Introduction
Guild creation and Influence rewards were changed in BWE3. The summary from ArenaNet of the changes was:
Guild Updates
- New guilds now cost 1 silver and start with a membership cap of 50.
- Guild membership cap can be increased 5 times up to a limit of 500 by speaking to a Guild Registrar and meeting representation requirements.
- Guild upgrades have been reorganized. Early tiers now have more localized benefits and are more social targeted.
Guild Influence Trees (as at BWE3)
Current Build Thoughts
See spreadsheet: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fsfc3sp0g0py643/GuildUpgrades.ods
The 30-minute buff banners last for 1 hour, take 4 hours to build, and you have to break off whatever you’re doing to refresh the buff after 30 minutes which sounds awful. Especially as there are no guild halls at release – where would we spawn the banner so that everyone playing across 5 different starter areas could use it?
In order to get the longer-running buffs, we’ll need to get to Economy Level 3. Due to build times, we are unlikely to be able to run buffs continuously. I’m thinking we run buffs on weekends so that we can pre-build the first buff and refresh it during the weekend, and build other upgrades during the week.
So – main build targets:
- Architecture + Guild Workshop = 2 build slots (16h + 48h to build). That’ll make keeping buffs active over the weekend itself easier, and allow the build of some of the longer upgrades (like the Guild Treasure Trove, which takes a week to build). The 48h build is a good target for speed-ups – each speedup will save 12h (for 1250 points – the same cost as a speedup for Architecture level 1 which would only save 4 hours = save the points for the Workshop because it’s far better value!)
- Economy 1+2+3 (16h + 30h + 72h) to unlock the 24-72 hour long buffs for weekend use. Economy level 1 unlocks a couple of 4h-build 30-minute-buff banners. Given the costs, speeding up any of these levels is prohibitively expensive = try to avoid. Economy level 4 is needed for some of the long-running buffs too, but that’ll take a while to build.
- Politics 1 + Guild Logo (though we can’t actually wear it until getting Politics 2 + Armor Contract for armors, and Politics 3 + Weapons Contract for weapons/shields).
I’ve mocked up two potential build scenarios based on the build times on the Guild Wars 2 wiki. However, I’m not sure that those times are accurate – they either changed between BWE3+the Stress test, or they’ve not updated the BWE3 times properly (for example, in BWE3 the 24hr XP buff took 3 days to build, not 1).
Based on the mockups, we can either:
- Get dual build ability ASAP, then build Politics+Economy for influence+long-running buffs, but we’ll only have the 24hr influence buff available for the first weekend, or
- Build Economy first, and have the 72hr Magic Find buff available for the first weekend (starting from about midnight Friday night to midday Saturday depending on how soon we’re able to start building), then get dual build/Politics unlocks.
The first means that overall we’ll unlock things a little faster – but we’ll need double the amount of influence in the first week which may be hard to generate, and not having enough will slow it down. The biggest issue with the second is whether we can have 5000 points available by 10am on Monday (still in headstart), so it’d depend a bit on whether we get much of a boost from the CE/Deluxe edition influence Tomes (we could buy influence too…but it’ll cost 50 gold for 5000 influence which is pretty much impossible for us in less than 2 days!). If we can we’ll have a beneficial-to-guild-members boon up for the first weekend, but it’ll take longer to get things like guild emblems/bank/armourer/weaponsmith. At this stage, building Economy first (lower initial point spend, faster buff unlock) sounds like the better option.
Request for Input
What’s your thoughts? Anything you’d particularly like built first? Any preferences in terms of priorities?
My WvW’ing will mainly be in the first 2 weeks (and not on day 1) so I’m not that fussed for any of the Art of War buffs. Also that’s only going to be the case if the daily resets are at a time when I can play.
I reckon aiming for multiple building first sounds like the right way to go, and maybe we limit the ability to queue stuff/quick builds stuff to the leader and have you manage it, just so no one cancels, undoes, wastes points, buys the wrong thing etc. Especially considering some of them can take aaaaagggeeesss. Once the initial setup is done and we’re only buying daily or 3 daily banners – then whoever wants a something can queue it.
The daily/three daily things are fortunately not banners – you don’t have to touch them to get the buff. It’s only the 30-minute buffs that are “touch a banner” stuff.
As for the build queues, what about activating built items (there’s 3 permission – queue, speed up, and activate)? i.e. if we’ve built a 3-day buff for the weekend, do we want everyone to have the ability to activate it (in case we don’t get on to do it ourselves at the right time), or do we want to prevent mistakes like “I activated that on Wed because it was built…what do you mean our build queue is full until next week so we now won’t have it on the weekend?” Does it matter?
I think it is better to leave the activation of banners/bonuses to a few people at the most, it would be a shame to accidentally waste the boost because perhaps someone wasn’t aware what they were doing. It could especially become a problem if we recruit from outside our current circle of members. After recently being kicked from my clan in Lineage2 because some douche bag was given rights and after an argument proceeded to kick everyone, I think for self preservation some jobs need to be maintained by a few people that we know we can trust. (though I honestly don’t play it that much any more so it doesn’t really matter lol)