Comfirmed- Nothing being done re: conditions
Well I do have to say this seems pretty lazy on their part, even if it is some sort of overexertion on resource(which I find hard to believe), they should seek an alternative. Something like this is just all too common of an event to write off as a minor issue. But then again there are known bugs still in the game since beta, so what really can I expect.
Lazy? Who are you, again? Just some random player? So your qualifications to declare a condition cap a “minor issue” are no more based than mine when I claim them a necessary game mechanic. And calling the development team lazy for implementing what they deem a necessary condition cap makes you look extremely immature.
Well jeez, we can’t have all of these nifty Quaggan backpacks AND a battle-system that allows for balanced condition-build groups. Clearly it’s us spoiled try-hards that are overworking these poor developers.
A condition-build group is, by it’s very nature, NOT balanced. Ergo, a balanced condition-build group is an impossibility. If you want a balanced group, you should probably stay away from overloading any one particular aspect of combat: be it conditions, support, crowd control, or anything else.
It appears you don’t at all understand the concept of a balanced party. So you’re making it very difficult to respond to your post with anything other than the rolling of my eyes. And you should probably tone down the snarkiness, at least until you have something of an understanding of the subject on which you’re speaking.
A condition-build group is, by it’s very nature, NOT balanced. Ergo, a balanced condition-build group is an impossibility. If you want a balanced group, you should probably stay away from overloading any one particular aspect of combat: be it conditions, support, crowd control, or anything else.
It appears you don’t at all understand the concept of a balanced party. So you’re making it very difficult to respond to your post with anything other than the rolling of my eyes. And you should probably tone down the snarkiness, at least until you have something of an understanding of the subject on which you’re speaking.
Pardon me, but how exactly is limiting a build to one in five ‘balanced’? And if this is true, why then can you fill a party with five Eles, Guardians, Warriors, or Mesmers of the same P/T build and run through any PvE event, while the same is not true for the remainder of the classes or for condition builds in general?
Balanced does not mean ‘equal but different’, it just means equal. You can have the exact same things on both sides of a scale and it is balanced, or you can have different things and still make it balanced.
(edited by Conncept.7638)
rift/wow/lotro and probably others all track individual stacks of debuffs, however Anet can’t afford it…
Pardon me, but how exactly is limiting a build to one in five ‘balanced’? And if this is true, why then can you fill a part with five Eles, Guardians, Warriors, or Mesmers and be just fine in any PvE situation and most PvP ones?
You can fill a party with five Minstrels, for all I care. If they’re all specced to do the same thing, it CANNOT be a balanced party.
Pardon me, but how exactly is limiting a build to one in five ‘balanced’? And if this is true, why then can you fill a part with five Eles, Guardians, Warriors, or Mesmers and be just fine in any PvE situation and most PvP ones?
You can fill a party with five Minstrels, for all I care. If they’re all specced to do the same thing, it CANNOT be a balanced party.
The five man bunker Ele group I’ve run dungeons with has something to say about that. As do the frequent five-man power/crit berserker warrior groups I’ve seen. There are dozens of power builds that you can do anything with in the entire game, and they remain useful no matter how many of their fellows they fight alongside. There are no such condition builds.
Once again, balance means ‘equal’, indifferent of sameness or variety.
(edited by Conncept.7638)
Word-play aside, the point being you can skew a party heavily towards zerker/direct damage be be rewarded in both PVE and PVP, while doing the same for conditions nets you nearly no damage increase whatsoever past 2 players.
Most condition based players just don’t want to join up with a group, see another condition hero, and saddly know if they were really looking out for the good of the group, they should drop party immediately.
You can argue personal skill/ability, ability to tank, etc, but at the end of the day, no group needs more than 1-2 condition heros, while EVERY group can get by with (or even asks for) multiple strickly direct damage heros.
The five man bunker Ele group I’ve run dungeons with has something to say about that. As do the frequent five-man power/crit berserker warrior groups I’ve seen. There are dozens of power builds that you can do anything with in the entire game, and they remain useful no matter how many of their fellows they fight alongside. There are no such condition builds.
A party of five bunker Elementalists? The very same bunker Elementalists ArenaNet has identified as unbalanced and promised to nerf? Five of those? A party of five unbalanced and soon-to-be-nerfed builds is, again, NOT a balanced party.
rift/wow/lotro and probably others all track individual stacks of debuffs, however Anet can’t afford it…
If they did, they’d have to lower the individual condition limit. And guess what. People would complain about that, too.
I’m going to be brutally honest with you guys. Some of you come across as short-sighted and opinionated people who are quick to complain about things you’re slow to understand.
Actually this is not true and is something we are actively looking at. We have a number of solutions that we are talking about and when we are able to figure out which one will have the least impact on balance, performance, and testing we will put that solution in place as soon as possible.
Jon
Thanks for communicating with us, it is appreciated.
The only thing I would suggest is that ArenaNet get on the same page with the information given out, as in a previous interview, your Game Director Colin Johanson said the opposite:
(Question) "There’s a cap on condition stacks of 25. In a scenario where you have two thieves attacking a boss and one of them can achieve a stack of 25 by themselves, the other one essentially becomes useless because they’ve got nothing to stack on. Is anything being done to address that to make them less redundant?
Colin: Currently no. Interesting statistic for you: every condition in the game costs server bandwidth. ‘Cause we have to track how often the condition is running, what the duration of that condition is and what the stack is. So the more stacks we allow them more expensive it gets because we’re tracking every additional stack on there. And so we could, say, you can have infinite stacks. Number one: that becomes really unbalanced. But number two: it’s actually extremely expensive for us, on a performance basis. That’s one of those weird, kind of back-end server issues that can help make game designer decisions regardless of what you want to do with it."
Think of how much you’d see getting done to, say, glass cannon builds if they ate 12x 25 Stacks of Bleed? Heck, even a tank-like build might be really in trouble at that.
How is that different than being hit by 5 different 100b warriors at the same time? Why should a team of direct damage dealers be more effective and capable of dishing out damage than a team of condition dealers?.
. . . because you can dodge Hundred Blades. You can’t dodge ticks from conditions.
You can however remove conditions. No matter how many bleed stacks you have on you, one condition removal takes care of it completely. It’s as if you had an effect type that removed all damage you have received in the last x seconds.
Is that part of what you’re proposing, that one removal removes all “Bleed”/“Poison” effects? That’s a difference, then.
On the more visual side of things, would this mean I’d have to look at like 20 Bleed icons? :P
This is already how it currently works. In the current game, if you have 20 bleeds and use a cond removal that removes 1 condition, it removes them all.
The five man bunker Ele group I’ve run dungeons with has something to say about that. As do the frequent five-man power/crit berserker warrior groups I’ve seen. There are dozens of power builds that you can do anything with in the entire game, and they remain useful no matter how many of their fellows they fight alongside. There are no such condition builds.
A party of five bunker Elementalists? The very same bunker Elementalists ArenaNet has identified as unbalanced and promised to nerf? Five of those? A party of five unbalanced and soon-to-be-nerfed builds is, again, NOT a balanced party.
You can do the same thing with bunker Guardians, power/crit eles, power/crit mesmers, or power/crit warriors. If everything that depends on those stats is universally applicable without diminishing returns, while those that depends on the remaining stats are not, then logically, they are not ‘balanced’ against each other, one clearly has more worth than the other.
For someone so stuck on balance, you don’t seem to have a very solid grasp of what it even is. If one object has more value than another, they aren’t balanced, even if they are the exact same object. Whereas two things that have the exact same value, are balanced even if they aren’t the same object.
You can have two object be exactly the same and of the same value, and they will be balanced perfectly, and this is likely the easiest way to obtain balance. However that would be homogenizing the classes, and is a way of balancing that eliminates variety. So obviously the second option is best, things need to be different but have the same value.
(edited by Conncept.7638)
The issue is big because of PvP. Condition Necro’s and Trap Rangers are a huge part of the meta at the moment. If conditions get buffed and are tracked independently the name of the game will have to change to Condition Wars instead of Guild Wars. All of the sPvP and WvWvW Fights will come down to who can apply the most conditions the fastest.
The best way to handle conditions and it’s effects in MMO was already in place in Guild Wars 1. Why fix something that isn’t broken? I understand they wanted to “innovate” but they literally went backwards in this area.
The issue is big because of PvP. Condition Necro’s and Trap Rangers are a huge part of the meta at the moment. If conditions get buffed and are tracked independently the name of the game will have to change to Condition Wars instead of Guild Wars. All of the sPvP and WvWvW Fights will come down to who can apply the most conditions the fastest.
The best way to handle conditions and it’s effects in MMO was already in place in Guild Wars 1. Why fix something that isn’t broken? I understand they wanted to “innovate” but they literally went backwards in this area.
They could have it to where it’s set up differently between PVE and PVP. In Guild Wars 1, they had plenty of “PVP only skills” so it wouldn’t be too unfamiliar.
They could have it to where the cap is unlimited in PVE/World Events/Dungeons but keep the 25 cap in SPVP/WvW.
Well jeez, we can’t have all of these nifty Quaggan backpacks AND a battle-system that allows for balanced condition-build groups. Clearly it’s us spoiled try-hards that are overworking these poor developers.
A condition-build group is, by it’s very nature, NOT balanced. Ergo, a balanced condition-build group is an impossibility. If you want a balanced group, you should probably stay away from overloading any one particular aspect of combat: be it conditions, support, crowd control, or anything else.
It appears you don’t at all understand the concept of a balanced party. So you’re making it very difficult to respond to your post with anything other than the rolling of my eyes. And you should probably tone down the snarkiness, at least until you have something of an understanding of the subject on which you’re speaking.
Internal balance =/= external balance, which is what the poster is complaining about and what you’re conflating here.
Condition damage is supposed to be a viable damage style for a player to specialize into. Therefore, it should be internally balanced with direct damage builds. That is to say, for every point of “character power” (be that traits, gear, or skills) you invest, you get roughly the same amount of killing power by investing it into either condition damage or power. For most classes, in most cases, this is more or less true to my knowledge (barring unique circumstances like objects which are immune to conditions).
It’s external balance where this falls apart, and that’s what people are complaining about. Most of the really viable condition builds rely on stacking bleeds as an example, and some are capable of hitting the condition cap on their own, or getting the majority of the way to the cap. That’s okay if you’re solo (to an extent), but this isn’t a solo game. You will regularly be fighting mobs with multiple people, and many of them will be throwing out incidental conditions, let alone the occasional person who is specced for condition damage. It’s an unfair burden to put on condition damage players, because the extra damage over time isn’t “free”; they intentionally devoted part of their character’s overall strength to doing damage over time rather than damage up front. The only condition that makes sense with a global cap is Vulnerability, since that functions as a force multiplier for all incoming damage, and thus gets better the more people you have attacking a monster.
I think most people would consider it ridiculous if mobs became immune to direct damage if they took a certain amount of direct damage from attacks in a given window of time, and if this window of immunity was so low that a direct-damage focused player could nearly hit that threshold solo and constantly bumped into it with 1 or more players around, including condition damage builds that do some direct damage on their attacks. That is precisely the situation that condition damage specs are faced with, however.
Until they address the cap, they won’t be able to make condition damage externally balanced against direct damage, which consigns it to being a generally inferior spec outside of fairly niche circumstances (that is, solo/small group, dungeons with no other dedicated condition builds, and similar PvP groups).
Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games.
Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet
Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet
(edited by Zyrhan.3180)
It is true that letting each player have a stack is unlikely to be the solution, however we do intend to solve this problem.
What if each player had their own small stack, and then a “universal” stack?
Example : First ten stacks of bleed go to the palyer, but after that, they get put on another stack that caps at fifteen, that everyone contributes to? So a single player would cap 25 bleeds (no different than now) but two would cap at 35, etc?
Again, how is it that other MMOs have figured how to do that? How does condition damage use anymore bandwidth than direct damage? I just don’t buy that excuse.
It’s the duration aspect of conditions that cause them to take more resources. Also depends on how much feedback they send back to the player.
I know in COH, when they introduced the detailed numbers it caused some issues for people with slower connections, and so they had an option to turn off the buffs/debuffs/etc numbers being sent to the client.
Sorry if this was posted as a potential solution for bleeds but here goes. If I’m not mistaken, currently the server reports to the player each tick individually per second and as far as I can tell there is no work done to optimize this data (thus the problem about bandwidth mentioned by the devs). So why not compress it or merge all the damage for that second? I’ll admit it is only a partial solution, but it’s a start to allow for a higher cap at least.
Scenario: 25 bleeds stacked on target and each tick does 10 damage for 15 seconds. Assume it was applied instantly at the same time for example purposes.
- SERVER 10 × 25 = 250 -> report (250dmg, 25stacks).
- PLAYER receives data (250dmg, 25stacks) -> sees a 250dmg popup instead of 25 10’s.
Let’s say ANET wants to keep the ability to see individual tick spam, I say “no problem”. replace the last step above with:
- PLAYER receives data (250dmg, 25stacks) -> 250 / 25 = 10 -> spam the player with a bunch of 10’s as per usual.
When we merge the ticks into 1 and then separate them we are essentially doing basic data compression. The method above will use some CPU power but I feel that it is negligible and/or may increase performance if the current system was optimized poorly anyway. This is assuming the problem lies solely in bandwidth and will keep the current bleed system exactly as it is, but allow for a cap increase. The benefit of this solution is it is cheap and easy to implement and requires no changes to the current bleed system. Again, only a partial solution I came up with because I’m bored at work. And given what little info we have about how calculations are done internally, I could be wrong in some of my assumptions (validation, time of calculation, rounding, etc). Haven’t given much thought to other condis.
Well jeez, we can’t have all of these nifty Quaggan backpacks AND a battle-system that allows for balanced condition-build groups. Clearly it’s us spoiled try-hards that are overworking these poor developers.
A condition-build group is, by it’s very nature, NOT balanced. Ergo, a balanced condition-build group is an impossibility. If you want a balanced group, you should probably stay away from overloading any one particular aspect of combat: be it conditions, support, crowd control, or anything else.
It appears you don’t at all understand the concept of a balanced party. So you’re making it very difficult to respond to your post with anything other than the rolling of my eyes. And you should probably tone down the snarkiness, at least until you have something of an understanding of the subject on which you’re speaking.
Internal balance =/= external balance, which is what the poster is complaining about and what you’re conflating here.
Condition damage is supposed to be a viable damage style for a player to specialize into. Therefore, it should be internally balanced with direct damage builds. That is to say, for every point of “character power” (be that traits, gear, or runes) you invest into it, you get roughly the same amount of killing power by investing it into either condition damage or power. For most classes, in most cases, this is more or less true to my knowledge (barring unique circumstances like objects which are immune to conditions).
It’s external balance where this falls apart, and that’s what people are complaining about. Most of the really viable condition builds rely on stacking bleeds as an example, and some are capable of hitting the condition cap on their own, or getting the majority of the way to the cap. That’s okay if you’re solo (to an extent), but this isn’t a solo game. You will regularly be fighting mobs with multiple people, and many of them will be throwing out incidental conditions, let alone the occasional person who is specced for condition damage. It’s an unfair burden to put on condition damage players, because the extra damage over time isn’t “free”; they intentionally devoted part of their character’s overall strength to doing damage over time rather than damage up front. The only condition that makes sense with a global cap is Vulnerability, since that functions as a force multiplier for all incoming damage, and thus gets better the more people you have attacking a monster.
I think most people would consider it ridiculous if mobs became immune to direct damage if they took a certain amount of direct damage from attacks in a given window of time, and if this window of immunity was so low that a direct-damage focused player could nearly hit that threshold solo and constantly bumped into it with 1 or more players around, including condition damage builds that do some direct damage on their attacks; that is precisely the situation that condition damage specs are faced with.
Their unwillingness to address this means that they are unwilling to put in the work necessary to make condition damage externally balanced against direct damage, and consigns it to being an generally inferior spec outside of fairly niche circumstances (that is, solo/small group, dungeons with no other dedicated condition builds, and similar PvP groups).
Well said. This explains the problem entirely. A PVE mob that had an immunity shield that would go up for 3 seconds every time it took more than 10,000 damage within 3 seconds is the perfect correlation. Ironically a mob like that would make taking a condition hero a really good idea.
That is what condition heros deal with anytime the bleed cap is at 25, or someone else put on poison/burn.
The issue is big because of PvP. Condition Necro’s and Trap Rangers are a huge part of the meta at the moment. If conditions get buffed and are tracked independently the name of the game will have to change to Condition Wars instead of Guild Wars. All of the sPvP and WvWvW Fights will come down to who can apply the most conditions the fastest.
The best way to handle conditions and it’s effects in MMO was already in place in Guild Wars 1. Why fix something that isn’t broken? I understand they wanted to “innovate” but they literally went backwards in this area.
Uhm… no? How often do you see people in pvp with 25 stacks of bleed? Granted, the attackers know that it would be pointless to stack them higher, but it wouldn’t actually change that much in pvp, while greatly improving the pve part of the game.
The issue is big because of PvP. Condition Necro’s and Trap Rangers are a huge part of the meta at the moment. If conditions get buffed and are tracked independently the name of the game will have to change to Condition Wars instead of Guild Wars. All of the sPvP and WvWvW Fights will come down to who can apply the most conditions the fastest.
The best way to handle conditions and it’s effects in MMO was already in place in Guild Wars 1. Why fix something that isn’t broken? I understand they wanted to “innovate” but they literally went backwards in this area.
Uhm… no? How often do you see people in pvp with 25 stacks of bleed? Granted, the attackers know that it would be pointless to stack them higher, but it wouldn’t actually change that much in pvp, while greatly improving the pve part of the game.
Yeah this made me laugh a little too. If the meta shifts to people stacking condition builds, then people will just start to carry around more condition clears, pushing the meta back the other way. You have ways of dealing with condition spam builds in sPVP, just like you have ways of dealing with zerker builds.
The issue is PVE, not PVP.
Regarding “external balance”. In open-world PvE everything dies quickly enough for this not to be an issue. In dungeons and PvP, you have control over your party composition. If you wouldn’t run a dungeon with two cc-spec’d engineers or two banner-spec’d warriors, why would you run one with two condition-spec’d thieves?
If you take too many of any one aspect of combat you’re going to hit a point of diminishing returns. The exception to this is direct damage. And while it’s true that direct damage isn’t capped, it is mitigated by measures conditional damage bypasses altogether.
And if parties consisting of nothing but characters spec’d for maximum direct damage, the glass cannons, are blasting their way through PvE content, then that’s a “difficulty-adjustment” issue and not a “mechanics of conditions” issue, in my opinion.
I was actually surprised to hear that they said that bleeds were limited by bandwith, because it’s not like we really needed to transfer all that information constantly. I don’t know of their internals of course, but it seems they just got lazy and chose the approach that fitted most seamlessly in the calculations done for direct damage, and the bleed cap was only neccessary under the premise that condition damage was tracked like direct damage.
After all, the information that really needs to be sent would be a duration and a power value when the dot gets initiated, that’s it. Everything else could be handled without a transfer between client and player, with changes only applying when the condition get’s cleansed, the target dies or optionally, the caster’s condition damage value changes. I get that people will now jump at me and say “you don’t know how their backend works, if they say it’s really complicated and they can’t change it then it’s probably true”, but really, if they made a system that needs so much bandwith for such a simple calculation then why do we have to just accept it?
Again, how is it that other MMOs have figured how to do that? How does condition damage use anymore bandwidth than direct damage? I just don’t buy that excuse.
It’s the duration aspect of conditions that cause them to take more resources. Also depends on how much feedback they send back to the player.
I know in COH, when they introduced the detailed numbers it caused some issues for people with slower connections, and so they had an option to turn off the buffs/debuffs/etc numbers being sent to the client.
Still, WoW managed to send back far more detailed information regarding DoTs, debuffs, buffs, etc… but a modern day MMO such as GW2 can’t figure out a way to accomplish the same thing?
The bottom line is it comes back to a failure in their condition mechanic. I mean was there really a need to differentiate the way bleeds, burns, and poisons all function with regards to stacks? It only serves to make things more complicated and puts them into the situation that they have now with regards to tracking DoTs from multiple players.
Stacks should represent multiple conditions from multiple players, rather than one player having multiple stacks of one condition (i.e. bleed stacks). There should be one bleed, one burn, one poison stack per person with a fixed value of damage that is increased via condition damage on gear. If you see two stacks of bleeds on someone then that would represent one bleed from two different people. Nice and simple… and the way that other MMOs handle it.
The problem is that this would require a very major rewrite to their entire system and all classes (as individual abilities would have to be adjusted as well). So honestly I have no idea what they can do at this point to actually bring balance for condition-based builds. I really don’t think that it’s possible at this point.
SoR – Nethernoz (Necro), Zealot of Pain (Guardian), William The Butcher (Ranger)
The issue is big because of PvP. Condition Necro’s and Trap Rangers are a huge part of the meta at the moment. If conditions get buffed and are tracked independently the name of the game will have to change to Condition Wars instead of Guild Wars. All of the sPvP and WvWvW Fights will come down to who can apply the most conditions the fastest.
oh no, whatever will you do, you will have bleeds that do total damage less than half of a warrior autoattack to the face. how terrible.
if you have a condition that hits for 100 dps for 10 seconds and a warrior that hits for 1000, they do the SAME DAMAGE the difference is that if you have only 1k hp left, the condition will take 10 seconds to kill you, but the warrior will kill you instantly, and you can remove the condition to completely negate it.
also, screw WvWvW, anet don’t balance around it and they never have
Is that part of what you’re proposing, that one removal removes all “Bleed”/“Poison” effects? That’s a difference, then.
There are several Condition Removal abilities that could remove both Bleed and poison at once, but there are very few abilities in the game that, alone, add both conditions at once.
Yes, you can Dodge a direct attack, but the same is true of condition damage, there is NO Condition attack in the game that you cannot use a Dodge to evade most if not all of the applied conditions. Getting hit by a Condition applying attack and then complaining that there’s no way to avoid taking damage from the Conditions is like standing there and taking a Hundred Blades to the face and then complaining that there was no way to avoid the direct damage done. If you don’t want that Thief to put bleed stacks on you, then when he does Death Blossom then you dodge it. No bleeds applied, problem solved.
They don’t have the same health pools as Champions or dungeon bosses, where the condition stack thing really comes into play. Just saying “oh just remove conditions” ignores the fact I can only remove conditions two ways on myself right now as a ranger. And both of them have long reset timers, to the point that the fight will be over when they’re back.
The disconnect some people seem to have is that they seem to believe that Condition damage isn’t “fair” damage. They they deserve to be able to negate it and are somehow wronged when they’re prevented from doing so. Condition damage is fair damage, it’s just as earned as anything else. If a warrior can deal 10K direct damage over ten seconds, then there’s no reason why a Necro shouldn’t be able to deal 100 condition damage over ten seconds. Condition damage does bypass toughness, but it can be cleared, while direct damage has to deal with toughness, and can’t be cleared (aside form just healing up, but that applies equally to conditions and in many cases removes them as it does so).
A condition-build group is, by it’s very nature, NOT balanced. Ergo, a balanced condition-build group is an impossibility. If you want a balanced group, you should probably stay away from overloading any one particular aspect of combat: be it conditions, support, crowd control, or anything else.
You’re playing the wrong game. Balance in GW2 has an entirely different meaning than in WoW. In WoW, a “balanced party” is one with a good tank or two, a good healer or two, and a good DPS or two, such that their combined efforts cause good results. In GW2, each player is expected to bring some measure of tank, DPS, and healing to the table. What a “balanced party” means in GW2 is that each character is “balanced” in and of themselves, each capable of handling the necessary roles. So yes, you can have a “balanced” party of condition build characters, so long as each is using gear, traits, and abilities that are strong enough but not overly strong.
Any party that is way too effective or way too ineffective relative to the design goals of the content would be “unbalanced,” and the assertion is that if you take one Condition Build character that is perfectly well balanced for soloing, and perfectly well balanced in a group of non-Condition characters, there is a problem in that if he were to group with four identical Condition build characters it would result in a drastically substandard party, while by comparison, if you were to group five identical power/precision Warriors they would be perfectly well balanced, or above.
Now if you’re worried about seeing five of the same class rolling together, keep in mind that there are 3-5 quite solid Condition classes, so you could form a party with no duplicate classes and still end up with multiple condition builds stepping on each others toes, a problem that does not occur with power-crit teams. I mean, can you imagine the angst that would occur if enemies were designed so that each time an enemy his hit by a crit attack, they become immune to crit damage from other sources for five seconds? Or if every time they took a hit of direct damage, they would gain Aegis?
“If you spent as much time working on [some task] as
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”
Regarding “external balance”. In open-world PvE everything dies quickly enough for this not to be an issue. In dungeons and PvP, you have control over your party composition. If you wouldn’t run a dungeon with two cc-spec’d engineers or two banner-spec’d warriors, why would you run one with two condition-spec’d thieves?
If you take too many of any one aspect of combat you’re going to hit a point of diminishing returns. The exception to this is direct damage. And while it’s true that direct damage isn’t capped, it is mitigated by measures conditional damage bypasses altogether.
And if parties consisting of nothing but characters spec’d for maximum direct damage, the glass cannons, are blasting their way through PvE content, then that’s a “difficulty-adjustment” issue and not a “mechanics of conditions” issue, in my opinion.
In open world PvE this still prevents a problem, as it’s near impossible to get enough damage on a mob to get loot credit when lots of people are using conditions (this applies to WvW as well). I’ve literally put down traps on mobs and not seen a single tick of a bleed go off because it was overwritten before it could even do damage.
Also, you do realize that not everyone runs with a controlled group composition right? People do pug in this game and no one should be required to run with a guild or pre-made composition just to play their class.
Also your statement of condition damage bypassing mitigation is extremely weak. Condition damage even fully stacked still can’t pull as much dps as direct damage even against the highest amounts of armor. Not to mention many direct damage classes have means to diminish mitigation through vulnerability (i.e GS warriors). Makes you wonder why groups stack so many GS berserker warriors huh. I guess that’s fair and balanced…
Honestly you aren’t strengthening your argument at all and at this point you just seem to be trolling.
SoR – Nethernoz (Necro), Zealot of Pain (Guardian), William The Butcher (Ranger)
Couldn’t each Class have it’s own Conditions, each with it’s own “haemorrage”?
Instead of Bleed, Necro’s get Disease. Once a Disease reaches the 25 cap the next application becomes an Acute Disease, which is burst damage. No other Class can apply Diseases.
Thieves get Toxins. At the cap, the next application becomes a burst of Virulent Toxin. No other Class can apply Toxins.
Guardians get Fervant Fire, a type of burning effect… that has blue flames instead of orange. No other Class does this kind of damage.
Ele’s have Fire, Rangers have Poison, Warriors have Bleeds, Mesmers have Confusion and Engineers have… um… Acid.
That’s the gist of it. Each Class has a unique condition. The cap remains at 25, but each application after that 25 bursts the oldest stack’s remaining damage, as smeone described earlier. By giving each Class their own unique Condition, this negates the problem of having three different people of three different Classes all competing for the same spot on the stack… while also preventing Condition dealers from just dealing constant haemorrages after the first few seconds fighting a Champ because every single class is applying the same Condition.
I really like the idea of professions having their own set of conditions, however, I’d prefer it if there weren’t three different sets of “poisons” competing with one another. For instance, in a fight you may have a necro, a thief and an engi, they’ll all be throwing their unique poisons to full effect, each utilizing the skill for maximum damage. But when there are three thieves in the party, the same problem will rear its head again, as each of them will be competing for toxin dominance. This will cause the same professions to rather not party together.
I think the amount of overall shared conditions should be lessened, which will make classes feel more distinct. At present, all profession except for the guardian can cause bleeds, while six can cause burn. What makes them so special if they can all replicate effects? I’d rather say they should share less conditions, but specialize a bit more in the conditions they have. For instance, two professions should share bleed, and two share burn. Add in extra conditions such as disease, albeit different than poison, such as escalating damage, but lowish duration, and has a chance to jump to nearby enemies. And give deep wounds to the warrior. Stuff like that, so each class starts to have more of a unique purpose rather than sharing almost all conditions across the board. The guardian is actually a good example of what I’m trying to illustrate, as he only has burn, and has a unikittenfect in aegis, which no other profession shares.
I also like the idea of spike damage. This will solve the PvE problem to an extent. When players of the same profession stacks a damage dealing condition, it will go into a burst, for instance, burn will get periodic fire explosions that deal aoe damage. Whereas something like bleed will have deal added damage whenever the target suffering a bleed burst takes an action.
The idea behind different Conditions for each Class is that instead of 20 people all applying the same Condition and only, say, three people actually having any impact, more people are getting to apply their Conditions to start with because they’re not in competition. Conditions of the same type that reach the stack cap then “haemorrage” as someone suggested (I really like the idea of each one having a different effect like the Fire being an AoE fireball you mentioned). Since fewer people will be adding to the stacks, the haemorrage effect will be seen less often than if you just applied it to Bleeding as we have it now.
Could another solution lie in the idea of a haemorrage, without changing everything? Once the subject has 25 stacks, the 26th then removes all current stacks and replaces them with a haemorrage debuff which itself can stack up to 25 times. Each haemorrage makes the target 1-2% weaker to Bleeds. Since the haemorrage isn’t actually applying direct damage nobody gets penalised by missing out on applying their damage to the stack. Come to think of it the opposite would happen because everyone would be doing slightly more damage and even those piddly little double digit one second Bleeds would be welcomed. The same idea could be applied to Burning and Poison.
Dragonbrand – Reforged Vanguard [ReVa]
Kyxha 80 Ranger, Sokar 80 Necro
Niobe 80 Guardian, Symbaoe 45 Ele
Kyxha 80 Ranger, Sokar 80 Necro
Niobe 80 Guardian, Symbaoe 45 Ele
In open world PvE this still prevents a problem, as it’s near impossible to get enough damage on a mob to get loot credit when lots of people are using conditions (this applies to WvW as well). I’ve literally put down traps on mobs and not seen a single tick of a bleed go off because it was overwritten before it could even do damage.
You say that as if spec’ing for conditions is done at the cost of direct damage. There isn’t a condition build in the game that can’t also inflict direct damage via weapon skills. If you’re not doing enough damage in PvE to get credit for loot, then you’re doing something terribly wrong. You. Not the game. YOU.
Also, you do realize that not everyone runs with a controlled group composition right? People do pug in this game and no one should be required to run with a guild or pre-made composition just to play their class.
You’re not allowed to discuss your party composition when you join a pug? You’re not allowed to leave a pug you deem to be overloaded on a particular aspect of combat?
Also your statement of condition damage bypassing mitigation is extremely weak. Condition damage even fully stacked still can’t pull as much dps as direct damage even against the highest amounts of armor. Not to mention many direct damage classes have means to diminish mitigation through vulnerability (i.e GS warriors). Makes you wonder why groups stack so many GS berserker warriors huh. I guess that’s fair and balanced…
Rather that picking apart your everything that’s wrong with this paragraph, I’ll just use the emboldened portion to illustrate your lack of rational thought regarding the subject. Protection reduces direct damage suffered by 33%. Vulnerability, as we all know, caps at 25. That’s 25% more damage. I don’t know how they do math in your neighborhood, but in mine 33% > 25%.
Honestly you aren’t strengthening your argument at all and at this point you just seem to be trolling.
If I’m not strengthening my argument in your eyes that’s because of your close-mindedness. You’ve stamped your foot, crossed your arms across your chest, and declared yourself to be right. And anyone who suggests otherwise is clearly just trolling. Right?
Why is it so hard to understand that being a zerker/knights class build for any class is great for any dungeon and any composition, while building for conditions isn’t? Condition class players are not asking for a free lunch, they are asking to be allowed to eat at the same table.
Rather predictable that the playerbase demands power creep instead of an actual rebalancing of conditions. You know how else this can be accomplished, much easier even than reworking the entire skillset of the game? By raising the value of conditions. Give bosses block skills, dodges or temporary boons like Protection. (Sure they work on some cond skills too, but unlike with a melee player your damage isn’t wholly negated because you still should have cond stacks left on the foe.) In dungeons or if they’re powered up in Events, unlock for them cond removal skills to use, so that it stays hard to maintain a full stack of conds. And most importantly, give them more crowd control skills that especially affect hard-hitting melees, like weakness, cripples/freezes/immobilized, blinds, launches, knockbacks and -downs, or simply have the player need to retreat due to received damage at PBAoE range. The value of conditions would rise dramatically if all of this were the case. You don’t even have to tweak numbers to fix conditions.
Honestly, with unlimited or individual stacking, how do you imagine it would be NOT the most prudent thing to do to just whittle them down with conditions while circle-strafing? (And yes, I’m mostly referring to Necros and Rangers because Cond Thieves and Sword Warriors generally inflict much less conds.) That logic does not presume that the boss has means to actively prevent non-cond damage, as if it was a completely static object, a red bar that is to be drained the fastest with the highest DPS, and everything between me and that goal needs to be fixed by the devs. This is just hurtful to GW2’s combat concept and would be more fitting a notion for WoW-era MMOs.
Why is it so hard to understand that being a zerker/knights class build for any class is great for any dungeon and any composition, while building for conditions isn’t? Condition class players are not asking for a free lunch, they are asking to be allowed to eat at the same table.
They trade that in with their survivability. A party of all-Cond Necros or all-Cond Rangers is much more resilient.
(edited by Jamais vu.5284)
Actually this is not true and is something we are actively looking at.
“There’s a cap on condition stacks of 25. In a scenario where you have two thieves attacking a boss and one of them can achieve a stack of 25 by themselves, the other one essentially becomes useless because they’ve got nothing to stack on. Is anything being done to address that to make them less redundant?
Colin: Currently no.
These two statements cannot co-exist.
You need to start having internal discussions about what you disclose publicly before you disclose it. I love that you’re trying to talk to us more, it’s a big step forward….but now we’re getting conflicting information from different developers.
The precursor system is both in development and yet it’s not. AoE nerfs are both in the works and they’re not, and they’ll be across the board but still individually assessed. And now, condition damage is both an active priority and not currently being looked at.
No more Schrodinger responses, here, please. Get on the same page, all of you, and give us one answer.
Remember when our developers talked about “strengthening the core game”?
How’d that work out for us so far?
Now let’s try some ideas that will really work.
How’d that work out for us so far?
Now let’s try some ideas that will really work.
I know I won’t receive an answer for this, but I feel compelled to ask it anyway.
When the game was going through design and test, it was realized at some point that, due to technical constraints, the game would have a ‘soft cap’ on condition (DoT) damage and no cap on burst damage.
At that point in time, why was it decided to NOT re-balance the professions and traits around this limitation? I see professions such as necromancer being effectively designed for condition damage as its primary source of damage output. I see armor/weapon stats that effectively are geared toward dealing condition damage. This would suggest to anyone that the expectation was that condition damage builds would be very viable, if not as viable, as direct damage builds.
However, that’s not the case. The game has been out for about 6 months now and I suspect the developers at ArenaNet have known about this limitation for much longer (9 months? 12 months?). However, only now the issue is being looked into.
Something simply doesn’t make sense here.
Heck, I’d throw a few more bucks at the game if I knew this was going to get fixed.
How about you guys put a special vanity item in the gem shop where the proceeds will go toward fixing this issue? Might I suggest a new Quaggan Backpack that continually coughs poison smoke and bleeds profusely.
(edited by Thedenofsin.7340)
You say that as if spec’ing for conditions is done at the cost of direct damage. There isn’t a condition build in the game that can’t also inflict direct damage via weapon skills. If you’re not doing enough damage in PvE to get credit for loot, then you’re doing something terribly wrong. You. Not the game. YOU.
But if you aren’t speccing in to Power as well as condition damage, then you still can’t be sure it will be sufficient to tag a mob. And since people report this issue all the time, obviously the unscaled power damage isn’t sufficient. If you spec in to power, it’s guaranteed that you will always be able to tag in one hit. It isn’t balanced, one is clearly superior to the other. An integer measured over a given time which remains constant will almost always be superior to one which fluctuates over the same amount of time.
You’re not allowed to discuss your party composition when you join a pug? You’re not allowed to leave a pug you deem to be overloaded on a particular aspect of combat?
Discuss all you want, you can’t change your traits, the largest portion of your build, while in the open world. This is, if anything, more evidence that power isn’t a parallel of condition damage, but directly superior because of it’s more varied application, since under the kill credit system relying on condition damage not only scales down your damage with more people, it potentially scales down your rewards.
Additionally, ANet has already stated that one of their design goals is for anybody to be able to play alongside anyone else in the open world, but so long as the guy next to me has damage that overwrites my damage to the point that I can’t even get kill credit, that goal isn’t met.
Rather that picking apart your everything that’s wrong with this paragraph, I’ll just use the emboldened portion to illustrate your lack of rational thought regarding the subject. Protection reduces direct damage suffered by 33%. Vulnerability, as we all know, caps at 25. That’s 25% more damage. I don’t know how they do math in your neighborhood, but in mine 33% > 25%.
Protection reduces all incoming damage by a percent, condition damage included.
If I’m not strengthening my argument in your eyes that’s because of your close-mindedness. You’ve stamped your foot, crossed your arms across your chest, and declared yourself to be right. And anyone who suggests otherwise is clearly just trolling. Right?
Right now, you have three people over two pages providing solid arguments, and more importantly- evidence, that counter your opinion, while you have provided no evidence and flat out ignored any that has been given you. Now who here is acting childish?
(edited by Conncept.7638)
Honestly, with unlimited or individual stacking, how do you imagine it would be NOT the most prudent thing to do to just whittle them down with conditions while circle-strafing? (And yes, I’m mostly referring to Necros and Rangers because Cond Thieves and Sword Warriors generally inflict much less conds.) That logic does not presume that the boss has means to actively prevent non-cond damage, as if it was a completely static object, a red bar that is to be drained the fastest with the highest DPS, and everything between me and that goal needs to be fixed by the devs. This is just hurtful to GW2’s combat concept and would be more fitting a notion for WoW-era MMOs.
Some bosses already have the ability to clear or consume conditions, negating all condition stacks currently on. Also others have mechanics that are horrible for conditions period, like the dredge fractal boss. I can’t see how anyone could look at the current state of the game and say that freeing up the 25 stack limit would cause all players and classes to roll conditions because it would be easy mode. Conditions are always going to be weaker than direct damage because they lack a third stat to directly increase their potential.
But they don’t have to be dog terrible if you happen to have a mesmer and warrior that cause incidental bleeds…. that isn’t a good thing.
Regarding “external balance”. In open-world PvE everything dies quickly enough for this not to be an issue. In dungeons and PvP, you have control over your party composition. If you wouldn’t run a dungeon with two cc-spec’d engineers or two banner-spec’d warriors, why would you run one with two condition-spec’d thieves?
If you take too many of any one aspect of combat you’re going to hit a point of diminishing returns. The exception to this is direct damage. And while it’s true that direct damage isn’t capped, it is mitigated by measures conditional damage bypasses altogether.
And if parties consisting of nothing but characters spec’d for maximum direct damage, the glass cannons, are blasting their way through PvE content, then that’s a “difficulty-adjustment” issue and not a “mechanics of conditions” issue, in my opinion.
The second banner warrior swaps his Grandmaster trait out and can either go healing shouts (a highly compatible, complimentary support spec) or pick up some spare damage, while still having doubled-up banners which aren’t useless on their own. I’ve never really run into a situation where we’ve had too much CC besides straight up brawl boss fights that are immune to CC, in which case they should probably swap to some higher damage kits/weapons. In either case, they don’t really need to swap out their gear entirely, and they don’t completely lose their effectiveness, and they’re competing with two similarly specialized builds.
Compare that to a conditionmancer. He’s put a bunch of trait points into maximizing his bleed stacks, along with a bunch of condition damage to maximize the damage that each of his conditions does. He can hit 25 bleeds without much trouble. Then my dual-dagger elementalist PuGs with him. While he’s stacking up his bleeds and getting ready to do epidemic, I run through my damage rotation, which includes a trip through Earth for Ring of Earth and Churning Earth. They do okay damage, and the extra 9(!!) bleeds are nice when I’m solo, but I’m not condition damage specced. My mostly DD character’s totally incidental bleeds have swiped half the damage potential that the conditionmancer built all of his gear around, and that’s just one prof out of 4 in the pug that can toss around bleeds or a burn here and there without even trying to. And the only thing the conditionmancer can do is respec (which is hard since we can’t save/load specs in this game, and requires swapping out all that condition damage gear) or just sit back and accept it. That’s ridiculous.
Again, ask yourself how much people would consider it balanced if one DD-focused player, or just 3-4 players who didn’t bother building for Power/Pre/Malice at all could make a mob constantly immune to further direct damage. That’s what condition players are up against.
Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games.
Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet
Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet
(edited by Zyrhan.3180)
They trade that in with their survivability. A party of all-Cond Necros or all-Cond Rangers is much more resilient.
Than what? A knights build player? Yes more resilient than an all zerker team, but a knights build is going to be more tanky than a rabid build stats wise… but yet we have to suffer with a damage cap?
EDIT: And to the other poster above, protection doesn’t change condition damage. Condition damage bypasses protection. It also does not get any extra damage from vulnerability.
(edited by Rennoko.5731)
The issue is big because of PvP. Condition Necro’s and Trap Rangers are a huge part of the meta at the moment. If conditions get buffed and are tracked independently the name of the game will have to change to Condition Wars instead of Guild Wars. All of the sPvP and WvWvW Fights will come down to who can apply the most conditions the fastest.
The best way to handle conditions and it’s effects in MMO was already in place in Guild Wars 1. Why fix something that isn’t broken? I understand they wanted to “innovate” but they literally went backwards in this area.
Uhm… no? How often do you see people in pvp with 25 stacks of bleed? Granted, the attackers know that it would be pointless to stack them higher, but it wouldn’t actually change that much in pvp, while greatly improving the pve part of the game.
Yeah this made me laugh a little too. If the meta shifts to people stacking condition builds, then people will just start to carry around more condition clears, pushing the meta back the other way. You have ways of dealing with condition spam builds in sPVP, just like you have ways of dealing with zerker builds.
The issue is PVE, not PVP.
Ahhh PvE’rs. I forgot who i was dealing with, forgive me. It’s apparent that neither of you spend much time in Tournament matches in sPvP (if any). The point isn’t to stack 25 bleeds on someone. Setting a single condition on them isn’t going to do anything because unlike PvE the enemy can actually think and react. Thus, you put one condition on them and they’ll use a skill to remove it or send it back to you. It’s very easy to deal with one condition. The point of a condition build and what is currently being run by Trap Rangers and Condition Necro’s is to literally dump as many conditions as you can on the enemy can keep them coming on. It’s a high pressure build in which you apply as many as you can on the enemy and keep applying them until the enemy is overwhelmed. Since there is no official Healer class the only person in charge of removing conditions from you is you. Nobody cares that you’re blind, chilled, poisoned, bleeding, vulnerable, weakened, crippled, and/or confused. It’s up to you to remove all of those conditions.
I understand that from your PvE experience you think it may be as simple as just using a skill to get rid of a condition when it’s placed on you but it’s not. However, in your defense most of the people playing tournament sPvP are already running at least 1 condition removal utility and bunkers are usually running 2. However, we have only 3 utility slots and these skills have longer cool downs then skills that the enemy is using to apply the conditions. On top of that the game is based on the Capture Point method. Thus, you have to be on the point in order to capture it or keep it from getting captured. So Anet is forcing people to fight over 3 tiny pieces of geography. So if you want to win it’s not as if you can just back up away from the red circles all the time. Often times you have to fight through it all and the only Capture Point big enough to kite around on is the Graveyard.
I am okay with a separate PvE vs PvP split for Conditions and how they’re applied but I think it would confuse newer players and frustrate PvE’rs as they attempt to tackle more challenging enemies than can found in the PvE world.
The issue is big because of PvP. Condition Necro’s and Trap Rangers are a huge part of the meta at the moment. If conditions get buffed and are tracked independently the name of the game will have to change to Condition Wars instead of Guild Wars. All of the sPvP and WvWvW Fights will come down to who can apply the most conditions the fastest.
The best way to handle conditions and it’s effects in MMO was already in place in Guild Wars 1. Why fix something that isn’t broken? I understand they wanted to “innovate” but they literally went backwards in this area.
Uhm… no? How often do you see people in pvp with 25 stacks of bleed? Granted, the attackers know that it would be pointless to stack them higher, but it wouldn’t actually change that much in pvp, while greatly improving the pve part of the game.
Yeah this made me laugh a little too. If the meta shifts to people stacking condition builds, then people will just start to carry around more condition clears, pushing the meta back the other way. You have ways of dealing with condition spam builds in sPVP, just like you have ways of dealing with zerker builds.
The issue is PVE, not PVP.
Ahhh PvE’rs. I forgot who i was dealing with, forgive me. It’s apparent that neither of you spend much time in Tournament matches in sPvP (if any). The point isn’t to stack 25 bleeds on someone. Setting a single condition on them isn’t going to do anything because unlike PvE the enemy can actually think and react. Thus, you put one condition on them and they’ll use a skill to remove it or send it back to you. It’s very easy to deal with one condition. The point of a condition build and what is currently being run by Trap Rangers and Condition Necro’s is to literally dump as many conditions as you can on the enemy can keep them coming on. It’s a high pressure build in which you apply as many as you can on the enemy and keep applying them until the enemy is overwhelmed. Since there is no official Healer class the only person in charge of removing conditions from you is you. Nobody cares that you’re blind, chilled, poisoned, bleeding, vulnerable, weakened, crippled, and/or confused. It’s up to you to remove all of those conditions.
I understand that from your PvE experience you think it may be as simple as just using a skill to get rid of a condition when it’s placed on you but it’s not. However, in your defense most of the people playing tournament sPvP are already running at least 1 condition removal utility and bunkers are usually running 2. However, we have only 3 utility slots and these skills have longer cool downs then skills that the enemy is using to apply the conditions. On top of that the game is based on the Capture Point method. Thus, you have to be on the point in order to capture it or keep it from getting captured. So Anet is forcing people to fight over 3 tiny pieces of geography. So if you want to win it’s not as if you can just back up away from the red circles all the time. Often times you have to fight through it all and the only Capture Point big enough to kite around on is the Graveyard.
I am okay with a separate PvE vs PvP split for Conditions and how they’re applied but I think it would confuse newer players and frustrate PvE’rs as they attempt to tackle more challenging enemies than can found in the PvE world.
I feel so type-casted as a PVE’er… but I actually mainly play WvW, which I guess you could consider PVEish…
Not sure what you are arguing? The post and subsequent discussion was about the problem that arises with condition based heros when there are MULTIPLE sources of longer lasting poison/burn skills, and over 25 stacks of bleeding.
Fixing the max stack bleeding problem has nothing to do with sPVP and arguably nothing to with WvW (extreme cases of Epidemic aside). How many times do you find yourself with 25 stacks of bleed in spvp? This discussion was about the DPS loss at at that point.
What does changing the 25 stack limit to 50 have anything to do with Spvp? Or changing the priority system of the stack?
+ThePlayboy – the problem, however, is that the pressure that a condition spec can apply is applied more easily and more quickly by a direct damage build, but without the ability to remove the pressure via a talent.
Regarding “external balance”. In open-world PvE everything dies quickly enough for this not to be an issue. In dungeons and PvP, you have control over your party composition. If you wouldn’t run a dungeon with two cc-spec’d engineers or two banner-spec’d warriors, why would you run one with two condition-spec’d thieves?
If you take too many of any one aspect of combat you’re going to hit a point of diminishing returns. The exception to this is direct damage. And while it’s true that direct damage isn’t capped, it is mitigated by measures conditional damage bypasses altogether.
And if parties consisting of nothing but characters spec’d for maximum direct damage, the glass cannons, are blasting their way through PvE content, then that’s a “difficulty-adjustment” issue and not a “mechanics of conditions” issue, in my opinion.
Look again at the imbalance please. In a dungeon party people clamor for multiple Warriors/Guardians and such. Why because Direct Damage is an easy method over Condition Damage. This means that if you are a Direct Damage person there is no reason to not pick you over a Condition Damage person.
They have a massive issue with balance that they have not addressed and are still in the “talking” phase for 8 months. This has been an issue since beta and they are still in the “talking” phase. Some within the company even deny it’s even in the “talking” stage.
I understand that they have an issue with bandwidth. I am not saying that it’s an easy problem to fix, but it is a supreme issue for people that play condition builds.
For instance try destroying a box, or a tent, or a variety of inanimate objects and peck away at it for a minute and watch a direct damage person destroy it in seconds. The same will be said of multiple condition damage persons vs direct damage persons on vet/silver/champ.
What I don’t get is there isn’t a DPS cap on direct damage and yet there is a DPS cap on condition. A direct damage can be dodged, so can many condition damages. While direct damage is affected by toughness, condition damage can be cleansed. I think mitigation is there. I just feel that they simply haven’t done very much talking on this subject in 8 months.
The fact that anyone thinks infinite condition stacks is even remotely balanced is laughable.
So you agree that direct damage is currently not even remotely balanced? Each condition or even a few stacks is equal to ONE direct damage attack..
Right, because it’s not like you can apply conditions & and do direct damage at the same time… oh wait.
You can have 100 warriors with direct damage builds that also happen to apply conditions & you think it’s ok to have that bonus damage just continue to rise? The Dragons are enough of a push over now, you want 300 stacks of bleed on it too?
No less balanced than a infinite number of zerkers.
So if they just equip Sup Sigil of Earth That won’t make the damage skyrocket? oh ok.. I’m sure people will really want that condition necro in their dungeon so much more.
I don’t know where this magical fantasy that condition damage isn’t done on top of direct damage comes from. Sure the cap sucks but infinite stacks isn’t the answer.
(edited by DarksunG.9537)
So you create a scenario where hybrid builds are better than zerker builds? How is that a bad thing? Why is it okay now for zerker builds to be the best damage, while taking power/condition/precision is sub par? They are both FULLY offensive builds… with no defensives stats, why should one be better than the other?
And if you did get into a situation where hybrid > All others, you can adjust the other damage levels (by say, increasing other stats outside the hybrid) to improve the other builds to where they are back in line. Like make condition duration easier to get, or crit damage easier to get.
You can balance all that out, but you first need an even playing field. A playing field where condition damage caps out isn’t even when direct damage does not.
EDIT: Also equiping sigil of earth doesn’t make anyones damage “skyrocket” if they don’t build for condition damage. In fact it deals less damage, even over time, in a power build than air/fire. That has nothing to do with the condition cap….
(edited by Rennoko.5731)
You say that as if spec’ing for conditions is done at the cost of direct damage. There isn’t a condition build in the game that can’t also inflict direct damage via weapon skills. If you’re not doing enough damage in PvE to get credit for loot, then you’re doing something terribly wrong. You. Not the game. YOU.
ah, ahah, AHAHAHAHAH
do you know how much direct damage my scepter hits do?
163/163/266 for the autoattack chain
that’s me in exotic rabid gear with an exotic PVT chest (because the only chest available is khilbrons and I’m still saving up), and rare carrion trinkets (P/V/CDmg) ie, the gear I’m going to be wearing when I want to make things bleed. those numbers will go DOWN as I get better gear for my trinkets and obtain khilbron’s coat
how much do they do when I focus on pure power?
172/172/246
that’s me in full exotic explorers (P/Prec/MF) gear with the same trinkets (P/V/CDmg)
(the last one goes down because it scales with CD as well)
sure, we can do weapon damage, a whole 163, WOW, how much does a warrior’s autoattack do I wonder?
oh, let’s check my damage if I was wearing rabid and using my condition dagger in my main hand
2×400ish/400ish/600ish
huh… so my dagger in rabid is doing quadruple what my scepter does in explorers…
if you look at the damage any weapon designed to cause conditions does, you’ll see that their damage coefficients are TERRIBLE, it’s assumed that the damage will be coming from bleeds, which, oh wait, we can’t use because the full zerker warrior keeps overwriting my nice powerful 10 second bleeds with his 0 condition damage 1 second bleeds everytime he crits… WHICH IS ALL THE TIME SINCE HE’S WEARING ZERKER GEAR.
But if you aren’t speccing in to Power as well as condition damage, then you still can’t be sure it will be sufficient to tag a mob. If you spec in to power, it’s guaranteed that you will always be able to tag in one hit. It isn’t balanced, one is clearly superior to the other.
I’ll say this again, because it seems to have gone over your head: if you’re not doing enough to tag a mob during Dynamic Events, that’s entirely -as in 100%- YOUR fault.
Discuss all you want, you can’t change your traits, the largest portion of your build, while in the open world.
Bleed-Thief A, “Hey guys. I noticed we have another thief in this party. Mind if I ask what kind of build you have?”
Bleed-Thief B, “I’m built to stack bleed.”
Bleed-Thief A, “So am I. There’s probably a bit too much overlap here. I’ll drop and look for another group so we’re not wasting a slot. Good luck.”
Bleed-Thief B, “You too.”
See how incredibly easy that is?
Protection reduces all incoming damage by a percent, condition damage included.
Okay, what about all the other direct damage mitigation? Does blocking also block condition damage? Does dodging also evade condition damage? Can you stun a stack of Bleed? Can you knock down Burn? Can you outrun Poison? Can you blind Confusion?
Right now, you have three people over two pages providing solid arguments that counter yours, the majority of which you haven’t even addressed. Now who here is acting childish?
Do you really want me to answer that? Okay, I’ll oblige. If you really think I’m going to respond to each and every post positing a differing opinion than my own in a 290 post discussion, then you are.
But I’ll tell you what. Instead of me combing through five+ pages of counterarguments, many of which are baseless, why don’t you give them all to me in one clear, concise post and I’ll address them all at once.
So you create a scenario where hybrid builds are better than zerker builds? How is that a bad thing?
Because the whole point of this is that people are whining about “I wanna play my way & not be gimped”. Yeah, play DD not conditions, problem solved NOW. but people WANT to play conditions.
The fact that anyone thinks infinite condition stacks is even remotely balanced is laughable.
So you agree that direct damage is currently not even remotely balanced? Each condition or even a few stacks is equal to ONE direct damage attack..
Right, because it’s not like you can apply conditions & and do direct damage at the same time… oh wait.
You can have 100 warriors with direct damage builds that also happen to apply conditions & you think it’s ok to have that bonus damage just continue to rise? The Dragons are enough of a push over now, you want 300 stacks of bleed on it too?
No less balanced than a infinite number of zerkers.
So if they just equip Sup Sigil of Earth That won’t make the damage skyrocket? oh ok.. I’m sure people will really want that condition necro in their dungeon so much more.
I don’t know where this magical fantasy that condition damage isn’t done on top of direct damage comes from. Sure the cap sucks but infinite stacks isn’t the answer.
no, it won’t make them do more damage, because with 0 condition damage it would be like flogging the dragon to death with a strand of gossamer thread
an infinite number of zerkers willdeal an infinite amount of damage instantly, an infinite amount of necros will deal an infinite amount of damage, over 10 seconds or so. (the metaphor kind of breaks down since we’re dealing with infinity here, but put simply, the warriors will deal the same infinity as the necros in 1 second, but it will take the necros some time)
oh no they won’t because only the first 25 bleeds count.
as for bleeds that don’t have DD: Blood is Power, a 20 second CD which adds 2 30 second bleeds.
it can be rendered useless with two crits from a warrior with that hideous minor trait that grants you bleeds on crit
(edited by Calcifire.1864)
it can be rendered useless with two crits from a warrior with that hideous minor trait that grants you bleeds on crit
So the answer is to make that trait more powerful? nice..
it can be rendered useless with two crits from a warrior with that hideous minor trait that grants you bleeds on crit
So the answer is to make that trait more powerful? nice..
er, no…
where did you get that from?
I DESPISE that trait because it overwrites my beautiful 30 second bleeds. if there was no cap I’d love it because hey, more bleeds on the enemy.
that trait not only does hardly anything for the warrior, but it actually LOWERS my dps, remember how lupi used to attack minions summoned via our reanimator trait and cause wipes? that’s how necros feel about “bleed on crit” things used by classes that don’t stack CD
(edited by Calcifire.1864)
Bleed-Thief A, “Hey guys. I noticed we have another thief in this party. Mind if I ask what kind of build you have?”
Bleed-Thief B, “I’m built to stack bleed.”
Bleed-Thief A, “So am I. There’s probably a bit too much overlap here. I’ll drop and look for another group so we’re not wasting a slot. Good luck.”
Bleed-Thief B, “You too.”
This game was supposedly designed to avoid this. THIS is what I hated about WOW, and other games. Having to be a certain build with certain gear to run a certain dungeon. You realize you are saying its cool that condition heros have to work harder, drop group, and search around for parties, but power builds are cool to just roll in any group? How many groups say “please no more DPS warriors”? And how many say “oh we already have a necro, sorry!”?
And the problem is, while there is a stigma with certain classes (like necro/ranger/engineer), in this case they are right. It really is a waste of DPS to invite two necros if they are both conditions. So why take necros at all? Why not just take a class you don’t have to worry about doing crap DPS and losing a fight to a tent post?
And that is what people do.
Bleed-Thief A, “Hey guys. I noticed we have another thief in this party. Mind if I ask what kind of build you have?”
Bleed-Thief B, “I’m built to stack bleed.”
Bleed-Thief A, “So am I. There’s probably a bit too much overlap here. I’ll drop and look for another group so we’re not wasting a slot. Good luck.”
Bleed-Thief B, “You too.”See how incredibly easy that is?
Re: Waste of time.
Nevertheless its good to ask who, if any, in your party has condi builds. I sometimes hit Caltrops to help with DPS although I run a Power build and I may have ruined some other players Condi damage.
Apologies to those who may find my posts on GW2 forums offensive and hateful.