The Guild wars official site has been updated with another edition of their State of the Game series of articles. This week's article is the second part to last week's article titled "NPCs, Splits, and you" which focuses on split team tactics.

Teams often decide to run a build dedicated to splitting because it can force poor match-ups with opposing teams who may not be, for whatever reason, as well equipped to split. A 6/2 or 5/3 offensive split can pose a mismatch against opposing base defenders, the flag stand team, or sometimes both. When this occurs, one of the split teams can overwhelm its counterpart, and force the opposition into reactive play.

As mentioned in chapter one, the recent changes to VoD make gaining an NPC advantage especially important, and this has elevated the potential of dedicated split builds even more so than in the past. Guilds that want to run a dedicated split often choose one of these four isles (as well as Frozen and, to a lesser extent, Nomad's Isle). This installment will examine common offensive split tactics on these maps as well as ways to defend against them.

These maps have two primary strategic points of interest: the flag stand and the Guild Lord. When teams split, they are trying to draw the opposition away from one of these two points to achieve some objective. Typically this is capturing/holding the flag stand, or killing NPCs. In addition, split teams seek to capitalize on mismatches and kill opposing players to rack up death penalty (DP).

Read the full article here.