Guild Wars 2

I found this too be a bit of an issue as well, I main an engineer and even though I’m zerk almost all of my skills deal some conditions…lame

Rainbow Sprint.3215:

hendo.1940:

The whole point of this anti condi and anti projectile mechanic is to teach people to adapt, because ANet want to improve the quality of the average player so that they can make more challenging content.

Complaining and refusing to pick up another set of gear, or refusing to drop your ranged weapon makes this impossible and implies you want them to just make 111111 zerg events rather than coordinated zerg events.

For the record, I’m not playing WvW since I haven’t picked up appropriate gear for it, so it would be nice if you could do your servers the courtesy to pick up the right gear before taking part in the event.

The problem with that is melee zerk gear is already the meta and generally accepted as the best choice. So instead of it saying to me that I should be able to do both of these things, it says to me that the rest of the community is right and this build you have made yourself is worthless and you should feel bad because you are not contributing.

Maybe if anet included the ability to change traits easily enough, there might be an argument that you can change, but as it stands right now it just sounds to me that anet is saying “You know these stats that you’ve invested your time and money into that have been out since launch? That’s kittening worthless.”

And condis and tanks are meta in WvW and PvP, yet you don’t see me saying berserker should be meta.

Why is it PvE can’t have it’s own meta but WvW and PvP can?

The difference is zerker stats are not reduced in effectiveness by wvw and pvp content. Condition caps on targets directly reduce the effectiveness of condition damage and condition duration.

There are plenty of zerker geared thieves who roam for example.

In pvp there is no gear farming so stat balances can be changed outside matches without consequences.

It’s definitely not a tactic that should be repeated in zerg content. Whether or not you have skills without condition damage as a condition user does not matter. You are forced to take a huge hit in effectiveness where others do not. On second thought, just being a condition user in zerg content already forces you to take a huge hit in effectiveness, nothing new here…

But for the rest of us at least maybe we can be saved from people who don’t know, don’t care, or would like to abuse it when we’re forced to shoot through condition fields or stand next to condition sharers.

hendo.1940:

Rainbow Sprint.3215:

hendo.1940:

The whole point of this anti condi and anti projectile mechanic is to teach people to adapt, because ANet want to improve the quality of the average player so that they can make more challenging content.

Complaining and refusing to pick up another set of gear, or refusing to drop your ranged weapon makes this impossible and implies you want them to just make 111111 zerg events rather than coordinated zerg events.

For the record, I’m not playing WvW since I haven’t picked up appropriate gear for it, so it would be nice if you could do your servers the courtesy to pick up the right gear before taking part in the event.

The problem with that is melee zerk gear is already the meta and generally accepted as the best choice. So instead of it saying to me that I should be able to do both of these things, it says to me that the rest of the community is right and this build you have made yourself is worthless and you should feel bad because you are not contributing.

Maybe if anet included the ability to change traits easily enough, there might be an argument that you can change, but as it stands right now it just sounds to me that anet is saying “You know these stats that you’ve invested your time and money into that have been out since launch? That’s kittening worthless.”

And condis and tanks are meta in WvW and PvP, yet you don’t see me saying berserker should be meta.

Why is it PvE can’t have it’s own meta but WvW and PvP can?

Well instead of having a best build, I want both builds to be viable. First of all you assume I just WvW and PvP. I rarely WvW and havent even touched PvP since beta. My build is very useful and has a lot of survivability in PvE and dungeons, I can even run PvE zergs with success because condition damage isnt all my damage.

Still I do sort of feel like anet is telling me to go kitten off with my conditions.

Yeah this makes me regret my quip and all the time I spent on Ascended rabid gear(For engi). I knew ANET was lying when they said they would nerf zerker to make other builds viable.

Hi,
I have played necro since day 1 of this game, largely using conditions although I have a set of gear for most builds. I have a full dire ascended set for wvw, and mostly for pve I use zerker dagger/wells.

While I agree that this boss is not especially rewarding to fight, you can easily help by simply equipping an axe and using skills 1-2, putting on signet of spite for the extra power if you don’t want to bother swapping out to a zerker set, and simply un-trait dhuumfire so you don’t burn yourself. Use the flesh wurm and bone fiend, and perhaps lich form for a bit of extra damage. All of these skills will work fine against the boss, you’ll barely damage yourself using the automatic bleed on crit skill even if you’re using full rabid.
Death shroud auto attack is another option you have, and won’t inflict any self damage. Building death shroud is easy using the staff auto-attack, which also won’t do any conditions to you, and you’ll get some life force if your minions die to the boss. If you find yourself taking bleed damage, use the blood fiend instead of consume conditions, which will heal you for around 900 every time it attacks, which is more than enough to make up for any damage you take, and also does a little damage too. You could even trait for minion damage since you have the slot unlocked as you have 30 in spite, which will help significantly as their damage is unrelated to your gear.

This build will work just fine!

Ascended dire gear is still very strong in wvw, so just because it doesn’t work in one boss fight doesn’t mean Arenanet hate you or zerker warriors are evil at heart.

Add Ranger to the mess – we can’t use any of our condition skills either – and nothing mitigates anything.

This patch is a disaster to any condition dealer.

Toothy.8640:

Hi,
I have played necro since day 1 of this game, largely using conditions although I have a set of gear for most builds. I have a full dire ascended set for wvw, and mostly for pve I use zerker dagger/wells.

While I agree that this boss is not especially rewarding to fight, you can easily help by simply equipping an axe and using skills 1-2, putting on signet of spite for the extra power if you don’t want to bother swapping out to a zerker set, and simply un-trait dhuumfire so you don’t burn yourself. Use the flesh wurm and bone fiend, and perhaps lich form for a bit of extra damage. All of these skills will work fine against the boss, you’ll barely damage yourself using the automatic bleed on crit skill even if you’re using full rabid.
Death shroud auto attack is another option you have, and won’t inflict any self damage. Building death shroud is easy using the staff auto-attack, which also won’t do any conditions to you, and you’ll get some life force if your minions die to the boss. If you find yourself taking bleed damage, use the blood fiend instead of consume conditions, which will heal you for around 900 every time it attacks, which is more than enough to make up for any damage you take, and also does a little damage too. You could even trait for minion damage since you have the slot unlocked as you have 30 in spite, which will help significantly as their damage is unrelated to your gear.

This build will work just fine!

Ascended dire gear is still very strong in wvw, so just because it doesn’t work in one boss fight doesn’t mean Arenanet hate you or zerker warriors are evil at heart.

In other words, we have to play your way or any way without conditions or we can’t participate and get the rewards.

Do you comprehend how ridiculous that sounds?

I agree that there is a problem, I’m just offering a solution for him to reasonably help with the fight without respeccing or buying another set of gear. Unfortunately all of these bosses are essentially zone events consisting of a maximum of 50 random players with random builds, so there’s very little control over whether you succeed or not. Maybe everyone there will by chance be a clerics guardian, maybe not. It’s not good design to make open world bosses require specific builds, which is why hardly anyone bothers killing tequatl and hardly anyone bothers attempting the triple headed wurm.

Unfortunately Arenanet, despite absolutely having statistics on how many people experience these bosses that they added, seem to be happy with it.

I accepted a while back that conditions are just bad in pve, and I think that’s a shame, and that the bleed cap is a big problem, but afaik Arenanet have never explained why it was added. People have talked about it being a bandwidth issue, but it should be fairly easy to use clientside prediction for bleed damage since the client knows how much condition damage you have and how many stacks you have on a boss, so as there is no condition mitigation in the game it shouldn’t need to know every tick damage of every bleed every second, which is what I heard the problem was.

However that could be completely wrong, who knows

However, necros can do decent zerker damage in pve so I just use that instead.

You’ve all known for over a year that condis arent good for large numbers of ppl pve content, if you have failed to get a power set by now frankly you should be ashamed at your inability to think and change.

how about anet actually makes conditions viable, why should there be only one type of build. I know balancing ain’t easy, but they constantly try and “balance” professions, having conditions be viable is a fair thing to want.

And thats what we’re asking for.

This boss emphasises just how much condition builds are seen as “less”/unneeded. So yeah, we’re in a huff over this and it’s about time anet looks into it.

mark.3160:

Rauderi.8706:

It really is disturbing that the devs refuse to acknowledge and adjust things for how people and zergs actually perform. When conditions are well more than half the game, why would they decide that reflecting them is a sane, fair option, especially when there are autoattacks that do it?

It’s bad enough that a heavy-CC build is generally crippled by champions, but hearing this just makes me question whether some devs need to be let go for some vacation time. Apparently, the two-week schedule is causing panic attacks that make things like the above seem like good ideas.

Because it’s all about adapting, im a condi engineer, but for these fights, i switch to PVT and get through it without too much trouble. This would be problematic for ppl who have not been able to craft multiple sets of gear though, i admit.

Berserker grenades here. I don’t change gear and do it np. At most I replace one of my utilities for the condition cleanse elixir.

I’ve tried this on my condi mesmer and just looked for ele conjure weapons (fiery GS, ice bow) to pick up to deal damage during the condi reflect stages. Of course, this isn’t too reliable cause you might not always have people spawn enough of them, but it’s one way to still be useful during the condi-reflect stages when you’re running a condi build.

You could also pick up a banner and do some stabbing if you’re desperate, but that’s rather suicidal. =)

Taygus.4571:

how about anet actually makes conditions viable, why should there be only one type of build.

That won’t happen, since it would obviously require the game’s handling of conditions to be rewritten completely and the devs aren’t capable of doing that. A long time ago, they already stated that the 25 stack cap wasn’t going to be removed as the engine could not handle more stacks. And as long as the cap is in place, you’ll start running into problems with the condition stacks as soon as there are two characters who apply the same condition, not to speak of 50 …

The condition immunity is a double problem on both power and condition builds. How many zerk build use traits that increase damage (mostly 10%) if the target is bleeding or is having an other condition on it?

I’m doing this event with my condi necro (main). And I find it fine. During the first phase i just use staff 1 and 4, DS 1 and 4, lich form. Sure, the damage isn’t that great , but is a good compromise. During second I spam anything I can. 25 bleeding cap? No problem, DS#5 + healing skill (I use a full set of rune of torment).

Considering that more than half of the fight is for the 1# phase and that even in my main server we don’t get all 50 calibrations on each fight and still success with no problems, I think the event is just fine.

Also, on the Breachmaker, we fight in 3 separed area (yes, there are 3 scarlet and 3 Holograms) and since not all people are attacking the main boss 100% of the time due the attunent mechanic, it doesn’t reach so quickly 25 bleeding stack. Almost the same things can be said for the rest of the fight with multiple targets.

Overall, this event is just fine. You just need to adapt to the new content. You can’t just pretend fo fight something new in the same way of the previous ones.

shiven.1892:

condition reflect is only part of the fight, the other part is the more conditions you apply, the less power the boss has

The trick here is that for that 50% of the fight, condition damage and duration stats on your gear and from your traits not only do nothing, but actually hurt your team. If you specced conditions, you are worse than dead-weight.

Meanwhile, power/prec/crit specced individuals do less damage with the conditions they auto-apply, they last a shorter duration, and all of their stats do 100% or more to the boss the entire fight.

This is worse than a gear check. This fight checks that a certain percentage of the player base isn’t using a particular build.

When the fights were zergable it didn’t matter because then it was just checking that you had the appropriate number of players on the map, but now its a kick in the teeth.

CptAurellian.9537:

Taygus.4571:

how about anet actually makes conditions viable, why should there be only one type of build.

That won’t happen, since it would obviously require the game’s handling of conditions to be rewritten completely and the devs aren’t capable of doing that. A long time ago, they already stated that the 25 stack cap wasn’t going to be removed as the engine could not handle more stacks. And as long as the cap is in place, you’ll start running into problems with the condition stacks as soon as there are two characters who apply the same condition, not to speak of 50 …

This can be circumvented by adding more condition types, which they have done at all. Also, temporary world events like this are usually designed to be more casual so as not to expose engine limits. Which this particular fight was until they patched it.

Vampirial.9056:

I think the worst part of this is all the ppl telling us to do “support” based stuff. These fights are already hard to do enough dmg to get loot when i do nothing but attack on my engi. If i do more support based stuff like the elixer gun i would never get loot from the fights.

That’s plain wrong.

I main a condi engi (traited for elixirs), and haven’t had any problems at all getting loot from these fights.

I use elixirs to support the melee players, and the rest of the time I attack with my range skills. The bosses don’t really attack ranged players, so the only damage I take is from my own conditions. I make sure to only put as many conditions on myself as I can easily outheal (especially since I use elixir gun etc. anyway).

Then during the two burn phases, I throw all my other condi skills on the boss (bombs, elixir gun, etc.) and watch her melt.

I don’t feel useless in this fight at all. If you think that the boss design means that you shouldn’t bring conditions at all, then maybe rethink your strategy. All it means is that you use different skills and ranges in the different phases, which is very, very okay for a boss fight.

Gatvin.6510:

This can be circumvented by adding more condition types, which they have done at all.

Do you want them to have a hundred condition types which all do essentially the same? Srsly? That’s absolute nonsense. Without a total system overhaul, condis will never be viable in PvE, but I agree that creating that condition reflection was just plain stupid. It even annoys me as a dedicated direct damage player since it makes me miss out on 40-50 % worth of damage modifiers.

At the rate Anet is going with this anti-everything but Berserker nonsense, they may as well just remove all other affixes and stats from the game, and just streamline everything to have varying levels of Power and Precision, because honestly, there’s no point in gearing up or speccing into anything differently.

And to me, that’s just wrong. There really is no gear choice or specialization in GW 2 anymore, it really has become simply “Go Power, Precision, Crit, or go home”.

What’s the point of running a condition build when most bosses are either immune to it, or due to the zerg mentality of the game, your damage craps out very quicikly since conditions share a community pool?

Toughness and Vitality? Wasted spots on your gear, since you’re better off just dodging the bosses attacks instead of eating any of them, and if you do go down, why the Zerg’s there to get you back on your feet in no time anyways.

And Healing Power? Well there’s the most useless stat you’ll ever find in GW2…Because having an affix that only affects, on most professions, a single ability, is ever so useful. Even the Professions that have dedicated healing spells have them on such a long cool down timer that it’s not worth it, at all.

Condition and Boon Duration may as well not even exist (especially the latter), considering how short most Boons last anyways (and again, how long their cool downs are), and since your using a community pool for condition damage, what’s the point of making our conditions last longer. It doesn’t help that these two stats exist on only two types of affixes, which happen to also be paired with two other useless affixes as well.

It’s gotten to the point now for me that I don’t even see a point in leveling an alt anymore, and playing just my Warrior, since any alt I make is going to be shoe-horned into the same raw-damage Berserker set up, since no other spec is viable. It kills almost any replayabiltiy this game has, and destroys any form of customization as well.

Honestly, the game’s entire stat system needs to just be revamped. Even with the (tiny) nerf Berserker is getting in the next update, it’s still going to be the superior affix compared to anything else, simply because every other affix is completely worthless, and Conditions are useless due to how they work.

My main is a Mesmer, and ever since Tequatl, I have had a kitten of a time trying to create useful builds for any class that isn’t DPS heavy.
A lot of skills apply conditions as a secondary afterthought. Forget survivability, forget creativity in a build. I either do support, DPS or don’t bother.
Clones and Phantasms die immediately, so no extra damage from that route.
Can’t interrupt on these bosses, how awesome would it be if we could.
Spam 1, Time Warp and Null Field, thanks.

While the battle organization is understandable, these bosses actually reflecting all conditions makes it very clear to me, that aspect of combat needs to be reworked.
Conditions either need to viable, or need to be converted into some sort of equivalent damage.
That would be a nice signet to have…
We have also been told to change gear, which is insane. Most people aren’t going to be able to have several sets of gear available at the drop of a hat, nor be able to afford to.

The choice I, and most indirect damage players, have is how to come into these sorts of fights. Backline support is currently a thankless piece of work, melee is a joke, leaving ranged options pinging away, if you have that option at all.
Please ANet, don’t discourage the spamming of one sort to encourage spamming of another.

Zaganna.6034:

The condition immunity is a double problem on both power and condition builds. How many zerk build use traits that increase damage (mostly 10%) if the target is bleeding or is having an other condition on it?

It’s worse than just that. As an ele, I refuse to drop fire fields during the knight reflect stage because I don’t like people hurting themselves off of them. No fire field, no might combo.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

My take on all of this is, Anet has put condition caps in place to limit the server side calculations, but apparently there is more than enough server power there to calculate all these conditions reflections, against massive numbers too.

Hey any Anet rep, you got the dollyak cojones to answer this man?

The real problem is that characters cannot sufficiently change their damage types by changing the way they play in battle. The itemization, traits, and class skill restrictions cannot be changed in combat and cannot be mitigated by intelligent play. Given that flexible builds suffer greatly in maximum performance compared to specialist builds, we have major PvE problems when key encounters limit damage from certain specializations (or even something general like condition damage).

CptAurellian.9537:

Gatvin.6510:

This can be circumvented by adding more condition types, which they have done at all.

Do you want them to have a hundred condition types which all do essentially the same? Srsly? That’s absolute nonsense. Without a total system overhaul, condis will never be viable in PvE, but I agree that creating that condition reflection was just plain stupid. It even annoys me as a dedicated direct damage player since it makes me miss out on 40-50 % worth of damage modifiers.

Nono, I was actually complementing them on their condition system. Confusion is conceptually fantastic, as is torment. There’s lots of ways to play around with it too.
My main point was that if we’re blaming the caps, which are a limitation of the engine, then the fight is putting focus on engine limitations, which is bad design.

I get that people complain about the caps all the time, but this fight causes more of that than normal.

Gatvin.6510:

Nono, I was actually complementing them on their condition system. Confusion is conceptually fantastic, as is torment. There’s lots of ways to play around with it too.
My main point was that if we’re blaming the caps, which are a limitation of the engine, then the fight is putting focus on engine limitations, which is bad design.

Ah ok, sorry for the misunderstanding. However, I can’t agree with your last paragraph.
The limitations are so tight that any fight, even involving a single group of five, will finally focus on the condition limitation. To give some examples: With my guard, I can take care of virtually 100 % burning uptime. A second character who wants to use burning? Wasted. My mesmer can spike up to ~20 stacks of bleed when using duelists or wardens (swordsman will die too quickly in many situations), there’s not much space left for someone else to bring bleeds. Note that with both characters, I don’t aim for the conditions themselves, they are just a by-product of direct damage.

You cannot design a fight that avoids these limitations – unless it’s a solo fight, but this is an MMO (at least in theory).