Guild Wars 2

It has recently gotten on my nerves that PvE is simply “Go Beserker’s or go home” now. Everyone can focus their gear entirely on damage output with no discernible tradeoff (except Necromancers, but that’s a different issue). Enemies in PvE can have all of their attacks dodged, blocked, or otherwise evaded, negating all damage dealt, making the glass cannon idea without a downside. Those that build defenses are at a loss because they are simply not dealing more damage to drop the enemy faster before the prevention cooldowns become a problem. Building defensive actually makes you less survivable in PvE.

I feel that the simplest solution would be to increase the attack rate of PvE enemies and reducing the damage per hit to keep the same DPS. Defensive skills and dodges do have cooldowns to be factored in. Currently in a glass cannon build, they don’t matter much because by the time the NPC attacks, at least one of the cooldowns is back up. Increasing the NPC attack rate would result in at least some of the attacks landing, once again making defensive stats matter and giving real choice.

As an example, any Wurm enemy. Right now, the time between attacks from a wurm is more time than it takes for you to get enough endurance for a dodge. Absolutely anyone can fight a Wurm and never take damage. While Wurms are a niche case, Dredge are not much faster on their attack timers. For that matter, very few NPC’s are.

On-shot mechanics, however, should remain on their current timers.

TLDR: Increasing the attack rate of NPC’s would aid in build diversity and would make glass cannon builds the high risk/high reward that they should be instead of their current tiny risk/high reward status.