Guild Wars 2

Does the crossed sword icon on the map report battles just involving your servers players, or does it report all battles?

Or maybe a better question is what exactly does the crossed swords icon report?

From what my guild and I gathered it is so many people all doing damage within a certain radius. We believe once you hit 4-5 people doing damage while still being near eachother then crossed swords will appear. This will also happen to gates occasionally when auto-attacking gates. We typically send it groups of two to take out guards so as not to bring up the yellow cross swords.

A group of, I believe it’s 5 (might be 4) doing damage in any way (auto attacking, using siege) to any target (players, npcs, structures)

Silver/White swords on Towers/Supply Camps/Keeps indicate that it is under current attack by a force smaller than 5, this can be either NPC’s or Players. Trebuchets can effect this too.

Orange Swords, Indicate a larger scale battle of more than 5. These can happen anywhere on the map.

Long story short, investigate every sword battle.

Gavello.2813:

Silver/White swords on Towers/Supply Camps/Keeps indicate that it is under current attack by a force smaller than 5, this can be either NPC’s or Players. Trebuchets can effect this too.

Orange Swords, Indicate a larger scale battle of more than 5. These can happen anywhere on the map.

Long story short, investigate every sword battle.

True, but needs bit of tweaking…

white swords indicate an attack on a gate or npcs at a camp/tower/etc. You can attack the walls with a group of 5 or less and get no white swords (ninja!)

I’m pretty sure I’ve caused the white swords to show up on a tower before by using a treb on a wall.

some of the above statements are incorrect^

WHITE SWORDS on the tower/keep/camp icon:
-tower/keep/camp is under attack. It could be under attack by any amount of enemy siege, NPC’s, or by enemy player(s). it does not indicate how many enemy players are in the area, you can get white swords from one enemy hitting a gate with melee while his friends stand next to him not engaging in combat

-starts an “in combat” timer on the keep/tower camp that is under attack. once the white swords are up they will remain up until a “defense” event timer finishes(3ish minutes?) even if the tower/keep/camp is secure or cleared of enemies.

ORANGE SWORDS:
-can appear anywhere on the map
-more than 4? or 5? players are in combat/gotten kills. what they are in combat with can be anything that can be killed; animals, npcs or other players.
-orange swords drop as soon as the fighting stops.
-using siege does not create orange swords.

Any damage to a tower or keep will bring up white swords on the keep icon.. Only if there are enough people doing damage do you get orange swords. You cannot ninja a keep/tower with no indicators on the map showing up. This is why anytime you see a keep under attack orange swords or not, it should be checked out.

majinvegitto.7124:

Any damage to a tower or keep will bring up white swords on the keep icon.. Only if there are enough people doing damage do you get orange swords. You cannot ninja a keep/tower with no indicators on the map showing up. This is why anytime you see a keep under attack orange swords or not, it should be checked out.

True although if you’ve got good control of your zerg you can potentially drop 3 rams on the door and still only have white swords. Orange swords will result in a large response immediately. If it takes 1 minute to run out there from the closest waypoint you double your time to get past the static defenses as it will probably take just as long for the zerg to arrive after the easily crushed scouting party shows up. This can be the difference between having the enemy zerg roll into your back as the doors go down and having them show up right as the lord goes down forcing them to beat the doors down themselves. Still a hit or miss stratagy however as if theres even a single defender inside the call for the zerg can go out right away without the need to wait for a scout to report a false alarm. can work for night caping but otherwise only effective if the enemy is makeing a major push elsewhere and is destracted.

If more than 6 players/npcs are in combat with each other it will display crossed swords. So 5 people attacking 1 mob will not cause swords, but if 1 more mob joins the fight swords will be visible.

A small team on IoJ did a nice job of using this to ninja Greenbriar from BG on Saturday night. Someone at Greenbriar called out “10-15 IoJ at Greenbriar but they may have run by”. After clearing a small run at Greenvale, I asked in map chat “How’s Greenbriar?”. The reply was “clear”. A few minutes later the wall was down and they capped the tower. Turns out they were stacked up and hiding in a little nook that drops down a hill and had set up 2 or 3 catas in there. I got there to drop some grenades on their heads just as they broke the wall. It was pretty sneaky and well played.