Guild Wars 2

I’ve played this game on and off up until now. I largely missed out on the Tower of Nightmares arc. However, that’s not why I’m writing to you.

While I am curious to see the changes to berserker gear overall, myself and several other players whom I’ve discussed the topic with agree that this is merely alleviating the symptom of a much larger problem.

First and foremost, the largest part of why people choose that stat-spread over several others, is because it offers raw damage to tear through high-hp enemies.

The first proposal is this: Make Toughness on enemies more effective, and reduce enemy health pools across the board.

Normal Enemy hp at 80 would have the smallest reduction. Veteran Enemy hp would have overall less hp, and so-on.

Enemy Toughness levels could stay the same with making the toughness stat overall more effective. This means that something like Vulnerability, would hopefully become much more desirable, and condition builds could become much more viable with this change.

Secondly, a major, sweeping change to how boons and conditions work and interact with one, another.

While I like the concept of necromancers, guardians, and mesmers being able to manipulate them so freely. I’d like to see it become less binary and more of a tug-of war.

An example of what I’m talking about would be this:

Might = Increases Power Per Stack. Each Stack applied removes a stack of Weakness.
Weakness = Changed to Decrease Power per stack. Each Stack applied removes a stack of Might. The Endurance regen reduction and glancing blows would be moved to other conditions where they’d make more sense.

The concept of using a boon to counter a condition, and vice-versa. This could mean as a rule of thumb each boon has a condition that oppposes it in some way.

Imagine an enemy, let’s go with a Dredge shield-banger, whatever they’re actually called doesn’t matter. They’re the guy that bangs on their shield to buff himself and allies nearby.

Initially, a player would have to resort to using a binary boon removal to deal with that situation.

With this change, a player could apply weakness, poison, and or Vulnerability to shred away the duration and stacks of those respective boons. Effectively removing them.

Each tick of Poison would grow stronger as it tears away at regeneration, each stack of might is replaced with a stack of weakness, and each application of vulnerability shreds some time off of protection.

Looking at this, this would likely mean having to rework several professions that rely heavily on boon and condition manipulation, if not all of them.

Why these two changes? Because it would hopefully free up more builds involving conditions and while keeping them viable in PVP, would make them much more valuable in PVE as well.

Thoughts?

I don’t mean to be contrary, but no. Across the board, no.

Your suggestion to “reduce” hp and increase toughness would make battles (some of which are already quite lengthy) take longer and would make my numbers, as a player, go down. That’s almost never a good thing

On top of that, your suggestion to make might and weakness a push and pull sort of situation would further magnify the issue of lengthening fights. A lot of champ/legendary mobs dump A TON of conditions on players as it is. If you made that a simple binary push and pull you would make all of the battles take EVEN LONGER (because make no mistake, a full stack of might is a HUGE increase in DPS, especially in large groups) It would render most world bosses near impossible with their current time limits.

Let’s just wait and see what comes of this feature pack and how ferocity will effect Zerker gear overall before suggesting sweeping changes like this.

Getting really tired about all these posts asking for a zerker nerf, please start using your brain just for once.

melee= high risk = high dps
range = low risk = low dps

3 dps stats = low defense/high risk = high dps
2 defense stats = high defense/low risk = low dps

The very core of the dps system in this game is based on what is written above. I will agree that condition stacking in dungeons is trash and that there shouldn’t be a condition cap in PvE but conditions should NEVER be on par with direct melee damage.

[edit: vulnerability is already highly desired since it can improve direct dmg up to 25% and might stacking causes a serious dmg increase as well, your suggestion to interactive boons is simply a strain on every players cpu]

adubb.2453:

I don’t mean to be contrary, but no. Across the board, no.

Your suggestion to “reduce” hp and increase toughness would make battles (some of which are already quite lengthy) take longer and would make my numbers, as a player, go down. That’s almost never a good thing

Or, you know, they could make battles last shorter. The Assault Knights for example had huge hp pools from what I could tell. The reason why they took so long was because no conditions could be applied to them for large chunks of the fight.

It could end up making fights end up lasting the same amount of time. Only in this situation your conditions would become more effective. Zerker gear is favored because enemies have high hp pools and low toughness. You’re just doing raw points of big crits without having to worry too much about anything other than raw, flat damage.

People choose that opposed to thinking about making a build that tears away at a boss’ defenses to effectively do the same damage as other players would. Because that’s what’s easier right now. Warriors, Guardians, Mesmers, and sometimes Elementalists are valued over everything else because of this. Warriors especially work well with berserker stats.

Anything to increase build variety. Rather than having to rework traits across the board, the enemy design needs to be looked at first. Then we need to look at how boons and conditions interact with one another.

1. I thought we already know this won’t work due to condition cap, during tri-wurm fight, there are husks basically fits what you describe, and they are more of annoying to the zerkers than making condi build look good.

2. Not necessary bad idea, but you have to take into account the current format:
Bleed and Vigor, if someone with bleed on its AA, then its target can never have vigor.
Burn and Aegis, do I need to explain why burn counter aegis is stupid.
Swiftness and immobilized, which pretty much make immobilization a joke if swiftness counters it.
Stability and Fear, stability are immune to fear, the suggestion will make fear remove stability.

Setz.9675:

Getting really tired about all these posts asking for a zerker nerf, please start using your brain just for once.

melee= high risk = high dps
range = low risk = low dps

3 dps stats = low defense/high risk = high dps
2 defense stats = high defense/low risk = low dps

The very core of the dps system in this game is based on what is written above. I will agree that condition stacking in dungeons is trash and that there shouldn’t be a condition cap in PvE but conditions should NEVER be on par with direct melee damage.

[edit: vulnerability is already highly desired since it can improve direct dmg up to 25% and might stacking causes a serious dmg increase as well, your suggestion to interactive boons is simply a strain on every players cpu]

At no point did I say nerf. I’m talking about making Zerker less necessary to do damage. I’m talking about condition builds. There is a condition damage stat you know. However conditions aren’t as strong in PvE. This is why I proposed that, to make other builds more viable.

How would interactive boons and conditions strain the cpu?

Why shouldn’t Conditions be on par with direct melee damage? If you put forth the effort to lay down many stacks of torment, bleeding, burning, confusion, and poison. You should see them compete with direct melee damage.

LastShot.4762:

1. I thought we already know this won’t work due to condition cap, during tri-wurm fight, there are husks basically fits what you describe, and they are more of annoying to the zerkers than making condi build look good.

2. Not necessary bad idea, but you have to take into account the current format:
Bleed and Vigor, if someone with bleed on its AA, then its target can never have vigor.
Burn and Aegis, do I need to explain why burn counter aegis is stupid.
Swiftness and immobilized, which pretty much make immobilization a joke if swiftness counters it.
Stability and Fear, stability are immune to fear, the suggestion will make fear remove stability.

A rework I thought of concerning point 2.

Vigor vs Burning: Rolling with Vigor will extinguish seconds off of burning. Single application of Burning shreds time off of vigor.

Regeneration vs Bleeding and Poison: Poison remains slightly the same, bleeding stacks get removed periodically by regeneration.

Retaliation vs Torment: Torment does a half tick for each time retaliation procs.

A crit damage boon of some sort vs Blind: Blind will make first attack miss, subsequent attacks fall under the glancing penalty from weakness.

Fury VS Confusion: Attacks that would crit during Confusion will cause double confuse damage to the player.

Stability vs Fear: Fear will shred some time from stability on application, Stability Breaks fear.

Swiftness vs Cripple: Cripple gets endurance regeneration debuff? Applications shred time off each other.

Aegis and Immobilization: If target under the effects of aegis, Immobilize will stay longer based on Aegis duration. Guardian Aegis is flat capped at 1.5 seconds or something.

That just leaves Chilled… hmm…

CrimsonRipper.5087:

Setz.9675:

Getting really tired about all these posts asking for a zerker nerf, please start using your brain just for once.

melee= high risk = high dps
range = low risk = low dps

3 dps stats = low defense/high risk = high dps
2 defense stats = high defense/low risk = low dps

The very core of the dps system in this game is based on what is written above. I will agree that condition stacking in dungeons is trash and that there shouldn’t be a condition cap in PvE but conditions should NEVER be on par with direct melee damage.

[edit: vulnerability is already highly desired since it can improve direct dmg up to 25% and might stacking causes a serious dmg increase as well, your suggestion to interactive boons is simply a strain on every players cpu]

At no point did I say nerf. I’m talking about making Zerker less necessary to do damage. I’m talking about condition builds. There is a condition damage stat you know. However conditions aren’t as strong in PvE. This is why I proposed that, to make other builds more viable.

How would interactive boons and conditions strain the cpu?

Why shouldn’t Conditions be on par with direct melee damage? If you put forth the effort to lay down many stacks of torment, bleeding, burning, confusion, and poison. You should see them compete with direct melee damage.

You just ignored everything I wrote beside the edit, how about you give us an argument why conditions that are applied by ranged attacks should be on par with zerker melee damage BESIDE for the fact that those conditions damage exist.

How interactive boons strain the CPU? I dunno maybe because the system needs tons more calculations before the real damage can be popped up on your screen.