Guild Wars 2

Unique to the player, at least damaging conditions. Obviously there would have to be extensive revamps of how conditions perform and therefore this would never ever happen. It would however solve conditions being useless if more than 1 person is using them.

EXAMPLE:
Each player can stack:
25x Bleed,
25x Confuson,
Their own burning
Their own poison

Vulnerability, Weakness, Cripple, Immob, Stun etc. Remain as is.

Now while i could the ridiculousness of someone having 100 bleeds on them being insane I also think that you could simply use DR to balance this out or rework how bleeding scales to accommodate.

Because berserker gear offers too much benefit to worry about it right now. Why condition when you can do twice the dmg in half the time with crit gear showing 70% crit rate and 100% crit dmg increase?

They should definitely fix conditions and lower the burst damage from berserker gear.

Its server limitations, conditions take up bandwidth. There are plenty of ideas on how to make 25 stacks still benefit all players but raising the cap is only going to make things worse.

The solution to this problem is the things MMO players love to advocate, but hate to actually use; teamwork and coordination.

No single player, no matter how they build, can apply every condition at maximum capacity. So the solution to this is what I call “back up conditions.” In a nut shell you build your character to be able to swap at will between two different conditions, such as bleed and poison. Then when you see someone in your party using one, you just swap to the other. This way everyone is still doing their full DPS, but the condition players aren’t competing to stack the same condition.

Mesmer: For this run I’ll stack confuse.
Necromancer: Okay cool; I’ll handle bleeds then.
Elementalist: Alright guys, I can handle burning like nobody’s business.
Engineer: This will be fun; my Elixir Gun can keep whole swarms poisoned indefinitely. And I can still heal and remove conditions from all of us.
Warrior: /kicks everyone for not wearing Berserker’s gear.

That doesn’t solve anything arkham, your still lowering the damage of every single condition user in your team (some more than others)

Dasorine.1964:

That doesn’t solve anything arkham, your still lowering the damage of every single condition user in your team (some more than others)

I fail to see how. Again; no one player can max stack every condition, so it is much more efficient to instead focus on stacking one as best you can. That is why everyone and their grandmother stacks bleeds (well that and it is the easiest to stack). So instead of calling for a significant redesign of a core mechanic why not just stop being lazy and organize your party so each condition player is focused on different conditions?

Arkham Creed.7358:

Dasorine.1964:

That doesn’t solve anything arkham, your still lowering the damage of every single condition user in your team (some more than others)

I fail to see how. Again; no one player can max stack every condition, so it is much more efficient to instead focus on stacking one as best you can. That is why everyone and their grandmother stacks bleeds (well that and it is the easiest to stack). So instead of calling for a significant redesign of a core mechanic why not just stop being lazy and organize your party so each condition player is focused on different conditions?

Its that condition builds don’t get their name for applying 1 type of condition. They apply a wide range, utilizing all the conditions that profession can. Asking a ele to only handle burn is just non-sense, they should be using all their attunements to maximize their effectiveness. Thieves got amazing poison and bleeds, telling them to only bleed or only poison just render’s them useless (condition builds). Also many builds apply conditions unintentionally (dagger main hand on thief applies poison on the 3rd strike, many power thieves will use dagger soo….)

There have been some interesting threads on how to fix the condition cap problem without raising it, wish I could find a link. Either way, raising the cap doesn’t solve anything, it just would create more problems.

dirtyshame.1863:

Because berserker gear offers too much benefit to worry about it right now. Why condition when you can do twice the dmg in half the time with crit gear showing 70% crit rate and 100% crit dmg increase?

They should definitely fix conditions and lower the burst damage from berserker gear.

Please tell me the first part was sarcasm… that’s not a reason to not improve on something that is obviously under-preforming. In-fact that’s more reason to fix it.

All the “why bother fixing that when you can just do this instead, it’s sooo much better” arguments are ridiculous and need to stop. All they ever do is further prove why something needs to be fixed.

If Player A wants to run a condition damage build, they should be able to without gimping themselves in groups. If Player B wants to run Crit/Power for super damage, they should be able to as well but not at the expense of becoming the only viable build style.

One thing Guild Wars was always good at since it’s first release was providing players with hundreds of potential build paths, some were total junk while others were hidden treasures. Even so there never really was a “only viable” build. With a little experimenting any player could make a build to fit their playstyle that preformed on par with all the other play styles.

Any time a “super build” was found it usually got hit with a build breaking nerf after a few weeks though. This was mostly because people were using skills in ways they were not originaly intended to be used making the build unstoppable. (Perma Shadow Form anyone?)

Ok… that said….

Yes something needs to be done to fix Condition damage in groups but I don’t think this is the best solution. Let me try to explain why.

Ok world boss has 25 stacks of Bleed from 5 players each for a total of 125 stacks. Lets look at it without DR first.

If each stack is doing 100 per pulse and each stack lasts 10 seconds. Assume each player can maintain a full 25 stack on their own. That is 2,500 per second per player…

12,500per second from all 5 players over 10 seconds thats 125,000. that’s just from 5 players… increase that to 20 or 30 players and now your doing 25,000-37,500 per second.

Add in DR and now your likely to see those numbers drop down to a single person’s condition DPS again. That brings us right back into the problem we have now. More codition damage players = stonger bosses with no increase in player damage.

So as it stands we either have absurdly high Cond damage or a capped cond damage that doesn’t work with group events.

NinjaEd.3946:

Arkham Creed.7358:

Dasorine.1964:

That doesn’t solve anything arkham, your still lowering the damage of every single condition user in your team (some more than others)

I fail to see how. Again; no one player can max stack every condition, so it is much more efficient to instead focus on stacking one as best you can. That is why everyone and their grandmother stacks bleeds (well that and it is the easiest to stack). So instead of calling for a significant redesign of a core mechanic why not just stop being lazy and organize your party so each condition player is focused on different conditions?

Its that condition builds don’t get their name for applying 1 type of condition. They apply a wide range, utilizing all the conditions that profession can. Asking a ele to only handle burn is just non-sense, they should be using all their attunements to maximize their effectiveness. Thieves got amazing poison and bleeds, telling them to only bleed or only poison just render’s them useless (condition builds). Also many builds apply conditions unintentionally (dagger main hand on thief applies poison on the 3rd strike, many power thieves will use dagger soo….)

There have been some interesting threads on how to fix the condition cap problem without raising it, wish I could find a link. Either way, raising the cap doesn’t solve anything, it just would create more problems.

What would you say is more effect; one guy using two conditions at less than optimum ability because of his split, or two guys staking one condition each to its maximum?

This is why I said that MMO players don’t actually like teamwork and coordination; you’re all too self centered. No one really cares about how the party is doing, you’re all to focused on squeezing every drop you can out of your own builds, even if that completely invalidates your own party members, and thereby lowers the party’s overall effectiveness.

This is also why The Holy Trinity is still so popular; because you don’t actually have to think like a team in those games. You don’t actually work together. You just have a few people standing beside each other focused on their own little mini-games, trying to beat their own high score. And when your party wipes you get mad at others not because they messed the party up, but because they mess you up. Without some kind of overlap, and the need to actually work as a unit to get maximum efficiency, you don’t actually have cooperation.

This is a cooperative game, and you’re part of a team. It doesn’t matter how much damage you can do alone, because if your obsession with doing max DPS gets in the way of the rest of your party you’re only hurting them, and doing yourself a disservice. With the way the game is currently designed in order for the party to do maximum damage you might have to accept that you’ll need to do a little less.

Arkham a person who is condition build requires on all the conditions they apply regardless of wether they hit cap.

Removing any one of them from them lowers their damage.

For example a thief uses bleeds and poisons, a thief can usually maintain around 12-15 stacks of bleeds permenately and keep poison up indefinitely at base condition damages that means that condition thief will deal 721.5 damage a second.

Lets say you have 2 condition thieves in your party and you tell 1 to do just bleeds and 1 to do just poisons to avoid condition stacking issues.

The bleed thief will put 15 stacks of bleed on and deal 637.5 damage a second base.
The poison thief will keep poison up permenately and deal 84 damage a second base.

So what you have is the bleed thief is doing a little less dps than he could and the poison thief is doing a LOT less damage than he could.

And in total the entire party is doing less damage than it possibly could as even if they where fighting over condition placements they’d still be doing more damage each then if they stuck to just 1 condition each, in that situation the party damage will be higher than if they stuck to 1 condition each but it would still be less than if they had their own personal stacks etc. This is also base damage, a real condition build will be doing at least twice that damage meaning both losses are twice as big.

The reason people want the mechanics of this to change is because its a stupid limitation on builds thats not present for any other type of build and no amount of “cooperation” will get around the fact that if you have more than 1 person in a condition build in your team they will both be doing less damage than if they were alone.

Arkham, although I agree in some fields, this isn’t about some holy trinity or selfishness. It’s about doing what you can, without weakening your team. I hardly call trying to damage as efficiently as possible selfish, I call it being useful. Now if said person is dieing all the time forcing the party to raise them, then yeah thats quite selfish but also mediocer.

Its not about coordinating who gets what condition, because then why even bring condition builds? it it’s current state, condition builds only match power builds when they use all of their conditions (dmg). Forcing them to only utilize a small part of their build is like telling power builds to only use basic attacks, its non-sense.

Throwing down combo fields with combo finishers is the only real teamwork gw2 has, and it works fine tbh. In wvw you can see a huge difference between groups that roll in with 20-25 stacks of might and spam water fields vs the teams that just spread out and throw body bags at the enemy. Telling anyone to only use part of their build isn’t being part of a team in any way, there is no holy trinity. You’re supposed to use your entire profession for what it offers, and condition builds are lacking in efficiency when in numbers. I really wish I could find the link, some guy had a really interesting idea on how to fix the condition cap without raising it.

NinjaEd.3946:

You’re supposed to use your entire profession for what it offers

Then why create a full damage build at all? My primary condition character, an engineer, also doubles as a support. You said yourself; use your entire profession. The problem isn’t that condition players can’t equal direct damage builds, it is that those direct damage builds are able to steamroll everything by creating massively out of balance DPS.

Condition players are not too weak, power players are too strong. So strong in fact that their builds completely invalidate the dynamic role philosophy this game was designed around. You’re not supposed to focus on damage, damage, and only damage. You’re supposed to be a hybrid. And a condition/whatever hybrid build is very powerful. The problem is that the min/max players and wiki-followers have figured out how to break the game and create damage specialist builds they were never supposed to be able to make.

Arkham Creed.7358:

The solution to this problem is the things MMO players love to advocate, but hate to actually use; teamwork and coordination.

No single player, no matter how they build, can apply every condition at maximum capacity. So the solution to this is what I call “back up conditions.” In a nut shell you build your character to be able to swap at will between two different conditions, such as bleed and poison. Then when you see someone in your party using one, you just swap to the other. This way everyone is still doing their full DPS, but the condition players aren’t competing to stack the same condition.

Mesmer: For this run I’ll stack confuse.
Necromancer: Okay cool; I’ll handle bleeds then.
Elementalist: Alright guys, I can handle burning like nobody’s business.
Engineer: This will be fun; my Elixir Gun can keep whole swarms poisoned indefinitely. And I can still heal and remove conditions from all of us.
Warrior: /kicks everyone for not wearing Berserker’s gear.

That just isnt true there are several builds for necro and thief and ranger who can all hit 25 stacks of bleed. I’ve done it. Confusion… that’s another story

also to cover a different point. the bandwidth complaint is bullkitten. Every MMO has buffs debuffs and dots. There is no reason why it would lag everything unless their infrasctructure is complete crap. Their programming is so inefficient if they put some effort into it there wouldnt be a problem

@Arkham

Not everyone can just switch to focus on a single condition at will. Also it is quite possible for other party members to completely invalidate a single party members entire build including your “back up conditions”. And as NinjaEd pointed out the condition builds don’t focus on a single condition. The weapon skills themselves apply an array of conditions.

Looking at condition DAMAGE builds

Mesmer Condition
Staff – Random conditions
Scepter/Torch – Confusion/Burning

Ranger Condition
Shortbow – Bleed/Poison
Sword/Dagger – Poison
Sword/Torch – Poison/Burning

Engineer Condition
Pistol- Bleed/Poison/Confusion/Burning
Bomb – Burn/Confusion
Elixer – Bleed/Poison
Flamethrower – Burning
Grenade – Bleed/Poison
Mortar – Bleed
Tool Kit – Bleed/Confusion

Guardian Condition
ALL – Burning

Warrior Condition
Longbow – Burning/Bleed
Rifle – Bleed
Sword – Bleed

Theif Condition
Shortbow – Poison
Dagger – Poison/Bleed
Pistol – Bleed

Elementalist Condition
ALL- Burn/Bleed

Necromancer Condition
Staff – Bleed/Poison
Scepter – Bleed/Poison

That’s just looking at the weapon skills that have damaging conditions. See how often conditions overlap from one class to the next and just how limited most are? When people make condition builds they usually make them as a method of doing damage. the other condition types are applied by just about everyone as added benefits most of the time and normally used for situation purposes as intended.

Also, MMO players do use teamwork and cooperation a lot more than you’d imagine. This cooperation is typically found in the use of disruptive and debuff conditions. All the complaints about Condition builds are about the condition DAMAGE builds. Yes MMO players focus a lot on their own individual damage, but they don’t do so selfishly.

Arkham Creed.7358:

No single player, no matter how they build, can apply every condition at maximum capacity. So the solution to this is what I call “back up conditions.” In a nut shell you build your character to be able to swap at will between two different conditions, such as bleed and poison. Then when you see someone in your party using one, you just swap to the other. This way everyone is still doing their full DPS, but the condition players aren’t competing to stack the same condition.

The main issues with this are:

• Some classes can already stack multiple conditions to maximum effect (Theives can achieve 25 Bleeds + Perma-poison, Engineers can provide Perma-poison, Perma-burning and some can provide 25 Bleed stacks etc)

• Not all conditions are equal at “Maximum Effect” for example at base 25 stacks of bleed will do 1062.5 DPS, Burning will do 328 DPS, Poison will do 84 DPS and 25 stacks of Confusion will do 3250 damage per activation.

This is due to how some conditions stack duration (Burning and Poison) while others stack intensity (Bleeding and Confusion) now because of this discrepancy in damage (Combined with non-condition builds also providing conditions) having one person focused on a single condition will be less effective than if each person could use all the conditions they had available to them, which at the same time is equal or less than the effectiveness they’d achieve if they just went “Sod it, I’ll go full zerker!”

Having some way to support multiple condition builds (Through either individual stacks or additional Conditions achieved through reaching caps/combining of conditions (I.E. Poison from multiple sources becoming “Plague” which does damage equal to multiple Poison conditions from the people applying them which stacks in intensity) which could come into affect for PvE enemies (So as to not upset condition removal tools in PvP)) would help to alleviate the “Oh dear, another condi build so now we’re both less useful…” and have a distinct difference between the choice of condition builds and zerker builds (Condi builds only need 2 stats to get their maximum damage allowing them to build for more survivability vs zerker putting out more raw damage)