Guild Wars 2

Hello there,
I’ll give you some of my recent thoughts on general gameplay in terms of casting times and interupt.

[TL;DR]: Skillful Interrupts are too difficult and not rewarding, random interrupt spam the way to go -> no fun

I’ll keep the information gathered as simple as possible:
1. i’m an engineer player with about 1700 hrs of experience in wvw and pve only. I’m not saying i’m the best, but i’m definetly no noob either.
2. i invested alot of time and effort into Guildwars 1, too.
3. i know there are differences in style of gameplay between those two games, and i know people will shout “why are you comparing two completely different games!”. What I am comparing is reaction times and activation times, and the like. in those terms both games ARE comparable, because the player skill didn’t change.

So i noticed that the interrupting system right now is very clumsy. It’s way harder to interrupt a skill you’re looking for, especially when you’re not 1v1ing.
I made a comparison to Guildwars 1, where i LOVED playing rupting mesmers after that mesmer patch (god bless the devs that made that patch), in both pve and random arenas:

• Skills activated way longer than in GW1. I can remember there used to be 1/4, 3/4s, 1s, 2s, 3s and 5s activation times, where for me only skills with 1s or more were “manageable” to interrupt. interrupting 1s skills was doable only on days where i was really playing well, and not always. rupting 3/4s skills was a matter of luck.

• Skills in gw1 had an icon with a timer bar. This helped alot in saying whether you were successful in interrupting or not, and WHAT you did interrupt. if you dont know every skill of every class and their animation and just see “interrupt” on the screen, it’s really hard to feel like “yeah, i’m proud of myself, i managed to keep him from doing xy!” This is something i really miss – although i already have quite some experience in GW2. Especially in situations where you’re not seeing your opponent (because he’s behind you) or when there are more than two players on the field, the heavy amount of effects do also hinder the sight. this is where, for example, asuras have a big advantage. their animations are way harder to tell, since they’re less visible in all the explosions and effects.

• uninterruptable effects: I know the variety of interrupting effects are bigger than in GW1 (knockback, knockdown, stun… ), interruption itself did get more random due to interruption mitigation like stability, dodging and stunbreakers. In gw1 you had like only one mesmer skill that kept you from beeing interrupted i believe.

All this makes skillful gameplay more difficult than ever, random interruption more rewarding and less fun.

As a skillful player you must (both in GW1 and GW2):

• keep an eye on all enemies on screen
• know your cooldowns
• know effects of all your opponents skills
• know their cooldowns
• know what to interrupt

Additionally in GW2 you need to

• know if their stability is up or not
• know the animations and recognize them in time (less than 1/4s + your skill itself has 1/4 activation time + eventually time before it hits +1/4s reaction time (which is extraordinary) )
• activate your interrupting skill in a way it hits (Engi Shield Throw for example)
• keep moving
• keep all surrounding friendly and enemy AoE effects in mind

In short: when i’m not playing 1v1 i find it impossible to even try to interrupt players doing something. Every build i know that use CC, like hambows, plex engis, etc rely on mostly permastun and any sort of spike, either condition or direct damage – never on targeted interrupts which they COULD used be for.

solving the problem on Posting #2

I’m trying to be constructive, but i’ll the community’s help on this, too. let’s get on to solving the problem:

some ideas:

• activation times could be increased on certain skills. especially highly rewarding group support skills that can be activated on the move could have that. of course they could be buffed in a different way, like giving better effects.
• a symbol with an activation timebar could be added to your target. i know the argument of arenanet is “we want you to see the animation of activation” but you need to keep watching the enemy’s statusbar anyway, due to stability – and your own of course.
• a really well visible animation, like fiery aura or confusion, for stability. i would wish the same for blindness and retaliation too, but that’s a different topic. you wouldnt need to stare at the status bar, which arenanet doesnt want anyway and hinders you from seeing the enemie’s animation.
• reduction of “useless” animations like explosions that do nothing but damage. this would help seeing the animations of the enemies. this could be added as a togglable “option” for the players especially in WvW which have to handle with animations slowing down their hardware, anyway.
• skills that remove specific kind of boons on the enemy, especially stability. there are few counters to stability and all of them involve the removal of all other boons applied after stability. since stability is incredible strong i feel this could be better counterplayed by adding additional stability removal.
• i can see the cooldowns of interrupting skills going up along with one or more of those changes, in order to balance them. I don’t want a CC-Meta either.

that’s alot of text for the moment. greetings from elona reach

I know where your coming from. I used to have mesmer as a main in GW1 as well. Coming to GW2 i tried interruption builds early on…. and man was i discouraged.

Impossible to tell when a mob starts using a skill (if its not the extra slow charge up skills with the special effect), or when they are idle between attacks. That same idle time between attacks make Confusion work less effectively as well.

As we can see when we are transformed into something, most monster skills, even the auto-attack, have at least a secod cooldown, unlike players. That means that while players can cast skills nonstop (making them more susceptible to interrupts), mobs in PvE has an inbuilt idle time that amounts pretty much to a second of daze. A second of daze is the weakest and most common form of interrupt in the game.

Many times it happened that i tryed to interrupt a specific skill of the enemy. Note that many skill activations are inconsistent. While an ettin takes about 2 seconds to charge up its heavy smash, a centaur berserker’s trampling only charges for about a second. No indication of the cast time whatsoever, only practice i assume. Also the arguement that we should see the activation animation is a moot one when you consider the particle effects galore, the size of most mobs, and specificly the range and travel time of most interrupting skill effects.

So we miss our interupts most of the time, but at least we manage to daze the mob for a second. Great. So it will stand idle for a second, just like it would have naturally with their 1 sec cooldown skills. Pretty much we did nothing.

But lets say the planets align, and we manage to interrupt. There are a lot of great effects that can be traited on interrupt for the mesmer (all spread out of course, so we must spend all we have just to make it barely worth the effort), but in the end, the most important thing we miss. It was in GW1, but not in GW2.
In GW1, you start to cast the skill, it goes on full recharge no matter if it was successfull or interrupted or missed. In GW2 appearently you only get full recharge when you get the first benefit of the skill.

pza.8024:

• a really well visible animation, like fiery aura or confusion, for stability. i would wish the same for blindness and retaliation too, but that’s a different topic. you wouldnt need to stare at the status bar, which arenanet doesnt want anyway and hinders you from seeing the enemie’s animation.

I agree with this part of your statement in particular. If ArenaNet doesn’t want us to stare at our enemy’s status bar, then they need to give stability a very evident visual cue.

Or they could give me a potion to let me grow a third eye out of my forehead to watch that status bar, while my left eye watches the enemy’s animations and my right eye looks at the minimap.

Imagi.4561:

Or they could give me a potion to let me grow a third eye out of my forehead to watch that status bar, while my left eye watches the enemy’s animations and my right eye looks at the minimap.

sorry to say, but you’re dead. you didnt see that fear aoe on the floor and ran screaming down the cliff.

@lakdav: my post is also referring to the pvp part of wvw, but thanks for adding my exact feelings about pve aswell. especially the way bosses with their superskills work: 5 stacks defiance and once you manage to interrupt, they will just stand up and activate the skill anyway. why should anyone ever bother to take away the defiance stacks and interrupt? never seen any pug saying “we need to get these defiance stacks down, so that we can interrupt his best skill!”

a solution to this could be a real cooldown for boss-skills. i believe this would help to change the currently welldiscussed DPS-meta.

i know it doesn’t help… but please, PLEASE! help us loving our interrupts again.

i hope i’m not necroing this thread too much, but i just wanted to say THANK YOU ANET for both Power Block and Disruptor’s Sustainment, which sound like a great way to improve the skill of mesmers interrupting abilities (since its more rewarding). a pity it’s only mesmer, but, well, he’s the king of rupt.

i wonder if power block affect monsters…