Guild Wars 2

lately I’ve been trying different classes in SW (usually I went with my mesmer or ele but wanted a bit of diversity) and especially on thief I noticed an annoyance with some mordrem skills. If you interrupt a thrasher or terragriff they immediately use their (highly damaging) skill again, instead of having to wait the 5sec cd everything else has after an interrupt.

imho the worst offenders are the terragriff with explosive projectiles (unreflectable/absorbable projectiles, how cool is that?) and the threshers root attack (which has insane range, no LOS necessity, stealth does not work once they’ve targetted you). on scaled up vets those attacks kill me within a few seconds (after dodges, blocks, invuln or whatever my current class has runs out). was it an intentional design choice to make CC completely useless against mordrem? sure, some classes may have it a bit to easy spamming interrupts but it seems like they simply decided a CC playstyle is not something they like so they made all the damaging attacks simply auto attacks so they would have no CD on interrupt. the only thing that reliably works are blind (fields which only thief can spam, though guard and engi aren’t bad at keeping up blinds for a bit either through other skills)

has this been asked before? couldn’t find any topics but then again, this forum isn’t renowned for it’s searchability.

tl;dr: mordrem attacks don’t go on cooldown when interrupted, making CC useless. why?

Those skills are their basic attacks. If you could interrupt them, they’d just stand there.

For the root attack, simply get within melee range once it begins and step outside of melee range after it stops. If you don’t step out and no one else is at range, it will try to switch to its leeching AoE and begin to follow you. If you want to stay at range, you can simply keep moving to out run the roots. Originally they were too fast to pop up, so you couldn’t out run them, then with the Silverwastes patch, they made them slower so you could. The last patch however made them a little faster, so you either have to run in a straight line forward or speed up your movement.

For the explosive projectiles, you can try jumping over them if you have a decent latency, or you can stay at range so that you can dodge through at least 2 of them. If you have a short cooldown interrupt however, watch the animation of the teragriff – it takes a few seconds to actually shoot the first projectile.

thanks, maybe I should’ve mentioned I already know both these things, though even then it doesn’t really change much in my opinion:
apart from thief nobody can interrupt a mob often enough to lock him down (the skill is easy to recognize though, I agree) and the thresher can attack you even through walls, up on ledges and such, making it quite a feat to actually find him (thanks to a range that seems to be more than 1200 as my ele usually can’t hit the ones attacking him before getting closer), let alone reach him. and even if you reach him, he will simply do his swirly thingy denying melee which is not really fun when only having melee weps equipped – and again, interrupting his swirly-fly animation does nothing as he’ll simply recast it immediately. at least one of his skills should have a cooldown, seeing as every non-primary attack gets a cooldown on interrupt and he shouldn’t be able to have two primary attacks.

besides, it’s not just about myself. if I see a vet terragriff firing at an AC user I would like to be able to interrupt him to take him down before the other player dies or has to step off the AC, but the way it’s currently done I can’t do anything on most classes.

a far more interesting mechanic would’ve been 0 (regular) cooldown skills they use by default which get the typical 5 sec delay on interrupt and a less dangerous attack when that is on cooldown. this would allow more build diversity (something ANet has stated time and time again they want, though there hasn’t been much progress in following through yet). maybe even some mobs which get more dangerous if their normal attack gets interrupted (i.e. wolves?). right now I’ll rather just go full dps and kill stuff as quickly as I can than trying things outside the normal stack and hack. on thief I’ll probably still use /p #4 when a vet or higher starts his skill, even if it means after every autochain, but on other classes it makes little sense to waste the very limited stuns for something that will immediately come back up again.

It’s always been a big issue that interrupts against most PvE mobs only put them on a short cooldown, rather than the full cooldown.

well, the whole interrupt system is pretty much useless in pve. against players it makes sense to not put their skills on full cooldown, or cc builds would simply kill everything. but in other games interrupting a big attack often meant the mob would skip it until next time, not just recast it 5 secs (or in mordrem cases 0 secs) later. at least most other open world mobs have relatively weak auto attacks and a few strong skills which can be put on a slight cooldown by interrupting (i.e. ogres, which yes, are just a weak enemy anyway, throwing stone is their auto which doesn’t do much except weakness, while the knockdown can be interrupted and won’t come up immediately again).

I still think mordrem should switch over to a weaker attack when they get interrupted to reward a bit of a more aware (I didn’t want to say skillful, as it’s not really. just needs some timing) gameplay.

breakbar will be a thing for bosses, and I assume we’ll use that to interrupt the more dangerous attacks. but interrupts shouldn’t be just a thing for bosses, it should be useful against non-champs as well.

Healix.5819:

If you want to stay at range, you can simply keep moving to out run the roots. Originally they were too fast to pop up, so you couldn’t out run them, then with the Silverwastes patch, they made them slower so you could. The last patch however made them a little faster, so you either have to run in a straight line forward or speed up your movement.

Currently, you need increased movement speed to outrun it. Even running in a straight line with normal (in combat) speed, it will hit you every time. I think this really needs to be reverted to being able to outrun it, at least with full forward movement.

As is, the veteran or higher versions of the leeching thrasher create a huge kill zone that makes them very difficult to engage. The champions do 3.5-4k hits each second, and their defiance makes interrupting practically impossible. Being in range of a champ that you can’t see is most likely a quick death, unless you get lucky and dodge the right way to get out of range.

The annoyance of these mobs is also compounded by players seemingly ignoring them most of the time. I rarely see anyone trying to interrupt this attack, and just as often see them being allowed to live for a very long time at the back of a group of other mordrem. This is probably because they don’t really appear to be doing much while channeling this skill, so players don’t see them as a threat or understand where the attack they are dying to is coming from.

I had a rather bad situation with 2 upscaled normal thrashers today on the back gate of Silverwaste’s red fort. They were outside the closed gate, both spamming their tentacle thrash attack for about 1200 damage per hit. Its radius covered from the portal outside to the side wall, so going out to kill them was too dangerous. Other mobs were behind them, so running past them and out of range wasn’t a good option. The attack radius also seemed to cover any spot on the wall where they could be attacked from. These 2 mobs had turned every spot they could be attacked from into a killzone that would down most players in a matter of seconds.