Guild Wars 2

I don’t think the concept of having abilities that do their damage over time being a BAD thing. It’s, in most cases, no different than abilities that frontload their damage and provide different ways to dps. So why is this an issue for PvP?

Several reasons. Some of them are circumstantial, while others are unintended side effects of the debuff removal system. So let me explain why these all weave together to make some the most frustrating moments in sPvP:

The debuff system worked fine in PvE. It was DESIGNED for PvE from the beginning, so little surprise there. It removes debuffs in the order that you would optimally want them removed in most situations for PvE. The problems became more obvious during HoT: the system ignores intensity and duration. It removes in order of what it considers “problematic”. This means, if you have 900 stacks of poison lasting 5 minutes each and a stunned debuff, the system views the stun as worse. This is obviously problematic against monsters who apply a lot of damage through conditions and soft cc at the same time, but the massive problem becomes present in PvP. Because the system IGNORES severity, classes that can apply a wide range of different debuffs quickly and spread out their damage this way tend to be the problem makers. Why? Some classes struggle to get access to debuff removal, and this removal can sometimes cleanse the soft cc that isn’t even the thing killing them.
tl;dr: Condition Removal becomes mandatory, but not necessarily useful. It becomes less of a temporary answer and more of possible answer. It removes build diversity and forces specific play options.
Suggested Fix: All Utility skills need to remove at least 1 stack of conditions OR have vastly reduced cooldowns to make them worthwhile options to pick over condition removal.

Situational Problems. These are more class specific, but also extend to conditions as a whole and the current set of amulets available to players in sPvP that perpetuate this absurd issue.
Issue 1: No stat reduces the damage of conditions outside of food buffs or rune set effects. This means, unlike physical damage, condition damage will deal unmitigated damage to most targets. If we assume conditions and physical skills end with roughly the same damage over time as physical skills, this makes conditions the vastly better option.
Issue 2: Amulet Choice. I’ve watched metas rise and fall, but I can safely say HoTs is one of the most imbalanced in terms of stat choice. The range of amulets is small. Bunker Amulets are gone. Toughness is an increasingly rare stat. So why is this an issue? Expertise being combined with powerful, synergystic stats. Viper is the biggest offender of any amulet meta I have ever seen. The player gains physical damage, physical crit chance, condition damage and an increase to the duration of those conditions, which increases damage. This opens up builds that have both high physical burst AND high condition burst, which vastly narrows the amount of counterplay to these builds. A Warrior running 20 seconds of resistance, passive Ignore Pain AND active Ignore Pain can still be bursted down by a CONDITION Mesmer/Thief/Guard. Why? The Condi guard can drop one of the more powerful DH power traps in and their natural burn rotation will force the enemy to either avoid taking massive damage from the trap and run from the guard, or try and fight a class based around massive survival and burst damage in their rings of death. Much like the Cele Amulet meta, the Viper amulet simply needs to be removed. It gives too much power with too little drawback. It allows players to exploit the unmitigated condition damage AND use power skills to make their bursts far worse than they should be. I don’t mind a class that builds for different forms of damage. However, those damage types should be EXCLUSIVE. If you want to use conditions as your primary source of damage, you should be restricted to using ONLY conditions for your damage.
Issue 3: Another post has addressed this, but simultaneous abilities have also led to the current condition-focused meta in sPvP. Being able to both stab an enemy for a large chunk of physical damage while they’re sitting in a field that pulses damaging conditions WHILE applying conditions from your attacks and other sources of damage all at ONCE is making this feel worse.
Issue 4: Condition Chronomancer and Condition Daredevil. These two stand out above the rest, at least for me, as the most frustrating classes to fight. Can they be killed? Sure. So can a bunker elementalist with a constant 25 stacks of might and a cele amulet. That doesn’t make it FUN. Chronomancer is a waiting game. You have to WAIT for them to stop blocking/being invulnerable/evading to hit them. It’s like whack-a-mole, except the entire time their illusions and phantasms are unloading conditions all over your face. If you turn to ignore the mesmer and kill their illusions, the mesmer can simply shatter them, doing a high spike of physical damage AND condition damage. The Thief? You’ll be lucky to hit it. The Condition Thief will apply a wide range of conditions, making removal difficult, while evading the entire time. With the recent changes to sword, it is now nigh-impossible to kite a thief.

Tl;Dr? Viper Amulet needs to be removed. Changes to the Condition Cleanse mechanics (at LEAST in PvP) and various slight nerfs to classes would be wonderful. Having Chronomancer’s block stop after a few hits, etc. I would love to hear some of your own (reasonable) ideas for changes.

Adding more condition cleanse only means conditions will have to spike people down faster in order to do any damage, that is to say, for condition builds generally to be viable.

Rather, if you don’t like condition damage spiking people down, you should call for less cleanse and a reduction in condition damage to match.

Also, I will point out that you are incorrect that condition damage cannot be reduced outside of duration reduction buffs on food/runes. Cleanse is, effectively, a variable duration reduction. The variable is when a cleanse is activated, what conditions it can target and the remaining duration of said conditions when it removes them early. If you cancel 10k worth on condition damage after it does 2k damage you have effectively reduced the duration by 80%.

I think condition builds are too strong and can too easily apply a ton of damage.

I agree that there aren’t enough amulets to choose from in spvp.

I think they should make certain amulets available per class.
For example, not every amulet is OPed on every class. I believe this would increase more diversity instead of just banning a certain amulet that is too strong on one class from an entire game mode.

Hot Boy.7138:

I think they should make certain amulets available per class.
For example, not every amulet is OPed on every class. I believe this would increase more diversity instead of just banning a certain amulet that is too strong on one class from an entire game mode.

I like this idea. If done well, it could address the issues of some classes having easy access to both types of damage on one ability (Mesmer Shatters, for example)

Since when is viper meta or even used in PvP? (PS: unlike cele, viper offeres zero defensive stats, which is a major drawback)

And why would you demand changes to a mechanic (condi remove) if you don’t even know how it actually works?

I agree with most of this, but I do not think that Viper amulet should be removed.
It has a great offensive stats, but lacks any survivability/ defensive stats that it can be one shot even by a bunker/ healer class. Vipers die before they even manage to make use of those stats, thats why Viper amulet is actually not even used at all.

Is there even a meta spvp build atm that uses Viper?

I mean, I play a Viper Reaper in WvW and the damage it does it pretty insane but simply trying to replicate the build in sPvP and equipping the Viper amulet doesn’t even bring me close to the damage I normally do while still having all the disadvantages of Viper, aka being able to spiked down and deleted in a matter of seconds.

So Viper in sPvP for my builds? No thanks, I’d rather equip the Carrion amulet all day. Much more survivablity and since people in team settings like to spam cleanses out the whaazo, expertise stat on Viper seems mostly useless as well. Rather have a bunch of vitality to scale up my health and Reaper shroud hp.

I don’t mind conditions, since I always spec to have good cleansing uptime, but I agree condifarter builds are somewhat annoying when you eat every condis of the world with 2 attacks. Most annoying though is poison spam + condi covers + high direct damage, gotta get rid of it first before healing. That kind of build doesn’t even have to spec condi damage, and I can’t think of a way to remove poison specifically.

Every build has its drawbacks and counterplays, but what feels imbalanced is that not every class can afford the luxury to equip a dps amulet.

The solution to this is simple. Conditions need to become the attrition mechanic they were always meant to be.

Problem
Blanket condition removal is too frequent (i.e Remove 3 Conditions vs Removes Burning and Poison or Remove Immobilize). This causes classes to have to spam massive conditions at once, and forces the devs to increase condition application and damage to compensate for frequencies of cleansing. This leads condition damage to basically function as burst. Basically you need to split second reaction use condi cleanse to get burn off you before you go down in seconds (making it almost no different then a dodge). Which is completely against the idea of a DoT class/Attrition class. And the back and forth balance between buffing conditions and then buffing cleanses is exacerbating the problem and limiting utility options and build diversity.

Solution:
To really get this stuff in line, they need to drastically reduce the amount of blanket cleansing and add more specific condition removal skills, making certain classes better at removing certain conditions would be ideal. (ie A heal that removes burning only, or a utility that specifically removes immobilize and crippled instead of “Remove One Condition”). This way they can lower the amount of condition damage and stacks available to put out on someone, while increasing their duration substaintially. This way conditions would ramp up in a fight ultimately being your demise. Not being hit with 15 conditions on an immediate engagement. This could be coupled by removing resistance as a boon and give it to us as a defensive stat. This way you can tune conditions much more effectively, because it makes them less binary and more gradual as they were always intended.

PvE Concequences:
Just as each player has a base amount of each stat, they could start with higher base resistances (based on class perhaps) and leave PvE enemies to have minimal or no resistance to allow for conditions to ramp up harder on PvE mobs to not allow condition damage in raids etc to fall too far behind. This would be the harder balance to reach and may require trickier mechanics of maybe condition damage windows, etc.

Honestly I feel MMO’s should always balance from a PvP perspective to keep classes unique and on par with each other then design and balance PvE accordingly.

Conditions are removed in order they were applied. Last on → First off.
Stop spreading false information.