More incentives to use the combo system.
Theyhave to be careful not to make them too powerful though or else the zergs in WvW will be firing off dozens of combos every second and putting out insane damage/effects/etc…
Maybe if they had them split in effectiveness between sPvP and WvW?
I really like the Smoke Screen → Projectile or Leap finisher. I use those all the time on my thief, but again, those are created and activated solely by me.
Just give things time to settle. I think combos are not really meant to be the focal-point of team-build making, but a thoughtful secondary concern. As things become more steady you’ll see players looking to take advantage of combos to gain that little bit of extra advantage.
Combos I think can work well in their current state when used properly but the game is new and people haven’t figured everything out yet. But there are definitely other combos that work well aside from the few mentioned and one thing that’s great about them is you can achieve various additional effects without having to carry certain skills on your bar.
You mentioned the Chaos Armor but that field can also produce a lot of stacks of confusion if people in your team have projectile or whirl finishers and suddenly your target is at risk of blasting himself to death. Or if you have an Ele putting down a Lightning field, you can stack Vulnerability on a person really fast and all of a sudden your target’s defenses are useless. Or have a guardian throw down some light fields and people can save their cleanses when facing condition heavy opponents. I do think some other combos that produce things like Chill or Poison are probably less useful for PvP than PvE since they stack in duration and not intensity, so people can just cleanse it and be done with it.
But combos do give your team the chance to do more with less essentially – you can use one spec and combos give you the chance to apply additional effects that your one skill alone can’t provide. It’s just a matter of finding the best situations to use them in and in those cases I think it can give an extra advantage that is probably worth it. I agree with the above poster on this though – I don’t think it’s supposed to be the big focal point, but instead something that more experienced teams can take advantage of to give them the upper hand.
The short durations of the buff/debuff finishers are problematic. 3 seconds is not exactly a lengthy amount of time. Retal or Might finishes aren’t worth much unless you essentially stack blast finishes in the field just to build a big stack of it.
Which of course brings us to sPvP/tPvP vs WvWvW. WvWvW zergs have a MUCH easier time building gigantihuge stacks of retal or whatever else in a field from sheer numbers.
I really think combos should have a far more significant effect, but also have diminishing returns. Like, each time a combo is triggered, the field becomes a little weaker, so the next finisher produces less of an effect, etc.
This may require some rewriting of combo effects so that each of them is scalable in this way.
To me, that’s the best solution for a game which has both small groups and massive zergs.