Guild Wars 2

Defiant, it caused the decline of control builds. There is high effort for very little reward. Don’t remove Defiant though, I like the idea of 5 players coordinate together to interrupt the boss and at the same time, it removes the problem with removing it is that players will stun-lock the boss. Instead, I like to work around Defiant instead.

Ideas for Improvements:

• When interrupting a boss with the use of disabling skills, you remove one stack of defiant, do more damage and cause x seconds of weakness to the boss. Instead of doing 300 damage, you could do 7000 damage.
• Interrupting a boss after all stack of defiant will do even more massive damage and cause 10 seconds of stun, it will take away x% of the boss hp. X could be, 5%, 30%, 14%, 50%, etc. Who knows? That is Anet’s job to balance it out. However, only one player can do this massive damage.
• If you use a disable skill but do not interrupt the boss, then you remove one stack of defiant but, you do not get to do the extra damage.
• Enrage timers, reserved only to the Final bosses. While in Enrage mode, players needs to remove stacks of rage to stop it. If left unchecked, the boss will do uncontrollable amount of destruction and will wipe out the experienced players. Regular skills remove 1 stack of rage. Disabling skills remove much more stacks. Enrage timer happens randomly. It may happen, or it may never happen at all during your boss fight.

I am going to put this up in the front page so it gets looked at more.

I do agree defiant needs some looking at, some bosses have way too many available stacks. But not sure I can get behind your ideas. You assume players will play responsibly and not exploit the kitten out of this, and you’re wrong. Players will exploit and break everything in a game they can because they are lazy and a large chunk lack the proper skill to do it the way it was intended (read: gimmick speedruns). These ideas, while sounding pretty nice on paper, would allow for even worse dungeon play than we already have.

Maybe have Defiant only trigger if you don’t interrupt a big attack?

That way, things like Stun and Daze are used as an interrupt, as opposed to as spammed.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

I do agree defiant needs some looking at, some bosses have way too many available stacks. But not sure I can get behind your ideas. You assume players will play responsibly and not exploit the kitten out of this, and you’re wrong. Players will exploit and break everything in a game they can because they are lazy and a large chunk lack the proper skill to do it the way it was intended (read: gimmick speedruns). These ideas, while sounding pretty nice on paper, would allow for even worse dungeon play than we already have.

Yes, It does seem like it could make the run faster. However, This could promotes skillful play. Interrupting requires precise timing and a stun. If you interrupt at the right time, the boss will take the bonus damage. It removes tedium as well if you are skilled players. I was designing this in mind that 5 players will interrupt the boss to deal a noticable chunk of damage to the boss’ hp. I can’t think of how players exploit this even further with that unless the boss stays in a forever attacking state where players spam all the control skills easily. In that case, it would be a bug which will need fixing.

I do realize that 10 second stun may be over the top(After removing all stacks of defiant), but the number can change. It could even be random if players removed stacks of defiant too often or doesn’t get stunned at all or trigger enrage timer on bosses under the condition that 90% of the stun skills of all players are in cooldown which is meant to mess players up.

It would be best if defiant simply capped at 3 stacks.
Bosses SHOULD be able to be stunned and dazed, knocked around. They are bloody HP sponges right now. Let us have some laughs by stun locking the boss for 15 seconds if we co-ordinate well enough.

Heres a hint, if you have to spend 5 minutes fighting a boss…then the designers failed at the fight design. Optimally fighting a boss should guarentee the boss is down in 3 minutes. Long fights are not hard, only a hassle. If the fight lasts longer it is 99% likely that it is only because of the hp the boss has is at rediculous levels. All bosses need a weakness that if one can exploit knocks them down hard and fast. Like allowing a heavy attack to hit you so you get charged by the attack by the bosses power, hit the boss before the charge wears off and you do a guarenteed 10% of the bosses health in damage (this supports toughness/vit builds thus getting us away from glass cannon builds).

ANYTHING to change current dungeouns into less of a kitten slugfest of boring.

+1 right here I love the crowd control role but yet it feels rather useless in a dungeon.