Guild Wars 2

What is Defiant? Defiant is the mechanic where whenever a CC ability is used on a boss, they gain stacks of Defiant that make them immune to further CC. The stacks can only be removed by wasting CC moves on the boss. This is to prevent content from becoming trivialized by players chain-CCing bosses so they are unable to fight back.

Why is it a problem? There already is a way to trivialize content, and that is full glass cannon/berserker DPS killing end game bosses before they can really do anything. Meanwhile support and controlling builds just take a much longer time to clear most difficult fights, because a good chunk of their loadout is useless on the boss. For non-glass cannon parties, combat becomes reactive (dodge attacks, stay out of red rings) instead of active.

Why remove it now? The Queen’s Gauntlet and the open world QJ Champions really made me wonder—is this mechanic really necessary? Those bosses are quite difficult and challenging but do not have the Defiant mechanic at all, which really increases the strategies you can use. Granted they are all typically fought by a single player, but the lack of Defiant makes them feel like 1v1 PvP fights, which is awesome.

Reasons to remove Defiant

- Defiant discourages skills that exclusively control enemies, even skills that might be useful on non-Champion/Legendary mobs. This reduces build variety.

- Defiant forces groups to focus on DPS and reactive play instead of active play.

- We already have large fights where parties & zergs face off against other powerful enemies without Defiant—PvP & WvW—and while chain stunning is a viable strategy it is in no way overpowered. We already know that this can work.

- The removal of Defiant can increase the complexity of Dungeon & open world boss fights to require the use of CC and generally make them more fun, instead of DPS/Dodge races. Right now, almost no fights require CC because of how unreliable Defiant stacks are to control. There are several fights in the Queen’s Gauntlet that benefit greatly from CC moves (pulls against Liadri, chain stunning the Windcaller to stop her from spawning so many whirlwinds, knocking back Chomper to keep him from getting to the meat for buffs). Every class has access to plenty of CC, many of them passive CC skills on their existing weapon loadouts they already use for DPS.

Alternative to Removing Defiant

Defiant doesn’t appear until a certain number of CC moves are used on the same enemy within a certain window of time, and then it fades automatically after time passes. Defiant is still a valuable mechanic in huge zerg PvE fights against against non-structural world bosses (Dredge Commissar, Ulgoth, etc)—with so many players it would be true that the the enemy would just be totally locked down without any active play from the players fighting it, they’d be using so many passive CC effects the boss would be totally disabled. Adding some kind of zerg check threshhold to trigger Defiant if too many CCs are used within say 3 seconds could continue to cover these bosses. The duration of Defiant could continue to increase as long as the same CCs/second continue to be used after the buff first appears, so this could add some strategy—go ahead and CC the boss, but if Defiant appears, stop CCing to let it wear off.

The threshhold could be set low enough to keep the risk of triggering Defiant in smaller PvE fights like Dungeons; this would keep the active controlling play, but require controller classes to space out their CC moves instead or risk triggering Defiant. Structural world bosses (with the big red targets) are already immune to CC and I think that’s fine.

Alter or Remove Defiant, but keep the resistance to Blind. Blind would still be overpowered in Dungeons (some classes can keep up Blind constantly) and so the Blind resistance should remain even if Defiant is removed or changed.
tl;dr: Defiant is an outdated mechanic that reduces build variety, PvE fight complexity, and fun in general. As the PvE meta has developed, it’s becoming clear it’s not really needed to keep the game balanced. It should be removed entirely or changed so that it triggers only when too many CCs are used at the same time, and then it should fade after time passes.

The new watch list is excellent functionality and extremely helpful for doing dailies and other achievements. However, it’s a bit of a hassle to go in and manually clear every watch item once it hits 100%. The way the list priority works it becomes pointless to use more than 5 watch item slots if you don’t go to the trouble of clearing out the completed items, because the 100% achievements will always sit at the top.

There’s no real reason anyone would want to have achievements they’ve already completed tracked in the top right corner, so please automatically clear Watch Items once the achievement is earned.

EDIT: Some folks have suggested an option for “Automatically clear completed achievements”, that seems fine to me. Another small idea, it would be nice if the “Daily/Monthly” priority system that already exists when you aren’t tracking anything could be applied as an option in the Watch list as well. That is, you check a box that says “Prioritized Daily/Monthly Achievements”—so long as your daily/monthly aren’t completed yet, daily/monthly achievements will be on the top of your ingame watch list until the overall daily/monthly is completed, then they sort by current progress as normal today.

I feel like allowing these to be thrown in the Mystic Forge for a random, new Superior Rune/Sigil would be good for the economy. The prices of the most useless Superior Runes/Sigils would increase, and the prices of the most demanded ones would decrease.

We wouldn’t sigh when the Soulbound runes/sigils—an exotic drop!—landed in our inventories in dungeons, as we do now—only able to vendor them for ~2 silver.

It would mirror the existing situation with armor/weapons (Exotic armor/weapons can be combined for a new Exotic).

Any economy reasons for why this isn’t allowed?

EDIT: Some folks have rightly pointed out that with this idea as presented, everyone would be redirected to an Underflow server and the home zone would never have time to populate. This is a legitimate concern; a possible fix might be checking periodically on the Underflow for players’ home servers and offering to send them all back at once. There are a number of other ways to handle it, I’ve included some at the bottom—post your ideas!

As the game launch is settling down and more and more characters are hitting level 80, the low-level zones are becoming sparser and sparser. The level 1 tutorial zones in particular are almost always empty when running a new character, which subtracts a little from their oomph for a new player.

I imagine that the overflow shards for these zones are underused right now, so here is my proposed solution to utilize them—whenever a player enters a specific zone, the game does a check for the number of players in that zone. If it is below a certain threshhold, a popup appears offering to send the player to a cross-server Underflow shard (really just an Overflow shard), where other players seeing low populations should land. The popup would work the same way as exiting an Overflow (Offer options for Travel, Leave Queue, and Reenter Queue).

While in the Underflow shard, the game periodically checks the home server to see if the population is above the threshhold. If it is, the player gets another prompt asking if they want to rejoin the home server, as usual.

I think this would largely solve the issue of barren low-level areas, especially since most overflow shard party jumping bugs have been fixed. One issue I can envision is where influence cannot be gained for your home server while on an Overflow shard, but this could either be treated as the payment for not playing on your home server, or addressed in a future patch.

Another problem could be that this would be confusing for newer players, so the popup text would have to be very specific explaining exactly what will happen if the player chooses to travel.

Issue Suggestions

Some astute players have noted a fundamental flaw with this idea—if everyone opts to go to the Underflow server, there is no way for the home server to build players. There’re a couple ways to fix this:

1) As mentioned above, intermittently perform a check for the # of players on the Underflow from each home server. If the # is above a certain threshhold, simultaneously offer all players to return to the Home Server.

2) Alternatively, track server/zone population rates with every WvW reset. For that week, zones noted to be “underpopulated” always direct to an “Underflow” shard for that zone. In this version, there is no notification to the player that they are on a shared shard, and they would remain on that shard anytime they visit the zone for that week (unless of course the Underflow actually overflows!). Recalculate the “underpopulated” zones with each WvW reset, for each Server + Zone.

3) Outside of Hub Cities, do away with the concept of server-exclusive zones entirely. Because the Trading Post is cross-realm, the only real meaning of separate servers right now is WvW allegiance. Keeping WvW allegiance consistent (and having consistent hub towns) is still valuable, but other than that, treat ALL other zones like Overflow shards. When players from any server enter a zone, they first attempt to enter Shard #1 for that zone. If Shard #1 is full, they go to Shard #2, and so on. This seems like it would save a lot on wasted server space as unpopular zones cross-realm (like the tutorial area and mid-level zones) might only need 2-3 dedicated servers running at all times. The added benefit would be that you would almost never play in a zone without any other players. Unlike other MMOs the design of GW2 and the dynamic event system really requires many players in each zone, for the experience to be fun. If a future content patch adds zones that are more fruitful for 80+ players than Orr, Orr will be totally useless if it is completely empty on a given world.