Guild Wars 2

Has there been any thought on separating the two very distinct meanings of “Condition Damage”?

When it comes to reading, understanding, and discussing skills, traits, and the like, there is a distinction between “Power”, a stat, and “Damage”, the resulting damage that comes from it. You can understand the difference in effect of a skill that adjusts your “Power” versus one that adjusts your “Damage” just by reading the words. “Condition Damage”, however, is currently used in both situations to describe the stat and the resulting damage. Most of the time, it’s used as a stat when referring to your own outgoing Condition Damage (sigils, armor, weapons, most runes), but as the resulting damage when it’s incoming (Vulnerability, literally every effect that “reduces condition damage”). Rune of the Berserker is the rare oddity that affects the “resulting outgoing condition damage”.

While easy to get used to, it is tedious. It can be misleading in general discussion unless you have a desire to be verbose. No one really wants to say “resulting condition damage”, and fewer still will even think to do it. Also, while I can only assume and speculate this, I can imagine that it’s limiting on the developer end as well. There are lots of traits/runes that increase % “Damage” but only two that do it for Condition Damage. And those two (Sigil of Bursting/Rune of the Berserker) do so according to different definitions. There’s probably benefit to increasing the amount of +X% (resulting) Condi Damage and giving new space for balance. But doing that too much would end up in having very confusing language.

There’s also the fact that the lack of having a separate term for “resulting condition damage” ends up in needless speculation as to whether a new skill that increases % Damage also does increases it for Condition Damage as well. The lack of specificity opens us up to the possible allowance of a new exception. The futile hope hurts but some of us will cross our fingers about Holosmith Laser’s Edge until we get cramps anyway.