Guild Wars 2

It’s inactive 99% of the fight and when it’s available it melts in seconds. It felt very forced and scripted, requiring no thoughts or management. Just mindless spam of CC when it’s available, the end.

While I enjoyed the fights, the defiance bars felt like the cinematic parts of a God of War boss fight were you press the timed on-screen buttons and the character script-pummels the boss with no other input from your part. Except there is no epic cinematic but only scripted boredom.

I felt like the defiance bar took away what little control we had left on bosses and outright erased any control form from high end PvE leaving only boons. Right now when I play thief with pistol off hand I have much more control over defiance.

I’m really concerned about professions and specializations with a lot of built in soft control, especially for Reaper. Currently things like chill are really helpful against some bosses like the mossman, archdiviner and imbued shaman. With the new break bars soft CC lose even the little use they had. And nope I’m not sold over defiance DoT. What’s the use of defiance damage over time if 99% of the time the defiance bar is immune? My Reaper’s chill didn’t felt useful at all while I was raiding.

TL;DR: They promised to take advantage of the complexity of GW2’s combat system like PvP, but it felt more like they completely erased control from PvE.

I think the mechanics for defiance were fine, the bar itself just melted far too quickly is all. It needs to take a lot more hits to remove.

Just from the videos I watched the Break bars seemed very under tuned. I don’t think devs intended them to be broken with only a couple of CC’s. Feels like they should take concerted effort by a portion of the team to break.

Still there is no management, just mindless CC dumping when it’s available. Even if the defiance bar lasted 5 times longer it wouldn’t change this aspect. Player have no control in least over defiant bars as long they stay as scripted event. Seems like they erased control from PvE and left only damage and support. :-(

I agree, breaking the defiance bar felt more like a quicktime event than anything else. With the current defiance you actually have to think about when you use which CC, the defiance bars are pretty brainless compared to that.

It would be nice if the defiance bar was always available, and breaking it when you shouldn’t punished you; however the fact that soft CC melts the bar would cause problems.

I think the defiance bar mechanic was ok as it was. It kept people paying attention, and it’s a reason to have CC in the group, which is nice. Otherwise CC would have no place what-so-ever.

To me, the entire Defiance Bar part of the Vale Guardian, and the trash mobs before it, felt like it was tacked on, because without it ArenaNet wouldn’t be able to say “Controller” is a role. It’s not a role, and if the Breakbar was harder to Break, it still wouldn’t be a role. Instead, we’d lower each Guardian to the Breakbar, then move on, and go around the room, simultaneously breaking each bar, which wouldn’t be any extra difficulty. In my opinion that aspect of the fight just felt flat.

I agree. Hopefully the mechanic is used in a variety of ways, but as a necro, my soft cc condis feels gutted because now its almost entirely useless while breakbar is down. (The only use is effects based on # of condis like Target the Weak)Hopefully there are more fights where its up the entire fight and we get to cc more regularly, or other unique ways to use it. If it is something so conditionally available, it should take everything the raid has to take it down, not just a cc or two from every guy.