Guild Wars 2

As it stands, a majority of the bosses in game lend themselves to the “PVT/Zerk” mentality of character design. That’s really unfortunate, since the trait system is so wonderfully diverse. I’ve been at the game a long time, and I started to come up with some ways that might help expand what people can bring to a fight and still be potent in their roles.

Improving Condition Damage
Considering most bosses are huge HP sponges that are worn down the most by Power-specialized builds, we need something to give other builds more potency.

Perhaps the most notable in this case is the 25 stack cap on bleeds. I’ve mentioned in other posts that most bleed-oriented builds can easily tip 10 stacks from one source, which means in a group of 20 (reasonable for many world bosses), if two people are built for condition damage, they can max out stacks easily. Some quick math to demonstrate:

For a 20 person fight:
Anticipate 1/3 being condition focused. (estimate, and I’m sure the devs have more accurate metrics) This gives roughly 7 people.
7 people x 10 stacks per person = 70 stacks. It’s easy to see how much DPS is lost, in this case, and how clearly unfair it is to condition builds.

Raising the cap to 50 would help significantly, though 100 would probably be the most fair.

Or raise the cap based on the number of people making contact with the boss. If we start with a 25-stack cap, add 1 or 2 per person, that could easily accommodate 50-70 stacks.

Alternately, if a stack is capped for intensity or duration, the incoming stacks should yield immediate damage at a smaller exchange rate, probably half to a quarter. This way, the damage isn’t completely lost. Or, if the stack flow follows a first-in first-out approach, stacks that are replaced disperse the rest of their damage at a reduced rate.

Improving for Crowd Control
Defiant started off as an interesting idea, but in real practice, it falls flat under mob rule. Trying to accommodate 20-50 people using different tactics and keep the Defiant stack clear to wait for that one time where it might be useful for an interrupt sadly doesn’t work.

Rather than have Defiant completely ignore crowd control until the countdown is reached, we could include alternatives, possibly even mixing one or several ideas in between different bosses. When a boss takes a hard CC skill like stun/daze/KD:

A: Replace the status with Unbalanced, stacks duration: Slows attack speed/cooldown recovery. My thoughts on this are to either make it a 10% reduction (opposite of Haste), for the duration of the CC, or a 25% reduction for a fraction (half?) of the CC duration. This gives control builds the option to aid the player base by reducing potential damage output without marginalizing the boss.

B: The boss gains Stability for a specific duration, possibly depending on the number of players in combat. (5-10 seconds, leaning toward 10 seconds)

C: Grant bonus damage (3%~5%?) to the attack when the boss negates the hard CC.

Making Support More Interesting
For all “roles” in the game, damage is a component of their play, and there’s not denying that. But some players get a big kick out of support roles like healing or tanking. Being that kitten that holds off a boss from your friends or dropping that last-second heal when someone else has theirs on cooldown is a thrill. This is by no means a demand for the Trinity, but those roles could stand to be better supported.

Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy status/condition related fix, but more in boss/dungeon design and AI control. I’ve seen a couple of ideas around the forums and thought to outline them here:

A: Better aggro control.
I don’t mean complete aggro control, and I certainly don’t advocate a taunt-only skill, but there might be a few skills that draw more emnity than others, especially stuns and hard CC. This would make those big weapons (hammers, greatswords) proper “tank” weapons without having to add other skills or mechanics. I’d like to see an entire forum post on this, because it’s an expansive topic that includes how bosses treat ranged classes, how to adjust their AI so that they keep everyone active, and disproving the stacking-as-tanking tactic.

B: Better damage spreads.
It feels as if bosses rely more on one-hit KO mechanics than any sort of fast, intense combat. Most of their attacks come slowly, especially compared to player combo attacks. Dividing up monster attacks to be more frequent but less individually punishing would lead to players having to choose the right moments to manage the incoming damage and gives them time to apply healing skills, including those support builds that focus on healing. In conjunction with better aggro AI, it can also have characters swap out on who happens to be the monster’s main target.

I know it’s a huge order for one post, but I really hope to see some changes made that would improve combat for the players.

Summary (tl;dr)

A: Raise the stack cap on condition damage or give damage for stacks unapplied/removed stacks.

B: Remove Defiant in favor of short boss-specific conditions that debuff attack speed/damage.

C: Change Defiant to give Stability for a short time after a hard CC ability is used.

D: Improve threat mechanics for more dynamic combat options.

E: Build/rebuild monsters/bosses to attack more frequently with less damage, to spread their DPS and allow for more reactive damage management.

Yes, please. +1

Bah, mod! Okay … long answer …

1. Won’t happen.

• Even if Anet change up the EHP value of champs, there is the 25 condi cap which can be undone for a while due to performance issues.

2. Won’t happen either.

• Defiant scales up, to prevent chain CC from players. If you give Stability to a champ, players will just strip it off or simply corrupt it for Fear, which means additional CC.
• Champs are soloable anyway.

3. It’s just a perception and learn to play issue.

• Champ uses projectiles = absorb, reflect
• Conditions = cleanse
• CC = stability and stunbreaks
• Melee boss = soft cc and max melee range it
• Unstopable = if you struggle range it

But all of the above doesn’t matter in the open world, due to players zerg content.

Rauderi.8706:

D: Improve threat mechanics for more dynamic combat options.

Don’t even try to make a WoW clone from this game, thanks. If you can’t react to a sudden agro change …

E: Build/rebuild monsters/bosses to attack more frequently with less damage, to spread their DPS and allow for more reactive damage management.

You still can facetank everything in PVT / clerics with the right builds, i don’t see the problem. Don’t gear in zerker and expect to not die from every hit.
Educate yourself. Welcome.

Even if Anet change up the EHP value of champs, there is the 25 condi cap which can be undone for a while due to performance issues.

I assume “can’t” be undone, because the processing to manage 50-100 stacks would be more strain on the server. Which is a legit concern, yes. The condition cap is build-limiting to anything but PVT, though, so the alternative bears examination.

Defiant scales up, to prevent chain CC from players. If you give Stability to a champ, players will just strip it off or simply corrupt it for Fear, which means additional CC.

I realize why Defiant is in place. I’m seeking alternatives that make it less restrictive. It’s a status that works okay in highly coordinated groups, but fails elsewhere. Also, my friend thought of the condition-nicking and that’s a valid point. Of course, making it a boss-only buff that can’t be removed as a boon solves that problem.

Champs are soloable anyway.

Yup, some are. I do it. Frequently. I’m referring to more than champs, but also world bosses and the like.

It’s just a perception and learn to play issue.

• Champ uses projectiles = absorb, reflect
• Conditions = cleanse
• CC = stability and stunbreaks
• Melee boss = soft cc and max melee range it
• Unstoppable = if you struggle range it

Yup, all valid points on gameplay. Be prepared is a good motto, but unrelated to design improvements.

But all of the above doesn’t matter in the open world, due to players zerg content.

Which is something some us are trying to improve. Hence the post.

Don’t even try to make a WoW clone from this game, thanks. If you can’t react to a sudden agro change …

I’m not advocating a strict WoW clone. Gods no. I like not having dungeon queues. (I’d say not having elitist players, but.. full zerk or go home. Yay…) It’s about presenting options instead of gear/PVT/faceroll/zerg bashing the content.

Trying to keep the snark down, but.. In this case, I have to point out you didn’t pay attention. It’s just a perception and learn to read issue.
But moving on…

You still can facetank everything in PVT / clerics with the right builds, i don’t see the problem. Don’t gear in zerker and expect to not die from every hit.
Educate yourself. Welcome.

I’m not even PVT/cleric on my warrior, and I can ignore a fair portion of damage mechanics, or at least survive them. That is not my short-sighted point. If I gear high damage on my thief (which I do), I expect to dodge like crazy or be dead on the floor. It’s usually the former over the latter.

My point with this is to promote diversity, instead of the PVT/zerk/l2p attitude that’s hurting the game and limiting a fair number of future content design decisions.

So, some further ideas regarding this:

Player denisty dependent CC/condition could work very well as a balance for stacking, at least for Bleed- how would this work for poison, and burn, should be considered (more people = higher damage tick?).

Does Vulnerablity also need to stack higher? That could get broken at some point.

The downside to stability on CC for bosses is that people could just steal/reverse/etc the Stability, and render it useless; having defiant as a timed, counter-proofed Stability might be more balanced.

Alternately, Defiant also seems unique, if I’m not mistaken, in that it’s not a cooldown based skill like everything else in GW2 – once it starts it just never seems to end. So basically, you get one shot at hard CC In the beginning of the fight. What if Defiant had a cooldown, before it can start stacking again? Maybe add diminishing returns to the boss’s ability to stack it. That way, you have some extra chance to do something with CC skills.

Good questions about poison and burn. Those have the potential to go very long, even without raising the cap, since they’re also easy to apply.

Vulnerability can stay capped at 25, as far as I’m concerned. No need to open a boss up like a tin can.

Defiant can be chipped away, but the problem is, in zergland, there’s no strategy in it. A highly coordinated guild can certainly take advantage, but then many bosses are just flat immune to stun/KD anyway. I mean, sure, there’s also the notion of don’t bring a hammer to a gun fight (which I don’t, I’ve got a bow and rifle prepped for those situations), but it marginalizes gameplay options.

Rauderi.8706:

I assume “can’t” be undone, because the processing to manage 50-100 stacks would be more strain on the server. Which is a legit concern, yes. The condition cap is build-limiting to anything but PVT, though, so the alternative bears examination.

It’s just a matter of time and money.

I realize why Defiant is in place. I’m seeking alternatives that make it less restrictive. It’s a status that works okay in highly coordinated groups, but fails elsewhere. Also, my friend thought of the condition-nicking and that’s a valid point. Of course, making it a boss-only buff that can’t be removed as a boon solves that problem.

That’s a learn to play issue. Most players don’t even realize that they need coordination and spams all the CC’s and come to the forum to complaining that control is non-existent, so +1 to you for realize this.

Yup, some are. I do it. Frequently. I’m referring to more than champs, but also world bosses and the like.

World bosses actually easier alone or with small groups. My personal experience so far, that as a necro (!) i duoed Golem with a mesmer in 2 minutes, while at peak times a zerg struggles with it for 10 minutes …

Yup, all valid points on gameplay. Be prepared is a good motto, but unrelated to design improvements.

I still prefer using said tools and not gimmick mechanics, like all the kite and pull mechanics in the Living story stuff, while bosses are invulnerable.

Which is something some us are trying to improve. Hence the post.

Remove rewards or big chunk of player base from the server?

I’m not advocating a strict WoW clone. Gods no. I like not having dungeon queues. (I’d say not having elitist players, but.. full zerk or go home. Yay…) It’s about presenting options instead of gear/PVT/faceroll/zerg bashing the content.

So you are again one of the “i hate zerker, i’m not zerker, but i join zerker groups and complain” type of guy? Hopne not. Look the vids above, every other gear is viable without the need of dodge, which is the most efficient damage mitigation ingame and available for all classes.
Btw whats your exact problem with agro? We talk about open world content now, right? World bosses (the structure ones) don’t even move and throw aoe everywhere, so it’s not an issue, while champs are … just champs.
One of my favourite champ is still the Cave Troll in Queensdale, but sadly the zerg comes in and range it to death anyway. In smaller case scenarios that champ is really entertaining. Faster attack speed, which applies high amount of bleed with each hit. Rapid movement. Projectile knockdown. And the usual big one hit attack with a loooooong animation, but that one is stupidly slow, so it doesnt matter. Even with a few people, you can kite it in melee in a small circle and max melee it with soft CC. Be aware of agro changes and kite it again.

If you want agro management, it’s tanking, thus pointless, because it’s against the current design of the game. Threat and artificial agro management (Taunts) are imo stupid. Just a personal opinion.

I’m not even PVT/cleric on my warrior, and I can ignore a fair portion of damage mechanics, or at least survive them. That is not my short-sighted point. If I gear high damage on my thief (which I do), I expect to dodge like crazy or be dead on the floor. It’s usually the former over the latter.

Yeah, indeed, it depends on class choice too. Warriors can endure a lot more, than … everyone else.

My point with this is to promote diversity, instead of the PVT/zerk/l2p attitude that’s hurting the game and limiting a fair number of future content design decisions.

I’m don’t affraid of future content. With the introduction of aetherblades and new factions, pve mobs got wide variety of options and mechanics. Or if you remember to the Queens gauntlet, it was a really fun and engaging content and those bosses weren’t even champions!

It’s just a matter of time and money.

Fair consideration, but it’s probably a really easy fix. Possibly as easy as change one or two specific variables (bleedarray.size() or whatever) and then test to make sure the dynamic memory allocation works consistently. Two people taking a day to three days, tops.

That’s a learn to play issue. Most players don’t even realize that they need coordination and spams all the CC’s and come to the forum to complaining that control is non-existent, so +1 to you for realize this.

It’s not so much a complaint on my end as much as a realization that the system, while working as intended, isn’t matching the play style of what happens most frequently. Defiant works better in small settings, in my opinion. Granted, I’m also usually the one chipping away at Defiant with hammer skills.

Player skill is a factor, and that’s a great thing about the game overall. It starts to fall apart on high-coordination things like boss CC where there isn’t enough time to communicate. (Yes, you could have Vent/TeamSpeak, but all it takes is one person out of the loop to hinder a team’s plans.)

World bosses actually easier alone or with small groups.

I feel your pain, man. I did a Mark II run with 5-6 people in under 2 minutes. And all I have to do for that fight is range it with a rifle. The same run with the zerg takes over 5 minutes.

Remove rewards or big chunk of player base from the server?

Eeeh. :\ I will admit that rewards need to be balanced around coaxing out the participation the devs actually want. Champ bags? Kinda bad, but something needs to be done to incentivize the time invested. (A forum topic in its own right.) Invasion of Lion’s Arch bag drops? Freakin’ awesome. I didn’t know what would come out of them, but I wanted them, and farming a bunch while tackling event points really helped me stay involved.

So you are again one of the “i hate zerker, i’m not zerker, but i join zerker groups and complain” type of guy? Hope not. Look the vids above, every other gear is viable without the need of dodge, which is the most efficient damage mitigation ingame and available for all classes.

Complain? Nah. I show up, I participate, other people get the benefit. The show up, they bring some damage, and I pick them up when they fall over. It’s symbiotic like that.
I still remember one of my best dungeon runs was with a Guardian who just tanked the everlovin’ mess out of the climax battle and managed to scrape us off the floor in a huge effort. (Thanks, Chiggit!)
Then again, I also remember tipping a 10k hit with my thief. Oh, but that felt good.
Point is, it takes all kinds, and that’s the beauty of the game. It just needs a little touching up to add some more value to other builds.

Btw whats your exact problem with agro? … If you want agro management, it’s tanking, thus pointless, because it’s against the current design of the game. Threat and artificial agro management (Taunts) are imo stupid. Just a personal opinion.

I agree with this. I’ve never been a fan of taunt-only skills or high threat for the sake of high threat. That’s a waste of design space, honestly. With the Trinity, you always, always have to plan for Tank, Healer, and DPS. There’s a freedom in the come-one-come-all design, so long as damage mechanics are balanced a little more carefully.
Still, a very good question, and I need some thought on it. Between Ranger and Mesmer who don’t want that kind of threat, I sometimes find that mobs will, for no predictable reason, stay aggro’d on my character instead of the HP dolls I put in the way. For my warrior, I usually want the threat, so my team members can focus fire while I HP-sponge/CC/dodge at it. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
I’ll have to analyze that more in depth as I play over the next few weeks. No sense in telling the devs to change something if I can’t articulate what specificially that I want, right?

I’m don’t afraid of future content. With the introduction of aetherblades and new factions, pve mobs got wide variety of options and mechanics. Or if you remember to the Queens gauntlet, it was a really fun and engaging content and those bosses weren’t even champions!

Truth. I must acknowledge the wealth of monster design changes that are expanding gameplay over time. The addition of elites reduced event-champ farms in large scale battles (though I have my issues with their scaling), the devs are really working to split up the zerg and create objectives that must be done before the zerg-damage rush can happen. So it’s improving! And I still log onto GW2 every day, so there’s obviously something of interest enough to do so. I’m even thankful for the downtime before the patch.

yes please +1
15 humans

I’m of the opinion that there MUST be some method to alter the existing Condition Damage model to improve long term damage even while maintaining the 25 stack limit (that is reportedly a hard coded limitation necessary to maintain servers side performance….NOT an option to increase).

Suggestion:

• When the 25 stack limit is reached the damage being applied by that condition (per tick is a known value DMG).
• IF the 25 stacks are maintained for X period of time (that could be determined by how quickly the stacks were or ARE being added), increase the damage DMG by some % (that could be related to the condition damage of players applying the stacks)
• Increase or decrease the DMG modifier based on time the 25 stacks are maintained or lost.
• Remove increased DMG if stacks fall below 25 for some period of time.

I have no idea if some form of the above could be put in place and NOT put an undue performance burden on the server, but I do agree SOME solution must be investigated. As of now, it appears that Anet’s solution to the problem is to tone down Crit damage some (but that doesn’t fix the issue when 10 Condition Damage players are attacking a Champ).

• Easy or not, Anet still didn’t solve the problem.

• I talked in general, about the avereage playerbase, nothing personal. =)
  The way it implemented in open-world, large scale content is to prevent the chain CC. Nothing more. In that kind of content it’s an unavoidable mechanic, while on a smaler scale it can work, like Queens gauntlet.

• Don’t want to derail the topic, but brainstorming on an ingame communication system would be a good step forward. Personally i don’t like the use of a third party program for better coordination. The system found in most MOBA games are a great example of this. My personal favorite is in Smite. That thing works like a miracle.

• Yeat it’s a scaling issue, but we have the same problem again. Too much difference between large scale vs. small scale even if the opponent is the same.

• Detection of made effort need to be adressed. I can’t even tell how many times i didn’t even get gold credit for an event even if i soloed the champ to 50%, meanwhile sometimes i got gold even for 2 hits.
  With the recent announcement of the megaserver feautre i’m a tiny bit worried about how it will work out in the open world. Overscaling everywhere. :/

• Of course it depends on the enemy, but every type of build has it uses. Heal oriented players can pump up the HP of the melee players, melee players holds the enemy in place, everyone throws out buffs. Even if spammed, it’s useful. But smart play is more important. I’m looking at you Golem …

• Yeah same here, sometimes it’s annoyingly unpredicatble. For example when Archdiviner don’t even want to look at me as a guardian and chases the zerker warr or thief for no reason. Even if i get some knight armor to increase my toughness, but it isn’t help most of the time.
  Annoying, sure, but as soon as there is a reason why the boss / champ gets agro on you (high toughness, race, range, whatever) it can be abused and well … We have a tanking role. Sure it can be good, like Archy or the Ettin in harpy fractal, where you want to kite away the boss while the rest of the team deals with other opponents, but these kind of encounters are on a fine line between full random and exploitable agro management aka tanking.

• If the enemy is dangerous and more than a punch bag with high HP, similar to enemies in Queens gauntlet, it’s great.
  The introduction of elite mobs or packs of elites and veterans are also nice, but yeah, the scaling is sometimes over the top. Aetherblade thugs were stupidly lethal if you get caught by their warbanner. 30k+ aoe? That’s a bit too much, when the place is full of players and mobs, but it’s more or less fine. Dangerous mobs should be dangerous and meant to be kill players, not just get killed.
  Another fine example was the Firemage from Queens gauntlet (again, i know, but that content was super awesome). While it was really obvious what his mechanic was, i still saw a lot of players fail contantly against him. Don’t ever cross the fire. Fire hurts. Fire bad. But nope, they still crossed it. Meanwhile as a necro i killed it in less than 10 seconds. Seriously, as an underdog of PvE i breezed trough that content, but it was refreshing, engaging and more or less challanging. Oh Liadri my dear, i miss you …

The way it implemented in open-world, large scale content is to prevent the chain CC. Nothing more. In that kind of content it’s an unavoidable mechanic, while on a smaler scale it can work, like Queens gauntlet.

Ayup. And it’s not to say that CC isn’t useful. I still get a lot of glee with burst hammer into a group of enemies. And I think we’re beginning to see more monoliths that have adds rather than just a single rampaging monster. That needs to happen more. Honestly, a consistent design change like that fits the GW2 fighting style, gives CC and condition builds something to do, and adds variability to a fight.

Just as an example (which may be in the game already??), Boss (A) can do the occasional hard hit and otherwise harasses the players with CC, Minions (b) are actually the bulk of the damaging force, coming out frequently and threatening to overrun the players. Each minion provides a buff to the ones around it (taking a moment to cast Regen or Might or whatever, something that can be removed). PVT and Zerk can focus fire the boss, CC and conditions can tackle the adds, and support has plenty of heal/buff on the field.

Or, a fight already in game, the Destiny’s Edge fight. They’re all CC’able but all dangerous. Eir’s damage needs to be toned down a bit and Zojja’s blindbomb needs more than an 1 second cooldown, but that fight was complex with available spots for any role.

I guess what I’m actually asking for is less champs, more minions. Not even necessarily more loot from the minions attached to a champ. Tank their drop rates for all I care, just give me more interesting fights. :P

Dalanor.5387:

• Don’t want to derail the topic, but brainstorming on an ingame communication system would be a good step forward. Personally i don’t like the use of a third party program for better coordination.

So much yes. Problem is, if the system can’t handle more than 25 condition stacks, I think adding a robust communication system would kill it. :P

Yeah same here, sometimes it’s annoyingly unpredicatble.

If I knew more about the aggro system, I could offer conjecture, but in WoW, some bosses are known to occasionally throw out attacks at the second (usually ranged) on their aggro meter or just dump aggro altogether and force the group to reestablish it.
Perhaps some bosses in GW2 do that? Or maybe their measure of aggro time is longer or shorter than we’d like?

The introduction of elite mobs or packs of elites and veterans are also nice, but yeah, the scaling is sometimes over the top.

Is it sad that I fear Elites more than I fear Champions? And the champs have the better loot!
Where I see the problem in Elite tuning is that they tend to hit excessively hard. While this is intended to occupy 3-5 players, you threaten that many people by spreading damage rather than increasing it. Well, up it a little, to account for regen/protection.

We’ve been talking about these issues almost since launch, but it’s good to keep them in front of Anet.

Condition damage is actually much easier to fix. Condition damage is the same as direct damage in that it is damage, but delivered over time. And, the sustained damage should be broadly comparable when considered in any fight of significant duration. The trade-off lies in the front-loading with direct damage and it offers very interesting gameplay alternatives. The solution is to manage the damage by player (as with DD), but account for it as damage, by tick, over some number of ticks.

Anet played the technical difficulties card initially but softened their position when reminded that other games have no difficulties doing this. But, since no fix has been forthcoming, I’d wager they have painted themselves into a corner somewhere in their technical infrastructure. But, nothing short of fixing condition damage in this way will fix condition damage. You really must attribute all damage done by players to the players. It really should go without saying…but just saying. Otherwise you risk the untenable state where adding another condition build to a group with one only adds ‘white’ damage while adding another power build scales normally. This untenable state is actually untenable and it is only corrected by accounting for all damage by player. We do this already with direct damage and we must also do this for condition damage.