Guild Wars 2

CC is the classic pressure reduction in a MMORPG, in that you put one or more mob that could damage you temporarily out of commission.

But CC in GW2 come in the form of 2-3 seconds of effect, 30+ seconds of recharge.

And without that, the obvious alternative is to stay out of the mobs range. But that do not reduce the pressure on the player. If anything it increases the pressure as now not only do he has to keep up with skill recharges and mob actions (and the status of his party, if he is not roaming open world), but also the terrain so he do not blunder off a cliff, get stuck, or enter aggro range of even more mobs.

Movement/evade has that role in this game.

Learn to fight with one hand and move with the other?

I’m still learning on this one!

Applying a huge stack of conditions onto the enemy, and getting a huge stack of boons onto your side is the way this works here.

Combat here is more like City Of Heroes, less like WoW. You don’t turn the mobs off and on, you debuff them.

Effective management of boons and conditions makes a world of difference here.

I do not see how conditions or boons can help reduce pressure, especially when getting hounded by multiple mobs.

And i have not played COH nor WOW to any great degree, i am talking about pressure in the sense of workload/information flow a player has to deal with.

Making one or more mob ignorable greatly reduce said workload, but i do not see any amount of conditions that can do so for any useful durations.

I am basing this on my personal experience that i find boss fights, where you face down a single large boss in a relatively open area, much less stressful and manageable than when i face a group of mobs in narrow tunnels. And that seems in all honesty backwards. Why should mobs that by all accounts should be a nuisance end up being a bigger threat than the big bad boss?

It sounds like your character is lacking in AoE damage. As a general rule, you need to plan your character so they are capable of doing two things:

1. They can survive more than a few hits from normal enemies, or at least one hit from a big enemy.

2. They are capable of taking on up to 3 or 4 normal foes at once and coming out victorious.

The first point can be handled by either beefing up on toughness/vitality or healing, or focusing on dodging and evasion. (In any case, you want to avoid a situation where any enemy can down you in a single hit.) The second point requires you to either have summonable allies that you can use to divert aggro onto, or you are capable of killing multiple enemies quickly enough before they can seriously hurt you.

As an example, the way I’ve built my Mesmer is that she excels at 1vs1 combat (to the point where she can sometimes solo Champions), but she’s a lot weaker when it comes to handling multiple mobs. To counter this, I use the staff as her second weapon, and use a combination of Chaos Storm + rapid Shatters + Confusion to spike down enemies quickly with burst damage. For tougher mobs, I bring along the Mistfire Wolf and use him for the added AoE damage spike when dealing with groups.

For my Warrior, a combination of Healing Signet and Adrenal Health is enough to keep him healthy against even multiple foes, meaning he can easily handle point 2, but against big hitting enemies his healing can’t keep up with the damage. So his secondary weapon is a Rifle, and against such foes I play a game of “keep away” with Crippling Shot and Rifle Butt/Stomp to prevent the enemy from getting close enough to really hurt him while peppering him with bullets.

It seems to me that CC is not designed to alleviate anything in GW2. In fact, I’m not sure what they are really meant for since aside from cripple, every other CC seems to be pretty much useless. Or maybe I just don’t know how to use them.

But here’s why:

If you use bleed, burning or poison as a main source of damage, they can never do as much damage as direct damage within the same amount of time. Aside from that they don’t have any other use given that bleed can only stack 25 times. Furthermore -and I’ve tried it with my necro on full condition damage exotic gears- condition damage doesn’t scale as much as direct damage. Worse, it doesn’t crit.

The most effective way to slow enemies down is cripple, I find. This is the only true “crowd control” condition in this game, because compared to Freeze and Immobilize, skills that apply cripple usually have shorter cooldowns and there are sigils that apply them. So its easier to inflict cripple. Since both cripple and freeze only stacks in duration, this means that more players can inflict cripple on the same target than freeze, making cripple last longer and your freeze only momentarily. Most skills that apply Immobilize are either single target or that the Immobilize only lasts a very short period of time compared to cool down.

Daze and Stun are useless. All stun skills I know have 1/2-3/4 seconds cast time, have long cooldowns, and only stuns for about 1 second. It seems like the only utility for something like this is clearly as to interrupt enemies casting some nasty skill, which sure enough can be seen with some animations… but said casting time is usually also 1/2-3/4 seconds only. So imagine, between you seeing the onset of the casting animation, your reaction time and the time for you to cast your stun skill, you only have at best .25 of a second. Human reaction time, btw, is scientifically averaged at .39 seconds. Also, mob skills that take longer to cast (like Drake’s fire breath) can just be dodged anyway. It doesn’t help that some skills, like Ranger’s, need you to be at flanking position. Furthermore, cooldown is usually at least 25s or 40s. But attack skills usually have shorter cooldowns, in the range of 8-20s, so that means either you have to kill somebody before then or he/she/it could just cast another skill anyway and you’re left with nothing to interrupt it.

Fear -situationally useful, if you need one more second to cast a heal spell. One second later, the mobs will be rubber banding back towards you.

Knockdown – completely useless, as you cant attack them anyway when they are on the ground, which only gonna be for a second or two as well. If you cast an area knock down, like Warrior’s, while you’re in the middle of a gazillion mob, that only gives you time to cast heal as well. Even if you roll out, they can still chase you because you will still be in combat speed.

Immobilize – also long cast time compared to its duration. Furthermore, I only ever encounter this in Elite skills, which, as you know usually have at least around 180 seconds cooldown.

Weakness and Vulnerability, when stacked, are extremely useful though. But I don’t ever see them as CC skills, given that the “crowd” can still attack you and you will still be attacking them. When you are fighting a champion with a few hundred thousand HP alone, this hardly matters – only whether you can sustain or not matters. When you are fighting said champion with others, it hardly matters too, as numbers will make up for your lack of anything.

All this being said, CC in this game right now is something close to an accessory. Its good when you have them, they usually don’t cost anything anyway cause they’re part of EVERY profession’s skill set (another thing which I find rather ridiculous), but they aren’t essential or game changing in anyway.

No one should ever rely on CC for their life. I can assure you, no amount of cripple can save you from a horde of risen if you don’t run away. Sadly, in this game, the best defense is offense, or -in the case of the Guardian- defense that is also an offense. I learned, with my necro at least, not to waste anything on improving CC, or even to put it in my strategy. Just pure damage.

CC is generally only used to interrupt key enemy skills. Two good examples are the Dredge Mining Suits and the Krait Hypnoss. Both mobs have a skill that, if you let them use it, will summon 3 – 4 additional mobs, which can easily end up overwhelming you. Using Daze/Stun/Push/Pull/Launch/Fear at those times will stop them from doing so. Note that the recharge time of interrupted skills is much shorter than their cooldown, so you typically need to have two CC skills that you can alternate between to keep them from getting the skill off).

It’s a different story in WvW or PvP, of course, where those skills can be used to knock enemy players off cliffs and other high places to get an instant kill.

1. blind
2. interrupt key skills
3. use protection
4. dodge
5. dodge
6. don’t stand in AoE circles
7. position
8. dodge

Zaxares.5419:

CC is generally only used to interrupt key enemy skills. Two good examples are the Dredge Mining Suits and the Krait Hypnoss. Both mobs have a skill that, if you let them use it, will summon 3 – 4 additional mobs, which can easily end up overwhelming you. Using Daze/Stun/Push/Pull/Launch/Fear at those times will stop them from doing so. Note that the recharge time of interrupted skills is much shorter than their cooldown, so you typically need to have two CC skills that you can alternate between to keep them from getting the skill off).

It’s a different story in WvW or PvP, of course, where those skills can be used to knock enemy players off cliffs and other high places to get an instant kill.

It sounds so simplistically ideal when you put it like that. I’ll give you an example to explain. In all of my characters, I only mostly use the stun skill in two: shortbow ranger and hammer warrior.

For the case of the hammer warrior, it has no problem dealing with 4-5 enemies more. In fact, that’s what it excels at because, well, that’s what it’s design for: to control crowd and to be a little bit tanky. So it doesn’t really need to stun that mobile suit as much as it needs more ways to weaken it, make it vulnerable or simply kill it faster.

Now for the ranger, a naturally squishy class, it does need to prevent it for summoning more minions because that would be a real problem. But as you said, it will recharge faster than the 25s cooldown anyway, and there is no other interrupting CC that is easily available for this profession.

Even if it’s true/ideal, CC is still very situational. How many times will you be facing a dredge mining suit, in which that CC is incredibly essential for your survival against 4-5 more enemies? Even in that case, a higher damage output can take care of that situation just as well -just kill them faster. Or how many times will you find yourself fighting an opponent by the cliff, in which you are just in the right position to push him off it to kill him? Compare to the number of time you can just kill people with direct damage.

But I mean, it’s not completely ugly to that point that there is any one profession forced to rely on CC alone. Every profession has direct damage skills and CC skills. I’m just saying that builds that tends to focus on CC rather than damage are just not effective generally.

Unless you get something like the engineer’s Big Ole Bomb which not only knocks foes back but also does a significant amount of damage.

projectcedric.6951

Even if it’s true/ideal, CC is still very situational. How many times will you be facing a dredge mining suit, in which that CC is incredibly essential for your survival against 4-5 more enemies? Even in that case, a higher damage output can take care of that situation just as well -just kill them faster. Or how many times will you find yourself fighting an opponent by the cliff, in which you are just in the right position to push him off it to kill him? Compare to the number of time you can just kill people with direct damage.

But I mean, it’s not completely ugly to that point that there is any one profession forced to rely on CC alone. Every profession has direct damage skills and CC skills. I’m just saying that builds that tends to focus on CC rather than damage are just not effective generally.

I do feel that there is a bit too much emphasis on direct damage in GW2. I would prefer it if there were more enemies with mechanics that made direct damage a less efficient way of dealing with them; perhaps an enemy with a skill that made them immune to all direct damage unless a CC skill is used on them, and then they can be attacked normally. Or an enemy that was highly resistant to direct damage (they take only 25% damage from attacks), but vulnerable to conditions (they take 50% more damage).

However, you do make a good point that CC skills tend to be highly situational. I’ll point out that you don’t HAVE to bring CC skills if they’re not needed though. You can freely swap utility skills and weapons outside of combat, so nothing’s stopping you from bringing, say, “Fear Me!” on your Warrior to deal with that particular Veteran, and then swapping it back out for a banner once you’re done.

digiowl.9620:

CC is the classic pressure reduction in a MMORPG, in that you put one or more mob that could damage you temporarily out of commission.

But CC in GW2 come in the form of 2-3 seconds of effect, 30+ seconds of recharge.

And without that, the obvious alternative is to stay out of the mobs range. But that do not reduce the pressure on the player. If anything it increases the pressure as now not only do he has to keep up with skill recharges and mob actions (and the status of his party, if he is not roaming open world), but also the terrain so he do not blunder off a cliff, get stuck, or enter aggro range of even more mobs.

Dodge
Dodge

Run around until energy builds up.

Dodge
Dodge

Run around until energy builds up.

digiowl.9620:

I do not see how conditions or boons can help reduce pressure, especially when getting hounded by multiple mobs.

And i have not played COH nor WOW to any great degree, i am talking about pressure in the sense of workload/information flow a player has to deal with.

Making one or more mob ignorable greatly reduce said workload, but i do not see any amount of conditions that can do so for any useful durations.

Banish (Guardian hammer skill) is great skill for getting someone out of your face while dealing with his buddy. Black Powder (Thief offhand pistol) is a great skill for AOE blinding everything around you while you try to kill them.

Most CC type skills in GW2 are not about taking a mob out of the fight while you fight another mob from start to finish. They are about slowing the enemy down long enough to thin the numbers and make the fight manageable.

Boons and conditions like protection, regen, and weakness also help. As you get more experience, you will start working whichever skills you have into your playstyle more naturally. As the athletes say, the game will slow down for you.

If you’re playing a ranger, the one shortbow attack is a great skill to have in certain situations. But your biggest CC asset is your pet. They can be a pain to deal with, but they will take hits for you and give you room to work if you keep them alive.

Stay out of Orr, frustrations are removed

Knockdown – completely useless, as you cant attack them anyway when they are on the ground

Hmm?

Yes, skill duration is very short in GW2. But then again, fights are supposed to be short & dynamic too. My current setup for my Engineer has access to:

aoe pushback
pbaoe blind
aoe immobilize/cripple
bouncing cripple
bouncing blind

Add to that:

2 dodges
near-constant swiftness
leapback escape

And 2 mechanics that influence enemy actions:

multi-target confusion
wall fo fire

So while each is very short in duration I have access to many skills that control if/how/when I take damage. And I don’t even have access to aegis, protection, or stealth which aren’t cc skills so much as damage mitigation.