Greetings, Mist warriors. As John Corpening said in his previous blog post, “Guilds are the lifeblood of Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™, and it’s our desire that they become a greater part of World vs. World. We want to give guild members more strategic choices and encourage them to work together both within their guilds and also with other guilds and players. To this end, we’ve overhauled the guild claiming system so that guilds have more tools at their disposal in WvW.” In that previous blog, we went over many of the high-level concepts of the guild claiming update. However, in today’s post, you’ll find a detailed breakdown of each of the upgrades your guilds will be able to unlock, craft, and apply to any objectives you claim.

First, I’ll quickly go over how upgrading a claimed objective works. We’ve added a new piece of UI to WvW called the Objective Upgrades panel. This UI can be accessed either by clicking on an objective’s map marker (on the compass or the world map) or by speaking with a quartermaster at the objective. This panel has two tabs. The first tab displays information relating to the general upgrade level of the objective—a list of which upgrades are currently active—and timers indicating when the next upgrade tier is unlocked.

The second tab manages the guild upgrade system. On the left side of the Guild tab is the guild’s war chest. This is a list of all the objective upgrades that your guild owns. These are unlocked over time and crafted in your guild hall. To the right of the war chest is where we display the guild upgrade tiers. There are two to three tiers per objective (supply camps have two), and each tier offers two upgrade slots.

The left column of upgrades is for tactics. These upgrades offer powerful temporary effects and are triggered by pulling a special lever inside the objective. After activation, a tactic will then go into cooldown period. These cooldowns currently range from 15 to 20 minutes. A tactic can only be activated by guild members who have been granted permission unless the “Public Tactic Activation” flag has been checked by an authorized guild member. The right column of upgrades is for improvements; these upgrades offer powerful passive effects. Once built, they will apply their benefit to the objective until an enemy team captures the objective or the improvement is replaced by a different slotted upgrade.

The longer your guild controls an objective, the more tiers will unlock.

Tier I unlocks after a guild has held the objective for 10 minutes.

Tier II unlocks after a guild has held the objective for 30 minutes.

Tier III unlocks after a guild has held the objective for 60 minutes.

Once a tier is unlocked, you can add one upgrade from your war chest to each slot. Each upgrade has a specific tier and slot type it fits into. Each slot has at least two potential options for upgrades. After slotting the upgrade, the upgrade will begin building for three minutes. Once the upgrade finishes building, it will either immediately activate (in the case of improvements) or become available for player activation (in the case of tactics).

That should cover most of how upgrading and the new UI works. To finish this off, you’ll find a list and description of all WvW guild upgrades below:

Tactics