Guild Wars 2

In all of the discussion of sPvP/tPvP that is found in this and other places, one complaint seems to come up with some measure of consistency, and that is the way that CC and burst damage make PvP to be feel very zergy right now.

Ultimately, one of the big issues people are encountering is that its very easy to find oneself chain CCed in the midst of a battle and, having only one or at best two escapes, to have no choice but to eat burst damage and die quickly.

Now in 1v1s, CC seems fairly balanced in this game. In 5v5s, 3v3s, 2v2s, etc., it doesn’t. This is because if professions are balanced, then any one player should have sufficient CC and CC escape to match another player evenly, but in battles involving multiple players, and 2 or more players using their CCs on any one will provide more control than his class is actually technically capable of surviving.

This is not unique to GW2 specifically, but is true of combat in any MMO with CCs, and not only is it arguably unfair, but its inarguably not fun to get killed through CC with no ability to do anything about it. To mitigate this problem, other games have introduced passive mitigation systems. Some have used a diminishing return system, whereby every consecutive CC used within a given period of time on a single player would last for shorter and shorter durations. Others have used immunity stacking, whereby all CCs used in a given period of time would contribute points towards some period of immunity, such that if, for example, you are CCed twice immediately in a row, you become immune for some given period of time. Besides just making CC less annoying, these systems introduce a particular element of tactics and skill to these games, as players must manage their own and opposing players’ stacks/DR/etc. to achieve the best outcomes for their battles.

GW2 has given us stability to deal with CC, but it doesn’t really achieve this same goal and serves instead as a good option for more specific situations and really serves the same role as the abilities some classes have to gain on-demand immunity for short periods in other games – games which also have the universal passive mitigation. As a general counter to excess CC, it’s not very good for several reasons. First, it’s more accessible to some professions than others. Second, its not always easy to get even for those professions for which it is available. Third, it generally has a relatively long cooldown, and it should, given its strength, but that’s part of what makes it strong for particular situations but bad for general management of excess CC. Fourth, its easy to watch a players boons and wait until it has expired to chain CC him, knowing that he will not have access to it for a long time.

Ultimately, I think that this one addition alone would double if not increase even moreso the fun and tactical effort required in GW2 PvP.

I kind of see your point but CC’s in this game are very short in duration.
I think that if you see that the team meta strategy is to chain CC, you can counter by equipping builds specifically designed to deal with multiple CC’s and even shorten their already short duration.

Also this is not Stun Wars where you could literally CC someone to death for minutes at a time.

In that game that diminishing returns system was so badly exploited it might as well not even be present, so a diminishing returns system does not solve the problem I think Arena.net took the best option, make CC’s short duration and have builds specific to counter CC heavy groups.

Latinkuro.9420:

I kind of see your point but CC’s in this game are very short in duration.
I think that if you see that the team meta strategy is to chain CC, you can counter by equipping builds specifically designed to deal with multiple CC’s and even shorten their already short duration.

Also this is not Stun Wars where you could literally CC someone to death for minutes at a time.

In that game that diminishing returns system was so badly exploited it might as well not even be present, so a diminishing returns system does not solve the problem I think Arena.net took the best option, make CC’s short duration and have builds specific to counter CC heavy groups.

See, I think it’s interesting (and to me, telling) that you mention TOR because, as you’ll see from many of my recent posts on this forum, I played a lot of TOR (including in 2 high level PvP guilds) and I found the CCing in that game to absolutely pale in comparison to what I’ve experienced in GW2. It’s really not even close. I never died in TOR to CC the way I have in this game. It’s resolve system could uses a tweak or two, but when you understand it you can manage being CCed just fine.

On the other hand, GW2 doesn’t have any system to manage it, so even if someone thinks the TOR system was bad, at least it was present. Sure, CCs are shorter in this game, but they’re in much greater abundance and the amount of damage you can take in a 2 second GW2 stun is sooo much more than you can take in a4 second TOR stun or even in some cases two of those 4 second stuns chained that it’s amazing.

The idea of making builds just to counter CC is somewhat silly, in my opinion, for a few reasons. First, the problem with CC isn’t that any one class really has so much on its own that it can’t be managed. Rather its that, as I explained in my OP, multiple players chain stunning has no counter currently. That’s true even for the most anti-CC build you can come up with. More importantly, though, designing a build to very specifically counter a given thing means that that build is going to be pretty bad at almost every other thing. It’s almost like the people suggesting builds designed exclusively to counter Mesmer Phantasm builds. Sure, it might work to some degree, but it would be fairly useless against everything else – not to mention the fact that anything which requires a very specific build to counter is rather unbalanced by its very definition.

The reverse is also true for them, if they spec in CC heavy they will also lack in a lot of things now finding what to hit them with is the key in this case. also teamwork can help with this issue I haven’t encountered such CC issues as of yet in this game and I’ve been playing since beta.