Guild Wars 2

I agree on defiant. Just a kittenin horrible design. They should make it as skill that bosses apply it every 30 sec for 10 sec or something like that, becase right now they have it 100% whole fight, this is just plain stupid.

The insta kill mechinc always goes for the player furthest away from mai. Also she turns, faces them, and fires a bolt of electricty at them that can be dodged. Also if you are mobile half the time it misss completely. Once you’ve got that worked out you can predict it to a degree.
That being said I’d also like to see an end to defiant, or at least a newer version of it. Also NONOBDY can tank mai. Not in the traditional sense. Her major attacks are like 100 blades. That is as long as you move out of it you’ll be fine at best, grazed at worst. You CAN stand there and take it IF you have some way of removing the bleed, but that’s not going to be something you can do indefitly.
As for the bombing, It’s rough, but you can bring swiftness, vigor, agies, heals and resses (assuming you’re not the one getting hit) to make it easier.

Yeah, the bombing I personally didn’t have any problems with. But I can see why my party members kept on dying from it. There’s so many red circles being spammed all over the screen, and its a bit much for some players.

But the worst part is definitely this whole idea of having to inspect the icon underneath her health bar. Who thought that was a good idea? And to make matters worse, if you are playing on a laptop you can often not read what the icon description says, because it only appears for one second. And that’s crucial battle information.

Don’t forget, it seems that immobilize doesn’t last its full duration on Mai. I’ve used shockwave on my ele several times and each time it hit, I noticed the duration was a about half or a third of the normal duration.

I agree with you except for point C, all her attacks can be dodged and if you pay close attention to her she is quite obvious on what she is going to do.

However, if they would fix point A, your point D becomes a little less relevant

DanteZero.9736:

Don’t forget, it seems that immobilize doesn’t last its full duration on Mai. I’ve used shockwave on my ele several times and each time it hit, I noticed the duration was a about half or a third of the normal duration.

All boss has this, all condition duration is reduced to third (or less). The problem, she sometimes invincible to any condition although her shield has been reduced to 9.

Yeah remove defiant from all bosses, so we can group 5 engis together and perma knockdown bosses

A great Idea /sign

I agree on the entire defiant rant. It should not exist in this iteration. It should have been reworked long ago. It destroys half our skills. As an engineer relying on shield blast I feel your pain.

However, let’s be clear on Mai’s so called undodgeable OHKO:
1/ it’s not undodgeable. In fact, I dodge it every single time once I got her telegraphs. Yes, multiple. There’s three consecutive telegraphs showing you’re the target.
2/ it’s not OHKO unless you’re zerk geared. Get another gear set and you’re fine.

Dear Mad Queen, you’re one of the pros in this game. I expected more skill from you.

But I still agree on the defiant.

Gumby.1708:

Yeah remove defiant from all bosses, so we can group 5 engis together and perma knockdown bosses

A great Idea /sign

That would be better by far than the current implementation. At least let that be one of the valid options.

A: you do know that you can remove defiant right? you just have to coordinate with your group, seems you are actually the lazy one.
B: I agree, too hard to see the circles, but the mechanic is fine, though maybe a little long
C: The attacks can be dodged and they are only insta-kill if you are full zerker. There are lots of other gear sets in the game, don’t complain because you specced and geared glass cannon that you die easy.
D: I don’t see how those are conflicting. The electric AOE is much weaker meaning that bunker builds can stand in it and keep mia there without a problem. You can also lure her through it by standing on the other side of the AOE.

It takes like 2 seconds to read the buff below her bar and then you know what to do. I suppose they could plaster it in giant red letters across your screen, would that be better for you?

Basic geometry states that the beam will move faster the further you are from the center of the circular room. If you want to move faster than the beam chasing you move towards the center point (the boss) while keeping momentum and moving away from the beam.

During phase 3, jump on boxes, dodge, blink, block. Use stability if golems are near so they will not pull you down.

Defiance just means that the tactics for every boss revolve around bashing it in the face faster, not trying to melt down 5 stacks of defiance using less powerful cc just so you can get that one good cc in.

The annoying thing about Mai Trin is that shawdowstep ignores immobilize, so the normal way of getting something to stay still just doesn’t work unless your party clumps up near melee so that Mai doesn’t go bouncing all over the place (and gl on that if you’re trying to rez someone).

ZudetGambeous.9573:

A: you do know that you can remove defiant right? you just have to coordinate with your group, seems you are actually the lazy one.

The problem with Defiant is not one of laziness. Control skills are a situational thing. The goal is not to just cause a control skill to hit the boss, but to make it affect the boss at the right moment. With the mechanic of having to peal down stacks of Defiant, you will never ever hit the boss with that control skill when you need it the most. And that is the problem.

Another problem is that the boss gains stacks of Defiant based on how many players are around him, but not every player will be focused on defiant at all. So regardless of build, each boss always has insane stacks of Defiant. The minimum is 3 stacks, which already is a lot for any single player to deal with. A system, that gives a boss only 1 stacks of Defiant for a limited duration, would be a vast improvement.

DEKeyzToChaos.7381:

Defiance just means that the tactics for every boss revolve around bashing it in the face faster, not trying to melt down 5 stacks of defiance using less powerful cc just so you can get that one good cc in.

Yes Keyz, you are exactly right. Melting down 5 stacks, just to hit the boss once with one CC skill is absurd, when you might as well just DPS the boss to death. It makes control skills completely redundant. Which breaks the balance of the game, since several classes rely on control skills for defense.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

C: The attacks can be dodged and they are only insta-kill if you are full zerker. There are lots of other gear sets in the game, don’t complain because you specced and geared glass cannon that you die easy.

Except that my gear is 100% toughness. I may be one of the few people on my team who managed to survive Mai’s attacks directly. But I have seen my party repeatedly be instantly downed by her.

I think it is unreasonable to demand players to change their equipment for a single dungeon. Currently the game does not offer cheap/easy ways to switch out statistics on our gear, nor offer ways to store all those different pieces of armor. My bank is pretty full as it is, without storing tons of armor in it.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

D: I don’t see how those are conflicting. The electric AOE is much weaker meaning that bunker builds can stand in it and keep mia there without a problem. You can also lure her through it by standing on the other side of the AOE.

But you are not supposed to stand in it. You are supposed to avoid it. And by the time you stand on the other side of the aoe, the effect may already be gone. Players are busy enough as it is trying to avoid everything else on the screen, and deal with Mai spamming her conditions. It is very conflicting to demand that a player must simultaneously avoid something, but also lure the boss into it. The electric cages in the underwater Fractal worked much better in this respect.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

It takes like 2 seconds to read the buff below her bar and then you know what to do. I suppose they could plaster it in giant red letters across your screen, would that be better for you?

It is a rubbish way to communicate the goal of the battle to players. Its indefensible. Clearly telling the players that Mai is vulnerable to Aetherblade electricity would indeed be a large improvement. To do so in an emergent fashion, rather than giant red letters, now that is a design challenge.

marnick.4305:

Dear Mad Queen, you’re one of the pros in this game. I expected more skill from you.
But I still agree on the defiant.

I personally have been able to kite Mai, but I have seen many of my party members be immobilized and instantly destroyed by Mai’s attacks. I think bosses do not have to deal so much damage and conditions, as if every players is playing a guardian with a toughness build. Some players play weaker classes, and many of these boss battles seem not to take squishy characters into account. Is there anything squishy players can do to prevent Mai from turning them into jelly?

I happen to be playing a necromancer with a toughness build, so I may be able to endure a lot more damage than many other fellow necros. But a toughness build on a necro is pretty unusual. I think it is unfair to expect other players to be packing this much defense.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Again with the Defiant, seriously?

Defiant truly needs to be retooled. Especially on bosses like Mai Trin and Subdirector Null (a fight that might as well have been labelled “everything wrong with Guild Wars 2”), Definiant makes no sense. A boss should develop resistence to crowd control if it’s used too much, but not be virtually immune to it.

The fact that EVERY boss gets Difiant slapped onto it betrays lazy design.

I also noticed that Mai can easily slap a stack of 25 bleeds on you, which continue to harm you, even after you’re downed. And then when your team helps you back up again, you still have a stack of 25 bleeds on you, and you will be down on the ground again in seconds.

Is this supposed to work this way?

DanteZero.9736:

Don’t forget, it seems that immobilize doesn’t last its full duration on Mai. I’ve used shockwave on my ele several times and each time it hit, I noticed the duration was a about half or a third of the normal duration.

Yeah tell me about that. God I hate defiant! Lucky for us one of the members in my party is trialing a new warrior build with 100% contdion duration. His throw bolas came in VERY handy.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I also noticed that Mai can easily slap a stack of 25 bleeds on you, which continue to harm you, even after you’re downed. And then when your team helps you back up again, you still have a stack of 25 bleeds on you, and you will be down on the ground again in seconds.

Is this supposed to work this way?

The bleeds come off when you are downed, But not when you are revived. It is supposed to work this way. So if Mai decides she’s going to make you her kitten while your down you ARE going to have 25 stacks of bleeding when you get up. For our party it was okay because many of us brought support condition removal to help those we were reviving. If you have a personal condition remvoal USE it the second you get up. Do not attempt to heal until you get thoese bleeds off!

That was my thought when i entered Ascalon Catacombs for the first time with my lvl 30 guardian last year……. I was so happy to play a class that can actively protect other characters only to find out, that cc skills are freakin’ useless when fighting bosses. The whole defiant-thing is boring.

Defiant Needs a rework or needs to go. Anet wants us to use more skills yet the bosses dont allow the use of these skills we are supposed to use. I have to aggree on the Defiant issue. Its broke, cheap and lazy way to deal with a design flaw. Give us a chance to use some of our Controls skills or just take them out the game all together! can anyone say God Mode… its practically what they gave the bosses.

Or better yet. Let me have the skill. lets see how fair that skill is when all the player base is using it!

To those upset with Defiant there is always the Fix the Guild Wars 2 (Un)Holy Trinity! post. Mad Queen is an avid poster there so I know she already knows about it but I thought some other posters here might want to check it out. BTW Mad, if you don’t like me linking another post in your thread I’m more then happy to delete it.

No it’s perfectly fine darling. It helps other players be more aware of this issue. Thanks for contributing.

I fully agree – the ‘control’ element of the trinity has no meaning in boss fights due to ubiquitous Defiance. This is a real shame as I’d argue that control is the most enjoyable (who doesn’t enjoy launching?) and tactical of the three roles, and making it effective would really open up fun and clever new strategies for bosses, as well as new builds for PvE (knockback Engineers, shutdown Mesmers, etc), which I know was part of the reasoning behind the recent patch.

As some folk have pointed out, there needs to be some form of defence against knockback spamming and suchlike. Fine, let more bosses have access to stability (which in turn makes boon-removal more valuable in PvE, encouraging further build diversification) and/or give them some kind of buff which, say, gives control effects a 50% chance to miss. Just something which makes all our fun knockbacks, dazes, launches etc useful.

It would be enough to give bosses a short term defiant status after they got CC’ed once. In fact, such a CC defense should be universal (with bosses enjoying a longer, stronger version while players getting only few secs of protection).

Defiant is annoying. But its the same in WoW and other MMOs…

I agree its not the best design. It is a major flaw of the ‘boss’ idea.

Its why I feel dungeons need to be us versus an enemy team. Not a boss. If you made them a team, they could be on par with us in many abilities, and would not need such gimmicks to be “challenging”.

Dungeon bosses, even in other MMOs like WoW, are not dynamically challenging, they’re just time sinks and repeatable dances. Hard as heck until you learn the dance – then suddenly farmable.

Defiant is just GW2’s version of the same Gimmick we’ve been seeing since CastleVania on the Super-Nintendo… Big guy at a stage.

We’ve moved beyond side-scrollers, dungeons should as well. End of bosses, end of defiant… that’s what modern MMOs need.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

…
E: And perhaps worst of all: I hate having to inspect tiny icons underneath the health bar of a boss, to figure out how to kill the boss. That is bad design, and shame on you for not thinking that through better….

I totally agree with that, i had hard times to figure out the meaning of those icons when I first fought Karka Queen. Fighting Mai, same story.
There are two very simple things to do, to rewrite two lines of code, in order to increase icons size and align icons to the left or right, not in the center, to remain stationary (less than the conditions applied by the players) and their tooltips can be easily read.

I do agree that we need a change in defiant. Maybe make it so that it only makes them immune to control for about 10 seconds, or lowers the odds of being controlled to maybe 25-50%?

I think defiant stacks should fall off natuarally over time as well as being able to be stripped. Also it wouldn’t hurt that after triggering defiance it took say 4 seconds for the defiant to re-activate. Imagine this scenario:
“Crap mai is on the otehr side of the room… Wait we all have launch!”
Group chain lauches Mia into the blue ring!

Why not just adopt the idea from the original GW?
Bosses from prophecies had natural protection which made hexes and conditions only last 50% of their time.

So just change the defiant to work the same way.

Make major ccs like kds only last 0.5-1s, fear 1-2s, daze 1-2s, immobilize 3-4s, kockback-push only half distance. Cripple could be reduced but not as much i guess but leave damaging conditions alone since they’re working as intended i think.
This way properly used CC could help manage boss fights while not allowing to completely shutdown the boss.

i think defiant should be a time-based thing. it wears out by itself, but skills can shave off time from it, and once you hit with CC, the timer goes back up.

that way you still can’t stunlock bosses, but at the same time you don’t have to burn Ckittenil all stacks are gone.