Guild Wars 2

I ran with my guild during the invitational. The map is gorgeous and the side objectives are pretty fun, but there were a lot of frustrations being expressed. I’ve compiled most of our observations here, as well as plenty of my own:

The Good

- Keep and tower bosses are actually threatening. Or, if they’re not threatening, they don’t completely bowl over to a moderately-sized group.
- Towers upgrading with waypoints makes holding them far more important.
- The Oasis event to fight over the laser is fantastic, forcing groups to split and skirmish to come out ahead rather than blob around. Defending or assassinating core carriers is very chaotic and strategic.
- Everything is gorgeous.

The Bad (and buggy)

- Shrine buffs. They’re a good concept, but if you triple-cap shrines, their associated buff (no lava dmg, no fall dmg, etc.) needs to linger for 5-10m so the people that put effort into capturing them will actually get to use them. As it is, half our group died mid-fall due to an Air shrine flipping on the way down. Hilarious, sure, but if it stays this way, who will bother with them?
- Neutral mobs. These are an annoyance most WvWers are used to, but it’s especially bad here, where the many confined, low-ground corridors and valleys make it so classes like Mesmer/Guardian/Necro can’t activate swiftness without being forced into combat. The canyon spiders in the east are especially aggrivating.
- No juvenile animals. More of a bug or inconsistency than anything; other Borderlands have pets for rangers to tame, but I couldn’t find any here.
- The vertical nature of this map gives classes with easy-to-use blinks a large advantage.
- This is especially true in the large, multi-level keeps with very circuitous navigation.
- Waypoint upgrades do not display when left-clicking on an objective icon via the world map.
- Rampart (Home) Keep: it takes almost a minute between entering an outer gate and manning a cannon to fend off invaders. The stone barriers are a cute gimmick, but feel like needless circuitousness in an already dense keep. Just stopping by to resupply after an incursion into the south is a big headache, especially with the lack of a watergate or water portal (which, granted, would probably give the home team undue advantage in the oasis fights).
- Shrike’s Place (Eastern Keep): There’s currently no supply depot in the inner keep. (This is true of the western keep as well, so perhaps this is intentional.)
- Shrike’s Place (Eastern Keep): The map shows a lake on the keep’s western side, but not the bridge over the lake leading to the west outer gate.
- The size of these keeps makes mesmer sweeps a completely ridiculous prospect.

The Ugly

- Nobody will fight inside these keeps. Nobody without a death wish, anyway. They’re breathtaking and all, but the first thing out of everyone’s mouth when we broke into the lord area of the western keep was “this place is a freaking meat grinder”. Unless you plan to build a shield generator (great siege, btw) every couple feet to mitigate AC/AoE fire, you’ll be ground to bits. The eastern keep is a bit better about this, with more open areas.
- On the other hand, these keeps are sorta schizo since they lack waypoints. You can’t just bunker them and waypoint in a zerg at the first cry for help.
- Everywhere seems to suffer from the keep dilemma. There are tons of confined choke points and narrow walkways, often one after the other. It was a cute gimmick in EotM, but it has no place in a serious WvW map – at least not when they’re as common as they are. Anyone with pulls will have a field day.
- The run from the towers – assuming they even have waypoints and aren’t contested – is a bit long, especially if you don’t know the terrain. At the same time, a blob barreling through Hills is much more quick than a blob barreling through these keeps – their size gives an actual travel time for threats, which could provide a larger window for response.
- I don’t see this working as a Borderlands map due to its size and layout.
- The size of the map, and the large distance between all the objectives, all but guarantees it’ll be dead in low-population servers.
- But in the higher-tier servers, where guilds tend to be more specialized, there’s still big question marks.
- Fight-oriented guilds will have a field day with the Oasis fights, but those are really infrequent. Keeps are too much of a grindstone to do much against, and these kinds of guilds will rarely bother with ninja-capping. The rest of the map is a multi-elevated mess, which is more frustrating than fun for a guild that wants open-field combat.
- Havoc/gank squads will also like the Oasis fights, but with supply dolyaks seeming to be much less important, there’s not a lot more for them to do.
- So… who will play this? Guilds that love sieging, I guess, or any 50-60 man group that can break into multiple squads to cover ground. But those feel like a distinct rarity as of late.

If this map replaced EB or EotM, it would probably see a lot of success. But it doesn’t make sense as an EB replacement, and following EotM’s mechanics would destroy much of its potential. And, really, if it hits all the points of the EB/EotM demographic… it doesn’t seem like it’s made for hardcore WvWers at all.

As it is, as much as I want to love this map, I don’t see myself playing it with any regularity. Some of these negatives may go away with tweaks, or as guilds learn the layout better and siege locations are learned. But as it is, I’m not that optimistic.

Furienify.5738:

If this map replaced EB or EotM, it would probably see a lot of success. But it doesn’t make sense as an EB replacement, and following EotM’s mechanics would destroy much of its potential. And, really, if it hits all the points of the EB/EotM demographic… it doesn’t seem like it’s made for hardcore WvWers at all.

Don’t touch, EB please. EB is the best WvW map they have designed so far, including the current beta-tested one.

Also, WvW and EotM don’t go hand in hand. EotM is the worst possible design for a WvW map. Literally the only good I have to say about this map so far is that the graphic/art designers deserve a promotion and the WvW team needs to get the ’ole boot.

Oh, I agree. It’s just that the the same ‘everything is sparkly/wacky to appeal to pubs’ side of EotM can be felt here as well.

I took more screenshots of this desert borderland map, than in the 2 years I’ve been playing GuildWars2 as a whole. I’ve literally been walking around like a scrub and as opposed to my regular WvW mindset (fights, fights, fights), been avoiding roamers and zergs alike to take kittening pictures of the map. The graphical team did an outstanding job, surely. Though as visually appealing as the map is, the practicality of this map is abysmal.

I have to agree with OP. Actually, the current maps don’t look so bad now. Wish they were just a little bigger. Not a fan of all the gimmicks, either. Just give me a good map to fight.

I wasn’t in the stress test, but imo for the shrines if it works the way you say it does, I think they should keep it. Reason being this opens up a lot of very nice possibilities for a small group to defend against a larger group.

Suppose the enemy has a 40 man zerg that has capped all 3 shrines and now has “no fall damage” on. Meanwhile your side only has 10 people so you can’t fight them head on, what you can do as 10 people is send 2 to each shrine ready to attack/cap them. Meanwhile the other 4 people act as bait and try to get the zerg to jump off a cliff. With proper communication you can wipe the enemy’s entire zerg through smart play.

As far as chokepoints go, it’s going to be really painful to attack definitely, but as far as warfare goes it actually makes sense to design your keep with many chokepoints. I’m fine either way really, more open spaces would be nice, but chokepoints also makes sense.

" Shrine buffs. They’re a good concept, but if you triple-cap shrines, their associated buff (no lava dmg, no fall dmg, etc.) needs to linger for 5-10m so the people that put effort into capturing them will actually get to use them. As it is, half our group died mid-fall due to an Air shrine flipping on the way down. Hilarious, sure, but if it stays this way, who will bother with them? "

I really agree with this, there should be some sort of cooldown (a small one, like a 10 sec cooldown), with a timer that is shown on the current buff. So that the team using the buff is not completely caught off guard.

Just wanted to chime in that Waypoint upgrades are not a thing and are available by default in certain towers and keeps and can only be used by the team who spawn is closest to them. This was addressed in a blog post a while back: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/ready-up-episode-34-wvw-automatic-upgrades/