Guild Wars 2

In my opinion, intelligent boon use and condition removal by AI would be far more engaging. Having high rank NPCs take shorter condition duration would be fine, but just making them invulnerable creates a discrepancy where players actions don’t have the stated, intended result. Defiant is just lazy and should be removed. Anyone else agree?

This has been stated over and over again since beta. It’s one of the single largest reasons that Guild Wars 2 PvE isn’t living up to its potential.

The problem is that stun-locking a boss and just hitting him without him having a chance to hit back feels quite pointless.
So unless they decrease the access to stuns/knockbacks/launches vastly, removal of defiant will make every single boss extremely trivial.

To be honest, I think they would have been better off making a game with no control skills at all if they were just going to include a monster ability that completely negates them.

Mungrul.9358:

To be honest, I think they would have been better off making a game with no control skills at all if they were just going to include a monster ability that completely negates them.

This is true. It breaks the combat system, which I have stated several times. It negates the need for having control skills in PVE at all.

See with normal mobs you don’t really need CC skills. The only fight where CC would matter, is against a strong opponent… like bosses… who are immune to CC. That is dumb.

CC is actually very important in sPvP and WvW as well and the majority of the enemies there does not have immunity to CC.

CC is game-breaking, in a negative way. Most situations in PvP and WvW require you to stunlock your enemy and then throw all your damage at them. It’s not defiant that is bad game design, it’s crowd control. In theory it looks epic, “Woaaah I can throw back this guy”, but when it comes to the game… it makes every challenge a laugh.

I often think about how they could make control work in PvE without players being able to exploit it or breaking it for PvP, and it’s a tough problem. And it’s something I think all MMO developers struggle with. I don’t think I’ve ever played a serious MMO that has solved this problem in a satisfying way.
I think we need to look at the roots of control as a mechanism to realise where developers have gone wrong.

Control is very much a staple of RPGs. And by RPG, I mean things like pen & paper D&D, and traditional single-player CRPGs such as Fallout and the like.
With these, there has never really been the necessity for “Fair” balance that an MMO developer has to aim for. When it comes down to it, all other types of RPG are about enabling players to live out power fantasies.
Everyone wants to be the hero in the game they’re playing, and the experience and gameplay systems present in these games allow players to live out these fantasies. Control is an incredibly large part of said fantasies (in more ways than one).

But this just doesn’t gel well with a competitive gaming environment or one where it’s in the developer’s best interest to prolong the amount of time a player is exposed to their game.
If players can stun-lock, that breaks PvP and makes PvE content trivial if there are enough players to maintain that stun-lock.

Given that problem, I can see the thought process behind Defiant. On paper, it must seem like an elegant solution; grant temporary immunity to control based on the number of players in the encounter.
In practise, it results in two major problems for the player.

1: If only one hit in every so many can be a control one, chances are that the optimal control skill won’t be the one to be used unless the group fighting the champion are incredibly well co-ordinated. Although to be honest, all of the control skills have pretty much the same end result, so it doesn’t really matter which control skill it is, but it’s still frustrating if you’re winding up your maxed out Earthshaker only to have a Ranger steal your thunder with Point-Blank Shot.
Whatever way you look at it, control is being stolen from a player.

2: If only one hit in every so many can be a control skill, then those skills are less useful than just another damage skill. While the cooldown might be quick, you’re limited when you can use it as a control skill by the stack of Defiant. And you have to use that skill in order to decrease the stack. Yet control skills traditionally do less damage than pure damage ones, so you’re actually being less helpful than the player using skills that focus purely on dishing out damage. This further cements the choice of DPS weapons in the metagame resulting in increased homogeneity.

It doesn’t matter if you enjoy playing with skills or weapons that focus on control; you are provably less useful to have around than just another greatsword warrior.

So how do you solve it?

Maybe make it so control skills do more damage to targets under the effect of Defiant. It’s not the most satisfying solution; when I use a control skill, I generally want to see my target physically affected by that skill.
But it does mean that skills and weapons that focus on control no longer take a back seat to those that focus purely on DPS.

certain harder bosses should do some kind of undodgeable massive attack that NEEDS to be interrupted. it would promote actual coordination removing defiant stacks instead of stacking in a corner spamming 100b. it would make control builds more desirable because they can remove a large amount of defiant stacks with ease.

lordkrall.7241:

The problem is that stun-locking a boss and just hitting him without him having a chance to hit back feels quite pointless.
So unless they decrease the access to stuns/knockbacks/launches vastly, removal of defiant will make every single boss extremely trivial.

Missed the part about intelligent use of boons.

Stun locking wouldn’t have to be so broken vs bosses that intelligently use boons and possibly have traits that trigger boons when cc’d or just hit, or only have bosses gain defiant while channeling a specific spell, rather than the whole fight. They could also get into evasion, blocking, reflecting…

The OP isn’t suggesting the boss gets to apply boons like a player can. They could of course apply them much faster on much slower cooldowns, with longer durations, etc. Or even lay down a temporary AoE that applies boons on short intervals so they can’t just get wiped off them easily.

& come on people… have you already forgotten about Stability?

Now, I do think that massive bosses should have something like defiant of course, but bosses individually should be looked at and reasonably examined what kinds of cc they look like they’d be immune to.

edit: I actually think defiant is perfectly fine, and would even be ok with it being a boon players can get (in maximum stack of 1 or 2) on a short duration – but a little longer than some stability abilities. It’s Unshakable that’s an awful design imo.

edit 2: a game without cc… like a first person shooter? Nah, I love CC abilities. This game imo has really nice cc design too, with much more reasonably modest cc lockout durations and short cd stun breaks, and boons to prevent being cc’d at all.

they just need a cooldown instead of a stack, the stack doesnt let you CC the boss when you need to, a CD per player would be perfect

If only there were some sort of buff that prevented CC and wasn’t as restrictive as Defiant, for example, a duration buff that could be removed or situationally unremovable for an enrage stage of a boss etc, almost like a boon.

It could be called something like “Sturdy”, or “Stability”. Imagine if bosses utilised that instead. Nah, that would be crazy…

One solution could be adding “phases” and/or “stances” to boss fights, i.e a boss only has defiant (or stacks of it) during specific points of the fight. Like, at a point of the fight, you’d need to burn through stacks of defiant to interrupt a deadly attack or a heal or whatever.

I know people tend to get a hissy fit when anyone compares GW to WoW, but that game really has better dungeon bosses, largely due to the fact that they have a wider range of abilities and different phases.

Bosses in GW only have few abilities, mostly close range AoE, which hilariously enough is best dealt with by stacking up in a corner.

Everyone knows defiant is bad, that is not the issue. The issue is, how does spending significant time and money to fix this problem bring in money to the gem store?

Unless you can make a compelling argument how this will make people playing the game spend more in the gem store it will never be fixed.

Take culling vs condition damage:

Culling, made everyone’s WvW experience bad. People couldn’t see others armor or finishers so people didn’t bother buying expensive gem store armor/finishers since no one could see them. Culling got fixed.

Condition damage. Affects everyone, but does not really change anything for the gem store. Who cares if people aren’t effective or useful, they can spend money in the gem store to buy trait resetters. Condition damage has not been fixed.

You need to argue about how it will make Anet money, the gameplay aspect doesn’t really factor into it. Also “it make more people buy the game” is not a valid argument in Anet’s eyes. No one is staying away just because of defiant or condition damage.

What about giving a boss stability whenever he is affected by a crowd control, this way you can still not chain stun a champion or Legendary ennemy but some of the professions can use their boon striping abilities to take advantage of their temporary stability?

Defiant’s actually not all that broken. Unshakable is the broken piece that makes it seem like defiant never goes away. Without it, a group can easily cc stacks of defiant off and regain control.