Guild Wars 2

THE DEFIANT BUFF

• Stacks of the Defiant buff now have a fixed duration of 20 seconds.
• Unshakable will now only grant two stacks of Defiant for every two players in the area.
• If an Unshakable creature is disabled more than once within 10 seconds, it gains 2 stacks of Defiant. This is to ensure that Defiant can still proc even in 1 on 1 battles with an Unshakable creature.
• The maximum amount of stacks of Defiant that Unshakable can grant is now capped at 12 in order to save on bandwidth.
• Whenever a stack of Defiant expires on a creature, that creature receives the “Exposed” debuff. Exposed means that this creature cannot receive the Defiant buff. Exposed has a fixed duration of 5 seconds.

CHAMPION AND ELITE ENEMIES

• All “Champion” class enemies have had their health pools reduced by 33%.
• All “Elite” class enemies have had their health pools reduced by 40%.

I’ll expand on my reasoning later, although it pretty much comes down to how current “high-tier” enemies normally nothing more than average enemies with a ludicrous health pool and a fancy circle around their face next to their health bar. Things like that combined with the current Defiant mechanic make fighting these guys about as fun as chopping down a tree with a baseball bat.

I’m fine with the current defiant mechanism. It takes coordination to interrupt a boss’ killer move.

Quick Mouse.7635:

I’m fine with the current defiant mechanism. It takes coordination to interrupt a boss’ killer move.

Perhaps, but you don’t find coordination in overworld mobs. Furthermore, my proposals wouldn’t really change the fact that players would need coordination to stop a boss’ big attack. You would still have Unshakable enemies with 4 stacks of Defiant each time you disable them for the first time in an encounter (in dungeon scenarios). You have to carefully chew through those before getting to the gooey center that is a boss susceptible to CC skills. The only difference would be that players would get more of an opportunity to get in big damage for a brief time window after Defiant wears off since the boss would be susceptible to CC at will. Although, maybe 5 seconds is too much for Exposed. Maybe 3 seconds would be better.

My suggestion isn’t about making it easier to interrupt an Unshakable creature, rather it’s about making interrupting an Unshakable creature more rewarding and giving players the opportunity to use “all-in” skill combos or attacks that otherwise might go wasted in a tedious boss fight.

Also—and this is apart from your statement, I suppose—I honestly cannot defend the health levels of elite dungeon creatures and champion creatures. This sort of plays into making more window for all out attacks on bosses available to players since right now everything just has so much health that most “high-level” encounters are just maypole dances with everyone skipping around the boss in circles and beating it with sticks and magic for several minutes until it dies. It’s not fun.