Guild Wars 2

In the past month of dungeon runs for armors for several of my characters, I have noticed that a lot players, not just newly joined players, but also experienced ones, don’t know what these are or don’t pay attention to them.

These passive buffs on champs should not be overlooked. With good coordination and communication. Parties can use CC skills to interrupt a lot of boss attacks to either stop a deadly blow or making the kill faster.

So why aren’t people paying attention to them? Is it because it’s not explained in the game? Or do people simply choose to ignore them?

For the same reason that so many people say this game is nothing but a zerg fest… because that’s the only way they care to play. Why coordinate when they can just dps and rez each other? (Also until recently waypoint zerg…)

And that’s why people hate dungeons.
Just because you want a coordinated team with good communication don’t mean other want the same or have the time to wait hours for another “pro”. Dungeons are for grinding and the faster way is go with anyone willing to grind them.
If you don’t like that, you can easily spam “Pro player LFG, only pros like myself, no noobs allowed” and done, no need to push your personal preferences into other, I’m sure you can always found people who think like you.

daimasei.4091:

And that’s why people hate dungeons.
Just because you want a coordinated team with good communication don’t mean other want the same or have the time to wait hours for another “pro”. Dungeons are for grinding and the faster way is go with anyone willing to grind them.
If you don’t like that, you can easily spam “Pro player LFG, only pros like myself, no noobs allowed” and done, no need to push your personal preferences into other, I’m sure you can always found people who think like you.

Oh no, I’m not calling myself pro, I’m just questioning why this basic thing isn’t known to the wide public.

Because most teams are pugs unless you are running with guildies, this sort of coordination doesn’t exist. As a result, most people will ignore the defiant mechanic.

I have tried to explain to multiple people to use control skills to get rid of defiant for certain bosses then we could interrupt a cast, but no one listens or pays attention to it. It’s not that difficult to just dodge outta the way anyway so it’s not a huge deal. It would certainly make things easier if everyone did it, but oh well

I try to keep bosses at zero stacks of defiant in order to interrupt them when necessary, but most players seem content with just spamming their CC skills for damage, rather than playing intelligently.

Defiant is why I love playing a hammer/dual mace warrior with 3 physical skills and Rampage. Oh you have defiant? Well I have THIRTEEN CONTROL SKILLS!

The only problem is getting people not to waste the window that removing the defiant stacks provides…

I’d say the problem is that Defiant is a kittenty mechanic.

I don’t understand the mechanic… and it’s not like we have time to hover over the icons (they move throughout battle) to read the tooltip.

I don’t understand why sometimes I can knock them down, and other times I can.
Even when knockdown fails, it says “Interrupt”, which doesn’t actually interrupt anything. I have always thought it was bugged.

Interesting, i did not know you could get rid of defiant.

Intelligence is a rare thing on the internet. But ye maybe a good recruitment question would be:
- explain how defiant stacks work and how they can be used for optimal dungeon play.

/wiki defiant
/wiki unshakable

Recycle.5493:

So why aren’t people paying attention to them? Is it because it’s not explained in the game? Or do people simply choose to ignore them?

Its not explained anywhere but in the tooltip of the ability when mousing over it with the mob targetted. If one didnt pick it up during the DEs in the world, it would be even worse in dungeons.

This may be slightly off topic, but does fear count for defiant stack now? It doesn’t seem to work the same way for bosses…it used to be awesome as an interrupt without having to worry about someone screwing up the stack.

Hi everyone,

You might find these articles of the wiki useful for this discussion
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiant
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unshakable

In short, Unshakable will grant the boss as many charges of Defiant as players are in the area. CC skills remove charges of Defiant. Once at 0 stacks the boss is susceptible to CC, after which the charges refresh.

As stated above the players can coordinate to have it at 0 stacks so they can prevent deadly attacks.

Hope this helps in your dungeon runs. As always, we ask you all to have a civil and constructive discussion.

Thanks

Would like some clarity on this, but me and my friends always assumed that it wasn’t even worth it. We would use our abilities to get defiant off just so we could interrupt /one/ of the bosses abilities? Then his defiant goes back up? Just dps the boss down and forget defiant ever existed. Crappy mechanic. I guess it’s cool ever now and then to use the number 4 skill as a guardian and see a big kitten dungeon boss go flying, other than that, I don’t see a use in coordinating anything, we’ve been doing fine putting defiant on the back burner.

Because people can’t read. It’s amazing how much you learn just reading tooltips and checking what your controls are at the start of a game.

“not having time” to read defiant – no , you have plenty of time, there are LOADS of champions, they have some new buff and you don’t even care to see what it means? really?

Last I checked fear didn’t trigger the immunity on some enemies, will have to play my necro some more though :P

ty Mod, however, with or without defiant, the group i run with, ignore it 90% of the because the bosses are no challenge what so ever, just large pools of HP. Their attacks are easely mitigated, we insta-res if one does go down, and we have 2 running support, 2 DPS, 1 versitile.

Most bosses are just a hold up more then a challenge.

Defiant and Unshakable are undoubtedly two mechanics that are terrible.
They encourage spamming of your abilities rather than timing them.

Even then there’s no point in interrupting and controlling enemy foes that are unshakable. Because every encounter is simply too easy and relies on the health of the enemy rather than interesting mechanics.

Myself and the other players I regularily run dungeons with know exactly what Defiant and Unshakable do. We choose to ignore them because everything dies fast and/or easy anyways. I remember when we were first learning Alpha’s attacks we fooled around with “Smart CC”, but that was the one exception.

The system just seems tacked on and unnecessary.

Because the open world experience teaches them that damage spam is the only thing that matters.

1. control effects last too short in open world to matter when you get 2+ mobs chewing on you. You simply can’t use them to divide and conqueror a mob group.

2. control effects and interrupt are interlinked.

3. interrupts can happen even when defiant is up, but the control effect will not. Meaning that the interrupt popup is the only indication that the control effect did anything at all.

4. it is easier to hit the dedicated dodge button when that big hit starts winding than try to remember that control skill x with that long cooldown can interrupt it (and pray that it is off cooldown since the last time you touched it). Never mind that there are zero traits that will half the cooldown of such skills, while vigor halves dodge cooldown.

End result is that by the time they hit a dungeon, most people have forgotten or ignore the interrupts because they so rarely had any use for them (except if they happened to also do some damage).

If people could more reliably control effect lock one or more mobs, then they would pay more attention. This because then there would be some incentive over the usual AOE spamming, dodging kite that most non-zerg fights devolve to.

Deroy.2457:

Defiant and Unshakable are undoubtedly two mechanics that are terrible.
They encourage spamming of your abilities rather than timing them.

Even then there’s no point in interrupting and controlling enemy foes that are unshakable. Because every encounter is simply too easy and relies on the health of the enemy rather than interesting mechanics.

In solo situations yeah but in group situations, no.
If everyone just spams their CC skills you will never manage to time interrupts of boss skills.

And this is where rifle engineers, bow warriors and other classes with immobilize abilities are so handly.

Mostly you want to keep bosses at bay, immobilize does this just fine and if you run with a good group, the rest keeps the defiant stacking CCs off the boss until they are really needed. Why? Because immobilize doesnt trigger defiant.

Sucks vs unstoppable mobs though a.k.a Abominations.

kokiman.2364:

Deroy.2457:

Defiant and Unshakable are undoubtedly two mechanics that are terrible.
They encourage spamming of your abilities rather than timing them.

Even then there’s no point in interrupting and controlling enemy foes that are unshakable. Because every encounter is simply too easy and relies on the health of the enemy rather than interesting mechanics.

In solo situations yeah but in group situations, no.
If everyone just spams their CC skills you will never manage to time interrupts of boss skills.

Thing is that solo experiences are what builds up reflexes that later will be applied to group situations. Meaning that as long as one can’t make effective use of CC in solo, because frankly they suck as CC and are designed more as PVP combo breakers, one will ignore their existence in group unless heavily prodded about it by others in the group. And said prodding will not happen because the whole group has had the same solo experience.

Moderator.1462:

Hi everyone,

You might find these articles of the wiki useful for this discussion
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiant
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unshakable

In short, Unshakable will grant the boss as many charges of Defiant as players are in the area. CC skills remove charges of Defiant. Once at 0 stacks the boss is susceptible to CC, after which the charges refresh.

As stated above the players can coordinate to have it at 0 stacks so they can prevent deadly attacks.

Hope this helps in your dungeon runs. As always, we ask you all to have a civil and constructive discussion.

Thanks

The problem is it’s a terrible uninuitive mechanic and largely unnecessary too. I don’t recall a single boss aside from the Dredge Fractal, where interrupting or CC is even necessary.

My big issue with Definat is that way it refreshes. From one second to the next he’ll have back all his charges and CC becomes impossible again. It’s just not a good system.

Why not have Definat charges replenish more seamlessly at say….1 charge every 5-10 seconds.

Either that or simply reduce the duration and effect of all CC by 70% vs. all bosses. Whatever you do it can’t be worse than the current Definat mechanic.

Recycle.5493:

In the past month of dungeon runs for armors for several of my characters, I have noticed that a lot players, not just newly joined players, but also experienced ones, don’t know what these are or don’t pay attention to them.

What what are?

Recycle.5493:

These passive buffs on champs should not be overlooked. With good coordination and communication. Parties can use CC skills to interrupt a lot of boss attacks to either stop a deadly blow or making the kill faster.

So why aren’t people paying attention to them? Is it because it’s not explained in the game? Or do people simply choose to ignore them?

For one I don’t know what you mean with CC skills. If you tell people “Use CC Skills!!!” perhaps they don’t know what you talk about.

Dee Jay.2460:

Moderator.1462:

Hi everyone,

You might find these articles of the wiki useful for this discussion
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiant
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unshakable

In short, Unshakable will grant the boss as many charges of Defiant as players are in the area. CC skills remove charges of Defiant. Once at 0 stacks the boss is susceptible to CC, after which the charges refresh.

As stated above the players can coordinate to have it at 0 stacks so they can prevent deadly attacks.

Hope this helps in your dungeon runs. As always, we ask you all to have a civil and constructive discussion.

Thanks

The problem is it’s a terrible uninuitive mechanic and largely unnecessary too. I don’t recall a single boss aside from the Dredge Fractal, where interrupting or CC is even necessary.

My big issue with Definat is that way it refreshes. From one second to the next he’ll have back all his charges and CC becomes impossible again. It’s just not a good system.

Why not have Definat charges replenish more seamlessly at say….1 charge every 5-10 seconds.

Either that or simply reduce the duration and effect of all CC by 70% vs. all bosses. Whatever you do it can’t be worse than the current Definat mechanic.

Actually the defiant charges don’t reset until a successful CC is used on the boss, Unfortunately, so many players just spam CC skill for DPS that in unorganized and larger groups the window of opportunity is pretty much impossible to take advantage of. I actually like defiant but I agree with you, it needs to have a different reset mechanic, the current one is completely unintuitive, and pretty much boils down to 1 in every X control skills is actually useful.

beren.6048:

Recycle.5493:

In the past month of dungeon runs for armors for several of my characters, I have noticed that a lot players, not just newly joined players, but also experienced ones, don’t know what these are or don’t pay attention to them.

What what are?

Recycle.5493:

These passive buffs on champs should not be overlooked. With good coordination and communication. Parties can use CC skills to interrupt a lot of boss attacks to either stop a deadly blow or making the kill faster.

So why aren’t people paying attention to them? Is it because it’s not explained in the game? Or do people simply choose to ignore them?

For one I don’t know what you mean with CC skills. If you tell people “Use CC Skills!!!” perhaps they don’t know what you talk about.

Crowd Control. Stun, daze, knockdown, anything that will stop a mob (or toon) from doing something for some time.

Thing about GW2 is that the CC effects are very short in duration compared to just about any other mmo out there. This because they are designed for PVP use, not PVE. This because they are also interrupts, providing ways to stop that toon from doing his massive channeled attack or break that combo chain. In essence they are to be used more like combo breakers in fighting games than classic mmo crowd controls.

Problem with this is that they become virtually useless as a survival tool during PVE roaming. And thanks to the defiant mechanic on bosses (to about them being CC locked, meaning that people can’t have them continually knocked down or similar) people lack any real incentive to remember that these abilities exist if they do not provide some damage source.

This is then compounded again by having most of these skills having cooldown/recharge timers that are 10 times the duration of their effect. Meaning that you may be able to daze that trash mob for 3 seconds out of every 30 seconds, or interrupt a boss attack every 30 seconds.

This while it takes 10 seconds to go from no dodge to 1 dodge, or 5 seconds if you have vigor going (and various professions have traits that grant vigor on critical hits and other activity, meaning that they can have it going virtually constant).

Conncept.7638:

Dee Jay.2460:

Moderator.1462:

Hi everyone,

You might find these articles of the wiki useful for this discussion
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiant
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unshakable

In short, Unshakable will grant the boss as many charges of Defiant as players are in the area. CC skills remove charges of Defiant. Once at 0 stacks the boss is susceptible to CC, after which the charges refresh.

As stated above the players can coordinate to have it at 0 stacks so they can prevent deadly attacks.

Hope this helps in your dungeon runs. As always, we ask you all to have a civil and constructive discussion.

Thanks

The problem is it’s a terrible uninuitive mechanic and largely unnecessary too. I don’t recall a single boss aside from the Dredge Fractal, where interrupting or CC is even necessary.

My big issue with Definat is that way it refreshes. From one second to the next he’ll have back all his charges and CC becomes impossible again. It’s just not a good system.

Why not have Definat charges replenish more seamlessly at say….1 charge every 5-10 seconds.

Either that or simply reduce the duration and effect of all CC by 70% vs. all bosses. Whatever you do it can’t be worse than the current Definat mechanic.

Actually the defiant charges don’t reset until a successful CC is used on the boss, Unfortunately, so many players just spam CC skill for DPS that in unorganized and larger groups the window of opportunity is pretty much impossible to take advantage of. I actually like defiant but I agree with you, it needs to have a different reset mechanic, the current one is completely unintuitive, and pretty much boils down to 1 in every X control skills is actually useful.

And they spam it because the CC provided in a fight against trash mobs (and they rarely come alone) is pointless compared to the added damage. This because the cooldowns are so long that you can’t CC a mob out of the fight while dealing with his companions. and so the other options are to burst him down to reduce the amount of incoming damage that way, or kite the bunch of them around the place while spamming AOE.

It only takes 1 competent person to deal with the defiant stacks, now that nonsense “frenzy” skill on the champ abom in CoE…yeah that’s a whole lot of rubbish.

I have read the wikis and the above messages and still don’t get it.

From my understanding:
A dungeon with a party of 5 will fight a boss with Unshakeable.
A party member uses knockdown and the boss gets knocked down, and then gets 5 stacks of Defiant.
Defiant makes them immune to some (unknown which) CC effects. So the party needs to hit him with 5 more to be able to use another CC.

Is that right?

If so, there’s not really any strategy to it. You don’t all decide as a party “applying 1 CC now, 4 more to go”. A lot of the time they happen automatically. Even if you watched the symbol (as it slides left and right rapidly as conditions/boons change), it would just be lucky if you got your CC done at the right moment before someone else’s caused it to reset.

It seems like it’s not meant to be used intelligently, it’s just a complicated way of saying “every 6th CC works”. Unless I’m misunderstanding the mechanic.

i never put attention to these stuff because is flawless victory for me no matter what. Has nothing to do with being lazy or not know the system…but isnt necessary, the boss still go down pretty easily.

Removing Defiant is not worth it.

It takes too much effort and you get almost no reward for it. The reward: interrupt a spammable move and a 2 second stun.

I paid attention to it today and waited for the last stack to be removed before using my knockdown.

It didn’t work. Someone must have done 2 in a row or something because it refilled the stacks. gg

Also, for a 5-person fractal, it gave 6 stacks of defiant. "Unshakable will grant the boss as many charges of Defiant as players are in the area. " Bug?

different mobs get different defiant stacks, it’s an interesting mechanic when you’re in voice chat with guildies, hopefully the upcoming guild missions will push us to the limit of coordination

The combat, the inherent depth of the gameplay in this game doesn’t encourage this type of coordinated play. There’s no healer, no great risk / reward, no true role specialization outside of DPS / Support. Unshakable and Defiant are design cop-outs. The encounters are braindead and zerg friendly because of poor, shallow design of the skill and class systems. No healer dynamic to appeal to casual, console whiners and skills tied to weapons so ArenaNet can put more focus on the cash shop rather than making their game engaging by having lots of variance and customization. Refer to GW1 mechanics and how encounters had concrete, player-usable skillsets to build against. Everything in this game is extremely homogenized. You need Defiant and Unshakable so that mobs don’t just get tossed around like rag dolls. Honestly, this is a case of a game designed for shallow, easy view-able, esports PvP. Taking out healers does nothing for the depth, it’s only to appeal to a certain audience. The group depth in this game, the potential is just not unlocked in the design. Most of the specialization, traits, combat depth…it’s all inconsequential to the combat in most cases. The design doesn’t encourage depth, it adds it as a side-dish that really brings nothing to the main course. What kind of game actually uses a mechanic that requires you to do a move 6 times to make it effective once on a boss? That’s not good planning, it’s a cop out mechanic, a consequence of poor, short-sighted, and shallow game design.

So if all party members only had access to ONE knockdown on a 30sec timer – hit once – wait 30sec – hit 5 times – wait…. how long does the effect last? < 5sec?

‘Illusion of depth’

Not many players will take time to learn boss buffs and mechanics. To them is just dps it. I usually inform my team when boss is vulnerable to CC and tell them to save it when boss is about to cast a certain dangerous skill.

Hear that Anet? See how your boss mechanic means so little to your players? What you thought to encourage team work is actually view as uninteresting, boring, and useless to players. In other games such as Monster Hunter or Phantasy Star, stunning/tripping a boss is actually meaningful and fun to do, but your little mechanic is just so lackluster that so few players even know about it, and even fewer who would execute it. Now, take this back to your drawing board and make it more interesting and meaningful.

FateZero.8536:

Not many players will take time to learn boss buffs and mechanics. To them is just dps it. I usually inform my team when boss is vulnerable to CC and tell them to save it when boss is about to cast a certain dangerous skill.

With Down State making revives so easy, with a self-heal button and various buffs available to most of the classes at will, there’s really no risk in it. There’s nothing integral about these types of tactics. So what, you interrupt the boss for the split second he was vulnerable and save little Timmy from getting hit for 5k damage? The boss hits little Timmy for 7k damage the next hit and knocks him out. You walk over and revive him in seconds or he simply just heals the damage with his heal button. Because of the lack of depth in the encounter mechanics, the arbitrarily high numbers, accommodations for removing a direct healer class from the paradigm list, the dodge feature that tries to add depth, but fails…it’s just a recipe for a bad combat structure. The dodge / self heal thing just breeds anti-social gameplay. I could go on explaining the flaws of the game, but i just get so aggravated trying to get the point across, that it comes out muddled and vague. Honestly, there’s just no depth in it. With the current system, i really don’t see the combat ever getting to the point of engagement GW1 had. They made some really bad mistakes designing this game.

The team – after a special combination of hits (made from multiple professions) knocks the boss down then one or more professions lay down combo fields for them all to blast 1/4 of the boss’s health away before retreating into a ‘dodge until skills recharge’ tactic and doing it again. (this sounds like fun)

Instead we get – spam DPS until boss drops.

Unfortunately the game never really gives you a proper tutorial about it. I noticed it on my own after a leeeengthy time of playing. I never bother to coordinate since someone always uses cc anyway, even with explicitly saying not to.

Most people ignore it because it’s easier to just kill the boss and avoid the attacks than it is to try and remove stacks of Defiant and use CC.

Defiant is a pretty bad mechanic. It promotes skill spamming and wasting CC abilities rather than skilled play. It really should function as an anti-spam ability, like if the boss is hit with a certain amount of CC skills within a short timeframe, then Defiant triggers. Something like that would encourage teamwork and co-ordination more so than the current function.

daimasei.4091:

And that’s why people hate dungeons.
Just because you want a coordinated team with good communication don’t mean other want the same or have the time to wait hours for another “pro”. Dungeons are for grinding and the faster way is go with anyone willing to grind them.
If you don’t like that, you can easily spam “Pro player LFG, only pros like myself, no noobs allowed” and done, no need to push your personal preferences into other, I’m sure you can always found people who think like you.

Seriously?
did you even bother to actually read the OP’s post?
There’s no need to attack the OP for asking a QUESTION.
There was nothing to indicate that the OP was pushing anything ON to any one (not “into” lol).
The post was an observation, and you should apologize for your unwarranted attack.

I don’t see the point of using this mechanic. Bosses are the easiest part of dungeons. I don’t think i’ve ever been in a group that has wiped on an actual boss, if we wipe it is always on large trash pulls.

Just dps and dodge and the boss dies, end of story.

For some bosses, it certainly is an interesting mechanic that potentially leaves a lot of room for coordinating for a good benefit.
However, I think that some mobs get way too many stacks of it. In content for groups of 5 it should never go over 5 or so.
Why should anyone even care pushing down the stacks when the mob gets 12 of them?

An example are the endbosses of the dredge fractal. In theory, you can knock down the stacks and then interrupt their heal. Instead, most groups just continue shooting it. Sometimes they have someone with daze (or was the interrupt effect that bypasses it something else?) or someone using poison at the right moment…
But normally, just continue shooting.

Panzen.4625:

For some bosses, it certainly is an interesting mechanic that potentially leaves a lot of room for coordinating for a good benefit.
However, I think that some mobs get way too many stacks of it. In content for groups of 5 it should never go over 5 or so.
Why should anyone even care pushing down the stacks when the mob gets 12 of them?

An example are the endbosses of the dredge fractal. In theory, you can knock down the stacks and then interrupt their heal. Instead, most groups just continue shooting it. Sometimes they have someone with daze (or was the interrupt effect that bypasses it something else?) or someone using poison at the right moment…
But normally, just continue shooting.

Nothing bypasses it anymore, but fear used to bypass it until they stealth nerfed it, effectively cutting off one of the best moves a necro had. Now fear is just another lackluster condition that several other classes can outperform necro on and is useless on bosses.

daimasei.4091:

And that’s why people hate dungeons.
Just because you want a coordinated team with good communication don’t mean other want the same or have the time to wait hours for another “pro”. Dungeons are for grinding and the faster way is go with anyone willing to grind them.
If you don’t like that, you can easily spam “Pro player LFG, only pros like myself, no noobs allowed” and done, no need to push your personal preferences into other, I’m sure you can always found people who think like you.

What’s the point of group content that requires no group co-ordination?

And dungeons are just for grinding? No, dungeons should be content where people need to work together to complete. I mean, what’s the point of group content if you don’t really need the other people?

daimasei.4091:

And that’s why people hate dungeons.
Just because you want a coordinated team with good communication don’t mean other want the same or have the time to wait hours for another “pro”. Dungeons are for grinding and the faster way is go with anyone willing to grind them.
If you don’t like that, you can easily spam “Pro player LFG, only pros like myself, no noobs allowed” and done, no need to push your personal preferences into other, I’m sure you can always found people who think like you.

I didn’t realize expecting people to understand basic game mechanics was not acceptable to the general public.