Guild Wars 2

Lurch.9517:

Reikou.7068:

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I am one of them, i wont touch S/TPvP in its current form, its just SO boring and so unbalanced that is not fun in any way shape or form. WvW is the ONLY way i will play PvP it is pretty much the only thing i play in the game other then the odd event outside but at least 90% of my day is spent in WvW.

I just think its funny how a WvW player thinks s/tPvP is “unbalanced.”

“boring” I can perhaps understand. “Unbalanced?” Even more so than WvW? Really?

To be fair to him I think what he means is that he does not bother with the cough e-sport cough S/TPVP because it is not balanced sufficiently to be equal so probably feels it is insulting his intelligence. WvW is not sold as or expected to be balanced or fair by its very nature so had no problem with it.
However, along with all the other general mismanagement of the WvW format, to put in such a misguided and badly thought out deliberate unbalancing feature and expect reasonable thinking people to just suck it up is indeed insulting our intelligence.

At least, thats what I think.

If WvW were balanced numbers wise then stat buffs would not be so much of an issue as all on a level playing field, when numbers can be 750 v 200 v 50 whats the bloody point?

The killer of the stat buffs is the guys that wake up to 0 ppt and the enemy with superior buff, they are not overly motivated to even bother playing = the only person actually happy is that guy who cares about PPT and he is a weirdo anyway.

Yes, balance is FAR more important to S/TPvP, if it EVER wants to become an eSport, WvW is ALOT different of course i know WvW isnt as balanced as it could be, due to up-leveling, gear and such.

S/TPvP is a whole new level of being unbalanced. When you only see certain classes in the mode – its unbalanced. The same old match design is very boring as well – stand still on a point, try to kill bunker before his allies rush to his aid – yeah that sounds fun.

For S/TPvP i would love to see some new modes – Team Deathmatch and Capture The Flag for example this would allow people to try different builds new team combos and everything

Not once did i say S/TPvP is more unbalanced, if you cant accept that S/TPvP —→IS<-— unbalanced then thats down to you. They can NOT make it an eSport when several classes arent even taken as they are more of a hindrance to the team then that shows the mode is far from balanced and is far from becoming an eSport.

Esoteric.5490:

The new stat buffs are great. Try figuring out the meta instead of assuming everything is a zergfest. I’ve had more small scale fights in the last 2 days in WvW than in the previous several months. The new terrain is INCREDIBLE and the stat buff is able to be held by small groups NOT a group of 40. Until servers figure out how to play with small groups, they will just get s*** on by the servers that do. My server was ticking sub-200 while we were gaining points on the server ticking 300-plus because we held the buff and actually killed people. Whine and moan all you want, but I hope ANet never removes this. It is balanced, directly benefits small groups, provides incredible terrain for creative engagement, and adds more layers of strategy. If anyone proposes that we go back to how it was or take the stats away, people won’t care about the middle of the map and all of the sudden we’re back to playing “who has the largest zerg”. Actually try playing the game instead of just complaining. And uplevels can get the stat bonuses too to be better while they roam. Why don’t you go cap the points so that big mean level 80 (with ascended gear btw, but I don’t see you complaining about that) can’t crap all over you with his “unfair stats”?

You all keep quoting Habib. Let’s see. You can’t hack these and you can’t hide them in an upgraded keep to hoard all your stats. They transfer fluidly between servers unless you allocate people to protect and hold the points. Just because you can’t strategically comprehend a level of gameplay doesn’t make it broken or stupid.

1. Start reading post
2. Notice it seems insane
3. Check SIG…oh, now I get it
4. Go back to my horrible population server

ShadowMaster.5708:

I LOVED roaming around in groups of 4-5 friends and killing groups of 10+ enemies before. But that wont happen again if the others have the buffs…

So why don’t your 4-5 friends group take the buff away from the enemy?

Ok so here is the simple solution I can think of, I understand that removing the stat buff removes the validity of claiming the buff in the first place here is what should happen. Remove stat bonuses. WvW revolves around ppt so we need some form of ppt to create a valid impact for claiming nodes for your world (finishing people buff shouldn’t be remove that is really fun for roamers).
Now that everyone has a equal fighting chance and 1v1 and GvG can happen again why would I ever want to capture a point that just gives a bad buff? Because you make it worth ppt for 1 point held at tick the server is awarded 1 point for 2 points they are awarded 1+2=3 points and so on up to 15 points per map. This is not a lot of points but it is balanced.
The enemy team now has incentive to take back one or two point because the more less points the occupying team holds the less points they get, it becomes in fact more worth it for the defending team to defend and for the attacking team to attack.
Is this not enough points? Well you could always make point values 1-4-9-16-25 instead of 1-3-6-10-14.
Anyways it’s simple keeps true to the goal of the update which to make roamers happy and keeps GvG and 1v1 fanatics happy. Hopefully someone reads this.

The absolute BEST way to modify or have buffs be patched is to completely ignore them. The reason why Anet does nothing for now is the fact that people “love” getting these buffs despite the community QQ about it. If there were a gentleman’s agreement that no server should be trying to attain buffs since they do not contribute to karma or PPT, then by all means, that is similar to the full brunt of retaliation to the buffs. Of course this is not possible because we can’t control the actions of every member on our server, but this is by far the quickest way to see results aside from a mass exit of the game or WvW.

Want to keep the idea of bloodlust but not break the stats game?

Just make bloodlust increase the chances of armor not being damaged by 33% and/or add a buff to resurrection time for people on that server.

Do something to keep people in the fight longer and get them back in the fight quicker. That is more powerful than a stat buff, but more positive for people to fight for.

DevonCarver.5370:

The stat boost, while controversial, is there to give the buff meaning in the context of the general WvW battle. Providing boosts like %WXP, etc. don’t have impact in fights against other sides, they are just a nice bonus for you. The stat boost and the points for finishing players mean that not only do you want to have the buff, but you don’t want your opponents to have it.

Meaningful buffs within the context of the battle would be improved gate and wall HP, improved guard damage, camp fortification, extra guards, faster Dolyaks with more supply, or access to stronger keep weapons (I.e. an Asuran Sky Hammer the uses player supply to fire). Stat buffs are neither meaningful nor relevant to the context of the fight, especially when they are only ever in the hands of the side with the most coverage, who will be winning with or without them. You implemented these buffs because it’s easy to fudge the match with +’s and call it relevant, knowing all the while that you lack the innovative mind set of your predecessors. I know this because a more seasoned development lead would have anticipated the increase to the server load from the buff being applied, and the ramifications of this buff encouraging players without it to Alt + F4 to avoid a stomp to deprive those that have it of points to the “war score” since it’s the same repair cost either way and there’s no queue to get back in with interest in the mode dropping to an all time low.

You have one job: make WvW fun.

Just ask yourself that before you go and do something equally under developed.

+50 to +150 stat points doesn’t sound game breaking. However when I have the +150, whether in small scale 1v1-3 or roaming with my guild, I’ve been killing other players much more quickly and easily than usual.

Is it possible that the “+150” buff is giving us more than that? It seems to be right on the player stats page, but it does not seem to be right in practice.

Maybe the buff is not working properly, and giving the buffed players too much? It really feels like it.

Abe Kleine.3568:

DevonCarver.5370:

The stat boost, while controversial, is there to give the buff meaning in the context of the general WvW battle. Providing boosts like %WXP, etc. don’t have impact in fights against other sides, they are just a nice bonus for you. The stat boost and the points for finishing players mean that not only do you want to have the buff, but you don’t want your opponents to have it.

I’m placing my bets on the Bloodlust being re-patched in aboooout…. 3-5 weeks, I’ve never seen the forums explode with this much retaliation before. If they don’t change this soon they will lose MANY players. This almost feels like the outcry that microsoft fans had over the “always-online” xbox one idea before they trashed the idea after the backlash at E3. Lets hope the backlash isn’t to severe

If they patch Bloodlust, it has to be before Leagues start, as they are on record as saying there will be no changes to WvW during the 2 months of the League.

So what does that give us, a month to correct Bloodlust before it’s locked in for another two?

daimonos.9831:

+50 to +150 stat points doesn’t sound game breaking. However when I have the +150, whether in small scale 1v1-3 or roaming with my guild, I’ve been killing other players much more quickly and easily than usual.

Is it possible that the “+150” buff is giving us more than that? It seems to be right on the player stats page, but it does not seem to be right in practice.

Maybe the buff is not working properly, and giving the buffed players too much? It really feels like it.

Another poster explained this well:

Ensign.2189:

Stats scale geometrically with each other in this game. It may not look like much at a glance, but in terms of force projection (Damage Per Second * Effective Health) [holding all three buffs] translates into roughly a 35% boost to character power.

I don’t see how this is helping us in WvW at all. The match-ups are all terrible and 1-sided in a whole new scale. It was the same mistakes over and over. I can understand the purpose it seems fun and dynamic but far too detached from the realities of world vs world and how population / coverage plays a major role.

First the stats. Now the zerg 24/7 servers has like +150 stats in all zergs including their NPCs in all their “FULLY” upgraded Camps, Towers, Keeps and Castle. They have way points to easily defend their ruins, while we have to run so far from our “ONLY SPAWN POINT” only “to get zerg” before we even get there. Right now only Tier 1 Match-ups seems at least balanced. The gaps between scores are getting wider and wider. Does Anet have something against the poor and the weak servers?

Second, the randomization of match-ups doesn’t work well with this. In our case a Tier 5 server was simply too overwhelming for us in tier 6-8, the runes makes it even harder for us when we barely get enough people to defend ourselves. Their up leveled and pugs get powerful hitting for more, ours get 1 hit in “an already 10 vs 1” fight. The old system would be preferred or 1 up 1 down. It happens that a tier 1 will fight tier 3 and 5 in random fights.

Third, The location of the ruins is also a big problem. If all you wanted was to spread zergs that was the worst possible place you could’ve put them. If you simply made use of the 3 locations up north skritt cave, centaur camp and former Orb altar in north camp, center island in lake and center ruins between two southern towers, you won’t even need removing the water or the 3 quaggan villages. Underwater fights will be more appreciated, dominating servers will have to spread small groups further not just zergs running around in circles all day, weaker servers find it possible to defend even if they lose all keeps and way points, combat guilds can just head north and camp there for fun and simply have defenders on the skritt cave and centaur camp.

These seemed more logical in spreading fights to both north and south ends of each borders. Just an opinion, it’s too frustrating to play wvw now.

violentlycar.5267:

daimonos.9831:

+50 to +150 stat points doesn’t sound game breaking. However when I have the +150, whether in small scale 1v1-3 or roaming with my guild, I’ve been killing other players much more quickly and easily than usual.

Is it possible that the “+150” buff is giving us more than that? It seems to be right on the player stats page, but it does not seem to be right in practice.

Maybe the buff is not working properly, and giving the buffed players too much? It really feels like it.

Another poster explained this well:

Ensign.2189:

Stats scale geometrically with each other in this game. It may not look like much at a glance, but in terms of force projection (Damage Per Second * Effective Health) [holding all three buffs] translates into roughly a 35% boost to character power.

I was curious about this so I decided to do some math. I’m using a typical guardian with a staff as an example here since it’s one of the most common wvw builds. The build our guardian uses is this.

Finding out the increase in effective health is very simple. +150 vitality and toughness increases the effective hp by ~12.5%.

Calculating the dps increase is a bit more complicated since we have to predict which skills the guardian uses. Also might and fury affect this value. I assumed that the staff guardian uses #3 first and then uses auto attack 12 times after which he can use #3 again. Because the staff guardian is running with a blob we can assume that his attacks hit 5 people every time. His enemies have 2800 armor which is probably pretty close to the average armor value in wvw. Here are the results without fury and here with fury (if you don’t see the graph click “use as referring to math instead”). The number of might stacks is on the horizontal axis and on the vertical axis you can see how much the dps is increased. Basically orb bonuses increase your dps of a staff guardian by ~12%. These values may not sound like much but 12% is HUGE in terms of balance. It really affects the combat and makes the game unfair for the servers without the orbs.

cash money baby

One thing that mystifies me about the bloodlust buffs is, all along, I’ve always thought the Outmanned buff was deliberately kept useless because they didn’t want to give any actual advantage to any team, so now they’ve gone and introduced what is ostensibly an overmanned buff. If the stats boost only applied to the current borderland, that would be one thing, but applying across all 4 maps and stacking? C’mon.

I know the stated purpose was to reduce zergging, and I don’t know how it’s going in other tiers, but in mine this has worked to an extent: They will break off 2 or 3 people as scouts while the rest of the blob goes to the other points.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a few decent fights in the ruins that were actually quite enjoyable, but they tend to be short lived because, as mentioned above, the blob is never far away and can have you roflstomped before you even finish capping.

What I don’t understand is, if Anet has any interest in actually making WvW better, why don’t they just go down the plethora of community-created lists built by those of us that choose to spend as close to 100% of our game time in WvW as possible?

If you want to break up the zergs you can do it overnight by actively punishing them with something like an “overmanned” buff that’s, say, -200 to everything if you have more than X players in Y radius or the debuff increments by Z for every A people over the other servers you have on the map. Some might not claim it’s fair, but I honestly don’t see how it’s any less fair than bloodlust (especially since it would only apply to one map) and can see it being considerably more effective than dropping an sPvP map in the middle of the borderlands.

TL;DR: This is a flawed mechanic tied to a borderline OP buff that will only make strong servers stronger and demoralize the weaker.

i wonder how awkward it is at anet hq when habib and devon walk by eachother in the office

but its exactly about the bloodlust,
1+1=2
with blood lust
1+1(+150) =/= 2
Equal skill vs. Equal skill = stat buff win.

The end.

Should make it increasingly harder to take all 3 orb buffs.

If you have no bloodlust, you should need 3 capture points. If you have 1 , you should need 4, if you already have 2 you should need 5.

The problem with this buff is it applies to all maps. That causes other players to think that it’s not fair, and gives the impression that they won without skill.

The solution is to limit each buff per borderland. Where Blue BL’s buff only applies to that bl and EB. And if a certain color covers all borderlands, it will only apply to those maps, and eb which won’t stack.

50 bloodlust points per map and eb which does not stack. Blood lust stays, the bonus isn’t so high, and everyone is happy.

So dev team, go do this.

Lord of the Rings Online tried almost the exact same thing a couple years back. If you captured these outposts they would give global stat increase + renown (WvW xp bonus).

The result: the side with more players logged on at a given time would control the outposts, because there are more players to cover the map. And thus they would win fights unless horribly outplayed. It was utterly ridiculous because the only thing you could expect was the undermanned team’s spawn being camped.

Why on earth would you give the winning (aka more populated) side in a 24/7 game a way to snowball even harder. I wish Anet would look at other games and learn from their mistakes…

There is one more piece to this problem that I don’t recall anyone mentioning here, and it’s one that’s been ingame since the beginning. WvW bonuses are also giving extra stats, and those stats are directly linked to your server’s war score. While most have no effect on combat stats, there are 3 that do. Buffs to endurance regen has a somewhat minor effect, but the gains to health and healing are more substantial combat buffs.

The server maintaining the highest PPT/war score is going to unlock these faster, and have better stat increases. If that server has significantly better coverage/population, this score/buff gap is even larger, and they are also likely to have an easier time holding the Bloodlust buffs. The stronger they become on their own, the more buffs the game throws at them to make them even stronger.

DevonCarver.5370:

The stat boost, while controversial, is there to give the buff meaning in the context of the general WvW battle. Providing boosts like %WXP, etc. don’t have impact in fights against other sides, they are just a nice bonus for you. The stat boost and the points for finishing players mean that not only do you want to have the buff, but you don’t want your opponents to have it.

You are so delusional its actually quite sickening, you think the people that are the hardcore wvwv players, the players that acutally give a kitten to log in everyday, do you acutally think those players love siege as much as you guys do? no the players that still log in everyday(myself included) play this game for fights and to say those stat bonus dont mean much to the overall battle, well thats the dumbest thing ive heard all year. Have fun losing your hardcore crowd and wvw can be the casual gametype you always wanted it to be.

Btw the way you guys copy/pasted spvp capture points into wvw, are you kittenign kidding me? so lazy

If the ruins of power were designed with the purpose to pull in big zergs with bloodlust and give smaller groups an equal fighting chance with the ruins/broken terrain then not having any statistic gain in holding them would defeat the purpose of the aforementioned.

However bloodlust does create and increase imbalance in the game with wvw populations disparity and differences in coverage and zerg sizes. I think a good solutions would be to have ruins of luck that stack magic find instead of ruins of power, and move one of the ruins points from the central lake up to the north supply camp where the former orb of power was. This should rebalance the game and not distort it in favour to the over populated servers with big zergs all round coverage. This should also please roamers, dualist, and GvG.

ThaOwner.7560:

DevonCarver.5370:

The stat boost, while controversial, is there to give the buff meaning in the context of the general WvW battle. Providing boosts like %WXP, etc. don’t have impact in fights against other sides, they are just a nice bonus for you. The stat boost and the points for finishing players mean that not only do you want to have the buff, but you don’t want your opponents to have it.

You are so delusional its actually quite sickening, you think the people that are the hardcore wvwv players, the players that acutally give a kitten to log in everyday, do you acutally think those players love siege as much as you guys do? no the players that still log in everyday(myself included) play this game for fights and to say those stat bonus dont mean much to the overall battle, well thats the dumbest thing ive heard all year. Have fun losing your hardcore crowd and wvw can be the casual gametype you always wanted it to be.

Btw the way you guys copy/pasted spvp capture points into wvw, are you kittenign kidding me? so lazy

It’d be nice if they apologized or something, he even says it’s controversial. I think I might have to push my bet back a whole extra month. If he truly believes this, it’s gonna take a long time for his stubborn butt to realize no one likes this. This is such a shame, sighs they attempt to cater to the roamers and end up biting everyone in the kitten . Now our smaller zergs of 15-20 won’t be able to contend with BP’s 25-30 man zergs like we used to do. Since they have more numbers = all bloodlust points. I might start doing dungeons and fractals. Thanks Devon for making me indulge in other parts of GW2 besides Wvw, maybe that’s what he wanted everyone to do It’s genius.

To say this bloodlust buff has no affect on wvw, to me, means you do not roam at all.

When 3 servers are up against one another, and one server completely out populates the other 2, then you have a server that has 150 bloodlust. One of the roamers I was out with tonight, got backstabbed for 13000+. The group of SBI we came across, literally had 150 bloodlust, and all the rest of the stacks that they could get in the game. Our group of 5, could not even take down 1 of their 5 because of these insane new buffs.

This is probably the worst idea for wvw I have every come across, and will likely make WvW casual based and actually loose the people, like myself, who don’t even PvE anymore. In my opinion, you really messed up WvW with this update.

Anet, you think this is suppose to be “beneficial” and geared towards roamers? You couldn’t be more wrong. You are basically making the hardcore roaming groups, have to zerg to stay alive, because roaming against other groups with 150 is IMPOSSIBLE to do now. What you guys implemented basically had the complete opposite effect then you intended. I really have no idea how this decision was made, but I sincerely hope you guys rethink this, because to me, this is worse then the orbs.

There is so much good sense and logic in the players’ feedbacks and field experience, in all your suggestions, I really feel sad the devs can’t understand the points you guys made

Outnumbered should be the buff giving stat increases, not bloodlust. Make the weak stronger, not the strong. At least have outnumbered magnify bloodlust.

MyPuppy.8970:

There is so much good sense and logic in the players’ feedbacks and field experience, in all your suggestions, I really feel sad the devs can’t understand the points you guys made

Honestly, I dont think DevonCarver, or any of them truly care. Only when they experience the incoming Mass Exodus, and when it starts hurting them monetarily, will they start to pretend to “care”.

Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to get rid of the lags.

MyPuppy.8970:

Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to get rid of the lags.

Interesting, make less people want to play WvW, lag decreases, It’s so simple yet genius. I wonder who came up with this brilliant idea?

Terrible idea, if anything should give a stats boost its outnumbered. Plenty of other good ideas in this thread to what bonus you could get instead of bloodlust that would be worth fighting for.
This has made fighting servers that where a pain and hard before to ridiculous and pointless, putting people off and giving the server with 3 stacks even better numbers.
Seems to me that it will be you roflstomping or being roflstomped for the whole week from now on

Having now played with the bloodlust available for quite some time I really can’t see the issues here.

Maybe my match-up is even enough so that it won’t be too unbalanced (which is unlikely if looking at the scores and coverage of one of the servers) but as of this time no server seems to have gotten an unfair advantage due to the buff, nor have a single server ever managed to hold all three buffs for more than a few minutes (if ever).