Guild Wars 2

Condition Damage is already of limited appeal in PvE, for reasons that are fairly well worn:
- Stacking Caps
- Hard to Spike
- Several foes immune to some conditions (Destroyer vs Fire, Hylek vs Poison, Dredge vs Blind, others)
- Doesn’t have the same multiplicative scaling that Power+Precision+Crit has.

For these reasons, those who care about inflicting more damage tend to focus heavily on Direct Damage.

And now, with Ascended Weapons, Direct Damage gets basically a straight up 5% buff, slightly more with higher Power/Precision/Crit pts. Conditions get a few points more Condition Damage, which won’t add up to even 1 more damage per bleed stack.

Sure, with the removal of magic find, there’s some better options for extending condition duration, but that typically is of limited utility due to the stack limits and that most things are dead well before most conditions wear off.

The most obvious solution to this would be to buff up all forms of damage except weapon damage to be on par with the new ascended weaponry. This, however, will likely unbalance PvP, which currently doesn’t have Ascended gear.
This also gives little incentive to condition based players and/or non weapon based builds (think engineers and conjure eles) to ever upgrade their equipment.

My proposed solution would be to have all damage scale off the level and rarity of weapon you’re holding, including those from utilities. PvP wouldn’t be affected, since they would stay at L80 Exotics.

Do people agree this is an issue, and what other solutions can people come up with?

Corrollary topic: Should Pets/Minions/etc get similar attention?

I don’t mind the difference in damage power vs condition, mostly because condition damage ignores target armor. Right now it gives power users a slight advantage because armor values have not increased to keep up with their increased damage output but that will equalize some over time at least in regards to pvp. As far as pve is concerned however they most definitely need to equalize it’s effectiveness in that game mode the only thing I can think of is to remove the stack limitation and overwrite on damaging conditions and move all those calculations to client side versus server side as they currently are. They could possibly do away with stacking all together and make all damaging conditions operate on 1 stack like say how burning functions but remove it’s duration overwrite. The problem with this really comes in the form of bleeding or confusion, what level of damage would you set that 1 stack to equal? 15 or 25 perhaps? It becomes much more difficult for them to balance that idea of “slow ramp up steady damage” So I think the best solution is the first that I originally posted in regards to simply moving the calculations needed from it being server side to client side and removing the “caps and overwrites”. All in all though, I think it is silly for them to try and balance wvw around just ascended weapons until they have the full sets released including armor. So it will take some patience on the part of the community to wait and see how much the whole picture will impact gameplay and then we can adjust accordingly or make pleas to anet to fix things. The stacking issues in pve however really need to be addressed sooner rather than later in my opinion.

Condition damage is so horribly broken in PvE it is laughable, the only thing that makes it even worse is that after 12 months the devs have yet to make a single improvement to the situation and have only made it worse by adding a new tier of gear.

All conditions and especially Confusion is a joke in pve and im not surprised at all about anet not doing anything in the year they’ve had.

There should be a condition equivalent of berserker. I think Cond.dmg/prec/duration would be the perfect stats. But of course it won’t/better not happen before they fix the condition cap. Also they need to increase boss’ armor to bring condition damage in line with direct damage. Then comes the defiant/cleanse problem. All these have to be fixed.

That said, I have no hope anymore they will ever fix condition in pve.

I wondered why my warrior and ranger did much better than my flamethrower engineer at getting gold credit and steel chests during the invasions. Then, after a duh moment, I realized it was because I was getting no credit for my burning, maybe because of all the tagging staff guardians proccing burns from Virtue of Justice.

true .. i did a couple of invasion with my necro thinking that i could tag more mob with staff marks and torment …. i got way more loot with my guardian with Greatsword whirling wrath and large symbols that do damage

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Condition damage is so horribly broken in PvE it is laughable, the only thing that makes it even worse is that after 12 months the devs have yet to make a single improvement to the situation and have only made it worse by adding a new tier of gear.

Basically this. Played a condition warrior for the last 10 months and I just can’t believe it’s still as broken as it is.

Afya.5842:

There should be a condition equivalent of berserker. I think Cond.dmg/prec/duration would be the perfect stats. But of course it won’t/better not happen before they fix the condition cap. Also they need to increase boss’ armor to bring condition damage in line with direct damage. Then comes the defiant/cleanse problem. All these have to be fixed.

That said, I have no hope anymore they will ever fix condition in pve.

You are right of course, but I think they’d need to do a lot more then that to make condition damage viable. From the top of my head, I’d add at least those issues:

- vulnerability doesn’t do crap for conditions, whereas coordinated groups can easily assume 25 stacks on bosses permanently.
- worse stat synergy, meaning worse scaling on everything, not just weapon damage; one point of power gets more valuable the more precision and crit damage you have, which affects the worth of might stacks, fury, food buffs and scaling to ascended. Condition doesn’t have an equivalent there, because duration is capped and precision does far less then it does for power builds. (this is also why a dedicated condition/precision/duration set wouldn’t do more then free up some rune slots)
- there are no static or conditional +x% bonus damage traits, sigils, or other effects, and nothing to make up for it.
- encounters frequently favor burn phases or have bosses cleanse, change targets, or somehow reset. Condition builds suffer more from having to build up again, power builds don’t care.

Anyway, this and more has been said a thousand times since beta already, anet either don’t give a kitten or are unable to solve those problems which they ineptly created in the first place.

Yeah, it’s sad how powerful conditions are in PvP (at least that’s what I gather from various forum posts) but how weak it is in PvE.

I’m happy that I can bleed anything (even if an Earth Elemental doesn’t have blood) because most condition builds would be useless then. But why can’t objects get hit by conditions, I know it doesn’t make sense on some things (you can’t make wood bleed, but it should be able to be burnt), but why should a power build have no trouble killing anything and a condi or hybrid build take x4 times as long to kill a structure.

But there really needs to be something that scales nicely with condi dam. While some builds can benefit from high crit chance, that’s only on triggering a sigil or an extra condition, not really extra damage. And like people have stated, most times in PvE things will either
1) die before the full duration
2) get overridden by someone else
3) get capped, and then you’re dps can’t get any higher, even though it’s still lower than a guy wearing full zerker

I’ve been struggling for a while now to try and figure out if I should take my tanky warrior (sword/shield and lb in knights gear) and get more power or more condi dam. Most of my damage comes from bleeeds as it is, but with all the extra restrictions on conditions, whats the point.

They should really just give us a revamped version of conditions on mobs or something, like how they made confusion stronger against mobs.

More skills that have (direct) damage procs on conditional events would be a good start, eg: Spinal Shivers on necro. Other examples: target takes dmg when gaining or losing a condition (eg: Fragility in GW1), or skills that consume all stacks of bleeding to do a single spike of damage.

The key thing here is basing the conditional damage portion of the skill on the subject’s condition damage.

You’d have to reduce the condition spam and passive condition removal a bit, but IMO that would be a good thing.

The condition dmg problem is something i will never fully understand, its like they took a singleplayer condition system copy paste it to an mmorpg, realise the problems it had
and gave it a temporary fix and boom here we are.

I just…..how can this even be in the game?
Just a tiny bit of testing or common sense would have shown the massive issues involved.

They didnt even have to test it as power vs condition.

25 condition specced vs 1 champ.
1 bleed stack pr person ( ignoring all other dmg ) even with 200+ pr tick its pathetic dmg.

What would actually help is to know where anet stands in this matter.

@mjharrison: Some of those ideas are pretty cool, you’d just need to make sure that they are added to all classes in some form or another, otherwise you force people to run a specific sigil/rune set or the difference of classes using conditions will only widen

Also, to play devil’s advocate here (which I failed at….):
Take an extreme zerg situation, any of the dragon world bosses (or scarlet)
They instantly have max conditions, which stay up until they die. Here I’m lucky if I can see 1-3 tics go off every other second, yet the people who go full zerk only see their large numbers. If the stacks were personal (which I’d find to be a decent start to putting conditions on par) in PvE, wouldn’t that be more damage than a pure power build. My bleeds usually only tic for ~100 or so (not too much condition damage in my build currently), but I can easily keep 18-22 stacks up. So technically I can do ~2200 damage per second on top of my base attacks. If I spec’ed more into condi damage I most likely get an extra ~200-300 damage per sec (more if I set up perma 25 stacks or include burn) on top of my attacks. So that’s ~2500-3000 (I might be high balling it, if someone who goes full condi could post their dam, I’d appreciate it) per sec. This ignores armor and still hurts them while I’m CC’ed or they’re blocking.

Hmmm, now that I type it out, unless I’m underselling conditions, full zerker still seems higher (25k crits, every ~7 seconds for example) minus the bonus of being able to kite/be CC’ed/have the enemy block and still doing damage.

I was trying to see if the 25 stack cap was personal, how “broken” would it be in PvE. But unless I’m missing something it still seems like we’d be on the short end of the stick (just a smaller stick). Ugh, I really want to go a tank/condi build, I just wish it was more useful thank tank/hybrid.