Guild Wars 2

Anet made a deliberate effort to simplify build options in guild wars 2, and put the focus on the arcade-y, action style combat. It was one of the things they were quite clear they were doing a 180 on from previous game. If you’re complaining that gw2 is not like gw1 in its build complexity, I’m not sure why you’re still with the game 2 -1/2 years down the road.

You could argue that the dungeons they launched with didn’t really take advantage of the strengths of the combat system they developed, and I wouldn’t disagree. But what you are looking for is antithetical to what gw2 is trying to achieve, so it’s probably best you stick with DDO. Maybe try out Path of Exile if build complexity is a priority for you . :P

You’re still focusing on the old, outdated content, which anet has already explained they don’t prioritize revamping. The are going to work on new content instead, so we should look at what they’ve introduced since launch, to see if they get whats wrong with launch dungeons and have made new content better.

Thamanova fractal – 4 different events which are accessible simultaneously, allowing for varied approaches. Not “sloppy corridors”.
TA aether – Puzzle elements. Though the main part of the dungeon is corridor like, the optional part afterwards is very open ended.
Molten Duo and Mai Trin – bosses with phases and mechanics you cannot simply 1111 through. Molten duo suffers from a lack of HP, and mai’s cannon phases can become tedious, but you couldn’t really call them an auto attack fest.

So, you can keep harping on about the design flaws of low level launch dungeons, but it’s beating a dead horse. If you hate it so much, get out of AC and do stuff like fractals and aetherpath, and tell anet we need more new instanced hardcore content in the expac.

Maybe the problem is, you play “exclusively necro”, a class which is infamous for its lack of team utility, and thus you don’t understand the nuances of playing a class with lots of team utility like guard, or mes? “There’s something incredibly boring about tweaking your character to only maximize the damage output.” – any good fractal guardian player would laugh at that statement. For any given fight you have to choose whether to prioritize blocks, stability uptime, reflect uptime, condition cleanse, or full offense. This includes triats, utilities and weapon choices. Mesmer is similar, but you also are responsible for boon stripping in cases like ettin for harpy fractal, molten facility, dredge, etc.

You’re also using a dps check encounter in a lvl 35 dungeon that is 2 years old as your primary example in assessing the depth of the combat system. I think everyone would agree its a pretty shallow and boring encounter. But its not really representative of higher-end pve where minmaxing is someone relevant. Fractals, ta aether – that’s the direction anet’s development has taken, and the encounters in those dungeons demand a much broader range of defense and utility then any of the at-launch dungeons.

Yeah 3-4 hours is crazy for a pug. Around 95% of my pugs fall between 30 mins – 1h30, with the average leaning towards forty-five to fifty mins. This is like – unfiltered 2 rangers one condi necro type groups fall in this range. You can get 25-45 mins reliably if you post yourself and filter for zergbergers and run with a friend or two. (Though wating for people who can read will eat into the over all time).

With that in mind if you buffed the rewards you might run into a situation where its a bit more rewarding then dungeons for organized groups, but maybe close to equivalent for pug groups. That doesn’t sound like a bad thing to me.

For necro, it’s hard to pin down just a few things because as Bhawb said, “while we did retain some buffs, these buffs might not keep us up on the level of power creep other professions had. Meaning we took one step forward, but if everyone else took two – we’ve effectively gone backwards.” Overall the changes just feel lackluster, not enough. But there are a few things that seem to keep popping up.

- No power-focused GM option for the Curses traitline, a traitline which otherwise works well with a power build – things like furious demise and banshee’s wail.

- 2 Death Magic GM’s are minon based, meaning non-minon builds specing in to DM are pigeon holed into a single GM (which isn’t that great.)

- Reaper’s precision is bad, and it was left basically unchanged. If you’re running a ds based build, you have decent lf- regen from your weapon skills, so reapers precision isn’t going to make a difference. Otherwise you are on scepter, where the aa is to slow for reapers precision to matter. If you buff the trait, it becomes OP with lf – regen weapons. Better to just scrap the trait entirely.

- ICD returned for DS-entry traits , needlessly nerfing DS flashing dagger necros.

I’m also going to link spoj’s write up from the necro sub, because I think it shows the though process a pve necro goes through looking at the traits, and where things become problematic.
Dagger necro // DS necro

By insane i didn’t mean unfair or too strong necessarily, just very exciting – its good stuff, relative to some of the other classes.

The necro changes, its like… it’s the main reason I stepped away from the class. Every livestream and change it just seems like the devs have no idea what necro is about, they just throw around some changes and hope its not terrible. Guardian changes look insane, as do the engi changes, some of the thief changes look fun as well.

Idk how many of ya’ll did the living story but in that mirror challenge thing in the library, your mirror was meant to reflect the current pve meta, and ele used icebow and LH, so I have the suspicion they think the meta is still s/d water camping lh build… That’s the only thing I can think of because it isn’t used in pvp or wvw.

yeah apparently LH does op damage and needs to be nerfed same as IB, staff needs a buff tho clearly /smh .-.

I totally understand if they don’t want to engage, but if they community manager is saying things like “I’ll check on this” “I’m actively looking into this” “I’ll get back to you”, etc, it usually implies they will, you know, get back to us. Just like some indication that the relevant developers understand what the change was, and maybe a rough idea of how they want to handle the situation.

It’s going to be a looot easier to speculate when we know what traits are and aren’t making it through to the new system, and how they will be arranged, so I do hope we get all that information. It definently seems like eles will have a harder time stacking damage modifiers, but if that “frees” us to take utility and playstyle altering traits that could be nice. They mentioned necro wells will be ground targeted by default so I wonder if blasting staff will become default as well. (Maybe a bit of a long shot but I can hope :p).

Human racial tree form # 5 serves the same purpose as grasping roots, it functions like a pre-nerfed ranger entangle. Really effective in pug arah p1 where damage is decent but no one thinks to BYO-immob. Char hidden pistol + necro is a classic, and technobabble + ranger as was mentioned above. prayer to dwayna is nice for classes that lack an unconditional burst heal like necro or mes. The unblockable chill of grenth form also has its uses.

This is going to be like the vote kick change. A few months of “I’ll get back to you” before a change goes in randomly with no word back whatsoever. It’s not a huge deal but I wish we could at least have a “The developers told me what happened was ‘x’, they are planning to do ‘y’, I can’t give you a time but it’s on their short list of bug fixes.”

deSade.9437:

P.S. I’d like to point out that I think stacking outgoing heal and healing in general is better suited for an elementalist, not a guardian. But that’s just my opinion.

The thing is, if your going for stat based support, healing power is basically your only option, outside of maybe boon duration. You need enough toughness to maintain agro (when it’s relevant)- any other defensive stat is selfish.

I prefer healing guard over healing ele simply because guard does more of the kind of healing you need when healing would be at all relevant – sustained healing to counter retal, aa damage, frizz lazer walls, etc. Ele has amazing burst healing, as you mentioned the dodge roll heal, but burst damage is countered most often with blocks/evades. You can aa in staff water, but as soon as you do anything else the only sustained healing you’re left with is soothing mist. I found playing a healing ele was much more reactionary, waiting for my teammates to get low so I could get of a burst, where guard keeps everyone topped off without wasting big heals.

Guardian also has much better access to aoe protection, which goes quite well with healing – keep the squishes from being chucked down too quickly so you can heal them up. A guardian will also have an easier time keeping themselves and the mobs still during the fight, which allows your party members to position themselves safely.

The burst healing nature of ele probably also explains why you didn’t see much improvement from cele to cleric – it’s very easy to over heal. But the small ticks of healing a guard has gains much more out of high healing power. It’s a wombo combo of aegis/prot to stop the spike damage, and sustained healing to keep everyone topped up, with just a few choice burst heals (f2 for example) for those oh-crap moments.

Sincerely, someone who may secretly enjoy trying out healing builds in late night FOTM. >_>

Lol well, I don’t know if would help in the case I was thinking of (the kick was almost instantaneous, like they had it planned or something) but I should in general be more aggressive in starting my own vote kicks if they aren’t respecting my lfg message. I just hate that pugging feels like an uphill battle a lot more then it use to, to do something as simple as fight without completely disabling the boss. I don’t hate the people that bug him, I just hate the environment the bug has created.

Read my post: “being kicked from parties I create” <— yes, stating in the LFG that I don’t want to bug him, still being vote kicked. Being told I was lashing out when I simply say, “can we not exploit him”. I’m glad you’ve had a better experience, I wish I could say the same. :P

If you cant see a distinction between pulling a boss into terrain where he literally does nothing and you can go make a coffee while letting your char 11111, and pulling a boss into a corner so that everyone stays close and the boss does his melee attacks then…there’s really no point arguing. This is the definition of safespotting, I don’t know how this is even a question. If you want to argue semantics based a tactic that was nerfed 8 months ago then, ok I guess. I’m not sure what the point is. At the end of the day this is still a bug, and it’s still faster to fight him on land unless you are with bad pugs. I hope it gets addressed because I use to love pugging fractals, but facing verbal abuse and being kicked from parties I create when I don’t want to exploit has become a regular occurrence.

I really disagree that reflects -outside of wall on wall- are too strong. A mesmer one shot from phase 2 takes coordination and even some luck. How rarely do people actually kill Lupi from p2 in a casual run without wall on wall? The issue as I see it is being able to place a reflect at the spawn point of his projectiles. I agree with spoj and some others – look at anet’s track record for nerfing reflects, and look at how trivial an issue it is when you remove wall on wall. It’s not worth the risk for one technique at one encounter that might be a bit too strong.

They’d have to ban 90% of people who pug fractals if they banned people for bugging him, so your account is safe. The facts about this are 1) Anet has implemented multiple changes since fractals was released to discourage people from fighting him in the water. 2) When he’s pulled to that spot he’s completely disabled. Exploit may be too strong a term, but its definitely abusing a terrain based design flaw that anet is fully aware of and has attempted to fix a number of times. If all you care about is whether or not you’ll get banned, though, and would rather afk for 10 mins than just do the fight legit, then you can continue bugging him.

That was the strategy I used in my solo a long while ago, but I’ve since just started los’ing her around trees. You sacrifice a bunch of init to keep her interrupted and you can psudo-extend the cd of her symbol by cnd right before she would symbol (usually after 2 sword summons).

Updating with Austin’s staff strat – I was hoping for sub 6, (I got ~ 6:06) but this was a fairly clean kill and I think it’s a decent example of how the build works. For casual daily solos this works quite well. The only part where rng can screw you is phase 2, but that’s nothing new and if you can sidestep the swipe you can mitigate a lot of the risk.

I also got a new monitor today and didn’t realize till looking back at the footage that obs cut off part of the right side of the screen. XD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N0ynbQHoUo&feature=youtu.be

That may be it, though anecdotally it feels like I see her going off in a random direction much more often. I’ll watch to see if she is blinded next time, and maybe get some footage.

Oh! I just remembered, maybe it was mentioned somewhere else but I didn’t see it. Mai Trin’s shadow shot has a very similar bug to lupi’s shadow step. Sometimes she will waaay overshoot and end up on the other side of the room. It’s such a similar effect I think they are probably related, though I can’t think of any other bosses or mobs that have targeted teleports to test it on.

Vigor + an energy sigil will actually take you a long way, but I’m afraid I’m not an engi expert. I’d imagine FT’s reflect might play into it, since it has a relatively low cd.

Yep, it’s Blind Guardian – And Then There Was Silence. Their stuff is cheesy but in a way I really love.

If I wasn’t totally trash at side-strafing maybe I could do it with out dodging. ;n; But yeah I thank the gods for ring of earth every day in mai trin pugs. XD

Hello all! After a night of much head banging, I wanted to share my ele solo of the “new” lupi. My set up was about as defensive as could be, so I’m hoping to see others in the community post more yolo strats – and maybe even some staff solos.

Turrets are still broken post patch; I rolled the shard early this morning.

fixin’ forum bugs

Mossman isn’t the best example of where healing is useful (although the wolf adds are more relevant then people are giving them credit.) But take a fight like the end boss of char fractal, with his perma unstrippable retal. Frizz where you eat lazer walls to brute force it.

And let’s be careful not to shift the goal posts. At first people were saying “you loose too much damage, it’s slower then full zerk”, and now I hear “trios are for fun and challenge anyway, afk 111 dps is boring”. which is kind of….ironic honestly when you think about what we tell people who complain about stacking for trash mobs.

I agree that we need to table the discussion until we see some evidence from the opposition. If you pre-spawn the wolves include that in the kill time, because the point is about overall run efficiency, not isolated kills. Ideally show a full run taking less than an hour. I do believe its possible, but I think its the only fair way forward at this point. Just saying “it should” “i think” etc over and over is just talking in circles.

RemiRome.8495:

or just not attack anything. like you’re already doing unless you’re supposed to.

edit: personally it’s a QoL change since the times I forgot to make pet attack outnumbers the times pet kittens up by infinity.

After playing with it a bit more I think I misunderstood what the change was, and I see it’s not unmanageable. Once you call off the pet after attacking, the pet wont re-engage with the target until you f1, so you don’t have to spam call off your pet like I was afraid you would need to. I can see it being an intended change, although I wish it had been included in the patch notes just to avoid the confusion. _

welp, looks like I’ll be running around in quaggan form a lot more until they fix this. -_- thank god for in combat tonics.

I don’t know how much you’ve played on EU, Dusk, but after having transferred I have a lot more sympathy for people who say its hard to pug with necro/ranger. For whatever reason EU pugs are much, much more class conscious, and when I pug with my ranger I’m frequently insta-kicked from groups with descriptions as basic as “p1”. As in, I’ll be kicked before I even load into the correct map, before I can even say anything. It’s not all the time, but it’s enough that it wears me down and by the end of the night I usually switch to ele/guard/thief etc. I just point it out because its one of those weird NA/EU differences that is hard to see unless you’ve played on both servers.

You definently have to alter your playstyle somewhat when you are pugging, and finding the right balence between “my way or the high way” and letting the pugs to pug strats can be a struggle. Arah can be particularly frustrating because there are more ways an inexperienced player can jeprodize the whole team rather then just dying themselves, same with TA aether.

My suggestion would be – take guildies when you can, even if it’s not a full group. 2 good players coordinating together can carry a team, and it’s easier to suggest strats when you have someone backing you up. It’s also sometimes easier to laugh off the shenanigans pugs get up to when you’re with someone else. For arah, if you can find 2 other knowledgable people it’s almost always faster then going with a full group of pugs.

I’m working on my third, waiting for HoT is making me a legendary grinding casual. I remember the days when I told myself I’d never get one. ;n;

I know the phenomena your talking about, but it’s a mystery to me as well. It plays as though he has a cc-immunity period after he is stunned a few times which you just have to wait out, but its a completely hidden mechanic. Interestingly, the first golem suit boss in SE story mode (the one that puts down necro-looking wells) has the same thing. It’s very easy to encounter if you’ve ever tried to keep interrupting his wells to stay in melee.

I fear involving anything that looks or sounds like a gear check is going to scare Anet off, even if the proposed system is solid. That’s not to say its not worth talking about, I just feel like they may throw the baby out with the bath water if they see gear/class filtering.

The two things I’d really like to see that I think would go a long way towards reducing lfg abuse reports without shaking up the system to much is 1) joining from lfg starts an invite, rather than automatically joining, and 2) three votes to kick in a full party.

When the dev’s talked about why they chose to make lfg insta-join, they said they wanted you to get out and playing as quick as possible. Really the only benifit is that you don’t have to take the half-second it takes to click the check mark, and it comes at a pretty high cost. There is currently not protection against people you have blocked joining your party. Also, someone you have just kicked can immediately rejoin once you re-list, possibly bringing a friend to kick you. (I’ve had this happen.)

Three votes to kick in a full party is something they said they were going to do, gale said she would get back to us about why it never went through, but we still haven’t heard back.

Edit: I’m not against a party leader system, I worry that it could take some time to develop so I was proposing some more immediate solutions.

In the few times its happened to me, I pm everyone in the party. the person who kicked me immediately blocks me when I try to pm them. The people who weren’t in the guild message me back saying saying they were kicked/blocked as well. No one from outside the guild was left in the party to confirm who they brought in, so we didn’t know for sure. I just infer from the fact that the only people left in the instance are in the same guild, multiple people were kicked usually before a boss (not after a wipe), and they were so quick to block us without giving any explanation or really interacting much at all, that more than likely the people they are inviting are from their own guild.

Too busy with the fractals kitten measuring thread I guess. :P

It sounds like we simply have different experiences and different priorities then, so I won’t argue that your point of view is not valid. If your goal is to make it to then end of an encounter without a single down in a pug, I can’t say that I can absolutely ensure that on my staff elementalist. I think to say the “speed is reduced a little” is generous, and I disagree that a good player will be “struggling to survive amidst the group’s tactical mistakes,” – a skilled player will adapt to what defense is and isn’t present in a given situation. Also the line “gw2 is harder than it appears” ? It sounds like you are talking to someone who doesn’t play the game – most days I solo or low man both fotm and dungeons, so I understand how hard (or not, as the case may be) encounters are. I do believe there are some genuinely challenging encounters in the game, but CM specifically is under-tuned for fully geared players with even a moderate amount of experience.

to iris – I understand the filmed run wasn’t a pug, but she was advising this group set up for “casual/pug” runs, which is what I was responding to.

Edit, to be a bit clearer: “1 heal 4 zerk is more viable in pug/casual scenarios than 5 zerk parties.” Is not the point I was arguing against, all though I would lean more towards “deserves consideration” rather then flat out “more viable”. My point was: From my experience at least, when going in totally blind to a random pug, bringing dps and active party wide defense makes things go smoother then depending on your party-mates to do enough damage. It seems like you’ve had the opposite experience, and I can’t really argue with that. You post for “zerker” pugs, so that may be part of it.

Goodness, it seems like you read “placebo” and nothing else of my post. The main argument that you make I actually mention just above that – Bridgette and retal. Turmain is essentially the same thing: you brute force rather then ib5, so healing allows melee classes to stay in melee range and dps the whole time. I was actually trying to play devils advocate. I’m sorry that word distracted so much from my point, which was really just that whether you have a centaur rune mesmer running around portaling or a healing guardian, being down one dps character isn’t going to make much of a difference where kill times are concerned. It’s going to be seconds or a few more seconds.

I don’t have any problem with the set up, although I wouldn’t advise trying to use it in pugs as you suggest. Because while 4zerk1heal is not that much different from 5zerks, 4 grab-bag-of random-traits-and-specs + 1 heal isn’t always going to work out. You can’t depend on pugs to deal dps, and after two years of pugging I can safely say it’s much better to bring your own dps and bring active defense without gimping yourself to buff or heal your party mates. Pugs are much more likely to lack good damage then they are to lack personal survivability. “They trust me to protect them, and I trust them to fully dps.” – trust is not something you bring into pugs, so I’d advise keeping the healer guard for times when you know everyone in the party and know the full group composition.

I think the real take away is that when encounters are so under-tuned (or tuned to level 45 characters with only a few trait points) that everything explodes in seconds, being essentially down a person makes a negligible difference in kill times. Using the same strategies as in the video but making the guard zerker probably wouldn’t make the path that much faster. If you’re in a casual group where you aren’t going to coordinate deep freeze, and you happen to RNG retal on Bridget I can see the heals being of some use. Maybe if there was a downed = dead gambit for the dungeon? As it is though I think healing had more of a placebo effect than anything else – you would have done nearly the same with or without it.

“You’ve talked about a lot of features but don’t see anything here about dungeons?” “We’ve talked about all the major features in heart of thorns.” Clear as day really, that’s how you say their won’t be any dungeons while still using “positive” language. In a way I’m glad any ambiguity left on that front is gone.

What worries me more is their avoidance of the word “instanced”. For me that’s what separates actual raids from the pseudo-raid zerg stuff we’ve seen of late. If they want to move away from 5 man group content in to 10 or 20 man stuff, and leave fractals as the primary 5 man stuff, that’s ok. As long as the raids are instanced. If all we get is more teq/worm and a few fractal masteries… I can’t say I’ll be surprised but it would still be a pretty big disappointment.

I figured there was a risk it would be taken that way. we’ve just seen record posts derailed into argument before, and this topic has been discussed a bunch already and was voted on. I get he’s saying “this is an example of how the rule can get kind of fuzzy, and makes me scratch my head as to why people wanted it banned first place.” It came to mind because of the situation. I do understand that. But a record post is not necessarily the place to “vent” about a topic that’s done and dusted at least for the present. As he said, no one wants the debate again.

spoj.9672:

Yeah. Dont really think its worth getting into this discussion again.

Then why did you say, “Don’t really get why that rule was implemented. But it was voted for. People seem to enjoy having so many pointless rules i guess.” and continue to discuss it? I think at this point everyone knows your opinion on the matter, so why bring it up? The rule was made, you disagree with it but the rules aren’t just based on what you want. We’ve accepted the restricted ruleset comes with some logical inconsistencies for pragmatic purposes. As was discussed in the belka-bugging thread, at the end of the day if the people who are actually doing speed runs don’t like using the rules, they just won’t use them. That’s why there was a vote about it.

I’m not saying your wrong for having a differing opinion. I’m saying bringing up your opinion in a way that is dismissive of the people who disagree with you, and on a record thread, is not the way to go about voicing it.

AndrewMcLeod.3857:

Immobilize also doesn’t currently affect the defiance bar currently. I’m somewhat of two minds on this condition, though- as it effects only movement, a lot of bosses aren’t punished by it, but it can be exploitative for melee bosses, especially in coordinated, small-group situations like dungeons or fractals.

Exploitative is a pretty strong term. Perma chill achieves basically the same effect because you can backpedal and max melee faster than the boss can catch you. Unless you’re thinking of a new boss we haven’t seen yet, I can’t think of a single boss in dungeons and fractals that is pure melee and isn’t considered a complete joke anyway. (Example – arah p1 ooze.)

MaXi.3642:

rfdarko.4639:

Well I wasn’t sure if that only applied to new content only, or if old bosses will be retro-fitted that way as well. That’s what i’d like to know, how old content will be effected by this change.

it’s a change to defiance system, not just to some NPCs, everything what uses it will be influenced… and he said that some NPCs will have an effect which is part of the event (e.g. Wyvern) and others will just have some general stun or vulnerability window (e.g. general champs and most old bosses)

This is my understanding but he didn’t state it explicitly, thus I was asking for confirmation. :P They could theoretically have a differnet solution for current dungeons that uses the new system but allows a single cc through for the vulnerability phase rather then applying a generic stun, where as bosses in new HoT content get their boss specific effect.

MaXi.3642:

yes that’s exactly what will happen I think he stated it quite clear…

Well I wasn’t sure if that only applied to new content only, or if old bosses will be retro-fitted that way as well. That’s what i’d like to know, how old content will be effected by this change.

AndrewMcLeod.3857:

When the bar is emptied, the boss will be affected by his defiance behavior, such as getting stunned or becoming vulnerable. After that happens, there’s a cooldown period where the boss is completely immune to crowd control, and then the defiance bar is filled and becomes active again.

This can somewhat depend on the boss, though, as some have custom defiance behavior like the Wyvern. For the Wyvern, there’s no cooldown period, but it is immune to CC except for during its takeoff skill, and the defiance bar is disabled at other times.

So just to be clear- with the new expansion, we will no longer be able to directly cc champion level and above mobs – they will have a pre-defined vulnerability state and cc will only ever strip defiant? So, we will not be able to scorpion wire mai trin into a blue circle, or deep freeze the berserker from the molten duo?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/The-New-Defiance-Article/first#post4828851

I believe we’re still balancing the broad-reaching solution but yes, a significant stun will be applied.

The implication being, once the bar is depleted it triggers a specific event, unlike the current system which allows your next cc to go through. From what we’ve seen of the demos there is no visible “unshakable” status effect, and it would be unlikely that blind would function both as a defiant-ripping cc and as a condition that very occasionally effects the boss. More likely, blind is being turned into a cc to address the issue that the 10% proc chance was in practice the same as blind immunity, and didn’t really work as a mechanic.

Yeah, I really don’t see a way this can be retro-fitted elegantly, except maybe on some multi-phase fractal bosses if they gave them a bit of a rework. It makes me a little more nervous for the expac to deliver on the instanced content front, if existing dungeons are going to pay the price.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

GoldenTruth.2853:

…I’d like some clarity in what happens to mobs when you deplete their defiance bar….

I believe we’re still balancing the broad-reaching solution but yes, a significant stun will be applied. Pretty sure we’ll be releasing more details through our channels real soon.

My concern is this – from what is being said, emptying the defiant bar results in a certain outcome, specific to the boss, rather then the system we have now where stripping defiant allows a CC of our choosing to go through. The current system gives groups more options.

For example, on mai trin, you man want to use your defiant-less window of opportunity to deep freeze her and get a burst of damage off, or you may want to use it to position her into a blue electric field. With this new break-bar system, it sounds like we would not be able to use our cc skills directly on the boss. Rather, they would serve only as a means to wear down the bar to achieve a scripted “vulnerability” event.

To me this makes fights less dynamic. There’s less tactical options because the game is basically holding your hand, saying “now spike cc, now burst, now dance around and avoid damage” rather then you controlling and making those opportunities yourself.

The break bar system will probably be better for zerg events where coordinating 20-50 people to any nuanced degree is an unreasonable expectation. But for 5 man content, I fear this will change encounters for the worst.