One thing I feel that gw2 needs to improve on before it can move on is mechanics in PVE. For a while I thought the game just had a very little mechanics to PVE, and thats why it was so easy and mindless, but now im starting to think its something else.
I was doing a dungeon recently, Hotw, and along the way I was keeping an eye on all the trash within the dungeon, along with the few bosses. One thing I noticed is that even though the creatures have mechanics to them, like CC, condi’s, cleave, none of these really matter at all, they are completely negligible. One reason for this is because all these abilities simply don’t scale enough in their impact on the players at all. If one mob has an ability that does CC, the CC frequency is so small, that players really don’t have to worry about keeping stability up. If one mob has condi abilities, it only applies a few stacks and they tick like they would for a player who has no condi damage. So in that case, condi’s are completely negligible again, and the player can just facebash his keyboard to kill the enemy.
The last example id like to give is Ginva the Butcher. On the wiki, they go into quite a bit of detail on how to kill this. He is a boss that has one nasty aoe attack that you do have to dodge, but also a bunch of totems that boon him up. After going into this dungeon and doing this fight, I pretty much realized that these totems don’t mean anything, you can completely ignore him and kill the boss fine, the only real reason youd kill them is so you can kill the boss a tad quicker. This type of example is very good at summarizing a lot of the problems in difficulty in PVE in this game. If the devs want to make totems meaningful, it needs to work like this.
So there are 3 totems, 1 for protection, 1 for regen, 1 for retaliation. If protection is up, his damage intake should be reduced by about 90%. If his retaliation is up, it should hit you back for about 1k. If his regen is up, his health regen should be about 5-10% per second. This way, the players are pretty much forced to kill these totems to kill the boss. However this isnt the case, like I said, you can completely ignore them. The game designers of gw2 really need to take a hard look at situations like this and realize the grand faults. Personally, I think almost every dungeon is gw2, and champion open world, needs to have their mechanics revamped so they are actually meaningful. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean they need to change the mechanics of some mobs that applies condis, or cc, only scale those abilities so they are something you must pay attention too.
I know some people may say that this would make things too hard, but in reality I think it would set the game at a level it should have been a long time ago. I mean if the devs really want the game to be as easy as it is now, just remove the mechanics from all of the creatures, because they don’t really do anything in the first place. The only point of putting these text bars under the creatures name tag would just be artificial, to make the player think there is something they have to watch out for. Anyway thats just one of my thoughts after observing PVE in this game for 18-19 months compared to what ive seen in many other games.