Guild Wars 2

There seems to be an obvious balance issue between these two means of dealing damage. First of all I will mention that being a direct damage dealer requires 3 stats (power, precision, and crit damage) to be successful. Condition damage only requires one which leaves stat points free to allotted into toughness, vitality, and healing. So while condition damage might not be as fast (depending on the type) it allows for those players to be equally as defensive.

Condition damage is the most over powered damage in the game, not only does it have what you already mentioned but you can also kill someone after they kill you, then add that condition removal is kinda sucky in this game and putting on 25 stacks of multiple conditions doesn’t take long at all…well I agree it needs balancing.

Removing condition isn’t hard either. As necro I have can carry at least 3 spells at once that remove conditions, one of which puts them on the enemy and one of which turns them into boons, so both actually make conditions on me good for me.
In fact, I use all spelles there are that also put conditions on myself just so I can use them later.
Also conditions are worse for events since it’s 25 stacks overall, not per person. 2 warriors can easily keep up 25 stacks of bleeding, meaning any bleeding effect beyond that is basically useless.

you’re right in events that is troublesome. in every other aspect they are fantastic.

Pandaclysm.4625:

you’re right in events that is troublesome. in every other aspect they are fantastic.

When you say “every other aspect”, I wonder what you mean. What makes them a poor choice in events is the number of players around and the short lifespan of most monsters. We can also say the same situation usually applies in most PvP encounters.

Conditions (assuming you’re the one dealing them) only begin to excel during encounters where you’re generally fighting alone and opponents are staying alive long enough for the condition to have its full effect. How often does that really happen in this game? Not very, in my experience.. certainly not enough to be saying “every other aspect” in any meaningful way.

Pandaclysm.4625:

. Condition damage only requires one which leaves stat points free to allotted into toughness, vitality, and healing. So while condition damage might not be as fast (depending on the type) it allows for those players to be equally as defensive.

Not necessarily. Most condition builds make use of traits that proc on critical. And in the end you need to survive for long enough to have the long-term damage kill the enemy before he does it to you.

Alright, so let’s see what we have here….
In every other aspect meaning situations where conditions are stacked to the point of redundancy like events…… even though people still don’t apply vulnerability. Even in “short” encounters you’ll probably get the full duration of most conditions due to anet liking longer fights.

About the proc on crit? You’re right that is one additional stat to make that more reliable. So I guess that’s condition damage+precision+defensive stats? Still better than Power+precision+crit damage.

This complaint doesn’t make sense because the condition damage stat increases condition damage by roughly the same amount that power increases direct damage. If you do damage with conditions and only stack condition damage, your damage increases by roughly the same fraction as that of a direct damage dealer who only stacks power (and not precision or crit damage).

(Specifically, in terms of fractional increase, condition damage beats power by 8% for bleeds and 9% for poison and loses to power by 30% for burning.)

I agree that it’s a little overpowered and mainly because you can stack vit/toughness with it. I’ve been playing a necro in sPVP condition specced and I’ve only lost a couple of 1v1’s. Have won plenty of 1v2’s and have been able to hold off larger groups just kiting and using the cloud elite skill which gives me over 40k hps for 20 seconds. Enough time for a team mate to come and assist. I’m not very good at pvp but it’s pretty easy to kite and spread dots with a ton of hps. I think I’m around 25k with my spec not using the elite.

Removing my conditions is a non issue, can reapply them pretty quickly. It might pan out differently though against an organized team that supports each other but haven’t really encountered it yet.

is there extensive math done on how these stack and affect? i’m not big on math for games and not TOO worried about DPS output (though who doesn’t like seeing big numbers), as long as i survive, i just like playing the game but i do wonder as well.

i try to get my friends to stack vulnerability, but they don’t seem to like their skills. am sure it’d help a lot when fighting vet or champs no? haven’t really ventured into PvP yet so can’t speak too much on that front. anyways, as a Guardian it’s not TOO hard to have to remove either, or transfer into boons.