I’m honestly not sure DBL are bigger than ABL. When you look at the 3 maps (just call maps and de-zoom, you’ll see), I’d say they’re slightly broader (W-E direction), and clearly shorter (N-S direction) than ABL.
Yet, I admit they’re clearly more intricate than ABL, because of verticality. The patch just before they put back ABL fixed the most of it. For now, I still think that the area around Air keep may be not so easy, but it’s also the part I’m the less familiar with.
Anyway, the map isn’t so hard. Having a look at minimap is really helpful, and you can read most of paths. Of course, you can’t really do it well when running away from a blob, but it helps for “explore and learn” part.
- Fire Keep: I still think Fire keep is a disaster, even after the improvements that Anet made to Desert BLs. The biggest flaw of Fire keep, I think, is the area just outside of the inner gates and walls. The design of all other keeps/garrisons/smc allow many angles of attack for the attackers and many ways for defenders to slip by the attacking zerg into the inner. Fire keep, however, has only ONE way for anyone to access the inner gates/walls, which is the big open area in front of the supply depot. Attackers and defenders eventually have to funnel into that small opening, not to mention the annoying little pillars which you have to jump through for passage. I suggest that Anet adds more ways to enter Lord’s Room. That’s my biggest complaint about Fire keep, but there are a few others, like the stairs being too narrow.
There’re many entrances at the outer wall, but indeed far less in the inner wall, and most of the fights are in that courtyard. A possible solution would be to provide an underground access, somehow like ABL’s garrison’s southern gate you enter at lake level. Could be some kind of tunnel linking the two camps (north and south from fire keep) with a gate leading to inner fire keep and some room below lord’s room, and another gate leading to staircases climbing up to lord’s room (south and north of the catwalk thing).
- Map Navigation: The multi-level design of the map had everyone complain about the map being too big (or at least feeling too big) since the release of Desert BLs. I personally never had any issues with the size of the map, but rather the path from any Point A to Point B was always too round-about. In Alpine BLs, if I want to get from Southwest spawn to Northeast camp, I could probably figure it out all on my own even if were my first day in WvW. In Desert BLs, however, with that same situation, I would either end up underground next to Fire keep or next to the Skysplitter (R. I. P. in Peace 2015-2016) looking for a ramp up a sheer cliff Northwest of Air keep. My suggestion would be to make the entrances to every camps/towers/keeps easily accessible with wide pathways. Why do I say “wide”? It’s because “mini jumping puzzles” seems to have been the theme when Desert BLs were being designed. For example, if I want to get from North gate of Fire keep to the Northwest camp, I have to jump up 3 or 4 small ledges. Why? Why is that even there? Just make it a wide pathway. The wooden bridges leading to South Air keep were definitely improved, but they could still use more. The bolded statement is what I think could save Desert BLs. People complain about Desert BLs because the time it takes to get to a place is ridiculous: the map’s not big, it’s just that the Desert BLs were designed with the phrases “Narrow pathways”, “Sheer cliffs”, and “small cliffs you have to jump over”.
I’m not sure making it plainer will make it more interesting. I’d suggest, for a beginning, to improve the minimap. Have a better outline of pathes, and add “ramp up/ramp down” icons like in HoT PvE maps. Also, why not put icons like “safe jump spot” near some clives ?
To me, going from A to B isn’t a matter of turning the character to the appropriate compass direction, and then press “autorun”. There’s a learn and experiment part, and also a landscape and minimap reading.
- NW and NE towers are too far from garri and doesnt offer any home defense in terms of movement.
- SW and SE towers are too far from east/west keeps.
Towers are indeed a big problem. Solutions have been suggested in old topics I’m too lazy to dig. Roughly, ideas were :
- Have towers provide their specific guards (which are more powerful than camp ones) to guard camps, keeps and supply dollies ;
- Implant in towers a network of skritt holes for fast travel from one tower to another.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m not really for providing towers with a tactical interest like in ABL (i.e. treb keeps from towers) for two reasons : it’s too hard to move towers from the map in its current state, and DBL shouldn’t be “ABL with a different landscape”. Let’s invent something new and cool !
