Guild Wars 2

Lately I’ve become annoyed with mobs in dungeons…specifically, why do crowd control skills almost never work? And why don’t some utility skills work consistently?

Primarily I think it’s silly that so many CC effects work on regular solo PvE mobs, where they die with a few auto attacks, but tougher mobs (like elites in dungeons) frequently ignore stuns, dazes, roots, etc. I can see having the durations shortened so players can’t chain stun a boss to death, but having them ignored does not make one feel heroic.

Even more frustration is watching them walk through a ward, or blast through reflects (The prototype golems in SE1 can’t shoot you though wall of reflection, but Sure-Shot Seamus can.)

I’m not complaining that dungeons are too difficult, and in fact I find them quite enjoyable, and usually run 5-7 different explorable paths every day. I just think there’s got to be a more effective way to make them appropriately difficult without rendering such a significant portion of a player’s skills useless. Players in an MMO want to be heroic, this sort of thing makes them feel anything but.

Which elites ignore cc?

You can watch the stacks of defiant and coordinate the landing of particular CC skills. My normal group tends to spam down the stacks and then burn the real CC for the ice block from ice bow, when applicable.

haviz.1340:

Which elites ignore cc?

Elite clockwork twisted something thingies. Hue hue.

Which dungeon has them?

a t s e.9614:

LF3 more stun-lock warriors for “x” path . If CC worked on bosses we will see the army of warriors coming back from death.

Just a matter of implementing Defiant better. The current version simply doesn’t work right. Stun locking of course shouldn’t be possible. Not against bosses, and not against players. But to make bosses immune and resistant to entire game mechanics, is not only lazy, but it breaks the combat system. It makes classes that rely on control skills and conditions a joke, when facing a boss.

Bosses should be affected by CC and by all conditions. They should not be immune to anything, or else the game favors DPS over the other mechanics (which is exactly the state of the game we have right now).

haviz.1340:

Which dungeon has them?

The new aethersuperscarlet fractal incoming. A cart full of those. Hue.
Hue.
Sob.

You can have one or 2 thieves in your group with pistol offhand, they just need to spam pistol #4 to remove the stacks of defiant.

It is useful against Melandru in the temple event so you don’t get turned into a croc, but now people discovered that if you try to equip that diving goggles while in croc form you are turned back to normal.

We have a cc heavy skill system where most classes can bring an interrupt or better with a moderate recharge without giving up much or any damage, whereas dungeon bossfights are usually 5vs1.
The current defiant system isn’t great but I have yet to hear any suggestion that does not enable coordinated groups to dumb bossfights down even more if they wanted to.

The idea of 100% projectile protection with long uptime and little to no downtime was broken from the start.

Its a known fact defiant blows in its current from. Were still waiting for a dungeon revamp that doesn’t include keyboard shattering mechanics.

Risen Hunters have stability mayn. Its op pls remove trash mobs from game Anet so i can leave my feathers at home

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Just a matter of implementing Defiant better. The current version simply doesn’t work right. Stun locking of course shouldn’t be possible. Not against bosses, and not against players. But to make bosses immune and resistant to entire game mechanics, is not only lazy, but it breaks the combat system. It makes classes that rely on control skills and conditions a joke, when facing a boss.

Bosses should be affected by CC and by all conditions. They should not be immune to anything, or else the game favors DPS over the other mechanics (which is exactly the state of the game we have right now).

But then what about spiky fruit? They should remove consumables that provide unlimited knockdowns if that were the case, since otherwise Alpha for instance wouldn’t get a chance to use his AoEs or any attacks at all..most dungs would be a cakewalk otherwise, especially with constant CC spam/interrupts on bosses. I feel its fine the way it is. I mean imagine the Effigy boss in CoF or the Nightmare Tree in TA being affected by throwbacks/KDs/Fear etc..

I think there should be some bosses that are unaffected by CC (mainly those that are already immune to CC like effigy, lupi and other massive bosses). for the rest I suppose a new system would have to be implemented to allow players to interrupt their skills at the right time to make the fight easier, kind of like interrupting the berserker abomination’s enrage at the right time so that you don’t get knockback. perhaps defiant could work like a stability-type buff that would be applied for X seconds after a boss used a skill….

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Just a matter of implementing Defiant better. The current version simply doesn’t work right. Stun locking of course shouldn’t be possible. Not against bosses, and not against players. But to make bosses immune and resistant to entire game mechanics, is not only lazy, but it breaks the combat system. It makes classes that rely on control skills and conditions a joke, when facing a boss.

Bosses should be affected by CC and by all conditions. They should not be immune to anything, or else the game favors DPS over the other mechanics (which is exactly the state of the game we have right now).

Well in fact i think that defiant as it is might be a ok mechanic not perfect (dat lapsus) but pretty solid. The real problem is that there is no real impact full reward for stunning/interrupting a boss. You will only get a few seconds of “calm”. So even if you could stunlock a boss it would only come in handy if you have a group of 5 warrior running a pretty specific build. But it Anet decide to make stuns work a different way on bosses in dungeons (skills to interrupt, fatigue system …) even with the actual imperfect system it could change the way to play an encounter.

Teckos.1305:

Well in fact i think that defiant as it is might be a ok mechanic not pervert but pretty solid. The real problem is that there is no real impact full reward for stunning/interrupting a boss. You will only get a few seconds of “calm”. So even if you could stunlock a boss it would only come in handy if you have a group of 5 warrior running a pretty specific build. But it Anet decide to make stuns work a different way on bosses in dungeons (skills to interrupt, fatigue system …) even with the actual imperfect system it could change the way to play an encounter.

I disagree that it is ok, it is clearly a broken mechanic. Depending on how many people are attacking a boss, he receives that many stacks of defiant. But not all people that are attacking him, are using CC skills. Thus the end result is that you have way more Defiant stacks to get rid of, then you have players using CC skills.

So players that use CC, spend the whole fight taking down those Defiant stacks, only to get 2 seconds of fear on the boss, and then all his Defiant stacks are back. In other words, it’s completely pointless. It’s a broken system. It defeats the entire purpose of control skills, especially since some classes (like the necromancer) revolve around control skills. It’s one of their main forms of defense and offense.

This has to change.

Group versus a single “powerful” boss is an old concept which creates stale encounters.

Mix of multiple bosses and elite enemies would be a lot more interesting. Then also give them frequent stun breaks to reward proper CC.

Example I posted some time ago

Idea applied to Arah p4 priest of Balthazar:

Spin works as a stun-break, moves much faster and actually follows people. And shoots fiery projectiles (Burning).
AoE attack (kind of like a meteor shower) takes longer to cast but gives Stability at start and is much more dangerous if it finishes.
At every 5% of lost health, a veteran Hound of Balthazar appears and priest gets one stack of “awesome powerfulness” (moves faster while spinning and does more damage, AoEs are bigger, gets deadly at ~5 stacks).

Hounds inflicts Burning on their attacks and at 25% start exploding. While casting explode they are immune to damage and inflict Burning on nearby enemies. If exploding finishes, big damage and knockback. If Hound dies without exploding, it drops a bundle which you can throw at priest to remove one stack.

Basically you would have to interrupt Hounds to finish them off. You can also interrupt Priest mid-spin to save people. Just spamming CC on Priest wouldn’t be effective because he would often stunbreak and you need to also focus on Hounds. Meteor Shower would force most teams play defensively unless you bring boon removal.

Also stacking would kill you quite fast.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I disagree that it is ok, it is clearly a broken mechanic. Depending on how many people are attacking a boss, he receives that many stacks of defiant.

So players that use CC, spend the whole fight taking down those Defiant stacks, only to get 2 seconds of fear on the boss, and then all his Defiant stacks are back.

This has to change.

I think you just showed the 2 principal flaws of defiant the fact that it stacks with the number of players attacking the boss, but also the fact that stunning bring so little to the table that players are better of dps-ing. But at the moment if think that the most important issues isn’t that we have to deal with 5 stacks of defiant (in Dungeons) but that stunning the boss isn’t much help to the party.