Guild Wars 2

The combo effects that you can create and finish as an individual are not the focus of this thread. Those ones you execute on your own anyway as part of your rotation if you think its worthwhile: Meaning the damage or utility you create as a result of the combo is superior to your next best option of not creating it by choosing a different rotational order of abilities. Therefore, they are more of an additional way to access that skill or effect as an individual.

The ones that are done through cross-profession combos are the biggest issue to me and the ones I want to focus on for this thread. This is because they don’t encourage any kind of team coordination and timing. Why don’t they encourage teamwork? To put it simply: It’s not worth it.

The majority of them are underwhelming in the effects they create. There are a few exceptions such as blast finishers on water fields for heals, stealth stacking duration for pvp, chaos armor, etc. The rest of the combos create effects that are already replicable with the majority of your own skills, and thus it is typically a waste of time to try and create with others instead of just spamming damage.

By players just spamming their own fields and finishers in an individual vacuum, they end up creating those combo fields anyway. So, their manifestation is many times unintended, and when created, no one cares.

The combos should be completely reworked to accomplish TWO goals:

1. Require classes to coordinate and time their abilities together to achieve them rather than creating the combos through their own damage rotation spamming. This would actually create actual and promote teamwork in the group format rather than 5 individuals who are just fighting side by side and happen to create marginal effects through spam.

2. Make the effects meaningful and strong, so that people will want to pursue them over just doing their own damage rotations!

How about all new special fields and effects if one players drops a dark field with a fire field to create a hellfire field? This Hellfire field should now offer an all new effect that is unavailable to the skills of any class on its own. Players could then use their finishers on that field to create new, powerful combos.

Or combine a water field and light field to create a Purity field to do something else that is strong and useful to the group? Or combine a dark field and chaos field to create something else?

There is so much room for depth and thoughtful play with this system and what has been implemented so far has barely scratched the surface and really is shallow.

Revamping this system could breathe all new life, challenge, and depth both into PVE and PVP mechanics.