Guild Wars 2

People may have mentioned this, but the break bars seem more like a liability for controlling foes, at least in PvE. Compared to Defiance, it’s harder to inflict CC’s.

Any enemy with a break bar is completely immune to crowd control, including soft crowd control. This means that all those chill effects that the reaper has are meaningless against enemies with break bars. Yes, yes, it helps deplete the break bar, but this is far less useful on the whole than chill would be. With defiance, chill, blind, etc, still had effects.

Something like a 5 second stun, while good, doesn’t offset the complete immunity to all forms of crowd control.

Further, what I’ve seen a lot of in the beta is groups taking down the break bar of a large foe very quickly (i.e. a few seconds), then a much longer period the segmented grey break bar indicating pure immunity to CC. This, along with the brown break bar regen, made CC’s a complete waste.

How about this: during the blue bar, full immunity to all CC’s, even soft. After the foe is broken, until the break bar regenerates, allow soft CC’s to apply. At least then there’s a feeling like your chill, blind, cripple feel useful.

Break bars are fine. All CC is actually useful now, which was not the case with defiant, where several types of CC simply did nothing.

Break bars are intended to encourage teamwork to land CCs in stead of the frustrating mess that defiance was, and they reward that teamwork with a long stun that the whole team can reliably exploit.

The whole point of break bars is that a group focusing CC will achieve the break, while a group randomly CCing won’t overcome the regen. Groups are supposed to be able to kill the bar in less than a second, if they use all their ccs at once.

The only real problem I see with break bars is that a lot of them are really undertuned so it’s too easy to break certain mobs with certain builds or enough players just spamming ccs.

Personally I find it significantly easier to CC than with Defiance, as Defiance was just frustrating, especially in areas with lots of players when a boss would get 50 stacks of Defiant and you’d have no hope of CCing them. This works a lot better, though it does need a buff since it’s pretty fragile as is.

I will say soft CC shouldn’t affect the Defiance Bar and should apply their own effects, like with how Defiance worked. I will say Weakness and Vulnerability should only have their duration reduced against particularly large world boss type foes, not in instanced content. Blind should have 50% effectiveness (25% against world bosses) instead of the current 10%.

I absolutely agree with the OP.

As breakbars are currently implemented, CC skills (soft or hard) may as well not have individual effects – they all do the same thing. There’s really no difference between a chill, a daze, or icebow #5 against champs with breakbars in PvE.

The slow regeneration speed of the breakbars I encountered this weekend also means that breakbars did not encourage co-ordination during a champ fight. Even if the group somehow managed to interrupt a large attack by breaking it at the right time (unlikely with everyone spamming CCs), the loooong regeneration time during which the boss was immune to all CC and interrupts meant that learning big attacks and interrupting them simply was not a relevant or useful tactic.

I see a lot of promise in the mechanic. I think fights would be really interesting if breakbars regenerated faster both before & after breaking – thus requiring more coordination to remove them and rewarding groups for understanding the fight and saving interrupts for crucial moments rather than spamming CCs as soon as the breakbar is up. I really hope these see more tuning before the next beta event.

It’d be great to see some different effects that really change the dynamic of a boss fight when the bar is down. Even something as simple as causing the boss to go into a frenzy where it has vuln but also hits harder would introduce more of a tradeoff with the mechanic than the current ‘spam all your CCs now, then forget you have them on your bar’ approach.

Really excited about the potential for this!