Discover Stronghold, the new PvP game mode coming to Guild Wars 2 in Heart of Thorns.

Stronghold is a new PvP game mode coming to Guild Wars 2 in the Heart of Thorns expansion. Today, ArenaNet released a new blog post giving more details on what players will expect in the game mode and its initial map: The Battle of Champion's Dusk.

Stronghold features two teams of players trying to break into their opponents' base and kill the enemy's Lord with matches ending when a team wins by successfully killing the opposing team's lord. Defeating a lord will be no simple task, as they have above-average health, a "potent set of skills" and a group of elite guard NPCs protecting it. This is in addition to the two walls players will have to break through with normal NPC guards and the enemy team of players standing in the way.

Even with all of these NPCs combat will be focused on the players. Most of these NPCs will only be summoned by a player fighting over and bringing back supply while NPCs that are not summoned will never respawn once killed. Additionally, most of the NPCs will not compare in terms of damage or survivability of a player, but will still be needed for the fight. The biggest example of this is that players cannot directly damage the gates blocking a team's progress to the opponent's lord. Instead, players will need to summon Doorbreakers — bomb-toting Skritt that, well, break doors. While these little bombardiers will deal massive damage to doors, they will ignore players and other NPCs as they head straight for their target and will quickly die if left unprotected.

Supply will be a big part of this map, as it is used to summon the Doorbreakers and Archer NPCs as well as instantly repair trebuchets on the map. Supply is gathered from a centralized depot and requires a two-second channel to pick up. Enemies will be able to interrupt this channel by either downing the player or using any crowd-control effect on them such as fear, knockbacks or immobilize. If successfully taken back to a team's barracks, the player will need to do another short channel to summon their NPCs, a channel that can be similarly interrupted by an enemy.

Guards will be positioned at each of the gates to help defend them from the opponents advance. While not as strong as players, they will still be able to one-shot doorbreakers that are left unguarded. While drawing the guards attention while your doorbreakers charge the gate, another strategy is to defeat them as they will never respawn during the match. To help with this, players can use supply to summon Archers to harass the guards. Unlike doorbreakers, the archers will stop and attack any enemy along the path.

The last NPC of the map is the Hero. Heroes spawn at two locations on the map, and are heralded by the forming of mists that slowly coalesce over 30 seconds. Once the mist has settled, players can summon a Hero to their side by performing a 10 second long channel that like the supply channel can be interrupted. Heroes will help players on the next objective, whether that be breaking down a door or killing the enemy lord, and won't stop for anything until they reach the objective. Heroes will be a major force on the battlefield, giving buffs to nearby allies and unleash a powerful ultimate attack if they reach the enemy lord's room.

When NPCs are summoned, they move in a straight line from the barracks to the enemy's gate. This creates two lanes, one on the left and one on the right, which NPCs move down. While your forces travel solely up the left lane, your enemies' forces will travel at you along the right lane. This will help split up the roles and builds a player needs as action will happen across the map. In testing, ArenaNet has already seen a handful of roles pop up for the map.

• Assaulter -- Clears a path of NPC guards, enemy players and trebuchets so doorbreakers can get through.
• Defender -- Stops the enemy players and doorbreakers from advancing, either through a defensive build or high-damage dueling build.
• Smuggler -- Gets in, grabs supply and gets out to summon NPC allies.
• Shepherd -- Keeps friendly NPCs alive as they travel down a path.
• Trebuchet Master -- Lays waste to all enemies with the Trebuchet, but must always be watching and ready for assaulters charging the Trebuchet.
• Roamer -- A jack-of-all-trades that jumps between lanes, the supply depot and the hero summoning locations.
• Slayer -- Focuses on preventing the other team's roles from succeeding, especially Smugglers, Shepherds and Treb Masters.

If you want more information on Stronghold, you won't have to wait long as ArenaNet will be doing a Ready Up PvP livestream tomorrow, Friday, February 12th at 1pm Pacific on the official GW2 Twitch channel where they play through a match on Champion's Dusk. Then at PAX East and REZ early next month, players will be able to play Stronghold for themselves.

Matt Adams aka the Mattsta

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