Guild Wars 2

Crimsonjr.2359:

This would be a unpopular opinion but my idea to make it better was to make it:
10 vs 10
options to place minimal siege (AC/Ballista)
30 minute timer
Few more NPC’s
Would be perfect for a small GvG group

no siege

FIRST MATCH; i was thinking that this is some kind of pve thing

SECOND MATCH; I get to see that it is more pvp focused and I am having fun

THIRD MATCH; You sold me the game mode, i love it. it is fresh and will be fun to see how it goes live as this map is dynamic based on how the teams react. AWESOME JOB

I think starting with supply is potentially problematic. An organized team with heavy damage can initiate a lord rush without ever having to leave the attack lane. Too often tonight, both sides were opting for this tactic, resulting in it being a race to put out the most damage.

Sure, executing this strategy requires good organization and some skill, but it also completely bypasses some of the core objectives of the game mode.

Playing this mode for the time I have, the game should not come down to “points” this game mode should be extended 20/25 mins or have a stalemate mechanic ( ex. lords run towards mid). It should have a early, mid, and late game to make it more interesting. Expand strategic diversity as the game progresses. Currently, this is the heroes, but having more than one added objective would be nice. In my opinion, the guards should be invulnerable to everything but archers. We already have a short game mode, some variation would really make this mode feel fresh.

Crimsonjr.2359:

This would be a unpopular opinion but my idea to make it better was to make it:
10 vs 10
options to place minimal siege (AC/Ballista)
30 minute timer
Few more NPC’s
Would be perfect for a small GvG group

We won it under 5 minutes so there would be need lots of tweaking if it was 10v10

I was interested in Stronghold as soon as you mentioned it, I watched the demo streams about it. Was glad to try it today. I’ve done about 10 game overall, almost half and half with my teammates or pugs.

The good :

First thing I wanna say is that it’s good to have some new things! Change is good for time to time to shake the meta and to liven up the scene. We definitely need to continue promoting PvP ; new maps and/or skills changes.

Love the dynamic of the map, it’s kind of overwhelming at first but there is always something to do. Could be also bad at the same time for some player because it kinda feels like you’re not doing enough, but to me it’s not a big deal.

I like the theme of the map : Pirates vs Knights. Could be nice to have some explanation and context about the events ; Is it just a fictional event for the sake of it or does it have some lore related to it? Could use more development on that side.
Heroes are good objective, they are strong enough to have an impact but not too much to break your team if you miss it.

The layers of the maps are well disposed; Lower ground in the lane and higher group on the sides.

The bad :

May be more fun to have group > 5, but you would really need to punish death a lot to do so. (see death punishment later)

Treb don’t have enough impact on the game. Being able to treb your own lord room maybe? How about being able to damage the doors with it?

Most of the time, it’s best to ignore the player when on the defense and just kill the NPC, same thing with initial push when attacking. Need to be more incentive to kill players instead of just focusing NPC.

Don’t have big comeback mechanics or we don’t know how to use it properly because when you get a lead, it’s easier to just rush and forget defense, even if they defend it successfully, lack of death penalties doesn’t do much to the defender.
NPC are too statics it would feel better to have them move around, dodge from time to time.

Timers is not fun. At some point, if the game is close enough and draw long, the winning team in points can just tank and wait for the timer. For me it’s not fun. Consider having unlimited time or puting a higher timer.

The ugly :

Need more maps and separate queue per game type (Conquest/Death match/Stronghold), at least 3.

Hero channel are not fun. Warrior rampage and GG.

Need to punish more for deaths. You can just defend, die spawn right away. A cumulative death timer should do the trick, or add a debuff of some kind when you die multiple times.

Need to replace death guards / repair doors. Supply running is kinda bad because good defender can kill NPC really quick when the offensive team puts a lot of pressure.

Oh and I almost forgot… TEMPLATES. Yes, yes, yes, this is still a high priority for me and that should be shiped with HoT. We need it even more if we end up having the 3 game type in the same map pool for unranked.

I’ve tried to keep it concise, don’t know if I did well! Overall, the map needs some tweek to be satisfying playing it, but good job on it Anet!

Laraley.7695:

As a squishy ele you won’t be able to cap the hero. I don’t understand how sitting in water would help.

It’s easy (and I capped it a bit); passive heal to ensure health stays above the threshold long enough to cap. Even with two people cleaving away it was pretty simple to do. As more skilled players try the map it could change but the point still remains that capping is far too simple to do because there are too few ways to stop the channel. If you’re hit, channel should end. Period.

ETA: I see you mentioned the same later in the thread – my bad!

I had a blast. Played a bunch of games solo, then played some games with guildies. I did well with builds that didn’t do so hot in Conquest that I’d always wanted to succeed with and did great. And the level of strategy involved is very fun. I like having so many objectives to shift my focus constantly as I play.

One thing I noticed is having a defensive bunker build in your defense lane seems like a poor strategy. In almost every map I took my spirit ranger up the offensive line and killed all the guards WHILE dancing around the turret engineer/bunker guardian/bunker warrior. Turret engineer was the easiest because all I had to do was pull away the guards and kill them away from the engineer’s kill zone. Without the ability to heavily pressure your opponent you won’t do that well as a defender as you can’t really protect the guards, you can only kill the players/NPCs that come after you. To this end I found my zerker staff elementalist to be fantastic at this role as he could nuke entire groups of NPCs in a few seconds.

Meanwhile a defensive build in the offensive line worked best for me. I was able to kill the guards while out-sustaining other players who were trying to defend them, meaning I was both full-filling my objective while holding the attention of one or two enemies simultaneously. I was also able to provide solid healing support to my NPCs to let them last longer.

I don’t care for the timer, though. I only saw a couple matches end because of the timer, but one was especially jarring. I had finished killing all the NPCs guarding the enemy Lord and the enemy had just failed their own lord push with our lord in downed state. We rallied the lord and prepared an offense, it was anyone’s game. Then DING! Time’s up, blue team wins. Anti-climactic ending to such a close game.

Only bug I came across was the channel for the heroes not showing up for some reason. This actually cost me two games as I could’ve summoned the lord unopposed if I had the prompt to start the channel when it should have been available.

ArrDee.2573:

After a few games… pretty angry that this is the game mode they chose to add over arenas! If I want to slay NPCs, I would play PvE!

+1
Hope for own qeue for stronghold so i can ignore this PvE crap.
Hope for more tdm maps in future

Finally played enough to get a good understanding.

+Tide and flow of battle here is BIG something Fantastic and nonexistent Conquest.
+The map is beautiful and the NPCs talking makes it feel like a warfeild. Makes me miss the beta days. “You got the keep, keep it!”
+Had amazing success kittenter Mes on Defense. Not sure why, however.
+I can see this game mode being crazy in high level play, with rotations and plays. No surprise seeing its based on a “moba map”. “Siege” no less, my favorite mode outside of “Arena” in Smite.
+Decent to Good balance.

Bad things
-A bit more complex, after two years of Conquest many players were confused, a guidlie explained it several times and we won those games. A TUTORIAL FOR THIS MAP, WOULD IMPROVE PLAYER EXPERIENCE. AND MAKE IT MORE INCLUSIVE
-Archers should do a little bit more damage.
-Heroes need a buff, I feel they should be able to damage players and be a threat to take out.
-Needs a death punishment.

Suggestions
=Tutorial added where the water tutorial was.
=Buff Heroes or..
=Less Heroes. Perhaps where the second set would spawn, instead add a “Planar Anomaly” that summons a Meteor Storm, or grants a buff similar to Ferocity, points on kill. It will add to the tide and flow of the battle to whoever gets it.

Hello,

After taking part to stronghold test for several hours overnight, here comes my feedback.

I first attended it as solo queue and experimented around, then once I made my mind on a strategy, I joined a “premade” made of random players that set their mind up on the same strategy. I must add that we all were on TS (although we would have done as well without TS given how our strategy was straightforward) and tried to optimize our build composition, which may have had an effect on the results of this test.

The first thing that struck me is that guards are really weak. As a hammer+bow warrior, using PVT PvP amulet, I was able to take on at once and kill all alone by myself all the 6 guards between the two doors, leaving the room free for skritts.
In other words, without active defense from players, both doors can be destroyed by a single player and 4 skritts in 2 minutes from game start.

After a while, it appeared that the passive defense (door health, guards and boss+support NPC combat) was so low that the best strategy was to simply rush the boss right from start along with 5 skritts. We got one ranger to defend our outer door and the 4 other of us rushed strait to the boss. Using this strategy, we lost only one out of 10-20 games (did not keep the count). For the lost game, someone understood it was very important to kill our skritts before they destroyed the 1st door, then we lost time trying to get a hero instead of simply skritt spamming like we did in other games.

One of the won game lasted for the whole 15 mins with a very strong defence and we managed to kill the boss in the last few seconds (we still won by kill, not by points once the time ran out). Our best time was 2:08 to complete and our average (excluding the 15min game) was about 3:10 (guesstimate). During most games there were 1-3 defenders on the opposing teams yet they were not enough to prevent us from winning.

From my experience, it appears that, once the outer door is opened with this strategy, the game is more or less won. A CC heavy team has a very easy time keeping skritts alive between both doors because 1/ guards are weak and 2/ enemy players have to run a long way from spawn to boss room without any cover. They are therefore extremely susceptible to ranged CC.

The boss support NPC are also quite ineffective. The mage dies in a matter of seconds, the cleric does not seem very proficient at healing the boss up and the two others being melee fighters are killed by melee AoE without even thinking about it. Moreover, they all (including the boss) were susceptible to ALL cc and never made use of defiance (either vanilla or HoT system) (may be a bug or the system was not yet implemented).

Of course, these results are biased since players are discovering this new game mode, making up new strategies and learning how to play it properly. I hope that the metagame will evolve with more focus on a proper defence later on, but it may also shift to a base-race paradigm where both teams rush for the enemy and it all becomes a PvE contest (WoW veterans will remember old times when Alterac Valley battleground, albeit hosting 40 players and being much larger than the current stronghold map, was host to such base-race).
The experience has shown us that many players tend to focus on the strategy which provides the best result for the least effort, and the possibility of earning about 1500 reward track points and 30 silvers in 2 mins looks extremely sweet. Moreover, advanced strategies require coordination and I can easily imagine unranked “soloqueue” teams resorting to simpler strategies that do not require strong team organisation, such as the rush.

From my experience, I conclude that:
- making the doors only susceptible to door breakers is a great idea. At least does it force to some NPC care.
- guards should be buffed across the board (both damage and health pool). A single players should not be able to dispatch them that easily while keeping skritts safe (when players do not defend). The way they are currently, archers are simply useless.
- the same applies to heroes. They have too little life at the moment and are not really worth spending the time to wait for them. Well, the only time we lost was because we tried getting ourselves a hero instead of sticking with the basic skritt spam.
- the same applies to boss and support NPC !!! They really diserve a lot more HP and they should be granted some way to avoid perma cc (unless it was a bug or the HoT defiance not yet implemented).
- in my opinion, the boss life should reset should all agressor die and the boss go out of combat. As it is now, once both doors are broken, you can simply switch to an attrition war strategy that consists in running and hitting the boss a bit each time (before defenders kill you) until it dies. Killing the boss should be an “achievement”, meaning that your team was able to hold the place long enough to bring it from 100% down to 0.
- I feel like guard behaviour may have to be changed. Currently, it is enough for players to hit them a few times to get them to completely forget about skritts. Skritts should not be allowed to run freely between guards like this (or buff guards enough that players really can’t engage them all at once so that there are always some guards hitting skritts as long as none of the 6 guards was killed).

On a sidenote, I have seen in the blue boss room a cellar with lots of barrels inside. The games were too easy for us to try abusing it but I think someone should have a look and report us whether a team can fit in and abuse it to hit the boss without taking damage.

Overall, the experience was pleasant and refreshing. I hope that some equilibrium will be found so that all the parts gameplay elements get a proper use and are not skipped over. I saw several “devs” around monitoring and one told me they are actively monitoring the beta to gather data, therefore I am quite confident for the future of this new game mode.

NB team comp:
In all games, we had a single zerker mesmer/ranger defend our outer door. Someone was constantly keeping swiftness on skritts and someone had a CC heavy spec to keep defenders at bay from skritts or stunned when they were too close. That done, team comp changed and we were equally sucessful with a 3 war, rang/mesm, guard comp and a eng, thief/elem, war, r/m, guard comp.

I’ve been having a blast. I really enjoy it.

I think there’s potential with the game mode, but as of now I have several major issues with it.

• Timer and Score Many of my games end due to the timer. It is insanely frustrating to loose based on the current score system, despite having the enemys inner gate down while they aren’t even at our inner gate yet. Basically the points don’t accurately represent a teams performance. Score should be considered AFTER taking a look at how far the main objective, pushing the lane, acctually is.

Besides, I’d highly prefer the lords rushing into the middle for a final battle once the timer’s up.

• Channeling This is a huge one. Unless your team heavily outnumbers the enemy at a hero channel, there’s no way you can stop a tanky build with stability from ignoring you and getting the hero.
  It’s similar for supply. The most effective thing in mid is ignoring everyone and getting your channels off with the help of some line of sight play. Fighting people there pretty much is a waste of time.

I ended up ignoring players pretty much entirely since it felt like that’s the most effective thing to do for the objective. When defending you only have to care for the assaulting NPC’s to die, enemy players there are just an annoyance when on a tanky mobile specc. Assaulting is pretty much the only place where you care for other players , because they are a threat to your NPCs

I was kind of disappointed, condition builds are really inferior there due to heavy NPC focus. At least in pve stacks are different being necro specific, how this mode is turning out is to me a foresight of how you plan to “fix conditions in pve” it’s not a good one. I would like to request the Silverwastes treatment higher toughness lower vitality I back it up with the fact that many said the NPC die too easily and some should be not solo friendly. Don’t increase their HP plz increase the defense and reduce the HP, I started to dust off my dhuumfire build in conquest but SH is not friendly to conditions.

If this is linked to the new mobs in HoT as well others and I will be disappointed twice. It could be better but it was refreshing experience since it’s still beta I hope this is looked at, if others would disagree with me I can still argue that their own gameplay proves it as well as current pve content. It felt good not staying on a point but I felt like I traded a problem with another I might as well avoid both AKA give TDM it’s own queue I will take that instead of those two.

One of the biggest things I noticed about Stronghold is how different it is with a pre-made team compared to pugging it up. I played probably around 15-18 games with guildies tonight, usually against enemy pre-made teams, and two-three times against tourny players.

None of these games went to timer, none even came close to timing out. If there was a mid-fight the team that won the mid-fight won the game. Later in the evening people were getting a little more experienced and began using staff eles with sandstorm as the premier defensive players. But even that was a questionable use of resources when more often than not the five man rush when executed properly would still win.

At the end of the night I pugged game or two and was exposed to the O/D/S meta people were developing without the use of voice-coms. And while it makes sense, it is entirely different than what organized teams are doing, and as evidenced by the people in this thread complaining about games timing out, very ineffective.

I had a few shots with a support guardian, and I had a lot of fun escorting the offensive npc.
The only real suggestion I have, as also someone else stated, is to punish more for death. Considering the number of things going on, a longer respawn or some penalty on life points like on gw1 could bring more come-back moments if the loosing party get a few kills at the right moment

I really like the mode, but i do have some minor aspects that I’d like to address:

1) The NPC’s in and in front of the base have a bit low HP. It’s very easy to just run to the front of the enemy base and kill them and even if the defender goes straight to the own door, he won’t be able to kill the attacker and/or heal up the NPC’s quick enough in almost all MU’s and Situations I’ve encountered so far.
—> This also contributes to the fact, that archers are used way less than doorbreakers, because you don’t have to fight against the enemy and his NPC’s in front of his base, so you don’t need archers to make the fight more even or fear that your doorbreakers get 1-shot by the enemy NPC’s.

This could also be mitigated by being able to rez and the necessity to stomp the NPC’s in the base (not the archers and doorbreakers and not the big NPC you spawn by channeling).

2) Archers could also be a little bit better: I don’t think they’re completely useless, like some players do, but they are in most cases inferior to the doorbreakers, especially bc it’s so easy to kill NPC’s that would one-shot the doorbreakers.

3) Another Idea I had (I heard that in a stream yesterday) is the ability to drop supply on the ground (maybe it should disappear after 1min), so you could stack them in your base and go for one big push or sth. Could be totally imbalanced, but I think it could also be pretty fun and interesting, so it could be worth a try.

PowerBottom.5796:

I really like the mode, but i do have some minor aspects that I’d like to address:

1) The NPC’s in and in front of the base have a bit low HP. It’s very easy to just run to the front of the enemy base and kill them and even if the defender goes straight to the own door, he won’t be able to kill the attacker and/or heal up the NPC’s quick enough in almost all MU’s and Situations I’ve encountered so far.
—> This also contributes to the fact, that archers are used way less than doorbreakers, because you don’t have to fight against the enemy and his NPC’s in front of his base, so you don’t need archers to make the fight more even or fear that your doorbreakers get 1-shot by the enemy NPC’s.

This could also be mitigated by being able to rez and the necessity to stomp the NPC’s in the base (not the archers and doorbreakers and not the big NPC you spawn by channeling).

2) Archers could also be a little bit better: I don’t think they’re completely useless, like some players do, but they are in most cases inferior to the doorbreakers, especially bc it’s so easy to kill NPC’s that would one-shot the doorbreakers.

3) Another Idea I had (I heard that in a stream yesterday) is the ability to drop supply on the ground (maybe it should disappear after 1min), so you could stack them in your base and go for one big push or sth. Could be totally imbalanced, but I think it could also be pretty fun and interesting, so it could be worth a try.

I would suggest this instead of the ability to revive guards from point 1: barracks have three doors. Two are in use at the moment, one for breakers and one for archers. The 3rd door could be made active and offer to exchange supplies to respawn guards. We still keep the interesting idea of being able to get guards back, but we tie it more to the stronghold mechanics.

Gilgalas.7860:

PowerBottom.5796:

I really like the mode, but i do have some minor aspects that I’d like to address:

1) The NPC’s in and in front of the base have a bit low HP. It’s very easy to just run to the front of the enemy base and kill them and even if the defender goes straight to the own door, he won’t be able to kill the attacker and/or heal up the NPC’s quick enough in almost all MU’s and Situations I’ve encountered so far.
—> This also contributes to the fact, that archers are used way less than doorbreakers, because you don’t have to fight against the enemy and his NPC’s in front of his base, so you don’t need archers to make the fight more even or fear that your doorbreakers get 1-shot by the enemy NPC’s.

This could also be mitigated by being able to rez and the necessity to stomp the NPC’s in the base (not the archers and doorbreakers and not the big NPC you spawn by channeling).

2) Archers could also be a little bit better: I don’t think they’re completely useless, like some players do, but they are in most cases inferior to the doorbreakers, especially bc it’s so easy to kill NPC’s that would one-shot the doorbreakers.

3) Another Idea I had (I heard that in a stream yesterday) is the ability to drop supply on the ground (maybe it should disappear after 1min), so you could stack them in your base and go for one big push or sth. Could be totally imbalanced, but I think it could also be pretty fun and interesting, so it could be worth a try.

I would suggest this instead of the ability to revive guards from point 1: barracks have three doors. Two are in use at the moment, one for breakers and one for archers. The 3rd door could be made active and offer to exchange supplies to respawn guards. We still keep the interesting idea of being able to get guards back, but we tie it more to the stronghold mechanics.

Nice, I really like that Idea.

But even then they could have a bit more HP to them. They fall so incredibly quickly. They don’t need more DPS, cuz they 1-shot doorbreakers anyways.

This gamemode is so stratheavy that it makes soloq an even more abysmal experience than soloq’ing conquest.
It also makes people QQ about stuff atm that might be perfectly fine in a team vs team environment.
I’d like to see team-only queues for ranked. Everyone has gotten used to soloq’ing but in a teambased game (Carrying is very limited in gw2) it doesn’t offer the same experience.

But this is a very unpopular experience as people don’t want to group up.

PowerBottom.5796:

Gilgalas.7860:

PowerBottom.5796:

I really like the mode, but i do have some minor aspects that I’d like to address:

1) The NPC’s in and in front of the base have a bit low HP. It’s very easy to just run to the front of the enemy base and kill them and even if the defender goes straight to the own door, he won’t be able to kill the attacker and/or heal up the NPC’s quick enough in almost all MU’s and Situations I’ve encountered so far.
—> This also contributes to the fact, that archers are used way less than doorbreakers, because you don’t have to fight against the enemy and his NPC’s in front of his base, so you don’t need archers to make the fight more even or fear that your doorbreakers get 1-shot by the enemy NPC’s.

This could also be mitigated by being able to rez and the necessity to stomp the NPC’s in the base (not the archers and doorbreakers and not the big NPC you spawn by channeling).

2) Archers could also be a little bit better: I don’t think they’re completely useless, like some players do, but they are in most cases inferior to the doorbreakers, especially bc it’s so easy to kill NPC’s that would one-shot the doorbreakers.

3) Another Idea I had (I heard that in a stream yesterday) is the ability to drop supply on the ground (maybe it should disappear after 1min), so you could stack them in your base and go for one big push or sth. Could be totally imbalanced, but I think it could also be pretty fun and interesting, so it could be worth a try.

I would suggest this instead of the ability to revive guards from point 1: barracks have three doors. Two are in use at the moment, one for breakers and one for archers. The 3rd door could be made active and offer to exchange supplies to respawn guards. We still keep the interesting idea of being able to get guards back, but we tie it more to the stronghold mechanics.

Nice, I really like that Idea.

But even then they could have a bit more HP to them. They fall so incredibly quickly. They don’t need more DPS, cuz they 1-shot doorbreakers anyways.

No no no, no HP increase increase their defense/toughness not their HP just no.

Edit: No!!!

Ranger and Warrior has ability to be immune to interrupts for a long period of time, thus have an advantage in channeling/capping mists essence. Other classes have immunity to interrupts as well, but not as great as Rangers and Warriors. For example, all classes have a way to push/pull people in Skyhammer, so it’s fairly balanced, but in Stronghold, the ability to be uninterruptable for a very long period of time is an unfair advantage that other classes have no fair answer (as I’ve said, there’s an answer, but not balanced with Ranger/Warrior with respect to channeling).

Our Beta Experience:
Already feels like a fun game mode, and refreshing after years of only conquest based maps. We had a guild group (3-5) queue most afternoon, on mumble. Our members are mid-rank, so feel free to take the following feedback with a grain of salt (mix of phoenixes, bears and wolves mostly, but we even had a few rabbits try out the mode and enjoy it).

Thoughts on the map/gameplay:
1) Communication is king. Premade seems like a much stronger advantage here (and would likely need a correspondingly higher mmr penalty than in conquest to keep matches competitive if pugs were to ever be put up against premades). Case in point: we are not exactly amazing, but we felt like we are able to fight above our technical skill level because of the advantages of voip.
2) Simultaneous lord fights feel amazing. Banner. Stability stomps. Boon removal and CC. Really fun moments for us in a couple of games. Unfortunately, they were quite rare. The far more likely scenario was a one-way fight at lord.
3) The map might have a bit of a snowball problem. Although the idea of two-lanes is clearly there to provide a risk-reward to pushing too kitten the enemy, this tended to fall apart. We won a lot of our games simply because we would win the early encounters. Getting down the outer gate early is a very strong change in the map, and even more so if you are able to push in numbers when it goes down.

This might be because of a couple factors:
- Defending NPC’s feel a little weak. Even with active defenders, it was possible to take them down as part of a push, or have one player wreak havoc –because of this archer’s felt considerably weaker and less useful than they probably should be.
- It’s really, really hard to re-establish map presence once you’ve been pushed into a defense. I think out of the all of the matches our guild played, we only lost one match where we got inner gate down first. In part, this is because there is a huge position cost to committing to defense. The enemy will respawn and make it back onto the map too quickly for your defenders to get back out onto the map and take advantage after a successful defense (run supply/reapply pressure on their defenses). The worst part of this was that there was never a real feeling of risk to making a lord push.
- A possible comeback-mechanic/suggestion:As this map already has a ton going on, it may not be wise to add another mechanic to the map, but it feels like it could really use a strong comeback one. The heroes don’t quite do it because of the positional problems from above.
Proposal #1: increasing respawn timers.

Proposal #2 : a one-time movement-speed advantage that only becomes available for use once after inner gate is down. Example: a shrine inside the home base that when channeled gives slick-shoes type speed to the entire defending team for a certain amount of time (usable once per game). This would create a way for a defending team to rapidly reestablish some map presence, without being a mechanic that helps the stronger side, while simultaneously adding a little bit of risk to pushing into their lord room. And yes, portal, but relying on one skill on one profession doesn’t make for an interesting general comeback mechanic.

Thoughts on scoring/win condition/timing:
Overall, the timing of the matches and win condition felt pretty good. There is one caveat – we had two close matches where we won/lost because points from kills even though the opposite lord was at half-health and the other inner gate was still up. That didn’t feel like a good win, and it felt like a horrible loss.

Thoughts on the NPCS/Trebs:
1) Doorbreakers and trebs feel about where they should be. Fix the treb targeting.
2) Archers need some love. Whereas doorbreakers feel like awesome little kamikaze tools, archers feel a bit weak. Maybe consider upping the damage from archers to guards and slightly upping the overall health of guards as well? Also, to our archers: why you run off after non-NPCs?

Nitpicky-stuff:
1) Why have the gate portals close when a gate is destroyed?
2) Is red spawn a few seconds back compared to blue? Seemed a tiny bit more rushed to get to gate and stack swiftness.

Another point I would like to bring up :

Respawn timers : In MOBAs that I have played, respawn timers get longer as the game progresses (based upon player level i believe). This is a huge catch-up mechanic in these games, because it means that if you are losing and the team over-extends (which they often will) you can team wipe them and get maybe even a minute of time without them on the map.

In Stronghold, if you team wipe the enemy in your base, they will probably have already respawned and be playing defense by the time you get to their base. Respawn timers should probably increase as a team completes basic objectives, IMO. Maybe 15/25/50 seconds for default/first door/second door.

I am not sure you want to extend respawn timers, because it takesp layers out of the game, but it is a very important moba mechanic. Even in Heroes of the Storm, where matches take 15-25 minutes, the respawn timer will creep up to a minute long after ~12 minutes of play.

The gap between the solo queuers and premade teams will be astronomical in this map. I was just on a team when 4 engineerings (3 guesses which build they all played, first 3 guesses don’t count). If you dont have a staff ele or a coordinate/premade team, this is a turrent paradise..

Ok, was able to get a good 6 hours (including queue waits) of matches in last night. General impression, liked it. Tried some pug, some groups with friends. Didn’t try any premades where people spec’d for it or brought classes that would compliment the team or were traited for the map.

Was able to run all classes except Guardian. Can see roles for just about any class so that was nice. Could see wanting to adjust some builds for this map. Saw lots of various techniques used and there didn’t seem to be a distinct, do this action which was a positive to the map. Now granted one partial day is not a lot of time to get set into ways but could see a lot of different options that could come into play which means it stays fresh longer.

Saw only one bug over the night where mist essence was displayed on the map but could not be summoned. Power level on the archers and bombers seemed to be pretty good as far as resistance and damage dealt. Treb didn’t come into play as expected as much as compared to Kylo. Pace in match seemed to be fast which was good, you really didn’t have time to waste.

Once again over all liked it and will look forward to playing more of it and seeing other maps with that style of game play.

Aerial Melodies.4938:

Laraley.7695:

As a squishy ele you won’t be able to cap the hero. I don’t understand how sitting in water would help.

It’s easy (and I capped it a bit); passive heal to ensure health stays above the threshold long enough to cap. Even with two people cleaving away it was pretty simple to do. As more skilled players try the map it could change but the point still remains that capping is far too simple to do because there are too few ways to stop the channel. If you’re hit, channel should end. Period.

ETA: I see you mentioned the same later in the thread – my bad!

Yeah, I do agree with you on getting interrupted on hit but if you’re really running squishy ele meaning you have zerker amulet equiped, a thief will be able to kill you 5 times before you end the channel.

Problem is if you die when you defend your lord, such a long respawn time gives you no chance to come back. Lord’s death coming ! Defending is already hard…

Pomdepin.7068:

Problem is if you die when you defend your lord, such a long respawn time gives you no chance to come back. Lord’s death coming ! Defending is already hard…

On the flip side, if you sucessfully defend, it doesn’t have much impact as your ennemies will be respawn before you can travel the map and may already be pushing before you’re there.

Also, when people attack, they can just Leroy in the guards to kill few before dieing. It provides no disadvantage to the attacker as #1, they push further #2 they will respawn before the defender can move up.

Gilgalas.7860:

Hello,

After taking part to stronghold test for several hours overnight, here comes my feedback.

I first attended it as solo queue and experimented around, then once I made my mind on a strategy, I joined a “premade” made of random players that set their mind up on the same strategy. I must add that we all were on TS (although we would have done as well without TS given how our strategy was straightforward) and tried to optimize our build composition, which may have had an effect on the results of this test.

The first thing that struck me is that guards are really weak. As a hammer+bow warrior, using PVT PvP amulet, I was able to take on at once and kill all alone by myself all the 6 guards between the two doors, leaving the room free for skritts.
In other words, without active defense from players, both doors can be destroyed by a single player and 4 skritts in 2 minutes from game start.

This is largely my experience as well. I see post after post of people WAY over thinking it. I felt major Alterac Valley boss race vibes right away as well.

Supply is a noob trap. it needs to be removed, and reworked entirely. there is almost ZERO reason to get supply. A good team with proper coordination can get 4 bombs, and take down both doors within 2minutes of the start of the game. Even when defended in equal numbers, offense should win this. Dueling in the center of the map is a giant trap.

As you say, 1 player can kill all the guards at the start. archers are near pointless. Nevermind 2-4 on escort/offense.

the game among any competent team atm ought to be a dps race. 1 maybe 2 on defense at most for nuisance.

Heroes are largely good. but again, totally OFFENSIVELY fixated. making defense again, much harder, and hardly worthwhile.

I think supply needs to be reworked entirely. As well as guards.
I think perhaps towers, akin to heroes of the storm would work better, for static defense.. no crit, high armor. a “seige” npc can damage them.
And with “ammo” that can run out. and replenishes over time. Powerful at first, and then weakens over prolonged siege due to ammo.
Npc spawning I think should be just on a timer.

Player spawn location heavily favors offense as well. The distance defense has to run, and positioning does not provide any advantage, often just makes engaging to your death. Particularly if the offense is already in the lords room.

I played three (casual) matches. What I think of it so far:
- Queue time was far too long on EU to consider playing more at the moment. This is hopefully a temporary issue but it stops me from participating more in the beta.
- My standard build for Conquest will not work in Stronghold at all. Deathmatch asks for another different build. If Stronghold will be added to the same queue as Conquest and Deathmatch we need build templates. I f not I will drop PvP from my play list for GW2. That would be a shame.
- All three matches were one sided, the most offensive team won. Stronghold needs good communication. Without a pre-made team I don’t think it is fun.
+ Map is nice, game type is nice.

First conclusion: Nice for organized PvP, not good for solo queue, needs to be in a different queue. If in the same queue build templates are mandatory, introducing Stronghold in the same queue without build templates will kill Unranked (for me).

Shade Madrigal.1729:

Our Beta Experience:
Already feels like a fun game mode, and refreshing after years of only conquest based maps. We had a guild group (3-5) queue most afternoon, on mumble. Our members are mid-rank, so feel free to take the following feedback with a grain of salt (mix of phoenixes, bears and wolves mostly, but we even had a few rabbits try out the mode and enjoy it).

Thoughts on the map/gameplay:
1) Communication is king. Premade seems like a much stronger advantage here (and would likely need a correspondingly higher mmr penalty than in conquest to keep matches competitive if pugs were to ever be put up against premades). Case in point: we are not exactly amazing, but we felt like we are able to fight above our technical skill level because of the advantages of voip.
2) Simultaneous lord fights feel amazing. Banner. Stability stomps. Boon removal and CC. Really fun moments for us in a couple of games. Unfortunately, they were quite rare. The far more likely scenario was a one-way fight at lord.
3) The map might have a bit of a snowball problem. Although the idea of two-lanes is clearly there to provide a risk-reward to pushing too kitten the enemy, this tended to fall apart. We won a lot of our games simply because we would win the early encounters. Getting down the outer gate early is a very strong change in the map, and even more so if you are able to push in numbers when it goes down.

This might be because of a couple factors:
- Defending NPC’s feel a little weak. Even with active defenders, it was possible to take them down as part of a push, or have one player wreak havoc –because of this archer’s felt considerably weaker and less useful than they probably should be.
- It’s really, really hard to re-establish map presence once you’ve been pushed into a defense. I think out of the all of the matches our guild played, we only lost one match where we got inner gate down first. In part, this is because there is a huge position cost to committing to defense. The enemy will respawn and make it back onto the map too quickly for your defenders to get back out onto the map and take advantage after a successful defense (run supply/reapply pressure on their defenses). The worst part of this was that there was never a real feeling of risk to making a lord push.
- A possible comeback-mechanic/suggestion:As this map already has a ton going on, it may not be wise to add another mechanic to the map, but it feels like it could really use a strong comeback one. The heroes don’t quite do it because of the positional problems from above.
Proposal #1: increasing respawn timers.

Proposal #2 : a one-time movement-speed advantage that only becomes available for use once after inner gate is down. Example: a shrine inside the home base that when channeled gives slick-shoes type speed to the entire defending team for a certain amount of time (usable once per game). This would create a way for a defending team to rapidly reestablish some map presence, without being a mechanic that helps the stronger side, while simultaneously adding a little bit of risk to pushing into their lord room. And yes, portal, but relying on one skill on one profession doesn’t make for an interesting general comeback mechanic.

Thoughts on scoring/win condition/timing:
Overall, the timing of the matches and win condition felt pretty good. There is one caveat – we had two close matches where we won/lost because points from kills even though the opposite lord was at half-health and the other inner gate was still up. That didn’t feel like a good win, and it felt like a horrible loss.

Thoughts on the NPCS/Trebs:
1) Doorbreakers and trebs feel about where they should be. Fix the treb targeting.
2) Archer’s need some love. Whereas the doorbreakers feel like awesome little kamikaze tools, archers feel a bit weak. Maybe consider upping the damage from archers to guards and slightly upping the overall health of guards as well? Also, to our archers: why you run off after non-NPCs?

Nitpicky-stuff:
1) Why have the gate portals close when a gate is destroyed?
2) Is red spawn a few seconds back compared to blue? Seemed a tiny bit more rushed to get to gate and stack swiftness.

Not sure if I could add anything better than this.

LOVE the new PvP mode. This is a huge change from previously hating PvP on GW2 with a burning passion.

I think its pretty close to fine.

NPCs could be a LITTLE stronger, but if they change it too much I think you’ll find that offense would become impossible, and defending would likely the best way to play. Defending + Guards would become way too valuable if they buffed the value of guards too much. Their role is to kill other NPCs, not players and they do that well.

Archers honestly, didn’t feel THAT necessary to me. Door breakers and escorting them seemed much smarter, then 4-5 man pushing the boss for the stomp. Maybe if Archers were faster and did more damage to players they’d be more useful.

I wish we could support the heroes a bit more. I’d love if heroes had a downed state! That’d be king. Right now, they tend to ignore everything and die fairly easy even if you are “supporting” them. There’s honestly only so much you can do to help them.

Door breakers are fine, the door doesn’t break too fast. People just need to learn to defend! After that first push, door breakers trickle in much slower, so just don’t ignore your defensive lane early on!

Liked:
1) Different from conquest
2) potential for my variation of builds (D/d ele for example isn’t as viable as a staff ele killing lane mobs, so far anyways).
3) Less bunkering so far anyway.

Thinks to improve:
1). Death doesn’t punish the player: As another player suggested above, asthe match progressives the respawn timer should increase, this will allow teams to comeback if they manage to wipe opposing team at the lord.
2). Increase timer to 20 minutes. A lot of people say 30 but that is mostly due to the lack of experience, with 20 minutes even if both teams decide to turtle in their forts the match wont be too long.
3) Make the hero a real threat: Given how difficult it is to get a hero. Make the hero something players should be afraid of aka buff the hero by 1.5.
4) Buff the archer and guards. They seem too weak.
5) Both teams start with 0 supplies or
or
6) limit the amount of supplies per minute, teams shouldn’t constantly be running supplies or spawning bombers or Archer (this goes with issue #4). Notify the map whenever supplies are about to be refreshed. this will allow teams to fight for supplies (giving more PvP while also respecting the MOBA aspect). To increase the amount of supplies have players drop it on death.
7) Improve Hero AI and damage. In this case have hero damage increase for each ally next to him ( hero strength= normal hero strengh*(1+x*y). Where x=# of allies y = (.07-0.1). Actually instead of buffing Archer and guards you should use this equation, this will force players to defend or attack instead of leaving their NPCs to do the job for them.
8) But seriously punish death with longer respawn timer.

Sagat.3285:

PowerBottom.5796:

Gilgalas.7860:

PowerBottom.5796:

I really like the mode, but i do have some minor aspects that I’d like to address:

1) The NPC’s in and in front of the base have a bit low HP. It’s very easy to just run to the front of the enemy base and kill them and even if the defender goes straight to the own door, he won’t be able to kill the attacker and/or heal up the NPC’s quick enough in almost all MU’s and Situations I’ve encountered so far.
—> This also contributes to the fact, that archers are used way less than doorbreakers, because you don’t have to fight against the enemy and his NPC’s in front of his base, so you don’t need archers to make the fight more even or fear that your doorbreakers get 1-shot by the enemy NPC’s.

This could also be mitigated by being able to rez and the necessity to stomp the NPC’s in the base (not the archers and doorbreakers and not the big NPC you spawn by channeling).

2) Archers could also be a little bit better: I don’t think they’re completely useless, like some players do, but they are in most cases inferior to the doorbreakers, especially bc it’s so easy to kill NPC’s that would one-shot the doorbreakers.

3) Another Idea I had (I heard that in a stream yesterday) is the ability to drop supply on the ground (maybe it should disappear after 1min), so you could stack them in your base and go for one big push or sth. Could be totally imbalanced, but I think it could also be pretty fun and interesting, so it could be worth a try.

I would suggest this instead of the ability to revive guards from point 1: barracks have three doors. Two are in use at the moment, one for breakers and one for archers. The 3rd door could be made active and offer to exchange supplies to respawn guards. We still keep the interesting idea of being able to get guards back, but we tie it more to the stronghold mechanics.

Nice, I really like that Idea.

But even then they could have a bit more HP to them. They fall so incredibly quickly. They don’t need more DPS, cuz they 1-shot doorbreakers anyways.

No no no, no HP increase increase their defense/toughness not their HP just no.

Edit: No!!!

Okay, that would probably be better, since healing them is pretty weak atm.

So yes, just yes. ^^

Had to add my thoughts here after playing yesterday – hope this helps!

I played 8-10 games yesterday, queuing up with varying numbers of players. I didn’t solo queue any (honestly, I was afraid to – communication seemed way too important and I figured we would be at a significant disadvantage without it). I queued with teams of 2-4 guildies including myself, so we always had at least 1 random person on our team. Keep in mind that my experience involves playing with decent players and using voice communication in all games, though always with 1-3 people out of the loop.

Overall, I absolutely love the game type. I didn’t want to stop playing!

The biggest thing that the game type currently does right is it feels like you are making distinct, describable, real contributions to the team. We had started to develop some decent strategies as we played – I had one guildie (Hambow War) who liked to defend, so he got to the gate right away and protected those guards as well as he could, which is critical to stopping the early gate rush and doorbreaker spam. Meanwhile, myself (Medi guard) and a guildie (Power Necro) rushed their gate to remove the initial guards. I could solo them usually, but if their team did defense early, I needed backup to ensure removing the guards. This allows our early DB rush to get through, but as we played we started to switch from 5 DBs to 3-4 DBs and 1-2 Archers, because typically you can’t remove the gate and kill all guards before they snipe the DBs.

The rest of the team roamed and fought over supply early on, though the players we couldn’t communicate as well with kinda did whatever. This was decently effective, but a team that devoted more to supply could control it pretty well. Once we removed the 6 inner guards, a hero or DBs could take down the inner gate and we spent time roaming to steal channels to cause that.

So here are some of my thoughts, trying specifically to point out my own counter points to some of the statements others have made (nothing directed at anyone in particular, though):

1. I believe guards are at the appropriate strength level. If guards were harder to kill, it would further discourage PvP on defense. Guards should be soloable, which forces players to devote some time to defending to ensure they don’t get an easy path cleared for heros and DBs. This also encourages summoning Archers, because when players are defending their guards, it’s more advantageous to spend supply pushing NPCs that can help overwhelm them rather than just doing DB spam.

2. Likewise, I feel that Heroes are appropriately powered as well. Heroes should require some amount of protection. Again, if Heroes are too difficult to kill, players will find greater benefit in simply counter-rushing and we’ll get less offensive/defensive play, which is where a lot of the fun PvP is. Based on what we’ve experienced, Heroes already do a good job of swinging games and players are encouraged to channel them. I think they are in the right place as it is, and buffs to them could easily backfire and encourage offensive zerging to beat the clock instead of actively defending against them.

3. I’m in agreement that the point system might not be the best way to determine the game end after 15 minutes. The Point system feels like a very anti-climactic way to end the game. That said, I like the visual representation of how much work your team is putting in, so I wouldn’t necessarily remove it. I would consider doing what has been suggested above – changing the game to being 20 or 25 minutes long, or simply removing the time limit entirely. If Stronghold is moved to its own queue, there is no need to have a time limit on the game anymore. As I understand it, the primary reason it has a 15 minute limit is to ensure that players who queue up for random PvP games can expect to spend no more than 15 minutes in game to keep things consistent. Let’s just solve multiple problems at once – put Stronghold in its own queue, and change or remove the time limit so that people who queue up for Stronghold can expect exactly that.

4. A tutorial is desperately needed for this game type. We had several queues where our random player did not know what they were doing at all. That coupled with the lack of communication really hurt our initial push, and missing that can put you at a pretty big disadvantage.

Continued in next post.

Continued…

5. Despite what others are claiming, I don’t think death penalties need to be increased as time goes by or in general (though if the time limit is removed, SOMETHING should be implemented to cause the “blinds to raise” as the game goes on to push it to an ending. But as it is, once a push makes it into your Lord’s room, it can be difficult to keep the defense up already. If it takes too long to res at that point, it will cause players to defend more conservatively OR counter-rush instead, which is less exciting to watch and creates less of the “insane play” moments that I think everybody wants to see in this game mode.

6. Regarding channeling interruption – I think this is a critical component of the mode and should not be changed. Heroes should actually be able to be channeled, and with the size of the map, if damage interrupted the channel, they wouldn’t be seen as often. The channel points already do a good job of encouraging PvP, but the fact that players need to build and play with CC in mind for these points adds a critical strategic element that I would be sad to see gone. If players are seeing unstoppable channels due to Stability stacking too high, there are two options that don’t involve changing the game type – either add more or play with more boon stripping, or nerf some of the key stability skills to be more manageable and promote more counterplay.

7. For those who weren’t seeing much Trebuchet use, it’s likely because the teams were playing reasonably offensively. Our games saw our defending warrior man the treb when the opposing team focused too much on Supply rather than escorting the NPCs/offense. The Trebuchet exists to counter the “heavy supply” strategy. One trebuchet shot can effectively counter several player’s time spent running supply, so a team that devotes to spamming NPCs needs to also devote time to running offense. The trebuchet likely won’t see too much use outside of that and sometimes swinging teamfights in mid, and in my opinion, that’s okay. It’s still an important check to force players to disperse and play roles.

8. My last point – 5v5 seems to work very well. There are more roles where players are needed than there are players, and that’s a GOOD thing. As some have said, upping the player count will likely lead to balls of players zerging because all the roles will be effectively covered already. With 5 players and 6+ things to focus on, players are forced to make critical decisions about where to play their character, and more importantly, players can effectively counterplay the opposing team by finding where they are NOT devoting enough time and taking advantage of that. That’s definitely a skill based decision and further promotes this mode’s focus on team vs team rather than strictly player vs player, which I think is a good niche for this mode to fill.

That’s about what I’ve got – I think there’s some really fantastic design here, and just a couple of tweaks (time extension or no timer + raising stakes as game progresses, exclusive queue, tutorial mode) should really be looked at to make this mode the best it can be.

I had fun.

I did several matches and i noticed in the majority of the games, people focused on att-def lines instead of camp supply. I think main reason is because is very easy to kill archers/doorbreakers/npc in general so basically many times people almost tend to ignore the opponenents in the supply champ after their def-att lines are in good state.

Imho supply should be more an important resource so i think npc should have a bit more life, in this way they would be harder to kill and probably there would be more focus on a supply champ.

I noticed a little random IA aggro for Heroes, I mean for exampe when an Hero is on the door and 1 enemy is on him (using wall doors in and out) sometimes hero focuses on player and sometimes hero focuses on the door, and of course there is a lot of difference is hero hits the door or not.

And I agree, a little more big mini map would be great.

Stability is very strong but you need to consider the new condi, slow, it will affact channeling so it won’t be easy channeling if an enemy hits you and you’ve slow on you.
Besides this there are strong counter to stability like Mesmer shatter with Mantra of Daze + MoA or a thief d/p.

I think Mesmer will be a very strong anti-channelig class with slow condition and specialitations. He is already strong for this. Necro is also interesting.

DaG.5103:

1. I believe guards are at the appropriate strength level. If guards were harder to kill, it would further discourage PvP on defense. Guards should be soloable, which forces players to devote some time to defending to ensure they don’t get an easy path cleared for heros and DBs. This also encourages summoning Archers, because when players are defending their guards, it’s more advantageous to spend supply pushing NPCs that can help overwhelm them rather than just doing DB spam.

I definitely agree that guards should always remain soloable, but I think that term could be made a little more demanding.

The reason I’d like to see that is 2 fold:
1) I’d really like the Archers to feel as threatening as the doorbreakers – something that needs to be kept away, cc’d, dps’d, treb’d away from your guards, just like the doorbreakers are for doors.

In a lot of cases, it felt like they were only ever a threat to your guards if you left your side completely undefended or they had a squadron of ’em and your team completely failed with the treb. Upping the armor of defensive NPCs relative to the player -a little (emphasis: not a lot) – and upping the damage the archers do to the NPCs might make them feel a little more threatening and something that needs to be controlled/summoned.

Perhaps having the archers strongly prefer to attack the NPCs over doing negligible damage to players would have the same effect (I may just be underestimating their damage potential because they always seemed to be plinking away uselessly at a player). Make them more mission-focused like those good ol’ kamikaze doorbreakers.

2) In a lot of our matches the enemy guards between the inner and outer gates were just collateral damage of us pushing a wave of doorbreakers (ignoring any mention of the rock-paper-scissor archers) to the next gate. They weren’t necessarily an obstacle in themselves. They either fall during the push or could be bursted down by a zerk while we prepared for another push with doorbreakers.

For me the map was in a team + teamspeak a lot of fun. We could coordinate where to go and who does what etc.

In soloQ it was terrible. Without any communication i couldnt really enjoy the map. Everyone was just running around doing .. whatever. Even if people get more experienced in thise gamemode in my opinion u need to be able to tell ur teammates whats npcs u shall spawn etc.

what sticked out for me was, that like really everyone ran a super tanky build. It was a bit annoying to see warriors and guards with settlers amulets just trying to get supps, not using one skill but heal and stability. they played more the PvE part of this gamemode.

• 15 minutes feels too short
• Score mechanic is flawed. A team that gets a higher score can just turtle in their base and wait till the end for their win. A better endgame mechanic (VoD!) would be awesome.
• Archers are useless. The guard npcs can be easily killed by the players themselves so we can spend more supply on doorbreakers.
• Supply at the start of the match feels wrong. My team was just insta summoning 5 doorbreakers at the start and they would brute force the outer gate down fairly easily.

Deli.1302:

• 15 minutes feels too short
• Score mechanic is flawed. A team that gets a higher score can just turtle in their base and wait till the end for their win. A better endgame mechanic (VoD!) would be awesome.
• Archers are useless. The guard npcs can be easily killed by the players themselves so we can spend more supply on doorbreakers.
• Supply at the start of the match feels wrong. My team was just insta summoning 5 doorbreakers at the start and they would brute force the outer gate down fairly easily.

People don’t realize it yet, maybe, but supplies at the start are MANDATORY. If they remove it, SH becomes much less of a formation game and more of a HUGE supply 5v5 zerg and the games basically over as soon as one team wins it…

There are so many negative comments in this thread geez. I thought stronghold was a ton of fun.

Pollution.8703:

There are so many negative comments in this thread geez. I thought stronghold was a ton of fun.

Me too. As well as the other many threads. Seemed more welcomed than unwelcomed overall. Of course it has valid issues which were discovered yesterday in the beta, but that’s what beta was for. The map overall and options are alot of fun.

Weez.6315:

For me the map was in a team + teamspeak a lot of fun. We could coordinate where to go and who does what etc.

In soloQ it was terrible. Without any communication i couldnt really enjoy the map. Everyone was just running around doing .. whatever. Even if people get more experienced in thise gamemode in my opinion u need to be able to tell ur teammates whats npcs u shall spawn etc.

what sticked out for me was, that like really everyone ran a super tanky build. It was a bit annoying to see warriors and guards with settlers amulets just trying to get supps, not using one skill but heal and stability. they played more the PvE part of this gamemode.

I can’t say I saw many tanky specs but maybe I wasn’t paying too much attention to it after all. I felt like there were more thieves, mesmers and dps specs than in conquest. It all makes sense, the map does favour zerker specs. On the other hand the number of condi mesmers I’ve met on Stronghold is pretty disgusting.

But I definitely agree with you, it’s way way way way less fun if you queue solo, hence why I think this map will be unviable for pugs.

That’s too bad for the people who had trouble queueing, should restart game maybe? I had a ton of fun though.

Needs a stronger penalty for death imo. Maybe a temporary debuff to dmg/healing.

A few points that need attention:

• Lane guards need a damage reduction from players. As it is right now, archers are useless. People can just rush the guards and spend supply on doorbreakers instead.
• The minimap should be rotated about 45°, so the lanes appear diagonally like in MOBAs. This will make it possible to have it more zoomed in, because it’s pretty small at the moment.
• Minimap icons for doorbreakers and archers need some work. They’re a bit small and sometimes one icon can cover up another one, which should not happen. Perhaps they could be a bit more generic too, so players new to the map can distinguish them more easily (e.g. a bomb icon for doorbreaker and bow & arrow for archer).
• Channels aren’t fun imo. It breaks the flow of combat and certain skills like armor of earth are just insta-win buttons in these situations. I’d rather have it be a capture point.
• Lord AI needs to be improved. If they get stealth, they should stop attacking. The lord’s downed mechanic is pretty useless at the moment, because of the abundance of safe stomps. Would be great if they had some dodges too or stepped out of focused AoEs.
• Teleports/blinks/shadowsteps are a bit wonky at certain areas. I wasted plenty of those even though we had a fix not too long ago. If the teleport fails, the skill shouldn’t go on full cooldown.