EverythingOP
Defiance and Soft Crowd Control
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Colin said about raids something like “we have a very good combat system, but it is only used to its full extent in PvP. Raids are meant to change that”. Well sorry to say, but this thread is a proof that PvE is not going in the right direction for this statement to be true, quite the opposite.
I aggree, I had high hopes for raids but the way I see it going suggests it will be the same of old only this time with mastery gimmicks. Kinda like crowned pavilion bosses. Also it is not only raids, fractals are suffering as well, who thought weakness was a good counter to the increased precision ,tough luck.
EverythingOP
I reflect Spoj’s concerns on this.
My primary focus is the PVE interrupt mesmer. While it isn’t the best PVE build, it is still pretty good. Vulnerability on daze, vulnerability on interrupt, quickness in interrupt, weakness on interrupt, etc. Once the chronomancer releases, I’ll be able to get slow on interrupt, too. Now, this was all balanced around the fact that, against mobs with defiance I have to actually time my interrupts well to get an effect.
But after HoT, everything is going to have a break bar. Against sub-champion mobs this is a massive nerf to the interrupt build. Even against champions, I now have less fine control over interrupts, since the bar will constantly be ticking down and regenerating. This will make the PVE interrupt build dead once HoT launches.
I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.
I reflect Spoj’s concerns on this.
My primary focus is the PVE interrupt mesmer. While it isn’t the best PVE build, it is still pretty good. Vulnerability on daze, vulnerability on interrupt, quickness in interrupt, weakness on interrupt, etc. Once the chronomancer releases, I’ll be able to get slow on interrupt, too. Now, this was all balanced around the fact that, against mobs with defiance I have to actually time my interrupts well to get an effect.
But after HoT, everything is going to have a break bar. Against sub-champion mobs this is a massive nerf to the interrupt build. Even against champions, I now have less fine control over interrupts, since the bar will constantly be ticking down and regenerating. This will make the PVE interrupt build dead once HoT launches.
Interrupts tend to be really short duration, as well.
Being reliant on interrupts means you will do effectively squat against a break bar, in my experience, though I did not try to rebuild my Mesmer for the beta weekend proper, and only tried it out a bit without diving into Verdant Brink.
Interrupt mesmers in GW2 are but a pale shadow of the wonderful niche mesmers used to fill in GW1.
Back then the interrupts had real bite and interrupting boss skills wasn’t cryptic since they had cast bars with obvious abilities, while in GW2 we don’t even get names to attacks so we have to datamine them, and the tells are so hilariously slight and covered by all the spell effect clutter.
The consolidation of boons/conditions actually made for a more bland combat experience with ton of class overlap (meaning classes lose identity as one class is better at might or fury application and so the might/fury from other classes isn’t as important).
Look at the condition clutter.
Burning, bleeding, torment, and confusion. In PvE, only burning is worth a kitten , bleeding is a weaker form of burn, and torment/confusion are just weaker bleeds with conditional bonuses that in niche scenarios MAY outperform a base bleed, but still be far behind burning.
It’s a metric ton of redundancy and now with the defiance bar model for soft CC we’re adding a whole new pile of conditions to the redundancy stack.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
It doesn’t matter how much complexity a system has, if it rarely ever comes into play.
Just because you can apply something to the mob, doesn’t mean it was applicable to the situation. (ex: You can apply cripple to a stationary mob). That’s an important distinction to make, because what we’re talking about here is:
Trading-off of ‘Applying soft control’ for ‘higher Applicability of skills containing Soft Control.’
And I support that.
It’s easy in discussions like this to elevate Chill/Fear/Cripple/etc to their own independent things. But at the end of the day, all your interactions with the combat system boils down to pressing the keys on your keyboard bound to Skills. Nobody has a ‘cripple button’, you have buttons like: Churning Earth that affects 5 targets in a 360 radius and applies damage+ bleed + cripple. Cripple is clearly a part of the system, but it’s just an ingredient to craft more complex Skills/Equip/Traits.
So, it doesn’t matter if cripple is the bees knees or not. It matters if Traits & Equipment are thought-provoking building blocks and Skills are compelling buttons to press, because that’s what playing the game actually involves. If cripple helps with that then great!...
If not, back to the drawing board we go.
Trying to preserve effects at the expense of making Skills more applicable is self-defeating notion. It’s spoiling the cake, to spare the sugar.
….
Look, it’s not like I don’t get it.
Reducing mechanics to generic “points” isn’t the best feeling. But, letting handfuls of skills rot on the vine or degrade into being one-dimensional wasn’t exactly the best feeling either. I think it’s important to get more skills into play across as many encounters and for as many levels of player expertise as possible, and if original intent has to be reconsidered – then so be it. That doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s room for growth, just that this solution is a pragmatic contemplated net positive.
(edited by Vox Hollow.2736)
Bosses should have specific and progresive resistance to diferent debuffs and effects (100% resistent to some, 50% resistent to others, etc). Multiple aplication of specific debuffs and effects would be more and more effective as long as the resistance to such effect or debuff is being capped (with 5 chill the boss is not affected, with 15 is partially slowed, with 25 suffer the full effect of the condition). Breakbar could be the average of the effects relevant for such boss. (If it is full resistant to burn, burn doesn’t count to break the bar. If is extra vulnerable to chill, chill will greatly affect the barr. The other debuffs and effects will chip the bar “normaly”)
“Only problem with the Engineer is
that it makes every other class in the game boring to play.”
Hawks
that it makes every other class in the game boring to play.”
Hawks
….
Look, it’s not like I don’t get it.
Reducing mechanics to generic “points” isn’t the best feeling. But, letting handfuls of skills rot on the vine or degrade into being one-dimensional wasn’t exactly the best feeling either. I think it’s important to get more skills into play across as many encounters and for as many levels of player expertise as possible, and if original intent has to be reconsidered – then so be it. That doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s room for growth, just that this solution is a pragmatic contemplated net positive.
Except this change is doing the opposite. The skills that provide these soft CC effects are now going to be even less useful. More skills are going to “rot on the vine” with this change. The current system at least has the potential to make them effective and popular. It was just encounter design that held it back.
And you can see clear evidence of this in game currently. In 5 man groups for fractals you rarely need such debuffs. However when you start to solo/duo/trio they become increasingly useful/important. Which just goes to show that they were perfectly fine functionally. Its just the encounters were tuned incorrectly to 5 man groups.
This change makes no sense because they seem to be addressing encounter design to encourage the use of underused mechanics such as soft CC. And then they effectively make soft CC redundant right after. Where is the logic in that?
(edited by spoj.9672)
It’s going to make debuff/interrupt centric classes far less wanted than the boon kings of GW2, which already shapes our landscape around all game formats (boon stacking and group utility/aoe classes like ele/guard/warrior see heavy representation on ALL game formats whereas necro/ranger/mesmer/engineer see less).
I don’t like the implications for power block either (and hell, now Distracting Daggers). A grandmaster trait centered around increasing cooldowns, suddenly made totally useless in most PvE where it matters. Bunch of weapons with interrupt skills in exchange for no further group utility, all seemingly neutered.
We really need to rethink the entire combat and utilities being designed with pvp in mind, where actually all of them are used, and then seeing most of the combat in PvE neutered by over the top arbitrary limitations.
Why introduce Slow as a new condition, if it’s not gonna work on many of the content in PvE? It makes no sense. Adjust all debuff potencies on bosses but still allow them to work.
This game needs more reasons to bring classes other than ele/guard/warrior, not less.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
#PvPbalancedecisions
All that creativity and power creep but only for PvP. Surely PvP is the one gametype you want to avoid power creep as much as possible. Clearly slow was made with PvP only in mind. Or they changed their decision on breakbars late. So i really hope they revert because it makes no sense to neuter your own design of new mechanics with another new mechanic.
I don’t like the implications for power block either (and hell, now Distracting Daggers).
My preferred weapon set on my main is Sword-Pistol Thief.
I have 3 interrupts on my weapon skills and 2 on my utility bar—it’ll be 3 when HoT hits—and none of them are worth a single kitten.
When I began playing GW2, I was promised that Thieves were hard to master but highly rewarding because they can do fun things with weakness, blind, interrupts… a predatory playstyle that made them different from anyone else.
It has not lived up to the hype, I’ll be honest.
In terms of the break bar specifically, my Mesmer didn’t fare any better over the beta weekend for the same reason: Interrupts being used to keep a squishy character alive in melee is impossible now.
Skill-based play is getting ever more difficult, while Warriors and Guardians can still facetank things all day… and Elementalists too. Soon, so will Engineers and Necromancers.
Why no love for the trickster classes anymore?
Against Breakbars, Skills containing Soft Control become applicable in moments where the breakbar is active, and are no longer applicable for moments involving mob movement. How this alters the overall applicability of a Skill is a question of whether or not we will experience more Breakbar Moments vs. Movement Moments while fighting Breakbar monsters.
With the new content this is solidly debateable, but with the old content the Breakbar Moments are a clear winner – because the inability of the current game to meaningfully engage movement is one of our chief complaints of it.
As I said: I think it’s important to get more skills into play across as many encounters and for as many levels of player expertise as possible. So I’m all about a solution like this; that’s a bit sideways but features a wide impact, over trying a solely encounter-design-based solution which is more intuitive but has a narrow projected impact.
(edited by Vox Hollow.2736)
I would really like Arenanet to review both vulnerability and might. There is just too much, especially vulnerability. Both could be deleted and replaced with direct damage in a lot of skills.
For Necromancer, I would be fine with deleting vulnerability from axe and increasing damage as appropriate. The same is true for Blood is Power, which is just a “turbo button” for dps. Everyone love hitting the turbo button but, at the same time, it is a boring mechanic.
I think the game could do with a lot less of both those conditions so that, where it is found is important, again. Maybe Ranger, Engi, and Revy should be the only professions with vulnerability stacking and War, Guard, and Ele are the only ones that can do might and the numbers of ways to generate might and vulnerability are reduced to key support skills.
I would really like Arenanet to review both vulnerability and might. There is just too much, especially vulnerability. Both could be deleted and replaced with direct damage in a lot of skills.
For Necromancer, I would be fine with deleting vulnerability from axe and increasing damage as appropriate. The same is true for Blood is Power, which is just a “turbo button” for dps. Everyone love hitting the turbo button but, at the same time, it is a boring mechanic.
I think the game could do with a lot less of both those conditions so that, where it is found is important, again. Maybe Ranger, Engi, and Revy should be the only professions with vulnerability stacking and War, Guard, and Ele are the only ones that can do might and the numbers of ways to generate might and vulnerability are reduced to key support skills.
Yes right, maybe we just disable all class specific weapons as well and give everyone a stick with only autoattack, since the new content should be complex and challenging…
Skuldin - No Hesitation [hT]
Maybe Ranger, Engi, and Revy should be the only professions with vulnerability stacking and War, Guard, and Ele
So you want to take the three most powerful professions and a smattering of the decent ones and make them the only ones worth playing…?
What about the Mesmer, who has a handful of traits around Vuln, and uses it as one of their key conditions?
What about the Thief, who needs to be good at something and for a condition that sets the target up makes a ton of sense? What about their thematic nature, focusing their power into one mighty strike with strange martial techniques?
What about the Necromancer, who is meant to be the master of curses and hexes, the grand poobah of conditions? What about the making of blood pacts to boost their power, or the ability to drain the power of others?
Honestly, the only one of the ones you posted where Vuln is truly thematically integral is Ranger.
Might kinda makes sense for everyone in small doses, though nobody should have as easy a time stacking it as many classes do now.
Why must ALL bosses be resistant to soft control? Wouldn’t be better to have 2 different defiance bars /Type of Bosses, one heavy CC resistant and other soft CC resistant? Wouldn’t that give players more choice and strategic play?
Finally, even if its harder to balance, wouldn’t be better making things “less effective to” vs “totally immune”?
“Scrapper is a melee bruiser with lots of good lockdown abilities. Very good at breaking Break Bars in preparation for raids.”
Ok, so why do we need a chill centric reaper class again? AoE protection and healing for allies, water fields, a 30 sec cd shadow refuge that also reveals targets.
An illusionary defender that has more HP and is able to create a reflection field as well.
Class group utilities are plain imbalanced. Compare a 1 second cast 6 sec cd swirl that reflects projectile on the hammer to Death’s Charge, which ends at the target, is directional, and requires reaper shroud expenditure.
Compare these utilities and the traits to the reaper and it’s just plain depressing how much more useful to a group some classes will be in PvE next to Reaper.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
“Scrapper is a melee bruiser with lots of good lockdown abilities. Very good at breaking Break Bars in preparation for raids.”
Ok, so why do we need a chill centric reaper class again? AoE protection and healing for allies, water fields, a 30 sec cd shadow refuge that also reveals targets.
An illusionary defender that has more HP and is able to create a reflection field as well.
Class group utilities are plain imbalanced. Compare a 1 second cast 6 sec cd swirl that reflects projectile on the hammer to Death’s Charge, which ends at the target, is directional, and requires reaper shroud expenditure.
Compare these utilities and the traits to the reaper and it’s just plain depressing how much more useful to a group some classes will be in PvE next to Reaper.
Because they needed to give the necro something and even though every other class got more we need to be happy with what we got. Seems to be the necro credo at this point.
Because they needed to give the necro something and even though every other class got more we need to be happy with what we got. Seems to be the necro credo at this point.
I am quite happy with the Reaper, personally. Sure, still needs a bit of fine-tuning (what doesn’t?), but it works quite well with what it’s supposed to do.
However, Necros do need a reason to be brought in raids, and since they can’t buff the party, their debuffs need to warrant their inclusion.
However, Necros do need a reason to be brought in raids, and since they can’t buff the party, their debuffs need to warrant their inclusion.
^this
Unless chill DoT stops defiance regeneration they aren’t adding enough to a group to warrant inclusion. I don’t think zerk dps in defensive gear matters in a game were support is king.
Unless chill DoT stops defiance regeneration they aren’t adding enough to a group to warrant inclusion. I don’t think zerk dps in defensive gear matters in a game were support is king.
A soft-CC like chill, slow, or cripple will deal damage over time to a defiance bar for the duration of the debuff.
Amberley Avalen – Charr Mesmer
Tanya Larina – Human Thief
Finchy Whyte – Sylvari Ranger
Tanya Larina – Human Thief
Finchy Whyte – Sylvari Ranger
Stop=/= degen.
If the rate at which the degen happens does not overcome the rate at which the bar recovers, it is not stopping.
And the degen is pathetic to be honest. Did you even play the last beta weekend event? This solution was already in it, and my chills hardly contributed to a broken bar.
So you want to take the three most powerful professions and a smattering of the decent ones and make them the only ones worth playing…?
What about the Mesmer, who has a handful of traits around Vuln, and uses it as one of their key conditions?
What about the Thief, who needs to be good at something and for a condition that sets the target up makes a ton of sense? What about their thematic nature, focusing their power into one mighty strike with strange martial techniques?
What about the Necromancer, who is meant to be the master of curses and hexes, the grand poobah of conditions? What about the making of blood pacts to boost their power, or the ability to drain the power of others?Honestly, the only one of the ones you posted where Vuln is truly thematically integral is Ranger.
Might kinda makes sense for everyone in small doses, though nobody should have as easy a time stacking it as many classes do now.
Might and vulnerability are necessarily capped at 25 to keep them from becoming over-powered.
I was not ignoring other professions but was focused on just those to whom vulnerability or might were more central to their job mechanics. Other professions still bring value to a team. For example…
- Mesmer is excellent at confusion and time/space and stealth mechanics. Vulnerability could be traded for increased direct damage.
- Thief can do blind and poison very well and has mobility and stealth. Vulnerability could be traded for another condition like torment where thief has only two sources.
- Necro can do chill and poison very well and has condition management mechanics. Vulnerability could be traded for a small, flat damage increase or another condition it already has that will not likely hit a duration or stack height cap in cooperative play.
It is easy to set up one profession to be really good at several things to allow random group composition but professions do not absolutely have to have at least one of everything. Also, it is might and vulnerability which are the most boring, the most prolific, and absolutely need their cap, or more rarity.
I know Necro does not need vulnerability. It could be removed and replaced with minor, or in some cases, tiny, damage increases. Necro will do chill very well and already does poison and corruptions well, sets up dark fields, AoE sipons, etc. If vulnerability did something besides just increasing damage, maybe my opinion would be different.
Look at Necromancer’s Dhuumfire, for example. Bleeds were capped back when Dhuumfire was introduced but they are not, now. Granted there are some skills and traits that remove entire stacks instead of fixed quantities from a stack of conditions but those can be modified. Dhuumfire could be changed to simply add bleeds, poisons, or something else Necromancer already has. Poison no longer stacks in duration and bleeding is no longer capped at 25. Dhuumfire could even be changed to increase chill condition damage on Reaper.
It is acceptable, to me, to limit specific boons and conditions to certain jobs as long as they are not totally unique to one profession. Might and vulnerability are more prolific and less unique to certain professions than they could be.
Throwing my voice in with those who oppose the loss of the unique soft-CC effects. This idea seems very counterproductive in regards to “challenging group content” and makes me worry about fights that are inflated with artificial difficulty though bigger numbers, rather than requiring players to recognize when it’s necessary to make use of debuffs and learn mechanics. This concerns me greatly and gives me a very little optimism about what we will be seeing in Raids.
Stop=/= degen.
If the rate at which the degen happens does not overcome the rate at which the bar recovers, it is not stopping.
And the degen is pathetic to be honest. Did you even play the last beta weekend event? This solution was already in it, and my chills hardly contributed to a broken bar.
I want to correct a few misconceptions here:
- Not all defiant bars have regen, in these cases soft CC will degen the bar as long as they are up until broken.
- This new system was not present in BWE2, it is new as of BWE3.
Stop=/= degen.
If the rate at which the degen happens does not overcome the rate at which the bar recovers, it is not stopping.
And the degen is pathetic to be honest. Did you even play the last beta weekend event? This solution was already in it, and my chills hardly contributed to a broken bar.
I want to correct a few misconceptions here:
- Not all defiant bars have regen, in these cases soft CC will degen the bar as long as they are up until broken.
- This new system was not present in BWE2, it is new as of BWE3.
Robert, can you clarify if on-interrupt procs will occur even though the interrupt won’t be applied to the mob? Similar to how on-chill procs can still happen even though chill itself won’t be applied.
Example being the Daredevil’s Impacting Disruption trait that applies Pulmonary Impact on Interrupt. Will we still be able to apply Pulmonary Impact that way to boss mobs with the break bar or is that ability designed exclusively for sPvP and trash mobs?
Stop=/= degen.
If the rate at which the degen happens does not overcome the rate at which the bar recovers, it is not stopping.
And the degen is pathetic to be honest. Did you even play the last beta weekend event? This solution was already in it, and my chills hardly contributed to a broken bar.
I want to correct a few misconceptions here:
- Not all defiant bars have regen, in these cases soft CC will degen the bar as long as they are up until broken.
- This new system was not present in BWE2, it is new as of BWE3.
Hm, strange, doing the personal story on my necromancer I did not use Infusing Terror against the champion, so I mostly camped greatsword auto and grave digger.
Maybe the ranged NPC’s applied some CC of their own I did not notice.
Question, did blind work on defiance bars in BWE2? Because I did use Nightfall and I recall you guys doing the announcement on blinds way before the other soft CC’s.
Stop=/= degen.
If the rate at which the degen happens does not overcome the rate at which the bar recovers, it is not stopping.
And the degen is pathetic to be honest. Did you even play the last beta weekend event? This solution was already in it, and my chills hardly contributed to a broken bar.
I want to correct a few misconceptions here:
- Not all defiant bars have regen, in these cases soft CC will degen the bar as long as they are up until broken.
- This new system was not present in BWE2, it is new as of BWE3.
Hm, strange, doing the personal story on my necromancer I did not use Infusing Terror against the champion, so I mostly camped greatsword auto and grave digger.
Maybe the ranged NPC’s applied some CC of their own I did not notice.
Question, did blind work on defiance bars in BWE2? Because I did use Nightfall and I recall you guys doing the announcement on blinds way before the other soft CC’s.
Blinds always worked against break bars, even going back to the first Stronghold beta. Remember, that was the first time break bars were publicly testable.
There have been a lot of questions coming up recently from several different profession forums regarding the use of soft-CC effects (cripple, chill, slow, etc) on bosses with the new Defiance system in HoT. We have a solution in the works for this but we wanted to make a post to explain how it’s going to work.
A hard-CC like a stun, daze or knockback will deal direct damage to a defiance bar, lowering it by a flat amount based on the duration of the CC. As an example, a 2 second stun on a 6 second defiance bar will take off 33% of the bar.
A soft-CC like chill, slow, or cripple will deal damage over time to a defiance bar for the duration of the debuff. Additionally soft-CC effects will apply to the creature for the purposes of triggering traits but not apply their debuff effect. As an example, chilling a foe with a defiance bar will cause their defiance meter to degenerate over time and place the chill debuff on their status bar, which will allow a Reaper to benefit from the damage reduction effect of the trait Cold Shoulder, but it will not affect the creature’s movement speed.
The exact numbers on the degeneration rates for each type of soft-CC are still in flux, but we hope this helps answer some of the questions about the viability of certain elite specializations in HoT.
EDIT: Even if the defiance bar is not vulnerable to CC, the conditions will still apply for the purposes of triggering traits.
Hey Robert So what you are saying is chill damage will take effect on these bosses from Reaper’s Deathly chill trait. Also when the bar breaks Will the creature then become slowed?
Also another soft CC no one talked about was Blind. When I did testing with the break bars Blind application actually degraded the Defiance bars as well. Can you confirm and give feedback on this? Its one of the soft conditions you didn’t mention.
I would really like Arenanet to review both vulnerability and might. There is just too much, especially vulnerability. Both could be deleted and replaced with direct damage in a lot of skills.
For Necromancer, I would be fine with deleting vulnerability from axe and increasing damage as appropriate. The same is true for Blood is Power, which is just a “turbo button” for dps. Everyone love hitting the turbo button but, at the same time, it is a boring mechanic.
I think the game could do with a lot less of both those conditions so that, where it is found is important, again. Maybe Ranger, Engi, and Revy should be the only professions with vulnerability stacking and War, Guard, and Ele are the only ones that can do might and the numbers of ways to generate might and vulnerability are reduced to key support skills.
“War, Guard, and *Ele are the only ones that can do might and the numbers of ways to generate might"*
#HOWABOUTNO!
I just think removing soft cc’s effects just takes all the skill play out of this game. Crippling , blinding or weakening bosses at opportune moments were effective and fun ways too counter attacks from them, plus they required timing and knowledge of what your skills actually do.
Now you just use whatever and watch a bar deplete.
This change is just a dumbing-down of a previously interesting part of the game. It also makes absolutely no sense too introduce slow on mesmer and lots of chill on necro only to nullify this again later.
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