Guild Wars 2

Title says it all, I’m very happy with most of the upcoming changes (can’t wait for wardrobe!) But one of PvE’s most requested feature is being ignored completely, I find condition damage to be too restrictive, only useful for certain game modes, and let’s not talk about how they are totally useless vs. structures…

They’re probably working on it, pretty tough to overhaul an entire damage system :p

They’ve got a lot on their plate for sure…heck in a year from now who knows…the entire game’s mechanics might be different, they may never fix Condition damage though lol

Hoping to see this improve as well. It’d go a long way to adding build diversity.

Wouldn’t take too much, unless processing power really is an issue.

Wouldnt just giving them(mobs) more toughness and less vitality make condi’s viable in PVE?

Condition caps and overwriting would still be a pain, but it’d be a start.

Rhalas.4167:

Wouldnt just giving them(mobs) more toughness and less vitality make condi’s viable in PVE?

It would alleviate, but the problem is that the stack limits prevent more than a few condition builds to show up and be effective at a time. Bleeding tends to be the biggest example, since it’s the most prevalent condition that gets used for damage, and most other conditions are actually duration-stacking.

The 25 stack on bleed means that maybe two or three condition-damage characters fit in any given monolithic boss encounter. Not so bad for dungeons, but terrible for world bosses.

As a charr conditionmancer, I whole-heartedly agree with this. I mean, I still play him regardless, ‘cause he’s fun, but I do hope they address PvE conditions sometime.

Rauderi.8706:

Rhalas.4167:

Wouldnt just giving them(mobs) more toughness and less vitality make condi’s viable in PVE?

It would alleviate, but the problem is that the stack limits prevent more than a few condition builds to show up and be effective at a time. Bleeding tends to be the biggest example, since it’s the most prevalent condition that gets used for damage, and most other conditions are actually duration-stacking.

The 25 stack on bleed means that maybe two or three condition-damage characters fit in any given monolithic boss encounter. Not so bad for dungeons, but terrible for world bosses.

This is the real issue. Condition damage is under assault as OP in the PvP/WvW forums, so it’s not that condition damage is weak. However, you can take a condition character into a world event and struggle to get gold credit despite playing harder than auto attacking only players with power gear — all because stack limitations are removing “your” damage before it can apply.

Just keep the 25 cap on players and remove the cap on pve mobs. There, I fixed conditions now we just need to hope for Anet to get their heads of their kitten

Don’t forget that non condition based builds still apply lots of weak conditions, especially bleeds.

emikochan.8504:

They’re probably working on it, pretty tough to overhaul an entire damage system :p

They’ve had sixteen months since they first stated they had a fix, they could have rewritten a quarter of the game code by now.

Seems like the obvious overhaul would be to do what they did with Ferocity, and translate into neutral “points” and then back out on the target side.

Meaning, there would no longer be a split between power and duration. The attacker would do 1000 points of bleed, or 1000 points of blind, or 1000 points of weakness, where the intent is that all are roughly equivalent in power.

On the target side, points would get translated into DPS and duration in a way that simulates stacking (e.g. more points would increase rate of damage, but only to a certain extent or with diminishing returns). Since the translation is handled target-side, you can use different formulas for players and various ranks of PvE mobs; you could cut stacking on players, while letting it ramp up much higher on PvE bosses (you could use the same system to dramatically curtail durations of conditions like blind or chill on such bosses).

It should be vastly easier on the network, since it would make every condition basically just a fire-and-forget variant of direct damage. Instead of being subtracted from a number that eventually makes you downed/dead, it’s added to a number that produces some effect. It also means that at most you have one stack of each condition to worry about on each player/mob.

Nemitri.8172:

Title says it all, I’m very happy with most of the upcoming changes (can’t wait for wardrobe!) But one of PvE’s most requested feature is being ignored completely, I find condition damage to be too restrictive, only useful for certain game modes, and let’s not talk about how they are totally useless vs. structures…

10k +dps with 700 + thoughness/vita would be stupidly broken, OP, and unfair. Knight/soldier players can´t do that much dps too.
Remender that most condispeccs are ranged, and ranged powerweapons do less direct dmg then melee ones. But conditiondmg does always the same amount of conditiondmg.

Con/power/prec is the only way to open up the possibility to bring 1 condispecc into optimized pve groups.

Ask for it here.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Stat-Combos/page/6#post3856879

If the Megaservers end up doing what they/I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more people in zones. This means that instead of 2-4 players jumping into a DE and having their conditions be worthwhile, we might see 8-10 players joining in on a DE and seeing conditions overlapping and overwriting.

Kinda makes a PvE condition fix even more important now.

Condition damage design in PvE has always been an issue for me. I really WANT to play a condition spec, but I feel totally useless in any large group scenario and am always conscious of small group play because of the possibility of two condition players in the same team.

Playing a power based damage toon is MUCH easier because they don’t overlap. Anet wants to coax people away from beserker gear in PvE…fix the condition issue and you’ll see more spread on builds and gear.

The boon/condition system seems to be tied up with the server load balancing, and the GW2 server farms are very tightly balanced.

Also, the overall game mechanics seems to have been developed for SPVP first and foremost. And the rest is then limited by that.

End result is that mobs are custom professions with special boons/conditions applied to provide mechanical “spice”, and so limited in functionality by the assumptions made when the base code was laid out.

What i like to see is twofold.

1. that the current Defiant “boon” is replaced by a system similar to the new mesmer grandmaster trait, making skills that currently trigger defiant instead go on longer cooldowns. Thus one badly applied control effect do not punish the whole group, but only the individual player. It should also avoid stun locking in zerg situations but still allow a skilled controller to make effective choices during a fight.

2. create a special condition for large mobs that will trigger when damaging conditions hit certain tresholds, wiping that condition and doing solid damage to the mob. We can see some inkling of this in the recent LA boss fights, where damage goes up with conditions at one stage and down in another.

Conncept.7638:

emikochan.8504:

They’re probably working on it, pretty tough to overhaul an entire damage system :p

They’ve had sixteen months since they first stated they had a fix, they could have rewritten a quarter of the game code by now.

Or they could of scraped conditions and come up with something easier to balance.

digiowl.9620:

The boon/condition system seems to be tied up with the server load balancing, and the GW2 server farms are very tightly balanced.

Also, the overall game mechanics seems to have been developed for SPVP first and foremost. And the rest is then limited by that.

End result is that mobs are custom professions with special boons/conditions applied to provide mechanical “spice”, and so limited in functionality by the assumptions made when the base code was laid out.

What i like to see is twofold.

1. that the current Defiant “boon” is replaced by a system similar to the new mesmer grandmaster trait, making skills that currently trigger defiant instead go on longer cooldowns. Thus one badly applied control effect do not punish the whole group, but only the individual player. It should also avoid stun locking in zerg situations but still allow a skilled controller to make effective choices during a fight.

2. create a special condition for large mobs that will trigger when damaging conditions hit certain tresholds, wiping that condition and doing solid damage to the mob. We can see some inkling of this in the recent LA boss fights, where damage goes up with conditions at one stage and down in another.

I like your #2 idea. Technically we also see this mechanic on the boon side with certain on-kill sigils, so a base system does exist.

I could see an easy rework in bleeding with this. Bleeding would work like normal for 25 stacks. On the 26th stack the set converts to hemorrhage, which would deal damage for 3 seconds based on the cond dmg of each player contributing a stack to the trigger, modified by a hypothetical “condition overload” multiplier, then wipe out the condition for another go.

Another way to bring about some improvement could be morphing underperforming conditions into other conditions. For example, a target has a high grade burn on and is hit by a lower power burn. Instead of adding duration (which would probably be refreshed by the original source of the burn anyway), convert the incoming burn into a stack of vulnerability so that the incoming contribution isn’t wasted. In the same manner, poison could be morphed to a random selection of weakness or cripple. Since one application of a “duration stack” condition lowers damage output for all characters applying that condition, this would allow them to continue to contribute in some way.

Pyska.1457:

Conncept.7638:

emikochan.8504:

They’re probably working on it, pretty tough to overhaul an entire damage system :p

They’ve had sixteen months since they first stated they had a fix, they could have rewritten a quarter of the game code by now.

Or they could of scraped conditions and come up with something easier to balance.

“Let’s fix it by removing it!”

Sorry, but I left EQ pre-Luclin and Vanguard after Sony acquisition for a reason, and this is exactly that reason.

digiowl.9620:

2. create a special condition for large mobs that will trigger when damaging conditions hit certain tresholds, wiping that condition and doing solid damage to the mob. We can see some inkling of this in the recent LA boss fights, where damage goes up with conditions at one stage and down in another.

I really like that idea #2, it seems simple and workable.

IMHO what the game needs is a major overhaul of the condition system programming wise.

Burning/Poison stacking on intensity for different sources would require different implementations for PvE and PvP and could cause serious balance issues, so they should probably remain close to the current state.
Bleed (and maybe torment), however, could use some drastic changes.

Each character/monster could have some kind of N length array to store received bleed damage, each cell symbolizing a real-time second (N would technically become the maximum duration for bleed stacks), and an index to reference the “current second” in those arrays
Whenever a X duration bleed stack is received, the damage of a single tick would be calculated and added to the “current second” cell and the next X-1 ones (on a circular fashion if the end of the array is reached).
When the damage application timer triggers, the server should just apply the value stored on the “current second” as damage, deplete that cell and increase the index by 1 (now again on a circular fashion).

Something like this would not only solve any stack cap issue (which is rarely reached in PvP enviroments and causes nothing but problems in PvE) but also seems lighter for server performance and could allow fixes for other technical issues like, let us dream, AoE caps or more interesting AIs.
There’s no need to store duration and source information for each individual bleed stack anymore. There’s no need either for constant references to bleed sources in order to dinamically calculate damage (this increases server load and doesn’t really make the game much more interesting. Probably should be extended to other damage dealing conditions).
I’m far from a professional programmer and I could be completely mistaken though.

The are a few downsides on the system, but all of them (as far as i have realized) have rather easy solutions (even improvements)

For example, players won’t be able to monitor bleed stacks anymore. However, that information is quite lackluster atm if we have to be honest.
There’s no way to know how powerful those bleed stacks are on average. The power is better measured through received damage and the duration is completely masked by the longer stack.
It shouldn’t be hard for this system to precalculate and track the total ongoing bleed damage and display that information on the UI as thousands of damage.
Instead of the number of stacks, an index of lets say 4 over the bleed icon would mean that between 4k and 5k damage are expected from bleed, which seems a much more valuable information for removal use.

There could be also issues with condition damage display, since the server wouldn’t recognize anymore who the source of each stack is.
As long as condition duration reductions are provided on the condition application server acknowledgments and condition damage triggers and cleanses are broadcasted, however, display information could be easily done on the client side (duration stacking conditions would require more information, like queue time or if the queue was already full).

I guess the main reason they can’t tweak conditions yet, is because they are completely overpowered in WvW and PVP, in any part of the game that players have to fight each other.

And removing the cap or putting separate caps for each player would make PVP unplayable, they are already a problem, don’t make it even worse. Removing caps is not a “fix” to the condition problem, and it’s also not doable with current server tech (as said by Anet devs themselves)

The key here is to identify the real issue with conditions (hint: it’s not the cap) and find out why they are so overpowered in PVP but nearly useless in big PVE encounters.