Guild Wars 2

For a game that centres around Damage, Control and Support as an “alternative” Holy Trinity, bosses are COMPLETELY missing the “Control” part. I remember when final encounters in GW1 campaigns were actually dependent on your ability to maintain control over the boss eg. interrupts on key skills, while maintaining the integrity of your own team. Instead, we now are forced to kite or get one-shot by mass AoE or overtuned melee hits, and if your team can make use of Defiant, then great. Control is no longer a central mechanic, and is now a complimentary one. It’s a grind from an overtuned HP bar and an occasional res for anyone who isn’t kiting fast enough (at least, for average groups). If you want to land a crucial CC skill to stop a boss from doing something that could cause critical failure, you just have to be lucky that your entire team has dragged all the stacks away and then refused to use any more skills of the same nature (most PUGs) or co-ordinate your use of the stacks. You can co-ordinate a mass CC with your group and then use a CC when desired/required, but what about the other skills you used to get there? Where’s the feeling that you actually did something? It’s a -1, and there’s no real feeling of contribution to the effort.

I’ll admit, I don’t know what an alternative could be (no methods of stopping CC skills would make bosses a total pushover for any 5 man group that could easily lock them). However, just having a flat-out counter that negates all CC until it’s taken away is a terrible way to work it. We have to waste all of our CC skills repeatedly until an arbitrary number disappears, get a tiny window in which we can disrupt the boss, and then it’s back to wasting skills again. This is especially true for higher Fractals. Bosses have MORE THAN TEN stacks of Defiant. That means that for every attempt to control the boss, you have to waste more than 10 control skills among your team for it, and then the small gap in which something can actually happen just isn’t worth the trouble, or at least doesn’t feel like it for whoever doesn’t actually land the control.

I would suggest having a boss being immune to a second CC after a first, on a timer, for example, 10 seconds. After that 10 seconds is up, the boss is up for another CC. Stronger bosses eg. higher fractal ranks would have a longer timer, up to perhaps 15-20 seconds. However, as it stands right now, Defiant is basically punishing players who try and fulfil part of the “Trinity” that seemingly doesn’t exist on gold/purple mobs. It just seems like a very poor way to power up a mob to “boss” status.

Just for the record, I actually do not have any difficulties with Defiant, this is an aethestic/experience problem. You “feel” worthless if you’re not using the skill that has the required effect. Your skill input is just a modifier to help someone else or another one of your skills get the desired result.

While I don’t want encounters designed around any trinity whatsoever, I do agree that it is annoying to have enemies with a straight up blanket immunity to certain skills. Why even have certain skills in game if you can’t even use them? I mean that Point Blank Shot on my rangers longbow just feels like a pointless waste of space all too often.

What I would suggest is adding a resistance factor like this: when a a boss/champion attacks they become more resistant to control effects; however, target them at (a) certain point(s) in their animation and they are weak to control effects (i.e. A boss charges up and launches an attack; he has high control resistance and it will take the combined and coordinated effort of the entire party to interrupt/control that action. If the champion is charging an attack while a single player uses a control skill, the single skill will take effect and interrupt the champions skill). This way timing and precision would be key to control skills in boss fights.

Another way they could go about it would be like Dragon Nest and have a “super armor” of sorts. The super armor is a resistance to stuns and other control skills, where different attack skills have different amounts of super armor breaking ability. Quite often it takes the entire parties combined efforts to break the armor in unified combo to actually break nest bosses super armor.

Referencing to that they could do something similar and give different player skills varying degrees of “Defiancy” breaking ability. The normal (1) auto-attack would be useless in breaking ability, while the other skills would for any single weapon (or combination in the case of dual wields) would take away varying amounts of Defiancy. Defiant would “regenerate” its stacks if a certain amount of it is not degraded by skills after about 1 second or so.

Just some ideas, but something does need to be done, because it just isn’t fun having them have a blanket immunity =(

/agree on the defiant mechanic as it stands. I like the idea of the boss using “defiant” as a response to controls. Not only would that make control skills feel less useless, but it also reinforces the timing of control attacks: if you “waste” your control attack interrupting something relatively innocuous, the boss will have Defiance during the attack that you REALLY NEED to interrupt. It would encourage skillful play.

Agreed Defiant should be a temporary buff they can use for a short amount of time

/disagree.

In a game about teamwork, 5 players remove one stack of defiant each and then the one that knows when to interrupt will interrupt at the right time.

This removes stun-locking bosses.

It encourages more skillful and teamwork play. Players that whines about this have neither.

runeblade.7514:

/disagree.

In a game about teamwork, 5 players remove one stack of defiant each and then the one that knows when to interrupt will interrupt at the right time.

This removes stun-locking bosses.

It encourages more skillful and teamwork play. Players that whines about this have neither.

You can’t remove Defiance from bosses sorry

Kaimick.5109:

runeblade.7514:

/disagree.

In a game about teamwork, 5 players remove one stack of defiant each and then the one that knows when to interrupt will interrupt at the right time.

This removes stun-locking bosses.

It encourages more skillful and teamwork play. Players that whines about this have neither.

You can’t remove Defiance from bosses sorry

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiant

Immune to crowd control. Crowd control skills remove stacks of defiant.

I realize that but Dungeon Bosses do not have stacks they just have defiance and that is it. Where this holds true for legendary and Champion mobs it does not hold true for Dungeon bosses.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=defiance&go=Go

Looks like pulling out of your kitten doesn’t work.

You probably mistaken defiance with Unshakable.

It is automatically placed on special creatures, especially event and dungeon bosses.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unshakable

All this does is reduces duration of weakness/blind/vulnerability and gives the boss defiant.

What are you talking about? You post a link of your search for Defiance in the GW2 wiki page. How about you pay attention to your game when fighting a boss in a dungeon. LOL

Please remember what you typed on your post.

Kaimick.5109:

I realize that but Dungeon Bosses do not have stacks they just have defiance and that is it. Where this holds true for legendary and Champion mobs it does not hold true for Dungeon bosses.

If you looked at the wiki, it shows zero result of any buffs called defiance. You are pulling that out of your kitten

Seriously, here let me give you the definition of defiant and defiance.

de·fi·ance
noun?/di?f??ns/?

Open resistance; bold disobedience
- the demonstration was held in defiance of official warnings

Web definitions

intentionally contemptuous behavior or attitude

a hostile challenge

a defiant act
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

(defiant) boldly resisting authority or an opposing force; “brought up to be aggressive and defiant”; “a defiant attitude”

de·fi·ant
adjective?/di?f??nt/?

Showing defiance
- she was in a defiant mood

Web definitions

boldly resisting authority or an opposing force; “brought up to be aggressive and defiant”; “a defiant attitude”
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

(defiantly) rebelliously: in a rebellious manner; “he rejected her words rebelliously”
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

(defiance) intentionally contemptuous behavior or attitude

(defiance) a hostile challenge

(defiance) a defiant act

Stop trying to troll. Defiant and defiance are the same thing, one is a noun and one is an adjective meaning the same thing just difference uses.

The web definition nor personal attacks should not matter here at all. What matters is that you assumed that there are two different kind of buffs called Defiance and that dungeon bosses’s defiance is Non-removable. Which is completely false. If you go back to the Defiant link, you will see that there is no evidence that Defiant is non-removable.

So stop relying on personal attacks and anecdote. If you are very sure that your claims are true, show me a screenshot with the description in it.

Wow this is my last post to you seeing as you are trying hard to troll. Nothing in my post of the definition was at all a personal attack, sorry the proper definition of both words mean and are the same thing.

Defiant is always on a boss in a dungeon always there are never stacks of it, neither is it ever removed. This whole useless banter is as bad as your sad attempt to troll my other post with information that holds no relevance to the original post.

Have a nice day lol, enjoy trolling someone else.

/disagree for the same reasons as runeblade.

Kaimick.5109:

Defiant is always on a boss in a dungeon always there are never stacks of it, neither is it ever removed.

Ignoring the other irrelevant personal attacks,

This claim is false. You provide zero proof that your claim is true except through unproven anecdotes.

I am waiting patiently for evidence that dungeon bosses do not have unremovable defiant. You can always go to a youtube video, provide a screenshot, or dig around in wikipedia and show me the part.

You can always ask from the dungeon experts in the dungeon forum about defiant and how it works and then quote that to me.

Point is, there are multiple ways to provide evidence instead of using uncertain personal anecdote.

On a different note… I think the current defiant mechanics are fine? Notice how a lot of the fight is dependent on how you move your character and team around, dodging and etc? It’d be boring if it was so easy to interrupt a boss on a critical attack and the current mechanics forces your team and you to move and coordinate a lot more than just stand there and press a button at the right time.

kenshinakh.3672:

On a different note… I think the current defiant mechanics are fine? Notice how a lot of the fight is dependent on how you move your character and team around, dodging and etc? It’d be boring if it was so easy to interrupt a boss on a critical attack and the current mechanics forces your team and you to move and coordinate a lot more than just stand there and press a button at the right time.

The current mechanics also make your character feel totally worthless. The first thing you learn in ANY school of fighting, is how to interupt an enemy attack. Bosses need to be interuptable, and interuptable with the SAME FREQUENCY as the players can be interupted.

Bosses already hit like freight trains, no reason to give them anythign else.

Currently, unshakable adds one stack of Defiant for each player around, and at least 3 stacks of Defiant.

Instead, it should give one stack of defiant for every player around that it’s attacking it, and only at least 1 stack of Defiant.

It wouldn’t change much things like group events or dungeons, but it would affect possitively small groups of 1 to 3 players who want to fight random champions while exploring.

Champions not only give poor rewards compared to the time they take to kill, they have skills that make them boring too often.

Runiir.6425:

kenshinakh.3672:

On a different note… I think the current defiant mechanics are fine? Notice how a lot of the fight is dependent on how you move your character and team around, dodging and etc? It’d be boring if it was so easy to interrupt a boss on a critical attack and the current mechanics forces your team and you to move and coordinate a lot more than just stand there and press a button at the right time.

The current mechanics also make your character feel totally worthless. The first thing you learn in ANY school of fighting, is how to interupt an enemy attack. Bosses need to be interuptable, and interuptable with the SAME FREQUENCY as the players can be interupted.

Bosses already hit like freight trains, no reason to give them anythign else.

In most MMOs I’ve played, most bosses aren’t interruptible on key points of the fights or when they do key abilities.

If you play a hammer warrior, you’ll be able to almost stun lock a boss. Combined with other players, it’ll make bosses just sitting ducks. I’m not sure why anyone would want more tank and spank bosses o.O. GW2 does give us dodging and a LOT of movement fights in the dungeons, and I find that really unique and refreshing.

Why do you guys want bosses to be easily interrupted as a player is? What I’m asking is: What do you expect from a boss fight? A boring straight forward fight where you can stand still? Or a more interesting fight with movement?

kenshinakh.3672:

Runiir.6425:

kenshinakh.3672:

On a different note… I think the current defiant mechanics are fine? Notice how a lot of the fight is dependent on how you move your character and team around, dodging and etc? It’d be boring if it was so easy to interrupt a boss on a critical attack and the current mechanics forces your team and you to move and coordinate a lot more than just stand there and press a button at the right time.

The current mechanics also make your character feel totally worthless. The first thing you learn in ANY school of fighting, is how to interupt an enemy attack. Bosses need to be interuptable, and interuptable with the SAME FREQUENCY as the players can be interupted.

Bosses already hit like freight trains, no reason to give them anythign else.

In most MMOs I’ve played, most bosses aren’t interruptible on key points of the fights or when they do key abilities.

If you play a hammer warrior, you’ll be able to almost stun lock a boss. Combined with other players, it’ll make bosses just sitting ducks. I’m not sure why anyone would want more tank and spank bosses o.O. GW2 does give us dodging and a LOT of movement fights in the dungeons, and I find that really unique and refreshing.

Why do you guys want bosses to be easily interrupted as a player is? What I’m asking is: What do you expect from a boss fight? A boring straight forward fight where you can stand still? Or a more interesting fight with movement?

I expect bosses to have better AI. Right now they basically do nothing, they don’t randomly change attack patterns, randomly change tactics, etc. If you put both the player and AI on relatively the same playing field (minus the fact the boss has boosted stats) and now make the AI more eratic, suddenly tactics matter a whole lot. Right now you can beat any boss out there by being ranged and kiting well enough. THAT is boring.

Auesis.7301:

If you want to land a crucial CC skill to stop a boss from doing something that could cause critical failure, you just have to be lucky that your entire team has dragged all the stacks away and then refused to use any more skills of the same nature.

This is why I love Defiant. Groups need to communicate and work together, otherwise they lose out on the control aspects in a boss fight and have to fight on the boss’s terms. An alternative is usually to kite.

Should it come as no small surprise that a lot of pugs kite bosses that organized groups will take on toe-to-toe?

Fildydarie.1496:

Auesis.7301:

If you want to land a crucial CC skill to stop a boss from doing something that could cause critical failure, you just have to be lucky that your entire team has dragged all the stacks away and then refused to use any more skills of the same nature.

This is why I love Defiant. Groups need to communicate and work together, otherwise they lose out on the control aspects in a boss fight and have to fight on the boss’s terms. An alternative is usually to kite.

Should it come as no small surprise that a lot of pugs kite bosses that organized groups will take on toe-to-toe?

You love Defiant because it makes your crowd control skills nothing more than a “minus” symbol for somebody else’s efforts and have no effect of their own?

I have no problem with working as a team to get a boss under wraps, and I’ve done every dungeon under the sun with relative ease using this mechanic but in its current state, Defiant downplays control skills entirely until someone lands one in the small window you get. It makes every skill except the effective one feel worthless. You may as well have slot skills that say “removes a stack of Defiant”. They serve no other purpose up to that point.

Blanket immunity is NOT the answer. Perhaps individual reductions on certain control effects, but not just a total negation of skills altogether in sequence, like a skill rotation, something that Arenanet were presumably trying to avoid.

Runiir.6425:

kenshinakh.3672:

Runiir.6425:

kenshinakh.3672:

On a different note… I think the current defiant mechanics are fine? Notice how a lot of the fight is dependent on how you move your character and team around, dodging and etc? It’d be boring if it was so easy to interrupt a boss on a critical attack and the current mechanics forces your team and you to move and coordinate a lot more than just stand there and press a button at the right time.

The current mechanics also make your character feel totally worthless. The first thing you learn in ANY school of fighting, is how to interupt an enemy attack. Bosses need to be interuptable, and interuptable with the SAME FREQUENCY as the players can be interupted.

Bosses already hit like freight trains, no reason to give them anythign else.

In most MMOs I’ve played, most bosses aren’t interruptible on key points of the fights or when they do key abilities.

If you play a hammer warrior, you’ll be able to almost stun lock a boss. Combined with other players, it’ll make bosses just sitting ducks. I’m not sure why anyone would want more tank and spank bosses o.O. GW2 does give us dodging and a LOT of movement fights in the dungeons, and I find that really unique and refreshing.

Why do you guys want bosses to be easily interrupted as a player is? What I’m asking is: What do you expect from a boss fight? A boring straight forward fight where you can stand still? Or a more interesting fight with movement?

I expect bosses to have better AI. Right now they basically do nothing, they don’t randomly change attack patterns, randomly change tactics, etc. If you put both the player and AI on relatively the same playing field (minus the fact the boss has boosted stats) and now make the AI more eratic, suddenly tactics matter a whole lot. Right now you can beat any boss out there by being ranged and kiting well enough. THAT is boring.

This topic was about defiance lol. I’m not sure how you get to boss AIs from there. But even so, there are decently fun fights. AC is one, and CoE is one I find pretty fun and they both require coordination between members. There’s one fight in AC that I’m pretty sure you can’t just kite- the one where the burrows spawn and you have to protect the two devices. And I’m pretty sure a lot of other bosses aren’t easily beat by just kiting or else we’d see a lot of rangers just farming dungeons.

Edit: I read through your other posts and I figured you have your own personal opinion that is very different from mine. Personally, I like how the dungeons are, but clearly you don’t agree. It’s actually pointless to argue since it’s a matter of taste, and it’s not a winnable debate since things aren’t based on logic :P. That aside, I stated my reasons and beliefs, and I respect yours. However, I do not agree with them, but I’m not going to argue much more against it except say that you shouldn’t want to change something currently just because you don’t like it. There are others that like it. If anything, Anet can make a couple of new bosses that fit your tastes and perhaps not have defiance, just to add some extra variety.
Outright removing defiance or changing current bosses would be too radical and would upset a lot of players.

Defiance is needed to keep some bosses challenging. If you 30 man the risen priest of Balthazar for example, or any other melee type boss then all it takes is 10 of those party guys to keep dropping stuns and immobilizes on the boss and he is perma-locked for most of the battle. Stuns and immobilizes are an often-effective alternative to kiting, I dont think they should replace kiting in situations where that game mechanic would be needed to keep the encounter fun and challenging.

Zero Angel: you should really read the OP. He acknowledged this problem and suggested replacing Defiant with a cooldown mechanic on CC skills (boss is immune for x seconds after being cc’d).

How about this: instead of making the boss immune, give the boss CC resistance that is proportional to the number of players participating. So when the boss rears up for its big attack if all the participating players use their CC, one will have a probable chance of getting through. Instead of coordinating to round-robin the CCs for no other reason than to remove stacks, the players have to be aware and smart enough to know when to CC. This allows large, disorganized PUG players to have fun taking down bosses without figuring out a CC rotation first.

Defiant actually works really well and makes the bosses more interesting. For example on the grawl fractal with my guild we plan how to remove the initial 5 stacks (as many have pointed out the bosses have 1 stack per person, which resets after a successful use of a CC skill), then call a person who’ll use a particular skill to interrupt/pull the boss to where we want him to be once the stacks are down, then the process repeats.

It takes teamwork and skill, and means that your CC skills are still useful without being utterly overpowered. I’m not sure what better system you could come up with.

Note – while this is certainly easier with a good guild group and voice comms I’ve had similar unspoken teamwork with a good pug group where we all instinctively removed the stacks and held off our final CC skill until a good time to use it.

I’d actually like the idea of defiant being some sort of stacking buff. Every time they are hit with a CC ability, they get a stack, that stacks in both duration and potency.

Each stack would reduce the time of a CC by 20%, at 5 stacks, they are immune to CC but it keeps stacking in duration. say 5 seconds per stack (and refreshing each stack). This would encourage both timing of the CC, and discourage constant CC for no reason.
What should count towards this is snare, chill, cripple, stun, daze, and knockdown.

Just my little suggestion