Guild Wars 2

Hi,

there’s a varity of different conditions in this game. All conditions can be separated into three categories:

Damage conditions:
- Bleed
- Burning
- Torment
- Poison
- Confusion

Movement conditions:
- Cripple
- Chill
- Immobilize
- Fear

Debuff conditions:
- Vulnerability
- Weakness
- Blind

The first category (damage conditions) are the focus of any condition based builds while the other categories (movement/ debuff conditions) are utilized by all kind of builds.

Condition durations can be largely increased or decreased with traits, runes and food. This is a huge problem for movement conditions because some professions can gain near immunity for those conditions (e.g. warriors, engis or eles due to the -33% traits combined with Melandru Runes and Lemongrass).

My proposed changes:
- Each condition is allocated to its category
- Condition duration bonus (from trait lines and foods) should only apply to damage conditions
- Condition Duration Food should be lowered (+40% and -40% is way too much)
- Special traits could still increase or decrease the duration of other categories (e.g. Dogged March), but that should be an exception.
- Each condition removal is allocated with a category, thus removing conditions only from this category
- Introduce more condition removers / revamp the existing ones so that every profession has good access to condition removers for every category
- The most dangerous condition will be removed first (e.g. the condition which does the most damage)

The benefits of the changes::
- No insane (high or low) condition durations for movement imparing effects
- Warriors, Engis or Eles cannot be nearly immun to cripple anymore, so cripple can be used to counter mobility skills like Savage Leap, Rush, Rocket Boots or Burning Speed
- Better control of which conditions will be cleansed.
- Movement and Debuff conditions are the same no matter if you run a condition or power based build

What do you think?

teg

teg.1340:

My proposed changes:
- Each condition is allocated to its category
- Condition duration bonus (from trait lines and foods) should only apply to damage conditions
- Condition Duration Food should be lowered (+40% and -40% is way too much)
- Special traits could still increase or decrease the duration of other categories (e.g. Dogged March), but that should be an exception.
- Each condition removal is allocated with a category, thus removing conditions only from this category
- Introduce more condition removers / revamp the existing ones so that every profession has good access to condition removers for every category
- The most dangerous condition will be removed first (e.g. the condition which does the most damage)

The benefits of the changes::
- No insane (high or low) condition durations for movement imparing effects
- Warriors, Engis or Eles cannot be nearly immun to cripple anymore, so cripple can be used to counter mobility skills like Savage Leap, Rush, Rocket Boots or Burning Speed
- Better control of which conditions will be cleansed.
- Movement and Debuff conditions are the same no matter if you run a condition or power based build

What do you think?

teg

I think that you are proposing incredibly overpowered buffs to the already dominant monster that is conditions.

The downsides of the changes:

-Everything that does melee damage will get kited all to hell even worse then it is now (and trust me, it is bad already and will become worse when double sigil hits the fan).
-Warriors, eles and engineers already have to spec very heavily into -movement impairing conditions to achieve said immunity (and they are NOT immune if you take +condi duration)
-You will seriously harm the usefulness of said gear
-You might get better control of which conditions you cleanse, but you will need a LOT more condition removal to keep up with the insane condition spam of, say, an engineer

This would be a pretty large nerf for condimancers that use Terror if condi duration no longer applied to Fear.

Cygnus.6903:

I think that you are proposing incredibly overpowered buffs to the already dominant monster that is conditions.

Already… dominant? Wait, what? Conditions? O.o

There are some good ideas in the proposal, but I think it needs refining. I also seriously doubt Arenanet would completely rehaul the conditions. It still doesn’t solve many of the problems: which include spamming conditions (you can apply them way faster you can remove them) and the 25 stack bleed limits in pve.

Why would you make the condition duration only affect damaging conditions? Adding duration to blind wouldn’t affect it basically at all: 5 second or 9 second blind = pretty much the same.

Let’s say all condition duration foods would be limited to max +25% increased duration and -25% condition duration. It would be actually pretty unfair if the +25% condition duration food would only apply to damaging conditions. This together with the traits and armor would make some skills nearly completely ineffective. Let me illustrate:

Engineer rifle #2, net shot, is 1000 range skill with 10 s cooldown.
It causes 2 s immobilize, no damage, can hit only single target and it is very easy to strafe (no need to dodge) at long range.

Now with -25% duration food, 6x Melandru runes (another -25%) and traits like dogged march -33% (mere 10 point trait sitting in a very useful trait line). The duration would be reduced a total of -83% meaning that the 2 s immobilize would last mere 0.33 seconds. That is negligible! To add salt to the injury, the poor engineer would give the enemy warrior 3 second regeneration as a bonus.

Even without the food, just 6xMelandru rune set + dogged march, it would mean 0.8 second duration, not much and warrior got regen as a bonus.

I also think skills that can inflict conditions on several targets instead of just one target should perhaps be treated differently. I know warrior’s longbow #5, pin down, is gonna get an added animation, but it inflicts 3 s immobilize, 6x 12 s bleed stacks, damage and can pierce up to 5 targets. For example warrior’s rifle #1, bleeding shot, can be used to spam bleed upon bleed, but in reality it is far weaker skill a condition build than let’s say engineer’s grenade kit #2, shrapnel grenade, where each of the 2-3 grenades does 1 stack of 12 s bleed (major part of grenade kit dmg comes this skill).