Warning: Incoming wall of text. Sorry.
From my experiences in playing, I have found conditions and condition removal to be somewhat flawed. While the system is designed fairly well, I believe that there is much room for improvement.
The way I see things, conditions should be used to tip the odds in your favor when in a fight. A warrior can use immobilize to set up a strong attack, so that their enemy cannot dodge it. A necromancer can use chill to slow melee players, to keep them away. A thief can blind their opponent, to ensure that the thief has a proper window to make their deadly close range attacks.
The way I have described these uses of conditions are what I believe to be the “proper” uses for them. Smart players thinking quickly to counter enemy moves, or ensuring their success using conditions. Unfortunately, this is not how I see conditions being used. A popular character build I’ve found is to maximize condition damage, while sacrificing everything else. Unfortunately for everyone else, this seems to be extremely effective. The sheer amount of ongoing condition damage, as well as crowd controlling effects is able to quickly shut down just about any other player in a matter of seconds. To get to the core of the issue, often the best course of action is to focus only on condition damage.
Currently, condition removal fares extremely well against few or moderate amounts of conditions. In scenarios where conditions are not used in excess, condition removal is a very useful investment. From my experiences, I have found condition removal to be extremely useful where, for example, a warrior locks me in place before using eviscerate. I am able to remove the stun or immobilize, and dodge away. Another example is when a thief inflicts poison on me, and my condition removal is able to remove the poison, and allow my healing to work at full effectiveness. In all honesty, it is too effective. My condition removal works too well against intelligently used conditions. I simply tap a button and my opponent’s plans come crashing down.
Condition removal begins to fail when the number of conditions increases. While I realize that condition removal should not be a complete counter to all conditions, it just often has no noticeable effect. When a player can put down almost all types of conditions at a very high rate, condition removal just cannot catch up. From personal experience, I have had enemies take out my fairly durable guardian, who I run decent condition removal with, in easily under 5 seconds. My condition removal cannot keep up with the sheer amount of conditions.
From my experiences, I have found condition removal to shut down few conditions much too easily, while having almost no effect on many conditions. To put it simply, condition removal often discourages intelligent combinations of conditions and regular damage, and instead rewards players who only ever use conditions, or who never use conditions. Obviously, a game where players must choose one of two extremes is not ideal.
What I propose is instead of direct condition removal, players may instead use condition resistance. Condition resistance should be an active effect that is caused by anything that currently removes conditions. This condition resistance would significantly reduce the duration and potency of any conditions on the player while it is active. I believe this would be a much better system than the current condition removal because it does not completely shut down conditions that are used in moderation, but at the same time it would have a noticeable effect when used against a large amount of conditions.
Crowd control effects could still hold players in place for devastating hits, poison could be used on players who are about to heal themselves, cripple and chill can still be used to keep players at a distance, and so on. That said, players who have exploited the imbalances in spamming down every condition in the game would finally have a legitimate counter.
Thank you for taking the time to read my wall of text, and I would love to hear the community’s opinion on the current state of conditions and condition removal, and of my idea.