Guild Wars 2

I’m curious…
Never have I played a rpg that so heavily relied on conditions, promoted them until they became the leading meta for any sort of pvp. While I understand that all sorts of changes to a character’s normal state is represented through conditions in GW2 and many other games, the effects of splitting all damage dealt into worthy direct and condition based, even splitting skillsets and whole classes / professions into such categories on balance and gameplay are rather vague to me.
What can this game (and potentially any rpg) gain from this disjunction? Do you see any problems in how GW2 handles conditiondamage, for pvp or pve? Let me hear your opinions!

Remember when conditions were nice?

Not at all. I have never been involved as much with conditions as in GW2 and have never even recognized them really. However you sound like you have some worthwhile experience to share?

Escadin.9482:

Not at all. I have never been involved as much with conditions as in GW2 and have never even recognized them really. However you sound like you have some worthwhile experience to share?

Uh, I was making a reference to Guild Wars and the way that they were handled . They were an extremely deep and integral part of the combat system.

In lieu of a deep combat system, they replaced it with one that is easier to understand.

Many of the issues with this game come from the basic development cycle, making sure everyone is capable of understanding it without thinking, and flooding the game with as much shallow content as possible in order to keep people playing the game.

I personally don’t agree with how they go about things, but hey it’s their game right? Too bad it’s going to have a massive negative impact on the western market for the next 4 years, then again that’s just my speculation.

Unfortunately, I haven’t played GW but perhaps it’s not too late…

Anyway, would you care to give a few examples of what exactly worsened compared to GW1? GW2 has indeed alot of simplified and even some oversimplified aspects and I want to observe this development so being specific here would help me a great deal. You can rely on the information of this wiki, which I will read thoroughly if necessary to understand your points.

Escadin.9482:

Unfortunately, I haven’t played GW but perhaps it’s not too late…

Anyway, would you care to give a few examples of what exactly worsened compared to GW1? GW2 has indeed alot of simplified and even some oversimplified aspects and I want to observe this development so being specific here would help me a great deal. You can rely on the information of this wiki, which I will read thoroughly if necessary to understand your points.

The explanation will take so long, that you might understand it better if you just read gw1 wiki.

It is quite hard to talk about the difference of condition damage without talking about the other mechanic. One mechanic lead to another, basically we’ll have to explain the whole game.

But to sum it up super short… Defense got severely weaker from gw1 to gw2, to balance that, offense got weaker too.

Opinion:
Then anet didn’t leave enough room for themselves and players to play with. Now they have to somehow come up with a way to “spice up” the system.

Escadin.9482:

Unfortunately, I haven’t played GW but perhaps it’s not too late…

Anyway, would you care to give a few examples of what exactly worsened compared to GW1? GW2 has indeed alot of simplified and even some oversimplified aspects and I want to observe this development so being specific here would help me a great deal. You can rely on the information of this wiki, which I will read thoroughly if necessary to understand your points.

kitten , I had this written out in the previous post, but decided it was likely just bloating the point. Well I’m going to do a bit more copy/paste from the wiki than I originally had intended and hope to do justice with a comparison.

Well first I guess it’s important to note that conditions in Guild Wars were not the only form of debuffs in the game, there were also hexes, spirits, and environmental effects, but for now we’ll just focus on hexes and conditions(mostly on conditions).

Some copypasta from the Guild Wars wiki:
Both conditions and hexes have negative effects on the affected creature; however, there are some differences:

• Conditions always have the same effect regardless of how they were applied. For example, health degeneration is constant for burning (-7), bleeding (-3), poison (-4) and disease (-4). In contrast, hex effects depend on how they were applied. The duration of both hexes and conditions tend to vary, depending on skills used, attributes, and other factors.
• Most players find that conditions are cheaper and easier to apply/remove than hexes. This makes them less reliable than hexes, but more efficient and easier to spread.
• Conditions tend to be caused by physical damage skills whereas hexes are more frequently applied by spellcasters.
• Most hexes can be applied to any creature, whereas a number of creature types are immune to various conditions. For example, non-fleshy creatures are immune to three of the ten conditions, but are immune to only one hex (Malign Intervention).

Now I suppose for the differences, I’ll let you decide if it was worth it or not.

Bleeding while still being widely available across professions, was not the highest damage dealing condition in Guild Wars. The way that bleeding and stacking bleeds is handled in Guild Wars 2 is the way that it is because they chose to do away with hexes. Hex spells such as Seeping Wound and Rising Bile no longer exist. As such they had to make up for the lack options in the damage over time department via homogenization.

Disease was removed from the game, and honestly needs to be put back in. As some sort of short ranged aoe dot that spreads upon dealing damage. In Guild Wars Disease was equal to the damage of poison, but a much more rare commodity. Only Necros and the rare Grenth dervish were capable of applying disease, however if disease found it’s way into your party, well it would wreak havoc as seen in The Great Snowball Fight of the Gods and Grenth vs Dwayna matches.

Poison was weakest of concepts in Guild Wars for a condition, as it was essentially disease without the ability to spread between species of the same type. The upside is that it was much more accessible, not as common as bleeding, but still more common than disease.

Blind Blind in Guild Wars was often times a game winning condition, instead of leaving the enemy after a single attack, it stayed on for the full duration. It could absolutely shut down melee. However it only affected Melee/Projectiles/Missle-Spells. Regardless if a team was capable of covering a blind on a spiker, it was likely that team wouldn’t have to worry about losing a team mate.(Until Sight beyond sight was added)

Cracked Armor Was another game winning condition. It would reduce your armor by 20. Armor in itself was an incredibly complex system as was the damage, seriously the formulas take days to explain. As far cracked armor is concerned, it reduced armor by 20, but would not take a target below 60(which is base armor at 20, and considered light armor). So using cracked armor to it’s fullest potential, a player could expect a 41% damage increase. This was replaced with Vulnerability, which isn’t even half as useful.

Daze Another Grammy Nominated condition, daze in gw1 unlike gw2, was a condition and as such followed all the condition flags, on top of that Daze was often lasted 5-15 seconds depending on how it was applied. Now the big difference is that Daze was not a silence, even though it originally was called silence. Daze would double your casting time and make it so any direct damage you would sustain could interrupt what ever spell you were casting.

Burning was one of the shortest duration condition, but it was the highest degen available to conditions, unlike how Bleeding in GW2 complete trumps Burning in both availability and raw damage potential. Burning alone was able to put pressure on a single monk if it was applied to hit whole team. Burning could also be applied to non-fleshy targets, which was especially useful for dealing with Spirits.

Deep Wound GvG All-Star. I’ve seriously lost matches due to a single deep wound being applied on a guild lord at the last second. Anyways, deep wound functioned as the anti-heal condition, reducing healing by 20% on a target, but also reducing a targets total hp by 20%. As you know it never made it to GW2, which is kind of lame, but at the same time it made poison useful, we’re still missing the 20% health reduction part however.

Cripple Remained the same, however more readily available due to the homogenization of hexes into conditions.

Chill Didn’t exist, instead hexes would be the only form reduced attack speed, and cooldown times, on top of interrupts that would increase cd times.

Weakness The final game changing condition, and the most nerfed condition in it’s transition to GW2. Weakness would reduce physical damage by 66% and all attributes by 1(which roughly averaged out to 8-12%). It could even break some builds if a character was put below the attribute thresh-hold to use a weapon because of weakness. Weakness now only reduces damage by 25% and doubles the time it takes your endurance to recharge. Which is cool and all, but it doesn’t hold a candle to what it could do.

Hope this turns out right, typing on a tablet with windows 8 is annoying.

The conditions are fine. The condition cleanse skills are not. Currently a 2 condi cleanse will do just that – 2 of the most recent condis regardless of how many stacks. It is unfair to both; 1 skill shouldnt be able to remove 25 stacks, and most of the time the cleanser will remove a condi only to get it right back.

I believe an overhaul is necessary. Every trait and skill that removes a condi now removes a couple of stacks or duration over time. This way the spammable part of condi application is under control and the playing field is more even for both sides.

So conditions in GW1 were pretty much part of the counterplay mechanics, with a way lower uptime and accessibilty across the board. They were also split into conditions and hexes to reduce accessiblity even more. Where a single well played desease used to win a fight, we now have constant 25 stacks of vulnerability and bleeding that can be cleared and reapplied with ease.
Still there are tornment and confusion, trying to keep the old days alive.
Thanks for summing this up for me, Judge Banks.9018.

My personal opinion is that quality instead of quantity makes abilities way more interesting to use but maybe there are upsides too? As it appears to be, anet is tries to equalize all classes more and more, even potentially sacrificing individuality of each profession. Another example shows this trend as well: relativization of ranged attacks to the point where there is almost no difference/advantage to/over melee attacks, while every class has easy access to both.

The question is: What good are conditions in their current form? What would effectively change if conditiondamage was removed and power / crit / critdamage became the only way to improve damage in pve as well as pvp?

Escadin.9482:

So conditions in GW1 were pretty much part of the counterplay mechanics, with a way lower uptime and accessibilty across the board. They were also split into conditions and hexes to reduce accessiblity even more. Where a single well played desease used to win a fight, we now have constant 25 stacks of vulnerability and bleeding that can be cleared and reapplied with ease.
Still there are tornment and confusion, trying to keep the old days alive.
Thanks for summing this up for me, Judge Banks.9018.

My personal opinion is that quality instead of quantity makes abilities way more interesting to use but maybe there are upsides too? As it appears to be, anet is tries to equalize all classes more and more, even potentially sacrificing individuality of each profession. Another example shows this trend as well: relativization of ranged attacks to the point where there is almost no difference/advantage to/over melee attacks, while every class has easy access to both.

The question is: What good are conditions in their current form? What would effectively change if conditiondamage was removed and power / crit / critdamage became the only way to improve damage in pve as well as pvp?

You would need to so much more than simply remove condition damage, after all we already lost hexes, but beyond the visible things that we lost, much of the internal damage mechanics were abandoned.

Just take a look at how extremely complex the damage formula was in the original Guild Wars.

The biggest thing to note is that Guild Wars had hit boxes which were used to determine where you hit the enemy. This was important because you could build to protect your larger hit boxes at the cost health, however if you get hit in an area that doesn’t have +10 armor you will take more damage. When doing Hardmodes it became imperative that you understand fully how to rune/gear against certain enemy types.