Guild Wars 2

I’ve seen lots of complaints about how “skill-less” Retaliation is and how it causes various issues because defensive guardians can keep it up the entire time.

So what if Retaliation stacked intensity instead of duration? The base boon damage would be significantly lower than what it is currently. However, you could now choose to run it the entire time for a small damage return or stack a lot of it at once for big returns for a short time. For example, you could stack it when a thief uses Daggerstorm or a warrior is using 100blades or Axe Whirl. But similarly, they could avoid taking a lot of damage by staying away when you have retaliation stacked.

Obviously skills and traits would need adjusted. However, with allowing intensity stacking, you have two tuning knobs (number of stacks and duration) instead of just one.

A potential problem would be stacking retaliation in WvW zerg balls and having opponents melt themselves, similar to confusion stacking.

Thoughts?

I feel like retaliation should be removed and replaced by a better boon that doesn’t rely on a character to take a few hits, which is against the idea of avoiding damage in the first place.

Would be extremely overpowered if it stacked in intensity.

it should be called confusion lite ^^

There are alot of problems with retaliation to be honest though.

A. It is a lazy damage source, you get hit you deal damage back, not very action based of a mechanic.

B. The insane uptime we get. Traited virtue use (which comes with 40% extra uptime generally) a signet, 2 shouts( one of which lasts 10 seconds untraited), massive lightfield + finisher spam. Its kinda overkill for a single boon.

C. The potential damage return from multi hit burst abilities. Most burst abilities are multi hit attacks, ZD WW 100b, volley, rapid fire, etc etc. the issue is that all of these attacks will cause ALOT of damage back to you due to retaliation activating on every hit. It does 267 base damage before power. Should you say use a ZD and land every hit that 2136 damage automaticly returned. Also there is no way to mitigate the damage as armor has no effect on it.

I dont think stacking intesity would fix theses as someone would just blow all of their retaliation on someone doing a multi hit burst, and odds are they would do more return damage than was even caused inthe first place. Honestly I would like to see it go all together, but if not that a lower in uptime, or a cooldown on damage procs.

I’d rather not see it get nerfed (that sounds like a problem for pvp by itself, not pve) before it gets replaced by a better boon that is actually productive instead of counterproductive.

You have to be pretty skill-less to be killed by Retaliation alone or lazy to not look at your targets boons before spam attacking him. the buff does rather low damage compared to the average hit. There is more then one way to counter it and per second cons tend to deal way more.

Retaliation should be fixed. My thinking is that stacking in intensity is bad.

I would like to see it changed to reward good effort and defense. One way would be to make retaliation hit the opposing player when you dodge instead of being hit. It could also work to simply absorb X damage, allowing it to depend on toughness to increase the absorb.

Meh, I want Regen to stack intensity.

I never cared for retal, seeing as it’s counter productive, and clunky by design.

How about a dmg pulse instead of a thorn mechanic?

lenexkabol.9438:

You have to be pretty skill-less to be killed by Retaliation alone or lazy to not look at your targets boons before spam attacking him. the buff does rather low damage compared to the average hit. There is more then one way to counter it and per second cons tend to deal way more.

As far as being skill less, you haven’t fought someone with the healway build before have you? 100% retal uptime and massive heals, you literally cant kill one before killing yourself. As far as being lazy to not look at boons, once again, doesn’t really matter if its up 100% of the time and only a few classes actually have boon removal, which is a gamble on removing it anyways.

Bakitten291:

lenexkabol.9438:

You have to be pretty skill-less to be killed by Retaliation alone or lazy to not look at your targets boons before spam attacking him. the buff does rather low damage compared to the average hit. There is more then one way to counter it and per second cons tend to deal way more.

As far as being skill less, you haven’t fought someone with the healway build before have you? 100% retal uptime and massive heals, you literally cant kill one before killing yourself. As far as being lazy to not look at boons, once again, doesn’t really matter if its up 100% of the time and only a few classes actually have boon removal, which is a gamble on removing it anyways.

You would have to hit a guard over 40 times never healing for it to even kill a low hp toon with the boon alone. Certain classes/build should be harder for other certain classes and builds to beat and every class can use boon removal. Some people have trouble killing thieves that don’t want to die others have trouble with guards. Unless your saying no one can kill a healway guard in which case maybe our base hps should be dropped ever lower and our healing nerfed below what it is.

I’d take something like WoW’s vengeance buff (overtime of taking damage, increases power) and remove retal if it was available. That means I’d hit harder the longer I was in combat. 5 second buff duration that refreshes every time you are hit. If you are out of combat for longer thatn 5 seconds, the buff falls off and starts over.

If retal stacked in intensity we’ll get the same complaints people are spamming the boards with about confusion. It’d make for some funny spike builds, but I don’t know if they’ll make two separate mechanics so similar.

lenexkabol.9438:

Bakitten291:

lenexkabol.9438:

You have to be pretty skill-less to be killed by Retaliation alone or lazy to not look at your targets boons before spam attacking him. the buff does rather low damage compared to the average hit. There is more then one way to counter it and per second cons tend to deal way more.

As far as being skill less, you haven’t fought someone with the healway build before have you? 100% retal uptime and massive heals, you literally cant kill one before killing yourself. As far as being lazy to not look at boons, once again, doesn’t really matter if its up 100% of the time and only a few classes actually have boon removal, which is a gamble on removing it anyways.

You would have to hit a guard over 40 times never healing for it to even kill a low hp toon with the boon alone. Certain classes/build should be harder for other certain classes and builds to beat and every class can use boon removal. Some people have trouble killing thieves that don’t want to die others have trouble with guards. Unless your saying no one can kill a healway guard in which case maybe our base hps should be dropped ever lower and our healing nerfed below what it is.

Yes because the gaurd with retal isn’t going to be hitting you too… Honestly have you ever seen the healway guardian work? I have no issue with a bunker being a bunker, even more so when your hear has 2 defensive stats. (toughness and healing power), but when they can kill you mostly because you cant attack them without causing yourself significant damage it is kinda crazy. I actually dropped 15 points in my build to pick up the retaliation traits just because I did the math on it. I reflect 400+ damage everytime I am hit.

As far as boon removal goes, only 2 classes have it enough to make a difference, Necro and mesmer, Engineer and theives have one skill that removes 1 boon. Guardians can trait for it on burn, but has a 20 second cd making it useless. Warriors have none, eles have none, rangers have none. So no, not every class has boon removal, and only 2 have enough to make an actual difference.

Also I run with christos, the founder of the healway, and have fought against him before. I cant remember, nor can he, the last time he has died in a 1v1 or even a 2v1. The bunker aspect of the class makes sense since it uses two defensive stats. The lazy damage return source is what needs to be fixed.

Edit: Fixing typos from writing on phone and added Boon removal information.

I’m all for making retaliation stronger but also much shorter duration and thus opportunistic.

I will be very surprised if they boost Guardian offensive …anything. Just look at the updates. They have already nerfed retaliation a while back limiting a damage build. The sword, an offensive weapon, received a bit of nerf from changes to vigorous precision. Changes which favored/didn’t hinder slower hammer and mace. Then the baffling changes to Spirit Weapons also served to hinder an already struggling damage boost.
Now compare this to changes made with support oriented weapons and build and you will see the direction of the class. Heck even our burn builds will become useless (in PvE) whenever they add Primordus. His minions are immune to burning.

Bakitten291:

lenexkabol.9438:

Bakitten291:

lenexkabol.9438:

You have to be pretty skill-less to be killed by Retaliation alone or lazy to not look at your targets boons before spam attacking him. the buff does rather low damage compared to the average hit. There is more then one way to counter it and per second cons tend to deal way more.

As far as being skill less, you haven’t fought someone with the healway build before have you? 100% retal uptime and massive heals, you literally cant kill one before killing yourself. As far as being lazy to not look at boons, once again, doesn’t really matter if its up 100% of the time and only a few classes actually have boon removal, which is a gamble on removing it anyways.

You would have to hit a guard over 40 times never healing for it to even kill a low hp toon with the boon alone. Certain classes/build should be harder for other certain classes and builds to beat and every class can use boon removal. Some people have trouble killing thieves that don’t want to die others have trouble with guards. Unless your saying no one can kill a healway guard in which case maybe our base hps should be dropped ever lower and our healing nerfed below what it is.

Yes because the gaurd with retal isn’t going to be hitting you too… Honestly have you ever seen the healway guardian work? I have no issue with a bunker being a bunker, even more so when your hear has 2 defensive stats. (toughness and healing power), but when they can kill you mostly because you cant attack them without causing yourself significant damage it is kinda crazy. I actually dropped 15 points in my build to pick up the retaliation traits just because I did the math on it. I reflect 400+ damage everytime I am hit.

As far as boon removal goes, only 2 classes have it enough to make a difference, Necro and mesmer, Engineer and theives have one skill that removes 1 boon. Guardians can trait for it on burn, but has a 20 second cd making it useless. Warriors have none, eles have none, rangers have none. So no, not every class has boon removal, and only 2 have enough to make an actual difference.

Also I run with christos, the founder of the healway, and have fought against him before. I cant remember, nor can he, the last time he has died in a 1v1 or even a 2v1. The bunker aspect of the class makes sense since it uses two defensive stats. The lazy damage return source is what needs to be fixed.

Edit: Fixing typos from writing on phone and added Boon removal information.

I never said every class HAS boon removal. I said every class can USE boon removal. It will cost you about 5 silver last time I looked.

Really? The plan to thwart retaliation is to waste an on crit sigil that can only activate every 10 seconds, and has zero promise of getting that one boon out of the many we have? How about some serious suggestions instead of L2P and a useless sigil.

Tyber Valens.5148:

I will be very surprised if they boost Guardian offensive …anything. Just look at the updates. They have already nerfed retaliation a while back limiting a damage build. The sword, an offensive weapon, received a bit of nerf from changes to vigorous precision. Changes which favored/didn’t hinder slower hammer and mace. Then the baffling changes to Spirit Weapons also served to hinder an already struggling damage boost.
Now compare this to changes made with support oriented weapons and build and you will see the direction of the class. Heck even our burn builds will become useless (in PvE) whenever they add Primordus. His minions are immune to burning.

Actually we did get a damage buff with blinds causing vulnerabilty in the same patch as the vig perc nerf. But it did kill AH 1h specs for the most part.