Guild Wars 2

Bunker needs counters. I don’t agree with getting rid of bunker all together. I just think it needs more counters I.E. Ways to melt it down in a 1v1 or smaller group. The question is why does bunker have so many get out of jail free cards?

I think we need to ask ourselves what a bunker should be. In a 1v1 A glass canon and bunker should have both a good chance to beat each-other. They have opposite strengths and weaknesses.

But if we leave it at that then the bunker would still get melted by two players. And this is the big controversy, all these sustain passives and get out of jail free one click abilities.
Because if we were just to remove all of those, then 1v2 1v3 would become less frequent and the whole Idea of holding a spot outnumbered would be marginalized or non existent.

I believe the proper nerf should be for the insane anti cc that bunkers have. How many times have you placed a trap or landed a successful blow that should proc a daze or a stun, and it does nothing because of a passive that the bunker had on or they activated a invulnerable.

I have a few suggestions

1. Make invulnerable removable. I don’t mean easily. I can think of a couple ways to do this. You could give invulnerable stacks. Lets say 2 or 3 stacks. If the invulnerable is hard cc’ed then you lose a stack. That way you either have to spec for more than one cc to help you solo bunkers, or a group has to land either 2 or 3 cc to remove it. As far as coding goes, seems like it would be easy because you could simply use the aegis boon to rework invulnerable. You keep the property of aegis being removed from one hit, give it stacks (perhaps 3 max) and instead of every hit removing invulnerable, only selected hard cc.

The other way I can see to balance bunker would be to straight nerf their sustainability in 1v1 situations and increase their bunker ability the more enemies that are around.
You might ask yourself how this would be possible, but i think it really is possible.

Yesterday I was playing around with Druid for the first time. They have an elite ability that tethers to enemies around them. So how about an ability that you have to use or procs every 30 seconds or so that builds your toughness and other defensive traits the more enemies that are around you. Anet could figure out the best timing, though it should be well under a minute otherwise you could jump in a mob of enemies then go protect another point with the buff.

This way dueling the bunker isn’t as big of grind fest and if there is more allies to help beat bunker the buff would give the bunker a better chance at surviving.

I believe these two solutions could help. Perhaps they could both be integrated. Along with these changes some tweaks to healing would be in order I’d imagine.

The whole point of this is to allow Bunkers to keep sustain but lose it if they are OUTPLAYED.

Being Outplayed is the key to everything in balance.

Or just trash their damage. Holding out versus 2 or even 3 enemies is fine if you are good enough to do it (I’m not a fan of passive bunkers either). But you shouldn’t be dealing any damage hardly and I think thats why they are considered broken. A bunker build shouldn’t be able to apply damaging conditions at all, and in my opinion they really shouldn’t be able to apply any conditions period. They are designed to survive, not to kill. You shouldn’t have classes that can do both, and do both well at that

It’s simple, the more damage you can do, the less you can’t take, and vice-versa.

The current ‘bunker’ builds can do way more damage than any bunker build should be able to do.

If you are going to go bunker, you are going to need your teammates to do most of the killing.

You can’t have a cake and eat it too.

And that’s how you actually fix bunkers.

I guess it depends on what you want to achieve. You guys have suggestede nerf damage . Yes that would solve PART of the problem. The other part of the problem is killing them. Bunkers need a counter to kill them not to prolong a stalemate. Even if you reduce the damage they deal they still have an ungodly amount of sustain that has no counter-play.

Counter-Play to me is outplaying your enemy and you are able to kill them because of it. Plus if you can’t kill someone or each-other, it gets boring.

I think everyone should be some type of DPSer. Whether it’s sustained or burst DPS, or relying on conditions. Being tanky goes against the ideal of having no trinity IMO. Just make everyone straight up killers with the ability to sustain themselves

OriOri.8724:

Or just trash their damage. Holding out versus 2 or even 3 enemies is fine if you are good enough to do it (I’m not a fan of passive bunkers either). But you shouldn’t be dealing any damage hardly and I think thats why they are considered broken. A bunker build shouldn’t be able to apply damaging conditions at all, and in my opinion they really shouldn’t be able to apply any conditions period. They are designed to survive, not to kill. You shouldn’t have classes that can do both, and do both well at that

Agreed. The single best designed bunker was always the staff guardian. It did zero damage, but could sustain and could buff teammates.

Its not a problem if they dont really hurt.
I feel that way about Bunker Tempests also, but I think their support easily pushes them into ridiculous territory. Yet they're a necessary evil in this condi-heavy meta

I ran sword/torch mace/shield on a Berserker all season and did not have any trouble killing the only bunker specs in the current meta, Scrappers and Tempests.

I also had a easy time dealing with tempest and scrappers as mace/shield condi warrior. The condis wreck the engis and the interrupts ruin the eles.

My suggestion:

Bring back the order in which conditions are removed, like before, instead of having it removed randomly like now.

Poison should be removed last.

MithranArkanere.8957:

It’s simple, the more damage you can do, the less you can’t take, and vice-versa.

The current ‘bunker’ builds can do way more damage than any bunker build should be able to do.

If you are going to go bunker, you are going to need your teammates to do most of the killing.

You can’t have a cake and eat it too.

And that’s how you actually fix bunkers.

This was how the bunker amulet worked before it was removed. The problem is, no one liked it.

Ramoth.9064:

My suggestion:

Bring back the order in which conditions are removed, like before, instead of having it removed randomly like now.

Poison should be removed last.

It was never changed. Its still last in first out. Only conversion and corruption became random.

In addition a skill will apply conditions as it reads down the skill. I.e skull grinder applied cripple last and chilblains applied poison last. Also any traits that add to the skill and are displayed in the list follow this order. Those that do not, deathly chill, are applied after making that condition the last in. Sigils are applied after that since they require a hit/swap hence why some warrior builds use frailty since you then need to clear two condis before you get to the damaging ones.

mrauls.6519:

I think everyone should be some type of DPSer. Whether it’s sustained or burst DPS, or relying on conditions. Being tanky goes against the ideal of having no trinity IMO. Just make everyone straight up killers with the ability to sustain themselves

Another Scissor that want to DELETE Rock.

Cobrakon.3108:

Bunker needs counters. I don’t agree with getting rid of bunker all together. I just think it needs more counters I.E. Ways to melt it down in a 1v1 or smaller group. The question is why does bunker have so many get out of jail free cards?

I think we need to ask ourselves what a bunker should be. In a 1v1 A glass canon and bunker should have both a good chance to beat each-other. They have opposite strengths and weaknesses.

But if we leave it at that then the bunker would still get melted by two players. And this is the big controversy, all these sustain passives and get out of jail free one click abilities.

…

1. Make invulnerable removable. I don’t mean easily. I can think of a couple ways to do this. You could give invulnerable stacks. Lets say 2 or 3 stacks. If the invulnerable is hard cc’ed then you lose a stack. That way you either have to spec for more than one cc to help you solo bunkers, or a group has to land either 2 or 3 cc to remove it. As far as coding goes, seems like it would be easy because you could simply use the aegis boon to rework invulnerable. You keep the property of aegis being removed from one hit, give it stacks (perhaps 3 max) and instead of every hit removing invulnerable, only selected hard cc.

…

What bunker you have difficulties with?

All bunker build got counterplay. Either CC or Condi burst do the trick.

I don’t agree that in 1v1 a DPS should kill a Bunker. Bunker can’t do much damage and this is a liability for your team. If you have more than 1 bunker class in your comp, you are making your team fights during for a long time without being able to kill anyone.

This is the risks to play bunkers.

1) For invulnerable, most skills that give it don’t work on Condis. So, it’s the time to apply them.

2) Another counter play to invul is that most of those skills will make you “immune to cap”. So, if your opponent do that, simply stand on point. When the invuln is done, boons strip stab then CC off point to win your CAP on a Bunker.

You don’t like stability?

1) Necro convert them to FEAR. This is a key play from reaper.
2) But thief, revenant and Mesmer can boon rip stability as well.
3) Sigil of nullifications is nice to stack with AOE pulsing field with classes that bring some way to boon strips….

All bunker build got many “counters” that you need to look for and know when to apply them.

The Rock, Paper and Scissor game is actually more fair with meta build than it was never done.

Stacking invulns, its an interesting idea if limited but the studio is going to find a way to break an idea like that.

How long are the stacks going to last? how many would be appropriate? These can easily be resolved if the change was done by a dev experienced at unorganized PvP but how many of them actually play unorganized PvP, unorganized meaning no voice chat to coordinate. If they are using ESL players to test, then their testing methods are worse than i thought.

Also the studio is clearly not interested in designing based on how players can outplay each other. If that were the case, Dh would not be the way it is, Shiro and rev shield would not have been nerfed to the degree it was and they wouldnt put so much pressure on Necro’s utility bar to the point where power builds would become so useless competitively.

The studio is more interested in strengths and weaknesses, which class can exploit which class’ weaknesses and which class will do well in which situation against which build. Anet are forever trying to balance this many variables and utter failures at it but yet continue to do so and have shown no signs of changing.

This is why stackable invulns wont make it.

The character has 3 main potentials – Damage, Resistence and Support. This potentials could be removed of especializations and only be obtained by equips like ammulets, runes and sigils. But to be viable, DoT conditions needs be balanced.

The potentials could be divided by:
DPS:
Power (with precision and ferocity).
Condition (with precision and ferocity).
Resistence:
Armor (to resist power damage).
Vitality or Health (to resist condition damage).
Support:
Heal (to increase self and group heal potential).
Concentration (to increase self and group boon uptime. This could be interesting if Anet limit boon uptime of all professions, making boon duration stat so important as others stats in terms of balance).
.
.
With these few changes, the game could be less passive and more strategic with players needing to choose their rolê between soft or heavi dps, tank or support. No more unkilable classes with insane damage.

JETWING.2759:

The character has 3 main potentials – Damage, Resistence and Support. This potentials could be removed of especializations and only be obtained by equips like ammulets, runes and sigils. But to be viable, DoT conditions needs be balanced.

The potentials could be divided by:
DPS:
Power (with precision and ferocity).
Condition (with precision and ferocity).
Resistence:
Armor (to resist power damage).
Vitality or Health (to resist condition damage).
Support:
Heal (to increase self and group heal potential).
Concentration (to increase self and group boon uptime. This could be interesting if Anet limit boon uptime of all professions, making boon duration stat so important as others stats in terms of balance).
.
.
With these few changes, the game could be less passive and more strategic with players needing to choose their rolê between soft or heavi dps, tank or support. No more unkilable classes with insane damage.

Where is Control role?

JETWING.2759:

The character has 3 main potentials – Damage, Resistence and Support. This potentials could be removed of especializations and only be obtained by equips like ammulets, runes and sigils. But to be viable, DoT conditions needs be balanced.

The potentials could be divided by:
DPS:
Power (with precision and ferocity).
Condition (with precision and ferocity)..

I’d rather see Condi builds actually need to invest in Expertise for meaningful duration than Ferocity. There would just need to be a few new amulet choices with it, and a shave to base Condition duration in PvP.

Cobrakon.3108:

Bunker needs counters. I don’t agree with getting rid of bunker all together. I just think it needs more counters I.E. Ways to melt it down in a 1v1 or smaller group. The question is why does bunker have so many get out of jail free cards?

I think we need to ask ourselves what a bunker should be. In a 1v1 A glass canon and bunker should have both a good chance to beat each-other. They have opposite strengths and weaknesses.

But if we leave it at that then the bunker would still get melted by two players. And this is the big controversy, all these sustain passives and get out of jail free one click abilities.
Because if we were just to remove all of those, then 1v2 1v3 would become less frequent and the whole Idea of holding a spot outnumbered would be marginalized or non existent.

I believe the proper nerf should be for the insane anti cc that bunkers have. How many times have you placed a trap or landed a successful blow that should proc a daze or a stun, and it does nothing because of a passive that the bunker had on or they activated a invulnerable.

I have a few suggestions

1. Make invulnerable removable. I don’t mean easily. I can think of a couple ways to do this. You could give invulnerable stacks. Lets say 2 or 3 stacks. If the invulnerable is hard cc’ed then you lose a stack. That way you either have to spec for more than one cc to help you solo bunkers, or a group has to land either 2 or 3 cc to remove it. As far as coding goes, seems like it would be easy because you could simply use the aegis boon to rework invulnerable. You keep the property of aegis being removed from one hit, give it stacks (perhaps 3 max) and instead of every hit removing invulnerable, only selected hard cc.

The other way I can see to balance bunker would be to straight nerf their sustainability in 1v1 situations and increase their bunker ability the more enemies that are around.
You might ask yourself how this would be possible, but i think it really is possible.

Yesterday I was playing around with Druid for the first time. They have an elite ability that tethers to enemies around them. So how about an ability that you have to use or procs every 30 seconds or so that builds your toughness and other defensive traits the more enemies that are around you. Anet could figure out the best timing, though it should be well under a minute otherwise you could jump in a mob of enemies then go protect another point with the buff.

This way dueling the bunker isn’t as big of grind fest and if there is more allies to help beat bunker the buff would give the bunker a better chance at surviving.

I believe these two solutions could help. Perhaps they could both be integrated. Along with these changes some tweaks to healing would be in order I’d imagine.

The whole point of this is to allow Bunkers to keep sustain but lose it if they are OUTPLAYED.

Being Outplayed is the key to everything in balance.

I’d be fine with bunkers that (if played perfectly) can 1v2 indefinitely against good players or 1v3+ against bad/mediocre players.

I’m not okay with bunkers that, with a bad/medicore player at the helm, can 1v2 indefinitely against better players (or 1v5 against equal/worse players) while also doing more than token damage.

For that matter, I’m not okay with full bunker specs doing 80% of the damage of a glass cannon. That makes the game to where everybody who’s able goes full bunker because they’re giving up very little (if any) damage for a TON of sustain, which means 90% of the players you face will also be full bunker (having a game where nobody kills anything is no fun) and the remaining 10% are playing a class with no valid bunker spec (getting killed constantly and not killing anything due to game imbalance and not player skill is no fun either).

Auramancer got close to the iron wall+wet noodle thing, a slight nerf to their healing (or stability, either would be acceptable but both would be a bit much) would put them about right. DH is a little farther off: Their traps (semi-passive damage) do too much and they have too little damage avoidance (but decent heals/cleanses). As much as I personally think it ridiculous that the tankiest class in the game wears a dress (light armor) and the squishiest wears full plate (heavy armor) it does seem to work in a game where everyone can do everything at least somewhat well.

Euthymias.7984:

JETWING.2759:

The character has 3 main potentials – Damage, Resistence and Support. This potentials could be removed of especializations and only be obtained by equips like ammulets, runes and sigils. But to be viable, DoT conditions needs be balanced.

The potentials could be divided by:
DPS:
Power (with precision and ferocity).
Condition (with precision and ferocity)..

I’d rather see Condi builds actually need to invest in Expertise for meaningful duration than Ferocity. There would just need to be a few new amulet choices with it, and a shave to base Condition duration in PvP.

When every stack of bleed is doing a thousand(+) damage a tick they’d need more than a “shave” to base condition. Especially when most abilities apply more than one stack of any given condition.

I see all these people complaining about Auramancer stability…. have you ever looked at the build to realise how little it actually has?

Also, anyone saying auramancer has 80% of the damage of a DPS class is just… idiotic.
Druid has significant DPS from the pet (with sensible boonsharing) but brings much less to a teamfight in comparison.
Scrapper (paladin scrapper) is the only imbalanced bunker in the current meta, part of which is because as well as having good sustain with high damage over time it has projectile reflection, which negates portions of DPS. Also the CD’s it has are just too low.

My biggest experience with problems with bunkers is when the counter-bunker classes (reaper, warrior, current scrapper) don’t know how to play against bunkers. Necros that never use their boon corruption, warriors that CC into Obsidian skin (done this myself more than I’d prefer to admit), scrapper that does the same and misses their pressure DPS…

Passive abilities are a problem though but reducing passives without also reducing burst and CC is just going to send us back to the old berserker meta that sat in place for about 2 years. CC is out of control right now for any class that doesn’t have a long list of breaks and passive breaks.

OriOri.8724:

Or just trash their damage. Holding out versus 2 or even 3 enemies is fine if you are good enough to do it (I’m not a fan of passive bunkers either). But you shouldn’t be dealing any damage hardly and I think thats why they are considered broken. A bunker build shouldn’t be able to apply damaging conditions at all, and in my opinion they really shouldn’t be able to apply any conditions period. They are designed to survive, not to kill. You shouldn’t have classes that can do both, and do both well at that

Thank you. Agree with this 100%. The problem with current bunkers is that they have so much damage right now. Sustain and damage need to be separated out more, especially when it’s passive defense.

Bunker guardian was the perfect balance. More builds similar to this need to exist. That’s not to say that brusier-esque builds shouldn’t exist, but on the scale they are now, they can be called bunkers with lots of damage. There needs to be actual tradeoff. Either heavy damage, some damage and some sustain (balance), or low-no damage/high sustain/bunker.

Edit: kittenmit the drinking seasn ….

There could be some attacks that strips the Toughness from your oponent and throw it on the ground nearby , forcing him to walk over there to get it .
Meanwhile he cannot be critted from the person who he ’’MARKED’’

The single person that you have lately attacked or aplyed Conditions is ’’MARKED’’ .

If you strip your oponent Toughness and cc him for 4 sec , the 3 sec CANOT-BE-CRITTED buff will expire and if he didnt make it to pick up the buff from the ground , he will be a defensless guy without stats .

If you are targeting a friend and then use Dodge , you can transfer your Toughness for 2 sec , but afterwards it will be dropped on the his feet , and you have to go there to regain it .
Otherwise automatically will be transfered to you after 10 sec , while being defenceless in the meanwhile

Or the more easy , give more attacks with evades frames that you can chain together , that does damage or condtions and remove the Toughness Amulets :P

Lucred.1802:

I’d be fine with bunkers that (if played perfectly) can 1v2 indefinitely against good players or 1v3+ against bad/mediocre players.

No you wouldn’t.

Teams would go full Bunkers. It would be very very boring.

The only way to bring back unkillable bunkers without making the game boring is to make a dedicated single target support/healer class that can be killed. If bunkers can tank forever by itself, the meta would go full bunker and it will be boring.

runeblade.7514:

[…]This was how the bunker amulet worked before it was removed. The problem is, no one liked it.

Nope, there has never been mechanics dynamically balancing your damage.

runeblade.7514:

The only way to bring back unkillable bunkers without making the game boring is to make a dedicated single target support/healer class that can be killed. If bunkers can tank forever by itself, the meta would go full bunker and it will be boring.

I don’t think anyone here is advocating for unkillable bunkers. They most definitely should be killable, but not by 1 class in a matter of seconds with a condi burst. A bunker should be able to hold out against 2, possibly, 3 players of equal or worse skill, for a good while but they shouldn’t be unkillable. Especially if they are playing against people of the same skill as them.

The problems with bunkers right now are that they are just messed up. We have bunkers that are dealing high damage, bunkers that have absolutely kittening amazing team support, bunkers that can go down in a few seconds if they are hit with a condi burst (which means they aren’t really a bunker but whatevs).

runeblade.7514:

Lucred.1802:

I’d be fine with bunkers that (if played perfectly) can 1v2 indefinitely against good players or 1v3+ against bad/mediocre players.

No you wouldn’t.

Teams would go full Bunkers. It would be very very boring.

You mean basically how it is now?
-auramancer (bunker)
-scrapper (bunker)
-macebow warr (semi-bunker CC/condi god)
-reaper (condibomb/semi-bunker) or another macebow warr
-some flavor of mesmer (some variety here but the bunker-ish ones are favored) or another macebow warr
If you’re not able to bring one of those 3/4 classes you have no place in high-end competitive PVP and will struggle to make rank in low-mid PVP.

I mean honestly, 4 condi warrs and an auramancer is a valid/viable team composition. Might not get into legendary but it’s competitive. For that matter I had one battle against 5 scrappers that was tough as hell (we won, barely, but only because we outplayed them and they were a dedicated troll team).

So yeah. Bunker is in.

edit I suppose when they’ve got an auramancer with them reapers are pretty good bunkers too. And anything is a halfway passable bunker around a competent auramancer.

OriOri.8724:

Or just trash their damage. Holding out versus 2 or even 3 enemies is fine if you are good enough to do it (I’m not a fan of passive bunkers either). But you shouldn’t be dealing any damage hardly and I think thats why they are considered broken. A bunker build shouldn’t be able to apply damaging conditions at all, and in my opinion they really shouldn’t be able to apply any conditions period. They are designed to survive, not to kill. You shouldn’t have classes that can do both, and do both well at that

this is the current problem we are facing

Fixing bunkers requires looking at what makes each class really tanky and coming up with a counter to it.

For example — ele has a lot of self heals and aoe heals. What if it acted more like a conventional healer, and its heals were less effective on itself? Or what if the engineer’s blocks/reflects/evades were much shorter duration, and the purge gyro wasn’t so effective? Or If invuln on a mesmer meant they couldn’t perform any actions either? Or if berserker took longer to recover adrenaline after performing a burst (IE a delay)?

These are just ideas. Part of what makes each class tanky is different. Part of the problem isn’t the tank, but the damage combined with the tank. If you focus on the crux of both (IE bursting for warriors, or invuln/block for mesmers), you can find your solution.

I think we can all agree though. Thief is just too tanky.

@Vagrant distortion on mesmers really isn’t that powerful if they aren’t sharing it due to it being tied to a shatter. I think the main reason that people think its more useful than it is is because the shatters don’t have a cast time so we can use them even in the middle of other skills/actions

You can nerf bunker when any class besides thief and warrior can run offensive stats without being farmed by thieves and warriors.

They need to put celestial back in the game. It’s just boring without celestial.