Guild Wars 2

Siva Mira.3546:

What about this “Weakness” a condition that counter boon “Protection” instead of double the effect.

Weakness: You can NOT critical but you will ALWAYS critical on a target that has “Protection”

Once you have Protection, you cant get it off.. means this is way too strong and makes protection more dangerous than helpfull.

Protection is one of the bigger problems at the moment. It provides too much reduction and there are not enough strips in the game. That is one of the reasons that S/D thieves are really good right now. They are the closest thing to a hard counter for high up time protection.

Conditions are a hard counter of protection too
But condition characters die fast enought , before they are able kill the bunkers :P

JonathanSharp.7094:

Some great ideas in here. We’re also thinking about Weakness ourselves and wondering if we need to do any changes to make it more meaningful.

Thanks for being so constructive with your feedback!

J

I think it worked well in gw1, why was it drastically altered to be rng? I feel it should just be a flat 50% damage decrease. This would make actually having the condition scary and also help balance the insane burst damage in game.

Likewise, I feel vulnerability should be looked at. It’s a counter to protection, but its very hard to consistently apply 25 stacks in spvp.

Burst isn’t insane when your mode is about flipping possession of nodes into your favor. If you can’t do that quickly, then you snowball points. Weakness shouldn’t be near as strong as it was in gw1 or a thief drops choking gas, people don’t die quickly in a mode where you want quick deaths so you can flip nodes.

Cripple is another condition that is extremely weak especially when you compare it directly to Chill. It doesn’t need any 2nd effects such as slower CD time on skills Chill has BUT Cripple duration should be significantly increased. I do NOT want to cripple some1 for 2sec because it makes no sense.

well many of you want to change weakness probably thinking of it us an indirect way to buff your class (like necro).
Thing is that i know my ele can keep perma weakness on target with just 1 utility and if you were to make a flat % damage decrease in addition to endurange debuff even with protection nerf it will end up making me more tanky.
It would also cause fights to drag really longer and potentially nerf direct damage builds way too much.
Already cond damage can break a bunker very effectively and in the case of engie its too strong.On the contrary there are very few classes that have actually access to good burst builds so those will get nerfed even more..
Changes like what people suggest could really flip the game completely.I personally would hate tickling a bunkers health for zero damage unless my class supports a condition build

kostbabis.8791:

well many of you want to change weakness probably thinking of it us an indirect way to buff your class (like necro).
Thing is that i know my ele can keep perma weakness on target with just 1 utility and if you were to make a flat % damage decrease in addition to endurange debuff even with protection nerf it will end up making me more tanky.
It would also cause fights to drag really longer and potentially nerf direct damage builds way too much.
Already cond damage can break a bunker very effectively and in the case of engie its too strong.On the contrary there are very few classes that have actually access to good burst builds so those will get nerfed even more..
Changes like what people suggest could really flip the game completely.I personally would hate tickling a bunkers health for zero damage unless my class supports a condition build

That’s true. But I’d imagine that skills and traits that apply weakness would need to be redesigned to fit the change to weakness.

Add flat damage reduction to weakness, and you’ve essentially killed warriors. They won’t be able to burst(and they got problems with it even now), and would still be worse bunkers than guardians, simply because of no protection, and no sustain, which is essential for any kind of bunker spec.

Careful with what you are suggesting, warriors are tired of being underdogs for almost a year now. This kitten would kill the only spec warriors are semi viable with, and wouldn’t add enough to cover that loss.

Making weakness a short duration anti burst condition would be perfect. Making a flat damage reduction like in Guild Wars would be nice. Necromancer has a lot of access to weakness, but right now it’s not a threatening condition. Necromancer Corrosive Posion Cloud (currently underpowered) and Enfeebling Blood could be used defensively if Weakness gave better damage reduction. Drop that CPC on point and your enemies burst is negated if they choose to stand there. Imagine a 100b Warrior comes charging in, you pop into DS for Weakening Shroud, his burst has dwindled. Thief getting ready to backstab you cast Enfeebling Blood in anticipation, boom his 6k crit is now 3k. Right now Boons>Conditions. Conditions really need help.

Krilce.7864:

Add flat damage reduction to weakness, and you’ve essentially killed warriors. They won’t be able to burst(and they got problems with it even now), and would still be worse bunkers than guardians, simply because of no protection, and no sustain, which is essential for any kind of bunker spec.

Careful with what you are suggesting, warriors are tired of being underdogs for almost a year now. This kitten would kill the only spec warriors are semi viable with, and wouldn’t add enough to cover that loss.

I don’t see how buffing a condition to give damage reduction kills off Warriors. There are not a lot of abilities and traits with Weakness. It would be just another tool to help mitigate high burst, and pvp right now has a lot of burst.

Many condi builds thrive on generating their stacks via crit. They will not be untouched. This is why the duration times for weakness may have to be adjusted. If a meta floated more weakness stacking then carrion, soldiers, and valkyrie would become more popular untill the weakness applicators have to switch in order to make themselves more useful. Right now the only great proliferators of weakness are warrior and necro. Warrior has it on a weapon that hardly gets used, one slow hammer attack, and the warhorn..

ensoriki.5789:

djtool.8372:

I’m in the camp for a severe reduction in crit percentage* if not making it effectively zero*. Even if that means putting in extra work to adjust duration times.

I’m not knowledgeable enough to know but this type of change may strongly encourage a wider variety of builds.

Removing builds from the game sure does improve variety.
If Weakness removed crits which generally burst builds are dependent on, then what happens is a greater pull to go towards conditions than current or crit builds trying to fit in more condi removal dropping their damage and generally being more ineffective as a result of how ezpz conditions are applied anyways (so might as well scratch the crit build).

It definitely be interesting if weakness gave better damage reduction and that would make some skills much more interesting if it wasn’t an rng based reduction, but shutting down crits? Are you cereal?

Copenhagen.7015:

Krilce.7864:

Add flat damage reduction to weakness, and you’ve essentially killed warriors. They won’t be able to burst(and they got problems with it even now), and would still be worse bunkers than guardians, simply because of no protection, and no sustain, which is essential for any kind of bunker spec.

Careful with what you are suggesting, warriors are tired of being underdogs for almost a year now. This kitten would kill the only spec warriors are semi viable with, and wouldn’t add enough to cover that loss.

I don’t see how buffing a condition to give damage reduction kills off Warriors. There are not a lot of abilities and traits with Weakness. It would be just another tool to help mitigate high burst, and pvp right now has a lot of burst.

It would basically kill their damage, which is their main, and only role in tPvP, when they are used in a team, which is rarely a case. There is already a protection for those purposes, and combining protection and weakness would basically make bunkers unkillable. They’d have to revamp whole condi spam design, which is a good thing, but I doubt that’ll happen, unless they make the longest weakness duration like 2-3 secs, just to avoid that one burst, and nerf protection to 20, 25% damage reduction, and even then, it would probably be spammed carelessly, like almost any other condition in this game.

Warriors already got problems with condition removal. Make another condition greatly affect their viability, along with cripple, chill, blind, and probably poison, because of already awful healing, and you could just as well completely erase them from any kind of competitive gameplay, which they already aren’t really part of.

Apart from that, you’d basically buff already good profession, who would have quite high uptime on weakness, even though they already got good access to protection – eg. ele.

And if you think that weakness application would make warriors more viable, you’d be wrong, because that won’t fix other problems this profession already has.

Introduce new weakness in form of plain damage reduction, and you’d have to revamp a lot of skills, traits, and game design in general.

Krilce.7864:

It would basically kill their damage, which is their main, and only role in tPvP, when they are used in a team, which is rarely a case. There is already a protection for those purposes, and combining protection and weakness would basically make bunkers unkillable. They’d have to revamp whole condi spam design, which is a good thing, but I doubt that’ll happen, unless they make the longest weakness duration like 2-3 secs, just to avoid that one burst, and nerf protection to 20, 25% damage reduction, and even then, it would probably be spammed carelessly, like almost any other condition in this game.

Warriors already got problems with condition removal. Make another condition greatly affect their viability, along with cripple, chill, blind, and probably poison, because of already awful healing, and you could just as well completely erase them from any kind of competitive gameplay, which they already aren’t really part of.

Apart from that, you’d basically buff already good profession, who would have quite high uptime on weakness, even though they already got good access to protection – eg. ele.

And if you think that weakness application would make warriors more viable, you’d be wrong, because that won’t fix other problems this profession already has.

Introduce new weakness in form of plain damage reduction, and you’d have to revamp a lot of skills, traits, and game design in general.

garethh.3518:

I’d like to see it be a good ‘anti-spike’ hate but that’d involve a tweak to most weakness applications… and on Anets time scale that’d take months to work out properly.

So it affecting all dmg (bump down the dmg mitigation) or just crits, would be a realistic alternative.

IF it was going to be a strong anti-spike condition.

Guardians, the main bunker doesn’t have access to weakness.

D/D elementalists have one 1~s cast weakness in one attunement, I mean if it was going to be an antispike condition then the duration would be dropped to 2-3s, meaning it wouldn’t be a good self anti-spike since its melee ranged and your probably CC’d during that time, BUT it can help an ally (what GW2 desperately needs).

Necro’s would be an interesting class with many more playable ways to spec.
Warriors might have one more playable spec (there’s that ‘bonus dmg with mace against enemies with weakness’ trait, that is bugged to have a 33% chance to proc 2s~ of weakness on hit with the mainhand mace)

In the end though this sort of change gives teamwork a chance to stop intense spikes…
I can’t complain there, fine tuned balance can fallow worthwhile gameplay.

BUT that blarb would involve a decent amount of balancing/number tweaking work, for a minor change in gameplay, no one could say otherwise, which is why it won’t happen.

In general… Anet doesn’t seem up for a large ‘setback’ right now no matter how much it helps the game in the longrun.
Which is tragic, since GW2 could seriously use a few large changes..

If they, along with redesigned weakness, make other conditions, and skills in general, more situational, I’m all for it. But, as you said, they won’t do it, because it’d take to many resources for just one condition fix, where there are much bigger problems this game is still facing.

reedju.5786:

Necro does not need anymore weakness, as is we are the only profession readily able to apply it. What it needs is a more meaningful effect like this thread suggests, as well as easier application for other classes.

? on my thief i could endlessly apply area weakness if i wanted to

Oh, yeah, I totally forgot about poison fields, where you could pretty much keep 100% weakness uptime if you got a thief and a necro in your team. Corrosive cloud would definitely find its use, but you have to take into consideration that both teams would probably be spamming weakness, so fights would take much longer, get any kind of burst class out of it, so most of the builds would probably end up being tanky condi builds, which is not really interesting to watch, or play.

Weakness always felt like an anti-burst condition. But it is not, and seems to lack any purpose outside of reducing dodging. Which, ironically, makes it a stronger offensive tool than vulnerability most of the time, which is not even saying much.

I don’t think that weakness would make warriors useless if it was an anti-burst mechanic, as long as it lasted for a shorter time. If anyhting, it would buff warriors, because they have several sources of weakness. And it could always affect condition damage too – why not?

I think Weakness can reduce Crit dmg but only have a 25% chance to reduce.
Then you reduce the dmg over time and have a chance to stop Burst dmg. That also help the necro because he only have these Conditions to stay alive but they are to bad.

Guardian can apply weakness through signet of judgement and shield of avenger.

Neldil.8715:

I think Weakness can reduce Crit dmg but only have a 25% chance to reduce.
Then you reduce the dmg over time and have a chance to stop Burst dmg. That also help the necro because he only have these Conditions to stay alive but they are to bad.

We don’t need more extreme rng.

Aza.2105:

Guardian can apply weakness through signet of judgement and shield of avenger.

Nifty catch.

Weakness should reduce all damage the target inflicts by 25%, this includes condition damage.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Weakness always felt like an anti-burst condition. But it is not, and seems to lack any purpose outside of reducing dodging. Which, ironically, makes it a stronger offensive tool than vulnerability most of the time, which is not even saying much.

I don’t think that weakness would make warriors useless if it was an anti-burst mechanic, as long as it lasted for a shorter time. If anyhting, it would buff warriors, because they have several sources of weakness. And it could always affect condition damage too – why not?

Both thieves and necros have ways of applying AoE weakness, where warrior has only single target weakness application. Although I agree that necros aren’t really in a good spot currently, as I play a necro along with a warrior, making them shut down a whole team burst, and not to mention thief, would again get those professions far more useful than a warrior, and warrior still wouldn’t be able to find his way into tPvP, because his burst would be counterable even easier(and it’s already easy to do it with wide variety of conditions, evades, teleports, etc.), and every profession would, again, do warrior’s job much easier, and much better.

It’s already extremely hard to find a team as a warrior, don’t make it even harder for us. You have to take every profession into consideration when suggesting drastic changes like this, not just your favorite one.

Or.

It should simply reduce the Attack/Condition Damage Statistic by 33%.

Warrior:

- Mace: pulverize (from chain) 6sec weakness (takes 1sec to pull that hit off), also when trained for sundering mace 1sec weakness every crit from maces (both mh and oh)

- Hammer: fierce blow 9sec weakness, 12cd untrained, 9 sec trained

- Warhorn: call to arms – 7sec weakness, 20cd untrained, 16sec trained

Thats the all options warriors have to gain weakness

be careful what you wish for
flat damage reduction on weakness would make classes with easy access to both weakness and protection insanely OP (hint: d/d elementalist)

Shar.3402:

be careful what you wish for
flat damage reduction on weakness would make classes with easy access to both weakness and protection insanely OP (hint: d/d elementalist)

I doubt a few seconds of damage reduction, which can be cleared easily since everyone runs condi clear, would be OP.

Copenhagen.7015:

Shar.3402:

be careful what you wish for
flat damage reduction on weakness would make classes with easy access to both weakness and protection insanely OP (hint: d/d elementalist)

I doubt a few seconds of damage reduction, which can be cleared easily since everyone runs condi clear, would be OP.

People have mentioned a few team situations where it wouldn’t be hard to keep weakness up on people. Elixir gun engineer would be really strong, just keep tranquilizer dart up on someone, watch as they do nothing to your team. Staff ele would also be really good support again.

Making it flat damage reduction, without making other changes elsewhere would just be foolish.

Numot.3965:

Elixir gun engineer would be really strong, just keep tranquilizer dart up on someone, watch as they do nothing to your team. Staff ele would also be really good support again.

What about reducing tranquilizer dart debuff from 1 sec > to 0.5 or 0.35 sec and generally any class that are doing great in tPvP atm , reducing weakness uptime to 30% .
+ reduce by 66% the cds of Warriors Warhorn , so they have 100% swiftness uptime + their 4th attack cure also the weakness ?
For example a warriors using the Warhorn 4th spell + the Axe F1 , would be pretty cool combo , catching the oponents offguard most of the times

Numot.3965:

Making it flat damage reduction, without making other changes elsewhere would just be foolish.

Making it strong or an anti-spike conditon without changing application so it was more anti spike based or sporadic would be silly.
The rest of this discussion doesn’t really matter, in fact this discussion doesn’t really matter…

If anything happens to weakness it probably will be a debuff to critdmg and that will change little to nothing about gameplay. A change in weakness large enough to change gameplay will involve far to much rebalancing for Anet to have a chance at succeding in it in any sort of timely manner.

Making it as strong as Guild Wars 1 would be nuts, but making it 10- or 15-percent flat damage reduction or adding 15- to 25-percent critical damage reduction to the current version would be good.

it wasn’t even that strong in gw1, it was mildly annoying for melee, but a low-priority condition. lower than blind and cripple for instance

The more I think about it (and the more I read here), the effects should likely be split.
Keep weakness as 50% endurance regen debuff, no need for any further mechanics changes – leave the abilities that currently apply weakness and their durations as is.

Introduce a new condition which reduces all damage dealt by some manner (specifics to come later) and selectively choose some subset of abilities/traits/whatever that already apply Weakness and also have them add this condition for however long (Duration is a playtesting issue).

This way, there’s no need to re-work weakness application/durations in the slightest. By separating it into 2 conditions, and choosing which abilities get to apply it, we can leave abilities that are already strong AND apply weakness alone, and add this new condition to underpowered/Underused abilities/traits that involve weakness as a way to bolster them.

My suggestion for the new condition would be a blanket 10-15% damage reduction. I also like the idea of an additional effect that if the afflicted player scores a critical strike, the duration is extended X seconds (I’m thinking 1-3 seconds, but this is a playtesting issue.), but that might be too anti-spike for the current meta.

evilapprentice.6379:

The more I think about it (and the more I read here), the effects should likely be split.
Keep weakness as 50% endurance regen debuff, no need for any further mechanics changes – leave the abilities that currently apply weakness and their durations as is.

Introduce a new condition which reduces all damage dealt by some manner (specifics to come later) and selectively choose some subset of abilities/traits/whatever that already apply Weakness and also have them add this condition for however long (Duration is a playtesting issue).

This way, there’s no need to re-work weakness application/durations in the slightest. By separating it into 2 conditions, and choosing which abilities get to apply it, we can leave abilities that are already strong AND apply weakness alone, and add this new condition to underpowered/Underused abilities/traits that involve weakness as a way to bolster them.

My suggestion for the new condition would be a blanket 10-15% damage reduction. I also like the idea of an additional effect that if the afflicted player scores a critical strike, the duration is extended X seconds (I’m thinking 1-3 seconds, but this is a playtesting issue.), but that might be too anti-spike for the current meta.

Not a good idea. Weakness is actually fine in PvE and this would screw it up, endurance is non-factor on mobs. They’d have to do a way too serious split, and I don’t think they’d do that.

…I’m in the PvP forums. I’m talking PvP changes. Nothing I’m saying will have any impact on PvE, because I’m talking PvP only changes.

that’s great but why would they split a condition for pvp? you think they have resources for that?

Just make weakness also reduce crit chance by 20 percent matching fury’s buff.
No need to create an entire new condition.

Weakness reducing normal dmg + reducing crit chance will have a stronger impact in pvp

Either a flat damage decrease of a 50%, or a reduction to all attributes by 50/100 with the inability to score a critical hit. Perhaps people will actually try to cleanse it then.

There is no reason whatsoever to step away from the way weakness worked in GW1.

KarlaGrey.5903:

Either a flat damage decrease of a 50%, or a reduction to all attributes by 50/100 with the inability to score a critical hit. Perhaps people will actually try to cleanse it then.

There is no reason whatsoever to step away from the way weakness worked in GW1.

weakness wasn’t really a flat damage decrease in gw1
it reduced the weapon damage by 66%, but it did not affect skills’ damage

That was the old weakness.
The new weakness reduces all attributes by 1 point.

… old weakness?? wtf
and yes I know it also reduces attrs but it wasn’t relevant

Yes, in the past weakness only affected physicals by reducing their damage.
Later on, it was updated to cause a general -1 attribute decrease, and that can matter a great deal for break point skills such as gale, or when having min req on shields (most notable example is probably dev hammer eliminating full shield armor if the user didn’t invest an additional point in tactics to avoid that.

i did not know that at all, thanks for the news. the talk page seems to confirm it

i like idea of making it cause more endurance loss/counter vigor etc. that way it would indirectly also hurt glass cannons.

jalmari.3906:

i like idea of making it cause more endurance loss/counter vigor etc. that way it would indirectly also hurt glass cannons.

What’s this nonsense about weakness not affecting glasscannons? Glasscannons are heavily invested in offensive power making evades one of their very few, or even ONLY, defensive options. Weakness in its curent state already hits glasscannons more than other builds.

Sure a glass crits more so the dmg decreaser procs less but thats just 1 side of the coin here. The other side is that it makes us a lot more susceptible to return fire.

While on a bunker more of his damage is affected (why does “is <so it doesnt get censored> hit” get censored? ROFL) by the weakness condition but he is less dependant on evades (and probably has more conditioncleansers and vigor anyway).

I actually therefor believe the condition is in a pretty good state.

Vyxion.6358:

jalmari.3906:

i like idea of making it cause more endurance loss/counter vigor etc. that way it would indirectly also hurt glass cannons.

What’s this nonsense about weakness not affecting glasscannons? Glasscannons are heavily invested in offensive power making evades one of their very few, or even ONLY, defensive options. Weakness in its curent state already hits glasscannons more than other builds.

It is a long term, slow, investment.
That means it is a ‘counter’ to glass cannons, only if you can already counter their spike… and need them to dodge roll like one time less in 15s~…
Think about all the top tier glass cannons (ele/mes/thief)…
Think about it…

No one takes weakness seriously.
You can crunch a few numbers and say ‘Hey its not useless!!’
But no one ever thought it was useless… just bad enough to never be worth picking up short of coincidentally or as a cover condition.

is,hit…
Remove the comma and i.

Remove the endurance regeneration, make it so that the effected character cannot critically hit for the duration. On those abilities where the endurance reduction makes more sense, put a short immobilize. Or just make a new condition that stops endurance regeneration and implement it.

Secondly, someone suggested Protection be reduced to 25% reduction, I honestly don’t know why this isn’t how it has been since the beginning. No single stack of one boon should counter more than 25 stacks of any condition.

O.O before i read this thread i already forgot weakness existed xD
what about this: each time a player inflicted with weakness uses a skill, weakness rises in intensity (stacks to 10). applying weakness by using a skill will still (as normal duration stacking conditions) increase the duration.

for each stack of weakness: lose 1% endurance per stack when attacking, damage dealt is decreased by 1% per stack, critical chance is decreased by 5% per stack, skill cooldown rate is slowed by 2% per stack, active boons expire 2.5% faster per stack.

example: player A has 60% critical chance.
player A receives weakness and somehow makes 10 stacks(-50% critical chance).
player A now has a 30% critical chance.

weakness would be effective on both bunkers and glass cannons. It could be used defensively (to control the amount of skills a player can use, or to simply make them do less damage) or offensively (prey on the weak!).

most weakness inflicting skills only last 5-7 seconds so players most likely wouldnt reach 10 stacks on taht one skill, so i dont think it would be overpowered, while still adding something you notice (i think noticing you have a condition makes each condition unique and more fun).

I guess it could be a bit complicated when you first encounter weakness and read what the tooltip says, but its not that complicated at all: use skills, number (intensity) goes up, bad

Happy discussing a (currently) useless condition,
Alissah