Guild Wars 2

It’s really counter-productive if you have to CC someone first to get another CC off as some of you suggested. You really want to CC someone to do damage. Gravity Well at its current form provides nothing useful other than a fancy not-so-big circle.

MailMail.6534:

Wells look to be under-WELL-ming to me at this point overall.

Gah, you beat me to this pun. Well played sir. Hopefully bad puns serve to summon Robert Gee.

I think Wells need another aspect to them. Easily predictable things like big hits and CC aren’t going to go over well in PvP.

Perhaps look into making Well’s triggerable early, with a bonus of some sort for letting the Well pulse longer. I can think of two methods:

1) Simple: Reduce the CD of the Well for each second it is allowed to pulse. So if a Mesmer wanted the full heal of Well of Eternity immediately they could do so – but they’d be giving up the pulses of Vigor and have a longer CD than if they’d allow it to run it’s course. This is simpler because it’s the same bonus for every Well’s

2) Complex: Reduce the potency of the end-effect and have it build up over time. So say a well can pulse for a total of 6 seconds and reaches maximum potency at 3 seconds.

The point is that both options emphasize the “Chronomancer” theme while making Wells much more useful since you can more readily land the end-effects of your Wells (this is especially important for Eternity, Precog, and Gravity) while being encouraged to let them pulse for as long as you can either by gaining a more potent effect or being able to cast the skill again more quickly.

With regards to Gravity Well, what if it also Chills enemies and drain their Endurance every pulse? That would make it much harder for them to get out without giving it a pulsing CC or Immobilise.

Embolism.8106:

With regards to Gravity Well, what if it also Chills enemies and drain their Endurance every pulse? That would make it much harder for them to get out without giving it a pulsing CC or Immobilise.

This would be very nice indeed. Endurance drain would be something unique as well.

I’d still prefer pulls but no stability & damage though.

This well desperately needs a gravity feeling. It should at least make foes feel hard to escape. That’s what gravity means, dragging you in, preventing escape.

Now players can just walk out in 1 second and laugh. The circle is not even large to begin with. 240 unit. To put it in perspective, ranger and guardian LB5 skill have radius of 360. So this well has 2/3 of the radius which means 4/9 of the area. That’s less than half of the area of those LB 5 skills. And guess what guardian LB5 only has a cooldown of 60 seconds and at least apply some cripple.

That’s a fair point. If returning the pulls or adding Cripple isn’t on the table, then we should at least get a radius buff or something. As it stands, you can literally dodge out of Gravity Well and take 0 damage.

tobascodagama.2961:

That’s a fair point. If returning the pulls or adding Cripple isn’t on the table, then we should at least get a radius buff or something. As it stands, you can literally dodge out of Gravity Well and take 0 damage.

Dodge out? More like walk out.

But yeah Cripple won’t be enough since you can just dodge, hence why I suggest it also drain Endurance (and Chill instead of Cripple because as you say, the area is tiny).

Carighan.6758:

If anything, I’d rework it to something like this now:

Gravity Well
Temporarily increase gravity in an area, slowing and crippling foes. At the end, revert gravity briefly, floating foes and causing falling damage when they crash down to the ground.

In other words, it’d float them high enough to actually cause ~20%-25% of HP in falling damage. People with falling damage traits ofc wouldn’t but hey, that’s good trait interaction IMO. I’d also remove the damage because frankly we got a damage-centric well already.

That’s a pretty neat idea actually: a Launch effect but directly up into the air! The leveraging of existing (but generally unimportant) game mechanics is quite clever and would make the skill very interesting, and uniquely powerful in that inflicts a scaling amount of armour-ignoring damage.

Unfortunately, a radius of 240 is still small enough to simply walk out of in under 3 seconds, even if crippled. 360 is the right size; avoiding it would require either a speed buff or force a cleanse. If it also pulsed Weakness to punish dodging out of it, it might stand a chance of finding its way onto my bar.

You could make it pulse displace towards its center. Displacing merely moves and doesn’t interrupt anything as seen with Revenant.