Guild Wars 2

I won’t rehash the popular complaints about the state of high tier PvP (and really in most tiers) and the tendency for teams to stack nigh-unkillable bunkers to engage in boring stalemates. It’s true and it’s widely known. While there are changes and a “balance patch” upcoming, it is important to understand that tweaks to survival might not fix things.

Now, a lot of people have suggested that the rise of the bunker is due to the new elite specs being able to dish out a lot of damage while still sustaining, such that you need to have sustain in order to play. This is partly at fault, but I propose that the real culprit is the surfeit of disabling effects (or “hard cc”) that entered the picture with the arrival of HoT, and the consequent ability to chain it together. Because it is so easy, especially in a team fight, to be locked out of skills, evasion, and movement, it becomes necessary to build in such a way that you can survive this inevitability.

My personal record — at least that I bothered to note — is eleven seconds of being disabled (testament to every build’s tankiness that I actually survived those 11 seconds, though I did die shortly thereafter). That’s 11 seconds wherein I could not cast skills, and for most of it I could not move as well. I’ve been on the giving end of brutal cc-chains, too, so I know how easy it is to pile on once a person is hit by the first one.

I’m not going to make this even longer by showing all the numbers (though I can if people need to see it), but I went through and counted up all the disabling effects in game before and after HoT, making note of their usage and cooldowns. I had to make some decisions, such as whether to count passive hard cc (like Guardian lines or Shocking Aura) and how to consider cc within a skill (like the Rampage kit). In the end, I counted everything.

Naturally, the fact that there is, say, a Pull and a Daze on an Ele’s Earth Shield isn’t really important for PvP purposes, and it would be disingenuous to count that the same as Gust, so I looked especially at the cc options of the most popular kits, before and after, going by what I’ve encountered personally, what I read/hear about, and what’s on metabattle. (Yeah, yeah, get the bug out of your nose about metabattle. It’s a resource. If people follow it blindly, that’s their problem. Don’t blame the bar for the alcoholic.)

Here’s a quick comparison (table formatting is not working, so I’m just going to list Profession/Old/New/And what I counted):
Gua / 1 / 7 / 2 wpn, 1 prof mechanic, 2 util, 1 elite, 1 trait
Ele / 2 / 4 / 2 wpn (staff and d/f), 1 prof mechanic (in Air), 1 elite (in Air)
Eng / 4 / 4 / 1 wpn (plus combo), 2 util, 1 elite
Mes / 4 / 4 / 2 wpn, 1 prof mechanic (up to 4 hits), 1 elite (3 hits)
Nec / 3 / 5 / 2 wpn, 2 prof mechanic, 1 elite (plus randomized corruptions)
Ran / 5 / 7 / 2 wpn, 1 pet, 1 prof mechanic, 2 util, 1 trait
Rev / x / 3 / 1 wpn, 1 elite, 1 trait
Thi / 3 / 3 / 1 wpn, 1 prof mechanic (traited, +guard steal), 1 elite
War / N/A

The above omits two important factors: First, the very short cd’s on many of the new skills, and second, the AoE nature of many of them. This is where the problem compounds. I also looked at the skills added in HoT for the elite specs. Unsurprisingly, with Wells, Shouts, Glyphs, and more, there is a large number that are AoE. Perhaps the most illustrative example is the comparison between old Death Shroud and new Reaper Shroud:

1: DS: single target; RS: cleave
2: DS: single target projectile; RS: cleave
3: DS: single target; RS: AoE
4: DS: targeted AoE; RS: cleaving AoE
5: DS: targeted AoE; RS: cleaving AoE

With so much cc and AoE, is it any wonder the poor thieves are suffering so much? A profession that relies on not being targeted no longer has to be targeted. You don’t even have to see him to blow him up!

Much of the cc seems to have been included for PvE purposes, to deal with the new Defiance Bar. I’m not really a fan of this; it seems like the thought process was: “Well, there’s no way to stop those bearbows from hitting longbow 4, so instead of encouraging better play, let’s just make spamming cc the right thing to do.” This seems to have impelled the Stability change, too, and while that was disastrous for WvW, it worked in PvP — before HoT. Now it’s a mess.

In sum, PvP is loaded with disabling effects that can be thrown around very easily to disable multiple targets and to keep a single target locked down for a long time. Do you question why bunker Chrono is king? It’s got a short cd, stationary evade; a very good block; and spammable stab. You’ve got to have the self-sustain of a Scrapper, Rev, or Tempest or else the Chrono is going to be rezzing you over and over. Nerf the existing top builds’ survival and people will just migrate to the next best thing.

What’s the Solution?
What other games have done is introduce a mechanic by which after the first instance of crowd control, subsequent applications of cc are subject to diminishing returns. This could work, but to be clear I do not want that and I do not think it is the best answer. Better would be to reduce the duration of existing stuns and dazes, change some AoE cc to single target, and perhaps introduce an icd on loss of Stability stacks.

SWTOR has this thing called resolve:

“The Resolve system protects individual players from having their character repeatedly controlled by enemy players inside Player vs Player combat. Each character possesses a Resolve resource bar, visible above the character in his or her nameplate, next to the portrait on the targeting window, and in the group window. When a character is the target of an enemy stun, sleep, knockdown, blind, or ballistic effect, that character gains an amount of resolve points. This value is based on the type of effect and its duration, with stronger effects like stun and knockdown generating more resolve than weaker effects like sleeps and blinds. Additionally, if there are control effects currently active on the target, subsequent control effects add a smaller amount of resolve based on the strength and remaining duration of those effects. Gaining resolve points fills up the character’s resolve with a purple bar. Once the resolve bar fills completely up the bar turns white and the character becomes immune to further control effects. When all current control effects expire the resolve bar begins to decay to zero resolve, at which point the character once again can be controlled and the building process starts anew.”

I played SWTOR for a while and the system was working well. In 1v1 situations disables had impact and were useful, but in teamfights ppl started to have full immunity so cc chains didn’t work anymore.

Similar system could be added to Guild Wars as well so that additional disables, after a certain point in a fight, would have no effect. This way you would have to make every cc count and not just spam them.

Of course SWTOR is a completely different game and I don’t know how similar system would work in GW, but I think it would be worth looking at.

i love it when i go in with 6-10 stack of stab and still getting Locked down and knocked around like a ping pong ball nowdays……

I’m familiar with the SWTOR system, even though I’m pretty sure it did not exist during my brief time in the game. It was probably added in response to excessive cc. It could work but it’s close to dr. WoW had dr which (I think — long time ago) accrued based on cc type, and so you had to cycle different types or the target would eventually go briefly immune.

There are two problems with dr. First, it means tooltips are unreliable. If my daze says 1 second I expect that daze to last for 1 second. The SWTOR visible bar might instead tell me whether or not my daze is going to land at all, but that doesn’t solve the second problem: either system demands coordination. If some goofball is spamming every cc he’s got and pushes the target into immunity, you might not be able to interrupt the thing you really need to stop. This brings the PvE problem into PvP.

Again, it’s not a terrible idea, but I would rather see stuns and dazes be very short, interrupt-style attacks, and reserve longer disables for knockdowns and blowouts and the like. Many disables have a big tell, but it becomes immaterial when you don’t have enough dodges to escape them all. Additionally, I would prefer to see most disables have more limited targeting than they currently do, requiring more of the player than just standing on the circle and dropping everything.

Ive been walking around with this exact issue in my mind for a while. Perfect write up, though the cc table is a bit messy to read.

There is already a DR system inplace in this game. (at least when it comes to fear, I havn’t realy noticed it on any other cc, wich should say enough.) It’s clearly not working well enough, and the hard cc chains are on passives and aoe that are ruining the game. Same goes for heavy condition builds with lots of verry strong aoe.

I tried every Textile and BBCode formatting option for tables that I knew and that I could find. Nothing worked. If someone can tell me how to insert a table, I would gladly edit it.

Ocosh.5843:

I tried every Textile and BBCode formatting option for tables that I knew and that I could find. Nothing worked. If someone can tell me how to insert a table, I would gladly edit it.

You can’t and I think you did the best posible job you could with the limited tools at your disposal.

Edit: Only way I can think of is to make it in excel or whatever and upload a screenie of it here.

Ocosh.5843:

I’m familiar with the SWTOR system, even though I’m pretty sure it did not exist during my brief time in the game. It was probably added in response to excessive cc. It could work but it’s close to dr. WoW had dr which (I think — long time ago) accrued based on cc type, and so you had to cycle different types or the target would eventually go briefly immune.

The resolve system existed since SW:TOR’s launch. However it did undergo significant changes in 1.4.

And no it’s not like WoW’s dr. SWTOR’s resolve wasn’t done by type, all CC went into the same resolve bar, however some types of CC would grant more resolve per second of CC, i.e softstuns gave less resolve per second of stun than a hardstun did.

The beauty of SW:TOR’s resolve is it created a lot of tactical decisions, especially with regards to stunbreak usage. It also promoted thinking about CC usage rather than just spamming CC.

That said GW2’s CC system is so fundamentally different from SW:TOR’s copying resolve isn’t going to be a solution, although there really should be something done about the insane amount of target control this game has.

Best I could do. Had to gut the names in the process, though. Unfortunately, all the useful BBcode appears to be disabled on this site. If you want to use this, you can copy it directly and put the {pre}{/pre} tags around it (with square brackets).

Guardian | 1 | 6 | 2 wpn, 2 util, 1 elite, 1 trait
Elementa | 2 | 4 | 2 wpn (staff and d/f), 1 prof mechanic (in Air), 1 elite (in Air)
Engin        | 4 | 4 | 1 wpn (plus combo), 2 util, 1 elite
Mesmer   | 4 | 4 | 2 wpn, 1 prof mechanic (up to 4 hits), 1 elite (3 hits)
Necrom   | 3 | 5 | 2 wpn, 2 prof mechanic, 1 elite (plus randomized corruptions)
Ranger     | 5 | 7 | 2 wpn, 1 pet, 1 prof mechanic, 2 util, 1 trait
Reve         | x | 2 | 1 wpn, 1 elite
Thief        | 3 | 3 | 1 wpn, 1 prof mechanic (traited, +guard steal), 1 elite
Warrior   | N/A

As for the topic, I agree completely that CC is out of control at the moment.

I dunno. This meta seems to me to be run bunker& AOE builds; nuke half the friggi…err kitten map and let your passives carry you thru. I hear about skill a lot on these forums; yet seeing this mess I wonder where its at.

Blue Hare.8612:

SWTOR has this thing called resolve:

“The Resolve system protects individual players from having their character repeatedly controlled by enemy players inside Player vs Player combat. Each character possesses a Resolve resource bar, visible above the character in his or her nameplate, next to the portrait on the targeting window, and in the group window. When a character is the target of an enemy stun, sleep, knockdown, blind, or ballistic effect, that character gains an amount of resolve points. This value is based on the type of effect and its duration, with stronger effects like stun and knockdown generating more resolve than weaker effects like sleeps and blinds. Additionally, if there are control effects currently active on the target, subsequent control effects add a smaller amount of resolve based on the strength and remaining duration of those effects. Gaining resolve points fills up the character’s resolve with a purple bar. Once the resolve bar fills completely up the bar turns white and the character becomes immune to further control effects. When all current control effects expire the resolve bar begins to decay to zero resolve, at which point the character once again can be controlled and the building process starts anew.”

I played SWTOR for a while and the system was working well. In 1v1 situations disables had impact and were useful, but in teamfights ppl started to have full immunity so cc chains didn’t work anymore.

Similar system could be added to Guild Wars as well so that additional disables, after a certain point in a fight, would have no effect. This way you would have to make every cc count and not just spam them.

Of course SWTOR is a completely different game and I don’t know how similar system would work in GW, but I think it would be worth looking at.

Swotor had a huge amount of more issues that kind of relegated the resolve system to useless in many cases. In some cases entire AC’s were built around soft and hard cc with insane burst capability. which could literally kill a player before resolve filled entirely

DoingDaMinimum.4530:

Swotor had a huge amount of more issues that kind of relegated the resolve system to useless in many cases.

Then please enlighten us. I played that game for 3.5 years and competed in 6 ranked seasons on top of 8v8 ranked. The post 1.4 resolve system was one of the best things in that game. And no it wasn’t useless, and at high levels of play (at least before 4.0 killed high level play) much of strategy was about maximizing CC or in the case of hardswitches juking people with resolve.
Heck after 3.0 resolve was the one dependable thing in the game because it was the only thing that wasn’t buggy.

GW2 really needs to have a resolve like system, since currently there is 0 penalty to spamming CC mindlessly. CC has no strategic value because CC is dime a minute.

Although honestly with stability in place what they could just do is simply make it so that CC skills are only CC skills instead of having CC tacked onto other skills.

In some cases entire AC’s were built around soft and hard cc with insane burst capability. which could literally kill a player before resolve filled entirely

The only time a single class could solo stunlock someone to death was concealment operatives prior to 1.2. At no point since 1.2 where classes capable of doing that.

The only way you could be killed by stunlock in swtor was with hardswitches which entailed multiple players all synchronizing their burst to land in a specific window.

Yea, the high amount of hard CC in GW2 is interesting since it reminds me of how different the mechanics are from WoW PvP. (Disclaimer, I haven’t played WoW since Cata)

In GW2, you have tons of spammable short duration CC along with tons of CC evasion/stability/and stun breaks.

WoW on the other hand, had fewer CCs, but many of them lasted longer (such as Polymorph, Sap, etc.). However, you also had less CC breaks and the PvP trinket was often the primary one.

Personally, while I prefer the high intensity of GW2 play where there’s shorter cooldowns which drives more play/counterplay per fight, I think we’re at the point where it would do the game some good to slow down a bit. Not only have the changes from HoT introduced a lot of CC and counter-CC, which has escalated the power creep of this aspect, but too much of this overall also is part of the reason why GW2 is such a hard game for viewers to follow.

/my2copper

Crinn.7864:

DoingDaMinimum.4530:

Swotor had a huge amount of more issues that kind of relegated the resolve system to useless in many cases.

Then please enlighten us. I played that game for 3.5 years and competed in 6 ranked seasons on top of 8v8 ranked. The post 1.4 resolve system was one of the best things in that game. And no it wasn’t useless, and at high levels of play (at least before 4.0 killed high level play) much of strategy was about maximizing CC or in the case of hardswitches juking people with resolve.
Heck after 3.0 resolve was the one dependable thing in the game because it was the only thing that wasn’t buggy.

GW2 really needs to have a resolve like system, since currently there is 0 penalty to spamming CC mindlessly. CC has no strategic value because CC is dime a minute.

Although honestly with stability in place what they could just do is simply make it so that CC skills are only CC skills instead of having CC tacked onto other skills.

Resolve’s usefulness was dependant on whether you could survive the assault coming after the cc. Swotor had glass cannon builds that could not in this games wording “trait” out of being glass cannon thus relegating many Ac’s to non-ranked status for years.. and even still to this day. Resolve also was dependant around having stun breaker up; survive one assault get cc’ed and control destroyed shortly after.

I do like your thought on having cc only skills…and I played SWOTOR since launch on both Harby and Bastion as a Gunslinger main. I did ranked only in season 1 and 2. Oh and before ya go there about the trinity and guard and having skilled teammates. I solo queued only…no hope of guard there.

We got here for 3 reasons. No reason to write TLDRs.

1. Anet doesn’t listen to the players they should.
2. Anet listens to the players they shouldn’t.
3. Anet doesn’t listen or play their own game.

Thanks for the post OP

Crinn.7864:

DoingDaMinimum.4530:

Swotor had a huge amount of more issues that kind of relegated the resolve system to useless in many cases.

Then please enlighten us. I played that game for 3.5 years and competed in 6 ranked seasons on top of 8v8 ranked. The post 1.4 resolve system was one of the best things in that game. And no it wasn’t useless, and at high levels of play (at least before 4.0 killed high level play) much of strategy was about maximizing CC or in the case of hardswitches juking people with resolve.
Heck after 3.0 resolve was the one dependable thing in the game because it was the only thing that wasn’t buggy.

GW2 really needs to have a resolve like system, since currently there is 0 penalty to spamming CC mindlessly. CC has no strategic value because CC is dime a minute.

Although honestly with stability in place what they could just do is simply make it so that CC skills are only CC skills instead of having CC tacked onto other skills.

In some cases entire AC’s were built around soft and hard cc with insane burst capability. which could literally kill a player before resolve filled entirely

The only time a single class could solo stunlock someone to death was concealment operatives prior to 1.2. At no point since 1.2 where classes capable of doing that.

The only way you could be killed by stunlock in swtor was with hardswitches which entailed multiple players all synchronizing their burst to land in a specific window.

Nope was it 1.5 or 2.5 they buffed concealments damage where they could literally stunlock and kill..it was definitely after 1.2. that isn’t even considering 1. and 2. anything shadow/sin ability to stunlock and kill lesser skilled players before resolve.. we could argue this all day but there is a reason both of us old SWOTOR players are on this game now…mine had to do with the never ending tweaking to already OP and infinintly bunker-able classes. what was yours? oh and there was no window …catch someone with stun-break down and it was blowout time.

DoingDaMinimum.4530:

Nope was it 1.5 or 2.5 they buffed concealments damage where they could literally stunlock and kill..it was definitely after 1.2. that isn’t even considering 1. and 2. anything shadow/sin ability to stunlock and kill lesser skilled players before resolve.. we could argue this all day but there is a reason both of us old SWOTOR players are on this game now…mine had to do with the never ending tweaking to already OP and infinintly bunker-able classes. what was yours? oh and there was no window …catch someone with stun-break down and it was blowout time.

None of your points have anything to do with the subject of CC systems. You’re complaints are because you did solo ranked (which in swtor is 4v4 deathmatch) as a gunslinger (a class that is hardcountered by stealth classes)

GW2 even with a replica resolve system would not have any of the problems you mentioned because GW2’s ranked isn’t based around deathmatch. Additionally GW2 unlike swtor doesn’t homogenize it’s classes which means GW2 doesn’t have the linear pecking order that swtor class balance has.

fyi the 2.5 conc ops buff was followed 2 weeks later by conc ops losing the stun on Hidden strike so that conc ops now have exactly 1 hard cc.

TL;DR
swtor did some things right and some things wrong. Resolve was one thing they did right, and I think GW2 would benefit greatly from some sort of similar system to discourage mindless usage of CC.

agreed that the changes in stability and CC chains made rise to bunker meta, but even before that the buff for cele amulet is at fault.

How we got here is simple: anet did not test their broken product.
This is not just about them making elite specs op when they said they would be on par with the core (i sound like a broken record), but also things that should have raised some heads during betas and development that got in the game and stayed.

I am talking about stuff like elementalist (tempest) traited protection 40% (that they have a stupid uptime of in aoe form) + frost aura 10% + geomancer’s defense 10% + stone flesh 150 armor and finally stone heart so you cannot be critically hit (tho this trait is not used at this moment, but when the bunker meta shifts to more burst guess what will hapen). How has anyone looked at this and though it is fine???

Nearly all classes have some bullkitten trait combination that lets them achieve a game breaking amount of one thing be it cc, sustain, passive mitigation or absurd damage. Some of thees come in a aoe form which should never have happened, but hey at least we got esports!! For top lolz look at the EU pvp leaderboard, i busted a lung laughing.

Did you count Jade Wind, Dragon Breath, Eye for an Eye, Temporal Rift, Surge of the Mists for the revenant CC?

I believe that one core issue about those crowd controls are the wide ridius they were given. I am looking at Jade Wind stunning for 3 seconds, deals a respectable amount of damage and is 600 radius. Same thing goes for Chill to the Bone from Reaper. Same thing goes to the Tempests shout (though feel the burn feels alright with the range, but not Aftershock). Also, I think frost aura’s radius is too much with chill dealing so much damage nowadays: if you deal damage to the enemies at 1200 range, and there was a necro + tempest, you’ll get chilled all the time for a long duration.

Bonus: “… and it would be disingenuous to count that the same as Gust…” I saw what you did there.

Alekt.5803:

Did you count Jade Wind, Dragon Breath, Eye for an Eye, Temporal Rift, Surge of the Mists for the revenant CC?

I believe that one core issue about those crowd controls are the wide ridius they were given. I am looking at Jade Wind stunning for 3 seconds, deals a respectable amount of damage and is 600 radius. Same thing goes for Chill to the Bone from Reaper. Same thing goes to the Tempests shout (though feel the burn feels alright with the range, but not Aftershock). Also, I think frost aura’s radius is too much with chill dealing so much damage nowadays: if you deal damage to the enemies at 1200 range, and there was a necro + tempest, you’ll get chilled all the time for a long duration.

Bonus: “… and it would be disingenuous to count that the same as Gust…” I saw what you did there.

I included everything in my initial count, but I forgot to include Eye for an Eye on my final list, for which I was granting Jade Wind and Temporal Rift. (I was using the Viper build as my model, which meant no staff, and Shiro or Glint, but not both.) In any case, consider Rev count up to 3.

Yeah, the AoE cc, plus all the AoE effects in general, are what really make the problem a lot bigger.

If you’re referring to my dismissal of Earth Shield: I was just trying to come up with an ability I was pretty sure no one ever used in sPvP. Guess I underestimated it.

I disagree with the notion that “mega bunkers” are caused by the extra damage some builds can do. Such a notion makes no sense. The bunker builds aren’t unkillable due to the possibility that someone in another game uses a strong DPS build.

The unkillable bunkers are caused by the fact the build exists at all. If they are unkillable by optimal top DPS build, what will the lesser builds even be able to do and in what way would the tank builds not be optimal anymore?

Life Transfer (DS #4) doesn’t require any target, nor is ground targeted. Dark Path (#2) does.

As for Thief and Daredevil especially, what they need is a bit more passive resilience to damage gained by increased healthpool or protection/other damage reduction, but absolutely no more active defenses or evasion.

As for the amount of CC on every profession, it would be fair to consider cast times and cooldowns.

Rym.1469:

Life Transfer (DS #4) doesn’t require any target, nor is ground targeted. Dark Path (#2) does.

As for Thief and Daredevil especially, what they need is a bit more passive resilience to damage gained by increased healthpool or protection/other damage reduction, but absolutely no more active defenses or evasion.

As for the amount of CC on every profession, it would be fair to consider cast times and cooldowns.

Fair enough on DS4. I was trying to suggest a difference in how they play and apply, but in the end they’re both AoE.

Unfortunately, giving Thief more survival tools in response to having given everyone else easy ways to kill Thief is exactly what bad balancing is all about. If you never shave down a bad change, you just keep piling onto a busted system.

I did look at the cooldowns, but as I noted I didn’t want to bog down an already lengthy post with excess numbers. Here’s a rough breakdown, by class, again comparing old builds to new. At the end, I’ll give cc per 59.9 seconds (why not 60? So it clears up whether or not you count, for example, a 20s cd as happening twice or three times in a minute):

I looked at cast times but did not make much of them and here’s why: There is so much AoE cc now that in a teamfight you will generally not have enough dodges to avoid it all, so you need the blocks, teleports, and stab that the ruling specs have. A lot of the abilities, new and old, have big tells (some do not). That hasn’t really changed. In a 1v1 you can do all right (though you might get decapped by some professions), but Conquest isn’t about the 1v1.