Guide ⚔ Guild Wars 1.20 ⚔ - Micro Management Time!

​

Hello! Yes, it's me.

The last time we had a large "Guilds" revamp, it was back in 2017 with the multiple bug fixes and patches (yes, the jpresent days!). For 6 years, the old warring system using mob defenses has served its purpose well (Here is an old and outdated guide). Now, change has come!

In a nutshell, Guild Wars 1.20 is more about managing resources, holding key territories and some strategy. Doing the wrong things can, and probably will lead to destruction of your HQ (only temporarily, of course)! Read all about those changes here!

(NB: At the end of the day, things written here are subject to change and personal opinion! What you take from here is up to you, though hopefully there is something that you may find helpful from it!)

-----⚔------------Table Of Contents------------⚔-----
1. Introduction to Guild Wars (What are Guild Wars? Why Guild Wars?)
2. Toppling a Guild Tower (Starting an attack! Help I just got one-shotted by tower why wars bad?)
3. Resources and Territory Upgrades (What do I use Resources for? Taxes?!)
4. War Strategies (Offensively and Defensively!)
5. Conclusion & Final Thoughts!​

⚔ Part 1: Introduction to Guild Wars ⚔​

So where to begin?

Fancy Guild Flag! Don't mind if I just...
​

What are Guild Wars?
After joining a guild for over 3 days, you are now able to participate in Guild Wars to help your guild occupy some land on the map. That's right, the territory names shown by the guild boss bar, and guild flags are actual land that your guild can occupy, you just need to fight for it!

As a captain or above, you can initiate an attack using the command, /gu attack. Typically, the first attack is always free, but once you own a territory, you will need a guild HQ (set by Chief via /gu manage) and emeralds from the HQ to initiate another attack.

Once the war timer ticks down, you and any guildmates in the territory will get teleported to a guild war arena, where your main objective is to defeat the guild tower as quickly as possible.

Why Guild Wars?
In pre-1.19 guild wars, there weren't really any real benefits in completing wars - It was mainly a feature for fun and getting guild xp, never benefitting the player.

In 1.20, the roles has been reversed! Guild Territories (with the correct upgrades) now provide players with buffs while in the territory, ranging from XP Boosts to Damage buffs, and passively seeking Emeralds (actual ones) and Guild-exclusive Tomes. Guild Wars are also a requirement for one of the Gathering Tome Slots.

⚔ Part 2: Toppling a Guild Tower ⚔

A 1.20 Guild War.​

Starting an Attack!
As Captain or above, you can start an attack by doing /gu attack. You can start an attack anywhere if:

• You don't have any territories.
• You have a HQ with enough emeralds for the attack cost, accounting for taxes.

Attack Costs mainly comes down to a few factors:

• The number of territories you own, which accounts for base cost. (1 terr = 256e, 2 terr = 768e. 3 terr = 2048e, 4+ terr = 4096e)
• The territories you pass through that is not owned by your guild or the defending guild, resulting in taxes.
• The existence of a price hike if the defending guild has been attacked recently. (So far, I am not certain how this works, as it is not clear how it worked when introduced in Hotfix #6. I would rather have proper info before giving pure speculation... for now!)

When starting the attack, you can view the difficulty rating of the territory before declaring the war. From my personal experience:

• Very Low: Easily Solo-able, pretty much nil defenses.
• Low: Solo-able with a good build. Defenses are light but can still be troublesome.
• Medium: Occassionally solo-able using consumables. Recommend having a decent party setup.
• High: Haven't actually defeated this solo yet. Probably requires a good party.
• Very High: Probably HQ. Thanks, I will pass.

Of course, this difficulty rating is still just an automated rating. Depending on the chosen upgrades, the territory could be easier / harder.

Help I just got one-shotted by the Guild Tower why wars bad?
Currently, Guild Wars are group-based Endgame (Lvl 100+) content, and depending on the difficulty of the territory you are attacking, you may or may not have a fun time. (So pick your fights or die!)

In 1.20 guild wars, your main goal is to topple the guild tower, by attacking the tower with everything you got (With spells, melee, powder specials). Every minute, tower damage increases by 20% (this increases exponentially), thus your team must have enough DPS alongside good survivability, or it might be too late.

It's easiest shown on video format. Have a look at the above video and we shall discuss more.

Back? Good. As you may notice, the boss bar indicates all the stats of the guild tower, in the order of HP, Defense, Tower Damage, and Attacks Per Second (Note that Tower Main Attacks do proc Defense and Agility, so it's not that bad!). There are also always mobs spawning around towers, which acts as additional defenses, or steal-IDs and powder special fodder. These are constant for all guild wars.

However, the defender may choose to give bonus defense upgrades as well. As of current, the two most devestating upgrades are Tower Aura and Tower Volley. It is very painful, as it does true damage (100% of tower DPS, which is equal to Tower Damage × Attack Per Second, ignoring Defense and Agility), but it is physically dodge-able! If you ever got one-shotted by the Tower, this is probably the reason.

You will know when a Tower is going to unleash a "spell" when you hear a dragon roaring sound (similar to war scream). You may also simply count the seconds and anticipate it. Be warned, the faster the frequency, the faster the spells itself, and the less time you have to react. For visual cues and appropriate responses:

• Tower Aura (3:33): Indicated by a circle appearing around the Tower. Either walk out of the radius, or dodge vertically if volley is coming (I.E. Uppercut Jump, Vanish, Escape, Jump Boost (?)).
• Tower Volley (3:46): Indicated by explosion particles from the sky raining down on the outer edge. Stay near the tower, this seem to do more damage than Auras themselves from my experience, potentially since you can get hit by multiple volleys at the same time.

Builds
Chances are, if you are using a glass cannon build, you are not going to last too long. Even more so than in 1.19 guild wars, there are a lot of unavoidable damage in 1.20 wars, thus you may want to invest in a build which focuses on defense and agility. However, these builds must also be able to do some damage as well...

Here's some builds I made (and perhaps you guys too) in a few seconds. Please consult an actual professional.

Spoiler: List of War Builds!

The War Build I actually use for Warrior (Rainbow with Crafted Items, Secondary ROTS and Boreal): [Build Link - 70 Extra SP is from Weapon Btw] [Forum Thread]

Mage Peaceful Rest + KoH Build with Jump Boost: [Peaceful Rest] [King Of Hearts]

???: Share your favorite and most successful war builds here!

And if all else fails, Morph + SP Potions is a decent budget option. Be warned that as 1.20 guild wars does use up consumables, you will want to check on the difficulty of each attack before using them.

⚔ Part 3: Resources and Territory Upgrades ⚔

Numbers go brrr!
​

What do I use resouces for?
Now comes the highlight of the 1.20 guild wars: Building an economy!

Whenever you capture a territory, you immediately gain all resources currently stored in that territory, as well as the ability to passively generate resources depending on the type of territory. In general:

• A territory will generate lots of emeralds (9k per hour) and a decent amount of a singular type of resource (3.6k per hour)
• A territory could be an oasis, which generates less emeralds (1.8k per hour) in exchange for a small amount of all resources (900 of each resource)
• A territory could passively have a double emerald or resource rate, which stacks with resource boosts upgrades too! (Generally, all main towns give double emeralds)

Wherever possible, resources always try to move towards the guild HQ, and at the same time, the HQ provides the territory with all the resources needed to sustain upgrades. Resources move based on the preference of routes (fastest, or cheapest), happening every 60 seconds. For this reason, you should always upgrade your HQ storage just in case, otherwise you could be leaking resources!

Upgrades to the territory can be managed in the territory menu (/gu manage) as a Strategist and above. Guild Tower upgrades and Bonus upgrades are separate - Tower upgrades affect pure stats, while bonus upgrades affect mechanics and boosts. The upgrades and effects are listed below.

Spoiler: Guild Tower Upgrades

Special Note: All these upgrades occur multiplicatively (Level 2 HP gives double HP, for example) - except for defense, which occurs additively. (Example: Level 11 Defense actually gives 82% defense, not some 10% *1.72 nonsense)

Spoiler: Bonus Upgrades

Depending on where you are warring, you will generally find yourself having plenty of one resouce but lacking another. As such, it is important to know which resources should be conserved and be a priority. You will be surprised to see the slippery slope that could occur if you run out of any single resource.

An extreme example: You run out of wood -> Your emerald storage is no longer upgraded, thus your emerald production is halted -> Your resource boosts on ores, crops and fish drains your emeralds quickly -> You run out of emeralds, resource storage is no longer upgraded -> You run out of ores, crops and fish -> Your HQ is vulnerable!

Taxes?!
Yes, capitalism has been added into Guild Wars.

Any time your resources move into a territory not owned by your guild, the resources are taxed by a percentage set by the other guild. This tax is compounded. A different tax is set for allies (often lower) such that it is easy to move through friendlies.

You can see how much resources are moving through your territory at any given time (Bread icon when viewing a territory). Fun fact - the numbers written down are actually after tax. This means an 80% tax on what seems to be 1460 emeralds traversing through... is actually 5840 emeralds getting taxed, every minute!

Taxes should not be underestimated. Since resources move both ways (to and from the HQ), this means resources may be taxed twice instead of just once. As an example, taxing a resource-boosted territory taxes all emeralds entering the territory... and all resources exiting the territory. This could drain a guild's emeralds very quickly, as we shall see shortly.

To prevent this, most guilds set their global trade preferences to "Cheapest", avoiding taxes whenever possible. However, you can still force taxes on a guild if they are not being careful / online, in particular, via choke territories.

Oh by the way, there is currently a bug which allows small guilds not having 80% taxes to use 80% taxes anyways, as it is likely left over from the previous guild setting 80% taxes to that territory. This likely won't last forever, but it's kinda neat for now.

⚔ Part 4: War Strategies ⚔

Story in a few pictures.
​

Let me tell you a story (a few weeks ago)!

So after weakening crippling the economy of nesaak quite severely, we got wiped but I logged on a few hours later to see that the Nesaak defenses is still not quite set up properly, and a different guild whose HQ is in Jungle Lower has captured some Nesaak territories to provide safekeeping, resource boosting and defenses.

I saw that the Nesaak HQ was very low on Crops, so I took the remaining sources of crops... and then proceeded to actually solo the HQ (and succeeded, as it had no fish or crops!). All the while, the other guild in Jungle had no idea I was here, since I didn't attack them directly, they didn't receive a notification at all!

So quietly, I managed to tax a lot of their resources without them noticing... and I ended up bankrupting their emeralds, as they are boosting several territories in nesaak. As a result, I got very rich, and held my position on the map for about 6 hours before getting wiped by the mega alliance, and in the process almost killed two guilds with one stone.

Morale of the story: Choke terrs are very powerful, nothing lasts if you are not in a map-wide alliance, and I am not sure I will have that opportunity again, especially after this guide comes out.

Yes, now that we covered the mechanics, it is time to cover some possible strategies I have thought about throughout 1.20 guild wars.

Key Territories... What are they?
With the implementation of trade routes, all territories are now unique, and some poses a greater significance depending on the circumstances.

In the above story, I have taken a key territory: Nesaak Plains South West. This territory is key because it force taxes all of Southern Nesaak - Icy Descent, Lusuco, Tower of Ascension, Twain Lake and Twain Mansion. Thus, if I plop my HQ on it, and defend it very heavily, I will get very rich if they don't respond immediately.

(Which is what happened, they transfered their territories to a sub guild after an hour or two. Sad)

But that's not all:- While choke territories are certainly always key, you can also consider a few other territories to be key as well.

• Any territory around your HQ is Key:- You can boost them without fear of ever being force taxed while you are offline, it buffs your HQ by 30%, and allows your HQ to reach outside territories.
• The trade route towards a boosted territory is Key:- If it gets cut off, then it can get force taxed, and you will likely go bankrupt.
• You can also consider territories which, while does not choke on its own, can choke with a little more territories, to also be key. An example: Taking City of Troms then Great Bridge Jungle, setting Great Bridge Jungle to closed and Troms to be your HQ, and then alternate between Great Bridge Jungle and Great Bridge Nesaak by abusing territory immunity every 10 minutes, will force all resources to go through Troms (even on Cheapest), effectively taxing the entirety of Jungle forever. [Of course, only an example, it's not oddly specific, I swear!]

In general, if you know what your and your enemy's key territories are, then you should prioritize it. Chances are, if you are attacking randomly, you might not be able to make too much progress.

Getting Rich, and Store.
One mistake I made when starting out guild wars was to highly underestimate the power of storage. With a high enough storage in HQ, you can last for hours with relatively high defenses even without any sources left.

As such, whenever you got free time, consider doing a "resource run" where you try to get as much resources as possible from nearby territories. Since nothing lasts forever (such as opposing guilds transfering territories to avoid taxes), this means that the best preparation you can do before you get wiped is to get as rich as possible: as long as your HQ has resources, you can defend and buy time.

Theorycrafting: The one weakness of "Cheapest" setting
Currently, the meta is to set everything to cheapest, as it avoids as much taxes as possible thus keeping your enemies poor. In the grand scheme of things, it always works.

However, after some thinking on how resources move, I believe that keeping territories to cheapest also means that territory supplies can be more easily disrupted, and thus territories stop being defended, albeit only temporarily, so the attacker needs to act fast.

What I mean:

Arrow Drawings!
​

Imagine taking the blue territory, right next to the HQ. Since territories are set to Cheapest, all territories that used the blue territory as a shortcut now re-routes.

The orange territory, which takes 3 minutes to get its resources, now takes 5 minutes instead to get resources. In that 2 minutes time span, the territory is undefended and is very low. This means you can take it very easily.

What this results in, is that the other territories below the orange territory also re-routes, since it used the blue, and then the orange territory for routing (and is disrupted heavily, since the orange territory is near the end of the trade route). In that time span of re-routing, the territories are once again undefended, allowing you to take it at very low and thus sweeping through all of them very quickly.

Of course, this is just a theory, as I never really managed to perform this on my own, but I am interested to see if it actually works. Theoretically, it is more effective the further the HQ is from the territories.

Responding quick and immediate
As a defender, it is quite important to immediately respond to an attack that chokes one of your boosted territories, as it will quite quickly result in becoming bankrupt, your opponent becoming rich. Thing is, all of these issues are easily negated with a quick tweak in territory settings:- Just turn off the boosts, just transfer the territories to someone else. If they are not that rich, take their HQ and they lose all their emeralds. Indeed, as soon as you respond, the jig is up.

Personally, I am unsure how valid this opinion is, but if you have a territory easily choked, and do not have 24/7 strategist+ coverage, then you might want to consider turning off boosts for a little while, just to avoid someone else taking advantage of it, then turn it back on once someone comes back online.

The opposite is true for attackers, wait for the guild to sleep! (Maybe this is why I have a slight advantage, no one is playing on my timezone)

Tools for Guild Wars!
These are some other tools I recommend having a look at, since it does very well help with finding success in Guild Wars!

• bolyai's Wynncraft 1.20 Territory Map - Shows all trade routes and resources. Very, very useful for planning things out (In-game map is very messy)! [Link]
• motoki1's discord moto-bot - Shows online players in a guild, good for stalkin- I meant, getting to know your enemies more. [Link]

⚔ Part 5: Conclusion & Final Thoughts ⚔​

For me, 1.20 guild wars has some very unique concepts and mechanics, and as always, unseen before in Wynncraft. Personally, I see it better than pre-1.19 guild wars, as it brought the much needed change for smaller, more casual guilds to at least compete if they know the strategies, and exploit weaknesses... but after playtesting it for a while, and writing this, I believe it still failed.

Spoiler: Slightly more Controversial Thoughts

That's right, I would like to address the elephant of the room, Alliances.

Yes, from the beginning of guilds (Even before 1.20), the only real way to truly win long term (as in, longer than 6 hours) in guild wars is to join a Mega Alliance, either on the attacking side, or the defensive side. It is a numbers game, really. You either have more guilds and active members, or you don't.

With the introduction of guild tomes, and guild wars starting to be actually beneficial to the players, I feel that it really sucks that many players in normal guilds will be locked out of these benefits simply because they cannot compete with the entire map, and many shall never experience guilds at all, unless promoted, since it is simply unviable to set up a small guild with friends and just do some wars for tomes together. It simply is just too much effort, despite the improvements in 1.20.

I think, the final straw for me, would be the day when alliances start selling Tomes to normal players for LE. I doubt it has happened yet, but it could be a possibility in the future, and thinking about it that way makes me slightly pissed. Simply put, camping the map with majority of the guild playerbase in a kahoot alliance, kinda should not be how guilds are meant to be played, but this has been the reality for years, because it really is the most effective way of playing guilds.

I really do wish for change, and hope Wynn cracks down even harder on alliances altogether (Is it really healthy for one guild to be ganged up on by every, single, god damn online guild on the map? 1 v 4? No, 1 v 8!). But then again, I know that guild players are very sensitive to changes, and some play it for the politics in alliances, and really, anything implemented often just backfire if not implemented correctly - Guilds would use any means and method to get the upper hand after all, this is shown by 1.19 when "sniping" and "subs" ran rampant. In 1.20, defender's shield is easily abusable in a sense, and transferring territories although seemingly a nice addition to counter ganging up on one guild, has also been quite annoying to deal with (when used correctly, or dodging taxes).

The change I would suggest: Guild when attacking a territory can only skip over 2 other territories that is not owned by itself (meaning, if you want to attack someone across the map, you have to actually get there, effectively giving a range to your attack). Yes, it outright kills alliances. No, I don't really feel too bad about it. If the goal is to prevent super big territorial claims, then this could make people think about having a supply line if they were to help reclaim, and also makes it possible to disrupt it more easily.

Next, add an Alliance cooldown. Currently, alliance list is meaningless as it contains only guilds you are cooperating with temporarily. Add a cooldown similar to how members cannot war until after 3 days - simply make an alliance "not take effect" until 24 hours has elapsed.

In addition to the above two, territory transfer should be locked for only guilds in your alliances. This means that in theory, the 3 territory range cannot be abused to lock a guild in a corner with 3 other impossible to attack towers as easily. (as of current, you theoretically can force a guild to sit in a corner and be able to do nothing)

Anyways, that's just my own harsh opinion on the state of guilds, as a whole. Until something happens, I might just chill with the game mode for the time being. Thanks for reading this rant, though.

That being said, I have spent a bit too much time on writing this guide, so I might just go outside now. I hope you got something out of it, and learnt a bit more about 1.20 Guilds! Peace!

 

guild wars banzai
who doesnt love guild wars

 

for some reason I had a bad feeling it won't post because I thought it was too long, turns out it was just fine. A win for me

 

:doom:

 

Great guide. One part missing from your guide I would like to mention is optimizing your resources properly. What I mean is for example, always try to boost double resource territories at least to lv 3 on both the rate and generation because you will always get your resources back through another territory and extra. There is a whole lot more than this but this is just a start.

Continues to cry in ores and chokepoints

————————————

Yep on top of what hppeng has posted, there are guilds already selling guild tomes... My guild will not sell these tomes and give them out for free for anyone who wants. Although getting said tomes is a different story, as we only got 6 tomes in a little over 3 weeks since we only have 1 fish territory...

 

oMg LoOk wE're oN ForUmS tHrEad?//11??! join tni uwu

 

As someone who also likes strategy games a lot, this all looks so interesting, but at the same time it feels a bit disappointing that it seems like if you really want to participate in guild wars, you have to be constantly active... Which means that such a big feature is only relevant for a very small portion of the playerbase.
I wish there was a system that would also allow more casual players to participate in guild wars, like allowing them to join guilds as "supporters" that dont count towards the member limit or even having fixed overarching factions like the cities in Wynn that players or guilds can join as "vassals". Of course guild wars would have to be adjusted (for example by letting successful attacks make progress towards capturing territories instead of capturing them directly), but as something like this would propably require another large revamp, I don't see it happen. And I'm not sure if the existing guilds would like it if thousands of random players would mess with their guild politics...

 

Very good guide!

smh if I had known beforehand I wouldve upgraded banner! ! !

 

Nice guide :o

 

This update is too complex for my simple mind, but nice guide tho :>

 

This is a necropost, please dont post on threads that no one replied to for over a month

 

I love your guide! Thank you very much for it. You have answered many of my questions directly and made many things clear once :D
unfortunately you are right and guild wars are not necessarily for beginners. As an example: my guild has many beginners and I am also still in my first playthrough means: for us it is not really possible to participate. We are nevertheless looking forward to it :D