Guild Wars 2

A strategy which has been trivializing a lot of dungeons is “stacking” (everyone standing in/around an enemy) and using line-of-sight to pull a group of enemies into a ball. It seems like neither the AI, attacks of enemies, or the balance of the game was designed with this in mind.

Most of the problem comes from many enemies having single-target focused attacks. What this does is allow everyone to huddle together without risk to anything but one player, and if that player goes down everyone can just press F and revive them in an instant. This not only reduces the risk associated with melee attacks, which is one of the main balancing points between ranged and melee weapons, but can reduce or even eliminate the risk of combat in general.

What this also allows is the entire party to always be in range of support skills. Any combo field, shout, symbol, and projectile reflect/block will be guaranteed to apply to or protect your entire team. This itself isn’t a problem, but when combined with the reduction of risk stacking provides it gives an even larger advantage. Players should be allowed to do this for an advantage, but doing so should result in a great risk to the party, which currently isn’t there due to stacking.

Additionally, some enemies even stop using some of their powerful attacks when the team stacks, as well as some attacks not being able to hit you while you stand inside the enemy. For instance, against the spider boss in AC you can stand next to it and it won’t use its AoE attack and against subject alpha he will stop using his fire attack and his earth attack won’t hit you.

In short, the core of the problem with stacking is that it eliminates the risk of melee and combat in general. Neither the balance of the game or the behavior of enemies was designed with this in mind so steps need to be taken to balance this out.

Here is what I suggest:
- Enemies should be fixed so that they use all their skills regardless of if players are stacking or not.
- Attacks like subject alphas rock attack should also affect the area inside him.
- Enemies should have access to more AoE and cleave attacks.
- Enemies should have a variety of actions when a player goes out of their sight, not rushing at them 100% of the time.

Just these 3 changes with likely balance it out. Because of more AoE attacks and enemies no longer having disabled skills, players will need to spread out and focus more on their positioning rather than all huddling in a ball. However more AoE might cause a few issues like companions (pets, minions, ect) getting killed too easily so AoE mitigation might need to be applied to them.

I agree. I will not be a hypocrite – I am also using this technique, but again, I agree. It should be “fixed” – boss should have more AoE skills