This topic is aimed to hit multiple fronts. Something mostly related to pvp environments but also applies to pve.
1. CC Spam: Some have it, others don’t. In groups however this becomes overwhelming to most and leads to little enjoyment when you play the role of a ping pong ball. One might say, “Well you have a stun breaker, just time it right”, or “evade the cc to begin with”. Sometimes, that just isn’t enough especially if you do not have stability. Some builds can reapply a cc effect over and over and you’re left with no option but to spam evades or back off, or fight fire with fire which isn’t healthy. It’s not so much of an issue in wvw because of group builds and foods helping cope with the amount of cc but still it needs to be addressed. There are a couple of ways of going about this.
a). After being affected by a cc skill, you gain immunity to it for a brief moment after the effect wears off (1, 1.5, 2 seconds?).
B). Similar to A, except only cc effects of the same type will not apply while allowing mixed cc to work. For example, you can pull and knock someone down, but you can’t knockdown and launch someone until the debuff wore off. Stun would be a universal category, since it doesn’t move the enemy.
C). Apply lesser effects from each consecutive ckittenil the debuff wore. So if you stunned someone for 3 seconds and used a launch, they would almost immediately get back up once they stopped bouncing off the floor vs slowly getting back up.
2. Evade spam: This applies to a number of builds, who can utilize evades to simply annoy the enemy. This DR would be minimal and only affect certain actions. Using a weapon skill that has a built in evade, will consume X% endurance (7%?). This will not apply to healing and utility skills that evade, because their cooldowns are generally much longer. Weapon skills that evade will still consume endurance even below the 50% margin, but if you do not have the endurance to supply the evade, the skill will still go off but without the evasion. This is meant to reinforce timed use of skills, and not just spam them in unison with dodge rolls. The % should be small to not punish the use of an evasion skill, but present to manage your skills better. This would apply to any weapon skill with a built in evade, including pw, blurred Frenzy, whirlwind attack, etc. Not suggesting gs warrior was evading too much, but the idea is to have evades and dodge roll work off the same resource so it doesn’t let people off so easy.
3. Skill spam (A.K.A Initiative): I flatly refuse to fight alongside a teammate who spams the same skill and have on occasion left a 2v2 to let them die. Why? Because I don’t support button smashing. Problem is, there really is no down side to it for some builds. We’ve seen S/D take the plunge and recently pw got visited with an increased initiative cost. This doesn’t necessarily mean these kits or skills were op, but the results people got from pressing 33333 were unhealthy and needed attention. Similar to how condimancer’s have received nerfs for having dhummfire, thieves have been punished for having initiative. I believe they could of done a much better job of addressing this than simply increasing initiative costs or nerfing the skill, because those weren’t the issues. What there needs to be is DR for using the same skills over and over, and here are a couple of ways that it could be done imo.
A). Repeated use of the same skill increased the iniative by 1, and stacks up to 2 times lasting a short time (1, 1.5, 2 seconds?). This is to not harm the player to much for using say #3 on sb to avoid burst, but to push the thief to use other skills in a fight.
B). Keep the initiative costs the same, but provide lesser effects from the skills for each consecutive use. This option would be much more tricky because some skills are already fairly weak or low in effect. For example, headshot’s primary goal is an interrupt, but it already lasts .25 seconds making any lesser duration essentially absent (idk if there is a skill that last less than .25 seconds). Also in the case of unload on p/p, which is the primary dps for p/p and already hits fairly low. Each skill would need to be treated differently for this to be balanced across each kit. For skills whose primary result is a condition, the durations would be shortened but again, this leads to an issue with some skills whose durations are already incredibly low like body shot, dancing dagger, cluster bomb, etc.
In any case, use of the same skill over and over should not be promoted or rewarded. Some kits unfortunately have little choice in that matter, like p/p, and should be looked at carefully to not nerf them into oblivion.
break. I feel like they should be back by now..”
(edited by NinjaEd.3946)