PSA for New Players: What is "CC"?

Hi, guys! As a commander, I lead a lot of events these days. A persistent problem is poor understanding of what "CC" is and how it should be applied. So I just wanted to take a moment to talk a bit about some critical mechanics that seem poorly understood among the community.

CC stands for Crowd Control. It refers to any ability that effectively removes enemies from the fight, even if only for a second or two. You may hear other players refer to two types of CC: Soft CC and Hard CC.

Examples of "Soft CC": Cripple, immobilize, chill, blind. They call these "soft" CC because they can reduce an enemy's ability to deal damage but they don't completely shut them down. For instance, immobilizing an enemy that has only melee attacks doesn't prevent them from attacking, but it does make it impossible for them to actually get close enough to hit you!

Examples of "Hard CC": Stun, knockdown, pull, launch. A hard CC generally causes a temporary loss of control. For instance, when you get stunned you are unable to activate skills (Exception: Skills with no activation time such as a stun break!).

Now using these skills may seem fairly straightforward, and it is! But what about enemies that are immune to CC, such as bosses?

Enter the "Defiance Bar" https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiance_Bar

The defiance bar (also referred to as a "breakbar") only appears on difficult enemies, usually champion or legendary bosses, but sometimes veterans or elites may have a defiance bar as well. The defiance bar displays underneath the target's health bar. It may appear 3 different ways: Armored (literally covered in what looks like armor plating), blue, or brown.

The "armored" defiance bar indicates that the target is currently immune to CC.

The blue bar indicates that you may use CC to damage the defiance bar.

The brown bar indicates that the defiance bar has recently been broken and is recharging, rendering the boss immune to CC in the interim.

When the defiance bar is blue, any CC you apply will take some amount off of the bar. How much depends upon the boss, the CC used, and how many players are present. I emphasized that last bit because it's important to note that simply by being present you will contribute to scaling the boss's stats upward. This includes how much health the defiance bar has!

Note that each attack deals a specific amount of damage based upon the type of CC (stun, daze, etc.) and its duration. Hard CC generally deals more damage to the defiance bar than soft CC and longer durations will produce better damage. The exact amounts are listed in the wiki link above.

So, why does the defiance bar matter? What does it actually do? This depends on the boss. Many bosses simply get stunned for several seconds, allowing players to get some damage in without having to worry about a counter-attack from the boss! But for many other bosses it is a critical mechanic. In particular, bosses that feature the armored bar usually have specific times where you're supposed to break the defiance bar. Those times will be marked by the bar switching over to blue.

An example of a boss like this is the Wyvern Matriarch in Verdant Brink. For much of the fight her defiance bar is armored. However, periodically she will attempt to take to the air and the defiance bar will display blue. At this point, players have just a few seconds to break the defiance bar before the wyvern takes off. If she manages to take off, you won't be able to hit her until she lands again. Worse, she will swoop down, raining fiery death across the battlefield! And that fire sticks around for awhile, presenting an additional hazard once the wyvern lands! However, if you break her bar, she will fall to the ground, stunned for several seconds. In this case, breaking the bar leads to a far easier fight that takes considerably less time to complete!

Another example are the PoF bounty bosses. They have a mechanic called "unstable magic" that provides them with 2 (or 3, in the case of legendary bounties) special abilities. These abilities are often extremely disruptive (e.g. "Phase Shifted" creates zones players must stay inside of in order to damage the boss!). Fortunately, when the defiance bar on these bosses breaks, it gives you a temporary reprieve from the unstable magic mechanics.

As you can see, the defiance bar is an important mechanic. Unfortunately, it's also poorly explained (if at all?) and poorly understood! So I hope this will be useful to some of you who are learning the basics here in GW2. Good luck out there!

It’s also worth noting Skills, traits, and sigils that have bonus effects when interrupting foes will now activate when used against foes with defiance bars as though they had been interrupted. So, you also need to think about timing if your intention is to deal more damage, as well as not wasting a valuable crowd control skill.

This does not require a creature's defiance bar to be active, just that the creature be using a skill when an interrupt effect is applied. To prevent abuse against bosses with long attack windups, a 3-second cooldown between activations of these skills has been added to skills without existing cooldowns. This cooldown is only applied when interrupting foes with defiance bars.

Warrior

Merciless Hammer: Confusion application only.Sun and Moon Style: Quickness effect only.Thief

Pressure StrikingImpacting DisruptionRanger

Moment of ClarityElementalist

Polaric LeapMesmer

Illusion of VulnerabilityFurious InterruptionPower Block: Cooldown increase is not applied to defiant creatures.Duelist's Discipline: Recharge effect only.Chaotic InterruptionSigils

Superior Sigil of RuthlessnessSuperior Sigil of AbsorptionSuperior Sigil of DrainingSuperior Sigil of RendingSuperior Sigil of Severance

Also worth noting is that on many bosses, breaking the defiance bar often gives you a damage buff while it is recharging.

I like this post..But for the purpose served, I think a more generic message should be broadcasted to new players. That is to type ‘/wiki term’ into the gamechat. In this situation, /wiki cc leads to https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Control_effect

If the info there isn’t good, edit the page to improve. (It looks fine to me). But the most powerfull part is that you learn a player where to get info quickly.

This should be very helpful for new players. Maybe the forum should have a dedicated section for more similar guides, which are more fleshed out than gw2 wiki?

Lol, this reminds me of an organised group to fight The Shatterer, 2 days ago, for the No-Fly achievement. Despite the comm warned us in time for the CC phase, we failed :/Then someone said "but he's dying, isn't it?". Good post.