Guild Wars 2

When originally conceived I believe Boons and Conditions were meant to be actual decisions made by players.

Something along the lines of…

“Oh, here comes a dangerous melee foe, better apply Weakness”.

Boons were probably designed under the same premise.

“Ok, the Boss is using his fire breath. Better trigger Protection.

I believe this is what it was meant to be like. But instead the game has evolved to a point where both Conditions and Boons are constantly spammed.

It seems like every auto-attack chain applies at least one Condition, sometime more. Powerful Boons like Protection are tied to abilities you can use every few seconds (like Dodge), ensuring a really high uptime.

I don’t recall the last time I ran a 5 man dungeon and the Boss didn’t have ALL possible conditions applied to him, even without a Necromancer.

When running with Guardians you also have all kinds of Boons rolling on you all the time. Most of the are applied passively and are never and active decision.

I feel this is a flaw in game design as given the potency of Boons and Conditions, they should be active decisions.

When I chose to strip a Boon from an enemy, this should give me a brief upper hand. But in most cases the target, be it an enemy player or a Dredge, will just have the same Boon up and running two seconds later.

Looking at some of the abilities like Singet of Agility that will remove one Condition (if solo) and is on a 30 second cooldown it’s obvious that this was designed around the original mantra. But how useful is such an ability in today’s world where a Necromancer can apply 6 Conditions within a second without even targeting you?

It seems like one design approach is clashing with the other and you need to decide which one to follow.

Should Conditions and Boons be tactical elements or something that is passively spamed in order to boost your effectiveness?

In either case changes are in order.

The problems are not conditions and boons, the problem is skill. A lot of players can beat the game with dodging and spamming their skills.

As bad as that might seem, there are plenty of other games you can face roll, even on hard difficulties. I’m looking at you Diablo 3.

Also, Protection isn’t a powerful boon. 33% less damage is nice but comparing it to skills that Block, I see it as just a minor bonus.

That and the PvP meta is conditions. Complaining about people not using conditions properly? Go join a tourney match and now you’ll complain only about conditions.

I feel like you missed my point entirely.

I think OP’s conjecture is basically “the sheer amount of conditions and boons that can e applied and reapplied constantly contributes to the often mentioned ‘spamminess’ of spvp?” Whether I agree with the premise, I’m not sure, but it’s an interesting discussion and something I heard alluded to by players much better than me. The idea that there is a functional relationship between tendency to spam and availability of boons/conditions is certainty worth discussing. These are design choices made that many here don’t have a full understanding of (I certainly don’t) so it would be nice to see someone

• more formally define what they mean by ‘spamminess’
• how gw2 creates the conditions for that
• why it’s good/bad for the game

:)

Some boons/conditions are indeed passive effects, but the depth comes from creating builds around specific boons/conditions.

Sure you could play a Ranger that automatically puts on bleed and you may wonder “if it just goes on automatically then why even think about it”, but you could also spec your Ranger to specifically focus on Bleed condition.

Same goes for boons. Sure my Guardian can apply health regen when I use X skill, but I can also spec traits and gear so that when I apply X boon it also applies Y boon and increases duration. Sometimes these boons can be something as important as stability so now you have another stun-breaker when before you only had 1 or two options. It’s really all about how you spec your character. Good players don’t just spam boons. They know what skills apply which boons and will use them accordingly. When I know a boss will do an AoE knockdown, I save my Stand Your Ground! ability until I see them using it, now the whole team stays standing. A bad player would just mash their shouts as soon as CD is up.

This 100% applies to PvP. A good team versus a bad team is very obvious when you look at their boon usage. Thief just popped up and is wreaking havoc on one of your squishies? AoE Retaliation and Protection/Regen.

Don’t just blindly mash buttons.

I think most people do this because they don’t have to do it any other way in most PvE encounters, but there’s more to it than what it seems on the surface.

That’s not quite what I meant.

Of course players build their characters around having certain boons at specific moments and that’s fine. It’s not the players fault that boons and conditions are so liberally used. It’s the way the game is designed.

Take a hypothetical situation:

I face an enemy that has Protection up. This is a 33% damage reduction.

I have an ability at my disposal that can steal a Boon.

Now typically my decision process would go something like this:

→ Shall I waste a GCD to remove a Boon or use it to DPS instead?
→ Is this a difficult enemy and is it worth blowing my cooldown on this or shall I just ignore the Protection?
→ Maybe I should hold on to my ability until I need to steal a Boon for self-preservation.

Now in GW2 I do not think like that because based on personal experience, even if I do remove Protection, it will be re-applied somehow, from somewhere in a matter of seconds.

Just join a hot-join as a Spectator for a few minutes and observe a Node-Battle involving 4 players. Check their Boon bar and you will see various Boon constantly being applied, especially if a Guardian or Elementalist is around.

Applying Boons happens so quickly and seamlessly that I often don’t even notice.

Conditions are in a similar boat.

They too are applied very liberally, often via auto-attacks or passive AoE effects. “Weakness” isn’t the condition you use to mitigate the damage of a dangerous melee class. It’s not an active decision. It’s something you apply passively via your auto-attack.

Originally it was my impression that Boons were supposed to replace your standard buffs with a more active “in combat” decisions. But this has resulted into an abundance of passive Boons and Conditions effects due to the limited number of skills available to players.

Or to put it in other words, how relevant is the ability to steal 1-2 boons on a 30 second cooldown in a world where Elementalist, Guardians are rolling practically all the available buffs nearly all of the time?

I see what the OP is saying. He’s basiacally saying that in a lot of situations condition/boon removal is pointless because it will be added again in a few seconds. Like fighting a warrior in PvP. There is zero point in cleansing bleed because next time he hits you it’s reapplied.
And I agree too. It’s nice to have those constant ticks eating away enemy health but it makes cleansing/boon removal a bit less useful. I don’t have any condition removal on my warrior because the options I have don’t regen enough to be more useful than another banner/stomp

It was like that from the start actually.

A lot of problems people complain about, most were already like that and it just took people forever to see it lol.

Thats exactly how i use stability on my ele thanks to the 20 point trait in Earth that grants me and allies 2s of stability when i switch to earth (every 9s). I enjoy it so much it’s my sole source of stability.

You’re right OP: as I understand, from statements made before the game was released, the original intention was for boons to be saved for special circumstances. Sometime before launch this was changed to the current spammy form. Don’t know about conditions.