Guild Wars 2

TL;DR – Damage is at a good place as it stands right now, Support is decent. What needs to be upped is Control and Difficulty. I propose doing this by giving Control a Stat of its own: Impact.

Disclaimer: All numbers below are a subject to change cause I haven’t bothered with a balance check.

Now, as we all know ANet wanted to base combat in Guild wars around 3 basic aspects: Damage (Raw damage and Condition Damage), Support (Boons, Reflections, Specific buffs and sustainable Heals) and Control (Crippling conditions and Stun/Knock effects). However, because of the current implementation of the big bads, namely Champions and Legendary enemies having Defiant Stacks that makes them entirely immune to Control for most of the battle, making it completely unneccesery to Spec your character with weapons focusing on Control, such as Warrior’s hammer, while playing PvE contant with larger groups. The most obvious lack is seen in Dungeons, but you all know the story of the Zerkers and how everyone wants them.

Doesn’t have to be that way. My idea would require much reworking and is a very long shot, but I feel it’s worth mentioning anyway as it might spur a compromise somewhere (Yeah, right).

Anyway, the basic idea is that aside from just Stun Duration, another stat would be introduced that’s called Impact, and it would come with an entirely new Meter: Balance. Impact damage would be recieved whenever someone uses a Control move and this Impact Damage would deplete Balance of the target. Once the Meter hit 0, the Target is effectively Stunned, knocked, feared, what have you, depending on the Skill used. However, it’s not necessery for a Control Skill to be effective at all, because without a proper amount of Impact stacked, control effects would be less effective than they are now. Nonetheless, the Balance meter would only recover to full after combat, or after you’ve been effectively Controlled once.

For instance: Assume the Balance Meter has the same base as Endurance (100). Someone with 0 Impact might cause 50 Damage to Balance, thus they fail to Control the target. However, say someone with 100% Impact comes along. Suddenly the same move deals 100 damage to the Balance meter, thus depleting it entirely and Controlling the enemy.

But hang on, wouldn’t this make Control even -less- Viable?!
Well, yes it certainly would. For Burst or Bunker Specs that put all of their points into Offensive or defensive stats. However, the idea is that someone who Stats into Impact will be able to dish out even More control than with the current implementation.

Yeah well, how will that matter in Dungeons and against World bosses?
Easy. With Defiant stacks removed (Actually, reworked) bosses will be more susceptible to get locked in stuns and left as sitting ducks, For a while. See, bosses as well would have the same Balance meter instead, meaning a Control-speccing player will be able to control them for longer periods of time, while non-specced classes might struggle to maintain Control at all. The Defiant stacks would now show After a successful Control effect ends, and would only double their resistance to Control effects until the Buff disappears. However the duration of the Control can be extended by using other control skills that override the previous, while the boss is still stunned (I’ll explain why you’d wanna do this later on).

So Say a Boss takes 100 Balance Damage and is controlled. But then the Boss gains a Defiant stacks and suddenly you need 200 Balance damage to control it again. Woohp, woohp, in comes the Controller, dealing 200 damage on his own with a strong Control ability like say Backbreaker or Banish. This while unspecced players would’ve needed twice or three times as many strikes for the same result. In return for this possible increase in control, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to boost Bosses’ damage in certain spikes or telegraphed attacks.

But I’d lose so much DPS, it’s not even funny!
Not necesserily, remember that Impact would only be one stat. There’d be several options to stack is, such as POW/prec/imp or TOUGH/pow/imp or COND/vit/imp.

I’m still not convinced
This’d counter the Stun Meta in PvP and WvW, as people would have to take out an important stat for the sake of being able to control an enemy better. Terrormancers for instance would have to sacrifice either Tough or Vit for their fears to have desired effect. M/S + GS warriors would see their Crit damage slither away and our of their grasp.

But that just makes it useless in PvP, and it’s still not useful for PvE!
I’m not done, furthermore I think that a Controlled enemy, wide open as it is, should be given a rather unhealthy Damage Resistance debuff for the time that it is Controlled. This Debuff would be dependant on how much Extra Balance damage you do with the Control effect. Say your Impact deal 140 Balance Damage (70 Base with 100% Impact) and your target has 100 Balance. BAM! Those 40 extra points are added as a 20% damage bonus as long as the target is Controlled. Add another Control skill and the Entire Balance damage is converted into Extra damage since the target already has 0 Balance left until the Controlling ends. a 25 Balance Damage attack? 12.5% extra. Another? 12.5% extra.
In PvP, this number would -obviously- be much lower.