Guild Wars 2

Hello. I myself played all those condition damage burst builds and I do think that condition damage needs a revamp.
The problem is that it can either be useless, if the enemy has enough condition cleanses or incredibily powerful if he hasn’t enough.

Case 1: enough condi removals
This is the case in which you are fighting against a warrior with both lyssa, berserker stance, signet of stamina and cleansing ire, or AR engineers. Well, congratulations: your build has just become useless like if you were fighting against a bunker (while for example warriors can still be very very DPS focused even with that setup).

Case 2: NOT enough condi removals
Well, you are now, to quote the game, a “God walking amongst mere mortals”. You can burst someone down in very few seconds without even requiring to much effort! Spam conditions on your targe -> wait for them to die.

As you can see, conditions are either too much powerful while not requiring skill at all (I remember when I used to play a HGH engineer, it was incredibly easy to melt opponents with AoE condition based skills with no possibilty for my enemy to counter that) or not enough effective. While power damage can be still avoided by, for example, dodging particular skills or moving out of the melee/ranged range, condition damage, once taken, cannot be removed and will kill you wether you outplay your opponent by clever positioning/dodging or not.
At the same time, if someone has enough condition removals, conditions become completely useless. While in order to avoid dying because of raw power attacks you have to trait somewhat bunkerish, to not to die because of conditions you just have to carry enough condition removals (and this can be argued a lot since some classes, like thieves/mesmers, simply cannot bring enough).

“Fine, Frenk, and now what?”
Legit question. I said that condition damage is both OP and UP, what nonsense is this? The problem is that in the case when “condition damage is OP”, it does not require skill and it’s very kind of a passive play, and instead when it’s the other case (UP), it can be too much easily countered with passive play like berserker stance/AR/Diamond skin.

Do you guys think Condition damage needs a revamp or am I alone in thinking this?

There is a third option: a build might have enough condition removal, but still need to rely on dodging/blocking/evading/blinding to survive and not just attempt to remove everything.

Unfortunately, the forums breed a lot of misconceptions, especially concerning strategy/gameplay. I feel it might be a big contributor on why most players in hotjoin/solo queue/wvw are…not very good. Relying on condition removal to beat a condition spec is like relying on toughness to beat a glass cannon. Of course, toughness is helpful, but you’re only going to withstand so many heartseekers before you go down. Condition removal is the same way: it’s going to slow down the condition damage you take but it will never keep you alive indefinitely. Toughness will slow down the damage you take but never remove it.

I think that condition dmg needs boost. Didn’t get much loot in orr today. Lame power spammers make too much damage.

You can tell by how some of the skills are designed in this game that it was never intended to have this amount of Condition pressure so easily applied.

Look at Singet of Agility for example. That removes one Condition on a 30 second cooldown.

ANet needed to buff all heals with some Condition removal just because of all the condition spam going around. It’s clearly broken.

Imo what they need to do:

1. Remove Agony – The addition of Agony is what pushed conditions over the top.
2. Make conditions moves better telegraphed. I can’t tell the difference between all the Necro spams. They all use the same casting animations. How am I supposed to dodge anything accurately?
3. Reduce the amount of full-condition clears and passive condition removals. Wiping conditions should be a tactical decision, not something you do passively.
4. Remove both the +40% and -40% Condition Duration food or nerf it down to +/-20%.
5. Reconsider some of the passive/auto-attack condition-applications.

Overall the changes should nerf both Conditions and their hard-counters down to a more reasonable level. Applying Conditions as well as removing them should be a tactical decision, not something done passively by the game.

Frenk.5917:

Do you guys think Condition damage needs a revamp or am I alone in thinking this?

Everyone has since beta.
Except Anet.

I posted in other threads the specifics

All in all, pure condi builds can’t work well in GW2.
Making them work would take waaaay too many tweaks to weapon skills, cleanses and conditions for Anet to be able to manage it in the next 10 years.

Right now, condition attacks aren’t setup to allow depth, yada, yada, I talked allot more about that in the other post.
If Anet ever wants conditions to not be mindless, changes have to happen in how amulets, condi effects and stat scaling are setup (pushing away from pure ‘condi for dmg’ specs and towards ‘condi for situational debuffs’ and ‘power/crit/exc mainly for dmg’).

But, Anet has yet to make a good large change to GW2, so it really isn’t going to happen.

This post looks bad to me. Even in the unlikely event that you know what you are talking about – they will never change anything this fundamental. It takes then 6 months to “reduce sun spirit passive by 1 second” and you expect big reworks.

Will never happen. This game is broken and skilless till an expansion which is never coming,.