Guild Wars 2

Hello,

There’s been a lot of ranting about DBL towers being useless, and as long as they’ve got no strategic siege role, they indeed can feel like it. That’s why I’m coming with ideas to improve towers in DBL, and make them strategic points you want to take and hold.

Idea 1 : have the towers work as barracks

Towers could train guards and soldiers, each tower having its own speciality, and one could send them as reinforcements for keeps, camps, dolyak’s escort… Each keep would have 2 towers “feeding” it with guards.
In this way, you’d upgrade guards NPCS in keeps with towers troops, which are more powerful, with various styles.

Idea 2 : have towers work as points to control a strategic area

I think that what was initially intended : anyone who controls a tower make opponents have to walk the long run to reach their objectives.

I think there’re better ways to do this like having tower detect enemies in a permanent fashion (from like T1 ou T2 on), but I think it’d be even greater to have towers produce an environmental effect in an “Orr’s Statues” fashion, that’d make moving in the area tedious, or provide a strong advantage for defenders. Some things like :

• Mage college tower : random elemental storms all around
• Lich tower : somehow like Grenth’s statues effect
• Ogre tower : random thieves popping, traps…

And, it’d become more and more powerful, or with additionnal effects while raising in tiers.

annoying environmental effects are one of the most hated features of DBL…you’re probably not going to get much support for that part of your idea.

people like the towers on ABL because they encourage engagements by being important footholds in the enemy territory used as jumping off points to attack the keeps/garrison. environmental effects deter engagements and make people want to avoid the whole area…definitely not fight in it.

nevertheless, we should have a thread for this since Anet has stated DBL will be coming back eventually, so…

idea: allow waypoints in all structures at T3 including towers, but only if both supporting camps are owned as well (losing a camp would make the waypoint contested, even if the tower is not necessarily under attack)

mcarswell.3768:

people like the towers on ABL because they encourage engagements by being important footholds in the enemy territory used as jumping off points to attack the keeps/garrison. environmental effects deter engagements and make people want to avoid the whole area…definitely not fight in it.

This is my all point : if towers are just standing there with no purpose or effect, then they’ll indeed be useless points to take over and hold. My idea here was to make a specific area very hard to cross without holding the tower. In that way, anyone leading an attack towards a big objective should say : “We’ll take the tower first to be free of our moves”. No more hazardous effect for attacking team, but a strong point they’ll hold because anyone who’d want to take the tower back will now suffer.

mcarswell.3768:

idea: allow waypoints in all structures at T3 including towers, but only if both supporting camps are owned as well (losing a camp would make the waypoint contested, even if the tower is not necessarily under attack)

On the same topic, it could be interesting to have towers work as hubs towards any other tower or keep held, with portals like things in a nuhoch wallow’s fashion. That’d enable very fast travel in “safe” places across the map. The main difference with a waypoint would be you can’t respawn in it.

I think what they should do for dbl:

Fire keep
——————
- add better lighting inside, more torches or so, for better visuability
-move the lords room below the inner gates to make it easier for attackers to reach it. Defenders can of course still build acs but not for billionrange distance. Gates can still have some kind of easier to reach ac spots above or mb the ac spots can be below hitting through glass thats on front of the gate.

Se,sw towers
———————
Put them closer together like in alpine borders, reduce east-west distance overall. Otherwise theyre fine

Ne tower
—————-
- move it more south and west so you can treb airkeep and garri from the ledge near lords. Change lighting here as well. Change dolyak routes and gate to behind the tower

Nw tower
—————-
Its fine, maybe move little east and remove that choke towards earth shrine, making it more open

Air keep
—————
- add middle inner wall, doesnt have to be easy to breach, but makes the inner more friendly, as if keep claim buffs are not enough to def with.
-make air keep and fire keep closer in general

Garrison
—————-
-add another set of stairs to inner Gates and remove that inner cata spot on the ledge on top of invis floor on east side
-remove rock walls from inside garri

Oasis
———
Maybe add borderland “colosseum themed” sm here which outer wall can be trebbed from garri or remove oasis overall

The best thing they did for DBL was remove DBL !!

Threather.9354:

Se,sw towers
———————
Put them closer together like in alpine borders, reduce east-west distance overall. Otherwise theyre fine

And right about there you basicly said “delete everything and start from scratch”.

Moving entire structures requires reshaping the entire map. In your case, you could move them closer together true. But it wouldnt be anywhere near alpine, because moving them together would mean that you increase the distance to hills and bay – which is the complete opposite of what really need to happen for it to become more like alpine (ie keeps and towers can siege and threaten each other to keep the pressure high). Wanna move hills and bay to keep up with the towers being closer? Oh boy… Wanna fold the center in itself to create a map rectangular like alpine? Well that kitten up garri completely. Either way you twist and turn this you cant make it work without remaking the entire map.

Dawdler.8521:

Moving entire structures requires reshaping the entire map. In your case, you could move them closer together true. But it wouldnt be anywhere near alpine, because moving them together would mean that you increase the distance to hills and bay – which is the complete opposite of what really need to happen for it to become more like alpine (ie keeps and towers can siege and threaten each other to keep the pressure high). Wanna move hills and bay to keep up with the towers being closer? Oh boy… Wanna fold the center in itself to create a map rectangular like alpine? Well that kitten up garri completely. Either way you twist and turn this you cant make it work without remaking the entire map.

That’s true : big moves of towers would need a huge rework of the overall map. Moreover, the idea is to give DBL towers new functionnalities which would give DBL a specific flavour and gameplay, instead of having DBL get the same mechanics as ABL, and eventually become a copy of it.

If, and I say if, the goal is to add a role to the towers so that they are a threat to the keeps then there might be simpler ways to achieve that. Examples, increase elevation of some of the structures that would allow treb or a new type of cannon to reach portions of the outer wall and/or clear some of the line of fire to the keeps.

Additionally maybe add smaller towers between the current ones and the keeps that threaten the keeps and are easily threatened by/are vulnerable from the existing towers. This would require less environment changes and increase the importance of the towers.

Make it so you must go through the north towers to attack Gari. Put a giant impenetrable ridge all along the southern portion of Gari. There will be room between the cliff and Gari to attack from once you get in through one of the towers. See attachment.

ThomasC.1056:

Idea 1 : have the towers work as barracks

Towers could train guards and soldiers, each tower having its own speciality, and one could send them as reinforcements for keeps, camps, dolyak’s escort… Each keep would have 2 towers “feeding” it with guards.
In this way, you’d upgrade guards NPCS in keeps with towers troops, which are more powerful, with various styles.

Interesting idea, working like a moba to send troops out. I always thought it would be kinda cool if they could extend the siegerazor idea to have a roaming group of npc guards for your borderland and take back the minor stuff if no one was around, and with this idea you could add in specialty skills and add a couple more guards per groups with the tower upgrades.
But I know a lot people would be against that.

ThomasC.1056:

Idea 2 : have towers work as points to control a strategic area

I think that what was initially intended : anyone who controls a tower make opponents have to walk the long run to reach their objectives.

I think there’re better ways to do this like having tower detect enemies in a permanent fashion (from like T1 ou T2 on), but I think it’d be even greater to have towers produce an environmental effect in an “Orr’s Statues” fashion, that’d make moving in the area tedious, or provide a strong advantage for defenders. Some things like :

• Mage college tower : random elemental storms all around
• Lich tower : somehow like Grenth’s statues effect
• Ogre tower : random thieves popping, traps…

And, it’d become more and more powerful, or with additionnal effects while raising in tiers.

I wouldn’t step foot into that borderland ever again. One of the worse things I hate in this game is messing with my movement, I hate immobilize, I hate that it can stack, I hate there’s no diminishing returns. So anything that hampers my movement in the game will get an automatic negative in my book.

There’s already a large collection of small plant roots you can’t run over that plagues the borderland, narrow walkways, tons of cliffs for you to fall off and die, I don’t need to run over snares, thief traps, sandstorms, random walls popping up in my face, etc, that does not make me want to go to a tower to take it, I’ll just avoid it completely. I’ll just go back to ebg and run and hop around with joy over it’s rolling hills and grassy plains.

mcarswell.3768:

annoying environmental effects are one of the most hated features of DBL…you’re probably not going to get much support for that part of your idea.

Why is this? I enjoy not having to rely on zergs and doing my own thing. If my playing would benefit my side it would motivate me to continue playing. Capturing camps, sniping dolyaks, capturing shrines and so on. NPCs can play a role in delaying capturing and in scouting. Currently lack of scouting is one of the biggest problems in WvW.

Desert borderlands was good because it provided smaller goals for individual players, namely shrines. Most of the terrain was not fit for large-scale fights, but having terrain that ostensibly favours one side is key for defending. It could be as simple as having vantage point for ranged players or choke for wall skills and traps.

HoT/DBL killed scouting.

Automatic upgrades no longer needed a player to keep checking on supplies or click the upgrade.
Sentries/watchtower marks enemies.
Keeps and towers were too big, so placing siege and then having to refresh them was a pain.
Side keeps didn’t start with waypoints you could use at all, so you had to run to them every time.
Even the annoying camp flipping roamers didn’t want to play on there, so less enemies to fight.
Guildhalls killed all guild auras and upgrades until they could be produced once again.

So shrines was suppose to keep players busy in the meantime?

There were players and entire guilds dedicated to scouting and havocing on borderlands, I was one of them. DBL killed all motivation to do any scouting, guildhalls and guild cata nerf killed motivation to havoc anymore.

So yeah lack of scouting, can’t imagine many have returned to their old roles. I don’t dedicate much time to scouting/havoc anymore since the alpines have been back, half my guild is still on a break, there’s just better things to do these days.

Appreciate the thought, but it turns out people really, really hate having their freedom of movement impaired by the towers. If you want them to have some sort of relevance to the rest of the map, it should be something that makes it easier to launch an attack on a neighbouring keep. This doesn’t have to mean trebuchets, it could be mercenaries or environmental weapons. But importantly it should be possible to counter or circumvent, which isn’t an option with environmental effects.

Ben K.6238:

Appreciate the thought, but it turns out people really, really hate having their freedom of movement impaired by the towers. If you want them to have some sort of relevance to the rest of the map, it should be something that makes it easier to launch an attack on a neighbouring keep. This doesn’t have to mean trebuchets, it could be mercenaries or environmental weapons. But importantly it should be possible to counter or circumvent, which isn’t an option with environmental effects.

There’s another good idea for use of the north towers, let them provide themed weapons for siege damage, sorta like the scorpions in eotm.