Guild Wars 2

Below is a portion of an article that I wrote for my site, found here: http://wvwstrategy.net/bloodlustbrainstorm/

Possible Changes – A Brainstorm
Decreasing the Power of the Buff

In order to decrease the magnitude of power that the current bloodlust buff has, it could be simply nerfed so that it has less effect for pvp interactions. Note: I am not talking about removing or changing the stomping part of the buff here.

Possible non-stat increase buffs for players and/or NPCs that can be combined or mismatched in conjunction with each other:

• Increases speed of friendly Dolyaks.
• Increases speed of workers.
• Increases world experience gain.
• Increases damage to supervisors, tower lords, and keep lords.
• Bloodlust buff only for friendly NPCs.
• Bloodlust Buff gives 150 stats to those around sentry points.

Making the Buff an Unlock

Instead of having Bloodlust give a buff, we make it unlock certain abilities for the server. Here are some suggestions:

• Allows for Veteran Supervisor’s Righteous Indignation timers to be seen on the map for your team.
• Increases the rate of capture on capture points in towers and keeps for your team.
• Reduces the size of capture points in towers and keeps for your team.
• Hostile creatures become neutral or friendly for your server. (okay, this one is kinda lame and is PvE kitten)
• Allows for all enemy siege in a keep to turn friendly when keep is captured.
• Keeps and towers captured while under Bloodlust retain their reinforced doors and walls.
• Temporarily unlocks all siege WXP upgrades to everyone on your team, regardless of their level.
• Enemy groups of 25 and over can now be seen on the map with new markers that move as they move.
• Various traps unlocked and only useable for your team. (needs the most work for implementation and design, fairly gimmicky, but sounds fun).

Stomping RNG In Addition to Server Points

Upon finishing a player, you have a chance to:

• Gain supply.
• Gain karma.
• Gain wxp.
• Gain bonus xp.
• Gain 5 extra points to the server.
• Receive supply trap. (because, it’s underused in current meta)
• Gain short term booster buff (magic find, wxp, karma, exp).
• Receive bonus champion bag. (common, rare, exotic with appropriate chances).
  * Receive wxp vial, karma jug, or bag of coins.

edit: I did not mean to make this a Q&A post and it isn’t saving my edit for when I change it to normal post. Sorry!

Why not simply make it increase damage of trebs catas and rams and NOT arrow cart/ballista, I can’t see any harmful effect of this, it would let servers who have nothing get momentum and would help the servers who have everything much less, seems like everything else helps the winning more populated server too much… people want wxp and ascended mats, being able to take buildings back quickly is alot of incentive to fight for the middle.(with the point on stomp)

I think a damage increase to attacker siege is not a bad suggestion, and I nearly put it in as my suggestion list. The only thing about that is right now offensive siege is getting powerful enough at it is and I’m worried about it affecting the gameplay too much with ram mastery already making rams extremely dangerous. I was thinking that maybe it could do something more defensive for attackers similar to breakout events or the Iron Hide buff, but it all seems overpowered in my head and sounds tricky to balance. Perhaps if you could weaken enemy gates temporarily, instead of buff your own siege? Lock enemy supply in a keep for a short period of time maybe? Not sure.

- Allows you to upgrade keeps with karma instead of gold. (the karma icon is already in place for such a thing)

[Because you made your OP a question, no one is able to +1 it, so I’ll just +1 your reply. It is well structured and full of great ideas.]

@OP; A lot of the first and second list seem trivial/meaningless, and some of them seem like things that should be the result of player action on the field. The third list seems like stuff that would either go well into a Mastery or should be baseline.

My thoughts.

There are a few things I’m thinking about when trying to address orbs/bloodlust;

1. The mechanic cannot be deleted. It can be stretched to infinity, but it must exist in some way.
2. It should not affect a player’s power at all.
3. Objectives are fine to modify.
4. Siege weapons are kind of stickly; be careful modifying them. Power growth with them has not been gentle on walls.

And there are a few other problems which exist in WvW;
1. The game doesn’t change as it progresses. It may as well last 2 days, not a week.
2. Objective upgrades are not particularly deep.

So, we have orbs/bloodlust, and we have two problems that are fundamentally rooted in longevity. So… Rework orbs so that they make the game change as the week progresses, and so that they change objective upgrades somehow.

I thought about it for not long at all and eventually I ended up on “turn orbs into a resource that allow you to permanently upgrade objectives, and these upgrades are built over the course of days to produce a cadence as the week progresses”.

I’d prefer to avoid things that increase damage (and to a lesser extent defence) passively, but I’m all for ‘utility’ buffs. Taking a structure with its upgrades would be incredible incentive for people to keep the buffs up (maybe 1 tier of upgrades for each stack) without interfering with fights, and it doesn’t just say ‘here, you’re magically better now’ – they still have to take the structure. Faster supply deliveries, faster yaks, stronger yaks… etc. could all be important benefits as well.

The ‘large group RADAR’ type thing sounds amusing to me; by nature it would be of less use against servers with very low populations.

Yeah, I really like the idea of giving buffs that help lower populated servers to get them on their feet. That’s why I suggested making upgrades faster for them by taking keeps and keeping the upgrades or siege, since it would only help the attacker force (usually the people with less towers/keeps). The buff right now only serves to affect open fights which is a small role in the ppt game.