News Post

Beta Weekend #3

[ Fri 3rd Aug, 2012 @ 12:43pm ] by Darkademic

Bit of a delay getting this written, but here goes:

Beta weekend number three saw the return of active WvW thanks to the matchmaking system being fixed. The first matchup was poor as we faced Umbral Grotto and Gunnar's Hold, two of the newer and considerably less populated servers, leading to an easy domination over the course of Friday night.

On Saturday morning the next matchup pitted Desolation against Gandara and Vabbi, Gandara being the unofficial secondary UK server, and both of them being well populated. We began our offensive in Vabbi's borderlands where we secured the corner of the map around our waypoint, and proceeded to head north where we assaulted Dreaming Bay, the keep on the western edge of the map. Due to the servers only being recently rotated, we met little resistance and brought the gates and keep lord down with ease. Over the course of the day however, Vabbi became more and more determined to retake their keep, and we decided to take it upon ourselves to make sure they weren't successful. We built cannons and arrow carts on the northern wall, which after holding off several waves of Vabbi attackers became known as "The Wall of Terror".

Later that afternoon Vabbi managed to break through our outer gates for the first time and we fell back to the inner walls. Outnumbered 3 to 1 it looked like we were going to lose the keep. They broke through the gates and began attacking the keep lord. In a surprise move, Toglos had laid down a siege golem site hidden from view and the attackers were no doubt shocked to see a siege golem come out of nowhere. Regrouping with the golem we were able to keep the keep lord healed and wipe out the attackers, with the keep lord on around 20% health.

Vabbi proceed to break through to the keep lord again later in the day and again got him down to below 1/3 health not once, not twice, but three times, due to us twice managing to force them back out of the gates long enough for the keep lord to reset. This time the situation looked even more hopeless as we were even more outnumbered and didn't have a siege golem with us - however we held on yet again and managed to push them out and repair our gates.

Something particularly memorable was the arrival of a land shark, as one of the trained sharks that swim around the keep came onto land and proceeded to heal our downed players outside the gate.

We held Dreaming Bay well into the evening and it was only when we finally vacated that they were able to take it from us.

Another memorable battle that occurred earlier on Saturday was where Gandara were sieging the tower nearest their own waypoint with a huge force. A group of us dropped down from the tower and went in a huge circle around the enemy zerg. We headed straight for the siege weapons they'd set up, and within a few seconds we had destroyed them all. Before the invaders had a chance to react we were already making our way back, and managed to escape without losing a single person.

The server rotation on Sunday morning matched us up against Fort Ranik and Augury Rock, two French servers, and the only other two servers to go 6-0 in the first beta weekend.

We decided to break up into smaller groups. The French servers seemed to be leaning heavily towards roaming around in one huge zerg, so this was undoubtedly a wise choice. We had one or two five man teams which went around the map capturing supply camps, whilst two other larger groups assaulted and defended towers. We teamed up with [ThUn] on a couple of occasions, and generally did a good job of attacking and defending multiple objectives simultaneously. Roles were reversed as we tried to assault the equivalent of Dreaming Bay - Ascension Bay, however it was proving difficult as our waypoint was on the opposite side of map.

After falling back east, invaders from Fort Ranik decided to try to push the tower nearest to our waypoint with three siege golems, however they failed miserably and all three golems were destroyed before even reaching the gate - thanks both to having three ballistas set up on the battlements, and having a lot of players fighting on the open ground which they needed to get through to reach the tower.

With our tower secure, we decided to attack the eastern keep and built a siege golem on the bridge leading up to it. We broke through both gates with relative ease and reached the keep lord, however defenders appeared from behind and we were struggling to stay alive. Then, a group of The Unnamed stormed in at the last moment and we were able to bring the keep lord down and secure the keep for [DkR].

Taking inspiration from The Wall of Terror, we fortified our new keep, this time even more heavily. We built a line of at least a dozen arrow carts and ballistas on the wall, and held of a huge attack for at least an hour. The Augury Rock defenders refused to give up, and threw themselves at the wall despite the constant rain of arrows falling on them. Eventually though, they ran out of steam and we chased them down as they retreated.

This battle was pretty much over by this point, and Desolation went on to become the only server in the world to be undefeated across all the beta weekends.