Guild Wars 2

I’m tried of all these infinite knockdown mechanics that you can do nothing about. Having two stunbrekaers doens’t help if a mob spams knockdowns. During the 3-4 seconds that you can’t do anything you’re dead from damage and insane bleeding conditions. Getting spammed knockdowns is annoying. There are places in other dungeons where this gets out of hand.

As a necro I agree with you. I did just enough achievements to get the mask and the 25 aps but I won’t bother with it anymore. At least in a week I will still find a zerg in WvW, but with the poor loot and density of mobs, this event will be as empty as the labyrinth by then.

This is a problem around many areas of the game where mobs can knock/stun you for 3 or even 4 seconds at a time, and as you said, even having stunbreakers isn’t enough as they can do it quite often. It really is something anet should look into fixing. Having control constantly taken away from your character for long periods of time is not fun in any way.

My suggestion would be to simply limit the PvE stun/knockdown durations to 2 seconds, max. For all enemies/bosses/champions, everything PvE related.

Most if not all knockdowns in the tower can be avoided, but it takes a lot of focus on the billion things that are all swarming around you.

The tree mines of course not only knock you around (and sometimes into other tree mines) but take away a large chunk of life. Some areas are dense enough that you have to clip some of them as you run past. You definitely need to save a dodge for these as you run past as they explode very quickly. Also watch out for others players and keep your distance and let them clear the mines for you. Players running into mines and blowing up other players is very common.

Several mobs in the tower also have knockdowns. These are dealt in the standard way of dodging, blocking, etc. You have to really keep your eyes open for these mobs as they like to get you while you’re busy dealing with one of the other 5000 mobs.

A few champs have knockdowns, pulls, and other crowd controls that no matter how much I try to see their tell, I fall on my face. I recommend waiting for cannon fodder…er, other players to engage these foes before jumping in late just to get credit.

I did the event twice. The first time I got lucky hooking up with a zerg and it was mildly annoying but still somewhat entertaining. The second I was not lucky about randomly finding zergs and any amount of entertainment promptly vanished.

I’m going back to Frostgorge champ farming, it’s more fun than the Tower. I don’t have to worry about getting knocked off anything and I can rez people rather than leaving them to die (or getting killed trying to rez them because one is left behind by the zerg)

The poor loot and mob density are certainly some of the issues, but the really annoying issue was the deliberately design to make it hard to keep playing with people. Everything in the Tower seems intended to kill stragglers, punish people who try to rez them and break up the zerg even though the zerg is needed to finish any of the content.

Enemies have a tendency to take turns spamming their CC skills. So as soon as one immobilize runs out, the next enemy casts it on you.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Enemies have a tendency to take turns spamming their CC skills. So as soon as one immobilize runs out, the next enemy casts it on you.

With the added bonus that any CC counters characters have equipped are quickly used up. This has been an issue since the game started as can be seen with the mobs in Orr and then SouthSun.

It would be nice if PvE mobs had diminishing returns that CC gets in PvP (or even more diminishing effect). ArenaNet seems to realize getting CC-spammed in PvP is not any fun, I don’t know why they don’t see it’s even less fun PvE.

I can see why Wildstar is taking their approach to making CC against players into something that allows some kind of activity and response, rather than sitting there waiting for your CC-counter cooldowns to reset.

So it’s more mummy content. I’m glad I’m sitting this one out so far.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Enemies have a tendency to take turns spamming their CC skills. So as soon as one immobilize runs out, the next enemy casts it on you.

Immobilize stacks now, Lady Malafide. 3 enemies can use a 3 sec Immobilize on you at the same time, and it’ll stack up to 9 seconds Immobilize.

Best mobs for knockdowns are risen gorillas in arah. 6 second knockdowns. So much fun being stuck with no stunbreak just hoping you can dodge after getting up just before they do the knockdown again.

Knock them down first! Engineer: Rifle 4, Big Ol’ Bomb, Mines, Battering Ram. Okay. It’s not knockdown – most only “launch” and some “knockback”. But still good… if it’s not too many vets or stronger at same time.

Knockdown? in the tower?

Ok, there is tree mine, but you can avoid them easily. And those plant-monster sometimes use a stomp, that you can dodge or not getting in range since it’s close range. But there is no other kd or stuff like that.

It’s more a condi hell than a cc hell.

Malchior.5042:

Immobilize stacks now, Lady Malafide. 3 enemies can use a 3 sec Immobilize on you at the same time, and it’ll stack up to 9 seconds Immobilize.

You are correct darling, I noticed that while doing the tower. And I’ve been there, being immobilized for 9 seconds. It is quite frustrating, with such a long recharge on necro stun breakers.

Kal Spiro.9745:

So it’s more mummy content. I’m glad I’m sitting this one out so far.

The content is actually pretty fun. It’s just the over abused cc the monsters have once you mess up dodging. I say a group of 2 party members should be more than enough to reach the top of the tower. Going solo only works if you have another party to move with.

Floor one and two can be done solo, but once you reach floor three it’s not. You need people to move along with you to run and stop at each turret cleaner along the way to clear the monsters. Going solo for floor three is asking to be spammed cc on you until you run out of stunbreakers and end up dying.

I wish they had a rune set that had a % chance to absorb incoming CC.

Kind of like how my ranger’s pet absorbs CCs intended for me sometimes.

Luthan.5236:

Knock them down first! Engineer: Rifle 4, Big Ol’ Bomb, Mines, Battering Ram. Okay. It’s not knockdown – most only “launch” and some “knockback”. But still good… if it’s not too many vets or stronger at same time.

Most of them barely last long enough to start a single attack before the mob is back up, and they have cooldowns measured in x10s of their effect duration (never mind that the rifle one is a self-knockback, woho on a thin walkway!).

Avoiding those stuns is relatively easy, but it also makes the game extremely unforgiving with a lag hit.

There’s worse places like this.
I can’t count how many times I got caught by gravelings in Ascalon Catacombs just because of a lag spike that lasted half a second.

All they need is get you once, and unless you have a CC ready, you’ll soon be down, because of the CC spam. And if you are CC’ed precisely during a 1-second lag spike, that’s more than enough time for bigger groups to take you out, stun breakers won’t help there. You may be seeing you character walking a couple of steps in your system, but when the client catches up with the server, you’ll be down.

Like with ANY game that has any sort of disable, there should be ways to prevent infinite deadlocks.

Some games have breakers for disables, GW2 has stun breakers, but they should be something to break out and recover and gain an advantage while the enemy has used their disables, instead it’s something useless if the entire enemy team or lots of monsters spam continuous CCs on you.

The key to prevent this is autobalance. Something that kicks in automatically for extreme cases, making unnecessary to balance all skills, traits and NPC skills accross the board.

In fighting games, they have limits to how many times one can juggle someone in the hair. In most MMOs, there’s effects like accumulative stun resistance.

They should make a new system that works for both players and enemies. Replacing the current Unshakable system in champions.
Something that makes it so the more people spam disables on a single target and the more disables per second are used on that target, the less they’ll work until the target gets an automatic stun break and a short stun immunity. Something that makes CCs work normally just like now unless under the special circumstance of too many people ganging up on a target.

This immunity would be shorter than for players for normal NPCs, longer for veterans and elites, much longer for champions, and way longer for legendaries, making the system more generalized and uniform accross the game. And for champion and legendaries. And for champions and legendaries, the number of stuns needed would be much less to trigger the immunity.

Probably the worst KD/immobilize spam in the game is delivered by Summoned Husks during the Jungle Wurm DE in Caledon Forest. You are supposed to intercept veteran husks before they reach the wurm and are devoured, providing health to the boss. The thing is, usually it isn’t possible to intercept a vet without simultaneously aggroing 2 or 3 husks that do a perfect job at coordinating their KD/immobilize spam to maximize the CC effect.

Compared to that event (which I do daily) the amount of CC in the tower is so low that it hasn’t even registered on my radar so far. I can see, though, how even a moderate amount of CC might cause problems for glassy builds.

Edit: I support MithranArkanere’s suggestions on how to adjust the stun/stunbreaker mechanism to avoid worst excesses.

I got 1 word for this thread: Dodge.

Wicked Rin.1972:

I’m tried of all these infinite knockdown mechanics that you can do nothing about. Having two stunbrekaers doens’t help if a mob spams knockdowns. During the 3-4 seconds that you can’t do anything you’re dead from damage and insane bleeding conditions. Getting spammed knockdowns is annoying. There are places in other dungeons where this gets out of hand.

counter it with stability no problems then

Fafnir.5124:

Wicked Rin.1972:

I’m tried of all these infinite knockdown mechanics that you can do nothing about. Having two stunbrekaers doens’t help if a mob spams knockdowns. During the 3-4 seconds that you can’t do anything you’re dead from damage and insane bleeding conditions. Getting spammed knockdowns is annoying. There are places in other dungeons where this gets out of hand.

counter it with stability no problems then

Wish my necromancer or the few other professions could use stability.

How ppl just arent aware of the dodge function <.< .. i dont get it.

Well, stability does nothing to immobilize, you need condition cures for that one. I dodge, block, pop stability, everything and I still had quite a bit of difficulty with one of the bosses, the krait warlock I think. I too have tired from the CC spam by mobs and players alike, it’s getting ridiculous.

And what do you do after you’ve used up your two dodges? This is one of the problems with the game. They give us mechanics, and then come up with ways to spam things that take more than the 2 or 3 times we can use the mechanic. See the end of the Aetherblade dungeon, or the tower. Or stunbreaks, where you break out of immobilize, only to be knocked down. What’s the point of a stun breaker if every mob has a stun mechanic, and you can only counter it once?

this has actually been quite the problem, i don’t what is it with me and finding mobs that have knockdown though i constantly find them. trying to kill 5+ that have knock down and having every single one of those mobs knock you down in sync one after the other every two seconds, my character could not get up at all. having ONE stun/knock down block every 40 sec – 1 minute absolutely doesn’t help.

what would be great is that after a constant knock down my character should be immune to that attack + 1 second after she gets up.

Went from bottom to the top of the tower, stopping at every opened chamber along the way with a horribly traited full zerker thief, a single stunbreak and no access to stability. Died three times in total, twice of which was the fault of panicky players I’ve attempted to save.
My advice is to save your dodges for when you really need them.

knockdowns I can handle well enough (I have 4 stun breakers)
it’s the perma-immobilize that gets me.

as a mesmer i agree with u. the knockdowns are very very frustrating.thats the one thing that gets me already mad in wvw and in pve its even worse as the mobs just spamm knockdowns. there should be something that grants u invulnerability to cc after being knocked down.

I was gonna make a thread about this as well but I wasn’t sure if I’m the only one finding this annoying. There are mobs that do 2-3 second knockdown on auto attack (the leaping charr hallucination thing) and others that have longer interval but they keep multiplying (summoned ogre). It’s very annoying. After you stun break, you get immediately knockdown again, then launched, then knockdown again… so dumb.

And what’s the point of having an option to “interact” and clean spider web when it takes just as long as when you get immo’d?

Yeah. Immobilize definitely is a bigger problem. Knockback and Knockdowns stuff the stun breakers aren’t really needed(I don’t like to fill important utility slots with them for fighting against stupid PvE mobs). If you have some vigor or endurance regeneration stuff you can dodge more and that is enough.

But that condition spam… yeah. Getting annoying. I mean it is not only immobilize. They also apply other conditions after it so it might not be easy to cleanse it for all classes.

digiowl.9620:

Luthan.5236:

Knock them down first! Engineer: Rifle 4, Big Ol’ Bomb, Mines, Battering Ram. Okay. It’s not knockdown – most only “launch” and some “knockback”. But still good… if it’s not too many vets or stronger at same time.

Most of them barely last long enough to start a single attack before the mob is back up, and they have cooldowns measured in x10s of their effect duration (never mind that the rifle one is a self-knockback, woho on a thin walkway!).

Yeah, it depends on the situation. That’s why I said “not too many vets”. Champs of course it won’t work most of the time they are immune to such stuff. But with all your CC and rifle immobilize you can have a single vet CCed permanently if he is not immune(even some vets or normal mobs are because of their “race” – like thos big tree things in some mobs that are neutral until you attack them). If he is melee only it works best – you take no damage then. If more other mobs nearby you need to be more careful. Works better in group then with other players and can support by disabling the dangerous mobs while not doing too much damage… but other players can clean other smaller mobs and then focus on that vet(or elite).

MithranArkanere.8957:

Like with ANY game that has any sort of disable, there should be ways to prevent infinite deadlocks.

Some games have breakers for disables, GW2 has stun breakers, but they should be something to break out and recover and gain an advantage while the enemy has used their disables, instead it’s something useless if the entire enemy team or lots of monsters spam continuous CCs on you.

The key to prevent this is autobalance. Something that kicks in automatically for extreme cases, making unnecessary to balance all skills, traits and NPC skills accross the board.

In fighting games, they have limits to how many times one can juggle someone in the hair. In most MMOs, there’s effects like accumulative stun resistance.

They should make a new system that works for both players and enemies. Replacing the current Unshakable system in champions.
Something that makes it so the more people spam disables on a single target and the more disables per second are used on that target, the less they’ll work until the target gets an automatic stun break and a short stun immunity. Something that makes CCs work normally just like now unless under the special circumstance of too many people ganging up on a target.

This immunity would be shorter than for players for normal NPCs, longer for veterans and elites, much longer for champions, and way longer for legendaries, making the system more generalized and uniform accross the game. And for champion and legendaries. And for champions and legendaries, the number of stuns needed would be much less to trigger the immunity.

This. I agree with this on so many levels for different reasons. First it would give CC so much more play in PvP type of things(This coming from a heavy CC user), and secondly, it would make it so CC is actually useful in PvE content without breaking it.

As a Necro this was the most frustrating experience i ever had in a game. Ever. Knockdown/Fear spamfest + 80% veteran that won’t make you rally + no access to vigor and poor access to stability+ 2 seconds respawn of mobs = FAIL

And i have to pay every single time for the wp, really?

I don’t have infinite endurance, i don’t have infinite stability, i don’t have infinite condition removal and yet i’m forced to either pick up the new healing and spec for stability in DS or to level up a kittening warrior just to do this kitten.

I’m really, really, really, really, really disappointed. Really. And kitten.

If even PvE content is going to become zerg or die i guess i’m done with this game

GOD. Guys really!
I did ALL of the achievements with an Elementalist (just turned lvl 80) with full exotic armor and only ONE ascended amulet. I’m pretty squishy, around 12k hp.

So just try an other build or get yourself some cleansing skills.

(I’ll have to admit though, no other class has a mobility comparable to the Elementalists)

Dodging doesn’t fix this. The minefield in level 1 is like a continuous explosion. If the timer on it were a bit longer it would be better, but missing one dodge leads to multiple blowouts. I spent nearly 5 minutes in one spot trying to heal, standing up, getting knocked down, rinse, repeat, stand, no time to dodge, dodge into another field, etc. Pretty pointless, not my idea of a fun time, logged off.

The tower is not even meant to be solo’ed. So why exactly are you trying to do that?
It’s like leaping of a building because you want to fly. <= not working.

So just stick with a group or take your friends with yourself.
If you can’t, then get yourself more skills in order to pass the minefield.
As an Elementalist I never actually had problems with the minefield. Even if they oneshot me, because I’m pretty low on hp.

sephard.2470:

GOD. Guys really!
I did ALL of the achievements with an Elementalist (just turned lvl 80) with full exotic armor and only ONE ascended amulet. I’m pretty squishy, around 12k hp.

So just try an other build or get yourself some cleansing skills.

(I’ll have to admit though, no other class has a mobility comparable to the Elementalists)

Kudos to you. Now do it alone with a necro without Mistform, Arcane Shield, Armor of Earth and Perma swiftness.

And i’m not even on a glass cannon spec, i actually have 2800 armor and 18k hp.
I just find plain stupid to put ALL TOGETHER :
1 AoE Knockdown all over the place (sometimes overlapping) so that if you get kd once, you are done.
2 Almost every single mob has to be stomped, so you can’t almost rally. Sometimes there are no mobs near plants, and plants respawn in 5 secs not giving you the time to heal yourself
3 at least one of the mob in every group has either kd or fear and all of them have insane aggro radius. They just tag along forever.

This doesn’t make the game hard, this make the game impossible to do for some professions and at the same time support zergplay (rush, skip content, get the chest).

I beg to differ and i actually want to enjoy the game. In this way i can’t and as far as i’ve seen i’m not the only one.

selan.8354:

as a mesmer i agree with u. the knockdowns are very very frustrating.thats the one thing that gets me already mad in wvw and in pve its even worse as the mobs just spamm knockdowns. there should be something that grants u invulnerability to cc after being knocked down.

Demonstrating that the skills are balanced for SPVP once more. There a single well placed stun break or similar can ruin an attackers day. And they have cooldowns to match this game changing effect (as do most interrupts).

But in WVW and PVE you all to often run into what may well be called CC conga lines, where one attacker after the other apply some form of CC. ANet clearly recognized this issue on the mob side, given that they gave bigger mobs a mechanic to specifically counteract this.

Time to consider character side defiant for PVE?

sephard.2470:

The tower is not even meant to be solo’ed. So why exactly are you trying to do that?
It’s like leaping of a building because you want to fly. <= not working.

With the lovely irony that the instances auto-balance between solo and 5 man bands. But to get there you pretty much need to hop on the zerg train…

sephard.2470:

The tower is not even meant to be solo’ed. So why exactly are you trying to do that?

I joined a PUG and we started to slowly aim for the top, cleaning everything along the way. We were wiped twice by a group formed by 1 elite, 2 veterans, some trash and plants respawn.

In my opinion when you can’t clean some content if you don’t meet some criteria (dps check, number of ppl, access to X boon/skill and so on) it means that it’s poorly designed.

Yuri.5810:

sephard.2470:

The tower is not even meant to be solo’ed. So why exactly are you trying to do that?

I joined a PUG and we started to slowly aim for the top, cleaning everything along the way. We were wiped twice by a group formed by 1 elite, 2 veterans, some trash and plants respawn.

In my opinion when you can’t clean some content if you don’t meet some criteria (dps check, number of ppl, access to X boon/skill and so on) it means that it’s poorly designed.

And that opinion is yours. If there is no zerg in your server, the mobs won’t scale as hard, so you should be able to run past them if you bring a stunbreaker or two and a condition cleanser.

The clockwork instance of the chambers pretty much exemplifies this. Until then i had fun with the chambers (the Marjory and Rox combo is hilarious after clearing the first chamber). This squarely because of the clockwork horrors, a insane mix of icebrood wolf and reef drake. Try to run from it and it pounce on you, knocking you over for multiple seconds. Get in its face and it produce a sonic scream that is wider and longer than the animation would suggest. Never mind that it can also knock you over with a paw swipe. End result you are etiher stun locked or facing down a big pile of confusion.

Its zerg content.

Run with a blob and its no problem, easy. But since most people have their achievements and find it dull to keep doing it for very little reward, the blobs died off. And running it solo or with a small group is a complete pain.

And its entirely intentional, to troll people. By putting several knockback mobs and Elites on narrow catwalks. Together.
Or have you constantly afflicted (level3 permanently) with a condition that randomly blinds your screen so you cant see where youre running, or randomly afflicts you with fear which has you running over an edge or catwalk or into Spore mines. Fun!

Terrahero.9358:

Or have you constantly afflicted (level3 permanently) with a condition that randomly blinds your screen so you cant see where youre running, or randomly afflicts you with fear which has you running over an edge or catwalk or into Spore mines. Fun!

I find the healing skill for the toxin is useless. Doesn’t heal enough to save you and the condition comes back instantly in floor level 3. 25 skills points for a useless skill.

Becka Williams.4978:

And what do you do after you’ve used up your two dodges? This is one of the problems with the game. They give us mechanics, and then come up with ways to spam things that take more than the 2 or 3 times we can use the mechanic. See the end of the Aetherblade dungeon, or the tower. Or stunbreaks, where you break out of immobilize, only to be knocked down. What’s the point of a stun breaker if every mob has a stun mechanic, and you can only counter it once?

Or any ranged champ. If the attacks are all ranged then we need an infinite amount of dodge to avoid all the attacks, especially since champs are immune to CC for no reason that can be explained within the confines of the game.

I loved GW1 to death, but my BIGGEST complaint about the game: sometimes you had to completely revamp your ENTIRE skill bar between every single level. It became really really annoying to me having to research a whole new skill bar just to complete one quest and progress the storyline. Sometimes I didn’t have half the suggested skills, so I had to hunt those down. When you finally get the “suggested” skills and complete the instance. BOOM! You hit another level that requires a COMPLETELY new skill bar in order to be efficient. Hugely annoying.

This wasn’t a problem for most of early to mid-game but it literally became standard by endgame in all the expansions that you needed to change skillbars repeatedly depending on the instance. People who disagree with this were either playing an OP class or assisted by a semi-full group of friends. I really hope GW2 isn’t starting to create content with this goal in mind.

P.S. Some people like this type of gameplay (more power to them). I, on the other hand, find it terribly tedious as I can’t just sit and enjoy content if I have to stop and research skill builds for a day or two in order to experience more.

You can spec with traits food and runes so you reduce CC time up to 90%

I just ignore all condition removal in pve because so many things pulse. get immobilized = remove condition; 1/2 second later you’re immobilized again! it’s better to have melandru runes and rare veggie pizza and just take it. It’s actually to the point that you can’t keep up with condition removal, so instead of getting rid of the conditions, you need to focus on simply surviving until the condition wears off.