Guild Wars 2

I agree. Just making bosses immune to everything is lazy. It turns fights into lame 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 fests.

It can be demoralizing especially if you have specialized in doing something a boss just utterly negates. I’m alright with penalizing or using diminishing returns but don’t tell us our abilities are suddenly useless. I mean one boss every once in a while makes sense thematically….it would be pretty hard to stun Tequatl for instance but otherwise I think we should expect our abilities to work.

Quells.2498:

You’ve designed a great system of interactive combat but half of it doesn’t work when fighting bosses.

Any specific bosses or just generally world bosses?

First of all he didn’t even mentioned whats frustates him. Only i could assume he talks about Defiance, since its almost a daily topic in the forums, which turn into always pointless posts (see above) and detailed reasoning by regular posters which gets ignored by said thread openers and believers that think the system is broken and want to roleplay CC bots.

Second, Defiance works as intended. It encourage team work and coordination instead of mindless CC spam with no effort, which OP wishes for.
Applying simply a diminishing return system as in WoW, with the removing of Defiance of course, it would just reward every non-skilled player who can push a CC button to actively interrupt enemy attack. Here is were team work comes in with the current system. If you need CC, you have to coordinate what to use and when.

Lets take AC spider queen for example with her new poison attack. Spidey starts to glow, raise its rear end and prepare to annihilate the group. Thief use headshot (1/4 second daze). Great, it got interrupted, queen attacks and spits poison as soon the CD wears off from interrupting. Or ele prepares with icebow to use Deep freeze. Great, now spider completely unable to do anything for 5 seconds. See the difference?
Or let’s take another example with Magecrusher and Abomination. I’m sure you are familiar with both fights and their mechanics, so i don’t need to explain whats happening.

That boils down to encounter knowledge and general learn to play issues every time. Every. Time. Also …

It can be demoralizing especially if you have specialized in doing something a boss just utterly negates.

I really hope you don’t speak about CC, because the above reasons and you can’t even specialize into control, except with condi duration, but i guess you don’t want to cripple stationary bosses. The only situation where your complain can be true, is that dredge are immune to blind, but i guess it’s a fair thing from blind moles. Also the burning immunity on embers.

One other thing OP. Name me the encounters where it bothers you. Open world doesn’t count. I hope it makes sense even for you, that open world bosses that get zerged by 50,100 or even 150 people would be really vulnerable to perma CC therefore trivialize the fight even further.

@Noah:
See the beginning. And everybody replied with the same style.
“the system is bad, hurr durr, change the mindless 11111 spam”
Which is entirely not true. Go into details with the problem and the solution. Pating eachother back isn’t constructive nor helpful and OP’s suggestion is far from the best option. Defiance is fine, people need to learn how to use it properly and content needs to encourage the use of CC more in small scale fights.

Your turn guys.

ps: Mind you, you can set your auto-attack on auto CTRL + right click, so you don’t have to spam it.

I agree with the OP.
However I don’t see it changing…
ArenaNet has created MegaZerg champ train schedule where people only DPS with Skill #1. Its ArenaNet created, ArenaNet supported. Regardless if they say otherwise – it exists because of them.

Yeah, for a game with a “new holy trinity” that consists of damage, support, and control they did a kitten ed fine job relegating the control aspect useless in pve. Trash mobs die to quick to warrant being controlled and bosses are immune to it. Ergo, it’s pointless.

Azhure.1857:

I agree with the OP.
However I don’t see it changing…
ArenaNet has created MegaZerg champ train schedule where people only DPS with Skill #1. Its ArenaNet created, ArenaNet supported. Regardless if they say otherwise – it exists because of them.

Open world has little to no common in instanced boss encounters and i don’t see why you complain about zerg bosses being immune to CC. I mean, c’mon, 100 players just randomly spams their stuff and the boss would do literally nothing.

darkace.8925:

[…]bosses are immune to it. Ergo, it’s pointless.

Read my above post with examples, but let me show you how the mechanic works.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unshakable
Gains defiance when targeted by crowd-control skills. Blind is 10% as effective. Weakness and vulnerability last 50% less time.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiance
Immune to crowd control. Crowd-control skills remove stacks of defiance.

You can see bosses aren’t immune to them, you just need coordination instead of mindless CC spamming to effectively interrupt bosses when needed.

Agreed. And they need to get rid of the 25 max. condition stack. I would love to have a condition-based build, but it’s useless. The whole Player vs. A.I. paradigm in this game needs a total rework.

Dalanor.5387:

You can see bosses aren’t immune to them, you just need coordination instead of mindless CC spamming to effectively interrupt bosses when needed.

There was obviously a bit of hyperbole in my post. Hyperbole aside, how many slots on your skill bar have you dedicated to CC when fighting bosses? How many slots in your party are you looking to fill with someone spec’d for CC? Unless a boss mechanic specifically calls for CC (i.e. Three-Toed Tootsie), I’m guessing the answer for the typical pve player is “not many”.

nexxe.7081:

Agreed. And they need to get rid of the 25 max. condition stack. I would love to have a condition-based build, but it’s useless. The whole Player vs. A.I. paradigm in this game needs a total rework.

Removing the condi cap would make condition builds less worse than they are now, but can’t reach similar results in group content.
The ramp up time alone makes them inferior, also they scale horribly compared to direct damage builds. In fact they ignore armor, but current dungeon bosses are low armor, high HP targets with the exception of the two end bosses of the dredge fractal, but those are gimmicky fights anyway.
Power builds scale way better, because might, damage modifiers, vulnerability and ferocity affects them, meanwhile condi builds only can benefit from might and more or less from condi duration if it has enough time to deal damage. Thats why its much better in solo situations, where you lack buffs and your damage aren’t pushed out by others.

darkace.8925:

There was obviously a bit of hyperbole in my post. Hyperbole aside, how many slots on your skill bar have you dedicated to CC when fighting bosses? How many slots in your party are you looking to fill with someone spec’d for CC? Unless a boss mechanic specifically calls for CC (i.e. Three-Toed Tootsie), I’m guessing the answer for the typical pve player is “not many”.

Hyperboles aren’t helpful, constructive and misinform others. I got infractions for less.
But to be on topic.

• Warrior: Off-hand mace, Fear me, Pin down, Throw bolas
• Guardian: Banish, Ring of warding, Zealot’s embrace, Binding blade, Line of warding, Sanctuary.
• Ranger: Counter attack, Hilt bash, various pets if needed
• Thief: Pistol whip, Headshot, Scorpionwire
• Engi: Big ol’ bomb, Magnetic shield, Overcharged shoot
• Mesmer: Diversion, Mantra of distraction, Magic bullet, Counter blade, Into the void
• Necro: Doom, Wail of doom
• Ele: well they got a lot of options with that many skills

And these are just often used skills by meta builds available to the player almost everytime, but not including a lot of soft CC skills for example skills with blinds, chill, cripple, etc. Also, you can’t build for control, since they are mostly tied to only your weapon and utility skills and only a handful of trait has any effect on them. Honestly i can’t name but only one, Banshee’s wail for necromancers.
You can say whatever you want, everyone can share their opinion, but it isn’t change the fact that you have a lot of option to deal with a lot of situation effectively where you need it if you coordinate it.
Also the “typical pve player” isn’t avare of a lot of mechanics, due to open world being horribly easy, where the only remotely challenging mobs, the champions get zerged down anyway. You drop them into dungeon content, where they get wrecked (admit it, your very first experience wasn’t better, neither mine) and need to learn to use certain mechanics or they ignore it, because they can, thanks to the game isn’t punish them enough. But thats another topic i guess.

Thanks for mentioning the new moa boss. I think its a horrible boss design. It’s the same boss what we have seen suggested in threads like this. It requires nothing, just brainless CC spam, which isn’t an issue with only a handful of people around. I find it really really lame. The sad thing it isn’t dangerous enough, just a big HP bag.

I don’t think that claiming that most of the game doesn’t count when discussing the relative lack of value of CC in GW2 is a valid point.

Obviously, I hope, the goal would not be to turn big bosses into helpless punching bags. The goal would be for them to be more involved, interactive fights. Something where many of your weapon skills do not end up being wasted space on your skill bar.

I didn’t say anything about Defiance. In general, I am talking about how skills are useless in many encounters. I’m certain the designers at Anet are smart enough to understand that a player will expect their skills to work everywhere regardless of the content. Simply making things immune is a lazy way to balance encounters. I don’t want CC spam as a lot of people are suggesting. I really hope from this point on we will think out our responses more constructively. As I said in the original post, diminishing returns or internal cooldowns are fine but at some basic level all our skills should work in all content.

To address some of the comments, no I won’t mention specific encounters because it’s not relevant. I’m talking from a design perspective. A player hits a button and expects it to have a result with cascading information. I also already mentioned that stunning Tequatl would be ridiculous and the player will understand that but some enemies that aren’t even champions are immune and that’s poor mechanic communication.

Quells.2498:

I didn’t say anything about Defiance. In general, I am talking about how skills are useless in many encounters. I’m certain the designers at Anet are smart enough to understand that a player will expect their skills to work everywhere regardless of the content. Simply making things immune is a lazy way to balance encounters. I don’t want CC spam as a lot of people are suggesting. I really hope from this point on we will think out our responses more constructively. As I said in the original post, diminishing returns or internal cooldowns are fine but at some basic level all our skills should work in all content.

To address some of the comments, no I won’t mention specific encounters because it’s not relevant. I’m talking from a design perspective. A player hits a button and expects it to have a result with cascading information. I also already mentioned that stunning Tequatl would be ridiculous and the player will understand that but some enemies that aren’t even champions are immune and that’s poor mechanic communication.

Dalanor.5387:

One other thing OP. Name me the encounters where it bothers you.

Go into details with the problem and the solution.

Yes, it’s relevant since you never mentioned whats your exact problem with mechanics.
As i said previously, people tend to blame Defiance for no reason, but if it’s not the case now, what else? Are you frustrated about the Mai Trin fight or what?
Give examples whats not working and how should it work, refusing said things otherwise turn the thread into a “stuff not gud, fix it pl0x” thread again. Which isn’t good for anyone.

Let me show how you should do.
“I miss some consistency with certain mechanics in PvE, namely the recents changes with Malrona in Twilight arbor Up path. Previously it was possible to reflect both attacks, but now they aren’t altough it isn’t mentioned in the description of the boss. Also it happened with some other spider mobs in said dungeon.
Same applies to Mai Trin, because she has both a unblockable and a undodgable attack. Later one heavily discriminates certain classes, namely Necromancers, due to their lack of other damage mitigation options outside of death shroud.
Can we get more consistency how certain things works (projectiles -> reflectable or at least blockable) or unique mechanics mentioned somehow in boss descriptions?”

See? It wasn’t hard at all.

ps: These are actual issues and if thats what OP meant in the original post, i’m agree with him.

Dalanor.5387:

Quells.2498:

I didn’t say anything about Defiance. In general, I am talking about how skills are useless in many encounters. I’m certain the designers at Anet are smart enough to understand that a player will expect their skills to work everywhere regardless of the content. Simply making things immune is a lazy way to balance encounters. I don’t want CC spam as a lot of people are suggesting. I really hope from this point on we will think out our responses more constructively. As I said in the original post, diminishing returns or internal cooldowns are fine but at some basic level all our skills should work in all content.

To address some of the comments, no I won’t mention specific encounters because it’s not relevant. I’m talking from a design perspective. A player hits a button and expects it to have a result with cascading information. I also already mentioned that stunning Tequatl would be ridiculous and the player will understand that but some enemies that aren’t even champions are immune and that’s poor mechanic communication.

Dalanor.5387:

One other thing OP. Name me the encounters where it bothers you.

Go into details with the problem and the solution.

Yes, it’s relevant since you never mentioned whats your exact problem with mechanics.
As i said previously, people tend to blame Defiance for no reason, but if it’s not the case now, what else? Are you frustrated about the Mai Trin fight or what?
Give examples whats not working and how should it work, refusing said things otherwise turn the thread into a “stuff not gud, fix it pl0x” thread again. Which isn’t good for anyone.

Let me show how you should do.
“I miss some consistency with certain mechanics in PvE, namely the recents changes with Malrona in Twilight arbor Up path. Previously it was possible to reflect both attacks, but now they aren’t altough it isn’t mentioned in the description of the boss. Also it happened with some other spider mobs in said dungeon.
Same applies to Mai Trin, because she has both a unblockable and a undodgable attack. Later one heavily discriminates certain classes, namely Necromancers, due to their lack of other damage mitigation options outside of death shroud.
Can we get more consistency how certain things works (projectiles -> reflectable or at least blockable) or unique mechanics mentioned somehow in boss descriptions?”

See? It wasn’t hard at all.

ps: These are actual issues and if thats what OP meant in the original post, i’m agree with him.

In the post you quote he provides more than enough information to get his point and his concern across.

I mostly have to agree with the OP.

I’m running my ele with a staff.
Water skill 4: Useless.
Earth skill 4+5: A little damage, but otherwise useless
Air-Skill 3: Useless.
Air-Skill 5: Only a source for vulnerability.

Especially the chill from water-4 used to be a great tool to buy some rez-time when engaging mini-bosses in small numbers.

I actually don’t have a proble with Defiance and Unshakable, per se; but they feel more like time sinks rather than coordination inducements. Even if – in the thief example up above – the interrupt landed, bosses tend to throw their buffs up within a very short period of time thereafter. Then the whole process starts over again, waiting on the boss to do its “tell” again, so you can throw Link’s boomerang again. Players spend most of their time waiting (and avoiding the octorocks being thrown at them, or whatever metaphor gets the point across).

This is not inherently bad, but it does make the bosses boring – epecially coupled with the relative immobility that has been greatly improved with the Jul I Dry Top release (Devourer Queen and “Tootsie” do ANYTHING but stand still now – this is great!)

I think they could be improved tho – use the typical mechanic above on occasion to throw player timing off, but give players other ways of bringing down these boss buffs at different times. New skills in the future are great candidates for this (thinking DnD’s Pierce Magic, Remove Magic, Secret Word, etc are all models that could be adapted). Spread out some of the debuff spells among the classes such that they have to execute the skills in a given protocol. Would allow for more than – what? – 2-3 “phases” of the boss we currently have now within the same approzimate timeframe, but it will “feel” more active to the player.

Ashen.2907:

In the post you quote he provides more than enough information to get his point and his concern across.

Except not. Let me quote myself.

Go into details with the problem and the solution. Pating eachother back isn’t constructive nor helpful[…]

OP outright refused to give examples. As i said " “stuff not gud, fix it pl0x” threads aren’t useful. Maybe he found some bugged enemies, it’s hard to tell whats his problem and maybe find a solution for it if he refuse to say it.
It’s a completely different problem to get frustrated from blind immune dredge and getting frustrated by unblockable abilities which aren’t mentioned anywhere in-game.
I hope it’s enough to get my point and concerns.

tekfan.3179:

I mostly have to agree with the OP.

I’m running my ele with a staff.
Water skill 4: Useless.
Earth skill 4+5: A little damage, but otherwise useless
Air-Skill 3: Useless.
Air-Skill 5: Only a source for vulnerability.

Especially the chill from water-4 used to be a great tool to buy some rez-time when engaging mini-bosses in small numbers.

Of course in the case of ele, you have plenty of tools due to attunements, but that doesn’t mean you have to use them everytime.
Water 4 is an awesome unblockable chill which is great at the last grawl shaman fight for example (except at lvl38).
Earth 4 and 5 are CC skills, they aren’t for damage purposes obviously.
Air 3 is the same, it’s for situational CC. I often use it on slavedriver in CoFp1 because pugs don’t now what controling the enemy means.
Air 5 is great for swiftness stacking (lightning field + blasts = aoe swiftness, read about combos here) both in open world and dungeons.
It has nothing to do with the system being broken or not, you just need to understand what your class and skills doing and use them at the right situation when you need them.

KarateKid.5648:

snip

These are valid concerns and i agree with you. The system is more or less fine, personally i like it, but the game isn’t encourage it well enough. Of course not every single enemy in the game should be now with the same mechanics, where you need hard CC, but more would be lovely. =3
However i still find Tootsie a badly designed boss. Of course it is hard do catch first, but randomly spammed CC will make it stand still for the whole fight, which is boring and lame. Or it bugged out every single time. Who knows?
I’m not sure it would be a good idea with the current design ideas. You know, the time you separate class mechanics and make really really distinct and unique ones, very specific roles will emerge and would make situations where certain class(es) will become mandatory which wouldn’t be an issues in bigger raid like instances, but GW2 current dungeons design is 5 man only.
Currently thief is one of this, since engi is unable to keep up high stealth uptime which is just too great to pass at certain places.
Sadly we can find examples for the other way around. I would say guardian is fit here. They got every possible defensive ability in the game and unique ones too (party wide aegis) to help the team, making every other class defensive support almost completely obsolete. Just look at poor mesmers. Let’s say, you remove every single cleanse ability from guardian. Now in PvE they make other classes more useful if you need condi removal. Of course that would be completely broken in PvP, but you get example.

I was specific and even more so on why it doesn’t make sense to list certain events. I’m not sure what you’re misunderstanding but this isn’t making much progress anyways. The most basic I can make my statement is to say that giving players abilities and then not allowing them to use those abilities is bad design. It is not reliant on any one mechanic or event but rather the lack of holistic mechanics that always work the way the player expects.

Quells.2498:

I was specific and even more so on why it doesn’t make sense to list certain events. I’m not sure what you’re misunderstanding but this isn’t making much progress anyways. The most basic I can make my statement is to say that giving players abilities and then not allowing them to use those abilities is bad design. It is not reliant on any one mechanic or event but rather the lack of holistic mechanics that always work the way the player expects.

This needs an example, vast majority of enemies aren’t immune to your abilities. The dredge blind immune , ember burning immune, earth elementals permanent stability etc.. makes sense.

What are you referring to because we’re not experiencing your issue.

nexxe.7081:

Agreed. And they need to get rid of the 25 max. condition stack. I would love to have a condition-based build, but it’s useless. The whole Player vs. A.I. paradigm in this game needs a total rework.

As mentioned hundreds (if not thousands) of times before it is much more difficult than just typing “get rid of 25 stack limit”. There is a limited amount of computing resources on the server side that makes the stack limit necessary. I seriously doubt the solution is simple or it would have already been fixed.

I’m not saying don’t ask for a change to it, just don’t act like they can just flip a switch and remove the 25 stack limit and everyone can start spamming conditions on Claw of Jormag with no effect to the entire Frostgorge Sound server.

I say defiance is bad in design simply because it hard-counters too much. Let’s say you’re fighting the Claw of Jormag. Since you know CCs aren’t going to work on him most of the time, are you going to wait until that time comes, try to coordinate everyone around you to make it happen or will you just stick to damage because damage always works? That’s why world events are spam fest.

Now if burning always gave him and his walls a special type of weakness that doubled the damage they received, what do you think players will do? That’s how bosses should be handled.

Crossplay.2067:

I say defiance is bad in design simply because it hard-counters too much. Let’s say you’re fighting the Claw of Jormag. Since you know CCs aren’t going to work on him most of the time, are you going to wait until that time comes, try to coordinate everyone around you to make it happen or will you just stick to damage because damage always works? That’s why world events are spam fest.

Fights are designed in a way that you don’t have to deal with defiant at all, because you can’t coordinate that many players everytime to interrupt. So indeed you can’t stun them, but you don’t even need it.

You have enviromental weapons to cheese the fight by 100% otherwise you would need to equip defensive abilities (stability mainly) and apply small heals around you when neccessary. Also the players are always split up into multiple groups to deal with ads and the mechanics (wall or golem escort).
I admit, the fight isn’t that hard at all, but there are dozens of dead players everytime i go there, becase the fight isn’t just about to slam your face repeatedly into the keyboard.

Golem would be a decent world boss, if vast majority of the playerbase wouldn’t range exploit it and negate all the mechanics they should deal with.

Now if burning always gave him and his walls a special type of weakness that doubled the damage they received, what do you think players will do? That’s how bosses should be handled.

Than you obviously don’t know how guardians work. One guardian alone is able to maintain 100% burning uptime without heavily investing for it. That’s how bosses shouldn’t be handled. By that logic they could simply reduce the health values by 50% and don’t need to hide it behind fluff.

I’d like to see a solution that works sort of like Defiant-in-reverse:

• Unshakable grants CC immunity.
• Unshakable creatures hit by CC gain a scaling number of Defiant stacks that disappear after a short while e.g. 2s.
• If players can strip all Defiant stacks before they expire, the boss loses Unshakable for a short time e.g. 2s.

So for a dungeon boss, you might have them gain 3 stacks of Defiant meaning that all 5 players must land their CC together to successfully interrupt a skill (or 4 CC’s and a blind to negate an attack), but open world bosses could have a sliding scale of Defiant stacks that represents e.g. 50% of players in the fight.

Thematically I think it fits nicely and is intuitive that while a lone Mesmer could stun a Veteran mob with a single thought, it would take a huge combined assault to stop Tequatl.

I can also see it helping with co-ordination because all PUGs would need to know is: when you see Defiant pop up, hit that Earthshaker!