Guild Wars 2

Now, beforehand I want to point out that what I’m going to talk about touches on PVP as a whole, not just spvp or wvw. Thus I’m posting it here instead of posting the same thing on two boards and trust that an admin will move it to whatever forum is appropriate (sorry, but I don’t know) – With that in mind, let’s get rolling.

Now, diminishing returns means that the more cc effects you subject someone to, the more resistent he becomes to them and eventually immune for a brief period of time. The idea of this system is to prevent long cc chains that leaves players with no way to escape death, either from one of multiple players – I’m looking at you, warriors.

Personally, I think we need this. Some classes just seem to have too many control skills so that they can pretty much control you more than you can control yourself. I feel that victory should be a matter of skill, and not of having stumbled upon the skill combo that just gives you tons of free shots all the time. While it is up to the developers to balance this out, having ALMOST escaped death just to be hit by a net and then twenty more control skills is just a bit… well… what the heck do you do? It’s really a bit… cheap?

Well, I recall that ArenaNet stated that they monitor the effect of CC skills (Crowd Control) to ensure that it does not completely dominate the whole pvp system – But apart from some skill tweaks, which we never get to test pre-patch anyways, and some somewhat contrived and sometimes mystifying changes, I feel that something more than just skill changes needs to be in place. I know that Rift did this, and that’s a pretty large game.

But it’s my 2 cents, as always, no one has to agree, everyone is free to disagree should they want to, but for everyones sake, please be civilized about it.

There’s one reason why you don’t need DR on CC. Stunbreakers.

Rift has stunbreakers as well, so that particular argument has been debunked already. Once they are used up, there might be fifteen more cc skills in store for you, plus, stun is just one of the many cc effects. Maybe it would be better if it also provided a short immunity upon use, but as it is right now, it’s just not enough.

Esplen.3940:

There’s one reason why you don’t need DR on CC. Stunbreakers.

If one can apply CC faster than you can take it off? Especially if skills with added CC are on lower cooldown than your means to take it off. Just fail…

To the OP – yes you make perfect sense but ANet is still sticking to the esports mania, having utterly ruined a solid chance to make a fun PvP experience by having the crappy 3-way king of the hill concept dictate all the PvP mechanics and balances. Wasted potential, and they won’t budge until SPvP and WvW is utterly devoid of players – at which point it won’t matter any more lol.

Stun breakers break “stun” skills for which half of the cc is not.

I think knockdown is a stun but I’m not sure daze is considered a stun. Fear is also a stun and then there is “stun”. You then have immobilize, chill, and cripple which are not stuns and so stun breakers will not work.

If cc is an issue, then there are steps you can take and a good pvp/wvw build should have one stun breaker in it. It should have one way to remove the other three cc as well (more than one if the removal is a secondary effect and/or on a weapon).

It is only a problem when you are out numbered (1vX) in which case the odds should be against you.

I will say that it seems that some classes are blessed with all kinds of ways to remove cc while others are lacking. Necros are backwards. Necros are suppose to commit to a fight and not run but there are a few problems with that…

1. We have an easy enough time to remove non-stun cc (consume conditions, staff skill #4) but too few ways to remove stun if we are suppose to be a class that commits to a fight because chances are you are not fighting just one (especially in wvw). Consume conditions should have a 0 cast time allowing its use while stunned.

2. We have very few ways from preventing our target from escaping. If we are suppose to commit to the fight, then we should have plenty of tools to force our target to commit as well.

As for warriors. Warrior hammer is rather obscene but I expect nothing less from ANet (cough Aion Warrior cough). To fight one you are looking at having to take 3 stun breakers and if you do that, then they won’t need the cc to beat you. It is too niche of a build that will leave you rather kitten in the killing department.

I play rather control heavy classes myself (S/P thief, turret engineer, terrormancer, etc), and I think the problem isn’t the presence of stun. In order to accomplish all of the stuns that I have on my classes, I have to put pretty much everything I’ve got into them. I sacrifice thins like stealth/cripple, boon stacking, greater utility, and burst damage. Does every with stuns do this? Certainly not, but I know the 3 that I play do.

That said, there are two problems in the game as far as control goes, and both of them can be solved by the same thing.

#1: Stun breaks don’t stop an immediate CC afterward. I see this a lot on my turret engineer: they use a stun break to get out of net turret’s stun, only for the rocket turret to stun them immediately. There are some evasive stuns that help with this, but most do not.

#2: There is very little stun protection. Stun breaks only work after the hit has landed, and with knocbacks and knockdowns and pulls, this results in characters being forced off points an over cliffs over and over again.

The solution is quite simple: We need a LOT more access to stability. As it stands right now, stability is a rare boon that has short durations with very long cooldowns. Any reasonable build has access to stability at maybe a 15% up time, and the current solution to stability is to just wait 3 seconds for it to go away, then resume the chain stunning again. Stability is never there when you need it, and there’s not enough for when you need it.

Since every class has plenty of access to CC, a nice counter to this would be so every class as plenty of access to Stability as well. Then, stability does more than buy you a few seconds where you are immobilized instead of knocked down. Stability gives you a rather large safe zone, making it so opponent’s defensive utilities have to be played smarter, and their controls have to take initiative. If they don’t want to give very class longer duration stability, then the least they can do is give short duration stability on every stun break that isn’t some type of evade. That way, you aren’t instantly re-stunned a quarter second later.

A 3s stability on stun breaks wouldn’t be bad at all.

There is a reason there is diminishing returns in other MMO’s.

CC in other games such as warrior CC in WoW for example, is 100% unavoidable. You cannot dodge shockwave or charge. You cannot block or parry them either. You have no choice but to just eat it. Psychic scream was an instant cast 10s AoE fear for priests. Frost nova is an instant cast, unavoidable AoE immobilize. You cannot stop a hunter from using wyvern shot or scatter shot. You cannot stop a rogue who wants to use gouge, or kidney shot, or blind on you. You simply have to take it, or use your 2min CD stunbreak. Diminishing returns is something that prevents this unavoidable CC from getting out of hand.

But in GW2, CC is for the most part, avoidable. You can see and dodge shield bash, or bolas, or binding blade, and so on. They’re also, unlike WoW, blockable and blindable. You can avoid CC by being skilled. You cannot avoid CC through skill in other MMO’s.

Also, I’d just like to point out that stunbreakers break cc not just stuns. While it is misleading that they say stun breakers, they do break you out of daze, knockdown. If you are being pushed, pulled, float, sunk or launched, you can stunbreak out of it, but since the duration of them is usually small, it requires very fast reaction as opposed to stun/daze/knockdown.

However, sometimes when you stunbreak vs kd, push/pull, the game will still consider you as controlled so you’re unable to move, still. But that’s not to say that you can’t use a stunbreak to move while controlled.

There are no controls that prevent you from using a stunbreak (unless you’re talking about immob + cc vs mobility-based stunbreaks, such as Roll for Initiative).

There’s not a single thread about broken game mechanics where some ‘L2P’ guy isn’t chiming in. Yes you should see everything coming and just hit dodge every other second because you got unlimited endurance…
Everything is fine, you can react, you can counter, you got all the tools you need at the right time – EXCEPT the game design is about hard-counters and rock/paper/scissor (ANets biggest fail ever as the basic game design was about no dedicated roles). Some classes are not meant to counter others, they need the assistance of other classes.

This is a more well thought out reply i’d like to answer:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The solution is quite simple: We need a LOT more access to stability. As it stands right now, stability is a rare boon that has short durations with very long cooldowns. Any reasonable build has access to stability at maybe a 15% up time, and the current solution to stability is to just wait 3 seconds for it to go away, then resume the chain stunning again. Stability is never there when you need it, and there’s not enough for when you need it.

Since every class has plenty of access to CC, a nice counter to this would be so every class as plenty of access to Stability as well. Then, stability does more than buy you a few seconds where you are immobilized instead of knocked down. Stability gives you a rather large safe zone, making it so opponent’s defensive utilities have to be played smarter, and their controls have to take initiative. If they don’t want to give very class longer duration stability, then the least they can do is give short duration stability on every stun break that isn’t some type of evade. That way, you aren’t instantly re-stunned a quarter second later.

So why fight fire with fire? Wrong approach entirely – the perma CC spiral is out of hand already. Smart game design is about making tactical choices at the right time, not to spam CC over and over – it’s just bad. We don’t need more pseudo-counters to CC but much less spamable CC with long cooldowns.

Oxstar.7643:

Rift has stunbreakers as well, so that particular argument has been debunked already.

Didn’t know Rift has a dogding mechanic.

Debunked, lol…

Caran.3217:

So why fight fire with fire? Wrong approach entirely – the perma CC spiral is out of hand already. Smart game design is about making tactical choices at the right time, not to spam CC over and over – it’s just bad. We don’t need more pseudo-counters to CC but much less spamable CC with long cooldowns.

I don’t agree that CC is that out of hand at all. Even while on a turret engineer or a terrormancer, I still find my opponents not stunned for the majority of the match, and I myself end up not stunned for the majority of the match despite not running a stun breaker on my engineer.

It is mildly annoying when a hammer warrior starts bashing you over and over again, but that is it: mildly annoying. Fact is, most of the stuns in this game already have long cooldowns and short durations, which is why on CC heavy builds I need to dedicate nearly everything I have to CC in order to pull off a few consecutive stuns.

I agree with the OP.

kokiman.2364:

Oxstar.7643:

Rift has stunbreakers as well, so that particular argument has been debunked already.

Didn’t know Rift has a dogding mechanic.

Debunked, lol…

It doesn’t, and if you had read the previous posts you’d understand that two measly rolls isn’t really a way to cover things. You’d need to specifically build for it, when it’s a problem that should be solved by developers.