Guild Wars 2

pointaction.4639 no one said condi classes cant be defeated. Whats being said is its super easy to play, low risk high reward, Meaning the same player who plays a condi class/build and then plays a power class/build will have significantly more success with the condi class/build.

I ran into my first d/d bless blossom thief last night in some time while I was on my p/p staff power thief.

The highest bleed tick he got on me was 529. I was never in any danger. I am traited EA and PR along with trickster using Haste and RFI and withdraw as heal. SOA is also on the build , which I never had to use and i have an added cleanse using the elite given I am in leadership runes. UC traited out of DrD. The Regens out of the Acro at 100 percent uptime kept me at near full health as I was able to dodge as many of his attacks as he mine. The Condition builds RAW attack damage was hitting me harder then were the condition ticks as he could rarely get a stack of any magnitude going.

This particular build I use has Crit chance 85+ percent when fury on. 200 percent plus crit damage. Might stacks durations doubled once applied. Full time swiftness and vigor. Near full time regen and fury. All but immune to Immobs Chill and cripple. 3 different stun breaks.

Base power low at 2200 but this made up for with always running might stacks along with close to 90 percent of all attacks being a crit.

I even peeled off a sigil that cleansed on the build as I had more than enough in the way of cleanses and will likely peel off more yet . There still potential cleanses left on the table for other builds such as the cleanse on s/X 2 , Shadows embrace, GI , Lyssa Runes, Sigils like cleansing , generosity and purity and of course Shadowstep.

posted this over on the pvp forum, but it applies here:

We currently have an arms race between cleanse and condi spam.

DoT (in most games) is something that builds up .. “oT”, Over Time. The longer the fight goes, the more advantage a DoT player has.

GW2 has so much cleanse that this can never work. Condi builds only work if they have spammable stacks of high-damage condi. Other builds only work if they have boatloads of condi cleanse and/or long-lasting resistance.

IMO, the only way forward is to tear it all down and admit that it’s broken. Tone down cleanse to a normal level (say, current Revenant amount of cleanse). Remove cleanse from traits, sigils, etc. Put it on heal skills and maybe a few other support skills.

NOW tone down condi stacking so that it’s DoT not burst. No more 12x confusion stacks. No more 30-bleed-in-2-seconds. No more poison spam.

coro.3176:

GW2 has so much cleanse that this can never work. Condi builds only work if they have spammable stacks of high-damage condi. Other builds only work if they have boatloads of condi cleanse and/or long-lasting resistance.

fixed

tone down condi stacking so that it’s DoT not burst. No more 12x confusion stacks. No more 30-bleed-in-2-seconds. No more poison spam.

+ The shear amount of random condis that comes with the burst, on a shorter CD than many cleanses. Should I get more cleanse? Yea, playing a build dedicated to cleanse is so much fun, right?

babazhook.6805:

I ran into my first d/d bless blossom thief last night in some time while I was on my p/p staff power thief.

The highest bleed tick he got on me was 529. I was never in any danger. I am traited EA and PR along with trickster using Haste and RFI and withdraw as heal. SOA is also on the build , which I never had to use and i have an added cleanse using the elite given I am in leadership runes. UC traited out of DrD. The Regens out of the Acro at 100 percent uptime kept me at near full health as I was able to dodge as many of his attacks as he mine. The Condition builds RAW attack damage was hitting me harder then were the condition ticks as he could rarely get a stack of any magnitude going.

This particular build I use has Crit chance 85+ percent when fury on. 200 percent plus crit damage. Might stacks durations doubled once applied. Full time swiftness and vigor. Near full time regen and fury. All but immune to Immobs Chill and cripple. 3 different stun breaks.

Base power low at 2200 but this made up for with always running might stacks along with close to 90 percent of all attacks being a crit.

I even peeled off a sigil that cleansed on the build as I had more than enough in the way of cleanses and will likely peel off more yet . There still potential cleanses left on the table for other builds such as the cleanse on s/X 2 , Shadows embrace, GI , Lyssa Runes, Sigils like cleansing , generosity and purity and of course Shadowstep.

Thieves in general are also hilariously OP. You have shadowstep and SOA to cleanse with. Try Power mesmer, you’ll be forced to build into Inspiration which will grant you way less damage, even while in zerker gear. This coming from a player with 3400 hours on a thief in wvw. They are simply a bit too good at the moment.

ThunderPanda.1872:

+ The shear amount of random condis that comes with the burst, on a shorter CD than many cleanses. Should I get more cleanse? Yea, playing a build dedicated to cleanse is so much fun, right?

think you might be missing the point. The more cleanse that exists, the more bursty/spammy condi needs to be to keep up. It’s an arms race, and the losers are builds with “normal” condi cleanse.

To fix it, we need a condi rebalance, and this requires less cleanse overall, not more.

i just logged in after 7 months insta quit again, conditions are insane cant even roam anymore unless im getting kitten build to lose conditions they reapply so fast i cant do kitten versus em seems to me that conditions ticks have been made faster like before was 1 tick every 2 seconds now seems to be 1 tick ever 0.5 seconds..

i havent got a problem with conditions but the way conditions are applied in this game is my problem they have no CD they have nothing u just keep smashing that 1 button and it keeps adding.

babazhook.6805:

You contradict youself in this one post and did not refute anything of what I said. You know full well that the damage scaling of classes across the board were scaled down in PvP. This is why a power thief could never get the bursts of damage that he can in WvW. For the purposes of PvP dire did not meet this model. It is NOT because it OP. It is because PvP is an artifical construct.

This is why they used the amulet system. They wanted to try and nromalzie builds as much as possible.

If you are going to create a system that says " we want to keep damage output and the ability to mitigate the same withing this range" then you can not single out specific sets while leaving others. I suggest to you had there been the same level of damage output one can get as in WvW in PvP from power builds Dire would have been allowed THEN as well ands no one would have been crying that it was OP.

Dire existed in WvW since I first logged in to that format. There were very few that used it . Why would that be the case if it was OP? The fact is it was totally outclassed by power builds which could always pump out more then enough damage to bring a dire user down in short order.

The change that occurred that has all of these people whining about dire was not Dire being “reintroduced” or “made more powerful” . It was always there. The change that happened was condition damage output was improved. Power damage output was also improved which is why there now so many tanky power builds. That condition damage may have made greater gains overall merely reflects how far behind it was in the first place.

1.) Damage scaling wasn’t reduced in sPvP as a whole; only a few problematic skill ssaw cuts, and typically, like in the case of CnD, these cuts ended up being fixed by other implementations and no longer necessary (like implementing the Revealed and CiS fixes to offset perma-stealth free-casting CnD-spam CiS SA power builds). The only difference is and has been stat amounts allocated via amulets vs armor.

2.) No, they originally launched the game with six amulet slots, just like armor. They brought it down to one to reduce complexity because the stat granularity wasn’t much of a factor.

3.) Dire didn’t exist at launch or even near it. Dire was an afterthought brought into the game when they removed the Magic Find stat from armor and needed a new set to compensate. Condition builds were slow to pick up and at the time under-performing in PvE as a consequence so they brought the kit to PvE only. At the launch of the stat, ANet PvP developers stated the set was too powerful for sPvP when people asked for it to be moved there. This was the same release as Perplexity being released into sPvP and then also removed because they too were also too overpowered to be used in the format.

4.) Yes, they wanted to keep damage output and capacity to mitigate it within a certain range within sPvP. Understand the sPvP developers have no bearing on what happens in PvE or to the professions in general. The best they have historically been able to do is change amulets and problematic runes/sigils to change the overall pace of the game. Else it goes through PvE testing justification. Any former ANet developer and even some very simple reading on reddit will confirm this.

5.) Dire was not outclassed by power builds. People just didn’t play them much initially, and the better players kept to the power kits they were already good at and simply preferred. Dire builds were and have been dominant in small-scale since early 2013, and honor-duel players would be quick to immediately DQ and gank people who brought something like a Dire thief or mesmer to a duel because doing so was a sign of disrespect and cheese. The condi hate is literally years-old with the dueling community.

6.) Nobody is inherently angry about condition damage going up, but how safe the builds are when played as durably as they are. I assure you, there is absolutely no comparison to a Soldier build vs a Dire one. My reaper pushing 4k power in Soldier’s gear full-combos for maybe 8-10k damage against a squishy opponent. I can tick 6k on a dire build in two seconds with one skill and have the same defenses that also ignore armor, bonus toughness, and protection.

In terms of raw efficiency and ease-of-use, there is absolutely no comparison to be made. Dire/TB need to go if we’re going to allow buffed condi damage.

Deceiver what is your opinion on significantly reducing cleanse for damage conditions and retooling conditions to balance around less cleanse and invulnerability generally?

saerni.2584:

Deceiver what is your opinion on significantly reducing cleanse for damage conditions and retooling conditions to balance around less cleanse and invulnerability generally?

It’d have to come with stipulations and a lot of further development. One of the biggest issues with condition damage is how cover conditions and control conditions can load up the queue to cleanse subsequent DoT ones, and how those cover and control effects have a very powerful effect on combat even without the DoT component. For example, when I fight on my power reaper vs a thief, it’s effectively a hard requirement that I immediately burn Suffer on Lotus Poison to cleanse the weakness in order to deal any damage, while also hitting the thief with a damage reduction and an endurance cut to keep their evades low in order to out-trade the incoming damage and keep in range/applying pressure. I cannot win with Lotus Poison applied to me, straight up. I’ll be out-paced in damage and out-evaded baseline. Most builds need to do the same for LP and various other control-applying traits such as an ele or engineer which is cooldown-dependent on Chill. It’s hard to work out timings when there are “must-cleanse-immediately-or-die” control effects which get applied super early and can snowball a fight. This is especially true for power builds in the case of passive or instant weakness, which comes from a number of traits from a number of professions.

If we were to go that route, we’d need overall an increased number of cleanses readily-available to remove control conditions and CC effects (especially since their increased accessibility since HoT), while splitting up DoT ones. While this may provide a better state of balance among a lot of builds, it potentially upsets the balance to some lesser-known builds, as these may be missing some of those “essential” cleanses that are readily-or-just-adequately found in the meta. Because I think this would ultimately yield a net decrease in build diversity on the fringes, I can’t totally support the notion.

Frankly, if we were to take a “simplistic” blanket-fix or re-design towards making DoT a viable means of play without breaking it, I’d simply delete the condition damage stat as a whole, and change all condis to just supplying DoT based on power, have it be affected by toughness, remove +/- duration foods/stats/traits (or re-brand control conditions/DoTs as something else entirely to allow +/- on control-only), and remove their capability of being cleansed. Then just re-tool some gear combos to feature kits like Power/Expertise/Precision or Power/Expertise/Vitality or what have you. Now kits can be played for either type of damage, and pretty much identical numbers achieved while control effects can be easier-managed without having to worry about cover conditions, etc.

This also fills the void for hybrid builds, as then they benefit from all of the offensive stats, and can tone and shape their builds to be more-or-less focused on either the DoT or instant-damage side of things. As it is right now, hybrids pretty much end up being worse at both because they can’t take advantage of the multiple stats needed for power damage worthwhile, or waste stats if their condition damage scaling is low and their power damage scaling is higher.

Overall, I think the removal of Dire/TB is the most realistic option of everything, as the stat combos are only really used in WvW, and quite frankly, break WvW. There are some problem-child condition abilities, but most of the condition-overpowered-ness comes from Dire/TB simply just out-tanking everything while simultaneously bursting things down. I’m not strictly opposed to mass-DoT bursts, but being mathematically incapable of matching that damage:defense ratio on any other possible set is kind of stupid.

Eventine.8024:

Tongku.5326:

Thank god. So many years of zerker or GTFO is finally over, and hopefully for good.

The problem is, to be a zerker you need power, precision and ferocity (no space for vitality or toughness). To be a condi, you just need condi (and so expertise, if you want), and this give to you 2/1 other parameters to choose

Uh…Marauders gives you vitality you know.

I simply do not believe the removal of dire/tb will have any impact worth noting when addressing the issues with Condition builds and cleanses. There are many condition builds that use neither that are MORE dangerous and retain High survivalbility.

As example I have tested out a Condition warrior using Settlers that is just as dangerous as any in Dire and has more Sustain then a user in Dire.

I have also tested a Thief in shamans apothecary that pumped out just about as much damage as One in Dire and had far more in the way of sustain. (I have fought dire users head on with this build and never lost to one).

DIRE and TB are not the issue. Removing them is not a fix.

I think it’s not guaranteed that the meta will shift to a net decrease in builds after removing damage based condition cleanse.

Conditions have a maximum DPS based on ideal application rate, duration and condition damage stats. This maximum is easy to calculate but is thrown off by the variable reduction that even an ill timed cleanse produces. This is much harder than just assuming a block will stop incoming damage completely (also why more unblockable spam is bad for balancing).

I run the equivalent of Maurader stats for condi in pvp. The stats aren’t tanky, just survivable enough, and come with decent condition damage / duration. For that reason I can say I would prefer the lighter stats in WvW if I wasn’t facing more than the usual pvp 1v2 in roaming situations. The damage is greater (or would be if the stats were equal with food and corruption stacks accounted for).

It’s the cleanse based Cold War that annoys me. Some people melt like butter. Others can build so much cleanse it is immune to conditions. No one should be immune to any kind of damage even if they build for it. Yet that is where we stand.

I’m not actually saying no cleanse should exist. But far less would make lower DoT builds far more consistent and viable.

Well seeing this thread is getting some responses, inc Anet closing it down