Guild Wars 2

People have talked a lot about combos in these forums, how they make dungeons easier, how they can turn the tide in PvP, or even how much fun they can be. As a guardian and engineer player, I can’t say I use them all that much, nor have I sought them out to use them in dungeons.

I went onto the wiki to have a closer inspection, and I was rather surprised to see how few options there actually are. Guardians have 4 blast finishers and only 1 leap finisher. Engineer have no leap finishers, but a quite a few blasts, which makes sense (although half occur when you detonate your turret).

Now as for the actual field effects, Guardian only has access to light and fire. Only 2 fire skills though, but 10 light, half of which belong to symbols. No wonder I’ve only used light a few times, it’s about all I have as a guardian, and frankly I don’t care much for the cleansing effect either, since I feel my shout build handles that pretty well.
Conversely, the engineer has access to four field effects, ice, poison, smoke and water. I love grenades, so I have worked with the poison field before, but haven’t seen the other three before.

Yes, I know I haven’t played the other professions much, but in my defense, in my guild groups we’ve never tackled dungeons and mentioned combos in our strategy discussions, not ever. For a mechanic that feels so important to the game, combos to me doesn’t really seem like it’s coming out of the woodwork, it feels a bit hidden, actually.

My question to you is: Do you actually use combos extensively, and how do you incorporate them into your gameplay?
Or are you like me, feel it’s too much in the background and needs a bit more prominence? Honestly, I’d like more skills (perhaps them all… why not?) to utilize this interesting game feature.

Chaos armoring myself and my minions through null field. Time warp whirlspam is pretty much 25 stacks of confusion before the enemy army can blink in WvW, but you need a few people with reliable whirl skills.

Each class may only have a few, but they’re still plenty useful in the right hands. I’d kill for a constant fire field blast finisher spam in dungeons. Adding more would just make them insanely overpowered. You can already beat a fire field like a drum for 25 stacks of might.

I can’t say it’s needed. But when your entire party is on low health, stack up around a water field and use a few blast finishers to bring everyone to full health it is quite nice.

They can bring a few advatages sometimes(like the one listed above), but they are often very situational.

zargnath.9524:

I can’t say it’s needed. But when your entire party is on low health, stack up around a water field and use a few blast finishers to bring everyone to full health it is quite nice.

They can bring a few advatages sometimes(like the one listed above), but they are often very situational.

I wouldn’t say area might, area healing, lifesteal, retaliation, or any of the other particularly potent field benefits are ever situational. Some of them are already insane (fire and water fields).

AnemoneMeer.7182:

zargnath.9524:

I can’t say it’s needed. But when your entire party is on low health, stack up around a water field and use a few blast finishers to bring everyone to full health it is quite nice.

They can bring a few advatages sometimes(like the one listed above), but they are often very situational.

I wouldn’t say area might, area healing, lifesteal, retaliation, or any of the other particularly potent field benefits are ever situational. Some of them are already insane (fire and water fields).

Yes of course you’re right. Probably I’ve just been shooting through way to many light fields lately removing condition after condition for no use at all.

I find them fun and beneficial, on all 3 of my 80s.

Some weapon sets have more fields than others, same with finishers. So if you’re not built for it and/or don’t play with others who’re built for it, you may be missing that aspect of the game. I think you can still have fun, regardless.

Combos are good. However people ignore them just as they ignore other support because to be effective it takes some coordination. Doing a combo all by yourself is possible, but generally not worth much. 5 people pouncing on a combo field, however, is quite nice.

The sad truth is many people don’t progress past spamming ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’ with their favorite weapon.

Yes, I love them. As a healing/support player they are really handy.
When party is on low hp, I just throw Eruption, switch to water (with passive it heals near allies) Geyser/Healing rain and arcane wave, boom heals. Water + 2 blast finishers <3

Or sometimes just for bosses and stuff, Unsteady ground + switch to fire ( passive gives might. ) + lava fond + arcane wave = 7 stacks of might.

Unsteady ground + Static field + Arcane wave + Windborne speed = Around 40 seconds of speed boon.

They need go expand the number of combos a bit. As a dual pistol turreteer, I have almost no combo options available to me. it’s the style of play I enjoy, but does put me at a mild disadvantage.

Reason #39283 you shouldn’t go turrets