Guild Wars 2

The current way in which the game works, forcing players to focus on either direct damage or condition damage, is very flawed. It vastly reduces weapon choices, making it often difficult to find two sets that you not only enjoy but that can also actually work together. And even within a single weapon set, you end up with certain skills being terribly weak simply because they do something you aren’t built for.
Like the Ranger Greatsword’s Maul dealing a measure of bleeding damage in an entirely direct-damage set, or the Thief’s P/P dealing bleed on auto attacks despite dealing direct damage in every other attack.
It’s an issue with every class, but the Thief in particular gets absolutely destroyed by this due to Initiative putting each weapon skill in such strong competition against the others.

This absolutely needs to be fixed, and I have a few different ideas for how it could be done.
The option that seems simplest to me would be to give every weapon set an even mix of direct and condition damage so that either Power or Condition or will increase the damage, but simply focus on either less damage immediately or more over time.
The Ranger Greatsword as an example again might get bleeding or poison added to more of the attacks in exchange for slightly reduced direct damage, and the Thief’s P/P might get shorter duration bleed on auto with more direct damage, and some condition damage added to Unload.
Unfortunately this would require a large number of carefully thought out changes to skills.
But, since this is only a truly desperate issue with Thieves, it would be possible to make this particular change only with Thief weapon skills and therefore greatly reduce the amount of changes made, while still solving the worst of the issue.

The second option would be to add a few extra attack skills to each weapon set, and allow us to change them out freely like utility skills, so that if we want to play direct damage we could swap out a condition attack for a direct damage alternative and vice versa.
But this would require a rather significant change to the way the game works, and could be complicated.

The third option would be to merge the effects of Condition Damage directly into Power and reduce the effect the stat has a little on both direct and condition damage compared to their separate states.
Then if one wanted to focus on condition damage they would stack Power along with some Precision for on-crit effects and still get good use out of direct damage attacks, and if one wanted to focus on direct damage they would stack Critical Damage instead of a portion of that Power.
The problem with this is that it would require the creation of an entirely new stat to replace Condition Damage due to traits and gearing.

I completely agree with being able to swap out weapon skills like we can utility skills. In the original Guild Wars, the number of skills we had were insane. You could truly make yourself a build to fit your play-style. I don’t believe that it would be too much to ask to let us pick between one or two other weapon skill choices. For example, as I played an Assassin in the original and a Thief in this game, instead of Death Blossom I would prefer to use Vampiric Assault. I do not like condition damage because, as you said, if you go down that path virtually all your other non-condition skills are nearly useless. It’s nice to find some people agree with me on issues like this.

I don’t get it… but then again I run an Ele build that burns on 30% of critical hits in addition to all the skills that can directly apply burning to an enemy. I run around Orr doing on average over 1k damage a hit with spikes up to 1500 – just from the auto-attack.

I’ve chosen to invest in both Power and Condition damage, so my level 80 character has an attack rating in the Hero panel that reads 3,084.

I choose to go with both damage types because direct damage can be negated by a high toughness in the enemies, while DoT will result in my death since some have such a high vitality.

Or are you just so unable to dodge that you feel forced to spec into Vit and Toughness thus in your opinion eliminating the chance at having both Direct and Condition damage?

About the whole character building point you make, I think you just should spend more time in the game building it – won’t say you’re doing it wrong but this game was made (very well) for any profession to do any role, so perhaps there’s just something you missed.

I don’t believe that I have missed anything, nor am I unable to dodge. First of all, you’re not able to dodge every single attack that’s thrown at you. Second of all, this game makes it very difficult to play your own style, regardless of what you believe. I’m glad you’re able to run around Orr and nuke the mobs. I would imagine an AoE class would excel at doing so. Third, if you run condition damage and pure power in a PvP setting, such as WvWvW which I do quite often, you’re not going to get very far. As a thief, I’m pretty limited on the type of builds I can run. I’ve only just begun to play the other classes, so I can’t speak for them. I have two options, condition damage heavy with some defense, or I can run a backstab focus build with little to no defense. I do not believe that what we were trying to say needed a rude response like “Or are you just so unable to dodge that you feel forced to spec into Vit and Toughness thus in your opinion eliminating the chance at having both Direct and Condition damage?”. We weren’t saying that we are bad at the game, or even hinting it. We were simply stating a little more variation would be nice. I’m sorry you cannot understand that.

andrewjt.7032:

We weren’t saying that we are bad at the game, or even hinting it. We were simply stating a little more variation would be nice. I’m sorry you cannot understand that.

I don’t do PvP, so I wouldn’t understand the problems that occur there. It seemed to me like your complaint was based on the fact you can’t spec into condition damage and direct damage – which was all I was trying to prove is it is possible if you sacrifice other aspects of your character.

If you want to be able to spec into condition damage, power, toughness, vitality, and precision then you don’t want to play this game – it is made so that players have to choose what they want is most important and play that style of character. Variation exists only because of that process – if you want to do it all then you’re not wanting to play this game.

And you’re correct, you can’t dodge every attack… however there are builds using shadowstep and the trait to regen endurance when using a dodge – that can allow you to put everything into your attack and leave yourself vulnerable with plenty of chances to live. If you don’t want to use the tools available to the thief it’s your problem not something the Devs need to change.

Again, I don’t play PvP – so perhaps the things I suggest are simply in the category labelled as ‘bad builds’… but it’s your choice to play your thief one of two ways not the devs, so I seriously wouldn’t expect much change regarding what your original suggestion requests. I’ll stop replying here now so you can continue to ask for whatever, just wanted to make sure you understood my point wasn’t to be rude – just to state a fact. Hope you’re able to have fun in the game.