Guild Wars 2

How are you supposed to deal with them? As a melee (Warrior), I have a couple condition removals, but honestly, what’s the point in using them? I remove my conditions, then they’re immediately back on me. If there is more than one condition class fighting against you, you have no real shot of winning. They DoT up and kite until you get close, then either use an escape/root/stun and put some more distance in between you. You will die eventually, not because you have played incorrectly, not because they are doing obscene amounts of damage, but because when you get hit with their bleeds/burns 100+ times, you can’t do anything about it and that combined 30k+ in conditions is beyond what you can deal with.

So what am I, or any melee for that matter, supposed to do in order to fight condition builds? Also, before anyone asks, I’m not a hundred blades warrior. I run hammer/axe/mace.

Vitality helps against conditions since they do the same damage regardless of your toughness. Also consider using runes of the soldiers since you’re a warrior and can benefit from the 6th rune which makes your shouts remove conditions.

As a warrior you’re going to have a very hard time doing anything to a decent condi spammer 1v1. Engies will keep you perma blinded, rangers will kite you around forever, and necros you can actually kill sometimes so long as you live through well of darkness and keep chill off of yourself.

Soldier runes help, but ultimately not that much because your condi removal won’t be sustainable in relation to their condi application rate over an extended period of time.

Gap closers help – you’ll probably have an easier time with a greatsword than a hammer. Use a shield w/ missile deflection – it helps, especially against engineers if you time it right.

Ultimately though it’s always going to be an uphill battle.

I think the main issues with the suggestions thus far are:

1.) I already have 29k health and am running soldier runes. Stacking any more defense will mean kittening my dps more than it already is.

2.) Switching to a Great Sword isn’t going to help except for movement. Hundred Blades is arguably garbage and is only really a gimmick/noob spec. Hammer provides utility with knockback, stun, AoE slow and vulnerability application.

I think the real issue at hand is that the removal of conditions is worthless. Once they’re removed, they’re instantly reapplied. After your removals are popped, you’re a sitting duck. At best, you bought yourself a few seconds before all conditions are reapplied.

Evincarr.6235

Switching to a Great Sword isn’t going to help except for movement.

That was the point…

Either that or keep the hammer and replace axe/mace with sword/shield. You’re never going to kill a good condi spammer 1v1 without sustainable gap closers.

Look at the Warhorn traits, convert conditions with warhorn. The conditions become their opposite and it removes entire stacks. So bleed and fire become regen, cripple, chill and imob become swiftness, fear becomes stability, weakness might I think.
Thats 2 conditions, then there is auto shake it off + shake it off for 4 (6 with soldiers runes). And soldiers runes will net you 2 more removals (from your other 2 shouts). There is also another 2 from heal.

Mind you building that way is more a bunker build and if you want to be balanced or damage then you rely are between a hard rock and a hard place

Noctred.6732:

Evincarr.6235

Switching to a Great Sword isn’t going to help except for movement.

That was the point…

Either that or keep the hammer and replace axe/mace with sword/shield. You’re never going to kill a good condi spammer 1v1 without sustainable gap closers.

While gap closing is nice, it’s oftentimes easily thwarted. Heck, even the terrain screws over melee more often than not. Ranged rains down, melee can’t charge/flash/port up. You can’t outlast them, you have to surrender your ground and hope they’re stupid enough to jump down and fight you on an even footing. Even when you’re on a level playing field, any good condi spammer has an Ace-in-the-hole stun/fear/blind/stealth/knockback/the list goes on and on and on…

Mitigation through huge health pools means sacrificing pretty much everything else. Equipping a ranged weapon and trying a return volley is suicide. In the end the most logical solution is to reroll Flavor of the Month, which I think explains the spike in Condition Thieves and Necros.

I don’t know why player’s hand out the worst possible advice like they are pro’s and act like they’ve handed you pearls.

Use Signet of Stamina it’s active removes every condition on you

Then spec 10 pts into Discipline for Signet Mastery it drops the cooldown on SoS to 36 secs.

I use the warhorn to remove cripples so they can’t kite me.

Having a 36 sec remove all conditions is about as good as it gets for any class, if your still having trouble after that you need to raise your dmg output. IDK about you but if I can get 6 secs of axe swings on a necro there in serious trouble.

OP, I can tell you as a condition necro, one of my worst matchups is a hammer warrior who has some condition removal and plays calmly. I say calmly, because a lot of people burn through condition removal at the first sign of bleed, but if you let just about any condition build stack up conditions for just a bit, then remove the whole stack, they are going to have a harder time getting all the way back up since they’ve burned through their Cd’s / Init.

Hammer warriors, at least on necros, can stun us to no end and we have almost no access to stability, and few run more than one stun breaker. The more time condition builds spend without conditions on you, the more dangerous the fight becomes for them.

If you know you’re fighting a condition necro, the best way to actually kill them is straight up damage. Don’t put conditions on them, they’ll transfer it back to you. Don’t use tons of boons at one time, they’ll corrupt them. Keep them knocked down / stunned and only use condition removal after they’ve blown a lot of CD’s.

What you’re describing is a large problem with the Warrior profession. It doesn’t affect any other class anywhere near as much, although obviously everyone has to worry about conditions.

Run a healing shouts build (shake it off, for great justice, probably use fear me over on my mark) with runes of the solider (remove conditions on shout use). That’s our one build we use. There isn’t another one. You can try Mobile Strikes as a trait to try to circumvent some of the issues, but that requires investing 20 points into a fairly worthless attribute line (0.1% burst damage per point, lol.) and it only affects immobilize, not cripples, freezes (which will make your leaps go about 2 inches) and so on. So that’s not an option either, if you’re trying to be serious about it.

If you want to be stupid, you can try to run a warhorn build. If you enjoy losing. One condition removal every 20 seconds sound good to you? Me either. Signet of Stamina removes all conditions on you, but like you said, any half-brained player will just put something right back on you again. And since SoS has a 45 second long recharge, feel free to think of anyone that actually recommends its use as a fool. Seriously, anyone that isn’t telling you to run a shout build doesn’t know what they’re doing, or only lucks out doing hotjoins. Or is a contrarian. The problem with BOTH of these options is that immobilizes, freezes and cripples aren’t neatly packaged together all at once every thirty seconds. Most players have many ways of knocking you around, sticking you in place, and so on. If they see you use your ONE way to get rid of it, they’ll just use another one, and you’re stuck in their kiting chain until your one pathetic counter skill comes off cooldown. As a Warrior you need constant counters to kiting of all kinds, and conditions are the most numerous and frequent, in most cases.

Just run healing shouts like everyone else. It’s your only build option. You at least have 40 more points to “play” with after burning 30 on healing shouts and reduced shout recharges.

Personally, my favorite build in pvp is 30 defense, 30 tactics, hammer and mace x2 with adrenal shouts (good trait hidden in Discipline, unfortunately). The condition removal mixed with the constant disruption is a nightmare for most players who see a warrior and think I’m going to pull out a greatsword and try to bull’s rush them. Warriors are the weakest 1v1 class for the reasons listed above, but I can usually 1v1 most players without much problems, because I’m mitigating their build by disrupting it in various ways. Plus with soldier gear, you’re running around with 30k health, 3k attack, 3k defense and about 25% critical chance with fury upkeep (SoR being the only truly viable elite in PvP.)

Just a tip;
Don’t cleanse conditions when there is only like 2-3 stacks of bleeds. The “sweet” spot is about 7-9 stacks of bleeds. Too much more than that and the conditions will kill you. If you cleanse before that, they get reapplied too easily. Cleanse poison when possible, as it is generally long duration and affects your heals (you heal 33% less when poison is on you).

Plague, you hit the nail on the head. People suggest that you stack vitality in order to survive, but forget to consider that that’s all your doing, surviving. You can’t actually kill anyone when you stack these traits, SoS is fail because of the absurdly long CD as well as the fact that any good condi player will just reapply after you remove them. I’m running a similar build to what you’re suggesting, with soldier runes and the healing shout skill at the end of the tactics tree. I’ll have to look into trying dual mace.

Cleansing is almost laughable; burning a long cooldown on one of your 3 slot skills to remove something that is being stacked by auto-attacks.

^ Having at least one means of disruption is what really matters. Some people run Axe-Mace/Hammer or even use a shield, or so on. I just personally like being able to stunlock people for extended durations using tremor as an opener, followed by pommel strike, switch to hammer, earthshaker (adrenal shouts, preferably enter combat with 100% anyway), backbreaker, staggering blow (all of these are interrupts and stuns of some kind), then switch BACK to mace and pommel strike, tremor, and so on. Fear Me acts as another interrupt for when you have everything on cooldown. It’s infuriating for targets to deal with if they’re not using stability, and even then it can be a problem since you can just fear them and pound the back of their head as they run away, until stability wears off. But that’s how you cover up weaknesses in your melee profession – disruption and denial (GW1 versions of what most gamers consider CC), not pure damage.

The issue with stacking vitality is, yeah, you’re not actively doing anything other than surviving, which is fine if you’re a bunker profession. (Warriors aren’t, and can’t be within reason.) Rather it’s that it’s VERY easy to burn through health points in this game. How do engineers, eles, guardians and so on bunker? With lots of healing and health? That can be a part of it, but it’s mainly through utility. Having a lot of health is meaningless when each profession can easily burn off that much in a few seconds. What matters is how you can deny that damage, mitigate it, redirect it or outright deny them the ability to use it. That’s how you played GW1 and that’s what works in GW2. The Warrior just doesn’t have much of it right now since I think they developed the profession with too much of GW1 in mind, where you had monks constantly bombarding you with condition removals and direct heals.

I know ANet considers the Warrior to be where it should be, and the other professions to be out of line, but I think they believed this incorrectly based on assumptions about the gameplay that we’re all still learning about. The class will have to change dramatically, along with everyone’s. The fundamental concepts behind the profession don’t work in execution, in some skills’ cases. Reducing the cooldown on stances for example is not going to magically make them a good skill to bring. There are lots of traits and skills that just need to be reworked, because the trinity is dead, and certain conventions associated with supplementing the workload of profession types is not currently being met by builds, across all classes. Thank you, Plague for President 2012.

You’re right, Plague. There was another thread where someone was complaining not that ANet isn’t doing anything about balance, but rather that they were taking too long to make changes that they already intended to make. ANet knows, for example, that thief and mesmer need to be looked at, same thing with bunker builds, but they are waiting weeks upon weeks to implement these changes. The meta game, as a result, shifts to emphasize the use of these “Flavor of the Month” classes. It’s why when people queue into a hot join match, they see the rosters of 16 people, with 8+ of them being thieves/mesmers. The changes just need to be made quicker. And before people start crying that I’m QQ’ing about thieves and mesmers, I’m just using them as an example as they are the current FotM and are actively shifting the meta.

Complaining about auto attacks that reapply conditions is like condition builds complaining about power build auto attacks doing damage…

Thing with condition builds is that its steady damage. Its not hard to keep 7-15 stacks of bleeds on someone. Smarter condition builds actually use mix of different conditions like bleed+poison or even bleed+poison+burn, so it would be harder to remove.

Idea of condition removal is not to actively spam it. You are not suppose to remove every condition in game. Condition builds have usually this “burst condition apply” combo. For example for trap ranger its when hes using 3 trap combo on you / for necro its enfeebling blood+mark of blood or in some cases blood is power. Those are the times critical times you HAVE to blow your condi removal. Its like using your stunbreak+dodge to avoid pistol whip thief/hundred blade warrior.

Also when ever you see 7-10 stacks of bleed on yourself, that the moment you should use your active condi removals. Let the passive one just tick on the background, if you have any.

Idea of condi removals is not to destroy condi builds. Its to limit the condition damage, give yourself those extra 5-15 seconds to blow them up with your burst/power damage.

So the hardest part is finding the balance in dps/hp/condi removals.

And like said before, stuns are always nice. The more time you cant apply conditions, the harder it is to do any damage. As condition builds are not ultimate tanks as well. We usually have a quite nice stack of toughness, but we do lack some hp in most cases. Thats the main reason to run condi damage build. You can still do ok damae, while being a little more tankier.