Guild Wars 2

It takes a really long time to cross. Like if you die on the opposite half of the map from your spawn, it will take you at least 5 minutes of running to get back to your group, depending on how many vertical barriers lie between you and said group. Personally, I would shave some of the unnecessary corner space away and reduce the overall size of the map by 10-20%. I don’t have a whole lot of love for the Alpine Borderlands, and while I’d like to see more variation in the Borderland maps, I don’t want to see the desert borderlands get removed. I believe that a reduction in size is one of the last things this map really needs to work well.

you want less walk time ?
Help your team to defend your keep to have the WP…

They could collapse the BL’S a bit and put the 4 towers in play against or for the keeps

Walk times are fine now. Either get a Shrine for faster running or hold a keep for WP to get faster south.
The only thing that is bugging me a bit are the role of the towers. Now with barricades gone (decent move by Anet), tower block even less than before and have no strategic value either defensibly or offensively. You could say that this is an exclusive feature of Alpine, but that still does not define their role in Desert BLs.

ok with that, tower are useless on DBL… No one care to defend it because except PPT they are useless. And as T0 and T3 have same PPT value there is really no reason at all to loose time to defend it…

It sounds like you’re taking some pretty inefficient paths. With the barriers gone, it shouldn’t take you half that time to get anywhere except the exact opposite corner (which should take ~3m).

Sviel.7493:

It sounds like you’re taking some pretty inefficient paths. With the barriers gone, it shouldn’t take you half that time to get anywhere except the exact opposite corner (which should take ~3m).

^this. Plus the fact they opened up some cliffs/walls to shorten the run. No longer forced zigzags ALL over the place, just a couple left though.

As long you control Garrison and have WP there, you can get anywhere on the desert map fast enough. But I was just following comm (who does a lot of commanding every day) yesterday who got completely lost in Desert map.

My friend and i used to have a game where we gave each other points when we caused one another to run into walls.

Called em wallpoints. Now i guess we can change to root points.

I feel the maps are large as well, but as others have said, once you get to know the maps better, it’s not so bad:)

Distance between the towers and keeps does make the towers rather pointless. And probably one of the things I’d want changed.

As a positive for the longer travel times: It adds more dynamic to combat. Greater repercussions for losing a fight.

easy fix – the pop-up walls of rock and the cripplers really need to go
more complicated fix – shrink the size of bl, give towers some significance, and redo air keep (just where is outer on the south?).

One of the many problems with desert borderland: the two northern desert towers have little tactical significance. If you took one of the north towers on Alpine it served as a foothold for an assault on garrison and all sorts of interesting offensive and defensive activities could. That just doesn’t exist with the northern desert towers that are too out of the way and irrelevant.

The northern towers at least stop the NWC/NEC yaks from moving to Rampart. It’s not much—not enough—but something.

Adding waypoints to the towers in the DBLs would make them a prize worthy of defending or denying an enemy.

Figure there are only four towers in the DBL as opposed to 12 in EBG. In EBG they can be used to defend a keep, but allowing maneuverability in DBL could make them less useless.

There is no strategic value to anything in the desert border lands, other than castles with waypoints.
There is little to no benefit for towers or keeps as bridgeheads for further conquest. There are so many vertical barriers and pathways that towers can easily be bypassed. They don’t serve as a base of operation, since there are no noteworthy treb targets, you could reach from them.

The problem with the desert borderlands is that holding any objectives serves no other purpose than PPT, unless you are planning on holding a keep for long enough, so it can get a waypoint.
This is completely different from the old borderlands, where holding hills, for example, was important in and of itself and getting the waypoints was merely a nice bonus. With hills, you could exert tremendous pressure on the spawn tower and the spawn camp. Someone holding a keep in desert bl? Nice for them… I guess…

Dear OP,
i do unterstand your point and to some extend i agree, but (we all knew there was a but ) i think that a certain amount of distance for both sides is required to prevent sitiuations like you find quite often in spawn camps or a while back when WPs Wege bugged: fights that drag on for ever with out a clear victor while the third party happyly pvds the remaining map.

naphack.9346:

There is no strategic value to anything in the desert border lands, other than castles with waypoints.
There is little to no benefit for towers or keeps as bridgeheads for further conquest. There are so many vertical barriers and pathways that towers can easily be bypassed. They don’t serve as a base of operation, since there are no noteworthy treb targets, you could reach from them.

The problem with the desert borderlands is that holding any objectives serves no other purpose than PPT, unless you are planning on holding a keep for long enough, so it can get a waypoint.
This is completely different from the old borderlands, where holding hills, for example, was important in and of itself and getting the waypoints was merely a nice bonus. With hills, you could exert tremendous pressure on the spawn tower and the spawn camp. Someone holding a keep in desert bl? Nice for them… I guess…

i get where your coming from and agree they need to adjust the map to make it more strategic that taking an object brings you closer to taking another object that the old alpine had

Maybe add a new item: portal? You’d have to balance/limit its use but it could help with the ‘crossing the entire map’ issue.

evry map has its own speciality, its different, if you reduce the map to what you like in the end you do not have any challenge?

Take the map as it is is my advice.

And i actually do not agree with the statement about the distances.

With a decent running build the distance is about the same in time you just need to use the right path, but on all maps even Alpine there were long and short routes to het from one objective to another.

I’m not saying anything but like players needed to learn to play Alpine to find the shortcuts the same applies to the desert borderlands.

For me each map should be different and have its own challenges this increases the challenge posed to the player on the maps.

I do however see an increasing lack of coordination and use of ts by players making it almost impossible to run a zerg or blob at the speed it used to run because loads of guardians do not get on ts 1 and do not use speed-rotations accordingly 2.

This is not due to the desert borderland map but to the carelessness of the individual player. Efficiency and good leadership makes you win this game so use your assets and use ts to coordinate.

I still agree with OP. The maps are too large and complex. Yes, once you know the pathways life gets easier and yes, if you hold garri and can use the wp, you get around comparetively quickly. However, you dont always hold garri, sometimes it is contested and sometimes you need to go from the air to the fire keep. It all takes ages then.

Furthermore, I consider the keeps as simply messy. The keeps are big and as a defender I simply have to get from A to B quickly inside. A larger keep with lots of stairs is the last thing I would like to see then. It made me hate scouting! If I actually want to defend a keep, I would have to position 2-3 scouts in one keep and need to put up lots of siege (many options to attack). To be honest, I agree with the majority of the players who simply dont do this work and leave the keeps aside. Yes, I run to them when they are contested and yes I defend them, but no I dont do much more.

In one part I disagree with many prior posts. I like it that the towers in the north have little strategic value. They still have value for the tick. However, I hated the trebs in the towers opening my garri on ABL. I hate on eb that you can open sm from the red keep (and the other way round) as well. The attacker should be on the open field. The easiest fix would be to shorten the range of trebs just by an inch.

The entire situation reminds me of the problems in PvP last season. The dev thought very nicely and carefully through a theoretically great model. They just made 2 mistakes. 1) They forgot that theory and practice are two different things. 2) The majority of the players is not sopisticated enough to learn and understand the great model.
Dont understand me wrong, there was lots of work involved and lots of good ideas were implemented. DBL is good example. The elements of the map are/were great ideas and nicely done. Just if everything is put together, the flaws appear. Someone really on top should have noticed what went wrong and changed the direction.