Announcing World versus World Season 2
World versus World Season 2 will begin on DD/MM/2014. We will be changing things up a bit. Starting with Season 2, players will now have two home worlds; one of them specifically for World versus World. The WvW worlds will have new names and a 2nd transfer option will now be available specifically for WvW. On DD/MM, players who completed the Season 1 Meta achievement will be able to select their new world. One week later, the option will be available to all players. World populations will have a hard cap which will increase every time all worlds have reached at least 85% of the cap. Our goal is to ensure guilds can stay together while also resolving some of the major population imbalances in the current structure. Once you have selected your world, you will have to pay the transfer fee if you wish to change. Player rewards for Season 2 will be based on the first world you log into once the season has begun. If you do not select a world prior to the start of the season, you will be assigned a world automatically upon logging in.
We are so confident that Season 2 will display the most exciting and competitive World versus World matches to-date that our internal staff is calling it World versus World 2.0
Changes to gameplay
There will be some additional changes to gameplay. Some are new, and some are changes we wanted to make in the past but that were not feasible at the time due to the major population imbalances. These changes are:
—Borderlands bloodlust once again awards up to 3 points, one per stack of bloodlust, for successfully using a finisher on a downed enemy.
—Waypoints – Contested waypoints will now allow 1 player every 10 seconds to use it, however they will stay contested for 10 seconds once the defense event ends, meaning it will not uncontest if the structure takes damage within those 10 seconds.
—Battle Standard – NPCs in World versus World that are revived by the Warrior skill Battle Standard will now have 50% of their health instead of 100%.
—Dolyaks – players are now able to take supplies from dolyaks that are in-transit, limit 5 per player and 50 per dolyak. This reduces the amount of supply the dolyak will deliver to its destination.
—Supply drop points – if a tower or keep has less than 10% of its supply capacity, it will activate a supply drop point where players can deposit their supply. Once the structure reaches 10% of capacity the drop point will disappear.
—Weight traps; new items will be sold in WvW that place traps on the ground which are activated by the weight of enemy players. Small traps are activated by 5 enemies and have a smaller radius. Medium traps have a larger radius and require 15 enemies inside it to activate. Large traps have a very large radius and will activate when 35 enemies are inside of it. Player minions do not count towards this total. Larger traps are more expensive. Upon activation, the trap does damage, a 10 second immobilize, 2 seconds daze, bleeding, reveal, and vulnerability to all players inside its radius. It also creates a temporary icon on the mini map at the location of the trap.
—Obsidian Sanctum is no longer part of standard WvW matches, and like Edge of the Mists is now a separate instance able to be entered directly from your WvW menu, and upon selection you will be asked to choose to enter as red, blue, or green. It now includes the overflow mechanic, and with the addition of the new open field area, will allow for player-organized battles across all servers. You can organize fights across servers without interfering with WvW matches. There are no official rules – this is your playground.
—Similar to the current orange sword indicator, a new orange flag icon will display on the map if there are 50 players from the same server within a certain radius of each other. In short, if there are 50+ of your server in one place, the enemy will see where you are on their map.
—World bonuses – in order to create this separation of worlds, we have eliminated the current world bonus structure. The reason for this is to prevent players from signing up for worlds for the bonuses without intention of playing WvW. To replace this system, we are adding additional permanent account-bound boosts to the achievement reward system, and these will be retroactive once implemented.