Guild Wars 2

The combo effects that you can create and finish as an individual are not the focus of this thread. Those ones you execute on your own anyway as part of your rotation if you think its worthwhile: Meaning the damage or utility you create as a result of the combo is superior to your next best option of not creating it by choosing a different rotational order of abilities. Therefore, they are more of an additional way to access that skill or effect as an individual.

The ones that are done through cross-profession combos are the biggest issue to me and the ones I want to focus on for this thread. This is because they don’t encourage any kind of team coordination and timing. Why don’t they encourage teamwork? To put it simply: It’s not worth it.

The majority of them are underwhelming in the effects they create. There are a few exceptions such as blast finishers on water fields for heals, stealth stacking duration for pvp, chaos armor, etc. The rest of the combos create effects that are already replicable with the majority of your own skills, and thus it is typically a waste of time to try and create with others instead of just spamming damage.

By players just spamming their own fields and finishers in an individual vacuum, they end up creating those combo fields anyway. So, their manifestation is many times unintended, and when created, no one cares.

The combos should be completely reworked to accomplish TWO goals:

1. Require classes to coordinate and time their abilities together to achieve them rather than creating the combos through their own damage rotation spamming. This would actually create actual and promote teamwork in the group format rather than 5 individuals who are just fighting side by side and happen to create marginal effects through spam.

2. Make the effects meaningful and strong, so that people will want to pursue them over just doing their own damage rotations!

How about all new special fields and effects if one players drops a dark field with a fire field to create a hellfire field? This Hellfire field should now offer an all new effect that is unavailable to the skills of any class on its own. Players could then use their finishers on that field to create new, powerful combos.

Or combine a water field and light field to create a Purity field to do something else that is strong and useful to the group? Or combine a dark field and chaos field to create something else?

There is so much room for depth and thoughtful play with this system and what has been implemented so far has barely scratched the surface.

Revamping this system could breathe all new life, challenge, and depth both into PVE and PVP mechanics.

I agree. I have been saying this for a while. Cross profession combos was a big factor when i got interested in the game. There are few useful ones, but all in all they are not rewarding enough.

I would like to see AOE damage nerfed in general and maybe make combos more usefull that way.
Combo fields that do fairly weak damage on their own, but with finishers they would become strong AOE’s like we see now. Imagine some of the marks/wells from necro being weaker by themselves, but with combos would spread condi’s?

Or a firefield that won’t cause burning, but when blasted would do direct damage instead?

TLDR; Bring down AOE damage across the board, bring new interesting combo’s to encourage more teamplay.

Cross Combo fields are a great way to improve teamfight in this game, so a revamp would be very good.

Combo fields is one of those parts of the game that could provide us with more depth and a higher skill ceiling (team-wise). This could also be used to promote diversity by giving more combo’s that are either support/dps.

At the moment there are only initiators and finishers. But why don’t we expand on this?

- Create more initiators and more finishers. Put them on all the different weapons and give them some unique ‘outcomes’.

- Make it more complex. Why not add a third or even a fourth (Reminds me of getting your combo’s off in Tekken :p) combo ‘part’.

For example: An initiator (1) + an enhancer (2) + a finisher (3).

(1) —→ the water field of ranger.
(2) --→ Sanctuary of guardian.
(3) —→ Any blast finishers inside the sanctuary on the water field.

Outcome —> The sanctuary gets enhanced. It becomes bigger. (As big as the node)

Now this is just an example but it would be fun to have lots of possibilities and see them more in action. This needs to be very well spread over the different classes or you get the same problem as now where you are pidgeonholed into stuff.

This should be part of making the skill ceiling higher team-wise and creating/allowing more synergy in teams. Maybe even creating some different team specs based on combos (a la gw1).

Though this more team-based, the individual skill ceiling should be higher too. To accomplish this lots of RNG and passive play needs to be removed or changed into things that allow reaction. And we need more distinct animations.

Combo fields are already overpowered in large scale WvWvW battles. You can get 25 stack of might from fire fields to your entire zerg. You can have tons of area healing from water fields negating enemy arrow cart fire. You can give very long time (1+ minute) swiftness to your entire zerg from lightning fields. Need I go on?

Buffing these combo fields would just give even more excessive power to zerging in WvWvW.

So far there has been extremely little split between WvWvW and spvp/tpvp skills and the splits don’t in fact many any sense whatsoever:
- dhuumfire does 2 s burning in tpvp, but full 4 secs in WvWvW (where burning is as effective and you are fighting against other human players)
- revealed is 4 s in pvp, but 3 s in WvWvW (even though stealth is much more powerful in WvWvW)

There is no lack damage in WvWvW. Killing is easy (unless enemy just trolls e.g. using constant shadow stepping + stealth). Please do not buff the damage multipliers or add more damage effects as this has already went too far.

What we could have:
- some additional skills could become finishers e.g. blunderbuss (engi rifle #3) would be a logical blast finisher and confusing images (mesmer scepter #3) would be a logical projectile finisher and so on

Special Field;
Why not overlap all 9 fields and create a permanent ultimate field that instant kills players! I think thats what everyone wants.

I agree with Deniara in that adding additional effects to the current combo fields would probably make them imbalanced, as well as increase skill lag due to the increased math involved. However adding the current finisher types to existing weapons could possibly make them imbalanced.

Perhaps a solution is to add new types of combo fields and finishers to the game that encourage other tactics. For example, a short duration, cone-shaped combo fields that results in a stronger effect when a projectile or leap finisher passes through it within the correct radius. Or adding a combo field type that inflicts torment. Or add some form of channeled finishers for skills such as kill-shot that provide a stronger effect than projectile finishers.

Combo fields are already overpowered in large scale WvWvW battles. You can get 25 stack of might from fire fields to your entire zerg. You can have tons of area healing from water fields negating enemy arrow cart fire. You can give very long time (1+ minute) swiftness to your entire zerg from lightning fields. Need I go on?

Other then those 3, combofields are not (intentional) used at all in wvw, not only are the effects of other fields underwhelming, they also overwrite the 3 good ones, which leads to stupid situations, where ppl can’t use there skills, because they have the wrong fieldtype and would be counterproduktive (for example Necro’s Well of Blood as a groupheal overwriting waterfields).
Personally i think those 3 need to be nerfed, and others buffed. They are way too strong (especially fire and water) and result in extremely dull gameplay, with very little communication needed:
Cuddle → Use Field → Spam Blast Fininsher.

Zzod.5791:

The combo effects that you can create and finish as an individual are not the focus of this thread. Those ones you execute on your own anyway as part of your rotation if you think its worthwhile: Meaning the damage or utility you create as a result of the combo is superior to your next best option of not creating it by choosing a different rotational order of abilities. Therefore, they are more of an additional way to access that skill or effect as an individual.

The ones that are done through cross-profession combos are the biggest issue to me and the ones I want to focus on for this thread. This is because they don’t encourage any kind of team coordination and timing. Why don’t they encourage teamwork? To put it simply: It’s not worth it.

The majority of them are underwhelming in the effects they create. There are a few exceptions such as blast finishers on water fields for heals, stealth stacking duration for pvp, chaos armor, etc. The rest of the combos create effects that are already replicable with the majority of your own skills, and thus it is typically a waste of time to try and create with others instead of just spamming damage.

By players just spamming their own fields and finishers in an individual vacuum, they end up creating those combo fields anyway. So, their manifestation is many times unintended, and when created, no one cares.

The combos should be completely reworked to accomplish TWO goals:

1. Require classes to coordinate and time their abilities together to achieve them rather than creating the combos through their own damage rotation spamming. This would actually create actual and promote teamwork in the group format rather than 5 individuals who are just fighting side by side and happen to create marginal effects through spam.

2. Make the effects meaningful and strong, so that people will want to pursue them over just doing their own damage rotations!

How about all new special fields and effects if one players drops a dark field with a fire field to create a hellfire field? This Hellfire field should now offer an all new effect that is unavailable to the skills of any class on its own. Players could then use their finishers on that field to create new, powerful combos.

Or combine a water field and light field to create a Purity field to do something else that is strong and useful to the group? Or combine a dark field and chaos field to create something else?

There is so much room for depth and thoughtful play with this system and what has been implemented so far has barely scratched the surface.

Revamping this system could breathe all new life, challenge, and depth both into PVE and PVP mechanics.

Very good post

It can’t work that way. Only the last created combo field will apply to projectiles, leaps, whirls, blasts etc.

Because there are several fields that can be up at same time for peeps to whirl / leap / shoot / blast etc and would create an immense mess (ie: you drop a fire field on node fight, thief drops smoke field, and mesmer ethereal and you want to get a buff from this, but your ranger gets trained hard and needs to use his healing spring etc).