Yes, both have a base with a ‘lord’ in the center and some NPC’s around. That’s it. That’s all.

If you want something more similar to keep raids, try Nundu Bay’s challenge mission where you kill a line of NPC’s while assaulting a base, then there’s a lord you have to kill. Only there’s the chance that some enemy players or more allies will pop up to help or annoy the crap out of you(actually fun). Boost the Corsair boss’s power level by a factor of over 9000. Maybe some siege weapons, a battering ram…

Simply put, its a form of pvpve (One side claims control of the environment side for the duration of the battle. GL to whoever has to fight that.) that alot of games claim to be their own. Not saying its bad, I rather enjoy casual pvp myself. But you’re not about to win monthlies by playing keep raids. ;) Believe me, screenhumping comes when you stomp a team, or beat the crap out of the noob who snuck up on you in stealth hoping he could score some rep on a player with a lower level. Skill, not epic phat lewtz.

In my Guild Wars times I was basically a pure PvE player and only tried PvP a little. When moving on to WAR the game really teached me to like PvP and I’m having a blast in scenarios (and also open RvR during the event when you actually saw large teams battling). You might be surprised however when I tell you that I really think that Guild Wars has the better PvP out of the two. WAR suits casual players a tad better since Guild Wars requires you to actually work out a good build instead of just allowing you to have all skills in your bar and smashing them randomly to do some damage. But if you put a little thought to gaming then Guild Wars offers so much more with a lot of room for interesting team combinations, always fair PvP battle set ups between equally large teams and also very well thought out map layouts, Guild Lord/other NPC placement, etc.

WAR has room for improvement and I really do hope that it does.

I did try and stay away from tactics in this post just because of how differently each is played.

But, now I do wish that Keeps had other “spots” that had to be defended… even if, say, the spot controlled how quickly your ram/oil placement pads rehealed.

In WAR there’s really only one avenue to victory/defeat, ie through the main gate. There’s really only one main tactic, with no opportunity to try something different if your first plan wasn’t working or if you don’t have the right group composition.

In Guild Wars both teams can clash in a big battle a la WAR, *or* they can split to force the enemy to stretch their forces, playing a more guerrilla style of tactics. This helps prevent particularly broken team builds from dominating, and also adds a lot of tactical depth in deciding which types of characters should be sent to handle which other types of characters at various points on the map.

So, big win for Guild Wars on that one in my book.

Of course, WAR gets big points for having siege engines and more players (potentially) per battle.

I was only recently in a situation where my (full) warband, made up of mostly guild players and augmented/hindered by about 8-10 ungrouped randoms, was held back by a determined force of six (6) defenders, although we had managed to bring down both doors.

The outer door respawned, a full respawn of guards ensued, the defenders sallied from the keep and wiped out healers. End of story.

Admittedly, the defenders were very high level (35-40) and the keep was Avelorn (the one where the oil above the outer door is un-killable).

My major grip with WAR Keeps is why you have the stairs/room setup. All it does is create an artificial choke point, and pathing issues for the Lord. It would be much better if you had to fight up the stairs (with perhaps a mini-lord guarding them, giving defenders a reason to try and slow down the attackers on the stairs), and then a hallway before fighting the final Lord and his guards, with perhaps another good defensive spot behind the Lord.