What causes town guards to spawn?

[malphigian]

I've observed a few raids over on Tichondrius (from both defender and attacker views) and I've been trying to figure out what pattern there is to the spawns of guards.

Basically, it seems like after a raid has been hitting a town for a bit, new groups of guards start to warp in. This seems to happen in packs (that is, 4-5 will appear at once). The total number of guards starts to exceed the number of guards in the town.

I've heard two explanations for this so far:
1. Everytime you kill a guard, 2 more will spawn in a bit
2. Killing non-guard NPCs causes more guards to spawn
3. Some combination of the above.

I don't think #1 is right because I'm not seeing exponential growth in guard numbers. I know there are some special triggers on NPCs (e.g. attacking a windrider is almost always an awful idea). So #2 might be right, but it's hard to tell.

Anyone have any more info?

[Pantalaimon]

I think most vendors have a trigger that when attacked they spawn guard packs like you described, which is almost always a bad idea :P

[Rinnhart]

I've observed a few raids over on Tichondrius (from both defender and attacker views) and I've been trying to figure out what pattern there is to the spawns of guards.

Basically, it seems like after a raid has been hitting a town for a bit, new groups of guards start to warp in.  This seems to happen in packs (that is, 4-5 will appear at once).  The total number of guards starts to exceed the number of guards in the town.

I've heard two explanations for this so far:
1. Everytime you kill a guard, 2 more will spawn in a bit
2. Killing non-guard NPCs causes more guards to spawn
3. Some combination of the above.

I don't think #1 is right because I'm not seeing exponential growth in guard numbers.  I know there are some special triggers on NPCs (e.g. attacking a windrider is almost always an awful idea).  So #2 might be right, but it's hard to tell.

Anyone have any more info?
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Make sure you're taking out their production structures.

[Kairos]

From my experience, guards will also spawn spontaneously when enemy players are in town. A couple of my friends and I entered the Undercity in our 20s or so. Even though we didn't attack anything, Deathguard Elites attacked us. I even saw one spawn near me and aggro me.

[Trucidation]

I have some experience with raiding towns. Here are some observations:

1. Some npcs call guards when they see enemy players. You'll see the NPC yell in general chat, and guards will appear. The number of additional guards that spawn is equal to the number of players in the proximity. So if you raid with four people, expect guards to spawn four at a time. There seems to be some kind of a cap on the number of extra guards that spawn at a time.. maybe 4 or 5.

2. Some npcs call guards when attacked. The rest is same as above. Again, if four players raid a town and one of them attacks an npc, four guards will spawn.

3. Some npcs call guards when they see a player of their faction get attacked. This might be explained away by #1. Not really sure.

Note that guard npcs don't usually do the above.


So, when raiding a town you should proceed slowly and killing all npcs and guards on the way. Once npcs have been killed you can fight players without more guards spawning.