Guild Wars 2

Okay, so I’m pretty solid against getting my face smashed in with weapons, it seems, but burning and poison totally kitten me up. Is there a stat I can focus on to try to reduce condition damage impact? Toughness doesn’t seem to do anything

rapthorne.7345:

Okay, so I’m pretty solid against getting my face smashed in with weapons, it seems, but burning and poison totally kitten me up. Is there a stat I can focus on to try to reduce condition damage impact? Toughness doesn’t seem to do anything

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition

melandru runes, op -40% food, any trait reducing condi duration ( dogged march, for instance) and there you go.
What’s your class? All of them have access to condi removal, even though some are more powerful than others?

As you have found out there are two main damage types. Getting bashed in the face and condition damage (of various types).
Toughness indeed only mitigates direct damage. Conditions bypass the toughness reduction direct damage gets and starts lowering your vitality immediately.
There are several defense strategies possible, depending on your class and play style you need to combine one or more to work for you.
1. Get stats to get a high vitality/healing. Higher vitality gives your more time to let the condition expire.
2. Get stats or use foods to reduce the condition duration/damage. This lowers the total damage the conditions apply.
3. Use condition removal skills. Depending on your class you will have access to one or more skills/traits that remove/cure conditions.

What combination you use also depends on what type of content you play (PvE is less conditions, PvP/WvW typically more).
Typically a combination of damage reduction food/stat and one or two skills that can remove conditions all together is a good starting point.

Vitality + skills that remove conditions.

Condition removal is really the best way to combat this. Or Condition —> boon skills, or condition transfer skills.

Some classes are better at it than others so keep that in mind. Guardians are especially good at condition removal if specced for it.

• High Vitality (HP) can “mitigate” going down due to condition (DoT) damage, but is really just a “bigger buffer/longer survival” solution.
• Judicious use of condition removal (if it’s available) can be a soltuion, but many classes and PvE enemies can simply pile on more and overwhelm any attempt to keep conditions off yourself.
• Confusion and Torment need to be recognized quickly (there are major tells on the screen) and require player inaction to mitigate the damage. That being said, inaction is BAD and these conditions should be removed with the highest priority.

Bottom line is that any enemies that are obviously stacking huge conditions on you quickly needs to DIE in a very timely fashion….DEAD enemies can’t hurt you (well at least once those conditions wear off).