Guild Wars 2

The more i think about it, the more i suspect the problem with PVE right now is how massively critical hits can amplify damage.

This becomes a issue for balancing the challenge between crit and non-crit builds.

The easiest/cheapest way to balance against crit builds is to simply up the health of monsters. But this increases the difficulty for non-crit builds as the fights grow longer.

So instead, perhaps certain monsters should be resistant, if not down right immune, to critical damage? I say damage because critical hits in GW2 is double stacked as it also trigger various gear and trait effects.

Say for instance that you face a mixed group of several smaller and one big monster. If the big monster is resistant or immune, the crit heavy build can still be valuable for clearing out the smaller monsters but will not be overly effective vs the big one.

Oh, another of those “DPS is OP, I don’t run DPS, so please nerf DPS” threads. Those never get old.

Because tactics like that have proven to be very successful and balanced in other games in the past…

Really bad idea. Making them immune to Critical Damage, is just the same as making some bosses immune to Condition Damage.

This is not to say that there maybe shouldn’t be some buffering. But it should be a gradual buffering and should not be targeted against any build in particular and more towards groups that do huge damage across the board.

• It could be that tough bosses put up a field that reduces the damage they take if they take more than a certain amount of damage a second. (but you could knock them out of it)
• Spike Bosses could do damage pulses that increase in severity the higher the damage coming in.
• More melee bosses could get an enrage bonus so they do more damage.
• Caster Bosses could get a cooldown reduction so groups that do more DPS have to dodge more.

In other words having more DPS should always do more damage. But it should be harder to do that damage. SO it becomes a balance between Damage and Support/Surviabilty. Rather than just the straight sum you have at the moment. I can dodge this mobs spike attacks so the only thing that is worth taking is DPS.

I will not support any threads that blatantly tries to fix what is not broken. Who cares if someone else does more damage than you in PvP anyways?

Pure damage isn’t even the way to go for most of the content like High Fractals, CoE and Arah.
CoF path 1 is farmable with anything for it’s lack of threatening mechanics, stationary bosses and the fact how it promotes pure damage in the last boss by giving it a ridiculous health regen that you need to burst through.

The problems why you are asking for a stupid nerf wont be solved by making a stupid nerf.

Let’s see what most encounters are about.

Bosses that can be kept stationary, have high HP regen, Have high health pool, dont have threatening damage.

If bosses were mobile, did very high damage, disabled players, had buffs that need to be stolen/destroyed, had an AI that moves out of stationary AoE, Complex attack and action patterns and had abit lower health pool than the boring DPS race facetank poo fests.

You would have a boss that lowers the potential damage of builds that are based on stationary damage, unless well played and gives a place for tankier builds that depend on condition damage to come into play.

TL:DR Content is over trivialized thus the fastest option is to bring as much raw damage to the table instead of builds that focus in dealing their damage over time while sustaining themselves near endlessly.

The issue is multi-fold Maridot but it all adds up together.

1. Power/Precision/Crit is exponential in how they stack. If you have stats in one of them it increases the effect of all the others.
2. Most fights can be survived without Toughness/Vitality/Healing, using just your base heal.
3. Healing stat doesn’t have a huge effect.
4. Other Support is not affected by any stat. A Wall of Reflection doesn’t refect X amount of damage modified by Toughness. It just reflects everything.
5. Most bosses only do spike damage which can be dodged, with very little fast sustained damage (they are missing auto-attack type abilities).
6. A lot of bosses have a blind spot inside there hit circle, which means that instead of risking more meleeing, it’s actually safer.
7. A lot of Control is useless in boss fights.

TBH to fix the issue you need to look at all these things and try to even them out, so Risk/Damage, Healing/Incoming Damage, Melee/Range and Control/Support/DPS are all balanced better. There are a lot of places the balance is hugely out of wack.

This was not so much about bosses as it was about the issue with people alpha striking the holograms, similar to how i recall warriors would whirlwind into a recently spawned pack of risen in Orr and deny anyone else even a chance at loot.

Maridot.9084:

Pure damage isn’t even the way to go for most of the content like High Fractals, CoE and Arah.

You could not be more wrong…

Most speed clear oriented guilds stack DPS in their group combo’s. In fact, the only place where I’ve run anything that isn’t pure DPS in the last ~2 months is in Fractals 38/48 and that was when I was playing the AH guardian and some other dude was playing the DPS guardian.

CoE is even more DPS or gtfo than CoF in our teams tbh.

And in Arah, only lupi is somewhat threatening. And all his attacks can easily be dodged. In fact, the most threatening thing in the Arah paths are the groups of 4 silver foes that spawn. Those can seriously wreck you if you don’t watch out.. Most of our guardians run full DPS there as well. Mainly because we usually only let people guardian that have enough experience on their warrior already.

digiowl.9620:

This was not so much about bosses as it was about the issue with people alpha striking the holograms, similar to how i recall warriors would whirlwind into a recently spawned pack of risen in Orr and deny anyone else even a chance at loot.

Then this suggestion is even more terrible than I thought it was… I agree that the hologram system is far from ideal, but proposing something as game breaking as this to fix it is like trying to nail a picture against the wall using a truck as a hammer..