its quite simple why the meta is where it is at this moment.
condition specced builds only require 1 single stat to be effective. condtion damage. they dont NEED power and precision to be effective. and how convenient that the condition based amulet gives precision (useful for proc abilities) toughness which directly counters burst builds (which are made to kill damage dealers…) and the almighty condition damage.
Burst requires power, precision and crit damage. Without the 3 you will find yourself unsuccessful at your role and will do more harm than good to your team. (nobody wants a squishy AND weak burster)
Now we can look at the hindrances of each spec…
starting with condition spec they can be affected by:
-condition removal
-intensity stack cap
-getting killed before their DOTs run course
-vitality
Now the things a burst build must deal with:
-new and improved weakness
-protection
-toughness
-vitality
-blocks
-invulns
-blind
-easily dodged telegraphs
-RNG
Now I dont know about you but this doesnt look promising to the burster. And Im sure some of you are saying wtf is he saying, conditions can be blocked and you cant apply conditions while they are invuln. I know this but due to the persisting nature of conditions, that means they not only continue to tick while you are blocking and popping invuln, but many ground target AOEs are unblockable.
I wanna come back and talk about RNG. When I say RNG I mean the pitiful 60% crit chance you are going to get if you go full burst. Going full glass and then lining up a perfect burst just to get the horrible white number or even glancing (when you dont have weakness -_-) it literally leaves you with nothing. plus in order to get a half decent crit chance you need to spec into the precision line. unlike pve and WvW where you can still hit decent crit chance with zero in precision, in PVP you lose out a lot. It doesnt help that many precision lines are tied with condition damage, making it a wasted stat for pure burst builds.
But I digress, 300 precision in a crappy line is the least of my worries (as I dont bother with it anyways…) Im more focused on the conditions being OP rather than burst being UP. I believe burst is in a good place, unfortunately condition spec needs to be looked at with a more critical eye. My solution is simple. Reduce base condition duration by a fairly large amount, (and nerf burning since it is insanely strong) but also add another amulet, power/precision (not sure which one would be more fair) condition damage (main stat) condition duration. So if you build into conditions, you will have the same duration as you had before, but if you want to go a tankier build to survive burst easier, you sacrifice duration. This way you still retain effectiveness of wrecking havoc upon people, but you require to make a choice. defense or duration (my best analogy of this is comparing knights to zerker)
(edited by Epic.3950)