Guild Wars 2

Ever thought, “I want to help the team more, but I just don’t know what to do”? Well then let’s talk about upgrades to forts and supply camps.

Upgrades are purchased from the quartermaster, which tends to be standing next to the supply pile at each fort and supply camp (sometimes they do wander off, though, so you may have to look around).

These are the main upgrades that are needed, in order of preference. Anyone can buy them. There is no advantage to being the owning guild (they don’t get a discount or an influence boost or anything — claiming keeps is purely for the purpose of fort buffs, which are different than upgrades).

Keeps + Stonemist
Cannons
Reinforce Walls
Reinforce Doors
Mortars
Waypoint

Cannons in keeps are extremely useful, as they get a lot of them and they tend to be in useful locations.

Reinforce Walls and Doors are excellent as well but I say cannons first because they are the least expensive and the most immediately useful.

The “Personnel” upgrades can be useful but are by no means important. A lot of people think the extra worker is a priority but that costs a lot of supply and usually the limiting factor in building anything isn’t time, but supply, so the worker might actually slow things down!

Towers
Reinforce Walls
Reinforce Doors

These are the two most important things for a tower. A lot of people buy oil or cannons but really oil is nothing but a minor delay on the door and it only gets 1 cannon so in my opinion it’s mostly a waste of money. The other upgrades are more useful for raising the maximum supply than for the actual effect. If a tower has reinforced walls, reinforced doors and some player-dropped siege, that’s about as good as it gets. The rest is if you just have more money than you know what to do with.

Like Keeps, a lot of people go for the extra worker to speed upgrades but unless the tower is really well supplied, the extra worker will tend to slow things down just because buying him consumes the supply that was needed for building!

Supply Camps
Increase supply deliveries

This is the #1 thing to have. Really it’s the only thing you need. “Hire Caravan Guard” is good if only because it’s really cheap and somewhat useful. The other two are a waste unless you intend to camp there with a defensive group for a long time. They’re nice, for example, as part of an Epic Pangloss Defense, but they don’t really make much difference by themselves and supply camps tend to flip every 15 minutes so it’s a waste of your cash.

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So there you go. In case you ever thought about buying upgrades for a fort but didn’t know what to spend money on, these are the biggies to get. They are the most “bang for the buck” in terms of being helpful to the team. Most of the other upgrades are, for now, rubbish. (For example, hiring a patrol for a keep gets you a couple squads of 4 regular, non-elite guards. Considering the average keep assault is at least 20 players, these patrols won’t even be noticed. They will simply be run over. Better off to save your money for the next tower flip.)

Cannons are not worth upgrading first, ever. They are decent once the upgrade actually finishes, but are extremely easily killed due to their vulnerable position on the wall unless you have large amounts of siege (arrow carts, catas, defensive treb, mortars) to back them up. The supply used on the upgrade goes further if you use it to spam mass siege, repair the wall/gate, or get the wall upgrade (which only costs 500 supply vs 400 for cannons). The repair to 100% on wall/gate upgrade completion can easily save your bacon – it would still be worth rushing without this huge extra bonus.

It makes me sad to have someone unknowingly sabotage the defense of a recently captured keep by draining supply on a Cannon upgrade.

I can’t disagree enough with yertle.

Hill has one cannon overlooking south gate that can only be hit by specialty attacks (1500 range). It has an interior cannon that can hit the inside of the north gate (destroying all rams). Cannons there are a huge benefit.

Bay keep interior cannons tend to be good because with the water, there’s not a lot of good places to build siege or to fall back to out of cannon range short of just sitting in the water. Bay also has exterior wall cannons that most people forget about and can be snuck up to in order to destroy siege from behind.

Stonemist has cannons up by the mystic forge area (where people build trebs) that can support the ground attacks and I think only one of them can even be hit from the ground at all.

Garrison is more debatable. There aren’t any particularly interesting cannons there. But Hill and Stonemist are no question — cannons are huge there.

You forgot to mention; Do NOT take supply from Keeps & Towers unless they are upgraded first.

Slamz.5376:

I can’t disagree enough with yertle.

Hill has one cannon overlooking south gate that can only be hit by specialty attacks (1500 range). It has an interior cannon that can hit the inside of the north gate (destroying all rams). Cannons there are a huge benefit.

Bay keep interior cannons tend to be good because with the water, there’s not a lot of good places to build siege or to fall back to out of cannon range short of just sitting in the water. Bay also has exterior wall cannons that most people forget about and can be snuck up to in order to destroy siege from behind.

Stonemist has cannons up by the mystic forge area (where people build trebs) that can support the ground attacks and I think only one of them can even be hit from the ground at all.

Garrison is more debatable. There aren’t any particularly interesting cannons there. But Hill and Stonemist are no question — cannons are huge there.

Stonemist, I have no idea to be honest. Never done anything there. Same goes for the rest of EB.

Hills – why not get 2 arrow carts + catapult behind the door and defend at a fraction of the cost? Pushing this keep without trebbing from the northern supply camp or sneak attacks (neither of which cannons help to counter) is a literal uphill battle.

Bay – cannons here are not very useful. Outer ones will be shut down by a moderate sized group because they are in such a precarious position and so easy to kill – assuming they don’t just treb you out from garrison or SE tower.
Inner ones will never have anything to shoot because you’ll either get trebbed from various areas in outer Bay (NW elevated area, bridge, outer walls, etc) and slowly lose the attrition battle, or force them back out of the keep.

Garrison – lots of suicide chokes here too. No particular reason not to just use arrow carts, though. Trebs at the Northern towers are also pretty common to make an opportunity to push; and again only wall upgrade helps that.

Cannons are just too easy to kill/shut down for how much they cost to build, when you could just upgrade walls + build a few siege and have equivalent defences vs zergs and much better defence vs trebs – not to mention the heal to full that may or may not save your bacon.
If arrow carts weren’t so cost efficient cannons would be worth building.
Are they worth getting eventually? Yes. Just not as 1st (or probably 2nd) upgrade.

Personally I’m not spending another copper on upgrades until ANet implements a public donation system build around a dynamic event progress bar with donations filling said bar. As should have been implemented in the first place. The current system is a failure. Either that or cut the costs by 400%.

I do miss the costs from beta. I dunno about you guys but my income didn’t scale up some huge amount in reaching 80.

That’s really why I wanted to make this list.

We can quibble over the cannons but a lot of people sink money into guard patrols, guard upgrades and stuff that’s just a total waste. Or they buy a second worker, thus reducing the supply stockpile to 0 and now there’s nothing for him to work on.

Most of the upgrades just aren’t that good. The final wall upgrade is often a waste too, in my opinion. Costs a ton and doesn’t do anything to improve the doors which is where 90% of attacks will break through at. It’s not “useless” but it’s not cost effective either.