Guild Wars 2

These two boons, one is a must have and the other can easily do without.
The idea of these two boons are good but poorly implemented, lets examine the issues:

Retaliation – Damaging without fighting.
There was a time where perma Retaliation was possible, sadly, it was also disastrous. Guardians would build extremely high defense and rely on this boon to do a majority of the damage. In team fights, this boon alone could be responsible for 25% if not more of the damage dealt to you. If you had a lot of AoE, it would easily be nearly HALF of the damage you took.
Obviously, that is not ideal and Retaliation had to go. So it was nerfed, hard. Very hard. Reducing its damage as well as making its damage output based on power.
This hurts the mechanic, you can’t really make it stronger without balance issues and right now, it’s underwhelming.

Stability – Your skills cannot be interrupted.
What makes this boon so powerful is NOT the fact the enemy cannot CC you. What makes it good is your skills CANNOT fail. In the current state, this boon is very good.
Which is exactly the problem! It has to be rare and/or in low doses how useful it is. It hurts the mechanic rather than helps it.

My goal is to propose more mechanics that can aid these boons. The problem with stability is it’s too rare, so weaken it for it to appear more in traits and skills.
Retaliation needs more options in it’s mechanics, too much is too powerful; too little is too weak.

• Retaliation – Stacks in intensity rather than duration. Reflects damage back to the attacker, then retaliation ends. The more stacks of retaliation, the more damage that gets inflicted.
  The damage of retaliation should be dependent rather than given. It will open up so many more opportunity for traits and skills.

For example, the trait Spiked Armor, right now it is gain retaliation for 5 seconds when struck by a critical hit, cooldown of 10 seconds.
It makes the trait too situational, yes, it has a use in PvP how a lot of builds are condition builds that trigger on critical hits but no one is going to spend 30 points into Defense when there are simply more powerful defensive options like Cleansing Ire.

Now, changing Spike Armor to something like:
Grant a single stack of Retaliation that lasts for 5 seconds, every 3 seconds. Basically, a perma 1 or 2 stacks of Retaliation outside of combat.

Lets say, 2 stacks of Retaliation is equal too 800 damage.
Now, that would be overpowered if that could trigger multiple times but since it only triggers once, it opens up more opportunity in builds.

Compared to the current Retaliation, 800 damage is equal to hitting an opponent 4 times. Since it stacks in duration, if you attack every 1/2 second for 10 seconds against an opponent with 10 seconds of retaliation, that’s 4000 FREE damage.
Retaliation is simply too powerful, which is why it’s so hard to achieve high duration of it.

By making it stack and ending on a hit, it will vastly open up more uses for this boon to shine.

• Stability – Stacks in intensity rather than duration. Protects against a control effect then lose a stack of stability.
  Like how Champions have defiance stacks, Stability should work the same.
  It will undoubtedly become weaker, which is good, that means it must show up more.

For example, Healing Breeze and Ether Renewal. Giving those two healing skills stability while casting will undoubtedly make them the superb healing skills as the heal cannot be stopped. Shelter cannot be stopped but in contrast, it’s a weak heal. Now, if Healing Breeze or Ether Renewal grants a single stack of stability, that would be undoubtedly harder to stop and require more thought or teamwork.

It can benefit offensively too with skills like Hundred Blades and Fire Storm. Utilities that grant stability already like Rampage as One will offer have multiple stacks.

The idea is to make Stability more accessible but in return, weaker as well.

The meta is in a jumbled mess right now, Mesmers dealing lots of damage while invisible, Necromancers and Rangers with protection from minions because of the AoE cap, Warriors running rampant with get out of damage free cards, Engineers having insane damage, CC and defense.
Everyone is stuck into Lyssa Runes for the condition cleanse or stability.

Maybe when the dust is settled ArenaNet should start looking at mechanics they have instead of adding new ones too enhance the gameplay COUGH TORMENT COUGH

Retal still is very strong in large scale WvW fights.

It’s quite unbalanced as to what gets hit the hardest even now (things like eng nades=‘s up to 15x retal per attack, pp thief unload =’s 8x retal etc.). Your suggestion would make it way too strong Vs. what it’s already strong against.

Popping a stability to make sure you can heal is fine imo. You’re giving up a stability which you could have used later to secure a stomp etc.

You can stop shelter btw, it just needs to be an unblockable cc (such as eng magnet/necro fear).

Aberrant.6749:

Retal still is very strong in large scale WvW fights.

It’s quite unbalanced as to what gets hit the hardest even now (things like eng nades=‘s up to 15x retal per attack, pp thief unload =’s 8x retal etc.). Your suggestion would make it way too strong Vs. what it’s already strong against.

You’d lose all retaliation after it triggers.
If a Thief used unload and you got hit by 8 bullets, only 1 bullet will trigger retaliation then it’ll end, the remaining 7 bullets will not harm the thief.

Like confusion, the idea is you don’t want to hit someone with a lot of stacks unless you are prepared to take a lot of armor ignoring damage in a single hit.

Unlike confusion, since it ends after a single hit, feel free to spam away if you can take a hit or wait for an ally/minion to hit the enemy.

Aberrant.6749:

Popping a stability to make sure you can heal is fine imo. You’re giving up a stability which you could have used later to secure a stomp etc.

It is fine to pop stability to use any skill, the problem is stability is too rare for some classes.
Necromancer, Elementalist, Engineer, Thief and Mesmer don’t have good options for stability, which is fine as they have other areas they make it up for in.

I’m not saying the other options isn’t viable, just the opposite it’s very good.
The problem is it’s limiting.

• Engineer, don’t like Elixirs? That’s okay, you’re forced into using Tool Kit for it’s block.
• Mesmer you must carry 2-3 stun breakers and Mass Invisibility, forget about using the other utilities. Mantras are lackluster anyways.
• Elementalist … Just hope for the best your powerful channeling spell gets off.
• Necromancer you have Doom and well, hope the enemy doesn’t have Stability while they are beating your face. Go ranged glass or bring your minion army.

• Thief… despite having only one source of stability, every weapon and weapon combination has a viable skill to teleport of the way, evade, go invisible or stop your opponent.
  Making every alternative, no matter what weapons or traits you pick, you have plenty of viable escapes.

It’s a double edged sword, you can only have so many alternatives to defense.
The alternatives to defense for a lot of classes is good but you only have so much.

Oh ok I misunderstood, I thought that it just stacked in intensity but still kept the duration. They would need to increase the damage on retal to compensate for it being a 1 time thing then. That would help balance it between multi hitting attacks and single hit attacks. Not a bad thing for both sides.

Yes not every class has the best stability uptime, and maybe some classes could use some buffs to their defensive sides. I don’t think that calls for a total change to stability though.

While eng doesn’t have that great access to stability (toss B is the only decent one) it makes up for it with being able to smoke field + stealth on demand to counter the majority of downed states. For defensive ant-cc stuffs in combat 50% vigor uptime + two traits that reduce damage when cc-ed + lots of cc/blinds + perma swift + perma weakeness + shield 5 +… ok eng has a lot that it can do (lol). Personally I don’t run B or toolkit. I use bombs/nades/eg. What winds up getting me far more often than the hard cc’s are the kitten stacking immobilizes. Overall seems fine to me other than condition removal problems outside of deep alch.

Mesmer gets a pseudo stunbreak on a 8/10s cooldown (phase retreat), they have some great sunbreak utilities, and class mechanic daze/invuln (better than stability, although the cd is long). Seems fine to me.

Eles Armor of Earth & Mist form… the cd’s are quite long though… Ele could use some love.

Necro… poor necro Designed to just HP facetank but balancing that to be ok in a 1v1 and 1vX is impossible.

Thief is very slippery indeed. Fine as is.

You know, while Retaliation was a nightmare, it really was a great way to tone down AoE spam.