Guild Wars 2

Recently there have been a lot of changes to reflect mechanics, however I feel like Anet is approaching the problem incorrectly. Currently, several boss attacks are built as a large amount of projectiles over an area, (generating aoe circles for the player to avoid), and this volume of projectiles when reflected back at its source deals a ridiculously large amount of damage. Recently, such boss mechanics are being converted to be not reflectable, to fix issues where the boss would kill themselves too quickly/easily. This causes inconsistencies and confusion in what attacks can or cannot be reflected, destroyed, mitigated or what have you.

I wanted to bring up a discussion on what would be a better solution to the issue of reflects, as the way things are going, reflects are either overwhelmingly over powered, or rendered useless. I don’t particularly know what would be optimal; perhaps a maximum number of reflects that can be done? Reduce the damage bosses receive from reflected attacks? I was curious to see what ideas the gw2 community might have regarding this balance issue.

Well I can quickly think of 2 solutions:

- all projectiles are blocked by reflect skills but some types are not send back. It keeps reflects as a reliable defensive tool but without being to kill some bosses to quickly.

- put a maximum cap on reflect damage. A bit more difficult since this has to be determined for each projectile but could work fine.

Perhaps in the case of bosses and powerful attacks being reflected, perhaps it should be treated as if it was sourced as damage from Retaliation instead in a manner? That way the damage is still there but it isn’t overly abundant.

Tim.6450:

Well I can quickly think of 2 solutions:

- all projectiles are blocked by reflect skills but some types are not send back. It keeps reflects as a reliable defensive tool but without being to kill some bosses to quickly.

This would really be the preferable one. It helps solve the problems of confusing mechanics without having bosses die too quickly.

don’t change it?
…
if u think its not fair then don’t reflect, but seriously, when people do this it gets on my nerves… it makes peoples day easier and u go around “nerf this plz”… lol

shadowpass.4236:

don’t change it?
…
if u think its not fair then don’t reflect, but seriously, when people do this it gets on my nerves… it makes peoples day easier and u go around “nerf this plz”… lol

He’s referring to boss mechanics. You know, PvE only? He’s asking for consistency, not nerfs or buffs.

I normally say “I think” in these situations as to express my opinion clearing being my opinion. Today is not the case. I know this situation should be handled differently. If a boss can kill themselves with reflected attacks then they are either shooting too many projectiles or the projectiles are doing too much damage. Reflects aren’t the problem and nerfing them will only enforce the zerker “kill it quick” meta instead of encouraging counter-play.

All works as intended, my dears

While I would prefer to be able to reflect everything, I can also understand the need to provide some mechanics which players cannot entirely avoid by stacking their group a certain way (read: bring more guardians!).

One common reply then is to say “But just make the reflected projectile do less damage to the boss!”. True, and that’s already done in most cases. But the issue is, you still 100% avoid the damage on the party.
And while this is consistent with how I’d expect my reflect to work, it’s not consistent with any sense of immediate danger in PvE. Because it’d imply that I need to spam those projectiles to prevent a party of Guardians and Mesmers and Engineers from simply spam-reflecting them. But then, a party without those is going to get completely torn apart.

The other way to fix it would be to nerf/remove more reflects from the game. Only, in PvP they work out really well and provide some much-needed destacking/dezerging mechanic.

So that can’t really be done either.

I do think there should be a more clear visual indicator of what is a projectile and what not. Maybe non-projectiles display an orange skillshot-like line on the ground when firing, like the current AE markers?

The basic issue is that ANet took the computationally cheap route with reflects.

In contrast to retaliation, reflect pretty much flip the projectile around, attackers stats and all, and throw it back at the attacker.

All well and good in PVP where the numbers are within a limited range, but blows up when you get the “dodge or die” projectile spam of PVE bosses.

Two options.

1. make reflect work like retaliation, and base the damage on the reflect caster, not the attacker.

2. give up on the whole “active combat” malarky in PVE, as people are looking at every last way of avoiding it anyways (stack in corner and spam DPS being the prime example).

digiowl.9620:

Two options.

1. make reflect work like retaliation, and base the damage on the reflect caster, not the attacker.

2. give up on the whole “active combat” malarky in PVE, as people are looking at every last way of avoiding it anyways (stack in corner and spam DPS being the prime example).

1. Make reflects scale off the casters power. This would probably fix a lot.
2. Stop with the kittening troll bait.

alemfi.5107:

Recently, such boss mechanics are being converted to be not reflectable, to fix issues where the boss would kill themselves too quickly/easily.

Which is stupid. Bosses are already virtually immune to CC, Conditions are mostly useless due to the cap (some bosses are even immune to conditions) and now immune to reflects too? Just making bosses immune to everything is not how you make a boss fight hard…

This is why larger boss fights turn into mindless 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 fests. Because why would you use anything else than your main attack, stupid bosses are immune to anything but direct damage…

But keep something in mind, GW2 is the first MMO to really work the specific way it handles combat and class complexity.

In other words, there’s very little groundwork.

Two improvements I can see which would easily improve quality of life for bosses though:

• Reduce boss immunities, reductions and health somewhat to a lot.
• In turn, add a lot of adds and mechanics. This would also add a certain amount of realism, if I attack a commander, shouldn’t he pull with dozens and dozens of adds? Shouldn’t my party’s worry be how we handle those while still burning down the boss, who ideally has some kind of escalating mechanic?

I repost here what i already wrote elsewhere in regards of the Wurm :
————————————————————————————————————————————
Yeah .. as somebody who also deals with code for me it looks as if the problem is that the Wurm has unlimited targets with his attack and all those attacks are reflected now, since i can’t think that a single attack does 100.000 damage or whatever is needed to kill him instant.
So now since we have so much players on Megaserver he hits maybe 100 players with 1000 damage .. and if that all is reflected .. bamm .. there is the 100.000 damage.

Now as a fix reflect should only reflect simply 5 of those attacks, since that is the normal AoE limit, and the rest is either absorbed or still hits other players .. thats free to however they want it to work in that case.

Carighan.6758:

While I would prefer to be able to reflect everything, I can also understand the need to provide some mechanics which players cannot entirely avoid by stacking their group a certain way (read: bring more guardians!).

One common reply then is to say “But just make the reflected projectile do less damage to the boss!”. True, and that’s already done in most cases. But the issue is, you still 100% avoid the damage on the party.
And while this is consistent with how I’d expect my reflect to work, it’s not consistent with any sense of immediate danger in PvE. Because it’d imply that I need to spam those projectiles to prevent a party of Guardians and Mesmers and Engineers from simply spam-reflecting them. But then, a party without those is going to get completely torn apart.

The other way to fix it would be to nerf/remove more reflects from the game. Only, in PvP they work out really well and provide some much-needed destacking/dezerging mechanic.

So that can’t really be done either.

I do think there should be a more clear visual indicator of what is a projectile and what not. Maybe non-projectiles display an orange skillshot-like line on the ground when firing, like the current AE markers?

first of all you cant reflect everything, you can only reflect projectiles. Its a problem of consistency and understandability of rules.
Everything should follow the rules
things that dont follow the rules should have clear indication

they have long ranged attacks that you cannot reflect, they are beams, and ground targeted aoes/conal attacks.
If they wanted enemies to be long ranged and non reflectable they should have made the attacks be this type of attack.
Its lazy solutions, and destroying the ruleset design. These sort of rule breakers are building up and making combat into something where you dont know what skills will actually work and what skills will not.

You have unblockable skills with no tells
Skills whose attack range doesnt represent its animation
enemies immune to skills with no indicators

yall are basically building your combat ruleset into a spaghetti code. You need to stop doing this.

Mesmer focus reflects have been acting weird too

The absolute worst thing about these changes is that it is becoming less and less obvious when a projectile can be reflected (in PvE). If this trend continues, and ANet work very slowly and in trends when it comes to balancing, are we to:

• Stop playing
• Consult a chart of what can and cannot be reflected
• Use reflections when the chart designates that they are useful
• Bypass the above by learning the freakin’ “Projectiles that may be Reflected” chart

Any of the ideas in this thread are better than arbitrarily designating some projectiles vulnerable to Reflection and hoping you got the memo (and they don’t even patch note it).

It’s good to see that everyone is frustrated by this lack of consistency… hopefully anet takes note of this and comes up with a good solution. Keep those ideas coming!

With regards to the worm, they’ve made it pretty clear they don’t want us to be able to prevent the larva eggs from spawning. So with that in mind how could they have kept that functionality of the attack without getting rid of the reflects? The reflects prevent the eggs from spawning so they ‘d need a new projectile that behaves like a projectile but obviously can’t be reflected.

Dual.8953:

With regards to the worm, they’ve made it pretty clear they don’t want us to be able to prevent the larva eggs from spawning. So with that in mind how could they have kept that functionality of the attack without getting rid of the reflects? The reflects prevent the eggs from spawning so they ‘d need a new projectile that behaves like a projectile but obviously can’t be reflected.

Have the eggs emerge from the ground. We know the wurm is mostly underground anyway, so it makes sense.

I had one very simple thought that they could have done. What if they’d added “pierces reflects” to the mobs’ discription?
Sure it’d still hurt reflect users’ viability in meta speed runs, but meta speed runs are a player construct in the first place.
And they’d have changed the rules but kept them consistent by way that the revamped rule would be “Reflects reflect all projectiles, unless stated otherwise.”
I don’t expect this to be a popular idea, but it’s better then nothing.

dace.8019:

• Stop playing
• Consult a chart of what can and cannot be reflected
• Use reflections when the chart designates that they are useful
• Bypass the above by learning the freakin’ “Projectiles that may be Reflected” chart

Funny thing, I was going to gather a list of non-projectile projectiles some time ago…

How did anet changed reflections mechanics? I can’t find anything.

haviz.1340:

How did anet changed reflections mechanics? I can’t find anything.

A number of bosses just ignore them. That’s how.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

A number of bosses just ignore them. That’s how.

I thought they just made some attacks unblockable.

I dont PvE so I don’t know anything much about this… But it is really poor game design to be creating exceptions to the rules of the games mechanics. If something is OP or not working then it shows a flaw in their mechanics and design which needs to be fixed, not just bypassed in the specific situations they want. That’s a lazy and inconsistant solution and just re-enforces the idea that I, and most other WvW / PvP players have that PvE is not fun or interesting or difficult, it’s just a memory exercise of knowing where to stack and what to do where.

If you cant rely on the game mechanics to work round problems you face it’s no longer in interesting challenge to overcome, its just a “have prior knowledge of what the designer whats you to do because none of the mechanics you know from the rest of the game work here”.

Make bosses immune to their own (reflected) attacks.

i started my first mesmer after the june 3 patch. i have to say i was rather confused when my feedback felt like it couldn’t reflect kitten, save for the occasional pistol/rifle-wielding humanoid enemy. i was especially confused when it came to those freaking ice wurms from the shiverpeaks and their obnoxious knockback boulders. turns out they hit twice, so even if i get aegis or break stun, i’ll still be knocked back. and they do it EVERY FREAKING SECOND.

The whole thing just wreaks of bad design. If you make a boss with projectiles, then specifically make those projectiles avoid reflection, then maybe you shouldn’t have made the boss with projectiles in the first place.

Consistency is pretty important. When you have a skill that blocks attacks, but then throw a whole bunch of unblockable attacks into the game, then what good is the skill? Why not balance around people having blocks, instead of just making an attack unblockable?

Carighan.6758:

While I would prefer to be able to reflect everything, I can also understand the need to provide some mechanics which players cannot entirely avoid by stacking their group a certain way (read: bring more guardians!).

One common reply then is to say “But just make the reflected projectile do less damage to the boss!”. True, and that’s already done in most cases. But the issue is, you still 100% avoid the damage on the party.
And while this is consistent with how I’d expect my reflect to work, it’s not consistent with any sense of immediate danger in PvE. Because it’d imply that I need to spam those projectiles to prevent a party of Guardians and Mesmers and Engineers from simply spam-reflecting them. But then, a party without those is going to get completely torn apart.

At least for the PvE part: I think that’s actually just fine. The fact that if you can plan out and know boss mechanics to the point where you know when to throw up a reflect then I don’t see why you shouldn’t be rewarded with a tremendous amount of damage. It adds a layer of awareness and skill beyond “my build does the most power damage and I don’t need utility skills” – essentially it gives other classes a means of dealing with huge boss health bars that don’t amount to trying to reach warrior levels of faceroll damage. Now, it might be too much damage on the reflect but I still don’t think it needs a huge change beyond slightly less damage happening. It fits right in with how most boss attacks can 1-shot you, by the time you fight things in Arah (or any dungeon, provided you’re trying to simulate the feeling of being the appropriate level – which anet is) and by the time it’s suggested that you go to dungeons etc you SHOULD be playing rocket tag with the boss. That’s what it’s like when two colossally powerful entities clash.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The whole thing just wreaks of bad design. If you make a boss with projectiles, then specifically make those projectiles avoid reflection, then maybe you shouldn’t have made the boss with projectiles in the first place.

Consistency is pretty important. When you have a skill that blocks attacks, but then throw a whole bunch of unblockable attacks into the game, then what good is the skill? Why not balance around people having blocks, instead of just making an attack unblockable?

Problem is there were already inconsistencies before this, some range non projectile attack reflect others do not.

Might be best to have reflect work like retaliation, but have attacks that are subject to reflection not subject to retaliation.