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Value of combo fields and finishers to damage


Tinker.6924

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New-ish player to gw2 (played ele back in 2013 for a few months and just came back as a ranger) and while I understand the mechanics of combo fields and finishers, and have had success setting them up and triggering combos in my solo pve play, I wonder is the effort really worth it as a ranger or even in general?

In looking over this info,https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/ComboAll the really cool stuff seems tied to Blast Finishers, which this level 65 ranger doesn't seem to have any of and the vast majority of finishers I do have as a Ranger are Projectile finishers which generally result in inflicting a 1 or 2 sec condition, which seems inconsequential. Yet this combo mechanic seems like it was intended to be a fairly significant and important part of your combat effectiveness.

So what am I missing?Can I personally trigger multiple combo finishes off the same combo field? With the same skill? For example, if my pet murellow does its poison breath attack (a 4 sec combo field), can I cast Ricochet multiple times at affected targeta in that 4 sec window and, assuming I'm extremely lucky with procs, get multiple finisher affects to those targets? According to the wiki the combo finisher effect is a 2s poison condition, does that even stack with each other or the original AOE effect? Or at least extend the duration?

The way this mechanic is described makes it sound like at most one finish effect will ever trigger on any field instance. Like if I drop a field effect, and joe random attacking the same npc reacts faster with a finisher, he will get the only finish benefit, it will happen just the 1 time, and I can only hope that it helps me somehow?

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The combo system has never been really reworked over the years. They changed a few finishers and results, like blasting a Light Field now grants Area Condition Cleanse instead of Retaliation.

It is possible to trigger one combo field with several projectiles/finishers of the same attack. It is theoretically also possible to overlap two fields and trigger 2 combos with one finisher. This is mostly a thing for blastfinishers and requires a lot of accuracy and good timing.

If you play condition-builds and want to use the finishers, be warned: the condition duration does not scale with your personal stats! Even if you have 100 % condition duration on your character, the effect caused by the combo will still last only as long as described in the wiki. It just adds a stack on impact. That is why most people do not care about combos, at least not for damage-purpose. They are still nice for buffing might, healing, cleansing and stacking stealth.

Back in the days when the Shredder Gyro (Scrapper) was still ground-target controlled, you could have put a fire-field below your opponent and set the Shredder Gyro on top. It was capable of adding 8-10 burn stacks really fast. I used it on a few bosses. But thanks to the non-scaling, it vanished after ~ 2 seconds. It was a nice discovery, but in the end not worth the trouble.

Another problem comes with the projectile finishers, which are mostly designed with a % success rate. As long as you do not have a ton of projectiles, I would not go for it.

The really useful part about combos is also the most annoying part. If there is a field on the ground, does not matter who activated it, every attack that has a finisher-move will cause a combo with that field.

Back in the days when we did not have reliable might-stack-buffers, we used to put fire-fields on the ground and ask everyone around to smash their blastfinishers into them. This worked quite well and was used even in certain organized Worldbosses like the Triple Trouble. The big problem were the Guardians. Because they almost always drop a light field to increase their attack-power (they have a trait that increases damage when they stand in one of their own symbols). Once the light field was on top of the fire-field, all blastfinishers only reacted with the light field = no might!

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