Guild Wars 2

Pure condition damage builds and AI pet builds seem to be the 2 most inflammatory types of builds in this forum. Every thread and discussion relating to them seems to generate controversy and usually descends into personal attacks and name calling. While I don’t have any suggestions for AI builds, I have some thoughts about condition builds.

I feel that conditions should be less about damage and more about control effects. This would make using them a more tactical choice and I believe that would add more depth and strategy to PvP.

Some personal thoughts and suggestions:

Burning, bleeding, torment, confusion, terror and poison damage reduced by half.

New bleeding applications restores the duration of all ongoing stacks.
New burning applications only extend the duration but the highest condition damage burning is applied for the full duration.

With the damage nerf these changes to the pure damage conditions would increase the long term damage- allowing the player to achieve large stacks or maintain ongoing stacks easier- but decrease the short-term damage.

For other conditions they should have more noticeable control effects such as:

Chill – no longer slows movement speed but instead stops cooldowns from ticking while in effect.
Cripple – 66% movement speed reduction.
Poison – cuts healing by half.
Blind – 50% miss chance, attacking doesn’t remove blindness. Max duration from a source is 5 seconds. Doesn’t stack duration.
Confusion – Caster takes 2% per stack of damage dealt with skills while under the effect of confusion, besides confusion damage from using a skill.
Fear – stun breaking fear allows the user to move and use utilities at will but keeps weapon skills locked until it’s original duration ends or the condition is removed.
Torment – damage becomes proportional to how long you move, the longer you move the more damage each tick inflicts.

Vulnerability, Immobilize and weakness are pretty powerful as they are.

Of course all these changes would be meaningless for PvE where conditions as a damage source is already a pretty bad choice in the player’s part and some other solution for that part of the game has to be brainstormed.

What happen my rabid ascended gear when you full berserker one hit heroes try to ruin whole game?

Junkpile.7439:

What happen my rabid ascended gear when you full berserker one hit heroes try to ruin whole game?

I only play Necro

Junkpile.7439:

What happen my rabid ascended gear when you full berserker one hit heroes try to ruin whole game?

you can get ascended gear on PvP ? :O gimme!

google.3709:

Junkpile.7439:

What happen my rabid ascended gear when you full berserker one hit heroes try to ruin whole game?

you can get ascended gear on PvP ? :O gimme!

Who cares about sPvP. I just want that you stop ruining whole game.

Junkpile.7439:

What happen my rabid ascended gear when you full berserker one hit heroes try to ruin whole game?

If you’re playing a condi class (eg; necro, ranger, engi), then you have more than enough defensives to deal with burst damage. It’s a l2p issue.

Kiriakulos.1690:

New bleeding applications restores the duration of all ongoing stacks.

Oh god, I can already see lowel’s unicorn thief build making its comeback. Ok, I like this concept, but how about a DR on application damage? Like you realize that d/d condi thief has an infinitely spamable aoe bleed with d/d 3, they could easily get 100+ stacks with this mechanic. This wouldn’t be a problem if the new stacks did 1/2 as much dps as the previous ones applied by the same skill, however.

Zodian.6597:

Kiriakulos.1690:

New bleeding applications restores the duration of all ongoing stacks.

Oh god, I can already see lowel’s unicorn thief build making its comeback. Ok, I like this concept, but how about a DR on application damage? Like you realize that d/d condi thief has an infinitely spamable aoe bleed with d/d 3, they could easily get 100+ stacks with this mechanic. This wouldn’t be a problem if the new stacks did 1/2 as much dps as the previous ones applied by the same skill, however.

That’s why I suggest halving all direct damage currently inflicted by conditions.
Lower short term damage for larger long term damage through easier application of conditions. The 25 stacks would be easier to achieve but hurt as much as 12 stacks currently do, so cleansing should be held until a large number of conditions are cleared.

Conditions become a real over time source of damage instead of the burst that builds focus on right now.

Some of your ideas are cool, some even balanced (just some… chill? Nah… ^^)! Do you really think that would be possible, though? It’d mean a brand new system, with changes to toooooo many traits and skills related to conditions! It’s simply not going to happen in a game/PvP like this!
Peace

Tetriandoch.6145:

Some of your ideas are cool, some even balanced (just some… chill? Nah… ^^)! Do you really think that would be possible, though? It’d mean a brand new system, with changes to toooooo many traits and skills related to conditions! It’s simply not going to happen in a game/PvP like this!
Peace

Yes it would be a lot of trouble but that’s what the solution seems to involve at this point. Trying to balance the game around the current conditions seems to be a futile endeavor a waste of resources. After nearly 16 months, some stuff just can’t be fixed and needs to be changed.

As for chill, removing the movement debuff helps to make it stop overlapping with cripple so much and making it stop cds ticking also makes it much better against low cd skills. Current chill feels much more like a super cripple than a slow to cooldowns, especially since most chill effects come in small durations. If full stopping is too much then at least halving the cd rate would be better then the current version.

Kiriakulos.1690:

Pure condition damage builds and AI pet builds seem to be the 2 most inflammatory types of builds in this forum.

Condi builds have a small pool of short CD abilities.
THINK ABOUT IT
-small pool of short CD attacks
-you have to overcome condi removal
-after that you have to deal good dmg or you are not viable
no matter how deep you make condis themselves you can’t stop the need for condi spamming for condi specs to be viable.

I explained in another thread, pure condi builds just can’t work well in GW2.
For them to work well, it’d require large changes in cleansing and/or conditions along with weapon abilities.
That isn’t happening.

The only serious way to fix that issue is to push away from dedicated condi builds… if every power based attacks wasn’t utterly unviable on condi builds, condi builds would have a larger pool of abilities… that’d allow CDs on strong condi attacks to increase along with how situational conditions themselves could be.
(everything everyone has ever wanted out of conditions)

Anyways.
It’s a good, easy and effective change that will only improve the game… so it’s never going to happen.

Kiriakulos.1690:

As for chill, removing the movement debuff helps to make it stop overlapping with cripple so much and making it stop cds ticking also makes it much better against low cd skills. Current chill feels much more like a super cripple than a slow to cooldowns, especially since most chill effects come in small durations. If full stopping is too much then at least halving the cd rate would be better then the current version.

The CD reduction idea, its a cool concept, but it doesn’t help GW2 at all.
It adds little if any depth.
It adds another condition.

There just isn’t any serious merit to it.

I would personally toss chill, and torment, to cut down the number of condis in this game (since condi removal wasn’t made for near so many conditions) and focus on improving the current ones.