Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone. While writing my reply to another thread, I came up with a change in WvW that I would personally very much enjoy.

I was thinking, what if we replace the keep lords completely by a player. Claiming a location would mean taking on the role of camp/tower/keep lord personally.

Having someone assigned as lord should be required to be able to upgrade the location, as this lord would become the only one to be able to queue tasks. Leaving their location for too long (5 minutes?) or going too far away should automatically release you from your duties.
Lords should always be able to reach the ‘linked’ supply camps. So the lord for Bay should be able to visit both western camps and southern camp. However, when outside of the locations bounds (walls for a keep/tower, range for camp) the capture circle should already go up. This means that if a lord actually does leave the location, it becomes very vulnerable for “ninja-ing”. It also means you cannot “lock down” a location by hiding your lord outside. Going back inside would bring the circle down, and if a lord dies it should take a certain time before a new one can step up (to avoid blocking capture by having someone else claim when the original lord is killed).

Lords should me marked on the map, similar to commanders. This way the world has a good view on which locations are being looked out for and worked on.

How to determine who becomes the lord would need some extra thought, but let’s not get lost in the details for now.

Being keep lord should give you a minor boost of WXP over time, slowly increasing to a cap the longer you hold the location and possibly also the more upgrades are done.

As I mentioned at the top, I only just came up with this. So there will probably be a few problems I hadn’t thought of yet. However, that shouldn’t block a bit of brainstorming!

Thoughts?

Really interesting idea! Looks complicated to implement though and some points to think about would be:
- if it generates Wxp you could see people just afk ‘lording’ and if the time comes they would be even less effective than the current lords. On that note, players are much easier to kill than lords due to lords having much more HP.
- if you plan to counter that by saying that lords get boosts to stats too you may find people becoming lords just for that and still roaming killing people in the nearby camps with his/her super powers lol
This cold be resolved by making the lords room pulse a stacking buff (something like increasing all stats by 10% and reducing cooldowns by 5% stacking 10 times) that is removed when the lord leaves. Idk, it’s tough to implement and balance, soooo many variables.

Personally I like the idea mentioned before about giving lords personalities and names to allow them to function differently. Like the ascension bay lord might be a clerics type healing based lord that throws out a lot of heals for his allies where as the dreaming bay lord might be a heavy cc stun lord with little group sustain but high disruption. It would make you have to think a little more when breaking into a lords room as your strats may have to change.

Love this idea make my theif keep lord and i keep it safe for millenniums

Stealth could indeed pose a problem, but it’s easily fixable by losing lordship when entering stealth.

Regarding players to be killed more easily, I just see that as a change – not a problem. If the enemy gets into your keep it’s usually not the lord preventing the capture. It’s the player defenders. In many of the big tower/keep fights the lord is down and circle is up, but the defenders fighting in the circles prevents the capture.

Going AFK as lord could indeed pose a trickier problem. Perhaps just take the WXP reward out – that way being lord is only interesting for griefers (which can be reported) or people genuinely wanting to upgrade and defend.

It’s an interesting idea, and I see the feeling behind it: that all the champion lords are essentially a boring necesary fight to geta claim circle. So yes, I agree that the fights could be made more complex and dynamic, but I personally wouldn’t like to see players taking on this role exclusively.

First reason: who would EVER choose this fate? You’re running round the map with a zerg or group capping stuff, but no, you don’t get to follow the train, you have to get off here and stand still for as long as you want to hold that tower. The thought that the moment you leave it’s just like putting up a free claim circle to the opposition? Awful!

I’ve done my fair share of sitting atop the Garri watergate for, oh, say, a few HOURS scouting for incoming attacks, and as soon as I leave, I ask for someone else to take this most boring duty. You can imagine the number of players who leap at the chance to give up their WXP training round the map for that responsibility.

Even if your WXP ticked up whilst being a Lord, I personally would rather be doing something and getting no xp for it than doing nothing. The benefit of the current Lords is that they never get bored and they never leave their posts. They are not human, and rightly so!

Second reason: only Lords being able to upgrade stuff would mean that even less people would put their hands up. I know I’d hate to be the one paying for every single upgrade. The way it works at the moment, anyone can fork out if they are feeling generous.

Thrid reason: So you’re the Lord, and the tower you occupy is zerged by a bunch of enemy. You have no other defenders, and you lose the tower. You feel crap, and you’re server thinks you failed becuase, well, you’re the LORD, surely you shouldn’t be overwhelmed so easily! You clearly weren’t a good enough fighter or whatever. Who wants that guilt? I know, given my generally dismal track record in 1v1 that I’m not the hardest person to kill. That makes me feel bad enough. Why would I want a whole tower or keep to literally depend on my PvP ability? Or anyones for that matter?

So, all in all, I favour NPC tower guards and lords. They will never tire of their duty, and so what if they are able to be killed by hugely superior numbers?

However, I think the NPCs could be spiced up, just as bradderzh said above. Different classes, different support troops and even the odd bit of dungeon-boss-like scripting could make the claiming more than just a foregone conclusion. I’d love to see a Mesmer lord messing us all up by putting uber-clones all around so we don’t know who to actually hit, or a Necro lord with a veritable army of undead minions. Also, these classes should not be static to each location, or again we’d all learn who is where and be so prepared that it would become commonplace once again. Every respawn of Lord could be a different NPC entirely, so if you took a tower by killing a Thief, he could be replaced by a Warrior, for example.

Perhaps another way to get players more active and concerned about the retention and upgrading of keeps and towers would be to really encourage guild claiming by rewarding guilds whose towers stay in your hands for the longest times with extra points, and again more points for the upgrades. That way, there would be less “tower down, on to the next” rolling zerging without any care for the land you just took.

Actually I think it would help increase the number of scouts, especially on servers that are currently struggling with that. By requiring one for upgrades people are more likely to step up, as they don’t want their keep to be lost quickly. Especially people having something to eat at their computer or taking a short break from commanding would have something to do now.

As for being the only one who pays for upgrades, we could always make it so that anyone can still buy upgrades, as long as there’s a lord assigned. That also solves the issue of upgrades being blocked if a lord goes AFK.

It will definitely lead to quicker captures of undefended objectives, but why does that have to be a bad thing? I see it as just an extra reason to encourage people to scout. If you, as a server, don’t scout, then you wouldn’t be able to have saved it anyway.

Finally, while being lord you can still keep supply routes open from the linked camps (and upgrade those if you’re dedicated enough). So there’s still something to do. Alternatively, the first hour or so you can easily spend on sieging up if you are in a keep.
Yes, leaving puts the circle up. But that’s a choice you make that the enemy has to make for each of their objectives as well.
Regarding the guilt of losing something, I don’t think that’s a big point either. If a zerg shows up, your dueling skills don’t matter. All you can do is man siege and call reinforcements – if that inner gate is down, and you’re alone, it’s out of your control and other players will understand that.

We already have a few individuals who stay behind and scout on most servers. I really think this mechanic will only encourage more people to do so. Yes, losing a keep will get easier, but then again if only the NPC lord is there all that gives you is maybe 30 seconds extra time to respond – usually not enough if there’s not already a scout there.

The changes that make you lose things easier of course also affect your enemy, so it will still be fair. If anything, because it becomes slightly easier to take things, that means servers who hold a lot of ground are at a disadvantage causing things to balance out a bit more.

WvW is a competitive game mode, and if a server as a whole refuses to scout there should be consequences to that. This could motivate people to step up and take responsibility for a specific objective, while getting credit for this (because everyone can see you are looking after it). Especially with the lack of scouts, people will still appreciate bad player lords over no scouts at all.

how about instead of only the PC keep lord being able to upgrade, the PC keep lord is able to upgrade with no gold/karma costs? going a bit further into it, it would be nice to be able to phase out PvE entirely, and allow the keep lord to designate players to take on the roles instead just with double the amount of total PCs doing the job as there are NPCs now. using workers as an example, there are 2 NPC workers (once the upgrade is bought), so that would mean that 4 PCs could completely replace them. in the case of partial replacements, if there’s 1 PC, they would just be added to the 2 NPCs. 2 PCs would remove 1 of the NPCs. 3 PCs would be have 1 NPC worker, and 4 PCs would have 0 NPCs. the same sort of system could be applied to the guards. the existing personnel upgrades would simply double the amount of available slots to be distributed. this would allow a team to come in and quickly get an area upgraded, and manage the defenses in that area. then give the people in those assigned roles a WXP bonus when their area gets attacked. if they receive double the WXP, they’re compensated for not zerging and the work they put into the area to set it up. since there’s a limited number of slots, defenders would be encouraged to spread out to cover all of the other areas on the map as well, so that everyone on defense makes the most of their bonuses.

then, they could safely lower the damage arrow carts do back to at least near the level it was at before they knee-jerked buffed it. everyone gets something they want, everyone ends up happy, everyone wins.