Guild Wars 2

I think the key problem behind the current condi damage debate is what should conditions be. People fight but all constructive argument is prevented by a disagreement on the core problem. I see basically 2 possibilities:

1) conditions are an alternative to direct damage. They just represent a way to have variations in builds and gameplay

2) conditions are meant to be a way to keep pressure while having a defensive gameplay.

I believe, the game was balanced around 2) initially but tried to evolve towards 1) which leaves us in this current non-satisfactory situation.

I personally see arguments for both:
1) some people just like conditions. They are very thematic, torment and confusion are super mesmery, fear is necromancery, burning is what a fire elementalist or guardian do… They exist in both burst type (burning, confusion, fear) or real DoT (bleeding). Some classes are almost designed around them (the necro is not best at applying condi, but particularly good at manipulating them). They also introduce variety in tanking since they ignore toughness. + they can now be played in PvE where defensive stats are usually useless (hopefully HoT will change that)
2) conditions are often paired with defensive attunement (bleeding for earth ele), defensive weapons (staff or torch for mesmer), defensive stats (rabid, dire…). They take time to reach their full damage, so you’d better survive in the meanwhile.

The reason why it is so important to choose a side is that that has a large impact on how to balance them.
To balance 1), you need to make sure that conditions also need 3 stats to reach their full strength (I suggest condition damage, precision and condition duration, allowing conditions to “crit” on application). They should be balanced around medium armor to give a bit more damage than direct damage to make up for the possibility to cleanse them. Burst conditions should be on cooldown so that you can’t apply them all the time while bleeding can be even on AA, thus having the same difference as direct damage with high burst which you can counter.
To balance 2) reduce significantly the burst possibility, pure conditions should be weaker than berserker but with higher survivability. The condition cap should still be like it currently is (because a cap is unfair and stupid) but the damage from conditions will anyway be low.

I personally like nr1 better. I love conditions, I would like more variations in both PvE and PvP and conditions are one way to do just that. But then many balances issue have to be fixed (in particular, the 3-stats system).

What do you think? If we could at least agree on the premises, we could send a stronger signal to ANet.

Sir you deserve that upvote! That’s a good review of the current situation and I could not said it better!

Conditions are not ment to burst, and if the do low damage needing a to long buildup and can be cleansed the are not good in teamfighs. I think its between 1+2.

In PvP, I agree with most of what you said.

In PvE, if you make condi builds weaker than zerker, but tankier, everyone will run zerker because this game is largely very easy. Tank isn’t entirely neccessary for a large chunk of its content. It’ll just be more efficient to run berserker, and that’s what everyone will go back to.

@Excludee
So you prefer solution 1 then. So do I

@Wolfric
But if they are not meant to burst BUT bad at long buildup, do you just want conditions to be pointless?

I think that in PVE, the players already don’t go for Dire stats. They indeed go for 3 offensive stats even if the damage bonus from the 2 minor stats apart from condition damage has less impact than precision/ferocity for a zerker. Thus if they balance things out on those stats, I think it would be awesome.

Well but that’s the thing, PvE does not care so much of those stats so if they could get 3 “real” offensive stats, they will be happy. On the other hand, PvP uses defensive while keeping high condition damage which is unfair. So both want the same thing really: 3 offensive condi stats, so that if you get more defense, you loose some offense, but if you want to be a condi glass-cannon you can.

Silverkey.2078:

Well but that’s the thing, PvE does not care so much of those stats so if they could get 3 “real” offensive stats, they will be happy. On the other hand, PvP uses defensive while keeping high condition damage which is unfair. So both want the same thing really: 3 offensive condi stats, so that if you get more defense, you loose some offense, but if you want to be a condi glass-cannon you can.

Condition damage, Condition duration, Precision
already are…

They are not. Precision is needed in some builds to proc conditions, but by far not all. So in most cases, the precision does not add significant bonus to condition damage. And condition duration is there, but in almost no rune nor stats-prefix (PvP amulet or PvE armors).
Also, if you want to implement this 3 stats systems, you need to scale down conditions. So basically, you would need those 3 states to reach a high damage. So make conditions shorter so that we need to invest in condition duration and make them less damaging so that we need them to crit.
It’s technically a nerf to conditions, but without preventing you to use them efficiently as long as you actually invest in them.

Basically, the PVE side would not truly be affected with the ideas proposed here. This change is mostly oriented to PvP-WvW. The point is to make condition damage benefits more from the other stats and not just on +condition damage (since + condition duration doesn’t come from gear).

As OP said, make condi damage slightly lower when running on +condition damage only, allow them to crit and maybe give a condi duration stats that allow them to stay longer (stack more, since they last longer = more dps overall). The overall damage would stay the same, but those who wanna keep a strong condition damage would need to sacrifice vitality and toughness, like a zerker build needs to do at the moment.

Another idea could be to also scale condition with ferocity instead of condition duration. A set of offensive stats for a condition build could become Condition damage (major) + precision (minor) and ferocity (minor). So the duration of the condition basically stays the same.

The point would be to level things up a bit where a person geared in Dire would not be able to condi burst someone while he himself becomes truly hard to burst due to all those defensive stats bonus.

You could build yourself as a glass canon condi like a zerker does while being on a condition build. Condition burst and power burst would both exist.

Sorry for the long post, here is a dancing kirby! <(^^<) ^(^^)^ (>^_^)>

If it is too much stress on server to make conditions crit. The formula for condition damage could simply include precision and ferocity as + damage on condition.

For bleeding it could become : 0.05 * (Condition Damage + precision + ferocity) + 0.5 * Level + 2.5 (and then scale it so it becomes a strong rival to zerker, just in a different form → the longer it is applied the stronger it becomes).

It should have stayed what it was. New trait system is kinda ok, but so much stuff is broken it’s unbelievable. It’s going to take a long time before this game is even remotely viable again as a eSport.

As I mentioned, I would see instead a crit on application (makes more sense physically + better for server). So you normally hit 200 damage/stack for 5s, but on a critical, it would be 300 damage/stack for 5s. Since condi damage would be on par with physical damage, it would be as hard as if you crit during a direct damage hit.

Silverkey.2078:

As I mentioned, I would see instead a crit on application (makes more sense physically + better for server). So you normally hit 200 damage/stack for 5s, but on a critical, it would be 300 damage/stack for 5s. Since condi damage would be on par with physical damage, it would be as hard as if you crit during a direct damage hit.

Ohhhh! Yes! I saw it like giving the possibility for each condition tick to crit… silly me.
Your idea is even better

I’ve always felt like conditions should be more towards #2

conditions shouldn’t be doing so much, but should be there slowly taking you down, but really difficult remove.

conditions should rely on both dmg and duration, but not as much dmg as it should be now, and condition removal shouldn’t be removing X condition or X amount of conditions, but x duration or X percent of duration that way the small pressure of condis will stay there slowly taking you down

not sure if that really made sense

Conditions should be my brother. He’s full of them :-/

Anyways, I think conditions are weird at the moment. Needs major reworking for the people that can come up with 19k+ damage hits as shown in one of Wooden Potatoes recent videos. That’s insane damage!

u all make it seem like direct wasen’t buffed newsflash u can 1 shot players with it now