Guild Wars 2

There is a type of skill in GW1 that is capping the amount of damage you can take to a specific percentage of health, for example Protective Spirit prevents any damage higher than 10% of maximum health. So, a character with 200 health cannot lose more than 20 health from a single attack, while a character with 10k health cannot lose more than 1000 health from a single attack. I was thinking of ways to integrate this into GW2 and have 3 ideas. All 3 work alone but can also be combined.

1) This mechanic can help mitigate high spike damage on players by boss mobs and by making it usable by characters that are heavily invested in Support, make Support specs more valuable. For example, making it a Boon, that scales the cap in offers by the amount of Toughness (or Healing Power?) the caster has will promote a Support spec more. So someone using a spec that has +Boon Duration and +Toughness (or Healing Power) will see a much more powerful boon.

2) Adding a damage cap mechanic on boss mobs (and some interesting ways to remove it) will mitigate the effect of raw damage on bosses. Smaller packets of damage will be more important, as well as teamwork to remove the buff, for example if a boss requires a knockdown to remove it. In general, it will promote more group play AND build variety at the same time.

Imagine for example if the final boss in CoF P1 didn’t regenerate health with the crystals, but instead had a damage cap that is lower and lower the more crystals are out. That way players will find it harder to burst the boss down while avoiding the mechanics of the fight completely. Similar caps can be added on other bosses too, to prevent ultra fast burst. Good teams will still be able to burst a boss quickly because they will remove the caps more quickly, wannabe damage players won’t be able to do insane bursts by just standing still and following their DPS rotations.

3) The final one is something I’m not so sure about, but here it goes:
Make dodging deal damage but capped. So when you dodge you don’t prevent all damage but still take a very small percentage of it. That way dodging is no longer a complete damage avoidance, rather, some very powerful mitigation.

Only damage cap now in effect is Weakness.

Weakness denies crits and fumbles 50% from all hits having them do 50% dmg. Unrestricted.

Using weakness on enemies woould be usefull for obvious reasons, though (World) bosses are less vulnerable

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

Only damage cap now in effect is Weakness.

Weakness denies crits and fumbles 50% from all hits having them do 50% dmg. Unrestricted.

Using weakness on enemies woould be usefull for obvious reasons, though (World) bosses are less vulnerable

Dealing 50% less damage isn’t the same as not being able to deal more than 10% of the target’kitten points. The first one can be ignored with high enough damage, same as healing or protection. The second one cannot be ignored at all, and requires either the removal of that “buff”, or adopting a completely different build, one that is not based on burst damage.

maddoctor.2738:

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

Only damage cap now in effect is Weakness.

Weakness denies crits and fumbles 50% from all hits having them do 50% dmg. Unrestricted.

Using weakness on enemies woould be usefull for obvious reasons, though (World) bosses are less vulnerable

Dealing 50% less damage isn’t the same as not being able to deal more than 10% of the target’kitten points. The first one can be ignored with high enough damage, same as healing or protection. The second one cannot be ignored at all, and requires either the removal of that “buff”, or adopting a completely different build, one that is not based on burst damage.

“hit points” – overzealous filter

highest hits ingame are ~7-8k dmg form normal skills and maybe 12-18k from exotic combo’s

under the effects of weakness when fumbled they’d be 1750-2k (3,4-5 without fumble) and 3-4.5k max. (6-9k without fumble) Which is a decent reduction IMHO

I agree a decent condition or mitigation should be introduced comparable to resilience. If you can ignore condi dmg by use of buffs, why shouldn’t we be able to ignore DPS completely?