EoTM Map Mechanics &Strategies
Green side:
Bell Tower-allows you to ring bells at shrines to summon some bronze NPC that will do next to nothing and always be skipped (terrible)
Forge-makes you pay 25 badge of honors for some hammer (likely not worth it but I have never tried it) but more importantly, you can interact with the fire behind the champ and get a 10% damage reduction buff until you die.
Shrine-standing on 3 points summons a champ that gives enemy karma trains another champion loot bag, not that useful
Blue side:
Wurm tunnel- gives 3 different tunnels you can use to travel across the map. One is right by the champion wurm and takes you north near the north west tower (15 second walk to tower upon taking it). The second most used tunnel is if you take the southern exit towards the south tower-you can take the tunnel which is a little bit before south tower (if walking from left to right out of blue territory) and it takes you east around 12,000 units closer to the gate/wall of green’s forge. The least common wurm tunnel is just south of observatory and can take you just south of north east tower. Wurm tunnel is very good.
Airport-allows you to purchase an airstrike that costs 25 badge of honors. I’ve heard it’s good but I’ve never tried it since I don’t want to spend those.
Workshop-way overpowered. Allows you to get in a siege devourer form when interacting with the champion and you can move a little faster than a golem and do 1800 range attacks that can damage walls and gates. It’s around 5000 damage per hit to a gate and 4000’ish to a wall depending on your power. It has a 2 second casting time and no recharge but a 1 second aftercast. Better dps than a catapult and around the same dps as most flame rams depending on if the rams are traited or superior etc. You can have your zerg all get in the form and melt a gate or wal in 10 seconds. This gives blue a good advantage to take down gates/walls. You can even waypoint in the devourer. They are terrible in combat, though so you have to be quick. One downside with this for blue is that if another side captures it, they can get in the form and very quickly melt blue’s keep.
Red Side
Altar-you can get a 3 minute form where you are invulnerable and move 50% faster but can’t do damage or stand in capture points (must give stuff to champion first).
Statuary-has some cannons, not that useful. The champion there is glitched to where he doesn’t have righteous indignation so he can flip very often.
Observatory-has sentry turrets that cost 25 badge of honors that reveal location of enemy players when they get in range. This is the only 30 point structure that has 3 different capture points you have to do so it takes by far the longest, though that’s 3 champion loot bags.
Other stuff:
Red and green keep don’t have any walls but blue keep does. Blue keep is by far the hardest to defend since workshop is right next to it and other players can easily get in devouerer form if they cap it and melt the gate/wall of the keep. Red and green keep are extremely easy to defend. Also, all walls and gates of all structures are reinforced even though they don’t say it.
Towers don’t give anything special but more PPT.
The aethers on the center area are good for loot farming. The area below has 3 sentries but is not traveled that often because it’s worth it to stay up top and continue on to a reactor or statuary or something for faster wxp/karma/rewards.
Hah perfect exactly what I was looking for!
Frostreach Keep is very hard to take with minimal defense due to the layout of the terrain around it. Chokepoints that are easy to hit with siege and mortars, that are close to steep drops that instakill, forcing a group to be very clumped.
Only one angle is attackable, but its still a far easier to defend keep then anything else.
The rest of the buffs and boons are good, and the Kodan hammer can be incredibly power depending on the context. Not to great in roaming, but its a fantastic support/area-denial role that can also protect siege and knock attackers out of siege and lock em out of that siege for a while.
The kodan armor and the speed-debuff to invaders are pretty good, but not absurd. The veterans are a bit meh, but do have a surprising punch.
The npcs are tough and protect eachother with ice shields aswell as players taking advantage of it.
Overgrowth has cool utility stuff. Quick mobility lets a whole zerg get around really fast with thw Light-form without risking any death, and it allows a zerg to guarentee an initiation against another zerg. Great for scouting or catching up to your allies if you should die, again without risk of death.
The boon is very powerful and carries, just like Kodan shield, over to the entire map. The sentry turret is a really cool concept, but a bit to force-tied to the observatory.
The big cannons offer good support fire, but are more of a hard to use gimmick. By the time you get a good aim at a tower, your rams will have broken down the wall. Also has a terrible deadzone and little defensive use.
The npc are the most powerful ones, both rooting players and throwing up a lot of windwalls to block projectiles. A nightmare to supress a wall with npc’s alive as projectiles often get blocked. Offering a great vantage for defenders, which in turn helps their keep to be quite defensible.
Patrolling npcs also make a surprisingly annoying zone control for roaming invaders.
Badlands feel a bit underwhelming. The powerful zone control in the form of turrets is also very easy to take out, and stationairy so easy to avoid for any experienced roamer. But powerful if left to fire freely upon you and your allies. A trade-off if i ever did see one.
The Airstrike is weak, costs 25badges but does fairly lackluster damage, with a surprisingly short range and long cast time. I have not found any specific thing that this happens to excell at from my time playing as Badlands.
The mechanized siegedevourers are a really cool concept, but come with some serious drawbacks. They are very slow, ooc speed = normal incombat speed and incombat speed = slower then normal in combat speed.
Unlike kodan you lose your class mechanic, utility skills, elite, heals, trait scaling (f.e. bleed on crit doesnt work, it does in kodan), your weapons count as unequiped (so you lose tough/vit from your weapons, lowering your armor and health). And you cannot jump, which is a serious drawback in the particularly broken terrain of the Badlands.
As a result i found these things to be far more usefull when attacking the Badlands then while playing the Badlands. As its an easy walk to their inner-Keep, but for Badlands the nearest opertune target is a good 5min+ walk away. They’re also worthless in a fight.
Think mobile baby Flamerams. The terrain or spawn of these should be changed so they are more usefull to the Badlands then an actual disadvantage to have around. But considering its a free unit that doubles as a siege unit, im okay with a high-trade off.
Badlands npcs are fairly weak compared to the Overgrowth and Frostreach. Badlands gets no boon to carry around, and their main “utility” is to use a tunnel system to quickly invade Overgrowth aswell as use several other hidden tunnels.
In my opinion Badlands should get a little buff, probably by changing the spawn or terrain of the mecha devourers to not so easily reach the Badlands Keep.
The design of the bridges on Badlands is also terrible as they are the main way in and out of the main Keep, but are often destroyed by Achievement farmers (Seriously, do something about these griefers…) which ive not experienced this bad on either overgrowth or frostreach. Altough it does happen.
Other then that i wouldnt change to much, and certainly not start slapping around nerfs. Everyone plays everything, nerfing unique mechanics makes them less relevant and just takes EotM one step closer to being a generic WvW matchup, while i believe its strenght lies in the fact that it isnt.