Guild Wars 2

Change the buff from the blood lust to give what outmanned gives…

Roamers love the new map changes and the mechanic on how to obtain the buff is ok (3/5). It adds a new meta to the game with the stomp = 1point mechanic.

BUT and this is a pretty big BUT it doesn’t make sense to reward the higher population server to get stat boost. I think the concept of getting 1 point per ‘orb’ per stomp is great and will promote open field but the stat boost (+50) ruins open field especially for the server with the lower numbers. Open field combat is one of the best things about WvW and when you lose/win a fight it shouldn’t be because you didn’t have enough people to neutralize enemy orb.

Organized guilds outside of T1US will be able to get back to GvG as well if you remove the stat buff.

Suggestion:
Replace the bloodlust buff (+50 stats etc) with +50% mf + 50% WxP + 50% exp gain & keep the stomp = 1 point mechanic to make it worth while to get. Everyone will want the 150% mf boost on top of the 300 achievable using base mf. This will allow you to increase rewards from WvW drops as well.

I’d really like to see decent arguments for how points for stomps encourages open field. If the other server has three buffs, what incentive does your server have to fight them? It seems like a drastic incentive to avoid combat.

Large scale open field, there isn’t really unless the buffs are even. As for small scale fighting, I have seen a huge improvement in T1. I have spent most my time in the middle area and very rarely do I find a group bigger than 15. Even then, that group normally just trys to zerg the nodes so the others are open to fight at.

As for the bloodlust buff doing MF/WXP/ect, sadly that alone wouldn’t be enough for any WvW server to really waste there time with. The points for stomps on the other hand is but you can at least make sure they are even and it would be fine. With the stat buff, its not only important to get them for your server but to make sure the other servers don’t have them. So right now it’s almost more important to secure 3 orbs then to have high PPT.

Personally I think they should lower the stats to 25 each (rather than 50) BUT since its only been less than a week it may be to hard to tell. Once every server figures out how to play the new meta things might change.

Also this is from my T1 perspective, Its the only experience I have with the buffs so I can’t comment on the lower tiers but I can see why its such a issue for unbalanced populations.

I think Bloodlust and Outmanned need to be swapped around, maybe decrease its value so that you dont get servers throwing abuse to get people to leave to get the buff back. I do like the Bloodlust being for Magic Find and everything.

Another addition could be, that holding all 3 would mean that a special (i know this part will be hated!) Mob of Legendary status to appear Once killed this mob would drop nice loot, Give the server that killed it a 50stat increase for say 1 hour as well as give the server say 5,000 points. This Mob would have a reasonable cool down

stomps will never be practical in open field combat. you only get to do it when you’ve killed the majority opposing team, and there are a few remaining in need of stomping.

Sovereign.1093:

stomps will never be practical in open field combat. you only get to do it when you’ve killed the majority opposing team, and there are a few remaining in need of stomping.

Not completely true, Its a matter of fitting it into your guilds comp. It may not be practical for pug zergs but stomping out down players in the middle of the fight is very practical for organised groups.

If the buff only provides something passive, where’s the drive to make sure the other guys don’t have it? No one will care, very few people will try to take or retake points and nothing will have changed, except the quaggans… the quaggans will be gone.

In my experience, it’s always been harder to keep random zerg assortments from stomping in order to keep on fighting. The amount of times I’ve heard commanders try to get their front line to keep on moving and just let the people behind them finish people off is immense. It’s always been the smaller groups that focus more on winning a fight and just dps the downed enemies so they can’t self-res. I mean seriously .. is it good players that you see trying to stomp a thief three times in a row? That’s some pub kitten right there.

Benjamin.6235:

I’d really like to see decent arguments for how points for stomps encourages open field. If the other server has three buffs, what incentive does your server have to fight them? It seems like a drastic incentive to avoid combat.

Maybe, but once servers realize how important the points for stomping are, they’ll be fighting tooth and nail over the bloodlust buffs. In other words, it’s a way to make holing up in keeps less profitable, and it simultaneously makes Pvdoor/objective trading less profitable.

In other words, it encourages open field fighting. It makes small group contributions extremely significant and discourages zerging and objective trading and hiding behind walls/siege, all at the same time. Isn’t that what people have been asking for?

This might be another tier disconnect. Most match-ups don’t have the numbers to fight over the buffs and defend structures at the same time (frequently don’t even have the numbers to defend structures), and the winners are usually decided as soon on reset when you see the server names pop up on the scoreboard purely due to coverage. Now if I go into an outmanned borderland to toy with enemy zergs, my server is going to be punished? They did a good thing when they took away repair costs when the outmanned buff is up. Made you feel better about messing around on enemy borderlands. This does the exact opposite.

I’m sure it makes for fun in match-ups with somewhat fair coverage numbers, but it seems like a problem people aren’t catching onto yet for the rest. The game is about to go into seven weeks of beyond imbalanced match-ups, so I think we really need to consider this. Think about how annoyed T1 servers have gotten recently when they drop down to T2 and have nothing to do? Seven weeks of that against servers that are discouraged to confront them. It will not be fun.

I’m starting to think that the T1 servers need to be in a league all by themselves and have rule tweaks that apply to them alone.

I think it would be better if those without bloodlust would get the stomp points. If you stomp one player with 1 bl, get 1 point, with 2 get 2 points, and with 3 get 3 points.
And tripple points for outmanned people stomping bl3 people.

Even if ANet replace the buff with Outnumbered one, that wont fix the performance issues. This is because the way the Bloodlust mechanic works creates a major performance hit independent of whatever effects it triggers.

The problem is that whenever Bloodlust changes it simultaneously affects around 2/3 of the players across all the WvW maps. At reset time when all servers are queued on all WvW maps, every flip of a bloodlust buff simultaneously affects 67% of the peak WvW population.

Compare this with Outnumbered where each flip of this mechanism usually affects at most 8.3% of the peak WvW population. Even in the absolute worst case scenario (Outnumbered simultaneously changes across all four WvW maps at a time when all except the lowest population server are queued on all WvW maps) the max number simultaneously affected would be less than 33% of the full WvW population – and the chances of this occurring are extremely low.

That’s an 8 fold difference in impact at peak times (possibly higher, depending on the level at where the outnumbered buff kicks in) between the Outnumbered and the Bloodlust mechanisms. Impact of the buff itself aside, it sure looks like someone didn’t do their homework when they designed the Bloodlust mechanism.

[quote=2884586;NevirSayDie.6235:]

NevirSayDie.6235:

I’d argue the opposite can be true.

I often play on the map where we are outmanned, with some friends and guildies. Just a small roaming group to cap camps and attack towers and keeps. Kinda to keep the enemy on their toes aswell as a sizeable force in that borderland.

Obviously, we get wiped from time to time. Especially when we stop being mobile and try and take a tower. Previously it didnt matter really, no repaircost and we kinda bothered them. Forced a reaction, forced them to put a lot of effort to wipe a fairly small force.

Now however, they can stomp me. So if we get wiped trying to take that tower or keep and we get wiped we are now actively feeding that server points. Which is the exact opposite of what we intented to do. We will very likely surrender more points to them then what we could’ve gotten if we had actually captured that tower or keep.

If anything its better to not have this small crew running around, because that force they leave on that borderland is suddenly useful again and can ramp up quite a lot of points that way, feeding off your roaming crew the moment that crew tries to attack anything serious. Which it has to if it wants to keep that enemy force present on that borderland.

It’s an interesting mechanic and after some tweaking we’ll learn to play it properly, but what would help, imho, is to get the tools for better gameplay in small groups, like officer tags which can only be seen by commanders and within officer parties, and maybe a commander chat channel.
At least then a commander can see where the other officer groups are, and solo players will divide themselves more equally over tags. In order to diminish flocking to popular commanders (unless they want to lead a zerg) it should be possible to have guild commander tags visible only within guilds, and not on map. Now this problems gets “solved” by putting a target on commanders who don’t tag up yet still lead guild teams, so why not make it a proper mechanic.
That’d help aspiring commanders too: i’m sure some people would love to tag up and learn to command but they would like to practice first within smaller groups and the assistance and support from others in their guild before having the entire server flock to them.

Terrahero.9358:

snip

I suppose it does discourage suicide attacks. I don’t think that’s as bad as you’re making it out to be, though. Sure, the other server will get 5-10 points if they wipe your group trying to take a tower. But your server is likely to get a lot more points if you can flip the buff.

It presents a great alternative to flipping camps and knocking on towers/keeps, which is all roaming crews really did before in the situation you describe.