Guild Wars 2

Most of the time I hit a zerg with my Barrage skill in WvW as a ranger, I do a minimum 60 percent damage to myself due to retaliation and other reflection-type skills. A good percentage of the time I will auto-gib myself and die in seconds.

That this is ridiculous is, I hope, a matter of common sense. If I told you there is a PVP game out there where every time you use one of your major abilities, you damage yourself and even die, would you play it? Of course not. Zergers should be punished for clustering together; instead I am punished for shooting at them.

It sucks that the damage I do to others with Barrage is limited to 5 people at a time, but there seems to be no limit to the amount of damage I do to myself if the enemy has retaliation up.

There is an excessive amount of retaliation, confusion and other skills that cause damage upon being attacked. The annoying feedback bubbles are everywhere now and it is impossible to tell if they are yours or the enemy’s. This is really a horrible mechanic and it would be great to see it removed from WvW altogether. If not, then these game-breaking abilities need to be severely nerfed.

In the meantime, can you fix ranger Barrage so I can actually shoot at someone without getting destroyed once in a while? I play other classes and no other class’s aoe auto-gibs them the way ranger Barrage does.

Retaliation is just a poorly designed mechanic. Passive thorns effects are little more than invisible power and have little gameplay around them. Kinda wish it didn’t exist at all.

You think it’s bad when you Barrage a zerg, try chucking Grenades at them :/

gimmethegepgun.1284:

You think it’s bad when you Barrage a zerg, try chucking Grenades at them :/

Or how bout Engi flamethrower, or Guardians whirling wrath.. I once had an Engi 100% to 0 himself on my retal with flamethrower.

Retaliation as it is now is ridiculous. When I throw in a barrage with my bunker build (3k Armor, 22K life) I still almost die of one barrage. That is totally crazy.
You cannot lower the damage from Retal with armor and it seems to me even dodging, blocking is useless. So you just eat the damage no matter what you do.

This really has to be changed. One good suggestion would be: You can only be hit once per second with retaliated damage.
That way retal is still a good source of damage (~400 dps) but it’s not rididulous as it is now.
Areanet, please really consider that solution and if you don’t want to implement this at least let us dodge and block retaliated damage. There has to be a way to avoid it.
Confusion is crazy too because in WvW it can hit for 4k damage but at least it’s my fault when I get hit with it because I can simply wait until it’s over or try to remove it and I won’t get hit when I’m positioning myself well in a zerg.
So please do something about retal.

Most games usually have a ICD on Damage Shields.. but yea one retal per second would be a good balance for it, It’d not hurt Retal users in small man fights, but it wouldn’t make it instant death in large fights for people hitting a group.

dank.3680:

gimmethegepgun.1284:

You think it’s bad when you Barrage a zerg, try chucking Grenades at them :/

Or how bout Engi flamethrower, or Guardians whirling wrath.. I once had an Engi 100% to 0 himself on my retal with flamethrower.

Or try to feedback that zerg :P

Instant down for my mesmer

Would like to see Retaliation return a % of damage done. So an attack for 1,000 against an enemy with retal would do say 250 damage in return, while a 10,000 attack would return 2,500. Just using 25% as an example, I have no idea what % would actually be balanced.

Confusion could be worked the same way, except it needs to work on heals and have a higher % return than Retaliation.

Retaliation is annoying, There is now way round it, What i do when in zerg play i stay a good few paces behind Home Zerg pop Barrage first and wait until health is about 1/2 then pop a healing spring and stay in it until Barrage is finished and continue play and pick off the downed >:)

Hold your barrage, do not fire it on opening. When zergs meet it is a massive face rolling of abilities so that they can all go back to spamming 1 knowing that they used everything. If you wait 5-10 secs, then fire barrage you will not get nearly as much retaliation.

So, you’ve never thought to group with necros or mesmers who can… ya know… remove boons?

Waffler.1257:

So, you’ve never thought to group with necros or mesmers who can… ya know… remove boons?

They only affect 5 people, and in a big group well… There’s more than 5, not to mention they don’t remove all the boons, also the ones that do remove all boons are only single target. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost 80% of my health with 1 attack from FT because guardians just spammed their retaliation.

Guardians have always been on the ridiculous level when with a team, I don’t know how A-Net balanced their game tbh.

We have a ton of Necromancers with us and we hardly have issues against retaliation, our Engineers and other similar classes don’t get insta gibbed anymore after having a Necromancer effort to get more for us.

While they are at it, make Barrage a skill that can actually be used in siege and anti-siege warfare – ie: use Barrage whilst on a wall to the ground, and use Barrage against players that are on a wall from the ground. At the moment, I find it is a useless skill in wv w.

Simple fix would be to pay attention to when a person gets retaliation(Which onyl guardians can give out) or drops something that can reflect your projectiles.

Not too difficult, but a lot of rangers seem to kill themselves when I drop Wall of Reflection.

I’ve literally never died this way.

And maybe mix in some P/T/V

Syktek.7912:

Simple fix would be to pay attention to when a person gets retaliation(Which onyl guardians can give out) or drops something that can reflect your projectiles.

Actually, nearly every profession can give out AoE Retaliation with a blast finisher on a light field (which is available to Guardian, Engineer, Necromancer, and barely by Mesmer).
And you can hardly pay attention for retaliation in a giant blob of enemies.

I’m fine with retaliation as a counter to specific fast-hitting aoe skills, but it doesn’t make sense as the damage add it currently is. Either let it be a damage add that dishes out a few hundred dps to whoever’s attacking you, or a counter skill that you have to choose when to use.

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Syktek.7912:

Simple fix would be to pay attention to when a person gets retaliation(Which onyl guardians can give out) or drops something that can reflect your projectiles.

Actually, nearly every profession can give out AoE Retaliation with a blast finisher on a light field (which is available to Guardian, Engineer, Necromancer, and barely by Mesmer).
And you can hardly pay attention for retaliation in a giant blob of enemies.

*Give out directly

And at that, retaliation only does 300-400 damage a tick on most people as it’s based on power. I’ve only ever seen it go over 400 on retaliation specced guardians who can stack a minute+ of it on themselves in less than a five seconds.

So really, it’s not too bad and you can easily stop shooting the target if they do have retalition.

OP’s issue is that he uses barrage, which is one of the easiest skills in the game to counter.

Roflstomp, if i enter zerg, i get aoe’d by 3x barrage STACKED. 30x 900 damage (if berserker). And you are kitten that retaliation exists? It’s there for a reason. Everything has a perfect counter. Confusions mesmer 1 vs 1 are very hard to beat but they suck in zergs (compared to other professions/builds). Barrage is good in zergs, but has it counters. Mesmers hate conditions, so spamming them on mesmer like necro can or SB archer will kitten them off. It’s how it works. People just want perfect cookie butter builds, but they don’t exist. Ele comes close, but at least they don’t have retaliation. Guardians need retaliation imo. 5 aoe’s stacked can bring down a guardians hp in no time, but guardian has to stay in the frontline.

If he had retaliation, it’s your fault for being to ‘killhappy’, or loot hungry.

It applies to more then just Barrage. As an Engineer i have but one way to reach ranged damage and that is through grenades. Everything else either cuts off around the 900range and usually also does kitten poor damage due to contrived mechanics. Where, for instance, my ability takes a -80% dmg cut simply for being used over such a “big” range.

So, grenades it is. They are aoe, and even without traits you always throw 2. Meaning a single attack of a mere 600dmg per target (with BOTH grenades, assuming they both crit) can return as much as 10 procs of Retal to me (2×5player aoe cap).
Lowballing Retal here, im looking at atleast 3k dmg to myself. I’m not a heavily armor profession and my healthpool is fairly limited no matter what. I can do about 6 attacks, hurting people for at the very most! 3.6k dmg. And then I AM DEAD, while never ever actually having been attacked.
Dont get started if you do trait, then you throw a 3th grenade and melt yourself 50% faster.

Killed entirely by passive damage, that involved about no thought whatsoever. Because Light-fields come as a second nature to Guardians who litterally poop em all over the place. And in a zerg, blastfinishers happen constantly. Result, retaliation for everyone a side effect is simply playing your professions.

And dont throw it on the lame “ugh, just run with 200 Necro’s”. This may seem odd, but sometimes people are defending keeps and towers. And not running in the zergball.

Syktek.7912:

OP’s issue is that he uses barrage, which is one of the easiest skills in the game to counter.

No, his issue is that he’s using AoE (as in, meant for groups of enemies) on a group of enemies (the very thing it’s supposed to be used against) but because of the very nature of the huge group of enemies (light fields, blast finishers a plenty) doing so will demolish him with little effect.
The same thing happens if you hit that with grenades, flamethrower, wells (though if you aren’t leading with Well of Corruption you’re doing it wrong), traps, projectile reflects, ele staff attacks, and detonated cluster bombs.
You know, the majority of the attacks in the game intended for hurting lots of things at once, where the ability to do so is the single greatest antizerg tactic.

It sounds like you guys really hate that people aren’t intending to retal you to death. So then would you feel better if you knew the guardians were actually spec’ing to deal out retaliation as much as possible.

To me, it seems like a legitimate strategy to retaliate people to death. Ive seen chokepoints hold for the longest time because each side spams every aoe they have, making a no-man’s-land in the middle. I don’t think something akin to trench warfare should be the goal of a zerg-on-zerg fight. People figuring out a way to ruin the popular strategies makes for a compelling pvp experience.

Retaliation is super uninteractive. Getting hit should not be a long-term offensive strategy.