Guild Missions

Guild Missions are the most guild engaging aspect of Guild wars 2.
I think its safe to say that they are a cool activity, a really great break from Dungeon/Meta/Daily/WvW farming, and lets not forget gettin Comendations for personal or guild use.

With that in mind i wanna ask everyone that enjoys doing them to help out in brainstorming ideas about how to do Guild Missions with high efficency.

As you might know Guild Bounty is the most challenging and tricky of all GMs. So lets focus on that.
Main goal should be to get Bounty done Fast & with a High chance of success.
For a guide on Guild Bounty please see:

Dulfy Guide on Guild Bounties (cant post links on forum yet)

BrainStorm Away!!

Well the way we used to do it worked suprisingly well up untill the leachers got in.
the idea we had about using /squad seems like a good start if we still need it.

maybe have certain people always tracking the same bounty? Ive been doing it for a while now and the advantage is that for the walking npc's you start to know the exact path they take. with this in mind i always found my npc within 10-15 minutes (depends on area of course).
might not be feasable for all bounties but i would make it a bit faster i think.
also i think it would be a lot easier and feasable if we just did tier 2 seeing as we still arent that many people and it gives us more time on the harder npc's

also on a personal note. i never really enjoyed guild bounty. it takes a really long time to set up and the npc are sometimes in impossible locations. like the ones you cant find before starting the mission.
we will have to do them but i would much rather just skip this as soon as we have rush and trek unlocked (with rush being the really fun one)

I like the idea of ppl going for same targets. This could make the system more efficient and faster.

For bounty i think its important to keep it safe. Don't take the risk of having findeable NPC's unfound. Y this takes a bit of time but you'll lose a lot more time if you fail. I think the system we had worked pretty good but we'll need to see if few ppl are strong enough to beat the targets

------------MZEM POST FROM OLD GUILD--------------------------


I'd like to make some suggestions that might make the whole thing run more smoothly.

One meet up in LA all participating at an uncrowded location then the person organising can see everyone and send off one at once and we know what tier we can manage (no where near enough for tier 3 yest) this way rather than spam guild chat and not allow anyone to use it once a boss is found whisper the organiser one person stays with boss then rest port back to la to be re allocated a place to search.

Then when all are found everyone not on a boss back to la split into 2 or 3 groups pref with com in each, then begin all active npc get pinged 1st group to first pinged 2nd to next etc then group 1 to four when killed group 2 to 5 and so on.

When it comes to killing the npcs the person who followed it presumably had dulfry open so can read how to kill it and /s it to everyone so no confusion in guild chat.

The people at other npcs can then join groups that need help while organiser overseas and is watched for in guildchat.

Rather than get mad and stressed and confused organisers see participants and starts the appropriate tier. Hope some of these suggestions can be useful and would love to hear others thoughts. Or point out any glairing flaws with this.

---------------------Akandra Post from Old Guild---------------------------------


Trying to account for everything people said today, I've tried to help come up with a solution. It is hard to track what is going on as the game simply does not have the tools. Lets hope they implement larger groups soon! I also understand the problems with certain bosses/leechers.

So to help I've started to build a little tool in Excel. its got some lookups so as you fill out the yellow boxes, it fills in the other information for you, letting you see what is happening. Its a first draft but I'm happy to refine it according to what the users want.

Finally, the wiki says Squads and /squad work in PvE so lets give that a go as it would help a lot. Only 30 people can be in a squad. If Squads work I will update the spreadsheet to let you use either groups or squads.

I can't upload it here so again its on my blog: heartofthemists.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/guild-wars-2-bounty-tracker/

google docs version of Akandra's Bounty Tool:
docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqkIP0XUpXNUdHQzRFFqY21lamtwbHdPYWtHdlBOOGc#gid=0

Characters: Akandra Greystar

darkness dragon wrote:

Well the way we used to do it worked suprisingly well up untill the leachers got in.
the idea we had about using /squad seems like a good start if we still need it.

maybe have certain people always tracking the same bounty? Ive been doing it for a while now and the advantage is that for the walking npc's you start to know the exact path they take. with this in mind i always found my npc within 10-15 minutes (depends on area of course).
might not be feasable for all bounties but i would make it a bit faster i think.
also i think it would be a lot easier and feasable if we just did tier 2 seeing as we still arent that many people and it gives us more time on the harder npc's

also on a personal note. i never really enjoyed guild bounty. it takes a really long time to set up and the npc are sometimes in impossible locations. like the ones you cant find before starting the mission.
we will have to do them but i would much rather just skip this as soon as we have rush and trek unlocked (with rush being the really fun one)

Great idea on having the same people and npc tracking duties. It will cut down the planing time. lets try and have that for future runs then.

About the Tier, i think its mostly a moment call. For example having 24+ people doing it and having all booses found while no other guilds doing it, might decide to go for Tier 3. But otherwise i see your point, if somethings are not right at the start of it, then yeah, better to play safe and go for lower tiers.

I agree that Bounty is not as fun as Rush, but for me the thing i like more is the planning and "strategy" of it. Its never just luck, you either plan for it the best you can, or you are sure to fail. So while Rush will still be the fun one, a good challenge from Bounty is what will make us more stronger as a guild, by working together. (Would love it if WvW had some sort of thing like this)

Twapper wrote:

------------MZEM POST FROM OLD GUILD--------------------------


I'd like to make some suggestions that might make the whole thing run more smoothly.

One meet up in LA all participating at an uncrowded location then the person organising can see everyone and send off one at once and we know what tier we can manage (no where near enough for tier 3 yest) this way rather than spam guild chat and not allow anyone to use it once a boss is found whisper the organiser one person stays with boss then rest port back to la to be re allocated a place to search.

Then when all are found everyone not on a boss back to la split into 2 or 3 groups pref with com in each, then begin all active npc get pinged 1st group to first pinged 2nd to next etc then group 1 to four when killed group 2 to 5 and so on.

When it comes to killing the npcs the person who followed it presumably had dulfry open so can read how to kill it and /s it to everyone so no confusion in guild chat.

The people at other npcs can then join groups that need help while organiser overseas and is watched for in guildchat.

Rather than get mad and stressed and confused organisers see participants and starts the appropriate tier. Hope some of these suggestions can be useful and would love to hear others thoughts. Or point out any glairing flaws with this.

Thank You a million to Akandra for taking the time to do this. I have been going over it with her and it looks like a solid system. It might need small tweaks, but nothing that i can pinpoint until we get to use it.

Thanks again Akandra

Twapper wrote:

------------MZEM POST FROM OLD GUILD--------------------------


I'd like to make some suggestions that might make the whole thing run more smoothly.

One meet up in LA all participating at an uncrowded location then the person organising can see everyone and send off one at once and we know what tier we can manage (no where near enough for tier 3 yest) this way rather than spam guild chat and not allow anyone to use it once a boss is found whisper the organiser one person stays with boss then rest port back to la to be re allocated a place to search.

Then when all are found everyone not on a boss back to la split into 2 or 3 groups pref with com in each, then begin all active npc get pinged 1st group to first pinged 2nd to next etc then group 1 to four when killed group 2 to 5 and so on.

When it comes to killing the npcs the person who followed it presumably had dulfry open so can read how to kill it and /s it to everyone so no confusion in guild chat.

The people at other npcs can then join groups that need help while organiser overseas and is watched for in guildchat.

Rather than get mad and stressed and confused organisers see participants and starts the appropriate tier. Hope some of these suggestions can be useful and would love to hear others thoughts. Or point out any glairing flaws with this.

There are some good ideas here. Think we even made use of some the last GM. It is a bit hard to understand and i see some small isues with groups, but it kinda gave me an idea to add some of this to Akandras Tool. ill keep you post it once i get it right.

I really just thought its easier for organiser if he can see whos free, the only thing I can think to add is that people who know npc routes may not always be on so we might want to rate each npc for difficulty and send more people to find those before locating the easy ones.

I personally work different hours all the time so cant always commit to specific times. If I'm online I know 2 multis route and trilla midwells there easy to remember.

I suggest we do guildmissions the following days:

Monday, Wednesday and Saturday

(try to stay out of Sunday as this is the most busy guild mission day for all, and we will most likely struggle against other guilds).

Also me and Twapper talked about doing guildmissions differently. We don't pre-search for it, but we have groups ready to jump directly to the areas needed. If we have 5-10 people ready to search an area the moment the mission start, we should have no problem finish a tier2 pretty fast.

In 6 hours research lvl 5 is done, and we can build guildbounty, we just need some more influence ready. Meaning, in less than 3 days we can start doing our guild bounty's.

I would still go and pre-search those that we can. I'm not saying its impossible to do so without it but it will be easier if we do. some of these bounties can take a good long time to track down even with 5-10 people searching for them.
I suggest taking just that half hour to search for a good number so we have more time to kill them. Its about making the most out of the time you have.

Agree with drago(about the most out of the time, maybe for tier 3), so far tier 1 and tier 2 went realy good without pre-search(Good job Twapper), also noticed having 1 commander in each group works very well, specially when a wp is linked to see what direction to go.. saves alot of time. For tier 3 we will need more groups, and that means more commanders, so ive decided to save for commander , but just to help out with guild mission&pve, not wvw.

I understand that it's really boring and some ppl may be against this. However, i suggest we do 1 bounty a week (the sunday one) with pre-search. If you see how close we some times get but fail cause we had to look for NPC. If we do a pre-search we can do a T3 on sunday and the rest of the week help ppls rewards with T1s or T2s. This might take time but now we do like 3 T3s a week and except 1 time we always failed.
So just post your comments on this.

I am all for doing Guild Bounty the pre-search way, but do please note i wont be able to organize such a thing.

While it is obvious that presearching npcs is better, even if more time consuming, my issues are not with this.

My issue is with what comes after presearching.

Organizing people after start while some have to stay with npcs and all the rest move around the maps or even worse doing groups for it and end up having people in the same group on 2 different npc, without commander title, no close waypoint... etc.
For me its to chaotic and i admit i havent found a good solution to make it work best.
Akandra has a post around the forum with a Tool to help, so she got closer than me, but i still think its messy when it comes to putting it in practise.
Messy from the organiser point of view that has to manage groups around the maps and alt-tab to check on the tool.

To sum up i would love to see the preserch method work, so i hope Drago or someone else will take a chance at it. maybe this saturday we can try it out if you guys are up for it.
Cheers

I've been thinking about pre-searching as well. My tactics would vary a bit from usual though. I would only pre-search those bosses that are really hard to find and leave the others alone. we could still group up and make teams of who goes where and asign a search party for each boss we need to look for.
The only problem we would have is indeed what to do after we find them and start the mission. My only idea would be to rearange teams.
Example:
we pre-search the hard bosses with 6 teams. this means that we can search for 6 bosses which are hard to find. (splitting teams will madden the chaos). once 5-6 or so are found we start the mission.
now say that team 2 is already on a boss we need. They proceed to attack and kill it. in the meanwhile we shout out to the remaining teams which boss they will now need to look for.

this can become chaotic and i dont know if this would work but its an idea to think on at least.
bosses that would require pre-searching would be:

bookworm bwikki (depends, i dont know how fast this one is usually found)
deputy brooke (very large area to search)
prisoner 1141 (immense search pattern and really fast. always pre-search this one)
diplomat tarban (again i dont know how fast this one is found)
shaman arderus (seems to have a large path so might be best to search)

I do see people really not wanting to pre-search because it can be done without it and it is always faster. basically it comes down to personal choice, either take half an hour more to pre-search and have a slightly higher chance of finishing tier 3 or dont pre-search and hope to get a bit of luck.
also we should only pre-search for sunday because then the most people will be online and ready to help.

so yea those are my thoughts. read, comment and discuss away.

I would reccomend doing it like this:

pre event:
1. (get coffee, stop dungeons, join raidcall, open dulfy mission panel)
reason for having pre-event is that when we start to organize teams and stuff it wont take another 30min for you guys to stop afking, hustling, dungeoing, etc.. forming parties doesnt take more than 10min if everyone is active and not afking and have read instructions how we are doing the guild mission.

event:
2. meet at LA spot
3. put your commander status
4. leader of the event makes the parties by inviting 1 commander to the party and after that he invite 3 more member to the party and types a number for team (which will be your party number). after that he leave party and invites another commander to form another party.
4.1 After your party is formed and you have your party number. Move to the map corresponding your party number. And start searching for the boss while other parties are being made.
- Bookworm bwikki (1)
- debuty brooke (2)
- prisoner 1141 (3)
- diplomat tarban (4)
- shaman arderus (5)
5. leader of the event will say in rc that the mission is about to start in 10seconds. this will happen when the leader thinks its time to start it or all bosses that are to be pre searched are found. everyone click g and go see which bosses needs to be found.

Killing / finding event:
6. Depending on which bosses come to the list, first we need to kill the prefound bosses. If you are party 1, you find and kill boss that is first in the list. If you are party 2 you find and kill second one on the list and so on..
6.1 Cause we did the presearch, if it happens that your party is next to a boss that is in the list. Kill it straight away and ask help from the party that was assigned to it after the list was received (corresponding party number and order in list). After the presearched bosses are killed, you move to another map which is the one that the party who presearched the boss you just killed has.
7. After killing your boss you ask in rc who need help and ask for waypoint and you go help those who didnt yet find or didnt yet kill their boss.

Tips / tricks:
- use party chat
- listen your party leader
- when searchign for the mob, look dulfy (sometimes they walk clockwise which mean its nice for you to run counterclockwise)
- portal to different locations on map.
- when someone has spotted the mob, say it in party ch, give waypoint, put ur commander status on.
- when there is 5 commanders on a map and we need to kill a mob. use guild chat to know who actually is in a right place.
- have fun but still competitive mind set when coming to guild missions. it takes 15min of ur life + 5-30min of hustling so try to focus these 15min and after that go back to autoattack your dragons.

Titus: It's not a bad idea to return to a pre-search for one of the days, but Sunday might be the worst day for pre-search, as it just has reset and all guilds are doing it (I remember from old days then I arranged it, a boss could easily be found and killed a few times before we had it all ready), plus we still have some bosses which we can't pre-search, and that is: Big Mayana, Sotzz the Scallywag, and Yanonka the Rat-Wrangler.

I'm not sure what is best. The pre-search way takes a lot of work from the one who arrange it, and many people lose the will after a long time searching or following a boss, plus we still can get 3 of the bosses which we can't pre-search. So after 30-60 mins searching and finding bosses, we might get 3 hard and 3 we haven't found and fail it.

Mursu, nice guide I have already made one tho, so maybe best to type there if there is something you wanna add or remove:

https://pain.actieforum.com/t50-how-to-run-a-bountyhunt-guildmission-for-all-officers-leaders-and-mission-staffs

NEW IDEA FOR BOUNTYHUNT

I just had a talk with Twapper, and to take away the pressure and frustration, we should maybe make a new way to run bountyhunts:

- Only go if we have at least 28 people joining

As we always will go for a tier3. Too many people are asking questions to "why do we do a tier3", and as explained earlier, we do not archive anything from tier1 or 2 if we already have tier2 done. It should not be necessary to keep explaining this, and also I do not wanna waste our raidleaders time, by having too few people joining guildmissions.

So what do you think? Simply rule, not enough people joining = no guild mission.

After all what we all need is having a good time, being social and archive missions together, but I see our raidleaders getting stressed and frustrated by the lack of people participating.

i can agree on this balli. if we dont get 28 people on sunday then i suggest doing a tier 2 to at least complete that much. otherwise this sounds like a plan. of course if we want to train on some bosses then we dont need 28 people but that speaks for itself.

i've been thinking. maybe its a good idea to change the meeting point of the guild for events.
My problem is that it can get very busy in LA. and i had one or two instances were i couldnt see people who were two feet in front of me because of culling. also since we are getting more and more people to join our guild events it will only increase so maybe we need to change it to another capital city that's not so crowded.

idea's, suggestions?

I agree Drago, I have been thinking the same.

What about Divinity Reach, nearby the Asura gate to LA?

hmm that feels a bit crowded still. (with all the trees and hills in the way). maybe in the back at plaza of grenth? or black citadel. its always dead there.

Black citadel for the win!

noooo Black Citadel is an awful city. Divinity's is way better. Or maybe at the ice fields all the way in the west of Hoelbrak. Large open spor with no ppl