Guild Wars 2

There were some threads a few months ago about borderlands being to small, but they are pretty big. The placement of keeps and towers however keeps us fighting in a small diamond on the lower portion of the map while a large amount of space is taken by pve/unused content up north.

I was wondering if there was any plans to change this maybe by adding a keep to each upper corner or since there are no longer orbs of power turning the center portion into a keep? or maybe a fortress that spans the whole north border.

My hope for this would be forcing zergs to spend more time north if they wished to cap a map allowing for other forces to regain some of their land and forcing all players outside of the small diamond we play in now.

What do you mean there is no reason to go north? You have half the map up north with 2 towers, a keep, and 3 camps. Are you talking about the relatively small space that the skritt, centaurs and orb NPCs take up? You don’t want TOO many objectives on the map, or have them be too crowded. I think putting anything important objective wise would cause a lot of clutter, and make the “2 camp/tower(or keep)” balance. The only place I think where COULD place an objective would be where the JP is if you got rid of that…but these spots are still relatively small portions of the map, and they are GREAT (the two corners) for alternative paths to those northern objectives.

I’d like to see the centaur and skritt become more important WvW objectives, how the hylek/ogres/dredge are in EB (but better, and those could use a retune too, but I’ll ramble about that later). There is some interesting terrain in those areas but not much PvP ever happens there because there is very little reason to go there.

Skritt could be enlisted to steal supplies from enemy owned camps and delivery yaks, and deposit it in towers and keeps.

Centaurs could be “hired” to reinforce supply camps with a few troops. The could also build low health destructible walls/gates to add more protection to supply camps in their cultural style, once the supply camps have reached maximum upgrade status.

Before anyone goes all “no more PvE in my PvP!” think about how this could encourage groups splitting off from the zerg to hold these objectives. More small scale PvP (possibly) would be the result if well implemented.

The hylek/dredge/orges/quaggans could use a buff too, making them important objectives would lessen the tendency to zerg-cap them and move on without caring at all if they are flipped.

Whole sections of the maps right now are just zerg highways with bonus exp stuffs, where strategic chokepoints are largely ignored because the biggest benefit of holding them is in the exp gained in the cap.

There’s a delicate balance between making these objectives useless and turning WvW into PvE. I personally think that the balance is about right for EB but should definitely be improved in the borderlands.

Thrashbarg.9820:

Skritt could be enlisted to steal supplies from enemy owned camps and delivery yaks, and deposit it in towers and keeps.

While that’s an interesting idea, it made me realise what could be a much simpler but still very effective change: make it so that centaurs/skritts position themselves on the roads that bring supplies from the north camp to the towers/garrison and kill any dolyaks they see.

This should only happen when they are owned by an enemy team (not neutral) and the 3 points for the dolyak that you normally earn should go to that team if/when the NPCs kill a dolyak. Also, the skritt capture should really be made faster – the respawn rate is way too low, it takes forever to complete.

The hylek/dredge/orges/quaggans could use a buff too

I think EB mercenaries are very good as it is, and it’s genuinely worthwhile to capture them. It might be slightly too easy to capture it back from an enemy (no indication it’s contested and very fast for most of them) but even then that’s a useful indication that enemies will come to your camp soon.

Bu the quaggans are definitely too weak. I think they should be strong enough to take an unupgraded south camp on their own (like tkitten NPCs) but not either not go to vale/water at all or not send as strong a group there and not be able to take it on their own (as that would likely make them too desirable).

It might also not hurt to make the quaggan shamans that destroy enemy siege in keeps stronger so that they can do their job without often being killed by unupgraded guards (making them just weak enough that they’d die against upgraded ones would certainly help make that upgrade more useful too).

Even if it was not time consuming it still would not be worthwhile and even if it was worthwhile it would not be time consuming enough to reach my goal of occupying a zerg for a long enough time to allow the south to be capped. Making a full map cap much harder.

I’ve been thinking about the better use of space on every BL for a while now, and have come up with a idea. Get rid of the water in the middle of the BL it’s not needed and entirely wasted space. Instead replace said area with ground and place a tower or mini SM in the middle.

This mini SM could then be attacked by any other tower/keep on the BL. The points on holding this mini SM would have to be high enough to warrant holding it. But would constantly be in a battle state. Plus having a 360 degree attack face means anyone could attack it.

The only thing is if a server has massive numbers. But hey i operate on a low tier server with not many active players

Just a idea??

Thanks

For me better is 1 big and 3 small

Taterz.1706:

I’ve been thinking about the better use of space on every BL for a while now, and have come up with a idea. Get rid of the water in the middle of the BL it’s not needed and entirely wasted space. Instead replace said area with ground and place a tower or mini SM in the middle.

This mini SM could then be attacked by any other tower/keep on the BL. The points on holding this mini SM would have to be high enough to warrant holding it. But would constantly be in a battle state. Plus having a 360 degree attack face means anyone could attack it.

The only thing is if a server has massive numbers. But hey i operate on a low tier server with not many active players

Just a idea??

Thanks

I’d rather they get rid of the dumb krait, and put the “island” underwater, and make something there more important so people will hold it. I think the potential of doing underwater fights would be great, I just think lots of people avoid fighting in the water because the stupid krait. The problem with putting anything too big though there is that garrison is right there, and so are the other keeps and towers, etc…so anything more “important” than a camp would really make the map too cluttered there!

As for the skritt stealing supplies, that’d be great if they were balanced in a decent way. It’d be really bad to have to have a squad of 5-10 people staying inside a keep to avoid near constant skritt waves. I think if you “capped” something and it gave off ONE wave of skritt to nearby keeps, or if you could pick a target, then it wouldn’t be so bad as long as it had a decent cooldown for the capping. But that being said, people already get way spread out in borderlands, especially since you have to defend 3 keeps, 2 of them being on opposite sides of the map (unlike EB where you only have 1 keep in your 3rd and the towers are pretty close), so doing anything which would spread people out more might just cause issues.

The BL’s are, in my mind, a different setting than EB all together. I like doing EB, but I really like doing the BL’s. You have to focus on holding 3 keeps, and it’s much harder to play defense and just have 1 big zerg, since you’ll lose stuff before you get there often. Scouts are much more important, since you do have to have such a heads up. If you’re at the NE tower and someone attacks your Bay, you have a long run if you have no WP there or at garrison! In EB, things are close enough that you can react much faster, from my experience there, and the focal point of the map is at the center. The BL’s don’t have a “focal” point ,except maybe garrison, but garrison is worth just as much as the other keeps, it’s just a good feeling though to own someone elses garrison!