In this week’s Ready Up livestream, host Josh Davis was joined by WvW Game Designer Tyler Bearce for a look at World vs. World’s new automatic upgrades system, as well as a demonstration of the dragonhunter elite specialization in Player vs. Player.

Tyler explained that the WvW upgrade changes were developed because players had the ability to make decisions that weren’t meaningful or fun. The changes outlined in the WvW automatic upgrades developer blog ensure that one person won’t be stuck footing the gold cost for upgrades or that a single player can’t delay upgrades by spending supply on other things.

Upgrade tiers will be roughly the same as they currently are, but each row of upgrades will unlock all at once. Dolyaks will carry less supply, but they’ll now reduce the upgrade time needed for objectives, maintaining the importance of everyone’s favorite fuzzy beasts of burden. Sentries will slow down dolyaks by throwing bolas at them, inflicting a five-minute crippling effect. It’ll be important to keep the road clear for your dolyaks, especially since new dolyaks only spawn after an existing one reaches a keep.

Stonemist Castle will still gain a waypoint when upgraded to tier 3, but waypoints will otherwise not be an available upgrade. Tyler said that captured waypoints were too weak when none of the objectives were upgraded but too strong when a team could snowball from a point and take over the map. Starting waypoints remain unchanged—the other existing waypoints will automatically become available when you own an objective, but only for the team with the closest home base to that objective. The north waypoint will belong to the red team, the southeast waypoint to the blue team, and the southwest waypoint to the green team.

Changes to the ability system were implemented to create a lower barrier of entry for WvW. New players who want to participate in WvW have a lot stacked against them, particularly if they’re low level; players at the top ranks have a large advantage due to having spent points in powerful ability lines. Tyler said that the WvW team also felt as though many of the lines needed to be changed or removed to be more useful for WvW.

Josh capped off the livestream with videos of the guardian’s elite specialization, the dragonhunter, in a number of PvP scenarios versus core non-elite builds. Josh has plans to demonstrate the other announced elite specializations’ PvP capabilities in future streams.

You can watch Josh and Tyler in the livestream recording below:

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