Isle of Meditation

The Isle of Meditation is a Guild Hall introduced in Guild Wars Factions.

Layout
The Isle of Meditation guild hall is based on the looks of Shing Jea Monastery and the rest of that island. It has small villages, rivers and beaches. Its prominent feature is a beautiful waterfall.

This Guild Hall is very large and has two layers. There are lots of winding paths along walls and over bridges and there is also a ground level where you can run through rivers and go on beaches. It is very complex.

Features

 * Monastery theme, looks like the Shing Jea Island.
 * Complex pathing between bases.
 * An Obelisk flag stand is at the center of the map. If controlled, members of the opposing team will take damage from statues that cast Fireball, located along the path to the tower flag stand.
 * One beautiful, tranquil waterfall.
 * There are Clouds of Miasma along one of the paths.
 * The smoke coming from the urns near the Guild Lord is made up of Asian-style characters.
 * On a rock between the road to the upper flagstand and the "Visitor's" base resembles a face.

NPCs
Both teams start with several NPCs.

Strategy
A popular map for guilds started after the release of the Factions campaign, Isle of Meditation is a constant flag battle. This is contributed to the fact that both flag stands need to be held in order to gain morale boosts, the extra damage from the statues is quite considerable when the battle around the stand is drawn out over a long duration. This map favours the balanced team, its ability to turtle or split allows it to take advantage of the conflicting stategies of being in two places at once to control both flag stands and the nessessity to "camp" the morale boost giving flag stand, the battle on this map ultimately comes down to the flag runners flag handling skill.

However, quite often the battle is restricted to the lower path as the upper path places both teams at a disadvantage due to the presence of the miasma, coupled with the fact that the upper path does not provide acess to the morale giving flagstand. This means that often the upper flag stand is totally ignored by less experienced teams and that teams with more experienced runners are at a huge advantage.