Guild Wars 2

The reason for this DPS meta is very simple, and the nerf to crit damage is only a bandaid fix. At the moment boss mechanics only really negate soft CC, hard CC, and conditions. There is little to nothing in the way of direct damage mitigation. on top of this, bosses only really deal large avoidable damage, making support and survivability rather pointless. The lack of direct damage mitigation and the abundance of support counters is what created this DPS meta. I’m not saying that DPS needs even more of a nerf, I’m saying the other specs need more relevance to how a fight turns out. It’s gonna take a few changes to make all of this possible.
The first thing that needs changing is how bosses deal damage. At the moment most bosses do large telegraphed attacks that can simply be dodged. Having these big attacks isn’t a bad thing in the least. The problem is the lack of any pressure outside of that.
An example of a boss done well in this sense would be lupicus. Lupicus has lots of attacks that hit hard in large aoes, pressuring people to be on the move. On top of this, he also has a single target auto attack that applies pressure between big hits. The auto attack isn’t enough to kill a player on it’s own, but it makes mistakes harder to recover from, leading to a fun fight where the person being chased by the boss tries not to die, while the others support him and attack lupicus!
An example of a boss that needs work would be alpha. Alpha has little as far as weak fast hits go. He has a burning damage aoe and. . .that’s it. The AOE isn’t even range either, it’s point blank. While melee shouldn’t be pressured out of fights entirely, The burning isn’t enough to make you want to back off after getting hit by it once, twice, or even three times! This leads to alpha fights being nothing more than a stack and smack. Even if most of your party dies, he’s pretty easy to solo, which in itself exemplifies the problem.
By giving bosses more weak but difficult to avoid attacks, it will promote:
-soft CC (chill for melee bosses, weakness for high damage bosses, ect): to reduce the damage/potential to hit of those weak attacks so they can be powered through.
-defensive stats: to mitigate that damage that gets through to you. As of right now you can simply avoid most damage making this stat currently undesirable for more advanced players.
-soft support- right now healing, protection, and to a minor extent retaliation, aren’t that useful as there aren’t small weak hits. However, more numerous hits will justify all three of these more so as you can’t utilize these boons against big damage attacks.
However, this is not the end of it. Making bosses more offensive will be good, but with the current state of defiant all of the soft CC conditions are neutered too much to be useful. On top of that, the amount of effort required to get stacks low enough to interrupt a skill simply isn’t worth it when the skill can be avoided instead. At the same time defiant can’t be completely neutered, otherwise bosses will just be CC spammed instead. I think defiant should create a tug and pull between wanting to stop certain skills or maintain soft CC.
Change defiant from giving a flat reduction of conditions like weakness and blindness, and instead have it be determined by the number of stacks the boss has. The fewer stacks the boss has, the longer these conditions last. Defiant will now truly be you weakening the bosses will to resist effects until pushed back over the edge. This will create a tug and pull where you want to get their stacks as low as possible, but not remove them all until a skill you want to stop appears!
Another point albeit lesser, is the PvE enemy use of buffs. At the moment most enemies don’t buff themselves. The ones that do, however, re-apply them so quickly that removing the buffs is almost pointless. There needs to be more of a happy middle ground created because, as of right now, buff removal is only really effective in PvP. The same can be said about condition removal. Enemies that have it tend to use it extremely frequently making condition duration ineffective.

The most important thing ist. If CC/Healsupport is “viable/useful” it is needed.

At this point, the content is not soloable anymore (or not as a glasscanon), and can´t be finished with every builds/class combination.
The class will/should not matter, but the builds.

5 Berserkerthiefs can´t do it, but 5 Shouthealwarriors can, just for example.

If we will get this kind of content, the forums will be full of crying people.
The reason why people are crying about the dps meta, is because they never thought about their builds/the content and teamplay.
They don´t want to change their builds, never.
Sad but true.

Needing heal classes isnt really the right way to do it, Don’t make this into some crap mmo, it’s an action mmo meaning full dps gear should be able to do it. We don’t like playing some generic mmo that has spank and tank mechanics.

What’s lacking is bosses with mobility, bosses that can back off (back step); a rush attack that gets him out of the way, a simple backstep, a simple melee aoe launch, back step followed by an attack, things like that. The way bosses are now is players stick to them like glue and dps, tracking bosses to maintain melee range should require more skill. They wanted to make an action mmo, then they have to emphasize movement.

As for defiant – why not make bosses vulnerable to CC at certain frames of the animations? something sort of a counter hit. When he goes for a haymaker he can be CC’d. Though it would take a little more work.

Norjena.5172:

The reason why people are crying about the dps meta, is because they never thought about their builds/the content and teamplay.
They don´t want to change their builds, never.
Sad but true.

Or maybe some of us want more engaging gameplay than stacking in a corner, using our autoattack skill and occasionally pressing the dodge button.

Then you can make your own groups and do that? >_>

J Eberle.9312:

Then you can make your own groups and do that? >_>

There’s only so much you can do with a poorly developed AI system. You can choose not to stack, but you can’t choose to have the enemy fight back beyond spamming an autoattack once every 3-4 seconds with the occasional second skill.

Bread.7516:

Needing heal classes isnt really the right way to do it, Don’t make this into some crap mmo, it’s an action mmo meaning full dps gear should be able to do it. We don’t like playing some generic mmo that has spank and tank mechanics.

I’m not looking to make any class required at all. However, there needs to be more incentive to use something beyond power/crit DPS. As of right now there is none.

I agree that making healers useful but not mandatory should be the goal. One way I can think of doing this might be to create a boss room with a healing fountain, and having the boss do a lot of small damage that accumulates over time. This means that zerkers would have to run to the fountain to heal up pretty frequently, but having a Cleric build healer present would reduce that need and make the fight go quicker.

striker.3704:

At the moment boss mechanics only really negate soft CC, hard CC, and conditions. There is little to nothing in the way of direct damage mitigation.

Typical bosses do not negate condition damage and soft cc at all and they do mitigate direct damage by reducing vulnerability duration by half.

The first thing that needs changing is how bosses deal damage. At the moment most bosses do large telegraphed attacks that can simply be dodged. Having these big attacks isn’t a bad thing in the least. The problem is the lack of any pressure outside of that.

A lot of the bosses do have autoattacks and they do pressure you. Problem is that most of those autoattacks are often projectiles which are being negated by reflections. Moreover, if bosses did only large telegraphed attacks that can simply be dodged that would mean that they do it once every 10 seconds since that’s the time your endurance regenerates without a vigour for builds like LH or staff elementalist. So, how come you can simply dodge their attacks if you don’t have enough endurance for that?

An example of a boss done well in this sense would be lupicus. […]

His autoattack is enough to one shot an elementalist. Secondly, it seems like you are kiting him which only leads to perceived fun mechanics because it’s one of the bosses (if not the only one) that can actually chase you since he’s faster than you. It’s still better to just melee him.

An example of a boss that needs work would be alpha. […]

If you are talking strictly about path 1 alpha, his aoe has 2 parts. First one is point blank burning plus damage while the second one are multiple dragon’s tooth on ranged users.
His earth attack doesn’t hit if you stand on him, fix that and suddenly you lack endurance to constantly dodge everything (and you cannot block it). I would advise you to take a look at this to improve your knowledge.

-soft CC […]

If by promoting chill you mean kiting them you can already do that with great effectiveness. There’s virtually nothing that oppose that, in fact, it’s the decent tactics for bosses with strong autoattacks like fractal bosses. Weakness only lasts 50% of its original duration because there are certain builds or even skills that can permanently maintain that condition on trashmobs.

-defensive stats […]
-soft support […]

Advanced players do not want to rely on passive defense because that’s an antithesis of active combat. Protection is mostly used in fractals. Permanent protection to add. Adds so much diversity and fun to the guardian builds that now has to spam autoattacks and do nothing else.

However, this is not the end of it. Making bosses more offensive will be good, but with the current state of defiant all of the soft CC conditions are neutered too much to be useful. On top of that, the amount of effort required to get stacks low enough to interrupt a skill simply isn’t worth it when the skill can be avoided instead.

Interrupting is pointless not because of defiance but because the skill you interrupted goes on 4s cooldown. There are few exceptions like abomination in arah and you see hard cc being used there, despite the presence of defiance.

Another point albeit lesser, is the PvE enemy use of buffs. At the moment most enemies don’t buff themselves. The ones that do, however, re-apply them so quickly that removing the buffs is almost pointless. There needs to be more of a happy middle ground created because, as of right now, buff removal is only really effective in PvP. The same can be said about condition removal. Enemies that have it tend to use it extremely frequently making condition duration ineffective.

Buff removal is highly scarce mechanic for most of the classes. You’d first need to give it classes like elementalist or ranger. There are exactly 19 skills or traits that can remove, steal or transform boons and classes like warrior or guardian has only 1 trait for that.

If you want to know what should be done without redesigning most of the bosses, it should be increasing the skill ceiling of active defense usage, not increasing the viability of passive defense.

what about getting some remote AI making boss walk out of banners area and attack from range if the party is full melee?

And the 5 zerk meta is a lie.
its a warrior AND guardian meta not a full zerk meta….

Zerk is the only way for players to cover the last spot in warriors and guardians PUG groups when there are no warriors available.

Most people if they could would play WWWWG or WWWGG….and many do.

LordByron.8369:

what about getting some remote AI making boss walk out of banners area and attack from range if the party is full melee?

And the 5 zerk meta is a lie.
its a warrior AND guardian meta not a full zerk meta….

Zerk is the only way for players to cover the last spot in warriors and guardians PUG groups when there are no warriors available.

Most people if they could would play WWWWG or WWWGG….and many do.

One thing, stop playing with pugs (or make a friendlist of good ones) or join a good guild. Then you’ll notice that every class can do the job right (ofc there’ll be always 1 war and maybe 1 guard / mes in the meta group).

Alpha’s cone attack now hurts even if completely inside him. There are still cases when you avoid the attack. Will have to investigate the modified attack to know for sure.

In one way this does punish stacking (if two cones somehow connect then poof goes half my eles health), yet at the same time further promotes higher dps and fgs usage to kill Alpha before he kills you. The ones who will feel the change the most are pugs who are zerks but do not know how to pull off proper high dps output. Organized dps parties will not notice the difference, except maybe now you will be procing the if-over-90%-health bonuses less frequently than desired.

I know the whole point of GW2 was to drop the trinity and I’ve enjoyed the game thus far, but sometimes I can’t help but miss being a dedicated healer. I know there’s plenty of viable support builds out there for almost every class, but it’s just not the same.