Node War Tier 1 vs Tier 2 vs Tier 3: Roster Sizes and Composition

Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 Node Wars are not the same war at different sizes. The headcount changes by a factor of three, the territory groups differ, and the roster shape that works at 25 players actively hurts at 75. This guide puts the three tiers side by side: preset capacities for every weekday, the default group layout each tier starts from, and what happens to people already signed up when you cut a roster down.

Capacity presets at a glance

Each tier carries a per-weekday capacity preset. Selecting a tier and a war day gives you a default total; officers can override it, and every group allocation is recalculated against whatever total is actually stored.

The weekday variation is not arbitrary padding. Weekend and midweek war nights draw different turnout, and the presets encode a headcount your guild can realistically field on that night rather than a theoretical maximum.

Tier 1: named specialists

A Tier 1 roster starts with four capacity-consuming groups — Mainball/FFA, Defense, Zerker and Shai — plus the non-capacity Bench, Tentative and Absence responses. Defaults are Defense 5, Zerker 2, Shai 2, and Mainball/FFA takes the remainder.

Naming Zerker and Shai explicitly makes sense at this size. On a 25-player Monday war, one Shai is four percent of your entire roster; the difference between two and five of them is the difference between a supported ball and a war party that cannot kill anything. Reserving those seats guarantees the composition rather than hoping the right people click first. The Node War roster guide covers each group in depth.

Tier 2 and Tier 3: Mainball/FFA, Defense, Flex, Bench

The larger tiers start from a different layout. Instead of named class groups, a Tier 2 or Tier 3 roster opens with Mainball/FFA, Defense, a general-purpose Flex group, and Bench. The capacities scale with the roster rather than being fixed numbers:

• Defense — roughly 16 percent of total capacity, with a floor of three seats.
• Flex — roughly 14 percent of total capacity, with the same floor of three.
• Mainball/FFA — everything left over, exactly as at Tier 1.

Why the change? Because proportional allocation is the only thing that survives a tripling of headcount. Two reserved Shai seats out of 30 is a deliberate composition choice; two out of 75 is noise. At Tier 3 you are organising around functions — a ball, a defence, a flexible remainder you assign on the night — and a broad Flex pool expresses that better than five thin named buckets.

Adding your own roster groups

Neither default is a cage. The web dashboard can enable extra groups from the supported presets — Cannon, Shai, Zerker, Ranger and Wizard/Witch — or accept a validated custom label for whatever your guild calls its siege crew. Each preset group starts at a capacity of one and is editable from there.

The useful discipline is to add a named group only when you would be unhappy to field the war without that role guaranteed. Reserved capacity is spent whether or not anybody fills it, so a speculative group is a permanent tax on your main body.

What happens when capacity shrinks

This is where most surprises live. Suppose a Tier 3 Wednesday war is set up for 75, twenty people have already signed up for Mainball/FFA, and you drop the tier to Tier 2 on a 40-player night — or you simply raise Defense by six after the announcement went out.

Nothing is deleted. Members who no longer fit are moved to Bench in stored order. Stored order means signup order, so the earliest responders keep their seats and the most recent ones overflow. Bench is uncapped and every benched member keeps the group they originally asked for attached to their name, which makes promotion straightforward when somebody drops out before the war.

Two practical consequences:

• Resize before you announce, not after. The rule is fair and deterministic, but being moved to Bench is still a surprise to whoever it happens to.
• Check the Bench after any capacity edit. It tells you exactly how much the change cost and who to talk to.

Choosing a tier

• Pick the tier your guild can fill on your worst night, not your best. A 55-player Tier 3 roster that fields 34 is a worse war than a full Tier 2.
• Match the tier to the territory you actually want. The territory groups differ, and the tier determines which ones are in play.
• Watch the Bench across several weeks. A consistently empty Bench with unfilled Mainball seats means you are sized above your turnout; a consistently long Bench means you are sized below it.

Once the size is right, automate the announcement with the Discord bot setup walkthrough, and close the loop after the war with scoreboard tracking. The documentation lists every command that touches capacity.