Guild Wars 2

I’ve been considering running [defiant stance] just to mix things up, recently. But obviously, it has a large flaw in the fact that, while requiring enemies to hit you to be effective, It both has a large visual cue in the form of an aura and flashes bright green happy numbers to players silly enough to keep swinging at the warrior.

I really enjoy the concept Defiant Stance presents. Right now though, it is too easy for players to determine when the warrior is being healed.

These things in mind, I propose the following:

*Make the damage numbers appear red, as if the warrior is taking damage.
*Remove the aura.
*Reduce recast time by 5 seconds.

Then still people will look at your icon/buff bar and see the defiant stance icon up and simply stop hitting you.Defiant only has a place in zerging where people wont notice you popping defiant,it just has no place in pvp or small scale stuff since people with 2 working eyes will simply stop hitting you when they see the icon.Removing the aura won’t change a thing,same for making the dmg numbers appear red.
Unless they completely remove the icon from showing when you pop defiant,so you will still get the aura but just no defiant icon..making it harder for people to see when you actually pop the skill unless they give you a few hits and see you’re gaining hp.

I would think that, knowing the stance has these drawbacks, you’d use it in situations where those drawbacks aren’t going to interfere with its effectiveness. For instance:

- when you just got stacked up with a massive condition burst; pop Defiant Stance, let all those horrible conditions heal you right up instead of melt you. It’s not like the conditioner can strip them off of you to prevent the heal.

- when you see a telegraphed move flying at your face. Hammer warrior in mid-air and you’re all out of stunbreaks/evasion? Defiant stance. Necro just popped Lich and has some nasty hands coming to tear your face off? Defiant stance. Etc.

All in all it’s a pretty niche buying-time skill, though, compared with healing signet which is basically nice 100% of the time, so…yeah.

I’ve been thinking about defiant stance vs HS as well for PvP. Typically I use HS for everything. Why? Because it’s awesome and amazing. But I’ve noticed in PvP especially in +2v1 situations I tend to get burned down pretty quickly, especially if they can get an immobilize off. While DS doesn’t have the passive regen, I would think that using DS when going into a situation where I would be outnumbered would be better, as I can just go Leroy Jenkins into the frey, pop DS, and kill all the things. I understand that this would be more situational, but in PvP where you can be outnumbered more often then not, would this be a better option then HS?

pdavis.8031:

I’ve been thinking about defiant stance vs HS as well for PvP. Typically I use HS for everything. Why? Because it’s awesome and amazing. But I’ve noticed in PvP especially in +2v1 situations I tend to get burned down pretty quickly, especially if they can get an immobilize off. While DS doesn’t have the passive regen, I would think that using DS when going into a situation where I would be outnumbered would be better, as I can just go Leroy Jenkins into the frey, pop DS, and kill all the things. I understand that this would be more situational, but in PvP where you can be outnumbered more often then not, would this be a better option then HS?

Tentatively not. You only heal for three seconds, which means you would need to be tanky to sustain intense focus long enough to use the stance where it would act as a decent heal.

It also seems to -depend- on focus. You may be singled out for a 1v1 on a point somewhere. at that point, vs someone with eyes, your heal is kitten because they just need to avoid you for three seconds.\

It’s good for an extra three seconds of sustain in 1 v X. but Healing signet does that across the board…

I’d rather take a 400ish heal tick per second rather than “you heal very fast when vastly outnumbered, but probably not at all when you’re 1v1ing or even 1v2ing.”

This skill is very common on MOBAs, but unlike in those games, in GW2 skills doesn’t do that much damage, and damage isn’t that concentrated (both in space and time). Making the skill very bad overall, you won’t get back to full health in most cases, but also, there isn’t a big trade-off for people not hitting you (like in mobas, where abbadon/accursed/etc will contribute a lot in damage, killing opponents).
In gw2 the skill needs to either have its duration increased, a lot, or reworked, to perhaps instead of healing you, reflecting all damage (unlike retaliation) during that short amount of time.