Guild Wars 2

Touted as one of the kingpins that defined combat in Guild Wars 2 was combo fields, I think they’re a fantastic addition that increases the skill cap. However blast finishers had been bugging me for a while, some of them seemed to be incredibly powerful, yet I saw no teams basing builds around them, or really paying any attention to them unless they happened to be present in a build. For instance, a Ranger will be aware of his water field, and will probably call it out, Mesmers will call their Null Field out, and possibly Chaos Storm, but a Water field isn’t a neccessity, despite how powerful it seems to be! 1320 healing +0.2 healing power scaling on blast finishers looks amazing on paper.

I commented on another post that I had seen an entire team spec, very early on, based around an Engineer, Ranger, Thief, Guard, Warrior combo, two hammers, thief shortbow, ranger for the water field and Engineer for another field and tonnes more blasts, they just blasted away in their field and seemed to be quite effective. However they disappeared pretty much without trace and I never saw another build like this.

One thing thats been bugging me for a while is why we don’t see a lot more of this, why combo fields don’t seem to have any effect on choice of builds. There’s a simple reason in my opinion and its the way blast finishers work.

All combo fields have an area where they are active, normally a radius, and it would be madness to assume that targets affected by the blast finisher have to be inside that area to be affected. Luckily thats not the case.

It might be that the radius of the blast finisher comes into play though? Nope, this isn’t the case either. Could have been fun to have blast finishers have different value in range, Call of the Wild and a traited Big old Bomb have massive radii’ where others tend to be in the 180 or 240 area.

I have been testing this with a friend and it seems that all blast finishers are actually centralised on where the blast occurs in the field. They then all have a standard 240 radius over which they take effect.

I found this really disappointing. That means I can blast finish everyone up by blasting a load in my healing turret unless they’re really nearby. I can’t grant Might in AoE to my colleagues unless they stack on me. The counterplay to any stacking in this game is AoE, which means high tier players avoid being localised in an area at all times, because AoE is so strong. So combo fields with blast finishers are pretty much useless, save for comboing your own.

The blast finisher buffs are good. They are not overpowered though, not by a longshot. The problem is that they are too powerful before engaging fights. You can gain 24 stacks of might for 20 seconds, then give yourself 10 seconds of stealth, run into a fight, burst down the guardian and wipe off the stragglers before the team knows whats hit them. Thats no fun at all.

However, whats important from my point of view is that most combo fields are small, and any large ones are short in duration. In the large majority of fields, only one person can stand in the target to avoid being AoE’d anyway, so it wouldn’t be the case that suddenly tonnes of players could stack in a field and blast finisher away to get buffs.

So, why not increase the radius!? I would love to see the radius increased to somewhere between 480 and 600, the radius of most shout effects. This means that, provided you were well within the realms of the action, and easily targetable, you could receive these buffs, but if you are grenading away from a high up place for instance, you would be out of range.

I believe this would hugely increase the skill level in the game without making it difficult for newcomers to get involved as it wouldn’t be essential. Blasting in a dark field to blind a downed target so someone else gets a clutch stomp, or a smoke field to stop a stomp, I’ve never seen a thief do that! A guardian putting a light field down before an Engineer comes in to blast field it up to counter a burst team! Stacking up a bit of Might mid fight, limiting your own damage for a while but again allowing for burst. What are other peoples thoughts on blast finishers and combo fields in general?

I accept that you probably would need to balance this is a bit so that any fields with very powerful effects either have the effects reduced or the durations limited. I’d also love to see a field that removes conditions in AoE on blast finisher, but maybe I’m dreaming a bit there.

I feel 240 is still big enough to give good support through blasting. I think 480 or 600 is absolutely massive & would reduce the skillshot quality of combo fields. It would be too easy to spread to avoid focused AoE but still gain combo benefits; I think AoE skills & combo fields are natural balancing forces against each other. It should be risky for a team to stack so much Might or blast for heals, but if range on blast was increased, you would see massive might stacks being refreshed mid-teamfight without effective counterplay.

I also think ANet directly avoided a condi removal blast through Light b/c it would just be far too strong, especially with Guardians already being the core support having access to Light. But projectile finisher through Light is still strong for condi removal.

Its not really balanced IMO with conditions. Have a necro on opposing team there’s no way. Reason being that there is way too small amounts of combo fields and finishers in certain/most fields in general compared to how many condition aoe attacks there are.

well just as an example, say an ally gets caught in a marks bomb from necro. if a mesmer uses focus pull, i can shortbow 4 → 5 → 3 the pulled target & that will be a guaranteed 3x condi removal to allies beside the target. same thing with guardian ring of warding or wall of reflection.

They should increase the duration of ‘wall’ combo fields IMO, it could add more positional play/make them more useful.

It could be due to the 5v5 format used in sPVP. Water field blasts are arguably the most important tool in WvW be it zerging or GvG. It takes good co-ordination and clear communication on voice.

All in all, when news starting filtering out about class combos before beta started many of us were extremely excited by the potential only to discover the extremely simplistic execution we have today.

Imagine the possibilities if more than one field type interacted with each other for example a lightning + smoke field granting swiftness + stealth with one application of blasts.

Furthermore fields types shouldn’t only interact additively, they should work inversely too for example a water field should cancel a hostile poison field etc.

Way too easy to randomly trigger aoe circle with blasts/ other finishers. Too much of that. Really. Especially aoe/blast combos. Way too many.

if ppl are randomly spamming & the finishers coincidentally pass through a field, the effect on the match will also be random.

if the finishers are coordinated with the fields to produce a deliberate result, the effect on the match will be deliberate.

we cannot use random ability spam as justification to alter a perfectly functioning mechanic. the solution is for players to improve their level of play.

Why do we have 1200 ranged blast finishers if you dont get the bonus (like might..)

Can anyone explain this more.??

Even after playing this game for 2 years i dont get these kind of weird bugs/hidden things..