Guild Wars 2

Pretty much all control effects seem to be balanced around their usage in PvP, but PvE combat is much different. In particular, monsters are far less reactive and have way more HP than players. This tends to mean that control effects are far less effective in PvE, and therefore skills which emphasize control effects at the expense of damage are laughably under-powered. This fact actually contributes significantly to the ‘all zerker all the time’ meta that persists in PvE.

One of the best examples is the Thief’s elite skill Basilisk Venom, which is a hilarious joke in PvE – (woohoo you “petrified” an enemy for 1 second!)

Apart for the fact that this has been a status quo for 3 years (lol), there are a couple of really stupid things about this:

1. PvE is played much more often by the majority of players than PvP is and, despite that, never seems to be of the even the slightest concern to the balance team.

2. While the best solution for this problem is rather complex and requires extensively overhauling all monster AI and PvE combat in general, there is a much simpler short term solution, and that’s to allow durations for control effects to be longer vs. monsters than they are vs. players. I’d say double is probably appropriate.

The will introduce the break bar in the expansion. That system will be better for CC in PvE. We’ll see if it will be enough.

They’re changing the defiance system on champions/legendaries with the expansion so the discussion about control effects seems partially meaningless in a way.

But, as they are now I actually disagree with you about them. There are some control skills like “Fear Me” and Deep Freeze that are extremely good. If you were to double the duration of control skills in PvE, then Deep Freeze would be a 10 second stun duration and elementalists would have 20% extra damage with their Tempest Defense trait for a solid 10 seconds with the boss completely prevented from attacking.

Worse yet, it’s very easy to strip 5 stacks of defiance before 5 (or in your case 10) seconds pass, so you’d be able to chain it for another 10 seconds. That’d be 20 seconds with the boss frozen in a block of ice, unable to respond, with the whole team able to freely unload all of their burst damage with no extra risk associated.

Why would this be a good thing?

While I can agree thief elites are pretty useless in PvE I don’t think CC needs to be any stronger than it is, most trash have no stability or counter measures for CC in-fact the monsters in Silverwastes which were specifically designed to counter specific play styles do not counter CC.

Purple Miku.7032:

They’re changing the defiance system on champions/legendaries with the expansion so the discussion about control effects seems partially meaningless in a way.

But, as they are now I actually disagree with you about them. There are some control skills like “Fear Me” and Deep Freeze that are extremely good. If you were to double the duration of control skills in PvE, then Deep Freeze would be a 10 second stun duration and elementalists would have 20% extra damage with their Tempest Defense trait for a solid 10 seconds with the boss completely prevented from attacking.

Worse yet, it’s very easy to strip 5 stacks of defiance before 5 (or in your case 10) seconds pass, so you’d be able to chain it for another 10 seconds. That’d be 20 seconds with the boss frozen in a block of ice, unable to respond, with the whole team able to freely unload all of their burst damage with no extra risk associated.

Why would this be a good thing?

Well, it’s probably not a one-size-fits-all thing. I’m sure some are fine how they are.

CC looks like it’ll be required on certain bosses in HoT (namely the wyvern fight that we’ve seen) so this discussion isn’t worth doing just yet, we need to wait and see how it pans out first.

CC is already pretty great in PVE, it just requires a level of coordination and teamwork that is beyond what most people want to do. The defiant change should help this in allowing just easy coordinated bursts or moreover just responding to a breakbar opening. No need to communicate and coordinate.

Purple Miku.7032:

They’re changing the defiance system on champions/legendaries with the expansion so the discussion about control effects seems partially meaningless in a way.

But, as they are now I actually disagree with you about them. There are some control skills like “Fear Me” and Deep Freeze that are extremely good. If you were to double the duration of control skills in PvE, then Deep Freeze would be a 10 second stun duration and elementalists would have 20% extra damage with their Tempest Defense trait for a solid 10 seconds with the boss completely prevented from attacking.

Worse yet, it’s very easy to strip 5 stacks of defiance before 5 (or in your case 10) seconds pass, so you’d be able to chain it for another 10 seconds. That’d be 20 seconds with the boss frozen in a block of ice, unable to respond, with the whole team able to freely unload all of their burst damage with no extra risk associated.

Why would this be a good thing?

The Break bar proves that controls don’t work correctly in PvE. Against trash mobs, theres no reason to do it… and Champs got Defiance because they were intended to be fought by groups, which could lock them down through the sheer number of controls being proced.

The Break bar an idea I (among others) had pitched a long time ago to work around the problem of unscalable numbers. This same problem is currently the center of the Stability debate after they went from duration based to stack based. Defiance was broken because only 1, often least desirable, control effect could be used per X control skills used against it. In a group setting, controls tend to be fired off to break stacks, but PUGs rarely prioritize so most useful effect is the one that goes through.

The break bar gets around that by having a pre-determined control effect specific to the champ. But by doing so, it invalidates the nature of the individual control skills. Its like Block Stacks some bosses (like the Shaman fight in fractals), where each hit, be it 1 dmg or 10k damage, removes just one stack.

The break bar works for bosses well enough due to the scale of player presence. But it lends nothing to the underlying problem if the trash mobs use the same potato mechanics they’ve been using up until now.