Guild Wars 2

Edit This is primarily for WvW and PvP.

I dont want to make condi duration and boon duration useless, but I think this has been a problem for long enough. I am mainly talking from a wvw standpoint for boons, and a pvp/small team wvw standpoint for condis.

Boons. HoT introduced some major changes, mainly resistance. Combined with the stability buff, melee trains are out of control. There is little to no skill involved anymore. With or without boonshare mesmers, the amount of and duration of boons have reached a tipping point. On my frontline revenant I can run around, hit pain absorption twice, and give everyone 8 seconds of resistance. Thats pretty huge, and only one revenant. Stability has received a major buff, it went from being a stack removed every .05 seconds to .75 seconds. Another really big change, making frontline an avalanche of unstoppable momentum. Soft and hard cc does not work, at all.

Conditions. In general, like boons, condis can stack to crazy durations. Also let me clarify, I’m not after damaging conditions, for the most part they’re fine. I’m talking about chill, cripple, and weakness. Some classes, like necro (not trying to single anyone out just pointing out a fact), can stack so much of these condis its ridiculous. The boon>condi corruption duration is way out of line. Warrior, ranger, and thief can apply decent duration of cripple and weakness but for the most part they’re fine. Now I’ve mained necro for a while, so this makes my argument all the more trustworthy and right. Hah. I have played a lot of necro, and to be honest I would rather see a nerf to our duration in these areas and a buff to others (fingers crossed for mobility).

So to sum up, I’ll throw some random numbers out there. These are hard cap durations that the boon or condi cannot go beyond, if another is applied, then the duration is reset.

Boons
Resistance- 5 seconds
Protection- 10 seconds
Stability- a stack removed every .4 seconds (so stand your ground would at maximum give you 2 seconds of cc invuln, which should be fine for most frontline)

Condis
Cripple- 10 seconds
Weakness- 10 seconds
Chill- 5 seconds

Condi>boon corruption, vice versa is the same(?)
Swiftness to cripple- 5 seconds
Might to weakness- 5 seconds

No, unless you also want to introduce a hard cap on DPS, in which case I’d likely say:

N( )( )( )OOOOO00000ooooo…..!!!!!!.

I personally think durations are fine as is… problem in this game is the PVE/WvW/PvP devides which are non existent…. But my PvE enemy attacks once every 3 seconds and my WVW enemies attack dozens of times a second with PvP somewhere in the middle…. Finding a balance in the midlle tends to be annnoiying….

They’ve only just lifted caps on condition damage to make them more viable alongside Damage builds, especially against World Bosses, so to U-Turn on that decision wouldn’t be very good. Though I do think some changes for the sake of WvW are probably needed.

I would be against this because it would be detrimental to build diversity.

Clever use of boon-stacking and conditions allows for some fun, balanced and interesting builds – and adds a layer of complexity to build design which is fun for those of us who enjoy that sort of thing. It would be sad to see that go.

The cap should not be on the boons and conditions themselves.

They should be on the ones producing them, and the ones taking them, based on their creature rank.

That is, a single player should not be able to maintain too many conditions on many targets, and a single player should not suffer too many conditions from many enemies at the same time, but on creatures of higher rank like veterans, elites, champions, legendary and epic prop bosses, for those what they can maintain and what they can suffer should go higher.

You also have to take into account game mode. In PvE and WvW what a player can endure is higher than in PvP where they have more limited stats and upgrades.

Unless you scale them based on creature rank and game mode, any change done would just be either too much or too little depending on creature rank and game mode.

In the end it mostly boils down to the biggest mistake in WvW from HoT: Revenants. It’s the rev that puts out a crazy amount of boons (resistance especially), increases boon duration like no other class. And its also the rev’s insane ranged damage (combined with out of this world condition application) that forced melee trains to go super dense, all boons murderball.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

No, unless you also want to introduce a hard cap on DPS

I dont understand what you are trying to say. I havent touched any damaging conditions at all.

penelopehannibal.8947:

They’ve only just lifted caps on condition damage to make them more viable alongside Damage builds

See above.

Gandolfi.1507:

I would be against this because it would be detrimental to build diversity.

Clever use of boon-stacking and conditions allows for some fun, balanced and interesting builds – and adds a layer of complexity to build design which is fun for those of us who enjoy that sort of thing. It would be sad to see that go.

Whats diverse, clever, or complex about a rev spamming 1 button to negate the melee trains biggest weakness? Or a necro spamming hours of cripple and weakness?

MithranArkanere.8957:

snip

My bad, I shouldve specified that I was talking about WvW and PvP. I updated the top of the OP.

Stand The Wall.6987:

[…]
My bad, I shouldve specified that I was talking about WvW and PvP. I updated the top of the OP.

Still applies.

There’s higher rank enemies in PvP and WvW. And it’s weird some NPCs do not have such ranks, but they should, like the guards in Legacy of Foefire, who should be noted as at least veteran, and the Forest NPCs, who are at least Elite in power.

Such scalings would still need to consider NPC rank, and wether the creature is a player or not.

So a cap scaling considering game mode and NPC rank would work across all game modes.

For Boons:
There is already a cap of 10 stacks for boons if I’m right… Elementalist will not be able to blast more then ~1m 20 s of swiftness… even with help, same should be for fury. I have little experience reaching the cap with protection, retaliation, and for Aegis…. ( boon duration, boon copy and concentration will increase thi in duration of course)

Might is still capped at 25 stacks of course.
Damaging conditons are limited by stack caps (being 1500 stacks)…

Stability
The unfortunate nerf to stability which made it as it is now is still hated with passion among most (WvW) players who where familiar with the old stability, which wasn’t stack/ CC based, and thus game you complete protection from CC’s for the whole duration. The change removed the Melee battles for a large part from WvW and gave rise to the pirateship Meta…

As for your suggestions:

Swiftness duration tends to be an PvE/Dungeon/Raid/Fractal thing as well.
Cripple durations and chills are used for Boss kites in PvE/Dungeons/Fractals
Remember your wishes will be affecting other gamemodes as well…

Conditions:
Non damaging conditions are limited by a certain amount of stacks as well, which used to be 10, and for chill this was lowered to 5 stacks. These stacks are cumulative in duration. newer stacks overwriting the oldest…. in case of cripple some classes have cripple on autoattack.

Cripple
10 seconds of cripple wouldn’t do you any good, as some classes can reapply it ever 2nd or 3rd attack, whcih is roughly the same for chill. if you look at sword auto chain for warrior… bleed/bleed/ cripple (with an option to immo on cripple every 10th second)

Chill
Necro has plenty of acces to chill, damage reduction from chill, condtion application on chill and a good acces to keep the enemy contained while hampering recharge.
There is plenty of reason to keep spamming the chills… and thus to keep up durations…..

So to answer your question:

The complete cap/nerf in speed reducing conitions would be bad for the slower proffesions who’d be losing their compensation for the speed.

Capping conditions has been done already and it has been like so since headstart, except the 1500 stacks of conditions which has been ingame since june 23rd 2015 (as I recall)

With present duration buffs available, any hard caps would be defeating:
expertise, concentration, condition duration and boon duration… which were available ingame for PvE and WvW since headstart and for PvP since the release of HoT.

MithranArkanere.8957:

There’s higher rank enemies in PvP and WvW. And it’s weird some NPCs do not have such ranks, but they should, like the guards in Legacy of Foefire, who should be noted as at least veteran, and the Forest NPCs, who are at least Elite in power.

Such scalings would still need to consider NPC rank, and wether the creature is a player or not.

So a cap scaling considering game mode and NPC rank would work across all game modes.

Uhh, rank would not be considered for players. Probably not even for ai, because I’m not too concerned whether or not some veteran in Tangled Depths is getting 20 seconds of cripple.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

snip

I’m not sure how to respond to your post. You mostly tell me things I already know, or state false claims like the current state of stability (its strong right now in wvw), stacking swiftness (I think the cap is 5min, also a big thing in wvw not just pve). 10 seconds of cripple or chill on some pve mob should be more then enough, even though the meta (most effective method) is to stack melee as it does more damage. Many of the things you say do not make sense.