Guild Wars 2

It seems a lot of people feel that breakbars really damaged the PvE experience. Why?

The current break bar isn’t bad it just requires less coordination. There was more skill to timing ice bow 5 and coordinating with your party to get the stacks down quickly without accidentally going over 5 stacks and missing ice bow

Andraus.3874:

The current break bar isn’t bad it just requires less coordination. There was more skill to timing ice bow 5 and coordinating with your party to get the stacks down quickly without accidentally going over 5 stacks and missing ice bow

This plus all cc skills lost their identity. It went from coordinating soft+hard cc to maximize damage and control to just “lol spam cc for free 50% damage boost”.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

This plus all cc skills lost their identity. It went from coordinating soft+hard cc to maximize damage and control to just “lol spam cc for free 50% damage boost”.

Old CC system was way too strong in coordinated groups and almost useless for random ones. New one is more balanced and overall better.

Rednik.3809:

TheRandomGuy.7246:

This plus all cc skills lost their identity. It went from coordinating soft+hard cc to maximize damage and control to just “lol spam cc for free 50% damage boost”.

Old CC system was way too strong in coordinated groups and almost useless for random ones. New one is more balanced and overall better.

Whether or not it’s better is just a matter of opinion. Some people like having more coordinated team work game play. I know raids brought that to some extent but we used to have more of that in other game modes like fractals with the old CC. I don’t particularly miss the old one but I do miss that coordination aspect. I know it was OP but it could have been nerfed to some extent rather than completly revamped

The breakbar system is better on bosses which are designed for it.

Old bosses, by virtue of not being designed for it, are not better with it.

I think the breakbar is fine in new content like raids, but they really hurt old content like dungeons and to a lesser extent fractals by making the power creep already felt by the elite specs that much higher.

Breakbars in general are ok not perfect but ok, the fact that they at least in dungeons are only at a strength of 600 (6s worth of CC)and give you 50% damage boost is just ridiculous especialy since the removal of unshakeable (vulnerability duration reduced by 50%). This 2 things is what most people call powercreep even tho they think its the elite specs

They just have to change how the breakbar works on some enemies.

Instead of stunning the enemy it should be more like in the old days that once broken you can CC the enemy as much as you want till the breakbar re-appears.

Of course the breakbar should have an idictator that it behaves like that.

Has anyone been able to use the breakbar well in solo dungeon runs?

I don’t know why anyone would say the new breakbar is worse than the old (damage wise). It gives all classes access to the equivalent of an icebow 5 CC, which was the best CC to use on a boss before the defiance change. Given the choice, most groups would choose icebow 5 over some lame push/pull/launch on a boss anyway. AND 50% damage increase!

Lord Kuru.3685:

Has anyone been able to use the breakbar well in solo dungeon runs?

Any class that can solo break the bar can use it effectively in solo dungeon runs. For example as a scrapper, blast gyro takes off half the bar and rifle’s overcharged shot takes the other half, and both skills are on the exact same cooldown as the breakbar’s regeneration duration (15s). Revenants (staff 5) and necromancers (flesh golem’s charge) are also able to solo breakbars themselves.

Even though the new system has its own issues, I’d doubt we’d be asking for the old one if the game had launched with the current one. The old one was little more than a crutch to make bosses a bit harder to deal with, it limited combat in odd ways, it created an impossible coordination issue for open world, and followed a sort of pencil/paper RPG convention (count, count, count, count, ok go).