Guild Wars 2

Hi there! I wanted to share some of my musings on conditions, and how they might be made a bit more interesting.

[New Condition: Disease]
Firstly, I always wondered why the Disease condition was not present within GW2. It would be interesting to see its return as a Necromancer-specific condition. I would envision it as a condition that would deal damage over time, much like poison, but the damage that it inflicts increases based on how long the target has been afflicted by the disease (with it probably leveling off at a certain point). It may initially deal less damage than poison, but would likely rival the damage inflicted by burning (perhaps even more) if enough time passes.

[Condition Removal]
As important as it is to make sure there are plenty of methods for both players and NPCs to remove conditions and counter condition builds, giving easy access to complete removal of conditions makes it difficult for condition-focused characters to function well.

What I propose is that most forms of condition removal instead remove stacks or duration from a condition, depending on the condition. The exact amount depends on the skill. For instance, a skill that removes a condition might remove 10 seconds if a condition stacks in duration, or 5 stacks if it can be stacked in effect. It would still be enough to remove most conditions, but if you have been hit by many stacking conditions, you cannot simply remove them all with a single skill (although perhaps some powerful skills may still be able to do so). To maybe balance this a bit, some skills might have to remove additional conditions.

This would also make boss encounter more interesting, especially if bosses employ additional methods of condition removal, as it would be important to maintain many stacks of conditions from multiple sources to ensure that the conditions stay on throughout the encounter. Characters with low condition damage can still be useful in such fights if they can spam enough stacks to help “cover” the higher damage stacks of other characters (or at least, if such a mechanic is even feasible).

Any thoughts?

I think you could get this effect by adding a trait that causes damage when you cure a condition, similar to how confusion makes you not want to use skills, disease could make you not want to cure conditions as it could do damage based on the number of conditions removed.

I don’t think removing stacks is the best idea with the current system, unless higher stacks was multiplicative instead of additive.

The only problem that I could foresee with disease causing damage when conditions are removed is that you could not prevent your allies from curing conditions on you.

I’m not sure what you mean about higher stacks being multiplicative?

They could do it so that it only damages you when you’re the one who removes the cond. If a friendly removes the cond on you then it won’t do any damage. This would stop it from being over powered as if it does constant damage while you have the cond and every time you remove it would be abit over powered. However, by allowing team members remove the cond for you without taking damage would lower the strenght of the cond abit, but still strong enough to make you worry about it. It would also add that extra bit of teamplay when it comes to the cond as you’d have to reply on party members removing the cond from you instead of just caring about their own.

Don’t forget that desease in GW1 used to spread. This new desease could pulse every second and spread to any allies within a short range.

An idea I had on this was every 3 seconds the desease could cause severe pain, which deals a small amount of damage and for 0.5-3 seconds inflicts one other random condition effect selected from the following: cripple, blind, weakness, daze. Each additional effect would have its own duration (so blind would be for 3 seconds while daze would be for 0.5 seconds). The damage would be on a par with poison and the additional effects are not separate conditions themselves. So a condi-remover that only removed 1 condition would remove desease AND it’s additional effect.

As to removers only removing a set amount of the duration or number of stack, I think it is a good idea, so long as it is implemented well. I also wondered whether it would be a good idea to add a mild passive defense into vitality. The more points you have in vitality the more condition durations are reduced. So players with high vitality would lose conditions faster.

Oh yeah, I forgot that disease could spread…

@Rin: I like the idea of disease causing random conditions for short periods of time. If the condition removal via stacks and duration idea isn’t viable, then I could see disease serving another purpose: by inflicting lots of minor conditions frequently, disease could provide covers for more important conditions. A person with disease would need to spam their condition removal abilities to try and remove the disease.

That’s true, as desease would deal less damage than the other DoT’s the fact it inflicts an extra condition every 3 seconds would make it a little harder to remove.