Guild Wars 2

This might anger all the players out there who are speccing for ‘Condition Damage builds’, but here it is. I find that there are some problems with Conditions, speaking from both theorycrafting and actual experience trying to play as Condition Necro/Engy.

That said, I’m mostly speaking about Burning/Poison/Bleed. I have little clue about Mesmer builds to talk about Confusion in enough detail.

1. There aren’t any low-cooldown abilities that only deal Conditions. Most abilities that deal Conditions tend to take too long to cool down, and/or a big chunk of its damage is put into flat damage that benefit off Power/Precision instead. Flat damage has no place in Condition Damage builds, because you’re likely investing in Toughness/Vitality to whittle down your foes while you dodge around. I’d rather, for example, have 6 Bleed stacks for 10 seconds than 4 Bleed stacks for 8 second + 300 base damage. I feel that Mark of Blood is the only skill that truly fits the ‘Condition Damage Skill’ concept.

2. Stacking Conditions is problematic. This is only problematic when you have more than three people speccing for Condition Damage, but nevertheless it is a problem. The general DPS from per person diminishes as there are more people applying Conditions, because of the max limit on Bleed stacks, and that Poison/Burning only stack in duration. This problem is quite evident in boss fights, where you can see that huge variety of conditions stacked on a boss that deal like… 0.0001% of its total health with every tick, and you really can’t do more than that because you’ve hit the limit. Meanwhile, Crit-based physical burst damage can ‘stack’ to no limits because we don’t have anti-spike skills anymore.

3. It’s too easy to prevent or remove it. No need for awesome dodging skills, or quick thinking with Block/Reflect abilities! Just press that ‘remove condition’ button, and BAM, there goes all the effort and spirit of your enemy Necros. In GW1, pressure builds worked because healers would eventually run out of Energy to continue removing conditions— and more importantly, there were hundreds of hexes to worry about on top of conditions. Now there are only conditions, yet they aren’t any harder to remove.

4. Bosses tend to be immune to a variety of conditions. I guess this isn’t a huge problem because ConDamage builds are strictly for PvP, but I think it’s worth a mention. Want to feel useless in an AC Explorable run? Go grab a Condition Damage build!

If you feel that I’m missing something obvious here, feel free to point it out for me!

I agree. I was speccing my ranger for condition damage and by the mid 40s it just wasn’t cutting it. I switched to precision/power instead and haven’t looked back since.

Ouspensky.5248:

I agree. I was speccing my ranger for condition damage and by the mid 40s it just wasn’t cutting it. I switched to precision/power instead and haven’t looked back since.

That’s another peeve of mine. All professions are very capable of making good use out of Power+Precision+Crit (which would explain why Ruby-based items are 3x the cost of others), meanwhile very few classes seem to have skills that actually make good use out of +ConDamage. There aren’t enough abilities that are not simply ‘targeted damage ability with a condition thrown on top that lasts 3 seconds’.

Only the Necro, with his Marks/Utilities, has a ‘working’ Condition build; all other classes seem to completely lack the ability to keep conditions applied on enemies and/or spread conditions to all enemies around, not just one target. Again, I’m going back to my title with the Conditions being hugely lackluster outside 1v1.

That was the single biggest problem I had as a ConDamage Engineer; the moment I’m facing against more than one enemy, I’m absolutely screwed because I can’t keep damage applied to both of them. Grenade Kit is nicer for that, but again, it suffers from the problem where its damage source seems to have a 50/50 split between Conditions and base physical damage that occur on explosion.

Rangers have plenty of AoE skills which apply conditions(triple traps, shortbow skills). Also, I am pretty sure the only bosses or mobs immune to damaging conditions are inanimate objects such as turrets, or special bosses like Zhaitan in Arah storyline.

Last I did AC I was sure there were constant 15+ stacks of bleeding on the boss, 8-10 of which were maintained by my ranger ticking for 110 per stack per second.

In any case, it’s actually difficult to maintain 25 stacks of bleeding on a boss in a dungeon, unless everyone is specifically and purposefully maintaining bleeds on the boss, which doesn’t happen very often because they could do more damage using their dps cooldowns.

I would like everyone to observe the debuff icons on bosses they fight and try to do everything normally like they always would, and see if they can really maintain 25 stacks of bleeding at all times. Chances are, it’s not the case.