Guild Wars 2

So as we all know Berserker is winning this by a large margin. Actually there were nearly no build on any class that truely worked optimal with Rampagers. Reasons for that is that direct damage stats just scale exceptionally with themselves and that there are 3 of them (Power, Precicion, Crit damage) while condition damage is just a single stat that has some trait interactions that require precision at best.

So how can we change that? How can we make Rampager builds more viable? How can we increase build variety?

Actually one way would be to buff the mentioned traits that proc condis on crit. Of cource traits like incendiary ammo are already exceptionally strong (have a 100% proc chance anyway) but there are for example some very mediocre bleed traits with really low duration of the applied condition and on top of that internal cooldowns that cap them hard. Remove that. Rampagers needs a buff.

Another way would be changing the formula of condition damage that you can see here: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition_Damage

Basically the huge difference compared to power is that there is a base value. You can never do 0 condition damage but you could theoretically do 0 direct damage with 0 power (even though practically this is also not possible to achieve). Actually this difference is what makes mixing condi dmg and direct damage exceptionally worse than going full direct damage. Even the full berserker build can benefit of the base damage of all conditions. Suggestion: remove or lower base condi damage values and instead increase the scaling in a way that it would be approximately equal damage compared to a current full condi build. This would make berserker lose the condi dmg it does without affecting condi builds. Also you could just make it more like power that you already gain some condi damage stat when leveling.

Opinions? I think the lack of build variety here clearly can be attributed to a flawed system that greatly promotes berserker builds.

If the base damage on scepter for necro was better then rampager would be a lot stronger.

Warrior sword works well as a rampager weapon but it suffers from being overshadowed by direct damage weapons like axe and gs.

Dojo.1867:

Basically the huge difference compared to power is that there is a base value. You can never do 0 condition damage but you could theoretically do 0 direct damage with 0 power (even though practically this is also not possible to achieve). Actually this difference is what makes mixing condi dmg and direct damage exceptionally worse than going full direct damage.

Actually, this has almost no effect on anything. Imagine if the amount of “power” displayed in the hero panel were changed to be your actual power minus the base power for your level (916 at level 80), while keeping the amount of damage you do exactly the same as it is now. Then direct damage, like condition damage, would do some damage even when you have “zero” power, and yet game balance would be exactly the same.

If you want to measure how much your damage is improving when you raise a stat, it would be better to ask: how much do you have to raise it to double your base damage? For power, you need to raise it by 916 (at level 80), to get double your default power. For condition damage, it’s around 850 for most conditions—which means it actually scales (slightly) better than power. Burning scaling is significantly worse, but other than that, they could take away conditions’ “base damage” and give everyone ~850 free condition damage to compensate and things would work basically the same as they do right now.

Now, there are a lot of asymmetries between direct damage and condition damage that affect balance:

• Direct damage is more common (pretty much builds deal noticeable amounts of direct damage; many don’t deal noticeable amounts of condition damage)
• Direct damage has more stats that raise it
• Direct damage can accumulate without limit, whereas conditions are subject to various caps
• Direct damage scales with weapon power, meaning it benefits more from equipment upgrades (like ascended weapons, which weren’t in the game originally).
• Conditions aren’t guaranteed to get full effectiveness, because they can be cleansed.
• Conditions tend to have “harder” counters than direct damage; there’s no rune set that will reduce incoming damage by the amount that some rune sets reduce incoming condition duration, for example.

Though, in favor of conditions:

• Conditions ignore the target’s armor. (This means ascended armor will help conditions relative to direct damage, but—due to quirks in the game math—not as much as ascended weapons helped direct damage.)

But this particular issue you have identified is a complete red herring: power and condition damage already scale essentially the same.

Yes, they scale the same. Still you can get free condition damage in a pure berserker build that does its job better than the free power/precision/crit damage (just by level stats) that you get in a condition build. And the reason for that is that the berserker setup becomes better the more you have of it (as you pointed out yoursef) while the condition dmg stat basically works on its own.

So it ends up like this:

Berserker build → some bonus damage due to base condi dmg values in formula
Condi build → base direct damage according to your existing direct dmg stats but since they are all on a low niveau this is more neglectable than the condi dmg in the berserker build