Guild Wars 2

GW1 Interruption

• It has a casting bar, so it was a lot easier to do.
• Most skills had at least a 3/4 casting time and every class has SOMETHING to interrupt.
• Interrupt skills rewarded you for interrupting VERY well. Power Drain basically refilled your energy. Psychic Distraction kittened up the day of the person you interrupted. Power Block was just…Wow.

GW2 Interruption

• There is no casting bar, so only very obvious animations will be interrupted.
• Most skills in this game have very SHORT casting times. Exceptions are elites, heal skills and some powerful skills.
• The current traits for interruption do this:

Halting Strike – 750 and scales with power. So for the most berserkery berserker this is about 1/13th of their health.
Bountiful Interruption – 5 seconds of might and 5 seconds of another random boon. Very small reward.
Chaotic Interruption – Immobilize your target when you interrupt them and randomly apply blind, cripple, or chill.
Furious Interruption – Gain 3 seconds of quickness when you interrupt a foe. This effect can only occur once every 15 seconds.
Illusion of Vulnerability – Inflict 5 seconds of vulnerability when you interrupt a foe.

We can’t take all of these. It leads to a very gimmicky build that doesn’t have much utility other than interruption.

As we can see, none of these are a good reward for interrupting a foe, especially when it’s so difficult in this game. I think these would be interesting changes:

Halting Strike – Deals 1.7k damage (Tool Tip) and scales with power. 15 second recharge.
Bountiful Interruption – Three stacks of might for 20 seconds and a random boon for 10 seconds. 10 second recharge.
Chaotic Interruption – Immobilize your target for 3s (Up from 1s) when you interrupt them and randomly apply blind, cripple, or chill.
Furious Interruption – Gain 6 seconds of quickness when you interrupt a foe. This effect can only occur once every 15 seconds.
Illusion of Vulnerability – Inflict 7 seconds of 10 stacks of vulnerability when you interrupt a foe.

I don’t think we’ll be getting a casting bar because part of the design of this game is to make you look at your enemy, not the UI. However, if getting interrupts is highly rewarded, this playstyle would become more popular.

I’m still calling for a Mainhand Focus. Would make for a nice control weapon..

But I’m starting to think that maybe we’re looking at these traits the wrong way. I’m thinking that we weren’t necessarily supposed to make a build revolving around interrupts, but the traits allowed for more flexibility in our current builds. For example:

Furious Interruption – Quickness buff would help Mantra charges and revives.
Bountiful Interruption – Works great for support builds.
Halting Strike- Extra DPS for shatter builds, especially with 5x Vuln on daze.

Just some ideas I’ve been toying with.

I think they are aiming the Interrupt based builds for mass combats.
There you have better chance that you can interrupt somebody who is performing skill and does not have stability.

IMHO it is still work in progress, lets wait for the next patch …