Guild Wars 2

Something I feel could be improved upon in dungeons is more importance given to combat mechanics.

Right now few enemies have mechanics that relate to the 10 skills players have available. As long as you know the behaviors of the enemy you are fighting, you just need your auto-attack, heal skill, and dodges. Your 8 other skills are for generic survivability and damage increases and rarely have a special part in the mechanics of the fight.

An example of something which utilizes our skills would be the part of the grawl fractal where you need to stop the grawl from pushing the hostages off the cliff. In order to beat this effectively you need to slow them down with your skills.

An example of something which does not is the worm boss in TA. They just keep spitting at you and there’s no interconnectivity between your skills and the bosses mechanics. The closest you can get is interrupting their smash attack, but they do it so often and it’s easy to dodge so it doesn’t make a difference.

I understand why this was done, but it was taken too far. The removal of the “trinity” was a good thing but it was taken to the point where any interconnectivity of our skills was removed.

This is not good thing as it dulls the combat to very noticeable levels. Side mechanics are the main thing keeping dungeons interesting, making Bjarl the Rampager run into the pillars in CoE being a good example. Luckily they have done as great job with these.

But unfortunately for monsters which don’t have these side mechanics it’s just a matter of generic damage, healing, and dodges which can grow to be boring and really tedious against higher health monsters.

What we need is more importance given to the skills players have available in the actual mechanics of the fight. But these mechanics should only be based around widely available things like stuns so that players won’t have to search for specific classes.

A good first step would just be adding things like using a daze skin to interrupt a special attack, slow skills to stop the enemy from reaching a buff item that fell near him (if he is slowed he won’t reach it before it disappears), and a knockback or pull to move the enemy out of an AoE he placed which buffs him.

The unshakable and defiant mechanic should also be modified to allow these things to be better utilized and improve combat mechanics in general, but I thought this would be a better topic for another thread rather than throwing both ideas into this one.

Hi! I think that its a good post and i respect the time u spent writing it, but ur logic is a bit flawed:

As long as you know the behaviors of the enemy you are fighting, you just need your auto-attack, heal skill, and dodges. Your 8 other skills are for generic survivability and damage increases and rarely have a special part in the mechanics of the fight.

I dont know much about other classes mechanics, but if we talk about warriors or thieves (classes which i play), u have to use most of ur weapon skills in most cases. For example, if u run fractals as a GS-specced warrior, u gonna use all 5 GS skills quite often (the least usable skill will be gs#5, but its very useful in certain situations). U will also swap weapons very often and use skills from another weapon set too. Utility skills are also used very often and, moreover, u will constantly change these skills (and even traits) to adapt to circumstances (for example, u gonna use stability to beat harpies, condition removals/swiftness at the swamp, thief’s pistol#4 to interrupt last boss at the dredge fractal, etc… The thief is even able to solo some parts of certain fractals). Besides, by using AA only u lose damage, coz AA damage is inferior to non-AA abilities (except warrior’s axe – most of its damage comes from AA, but u still use rest weapon abilities).
Whoever plays a warrior or a thief and uses no abilities except AA, heals and dodge is just a bad player. I dont play guardian, but i cant imagine a guardian who only uses AA as well.

Ofc there are several easy dungeon encounters that become non-challenging when u learn the behavior of the bosses, but if u wish a real PvE-challenge, try leveling through fractals (especially with random groups). I’m sure ur opinion will change.

My problem isn’t that the skills are worth using, it’s that they rarely have a part in the specific fighting mechanics. I’m not saying that the auto-attack is more efficient, but that the mechanics of a fight don’t go any further than damage, dodge, and heal. When the mechanics are this limited your 8 other skills only serve generic purposes like extra damage, extra healing, and extra blocking and do not fill a role that auto-attacks, dodges, and healing cannot.

The examples you gave like using stability, blocks, and projectile reflects to beat the harpies is exactly what I want to see more of. You actually have to use your skills to fulfill a role like blocking the lightning orbs, which dodges cannot do given the small platforms.

Likewise with one of the things I suggested, you would have to use a pull or knockback to force the enemy out of an AoE which is buffing him, requiring players to use specific weapons and skills to gain an advantage or perhaps even harm the boss for more difficult areas. Things like this would make dungeons a lot more fun to do.

I hope I explained it well enough this time around.

Now i understand what do u mean, but that will require redisigning of many class skills (or adding some new skills), and im sure that this wont be done, coz it requires a lot of work and affects pvp-balance.

There is only 1 class that is useful in terms of active blocking and groupwide damage reduction: a guardian. Most of rest abilities are either boons or conditions (or their removal) or class-specific skills.

The challenges u are talking about exist at fractals, but what do we see there? A guardian is just mandatory. Most ppl wont even start w/o a guardian, and if u look at g2lfg.com and search for 38/48 lfg topics, u will most likely notice only “LF guardian” requests. There is a reason for that: guardians make these challenges much easier. Why bothering yourself with a difficult fight with lvl 48 bloomhunger or grawl shaman when ppl can just rally under guardian’s damage blocking abilities? In case of bloomhunger u wont even need to kill these little spirits, and if u got 2 guardians, they can rotate their abilities and ur group will barely need to move during the entire encounter.

U said that the removal of the “trinity” is good, but in fact when some challenge arises, a guardian plays a role of a groupwide tank and healer combined.

Think about it: if ur suggestions will go live without class revamping, will players become more excited about it? Or will they just prefer to group with 1-2 guardians (thus increasing the time to find a group), ingoring most of the challenge?

The last thing I want to see going on is what is happening with mesmers portal, guardians projectile reflect and block, or thief’s stealth. That’s why I said it should only be done with widely available things. Most classes have access to stun, pull or knockback, movement slows, stability or stun break, and immobilize, so mechanics could be built around these things without issue.