The Stronghold PvP Public Beta Is Coming! and GW2 75% off sale!

[PACOX]

ANet doesn't really have a set patch schedule anyways. It's 'eh, when we get to it'. But on the upside, they don't have daily or weekly maintenance, either, so...

Patches usually ship between Noon-2pm EST so morning PST. Bigger feature patches tend to go through extra Q and A, shipping EST evening, PST afternoon. Patches tend to be every other Tuesday though it's a bit off n9w because one got delayed. The gem store is updated weekly.

[Deleted]

Did someone try it yet?

[zed zebes]

Stronghold is so much more enjoyable than Conquest that I don't know how they don't separate queues. It is very MOBA-like and will draw more attention than Conquest's style. Still not any team fight comp strategies to be had, so not what I wanted but it's an enjoyable mode.

There were certain issues to be worked out before release. (Summoning Heroes awards too many points imo. Immob interrupts channels. Flamethrower can shoot through gates and kill doorbreakers from safety. Treb shots on doorbreakers aggroes the doorbreakers. Some other tweaks.)

Overall, it's pretty much a lane game. You fight along a lane either defending or attacking. I think group size could be expanded a bit, which would make separating queue even more important. Unfortunately, there's no way for any party more than five to queue together. The game doesn't have a >5 team system, but Stronghold could work with 6 people quite well.

For example, there's two lanes. We defended with two people and had the other 3 doing offense or supply. There's still Heroes to summon and a Trebuchet to use. As is, there's more options than there's players to use the option. Treb was hardly ever used in the matches I came upon. Only once we realized that using it defensively worked best that we started to use it. However, that left one person to defend the lane in combat.

[Karizee]

Remarkably well polished for a beta, it played like a trial. Only bug I saw was one where if you picked up supply off a player kill, you could infinitely spawn doorbreakers but that was hotfixed pretty quickly.

Other than that, really fun! Saw builds I didn't even know existed, everyone was trying out everything. May be a bit soon but it looks like there's so many strats you can use, so many ways to play it. I otoh spent most of my time testing out all the blink spots when I wasn't running supply or shepherding. Oh, and Ice Bow is amazing on the Lord - any aoe really, that spot is a pit of death. :3

There is a massive difference between pugging and playing on a team, I think they could include indicators on the other NPC's health to even that out a bit.

I wonder if there would be any downsides to getting rid of Unranked altogether and make that the Stronghold queue?

[Arlee]

I wonder if there would be any downsides to getting rid of Unranked altogether and make that the Stronghold queue?

Eh, iirc there are two other maps that are only available in the unranked queue so they'd either have include those too or get rid of them all together. Also some people use unranked as a place to tryout things before going into ranked.


I had a lot of fun overall... though the optimal strategy seemed to be just to have everyone mostly ignore the other team and just go all out with getting the doors down and killing the Lord... not sure what they could do to change that though. One of my guildies saw a bug where a thief managed to follow him through the door so that was hilarious. It was also possible to get supply through the wall, which is pretty obviously not intended as well.

[zed zebes]

Yeah, Courtyard and I think the orb map are not in ranked, but exist in unranked.

I did find that full offense seemed to work best, but that's a poor meta if it holds true. PvP where.. people don't pvp. I guess that is the trend thanks to MOBAs. (Yes, I went there.)

We played balanced and I mostly defended.

[Arlee]

I did find that full offense seemed to work best, but that's a poor meta if it holds true. PvP where.. people don't pvp. I guess that is the trend thanks to MOBAs. (Yes, I went there.)

This what I think is pretty much the biggest issue with Stronghold currently. From what I saw if one time went full out offence and didn't bother with defense at all it seemed inevitable they won. Then if you get two team going full out offense and not defending at all... well at that point it just becomes a dps race. In the current structure I don't think there is a way to fix that; the only fix I can think of is making it so killing the lord wasn't an automatic win. They'd have to do something like making it end the game and be a big chunk of points, but not an auto win. That could open a lot of room for strategy.

[Lazuli]

It needs its own queue. No point in even playing until (if) that happens.

GW2 pvp system would be like me queueing for arena in WoW but it gives me a fucking random battleground instead. Wtf???? such ignorant devs rofl.

Those unranked garbage maps are not competitive at all so I don't see an issue just removing unranked and letting people troll those maps in hotjoin. They do not belong in any type of competitive environment.

[zito]

Should be a choice between courtyard, stronghold and capture point at all times with different maps of each instead of like courtyard and 2 capture points

[Lazuli]

I agree that would be perfect but logic doesn't exist over at ANet HQ nor is it welcome.

GW2 was developed in 5 years? Pvp is still in beta after almost 8.

[Karizee]

Yeah, Courtyard and I think the orb map are not in ranked, but exist in unranked.

I did find that full offense seemed to work best, but that's a poor meta if it holds true. PvP where.. people don't pvp. I guess that is the trend thanks to MOBAs. (Yes, I went there.)

We played balanced and I mostly defended.

May be a bit soon to call meta strats from a 24 hour beta, although Tizrah's Terminator build did get some attention ;-)

Lewis at Ten Ton Hammer has a thoughtful review here:
http://www.tentonhammer.com/preview/...minator-tirzah