Guild Wars 2

So stunbreakers are an important part of GW2 PvP but they really don’t seem to get enough attention. They’re often just forgotten about during balance changes and community discussions even though they create huge changes in the meta.

So why are there uneven amounts of stunbreakers? Why do rangers get “4” while mesmers get 6? Why do some professions have stunbreaks on all of their useless utility skills while others have them on extremely good utility skills? How can we fix stunbreakers?

The thing is stunbreakers are worthless in some matchups and almost vital in others. Because of this a stunbreaker is only worth running when it comes tied to a good/great skill. If the passive gain from getting a better utility is larger than the active loss that comes during the few seconds of damage taken during a stun then you swap your stunbreakers out which limits active and competitive play.

It’s not enough to just throw stunbreakers on skills randomly and spread them out. You have to actually take the time to place them on viable skills which I don’t think was done during the last patch.

Yeah you can (and I have plenty of times) run without a stunbreaker but when you come up against a matchup that really requires a stunbreaker it feels like RNG and buildwars over player skill. Do you think mace warriors exploded in popularity because they suddenly became better at fighting cripple and chill and gained a ton of sustain? No people just stopped running stunbreakers since cantrips lost them on ele and elixer R lost it on engineer and necromancers never had any good stunbreak options to begin with but are popular now. The more good skills loose their stunbreakers the larger the window for cheese builds that take advantage of this fact and the more passive play takes over active play.

How could we change stunbreakers? What are some ideas/options? I’d love for you guys to tell me but here are some of my ideas.

1 Make an even number of stunbreak options for each class and spread them out in a way that actually makes sense rationally. For example frenzy shouldn’t have a stunbreak because you usually stunbreak right before you’re going to get hit with a burst in order to get out of the way and dodge. Not to mention stances make up 3/6 of the stunbreakers available to warrior. As another example thumper turret shouldn’t have a stunbreak on the utility belt since while the turret is out (IE when you would need it) it’s hidden away by the turrets explosion. Stunbreaks are a defensive ability that is generally needed mid fight.

2 Remove stunbreaks entirely from utility skills and give every player a stunbreak button on a medium sized cooldown. For example 25 seconds. This way every single build has true access to a stunbreaker even if the utilities you want to specialize in (like spirits on ranger) don’t have any.

Weapon skills seems like the obvious one each main hand or 2 handed weapon should have a stun breaker tied into a skill.

Actually elite slot should just be opened up to put normal utilities into it.

I don’t like the idea of having stunbreaks be tied to weapon skills since most weapon sets have fast cooldowns on all of their abilities and it doesn’t work with some professions like thief and elementalist.

Placing stunbreaker on weapon sets is stupid. If else, no weapon set should have such an advantage (usually on short cd as well)
That being said, I agree that some skills make no sense as a stunbreaker (speaking for my class, Glyph of Elemental Power) or are just too weak to justify its usage (Mesmer’s Signet of Midnight, for example)