HoT Considerations

[Indigo]

I'm going to keep updating this post with new information, and new considerations if they pop up.

With Heart Of Thorns around the corner, we as a guild will need to make some decisions on things.

Which of the 2 guild halls do we choose? Gilded Hollow or Lost Precipice.
The new guild halls system open up 2 halls to choose from. An expedition for a hall is 100g, and in theory you can switch between the two but it'll cost 100g every time. 

A basic overview of the two based on what I know.

Gilded Hollow is based more on cave like structures, everything is closer together and easier to get to. We see some shots of the Gilded Hollow in the Welcome To Guild Halls trailer, a lot of 1 minute onwards seems to be the Gilded Hollow.

 

We also see the Gilded Hollow in the Thursday stream although they don't seem to go around the place as much we get a good idea of the feel of the place and a look at the arena.




Lost Precipice, is a very open and much bigger map, you can navigate the hall using gliding, everything is much more spread out. Here is the Wednesday Guild Chat stream, a couple of minutes in they start looking around the Lost Precipice. (It's actually worth watching the whole stream as there's lots of info in this one)


My personal opinion right now is Gilded Hollow, but I think the openness and gliding options for Lost Precipice will alure a lot of the guild. And I'm totally fine with that because both the halls look awesome from what we've seen so far.

How should we spend the remaining influence and merits?

From the guild week stream (one embedded above around 48 minutes in), we have been told influence and merits have been made nearly worthless in HoT. This is due to the fact there are new guild currencies in HoT. It was suggested that investing in banners would be the most efficient way to spend these guild currencies. I know Rugi has been queuing as many upgrades as possible.

We can hold on to the influence and trade in 10,000 for 1 favor, or trade it for Resonance which can be used to speed up other upgrades. It was mentioned that influence trading was being made inefficient. Or we can buy a load of banners with the influence.

Merits don't have any use in HoT, it was suggested during the Guild Chat stream that they should all be spent.

[Indigo]

I updated the original post to include the Thursday Guild Chat stream, which features footage of the Gilded Hollow.

[Indigo]

Something else that came out of a Q & A stream today. The guild will have to earn some favor (from completing missions or other ways) to unlock the expedition for the guild halls. It's likely we can get the guild hall in the first week, but at a minimum in the 2nd week.

[stormseeker]

I really like the vertical feel of precipice, I can only imagine the science that can be done with all those drops @__@

[Indigo]

Last nights Guild Chat stream provided us with a good look at both of the Guild Halls in action, the video is below and should start you at 1 hour 45 minutes into it. We have less than a week until the launch of HoT. With this in mind, it'll be 2 or 3 weeks until we are able to go on the Guild Halls expedition. I thought I'd create a quick strawpoll to gauge peoples feelings on the guild halls. It's a simple poll, which guild hall would you choose? Gilded Hollow or Lost Precipice. This won't decide things regarding our choice of halls, but it will help us get an idea of what the guild as a whole want.

STRAWPOLL LINK HERE

To follow up on the other point in the original post, I've been spending influence and merits up to where we have only 5,000 influence left. Unfortunately we don't have any massive merit sinks. The reason were keeping 5000 influence is with the launch of HoT all items in the guild upgrade queue will be automatically completed. So we plan on queuing 10 Guild Catapults, which is worth 5000 influence. You should also know for the HoT launch we will have a number of guild bonus buffs running, this is due to the fact that some guild buffs won't be able to be activated after HoT is launched. What we will do is activate them shortly before launch and it should give you some bonuses.

• +15% Karma for 24 hours
• +10% Magic Find for 3 Days
• +5% Kill Experience for 24 hours
• +10% Gather Bonus for 48 Hours
• +10% Crafting Critical Success for 24 hours
• +5% Gold for Kills for 24 hours.

Hopefully they should be some nice bonuses for everyone on launch. Less than 6 days to go now

[Rugiviet]

Casted my vote

[starrifyx]

Really useful links that popped up on Reddit today, this was what I needed to make my decision on which guild hall to vote for.
365gw2.wordpress.com/guild-halls-comparison/

He then pointsout there are also associated weapons for GILDED HOLLOW which can be seen here:
dulfy.net/2015/06/19/gw2-guild-hall-points-of-interest-livestream-notes/