Guild Wars 2

I play a Guardian. The simple fact is I will -never- be able to play a straight condition build due to the fact that I only have access to one condition(Yay burning). But honestly, burning somebody with fire should really be all you need. The fact that it doesn’t stack in intensity in any way, and is so easy removed, is an obvious (imo) flaw in the conditions system. I’m not just talking about guardians here, I’m referring to any class that doesn’t have easy access to 4-5 conditions. You shouldn’t need access to that many, -you should be able to capitalize on what you have-(like incinerating people). This could obviously be achieved by new traits and balancing etc etc, or…

Give damaging conditions tiers. Each tier would count as its own condition.

Example: Somebody gets 14 seconds of burn.10 seconds of burn is put on hold and they are given 2 seconds of “ablaze” condition, it lasts half as long and does 150% damage burn would. They get burned past 10 seconds of “Ablaze” they get put into “Inferno”, lasts 1/3 as long and deals 170% damage. This way condition duration on burning would actually be put to some use, instead of having it build up and it just getting wiped away by a removal.
The same could be done with Poisoned->Sickened-> Septic, improving the damage and healing reduction with each tier. The same with bleed and torment and confusion.

While these would count as separate conditions for the sake of removal they would all benefit from traits that improve their parent condition (anything that increases burn duration increases Ablaze and Inferno duration)

These “new conditions” wouldn’t only have to be a product of excess condition time. They would also be able to be triggered by skills. Maybe a spell, or an engineer tossing gasoline on somebody.

I feel this would not only make condition builds more viable for all classes but also allow classes with multiple conditions be able to “specialize” more, as they would be able to capitalize on single conditions as opposed to spamming as many as they could.

i think it would be interesting if damaging conditions that stack in duration (poison, burning) didn’t stack in intensity, but instead started doing more damage the longer they are on.

so a stack of burning might do 10% more damage every tick. if you have burning on you for 10+ seconds it could start to do 1,000+ damage.
along that same line a condition like poison could start giving you additional none damaging conditions if you have it on you long enough. an example would be after 5 seconds of poison you get weakness then vulnerability.

the problem with your idea is that guardians isn’t the only class that can set up some long duration burns, and your idea would front load burning to an insane amount. heck if you wanted to on engineer you could set up 30+ seconds of burning instantly without a problem.