Guild Wars 2

“PC” in this case means “Player Character”, I.E., you. Why don’t I have a breakbar? Is that coming out with the next elite spec? I want one.

Go into wvw, grab one of the banners so many people hate. Voila! Breakbar

I think early design for the Berserker involved a break bar mechanic, but they scrapped that.

I remember the Tempest overload earth had a breakbar, but I don’t know what happened to that.

stability is kind of a breakbar… stability should be restandardize with breakbar. but i understand why they didn’t is because this make softer CC useful for eating stability… but ya i don’t like there being 2 set of mechanic, but i can understand why they are afraid to touch stabilty.

Few skills had breakbars but Anet decided against them in HoT beta.

From a game design standpoint, giving players a breakbar would be sort of like giving them a second health bar. With all balancing said and done, you more or less come out to the same thing.

The reason that breakbars make some semblance of sense on enemies, is that those same enemies are usually built for group play (e.g. higher ratio of players to enemies). So there is the expectation that a lot of CC is going to be coming at the enemies from the player. Breakbars are a way to regulate that CC in a way that is meaningful and adds to gameplay.

But player-player combat has no guarantee of an imbalanced ratio. Players can easily end up against each other one on one, where the concept of pushing through an arbitrary CC bar would quickly became an exercise in redundancy and stalemate. King against King, on the chess board, to put it one way.

In short: Big enemy up against lots of players – simplicity of breakbar works because of the inherent imbalance.

Players up against players – simplicity of breakbar would turn into another extraneous mechanic to tune that doesn’t necessarily add anything meaningful to gameplay.

And finally, players against NPCs with both having a breakbar… now you have a situation where you need to make sure you give NPCs enough CC that their CC toolbox can have a meaningful impact in player/NPC combat. Again, it becomes a matter of “too simple” for a complex series of interactions. You would be endlessly tweaking things to find the sweet spot between nullifying the point of NPCs having CC at all, and frustrating players with sudden stuns and vulnerabilities.