Guild Wars 2

Let us pretend, for a moment, that WvW will be around a long time for now. It’s not too important whether you personally believe it or not. Many of the choices I’m seeing indicate that ANET is playing the long game with WvW and I want to see if we can hash out their vision.

Most of this is only applicable in the top 3-5 tiers of NA. Don’t know about EU.

Of note:
-Superior Siege, once the glut of spirit crystals dries up, will become comparatively sparse. It will be a much bigger investment to drop 5 superior catas on a wall, especially since they usually can’t hit both inner/outer on keeps now. It will either be replaced by guild siege or switched out for normal catas.

-Guild upgrades will eventually become prominent and people will be heavily incentivized to defend said upgraded structures. Towers will run Sentry Balloons just about always and keeps will run Hardened Siege/Walls.

-Northern camps will run Speedy Yaks to boost PPT while southern camps will run Iron Guards so that they don’t flip to solo roamers. Southern camps will also run Sabotage Depot as it is comparatively cheap and effectively denies attackers any supply to work with.

-Fights will refocus on taking camps while harassing keeps. Taking a keep will generally happen after prolonged harassment instead of as a rush.

-Small guilds will be relied upon to hold claims so that larger guilds can slot upgrades into a structure.

-Supply traps will become ever more important as supply itself gains importance. In the absence of guild catas and with a greater necessity to build siege to destroy defensive siege, zergs will need to actually pay attention to their supply count. Meanwhile, with so many small paths, it is easier to lay a trap where you know enemies will run.

-Small groups will become indispensable for taking camps and harassing keeps. I imagine 3-5 people. This will be driven by a desire to reset claim timers on camps for attackers and a desire to preserve claims/supply lines for defenders.

In order for these things to happen, we’ll need to see the price of higher tier guild upgrades drop. I don’t know if this will happen naturally or if ANET will be forced to intervene. We’d also have to see a bit of player adjustment, but this is happening…slowly.

tl;dr WvW will become a game of supply. The total amount of available supply will eclipse the total number of players in determining siege success. Camps will generate more fights than walls, many of them small scale.

WvW has always been a game of supply. Why do you think they nerfed it with HoT?

Don’t forget PoH’s. You can buy Sup Siege with those except Golems for some reason.

- Superior Siege, once the glut of spirit crystals dries up, will become comparatively sparse. It will be a much bigger investment to drop 5 superior catas on a wall, especially since they usually can’t hit both inner/outer on keeps now. It will either be replaced by guild siege or switched out for normal catas.

You can now buy superior siege with Proofs of Heroics + Badges. There will not be a shortage of superior siege blueprints.

- Guild upgrades will eventually become prominent and people will be heavily incentivized to defend said upgraded structures. Towers will run Sentry Balloons just about always and keeps will run Hardened Siege/Walls.

-Northern camps will run Speedy Yaks to boost PPT while southern camps will run Iron Guards so that they don’t flip to solo roamers. Southern camps will also run Sabotage Depot as it is comparatively cheap and effectively denies attackers any supply to work with.

These both heavily depend on the cost of crafting a schematics. We already know that low-tier schematics cost 2-5g to craft and Dune Rollers take 100 seaweed (about 15 gold).

Do you really think that 75 Flax Fibers (for one deployment of Sabotage Depot) is cheap? There’s never a time when I’d spend 3.75g (today’s material cost) to deny 100 supply.

-Fights will refocus on taking camps while harassing keeps. Taking a keep will generally happen after prolonged harassment instead of as a rush.

Maybe

-Small guilds will be relied upon to hold claims so that larger guilds can slot upgrades into a structure.

Maybe, but only to the degree that small guilds feel any incentive to progress the expensive and pointless tech tree of Guild Hall upgrades.

-Supply traps will become ever more important as supply itself gains importance. In the absence of guild catas and with a greater necessity to build siege to destroy defensive siege, zergs will need to actually pay attention to their supply count. Meanwhile, with so many small paths, it is easier to lay a trap where you know enemies will run.

Supply management has become less important since HoT, though also a bigger hassle.

Automatically-upgrading objectives (even without yaks!) removed a big part of the supply equation, while also increasing the demand for supply to build siege to breach those objectives.

Supply manipulation is now harder and more expensive than ever, but it basically simplifies to “bring lots of people” and “don’t bring a few people”.

-Small groups will become indispensable for taking camps and harassing keeps. I imagine 3-5 people. This will be driven by a desire to reset claim timers on camps for attackers and a desire to preserve claims/supply lines for defenders.

In order for these things to happen, we’ll need to see the price of higher tier guild upgrades drop. I don’t know if this will happen naturally or if ANET will be forced to intervene. We’d also have to see a bit of player adjustment, but this is happening…slowly.

tl;dr WvW will become a game of supply. The total amount of available supply will eclipse the total number of players in determining siege success. Camps will generate more fights than walls, many of them small scale.

This is actually the past of WvW. It is not the present, it will not be the future without large changes on ANet’s part.

How they will look in the future? I think in the futere willl be less diference between T1 and T8. More and more ppl will quit. The last sign of life, the queue in EB will disapear. They will just look empty and deserted.

What is very interesting is that Guild Siege Golems are amazingly cheap to build with supply (50) and at this point can only be crafted by a level 400 scribe. The base materials run currently about 10-12g per golem. This will have an interesting effect long term, I think.

Sviel.7493:

-Guild upgrades will eventually become prominent and people will be heavily incentivized to defend said upgraded structures. Towers will run Sentry Balloons just about always and keeps will run Hardened Siege/Walls.

Defend against what?

When defense increase, it only make people bored. So they go somewhere else or wait until there is few/no defenders. Combine this with the do or die attitude of returning to battle due to map design and that’s how we get PvD.

The future of the BLs is death by starvation. They are only being maintained because of a few hopefull roamers and small guilds trying to make things happen. When they stop, everything become pointless. WvW will become a choice between play for fun on EB and drop like a stone in the matchups or play for points in the borderlands and become so bored you want to kill yourself. It will no doubt only cause drama in the server communities because people on EB will blaim border roamers for the loss and people on the borders will blaim EB for not doing anything to help win.

So yeah its looking good!

What WvW BLs Will Look Like in the Future….

EMPTY

Seriously though, they’ve already screwed over small groups with the changes. The price for the upgrades are insanely stupid, there’s no other way to put it. Upgrade prices need to drop to under a gold and less in order to be worthwhile, either that or they adjust the material requirements for the schematics.

The future of WvW will only see large PvX guilds playing for PPT. They’re the only ones able to afford WvW buffs/upgrades consistently. What remains of the fight guilds will mostly stick to EBG.

@Heimlich

-I realize that Sup Siege can be bought with badges/proofs, but as badges/proofs are not available in large enough amounts to match the previous glut of mithril/elder wood, I predict that less siege will be available.

-Sabotage is comparatively cheap. I said that it depends on Flax Fibers and Resonating Slivers dropping in price, but since they’re the major part of the cost and both new materials, I’m predicting that they’ll fall.

-Small guilds don’t need to progress their guild halls very much. As long as they can claim things, larger guilds can slot upgrades (built by the large guild) into their claims. Given the difficulty of raising the guild hall and the cost of the upgrades, I’m predicting that this will happen rather than most of the guilds paying for their own stuff.

-I don’t think you’re wrong about supply, but I also don’t think we disagree. What I’m saying is that hitting attackers in the supply is more effective now than it was—for the reasons that you stated. Also, defenders have old tools to hit supply (cows/traps) and now new tools (sabotage depot) that should make a supply denial strategy more feasible/effective.

@Downwood

-That’s pretty interesting…perhaps that’s because golems are considerably easier to deal with than before. I’m not confident with making any predictions on that yet—will have my eye on it.

@Dawdler

-I’m not really concerned about closet K-Trainers who complain about people defending.

@Xenesis

-I think their intent was to boost small groups but, you’re right, the costs are just too high. If they don’t come down like I predicted and/or ANET doesn’t change the mats then this all falls apart.

@Pixie

-If we can establish a symbiotic relationship where large guilds handle the upgrades and small guilds focus on claiming, it will ease the pain enough that small guilds should stick around.

Given that Sabotage Depot is basically WvW Scribe 101, as long as you have new scribes in training in your guild you will never run out of these. As we continue to unlock schematics for WvW we are finding a fairly nice scribe progression ladder that will eventually help new scribes level mostly from 0-400 through WvW upgrades alone. We’re still unlocking stuff but the full picture is coming clear.

Guild Siege Golems are a level 400 schematic involving 5 orichalcum reinforced plates (1 supply sack and 5 ori ingots each) , 3 alpha blueprints, and 5 Badges of Tribute.

The larger/smaller guild symbiosis is starting to develop. With watchtower a 375 scribe recipe and very useful, you’ll even see the mid-size guilds claiming towers for the big guilds to slot watch tower into.

The Watchtower recipe is 2 BoT, a Resonating Core, a Strategic Defense Map of the Mists, and a bag of incandescent energy

The flax fiber requirements for everything WvW related is stupid. Not enough drops in WvW for it to be something that can be rationally collected in the game mode that it is being most used in.

Given what we’ve seen from Anet, my guess is that they’ll gradually make the maps one giant circle of areas, with arrows painted on the roads to show zergs which direction to ktrain in. It’ll be a megaserver system, identical to EotM, because they think that a bunch of strangers silently standing next to each other is “a social experience”, while actual communities are “irrelevant”. The areas will continue to upgrade by themselves, and NPC mobs will fill in on the Ktrain rotation if there isn’t a busload of players ready to ride the loop. Defenders will leave, anyone looking for actual fights will leave afterwards, and then….. BLAM! sPvP Esport, baby! No more competition, anyone that wants to do any PvP at all will have to go into sPvP. They’ll eventually disable combat in guild halls, citing that it “violates their game mode” and probably hand out a few bans in the process too. EotM will be shrink down into a much smaller ktrain circle, and used to test out new, bad, ideas for sPvP. And in a year, they’ll put out another expansion, and take everyone’s gear and levels away, and make them grind 10 times harder just to get it back, and call that “exciting new content!”.

I wish I was joking, I really do. But I’ve been paying attention for too long to be able to ignore the path they’ve been going down for quite some time now. While I was greatly disappointed at the changed HoT brought, I wasn’t surprised in the least. And if any of the horrible ideas I listed above actually happen, I won’t be surprised in the least by those either. You can only watch someone running towards the edge of a cliff for so long before you realize they’re dead set on plummeting off of it.

Phantom.8130:

It’ll be a megaserver system, identical to EotM, because they think that a bunch of strangers silently standing next to each other is “a social experience”, while actual communities are “irrelevant”.

Except that it sort of works and many peeps on this forum are proving them right. I’ve seen plenty of post saying go to EB or EoTM if you want a fight, dont go to borders.

Personally I still envision the full hybrid. No more WvW and EoTM separation. Just one single all-server WvW.

Imagine 9 EBs (1 per tier, EU) always open. Everyone on any server can join any EB but your server get more points for holding your color stuff on your " home EB" and home server players have priority access (ie mercenaries from other servers get kicked to either their EB or a border if queued but room for home server players). When an EB become queued, it starts a 3h EoTM or border map, linked to that EB. Anyone can join this. Winner gets a boon to the linked EB and the instance is closed again (until reopened).

So the amount of maps shift between 9 and 18. If that turns out to be too little, add a second 3h border matchup layer for 27 maps, etc. At this point I think 18 will be enough though, lol.

In terms of points it would get rid of tier matchups, but glicko ranks for servers can still remain. More like sPvP rankings, but for servers.

And of course, Anet completely changed the materials requirements of all the WvW scribing items and now they’re …. reasonable.

“Scribing costs for WvW claiming and guild siege equipment have been adjusted to be less expensive.”

This is the best news~ It should allow for everything else to develop as well.

Supply +5 unlocked