Castle War

Castle War is a scheduled guild-versus-guild siege. Seven fortified castles sit in the world, each its own map. When a war window opens, guilds fight their way to the heart of a keep — the Keepheart, three gold rings turning round a small sun — and whoever breaks it takes the castle on the spot. Hold it when the window closes and it is yours until the next war, and your guild leader wears the Keeper's Crown.

You need a guild. Not a party, not a friend list — a guild. A character without one cannot set foot in a castle at any time, and cannot damage a Keepheart even standing in front of it.

The seven keeps

Seven castles are contested, and every guild in the realm knows them by name — the three old keeps, and the four realm keeps raised after the great castles of the four old realms.

An ice-locked keep of frozen stone. Its crypt is a glacier mine haunted by Mammoraks and Frostwraiths.

A blackened fortress over old fire. Magmapedes and Ashwings hold the tunnels beneath it.

A palace keep of long halls and colonnades. Deathguards and Obscurons walk its crypt.

A red-brick keep of shield-maidens: an outer bailey under an archers' gallery, the Hall of the Valkyries, and a long nave with the Keepheart in its apse. Seraphels and Morthexs haunt the Valkyrie Barrow below.

A blue-and-gold palace beside a canal, whose defenders shoot from the quays across the water. The Keepheart waits inside a walled labyrinth. Glacifangs and Fincroaks fill the drowned cistern beneath.

A red-lacquered palace of lantern courts, a lotus pond and a bamboo walk, ending in a spiral sanctum. Oakenroots and Bramblemaws crawl through the root caves under it.

A battle-mage's fortress with two ways in through a forked courtyard, martial at the gate and arcane at the heart. Glaciors and Galehowl Harpies roam the crystal mines below.

Each keep is a 90×90 interior with its own Pillars, Shieldwall lines and eight spots where its holders' Sentinels stand, and each comes with a private guild crypt for whoever holds it. A castle nobody holds does not sit empty — it is overrun, stocked with every hostile species in the realm and one of every world boss, so an unclaimed keep is a monster den until a guild takes it.

The schedule

Castle War runs on weekly windows. Two ship with the realm:

Those are the defaults, not a law: the schedule is edited by the game's admins, who can move a window, add more of them, or force a one-hour war open at any moment for an event. Never assume — the Castles button always shows the real answer, either the time left in the war running right now or the countdown to the next one.

While a war is live, a countdown sits at the top of your screen — everywhere in the world, not just inside a keep. It is the same clock the server runs on, so when it reads 0:00 the war is over. You always know how long you have to break that Keepheart.

Getting in

Open the Castles button in the sidebar. It lists every castle, who holds it, and either the time left in the running war or the countdown to the next one. Press Enter to be warped in.

Between wars a castle belongs to its holder alone — the gates are shut to everyone else. When the war opens, they open to every guild. If you cannot go in, the Enter button says why rather than bouncing you.

The Travel Agent will not take you to a castle; the Castles button is the way in. The agent standing inside each keep is how you leave.

When the bell rings

The moment a war begins, every castle's defences are laid — the Keepheart, its Pillars, Shieldwalls and Sentinels — and every held keep is cleared of anyone who does not hold it. You cannot camp inside a castle beforehand and be standing next to the Keepheart when the gates open.

You are put down in a temple town — the same one every time, and rarely anywhere near the castle you were just standing in. You cannot walk back: castles have no roads in or out. Open the Castles button and go in again, which any guild may now do. You just do not get a head start.

An unclaimed castle has no holder to protect, so nobody is moved out of one.

Fighting inside

Player-versus-player damage needs both a castle map and a running war. Inside that:

• Different guilds may fight. Same guild and allied guilds may not.
• Two guildless players cannot fight — but neither of them should be in here anyway.
• Standing on a temple tile makes you untouchable until you step off.
• All player-to-player damage is halved, so nobody deletes anybody instantly.

Dying during a war has no corpse and no resurrection: you respawn immediately in a temple town — the same one eviction uses, well away from the keep — with resurrection sickness, every combat stat cut in half for two minutes. Going back in through the Castles button under that penalty is the price of dying.

The defences, and healing them

A castle is not just its Keepheart. When the bell rings the server lays the whole set out:

None of it can be touched by the guild that owns it — your own pieces are allies, and your support spells treat them as such. The defending guild can heal and buff its Keepheart, Pillars, Shieldwalls and Sentinels, which is a real part of holding a keep: a healer parked behind the Keepheart buys the defence minutes it would not otherwise have.

There is a hard limit on it, though. Every heal that lands on a castle's defences during a war is cut to 30% of its normal value — direct heals, area heals, lifesteal and a Mending Sentinel's alike. You can shore a Keepheart up between hits. You cannot out-heal a committed assault.

While the war runs, the Keepheart's health is pushed to everyone on the castle map about once a second, so the whole keep watches the same bar fall. There is no hiding how close it is to going.

The Sentinels

Sentinels are carved totems on small gold seals. They never move — no chasing, no leashing — and nothing stuns, roots, silences, slows, taunts or knocks them back. Each one picks the nearest attacker it can see in reach every time it casts, so getting behind a wall really works: a Sentinel needs a clear line to you. They never hit the guild that holds the castle; allied guilds get no such mercy. The big attacks always mark the ground first, so you have a moment to step off. Break one and it stays down until the defences are next laid: the next war's opening bell, or the rebuild after a conquest.

A castle has eight Sentinel spots, and its upgrade level opens them from the inside out: two by the Keepheart at level 0, two by the Pillars at level 1, two just inside the outer Shieldwalls at level 2, and the last two in the gate hall at level 3 — always out of reach of the spot where you arrive. An unclaimed castle has Sentinels too: every open spot stands a Raven, hostile to everyone, so the first capture has to be earned.

Setting your castle's defences

If you lead a guild that holds a castle, open Guild → Settings → Castle defences. Each castle you hold lists its eight spots: an open spot has a menu of the five Sentinels, a closed one says which castle level opens it. Pick, press Save defences, and the Guild window comes back on Settings.

• It is free. The castle upgrade that opened the spot was the price.
• Only the leader sets them; the rest of the guild never sees the menus.
• Only between wars. While a Castle War is running the menus are locked.
• A spot you leave alone stands a Raven.
• Picks belong to the holder. When another guild takes your castle its spots stand Ravens until the new holders choose. Your old choices are kept only until they save theirs: take the castle back before that and your line-up stands again; after it, you choose again. The castle keeps its upgrade level either way.
• Your choices stand from the next time the defences are laid: the next war's opening bell.

The Keeper's Crown

The leader of every guild that holds a castle wears the Keeper's Crown: a thin gold circlet floating above their name, with small crown points circling at their feet. It shows everywhere in the world, for as long as the guild holds any castle. Take a castle and your leader is crowned on the spot; lose your last one and the crown goes with it; hand the leadership over and the crown follows within a minute.

Breaking the Keepheart

Break it and the castle is yours immediately — there is no capture timer and no second round:

• Ownership transfers to the breaker's guild on the spot, and the conquest is announced to the entire realm.
• Every member of the winning guild standing on the castle map at the moment it breaks is credited with the attendance. Presence at the break is the whole rule; there is no damage ledger.
• Everyone not in the new owning guild is thrown out of the keep.
• About two seconds later the full set of defences rebuilds at full health — Keepheart, Pillars, Shieldwalls and all, with a Raven in every open Sentinel spot until the new holders pick theirs. Taking a castle early in a window means holding it for the rest of that window against everyone who now wants it back.
• Your guild leader puts on the Keeper's Crown.

A guildless character who somehow breaks a Keepheart takes nothing: it simply re-arms.

When the war ends

The Keepheart, Pillars, Shieldwalls and Sentinels all vanish. The keep stops being a PvP zone — you cannot attack anyone any more — and with no Keepheart there is nothing left to conquer until the next war.

Nobody is thrown out. Wherever you were standing when the bell rang, you stay. Walk out in your own time, or talk to the Travel Agent by the gate.

What holding a castle is worth

The daily vault

Every castle you hold has a treasure room, and it refills once a day. Each chest holds one rolled item and a pile of gold, and both go straight into the guild bank — never into the opener's own bag. Only a leader or an officer can open one.

Investing in a castle improves the vault on three axes at once: more chests, more gold in each, and better odds on what is inside — a top-tier item comes out five times as often at maximum investment as it does at level 0. A maxed vault pays back its whole 60,000-gold investment in about a week of daily openings, before counting the items.

One warning: a refill replaces whatever chests are still sitting unopened. Ignore your vault for a week and you find one fresh batch, not seven. Open them daily.

And the rest

• A private guild crypt, reached through a warp inside the castle: your own farming map, with its own monsters and ore veins. Only the holding guild may go down, and nobody at all may while a Castle War is running — no waiting out the siege underground.
• A weekly cut of the market tax from the castle's region.
• A daily gold stipend. Every castle you hold pays 5,000 gold straight to the guild bank each day — 25% more once your guild reaches level 12.
• Upgrades. Spend guild-bank gold — 20,000 per level, up to level 3 — to harden the keep: tougher Pillars, two more Sentinel spots, more chests in the vault, and better odds on what is inside them.
• The Keeper's Crown for your guild leader, worn everywhere in the world.

Where to next

• Combat — how damage, spells and stats work.
• Factions & Holy Relics — the realm's other war, fought between the Aesir and the Jotun. Faction lines are ignored inside a castle: cross-faction guildmates besiege any of the seven castles side by side.
• Guild Directory — the realm's top guilds, ranked by level.
• Browse the Compendium for every class, monster, item and place.