In Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™, we’ll be introducing a new Structured Player vs. Player mode called Stronghold. We’ll also be completely revamping our current World vs. World Borderlands by introducing a new desert map that will give you new ways to fight massive battles.

Structured PvP

In Stronghold, you’ll fight alongside a new type of ally, Mist Champions, and have the opportunity to unlock them—and other rewards—through reward tracks. If you’re looking to get up and running with our new Stronghold mode, you can read a basic guide right here.

On top of Stronghold, we’ll also be making changes to the overall competitive structure of the game with the introduction of a new league system for Structured PvP. Additionally, form your own guild teams for PvP and compete on a team-specific leaderboard.

World vs. World

The new desert Borderlands map has many new and unique design elements that will make the battles on these maps significantly different than the existing alpine Borderlands.

To shake things up a bit more, we’re also changing the way upgrades work on the maps, as well as updating World vs. World objective claiming so that guilds have more tools at their disposal in WvW.

John Corpening says, “We had a presence at a lot of conventions in this year leading up to launch, and I had the honor of attending many of them. This gave me a chance to talk to players all over the world and bring back tons of feedback to the team that helped us make Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns a better experience. It is absolutely amazing to see how Guild Wars 2 has given so many people in so many places something to share, and those events have created some of the greatest memories in my life. Whether that’s toasting our top players during our first World Tournament Series in Beijing or trading my scarf for a song about PvP at the community party for Rezzed in London, this has been one of the best years of my life. We may create online worlds, but from that our players create real world communities, and it’s so humbling to have a part in that.”

Hugh Norfolk takes a look back at the process of designing Stronghold: “Stronghold has seen many different iterations during its creation. I remember one of the first iterations, where it was more about getting channelling nodes to start spawning NPCs who would attack the enemy castle. When you got into the enemy lord room he was a temp creature that was super hard to kill, and he would stomp you if you went down. He would have been MVP in every game with the most kills…other than Josh Davis, who destroyed my life every game. I vowed revenge against him…I have yet to get it.”

Here are some of the livestreams we’ve aired about PvP and WvW in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns!