Guild Wars 2

With such a low frequency of balance patches, they sure do a good job of avoiding the elephant in the room. The downed state is pretty sad atm, with some clear victors and no effort to address them.

(Looked for thread discussing this, seems to of been swallowed by the flood).

Downed skills drastically suck. Most are very easily avoided, few are near impossible to avoid. I don’t think the point of the downed system is to “fight back” as much as “hold out” for someone to rez you or for a rally. B+ for doing something different from other pvp systems, C- for giving no attention towards it’s balance.

I wish they’d remove downed state entirely but in absence of that some of the skills need attention.

I agree that the downed states are quite unbalanced. They range from can not be stomped on the first attempt ever no matter how many people try to stomp→single target projectile that can be avoided by a blind/block/stability/2 people stomping at the same time/stomping behind a pet/stomping behind a pebble that somehow causes obstructed… just what the heck…

I wouldn’t mind if they removed downed state altogether for PvP/WvW, but it’s a unique feature of this game so they probably won’t do that… so instead they need to make balancing them more of a priority. So far the only downed state balance has been with ele. One change in this amount of time is just redic.

I also think that downed states as a whole are underutilized. Having PvE mobs which use them in the toxic alliance was amazing. There needs to be more of that.

As far as PvP balance goes, I think they need to give more of an identity to the downed state. As in: “Class hard to down” can be balanced by “Downed state cannot avoid a stomp in any serious way”. On the flipside, a fragile class with few escape skills should have a reliable retreat to their friendly line (hello Elementalists, so this partially works).

There’s a lot of potential balance mechanics left unused. It seems everyone is hyping some fully 1-to-1 balance downed state, which makes me somewhat sad. That’s such a waste of gameplay potential.

Carighan.6758:

I also think that downed states as a whole are underutilized. Having PvE mobs which use them in the toxic alliance was amazing. There needs to be more of that.

As far as PvP balance goes, I think they need to give more of an identity to the downed state. As in: “Class hard to down” can be balanced by “Downed state cannot avoid a stomp in any serious way”. On the flipside, a fragile class with few escape skills should have a reliable retreat to their friendly line (hello Elementalists, so this partially works).

There’s a lot of potential balance mechanics left unused. It seems everyone is hyping some fully 1-to-1 balance downed state, which makes me somewhat sad. That’s such a waste of gameplay potential.

I think that sounds terrible. Professions shouldnt be balanced in a way that hard to down = easy to stomp.

Even if at the moment thats going exactly against the grain as it is, Thief. Hard to down, hard to stomp.

Downed state is just 3 skills, how hard is it to have some consistency? Some professions have blatantly better downed state that does exactly what its suppose to. Buy time to rally, which for some is much easier then for others.

So fix that!

Terrahero.9358:

Downed state is just 3 skills, how hard is it to have some consistency? Some professions have blatantly better downed state that does exactly

Define “consistency”.
You’re probably talking about having a guaranteed stomp avoid on the second skill? They’d be quite unbalanced if it’s focused on that.

Effectively, you’d have to make all downed states the exact same. Ranged attack on 1, applying a condition (same for everyone, say, Bleeding) in the process. Teleport on 2, guaranteeing a stomp avoid. “Something” on 3, but again same for everyone.

Either it’s the same for everyone, or it will be unbalanced, because when people talk about unbalanced downed states they usually talk about sPvP situations, which ignores that downed state is a weeeeeee bit larger than sPvP.
As a simple example, in most WvW engagements Engineer 2 on a non-stability target is an instant-rally, as the sole closer enemy target will go down before they even realized what happened. Yes it’s really weak outside of that (though it can be used to similar end in PvE, it rarely helps there), but it’s important to consider the unique aspects of each skill. Some 3-skills are pure damage. Some rally you. Some are utility.

They don’t need some global system of skills for being downed, the function of it is all that needs changing. Granted both being downed and planting are both highly unbalanced (stability stomping/stealth stomping/invuln stomping/ele downed/thief downed/etc) they should work on the core 2 skills which are meant to avoid being planted.

Whether it is an aoe cc, or movment, or stealth w/e. The #2 should help avoiding a stomp against a simple situation, and the #3 can serve as a punishment towards the enemy for failing to stomp you in time. Some have it, others don’t.