Guild Wars 2

+1’ed

I really want to see a change to Defiant, that would make the game/combat so much more interesting

Simply has to happen. Defiant is holding this game back in terms of PvE combat. I would hope ANet realizes that and will do something about it. Stun locking shouldn’t be allowed, but there are far better ways to counter that then defiant in it’s current form that would then allow for far more interesting PvE fights.

+1 with OP, i’m sure the Dev’s can do something bout it.

+1. Let’s make our CC’s count

Love this, I’ve always felt like CC abilities were downright useless on bosses and this would definitely make things more interesting!
I don’t think it should be removed altogether, as you said it should start stacking if players throw too much cc on a boss.

+1. I’ve dedicated many posts to this issue in other discussions. It is about time Defiant went bye bye. I agree with all of the points brought up by the OP.

+1. I don’t think removing it completely is possible, but something has to happen. Just saying “oh, those skills don’t work on bosses” is a terrible cop out that too many games use for too many kinds of skills.

I think I’ve compared Defiant before to the way Final Fantasy handles magic. In that same way almost all bosses in Final Fantasy are immune to conditions like blind, poison etc. It’s a serious design error, to make an important game mechanic (CC skills) and then make all bosses immune to it. It’s the same reason everyone tends to play through Final Fantasy games by using their normal weapons, and spamming summons, since the magic is redundant for most of the game (at least with many of the games in the franchise, probably not all).

I hope the game designers for GW2 see this design flaw for what it is, and change it.

1+

Launches on bigger monsters could stagger them instead of sending them flying (which would look silly) and bosses could have 3 seconds immunity to CC after 1 is used. That would make CC locking impossible and it would also make CC more valuable from tactical point of view.
Give more strong attacks to bosses but also give those attacks very clear animations so they could be interrupted with right timing.
It would also be cool if some bosses would be out-right impossible to defeat if your team doesn’t have, let’s say, mesmer or guardian. Like un-dodgeable projectile showers.

Awesome. I normally don’t bother to +1 but this is a really good idea, and that idea of not completely removing defiant but rather improve its mechanics is genius.

Reading your post, I came up with this idea for changing defiant. During some fights (Strugar and chomper, and the Wraithlord in Arah) you are stacked with a debuff that activates an event at a certain number. If we apply this to champions, where instead of stripping stacks of defiant, control skills ADD stacks of defiant, granting the boss invulnerability to control as long as stacks remain above a limit. Here’s the kicker though, you can keep stacking defiance after that invulnerability hits, making players be wise about their control abilities, and coordinate so they don’t make bosses permanently invulnerable to being controlled. This allows for windows of time where you could control a boss, but can’t stun lock them.

Edit: I guess this could be abused, but you’d just have to lower the limit of stacks certain bosses can have, and adjust the time that stacks remain.

+1

This post has great ideas, and with a few tweaks and number-crunching, it could just make the game’s bosses great to fight, and allow for a lil’ bit more diversity.

Queens gauntlet is a 1v1 you can’t compare it to a instanced boss fight because alone you can’t CC 100% but with 5 people you can.

I do not agree in remove defiant.

Marstead.6430:

What is Defiant? Defiant is the mechanic where whenever a CC ability is used on a boss, they gain stacks of Defiant that make them immune to further CC. The stacks can only be removed by wasting CC moves on the boss. This is to prevent content from becoming trivialized by players chain-CCing bosses so they are unable to fight back.

This isn’t quite the proper definition of Defiant.

Defiant stacks build the more times an NPC is successfully CC’ed. That means, if a group or zerg of enemies constantly spam CC in an attempt to incapacitate an NPC, it will become harder and harder as the fight progresses. Mechanically, after being CC’ed, an NPC gains stacks of Defiant. When you burn through these stacks, they are vulnerable to CC and then gain more stacks of Defiant than before.

That said, I don’t disagree with your solutions or rationale. Something should be done with defiant stacks.

Another idea that might be slightly simple is simply having Defiant deteriorate over time along with CC being able to eat through it as well as perhaps making Defiant deteriorate faster when suffering under certain conditions. Defiant shouldn’t be trivialized but it’s core function should be kept intact. It’s meant to, basically, keep an encounter relatively the same difficulty the more players that join a fight. So long as some semblance of timing and teamwork can be kept, any solution is better than what we have now.

If 20 people were beating on me this is what I’d do.

If I take a certain amount of CC I’d just get desperate.
-Cue Blind-Fire Mode-
Shift preference to AoE attacks
Gain Quickness Buff
Gain Recharge Buff
Increased AoE range and quantity
Start using my super secret stun-breaker move
Do that until I calm down.

If I take a certain amount of damage within a time limit, then I just get furious.
-Cue Focus-Fire Mode-
Always target highest dps in group
Gain Swiftness Buff
Gain Critical Hit Chance Buff
Decreased AoE range
Start using my super secret CC move
And do that until I calm down some.

The point of those modes to introduce an action oriented skewing of the risk/reward ratio of the group relying too much on a particular combat style.

edit: The point at which I’d go into those modes would be adjusted by the number of participating players. So it’d be a scaling mechanic.

I +1ed this.

I make MMOs for a living (game design) and Defiant always confused me. In a game with so much hype for “breaking the holy trinity” and whatnot, Defiant brings us to the “holy single spec worth taking”.

As the OP mentioned, right now there is no point in doing anything but glass cannon in PVE. “The best CC is dead” has turned into “the only CC is dead”. Anything that increases the time a boss is alive radically increases the odds of player death.

Removing CC immunity can add a LOT of options for new PVE mechanics, as we have seen with the gauntlet. We need bosses that have solutions that don’t boil down to “kill it so fast we can ignore the mechanics”.

That said, uninteruptable One Hit Knock Outs (ohko) should be absolutely avoided in general PVE (it’s fine for the gauntlet, but not ok in dungeons). Ohkos bring us right back to stacking DPS at the expense of all other stats as a necro with 30khp is just as dead as a glass cannon guardian with ~10k.

EDIT: if this seems like a ramble, I’ve not had my morning coffee yet….