Guild Wars 2

(Sorry for my English, it’s not my first language) I love PvP but somehow in this game it’s not so much about skill. A condition build can out kill with ease but at the same time remain extremely tanky. Not only that, a condition build can apply conditions constantly while the opponent only having a few means of removing a couple of conditions. In PvP most of the time I find myself being wrecked if getting caught by more than one condition player. I noticed that more and more players are leaning towards condition builds due this reason. Blinds, Chills, Immobilizes, interrupts, stuns, slows, fears, poison fine I understand those are more about control but, bleeds, burns, torment, confusion deal a ton of damage specially if they can be applied almost constantly. That being said I decided to stay away from PvP.

PS: This should be called Pet Wars 2 instead. With all the clones, turrets, spirits, minions and pets can’t even identify what I’m attacking anymore.

Conditions are a very favorable and newb friendly damage source in pvp, just as much as power is favorable in pve. Condition ticks ignore armor and protection, and can deal damage while you’re running around, healing, dodging, stealthing. That being said, you can still make plenty of power builds work, and just killing other players isn’t all pvp is about. You can still be very effective for your team simply by knowing when to disengage/avoid a fight, and backcapping points.

There’s no way to truly balance a game that has 8 different classes, a very large pool of stat options, multiple weapon sets, and sigils/runes compounding the issues. pvp should be a game mode you play because you enjoy it, or because you find the rewards worthwhile. If not, just avoid it.

Yes I learned that on my way. I also learned that Structured PvP is not for me. I’m more of a gladiator arena type of guy. That being said I will follow what you said and just avoid it.

They began to introduce “team deathmatch” as a mode/new arena a little while ago, I remember playing a few matches. Not sure if it’s still around, but you might prefer that over the traditional capture point maps. Or you might have more of the same frustrations since it’s basically a lot of people headbutting in the middle of the map, but I suppose you can skirt around the edges and use the walls/terrain to zone out ranged conditioners and hope one of them follows you.

If it’s still around give that a try, and if you still don’t like it I guess it’s just not the game mode for you.

Solzero,
I compliment you on your English. It’s very good and completely comprehensible for a 2nd or other language.

As for conditions in PvP, I keep hearing people complain about it. I honestly don’t feel it’s a problem, but if it is, there’s no harm fighting fire with fire. Actually, when I do hotjoins, I enjoy using a sub-standard hybrid build that uses power and conditions along with a slight focus on vitality. I can bleed/burn a target down nearly as fast as they can to me, but I can also wallop someone that gets hit by me at the same time.

If conditions are really some sort of balance problem, I can suggest some possible additions to the game that could help but I honestly don’t think it’s needed.

just wait for the mesmerpocalypse next week.
staff and scepter mesmers are going to be applying crazy conditions.

The Guardian build below brings 9 team condition cleanses, as well as a few condi-cleanses for itself. (I do not take credit for the video below.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FuIc6l-9kM

In PvE conditions are pretty terrible. EDIT: The build itself is pretty outdated, but you can cleanse plenty of conditions in PvP.

Thx guys for the nice feedback. Well in my opinion they should really tone down the amount or damage output of condition (there are around 12 conditions O.O)

Solzero.5380:

Thx guys for the nice feedback. Well in my opinion they should really tone down the amount or damage output of condition (there are around 12 conditions O.O)

Each class specialises in a particular set of conditions with others playing supporting roles.

Necros are very strong in bleeds and well supported by fear, torment, poison, vulnerability
Warriors are also very strong in bleeds with good support via vulnerability, cripples and immobilises
Mesmers specialise in confusion and soon torment
Engineers drop vulnerability like no tomorrow but can support with other conditions (I don’t play engi so know little about them)
Guardians are strong on burning but aren’t that good on much else
Rangers are good at bleed supported with poison and cripple
Thieves excel with blind but well backed up with bleed, cripple and immobilise.

On the flip side, warriors, guardians, necros and to an extent rangers all have good condition cleanse abilities which are easy to use while thieves and engis area a little trickier while mesmers are weak in cleanse. So it’s really knowing when not to fight and when to fight. A cleanse heavy warrior will be able to cleanse himself all day. Traited warhorn converts them too boons, shouts can cleanse and heal with Trooper runes, traited heals can strip cc skills. Traited Mending can cleanse a staggering 7 conditions in one cast with quite a short recharge. Builds like these sacrifice a lot of personal DPS for this kind of survivability.

Conditions might be fine, but the AOE condition fields are not fine. AOE direct damage fields can be countered with retaliation, so the caster has to be careful not to nuke 3-4 people who’ve been buffed with retal since that’ll result in heavy damage to the caster.

Laying down a condition fields does not have any counter-play. I’d like to see retal activate with every pulse of a condition field.

conditions should only be used as Crowd Control in this game.
I’d say remove all damaging sources from conditions:
-Remove “Bleeding” and “Torment” or change their purposes
-Keep and maybe raise to 50% the Poison secondary(or primary?) effect of nerfing heals, just remove the Damage over Time effect
-Keep Cripple, Chill, Immobilize, Fear, Weakness and also I’d also say Confusion like they are
-Maybe improve a bit Vulnerability

Hello frands! Vee Wee here, #1 Engi NA and world first rank 80!

Staff Ele says hello! Removes 50 conditions every 10 seconds!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

Condi is definitely way too strong in this game. What makes it worse is AOE condi. Takes no skill to apply it and still does well.

Heya Solzero,

The problem here is basically due to the math involved and the character attributes.

In order to have a decent Power build, you need to focus on increasing Power, Precision, and Ferocity. Increasing these three attributes leaves you little room to increase Vitality, Toughness, or Healing Power. Power builds are usually “glass cannons” and although there are those that do up their defensive attributes and rely on Fire and Air weapon sigils to help them with their damage (or might stacking), they mostly are not very durable.

On the other hand Condition builds only really need one attribute: Condition Power (Condition Duration is also nice, but not really necessary). Since you only really need the one attribute, it leaves you more wiggle-room to increase your defensive and healing attributes. Thus, you can make a fairly tanky character that can still wreck face in PvP with conditions (with the exception of the Guardian as they have no viable condition builds). This gives Condition builds much more sustain versus their Power build cousins.

Finally, after you have built your Power build all it takes is Weakness to completely make your build ineffective. There is no “magic condition” that affects Condition builds in this manner.

So, make a “glass cannon” Power build that can be stopped simply by applying Weakness, or make a durable Condition build that has the sustain to hang in there and keep fighting. The choice is fairly simple and thus why you are seeing the condition spam meta that currently exists.

Thanks.

I totally agree with Kolly! and Thank you Magister for an accurate and very simple explanation and anyone who thinks condition aren’t a problem is either playing condi himself or plays a profession with high condi removal. Sure I can choose my battles, run away and what not but that’s not how I want to play It’s almost as I’m playing rock paper scissor. Why should I play a class or use weapons I don’t even like just so I can be able to counter or remove a handful of condition that are going to be applied back a couple of seconds later. Looks like I’ll just have to stay away from spvp. (1v1 versus a condi player is manageable but 1v2 and up get’s pretty upsetting).

I just came back after about a 6mo break. Idk what all has changed specifically, but condi feels toned down quite a bit. I haven’t touched a Lyssa rune and usually just run one condi wipe utility.

And like Lopez was saying, damage is damage. If I’m not split second perfect in avoiding direct damage, I’m toast, why should conditions be different?

Lopez.7369:

There was a time that condition builds were a huge problem. That’s no longer the case. They’re now a rarity in tournaments. TCG, the only competitive team in the world at this moment, doesn’t have a single condition build.

Again, there’s a reason high-tier players don’t complain about conditions anymore. Think about why that is and what they do different, and adapt.

Didn’t you just answer your own question on that one? It would appear they don’t complain about conditions anymore because they don’t use any condition builds. Seems simple enough to me.

I think the problem is that too many people (ArenaNet included) base their opinions off of what the very few “higher tier” players think and forget about the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of other players in the game besides just those few.

Thanks.

Lopez.7369:

condition builds have more room to get survivability stats by design, because they’re supposed to be attrition builds for a slow ramp-up.

slow ramp up?!
most condi builds will bury you under a mountain of conditions in seconds.
your magical world of slowly building conditions does sound balanced,
but thats not what we have.

Lopez.7369:

I honestly don’t understand how you all justify these complaints to yourselves, considering conditions very clearly aren’t a problem in high-level play. That should show you that you have to be doing something wrong.

Well, there you go Solzero. The answer to your question/problem (and anybody else with these concerns) is to just play in high-level play as condition builds are simply not a problem at that level.

Thanks.

The only problem about condis in this pvp is that they can stack way faster than you can usually remove them…condition spam like engi’s nades and incend powder, necro auto, ranger shortbow and so on have pretty much no cd so you’re eventually gonna remove those and then they can go for the heavy stuff like signet of spite, fear chains, confusion stacking…. while you have nothing left to counter it cause they made you use condi removals for no cd autos…

One step in the right direction would be removing condis from every autoattack and every low cd skill like nades (Maybe lowering key condi skill’s cd too) but preventing them to be fully spammable making ppl actually using their skills with more brains…while making condi removal skills cds more in line with heavy condi bursts cds, the only two classes that can counter (Not always) condition spam specs are eles and wars cause they have a sustained condi removal instead of a few skills with long cd that are just gonna delay your death…problem is not how many condis can you remove..problem is HOW OFTEN can you remove condis compared to how fast someone can spam them.

If you remove 100% of conditions all the time where does the damage come from? That condition on AA exists a lot of classes wouldn’t have viable conditions withouth it and yes sustain is needed for those builds.

Edit : *That’s why

If you waste your (activ) cleanse on some harmless condis its like doging an autoattack and then get hit by an eviscerate or something similar because there was no endurance left. Of course it can suck, if you only have passive condi remove and the enemy times his “burst” well.
Therefore I would prefer more active condi remove instead of passive abilities (and maybe more control over which condis are removed), but more condi remove in general (and/or less condi “spam”) is not necessary.

Lopez.7369:

It seems like people on this forum have this weird misconception that condition damage just shouldn’t exist at all, because it’s somehow this weird, abstract type of damage that’s completely different from direct damage in practically every way. I don’t get it. I think people are what over-complicating condition damage actually is, and it’s making them fail at successfully countering conditions like high-level players do.

More likely that some threads are made regarding soloQ experience, and some answers are made regarding teamQ experience. The problem is that the 2 modes are way too different now…

I would agree with you from a teamQ point of view, but i can feel what the OP means. Randomness of soloQ makes it rather difficult for some setups to handle these builds, which happen a lot

I’m surprised there isn’t more discussion about how condition builds have more favorable mechanics than berserker builds. It’s easy to see an eviscerate or 100b coming your way and dodge it. Aside from ranger (especially post-patch) high direct damage requires close-range, making it very vulnerable to cripple, immobalize and chill. As someone mentioned already, weakness + blind also counter direct damage.

Condition builds are a direct counter to physical damage due to the mechanics of the game (higher toughness, weakness, blind, chill, cripple, immob).

As for my previous comment about fields: Fire fields (warrior, engi, ele, guardian, ranger) do great AOE condition damage while allowing players to build up might stacks/fire aura. Poison fields (necro/thief/ranger/engi) allow AOE weakness to be spammed via blasts on top of spreading poison. These fields are always layered on top of points, so you’re stuck with permanently having these conditions on you. Cleansing poison/burning is pointless since they’re re-applied right away. There is no counter-play to this aside from giving the opponent(s) the point.

Retaliation would add some counter-play to this. If opponents start putting up retal, your team could switch to water/light fields for added support instead of condi spam. Another solution would be to have the fields front-load their duration instead of reapplying it every second to allow better counter-play with cleanses.

Edit: This really comes back to the problem with Warrior’s Impale skill that Anet is trying to address — Initially, it would slowly apply torment making it difficult to cleanse since you’d either have to take a lot of damage before you could cleanse the full stack, or cleanse early and still take a large amount of damage from stacks that were applied post-cleanse. Condi fields have the same problem: Cleanses do not work against them.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

If you waste your (activ) cleanse on some harmless condis its like doging an autoattack and then get hit by an eviscerate or something similar because there was no endurance left. Of course it can suck, if you only have passive condi remove and the enemy times his “burst” well.
Therefore I would prefer more active condi remove instead of passive abilities (and maybe more control over which condis are removed), but more condi remove in general (and/or less condi “spam”) is not necessary.

15 stacks of bleeding or permaburning + all sort of crap from necro and ranger autos (the first) and engi auto + spammable nades (the second) are not so harmless…expec in teamfights when you already have pressure from aoe, cleave and so on..

-What class are you playing?

-Are you actually building in condition defense? Even on engi which probably has the worst condition defense conditions are manageable unless you are just putting yourself in stupid situations. Provided you built right of course.

-When autoattack torment goes live everything you said will be correct and it is time for everyone to quit all GW2 PVP because it will be stupid so this post is only good for another nine days.

Otaking.4675:

-What class are you playing?

-Are you actually building in condition defense? Even on engi which probably has the worst condition defense conditions are manageable unless you are just putting yourself in stupid situations. Provided you built right of course.

-When autoattack torment goes live everything you said will be correct and it is time for everyone to quit all GW2 PVP because it will be stupid so this post is only good for another nine days.

They chose torment on AA and added swiftness to PU to punish the marathon on condition mesmer. The AA is still slow so meh.

I play a power thief and I have to burst condi builds down quickly or I die.. but isnt that the whole point of these speccs. would be kinda weird if burst builds win both short and long term fight.

Right?

Lopez.7369:

No. They still encounter condition builds. I’m one of the people that still plays conditions at a high level. But high-tier players know how to play against them.

Most of the problems are probably because they don’t have anyone around for aoe condi clear. Instead, everyone wants to play Faceless Void. Which means that the full deeps medi guard on your team just passively said, “puppy you” to the rest of the team.

Well my real problem is that I have no control over what condition I’m cleaning. A net should implement an option in which you could chose what condition you prefer to cleanse first. For example you enable clean bleeds first then burns then poison and on and on. They could put this option in combat on the option window.

If you think your condition issues are bad now, just wait until Mesmer gets Torment on their auto-attack. Combined with Confusion you will have a choice of moving and using skills to kill yourself, or just standing still and doing nothing while the Mesmer kills you.

Good times!!

Thanks.