Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet is taking a step in the right direction in reaching out to the community for feedback on their stress test. However, they did a lot of changes and concepts in this map may need to change from their current iteration.

First, the good:
-Thematically amazing. I love the look. Fire keep reminds me of Greco-Roman architecture + LOTR’s Mines of Moria + a fire demon cult. Air nails the Palace/city feel and the ceiling of the Lord’s Room is sweet. Earth feels very expansive and is fitting of being the Garrison equivalent of the map. All three keeps could easily be turned into PvE raids with some tweaking and added mobs. Oasis looks impressive, it reminds me of the architecture from the Living Story’s trade city among the cliffs (I forget the name, but the Glint followers docked here). The shrines are all nice, and the towers have distinct flavors. NWT to me is the rockwall area that prevents you from autorunning, NET is clearly the lich kingdom, SWT is that clearly-physics-hacking ogre’s place, and SET is the Charr outpost.

-It feels like it could easily house more players than EBG fits, which would be amazing for the T1/T2/T3 servers.

There are two categories I’ll put problems I see with the map into, and then a miscellaneous category:

Fighting, or appealing to the GvG/scrim players They want intricate map design, but WvW is a game mode that myself and a lot of players I talk to consider best played on a relatively flat land with structural/neutral ruin features to give LoS and maneuverability. However, their new map gives little room for good fighting space despite the massive size. There simply aren’t enough flat expanses of land to fight in. The only really great spot for open-fielding is in the bottom level of Oasis near the north, and it has an issue: water has historically obscured the AoE rings – both ally and enemy; this makes it harder to fight since you can’t fully see the ground-targeted abilities clearly. Performance on lower-end machines may be of concern here as well due to water rendering. The other area that should be good to fight in is the desert biome of the southwest, between the ogre tower and the fire keep, but it is currently riddled with lumpy dunes that will make leap/dash attacks and certain projectile attacks work strangely. If these were flattened out, it would be a perfect spot to fight.

My idea on open field fights is that there should be at least 3 flat expanses suitable for fighting before considering everything else – one in the center that everyone can easily reach, and one by each enemy spawn (southeast, southwest). In the Alpine Borderlands you can see this philosophy: between Bay and SWT is a popular area, so is the area directly west of SET, and then you have more open areas northeast of Bay and on both sides of Garrison. If the Desert BL’s southwestern desert is flattened out then we have 2 solid areas to fight. Southeast feels a little cramped and might not lend well to open fielding. There are too many mobs in the Necropolis area that could be hit to make it a viable area to fight, but removing those Shadow Imps might help. Same thing with the Veteran Bristlebacks and other Vet mobs near Palace.

Finally, mechanics would go here as well. The shrine aspects are neat, and I like everything until you get to the group stealth from Sandstorm effect, and the varying stat buffs. I’m talking about the -10% incoming damage, +10% outgoing damage, and +10% critical damage. The critical damage one is bad, and even if it’s crit chance it would still be bad. Fire and Earth are the best, although immunity to burning is a rough one due to its impact in damage. You should make the Air and Fire shrines equal in power as they are attack-oriented and natural targets for enemies to go to before going to the Earth keep and shrine. The Earth shrine can stay defensive since it’s likely going to be used by defenders. Make Air and Fire both buff all outgoing damage by 10%. Finally, make these removable by the player’s choice. The 33% movement speed is great, but if I’m scrimming an enemy guild and it’s 15v15 I don’t want to win because I had the -10% incoming damage when they didn’t have anything (or even the offensive ones, which in the end are less valuable math-wise).

The size of the map, and PPT concerns The massive size deters k-training, which is a good thing. There are far fewer objectives on the map compared to say EotM. Unfortunately this also means that you have to run for a long time to get anywhere, and the paths aren’t straightforward. Towers and keeps greatly inhibit travel if you don’t own them, as they act as gates of sorts to get to different places, which can be a good thing for defense but makes it hard to traverse otherwise. There are few waypoints in the map, so owning towers is really important especially since Lava and Palace keeps don’t have waypoints. I would like to see a respawn mechanic where groups or players respawning get a superspeed buff that is removed on enemy proximity, allowing players to get back to where they were a bit faster (because right now it’s a 5-minute trek not including being killed by environment/players) without being able to outrun roamers. In the same regard, the massive size makes it hard to find enemies. Introducing the radar from EotM’s sentry turrets would help a lot, and should be available in all towers and keeps to direct groups towards each other to fight – groups may miss each other otherwise.

It appears to be a map aimed at a slightly larger than EBG-sized population. It won’t be effective to split up into more than 2-3 groups due to the amount of supply needed to siege something. Fortified walls and gates are rightfully very hard to chew through, but when defensively sieged are massively hard to take. Shield generators will be a necessity here, but building shield generators + adequate catas/rams + ballistas to take care of poorly-placed wall siege means that you need a lot of supply. Camps are distanced far enough away that if your group splits to refresh supply, they’ll be gone for a long time. Camps are going to need a higher supply generation rate in order to fuel the amount of siege needed, especially with most people walking around with the +5 supply mastery.

The final issues here deal with the design of towers and keeps. Too many times yesterday I was greeted by narrow and ledges with a lethal drop exiting out of tower/keep portals and when breaking into a tower/keep with catas. At least portals should be moved since portals are occasionally affected by latency, and you may run off the edge if you don’t have a great connection. Also, the asuran elevator portal. Why is it there? It’s weird, and looks like a really great way for a group to die. The drop down is lethal on my 23k hp warrior, so I can’t imagine a whole lot surviving that. The camp nearest the Mage College (NWC) features a claimer and supply hut on a second floor, with guards on the first floor. This is begging for easy caps, no need to kill guards – just stealth up the ramp and gun it for the claimer. It’s an interesting design, but one that is more vulnerable than the rest of the camps.

Very important note, walls are HUGE. They’re towering at maybe 2x the height of current walls, which makes ballistae somewhat ineffective since they don’t arc up fully and get destroyed on wall lips. Unless you intend for Omega Golems to be the main siege killers, arrow carts and the like will be unnecessarily hard to get rid of. Omegas suck at killing walls here, 800 damage per attack is laughable. Not sure if Omegas will be used for their current WvW use.

Miscellaneous issues:Biggest one: sentries don’t alert anyone anything. Please let my sentry do what it theoretically should – a sentry should alert me of a number range of what faction passed through. I would want this visible on my map, with a ping alert on my minimap. A bubble with the info could hover where the sentry stood, and would go away on mouseover.

I had slight performance issues in the northwest rocky area, which had a lot of animated pieces. The ranged golem guards have an attack that forms an orange beam that interrupts and locks players in place – this should go and be replaced with something else. As I said earlier, too many flavor mobs – lots of hostile ones at that. Running back along the eastern side from Citadel sucks. Palace is a maze, probably intentional but still annoying.

TL;DR:
ArenaNet will have to tweak how players respawn and move around the map as well as either the wall heights or ballista functionality as well as golem damage in order to have the PPT side of things run smoothly. As it stands, it is very painful to siege something not only in terms of time and cost, but also in terms of your players’ health bars. Defense was buffed a bit too hard here.

I believe that prior comments have been right on. I love the scope but find the complexity frustrating. I am still 100k files from being completely downloaded and am happy to have had the playable feature so that I could participate. I was able to roam, capture shrines and camps. There were a couple of crashes but that might be expected. I am looking forward to next weekend with more ppl and the chance to make a revenant which I think was definitely considered when making this new borderland.