Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I’ve got some questions about condition-mechanics and I don’t really find answers. The guys in my guild do use condition builds, but their answers weren’t much helpful, mapchat and lfg leaded to no result either :S.

I’ll use numbers to make it easier to answer to single questions, no need to quote everything.

1. When I do conditions on opponents I sometimes get countiously raining numbers, and sometimes I get single hits of numbers. To be honest, I mostly see the tiny numbers. But when I talk to other people, especially players who play on condition damage, they tell me about thousands and thousands of damage they do with a single tick. When occures which effect and why?

2. For example, we take poison.
2.1 Let’s say I have 1200 condition damage and another guy has 1500 conditon damage. I apply poison to the mob first, then he does. When his stack applies, who hurts the enemy?
2.2. The mob now has two stacks of poison, one from me and one from my friend. As far as I have read, with poison more stacks result in more damage. Let’s say a non-conditon build engineer comes by and puts another 2 stacks of poison on the mob, will this increase my damage?
2.3. How about the duration? If I put on the first stack of poison and the mob stays posioned for 5 minutes, will I deliver the entire 5 minutes condition damage or only for the time my original stack would have lasted if no other stack was applied by other people?
2.4. My current strategy, as a non-conditon player, fighting huge zergs of mobs is to lay out large condition fields they walk in to reach me. Do the coniditon-based members of my party benefit from this strategy, or do I weaken their attacks with it?

3. Can conditions land critical hits as well?

4. Condition removers.
4.1. I use conditon removers quite a lot and noticed something odd. When I have a damage and a movement condition applied and I use a cleanse, the movement conditions get removed the last. Is that really the case?
4.2. Recently I’ve noticed that my condition-removers sometimes miss. The ones I use on other people always land, but when I use one on myself I sometimes need two of them to remove a single conditon. Is the success rate really 100%?
4.3. Guardian: Thought about combining trooper runes with the trait Pure Voice. Would that really remove 2 conditions per shout? Or is that not allowed?
4.4. Some skills convert conditions into boons. How does that work with stacks? Do I get a stack for a stack or 1 boon for a stack of one condition?

5. Some classes have traits which allow increased direct damage once a mob has a certain condition applied. Does it matter how the mob got that conditon, let’s say who delivered it?

6.1. In some bossfights, worldboss if I remember correctly, I’ve seen a bleeding stack increase over 99 stacks. The icon number changed to the infinite sign or something like that. Can’t the counter display more than 99 stacks?
6.2. Wiki says 1500 possible stacks. Wiki is not always true and this actually seems a little high, especially if the maximum ammount I saw was only 99. Is that really true?

7. Weakness causes 50% reduction in endurance regeneraiton. I’ve actually seen some bosses using evade, like Kudu in SE, but those evades are timed with hp level and the kind of attack you use on him (AI). Do mobs have reduced endurance regeneraiton with weakness or is that effect for PvP only?

Oh, a little longer than I expected first. I have to admit I did not care about that topic much over the past years. Usually I play tank/support builds. The little ammount of damage I deal, I do with power and direct damage/crits. However, I want to make a character with more focus on damage. But before I start, I want to know how things work and what I have to keep in mind. Sorry for the long post.

Quite some questions and I bet most of them will already be answered if im done writing.
Regardless:
1)I dont really understand the question. All damaging conditions have certain values for base damage (without any condidamage) and scaling damage. So a certain condition will do a default damage with 0 condamage stat, and increase as you raise the stat.
2.1) From my understanding every tick you apply is unique to you. The mob suffers from 2 stacks of poison, but the game knows which one you applied and which one another player, they all tick and scale as if they were individual.
2.2) Answered above
2.3) I dont get what you are trying to say
2.4) If you dont play a condi build, every power based attack will deal more damage. The damaging conditions are simply not viable. Blind, weakness, cripple are ofc useful.
Depending on what fields you use they can however serve as combo fields for condi users.
3) No
4.1)Im not sure if skills have a priority to remove conditions, if they have so they will probably tend to remove damaging conditions first.
Could also be based on the skill concept.
The question would be: why does that kittening 16 stacks of confusion always get removed after the 1 stack of bleeding?!
4.2) Yes. if you get less than the tooltipped number of conditions removed, its either a bug or an issue with your eyesight.
4.3)Im pretty sure it would, if im not mistaken its even QandA’ed in either one of the entries in the wiki.
Logically: both are seperate effects, there is no reason why they should cancel out each other. Worst case the rune effect could be triggered first, preventing the convertion.
4.4) The entire stack of condition is consumed, but the amount of stacks does not change anything about the applied boon.
Due to the fact that every converting skill has a unique spreadsheet on the wiki whilst boon corruption is normalized, the convertion is probably unique for every convert source.
5)No
6.1) Yes
6.2)The idea was to increase the threshold for damaging conditions to an unwritten ‘unlimited’. A number that will never be reached so every condition gets to deal damage.
7)The evade moves from mobs are probably not dodges and therefore have no endurance cost.
Not every evade is a dodge.
However the second effect, fumble, can prove extremely strong in pvp and pve.

The raining numbers vs. big blob of damage comes down to your user interface settings. In the options there is a way to change the damage indicators for conditions. I can’t remember the exact settings, but one option uses the old version where little white numbers rain from your enemy. The newer setting tells you how much damage the sum of this little numbers is every second.

There’s no operational difference between the two, really. The fountain of little white numbers shows how much damage is done by each individual stack each second, while the big blob just shows the total damage for all the stacks of that particular condition. Conditions work the same either way.

Now, to answer the other questions:

2.1-2.3: Asrat got it.

2.4: This is technical. The short answer is they benefit. The long answer is, the more conditions you lay down, the harder it is for the enemy to cleanse them all. Condition cleansing skills tend to affect a limited number of conditions, so the more unique conditions you put on an enemy, the less likely and less frequently they’ll be able to cleanse a really damaging one. So while your conditions don’t do much damage, they do help other condition builds out. Also, necromancers with epidemic spread conditions using their condition damage stat, so they benefit from it as well.

The technical thing is, that unless you’re running a condition build, damaging conditions aren’t worth that much. They do very little damage compared to the power damage you can output. Disabling or inhibiting conditions like weakness, blind, cripple, and vulnerability are good no matter your build, but laying out as many conditions as possible on a non-condition build isn’t an effective strategy in the least. Your teammates would probably benefit better if you used power tactics on your power build.

3: Already answered

4: Well, this is one of those great debates among condition cleanses. The truth is, no one is sure. There are many camps of people:
FILO: First in, last out. The idea that only the most recent condition is cleansed, so if you apply a burn and then a cripple, the cripple will be cleansed.
FIFO: First in, first out. This is the opposite of the above.
Random: The order in which conditions are cleansed is random, and any trends are just anomalies in the RNG.
Global Hierarchy: This is the theory that each condition has a hidden priority ranking, and so the cleanses will always go in the order of this ranking. The ranking is unknown to players, and is not public knowledge.
Personally, I’m in the camp that each cleansing skill has its own set of priorities. That is, from one cleanse to another, there is no set order, but each individual cleanse does have an order. This is one of those subjects where there has been no explanation by the devs, and even if there was an explanation there’s a good chance it would be wrong. It is due to how GW2’s code is a gigantic knot of spaghetti.

4.2 Condition removal should never “miss”. There’s a chance that it appears the removal hasn’t worked because the enemy you are fighting applies conditions so rapidly that it looks like nothing happened.

Wow. Did not expect to get such detalied answers on the first entries. This answers my questions completely. Thank you very much, both of you!

This knowledge will help me a lot ^^.