Guild Wars 2

Sure hit 5 targets take 5 ticks of retal.
Hit 5 targets, 3x each in 1 second? Should take 1 freaking tick. They should’ve moved if they didn’t want to eat the Flurry.

Honestly retal damage output on multi-hit attacks isn’t right. Not really because of any issue on an individual level, but as far as my MMO experience and gaming experience in general has shown me, sitting in aoe’s is your fault and you shouldn’t do it.
There is a concept of zoning, there is an idea that people should not sit in aoes, and especially not if that aoe ticks multiple times.
Don’t know why but ,if you’re dropping out good aoe/cleave damage and the opponents are not sensible enough to….move, you’re the one who’s really getting slapped and frankly It doesn’t make sense for poor positioning to be as rewarding as it currently can be to multi-hit attacks.

Eg. A firestorm if I recall surpasses the aoe limit hits 9 times. Assume just 5 people are hit, if these people dont move they’ve allowed an ele to have 45 ticks of firestorm occur on them. If they’re under retal this elementalist is getting butchered because they can’t position. Honestly if an elementalist gets 45 ticks of firestorm on your entire party, the game should just stop. Shouldn’t even continue, ele and his team wins, no questions asked.
Pistol whips? 3 people? 8 cleave hits + 1 pistol hit? lets say 5 sword hits thats 15 ticks of retals not counting the pistol hit, because these people cannot position themself,
Are.You.Serious?
Against 1 person? Retal is fine, annoying damage that adds up, but nothing silly. If I hit 3 or 5 people 1 time? Annoying, hurts but whatever it’s one time. I hit them multiple times because they’re dense and Anets punching me in the face.
Why I don’t even know. Flanking strike isn’t cleave boon removal anymore, Bountiful theft isn’t aoe. Sigil of null isn’t aoe. Spinal shivers isn’t. There is what 3 skills in this game that aoe remove boons for a team on 2 professions?

Reality check regardless of whether aoe is too strong, retal shouldn’t tick frequently for opponents who can’t space themself. Shoot something like “You can’t take more than 10 ticks of retal every 2s,” like Soul reaping only proccing thrice every 15s.
/rant.

Retaliation is simply flawed in its design.
Taking just power in account, it is useless versus bursts and absurdely strong versus weak multi-hit skills.
Using the flamethrower autoattack is a suicide in pvp. Too weak versus a single person, should be used versus two or three opponent to be decent, but by doing so any area retaliation – and there are quite many ways to gain that – means killing yourself in a couple autoattacks. Heh, even a single opponent with retaliation is enough to make that attack useless.

The idea of retaliation good. Ideally you want a potential damager to stop attacking a target that has the retaliation buff on. I’m guessing that was the intended effect.

But, here is the flaw in its design if that were indeed the intended effect. While someone has the retaliation buff on they are free to DPS while their opponent cannot.

The problem is that it doesn’t take in account the real damage done by the skill, just the power of the attacker.
A single strong attack can do much more damage than a weak multi-hit attack (like the flamethrower’s one), but the latter will take a lot more damage from retaliation.

Skill wise there is only two relyable AoE sources of retaliation and only one skill that gives more than 5 seconds. Also i have yet to witness a tpvp where my enemy bothered to stack retaliation via combos.
So the only thing i m reading here is that there is people that don’t even bother to see what their enemy does, they just want to keep spamming attacks till the fights won.

What i want to say is: If you keep spamming AoE while retaliation is applied on your enemies its your own mistake

yes its so rare that a blast finisher is used on a light field. basically never happens in mid fights

Stacking on purpose is different from being lucky enough that the oldest field you hit is a light field once the fight started and you have tons of fields under yourself

Retaliation is a bad mechanic in general. I don’t understand why getting hit is a viable long-term strategy in this game. It’s especially bad that it punishes lots of small hits instead of one big hit and is completely unmitigable.

Fast Asleep.8475:

Skill wise there is only two relyable AoE sources of retaliation and only one skill that gives more than 5 seconds. Also i have yet to witness a tpvp where my enemy bothered to stack retaliation via combos.
So the only thing i m reading here is that there is people that don’t even bother to see what their enemy does, they just want to keep spamming attacks till the fights won.

What i want to say is: If you keep spamming AoE while retaliation is applied on your enemies its your own mistake

If you’re standing in aoes/cleaves that are multi-hit attacks and such give you numerous time to move out of the effect instead of taking full damage, and you stay inside. You’re making a mistake. If 3+ members of your team is doing this? This should be a costly mistake. It can often be not because the attacker is getting ripped apart for a teams poor positioning. Poor positioning is literally the kind of situation where you should be rewarded the most and yet retal disproportionately discriminates multi-hit attacks.

What I want to say is: If you’re a sensible player, position yourself well whether in a team or your solo que, you generally dismiss the idea of making the heinous mistake to be caught up in multi-hit aoe/cleaves for their full duration. You’re to smart for that, I would think, but somehow if it happens you feel that the inability to punish because of group retal is fine because you personally do not encounter retaliation on multiple targets. The reality is, if you’re afraid of multi-hit aoe damage the attacks happen over a period of time destroying your team don’t cling side by side. Move.

I find it odd though this idea that I haven’t watched the field. Retal hasn’t caused a death in quite a long, long time. All it’s done is ceased an assault, where they’re poorly positioned and you have to let them go scot free, because you’ll cause 27-28 hits for about 15-30k dmg divided amongst the 3 after 2 seconds. How someone taking 27 strikes of retaliation because you cannot position seems proportionate to you, I have literally no clue. I’d think to most players taking 27 strikes of retal damage in about 2 seconds is crazy and they simple won’t do it. They’ll stop the attack, or just not even take the weapon or utility skill in the first place. Taking 8 on an individual? No problem, got a heal skill, got some vitality and I’ll just dodge they’re skills so it’s primarily retal I eat. Hit 5 people? huge problem. Especially if you have an aoe that ticks for multiple attacks but you cannot cancel it once laid. Brb they sitting in your attack and you’re dying because they don’t feel like moving out of it. Wut?
Retal puts out relatively insignificant damage numbers where it should put something that is felt, and outrageous output where it should not.
There’s only 3 ways to look at it
1) Retal itself is not in proportion
2) We need more aoe boon removal then Mindstab, null field, Mind slash, Well of corruption. So that group defense tactics are matched well by group utility of that nature.
3) Multi-hit attacks have to have their damage pumped up significantly so you “really” cannot sit in it, and retals damage is counterbalanced by people never sitting in these attacks to make it tick in the first place.

Personally I think Retal just ticks too much in multi-hit situations. When the situations when multi-hit shines (hitting 3-5 targets) means those targets made a positioning mistake.

I agree. Flame aura has a 1 second internal cooldown. Retaliation should as well.

Try playing a trap ranger and looking at your death reports. Retaliation is almost always stacked into the tens of thousands. That’s why rangers are stuck at homepoint in tPvP because they are simply not viable at midpoint when every team in the game runs a guardian bunker with aoe retaliation.

Seems like retaliation is more effective against condition builds that need to keep hitting to reapply bleeds etc. than it is against power/burst builds, which is what I thought the original intention behind retaliation was.

Retal would be a better mechanic if it provided a flat damage removal aspect, rather than a passive source of damage. It would provide protection against small attacks while not promoting passive play.

I’ve had many fights wherein I’m not being hit at all, but I take 12-16k worth of retal damage, with no solution other than to stop doing anything, which forces me to disengage and get out of combat healing to proc. I can’t remove the buff, and in a fight on mid, there’s going to be enough blasts to keep retal consistently on a number of targets.

If I detonate a clusterbomb ontop of a group of people, I get hit for retal 3x times. In situations where 2 people are ressing someone, retal is up and I’m cleaving I will take 2500~ damage per shot. In those cases, I generally don’t split, and instead still end up taking approximately 800 × 4 shots during my cleave. The downside is that the non-cleaved shots do slightly less damage, take longer to land and are more mitigated by aegis applications.

That said, I think retaliation is a very poor mechanic because it promotes passive play. Most classes simply do not have the variety in their setups to switch from short quick attacks to big ones. Clusterbombs are a rare example of where there is actual counterplay, but in general the priority in a cleaving scenario is to put as much pressure on a corpse as possible regardless of damage intake, so the tradeoff often becomes irrelevant.

I don’t think an ICD is a good way to go on Retaliation.

This is actually a way to punish the overkill use of AoE attacks that is very effective. You can cancel cast channelled/multi-hit skills to avoid retaliation damage, so I don’t think there is a problem there. It might be better served to return a percentage of damage taken rather than being a flat damage per hit so that it effects classes with access to single hit killers better, but then it becomes a difficult debate of how to scale it or if it should scale at all.

Manuhell.2759:

Retaliation is simply flawed in its design.
Taking just power in account, it is useless versus bursts and absurdely strong versus weak multi-hit skills.
Using the flamethrower autoattack is a suicide in pvp. Too weak versus a single person, should be used versus two or three opponent to be decent, but by doing so any area retaliation – and there are quite many ways to gain that – means killing yourself in a couple autoattacks. Heh, even a single opponent with retaliation is enough to make that attack useless.

Ye because Burst is strong right now (Warriors) and not multiple small hit builds. Heheheh.

A-Net better reduces the amount of AoE-Skillz, instead of nerfing retaliation due to AoE-spammers complaining about it.

Change Retaliation to act more like Aegis.

One hit removes it, base damage of 1000.
Damage formula of 1000 + 0.067 x Power. (1134 at 2000 Power).
Most skills grant around 3 seconds of Retaliation and would now grant this single charge of Retaliation for 3 seconds.

Gaining multiple sources of Retaliation without being hit would only add to the duration, it would still only have 1 charge.

Symbol of Wrath would add 1s of Retaliation every pulse but if no one attacked then when the symbol finished there would just be 1s of Retaliation left and counting down.

This works well to advance AoE mechanics too as each charge of Retaliation can only hit one person.
So even if you lay Symbol of Wrath down inside a bunch of people while they are hitting you only one person will remove the Retaliation each time it was added by the Symbol and it could be a different person each time.

It would make Retaliation more tactical in it’s use and therefore also create a more tactical decision to look out for it and plan your attacks, multi-hit attacks are now punished less and high damage attacks take more than they currently do.

For example:
Whirling Wrath makes 14 hits and takes about 2s to complete, currently if I stand on top of someone with 3s of Retaliation and use it I will take 2926 damage in Retaliation.
With the new system I propose I would take one hit for around 1100 and the Retaliation is removed.

I think this would be much better.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

A-Net better reduces the amount of AoE-Skillz, instead of nerfing retaliation due to AoE-spammers complaining about it.

Yup

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

A-Net better reduces the amount of AoE-Skillz, instead of nerfing retaliation due to AoE-spammers complaining about it.

Reducing the amount of aoe skills doesn’t change what’s actually there, that retal scales outrageously with multi-hits.

Anet said awhile ago they were going to change aoe and frankly I wonder if they’re ever going to, but lettuce be serious.
Retal does 1) little for single target single hits, not a real problem
2) significantly more for single targets multi hits, fine we cancel the channel.
3) More or less the same as a single target multi hit for multi-target single hit aoe.
4) Outrageous damage for multi-hit single-target when generally the damage output does not justify the retal they take and the idea of “don’t clump” generally implies they’re the ones who shouldn’t be clumping.

Confusion is a similar threat but condition cleanse is such a reasonable response it’s fine. Group Retal is discouraging the entire reason of bringing these skills, when the group fight is when they should be at their most relevant, not the 1v1’s on back point.
Though passive offense is boring, retal itself is fine on an individual level, the simple x3 to x5 scaling it does is nuts.

Retaliation is working as intended. There are classes in the game that remove boons. This is a team game, so if you attack 5 people alone and they are smart enough to just sit in the AoE and kill you with retal its your fault only. Take some class in your team that remove boons and see if they stand in your aoes without retaliation.

silentnight warrior.2714:

Retaliation is working as intended. There are classes in the game that remove boons. This is a team game, so if you attack 5 people alone and they are smart enough to just sit in the AoE and kill you with retal its your fault only. Take some class in your team that remove boons and see if they stand in your aoes without retaliation.

Addressed brah.
Out of 8, there are 2 who remove boons in aoe. Out of the two if I recall off the top of my head, Necro has 1 skill. We’re talking about approx 4 skills in the game to deal with this. If I say remove a boon myself then its two ticks of retal. Note if your prof does not have this capability (and since only really 4 profs can and engi’s certainly aren’t adept at it), gl with retal.
With a 5 party limit, this is a fairly “why bother” suggestion, when you can simply not take professions or weapon sets that are smothered by retal, that don’t put out enough damage to justify the threat of self-destruction or the relative down-time while they wait for retal to disperse.
But again this is exactly what happens opponents are mis-positioned, there isn’t enough aoe boon removal (which is fine by me), especially if cover boons like swiftness/aegis/might/fury are thrown into the mix over top of it.So you end up resorting to other measures, that frankly garner the question “why did you bring this in the first place?”

I’ve solved the problem: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Retribution