Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone. Long time reader 1st time writer here. After playing the stronghold beta I was instantly reabsorbed into guild wars 2. I had a ton of fun playing it, both solo and with friends.

There is one thing lacking however, the tension of “oh crap, we just wiped at their lord and now we are going to likely lose.”

Before that let me give you a little bit of background on myself. I played gw1 competitively since it launch until about 2008. I was a member of the trueblade we took 23rd place during the second gw1 ladder season. That was the most success I’ve ever achieved in that game. So this is coming from an enthusiast, and not a “top player”.

Stronghold brought back a lot of those memories from playing guild wars. A rush of nostalgia invigorated me and I was all about playing this game mode. In fact, I played it from around 11 hours or so. I was hooked.

During my playtime, I noticed a lot of stuff that could have been done better and brought more pacing and tension to the game. For example in guild wars 1 if you wanted to kill an enemy base and solo the guild lord, it took A LOT of work and time. Mainly assassins could do this but I’ve seen a handful of skilled warriors and rangers also do this. In stronghold, it’s not like that. One glass zerker can just leeroy your lord unload his damage a few times, die, and repeat. There is no penalty for this type of play. (granted this has a little bit of set up time, not dismissing that.)

GVG in gw1 punished bad play and rewarded good play. Mesmer gets caught out of position and gets spiked down. Bad play. The player was punished for getting greedy, sloppy, or whatever. This bad play also punished the team because now your monks had to push up to try and heal your stupid mesmer self, and now they are out of position and vulnerable. Stronghold doesn’t really seem to punish bad play. You just re-spawn in 15 seconds and go at it again. There is no room for power plays while a man is down, they just come right back and are in the fight.

Sure it’s fun and all fine in a casual setting. In a more competitive setting this can get rather annoying, spending all your time and resources to take down that bunker guardian or engie defending the gate only to have them reappear in such a short-time window. It’s rather annoying.

I think anet needs to put more emphasis on good play as opposed to sloppy play. Punish those players for it, and reward those who are playing well.

Some suggestions for this are as follows:

Make the pit (lord room) more dangerous to solo players to come and gank the whole room. It should be a team effort to defend the lord / push for the win.

Each guild lord fight the lord should start with full hp. This will discourage those kamikaze strategies I mentioned earlier.

If not that, maybe add a healing modifier to the lord so a team can choose to spend the time to heal the lord to full health.

Make archers have another purpose or spawn two at a time with your supply investment.

In conclusion, stronghold might not be traditional gvg in the sense however, it adds it’s own flair to the mmo pvp. It’s in its own right a very good, fun, and challenging game more. With some minor improvements, it could be the best pvp experience in a long time.

sirnibb.4709:

Hello everyone. Long time reader 1st time writer here. After playing the stronghold beta I was instantly reabsorbed into guild wars 2. I had a ton of fun playing it, both solo and with friends.

There is one thing lacking however, the tension of “oh crap, we just wiped at their lord and now we are going to likely lose.”

Before that let me give you a little bit of background on myself. I played gw1 competitively since it launch until about 2008. I was a member of *bold*the trueblade*/bold* we took 23rd place during the second gw1 ladder season. That was the most success I’ve ever achieved in that game. So this is coming from an enthusiast, and not a “top player”.

Stronghold brought back a lot of those memories from playing guild wars. A rush of nostalgia invigorated me and I was all about playing this game mode. In fact, I played it from around 11 hours or so. I was hooked.

During my playtime, I noticed a lot of stuff that could have been done better and brought more pacing and tension to the game. For example in guild wars 1 if you wanted to kill an enemy base and solo the guild lord, it took A LOT of work and time. Mainly assassins could do this but I’ve seen a handful of skilled warriors and rangers also do this. In stronghold, it’s not like that. One glass zerker can just leeroy your lord unload his damage a few times, die, and repeat. There is no penalty for this type of play. (granted this has a little bit of set up time, not dismissing that.)

GVG in gw1 punished bad play and rewarded good play. Mesmer gets caught out of position and gets spiked down. Bad play. The player was punished for getting greedy, sloppy, or whatever. This bad play also punished the team because now your monks had to push up to try and heal your stupid mesmer self, and now they are out of position and vulnerable. Stronghold doesn’t really seem to punish bad play. You just re-spawn in 15 seconds and go at it again. There is no room for power plays while a man is down, they just come right back and are in the fight.

Sure it’s fun and all fine in a casual setting. In a more competitive setting this can get rather annoying, spending all your time and resources to take down that bunker guardian or engie defending the gate only to have them reappear in such a short-time window. It’s rather annoying.

I think anet needs to put more emphasis on good play as opposed to sloppy play. Punish those players for it, and reward those who are playing well.

Some suggestions for this are as follows:

Make the pit (lord room) more dangerous to solo players to come and gank the whole room. It should be a team effort to defend the lord / push for the win.

Each guild lord fight the lord should start with full hp. This will discourage those kamikaze strategies I mentioned earlier.

If not that, maybe add a healing modifier to the lord so a team can choose to spend the time to heal the lord to full health.

Make archers have another purpose or spawn two at a time with your supply investment.

In conclusion, stronghold might not be traditional gvg in the sense however, it adds it’s own flair to the mmo pvp. It’s in its own right a very good, fun, and challenging game more. With some minor improvements, it could be the best pvp experience in a long time.

This is a very well written piece. I’m going to bump it so that it gets more attention. I don’t know if I could have said anything better as you have put it but you made some great points and I agree. When I first started playing stronghold I was immediately brought back to guild wars 1 gvg and I wish that it was just like gw1 and the gates stayed open and kill all the guard NPCs and then focus on the Lord. all player deaths players would respawn every 30 seconds. and the power plays that you mentioned with the team splits like 4/4, 5/3, 4/3/1, 5/2/1 or 6/2 and 6/1/1s made strategy so much more fun than constantly Yolo zerging their npcs till your team wins or loses.

Thank you. I never post on forums, but I was inspired by the game mode. I see a lot of potential here I just want to see it succeed.

GvG was not very casual friendly but still loved a lot by the players.
stronghold on the other hand is very casual.

i’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, other games like LoL and DotA are simple games but i don’t know if they are more casual than stronghold (also because i don’t play those games).

but i agree on what you say, team wipes are not as punishing as they were in GvG and tbh that is a bad thing. i wonder what would happen if you made dead players resable by hand/banners but auto respawn is only at even minute numbers (2:00, 4:00, 6:00 etc). would add some difficulty.

npcs should definitely regain their health when out of combat.

Long time GvG-Player (Monk) and multiple top-25 finishes at the end of the season with top-teams (Capita Cerberi [CC], Bruderschaft der Verdammnis [BdV]) here – I loved the kitten out of GvG and I still think it’s probably the best game-mode ever in a game thats even remotely similar to GW2 (yes, I think it’s a superior mode to MOBA’s).

I can agree with most of what’s been said by the OP: killing base is too easy and deaths could be more punishing. I don’t know if longer respawns is the best way to do it though, because thats just time you are waiting, doing nothing. You could also give players death-penalties for a certain duration or sth.

The main thing I’m missing from this mode are long and sustained temfights: Yes, there was a lot of flagrunning, splitting off into the base and killing NPC’s etc. involved in GvG, but the most impactful and interesting part for me still was the long drawn out fights in the middle of the map – in a large, open area. This is also why I get the biggest nostalgia-induced GvG-flavoured nerdchills in a long 4v4 or 5v5 in Foefire in the big mid-node: Intelligent movement and positioning, spiking, calling targets, switching targets, CC-chaining, deciding between offensive and defensive CC/dps, impactful interrupts, coordinated rezzes and stomps: These are things you only get in teamfight-situations with more than just 1-3 players per team and enough space to enable good positioning.

The Stronghold-Mode has potential to encourage these situations in various different ways:
- Make the hero you can channel more impactful:
1) This would force bigger teamfights at the channelpoints.
AND
2) More teammembers running with the spawned hero or defending against it.

- Make the mode 6v6 or at max 8v8: More Players; bigger teamfights, or at least higher possibilities of those.

- VoD if time runs out: All left NPC’s run to the mid and ppl get an offensive stat-buff depending on the amount of points they’ve made: guaranteed huge and epic teamfight.

I also think the points of contestion; channelspots, the mid and the area where the hero’s walk along, are open enough (only barely though, I wouldn’t mind mid and the channelspots being more open at all) to make smart positioning and movement possible.

They could make sth. new and epic out of stronghold.

I also though about tweaking the archer/doorbreaker-spawning a bit:

Right now, it feels more like the Flagrunner in GvG: You had to hold the flagstand in the middle for morale-boost and when the opponent put his flag in it, you could put yours on top and capture it – hold it for a few minutes and you get the boost: This resultet in one poor soul having to just run from mid to base again and again for a huge part of the game. Trust me: No1 wanted to be the flagrunner. ^^’

They could make more teamfights mid and less running happen, if they’d allow players for example to hold on to 3-4 supply: This would also encourage more runner-sniping, which was basically IMHO the only interesting part about flagrunning: being able to kill him when he’s running around far away from his team.

Another way is to make the channeling take double the amount of time, but the archers and doorbreakers just always spawned in doubles for 1 supply.

I’m actually currently theorycrafting if it’s actually advisable to gather almost any supply, because a players time is much more valuable and impactful than the stuff he spawns while he’s not actually teamfighting. Also, you get an NPC-advantage for free at your base (which makes defending a lot better if no1 ever runs supply and if the opponent runs supply, you’ll just have more players there+NPC’s).

Also, the hero-spawns will give you the option to break doors as well.

In addition to that, after winning a teamfight, you have the potential to gather a lot of supply quick for some doorbreakers and push, without ever having to dedicate a player running when he’d be needed elsewhere.

Srsly, I’d love to try out going full defense, even holding on to your supply from the start, maybe send a few players to kill the NPC’s at the enemies door and go full ham on the heroes and only gather supply after you’ve wiped a couple of players.

—> this could result in some weird stalemates and waiting-games, where no1 really wants to engage, so I guess making the supply mean more could be a smart choice.

The re-spawn timer may not be the issue, however, some kind of death penalty should be introduced into the system. You could even go as far as to cleanse the death penalty with a successful hero channel, or something similar of that nature.

I really miss the notion of rallying behind a “morale boost”. Which I guess, is what the hero spawn is suppose to represent. It doesn’t feel that way.

Let’s face it winning by points is after 15 minutes is kind of dull. You want that crushing defeat, or the thrill of victory.

There should be a way to reduce the supply delivery since it’s quite boring.

Maybe all the gathered supply could be shared with your Team so anyone can summon minions using the “Team resources” instead of personal resources.

That would make every single kill more rewarding, as you would steal 1 resource per kill if the enemy team has any.

I agree COMPLETELY with longer respawn time AT LEAST if you die. The longer you stayed alive the shorter the revive time.