Guild Wars 2

Wouldn’t dungeon runs be a lot more fun, and dungeon parties more diverse, if this mechanic did not exist?

Are blind, vulnerability and CC skills so powerful that they would trivialize any Boss encounter that did not involve the Defiant mechanic?

If I recall correctly Defiant was added to the game during BWE2 or BWE3. I didn’t get to try Ascalonian Catacombs WITHOUT Defiant but I’m guessing a lot of other people did. What was your experience with Defiantless Bosses?

Are you aware of Bjarl the Rampager? No defiant would trivialise boss fights even more than they currently are.

Wynne.3908:

Are blind, vulnerability and CC skills so powerful that they would trivialize any Boss encounter that did not involve the Defiant mechanic?

Yes. Yes they are.

Although I do agree that the current defiant mechanic is far from optimal, removing it completely is definitely not the answer.

I think the dungeons would be more fun if we were allowed to use CC skills against bosses. But I don’t think complete removal of Defiant would be a good idea, if not other mechanics were put in its place. You can’t have bosses being stun-locked. That trivializes any fight. And trust me, without Defiant players would stun-lock bosses. I think they just need to change Defiant.

I think they could change defiant to something like

Defiant: Blind is reduced to a 10% chance to miss. This foe gains Stability for X seconds after being stunned/dazed/launched/knockdown/knockedback

Grok Krog.9581:

I think they could change defiant to something like

Defiant: Blind is reduced to a 10% chance to miss. This foe gains Stability for X seconds after being stunned/dazed/launched/knockdown/knockedback

Exactly. We already have an in-game mechaninc that counters CC skills: Stability. So why don’t they give Bosses/champs a stability skill? If Weakness is going to make a Boss fight too easy, why not give them a way to cleanse themselves of it, rather than nerfing every skill in the game that that causes weakness/blind/vuln.

My belief is that Defiant was quick-fix, implemented during one of the BWEs.

Grok Krog.9581:

I think they could change defiant to something like

Defiant: Blind is reduced to a 10% chance to miss. This foe gains Stability for X seconds after being stunned/dazed/launched/knockdown/knockedback

I’d say this, except buff blind a little bit by making it a 25% chance of effectiveness and also having the CC immunity be a passive buff rather than a boon that can be stripped.

Black Box.9312:

Grok Krog.9581:

I think they could change defiant to something like

Defiant: Blind is reduced to a 10% chance to miss. This foe gains Stability for X seconds after being stunned/dazed/launched/knockdown/knockedback

I’d say this, except buff blind a little bit by making it a 25% chance of effectiveness and also having the CC immunity be a passive buff rather than a boon that can be stripped.

I’d rather dungeon boss/champs had basically the same toolset players are given to deal with various situations. Anet doesn’t want people knocklocking in dungeons… fine! Give them Monster Skills like Guild Wars 1 had. Just off the top of my head:

“Defiant” – Cast Time: 3/4 sec.
Duration: 10 sec.
Cooldown: 5 seconds
Description: Cannot be targeted by Crowd Control effects.

Anet doesn’t want people stacking weakness and blind on dungeon bosses? That’s fine too.

“Cleanse” – Cast Time: Instant
Duration: None
Cooldown: 15 sec.
Description: Remove up to 5 conditions

Just making up numbers here as I go along but whatever, the principle remains the same. Give the bosses/champs a the tools they need to keep encounters fun and challenging, without locking out certain builds and playstyles.

The best solution would be designing encounters around PvP. Instead of a static one enemy have 5 mobile enemies.

Defiant is a rather a blunt instrument but it is probably here to stay just because of the amount of rework to balance everything if it is was removed. Defiant and the condition caps remain a big obstacle to PvE balance but I’m guessing the condition cap will see changes first.

Wynne.3908:

Grok Krog.9581:

I think they could change defiant to something like

Defiant: Blind is reduced to a 10% chance to miss. This foe gains Stability for X seconds after being stunned/dazed/launched/knockdown/knockedback

Exactly. We already have an in-game mechaninc that counters CC skills: Stability. So why don’t they give Bosses/champs a stability skill? If Weakness is going to make a Boss fight too easy, why not give them a way to cleanse themselves of it, rather than nerfing every skill in the game that that causes weakness/blind/vuln.

My belief is that Defiant was quick-fix, implemented during one of the BWEs.

Allowing the boon to be stripped would give boon stripping more need. You still wouldn’t be able to stun lock because the boss would get stability again on the next stun

Edit: Though I guess with a Thief you could keep it off all the time. But they could also give bosses more boons to cover with

Defiant is there because the devs are too lazy to create bosses that use existing mechanics (stability, might, condi cleansing) properly. Also the 10% effectiveness of blind basically kills the viability of the condition completely — especially since you don’t know whether that 10% will proc when you place that condition.

Anet just doesn’t get it. Players don’t like it when their skills are useless. As evidence: all the CC heavy mobs that they like to create.

When ever you design boss fights in a way that negates most of the game mechanics, you are basically killing your own combat system. That is why we see nothing but zerker builds, amongst other things. It is truly bad game design, yet a lot of games are guilty of it. Final Fantasy does it in EVERY installment, and I can’t understand for the life of me why people keep playing those games either.

Defiant isnt as bad a system as people think. The problem is that you can completely ignore it and bypass key boss skills in other ways. There are several fights where we use cc to keep defiant down and interrupt important attacks. Interrupt the enrage on abomination in arah path 2, the spin attack on risen priest of melandru and the life drain on the champ wraith for grenth defend. As you can see the issue isnt defiant its the lack of attacks that require cc. The life drain is a long channeled multi hit attack which you cant dodge forever so it has to be interrupted. The enrage on abom doesnt need to be interrupted but it saves times if done correctly. Same goes for the spin on risen priest of melandru, its dangerous and you cant dps him in melee while hes doing it so its worth interrupting.

This is my personal opinion on defiant stacks. I do however think the unshakeable buff needs a rework. Control conditions rendered far too useless just ruins certain classes/builds viability.

The problem as I see it, is that the current system makes it really difficult for an individual to land an interrupt on a boss. Which is an odd design choice, considering the fact that GW2 seemed to take a step more towards individual roles.

In GW1 it worked on an individual basis. You just had to time interrupts right, and some bosses had skills that you really had to interrupt. Such as Glint’s Crystal Hibernation . But with the stacks of defiant that you have to peal down in GW2, the chances of a team mate ruining your interrupts are very high. Because landing that interrupt at the wrong time, instantly refills the whole stack of defiant.

Now a game that requires some team play and coordination isn’t bad. But when the game does not really require you to go to such great lengths to do an interrupt, it makes it a very unattractive strategy, and this ultimately dumbs the game down. People will go for the strategy that is less prone to scr*w ups. Such as simply stacking and bursting the boss into oblivion.

Explorable modes were always ment for coordinated teams. So it does its job. But theres not enough attacks which require cc. I personally enjoy fights a bit more if the group is pealing down the defiant stacks ready for an interrupt. Means the fight becomes less braindead. We already have dodges and blocks for reflex. Interrupts being coordinated is a good combo with the reflex nature of the combat system.

It all comes down to boss difficulty in the end. And its a shame good bosses like lupi are completely immune to cc.

Idea I had for unshakeable that i thought id post. Atm blinds have a 10% chance to work which means if people blind a boss they are still going to have to dodge to be safe. It should be changed to blinds are applied 10% of the time. That way you can spam blinds to try and get a guaranteed working blind if you really need to. And you can tell if you need to dodge or not because you can see if the blind is going to work.

How about blinds work 100% of the time, but bosses have ways to cleanse it, or a boon that must be stripped first, which clears conditions?

I feel like that would be too easy to blind every attack. You just apply it at the last millisecond.

All depends on implementation. But I feel changing it to chance to inflict instead of chance to work is a very simple fix.

How about blinds have ~10% normal duration, at least for dungeons, so that you need to time it almost perfectly for it to be helpful making blind spam a waste of time.

An ele and a guard can still keep it up with their spamming whatever-they-are-doing-that-everyone-knows-they-are-doing (sorry, I’m not very knowledgeable in meta build :>)

how about giving bosses a stunbreak skill? also put stunbreak skill animations, not just some cheap implementation with no visual indication. (example: guardian smite conditions animation looks pretty indicative of a stunbreak even if it isnt)

but nooooo it’s too much effort for anet. as far as we know they dont care about legit boss fights, only zerged world events.

blinds atm are completely useless for bosses because it is unreliable. the 10% chance to miss is obviously because they have no idea how else to implement it.

I think bosses should have to adhere to the same rules that players do to some extent. They should have stability, like we do. This would allow classes with boon stealing abilities to be more useful. They should have stun breakers, but be allowed to apply them and stability more frequently, but not to the point that it renders our stuns moot. They should stun us because we can stun them as well and why not steal our boons too? Very few bosses also make real use of conditions to put pressure on us as well. They can still have mountains of HP and defense too. It is 5v1 after all. Having a group boss fight would actually be pretty fun too now that I think about it, having 3-5 semi powerful bosses instead of one glorious mountain of HP to whittle away. There’s a lot of things they could try out. The Aether Retreat boss was a step in the right direction, imo, but maybe I’m asking for too much.

There are 2 solutions to Defiant:
- Remove Defiant from mobs/bosses and replace them with “support” skills which they will use to cleanse/heal/etc. themselves.
- Change Defiant so that once maybe 4 (instead of 6) stacks are removed, it is vulnerable to CC for like 15 seconds before it regains its stack.

It would still make CC more useful.

Currently skills like Static Field or Unsteady Ground are 99.9% useless in PvE. I hate it. They really ought to change the Defiant mechanic or enable us to change CC skills for DPS skills.

While we’re at it let us not forget Unshakable. I feel terrible for all the Necros, Rangers and Thieves who love to dish out vulnerability, weakness and blind. I mean really what is the point of Unshakable/Defiant? It doesn’t make the fight any more or less challenging at all, ever. Please remove these things and come up with a better way to implement the same ideas. Thanks.

Was just thinking instead of giving Stability after an interrupt they could gain a “buff” instead that makes them immune to CC for a period of time. Taking CC under that buff could make them “defiant” and gain might, protection, etc.

As for unshakeable, I can understand weakness duration being reduced (I think reducing it to 25% effectiveness would be better) but not Vulnerability. It’s not much of a difficulty reducer as Blind/Weakness

I see a lot of good ideas.. posted in a thread that devs aren’t going to read. Such a shame.

Half the problem is just poor boss AI, the other half poor boss design. I’ve seen many threads about defiant on this forum and others but have never heard Anet say anything about it. I don’t know if that means they’re working on it or stumped on what they should do.

Defiant should be changed to do a duration type buff that activates once certain conditions are met like being stun locked rapidly, too much blindness/weakness/immobilize or even at certain health thresholds to make it interesting. And the abilities defiant gives should be redone as well.

+10% Outgoing damage
-10% Incoming damage
Immune to control effects including immobilize
Gain bandom a boon every 5 seconds

Aegis: 10 s
Fury: 5 s
Might: 10 s
Protection: 5 s
Regeneration: 10 s
Retaliation: 5 s
Swiftness: 10 s

Unshakable will always be on the boss.

The saddest thing about this thread is I see good ideas which will never see the light of day in game because Anet doest see enough gem potential from pve.

We had CC on bosses in GW1, and we did fine!

Just saying.

It’s rather easy to solo the standard 5 stacks of defiant depending on your class. It’s just not needed. They don’t need to remove defiant, they need to give attacks patterns to some boss that would wipe the entire group no matter what if you didn’t interrupt the attack. Now you’d have a justification for spamming pistol 4 on thief, or run a mace swap on war etc. A prime candidate for this would be Lupicus phase 2 AoE. Make it unblockable and impossible to reflect, then give the option to interrupt it.

Defiant is perfectly fine as it is. Don’t touch it.

Kain Francois.4328:

We had CC on bosses in GW1, and we did fine!

Just saying.

Most of the fights in gw1 pve were group vs group.

Just saying.

Only real gw2 style bossfights we had in gw1 were lich, shiro, shiro+lich and dhuum (being released as one of the last additions to the game). All of those had knockdown immunity, condition and hex duration on them reduced and op monster skills.
In gw1 cc was a scarce resource and almost always went along with a harsh cut in group dps.

Defiant boon just disappear when the boss uses important “interrupt this!” skills.

Nikaido.3457:

Defiant is perfectly fine as it is. Don’t touch it.

It clearly is broken as hell, as is already evident if you examine it on paper. A boss gains defiant stacks based on the number of players fighting him, -not based on the number of players using control skills. That is a big flaw in the system. It means that often there’s an imbalanced amount of Defiant stacks on a boss that takes way too long to remove for the players that are using CC skills.

In the open world this means that the boss has so much Defiant, that by the time you’ve stripped them all, the boss is already dead, thus negating an entire game mechanic.

But another problem is that the purpose of CC skills is not just interrupting. For several classes CC skills are a key form of defense. For the necromancer for example, Fear is not just an interrupt, but a way to drive enemies away from the caster. Landing a fear at the right moment is impossible with stacks of Defiant. Every single time when you would want to strategically drive off the boss, he only loses 1 stack of Defiant, and proceeds to bash your head in. It’s a shame this system wasn’t thought out better, because if designed properly, it would add a layer of strategy that the combat is severely lacking right now.

If the purpose was to prevent stun locking. They should have just given the boss a 5 second CC immunity buff every time he is hit by a control skill, which stacks if hit multiple times in a row. A way more elegant solution to this problem.

Thats a problem with necro not defiant. And yes defiant is broken in open world when you scale events but its not as if it matters when every1 just afk zergs everything. The actual defiant mechanic itself is fine. It just has poor implementation in scaled events.

Defiant is a bad design choice for several reasons.
- A half bad player like me can immediately destroy the effort of a team in bringing down the defiant stacks with a misplaced CC
- Renders control skills useless

Bosses would need to have the same skills as players, down to the endurance and ability to dodge if needed.

Artificially limiting a big amount of our skills is ridiculous.

And about the stun lock :
It is possible to stun lock a boss, sure. But during that time who brings down his health? With the skill cooldowns I think at least three coordinated members in the party are needed to stun lock a boss.

And even so? Stun locking a boss would be no different than dps stacking. It’s just a method to bring it down.

This is different for open world though. With a hundred players over a boss the poor guy would not even be able to blink an eye. Stun locking in a dungeon would make the encounters waaaaaaay longer.

spoj.9672:

Thats a problem with necro not defiant. And yes defiant is broken in open world when you scale events but its not as if it matters when every1 just afk zergs everything. The actual defiant mechanic itself is fine. It just has poor implementation in scaled events.

Several other classes use CC skills as defense as well. The concept of CC as defense is fine, but bosses should stick to the same rules as normal enemies. Once you add exceptions to your own game rules, you break the combat system.

There are better ways to prevent stun locking, like the 5 second buff that I suggested earlier.

BeoErgon.9107:

And even so? Stun locking a boss would be no different than dps stacking. It’s just a method to bring it down.

This is different for open world though. With a hundred players over a boss the poor guy would not even be able to blink an eye. Stun locking in a dungeon would make the encounters waaaaaaay longer.

You are right that it would be no different. But that in my opinion does not make it a good thing. I think both DPS stacking and stun locking should be dealt with, with solid boss designs. Defiant doesn’t solve the issue of CC-skills being used for stun locking, it simply removes CC skills from the combat. It renders it useless, like you said.

It’s interesting from a game design point of view, that apparently the designers were fine with trash mobs and PLAYERS being stun locked, but not with bosses. That seems a bit iffy as well. I think there is a design mistake in the core implementation of CC-skills, which allows stun locking of any creature or player to begin with.

But then you cant use cc as defense for 5 seconds. And you have a bigger problem. Atleast with defiant you can counter it by using cc to burn the stacks down quickly. A coordinated group can burn 5 stacks of defiant very quickly so they are ready for the next interrupt only a few seconds later. I think you are looking at this from a pug point of view. And thats not wrong but its not right either. Id rather think about when to save my cc and when to use it to burn stacks down, than just always be able to interrupt a boss. That feels pretty mindless to me.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

You are right that it would be no different. But that in my opinion does not make it a good thing. I think both DPS stacking and stun locking should be dealt with, with solid boss designs. Defiant doesn’t solve the issue of CC-skills being used for stun locking, it simply removes CC skills from the combat. It renders it useless, like you said.

No, I don’t think stun locking is a nice thing, but I also think that stun locking is so counter-productive that no one would use it as a method in dungeons. It needs practice, coordination between team players and a hell lot more time than DPSing.
I see no reason not to simply remove defiant in dungeons.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

In the open world this means that the boss has so much Defiant, that by the time you’ve stripped them all, the boss is already dead, thus negating an entire game mechanic.

This is the dungeon subforum and you’ll find not many give a crap about the consequences in the open zerg. In dungeons the defiant stacks are low enough that we could use interrupts as often as necessary if the game actually required us to use interrupts. The fact is even if you removed defiant there is almost no fights in this game where using interrupts would make more sense than using damage mitigation and just dpsing stuff.
Some fights like AC p3 can benefit from an interrupt while dpsing but there ain’t a whole lot.

But another problem is that the purpose of CC skills is not just interrupting. For several classes CC skills are a key form of defense. For the necromancer for example, Fear is not just an interrupt, but a way to drive enemies away from the caster. Landing a fear at the right moment is impossible with stacks of Defiant. Every single time when you would want to strategically drive off the boss, he only loses 1 stack of Defiant, and proceeds to bash your head in. It’s a shame this system wasn’t thought out better, because if designed properly, it would add a layer of strategy that the combat is severely lacking right now.

You could say the same of most classes, since access to CC is rather well distributed in my opinion. I don’t believe CC is a “key” form of defense for necromancer, it just happens to be mildly useful because it’s a broken, badly designed class that doesn’t have much useful active damage mitigation, even lacking any sort of ability to regenerate endurance, something that is unique among all classes. All of the other classes have either an endurance regen trait, an endurance regen utility, a vigor granting trait and skills, or a lot of built in evades and blocks.. necromancers are rather lonely in the “I don’t have anything of use in PVE” category.

- A half bad player like me can immediately destroy the effort of a team in bringing down the defiant stacks with a misplaced CC

That’s your problem. Dungeons are meant for organized groups and as such your point is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if some random breaks something. How can you even do a “misplaced” CC? Are you spamming your whole weapon skill bar every time something is out of cooldown?

Defiant doesn’t solve the issue of CC-skills being used for stun locking

It solves it by making it incredibly inefficient. A thief alone could interrupt every single major attack from a boss if there was no defiant. With defiant, doing that kind of thing requires constant use of CC from the whole group and would literally multiply the time it takes to kill something. There’s no point in stunlocking something for 10 minutes if it dies in 30 seconds without stunlocking.

I think there is a design mistake in the core implementation of CC-skills, which allows stun locking of any creature or player to begin with.

You seem to forget that players can use stability and other active abilities like blocks to protect themselves. There is no design mistake.

Nikaido.3457:

You seem to forget that players can use stability and other active abilities like blocks to protect themselves. There is no design mistake.

What about classes that do not have a way to interrupt a barrage of CC skills? Like for example, a necromancer getting ping ponged around in competitive play?

Or is that more of a case of the class being broken again (which I agree, it is broken, I play one).

Fractal lvl 28-uncatergorized
Last fight against mob-o-kitten
1x guardian pulls them all in
2X hammer warriors knock them back>earthshaker
mesmer with chaos storm the time wrap with bountiful interrupt
= see ya later kittens.

However, as a player I think weapons should do what it is they say they’ll do. Line of warding means nothing when they just walk on straight on by by it. Sanctuary means nothing when dmg just penetrates straight through it.

Nikaido.3457:

That’s your problem. Dungeons are meant for organized groups and as such your point is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if some random breaks something. How can you even do a “misplaced” CC? Are you spamming your whole weapon skill bar every time something is out of cooldown?

I only PUG because of several reasons.
Communication in PUG fights is hazardous at the best. And yes, you can misplace a key and use a CC not intentionally. Errors happen. Say you see the defiant stack is down to 1. You want to bring it to zero for the next big attack.
A pity! The guy next to you had the same idea… Defiant stack reseted.
My problem becomes the party problem.

There is no reason to have defiant. Period. Without it at least control skills would be of some use. An no one will go the stun lock route for the same reason you said: it would take and awful amount of time.

But at least we would be able to use ALL of our skills efficiently.

Is that why we all used spiky fruit against Bjarl? No defiant = trivial fights.