Guild Wars 2

Pretty much everyone goes for berserker gear first from the moment they reach the level cup, and I don’t blame them. When you want to speed-run a dungeon path for the 50th time, you want to take down the bosses as fast as possible to go on with your life. It’s not like people don’t try other builds, but the damage output is clearly the primary focus here.
On the other hand, In most of the bosses, the time works against you, by having bosses leave on Time over, or being vulnerable for only small periods.

Here are some ways to encourage build diversity.

Time should be on your side.
Have bosses become weaker as time passes, playing a game of survival with the players.
For example: Have a Boss going on some kind of rampage with increased Attack and immunity to most incoming attacks for a certain amount of time. Once the boss becomes soft again, there shouldn’t be a timer for him being in Vulnerable mode, but instead a percentage of health.

Environmental weapons with fixed damage.
Have environmental weapons scattered around with fixed damage damage. These tools will have fixed damage output and will deal medium or heavy damage compare to what you are dealing your self. They don’t have to be necessary for the boss to fall.

Conjured weapons to have creator’s damage output when others are using them.
Don’t know if this already works, but we’ll have a new group strategy here! One player will be a glass cannon that produces extremely powerful environmental weapons for other players, and the rest will be tanks that get their DPS from them.

Allow more condition stacks on bosses.
I made a topic about this some time ago. While I understand that an increased condition stack will weigh the internet connection required, I can’t see why it can’t be done just on champions and bosses. Doubling the cap just on those, will be as if you are adding an extra enemy on the world, It’s rare to have more than 5-10 on a map, and they are the main offenders when it comes to condition limits becoming a problem.

High DPS boss, very interuptable.
Have a couple of bosses have supper strong hits that can one-shot players, but make them very vulnerable against Control effects and/or Conditions such as launch.
That means that players can stun-lock, blind or weaken certain bosses, that would otherwise one-shot them as a strategy. And by that, I don’t mean having some environmental mumbo jumbo with exclusive debuffs for only that particular boss. IMO, all bosses should become a little less resistant to Control effects, to make the control role in the party more obvious and useful.

Bosses with perma Retaliation, effected by players defense.
This will force players to find a fine balance between attack and defense. Glass cannons will be forced to reduced their damage output because their fragile characters can’t survive their own DPS.

Don’t spread the above strategies.
Instead, have entire dungeon paths being based on non-DPS tactics and have players prepare accordingly for that particular path. Don’t force players to carry 3 sets of Armour, just because a single enemy in that path is resistant to DPS builds…

Any other opinions and strategies?

Basically, it requires a complete redesign of their combat system to make support roles worth more. I, for one, definitely welcome this since I have gone against convention and made supporting characters. Unfortunately they’re simply not very good in general because the game doesn’t support their use in any meaningful way.

I like most of them, especially the Conjure weapon.

I disagree with environmental weapons. I rather not have them at all.

Bosses with perma Retaliation, effected by players defense.
This will force players to find a fine balance between attack and defense. Glass cannons will be forced to reduced their damage output because their fragile characters can’t survive their own DPS.

I completely disagree with this one.

Instead, I would like bosses to use active retaliation. In which they will take the time to cast a spell to put retaliation on themselves.

This way, Boon strip professions will be useful here.

Overall, some good conceptual ideas and things that ANet could definitely build from. My 2c:

Time should be on your side.
This could be implemented just by allowing stacks of defiant to automatically decay over time, and decay faster the longer the fight goes. The defiant buff is one of the reasons why supportive characters are so useless against most of the current mechanics.

Environmental weapons with fixed damage.
Environmental weapons are very cool, and I like fights that use them, but the devs would have to be careful not to over-use them. Even if they equalize DPS across the whole party, that still gives the advantage to the heavy armor classes and removes all strategy related to weapon skills.

Conjured weapons to have creator’s damage output when others are using them.
This would actually make conjured weapons much more useful, IMO. This is similar to how Ritualist Spirit Weapons worked in GW2. Good idea. The same thing could be done with supportive conjured weapons, such as Ice Bow, where it uses its creator’s healing power no matter who uses it.

Allow more condition stacks on bosses.
Agreed. Condition builds need to have more ways to contribute against bosses, even if it means that the bosses have some sort of condition resistance buff.

High DPS boss, very interruptable.
I think this would be a reasonable trade-off with the decaying Defiant buff. As the fight stretches out, the boss does more damage, but is more susceptible to control.

Bosses with perma Retaliation, effected by players defense.
Does armor reduce retaliation’s damage, or is that what you’re suggesting? Retaliation is currently my least favorite boon in the game, as there is no real counter for it unless you’re playing one of the classes with boon steal/strip (or have the sigil). I don’t mind bosses that apply it occasionally, as it can be removed strategically, but I’d rather not see this boon at all.

Don’t spread the above strategies.
While I agree with encouraging non-DPS builds, we also can’t go too far with it. Eventually the pendulum swings to the other extreme, where we’re punishing DPS builds.

Vick.6805:

Time should be on your side.
This could be implemented just by allowing stacks of defiant to automatically decay over time, and decay faster the longer the fight goes. The defiant buff is one of the reasons why supportive characters are so useless against most of the current mechanics.

Here I was mostly meant to give an example of how some of their existing strategies are wrong…
There is no need to deal decaying boons in all bosses. The boss can keep their Defiant if that prevents players from exploiting them with some stun-lock strategy.
They should just keep in mind that if they want to add a timer on a boss battle, it should not be over-reliant in DPS or it should not be working against the player.

Vick.6805:

High DPS boss, very interruptable.
I think this would be a reasonable trade-off with the decaying Defiant buff. As the fight stretches out, the boss does more damage, but is more susceptible to control.

As above, I don’t think a battle where you have to “wait” for Defiant to expire will be fun.
All I said was to toss in the game some bosses “without stability” or “with no resistance to conditions,” to promote “control” builds and different strategies.

Vick.6805:

Bosses with perma Retaliation, effected by players defense.
Does armor reduce retaliation’s damage, or is that what you’re suggesting? Retaliation is currently my least favorite boon in the game, as there is no real counter for it unless you’re playing one of the classes with boon steal/strip (or have the sigil). I don’t mind bosses that apply it occasionally, as it can be removed strategically, but I’d rather not see this boon at all.

To my knowledge, retaliation is not affected by defense and it sends back damage depending on the attackers power.
Aka. It’s a Glass Cannon’s worst Nightmare, thus it should be used a bit more often to discourage such builds, and players should be able to deal with it with defense instead of just Health, to promote defensive builds.

Vick.6805:

Don’t spread the above strategies.
While I agree with encouraging non-DPS builds, we also can’t go too far with it. Eventually the pendulum swings to the other extreme, where we’re punishing DPS builds.

As I clearly stated in the OP, strictly non-DPS dungeon runs should just be a handful of paths (4-5 from the 25 explorables), precisely so we won’t have the opposite effect.

Thanks for agreeing with the rest of my suggestions though!
I spend a good time writing them!

In the meantime I found a new way to promote support builds here.

Please leave your Ideas as well!