Suggestion : Condi, Boon, and CC new system

Suggestion : Condi, Boon, and CC new system

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Posted by: ThomasC.1056

ThomasC.1056

Hello folks,

I’ve been thinking about a way to clean things up for a new condi + boon + CC system that’d mostly allow more lisibility. It involves a splitting in categories that’d allow traits or skill to focus at a definite kind of condis or boons, hence, more diversity and refinement possibilities.

All this will require a re-work of some traits and skills, but I think it’s worth it.

Conditions :

  • Damage conditions : these do damages at each tick plus an additionnal effect. They rely on condi damage and expertise stat. They can stack intensity (for damage only) and duration :
    • Bleeding : lowest damage output. Each dodge roll (success ful or not) doubles th bleeding stacks and reset the bleeding CD.
    • Poison : intermediate damage output. Halves healing stat efficiency.
    • Burning : highest damage output. Burning spreads to adjacent foes.
  • Punishment conditions : these only deal damage when a specific condition is met. They rely on condi damage and expertise stat. They can stack intensity and duration :
    • Confusion : damage on skill activation (whatever the outcome of that skill is)
    • Torment : damage on movement
    • Worry : damage each time a skill CD expires
  • Movement conditions : whatever happens, they provide a 33% speed reduction. Each has an additionnal effect. They can only stack duration, and hence rely only on expertise.
    • Chilled : additionnal effect : -50% endurance regeneration
    • Slow : additionnal effect : +50% skills CD
    • Crippled : additionnal effect : 50% chance to get knockdowned at dodge roll.
  • Outgoing damage : these affect the ability of the victim to deal damage. They only stack duration and rely on expertise only.
    • Blind : next attack misses
    • Clumsiness : next attack has 50% chance to deal half damage to caster and half to victim.
    • Distraction : condis applied have 50% chance to be self-applied
  • Incoming damage : these increase damage recieved by the victim. They stack intensity and duraction ; they rely on expertise only.
    • Vulnerability : +10% direct damage recieved. Formula is : incoming damage*1.1^k k = number of stacks
    • Weakness : +10% condi damage recieved. Same formula
    • Despair : +2% chance to be critted. Formula is : initial chance + 2%*k. k = number of stacks

(edited by ThomasC.1056)

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Posted by: ThomasC.1056

ThomasC.1056

Boons :

  • Damage mitigation : these reduce the incoming damage. They last “long”.
    • Protection : reduce direct damage of 33%
    • Resistance : reduce condi damage of 33%
    • Purity : condis expire 33% faster
  • Damage cancellation : these cancel some damages. Their duration is shorter and they self-expire when condition is met.
    • Aegis : next attack is cancelled
    • Resilience : all damage (condi+direct) taken during uptime is cancelled. Resilience has a cancellation threshold, based on healing stat.
    • Retaliation : incoming damage is mirrored to the enemy 1 for 1. No stat involved.
  • Outgoing damage : these focus on increasing outgoing damage
    • Might : increase power stat
    • Fury : increase precision stat
    • Malice : increase condi dmg. stat
  • Speed-related : these focus on making things faster.
    • Swiftness : increase movement speed
    • Quickness : increase attacks speed
    • Alacrity : reduces skills CD
  • Gain over time : these provide continuous gains.
    • Regeneration : health gains, based on healing stat
    • Vigor : endurance gains, based on vitality
    • Stability : defiance gains, based on toughness

(edited by ThomasC.1056)

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Posted by: ThomasC.1056

ThomasC.1056

Crowd Controls:

A new system requires each character to get a breakbar, very similar to NPC’s :

  • Blue breakbar would be filled an amount determined by toughness stat.
  • A broken breakbar would place the character in stun status i.e. : immobilized, can’t use skills but stun breakers, incoming damage increased.
    The base stun duration is reduced by toughness stat.
  • Once broken out of stun, breakbar turns ochre and character gets immune to any CC. The bar fills at constant pace, meaning that the bigger the bar is (toughness) the longer the immunity lasts.
  • Stun breaker skills would either break a CC, or partially refill the blue breakbar. They won’t affect the ochre breakbar.

Now, there will be only 2 categories of crowd control skills. Both of these CC categories will trigger while “blue breakbar” is up and they’ll consume defiance as well.

  • Movement CC : fear, taunt (remove the attack thing), float, sink etc. The character moves uncontrollably yet every skill remain available. Should several movement CC be up, only the most defiance-consuming will have an effect.
  • Disrupting CC : daze, knockdown, push, pull etc. The purpose of these is, as their name says, to disrupt the pace of a fight. Their immediate effect would be to put any skill that is not on CD, in a 0,25s CD state. They can have a “fast” displacement effect as well. If a disrupting CC is put on an enemy already under a movement CC, then the defiance he already lost because of the movement CC will be removed from the cost of the disrupting CC.

Conlusion :

I hope such a clean up would allow to bring more balance between condi and direct damage, as well as shed more light to the healing stat. I also hope it’ll prevent stunlock builds.
In a more distant future, I hope such changes will allow neater combinaisons and more build diversity.
Thanks for attention !

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Posted by: BlaqueFyre.5678

BlaqueFyre.5678

Why did you swap Swiftness and Quickness? Seems unnecessary.

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Posted by: ThomasC.1056

ThomasC.1056

Why did you swap Swiftness and Quickness? Seems unnecessary.

Because I always confuse them… My bad. I edited it.

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Posted by: CMM.6712

CMM.6712

The last thing this game needs is redoing an old system

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Posted by: Dawdler.8521

Dawdler.8521

Clean things up by adding more conditions and boons?

Thats a good one, haha.

If anything many of them should be combined so there is less conditions, builds would no longer be able to overload enemies, condi cleansing is more effective, boon rip is more effective and WvW is faster and less laggy.

Probably the best example is chill, slow and cripple. Why? Just have one skill that does all 3 things to a lesser degree. Call it “chillowipple” or whatever.

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Posted by: OriOri.8724

OriOri.8724

Adding more boons and condis sounds like a bad idea, the cleanses are already few and far between for how many condis we currently have. Some thoughts:

  • Dodge rolling resets bleed duration and also doubles the stacks? This is ridiculous. Either one would be OP. Bleeding is fine as it is
  • Burning spreading to adjacent foes should absolutely be something you have to trait for, it should never, ever be a baseline or it shoots burning way higher than other condis in a condi build. Way too powerful to be baseline, and really its too powerful to even trait for unless its nerfed a bit along with this
  • Removing the passive tick from confusion and torment just kittens over mesmer. Overall I wouldn’t be surprised if ANet implemented this just for that reason.
  • Worry just sounds awful. Punishing players for literally doing nothing?
  • Currently chill increases skill CD, why did you switch this to slow? Though I support reducing it to 50% increased CD duration
  • Cripple removing the ability to dodge would be OP. Sure, it would make fighting DD a kittenton easier, but its way too much. They already can barely move with cripple applied, why remove their ability to dodge as well? Just keep it as 50% reduction in moving speed
  • Clumsiness is just a nerfed form of Weakness. Why even add this to the game and change Weakness? Keep weakness as it is
  • Distraction sounds godawful.
  • First off, Vuln should still affect both direct and condi damage, no need to change Weakness. Secondly, you just suggested making Vuln 10x more powerful. A full stack of Vuln would now mean that someone is taking 2.5x more damage. 250 damage instead of 100. That’s absolutely insane for PvP. I could get behind this in PvE (well maybe if it was nerfed to 5% instead of 10%), but it should never ever happen in PvP or WvW
  • Despair doesn’t even make any sense. This effect, if ever implemented, should be on a boon and affect the attacker, it shouldn’t be on the guy being attacked
  • Merge Resistance and Purity and you actually have a really kitten good boon there. Its suitably powerful against condi builds without completely shutting them down. It could even be further buffed to either ignore movement impairing conditions, or reduce their effects by 50% and still be in a pretty good place.
  • Resilience sounds interesting, but shouldn’t it scale off of toughness if anything?
  • The change to Retaliation is interesting. I wonder if this would be too much though.
  • Why split up Might into two different boons? Makes no sense, but now it makes it much harder for a single person to buff the entire party with the same effects as current Might. Remove Malice and just keep Might as it is
  • Alacrity should stay as an effect, not a boon

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Posted by: Lahmia.2193

Lahmia.2193

Good intentions but bad idea.

Surrender and serve me in life, or die and slave for me in death.

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Posted by: Black Iris Flowers.3418

Black Iris Flowers.3418

The amount of visual clutter from so many conditions would be insane and condition removal would be insane. Decent concept of categorizing conditions and boons but that is way too many added conditions

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Posted by: azureai.9764

azureai.9764

Yeah, I agree with a lot of the posters here. The idea here has an elegant symmetry. And that’s nice in design.

But the problem is that the idea would add clutter into the system that ultimately would make the game worse. This is a LOT of information for your players to have to retain. A strong editing pen – that’s also needed for good design.

Nice thoughts, though, OP.

[edit, apparently a ball-point tool is not allowed to be paired with the word “is”]

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Posted by: Linken.6345

Linken.6345

Outgoing damage : these affect the ability of the victim to deal damage. They only stack duration and rely on expertise only.

Blind : next attack misses
Clumsiness : next attack has 50% chance to deal half damage
Distraction : condis applied have 50% chance to be self-applied

If you want to mirror condi and direct damage like you have for almost all the other sub groups then clumsiness would deal half damage to the one dealing the blow.

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Posted by: ThomasC.1056

ThomasC.1056

Thanks everyone for feedback.

As many stated, I was looking for more symmetry between direct and condi damage, so that a buid crafting would be neater.

The visual clutter put apart, I don’t think that system would be harder than the current one. At first, because of the categories system. It prevents the 1 boon = 1 category effect, and it’d allow traits and skills to work for several condis or boons at once. There’s already something similar for movement impairing conditions. I just generalized it.

Now, I actually browsed the GW1 enchantement and hexes system to see what the trends were. There’re some of them that now work as boons and condis, and some other that work as traits or skills now. Anyway, for those who remember it, there used to be far more hexes and enchantements than the 15+15 I wrote here ! It wasn’t more difficult because players only knew what was on them, and what they cast on others. About foes or friends, they only knew they were having hexes or enchantements. That can be thought of.

Last thing on that topic : skill access. I can’t envision (and don’t endorse) a way to be able to cast all the condis or boons. A class (and/or elite spec) should only be able to access some of them.

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Posted by: ThomasC.1056

ThomasC.1056

Now, for specifics :

  • Dodge rolling resets bleed duration and also doubles the stacks? This is ridiculous. Either one would be OP. Bleeding is fine as it is

My idea on that one was one stack of bleed would deal insignificant damage, but stacks could raise very quickly.

  • Burning spreading to adjacent foes should absolutely be something you have to trait for, it should never, ever be a baseline or it shoots burning way higher than other condis in a condi build. Way too powerful to be baseline, and really its too powerful to even trait for unless its nerfed a bit along with this.

It actually depends on the condi duration. Burn should be a really quick condi. One or two ticks, no more.

  • Worry just sounds awful. Punishing players for literally doing nothing?

That’s the idea indeed. My idea was punishing player that, roughly, run away, or that cast everything they have. Yet, on second thought, correlating it with CD may not be the best way to do it.

  • Currently chill increases skill CD, why did you switch this to slow? Though I support reducing it to 50% increased CD duration

Mostly because it made more sense to impair endurance through “chill” than “slow”. But that’s mere words.

  • Cripple removing the ability to dodge would be OP. Sure, it would make fighting DD a kittenton easier, but its way too much. They already can barely move with cripple applied, why remove their ability to dodge as well? Just keep it as 50% reduction in moving speed.

On the dodge + endurance topic, I feel like it’s a key mechanism in fights, especially for DD indeed, yet there aren’t so many things that impair it. Weakness in its current state, and that’s all. I want some conditions to give a hard time to compulive dodgers. Hence, bleed and that new cripple effect. Another solution :

  • Cripple : additionnal effect : 50% chance to be knockdown while dodging.
  • Clumsiness is just a nerfed form of Weakness. Why even add this to the game and change Weakness? Keep weakness as it is.

See below.

  • First off, Vuln should still affect both direct and condi damage, no need to change Weakness. Secondly, you just suggested making Vuln 10x more powerful. A full stack of Vuln would now mean that someone is taking 2.5x more damage. 250 damage instead of 100. That’s absolutely insane for PvP. I could get behind this in PvE (well maybe if it was nerfed to 5% instead of 10%), but it should never ever happen in PvP or WvW

I didn’t think much of figures. It’ll need tweaking.

  • Despair doesn’t even make any sense. This effect, if ever implemented, should be on a boon and affect the attacker, it shouldn’t be on the guy being attacked.

Not necessarily. Vulnerability has he same outcome than might, yet both exist. Why not the same about crits ?

  • Resilience sounds interesting, but shouldn’t it scale off of toughness if anything?

I hesitated for that one. The reason I chose the healing stat is Resilience can be considered an anticipated healing. Yet the true reason is I think the healing stat is underrated, and I think lots of player don’t invest in it. If Resilience had a formula like threshold = 500 + 5 times healing stat, than maybe people would invest more in it ! I acknowledge that’s a bit artificial.

  • The change to Retaliation is interesting. I wonder if this would be too much though.

It may be. I think retaliation should be a quick boon. Anyway, on its current status, unless you focus your build on it (there used to be a guardian build I think), it doesn’t have much effect.

If you want to mirror condi and direct damage like you have for almost all the other sub groups then clumsiness would deal half damage to the one dealing the blow.

I like this one. I’ll edit my post.

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Posted by: Curunen.8729

Curunen.8729

Yeah, I agree with a lot of the posters here. The idea here has an elegant symmetry. And that’s nice in design.

But the problem is that the idea would add clutter into the system that ultimately would make the game worse. This is a LOT of information for your players to have to retain. A strong editing pen – that’s also needed for good design.

Nice thoughts, though, OP.

[edit, apparently a ball-point tool is not allowed to be paired with the word “is”]

Yeah I agree with this.

Nice intention for symmetry and there are some good ideas in there regarding conditions and boons. I can also appreciate the amount of thought and time you must have put into this, but overall it looks much too complicated and I think would not be beneficial for the game.

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Posted by: Orpheal.8263

Orpheal.8263

The game needs a more compact system that goes for the goal of making the Game actually easier to balance, reducing effect clutter, moving unneccessary effects that are currently designed as obsolete Boons or Conditions over into either Skill or Trait Effects for just specific Classes, where they are better balanced, than to have these effects for all Classes accessible through said Boons/Conditions.

Increasing the amount of Boons/Conditions will help absolutely not all, it will make everything just only worser and worser over time.

Poison, Is it needed? Yes, because it can impactfully influence the outcome of a battle, because of its effect to decrease Heal Efficiency

Bleeding, Is it needed? No, because its nothing else but just a Health Degeneration and for that can work also a nerfed Burning that receives as Counter Buff therefore the new effect of spreading over to nearby targets to make it as a Condition more interesting and interactive, to bring peopel to think about, how they should positionate themself in a battle.

Every single Boon, Condition and CC Effect of this game must have to be requestionable, if it is absolutely needed for this game to exist and if there is for any Condition, Boon or CC the answer to that question a strong no, because you instantly can come up with alternatives for how its effect could work in the game, without that it is a Boon, a Condition or a CC, then it is something, that should get removed out of the game, merged or redesigned to just reduce the effect clutter in this game for a greater good and easier balancable game & classes.

Take a look at Retaliation. Must such garbage seriously be in this game as a Boon?
HELL NO. An effetc like this could easily be redesigned into various different working similar mechanics, without that the result needs to be for that a Boon.
The Effect of reflecting back incoming damage can easily be redesigned into either a Skill Effect, a Trait Effect, into a Rune Effect, or a Sigil Effect, it doesn’t need to be a Boon.

Same goes for Vigor, an totally obsolete Boon. It woudl be much better for the Game if the Effect of increasing Enduranre Regeneration would become part of general Class Balance through an Attribute that players need to increase, to slowly increase your Character#s Endurance Regeneration on an individual level, instead of doing this with a Boon, which instantly can pump up for everyone Endurance Regeneration directly by +100%. Thats NOT balanced!!
Balanced wold it be, if you have to put Points into your Attribute “Agility” to increase with this Dual Effect Attribute your Endurance Regeneration and Chance to receive Critical Hits from enemies as a counter high precision builds from enemies.
That would be freaking LOGICAL.

After reworking Boons, Conditions and CC, reworking the Attribute System would be the next needed step to refresh this game’s outdated combat system and to make out of it a good foundation, that can work as a good basic for new added Elite Specializations in the future, instead of adding Specs into an totally unprepared Game, thats still using old gameplay mechanics of 2012 that were never designed for all of this.

The Combat System of GW2 needs new fresh air, a new painting, its varnish to be renewed. If Anet is able to seriously get this done well, then the whole game will just profitate from this on a long run.
Sure, it means alot more work, than doing just only always permanently tiny number changes on skills and traits here and there, but these kind of reworks are just sometimes very necessary.

Same as much as you need to repaint and renew you home’s walls every few years with a new wallpaper, the same way we need to get renewed every few years the combat systems of a game, so that all of its elements are on a same level and harmonize again with each other like a ticking working clock.

But if you constantly change always only Skill Numbers and Trait Effects, then you have no Combat System harmony, you will end up some day only with a Combat System Chaos… especially when you add new elements to the mix like new Elite Specs and a different balancing to only Conditions, while totally ignoring Boons to get adjusted as well.

Personally I like the idea behind sub classes ~ quoted from Chris Whiteside

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Posted by: OriOri.8724

OriOri.8724

  • Cripple removing the ability to dodge would be OP. Sure, it would make fighting DD a kittenton easier, but its way too much. They already can barely move with cripple applied, why remove their ability to dodge as well? Just keep it as 50% reduction in moving speed.

On the dodge + endurance topic, I feel like it’s a key mechanism in fights, especially for DD indeed, yet there aren’t so many things that impair it. Weakness in its current state, and that’s all. I want some conditions to give a hard time to compulive dodgers. Hence, bleed and that new cripple effect. Another solution :

  • Cripple : additionnal effect : 50% chance to be knockdown while dodging.

If you want Cripple to inhibit dodges, then just make it so that a player doesn’t regenerate endurance while under the effect of cripple. As it stands though, players should never, ever be punished for trying to avoid an attack. But having it halt endurance regen still makes it incredibly dangerous for classes that rely on dodging (mainly DD and any mesmer running Deceptive Evasion and/or Ineptitude).

Other than this, I like the direction you want to take some of the conditions (burning being high damage but short duration, bleeding being low damage per stack, but stacking really quickly etc…), but unless ANet actively balances condis like that, then most of your proposed changes are still incredibly OP. As it stands now, baseline conditions don’t support your view of what they should be though (Ele’s signet of fire applies 6 seconds of burning on a 20 sec CD baseline, traited you can get 7 sec of burning on a 16 sec CD) which is why these ideas are overtuned. They would require a massive rework of nearly all skills that inflict conditions.

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Posted by: Illconceived Was Na.9781

Illconceived Was Na.9781

I don’t think it’s usually worth talking too much in depth about skill changes. ANet almost never balances the details based on our feedback. Where they do look for ideas/guidance is on the principles, the UI, the overall balance, and the overall impression.

Here’s what I understand the OP to be saying generally:

  • They’d prefer more direct correspondence between conditions and boons, e.g. if might increases power & condi damage, then there should be “enervate” which reduce them.
  • They’d prefer parallelism in conditions: each condi has a base effect and a per-tick effect.
  • They’d like to see player CC use defiance, instead of the current “wax on|wax off” mechanic.

I can’t see ANet ever going for the first two. Their games have a long tradition of avoiding strict 1:1 correspondence: water skills tend to heal/chill/slow/cripple, while fire skills tend to burn and DPS, buffs and anti-buffs aren’t always opposite, and so on. I’ve played games where things were parallel and the OP is right: those are easier to learn. But, as much as I like that predictability, they are also less interesting games, because things fitting into neat little boxes reduces the creative synergies that players can discover.

I don’t really have a strong opinion about defiance vs CC/stability. Defiance was a much-needed improvement for the AI’s capability and the UI, but I’m not really sure how well it would work for players, especially in PvP. It looks better on paper; I just can’t imagine it playing as dynamically and fun as it sounds. Of course, we would adapt and figure out how to stun each other more efficiently (after the inevitable whining and whingeing). I’m just not sure it would be worth the effort.

tl;dr the OP would probably get more traction discussing first principles rather than condition/trait details. Even so, if I understand the intent correctly, I don’t think ANet is likely to be interested and I’m not convinced that implementing the ideas would make for a better game.

John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”