Guild Wars: Costume Brawl Lies, Damn Lies, and Strategery

Don't listen to the strategy on the GW wiki Costume Brawl page. It's awful. Play that way if you want my Ranger to poll grind over your smoldering corpse. Actually, come to to think of it... No, no, I must rail against the spread of disinformation here. Here's how you do from someone who's done. Check the trick-or-treat bags, son, I stack candy like mad. Or, in plain English, I've played the format to exhaustion and tallied over 150 wins in only about 15~20 hours of play. I know what works and that mishmash of bad advice and wrongheaded thinking isn't it.

There are only two maps you play on. Originally, I got a bit messed up - despite cautioning others to know their maps - and mistook the flipped side of the map with two health shrines as a separate place. It's not. There's just the larger five shrine map and the smaller three shrine map.

On the larger map, there are five shrines. Two morale shrines (+2 pips on the score meter) just outside of each base, two health shrines (+120 health each), just down the hill from each base, and a Battlecry shrine (+25% movement speed, +15% attack rate, +15% skill recharge). The base has two exits, above and below the morale shrine. You want to go with a 2/1/2 split at the start. Two pairs head to the far shrines - the Health and Battlecry - while someone stays behind to cap the central morale shrine. Afterwards, that lone charcter can rejoin whichever party they want as you try and collapse whereever your opponent is weakest. But, done right, you should either be engaging the enemy on equal terms at the stress points of the health and battlecry shrines or have an early advantage when it comes to capping if you're opponent is overloading on one side or the other. Don't forget the bridge in the middle which acts as a quick shortcut between sides. This is a really easy map to trap the other team in their base and mow them down repeatedly to rack up the score, there's a bonus effect in there that gives them 50% bonus damage and 50% damage reduction but if you can kill them once it generally doesn't matter and you can do it again and again as needed, if you can just get them to auto-rez initially. Otherwise, there's a lot of running around in relatively narrow lanes and a lot of cover to hide behind if you're getting pelted. As a Ranged character, this entire map is downhill from the Battlecry shrine, and you can get some pretty amazing distance on your shots.

The smaller map is a lot cozier with only three shines. A morale shrine in the center, with a Battlecry and Energy (-20% skill cost) to either side. Each base has a single exit - the red's side points towards the Battlecry shrine and the blue towards the Energy shrine - and a teleporter which puts you on a hill just off the center pointed towards the opposite one - note you can teleport out but you can't teleport back. There are two paths from each of the side shrines down to the center, one leads across a bridge to the teleporter's destination where you can go down a little hill. The other goes under the bridge (The path from the Battlecry shrine leads you around a big rock which blocks line of sight, the only thing that does this near the energy shrine are the ledges.). The lower path under the bridge is generally faster but keep in mind the other route if the enemy is heading towards you en masse. North of the center shrine there's a small rise and some trees that make line of sight difficult, a little closer to the bases is a little cutaway with two walls that's a dead-end but can be used to duck into if, say, you're dodging fire. The ledges on either side of the bridges can be used for sniping, letting your bow shots travel far into the central area - you can't quite hit the area directly around the shrine, but you can hit anyone coming from the shrine towards you or trying to run away. Some people like to move as a big group to the center but I like to go with a 3/2 split from the start since I think it makes you much more flexible. The smaller group heads to the closest shrine while the larger group either takes the other shrine or the central one, depending on what the enemy is doing. Once those are secured and anyone trying to stop you has been killed off you can regroup and grab whatever shrine you missed in the early rush.

When capping shrines the morale shrines are worth a lot less than the bonuses you get from the others. Those make your fights a lot easier and allow you to capture any shrine that your enemy is holding. So, get the Battlecry and Health and Energy shrines, then worry about the morale. In fact, ignore the shrines altogether because the easiest way to get them capped is when your opponents are all dead. You earn a lot more points from killing people than you do from the morale bar anyway. Kill off your enemy, even if it means hunting them down when they go rabbit on you, then cap up.

Beating a team of five that sticks together is a simple matter of running them around. Although they can hold a single shrine or two, if they're not splitting that means you can control the rest of the shrines by splitting yourself. Your squads should be avoiding combat unless you catch a straggler or something because the surest way to lose against the juggernaut is to tackle it head-on. You don't want to fight unless you have the odds on your side. Instead, you want to avoid combat, minimize your deaths, and let your morale advantage eventually earn you the win. Or, at the very least, force that large squad to split up so you can take them apart.

Otherwise, you want to split around like mad and force mismatches. You want to get your Ranger, your Ele, on their Wars. You want your three person squad hammering their two-man team. Whatever it is, you want to get the advantage when it comes to numbers and builds. The key things in the CB are mobility and disruption (The first is abundant, the second in short supply.). Always move. Always ruin your opponent's plans.