Guild Wars 2

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Scoring: 48.90%
Quality of Life: 45.23%
No Preference: 5.87%

Scoring has won! The WvW team will be releasing another poll soon so everyone can vote on what scoring project they want us to work on next.

I HAVE THE POWER!!!! to vote for my favorite game modes development!

PLEASE CHANGE IT BACK TO FRIDAY! I want my fight nights back!

Gaile Gray.6029:

Please let us know what you think of these changes. We’re going to hold off on picking a release date until we have a chance to review your feedback, but we’d like to target early 2016. So please add your feedback about these proposals to this thread.

This line while hilarious, should have been your approach from the beginning. Anet we love you and this game mode, but just a bit of transparency is how we can help save it!

My fights guild will relish the opportunity for PPK again! <3

Part 2 of my suggestions: These are fixes that really need to be implemented or at least discussed.

1: Removal of Auto-Upgrades/Supply Yaks
Remove the auto upgrade process. As has been said a thousand times here, there is no pride in holding any objectives. Those hours of walking yaks in, deciding whether its worth the risk of building a treb versus getting a full repair on gates is over. Make it so you can starve upgrades by denying yaks. My wallet is thankful that we no longer have to pay gold for upgrades but still make supply be required to get something done. As it stands now I can take a guild group of 20 and bunk up the lords room of a keep with 20 AC’s and there is no way anyone could walk through it and in 3 hours we have a free t2 keep.

2: The issue of “nightcapping”/Score
Remember that one test that you guys ran like 2 years ago, PPK – points per kill. Servers like myself that are often outmanned in giant blob fights but are skilled are allowed to even the scales. I remember that when they changed the rules, the scores were much closer as actual player kills/fight guilds could really contribute to the overall score. This NEEDS to be added back into the score. The 2nd issue of nightcapping is different. As a late PST/early OCX commander/GL I understand that it is always night somewhere and this issue is 100% about server coverage and making that fair. There really is no solution to this but by removing auto upgrades and adding in PPK it would not be as much of a problem. If you didn’t have to log into finding out that your whole BL is filled with enemy T3 keeps because they mega blobbed you at 4am when your sever has a low pop it would be less demoralizing. Right now if someone caps your keeps everyone is just like “oh well, it will auto-upgrade again in like 3 hours”. My solution below about reducing the total maps would also make it easier for your outmanned server to bunk up in your 1 keep and fend off the late night attackers rather than worry about trying to defend 4 keeps. With the new borderlands a force of about 10-20 with siege can keep forces back for quite awhile.

3: Guild Hall WvW Upgrades
Please lower the cost of War Room upgrades for our guild halls. We worked hard to earn our buffs, you took the most useful one +5 (that we ran with every night) and gated it past 2 months of PvE and about $3,000 gold. I would like to be able to immediately purchase all of the auras from guild level 1 if you had them before!

4: Map Size/Current WvW Population
My biggest criticism that I voiced during the closed WvW beta tests, the map needs a higher population. This isn’t another complaint “The map is too big” I’ve done the math, i’ve timed how long it takes to run around once you understand the layout. That part isn’t bad. What is bad is that not even T1 can fill all 4 maps. I want WvW cut down to 2 maps. EB and 1 Desert BL. Adjust the desert map to be like EB where each server is expected to hold their own corner, by only giving us 2 options you would increase the amount of players and more people wouldn’t complain that it feels dead. With current declining populations you could rarely get a fight, I think that this would fix all of these problems. You would have to increase the total population per server though to be ~150 (per server) = 450 total. The map would feel so alive if you could have over 5 guilds all running independently either defending, scouting, upgrading (escorting yaks!) , doing the stupid lazer PvE event, or attacking.

5: WvW Rewards/Gear Proposal
WvW needs to feel rewarding! I think that a good way to balance these so called rewards is that they should all be ACCT bound! If you are really worried about the economy think about this solution. We have PvP gear, and then we have PvE/WvW gear. I want to separate WvW to be like PvP. Let us purchase account bound: armor/weapons/food/runes/sigils and siege with ONLY WvW badges/gold and restrict it to WvW game maps only. So for example if I have a berserker’s set with strength runes, normally that could cost around 100g right now. If you added a WvW armor slot/mode to the hero panel I could buy an exotic set, “unlock” the runes/sigils and have a set of gear with whatever stats I want but could not be used in PvE. This way WvW players could still get the gear and food that they want without having to play other game modes. You have said that there are “no true WvW players”, I am part of the people that would auto-spawn straight into my home BL/Guild Hall if I could. If I could sustain commanding for my guild with siege/food without going into another game mode I would. This way of unlocking/using gear in WvW would remove a lot of hostility and keep us happy. On average I can easily spend 5-10gold worth of siege in a single raid, then add in the cost of 40s per hour to run my food/wrench buffs. That cost is required each day I want to command in WvW. This does not count the set of exotic/ascended gear + expensive runes + expensive energy sigils that I had to grind for to craft just to play my game mode.

Describe a typical hour for you in the Alpine Borderlands in the past. For example, What size of group were you running in? What kind of tasks did you run? What activities did you do?
A typical hour involves running with my close knit guild with a size of 15 looking for fights. We would do some PPT but generally only drop siege to lure out the blobs/defenders to come play. We would move around to multiple maps or if there was a callout to defend something would run to our home map to fend off the attackers. Generally a well rounded night running around 3-4 hours doing all sorts of tasks.

Compare your experience described above with a typical hour spent in Eternal Battlegrounds, if you went there at all. Does your style of play change between the 2 maps?
If we decide that we are staying on EB it means be prepared for fights. All it is involves running to the OJ’s and using our battle skills to fight our opponents in open field. As long as we held our corner for the most part we were content to sit with massive 3 way fights in SMC fighting for hours.

Compare your experiences described above with an hour spent in the new borderlands.
The new borderlands are beautifully designed but as I said in a previous closed beta test of the maps, they feel too big. I think that they are designed for 100-250 people in mind (per server) and not 75. It does have a sharp learning curve in map navigation which can turn people away but I feel that it has to many “PvE” mechanics. The central lazer event, the lack of wide open spaces, the excessive ways to turtle in and bunker down prevent fighting. In my previous report I said that it will take a minimum of 18 people to take a single keep all carrying 20 supply to attack effectively. People don’t want to fight on these maps because they “feel” empty. Without fail, every time I play on the desert maps, all I do is karma train with my guild, get bored after 20 mins and leave to EB to look for non-blobs to fight.

Describe the nature of combat in the borderlands in the past. How have the new borderlands impacted this paradigm for you? What style or build changes might it cause? For example, knocking people off cliffs or into lava might play a more important role.
The other maps felt very open and fair. While the new maps promote a higher degree of skill/tactics, I honestly can’t say that I’ve been tested as a commander and have had to adapt. We have had only 2 good fights in the new desert maps since launch. Yes there is a lot of verticality and choke points and areas for you to come around and flank your opponents but I haven’t had enemy numbers to fight against.

In your experience, compare the time it takes take a structure or objective here, then it did in the past.
The time it takes to capture a structure (keeps specifically) is astronomical. For keeps, the amount of health feels like I can ignore the attackers for a solid 10 minutes and then go run to defend. Camps/shrines/towers all feel about right from the health in the walls/gates and strength of the lord. Keeps take a long time and a large amount of supply to capture. The days of a small guild group (read 10) dropping 5 guild catas to ninja a keep is over. Before you had maybe 5 minutes to react and defend your keep, now you have a good 10 before you need to even begin getting worried.

How is the loot and wxp for you compared to in the past? Will it be able to sustain whatever you are doing? Did it take a hit, or was it improved? If you are planning to unlock an elite specialization, do you think you were helped or hurt in these regards? Do you think you could pursue any other in-game goals just by playing WvW?
The loot compared to the past is the same (which is actually negative), the gold loss per hour now is smaller, this is only the case if I make sure to stop in each objective and gather the nodes. Half the time I forget or am in a rush to go defend/fight on a different part of the map so I don’t want to spend 1 minute waiting for everyone to regroup and finish gathering. I have never been able to sustain myself on WvW alone. I always had to do dungeon speedruns or PvP to have the money to be able to afford my siege and food. I understand that I don’t need all the shinies but to afford sigils of energy, runes of strength, food that costs 40-50s/per hour is not sustainable in WvW alone. I have unlocked 2 classes entirely through the proofs of heroics but I am also rank 1600+ so the points are of no consequence to me. As a WvW fight guild commander if there aren’t enemy’s then I don’t get xp and I don’t get loot. I feel like I am forced to play other game modes just to play what I want. This is not the case in both PvE and PvP. Both provide amble gold/rewards/skins and get attention through balance patches/new content. I would like to be able to purchase large amounts of account bound armor/weapons/runes/food by my WvW rank points or badges of honor.

How will the map change impact the long sessions (multiple hours) you spend in WvW?
They have been reduced. My guild is no longer raiding daily for 3-5 hours. Now we spend around 2-3 and aren’t having as much fun. WvW guilds/players have either left the game mode entirely, are grinding PvE to pay for the WvW guild buffs/items that we already had or waiting till you decide to rebalance everything.

In 100 words or less, describe how the new BLs could be improved.
Get rid of 2/3 of the desert maps. There should be only 2 maps. The desert borderland: red – earth keep, blue – fire, and green – air; and EB. Each map should have an increased population cap of at least 150 fights PER SERVER.

In 100 words or less, describe how the borderlands work to a new WvW player.
If someone has never set foot in WvW, all they will see is an empty map maybe with a commander tag where they cannot glide even though it looks like it was designed with that in mind.

In 100 words or less, describe how the borderlands work to a veteran WvW player that is new to the maps.
They will be frustrated, and confused as they compare it to the old maps. Once you spend 10 hours in it though you can understand all the secrets and things you need to know to navigate/play effectively.

Which map am I most likely to find you currently, if you’re on Gw2?
If I am playing WvW, it is 99% on EB because that is where I find fights and enemy servers. This game mode is bleeding more and more players each day because we don’t have any communication or transparency. I have had faith in ANET for 10 years as a long time veteran, I have seen them somehow pump out an expansion each year with LOADS of content and amazing features so it is sad to see Wvw getting the scraps of attention in over 3 years of GW2.

We want to be able to fight (you have developed an amazing combat system, let us use it!). We want to be able to buy normal gear (armor/runes/weapons/food) without leaving WvW. We want actual tournaments/competitve GvG focus for once.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Probably not since there are Tyrian and Maguuma Masteries, and WvW (and PvP for that matter) are neither area. WvW exp goes towards its own set of lines for that area, so I doubt it would go towards WvW goals and also a Mastery line. That would be double dipping. But it would be good to know for sure.

That was my line of thinking but you can use central tyrian masteries chiefly the auto-loot from Pact Commander so at least some of the mastery benefits can be used in WvW I want the xp source clarified though

Yes they will Read the top posts /15 chars

What that says ^^

Will XP earned in WvW count towards the central tyrian mastery tracks (ie. Pact Commander)?

I know WvW is technically “the mists” and I know we can’t use HoT things like gliding but we can use things like Pact Commander auto-loot.

Any dev response would be lovely! <3

Yes it is a 100% new crafting profession. It is being added to the list (like cook, weaponsmith, etc.).

In order to train this profession you must interact with the scribe in your guild hall (HoT + guild hall required to start/train) and the only place where you can use it is within your guild hall, it is not being added to Lions Arch or other cities.

So…it is part of the new guild hall functionality and now there are a total of 9 crafting professions

Colin Great news on the guild missions and WvW hero points for HoT. Thank you!

100gold, 150 favor is the cost (according to video footage, values could change by time of launch)

It was shown on a live stream that you need 150 favor to start the expedition but they could have changed that value by launch this week.

I ask because we know that the guild expedition requires 3 things:
1- 100gold
2- 150 favor
3- physical access to the hall (we have to explore HoT to find/conquer it)

I want to know if guild missions are live at 12:01am pst at launch. They did say that the guild mission reset change will happen Monday but do we get those 3 days to do the missions under the new system to get enough favor to start our expedition?

Iirc I saw that an easy mission rewarded 300 favor (at least preliminary numbers) and Colin said that it would take at least 1 week to gather the necessary favor, so does the first 3 days count as (week 1)?

Before you go all melodramatic we do not know the current cost to build the new +5. Yes it may take some time to build up the War Room but it could simply be a scribe recipe like 50 badges of honor, 10 wood, and 10 leather.

Yes I get that it is gonna suck to have to rebuild up that progress to get our essential buffs back I don’t think it will be hard to do. From one of the streams that I watched they said that there is a separate WvW queue to build items (like +5) than the PvE things you may need.

I trust that Seth and the other programmers know how important these are to running efficiently in WvW and doubt that the new system is a disaster. Just wait 9 days and then we can pass judgement.

Seth already said that all things in your queue by the time HoT launches will auto finish. So queue up those guild catas or banners before (can hold 10 total)

I am going to chime in and add my voice to the crowd. I Do NOT want our reset moved back a day. My guild raids late PST/Early OCX and by doing so like others have listed are effectively crippling half my OCX members by giving them 6 hours of weekend gameplay. If ANET thinks that Friday is a bad day for reset due to patches, events, PvP tournaments or whatnot I think they should move the reset day. But do not make it halfway through our weekend!

Many people have stated that the last day or 2 of the matchup is more of a karma train/ghosttown depending on server population so by taking out all of Friday and most of Saturday you are killing over 24 hours of prime WvW fights. I think that if you wish to move the date, pick any other day Monday-Thursday as a solution.

One reason why this would be beneficial is that WvW is: players would not have to be upset at Friday night patches kicking us all out of maps and messing up the queues. You could move reset halfway through the week (say Wednesday) and that would really change the way the scores work. As many people have said, over the weekend the massive player activity increase allows much of the score and match tone to be set. But if you moved it halfway through the week, the weekend fights would have a much larger impact in final scores leaving Monday and Tuesday to be break days. We have been told that Devs are trying to give some attention to the negelcted 1/3 of their main game modes but a decision like this without any feedback from the community is not the best approach.

So, to reiterate, ANET, if you want to move reset please pick Wednesday (or any weekday Monday-Thursday) and you will get a much smaller backlash from a very dedicated community that hasn’t been shown much love in over 3 years.

The stacking limit of guild consumables was raised to 25. This includes guild banners, world Boss tokens, guild catapults etc.

As seen in a screenshot I took during one of the live streams, 100g and 150favor. They said you should be able to earn that amount in a week.

From what I believe it’s 300 favor for an easy mission, 400 – Med, and 500 – hard with an unknown weekly cap.

Astralporing.1957:

I’m pretty sure that the percentage thing is some sort of misunderstanding on the lordvrooms part. The blog post was very clear on the issue after all:

When claiming objectives, the guild with the most members present when an objective is captured has first priority.

That doesn’t mean of course that this guild will claim the objective, it needs to be accepted

You are correct that they said this in a recent blog post. I think they just said so because they don’t go into math as I previously just stated.

See if anyone (a dev) can reaffirm my point because I had received it first hand 3 years ago that percentages count.

Also if you don’t believe me, please put this to the test, go take a havok guild with a 5 man roster and make sure 100% of them are there to capture a camp, and your 100man blob guild and bring 20 people. If everything works as I have seen it in 3 years of this game mode, the havok group will beat you and win out in the current system.

That being said, they could alter the new claiming system to only account for “present boots on the ground” but I think they are just making claiming for visual and not changing the underlying mechanics.

PopeUrban.2578:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

You are right, I don’t understand. What good does it do to split up the Guild, as far as capping goes, if only one objective can be capped at a time?

Now, I understand splitting up the Guild to try to remove an enemy from an objective, but only to free it for another Guild to capture it belonging to the same Home World.

I guess. Lol. Somewhat confusing. =/

Basically, if you could split a 200 person guild in to 50 person guilds, you could functionally own 4 objectives, thus cutting all of the real 50 person guilds on your server out of the system since those 50 person guilds would have 100% of their roster present to claim the objective, and thus get priority.

The system as the rest of us understand it is simply that the 200 person guild would want to have all 200 members there when a fort is claimed so they could own the fort, which would prevent them from also owning the towers/camps around it unless they all swapped tags to another guild.

I mean functionally there’s not much difference aside from the fact that a percentage system would make it much easier to hog ownership by claiming multiple objectives at once, while the numbers system in stead would require people who wanted to do that to have the entire 200 person guild switch tags and actually be present at each objective.

In the numbers system you’d have to get a lot more trolls together to pull it off, so it’s better, which is probably why anet went this way with it.

Hey sorry about the late reply. I’m going to try to reply to your question.

Yes you are correct in that recent blog quote where they said the guild with the highest amount of members present gets priority (I think that is a simplification as they rarely discuss hard math numbers/statistics). As far as my reason saying that there is a percentage component, sadly I cannot give any literature or point to anything concrete.

I also am not sure but I agree there should be a “minimum” number but knowing anet I feel like people would cry foul if their small guild could never claim anything. I will say to my knowledge I do not believe there is a minimum.

I will say that my understand of it comes from 3 years of playing WvW, during the beginning (first 1-2 months of launch) a developer came forward and said that it was not just a simple “boots on the ground number” and accounted for present roster percentage into the claiming priority system. Now you’re right I have no 100% answer if they have ever changed this, but I have been operating under the asumption that is is. (And have personally never seen anything on the contrary) – I’ve seen 10 man guilds beat out blobs in the current system to claim something.

And to answer your question, if the way I have been managing WvW guilds for 3 years is correct (boots present + percentage statistic) factors into claiming, it would be more productive for your 200 man guild to split up into 4×50 mans (and you could claim 4 objectives per map and get 100% success rate)

They should kill it imo. Its original purpose was supposed to be a testing ground for us WvWers but things like golem week prove that they don’t even care. As long as it remains while unique and cool in its design is a worthless imitation to all serious WvW players. We all view it as the easy place to karma train(which we don’t need) and uplevel city.

I think it should just be scrapped and with HoT leave only 2.1 maps in existence: Eternal Battlegrounds, The Desert Oasis, and Obisdian Sanctum (for larger GvG’s?)

Review updated.

Tongku.5326:

you are incorrect in your comparison.

I am also in a small guild, very small PVX guild which is WvW focused.

Point is, in a WVW focused guild you HAVE TO HAVE WvW upgrades going which is possible and doable within the current system of influence.

But to our understanding, after HOT launches, we will have to have a guild hall and continuously obtain the new currency in order to maintain WVW effectiveness.

We do not need to raid for armor, only those of us that want the new legendary armors will go after them and they are not necessary for WVW, but the WVW upgrades are.

So a better comparison would be that we will have to do PVE raids in order to maintain the WVW upgrades (regardless wether those raids are guild missions or new upcoming raids in HOT). That is the issue.

This is exactly what I am trying to emphasize and thank you @Colin for the response I just want you to understand that we just want to know as Guild Leaders how can be best prepare for the upcoming changes for our guilds to survive. We also want you to understand that We (WvW) guilds will NOT be happy if we are forced to do PvE content (missions) in order to sustain our WvW gamestyle

PopeUrban.2578:

What makes you think a quite small guild will get any use out of wvw upgrades in the new system? Claim priority scales based on the number of players representing a guild when an objective is taken. I don’t know what your server is like, but on mine it’s pretty much a given that a guild of less than 20 people wouldn’t really ever get claim priority.
Your server may be different though.

Pope you are misinformed about how Guild claiming works. The current system does not grand favor to the largest amount of players in one guild there. It is based on 2 things: The number of guild players in the cap and the percent of the guild present.

Example: I have a 100 man guild and we capture an objective but we had 20 members present. Yes we had 20 people there but only a 20% roster present.

A small WvW guild with 20 people and 10 people present(50%) will actually gain priority over you in this system because the largest majority of players (in terms of roster%) are in the smaller guild.

EDIT: This is also why some guilds like myself prefer to keep it extremely active (50 member cap) this means when we raid 20 members we have a very solid chance of near 100% claim on any objective where we are present.

roachsrealm.9284:

I don’t think you are required to do missions to unlock content from what I read. it seems like missions will award favor and commendations, but nothing directly related to guild hall materials. most of that comes from your aetherium mine, right?

Can you point to something backing this up? From what I read Aetherium is just for speeding up upgrades or possibly related to the scribe but still Favor (merits) will be required to build the new structures. From that datamined picture it looks like some materials and guild level are needed to advance the market with merchants and TP access and those things are fine I just want to find out the exact use of favor and if it can only be earned from guild missions. (yes I know they said some influence can be converted to favor which may be our only hope if you need it to build your hall)

What about guild challenges I know most of these responses are aimed at bounty and I get that. There is a large disparity for finding some of them (Rat Wrangler where you need to talk to a kittenton of rats to pop him) and Komali which require solid groups to defeat. I also know that the PvE guild that I occasionally join for missions seems to need at least 15 to complete a challenge at all.

I just want the guild system to remain as fair as it is right now, yes you need to do missions to get commendations but nearly all of the things that commendations buy you are available in other ways.

Chaba.5410:

It is about time that a superior trebuchet actually looked like a trebuchet instead of a glorified catapult.

Do Guild Trebuchet’s count? Those things look freaking kitten!

I have an official Dev response when I sent a PM to Tyler B

Tyler Bearce
Yes, at least one character in the guild will need to use a crafting slot for the guild to gain the benefits of a scribe.

@Tyler can you answer a quick question. After capping an objective the Claim window pops up in the corner. Who all sees that. For example say I am there with 5 guildes, I am the leader, have 2 officers, and 2 members there. Does the highest ranking member get priority if they wanna claim or does any member that has claim privileges allowed to decide?

Placeholder for more content (part 3)

Tactics:
I felt like this is a very cool and creative use on the whole claiming and defending an objective. Before if a guild had buffs slotted it it felt rather passive and insignificant. By allowing guilds to customize how their towers and keeps are upgraded and therefore defended it allows a greater variation in playstyle.
The default upgrade sequence was the fortified gates (invulnerable to PvD – siege damage only). I would most like always want this go prevent a zerg rushing it. But, there were other upgrades you could pick instead, like having the very strong vet guards gain the “Iron Hide” buff (rams 50% less damage taken). So while I think the most used ones will prevent all but siege damage there were other options to buff objectives. Overall really strong system A+.
My only feedback which I listed above would be to include some sort of obvious tactic timers so that defenders are more aware of what can be popped. I didn’t like that you needed to run to a quartermaster to find out the CD timers. Also I felt like there needed to be an additional NPC in each of the keeps on the inner by the lord and the main supply depot. Right now I could only find them at the edge of the outer gates, so I feel like a 4th? quartermaster should be added near the lords room. I think this makes sense because after claiming you would be near the lords room and could easily pick your upgrade cycle rather than leave a member behind to do this.
-Banners:
- I know that a lot of people complained about the banners but I found them very situationally useful. Yes they could use a little bit of balanced (ICD on skills) but otherwise the break bar and other buffs I think will be very useful for havok or groups <20.

The Oasis Mid Event
Unfortunately I only got to do this event twice but I found it boring. I feel like once it pops all of the roamers, thieves, mesmers, and revenants will swarm it. Armed with stealth, teleports, portals, and shadow steps these classes are the best suited to picking up and running the crystals to charge the cannon. I will say that if you are able to control the cannon the damage is not insignificant. It did from what I saw 50% damage to T3 gates (inner and outer) on our keep so therefore shaved off a significant time of siege. I think time may tell but by bringing your zerg or main force to the middle of the map you may reduce the amount of the so called “long siege” that we will see with these new maps. I know Chaba made a separate post about this so I won’t bother including my thoughts here, she adequately listed my concerns.

Movement Speed/Travelers Gear
Here we go, the big one. Over and over I heard people complaining about how big the map was. Yes it is large but after spending several hours in it I felt competent in my movement and even though I still got lost sometimes that made it feel smaller. I do know that most people took awhile to figure out that if you stop by one of your controlled shrines you got a 40% movement speed buff (I think with 5m duration). With this speed its not like you were flying all over the map but I think if you are doing any long distance running will be required by groups to stop by one of these or flip an enemy shrine in order to shave off precious response speed. In my test I ran gear with and without traveler’s runes. Even though it isn’t hard to get this shrine buff I felt more comfortable with the 25% rune buff. Maybe this was because I was still new to the map and it took some time to figure out but I guess that these will be immensely popular in the beginning of launch when everyone feels slow and doesn’t remember to get the shrine buff.

Mesmers/Thieves hiding
Here we go, with my 2nd main being my Mesmer I am super stoked for the ability to hide in objectives. PU stealth mesmers working with a team of thieves could hide in objectives endlessly! The keeps are so massive that you would never be able to find or hunt one down solo. I will say that ANET thought this threw (somewhat). When an objective is captured a revealed debuff is placed on all enemies within the walls for ~5 minutes (I think). Using this time to locate mesmers and thieves will be vital to ensuring that you don’t have a hidden team ready to flip back your stuff when you leave. I still think that some really talented thieves/mesmers with their teleports and shadowsteps in a good hiding place may be able to avoid death during the reveal debuff. With few people sweeping you could avoid them for this 5 minutes or in that time have your reinforcements get portaled in. I will say it again, I think that some very exciting new tactics will be created for these new maps and the learning curve will be steep. It will take people time to recognize that those small little red dots on your mini map are actually enemy players. By having this reveal buff or the tower scout upgrade to spot your foes on your maps will be very useful to have passive scouts helping keep an eye on enemies.

Keep/Tower Lords
Here we go, the part about Keep/Tower Lords…Man they were fun! I only ran a group of ~15 so I could hardly imagine them scaling up even more. As it stands now any group from a size of 5-50 can melt lords with impunity. Anet really stepped up the bar for this. Now if it is overkill I am not sure but I will say that you will most likely have a very hard time capturing something with 10 defenders fighting alongside their lord. The tower lords weren’t too bad, with 1-2 defenders and our 10-15 man group we took him down and cleared the circle in ~5 minutes. I’m sure with better focusing and teamspeak to call incoming targets you could plan your cc better but this new map really favors defenders. In this time that your enemies are fighting the lord you can bring a solid chunk of your forces back to defend the objective.

Right now, if you are in a map and you hear “Inners 10%….5%….down they on lords, gg” that whole process occurs within 10-30 seconds if they have a normal amount of siege up. Now with these new lords, I was on the other side of the map at Earth Keep on inner ramming the gate down and I heard “They on inner gate, 10%!!!” I actually had the time to say ok guys get ready, keep ramming for another minute. (starting a timer here – 0m)2 minutes went by, ok guys lets all port spawn (3mins) lets run back to the keep (air) (5mins) we arrive to the lord nearly 75% and 2 of their attackers downed (~15 total). The lord as well as the massive HP buff to gates/walls made it so that we have ~5 minutes to respond to our attackers. Now that is a rough example, but I was so surprised that he was so tanky and could hold his own to actually give us the time to pull off our objective, port, and run back all in the time before the keep was lost! That is a HUGE change from the current map design. I know Tyler said that they were looking at the balancing the lords offensive/defensive abilities.

I personally think 5 minutes is far too long to be able to respond to defend something. I believe that if your inner gate is almost down you DROP EVERYTHING to get every single body back to defend your lord (especially if its a T3 keep). I think that a lord should be able to sustain the defense for ~2 minutes, I am not sure how to measure that (have a group of 15 attack him?). That still is not a small amount o time to allow defenders to rally up and push in together to help defend. Keep in mind that our 5 minute response time was without the temporary waypoint. This is a circumstance where I would tell defenders pop that buff! In that 5 minutes, we could have almost captured the earth keep and then with the temp WP arrived instantly to rush our lord and push out the attackers without wasting precious run speed times.

Part 2 complete/

I actually posted this to my server’s community forums and they recommended that I put it hear if anyone feels like commenting or a rare unicorn Dev happens to read it. Yes I am aware that some of this has already been said this is just my personal opinion on it. I wrote this with as little pre-judgement as I possibly could and looked at this from both a commander and roamer standpoint. Some background, I lead a small guild with actively raids 15 + 5-10 pugs.

TLDR warning…I kindov wrote a block.

General Thoughts on Group Sizing (zerging or havok sized groups)
I am really discouraged about the total amount of supply that is needed to capture an objective. I feel like this map supports both zerging and havok. Havok for all of the smaller objectives and then a zerg for any tower or keep. Havoks would be very useful for either ganking your enemy’s shrines or maintaining your own. As a solo roamer I felt like unless there were 100+ on map you could go for minutes at a time and not see a soul. In this regard I think havoks (3-10) in size would be perfect for slipping by unnoticed and could fulfill the saboteur role.

Keeps:
Unless changes are made you will NOT capture a keep with <20 people in under 30 minutes. Because most of the walls/gates were immune to all but siege it required multiple superiors to make a dent and even that took ages. In my tests I found it was simpler to just make 5 omegas and break down a wall because at least then you could walk your siege to inner (not without sustaining moderate damage due to turrets/NPCs
-Example: Superior rams are needed to break gates, so I say you need 3 per + 1 ballista to take out cannons + oil = 180 sup and you need to do that at least twice! So 360 supply minimum. Being generous saying all members are running perma +5 and guild +5 means that you need 18 people with 20 supply in order to accomplish all this without a retreat to go resupply. This does not account for having any defenders and that you are able to build this all without any of it getting disabled or destroyed by the cannons/guards/turrets.

Resupply runs will be very common so a few well placed supply traps will decimate your enemy as they have to run back 5 mins to get more. I tagged up and lead a group of 10-15 and we got destroyed by 1 (thats right a single defender) and his NPC’s + auto turrets. He didn’t even build siege, he just used the cannons/oil.

Size:
I feel like the size of these maps should be combined into a single instance and have EB as the 2nd map. The population could easily be raised to 300-500 and there would still be loads of room. Now with that many people, mega-blobs would run rampant and I’m not even going to mention the skill lag that would occur but things would never get capped. I will say that I can’t imagine being able to cover multiple maps for any server below tier 2. Yes the maps can be looked at as deceivingly large or moderate in size (remember all the ~5 stories of verticality like Verdant Brink that is in this map). (PS I WANT gliders! I know it won’t happen but man that would be cool especially around the air keep)

Automatic Upgrades/Guild Claiming:
The good thing about automatic upgrades (defensively) is that once a keep gets to T3 and has the invul upgrades….its really effin hard to lose it. You could have only 5 defenders and they can easily thwart multiple attacks/golem rushes. The upgrades were really nice and the guild claiming system while a work in progress is a definite improvement. You can make the temporary buffs (tactics) able to be used by guild members only or accessible to the public. I could see a potential issue with a troll guild claiming a keep and locking the buffs so noone could use anything.
EDIT: Tyler clarified that they are adding a system in place to remove the majority of such trolls.
My favorite tactic was the temporary waypoint (when it worked). I do think that the visibility could be better to understand when defenders could pop these defensive tactics. I would do so in a similar way to Stronghold where at the top near your servers current tick was a small set of icons similar to your skill bar with timers listed (like siege decay). You could pop a WP that would remain uncontested for ~1min to let your forces pile into the map if you needed to wipe your attackers. Otherwise the buffs to gates and cannons is really nice as it prevents a blob from mindlessly PvD forever.

Turrets: (this gets its own section)
The automatic turrets are OP as kitten and broken, they are a T3 upgrade and cannot be damaged, destroyed, or removed. I brought a single omega to a gate to see how Ninja work would fair….I took the gate down to 60% after safely clearing the guards. That whole process took me ~5-10 minutes in which in a normal match someone would have come running to scout around and discovered me. The turrets type of damage range from keep to keep but basically they hit me for ~1-2k ea every 2-3 seconds (while in a golem) with whatever CC the keep corresponds to. Air was 1s stuns, Fire 1s burn, and Earth knockbacks (you literally CANNOT use rams on Earth keep with turrets because you get interrupted every other shot). I tried the same thing with 2 superior rams instead. They melted the siege in ~5 mins. With no way to block other than literally have people stand as a meatshield and try to tank/or reflect the bullet like you would a ballista it was very discouraging.

The Shrines:
These are an interesting mechanic and were somewhat reworked after the first beta. Now in order to receive the benefits you must own all 3. These buffs only work in their respective regions.
Air – No falling damage (even on golems…yes that was fun leaping a golem down 10 stories on a roamer and spinning)
Earth – Stealth while out of combat within the canyons (can you say Thief Shadow Arts zerg)?!?
Fire – Lava chutes, able to run across lava with impunity

I did feel that they need to be tweaked because for instance there were 2 times where I leaped off a cliff and lost a shrine mid-air and promptly died upon impact. This could easy be countered by say add a perma buff while you own all 3 and as soon as you lose 1 shrine give you a 10s warning to get to safety. That way you won’t either die from lava, lose stealth, or squish against the ground.

Siege:
The AC’s used the new LoS system and effectively removes most cheesy placement/camera angles. There were still a few spots that they would not be able to counter without a cata or treb but as long as its not abused I see no issue. Another thing, they reskinned all the regular and superior skins and man are they UGLY! I get that this is a new map and ANET wants to put some new life into it, but the design changes while refreshing to see something else, do not flatter me in the slightest. The only other instance I can think of was Chineese New Year when they reskinned siege to be red+gold, now that was a cool upgrade and a nice visual change. The current new siege skins look like the Zephyrite crash test salvage and I get it your group literally brought some wood and metal and is assembling rams but I think they look lame. (I can deal with it). I will say, the new system when you are placing siege A++. Getting a preview for the direction you are throwing siege with a shadow imprint (Trebs/Cata direction) is spot on, really nice to make sure you don’t accidentally place it backwards and have to spend 30 seconds turning it.

I may add more thoughts later but I think I touched up on most of the information that I observed with my 1 day of playing the beta.

This map needs some work but it is not without praise, they have done a lot of work on it but I think with some more tweaking and listening to us the playerbase (True real 99.99% WvWers that this could require a lot of new tactics and strategy.

Cheers!
-Vrontios
[CREW] Leader
Fort Aspenwood

Pink Ninja Man.4375:

Already mentioned in the mega thread, if nothing gets slotted other players can fill the slots. The guild that has claimed the objective has the right to override any other player’s choices at any time.

I thought so but I was unsure how that worked like if it overwrote the guild tag or just let you slot an otherwise empty buff/tactic. If the guild still has rank over others can they unslot an upgrade? Not replacing it with a different one but could for instance a troll guild remove a buff that someone else slotted in?

I’d love to get a Dev response because if so i’ll be handing you my $$$ today in terms of crafting license gem item! Otherwise I’d end up waiting or possibly never buying it.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

We’re making a couple changes as a result of the lastest testing.

• By default claimed objectives will be flagged for public activation. Guilds can still toggle that permission whenever they want.
• If no guild members are present on the map, the objective will auto flag for public activation.

Beautiful, thanks Tyler! This is exactly a 100% good change. I liked the claiming but having no active guild members on map will remove the possibility of troll guilds, or people forgetting to make the tactics public so that your defenders can’t use them.

I have a question, what if a guild has 0 upgrades/tactics (a troll guild) and claims your keep, do you just have to wait for it to flip or could a way to trump them exist. Obviously it would only trump if they had more things unlocked but is anything like that being considered?

And a tonic section!

It should be used like the current finishers tab. You have your permanent ones listed to be easily clicked and the temp ones would have single uses or charges

Sorry to be bothersome but do you have any links to that anywhere or can anyone else confirm? From what I read it sounded exactly like that as well but then I could only find random Dev comments in POI’s and nothing actually text or from an article.

I really want a 100% yes Dev answer :P

Is Scribe an actual real crafting discipline with levels that takes up a license spot?

I ask because I understand it is guild based and is to be primarily used for consumables. But, will it simply be done through the guild panel or from the guild hall or is it a standalone thing like chief, or weapon-smith.

If it is standalone I would buy the extra craft license so my main can have 3 professions on him (the 3rd being the scribe) so I don’t have to swap to an alt to make guild things.

While I respect and understand what you’re saying about only needing a few members to do missions. The bottom line still is…my WvW guild will NOT ever run guild missions and that we are appalled that ANET would force us to complete them in order to get our guild hall outfitted with things like the War Room and Private Arena.

By requiring you to complete them for favor this forces players into being pigeon-holed to complete something that we don’t want to do in order to get our GH. So I still am sticking to my opinion that at least influence was fair. Yes you could buy it for gold but simply remove that option if you want it to be more important.

lordvroom.1274:

…often require 20+ members to do with ease in order to advance our guild hall?

I didn’t say you need 20 to do missions. I said that they are easy when you have that many people doing them. While yes I understand you could have a strong core of 6 people that could somehow do all the things but it isn’t a walk in the park, especially considering most of us are hardcore WvW’ers and therefore <20% of map completion.

I would like to ask why we haven’t had any followup information about earning Favor the new guild currency in Heart of Thorns.

Now from what I understand this is the replacement for merits and influence and can only be earned by completing guild missions…Now what am I supposed to do with my WvW Guild?

While we are a small guild, we are not tiny – 20 active (40 total) I am not afraid of us being able to secure our guild hall, but I am bothered by the fact that we may have to complete missions. Most of us have been pure WvW players and do not or have any desire to complete missions or any PvE content. At least influence was fair in the fact that you could earn it in PvE, PvP, and WvW. How is this new currency going to be “fair” for every guild of all sizes?

So, are you going to force my guild to complete guild missions which often require 20+ members to do with ease in order to advance our guild hall?

What happens in WvW when the Arrow Carts run Low…
http://imgur.com/4aW7ySV

-Love FA

As a commander I am happy to test this out and add it to my kitten nal of tools/overlays. Thanks for sharing! The voice notification is gonna be a nice help if I somehow manage to miss something

I am using the nVidia equivilant (NVIDIA SURROUND) and mine is broken as well :/

^^ yes! As a leader I would totally love to make an announcement to the entire guild like in guild wars 1. The login message would be displayed to all members and would really help coordinating special events, (ie. Dungeons, WvW this friday night). ANET this has been on my list of improvements for guilds. Please help us.

Something that I have noticed is that after you max a crafting discipline all of the items on the crafting list are still greyed out. It was understandable to grey out these items as you raise your crafting level and to visually convey that you would no longer gain experience from further creation, but I feel like after you reach level 400 that should go away. I think that a simple fix that I would personally like to see would be to organize all of your available recipes by color (rarity). So take weaponsmithing as an example, a bronze sword hilt would be colored white, while an orichalcum hilt would be orange symbolizing exotic materials, a rare item would be gold, masterwork green etc. I just feel like having your crafting list re prioritized would help with figuring out what you need if you are making weapons for your alternate characters or crafting an item to sell on the Trading Post. I am not sure if this is difficult to implement but I would be more inclined to craft certain recipes without having to look for a particular item for a few minutes. I know that there is a search button but being able to separate the list by color would be easier rather than rummage through a never ending list with no easy visual differentiation between the rarity of items.

Hope that others find this suggestion helpful and I would appreciate to see this in a future patch.

Thanks!

Hi everyone. I just wanted to come on here and say that since I moved servers to Fort Aspenwood I am starting a new guild that focuses on small team based combat. The core of the guild is my close personal friends but we are fun and accepting of all different types of people. We primarily do WvW but also enjoy dungeons, meta events, or anything that is fun to do as a group. We have a private TeamSpeak3 and RaidCall to help coordinate over VoIP. We have commander’s and are looking to have a final roster of no more than 50, so if you are looking for some guys that you can have some fun with hit me up in-game.

Thanks for reading the wall of text.

Vrontios
Leader- The Backup [CREW]

As far as some of my character names:
My main was- Vrontios, but I have others also, Vroom
The account name is lordvroom.1274

I have not played guild wars since last Friday for personal reason because I am very busy with school lately. I received an e-mail from GW2 letting me know that someone from China tried to access my account. It was blocked though and I changed my password from the website here but my friend who regularly plays says that he cannot get into our guild anymore. I tried to log on as well as setup the mobile authentication and am unable to do either of them. Please let me know what I need to do I am fearing for the worst that I lost my Lvl 80, my guild, my account, and all of my names and GW1 items, namely my GWAMM title from GW1.

Hi I have noticed this buy occur a few times when I am playing GW2. Normally one of the first things that I do when I first join a new map in WvW is advertise in the chat Guardian LFG (respectively changed with my current profession). A minute or two later I will open the friends panel and navigate to the looking for group tab. I will normally find a person or two and click on them to add to my group. Everything seems fine and dandy till I was wandering to one of our keeps to meet up with my new team mate. All of a sudden I am greeted with an opposing zerg from another server and quickly die. I just assumed that he had mapped out but then I checked the map and he was standing in the middle of the zerg. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Later I was using the team chat and said WTF and we ran face to face. We both realized that we were on opposite teams but still showed up together in the same party. And he promptly left the group after laughing that this was a bug.

I don’t know if any of you have ever experienced this error before but it allowed me to join into a team with a player from another server and unfortunately resulted in me running open arms into an opposing mob of 20 players around the corner. I jumped to another borderlands and I later realized that I could sneakily realize where the zerg was and directed my team that direction but decided that this probably shouldn’t be happening.

Let me know if you want me to try and replicate this issue again and get screen shots as proof.