Guild Wars 2

When i was a noob, it took me a while to understand the game mechanics. It took me a while to understand the difference between a stun and an immobilize. I was stunbreaking immobilizes and it wouldn’t work. I was a huge noob.

Looking back, i start to realize why it took me a while to understand the “mechanics”. The reason it took a while is that there seems to be inconsistancy on how the mechanics work.

For example:

Immobilize can’t be stunbroken and goes through stability. Immobilize is a condition and i guess it isn’t a “control effect” even though it disables you from moving or dodging. So you need a condition cleanse to remove immobilize.

Fear is also a condition similar to immobilize. However, you can stunbreak and cleanse fear and it doesn’t work on stability. I guess it is classified as both a “control effect” and a condition. Other control effects (daze, stun, knockdown, float, sink, etc) are not considered conditions. Melandru runes -condition% and -stun duration% both “double dip” in reducing the length of fears (-25%condtion + -25%stun= -50% fear duration) which is evidence that fear is considered both a stun “control effect” and a condition. Stunbreaker working on fear also proves that fear is considred a stun “control effect” and a condition.

So my questions are as follows:
Why is fear double dipped as both a control effect and a condition? Is this intended? Im sure this is confusing new players on the mechanics of the game.

Bonus question:
Why does necromancer trait terror fail to do damage ticks through stability?

Definitely a question for the future SOTG!
I think only a def can answer this, as they created the conditions and stunbreakers.
Definitely interesting what their intention was/is.

If I am not mistaken there was a time earlier in development that Fear was only a condition. For some reason it was deemed to be OP, and so it became an anomaly treated as both a “stun” and a condition.

Frankly, I think that it would be better to have a counter to stability (and technically an indirect counter to protection as well) in the game with the limited number of boonstrips available. How many reliable ways are there really to get stability off of a boon stacking player? S/D Thief works. Shatter Mesmers that trait for it have a chance, but struggle if too many boons pop and stack. Necro can CB on 40s CD (32 traited), which is reliable (when not blocked), but on too long a CD when classes have multiple sources of Stability (like Guardian) then try to land a 1.25s cast on Focus 5 (not happening on a remotely competent player) or try to get it with a Well of Corruption (unlikely without rooting with Dagger #3 which you shouldn’t hit) or rely on RNG from minions and sigils (stupid). No other professions really have a realistic shot of eating through stacked boons to get to it. The game still needs more ways to negate boons (i.e. reduce ICD on sigil of nullification to 1 or 2s), or some better conditions that can actually counter them.

The only class with access to fear on reasonably short CD is Necromancer, and under extremely limited circumstances (Necro present and large trait investment to reduce steal recharge) Thief (which they arguably shouldn’t have anyway). It doesn’t seem to me that reverting this change would suddenly make Necro an unstoppable force. In fact, Necros would still get pinballed around and gang-banged into the dirt, only perhaps faster if people had a reason to be afraid of them.

Of course, it is possible that A-net is already thinkning about this stuff for the balance patch (fingers crossed).

Immobilize allows you to use your skills, fear doesn’t. So fear is both a condition and a stun effect.