Guild Wars 2

The Oasis event was removed. All good in my books since it only helped the dominating server or helped capturing full empty maps. I don’t want this event to return.

An often requested feature is the return of Alpine Borderlands. ANet has hinted about some kind of rotation. I have felt having 3 copies of the same map in a matchup is balanced but boring.

Players have also called for making player vs player fights to have more direct impact on the war score. The introduction of PPK helped but I feel it is too weak and encourages mindless ranged AoE spam.

I liked the Ruins of Power in the Alpine Borderlands when the stacking Bloodlust granted upto 3 points for each finished enemy. Note finished by a finisher and not by spamming the downed with ranged AoE skills.

When the Bloodlust was changed to max 1 point per finisher teams stopped going for the ruins except in their own borderland. It became too weak to be interesting.

There also seems to be less players in WvW. Especially in lower tiers WvW maps feel empty. My guild transferred up a tier because of this.

To address these issues, I’d suggest the following 6 easy steps.

One dev could easily slap this together in an afternoon and run it as an week long live event to try it out. Or maybe it could be labelled as the Overhaul which has been worked on for over a year already. I don’t know.

Anyways here goes:

• Redesign the Desert Borderland Oasis area
  • Remove the temple ruins and jungle from Oasis area, dry up the lake
  • Airlift the dinosaurs, the tigers and any other fauna to Verdant Brink
  • Put there plains and easy rolling hills which do not prevent movement
  • Add a handful of rock formations and ridges to support tactical movement
  • Open 2 easy routes from each keep into the area with equal distance from the waypoint
    • Block the Earth keep south gate entry
  • Keep the existing other entry points through barricades, southern towers and the roads from south, north west and north east
• Introduce Desert Borderlands Bloodlust
  • Place 5 flags in the Oasis area that teams can capture
    • Holding at least 3 flags grants the team 2 points per finisher
• Change the way keeps are contested
  • The keep waypoint only gets contested when gates or walls take damage or when the lord is in combat or dead
  • Gates only take damage from siege weapons
    • Change Schematic: Hardened Gates to grant 25% more health and resistance to gates
• Redesign the matchups to have only 3 maps
  • Maps:
    • Alpine Borderland
    • Desert Borderland
    • Eternal Battlegounds
  • Corner assignments:
    • EB: red Overlook, green Lowlands, blue Valley
    • Alpine: red Garrison, green Bay, blue Hills
    • Desert: blue Earth, green Fire, red Air
  • Assign the team colors randomly instead of by rating
• Retune the Alpine Borderland Bloodlust
  • Owner gets 2 points per finisher
  • Remove the stats boost and the boon like icon
• Replace PPK by 1 point per finisher

Points of contention:

• Having fewer maps and not increasing the map player limit increases queues on the top tiers. Would the population trickle to lower tiers?
• Randomizing color assignments may balance EotM. Or is the team balance irrelevant for the EotM game mode?
• Green team would “own” 1 less tower. Would having the best EB corner be enough to compensate?
• Vengeance can be used to avoid a finisher. Should there be a reward mechanism when the warrior fails to rally?
• The objectives today can be contested by putting a guard in combat. Is this too easy for keeping a waypoint contested?
• There are 695 points per tick from objectives today. Add upto 288 points per tick from dolyaks. If one borderland map is removed these numbers go down 25%. Would upto 5 points per finisher be too many?
• Should the tigers be made into backpack items like the quaggans?

(Missed this thread earlier)

Like this idea, will probably come back with more thoughts later.

Don’t know how the Points Per Stomp would work out or not, giving lots of points per stomps (as opposed to per kill) would certainly encourage small group play rather than zerging over the enemies with guardian loot stick #1.

Also the BL maps have different PPT total than EBG, so it’s a bit less than 25%

Are the Desert + Alpine bloodlust cumulative ? So holding both would give 3 points per stomp ? Or would it be pointless to grab the other if you already have one ?

(Man I miss the Ruins of Alpine, my favorite part of any map in the game.)

joneirikb.7506:

(Missed this thread earlier)

Like this idea, will probably come back with more thoughts later.

Don’t know how the Points Per Stomp would work out or not, giving lots of points per stomps (as opposed to per kill) would certainly encourage small group play rather than zerging over the enemies with guardian loot stick #1.

Also the BL maps have different PPT total than EBG, so it’s a bit less than 25%

Are the Desert + Alpine bloodlust cumulative ? So holding both would give 3 points per stomp ? Or would it be pointless to grab the other if you already have one ?

(Man I miss the Ruins of Alpine, my favorite part of any map in the game.)

Some servers gained a lot when the Bloodlust granted upto 3 points. I guess those were more fight oriented servers while the others relied more on objectives (nightcapping).

Quite right. 21% less points from objectives if one BL map is removed; 25% less points from dolyaks.

I was thinking Alpine and Desert Bloodlusts being cumulative. That way they would be very attractive, but not having both would still encourage stomping.

• No Bloodlust = 1 point per finisher
• One Bloodlust = 3 points per finisher
• Both Bloodlusts = 5 points per finisher

Oh boy, my guild would salivate over 5 points per stomp!

I keep trying to +1 this thread, but for some reason it refuses to "stick", and whenever I refresh or come back to this thread the +1 is gone sad panda!

Blocking the south gate of Earth Keep won’t help, people will just jump over the wall. They can also deny the whole north end of the Oasis area by putting up large amounts of siege.

5 points per kill, no thanks. This would just encourage more people to go to the top worlds and huge zergs.

The whole point of having 3 borderlands is that they balance, each side having 1 home borderland. You would be better off reducing the number of servers, at least until they manage to fix things a bit.

In the end changing PPT so that it is proportional to the numbers of people on the borderlands/EB may be a better option. That would make holding a location during peak time better than at night.

Hi, you missed a few points

Serious.6940:

5 points per kill, no thanks. This would just encourage more people to go to the top worlds and huge zergs.

Points Per STOMP. Finisher. How often do you see those done in zergs ?

Serious.6940:

The whole point of having 3 borderlands is that they balance, each side having 1 home borderland. You would be better off reducing the number of servers, at least until they manage to fix things a bit.

This idea is about REMOVING the BORDERLAND system, and making Alpine and Desert into BATTLEGROUND type maps. No more “home map” (the whole borderland system needs to die, I’m sick to my stomach of 3 identical maps)

Serious.6940:

In the end changing PPT so that it is proportional to the numbers of people on the borderlands/EB may be a better option. That would make holding a location during peak time better than at night.

This could also be accomplished by dynamically adjusting the number of maps to the current active playerbase, so there is only a single map at night with few players, and 2-3 maps at prime time.

And you know how much a lot of people hate on the changing the points per time of day. Heck depending on how they solve that system, a server could just log out during an entire day when they’re getting karma trained, to reduce the enemies PPT if they’re going to get everything anyway. Is that really a mentality we should encourage ?

Serious.6940:

Blocking the south gate of Earth Keep won’t help, people will just jump over the wall. They can also deny the whole north end of the Oasis area by putting up large amounts of siege.

I meant block the access to Oasis area from the earth keep south gate. The gate should still be there to allow alternative ways to attack the keep.

In practice that would mean a high cliff standing between the keep and Oasis blocking too fast access. The earth keep owner would have to enter the Oasis area from east or from west.