Guild Wars 2

First off, I love this tower. It’s one of the few pieces of PvE content that I’ve returned to after playing it once. I am, through and through, a hardcore player. If something is challenging, I love it. That said, some people might say some of the stuff I’m suggesting is too difficult, but in reality, a lot of it already exists.

The Downed State

I love the integration of the downed state in PvE, but I don’t think it was done as well as it could have been:

1. The enemies while downed have no player like CC to keep players from killing them. If you have more than 2k health, you can stomp anything.
2. The enemies healing ability cannot be interrupted by damage. This means that in a downed fight, the player will lose.
3. Other enemies, besides the snake looking one, don’t try to resurrect their allies. An argument against this might be that it isn’t there fighting style, but Toxic Bulwarks seem more likely to do this than the snake looking thing.
4. Enemies don’t try to stomp you. I don’t understand why this isn’t implemented for enemies that aren’t covered by 100 stacks of defiant.

The reason I want all this extra downed state stuff is because, in reality, this is the leading mechanic of the game. Every single skill created is designed with the down state in mind. Lupi can hit for 15k with a very hard to read attack. If there was no down state, that boss would almost never be beaten by most parties. How on earth could we have a thief that murders some players in 1 second without a downed state? Stealth? Hundred Blades hitting for upwards of 14k? None of this could exist if we didn’t have this second chance mechanic in the game. So why doesn’t PvE take FULL advantage of this?

It also gives players a reason to bring so many skills that are usually not taken:

1. Resurrection Skills
2. CC
3. Blinds
4. Invulnerabilities

It also introduces something that PvPers have been mastering for a long time. There are so many different and interesting ways to stomp someone. Portal Stomp, Distortion Stomp, Gear Block Stomp, Elixir S Stomp, Dodge Stomp, Plague Stomp etc etc. I could go on for hours. It adds so much diversity to the gameplay rather than simple blasting everything down and moving on.

Of course, not everything needs to be stomped. For example, S Golems (Suicide Golems) in CoE probably don’t need this mechanic, but it would add a whole new dimension to the fight if you have to stomp out the champion golems.

You could apply this to bosses and make downing them another part of the challenge! Maybe bosses require a slightly longer cast time to stomp them!

You could even have it so that champions (with defiant) can res their minions from the downed state (not dead). Now instead of simply CCing everything off, players have to be smart about getting enemies down. Cleaving, Poisoning the downed body, using invulns, etc etc. Some of the simple encounters get a whole new dimension to them simply by adding this mechanic.

Of course, this requires a crazy amount of development time. It’s something that probably should have been put into the game from the beginning. Shame =/