Guild Wars 2

Conditions, as they exist now, have problems, especially with scaling to accommodate more than a few conditions users and with the ease with which they can be wiped clean. The move to duration-based conditions alleviated some problems, but also caused massive wastage of damage when you have more than a few condition users. Except for proposal 3 later on, this post doesn’t fix the problem… but it introduces fundamental balance that you can build a solution on top of.

The ease of wiping conditions currently varies wildly: a 15 second burn can be removed with the least and lowliest condition remover, but 7 stacks of bleeding might not even notice. That’s a wild and unbalanced variation in power. Currently players “armor” a stack we want to keep with other conditions that must be removed first, but that’s a workaround of the core problem.

Proposal 1: Duration-stacked conditions are considered “stacked” by duration.
Example: make all current one-condition removers instead remove 3 stacks of conditions, 2s burning is a stack, 3s bleed is a stack. Now a cleansing bolt will nail 2-3 stacks of low-duration bleed or 6 seconds of burning… now it’s twice as effective against bleeds but won’t completely kill a 10s burning stack. The numbers can be tweaked but the goal is to even out removal of duration stacking conditions versus instance-stacked ones.

Proposal 2: Ban the use of the word all with regards to conditions.

You are much more careful with the word all elsewhere in the game: Blocks, invulnerabilities and protection have severe duration and often cooldown limitations, weakness excludes both crits and condition damage, and although “reflect all projectiles” abilities exist, one only has to step into WvW to experience the vast power of the word all. Immunity to all crits doesn’t even exist for players in this game AFAIK.

Yet, “remove all conditions” is found in quite a lot of places in this game. Some are even AoE. There are indeed very few AoEs to shut down power and crit builds.

Because of proposal 1, we now have an alternative: make “all” mean 15 stacks for personal removal, and 10 stacks for AoE removal. That’s still a lot of condition removal… but it’s not infinite like before.

This approach will help greatly with your scaling issues, because “all” becomes exponentially more powerful in massive fights. Again, see reflect wall for details.

Proposal 3: “Pulse” > 5 stacks of duration.

Now that duration is considered a stack, we have another trick available – one that solves the scaling problem. When you apply a 8th stack of a duration-based condition, 5 stacks get consumed and you apply a special effect. Now having 5 mages burning the same target is actually useful, since the duration converts to a burst of damage if the duration gets high enough.

Assume we use 2s burning for a stack. You get burning on a boss up to 16s. When you cast the spell that pushes it over the top, 10s of that gets applied instantly (perhaps with a 25% penalty to total damage?), and now you have 6s of burning left.

The penalty to burst damage, along with the high duration requirement (for non-elementalists, anyway) before it triggers is intended for balance purposes so that condition damage doesn’t become the new burst damage.

Take all 3 proposals together, tweak it with testing and experience, and I think condition damage becomes viable again… and more importantly, it’ll be easier to STAY fixed because the mechanics once again support scaling on both the application and the removal sides.

Oh, forgot to add one part:

For stacking duration conditions that aren’t damaging ones, the burst should be some special effect related to the condition.

For example, overstacking chill procs an immobilize.
Stacking weakness strips several stacks of might and/or removes unshakable stacks.
Stacking blindness gives a short-duration debuff that prevents the target from critically hitting.