Guild Wars 2

For those that don’t know the PvP game, it’s a total mess.
Right now the biggest issue is conditions. For those that remember pre-torment update, conditions weren’t very viable. They worked, to a small degree.

Then the balance geniuses assumed everyone wanted condition builds. Adding powerful traits, adding conditions to skills so they can be viable builds.

It destroyed PvP.
Why?
Two reasons:

• The amount of conditions were to much.
• Conditions do not punish failure. You can dodge skills that lands a condition but it is LESS punishing to miss skills with conditions than with just regular power.

It’s why traits like Dhuumfire and Incendiary Powder are overpowered, often taken in every build, even power based builds.

Giving some professions like the Necromancer, Warrior, Ranger and Engineer just blow other classes out of the water.
It’s not that they are to powerful, it’s that they are not punishing failure enough.

So how to you punish failure with conditions? For starters, limit the effectiveness of every condition in certain situations.
Why?
Look at a lot of skills, Hundred Blades, Fire Grab, Backstab. They all have one thing in common, to be at their strongest, they need a requirement from their opponent.
Which is exactly what conditions lack.

If I were to rebalance conditions, I wouldn’t make them weaker or have shorter durations on every skill, instead, requiring more skill based gameplay.

Burning – deals more damage the higher health the target has. (125% – 25% ratio)
Burning is a powerful condition, it’s base damage is just good. Adding an extra thousand damage to your flurry of attacks. Not matter the situation, burn is useful. Which is also a problem, to make burning more prominent as well as giving it a major damage decrease. I’ve decided the best way to handle burning was to reduce it’s damage the lower the targets health but increase it the higher the health the target has.
(The opponent starts taking less damage from burning after the 75% health mark)
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Bleeding – deals more damage the lower health the foe has. (25% – 125% ratio)
Following the same formula of burning, bleeding has it’s damage reversed. Aiding to the idea of ‘bleeding out’ bleeding will deal more damage the less health target foe has. (Bleeding dealing 100% of it’s damage at the 25% of the opponents health mark)
Now, this may seem like a massive nerf, which it is but remember, bleeding stacks, by the time you apply ~14 stacks of bleeding, the opponent SHOULD already have lower health. This will decrease to need to spike opponents with 10 stacks of bleeding who is already at full health.
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Torment – no longer deals damage upon movement. Stacks duration. Torment still deals damage over time, if the foe affected by torment goes near its ally, it transfers torment. (Cannot transfer more than once.)
The dreaded update brought this monster with it. Torment. By game design, it’s bad. It punishes mobile players and it hits hard.
Too hard.
The problem with this condition is that it’s very damaging giving ANY situation. It needs a nerf, not only to bring down it’s power but to allow more builds. The problem with super strong conditions and boons is you must limit them.
I decided the best route would to bring back a similar effect, a condition in Guild Wars 1 called disease. The change to this is simple, if you go near a player, they become affected by Torment. This will allow more interesting gameplay, punishing enemies that group together. It’s damage is NOT going to be very large, I’d say less or equal damage to poison. It’s purpose is to harm enemies running close together and focusing single targets.
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Immobilize – no longer halts movement. It now slows movement by 33% and Immobilize prevents dodge rolling and slows endurance regeneration.
Immobilize is simply to powerful, not just the fact you cannot dodge roll but not being able to move or turn is asking for a beating.
To nerf this and keep it’s stacking by duration, have it so immobilize simply stops dodge rolling with the effect of slowing endurance regeneration and movement speed.
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Cripple – Now deals damage to moving enemies.
I’m a bit surprised ArenaNet didn’t buff crippling instead of adding Torment. Basically Cripple becomes the new Torment, to a degree. Cripple will not deal damage to non-mobile enemies, because it stacks duration, it’s damage should be between burning and poison.
The animation of a crippled character already makes them look like their in pain, changing cripple to deal damage to moving enemies would add a nice additional damage to the nerfed burning, bleeding and torment.

Confusion – Damage only triggers if target does not hit a foe. Increased base damage.
For those that doesn’t know, confusion used to be much more powerful in terms of raw damage. Now matter what you did, dodge, heal, use a kit, swap attunements, you took a lot of damage. Which hurt the condition, a lot, making it not very damaging without several stacks.
I believe returning it’s high damage but instead it only damages foes that use a skill and didn’t damage a foe. Rewarding careful gameplay for players affected by confusion as well as rewarding cautious gameplay for players that can abuse it.
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Weakness – reduce critical chance and damage by 33%, no longer slows stamina regeneration.
Weakness is not a problem because it is too powerful. Which is why you don’t see if very much. By reducing it’s punishing damage reduction it will open up more uses in gameplay. Before critical hits ignores the effects of weakness, following the trend of it’s last buff and giving it a slight nerf, instead of reducing all damage by 50%, reduce the damage by 33% AND reduce the critical chance by 33%
I’d nerf this not because it’s affected gameplay too much, I’d nerf this because it affects gameplay to little. The weaker it is, the more uses it has.
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Vulnerability – stacks duration. Now increases damage dealt to affected target by 10% and increases critical chance of hits to target foe by 20%
This condition is simply too weak, further down, I have a change to Fury and my reasoning behind it. Vulnerability is only used on two professions on two specific builds. That’s it. That is sad. By changing the need to stack it to deal more damage, instead, make it stack duration. It’s basically the new Fury.
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Boons. Boons are good, boons are useful and boons are everywhere. Not matter the situation, a boon is always useful. Some, more-so than others. My focus is to strengthen some weaker boons. Opening more opportunities for using these boons.

Boons are NOT the same mechanic as conditions. As boons only effect the player or it’s allies, punishment is simply bad use. It’s why I believe treating boons the same way as conditions in terms of punishment/reward skillful gameplay isn’t ideal as boons already have a punishment system, which is punishing bad timing. Something the current conditions lack.
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Fury – now increases the speed skills recharge by 20%.
Fury is useful, not matter what profession or build you are using, having that extra 1/5th chance to critical is pretty handy. However, it’s purpose would be better used elsewhere, it’s why Vulnerability would benefit more from it, giving it a nice buff. However, I didn’t want this to have basically the same effects of Vulnerability but not making it too overpower and still useful.
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Retaliation – reduces damage taken and deals the damage back to the source. Ends after taking damage. How much reduced is affected by healing power.
This used to be significantly stronger but it was nerfed for good reasons. It hurt a lot, hit a foe for 800 damage, you’d take half that back as free, extra damage. So it was nerfed, very hard, now it’s often overlooked.
Like Aegis, Retaliation should end after a single hit. However, it should also reduce the damage that was taken as well as dealing damage back. Making it a good defensive option to the boon like protection, speaking of…
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Protection – Amount of damage reduced is affected by healing power.
This Boon is good no matter what you run. Like burning, this isn’t ideal. Instead of making it situational based, the best route for boons is stat based. Rewarding those that build defensively instead of rewarding everyone who has it.
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Stability – Ends after hit with a control effect.
You might look at this and assume I am crazy, you must have stability, you’d get wrecked without it!
That is exactly the problem.
You must have it, you must have several seconds of being immune to control effects.
It’s a powerful boon that is often on skills with very long recharges, most traits that break stun, are on 45-90 second recharge!
You want Stability more accessible yet ends sooner. Timing your stability instead of breaking stun then running around immune to control effects for several seconds.
If Stability gets nerfed, it HAS to show up more in other places. Seeing it in more skills, more traits, instead of sitting in most Grandmaster trait lines.
Opening the way for more useful traits and skills.

I don’t necessarily agree with all of the ideas put forward here but I do agree with the whole punishing failure kind of aspect you’re going for. I still quite like a few of the ideas, whether or not I think they’d actually do well is another story, though, I especially like the Protection one and have suggested that myself a little while ago.

Step 1: Play condition specced character.

Step 2: Realise conditions aren’t OP.

Step 3: Go back to whatever class/spec you prefer.

Good luck out there.

My main issue with condition builds is not the conditions themselves but the stats required.

DPS builds require: Power, Crit Change, Crit Damage.
Condi builds require: Condition damage….. and that’s it. They can too easily spec for defensive stats while maintaining high damage output.

Nova Stiker.8396:

• Conditions do not punish failure. You can dodge skills that lands a condition but it is LESS punishing to miss skills with conditions than with just regular power.

It’s why traits like Dhuumfire and Incendiary Powder are overpowered, often taken in every build, even power based builds.

From my observation this is true. It is just stupid that you need to only crit once every 10 seconds to apply insane burning (4 seconds + condition duration, which often means 6+ seconds of burning for 780 HPpS). One only has so many condition removals / cleanses to survive the never ending stream of condition spam, it is just too much.
Condition application should require more attention than just spraying the ground with AoE and hitting some ranged auto attacks, especially with all the possible +condition duration gains in WvW. I wouldn’t mind if condition duration or strength would be slightly increased if all the auto-procs would be removed from the game. It’s just stupid how easy it is to apply heavy condition pressure on a target by just auto attacking. If you miss one, there is no ICD, which makes IP and DF so insanely strong. It has no penalties which adds to the cheese gameplay which we have right now: everybody and his or her mother running condition bunkers (with some precision mixed in) or condition hybrids, because it is so stupidly easy to win against most direct-damage specs (except for warriors maybe).

Brew Pinch.5731:

Step 1: Play condition specced character.

Step 2: Realise conditions aren’t OP.

Step 3: Go back to whatever class/spec you prefer.

Good luck out there.

Yeah, conditions were under powered for so long, now that they are only slightly below direct damage, its like it part of the complainers meta to focus on complaining they are OP.

You have professions that can do thousands of direct damage in literally one attack, but you want to focus a complaint about a situation that does thousands of damage over time and can be cleansed.

Fury change would be game breaking because the game is balanced around cool downs since there is no mana or energy. That being said I would welcome the change and change my build for perma fury

Heta.8629:

Fury change would be game breaking because the game is balanced around cool downs since there is no mana or energy. That being said I would welcome the change and change my build for perma fury

My Elementalist would be running around with perma fury as well, with my suggested changes, conditions and boons will have to be moved around or reduced.

The problem with Fury is that it’s everywhere, it’s a boon that is given out on most skills and traits because it’s pretty weak.

By making it stronger, it would require more thoughtful placement in skills and traits. Making it less spammy.

Which means goodbye perma Fury.

However, if it’s more powerful and stability is less powerful, it will allow a nice balance to availability.

Dand.8231:

My main issue with condition builds is not the conditions themselves but the stats required.

DPS builds require: Power, Crit Change, Crit Damage.
Condi builds require: Condition damage….. and that’s it. They can too easily spec for defensive stats while maintaining high damage output.

Can u please stop this nonsense of conditions only need 1 stat.

They require 3 stats aswell. If you argue, that only 2 of them are armor stats, then ok, i can agree with that, but on the other hand, conditions need time to deal their damage, so some defense is required.

In my oppinion, either make condition duration an armor stat and/or change thoughness on rabid gear to vitality. This will still increase their survivability, but makes them more vulnerable to direct damage.

Brew Pinch.5731:

Step 1: Play condition specced character.

Step 2: Realise conditions aren’t OP.

Step 3: Go back to whatever class/spec you prefer.

Good luck out there.

Or just remove conditions from low cd spells and add massive condition stacks on longer cd spells

so… they made the guardians anti condition abilities useful.. what of it?
You just gotta learn to play as a team instead of soloing all the time… sounds awesome to me…