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These are my experiences from mostly dungeons with heavy coordination from my close friends.
Bolded are my main suggestions as far as pve changes.
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Retaliation and damage reflection through guards can have massive returns to enemies and bosses. It is affected by your power stat.
The basic idea is to tank enemies with skills that make you unable to take damage (from all sources, or just the applicable sources) until you can get the proper combo fields set up to maintain consistent hard damage reduction. You can buffer down times in these reductions with dodges and certain utility skills.
The current set-up my team uses is a defensive elementalist. He uses mist form and obsidian flesh to get himself in and attract the initial attention. Nearby we have a banner warrior. His job is to tank the mobs if/when the elem goes down (when you are downed your aggro goes to 1 on the table as far as I can tell). Using ignore pain he can tank temporarily and drop his elite banner to revive if necessary. We usually have another elem for dps that uses glyph of renewal to get the tanks back up and etc. We have a necro that managed most conditions that also has signet of undeath to get members back up.
You use invulnerability skills to get in and draw attention (and dps) while your team sets up combo fields that can directly mitigate damage through blinds, retaliation, and etc. In case we can't keep something up properly they buffer the down time with invuln skills or dodge rolls. If they fail aggro goes to the secondary tank while we revive the original with a skill. We continue to use the off tank while the original dps' until the offtank dies. We switch between them as needed.
Each member fills two primary roles. Their choices depending on class are
1. Being the enemies focus. You use invuln skills/dodges/and retaliation when your boon man can't keep boons up.
2. Reviving downed teammates
3. Creating combo fields
4. Finishing combo fields
5. The buff guy. Keeps everyone mitigating dmg, doing more dmg.
6. The debuff guy. He keeps the enemies debilitated.
Everyone does dps. It isn't that important. For example the necro handles some revives and debuffs while dropping dps with everyone else. The guardian keeps up retaliation and boons on people. The warrior holds focus and revives.
We are clearing most content fairly easily once you get past the crazy stuff (elemental reflection, odd combat mechanics, traps). Half the fun however is dealing with the special situations in dungeons while attempting to keep this kind of organization together. It just takes organization. Several encounters are incredibly challenging still because of how the unique combat mechanics present interestingly seem designed to stop certain interactions and kinds of teamwork. Like pulses that wipe off status effects and being chosen to do partial content alone.
Certain people do certain roles better. Warriors are great for using retaliation, ignore pain, and their elite banner revive. Every class has signature moves like those that define their roles. Your stats arent as important as what you're doing in a fight. Every fight we've had to manually rez someone we have lost in the later dungeons.
I really love it this way. It keeps you doing varied things but still performing a job. No one simply dps' and no one just tanks. Honestly it is a beautiful meta. Too bad it only happens in dungeons. Outside of dungeons the rest of the pve is tripe. There are a few exceptions but the real interesting, skillful, and fun for a team gameplay is only found in dungeons.
I should also add that combo fields are incredibly important for this. For example necros are our best source of blind using their wells. We use our tank/enemy-focus to combine the wells with leaps and blasts to keep TONS of blind up more than constant... in excess.
Necros are gods at this.
We also use guardians for light fields which grant retaliation with leaps and blasts as well. This allows us to help mitigate things blinds don't (aoe radial explosions, falling debris, giant lasers).
Those are the big two. Smoke fields are helpful as another source of blind too.
Oddly enough Warriors, engineers, and elementalists have the most necessary finisher... blasts. Necros and guardians have the most wanted fields dark and light. These classes also contain the most wanted utilities like blocks, invulnerability, rez, and more. This leaves the other classes kinda unwanted later on.
Thieves use smoke screen and black powder a lot in our group to apply ranged blinds with projectile finishers (necessary in a lot of situations). Engineers can make smoke fields but not even close to a thieve (they also are awesome with poisons).
Basically only rangers and mesmers do almost nothing we want for our groups and pack the least of our wanted utility. However they are the only classes capable of soloing certain mobs and handling niche roles when you need to split up for a few things.
It all balances out when you see the big picture but mesmers and rangers need to be able to do more for teams and necro skills need to be more 'fun' (even though they are incredibly effective).
The game also needs to teach you about combo fields and stuff. The hell is up with how it is doesn't? Everyone is all like "necro suckz even though I can create constant blinds".
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Edited by Ganondorf, 03 September 2012 - 06:44 AM.
