Guild Wars 2

Immunity timers.

In pve the Control and Condition systems are more manageable. In pvp (wvw and spvp), though, they have been poorly implemented because our characters are continuously hit with CC effects.

What I’m proposing below is to NOT give immunity to the damage component from weapons and skills that produce CC, I’m saying that the status effects need to be more manageable for players in pvp in this CC heavy game.

The general idea for CC effects in pvp environments…

“Every time a character recovers from a Hold, Immobilize, Disorient, Sleep, or Fear status, that character becomes immune to all five of those effects from other players for 15 seconds. Every time a character suffers a Knockdown, Knockback, or Knockup effect, that character becomes immune to all three of those effects from other players for 10 seconds. These two timers are independent. It should be noted that Confuse effects, while technically mezzes, are on a separate 15-second timer than the other mezzes listed above.”

So let’s tailor the above quote for GW2… the basic gist is that a character goes on an immunity timer to all “hard” Control effects after the effect ends or the player uses a Stun Breaker. Moa should go into this “hard” Control category as well.

For “soft” Conditions there are two ways to do it… First is an immunity timer on a 1 cleanse-1 condition basis, or an immunity timer to groups of “soft” Conditions. Some grouping examples below…

Group 1… Blind, confusion, vulnerability and weakness.

Group 2… Chilled, crippled, immobilize and slow.

Group 3… Bleeding, burning, poison and torment.

And again, the main damage components from weapons and skills that produce these Control and Condition effects remain unchanged.

Doing it these ways allows for multiple CC skills to still be used, but it allows for some breathing room from these effects. All “hard” CC is either put on a timer naturally when ended or when manually broken. Individual or group “soft” CC are put on a timer once actively cleansed by the player or another player. Visual indicators can be assigned to the UI so both player(s) and attacker(s) know what immunity timers are in effect.

There are other factors that we can look at too like initial weapon and skill damages and their cool downs, adding an initial damage component to certain CC skills so they are still viable to use, CC durations, reevaluate CC removal skills… but this would be the core way CC functions in pvp and the rest can be looked at and modified.

Thoughts?

The devs chose to include stunbreaks and stability as hard counters to CC skills and you can evade/blind/block a lot of them; some games don’t have these options (or they’re much more limited than in GW2) and use diminishing returns/immunities instead.

I don’t think we need both.

This isn’t even a CC heavy game lol, most CC is so short it’s not even an issue its just for interrupts, decals and stopping a res or stomp. Most other games give you a cc break on a 2 min cd lol, we have stability which eats a cc per stack and it’s pretty easy to get into your build somehow or from a team mate.

The “omg so much cc” is hyperbole at best.

Valkyriez.6578:

This isn’t even a CC heavy game lol, most CC is so short it’s not even an issue its just for interrupts, decals and stopping a res or stomp. Most other games give you a cc break on a 2 min cd lol, we have stability which eats a cc per stack and it’s pretty easy to get into your build somehow or from a team mate.

The “omg so much cc” is hyperbole at best.

DAOC had 90s mezz and 11s stun + immunities and purge on (huge) timer, yet I was less annoyed by DAOC CC…here I often feel like pinball ball once my stability expires

Edit: there were also pretty long roots, but I forgot timings on those (blush)

Also, despite my GW2 guardian having 15 times more hitpoints than my DAOC cleric, TTK is like 3-4 times shorter in GW2 making for less fun and much shorter fights

Valkyriez.6578:

This isn’t even a CC heavy game lol, most CC is so short it’s not even an issue its just for interrupts, decals and stopping a res or stomp. Most other games give you a cc break on a 2 min cd lol, we have stability which eats a cc per stack and it’s pretty easy to get into your build somehow or from a team mate.

The “omg so much cc” is hyperbole at best.

The issue is that CC effects are short duration yet they can be continuously used over and over. There are many situations where you can cleanse or use stability, but then a few seconds later you are hit by these effects again.

Also, professions and weapon and skill and trait designs were made for pve in mind. You have to look at the bigger pictures.

Learn to block, blind, dodge and positioning and stop beat against the DH walls.
Diminishing returns – bad system overall, designed for much long CC than we have. 5-7 secs hard CC with one skill easy in WoW for example.

Theologus.7085:

Learn to block, blind, dodge and positioning and stop beat against the DH walls.
Diminishing returns – bad system overall, designed for much long CC than we have. 5-7 secs hard CC with one skill easy in WoW for example.

Personally, I think GW2 system is fine for pvp, but it totally sucks in wvw.

DAOC system for example allowed teams of 8 to sometimes win against 50+ big but dumb zergs

Swagger.1459:

Valkyriez.6578:

This isn’t even a CC heavy game lol, most CC is so short it’s not even an issue its just for interrupts, decals and stopping a res or stomp. Most other games give you a cc break on a 2 min cd lol, we have stability which eats a cc per stack and it’s pretty easy to get into your build somehow or from a team mate.

The “omg so much cc” is hyperbole at best.

The issue is that CC effects are short duration yet they can be continuously used over and over. There are many situations where you can cleanse or use stability, but then a few seconds later you are hit by these effects again.

Also, professions and weapon and skill and trait designs were made for pve in mind. You have to look at the bigger pictures.

I do look at the big picture, and I’ve got a few games under my belt to know that CC isn’t really an issue. Whilst CC is rather plentiful, a lot of it is soft CC and stability is t exactly hard to find in 90% of builds and use it at the right time. The game is about capturing points, i.e knocking people off those points to capture it. It’s a required mechanic and works pretty well. There’s more then just stability, blind, block, aegis, dodge roll etc to avoid cc effects.

Every build should have a stability source (except thief I think), a condi cleanse and a stun break. That’s the trade off each player has to make to fit those into the build.

Valkyriez.6578:

Swagger.1459:

Valkyriez.6578:

This isn’t even a CC heavy game lol, most CC is so short it’s not even an issue its just for interrupts, decals and stopping a res or stomp. Most other games give you a cc break on a 2 min cd lol, we have stability which eats a cc per stack and it’s pretty easy to get into your build somehow or from a team mate.

The “omg so much cc” is hyperbole at best.

The issue is that CC effects are short duration yet they can be continuously used over and over. There are many situations where you can cleanse or use stability, but then a few seconds later you are hit by these effects again.

Also, professions and weapon and skill and trait designs were made for pve in mind. You have to look at the bigger pictures.

I do look at the big picture, and I’ve got a few games under my belt to know that CC isn’t really an issue. Whilst CC is rather plentiful, a lot of it is soft CC and stability is t exactly hard to find in 90% of builds and use it at the right time. The game is about capturing points, i.e knocking people off those points to capture it. It’s a required mechanic and works pretty well. There’s more then just stability, blind, block, aegis, dodge roll etc to avoid cc effects.

Every build should have a stability source (except thief I think), a condi cleanse and a stun break. That’s the trade off each player has to make to fit those into the build.

I have two decades and hundreds of games under mine so I’m pretty well versed.

The issues is that all control effects and conditions are unending in combat. Nothing of what I suggested completely takes them away, just makes them more manageable in pvp combat. Direct impact damage output is still there and perhaps increased in some cases, DoT damage is slightly lessened and side effects from CC skills become a bit more reasonable.

Your bolded part… Spvp is not the only pvp mode. There is rvr here. Mass combat with multiple players attacking and tossing damage plus DoT plus control effects plus condition effects at once… Also, there are some builds that can just continuously layer conditions to a silly degree.

There has to be a balance. You can’t have “stunlock” like in other games and you can’t have players always just be plagued with effects over and over like here. I appreciate that the devs did not go the “stunlock” route for an individual character to be able to do, but that does happen in ways, along with unending cc effects, outside of 1v1 all the time.

The competitive side of the game is poor because profession designs are subpar. Also, continued profession development and balancing is poor. The original vision of professions, and certain combat designs, are not working well and lots of things need to be reevaluated if gw2 hopes to improve the game overall.

Professions need a revamp to define roles better. HP need adjusting for the high damage meta. Many weapon skills need rework to be more competitive with other weapons. Traits are a completely jumbled mess. The CC system needs a review. Stealth needs a to be handled differently because it should not be used mid combat, particularly with the poor counter stealth in the game. Thief needs to be studier outside of the stealth mechanics… Each profession needs to be looked at for changes and additions… Lots of things on the list to make the game better.

Also, there are enough movement imairment CC skills in the game and the combat movement suppression is awful. It kills the freedom of movement that the game was built on.

Serval.6458:

The devs chose to include stunbreaks and stability as hard counters to CC skills and you can evade/blind/block a lot of them; some games don’t have these options (or they’re much more limited than in GW2) and use diminishing returns/immunities instead.

I don’t think we need both.

Counters to CC or heavy CC team exist.

Since you have a great experiences into thousands of pvp games since 20 years, I will let you discover how to counter it by yourself.

One of the worse CC meta was the 3 turret engi team. In MISTCORE, we did found many compositions to neutralize all that CC.

More than half the classes bring strong AOE counter to CC.

you kids need to play mmorpgs where stun lasts 15 second and there is no way to break it without help from someone else

Lexander.4579:

you kids need to play mmorpgs where stun lasts 15 second and there is no way to break it without help from someone else

Once I accepted for a fact that noone will ever come close to DAOC, I started to enjoy other MMOs better…well, at least until this season 2 pvp frustration, its really unbearable