Guild Wars 2

It was somewhat different from stability, and had more interesting counterplay. It couldn’t be boonstripped, but could instead be seen more easily and coordinated. The problem was that it was getting popped nearly every time it was used. The one reason for this was that soft CC worked on it.

In my opinion, and from the experiences of others i spoke to during the beta, all it needed was a slight boost in strength (amount CC to break) and complete immunity to soft CC. This would both retain its flavour, not invalidate the previous work of the devs, while still being as useful as stability, if not moreso some times.

TL;DR: I believe it would have been better to just make the player-only defiance bar IMMUNE to soft CC.

I totally agree, it could be a stronger version of stability, but if you manage to break it, it gives you an advantage. That’s good design, we just have to increase the amount of CC to break it, like you already said. BBut I’m afraid most players are against it, because it will still stun them in an pvp environment. People don’t like giving themself disadvantages (just look at the whole necromancer corruption skill discussion).

The intended purpose was that soft CC did only a small amount of damage to it, while hard CC did a lot. The issue is that it still does not have a huge amount of Hitppoints on the bar. Really, just a 50% increase in HP for most of the defiance bars and good scaling would work.

Kodama.6453:

People don’t like giving themself disadvantages (just look at the whole necromancer corruption skill discussion).

Whoah there, go ahead and back that on up. The only reason that was ever an issue was due to how weak those corruption skills were, and the fact that they added even more punishment to the skills without adjusting the benefits of the skills.

Shaogin.2679:

Kodama.6453:

People don’t like giving themself disadvantages (just look at the whole necromancer corruption skill discussion).

Whoah there, go ahead and back that on up. The only reason that was ever an issue was due to how weak those corruption skills were, and the fact that they added even more punishment to the skills without adjusting the benefits of the skills.

I didn’t want to offense you, sorry for that. My opinion about corruption skills is different though, because I don’t think it is a weakness to get these conditions. Anet has shown that they want corruptions to get used that way, that you inflict conditions on yourself and the enemy and then transfer your own conditions to the enemy too. I really like that concept, but it seems like there are not many people with the same opinion.

I just quoted it because I saw the discussion about corruption skills and think there is some kind of psychological issue. People have bad experiences with something like defiance bar, cause they get stunned in pvp because of it. That’s why they don’t want something like that anymore. And people get bad experiences with corruptions too, if they don’t run a condition transfer. That’s all.

And I want to apologize one more time.

Defiance bars everywhere need tuning (and in PvE especially, scaling!). The concept, even on player skills, is fine. It just needs to be tuned properly (and not eat soft CC like Cripple and Chill, too many traits tied to those conditions being on a target).

Is the Defiance bar trivial to break? Adjust how much is needed to pop it. Also, why is it breaking? Is it usually from burst CC or is it from sustained applications? If the later, boost it’s regeneration rate. Is it not getting broken except in total focus fire CC burst? The bar should probably be reduced.

Additionally, they can play around more with how a break bar works. Warriors and Necros could both thematically have a break bar that fills when CC’d and degenerates over time, leading to a massive attack or steroid when it peaks.

Yeah, I really wish they hadn’t given up on players having break bars. It really was a good idea and just needed some tuning.

I think they removed player breakbars because they were too lazy or unskilled to code a new version that was appropriately balanced.