ArenaNet gives more details on the World vs. World Borderland changes coming tomorrow.

Changes are coming to WvW in the Tequatl Rising update releasing tomorrow in Guild Wars 2. In an effort to keep things interesting, ArenaNet is replacing the lake in the middle of the WvW Borderlands with the new Ruins of Power that will rewards servers with a new and powerful buff.

There are five ruins that have their own flavor with all new art. In the center of each of these ruins is a capture point that work similar to the capture points in sPvP with a few modifications. The most notable of these changes is the control decay. If there are no players within a captured point, it will slowly decay back to a neutral status. If an opposing team steps into a captured point it will then decay even faster.

Like the capture points in sPvP, the rate of capture will remain the same whether there is 1 player or 50 friendly players within the point. With five total ruins, players are going to need to divide and conquer if they hope to acquire Bloodlust for their server.

If a single server is able to acquire three of the five points, a two-minute countdown event will start. If the server is then able to remain hold of at least three points during this two-minute period, their server will be awarded the Bloodlust buff.

Much like the Orbs of Power buff that existed at launch, the Bloodlust buff will cross over to all of the WvW servers. If the red server gets the Bloodlust buff on their own borderlands, it will buff all players on that borderland as well as the other borderlands and the Eternal Battlegrounds. This also means that a coordinated server can acquire all three Bloodlust buffs from each of the borderlands and have triple the effect.

The Bloodlust buff will give players a 50 point increase to all stats as well as healing power and condition damage. On top of this stat boost, it will also give your world 1 war score point every time a enemy is killed by use of a finisher. If a world own all three Bloodlust buffs, this means each completed finisher on a downed enemy will net the server 3 points. To put this into some perspective, each owned supply camp will give a server 5 points every 15 minutes.

After the Bloodlust buff is acquired on a borderlands, it will remain until another server has acquired the buff for themselves. This means that a server could grab the buff and then lose control of all the ruins, but doing so would make it easier for another world to claim the buffs and potentially acquire the buff for themselves.

According to the blog post, the ruins are set up to encourage small group fighting. Players will be able to find out the validity of this claim when the update this week. I personally will be interested in seeing how well the zerg will divide and conquer to claim this buff.

Matt "Mattsta" Adams

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