This article of The Scrying Pool looks at how some skills cover too much ground.

Stability is a boon that prevents a player from being knocked down, pushed back, launched, stunned, dazed, floated, sunk or feared. You might be thinking from that long list that I consider stability to be a BA because it prevents so many different things. I actually like it because it prevents all of these things that are designed to push players around (except for dazed; I still don’t understand why it is blocked by stability). The reason I consider it a BA is not in the width of abilities it prevents, but in the length of time it prevents these in most instances.

Most skills that buff players with the boon will give eight seconds of stability. In a game where control is one of the three big pillars of gameplay, eight seconds of stability is a very long time. Players could feasibly last the majority of a fight protected by stability, and this isn’t even considering the elite skills which give up to 20 seconds of the buff. Whereas condition BAs are bad because of their randomness, stability is bad because of its less than tactical application.

Mantra of Concentration is what stability should aim to be applied as. This mesmer skill gives 2 uses of stability for 2 seconds before a 25 second cooldown. Instead of having an 8 second blanket with a 45 second cooldown, players must use the shorter stabilities with a little more tactics. These 8 second blankets could then be reduced to 2 second windows of invulnerability to these controlling effects with around a 12 second cooldown. Now not only do players need to use these tactically, but a misuse of the skill only results in a 10 second wait for its return instead of over half a minute. See that guardian winding up his hammer to punt you? Two seconds is all you need to prevent it and the shorter cooldown means you likely will have the stability ready to use.

Similar to stability is the monster only ability Defiant. This stacking buff prevents any form of crowd control, but every such prevention removes a stack. If an enemy has 10 stacks of defiant, players must use 10 crowd control abilities to no effect to remove the stacks before the 11^th crowd control skill will be effective when there are no stacks remaining. After that single effective crowd control skill is used, the boss gains back the full stacks of defiant that players need to remove again.

This just feels bad. This only becomes worse on some of the bosses that require a successful knockback as part of the boss mechanics and someone uses a daze at the wrong moment to reset the stacks before the knockback can be landed.

While it sucks in its current form, it is needed in any type of group setting. Without defiant, a large group of players could just continually knock a boss back into a corner without allowing it to ever attack. I would like to keep defiant, but change it so that it is not so absolute.

The way I want defiant to work is if a boss’s maximum stack of defiant is 10, then at 10 stacks he would be immune to all crowd control effects which is the same as it currently exists. My defiant changes when you start removing the stacks. At 9 stacks, the boss would then be 90% immune to crowd control effects. This means that a player’s crowd control skill only has a 10% possibility of succeeding. This then continues down until 1 stack at 10% and no stacks at no immunity. This defiant could also scale for large groups of players. If there are enough players to scale the boss up to 50 stacks of defiant, each stack would remove 2% immunity.

Like the current defiant, under this new defiant stacks would be removed after each non-successful crowd control. If a boss is at 70% immunity and is hit successfully with a crowd control, the stacks would immediately rest to 100%. With this system it is still the one success before a full reset of the defiant, but now it is possible to get the crowd control on a fuller range. Accidentally resetting the stacks will not be as big a concern; players could possibly knock back that boss a little earlier and crowd control skills won’t feel like they are completely wasted 90% of the time.

Matt "Mattsta" Adams is really sad that last year's Halloween achievements didn't return.

I was thinking it would be cool if last year's Halloween achievements came back with the next patch which comes out two days before Halloween. The only content we are missing from last year is Reaper's Rumble, the Mad King dungeon and the Mad King storyline (that players received the back piece from). I'm not sure why any of this content would be held back, especially with all the new players that have come in with the last trial period. Players complained about the replaced TA path, but this is more like we are just short a few things without any replacement for them.

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