Guild Wars 2

There doesn’t seem to be much talk regarding this little teamwork-promoting mechanic, and I thought it was due time for some discussion on the subject.

If you don’t know by now, Combos work by combining a skill with a “Field” effect (e.g. Combustive Shot from Warrior is a Fire Field) with a “Finisher” effect (e.g. Arcane Wave from Elementalist is a Blast Finisher). This adds some very nice flavour to the game as you’re encouraged to time your skills right with your party to get additional bonuses on top of what you’d normally get from your skills.

A list of all possible combos in the game:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo_finisher

Now looking at this chart, I’d like to take note of a few combos I feel are grossly underpowered and are completely not worth spending the time to organize the teamwork required to pull it off. If the effects were improved, maybe people would actually actively try to pull off combos rather than just let it happen randomly when they’re using their normal skill rotation.

Blast Finishers:
The Blast Finisher combo effects are, as a whole, well thought out and very rewarding to pull off. I’d say the only flaw with these are the effects that cause some form of “Armour”, which are Light(Retaliation), Ethereal(Chaos Armour), and Ice(Frost Armour). These last way too short of a time to be of much use in a PvE fight due to their nature of being “on being hit” effects. Mobs and bosses generally have slow attack speeds, meaning it’s very likely that these effects will just fade away before activating even once. This isn’t even taking into account Retaliation being not a very good boon in PvE due to the lack of multi-hit moves on mobs.

A duration buff up to ~5s would make these much more effective at what they’re meant to do.

Leap Finishers:
These suffer exactly the same flaw as Blast Finishers in that the “Armour” effects last too short of a time to be useful. A buff up to ~7s would make leaping through a field and entering melee range more appealing.

Projectile Finishers:
Let’s be honest here, projectile finishers are the finishers most likely people would just let happen “accidentally”, so it’s sort of excusable for their effects to be sub-par compared to, say, blast finishers. However, the Smoke combo in particular strikes me as plain useless, due to the nature of the blind condition being completely(!) removed the moment the mob attacks. Remember that all smoke fields inherently cause a constantly refreshed blind on every mob in it(which really is the only practical application of blind) and cause enemy projectiles to miss, so extending the duration of blind is a very redundant effect.

Whirl Finishers:
This is the biggest beef I have with the combo system. Whirl Finishers tend to be just as rare as Blast Finishers, yet their effects are on par, if not much worse, than Projectile combos. First of all, every effect created from these send off bolts in /random/ directions that may or may not hit the target. On hit, they deliver the exact same effect as Projectiles would, which does not match up at all to the rarity and cooldown that comes attached with Whirl Finishers. I don’t really know how to fix this, but it definitely requires a rework.

TL;DR

Blast finishers are mostly good, “Armour” effects generated from combos need to last longer, projectile finishers have understandably(excusably) weak effects, whirl finishers don’t nearly have the frequency to excuse their weak effects like projectiles do, on top of being a random chance of hitting the mobs.

A good read.

I’d like some time to organize my thoughts and have some real suggestions to offer before I respond. At present I’m not even sure I know all of the effects by heart, merely the ones that I can generate on the characters I’ve played extensively.

Whether I wind up agreeing with your assessments or not, I support the idea of examining one of the more overlooked mechanics in this game.

Nice post. I had the same thought that whirl finishers were pointless for the most part. The chances of them actually affecting a battle are really small.

Hmmm thinks …. three elementalists being able to channel fire power to drop a Fire Nova! yeah now that’s a FF-style combo I’ve once in my NDS!

I’m of the opinion that some of them are underpowered, and some of them are pretty blatantly overpowered.

Blast gets Fire/Water/Smoke

Projectile gets Fire/Light/Dark/Ice (They’re less impactful individually, but many classes can literally spam 20% chance finishers at a rate greater than once per second.)

Whirl gets Ice/Fire/Dark/Water/Light (Seriously, don’t underestimate whirl, it tends to spread strong conditions enmasse)

Leap… um… yeah… leap needs buffs.

Alot of people underestimate the effects. Whirl finisher in dark field can heal you quite a bit and ramp your damage up quite a bit as well. Blast has some great support options, especially fire, and the area stealth is literally murder if used right, especially with a thief.

They’re too costly to put resources specifically into proccing, but they ARE useful, and that’s where the issue lies.

Popping a long cooldown AoE, then using either a blast or whirl skill is simply too costly most of the time to be any sort of reliable. Even if some are downright overpowered when used right, getting the situation to use them is simply too difficult to make them a constant.

To everyone underestimating Whirl finishers. AoE +damage and healing from dark. AoE burning from fire. AoE chill, and the usual “Water field is overpowered”. The issue with whirls is they are rare and oftentimes too costly to use just to proc a finisher. In the situation where you’d use the whirl naturally, and proc the combo field as well, it’s a large buff.

AnemoneMeer.7182:

I’m of the opinion that some of them are underpowered, and some of them are pretty blatantly overpowered.

Blast gets Fire/Water/Smoke

Projectile gets Fire/Light/Dark/Ice (They’re less impactful individually, but many classes can literally spam 20% chance finishers at a rate greater than once per second.)

Whirl gets Ice/Fire/Dark/Water/Light (Seriously, don’t underestimate whirl, it tends to spread strong conditions enmasse)

Leap… um… yeah… leap needs buffs.

Alot of people underestimate the effects. Whirl finisher in dark field can heal you quite a bit and ramp your damage up quite a bit as well. Blast has some great support options, especially fire, and the area stealth is literally murder if used right, especially with a thief.

They’re too costly to put resources specifically into proccing, but they ARE useful, and that’s where the issue lies.

Popping a long cooldown AoE, then using either a blast or whirl skill is simply too costly most of the time to be any sort of reliable. Even if some are downright overpowered when used right, getting the situation to use them is simply too difficult to make them a constant.

To everyone underestimating Whirl finishers. AoE +damage and healing from dark. AoE burning from fire. AoE chill, and the usual “Water field is overpowered”. The issue with whirls is they are rare and oftentimes too costly to use just to proc a finisher. In the situation where you’d use the whirl naturally, and proc the combo field as well, it’s a large buff.

You do realize that whirl does exactly the same effects as projectiles at a much more random, 1-shot chance right? At least projectiles are constantly fired off due to every ranged weapon being innately projectile finishers. (Also all the bolts don’t do damage at all, and the health you leech from leeching bolts is baaarely more than projectile leech if you looked up the values)

Anyway the point is that they’re nowhere near effective enough, especially when you compare them to blast finishers which have nearly the same distribution/cooldown

I agree the duration needs to be increased. I hate setting up a combo just to see if disappear before anybody gets hit or even sees that its up.

Although I think the duration should be increased for PvE/WvW. Not PvP

Random side note: Was in AC on my D/D ele and had a mesmer in the group. Had the queen pinned in a corner and I had just given the group area might through fire field/leap share combo when the mesmer popped time warp. It wasn’t planned, but oh was it glorious seeing the HP bar just melt.

Couldn’t stop thinking about this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izBJGvm9dQo
As soon as I saw combo fields.

Imo effects need to be greater to make any serious impact on battle.

In light of what seems to be a common opinion that there is not enough teamwork encouraged in combat, it would seem that another look at this thread be in order as arenanet themselves seem to think that the combo system be the true teamwork mechanic, except most of the effects suck.

combo fields are also easily overwritten and quickly overlooked in the particle wash that is a big fight.

About the only ones that seems to make good use of comboes right now are D/D elementalists, because they have a blast finisher coming out of evasive arcana.

Chaos Armour is a lot stronger then most ppl know. Its every time you take dmg it goes off so if you have a bleed or burning it will go off. It is the counter to condition dmg and aoe in effect.

Burst is the best finisher but its all support where the other 3 are more about applying a type of condition to some one all but leap that is about self support purely.
I can see combo becoming a great deal more complex and stronger in time all that is needed to make them into game changers is all there just a mader of making sure it dose not become OP. As things stand burst is godly in wvw nearly op if you got a team that can take full advantages of it. You go into fight with 25 stack of might (that alone is a game changer) you can also make sure every one on your team has Retaliation becoming a killer for any aoe user and what a lot of ppl forget is the burst in a water field its a soso aoe heal it become unstoppable when you have 5+ using it after a fight has started.

Combo in this game should be use and are the true depth of combat that set GW2 above any other mmorpg (well but ff11 when the game first came out you had to use there combos or skillchanes to kill mobs sadly not so much in the late days of the game). Because your not just working beside some one that happens to have the some goal as you but your truly working as a team to get to the same goal.

So ya i am all for much more complex combos lets make fields interact lets make the element of the finisher become a factor. This is what makes GW2 the game for me.

Added note this was my bible when i played ff11 to show you how it can be crazy what could be pulled off it was a dmg only thing but in GW2 is support too there SOOO much you can do with that.
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33990008

Jski.6180:

Chaos Armour is a lot stronger then most ppl know. Its every time you take dmg it goes off so if you have a bleed or burning it will go off. It is the counter to condition dmg and aoe in effect.

O_o i did knew chaos armor was strong but never considered or noticed it got procced by all the condition ticks, and I even have a mesmer as my most played character * feels ashamed *

Thank you for this. I remember getting pumped about this game mechanic prior to release, and then completely overlooking it while actually playing. Now though, I’m definitely going to start comboing with friends more often. The combos should be even stronger IMO to encourage skillful behavior like teamwork.

GummiBear.2756:

Jski.6180:

Chaos Armour is a lot stronger then most ppl know. Its every time you take dmg it goes off so if you have a bleed or burning it will go off. It is the counter to condition dmg and aoe in effect.

O_o i did knew chaos armor was strong but never considered or noticed it got procced by all the condition ticks, and I even have a mesmer as my most played character * feels ashamed *

I may be wrong about this now that i am looking it up for hard facts its was something i heard on the forms. Only i should be ashamed for not looking it up.

Good thread. This need to be adjusted.

Strongly disagree.

The reason for that is that due to the way effects stack in Guild Wars 2, things can add up quickly. If you make the effects of combos too powerful, you may end up with a situation where making a combo is meaningless because the target already has a maximum effect. An example:

Take an Frozen Ground for example. Say you place it on the boss. It causes 10 seconds of chill. Your team, that uses projectile finishers as well as a melee player with a blast finisher. The projectiles each add another second, the blast finisher gives a Frost Aura that, when the affected players are hit, adds 2 more seconds per player per hit. This could easily turn into a chill duration fo 20 seconds or more. 20 seconds of chill from a single skill is huge.

The main issue with this is that combos quickly escalate into large numbers when the group and number of combos grows larger. In most dungeons I don’t even need to use burning because my Lava Font combined with the finishers creates a near-infinite amount of burning on the boss.

Combos shouldn’t be looked from a single player, single combo perspective. During group play, effects stack so greatly that increasing the duration of any of the effects would make most of them everlasting after 1 or 2 combos. For some combos, like the burning/fire field one, this is already the case.

ThiBash.5634:

Take an Frozen Ground for example. Say you place it on the boss. It causes 10 seconds of chill. Your team, that uses projectile finishers as well as a melee player with a blast finisher. The projectiles each add another second, the blast finisher gives a Frost Aura that, when the affected players are hit, adds 2 more seconds per player per hit. This could easily turn into a chill duration fo 20 seconds or more. 20 seconds of chill from a single skill is huge.

More like 20 seconds from 2+ skills, something that can be achieved also without combos.

Do note how the OP does not even mention the circumstances you are bringing up as a problem, rather it focuses on a few key weak combo effects and the much rarer combo finisher effects.