Guild Wars 2

Better still: allow us to reset WXP point allocation and cap the number of points that can be used on a WXP build.

This way we get build diversity rather than the massive incentive to build a monolithic do-everything-WvW toon.

Aberrant.6749:

Zenguy.6421:

Zoel.9154:

Power creep in World Versus World has now reached the point that it poses a significant barrier to entry for casual players.

+1

+2

I would also include alts in this.

This too

Zoel.9154:

Power creep in World Versus World has now reached the point that it poses a significant barrier to entry for casual players.

+1

Lahel.6381:

So by OP’s system, if I choose to solo roam on a battleground with 130 people, I should have 150 less of every stat?

Wouldn’t that be better than having 150 less of every stat when your enemy outnumber you?

Cuchullain.3104:

I like this idea and it could easily be done without hurting PVE buffs. Just combine two low-pop servers (preferably in a way that balances the Oceanic people) and let whatever buffs that WvW server earns apply to both PVE servers. Simple.

^ This

I really like this idea, but fear it conflicts with Anet’s current direction which seems entirely based around increasing rewards for leaders.

Wasn’t there an Anet post some time back saying people who encounter situations like the one Dangermouse has described should report them because they constitute a breach of game rules?

CrassBippy.4619:

actually, they [badges of honor] were given away because anet doesnt want to anger the droves of legendary chasers that spend hundreds of dollars on their game.

That’s what I was saying. The idea that all those players would go to WvW to get those badges of honor simply failed and now, as well as having to give away badges to PVe’ers, Anet have have too many WvW servers for the number of people who play WvW.

Half the problem is that all enemies look the same (same color tags). You need to read the text within their tag to see which server they’re on – bit how often do you get to do that?

Seems to me, the simple solution is to make the tags of the two enemy servers different colors. Then in the heat of battle you would be able to distinguish enemies from potential allies. (Maybe someone could post that over in the suggestion forums.)

Blix.8021:

eh, it’s not hard to get the ~90ish gold you need to pay for the gems to transfer.

And the best place to get that ~90ish gold is?

Banzie.5248:

They already said nope.

Sadly true.

The question is: Why?

WvW was originally designed as a direct extension of PvE: “Come and defend your world from invaders”; WvW benefits apply in PvE; etc.

It was recognized that most GW2 players would sign up for PvE, and the idea was that WvW would create a natural transition path from PvE to PvP, especially for L80 players seeking more end game content and challenge.

What was a great idea in theory hasn’t worked out in practice, with the numbers moving to WvW and PvP being been far lower than anticipated. WvW participation has been so abysmally low, in fact, that even simple incentives to participate in WvW like the need to get 500 Badges of Honor for a Legendary have failed and Anet have had to resort to giving them away free as achievement point rewards. As for the WvW buffs to PvE, the only people who even notice them are the WvW’ers. The result has been that we now have too many underpopulated WvW servers.

The only remaining benefits of keeping PVe and WVW linked are: a) players who join WvW default join a sever containing players they may know from their PvE sever; and b) guilds can participate in both PvE and WvW knowing their members will be on the same server together.

These last benefits are real but could be achieved with less WvW servers, simply by having some PvE servers sharing the WvW servers (e.g. two PvE servers to each WvW server for all except the top tier or so in each region).

The current server mismatch is a symptom of two things:

1. too many WvW servers
2. population being the largest determinant of outcomes in WvW

The solution is not to penalise the players on the most populous servers, but to increase the populations of the other servers to more competitive levels.

As we’re not going to get an influx of new players into WvW (despite Anet’s hopes for the new league), the only way to achieve this is consolidate the WvW population form the other servers onto a smaller number of servers.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Commander

Sarrs.4831:

I’ve said in a lot of other places that the variance needs to be brought down, but how do you propose to fix it without causing serious damage elsewhere?

Maybe this will help: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Time-for-a-change-of-direction (in particular the stuff on reducing the number of WvW servers).

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

Forcing people to spread out is a bad idea because there are only so many to go around.

Thanks for highlighting this point, CreativeAnarchy, as it wasn’t clear in my OP. I’ve edited the OP to address this (ref recommendation #1).

The imbalance between WvW servers is the direct result of their being too many servers for the number of people playing WvW. A few servers have addressed this by stacking their WvW populations to more effective levels, but this has further depleted the WvW populations on the remaining servers. Spreading the WvW population out across the current servers wouldn’t work because, while balanced, the effect would be that every server population would be below what works best for WvW – and what we want is great WvW.

Instead, the number of WvW servers needs to be reduced to the point where all WvW servers have an effective WvW population. The steps for doing this are:

• Unhook WvW servers from PvE – this is required to be able to reduce the number of WvW servers which right now is directly tied to the number of PvE servers.
• Consolidating WvW servers with low populations – this is where the actual reduction in the total number of WvW servers happens.

The following steps are required because there will still be significant differences in WvW server population after consolidation, and these will help the numbers even out voluntarily without having to forcibly break up populations:

• Capping WvW server populations at the highest current WvW server population – this prevents blows outs on the highest population servers.
• Making it free to join or transfer to WvW servers with lower populations – this helps grow less populated servers.

ykyk.2740:

The matchups are unbalanced because SERVERS are unbalanced. The power disparity between tiers in NA ladder is beyond silly. There is no way to address this unless matchups are locked in all the time.

There is another solution: start balancing the WvW server populations by unhooking them from the PvE servers, consolidating low population servers, capping server populations, and making it free to join lower population servers.

WvW isn’t successful enough to meet Anet’s aspirations, and the the way it’s been headed it’s not going to be.

Even with (or perhaps because of) the disasters of the current patch, WvW is rapidly turning into a game focus on the hardcore WvW players and servers. This is emptying out the WvW maps, makes WvW less appealing to new and casual players (they are even more stomp bait than they were in the past), and makes it progressively harder to create successful match-ups in WvW.

The problems seems to arise from two lines of flawed thinking:

• Flawed Idea #1: Imbalance is a defining characteristic of WvW
  This has led to Anet’s Wvw team:
  a) Implementing changes that make WvW even more unbalanced
  b) Being blind to the potential to improve balance in WvW and the benefits that would deliver (WvW would be more fun for existing players and and more attractive to new/casual players)
• Flawed Idea #2: Increasing player power is a successful strategy for WvW
  This idea has lead to changes that directly increase the power of dedicated WvW players and servers and in doing so has:
  a) Made WvW less appealing to new players and players on servers with low levels of WvW participation
  b) Exaggerated the differences in competitiveness between WvW servers.
  Amazingly, this idea (which seems to be derived from the flawed imbalance idea) is directly counter to the approach that has been fundamental to the success of the rest of GW2.

There is one further problem:

• there are too many WvW servers for the number of people playing WvW.
  This results in many servers having WvW populations that too low to be competitive, and avid WvW players flocking to the few servers with competitive populations and in the process further eroding the competitiveness of the servers they abandon.

Anet need to clean up the mess they’ve made of WvW with this latest patch. But rather than plaster over the latest problems, Anet would be far better to use this as a prompt to change direction and improve the balance in WvW. The obvious steps to doing this are:

1. Reduce the number of WvW servers and balance up their populations This can be done by:
   a) Unhooking WvW servers from PvE
   b) Consolidating servers with low populations
   c) Capping WvW sever populations at the highest current WvW server population
   d) Making it free to join or transfer to WvW servers with lower populations
2. Cap WVW gear stats at the exotic level
3. Remove buffs that cause power creep for WvW players

Once that’s in place, we will all have a more competitive environment in which to play WwW (and without which we simply don’t have enough people to play against). From there Anet can take complexity they’ve already put into WvW and make it work by doing things like: fixing the older lag problems, improving the commander system, fixing the party system, and fixing the excessive incentives for zerging.

Overall, this will make WvW more enjoyable for existing players as match-ups and in-game fights will be more balanced and therefore more exciting. This will also make it easier for new players to join WvW as they will a) have less of a performance deficit against established WvW players, and b) have access to more competitive WvW servers without having to sacrifice ties to their existing PvE communities.

Unfortunately, this will also require Anet to acknowledge that it has made mistakes with the direction it’s been taking WvW. The mistakes are there, but to date Anet has shown very little willingness or ability to acknowledge mistakes. Hopefully the disaster of this latest patch is enough to push them past that.

The other problem will be the dedicated WvW players who’ve become addicted to the extra power the recent changes (guard buff, bloodlust, open ended WXP abilities, ascended weapons) have given their characters. They’ve got used to winning more easily and won’t want to give up their hard won superpowers. Their challenge will be to accept that instead of making WvW better, that increase in power has been undermining WvW by i) making participation in WvW less appealing for new and casual players, and ii) making it harder for servers with more dedicated WvW players to find decent competition.

( http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/power-creep covers the basic issues. Anyone have links showing how imbalance and power creep erodes player numbers in PvP games?)

TLDR: Anet have to fix the current mess they’ve made of WvW. It will be far better if they do that in ways that return balance to WvW because that’s what it’s going to take for WvW to succeed.

[Edit: Included statement about there being too many WvW servers]
[Edit: revised recommendation #1 to explicitly state it will reduce the number of WvW servers]

Tom Gore.4035:

And yet people claim if WvW was normalized like sPvP is, it would become a ghost town.

Do they?
Do you?

One of the most frequent requests is for better (i.e. more balanced against a wider selection of servers) WvW match-ups.
Why wouldn’t that apply at the player level as well?

Personally I far prefer fighting enemies of comparable strength – that way when I win I know I out fought them and if I lose its because they out fought me.

That post by Devon is 100% consistent with the changes Anet have made to GW2 this year. I think Devon did us a great favour posting as candidly as he did, because his post is making it very hard for ANet to pretend that isn’t how they’ve been operating.

It’s not that Anet haven’t pay attention to these forums – they clearly have, as evidenced by the fact that they make changes that we’ve requested: e.g. gameplay that rewards multiple groups over monolithic zergs; more opportunities for roamers and small groups; new content in the WvW maps – all things we’ve been asking for.

However, it appears that Anet’s attention to these forums stops once they’ve collected a list of ideas about areas where we want changes. It’s as though, once they’ve got that list, they then ignore anything further we might have to say about the priority or nature of the changes we want. Instead they pick some items off that list that involve new content and go off to develop those according to their own ideas, independent of anything we might have to say on the subject. (This game is over 1yo now, so they shouldn’t still be putting time into getting areas of the game to work – just look at how much new GW2 content Anet have rolled out!) This is why they can deliver a poorly thought out WXP system, some map changes and a game breaking (and now performance killing) buff we’ve been protesting about for months, while ignoring some of our top complaints (e.g. the broken party system, the stone age commander tags).

ANet don’t seem to have recognized that WvW needs work on its foundations and simply piling on new content is only making things worse. The original WvW didn’t need WXP progression, PvP maps or power buffs to make it a success, it already had most of what it needed. What’s been missing are tweaks to the combat, rewards and server systems to make match-ups more interesting and encourage more diverse styles of WvW gameplay; that, and a few QoL changes (most notably to the commander system).

Instead, Anet’s blinkered drive to deliver new content combined with their practice of cherry-picking the forums for ideas for new content and side-lining anything else, has meant that WvW still isn’t working properly at its core. The starkest illustration of this is that Anet are charging blindly into the new WvW leagues their ears firmly stopped up against the now overwhelming cries that those leagues are doom to failure.

The disaster of this latest patch gives Anet an unprecedented opportunity to get off the content treadmill they’re on with WvW and go to work on the underlying problems that are holding back WvW. I hope they take this chance.

Sovereign.1093:

I think the main issue is the community over reacting to the change; thus the player base is waning, other than new games competing with gw2 and taking new customers.

That’s the approach Anet have been taking to the resistance to the Bloodlust buff – which would be fine if it really is just an overreaction. But what if it’s not?

What if, instead of being an overreaction, the strength of opposition to Bloodlust and the lastest patch is the result of a serious mismatch between where Anet are taking WvW and what really works in WvW? If that is the actual case, then the blindness of “they’re just overreacting” is going to make it very hard for Anet to see that they need to change direction if they want WvW to be successful.

The most common complaints I’ve heard about WvW have been i) lag and ii) unbalanced match-ups. This latest patch has made both of these worse. That means that the reaction to this patch is not an overreaction, but the inevitable result of making the most disappointing aspects of WvW even worse.

Parktou.4263:

And they both shouldn’t exist…..

QFT

Far better to cap WvW weapon stats at the exotic level.

Yes, I know this will upset all those hardcore players who’ve picked up ascended and legendary weapons and are now very attached to those extra stats. But the benefits of more competitive enemies and therefore more exciting combats are worth it.

wbonetwo.2196:

I have all of the classes level to 80 except for engineer

That’s your problem, right there.

Spicyhash.7605:

Really, there should be no resurrection downed skills and if there are, all classes should have them.

QFT

Faelaan.4681:

WvW isn’t fair… It’s not suppose to be.

That’s where things have been going wrong.

The fact that most WvW battles are unbalanced in some way doesn’t mean balance should be abandoned as a design objective for WvW. That’s like saying that because some homes get broken into people should stop locking up their homes when they go out.

WvW is a more fun the more balanced the match-ups. This applies at all levels of WvW. It’s as simple as that.

[Edited for typos]

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

Zenguy.6421:

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

Release to spawn and I’ll stop.

Did you realize that gives them power over you?

If I’m am acting in such a way that I /sit multiple times, laugh, point, otherwise deficate all over the corpse, they are corpse spying or a mesmer waiting for a thief to res them.

As long as they persist in their deceased state in the spot that I’m at, especially if they are a mes waiting for a res(really any corpse that I’m guarding on inner keep) as I will be entertaining myself in the fashion that I wish, I’ll continue to violate the corpse in any way that I possibly can.

Dude, it’s just a game and those really are just pixels on a screen. But if thinking like that helps you . . .

Greens Daily Ritual.9025:

“This is to ensure that the playing field is as level as it can be at the start and the finish of the season.”

Well they’ve already screwed this up.

If Anet genuinely think this is the best thing they can do level the WvW playing field in preparation for the leagues, then they have a very narrow understanding of WvW.

Ostra.3927:

NCsoft for all its faults (it has plenty) has always let ArenaNet do its own thing. During development, for the entire duration of GW1… I am not sure.

What I do know is just before GW2 was released a few of the key players from ArenaNet left the company. I did not worry to much at the time.. but I have a feeling they were really the hear and soul. These were the ex Blizzard guys btw that founded Anet, or at least a few of them were. I think that is the main problem here.

Any idea where they went?

Runty Choir.4893:

So if we are only a minority on the forums how are we supposed to give Anet feedback that they will listen to?

We can give the feedback (or in the case of the Bloodlust buff would that be feedforward?) – it’s up to ANet how well they will listen to it.

ANet are currently finding out what happens when they don’t pay enough attention to the insights and recommendations from one of their forum communities (i.e. they develop changes that don’t work and/or make a part of Gw2 less appealing to players). The test will be how much they learn from this. Fortunately this isn’t the first time they’ve made this mistake, so hopefully they’re able to spot the recurring pattern here.

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

Release to spawn and I’ll stop.

Did you realize that gives them power over you?

The Game Slayer.7632:

ArkAngel.7940:

It would be nice if kit refinement has its internal cool down be either reduced or persistent for each kit. The global CD really hurts using multiple kits. Seeing as the kits kind of act like elemental attunements where they do not have a global internal CD but only a CD for each attunement in their aura or evasive arcana.

thats because evasive arcana is a GM trait and Kr is, minor or adept trait.

That’s the logic ANet used to kill off the useful KR trait. If they’d just waited a bit longer and included in the patch where they moved traits around we could still have a useful KR trait.

If Anet would just swallow its pride enough to give us a decent Master or Grandmaster KR trait along the lines of the original. (The original KR trait really was the best uniquely Eng class trait whose biggest flaw was it was sitting in the wrong tier.)

Niim.9260:

Drigan.7382:

Do competitive WvW guilds have to stop playing to show you that you need to change it?

Nothing about WvW is competitive. Apparently ANET wants it to be that way, since everything about their design is about appeasing the non-competitive in the crowd.

And that’s just nuts.

Somehow the observation that WvW battles are almost always be unbalanced (different populations, up levels, the impact of better commanding, etc) has turned into a deliberate strategy (power creep through WXP, server buffs, etc.) and its destroying WvW.

I’ve noticed this problem when escorting Doly’s too. After the first few seconds swiftness seems to drain off a doly far faster than it should. Is this meant to be happening with dolys?

Benjamin.6235:

JudgeD.5673:

One can also argue that having the right WvW rank/skills and killing 5 NPCs is also OP vs someone who doesn’t have the same buff, but I’ve yet to hear any complaint about this.

Then you haven’t been listening.

QFT.

The Guard buff came out when WXP was new so it took time for players to get full access to those buffs. This meant that the true impact of those buffs has only become apparent over time. People have been complaining about it but the boiled frog syndrome has meant the number of complaints has been far lower than if the full buff had been available when it was first released. The Bloodlust buff on the other hand arrived at full power so it’s triggered a much more immediate reaction.

You’re right, I did miss that.

The good thing about Devon’s post was it put out in plain sight what was already happening in practice. That wasn’t the first time someone from Anet had expressed those sentiments. The difference with Devon’s post was that he didn’t sugar coat it or gloss over it, he just spelled it out honestly and I respect him for that (after all, it’s not as if Devon was the originator of that approach).

Overall, I’m very glad Devon made that post. That it occurred directly before the disaster of this latest patch is even better. Now Anet can’t pretend that isn’t what’s been going on and instead are having to engage directly with the consequences of that practice. I’m hoping the result of all this will be that Anet will start paying more attention to the insight and recommendations this community have for improving WvW. The test will be whether Anet have the cahunas to admit they’ve stuffed up and change the direction they’ve been taking WvW.

It’s only happened to me a couple of times and each time I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the person doing it. (One time I got stomped and went to top up my coffee, when I got back the the person who’d stomped me was still there jumping up and down on my corpse.) If their world is so small that they waste time doing that then they deserve my pity not my ire.

Defending has become even less relevant with the latest patch. Better to cap the buff and go farming stomps.

Nuzt.7894:

Turamarth.3248:

With the old matchup system people complained that the matches were too stale. EU tier 1 and 2 for example were the same for about two months and it took the complete breakdown of two servers to change it.

I do believe it was the Minority that complained, just ask Devon.

Except that may not have been as much of a minority as you think. For all we know, those few servers may represent a sizable chunk of the overall WvW population.

Quick win: separate WvW and PvE servers, set a population cap on the WvW servers, and consolidate the WvW servers with low populations.

Result: WvW servers have much more balanced populations and match-ups become far more competitive.

In the beginning there was a recognition that WvW battles can’t be balanced the way PVP fights are.

Somehow, this simple observation has grown into a full blown strategy that is destroying WvW:

• Power creep through WXP abilities
• Ascended weapons in WvW
• Buffs for the leading team
• Increasing rewards for winning servers
• Match-ups that are more and more unbalanced
• Leagues involving severely mismatched severs
• No attempts to balance WvW server populations

Then we have QoL changes such as reducing lag and improving the commander system pushed back behind the release of performance degrading new content.

WvW needs competitive match-ups and tools that help less organised servers get better organised far more than it does new content. Yes, the domination of zergs was a problem, but the solution for at wasn’t an sPvP system that gives low rewards to participants (sooner or later people will realise that zerging still gives far greater rewards regardless of whether or not they have the Bloodlust buff).

ANet clearly do care (e.g. all the map development work that could have going into PvE or PvP) but that on its own has not been enough for them to pay more than superficial attention to this communities ideas about what will make WvW more successful. (Devon Carter’s notorious post may have upset many people, but it did put out in the open what was already happening in practice.) I’m hoping this latest disaster will be the catalyst for Anet finally giving deeper consideration to insights and recommendations this community has about what will make WvW work better.

The problem with match-ups is that WvW participation varies too much across the different PvE servers.

• There simply aren’t enough PvE servers with comparable levels of WvW participation to make good match-ups a common event (or to allow variation in those few cases where balanced 3-way match-ups can occur).

ANet have tried several different methods of creating match-ups for WvW and they have all failed for this same reason. The upcoming league is yet another attempt, but only a very small number of PvE servers have enough interest in WvW to compete effectively regardless of how big a reward Anet offers to the winners.

The solution to the match-up problem is to create servers that are more balanced.

ANet are saying this isn’t possible, but that’s only because they are keeping the WvW servers tied to the PvE servers. Why? That’s how Anet built it originally and although it has failed to deliver good WvW match-ups, the success of competition at the top of the WvW tables gives the false impression that the current server system can work. The increased rewards offered in the upcoming league indicates makes it clear Anet are hoping success of WvW at the top of the tables will somehow magically ripple down to all the other PvE servers. What is overlooked here is that the success of competition at the top of the tables is an aberration caused by active WvW’ers migrating to the WvW server of their choice. In short, WvW match-ups have only been successful where people have ignored the PvE-WvW link and instead treated servers as WvW destinations in their own right.

What if Anet separated WvW from the PvE servers? This would allow:

1. WvW servers to have balanced populations
2. Consolidation of low population servers into populations that are far more competitive in WvW

The result would be would be far more balanced WvW servers and far more competitive match-ups – this has got to be good for WvW.

TLDR: The idea that WvW servers can’t be balanced is an outdated fiction that is hurting WvW. The solution is to:

1. Separate the WvW and PvE servers
2. Consolidate servers with low WvW participation
3. Balance WvW populations in same way as PvE server populations.

Sizzle Hint.1820:

Zenguy.6421:

Not being a PvP’er, this patch has made roaming in WvW less enjoyable for me.

I main an Eng in PvE which I use for late night roaming in WvW in the BLs. However, I’m far less inclined to do so now after this patch because:

• The changes have turned the bottom half of the Borderlands maps into a low reward PvP zone – if I wanted to PvP I wouldn’t be in WvW
• The buff is far too powerful and prone to changing in the middle of a fight – I want to know I won or lost a fight because of skill, not because someone on a different map stood in a giant’s toilet at the right/wrong time.
• Capping the buff is unrewarding and takes time away from more strategic activities
• Solo roaming on my Eng is too easy when we’ve got the buff and a waste of time when my enemies have.

Serious? You enter a PvP zone and then you complain about PvP being there? Erm…

My mistake, I should have said sPvP.

I enjoy the PvP aspects of WvW, but I don’t to WvW just to duel, do small group fights and stand in giant toilet spaces. If I wanted to do that I’d spend all my time in GW2’s PvP zone.

There are far more ways to roam in WvW than just spending my time looking for small group fights – and that’s what I prefer to do. But this patch has made those less enjoyable for me, hence my down vote as a roamer.

The logic is in the second paragraph of my post. (Any corrections or additions to this logic gratefully accepted.)

Busting up the tier 1 severs isn’t the solution.

The solution is to separate WvW from the PvE servers, and to cut the total number of WvW servers back to a number that better fits how many people play WvW.

NB: The idea that WvW is an extension of PvE world simply hasn’t worked. WvW players may care about the PPT benefits in PvE, but the PvE players never notice them. The only thing the current PvE-WvW link really does is give PvE players a default WvW server to join.

The down side of the current PvE-WvW link is that, unless they start on sever that already has a strong WvW presence, PvE players who develop a serious interest in WvW often have to leave their PvE community if they want to get invovled with a stronger WvW community. Rather than strengthening the ties between PvE and WvW, this has the effect of further undermining those already weak ties on severs with low WvW participation.

The Bloodlust mechanism is the cause of the lag. Forget the buff, just the mechanism alone is killing WvW.

Every time one of the buffs changes hands it simultaneously affects 2/3 of WvW population across all 4 maps. It doesn’t really matter what the buff does, having to simultaneously updated 2/3 of the entire WvW population is killing performance all on its own. And that’s before you start to factor in updates to conditions applied, etc.

I think Anet may have overextended themselves with this patch. Instead of getting the basics working right (performance, commanders/grouping, massive incentives to zerg, etc.), they’ve endeavoured to ‘fix’ WvW by adding yet another layer of complexity and its attendant performance impact to the game. The result is even more problems, not less.

There is an game feedback system already: play what you enjoy and don’t play what you don’t.

Unfortunately, that system doesn’t give ANet much useful information (e.g. Is the drop off in WvW participation due to the maps? The buff? The performance issues? Or a combination of these?).

What’s needed is an area where people can post feedback, discuss changes, develop suggestions, etc. about GW2. What would make this even more useful is if Anet were able to do things like see how many people are interested in particular topics and even ask questions and add information directly into those discussions.
- Maybe I’m missing something here, but that sure looks like these forums to me.

MiLkZz.4789:

Imagine you taking down 1 gate/wall of a a keep/tower. Imagine 50 people inside which ain’t that abnormal. Imagine they all chaining their aoe into the gap. Good luck walking through and surviving.

Except a 50 person zerg could walk through that, and do.
Have you never seen a zerg sacking while under continuous AoE fire?

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.

@ArkAngel you are right.

Unfortunately, Anet have been adamant that as a 10 pt trait Kit Refinement should have restrictions that ensure it is only ever of minor value.

We keep hoping that one day Anet will listen to our requests and give us a Master or Grandmaster level KR trait that does as you say. (FYI, KR used to do that and as a result was one of the most popular Eng traits, but rather than move it to a more appropriate level, Anet instead spent two months reworking it to give us the KR trait we have now. I believe a few people still use it occasionally in PvP.)