Guild Wars 2

I’d suggest A-Net looks into a differnt approach, and leaves conditions for now as they are and tries the following

Healing could be implemented as a defence versus conditions like
Toughness is implemented as a defnece versus direct damage

It sounds logical, and a direct reduction of condition damage could be achieved?
ppl could spec for a build being tanky or condi resistant or both.

You choose:
power and maybe critical damage or condition damage
additional vitality or toughness and/or healing

You make it. you deal with the consequences. T

his is called balancing a game. instead of max power, precision, ferocity cause nobody cares about the rest of the stats. I actually love this.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

I’d suggest A-Net looks into a differnt approach, and leaves conditions for now as they are and tries the following

Healing could be implemented as a defence versus conditions like
Toughness is implemented as a defnece versus direct damage

It sounds logical, and a direct reduction of condition damage could be achieved?
ppl could spec for a build being tanky or condi resistant or both.

then everyone would spec in longbow ranger until they fix it again
ppl r always going to play the best build if u bring bunkers enemies bring condis

It absolutely disgusts me that ANET targeted Mesmer for an insta nerf. Finally I start to have some success and the first thing you do is crush it.

I fully expected that ANET will nerf Mesmer back to uselessness within days and destroy confusion. STOP NERFING MESMER.

I have have heard devs repeatedly complain about the zerk meta. The strong condi is an excellent solution. Let it ride.

Please stop hounding Mesmer, I’m finally having some fun with it after waiting for years.

Ithilwen.1529:

It absolutely disgusts me that ANET targeted Mesmer for an insta nerf. Finally I start to have some success and the first thing you do is crush it.

I fully expected that ANET will nerf Mesmer back to uselessness within days and destroy confusion. STOP NERFING MESMER.

I have have heard devs repeatedly complain about the zerk meta. The strong condi is an excellent solution. Let it ride.

Please stop hounding Mesmer, I’m finally having some fun with it after waiting for years.

This post is all sorts of misinformed I don’t even know how to respond except for

LOL.

I don’t normally get on to complain, heck, I rarely so, but I gotta say…

GG ANET, you guys royal kitten up the balance, and I cant even begin to fathom how long its gonna take you to -de-kittenhis. This long and this much work on balance for this?

and people thought the game wasnt balanced prior to the patch

insta death condi bombs, perma CCs, even more aoe spam, everything is nuking everything else, vulnerability making conditions stupidly OP, I can go on…

TrustyBoulder.4305:

Abnaxis.4593:

JonPeters.5630:

Let’s be clear, this version of condition stacking and condi builds being viable in all games modes is a large part of our goal. We just want to make sure we don’t create imbalances that actually make the game less fun. Don’t expect huge balance swings, but rather our balance goal has always been to make more small adjustments.

Since you’re re-balancing conditions, is there any talk about doing something with burning to make it at least a little unique? Right now it’s exactly like bleed, except harder-hitting. There’s no tactical difference.

I liked the idea one other poster had on a different thread—make burning deal more damage to stationary targets, like torment with the formulas flipped. That gives burning a niche, and you can probably just copy-paste the torment code and move some numbers around.

Oh god anything but that. Burning is literally Condition Guardian’s only damage. Why would you think making it a niche skill would make any sense? It’s our bread and butter. If it doesn’t work under normal conditions, then the ENTIRE BUILD doesn’t work under normal conditions.

Maybe ‘niche’ is the wrong word. What I want, is for burning have a special place outside of “a bleed that hits harder.” As it stands right now, ANet could replace every burn with 3 stacks of bleed and there would be no difference. That’s boring.

In fact, more than any other problem with conditions, this is the real issue. Conditions are boring. One of the things I like about GW2 is that “every profession can do anything,” with an implicit “…but they all do it differently.” If you want to maximize survivability, you are going to play a LOT differently if you are a thief, versus a mesmer, versus a warrior. Same goes for maximizing damage—all those “+% damage” traits trigger on different conditions, like having buffs or HP levels or in certain attunements, that encourages certain playstyles and makes the professions play uniquely, even if they can all deal out roughly equal damage.

Conditions don’t have that. Almost without variance, every single condition build uses 1-5 skills to dole out stacks. Every single condi build trait is “X% chance for condi on crit,” that you automatically get from a minor trait from choosing a specialization. Every single class has access to all but one or two of the damaging conditions, so they always dish out condi soup with no regard needed for whether a particular condition is good for the situation where it’s applied.

If I had my dream, this is what would happen with conditions:

• Change the mechanics of burning. Maybe not the “more damage while holding still,” but I’m favorable toward “melt the flesh from my enemies if I properly control the engagement” so I’m still biased toward that one. The idea is, you wipe the floor with your enemy if you land big stacks followed by some CC.
• Greatly reduce the number of conditions available to each class. Since it’s possible for all conditions to be viable in PvE now you can get away with this. Note this doesn’t mean to reduce the STACKS, just the VARIETY—instead of 3 stacks each of bleeding, burning, poison, and torment in the skills, consolidate to 9 stacks of bleeding and 3 of torment.
• Take the boring “X% chance to proc” traits out of the minor traits, and move one of the major traits in to replace them. Adjust proc sigils (earth, blight, etc) with lower cooldowns so people can still build a crit-proc condi build with them if they want.
• Replace the displaced major traits with INTERESTING condi traits. Add 100 Condition damage for 3 seconds after a successful block/dodge/distortion. Extra 300 condition damage while dancing (OH DEAR GOD THAT ASURA NECRO IS DOING THE ROBOT! THE HUMANITY!). Maybe repurpose some of the “+X% damage” traits to add condi damage instead, especially in the condi-focused specializations. Bear in mind, though, that since condition damage happens over time, you can add bonuses from things that aren’t attacks and still give players a boost to damage.
• Give us more choices to boost condi duration.
• Balance after you make the fixes, because you know the fixes are going to play hell with the balanace when they first roll out.
• For the love of Zommoros, refund hero points so people can start for scratch if you’re going to overhaul the skills/traits system.

All of this would require an overhaul that makes the current patch look like a minor balance update, so I’m not holding my breath. It’s nice to hope, though…

JonPeters.5630:

Cheshire.8761:

Are you going to address how you forced characters to train into builds using their hero points without their consent? :o

Why not. Basically there were two options, both with a large number of edge cases.

1) We wipe your stuff and let you respec as you see fit. Because so much had changed this was our initial plan. Here are problems it ran into.

• People return from a long hiatus and don’t remember what they were running
• People log in and the first thing they have to do before they can play is learn both the new unlocking system and the new build system.

2) We look at what you had equipped and unlock the necessary skills and traits to re-equip you. Here were some discussions points around that:

• We might give you stuff you don’t want
• at least this won’t matter for lvl 80s if we make all the unlocks possible by just reaching lvl 80.

There is a third option which I’m sure you will bring up.
3) let players choose
Here are some reasons we did not go with that:

• Its twice the work
• Its actually more than twice the work because it would have required temporarily saving both options until you choose which is more complex technical work.
• People who were unlikely to understand or want to explore the new system were going to be potentially more confused by the choice.

At the end of the day we wanted to ship this build so we had to decide. Based on instinct we erred on the side of helping people we thought would be more overwhelmed by the opposite choice, and I would make that choice again because it has less edge cases, impacts more expert users, and leans towards over unlocking for free to benefit most of the edge cases anyway.

Hope this info helps you understand our process a bit more.

Thanks,

Jon

About no1.
Please,stop treating your players as if they were Hodor.
People are smart if you give them the chance to be.
You can’t adjust the game for the lowest possible denominator
and not at least give alternates for the 99.99% rest of the players.
I believe you overestimate the complexity of the game and
underestimate the capacity of players to get familiarized with
new systems.
People log in and they have to spend 5 minutes to read the
Trait descriptions and choose Traits and that is a problem?
Also a Traits/Skill Training UI tutorial video takes 15 minutes to
make and 0 hours to code.

Abnaxis.4593:

TrustyBoulder.4305:

Abnaxis.4593:

I liked the idea one other poster had on a different thread—make burning deal more damage to stationary targets, like torment with the formulas flipped. That gives burning a niche, and you can probably just copy-paste the torment code and move some numbers around.

Oh god anything but that. Burning is literally Condition Guardian’s only damage. Why would you think making it a niche skill would make any sense? It’s our bread and butter. If it doesn’t work under normal conditions, then the ENTIRE BUILD doesn’t work under normal conditions.

Maybe ‘niche’ is the wrong word. What I want, is for burning have a special place outside of “a bleed that hits harder.” As it stands right now, ANet could replace every burn with 3 stacks of bleed and there would be no difference. That’s boring.

In fact, more than any other problem with conditions, this is the real issue. Conditions are boring. One of the things I like about GW2 is that “every profession can do anything,” with an implicit “…but they all do it differently.” If you want to maximize survivability, you are going to play a LOT differently if you are a thief, versus a mesmer, versus a warrior. Same goes for maximizing damage—all those “+% damage” traits trigger on different conditions, like having buffs or HP levels or in certain attunements, that encourages certain playstyles and makes the professions play uniquely, even if they can all deal out roughly equal damage.

Conditions don’t have that. Almost without variance, every single condition build uses 1-5 skills to dole out stacks. _ Every single condi build trait is “X% chance for condi on crit,” that you automatically get from a minor trait from choosing a specialization._ _ Every single class has access to all but one or two of the damaging conditions, so they always dish out condi soup with no regard needed for whether a particular condition is good for the situation where it’s applied._

If I had my dream, this is what would happen with conditions:

• Change the mechanics of burning. Maybe not the “more damage while holding still,” but I’m favorable toward “melt the flesh from my enemies if I properly control the engagement” so I’m still biased toward that one. The idea is, you wipe the floor with your enemy if you land big stacks followed by some CC.
• Greatly reduce the number of conditions available to each class. Since it’s possible for all conditions to be viable in PvE now you can get away with this. Note this doesn’t mean to reduce the STACKS, just the VARIETY—instead of 3 stacks each of bleeding, burning, poison, and torment in the skills, consolidate to 9 stacks of bleeding and 3 of torment.
• Take the boring “X% chance to proc” traits out of the minor traits, and move one of the major traits in to replace them. Adjust proc sigils (earth, blight, etc) with lower cooldowns so people can still build a crit-proc condi build with them if they want.
• Replace the displaced major traits with INTERESTING condi traits. Add 100 Condition damage for 3 seconds after a successful block/dodge/distortion. Extra 300 condition damage while dancing (OH DEAR GOD THAT ASURA NECRO IS DOING THE ROBOT! THE HUMANITY!). Maybe repurpose some of the “+X% damage” traits to add condi damage instead, especially in the condi-focused specializations. Bear in mind, though, that since condition damage happens over time, you can add bonuses from things that aren’t attacks and still give players a boost to damage.
• Give us more choices to boost condi duration.
• Balance after you make the fixes, because you know the fixes are going to play hell with the balanace when they first roll out.
• For the love of Zommoros, refund hero points so people can start for scratch if you’re going to overhaul the skills/traits system.

All of this would require an overhaul that makes the current patch look like a minor balance update, so I’m not holding my breath. It’s nice to hope, though…

The only guard minor that causes condi at all is new, and its 33% chance to burn from SYMBOLS, which only 3 guard wep sets have, none of which are part of the normal fire build, unless you’re going for block spam, which is somewhat viable I guess.
And if we’re specifically talking damaging conditions, I ONLY have burning. One condition. There is no condi soup here. If you stop my ONE condition, I have no damage.
Can agree though that there seems to be a habit of making traits only affect direct damage despite them being in the middle of condi trait lines, and occasionally some of the opposite as well. And the lack of condition duration is strange considering they decided to make it available as a sat in the first place, although I generally prefer increased applications over duration anyway, especially now with stacking intensity.

I just saw this video from current WvW situation where relatively small group (guardians?) burn everyone and everything. :-)
And not me but author of that video named it massive bug…
Is it something about buff sharing between people or related to OP burning?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVWMfHu_dWw

Last year when I played ESO they did some “balancing” and things like one Dark Knight player with vampirism solo killing 30+ enemies become possible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyZsIDSSGV4
Many players including me quit Eso after that. (last nail in the coffin)

It literally even says in the video description
“Published on Jun 24, 2015
server far shiverpeaks we can sharing all the buffs for all the ppl”
And if you listen to them talking they’re stating some of the ridiculous buff durations that its causing. It probably IS making burning numbers stupid high, because now they’re actually USABLE IN THE FIRST PLACE. but the PROBLEM in that video isnt burn damage, its the buffs. Which the guy recording is GS/Shouts, which wouldn’t have anything to do with high fire damage anyway.

Aenaos.8160:

JonPeters.5630:

Cheshire.8761:

Are you going to address how you forced characters to train into builds using their hero points without their consent? :o

Why not. Basically there were two options, both with a large number of edge cases.

1) We wipe your stuff and let you respec as you see fit. Because so much had changed this was our initial plan. Here are problems it ran into.

• People return from a long hiatus and don’t remember what they were running
• People log in and the first thing they have to do before they can play is learn both the new unlocking system and the new build system.

2) We look at what you had equipped and unlock the necessary skills and traits to re-equip you. Here were some discussions points around that:

• We might give you stuff you don’t want
• at least this won’t matter for lvl 80s if we make all the unlocks possible by just reaching lvl 80.

There is a third option which I’m sure you will bring up.
3) let players choose
Here are some reasons we did not go with that:

• Its twice the work
• Its actually more than twice the work because it would have required temporarily saving both options until you choose which is more complex technical work.
• People who were unlikely to understand or want to explore the new system were going to be potentially more confused by the choice.

At the end of the day we wanted to ship this build so we had to decide. Based on instinct we erred on the side of helping people we thought would be more overwhelmed by the opposite choice, and I would make that choice again because it has less edge cases, impacts more expert users, and leans towards over unlocking for free to benefit most of the edge cases anyway.

Hope this info helps you understand our process a bit more.

Thanks,

Jon

About no1.
Please,stop treating your players as if they were Hodor.
People are smart if you give them the chance to be.
You can’t adjust the game for the lowest possible denominator
and not at least give alternates for the 99.99% rest of the players.
I believe you overestimate the complexity of the game and
underestimate the capacity of players to get familiarized with
new systems.
People log in and they have to spend 5 minutes to read the
Trait descriptions and choose Traits and that is a problem?
Also a Traits/Skill Training UI tutorial video takes 15 minutes to
make and 0 hours to code.

Yeah, I will say Anet seems to have a real problem getting this.

TrustyBoulder.4305:

Abnaxis.4593:

snip

The only guard minor that causes condi at all is new, and its 33% chance to burn from SYMBOLS, which only 3 guard wep sets have, none of which are part of the normal fire build, unless you’re going for block spam, which is somewhat viable I guess.
And if we’re specifically talking damaging conditions, I ONLY have burning. One condition. There is no condi soup here. If you stop my ONE condition, I have no damage.
Can agree though that there seems to be a habit of making traits only affect direct damage despite them being in the middle of condi trait lines, and occasionally some of the opposite as well. And the lack of condition duration is strange considering they decided to make it available as a sat in the first place, although I generally prefer increased applications over duration anyway, especially now with stacking intensity.

Guardians don’t have a trait, because they automatically get passive burn applications with VoJ. Who needs 33% chance to burn on crit when you automatically get a burn every 5 attacks? (3 if traited? Haven’t loaded my guard alt since patch)

The problem with passive condi procs on minor traits is that conditions aren’t an interesting build choice, they come automatically lumped in on specializations, and on guardians it’s more automatic. That being said, guardians at least have some neat major traits they can choose to synergize with VoJ, so at least there’s that for build diversity…

And again, to make myself clear—I don’t want to nerf burning. In fact, I want it to keep doing the massive damage it’s at currently or more—if you play right. I want guardians who focus on burns to play differently than necros who focus on bleeds, and right now the only difference is that burn hasn’t been nerfed into the dirt yet. Once it is the two classes will be virtually the same as far as condi damage goes.

I think a lot of this is sour grapes. The zerk gravy train has been running for a long time. It’s refreshing as hell to finally be a factor as a condi Mesmer after years of struggling with being over nerfed.

This is something I’ve waited a very long time to say to the zerk warriors and rangers; LEARN TO PLAY.

JonPeters.5630:

Cheshire.8761:

Are you going to address how you forced characters to train into builds using their hero points without their consent? :o

Why not. Basically there were two options, both with a large number of edge cases.

1) We wipe your stuff and let you respec as you see fit. Because so much had changed this was our initial plan. Here are problems it ran into.

• People return from a long hiatus and don’t remember what they were running
• People log in and the first thing they have to do before they can play is learn both the new unlocking system and the new build system.

2) We look at what you had equipped and unlock the necessary skills and traits to re-equip you. Here were some discussions points around that:

• We might give you stuff you don’t want
• at least this won’t matter for lvl 80s if we make all the unlocks possible by just reaching lvl 80.

There is a third option which I’m sure you will bring up.
3) let players choose
Here are some reasons we did not go with that:

• Its twice the work
• Its actually more than twice the work because it would have required temporarily saving both options until you choose which is more complex technical work.
• People who were unlikely to understand or want to explore the new system were going to be potentially more confused by the choice.

At the end of the day we wanted to ship this build so we had to decide. Based on instinct we erred on the side of helping people we thought would be more overwhelmed by the opposite choice, and I would make that choice again because it has less edge cases, impacts more expert users, and leans towards over unlocking for free to benefit most of the edge cases anyway.

Hope this info helps you understand our process a bit more.

Thanks,

Jon

Mail a soulbound retrainer tome consumable to all pre-existing characters. If you want to be really fancy, spend five minutes coding it so they only go to sub-80 characters.

Problem solved.

Abnaxis.4593:

TrustyBoulder.4305:

Abnaxis.4593:

snip

The only guard minor that causes condi at all is new, and its 33% chance to burn from SYMBOLS, which only 3 guard wep sets have, none of which are part of the normal fire build, unless you’re going for block spam, which is somewhat viable I guess.
And if we’re specifically talking damaging conditions, I ONLY have burning. One condition. There is no condi soup here. If you stop my ONE condition, I have no damage.
Can agree though that there seems to be a habit of making traits only affect direct damage despite them being in the middle of condi trait lines, and occasionally some of the opposite as well. And the lack of condition duration is strange considering they decided to make it available as a sat in the first place, although I generally prefer increased applications over duration anyway, especially now with stacking intensity.

Guardians don’t have a trait, because they automatically get passive burn applications with VoJ. Who needs 33% chance to burn on crit when you automatically get a burn every 5 attacks? (3 if traited? Haven’t loaded my guard alt since patch)

The problem with condi procs on minor traits is that conditions aren’t an interesting build choice, they come automatically lump in on specializations, and on guardians it’s more automatic. That being said, guardians at least have some neat major traits they can choose to synergize with VoJ, so at least there’s that for build diversity…

And again, to make myself clear—I don’t want to nerf burning. In fact, I want it to keep doing the massive damage it’s at currently or more—if you play right. I want guardians who focus on burns to play differently than necros who focus on bleeds, and right now the only difference is that burn hasn’t been nerfed into the dirt yet. Once it is the two classes will be virtually the same as far as condi damage goes.

Hm. I see your point about the minor traits at least. Some of the interesting choices were always majors though, like Burn on Block. Actually sorta made Mace/Focus have a nice damage component along with utility tools, which comboed with ANOTHER trait that gave aegis on block for more party support. But thats probably a niche build most people wont run.
The only thing I might suggest is that instead of making BURN the conditional one, as it IS powerful right now, why not let it get a SLIGHT nerf, so that when stacked properly is still is a powerful condition on its own, and make BLEED the conditional one? Significantly more classes have it, and I assume no one else is STUCK with it like guardian is with fire, so it wouldn’t significantly hamper any classes if they end up hating the mechanic. So the classes that you’re saying play with condi soup all day wouldnt even notice, while the ones that do have a new mechanic to play with.
I mostly say this because lots of guardian abilties, the best ones anyway, do not have any significant ENEMY CONTROL components like the ones you’re saying should be comboed. AKA immobilize/stun/etc to keep them from moving. Guards rely on blinds and aegis mostly. Scepter has ONE immobilize. And we have a few fields to nullify/reflect projectiles. If you make burn reliant on control, which most guard builds have fairly little of, you run the risk of making 90% of guardian builds unusable with condition damage entirely.

Well I know that:

Warriors now do insane burst dmg + (rampage 7k fatalities)
Necros now do insane dmg + (lich form 9k fatality)
Mesmers now do insane burst dmg (12-15k)
Thieves now do insane burst dmg
—————————-
Guardians now do good/insane burst dmg
Rangers now do good/insane burst dmg
——————————————————
Elementalists have insane sustain condi/dmg/heal
Engineers have insane sustain condi/dmg/heal
———————————————————

Something needs to be done. Me as casual/hardcore pvp-er after 2,3 figths cant feel my fingers because you need to act quick now 1 mistake and you are gone.
Some builds are way to overpowered. I don’t know how you will fix this but you must do something.
————————————————————

Ah, sorry, forgot to specify. Let bleed be the one changed so as to have an excuse to make it significantly more damaging as it is. Not JUST make it conditional to make it even harder. Use it as a justification of making the skill do enough damage that people will actually be able to run it successfully.

Someone should organize a skilled berserker group in the Silverwastes to burn down Vinewrath with largely DPS only.

And then they should organize a skilled condition group to burn down the Vinewrath with primarily condis.

Invite an ArenaNet dev who could take metrics in real time to come up with data to compare between the two.

Maybe make berserker a little stronger to catch up to condis, and make all bosses and mobs more durable and intelligent.

Or barring that, you know, just data between the two DPS forms would be good.

If Anet is willing for such an idea, what better way to get the community involved in the balance process?

CETheLucid.3964:

I think the patch is fantastic. Conditions are awesome right now, maybe too awesome (that delicious burning). It needs to be toned down, yes. But I would advice delicacy.

Tone it down, but it is a frail and hard to define line between too strong and too weak. It’s just a tad too strong right now. Carefully inch it more towards that happy middle line.

Conditions are really viable now. I’d hate to see that nerfed too hard to the point where they become obscure again against the mighty zerker.

(There are probably bigger guilds than my own to do such a thing, but…

If anyone from Anet wants too, I can totally get in touch with my guild leader and see about organizing such an event.

Anet could also already be doing that and this is a moot point, so eh. lol)

TrustyBoulder.4305:

Abnaxis.4593:

snip

Hm. I see your point about the minor traits at least. Some of the interesting choices were always majors though, like Burn on Block. Actually sorta made Mace/Focus have a nice damage component along with utility tools, which comboed with ANOTHER trait that gave aegis on block for more party support. But thats probably a niche build most people wont run.
The only thing I might suggest is that instead of making BURN the conditional one, as it IS powerful right now, why not let it get a SLIGHT nerf, so that when stacked properly is still is a powerful condition on its own, and make BLEED the conditional one? Significantly more classes have it, and I assume no one else is STUCK with it like guardian is with fire, so it wouldn’t significantly hamper any classes if they end up hating the mechanic. So the classes that you’re saying play with condi soup all day wouldnt even notice, while the ones that do have a new mechanic to play with.
I mostly say this because lots of guardian abilties, the best ones anyway, do not have any significant ENEMY CONTROL components like the ones you’re saying should be comboed. AKA immobilize/stun/etc to keep them from moving. Guards rely on blinds and aegis mostly. Scepter has ONE immobilize. And we have a few fields to nullify/reflect projectiles. If you make burn reliant on control, which most guard builds have fairly little of, you run the risk of making 90% of guardian builds unusable with condition damage entirely.

Most of the condi output from necros is bleed (though really, I would prefer they get consolidated into doing more torment instead of bleed as my wish-list bullet because I think torment fits them well). I would be cool with fiddling with the bleed mechanics that if it meant they get differentiated from burn.

Hrm…my guardian alt isn’t level 80, and I haven’t had the heart to load her to see how messed up her traits are. I thought I remembered there being more “ward” skills that you might be able to use to pin down a foe, but hammer’s the only one that has those. I also thought GS 5 immobilized, but I’m remembering wrong there too.

OK, so maybe the immobilize idea doesn’t work so well for guardian. Still, there might be other implementations that work—maybe burns do more damage while in combat, but quickly dissipate when out of combat? I’m just spit-balling here.

Condis are fine except for the burning,if the nerfhammer hits the condis we are back to the zerker meta again.
Pls dont.

Also,new amulets,1200 power?
Holy hell had to play hide and seek with all the oneshot thieves whole day.

Ithilwen.1529:

I think a lot of this is sour grapes. The zerk gravy train has been running for a long time. It’s refreshing as hell to finally be a factor as a condi Mesmer after years of struggling with being over nerfed.

This is something I’ve waited a very long time to say to the zerk warriors and rangers; LEARN TO PLAY.

I say the same exact thing to most dire condition builds who claim they’re weak when they’re statistically the strongest builds in the game and have been in WvW, with similarly-durable setups achieving similar damage : durability : ease of use measures in the past.

I’m sorry that scepter AA PU stealth mesmer in dire gear wasn’t a tier 1 PvE boss kill build. I’m sorry the mesmer’s weakness has come from inherent design flaws with the formats it’s weak in and bugs which have created a lot of problematic issues.

But there’s zero justification behind this ridiculous condi build damage coming out of builds that are quite literally face-roll easy. I have played and won fights using my face on the keyboard with a variety of dire condi builds even before the patch. For the damage to be so absurd as it is now is cringe-worthy, and anyone claiming that the damage is justified “because berserker gear was ‘meta’ for too long” is frankly clueless and only looking at the game through a competition-level PvE dungeon speed clear scope, which only a small minority of active players participate in. Those trying to justify the current state of conditions are strictly a terrible and selfish players with no knowledge or willingness to look at the rest of the game or consider any other players’ perspectives or the absolutely game-breaking issues caused by the changes.

No. Don’t fix conditions.

This is honestly the most fun I’ve had with necros in a long, long time. The meta changing from “Zerker Or Bust” to “Zerker or Rampager/Sinister” is amazing.

Just give the other classes equal fixes and you’ll be fine. Let Necromancers (and Engineers and Rangers, I guess…) keep their niche. And let salty people stay salty

[edit] Okay, I do want to make my thoughts on all this more clear.

As far as PvE goes (because I’m casul when it comes to everything else), I love that Zerker isn’t the end-all-be-all prefix anymore. Conditions MATTER now. Now if only you would just delete Defiant/Unshakeable from the game… Just do some minor number tweaks, have a testing server with a beta testing team, and roll out the changes that seem most appropriate.

I don’t want to live again, suffering as a non-Power-based class in a Power-class meta. Pls no.

JonPeters.5630:

Just getting these out there so we know we are all in agreement:

1) Conditions seem a bit strong
2) World bosses are currently too easy
3) There are some bugged skills and traits
4) There are some overpowered builds

We won’t fix it all at once but these are four large topics we are talking about. In the meantime keep the feedback and bug reports coming, and I guess farm up some world bosses. We are dedicating time towards these issues and are intending to resolve them as quickly as possible. As we have said before, the live environment differs too greatly from anything we can reliably simulate internally so big changes like today’s build will cause things to sometimes change at an alarming rateTM.

Thanks for your patience,

Jon

Please tell me you are doing something about the total imbalance in WvW

as someone who started on thief almost 3 years ago, and build conditions almost from day 1, I’d like to say that I am massively enjoying the current balance of things.

for the first time in a very long time, I can go out roaming with friends, and I can reasonably kill anything they can. I find myself contributing to world-bosses, instead of worrying if my non-condition damage will be enough to get me a contribution. for the first time since I started playing, my main is viable – and I’d prefer not to lose that.

I understand burning is a little out of hand (the scalings – on level and CD – are pretty high) but I don’t think that other conditions need too much fixing, it’s true that my bleeds/poisons do a reasonable amount of damage, but only because I built all I could to make that so.

JonPeters.5630:

Let’s be clear, this version of condition stacking and condi builds being viable in all games modes is a large part of our goal. We just want to make sure we don’t create imbalances that actually make the game less fun. Don’t expect huge balance swings, but rather our balance goal has always been to make more small adjustments.

So like ummmm reducing a kits damage by 28%….what happened to the small adjustments?
I mean its been only a day or so…you couldve started at 10% and go on from there…

Keep the condition as it is. I’m actually having a good time playing shatter Mesmer for once.

You people who are “zerk” built with no defense need to realize that it was a crutch all along and learn to play for real.

Condi is unreal at this point. No idea how to fix it but wow am I enjoying the massive death!

In wvw it’s just burst burst burst there’s no reason to play it anymore.
I don’t care about pve but wvw is broken.

5) condition necros are weak

It seems that everything that could be done was done in order to nerf condition necros, especially corruption necros. While other condition classes are enjoying a " golden age" of condi damage the necro is struggling. Dont nerf condis across the board without addressing necros, you’re only going to beat a horse thats already dead.

Who really thought being able to kill yourself in plague was a good idea?
Extra conditions from corruptions are only good on paper, not in a multi-player environment, im amazed that slipped through.

Having bleed and poison stack on you while in plague is ridiculous, no way to cleanse it, no way to transfer it, its a literal suicide button, Thanks anet, thanks. /sarcasm off

While I enjoy having a permanent 25 stack of might and nearly all other boons at world bosses, I will reiterate that burning is a massive condition that should be toned down quite a bit. While in the train, I noticed that the health would go down smoothly for a couple seconds and then its HP would just drop by 5%, few more seconds of smooth and then another drop. We were eating bosses so fast we had to wait over 10 minutes at most bosses just for the pre event time.

Jungle wurm almost reminded me of the mesmer skill that made it kill itself all those months ago.
I noticed also that the downscaling hit me pretty hard, there was a drop into the megadestroyer tunnels that I usually take that leaves me with around 3500hp, this time it killed me. Other than my necro’s HP dropping by several thousand, I was doing about 30% more direct damage than usual as well and I’m not running a zerk build.

Oh, and the dirt textures in LA are hovering above the ground in places. fyi

TrustyBoulder.4305:

Ah, sorry, forgot to specify. Let bleed be the one changed so as to have an excuse to make it significantly more damaging as it is. Not JUST make it conditional to make it even harder. Use it as a justification of making the skill do enough damage that people will actually be able to run it successfully.

An idea for a change to bleed that I have:

Maybe Anet could make it act a little like a bleeding wound acts in real life. In real life bleeding wounds that are stopped immediately are not that big a deal. But you let the bleeding go on longer it gets progressively worse (logarithmically,), plus you get weaker after a little bit if it goes on long enough, plus it’s harder to stop the longer it goes.

So in game terms something like this: dmg per tick increases X% for each additional tick+after X amt of ticks the victim gets the weakness condition+after X amt of ticks it has a X% chance to come back immediately (at the first dmg amt, like the process starting all over).

It sounds like it would be a bear to program. But that would differentiate it from the flat X damage each tick that burning does.

Meadfreek.6789:

TrustyBoulder.4305:

Ah, sorry, forgot to specify. Let bleed be the one changed so as to have an excuse to make it significantly more damaging as it is. Not JUST make it conditional to make it even harder. Use it as a justification of making the skill do enough damage that people will actually be able to run it successfully.

An idea for a change to bleed that I have:

Maybe Anet could make it act a little like a bleeding wound acts in real life. In real life bleeding wounds that are stopped immediately are not that big a deal. But you let the bleeding go on longer it gets progressively worse (logarithmically,), plus you get weaker after a little bit if it goes on long enough, plus it’s harder to stop the longer it goes.

So in game terms something like this: dmg per tick increases X% for each additional tick+after X amt of ticks the victim gets the weakness condition+after X amt of ticks it has a X% chance to come back immediately (at the first dmg amt, like the process starting all over).

It sounds like it would be a bear to program. But that would differentiate it from the flat X damage each tick that burning does.

Something else to consider would be to take a deep bleeding approach where each stack of bleed reflects a severity of cut. As more stacks are applied the “cut” worsens so bleeding damage scales up. The idea is that bleed would do +X% more damage for certain thresholds of stacks. so 1-5 stacks may be 20% below current damage and then 5-10 may be 15%, so on and so forth in 5% increments where it then starts gaining +Y%. This would make condition duration and weapon speed more even relevant to the condition meta, and would add more thoughtful active application and counter play.

Aenaos.8160:

About no1.
Please,stop treating your players as if they were Hodor.
People are smart if you give them the chance to be.
You can’t adjust the game for the lowest possible denominator
and not at least give alternates for the 99.99% rest of the players.
I believe you overestimate the complexity of the game and
underestimate the capacity of players to get familiarized with
new systems.
People log in and they have to spend 5 minutes to read the
Trait descriptions and choose Traits and that is a problem?
Also a Traits/Skill Training UI tutorial video takes 15 minutes to
make and 0 hours to code.

Hodor? Hodor….

I wish all the issues that ever come up could be addressed how Jon has done it here. I really like the explanations and plans of what is going to happen. I think Jon’s my favorite now.

The PvE enemies have been to easy for ages now, even prior to this patch. There’s no reason the stacking meta ever had to exist in the first place, and it’s easy to deal with. Improve enemy AI so they flee from AoE fields, and do not mob on stacked players. The moment a player team stacks, enemies should scatter and swap to AoEs and ranged attacks. Give them the team dynamics and synergy we saw in GW1 Winds of Change. That was actually challenging.

Let ANet figure out how to balance the condi dmg and stop stressing them to change it again. A lot of people were complaining about how useless condi-dmg was before and now that we finally got what we wished for the rageing just starts all over again… annoying.

And about PvE: You want challenging content? Then go for it, but don’t expect white mobs or even champions in the normal map enviroment to be something special, they never will be due to the simplistic skill system gw2 has. Instead go for fractals, story achievements or liadri the next time she’s aviable – and i bet the majority of you won’t ask for challenging content again.

I must agree on the condition damage changes. While I love it, when not used against me, it’s pretty obvious something’s off when it melts some World Bosses in less than thirty seconds. I hate to use the word ‘nerf’, but anyone with eyes can see there’s an issue.

This patch really shook up the game in a good way and now condition users are not trivialised and penalised in large scale events. The specialisations while needing tweaking are a big step in a good direction to provide meaningful choices instead of having multiple borderline useless traits.

Well done Arena Net, keep up the hard work.

As for the rest, everyone is going on about nerfing conditions, burning is a bit excessive and does need toning down, I agree. However bleeds and condition builds are nowhere near as strong as the direct damage counterparts.

My ele was and has been hitting for about (usually over) 10K direct damage a second for well over a year or two, condition users outside of those with ridiculous burns couldn’t even hope to come close to that.

I hope Anet does instead look at applications of burn and just put ICDs and limits on just how much people can generate, that or alter it to be medium damage, medium duration so the damage isn’t over 2s but 4s.

Also quickness stacking up to 2 minutes and the many, many, many guards using that elite, can’t possibly be compounding the issue.

I know it’s going to be a rough few weeks but I hope the adjustments are made carefully, the core of the patch and the intent is great and I would hate to see that thrown away.

Clyan.1593:

Let ANet figure out how to balance the condi dmg and stop stressing them to change it again. A lot of people were complaining about how useless condi-dmg was before and now that we finally got what we wished for the rageing just starts all over again… annoying.

And about PvE: You want challenging content? Then go for it, but don’t expect white mobs or even champions in the normal map enviroment to be something special, they never will be due to the simplistic skill system gw2 has. Instead go for fractals, story achievements or liadri the next time she’s aviable – and i bet the majority of you won’t ask for challenging content again.

When things changes, human nature is always trying to resist changes. Because people don’t like to get out of their comfort zone. And these is why people are raging about it.

Anyways, you will see that when ANET nerf condi-dmg, everyone will go back to the old meta just because it will still be the meta that does the most efficient dmg and fastest to kill bosses.

So, there is no point in investing in condi-dmg equipment as ANET will nerf it to kingdom come.

The reason is that balancing physical dmg vs condi-dmg is not easy. How would you define what is the best balanced between them? Just like now, condi-dmg is taking down world boss like they are Elite mods. The Vets and elites almost got 1hit ko by condi-dmg. And the whites? I don’t even know what to say about the whites, as my ele was plowing through them like they are ambient creatures.

A balance it needed, but which one? Buff mobs or Nerf the condi-dmg? ANET is having a headache right now about this, I hope they don’t break the condi-dmg thing too much, if they did, then there is no point in this patch actually. They might as well just revert back to the old system and everyone will be happy, Well, at least the old meta people will be happy to go about their business while the condi people will rage on some more as usual.

Sigh…

SirDrygan.1823:

When things changes, human nature is always trying to resist changes. Because people don’t like to get out of their comfort zone. And these is why people are raging about it.

Ok, you see the conditions at world bosses or whereever – would you like to have these condis used on you?
I don’t think so but it is happening in wvw as wvw has got the same rules like pve, justthat they forget about that game mode most of the time. And that is the issue – I don’t care if you guys melt world bosses in seconds.

Conditions are finallyt working… People have been running without paying attention to conditions for 3 years now.

In WvW zergs stay conditionless. shout removes warhorns and specialised skills remove conditions instantly.
In PvE people finally see how much damage was cheated away by limiting stacks to 25 ONLY. I have not seen stacks go above 500 though..

In PvP there might be problems but I am happy I can play WvW and Pv E now with my hybrids/condition builds and get a tag.

WvW roaming seems like it has become a condi meta, BUT it was ALREADY a condi meta. it just became more dangerous.

People who have roamed before know PU mesmers thieves and other condition builds especially grouped with 1 or 2 AOE condi cleansing CC-ers were really dangerous.

Nothing changed except maybe ppl got sinister instead of rampager now.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

Nothing changed except maybe ppl got sinister instead of rampager now.

A lot changed – you should play some wvw.

Jana.6831:

SirDrygan.1823:

When things changes, human nature is always trying to resist changes. Because people don’t like to get out of their comfort zone. And these is why people are raging about it.

Ok, you see the conditions at world bosses or whereever – would you like to have these condis used on you?
I don’t think so but it is happening in wvw as wvw has got the same rules like pve, justthat they forget about that game mode most of the time. And that is the issue – I don’t care if you guys melt world bosses in seconds.

That’s a problem for ANET to solve. There are the ones that forgotten about it. Or I should say ANET did not expect it to be this OP in a PvP/WvW environment. My guess is they were to fixated on the PvE side, they forgot about the PvP/WvW side. Let them figure this kitten out.

On the question on the condis used on me. Pre-patch, I also got like 5 to 6 condis hits on my guardian in a split second. I was down before I could do anything. That’s in a zerg vs 2 huge zerg thingy. So, I know about it. Now I can imagine it would take like less than a split second for you to be down before you can even press your first skills. I can imagine that.

Just me saying.

Kudos to Anet for admitting things aren’t working well and good luck trying to fix things.

In the long run, things are going to get tougher to balance. There are now 4 more traits than before, so there’s more possible things that can go wrong. And it will get tougher with the new elite specializations.

With 3 games modes (PvE, PvP and WvW) and with more things introduced over time, balancing things will become more difficult as time moves on. But perhaps one should have foreseen that imbalances would occur, as more damage/disabling traits were introduced compared with little in terms of defense.

No doubt 3 million purchasers can outthink your small crew, but better feedback needs be solicited especially in the absence of a test server. The changes to the necromancer heal/plague form is fidgeting with something that few people complained about – never mind that necromancers don’t excel in any game mode aside from WvW zerging. You have enough on your plate to balance. Don’t go looking for more problems by coming up with solutions to non-existent problems.

SirDrygan.1823:

Jana.6831:

SirDrygan.1823:

When things changes, human nature is always trying to resist changes. Because people don’t like to get out of their comfort zone. And these is why people are raging about it.

Ok, you see the conditions at world bosses or whereever – would you like to have these condis used on you?
I don’t think so but it is happening in wvw as wvw has got the same rules like pve, justthat they forget about that game mode most of the time. And that is the issue – I don’t care if you guys melt world bosses in seconds.

That’s a problem for ANET to solve. There are the ones that forgotten about it. Or I should say ANET did not expect it to be this OP in a PvP/WvW environment. My guess is they were to fixated on the PvE side, they forgot about the PvP/WvW side. Let them figure this kitten out.

On the question on the condis used on me. Pre-patch, I also got like 5 to 6 condis hits on my guardian in a split second. I was down before I could do anything. That’s in a zerg vs 2 huge zerg thingy. So, I know about it. Now I can imagine it would take like less than a split second for you to be down before you can even press your first skills. I can imagine that.

Just me saying.

That was my answer to your “people don’t like changes, that’s why they complain” – I complain because the game just isn’t fun like this. I know that condis already were “OP” but anet obviously didn’t, so let’s buff condis, no matter what.

How about this, for a bleed-alternate: Get rid of bleed entirely. Add a new condition called Curse.

The way curse works, is it does massive damage, more than burning even. However, every time the curse victim lands an attack, they are healed for every stack of curse on them. It’s like the opposite of confusion, except you have to actually connect with a skill use, not just use skills.

It doesn’t make sense to replace all bleeds with curse, but ANet should be able to distribute all the other damaging condis in where bleed is to make them make sense.

Obviously, necro would be very curse-heavy, but it wouldn’t be exclusive to them. If Plague self-inflicted curse, it would be really interesting—it’s a suicide button, unless you are actively enveloping your opponents.

Personally loving the changes. My warrior build using strength, defense and tactics became a lot more fun now

Ardenwolfe.8590:

I must agree on the condition damage changes. While I love it, when not used against me, it’s pretty obvious something’s off when it melts some World Bosses in less than thirty seconds. I hate to use the word ‘nerf’, but anyone with eyes can see there’s an issue.

And the reason for that isn’t as much that Condition Damage is “off”. Think about it for three years the world bosses have been scaled for groups of players where only the non condition builds really did significant sustained damage. Now condition builds are actually dishing out equivalent damage of course you are going to see them die significantly faster.

Imagine if only 25 Melee characters could hit a world boss at any given time for a specific weapon type. Because that is effectively what conditions where before the patch.

Again I stress that of course bosses are going to go down faster not because conditions are broken but because after three years of being hobbled 100% of the people showing up to world bosses are now able to contribute.

i didnt read the whole thread, maybe its mentioned before, but skills dont fire correctly.
when you press for instance skill 2, you see it starting, and then nothing.
Skill is still charged, and didnt fire. I have this on my necro, and warrior, on all skills.
What i notice that this is mostly at events with a lot of people.

I never had this before.

Pls don’t nerf condys in PvE
They are atmost “usable” now. You can make the scaling to CondiDmg even stronger and even not linear, so at <700CD condys don’t tick almost no dmg.
700-1600 they do the same as now
and 1600++ even more than now