Guild Wars 2

I think after HoT there is a lot of CC in the game and after the changes to stability it is sometimes a hard way for classes with nearly no stability.

So my idea is to give everyone who successfully uses a stunbreak a 3-5 sec 3 stack stability. (3 sec to classes who have stability already with stunbreaks)

So no chain stunning on classes without stability or very few stability sources.
More choices for melee group members besides Warrior and Guardians.

I see not many disadvantages, maybe melee train gets too strong, but there are still many soft CC like slow/freeze/cripple/immobilize.

What do you think about this?

Haralin.1473:

I think after HoT there is a lot of CC in the game and after the changes to stability it is sometimes a hard way for classes with nearly no stability.

So my idea is to give everyone who successfully uses a stunbreak a 3-5 sec 3 stack stability. (3 sec to classes who have stability already with stunbreaks)

So no chain stunning on classes without stability or very few stability sources.
More choices for melee group members besides Warrior and Guardians.

I see not many disadvantages, maybe melee train gets too strong, but there are still many soft CC like slow/freeze/cripple/immobilize.

What do you think about this?

Sorry but I disagree with you. CC in this game is so short in duration that going any lower then it is currently would make it utterly and completely useless, you might as well go back to infinite stab and hammer trains, which was bad.

Hard CC such as daze, stun, knockdown can not be replaced with soft CC. I noticed in your sig that you play an engie, thus you in particular should know this from gameplay. Traits such as mecha legs for example coupled with any other effect will make you completely immune to soft CC a lot of times.

The way the game works, which might be bugged, or simply limited by the server structure (both hardware and software) is that if you bring down the duration of said soft CC to below 1 tick it doesnt register at all. The target player is simply immune, you don’t get any error or immunity messages or anything like that, it just takes no effect, nothing happens. My guild has noticed this a long while ago because we run vs other organized and coordinated guilds and mostly stopped using those and switched to the hard CC. on top of that, vast majority of soft CC can be insta cleansed via condi cleanses.

On top of that both hard and soft CC applications can be evaded, blocked and negated by various invuln effects. Skills such as engi hammer (especially when traited for stab on evade) 3 are great ways of avoiding multiple CC fields, I personally do it all the time.

The key is all in group timing and group coordination, as it should be. If commander mistimes calls for stab or CC then it will cause you a problem, if you run like a pug with a bad build or in a pug group with nothing but bad builds, then yes, you will have a problem, but its the same problem as all other pug problems, not enough cleanses (nerf condis), not enough sustain (nerf DPS), not enough DPS (nerf bunker builds), etc. etc. You can take all these nerf calls in full circles. Bottom line is, this is a group coordination problem, I personally feel this aspect of hard CC vs stab is actually balanced for once where the better skilled group will come out on top assuming roughly even numbers. Because of course once the numbers are grossly disproportional, then the outnumbered team will pretty much just lose if their opponents have a somewhat competent core.

The one thing I would change is the stab dedicated skills such as Well of Power and Hallowed Ground. I think they provide far too little stab for their CDs. Especially well of power, either double its stab or cut the CD in half, reduce CD on skills such as Hallowed ground, make the rev stab road thingy cost less of their energy, etc. Those skills do not see wide use because they provide far too little for their cost, CDs, and utility slot which they take up.

The thing is there is so much CC now that stability doesn’t have the same impact as it used to. The problem with your comment about hammer trains is that it’s just a personal opinion. Some people loved hammer trains and some people hate pirate ship. You could remove stability from the game entirely and some people would be ok with that.

The fact is that stability could be countered with wells of corruption, null field and other boon stripping skills.

Your entire point about positioning, timing, coordination was just as valid before the stability change. Do you think a crappy group back then could beat blobs just because of stability?

To me the main consequence of the stability change was that play is far less aggressive anymore as you have to be extra careful not to push and getting locked into a massive bomb. People stare at each other for a while hoping for the other group to make a mistake, etc.

I wish stability was back to the way it worked before and I have yet to see a good reason why it shouldn’t.

Is it really the better group that will win a fight or the group with the better class setup?
Why is there a reason every melee group wants at least 1-2 guardians?
Will a group win if they have a lack of guardians in there melee train?

This was my thinking to bring more possibilities in frontline groups (ranger,engi, thiefs, necro)

Deratrius.4035:

The fact is that stability could be countered with wells of corruption, null field and other boon stripping skills.

Not really, this game was designed and balanced around tPvP, much of that design and balance utterly fails to translate to WvW where things are just broken, including boon stripping vs boon generation.

Game was not designed for 2 or 3 guards sitting in a party rotating boons, it completely outpaced boon stripping, half the boon stripping skills that get used in tPvP are useless in large scale WvW (mes shatter strip, thief steal, thief sword 3, etc), which left well of corruption and null field for actually trying to strip stability from the melee train (commander focusing with corrupt boon is something else), and guess what, it was totally ineffective.

And why was it totally ineffective, because back then against any vaguely organised group that could manage the pretty basic task of rotating stab, generally avoiding / spending as little time in wells as possible, generating more boons if they got hit by wells, etc it was useless, because stability was last in the boon stripping order to be stripped on well of corruption, so when you had people running about with pretty much permanently 5-9 boons on them, could instantly apply more AOE boon spam with guards & warriors, and boons stripped at 1 per second, assuming people just stood there, then the idea of boon stripping stability was a joke.

Deratrius.4035:

To me the main consequence of the stability change was that play is far less aggressive anymore as you have to be extra careful not to push and getting locked into a massive bomb. People stare at each other for a while hoping for the other group to make a mistake, etc.

Now maybe it has gone too far the other way, but of course it is less aggressive, before hard CC was virtually useless against a melee train, so you could push with very little consequence or thought much of the time.

I watched an old GvG video the other day from the PoV of a warrior, I think it was Ve guild, but anyway he had stability up (covered by numerous boons) for about 1 min 40 secs out of 2 mins, and bearing in mind that other 20 secs was them regrouping etc, it was basically perma-stab, and this was against another “GvG” guild, so if they can’t strip stab, well… The level of stab we used to have was completely skilless.

P.S – People stare at each other even more when your server builds arrow carts so much of the time, even when you outnumber your opponents, what happened to the AG I fought against in season 1, has the SFR PvDoor infestation taken over?

Stability is almost stripped instantly in large-scale WvW post-HOT.

The amount of CC is incredible and the CC spam is not promoting skilled play.

I remember the days when you could outplay larger forces – this is still possible, but they need to do something about the CC.

Playing a Necro in post-WvW HOT is a massive headache with the lengthy cast times; stun, stun, stun… move to cast, stun, stun.

My opinion/experiences only.

Not that I was a fan of Hammer Trains but that game play was much more fun than watching 2+ big groups circle each other dodging AoE/CC for a ridiculous amount of time. In the current meta, it gets stupid when there is a choke point.

AoE/CC in this game is just too plentiful on virtually every level of game play so much so that most single target abilities are not worth taking even in small scale fights.

Straegen.2938:

Not that I was a fan of Hammer Trains but that game play was much more fun than watching 2+ big groups circle each other dodging AoE/CC for a ridiculous amount of time. In the current meta, it gets stupid when there is a choke point.

AoE/CC in this game is just too plentiful on virtually every level of game play so much so that most single target abilities are not worth taking even in small scale fights.

^Yep! They (Anet) need to find a happy medium with the way stability works for WvWvW. Being able to strip stability stacks is fine but with no diminishing returns on CC, the bigger group has another advantage in addition to raw damage, support and a rally system that works in their favor. The bigger the fight, the more obvious this becomes. It doesn’t take skill to huddle up with forty plus people and throw an AoE CC in the general direction of red nameplates moving near you.

Haralin.1473:

Is it really the better group that will win a fight or the group with the better class setup?
Why is there a reason every melee group wants at least 1-2 guardians?
Will a group win if they have a lack of guardians in there melee train?

This was my thinking to bring more possibilities in frontline groups (ranger,engi, thiefs, necro)

Why not just nerf Guardians if that’s the problem? Has anyone considered what this would do to warriors or any classes/builds that rely on stunning/knockdowns/immobilizing to survive and prevent themselves from being kited to death? Much less what a warrior can bring to a teamfight….which is hammer and that’s completely based on stuns and knockdowns.

I agree that there’s a lot of CC. And partially that stability is under-tuned.

The big problem is that there’s too much CC and stability on the same classes and weapons, and not enough diversity between where it’s accessible and where it isn’t.

Even with adjustments, though, I don’t think much would change. There’s also a lot of really short-cooldown AOE-boon-stripping, and boons themselves are so incredibly strong that a few good strips can predetermine the outcome of a fight.

While giving every stunbreak stability is likely too much, giving a select few, notably the higher-cooldown ones some short-duration-crazy-amount of stability would definitely change things up a bit. A preemptive stunbreak use for 1s of 25 stacks of stability on very specific skills across all of the classes (or something along those lines) could massively impact how fights are approached and how to coordinate an assault, for it also ups the skill cap by making people use their abilities intelligently at the right time, rather than just stacking up for boons and pressing a standard rotation through the enemy blob.

Cerby.1069:

Haralin.1473:

Is it really the better group that will win a fight or the group with the better class setup?
Why is there a reason every melee group wants at least 1-2 guardians?
Will a group win if they have a lack of guardians in there melee train?

This was my thinking to bring more possibilities in frontline groups (ranger,engi, thiefs, necro)

Why not just nerf Guardians if that’s the problem? Has anyone considered what this would do to warriors or any classes/builds that rely on stunning/knockdowns/immobilizing to survive and prevent themselves from being kited to death? Much less what a warrior can bring to a teamfight….which is hammer and that’s completely based on stuns and knockdowns.

The stability change affected weakened guardians greatly. Guardians are the biggest provider of AOE stability, and now that it’s been weakened, you need even more of them to not explode instantly near the enemy. Even more affected are warriors, because their personal stability is not so hot anymore with balanced stance giving only 5 stacks.

The trouble not comes just from CC, but also the existence of stuff like static field and lines which can affect a lot more targets than you can afford stability too.

Old stability was awful. It was significantly stronger than stunbreaks, and scaled infinitely against any number of foes.

New stability scales linearly and is a valuable defense, but doesn’t require such specific tricks to get rid of. it is a good thig that it can be overwhelmed as being completely CC immune to infinity number of opponents was a horrible gameplay experience for professions without stability, and teams without stripping. That setup make both stability and stripping required rather than optional and helpful like every other boon and mechanic in the game, and that was really bad for the ongoing design and balance of the game

Look at the length and frequency of stability stacks for stuff that feels underpowered, but old style stability is not the answer.

So the answer to balance for the loss of guardian stab stacks was to give them a LB w/traps to pew pew in the back with the rest(Pirateship Meta)?

You can take that option, yes. Guardians didn’t have a good range option in big conflicts.

I still revert to base guardian when it’s needed though. I’m pretty sure DH is not meta in WvW, but I could be wrong.

Yep because most of the guards I see down in T8 are DH’s. I just see giving up too much individual survivability taking the Elite.

PopeUrban.2578:

Old stability was awful. It was significantly stronger than stunbreaks, and scaled infinitely against any number of foes.

It was still a boon and could be stripped/inverted hence the need for good Necros in a group. The problem we have now is that CC abilities are significantly more plentiful than Stability application.

The end result of the stability changes are what we have today… a big ole circle kitten where backliners die of boredom sooner than they die of melee damage.

Straegen.2938:

PopeUrban.2578:

Old stability was awful. It was significantly stronger than stunbreaks, and scaled infinitely against any number of foes.

It was still a boon and could be stripped/inverted hence the need for good Necros in a group. The problem we have now is that CC abilities are significantly more plentiful than Stability application.

The end result of the stability changes are what we have today… a big ole circle kitten where backliners die of boredom sooner than they die of melee damage.

That was the problem. Not every profession had comparable access to stability or stripping. Every profession does, however, have comparable access to stunbreaks and some hard CC.

Old stability treated stability and boon stripping as a required element of pvp, like HP and damage, but the problem was that only a select few builds had access to it. The new method treats stability like other boons. Using them properly helps you win fights, but they are not required to attempt fighting in the first place.

The problem with melee versus ranged isn’t the stability. It’s the tired and lazy tactics people got used to using as a result of old stability. Simply stacking everyone up in one huge zerg and running headfirst in to the other zerg is a horrible combat strategy and makes for extremely boring fights. If you want to insert melee in to the back line, actually develop a plan that isn’t “run directly forward in to enemy fire in full view of the enemy without any supporting elements, cover, or stealth.”

That’s not a strategy in any decent pvp game. It’s suicide.