of players which I have highlighted on the maps below.   In general, the closer to the gate being sieged the choke is, the better the group should be at stopping someone from moving.  Chokes that are far from gates can have players who rely on cripple or simple kiting.

Check out the full article here.