Guild Wars 2

Ascended gear scaling is very much broken for a certain subset of players. Condition users (surprise!)

I don’t know if Anet is trying to forcibly remove condition specs or what, but the discrimination has now further increased with ascended weapons.

Ascended weapons as we know gain 5% more stats as well as increased weapon damage.
This is great for power users. Power scales linearly as does weapon damage. More power = more damage. More weapon damage = more damage. They also get increased crit chance which increases their damage further. The exact interplay between these stats is complicated and the overall increase in dps is somewhere between 5-15% depending on who you ask. We will assume the bare minimum of a 5% dps increase.

Now we look at condition users… they gain the same 5% stat increase and the weapon damage increase. Weapon damage is useless for condition specs, my scepter hits for a smashing 250 dmg so yes I do gain a 5% increase in that but it doesn’t make up hardly any of my dps. Most of my DPS comes from damaging conditions. Bleed, Burn, Poison, Confusion, and Torment.

The problem is introduced when we realize these conditions only tick rounded numbers at a fast rate. To gain 1 extra bleed dmg tick you need 20 condition damage at lvl 80. This means if my bleed ticks for 130 dmg, adding 20 condition damage will make it tick for 131 dmg. Adding 19 condition damage however will still make it tick for 130.

If we look at ascended weapons now we can see the problem. they only offer +4 condition damage, and you can gain a potential +5 more from the infusion. This means total if I craft an ascended main-hand, an ascended off-hand, and infuse both of them I will gain a total of +18 condition damage which gives me exactly a 0% increase in damage.

It doesn’t matter how many stacks I put on, or how much skill I have, or how much extra crit I have or how long my condition duration is, getting full ascended weapons does not increase my condition damage (roughly 90% of my dps) by a single point.

TLDR: Power users gain somewhere between 3-15% extra DPS from ascended gear. Conditions users gain significantly less. Please increase the condition damage on ascended gear to bring the dps increase inline with power users.

One thing to keep in mind is this is just the weapons that are now being introduced, once the armor is introduced it will balance out some in WvW at least. The reason I say this is two fold really, the condition damage increase for amor sets is unkown and condition damage is not affected by armor value. So right now you have ascended level weapon strength and exotic level armor values, giving ascended power users a bit of a leg up, but once the ascended armor value and increased stats from that come in to play it should even things up a bit. Conditions in pve will still be garbage just because of the way they have implemented the condi stacks.

Condition specs are already ridiculously overpowered: can have both vitality and thoughness while still dealing massive damage. Conditions can be removed, but this is compensated by the fact that they ignore armor, protection and most traits and signets that reduce damage. They are the last thing in the game that need a buff.

The additional 5% damage will be counteracted by an additional 5% armor when ascended armor comes out later this year. Since conditions ignore armor, they’ll get a relative buff at that time.

I have a full condition necro and engineer and those two I would not even think of grinding out ascended gear for. In the normal scenario, i.e., playing with other people, my condition builds are already not experiencing the actual accounting for the damage they do even in full exotics due to the way condition damage is managed (by stacks on a mob rather than damage by player. Why grind out ascended gear if it is not going to add anything to the damage you do.

Good eye though. This is one of the, I’m sure, unintended effects of their decision not to account for all damage by player.

Going ‘glass condition cannon’ has always been a losing situation in balanced games. You’re built to win the longer duel, but because it’s PvE, you look to trade off your biggest strength for gains where you need them. I’ve always treated that type of build like it’s AoE, and you have to pull more foes at the same time to make it synergize. If I can’t DoT up multiple foes and outlast them, then it’s a bad PvE design and I wouldn’t play it in PvE; because it certainly doesn’t carry it’s weight on bosses unless it debuffs them.

But ascended damage “gear” causes things to scale (i.e. power creep) a bit faster than most people realize. There are some traits that add +% scaling to offensive abilities. And there are other traits that add boosts where they don’t exist innately (proc on crit, Thief Mug) and that force opponents to require a certain amount of counter-building to deal with. Scaling in a particular place might allow you to win fights you previously would have lost, because you gained within a type of scaling that was already strong from your class design and skills: burst damage, high toughness with healing, high survival with condition damage, etc.

Personally, as I scale better on my defensive support spec, it allows my glass-cannon teammates to get more DPS time if I’m still the primary focus target (because of their dodging or PvE aggro mechanics). When I’m running a glass cannon, I usually try to reach a certain threshold of passive defense that allows me to survive until my active skills come back off cooldown. And from leveling several characters, I also feel like dual weapon combinations would scale better than one handers (given that the two sets have similar functions) because of the extra passive sigil type (5%/10% at night).

As of right now, it’s harder to find broken defensive multipliers than it is offensive ones. It’s kind of funny to play something like an elementalist with stacked toughness, and see when things give up after hitting you because they would have to blow too many cooldowns on you in a team fight. Or a burst guardian, who punishes people for expecting him to be unkillable. But things like this will also be competitively phased out in the long run as people come to anticipate them, and they won’t be worth the effort in gearing optimally for either.

The scaling is actually broken in multiple places.

Master of Timespace.2548:

Condition specs are already ridiculously overpowered: can have both vitality and thoughness while still dealing massive damage.

Uh… Is the damage from this spec really higher than the damage from a Power/Toughness/Vitality build? Considering how both are very inferior to a Berseker build, somehow I don’t think condition spects are “overpowered”.

Erasculio.2914:

Master of Timespace.2548:

Condition specs are already ridiculously overpowered: can have both vitality and thoughness while still dealing massive damage.

Uh… Is the damage from this spec really higher than the damage from a Power/Toughness/Vitality build? Considering how both are very inferior to a Berseker build, somehow I don’t think condition spects are “overpowered”.

You don’t duel or do PvP do you.

Master of Timespace.2548:

Condition specs are already ridiculously overpowered: can have both vitality and thoughness while still dealing massive damage. Conditions can be removed, but this is compensated by the fact that they ignore armor, protection and most traits and signets that reduce damage. They are the last thing in the game that need a buff.

Here is where the folley of your statement lies – Ascended Gear is not available in platforms in which condition builds are typically favored. They are not available in sPvP/tPvP at all. Condition builds are not overpowered in zerg WvW play (on top of balance being irrelevant in zerg WvW play to begin with). Conditions are disgustingly underpowered in large scale PvE and in any other PvE scenario with more than 2 condition damage dealers and comparatively weaker than Berserker builds even in optimal PvE scenarios.

This leaves only one scenario in which your argument holds any weight – solo/small group roaming/dueling in WvW. Is this really worth balancing for? Is this really worth such a large oversight as new gear that greatly buffs one damage type while doing absolutely nothing for the other? I say that it is not.

So yea, i’m around level 460 huntsman, already assembling my acsended mats. I was really looking forward to getting an acsended weapon. Now i realise it’s not even worth it unless i COMPLETELY change the gear on my character and my build, which is now narrowed down to rifle variants only (which are only a few for engineers), I’ll have to re-apply all of my armor skins (yes, i care about looks) and so basicly, completely change the way how I play the game.

That’s all exaggerated ofcourse :P , and i dont really care that much. I just have to accept that my condition build is more of a “fun”/alternative build that will never be useful in ALOT of content.

You gotta sum the classes which get full benefit, medium benefits and almost no benefits from ascended weapons:

Full benefits:

• Warrior
• Guardian
• Shatter Mesmer
• Ranger
• Elementalist

Medium benefits:

• Sword Warrior
• Mesmer
• Shortbow Ranger
• Thief

Benefits?:

• Condition Necro
• Engineer (Kit or conditioneer are most)
• Conjure Elementalist

As you can see, most important classes did get their + 5% bonus, others recieve negligence and a few almost complete ignorance.

ANet is telling you to go Zerk Warrior or Guardian in SO many ways …

Some classes just scale better with stats than others.

Ascended gear makes that thief that was hitting for 2000 now hit for 2500 but it doesn’t make an Ele’s stun that was 2 seconds in length into 2.5 seconds. That’s why the game is in the state it’s in now, it was balanced around Exotic gear, not Ascended.

Unfortunately, we’ll never see a fix. The only way to fix the imbalances caused by the increase in stats is to overhaul every skill in the game. You know that will never happen...

Just go play a warrior, that’s what I’m doing.