Guild Wars 2

I really like the new Breakbar Mechanic introduced with HoT. However, I feel that, in its current state, Breakbars are just a bit too weak.

Two issues:

• In the open world, enemies with Break Bars get too easily Broken. The scaling on Break Bars needs to be scaled up much stronger when playing against groups of players, large or small.
• The Elementalist’s Overload Earth is actually EASIER to interrupt than Overload Air, Water, or Fire. The reason for this is that Chill, Cripple, Blind, and Immobilize take a rather large chunk of Breakbar Health. I’ve been interrupted on my Overload Earth more than anything else because enemies used Soft CC and broke my Breakbar.

Now, I think that the Breakbar is a fundamentally good idea. The issue is that they’re just a bit too weak right now, both on Players as well as on NPCs. I think part of the problem is the amount of Breakbar that Soft CCs remove. While I understand Soft CCs removing a decent amount of Breakbar Health against NPCs, against players, it just makes Breakbars a liability rather than a benefit, which is just wrong.

I think, at its core, Breakbars just need to be buffed across the board. Soft CC should remove less Breakbar against NPCs, and Soft CC should remove little to no Breakbar against Players. Alternatively, Breakbar Health needs to be vastly increased throughout the game. I think either of these would go a long way to making the mechanic a bit better.

I agree, break bars need to be harder to take down in some encounters. I was fighting a legendary wyvern with lord faren and the breakbar was literally so easy to take down, it ruined the encounter somewhat for me. There should be a coordinated moment where we have to really try to get it down and not instantly.

It tends to vary. When doing the Quaggan storyline, a small group had slightly trouble with the dual-sword boss’s breakbar in the first encounter, but later on we had that thing broken instantly, all the time. When fighting the champ frog with the hammer though, his breakbar was “balanced” in my mind, in that we would be able to get it down fairly consistently, but not constantly, he had his shots at us. It seemed to regen much faster than the sword boss’s.

Neko.9021:

• The Elementalist’s Overload Earth is actually EASIER to interrupt than Overload Air, Water, or Fire. The reason for this is that Chill, Cripple, Blind, and Immobilize take a rather large chunk of Breakbar Health. I’ve been interrupted on my Overload Earth more than anything else because enemies used Soft CC and broke my Breakbar.

Of course, the soft CC. I was wondering why mesmers were eating straight through my breakbar on my revenant tonight, and I suppose it’s because one good shatter is going to apply 4 instances of blind. Maybe cripple as well if they’re traited for it.

Also, something to keep in mind.
Currently, break bars are easy to take down on bosses because there are tons of people who are around and do the events/fight.
After a few months of release, there will be way less people in the area and if the break bar is made harder to take down, it will be almost impossible for a few people to complete the events so it makes the area less attractive, which leads to fewer people etc …

After a few months of release, there will be way less people in the area and if the break bar is made harder to take down, it will be almost impossible for a few people to complete the events so it makes the area less attractive, which leads to fewer people etc …

True. Ideally though, the breakbar should scale based on participants. I would actually scale it two ways, assuming that each CC has an internal “point value” and that a certain number of “points” are needed to break it, I would make it so that with low numbers of players, the points needed would be low, and any CC would have relatively high point values, so that while a hard stun might beat a blind, it would not be by much. With a huge number of players, both the points needed would rise, and the difference between CCs would go up, meaning that hard CC would have a much larger impact than soft CC.

This would allow relatively small groups to clear it, even assuming that few if any of them have dedicated “CC” builds, but then would require at least some serious CCing for a large group to clear it, and not just a lot of people throwing blinds and cripples around.

No idea how their actual mechanics work though.

In a game where the number of people is not set the hard way (except for dungeons), scaling is important.

That is kind of odd, because at first my experiences of the break bars were they too hard to break. My biggest observation for that was with the wyvern, at the start of the fight we couldn’t break its break bar no matter how hard we tried, we’d get it low, but not actually break it. And then suddenly couple minutes into the fight it became dirt easy to break his break bar, it would just go straight to 0 without hardly any effort. This was both in the same fight. So I’m not sure what was going on.

Meanwhile we fought some champion hylek of some sort and it’s break bar took forever to reduce. We hammered on him for minute after minute after minute and its break bar barely budged. Now of course his break bar had a different effect than the wyvern’s, his said that he became vulnerable when it was broken, & I suppose the whole point was that champion was supposed to be very hard to kill but once his break bar was brought down, he become much more easy to DPS.

So I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not sure whether the break bar needs to be buffed. I think there’s something going on with balance when sometimes its too tough and other times it’s too easy. Especially in that or wyvern fight where apparently both was happening.

The only thing that makes me pause to consider, is whether in that fight the real issue with the break bar was initially few people using ccs that they started using later, or perhaps the break bar did become more vulnerable because maybe other people showed up that I didn’t notice. I’m just not sure yet it was late I was very tired and I went to bed immediately after lol

This seems to indicate to me that less Bock and more balance is what is needed. However I will say, that if the break Barb doesn’t scale to the size of the group, it needs to.