(edited by Einlanzer.1627)
Poison
Or…Just make death blossom a useful skill → Power based
A full evade with a minimal aftercast would solve it. The random bleeds here and there don’t hurt, its just too clunky on the evasion part to be “useful”.
“I’m waiting for the staff to get off their lunch
break. I feel like they should be back by now..”
break. I feel like they should be back by now..”
This is more of a global issue. I’d argue that a full power setup has too strong direct attacks and too weak conditions. This goes for just about every specialization you can choose. Full-glass is too glassy, full bunker too tanky. On the other hand, glass could take some more damage and bunker deal more damage. Etc etc.
I’d saw off the other ~20% of specializations.
The strength of heart to face oneself has been made manifest. The persona Carighan has appeared.
Or…Just make death blossom a useful skill -> Power based
DB is already a useful skill. That isn’t what I’m talking about. Besides, D/D needs to work with condi builds because it’s the only option Thieves have. It doesn’t need another power skill.
(edited by Einlanzer.1627)
Guys guys, I’m not talking about Death Blossom, which I believe is fine as a skill. I’m talking about Poison as a condition, the weakness of which skews peoples’ perception of what D/D can do. I suppose I should have made that more clear.
A skill that dodges and inflicts lots of aoe bleed.
A SKILL THAT DODGES AND INFLICTS LOTS OF AOE BLEED.
What the eff dude?
Poison is fine.
Poison is fine.
I disagree.
I also think Poison is fine as it is.
I think it’s a good thing that actually most conditions are just as good on a direct damage build as on a condition build, a fact which is sadly missed by most people.
There are already 3 conditions dedicated purely to damage (Bleed, Burn and Torment) which is more than enough. The rest should be there for all to take advantage of regardless of their stats / build, just like all boons do, especially a condition which is really more of a utility condition than a damaging condition.
Cufufalating – Ranger / Part-Time Mesmer
Gunnar’s Hold
Gunnar’s Hold
I also think Poison is fine as it is.
I think it’s a good thing that actually most conditions are just as good on a direct damage build as on a condition build, a fact which is sadly missed by most people.
There are already 3 conditions dedicated purely to damage (Bleed, Burn and Torment) which is more than enough. The rest should be there for all to take advantage of regardless of their stats / build, just like all boons do, especially a condition which is really more of a utility condition than a damaging condition.
It would still be there to take advantage of. There’s no point whatsoever in having a damage dealing condition that doesn’t really scale properly with condition damage.
I also think Poison is fine as it is.
I think it’s a good thing that actually most conditions are just as good on a direct damage build as on a condition build, a fact which is sadly missed by most people.
There are already 3 conditions dedicated purely to damage (Bleed, Burn and Torment) which is more than enough. The rest should be there for all to take advantage of regardless of their stats / build, just like all boons do, especially a condition which is really more of a utility condition than a damaging condition.
It would still be there to take advantage of. There’s no point whatsoever in having a damage dealing condition that doesn’t really scale properly with condition damage.
It does scale with condition damage, but like I said, it’s a utility condition first and a damaging condition second, so I don’t see a problem with is scaling worse than pure damage conditions.
Cufufalating – Ranger / Part-Time Mesmer
Gunnar’s Hold
Gunnar’s Hold
It would still be there to take advantage of. There’s no point whatsoever in having a damage dealing condition that doesn’t really scale properly with condition damage.
Except for that thing where it reduces all healing by 33%, which is an absolutely massive amount of potential effective damage. A warrior with healing signet and no healing power is effectively taking an additional 120 damage due to the loss of the healing from his signet. Someone who uses their heal skill for 5k? They just effectively lost 1650 hp from that skill. Poison deals a deceptively high amount of effective damage because of how much sustain it prevents.
Making it stronger in stacks isn’t necessary, it is a utility condition above all, it is balanced as is because it deals low damage on its own, but has a massive utility in healing reduction, and can be applied in full strength in a single use.
It would still be there to take advantage of. There’s no point whatsoever in having a damage dealing condition that doesn’t really scale properly with condition damage.
Except for that thing where it reduces all healing by 33%, which is an absolutely massive amount of potential effective damage. A warrior with healing signet and no healing power is effectively taking an additional 120 damage due to the loss of the healing from his signet. Someone who uses their heal skill for 5k? They just effectively lost 1650 hp from that skill. Poison deals a deceptively high amount of effective damage because of how much sustain it prevents.
Making it stronger in stacks isn’t necessary, it is a utility condition above all, it is balanced as is because it deals low damage on its own, but has a massive utility in healing reduction, and can be applied in full strength in a single use.
Jesus Christ. The point is not that poison sucks and needs to be buffed. The point is that the benefits it offers are too static. It deserves to scale better than it does with condition damage. Making the healing reduction lower at baseline and having it scale with condition damage would make more sense, as would having it do a non-trivial amount of damage.
The formula for poison is currently a flat 33% reduction in heal and .1 damage per point of condition damage, which is so trivially low that it would barely be noticeable if it didn’t deal damage at all.
Either the healing reduction should scale with condition damage (say 25% – 40%) or the damage should scale better (like .15 points per condition damage), or some combination of both. I don’t understand why there are any arguments about this.
(edited by Einlanzer.1627)
That is simply how utility conditions work. Cripple doesn’t cripple you more with more applications, you can’t stack chill on someone to chill them more, etc. The change you are asking for requires a significant amount of balance work; first retuning the condition itself, then balancing every single application of it in the game. All that work to something that is entirely balanced and working fine as is, so that it can deal some more damage.
That is simply how utility conditions work. Cripple doesn’t cripple you more with more applications, you can’t stack chill on someone to chill them more, etc. The change you are asking for requires a significant amount of balance work; first retuning the condition itself, then balancing every single application of it in the game. All that work to something that is entirely balanced and working fine as is, so that it can deal some more damage.
You know that Poison originally stacked in intensity, right? I don’t think it is entirely balanced, frankly, which is why I made the post. D/D is a prime example of where it should be playing a more significant role in making the set condi friendly than it actually does.
I feel like this is one of those topics where power-only players want to have their cake and eat it too.
You know that Poison originally stacked in intensity, right? I don’t think it is entirely balanced, frankly, which is why I made the post. D/D is a prime example of where it should be playing a more significant role in making the set condi friendly than it actually does.
Yes, and Epidemic used to have no AoE limit, no LoS requirement, went through walls, and could basically wipe zergs on its own. There were a lot of things that worked differently before, and there is good reason they aren’t like that anymore.
If D/D needs more condi support, then, you know, give it better condi support, don’t just change an entire condition to suit it.
I feel like this is one of those topics where power-only players want to have their cake and eat it too.
Yes, I, as a Necromancer, am definitely a power only player who hates poison (insert copious eye rolling here).
imho poison needs its healing reduction removing completely,
add another more scarce source for healing reduction.
poison is to plentiful to have such a ridiculous effect,
yes lets put -33% healing on multiple classes auto attacks….
in gw1 you had to descide when the best time was to use healing reduction effects,
it added strategy and depth to both sides, in gw2 its just spammed all over the place, you’ll spend more time with poison than without.
… The point is not that poison sucks and needs to be buffed. The point is that the benefits it offers are too static. It deserves to scale better than it does with condition damage. Making the healing reduction lower at baseline and having it scale with condition damage would make more sense, as would having it do a non-trivial amount of damage.
None of the debuff conditions scale with condition damage. Making the debuff effects scale with condition damage is an excellent way to effectively nerf these types of conditions, with a tremendous effect on all kinds of balance.
And all of that just to make D/D a bit less power focusses? Just look at condition D/D as a kind of P/P, big damage coming from one skill (actually most thief weaponsets do this, Backstab, Sneak Attack, Unload, Death Blossom and Pistol Whip.
Poison is incredibly powerful and you aren’t looking at it right if you think it isn’t “doing enough damage”.
Let’s say you are attacking a guardian who has constant regen 200hp/sec and his healing virtue at 150hp/sec.
By using poison you are doing the base damage of poison (let’s pretend 100 damage/tick) but also an effective pseudo-damage of 50hp/s on the virtue and 66hp on the regen. If he uses a shelter, you are also going to take off a good 1.5K from the heal there. What’s even worse is that it is incredibly easy to apply, stacks duration and can be made to stack for entire fights if you have mutiple applications (p/p engis with grenade kits for example).
If a fight lasts for 30 seconds and the guardian has poison the entire time but still manages to heal for a total of 10K HP, that means your poison did 5K pseudo-damage for the fight duration as well as 3K damage of real damage. This is not something that should be laughed at.
Poison is more than effective enough.
Fundamental misunderstanding of what poison is for.
Poison is, first and foremost, a control skill. It is not like burning or bleed; it is not plain damage. You use it to make sure that your enemies can’t easily recover from your attacks. It is not like torment, confusion or retaliation; it does not directly punish a specific action. I would hesitantly say it’s most similar to Chill; where Chill slows your ability to put out pressure, Poison slows your ability to recover from or during a fight.
The damage is gravy.
Also trying to address DD by changing its 1 is silly. DD’s problems are a useless 4, a somewhat schizophrenic 3 and a difficult to ensure 5. Try fixing the stuff that definitely sucks before trying to fix the stuff that might suck.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Nice fail at reading comprehension all. I’m done.
Poison is a blessing on a Power-based build, in my opinion. It could do 0 damage, and I’d love it. The only part of D/D that appears to dip into hybrid mode is the bleeding on Death Blossom. The fact that it’s 3 stacks of bleeding applied quickly makes me think that they wanted to potentially give Dagger the ability to bypass Toughness differently by quickly applying a bunch of bleeds to supplement the rest of their damage, but I don’t think it seems to work in practice based on what I’ve seen/thought.
Also trying to address DD by changing its 1 is silly. DD’s problems are a useless 4, a somewhat schizophrenic 3 and a difficult to ensure 5. Try fixing the stuff that definitely sucks before trying to fix the stuff that might suck.
Is 4 truly useless? It seems situational, but I don’t think situational === useless. You’re approaching a Guardian who has Aegis up. Do you lead in with the typical Steal+CnD, and just blow Mug damage on the Block to get the CnD off, or do you throw a dagger for 3 initiative to break the aegis first? It seems like a tool to blow Aegis/Blind while at range to avoid having your actual hitters potentially miss/get blocked. Additionally, I feel like the Cripple could be useful, but maybe that’s because I don’t have a good feel for how Initiative actually plays out (which I admittedly dont’).
Also, I’m not sure you included this as something that needs to be looked at, but 5 being “difficult to ensure” just sounds like good design to me. If you’re comparing it to the ease of which you can enter stealth with D/P, I personally think that’s an unfair comparison as I feel the ability to leap back into stealth almost on a whim (and even land the damage from the Heartseeker that puts you into stealth) while even blinding your target in the process is complete overkill on the Easy scale.
With CnD, you can cancel the cast animation to pump fake, and not only do you conserve the initiative, but it only goes on like an aftercast cooldown, so you can just CnD immediately after if you want. Or you can Heartseeker into a CnD to land it after they dodge. You can even pump fake the 2nd CnD after the Heartseeker to bait 2 dodges, and if they are crippled, you can catch back up and land the CnD.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone cancel the CnD cast in my life, so I had to test to insure that the initiative is spent on completing the cast instead of on initiating. And it is. That’s the sort of next-level gaming that I think an ability should have, so juxtaposing it with other methods for entering stealth should shine a light on those methods, not CnD.
Plus, at a .5 second cast time, it already requires someone to know what they are looking for and have decent reflexes to acknowledge and avoid, considering lag and such.
Alduin Nightsong, 80 Human Necro
“He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”
“He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”
Is 4 truly useless? It seems situational, but I don’t think situational === useless. You’re approaching a Guardian who has Aegis up. Do you lead in with the typical Steal+CnD, and just blow Mug damage on the Block to get the CnD off, or do you throw a dagger for 3 initiative to break the aegis first? It seems like a tool to blow Aegis/Blind while at range to avoid having your actual hitters potentially miss/get blocked. Additionally, I feel like the Cripple could be useful, but maybe that’s because I don’t have a good feel for how Initiative actually plays out (which I admittedly dont’).
Sure, popping a blind or an aegis with the dancing dagger can be a use for it. Very very situational, but if you’re in that situation, then fair play to you. This isn’t anything that Head Shot couldn’t do, though.
The cripple duration is really pathetic. The only way to get a respectable Cripple duration out of it is to either spam the ability or rely on good bounces. Additionally, according to the wiki, it’s bugged and doesn’t grant the effect duration that it says it does.
As a skill overall, it could hypothetically be useful, but only under very specific circumstances. It has a few traits that could make it valuable; it’s a 100% projectile finisher with a lot of hits, so throwing it through a correct field would cause a lot of effects. Thief combo fields are few and far between, though. Beyond that, it’s basically Shortbow 1 except with a couple more bounces and an Initiative cost.
Also, I’m not sure you included this as something that needs to be looked at, but 5 being “difficult to ensure” just sounds like good design to me. If you’re comparing it to the ease of which you can enter stealth with D/P, I personally think that’s an unfair comparison as I feel the ability to leap back into stealth almost on a whim (and even land the damage from the Heartseeker that puts you into stealth) while even blinding your target in the process is complete overkill on the Easy scale.
Yeah it’s more of a ‘unique challenge to overcome’ than a ‘anet plz buff’. I’m pretty happy with CnD as is, but it is an ability that’s overshadowed by the DP combo, and you’re making a trade that you don’t really get that much out of.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
I always wanted torment moved from shadow strike (#3 on p/d) to dancing dagger, wouldn’t change p/d or s/d much, but would help d/d from a condi stand point.
@Einlanzer
I hope your still around, taking me awhile to collect my words here.
So you want to see poison scale better in terms of damage and healing reduction?
You say it deserves to scale better with condi damage, but why? Because one build on one class is view as weak?
What about the other class/build where poison along with other condi are strong? Wouldn’t that have an undesirable effect on those builds.
Can you pinpoint other builds where poison is making the set weaker than it should be to warrant your idea?