Gone With The Winds : GW2

By chance, this month my desktop gallery has been serving up a selection from the hundred and more screenshots I took during the first appearance of The Bazaar of The Four Winds. That was almost exactly two years ago.

This year we got Golem Rush. And some people say there no such thing as progress.

The Best Defense Is a Good Defense: GW2

Here's something I didn't expect to see this week: our Garrison with a waypoint. What's more we have another at Lowlands on Eternal Battlegrounds. There's even a chance we might have a third at Dreadfall Bay later this afternoon.

What's unusual about that? Golem Week, that's what.

The special event kicked off, unexpectedly early for those of us on North American servers, at EU reset on Friday. It threw the last few hours of the NA league matches into total chaos and I missed the start because I was in the middle of writing a blog post. As people realized what was happening the borderlands began to fill up with golems large and small. Within minutes virtually every Keep and Tower had changed hands. They kept doing that. They're still doing it.

Inside an hour or two even those, like myself, who'd been looking forward to the event, were beginning to have second thoughts. The majority of WvW regulars were talking about taking the week off and finding something more amusing to do like household chores or yard work. Mrs Bhagpuss, an inveterate defender, scout and strategist, was highly disgruntled. It seemed none of those qualities would be required while the event lasted.

The underlying concept - doubling the run speed and damage of the asuran power suits while making them free and instantaneous to create - was always a risky proposition. It was always likely to favor attackers, very heavily, over defenders. Coupled with a slew of bugs that, among other things, permitted golems to use summoned weapons and be duped at no cost whatsoever, the whole thing looked set to become a total disaster.

Someone has too much time on his hands.

Certainly that was and largely remains the opinion of most posters on the merged Golem Rush Feedback Mega-Thread, where,  at a rough estimate, more than 90% of all posts are highly critical of either the concept or the execution or both. WvW players are almost unanimous in their contempt and derision for the event. The few positive opinions come from the occasional PvE player that happens to stumble on the thread.

If more PvE players visited the WvW forums the story would be very different. For PvE players with a casual interest in WvW it's rather a fine event. There's a phenomenon in GW2 known as Karma Training (KTraining for short) in which gangs of players from each team run around maps avoiding each other while battering down gates to capture undefended structures. Each capture gives large spoonfuls of regular xp, wvw xp, karma, loot and who knows what other goodies.

It's the very definition of reward without risk and like all such opportunities it's wildly popular with a certain demographic. The home of the KTrain has long been the Edge of the Mists map, which ANet added a long time ago as a kind of waiting-room with magazines for people queuing to get into the real wvw maps but which almost immediately became the domain of PvE players looking to level alts at a breakneck pace.

The current event not only comes with its own xp bonus but it takes place in some nice, flat maps (you can easily fall off the narrow walkways in EOTM) and the objectives are much closer together (there's a lot of running in EOTM), making it a more attractive alternative for trailing around and around in a circle sucking up xp for an hour or six. That's exactly what happened from the moment the rules changed and it's very likely what's happening on most servers and in most matches right now.

Let's be honest. On Yak's Bend every week is Golem Week.

It's happening in our match too but thankfully it's not all that's happening. Yes, there are KTrains running almost non-stop. I took advantage of one this morning, along with the good old World Boss Train, to finish the last ten levels on my Asura Warrior. He dinged 80 taking a tower in EBG with his bags too full to collect his loot. Inbetween stations, though, he hopped off to answer several map calls, defending the two Keeps we've so far, somehow, managed to hold long enough to fortify and waypoint.

We are, after all, Yaks Bend. Roundly criticized from all directions for siege-humping, known as the Home of The Superior Arrow Cart and, ironically, infamous for our golem rushes, it's sometimes forgotten that there's a reason we love our siege: we're defense obsessives, the lot of us. Somehow, even in the face of a set of rule-changes seemingly designed to render defense completely pointless, we have managed to develop strategies to Hang On To Our Stuff.

It's led to some amazing fights. The successful defense of Lowlands a few hours ago, when FA arrived with what looked to be at least two dozen Omega golems and as many ground troops, was one of the most exciting I've experienced for months. I answered a map call and arrived, in the guise of one of my two elementalists, to find the Lord down and the ring two-thirds complete.

I made the mistake of running in to contest and was insta-killed by a wall of spinning FA Omegas spitting double-damage fire like erupting volcanoes. Like every other Yak's Bender on the map I immediately ran back to throw myself into the fray again only this time I danced around out of range of the golem apocalypse and rained my own fire down on them instead.

The Golem "Dance"

The battle lasted what seemed like an age but was probably less than ten minutes. I was downed repeatedly but always rallied, or was revived, before I fully died. The ring remained stubbornly at 70% while we slowly whittled away at the FA Omegas, our own golems standing and spinning among them while the rest of us picked off the downed and chipped chunks off the metal men.

At some point Mrs Bhagpuss arrived, also on one of her elementalists, but the fight was so manic I didn't spot her until all the FA golems were destroyed, the ground troops killed or chased out and the Keep Lord revived and back in control. This was the kind of battle I'd hoped for when this event was announced.

How many similar fights are happening around the NA and EU leagues I have no idea. I'd guess not many. Was the golem event a good idea just because we've managed to make it into something a little more than a KTrain festival? No, it wasn't.

It was, as so many are complaining, both ill-conceived and ill-executed and if, as some suspect, it points to a future direction for WvW that ANet wants to pursue then that's a very ominous prospect indeed. I count myself very lucky that not only am I on a server that cares about defense but also that the event arrived when our server happens to be particularly strong and is able to enforce its will to some degree even against stiff opposition. On most servers and in most Tiers I would guess normal WvW is effectively on hold for a week while PvE has its head.

There was quite a lot of talk earlier this year about how Heart of Thorns would make defensive play and holding territory more important in World vs World. I hope that remains the vision and this week is no more than an aberration. As with almost everything about HoT, we won't know until it's here. And we still have no idea when that might be. This event does not instill confidence and that's putting it mildly.

If nothing else, though, at least I learned that Golems can dance.

Golem Rush! : GW2

It's unusual for patch notes to contain information about changes that haven't happened yet. Usually you'd expect to get that kind of news in some form of Press Release or Announcement. Why ANet chose to open the notes for Tuesday's update with a reveal of their latest World vs World special event beats me but that's what they did.

It's a wonder it took them this long to get round to another WvW event. What with Living Story going on indefinite hiatus and everyone left twiddling their thumbs waiting for Heart of Thorns to get even as far as a firm release date it's a fair bet that a lot of players have, like Ravious, wandered off to find something else to do.

Throwing WvW a quick change-up always looked like an easy way to bring bread and circuses to the people so it's very surprising the tactic hasn't been used more often. It's getting close to a year since the last full Tournament and all we've had since then was the Sneak Attack event just before Christmas.

That simply removed some of the notifications we normally get to warn us that towers and keeps are under attack. It was received fairly well in the end, having been heavily criticized on the forums before it happened. Quite a few people, myself included, seemed to think it was an improvement to the regular ruleset and should have been adopted as a permanent change.

It wasn't, though. It came and went in a single week, never to be mentioned again. That was six months ago. The optimistic tone of the press release at the time, in which it was suggested that "This special event gives us an opportunity to freshen up play by bending the rules of WvW, and we’re excited to try out some new things and offer improved rewards for a limited time" led some players to believe it would be the first of a series of one-off rule changes but nothing more has been heard of a second event.

Until yesterday, when we heard we were getting a Golem Rush. In our house that's a phrase that's often yelled excitedly from one room to another as one of us zones onto a map to find Our Glorious Leader shoulder-deep in half-built Omegas.

We love golem rushes Chez Bhagpuss. Of course we do. We play on Yak's Bend, Home of the Golem Rush, after all. It would be a very poor show if we didn't. It must be said, though, that not everyone is so keen. In some circles and on some servers golems are looked down on as the cheesy last resort of skill-impaired PPT siege-humpers who couldn't win an open field fight with a three-to-one advantage.

The reaction on the forums from those quarters has been predictably hostile. The usual suspects are out making the usual claims that ANet just doesn't get WvW. Some posters even feel an event that makes a feature of one of the more controversial tactics in the game is tantamount to ANet trolling its own players.

Counter to that are plenty of people applauding the potential chaos and looking forward to a week of all-out robot war. I'll put my hand up to being on that team. And even among the naysayers there's a sizeable moderate faction pointing out that it's just for one week and we can all surely manage to put up with it for that long or find something else to do if we can't.

As to why Golems have been singled out for this attention there's plenty of speculation. Perhaps it's some clever gold sink? Maybe we won't be able to deploy golems in the Desert Borderlands (which are themselves getting a stress test right in the middle of the Rush) and this is some kind of last hurrah?

I don't know and I don't much care. I just want to be there when the golem armies march. I always want to be where the golems are, whether I'm piloting one (I have a full license), running alongside with the ground troops, making a suicidal run to get a Disabler down or standing on the walls raining flaming meteors on their steel-domed skulls. Offense or defense, golems mean fun.  Unless you're the poor mesmer who has to do the portals. Talk about performance pressure.

The most Omega Golems I've ever seen deployed at one time is around fifty. They kept moving about so it was hard to count. That charge ended in complete disaster since half the people pressed into driving the mighty metal machines had no idea what they were doing and we had so many people in golems we forgot to bring any ground troops.

I'm sure that's going to happen again. I'm hoping we might even get to see all three sides bring half a hundred each for the mother of all battles over Stonemist Castle although I fear if that were to happen my PC would catch fire.

It'd be worth it just for the screenshots.