Guild Wars 2

I decided to open this new thread, since I couldn’t find single topic dedicated to talking about Defiant and it’s effect in current PvE meta.
It’s no secret that current implementation of Defiant isn’t quite working out as intended, making it stack and making those stack disappear when new CC effect is applied to the boss isn’t really nice way of doing it. I find that Definat is the biggest reason why people don’t take hammers into dungeons, or any CC skills. And this is also reason why there are 2 roles atm, damage and support.
I understand the reason for it, we don’t want big bosses inturrepted whole time so they don’t do any of their big attacks and mehanics, BUT that is another way of skillful play that we can have in PvE. And we can finnaly have damage/support/control.

My suggestion would be to make Defiant a timed duration and not stackable.
For an example: Warrior uses 5th skill on his hammer to interrupt big boss attack in dungeon. After that boss gets Defiant as he would always, BUT instead of having 5 stacks of Defiant he would have Defiant that last for example 10-15 seconds. During that time he is immune to any CC and also applying new CC DOESN’T refresh Defiant duration. This way I don’t have to burn my CC skills to take down Defiant stacks, so when defiant is no more, my CC skills are all on cooldown and then I’m useless.
Of course this should scale to the number of players, those number would be hard to pinpoint, but at least this would make CC more desirable in dungeons.

This way PvE meta can change a little bit, “requiring” party to have 1 CC, 1 support and 3 DPS as an “optimal” group.
In my honest opinion, PvE encounters needs to be changed, but Defiant is the first step in solving current PvE meta.

I would like to hear from others what they think about defiant and their solution to this problem. PLEASE don’t make this thread into Zerkers are OP, Anet sucks, etc…
I’m pretty sure Devs want to see a good disscusion from us on this topic.

I completely agree with you. Currently, defiant work as a complete immunity to prevent that player can permastun a boss/champion.
But it make control useless and unpredictable when control could be a tactical tool.

I have some ideas in my mind that can be mix with your to provide game mechanism variation.
For a dungeon for example. The boss have the defiant thing and players can remove them during the battle, but they can’t apply any control when defiant is removed. When the boss will do his big everyone-will-die attack, each control applied after the defiants faded reduce the strength of the attack or remove the “you will die even if you’re rolling” effect.
I say “die” but it can be an undodgeable chilling, knockback, stun, weakness…
To make things more interesting, the control is counted only if applied in a short window so player have to carefully wait the better moment to use their control.

The other idea is that “Control” are converted instead of nullified.
Daze => Blind
Stun => Weakness
Knockback/Pull => Cripple
Knockdown => Chill

Last idea is that control became part of boss mechanism.
I remembered old games where you have to stun the boss to be allowed to hit him for a small time window. After that the boss go berzerk and you run to save your life and retry to stun him again until his death.

Do you remember the fractal boss Ice Elemental that you need to put him under melt iron to make him vulnerable ? What if you had to pull/knockback him under the flow ?

I think all that’s needed to fix Defiant is to make it a CC duration reduction that stacks intensity up to 100% with a duration, and any CC that would last less than a quarter second on a target with Unshakable after duration reduction should be completely nullified.

Players can CC a little bit and almost not notice, but constant CC is mitigated. If required in the case of knockbacks (which have no duration) the target with Unshakable could gain stability each stack over a certain number of stacks.

just take more thieves into your dungeons
thief can burn off defiant stacks so fast it’s outrageous

reikken.4961:

just take more thieves into your dungeons
thief can burn off defiant stacks so fast it’s outrageous

Heresy
Thief not deepsing if they are playing red light green light with defiant stacks

My suggestion would be, remove defiant completely make bosses go enrage, when they get interrupted too often.

Enrage would make them move faster, attack faster, deal more damage and imune to CC for some time (for example 30seconds). So fighting bosses would require teamwork to interrupt them and not CC spam.

ens.9854:

reikken.4961:

just take more thieves into your dungeons
thief can burn off defiant stacks so fast it’s outrageous

Heresy
Thief not deepsing if they are playing red light green light with defiant stacks

well you can’t have your cake and eat it too
I mean, warrior can’t pump out axe/greatsword dps with a hammer either

but you can compromise and use pistol whip for your dps