The Legacy of the Foefire PvP Guide • Guild Wars Insider

Grand Strategy

The Guild Lord

Avoid at all costs. No, seriously. “But Sryii,” you whine in a nasal voice that is nearly as incoherent as it is grating, “ I thought this was a major mechanic which was a throwback to the original Guild Wars Guild vs Guild maps where you KILL the Guild Lord.” Yes, it is a throwback to those maps, but the major difference is the winning conditions of the old maps versus the new one. Killing the Guild Lord meant you won but in this map it means you are, at best, 100 points closer to wining the match. This isn’t a paltry sum, true, but it comes at a cost. Team Resources.

Anything you do in battle, particularly in sPvP, comes at a cost. In a competitive match you only have 5 players and must make the most of them. If you allocate resources to an objective you must always do it with a clear understanding of the intended outcome and that outcome MUST be beneficial over doing something else. If not, you have automatically wasted resources and thus given your enemy an advantage and who would want that? How do we prevent that? Simple, we use MATH! (Oh sweet Grenth take me now!)

Not to worry my fellow haters of the mathematical dark arts, I shall keep this as simple as I can. To look at the advantage of diverting resources to kill the enemy Guild Lord we are going to look at how many points are lost and the time that will cause the killing of the keep lord to be a null victory.

Here we are calling X the number of seconds required to equal 100 points depending on whether your enemy is in control of 3, 2, or 1 Control Points. Remember you gain 1 point every 2 seconds.

What we see here is that if your enemy has 3 control points your Time to Kill (TTK) the Guild Lord is only 67 seconds. The fewer points your enemy controls the more time you have. This of course ignores 3 key factors. 1) You will have a reduced presence at your Control Points which will lead to an almost certain turn over to the enemy, 2) the time it will take your enemy to flip these newly captured points, 3) any kills the enemy makes adding to their score and thus reducing your TTK.

Now even in the worst case scenario, your enemy having 3 control points and your team deciding NOW is the perfect time for a heroic and glorious slaughter of the enemy Guild Lord, you have 67 seconds, which seems quite doable. Not so fast. You have to keep in mind that TTK is a little deceiving. TTK includes:

Traveling to the enemy base
Destroying the gate if it still is up
Traveling through the base
Dealing with the enemy guards
Killing the Guild Lord
Traveling BACK to the Control Points
Retaking said Control Points to stem the bleeding of points due to your little PVE excursion mid-PVP.

The Cage of Death from which the Red Team will respawn and kill you if you attack our Guild Lord

Oh yes, and did I mention that all of these steps can be hindered by even ONE enemy player at any point with relatively little effort or skill. On top of THAT, take into account that any enemy player who bites the dust elsewhere on the map will be reborn inside the base a stones throw away from wrecking your boss attempt.

FURTHERMORE, even if the entire enemy team was suddenly struck deaf and could no longer hear the announcer incessantly bleating that the base and/or Guild Lord is under attack the rather small size of the map will almost instantly allow the enemy team to predict where you are by where you aren’t.

“Gee, its rather curious that we haven’t seen any of those darned Red bastards around for a while. Wherever COULD they be?”

That may have been a little bit ranty. That’s ok. This is a design flaw, not because I say so (even though I am right), but because the high level teams just completely and utterly ignore this mechanic. If anyone does attempt this I have only seen it met with failure and tragedy. Typically an attempt, even with only 1 or 2 players, will result in one or all Control Points being flipped to enemy control. It may seem like 1 or 2 players couldn’t cause a serious disadvantage but in a highly competitive match with only 5 players this will have a serious impact on your team’s performance. Again, this is still Beta and these mechanics and difficulty can and most likely will be changed. For now leave this to the 8v8 Hot Join crowd.

Other tactics

Kill stuff? What . . . I suppose you want more than that? Fine, kill stuff harder. So this map is a bit interesting at the moment with the whole ignoring the secondary mechanic issue. It is almost purely PvP with no secondary mechanics to influence gameplay. The map is also shaped a bit like Kyhlo but flatter. So the number of “openers” is rather limited. I recommend not going all infor any point and definitely NOT all in at the Sanctum. What will end up happening is the enemy team will stall the capture of the Sanctum and if they are of average intelligence will have taken their natural, thus earning a steady if meager lead and if they are especially smart will send another player to leave the Sanctum and make a push towards your Natural.

So what IS the best strategy? Well the best possible solution is again, MATH! Shhh, shh, trust me this one isn’t that bad. You only have to capture and hold 2 points the entire match and die less than the other team to win. Simple, right? While that was a complete oversimplification of a winning strategy that’s the gist of it. Defend where you control and apply pressure where you don’t. Like I’ve said in other guides communication is one of the best weapons you have, make use of it and you are that much closer to victory. This section is a little sparse(I know, shut up) and I will update it as new strategies emerge and develop.

Conclusion

The Legacy of Foefire is an interesting map. It combines sPvP with some PvE elements but at the same time this PvE element is often ignored. This beautiful map offers a format that we are familiar with a terrain that deviates from previous maps. As always, Live Strong and Fight Hard.

Special Thanks

As always, a special thanks goes out to Beliasta who provides great tips for every map and Zid for their great contributions to Warrior Tips.