Guild Wars 2

1. Reduce the cooldown of boss abilities.

2. Reduce the casting time of boss abilities.

3. Reduce the base values of healing abilities and increase the healing power ratios.

4. Remove Defiant.

5. Utilize creative mechanics to incentivize build variety (ex: fast-healing bosses, fast moving/attacking bosses (similar to Mossman), Very high toughness, low HP bosses with retaliation, encounters where player HP ticks down at a flat rate per seconds, etc)

6. Reduce the base endurance regeneration rate and the effectiveness of Energy sigils.

7. Balance instant down mechanics to create a meaningful correlation between risk and dps.

8. Remove the condition cap on enemies, but give bosses various condition cleanse abilities.

In an ideal world, the best way to improve active combat in GW2 would be through far improved, reactive, unpredictable AI. Unfortunately, that likely won’t happen, or at least, would take a long long time to do. However, the set of changes I’ve suggested would encourage more varied gameplay, build variety, and unique strategies for various situations, all while preserving the goal of active combat rather than stat based combat, and involve mostly tweaks to the numbers rather than drastic reprogramming.

I agree. Most bosses are just too easy with how slow and their attacks are with cast time and how long it is between the next attack.

I do think these are avenues that should be explored (no. 2 not so much in my opinion, as no. 1 should make a better job of it). Active combat is indeed the way it should be and, as you point out, there are already many mechanics already implemented that can help (retaliation, weakness, vulnerability, etc.)

However, I would be careful with statements like no. 7. I do understand that many players are not happy about the current all-out DPS meta, but this would be a step towards stat based combat, which you are trying to avoid. Moreso, if a Berserker Warrior (2127 armor, 18.3k hp)* dies in one hit, what about an Elementalist who chooses to go for Celestial gear (2203 armor, 14.5k hp) or a Thief who goes for Soldier’s Armor and Valkyrie Trinkets (2204 armor, 17.2k hp)? Other classes who would go for defensive stats would most likely get one-hitted too, and they’d just go back to full damage specs.

*Armor + Trinkets/Jewels stat, no runes, no traits.

theguildless.1386:

I do think these are avenues that should be explored (no. 2 not so much in my opinion, as no. 1 should make a better job of it). Active combat is indeed the way it should be and, as you point out, there are already many mechanics already implemented that can help (retaliation, weakness, vulnerability, etc.)

However, I would be careful with statements like no. 7. I do understand that many players are not happy about the current all-out DPS meta, but this would be a step towards stat based combat, which you are trying to avoid. Moreso, if a Berserker Warrior (2127 armor, 18.3k hp)* dies in one hit, what about an Elementalist who chooses to go for Celestial gear (2203 armor, 14.5k hp) or a Thief who goes for Soldier’s Armor and Valkyrie Trinkets (2204 armor, 17.2k hp)? Other classes who would go for defensive stats would most likely get one-hitted too, and they’d just go back to full damage specs.

*Armor + Trinkets/Jewels stat, no runes, no traits.

Hm. Perhaps you’re right and that’s a bit extreme. Perhaps a full glass cannon elementalist would get 1 shotted? Honestly that’s something that would require fine tuning, more so than I can speculate here. However, somehow there should be a correlation between increased dps and increased risk. I suppose that’s how I should have worded it.

I’ll edit my post to say that.

I do hope they’ve taken the view from Kaboose and run with it because it allowed bosses to still cast their anti-CC spells however it mitigated that CC immunity to a lower scale than before so that classes which have a higher number of skills with CCs as side benefits would actually be useful once more.

I’m waiting to see what their post CDI solutions will be for this and Condition damage issues.

I wish I knew what Kaboose is, but yes, in its current incarnation, Boss’ CC imunity pretty much invalidates the “control” aspect of A.Net’s vision for GW2’s combat system.

I’d like to get some more feedback on these, as well as other suggestions you might have.

actually the whole combat system fails entirely, the reason is simply how the targeting system is done.
we now have 2 systems that are unable to work together.
1.) a battle system made for a persistent targeting system
2.) a dynamic targeting system for a sandbox-like battle system (think tera or skyrim)
the problem now is simple, which of the two is more important and which is the way you want to play?