Guild Wars 2

With the changes of conditions back in June 23, it’s quite clear how disproportionate Burning is damage wise compared to other conditions and especially compared to Bleeds, another flat damage condition.

It definitely needs to be adjusted lower, no doubt. However I’ve had other thoughts in mind to balance it.

• Have every condition apply it’s own special effect, each with a different purpose, and never just flat damage.*

So Poison reduces healing by 33%, and Chill reduces recharge by 66% and movement speed.

Couldn’t we do the same for burning and bleeding?

For one, reduce the Burning damage so that it is on par with Bleeding. However Burning has the ability to “spread”.
For example, If I have X amount of burning stacks, and I’m standing next to an ally the ally next to me would receive 1 stack of burning. And If I’m still next to my ally, burning would spread onto me and now I would have X+1 amount of burning stacks, and so on and so forth.

This would only work and be balanced if current burning damage was reduced to be on par with bleeding.
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In effect, this would encourage stacked enemies to separate, and to tactically deal damage to multiple enemies if positioned correctly. Adding positional play into mind, and balance burning damage without it feeling like it’s a “nerf”

And for Bleeding, it would increase/multiply the duration of your previous stack of bleed when you apply the next stack:

So if I put one stack of bleed for five seconds, and by the time I place the next stack of bleed my previous bleed stack, which would be at two seconds, would now be at four seconds.
And if I apply another stack of bleed, my 1st stack at one second will now be at two seconds, and the 2nd stack at four seconds would now be at eight.

This is a great way and fun functionality for people who want a skillful way to maintain and increase there condition duration (for Bleeds) mid-combat.

All in all, each condition would have a unique application for each situation. Burning would be great for dealing with groups of enemies stacked together, and in PvP tactically make your enemies want to separate from each other to prevent them from stacking.
And bleeding would be great maintaining condition stacks on one target and good for single target pressure.

This would be the list of all conditions and their unique functionality:

Bleeding- Deals damage over time and increases the duration of the previous stack by 50% when the next stack of bleed is applied.

Burning- Deals damage over time (now equal to Bleeds), now spreads to other enemies within 70 radius(so it would spread only if they stand RIGHT next to each other, or anyplace closer). Causing nearby enemies to receive 1 stack of burning with the same duration amount.

(so if an enemy has 25 stacks of burning for 20s, the enemy next to him would receive 1 stack of burning for 20s. And if they are still standing next to each other, the first enemy would now have 26 stacks of burning for X amount of seconds)
Includes an internal cooldown of 1 second

and now if you include the full list of conditions : https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition

We’ll have each condition that has a unique effect, and all have similar and balanced damage.

Because right now, Burning just does “Deals damage every second; stacks intensity.” just like bleeds, but burn does soo much its just OP without any creative function in mind.

I hope Anet takes this Condition Philosophy into consideration.

Yeah I’m sick of condi builds in general, there is nothing competitive about them. Seems like they always had a problem balancing conditions in this game.

You would think with Arena net trying so hard to make their MMO a Esport they would focus on balancing blatantly broken mechanics like over tuned burns or cele stat only having 1 or 2 classes who can reap the benefits of like Eles.

I like the idea of burning being able to spread. It could be similar to how the disease condition worked in GW1. It had the same health degen as poison did, and disease functioned in a manner that it spread to the same species, so if a player applied disease to an enemy player in PvP, it could spread to teammates as well (human was the only playable race in GW1). But if you applied disease to a random creature, it would not spread to your allies because of the species lock.

If disease were in GW2, it would be a great incentive for players to have characters of each race so help reduce the chance of spreading disease to your teammates. The majority of player characters are human, so yeah maybe this could help for the other races to see more play?

As far as bleeding goes, yeah it definitely feels very underwhelming compared to burning. My condi ranger and condi warrior both are able to apply very good bleeding stacks on foes, but my burning ele outdamages them without a problem. I haven’t even tried flamethrower engi yet. So yeah, maybe a slight damage reduction to burning while adding the spread effect would be really neat.

Also, ArenaNet, please bring back disease, exhaustion and deep wound from GW1 while we’re on the topic of conditions. They each had great effects and could be game changers if used properly. Deep wound, in particular, was a significant game changer.

Deep wound:
For those of you who missed out on the kittening amazeballs that is GW1 (I know some of you devs missed out), deep wound would reduce the target’s maximum health by 20% and would reduce incoming healing by 20%. Additionally, 20% of their health bar would be greyed out for the duration to show the reduction in max health. In GW2 you could make it so it only stacked duration.

It also made for some interesting situations with healing where if you applied deep wound to a foe with very low health (without dealing damage), their health would be in the negative but they will not die, and an incoming heal would kill them because it would cause their health to go up to 0. The only healing that would not kill them was health regeneration (not numerical heals per second, it functioned more like how your health regenerates when you exit combat).

Seriously, GW1’s health regeneration/degeneration mechanics were brilliant. Heals per second suck.

Deep wound usually only last a couple of seconds, but it was amazing for setting up spikes in PvP and PvE. Imagine being able to use this against foes with tequatlillion health.

Exhaustion
Exhaustion from GW1 could also have a use in GW2 where it would grey out 20% of your endurance bar, so you could only dodge once even at full endurance and would have to wait for an additional 20% of endurance regen to dodge again. This is purely to prevent a player from being able to dodge twice consecutively even at full endurance. I don’t know, just a thought.

In GW1 it reduced your energy pool capacity bit by bit (for you nonners, in GW1 all characters had an energy pool and all skills had an energy cost, so 0 energy means you can’t use any skills other than auto-attack). There were mesmer hexes that made it so a spell caster would give themselves exhaustion with each spell they cast, so a spell caster would reduce their max energy pool by a lot if they carelessly spammed spells, effectively shutting them down.

Strategy and player positioning: GW1 had it, GW2 not as much.

I heard they are to improve the damage done by bleeds and reduce the damage by burning a little. can anyone confirm this?

I’m all for balancing, but I really hope any changes made don’t severely weaken conditions again.

This idea really makes sense, burning and bleeding should have their unique effects instead of just being a superior/inferior version of each other