Greetings there, as the title states, I’d like to open up a discussion, basically theory-crafting about the conditions.
I want to retain the expectations that GW2, so far, haven’t fully met in this post and therefore, shall use them as an argument from a rather subjective point of view, but even though it is subjective, I feel that many people feel about the current state of Condition Wars 2.
To claim it off the bat, rework the damaging conditions. Removal would be too harsh and shouldn’t be like that. Here is my idea of rework. I come from Asheron’s Call, Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, Warhammer and many alike, and I have experienced what good combat system does and what bad combat system does. Currently, in GW2, combat system is just perfect, no RNG, but there are damaging conditions, namely bleeding, poison and the hated burning. With all of those games combined, I can tell you what is most pleasant thing to watch from a spectator point of view and how the game is more awesome.
The effects of the spells need to be toned down, that’s for sure. Now about reworking the damaging conditions.
When I (and my friends) were reading about the game, we figured that conditions would be like debuffs, and there is actually a class that is in charge of debuffs (namely Necromancers), while other classes can provide a lower amount of debuffs as well. The problem occurred when the debuffs became a primary damage source. Just today, I played with a couple of friends (new to the game due to 2-day free-trial) and they were just frustrated while playing it. They would check what did they die from, and it’s usually 17k ticks of bleeding/burning in a matter of seconds, they asked me how to prevent that, and quite frankly, there are very few ways to prevent that after you dodge a couple of things beforehand.
I shall take the perfect example of the combat system that worked in a game called Dark Age of Camelot. So-called debuffs, were what they are, debuffs. You could have conditions on you, bleeding, poison, namely DoTs (which is basically what conditions are) but their damage was so minor, it was often ignored (80-150-280, if you were really specced into dots, ticks every 2 seconds on a 2.5k health pool for 12 seconds), bleeding damage was maybe 40 per tick. What this meant was that the actual damage, the damaging ability was everyone’s main damage. That’s how Guild Wars 2 should have been. You could have avoided the entire “remove the conditions or be able to inflict more than your opponent” meta.
If ANet reworked condition damaging abilities to be just an addition to the primary damaging ability (like Backstab causing Bleeding for some minor damage, let’s just say 80 per tick over the course of 10 seconds with 1.5 seconds in between the ticks). That’s just complementary damage to your already main damaging ability. This does not cause confusion amongst the new players. If a player sees “oh, he killed me with Backstab? well I better avoid that next time”.
How would then this pair onto the pro scene? Where everyone should know what to dodge and when not to dodge. Most of the “high damage” skills have some sort of an animation beforehand (this also complements my next point) and players should react by dodging it. However, the player who is using the high damage skill can always interrupt his own spell-cast in other to juke out a dodge from the enemy player and he can use it again in 4-5 seconds (if I remember correctly).