Guild Wars 2

here is the thing, use a build for what you are going to do. if you are roaming solo small group make sure you can cleanse in a zerg you or your zerg mates should have a group type cleanse…. Get good..

dancingmonkey.4902:

Commanders request my talents for viels

Those commanders confuse me just as much as those requesting whales. I am a mesmer, where am I going to find a whale?! Now if they want a veil on the other hand…

reddie.5861:

also condition damage needs to get toned down its beyond lame how one can ram up to 8 ticks of burning or any other crappy conditions on your kitten without any problem and then just run off and watch you die these people dont even wanna fight all they wanna do is apply conditions and run..

How is applying damage over time any less engaging in a fight than simple spamming attacks and crossing your fingers for a crit? It isn’t like almost every condition attack in the game is unblockable/undodgable, and the difference between straight damage and conditions is that conditions need time to apply, while damage is instant.

You really sound salty over the fact that you basically died 10 seconds ago if the person you were fighting was full Zerker instead, only with conditions you have an opportunity to remedy the problem. If you have an issue with Condition builds, then map anti-condition skills on your toolbar at the cost of DPS. You cannot make a build that is good against everything in this game, so stop trying to feel as though you are entitled to a completely fair fight when your very build is a hard counter to others out there.

EDIT: I’d also like to point out that my new Pistol/Shield Engineer is literally laughing at all stealth builds, atm. Nothing is funnier than seeing a Thief or Mesmer try to stealth away from a fight only to have 6 seconds of Reveal applied to them, or to take a flamethrower to the invisible face and kick their punk!@# out of stealth. Every class has a means to deal with conditions and a good chunk against stealth. If you DON’T have tools against stealth, you are the paper to their scissors. Get used to it.

McFribble.2349:

reddie.5861:

also condition damage needs to get toned down its beyond lame how one can ram up to 8 ticks of burning or any other crappy conditions on your kitten without any problem and then just run off and watch you die these people dont even wanna fight all they wanna do is apply conditions and run..

How is applying damage over time any less engaging in a fight than simple spamming attacks and crossing your fingers for a crit?

~snip

While you’re “spamming attacks and crossing your fingers for a crit” you risk your health dropping fast since you actually have to give up defense to get worthwhile output that people can’t just out heal or walk away from. Conditions don’t just do damage over time, they can effectively shut down opponent’s ability to perform even basic actions which means even more damage mitigation in favor of someone who can already run pretty tanky. It’s less engaging because there is more cushion for mistakes.

gennyt.3428:

McFribble.2349:

reddie.5861:

also condition damage needs to get toned down its beyond lame how one can ram up to 8 ticks of burning or any other crappy conditions on your kitten without any problem and then just run off and watch you die these people dont even wanna fight all they wanna do is apply conditions and run..

How is applying damage over time any less engaging in a fight than simple spamming attacks and crossing your fingers for a crit?

~snip

While you’re “spamming attacks and crossing your fingers for a crit” you risk your health dropping fast since you actually have to give up defense to get worthwhile output that people can’t just out heal or walk away from. Conditions don’t just do damage over time, they can effectively shut down opponent’s ability to perform even basic actions which means even more damage mitigation in favor of someone who can already run pretty tanky. It’s less engaging because there is more cushion for mistakes.

Crits hit harder and burst faster per hit than conditions ever will. There is immediate payoff for going full Zerker, but you get this at the cost of defensive traits. I don’t 1v3 people with my Zerker Warrior/Thief because the bleed/poison ticks caught them off guard. It’s because I am able to completely take a person out of the fight before they even have a chance to hit the TAB key through physical crits having immediate effect, whereas my Rabid Necro/Engineer need to be tanky enough to even get to the point where damage is going to make an actual impact.

Physical: Press 1, deal 2k instant damage
Condition: Press 1, deal 800 damage over 8 seconds

If you can’t see why being tankier is a fair trade-off for condition users (and borderline NEEDED to even be viable in a PvP environment) then PvE honestly is probably more your speed.

McFribble.2349:

Physical: Press 1, deal 2k instant damage
Condition: Press 1, deal 800 damage over 8 seconds

Or in the case of a condi Guardian, press a few buttons and cause 8,000 damage every second for 10 seconds.

You where close though.

Dawdler.8521:

McFribble.2349:

Physical: Press 1, deal 2k instant damage
Condition: Press 1, deal 800 damage over 8 seconds

Or in the case of a condi Guardian, press a few buttons and cause 8,000 damage every second for 10 seconds.

You where close though.

All of which can be wiped clean with the press of a single button. Anti-condition is flooded in this game, and no one seems to want to use them despite endlessly complaining about their presence. The trade off is that you are now more susceptible against zerker builds (shocker!).

Also, if you think a full Zerker build isn’t able to deal more than 8k dps with a few button presses, you are having a massive case of confirmation bias.

Actually read my previous comment about the diversity of conditions and how they can shut opponents down in addition to the applicant having the option of being extremely tanky. Being tanky in it of itself is not the problem. You say the game is “flooded” with anti condi tools, the thing is, all of them will cost you, chiefly your burst output. Currently, conditions ignore armor and the protection boon and vulnerability has been changed to accommodate condition damage as well. And with “cover conditions”, 1vXs being more likely than 1v1s, the fast and high damage some conditions can crank out (looking at you burning) and the afflicted being tasked with the usual watching of their opponent(s) also now having to watch their ever frequent debuffs and gauge whether or not to burn a cleanse ends up throwing the trade offs out of balance in favor of tanky condition builds in small fights. You can’t speak about payoff without assessing risk and that risk is hardly worth it if you’re not landing hits, it goes back to my statement about condition diversity.

McFribble.2349:

Dawdler.8521:

McFribble.2349:

Physical: Press 1, deal 2k instant damage
Condition: Press 1, deal 800 damage over 8 seconds

Or in the case of a condi Guardian, press a few buttons and cause 8,000 damage every second for 10 seconds.

You where close though.

All of which can be wiped clean with the press of a single button. Anti-condition is flooded in this game, and no one seems to want to use them despite endlessly complaining about their presence. The trade off is that you are now more susceptible against zerker builds (shocker!).

Also, if you think a full Zerker build isn’t able to deal more than 8k dps with a few button presses, you are having a massive case of confirmation bias.

This.
In a max dps guardian I play both power and condi.
I’ve seen people die in seconds from a condi burst, I’ve downed people in a single attack with power.
Difference: The condi victim had a second to think about it

Burn guard is a topic of itself. Incredible stupid build and for the low skill cap absolutely amazing damage, but that´s another story of the arenanet balance team fails. But at least you can see a guardian attack and you can do something about it to counter, condi clears, -40% condi dur food etc.

Whats really killing this game is people able to bring the same kind of burst from stealth with no time to react. This is what annoys me the most in this game, lack of counterplay to stealth. And with hot they make it even worse. Some classes get more stealth and some get reveals. If you don´t play one of them you are kittened. Stealth is by far the most stupid “mechanic” in this game, zero counters except for some prof. , low risk high reward and since vanishing is just a keypress away easy to achieve. There is no positioning involved, you can just disappear completely in front of somebodies eyes.

I don´t know who designed that at Anet but that person should be punished with at least 4 weeks of gameplay in WvW as a solo roamer. Maybe the taste of their own medicine in form of the condi PU mesmer plague will wake them up.

Aeolus.3615:

Stealth is fine, the problem is that some classes/builds do to much w/o sacrificing to much.

Which means that it is not fine.. Anything open to rampant abuse is a problem. Capture a castle with a PU mesmer inside an you end up wasting 10+ mins with team of 5+ just to rid the place of one pita.

Kolisch.4691:

While in stealth, condition damage and duration decrease by half — the most logical fix.

No, the most logical fix is that conditions should drop off completely if the mesmer enters stealth. Mesmer disappears = Conditions disappears.

Tell me about a time since release that mesmers and thieves have not been way over the top.

Go ahead I’ll wait. Reality is these two have been kitten since the very beginning and it will not be changing.

Stealth has counters.
You can lead the horse to water…..

srsly guys how much do they need to nerf thief before you’re happy?

mordran.4750:

Burn guard is a topic of itself. Incredible stupid build and for the low skill cap absolutely amazing damage, but that´s another story of the arenanet balance team fails. But at least you can see a guardian attack and you can do something about it to counter, condi clears, -40% condi dur food etc.

Power Necro is a topic of itself. Incredible stupid build and for the low skill cap absolutely amazing damage AND sustain, but that´s another story of the arenanet balance team fails. But at least you can see a Necro attack and you can do something about it to counter, swiftness, blind, burst from the flanks when they’re not in DS, etc.

vespers.1759:

Tell me about a time since release that mesmers and thieves have not been way over the top.

Go ahead I’ll wait. Reality is these two have been kitten since the very beginning and it will not be changing.

I only had a problem with those two classes until I played them so no, they have never been over the top. Reality is that instead of learning counters players would rather scream nerf.

Conditions should either reveal or not tick at all while in stealth.

Spicyhash.7605:

Conditions should either reveal or not tick at all while in stealth.

If that is the case I shouldn’t be able to be hit by anything when I’m in stealth including any form of cc or skills that channel and still hit me after I stealth..

briggah.7910:

Spicyhash.7605:

Conditions should either reveal or not tick at all while in stealth.

If that is the case I shouldn’t be able to be hit by anything when I’m in stealth including any form of cc or skills that channel and still hit me after I stealth..

Like Rapid Fire….

@Thread

If conditions and the way they are applied wasn’t SO strong, then the “Condi Meta” wouldn’t be a thing, anytime ANYTHING becomes strong and has a low skill ceiling everyone and their grandma plays it and uses it over anything else.

Players get used to using such a build, such as, Condi-PU Mesmer and will defend it forever saying people need to learn to play and know how to counter it, ect. They NEVER think anything is wrong with it, they just believe they are professionals and everyone else is whining because their “Bad”….

Conditions are VERY strong right now, conditions such as Burning, Torment, and Confusion are the top three, and sure you could build your character around reduced condi-durations and have cleanses up the ying-yang but, after cleansing them, your right back where you started because those same conditions are just reapplied soon after their cleansed, and if your a class/build with a lower health pool, your toast, unless you can kill someone before the conditions eat you alive, kill someone who’s all over the place, in and out of stealth, stacking conditions passively ect.

Power builds have been scaled down, people had a fit when certain classes where able to 1 hit them or bring them very low in 1 attack, perhaps it’s condi-builds that need to be scaled down now.

Conditions should assist in taking down your opponent through attrition, not, do everything for you while you dart around seeing your burns tick for 5k+…

That is just it. “Condi Meta” isn’t a thing.

You absolutely do not see more conditions then direct damage players WvW. Conditions are completely neutered in group play. The only aspect that you see pure condition builds thrive is in solo roaming or 2 to 3 man team roaming.

Neither is it true that “conditions are strong now” Conditions are no stronger then direct damage. There is simply a very few professions, with even fewer builds, that are too strong. So very very specific builds, on specific professions, with specific gear, very specific runes, very specific sigils, very specific traits, very specific weapons sets, and very specific utility skills, all combined, are what is problematic. These blanket statements are very much a sign to me of one of three things, dishonesty, being ill-informed, or simply band wagoning based one a few bad experiences.

Example :

Odokuro.5049:

Power builds have been scaled down

No, direct damage is very much up since June 23rd. This is a well proven fact, and common knowledge. The fact that you declare the opposite, supports my last paragraphs statements.

Your example of a burn ticking for 5k. If you know a very specific heavy hitting attack applies a lot of burning, why didn’t you dodge it, block it, or cleanse it. I can do 5k in direct damage with my eyes close. How is that of less concern then condition damage in which it is very easy to cleanse after your opponent burns their cool downs to apply all of those stacks.

Now what I can agree with, is that specific skills that are applying too many stacks of a condition for too long, when combined with certain runes and traits, are problematic. Instead of making broad blanket statements that are almost entirely inaccurate with rare exception, perhaps it would be wiser to list what specific trait+skill+rune combinations that your experience suggest are specifically problematic.

dancingmonkey.4902:

That is just it. “Condi Meta” isn’t a thing.

You absolutely do not see more conditions then direct damage players WvW. Conditions are completely neutered in group play. The only aspect that you see pure condition builds thrive is in solo roaming or 2 to 3 man team roaming.

Neither is it true that “conditions are strong now” Conditions are no stronger then direct damage. There is simply a very few professions, with even fewer builds, that are too strong. So very very specific builds, on specific professions, with specific gear, very specific runes, very specific sigils, very specific traits, very specific weapons sets, and very specific utility skills, all combined, are what is problematic. These blanket statements are very much a sign to me of one of three things, dishonesty, being ill-informed, or simply band wagoning based one a few bad experiences.

Example :

Odokuro.5049:

Power builds have been scaled down

No, direct damage is very much up since June 23rd. This is a well proven fact, and common knowledge. The fact that you declare the opposite, supports my last paragraphs statements.

Your example of a burn ticking for 5k. If you know a very specific heavy hitting attack applies a lot of burning, why didn’t you dodge it, block it, or cleanse it. I can do 5k in direct damage with my eyes close. How is that of less concern then condition damage in which it is very easy to cleanse after your opponent burns their cool downs to apply all of those stacks.

Now what I can agree with, is that specific skills that are applying too many stacks of a condition for too long, when combined with certain runes and traits, are problematic. Instead of making broad blanket statements that are almost entirely inaccurate with rare exception, perhaps it would be wiser to list what specific trait+skill+rune combinations that your experience suggest are specifically problematic.

You make a lot of false statements. The thing that makes stealth + condi OP in WVW is the amount of available space to disengage.

Everything else is fairly balanced, see your nearest SPVP meta, and yes the inc “but this isnt SPVP…. but the foods …. but the blah blah ….” That is all balanced by the fact that its all available to all players. +duration, – duration, +application, -application. When you get 2 teams and each one is running + and – it becomes all roughly equivalent to SPVP.

The specific instances that make stealth + condi OP is that you can stealth + disengage in any direction due to amount of open space while the applied condis keep on ticking, whereas in SPVP you can’t do that because the areas are small / closed in, so you end up eating all the cleaves AOEs anyways stealthed or not, because you simply have no room to disengage to and get cornered by the smarter opponents. The stupid ones are of course still just as stupid and will always remain so, there is no fixing that.

There are some ways to fix that which are implimented in other games. For example, when you stealth up you move a lot slower, or can’t sprint, or in the case of this game, maybe get a endurance regen debuff or alike. They of course have options to spec so these negative effects are not as bad, but to spec, they have to sacrifice damage or utility.

the other factor is that condis actually already do a lot less damage then power builds. Both on burst and sustained with exception of few burn builds on select few professions and even those are actually in 10-15% below zerker builds but at least they come close, the rest are utter crap, but again they continue to tick when disengaged.

the proper way to “fix” the combo of stealth + condi, would be to remove the space available for stealth to disengage while condis are ticking, to allow counterplay like in SPVP. But how do you do that in WVW ? Make the maps SPVP sized ?

you can’t really reduce condi damage because it will become utter crap like it is in PVE and zerg figths and it needs to be balanced and in fact still needs to be largely buffed for large scale group fights. So how would you buff it for large scale while reducing its effects in small scale ?

If you split the specs so that stealth and condi don’t mix very well, it will do absolutely nothing. Stealth specs will just switch back to power builds and you will still be here making QQ posts about being pwned by stealthed zerker thieves or mesmers or rangers etc. the same exact way as things were pre-condi patch, no change there. So thats not the way to go.

And if you nerf all tehse back to the pre-patch levels, then what ? back to the idiotic nike war meta ? back to the stupid 3+ years of playing boring kitten power builds ? what do you want to do that doesn’t come full circle but actually improves things ?

This is just my opinion on certain matters brought up.

People are not taking into consideration one major point with the difference between Dire & Soldiers sets. For Dire you apply condi’s then you can focus solely on defensive abilities while the Condi’s do their thing with the occasional reapplication. Soldiers requires you to continuously be in offensive mode in order to do damage, you don’t have the luxury of running in circles focusing on only mitigation.
Its not the numbers, its how it preforms, so Dire is basically fire and forget, Soldiers is fire and keep on firing.

As for damage removing stealth, it does seem to make sense that damage would break stealth, however, this would make Condi builds pointless on a class with stealth. An alternative would be power based damage breaks stealth (as it already does now), Condi based damage breaks stealth after say 3 seconds (just grabbing a number out of thin air). You shouldn’t be able to remain in stealth for the duration of a condition but you should have at least some time for that Condi to ramp up a bit up Damage.

Burns:

They are over the top currently, people focus on burn because of this, don’t kid yourselves, players will always gravitate to what is OP because winning is fun. Truth hurts.

Mesmers:

Good Mesmers did just fine pre-patch the patch just made it face roll for those players. The rest did what players do in every game, they gravitated towards the current OP class. I’m not going to deny that Mesmers were Veil/Portal bots, I will point out that in organized play they were great for gank as well. With HoT being released they will no longer be limited to Veil/Portal, they now have wells which will greatly increase their group function.

There’s a lot of good points on both sides of the spectrum.

I’ll just leave this here, if you trully want to know what is OP just watch what players gravitate to, it is an undeniable measurement of what is OP.

Immobilize is the worst. It’s an embarrassment to Arenanet’s reputation. Disgraceful!

vespers.1759:

Tell me about a time since release that mesmers and thieves have not been way over the top.

Go ahead I’ll wait. Reality is these two have been kitten since the very beginning and it will not be changing.

The thief has been nerfed into annoying but near harmless outside of very skilled players. The trapper thief is annoying and can be frustrating but is pretty easily managed as is the trapper ranger. The real problem here is Mesmers and stealth.

This issue still boils down to all damage should proc an instant reveal on its source. Caltrops on a dodge roll, reveal. Clone applies condi damage, reveal. Ranger drops trap and trap is sprung, reveal.

I also support the idea for reveal on condition damage.

This is too common in WvW:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Ghost-Thief-solo-roaming-UPDATED-10-6

Condi’s need a buff

https://youtu.be/ML265czLKjE

it takes me too long to kill everyone

dancingmonkey.4902:

TheBeesKnees.8391:

I found a Staff ele, it was a regular 1v1 but with a twist, I used my nose to press the skills on my keyboard, that’s right my nose. For the majority of the fight I did nothing but press 2 and 3, I think I pressed 4 once on scepter/torch and I won the fight; without even going below 50% health, I didn’t dodge once, I didn’t use my heal, nor any utilities and I still won.

I play a kit less engineer with only one hand and have never, ever, once, lost a fight to a thief or mesmer, stealth or not. Not one loss.

Let’s talk about the real hero of this thread. It turns out the best engineer in the game doesn’t use any kits and only plays with one hand!

Or, well, he’s never actually dueled anyone.

For me the top priority is to enjoy longer fights. I like running tanky condi builds on my Mesmer and Ranger, because I enjoy having a gf that last more than just 2-3 seconds. I just find it more exciting to face that challenge, where I need to dodge, evade or stealth (essentially stay alive) while seeing the condi I apply slowly tick.

Majority of players I encounter in wvw are still power builds though. I think many just don’t have the patience and or care for a longer fight. They just want to get their rotation burst off and be done with it by 2-3 shotting their opponent, then move on. They get frustrated if they fail in doing that. I don’t get the fun in that.

What I don’t agree with is the ability to apply condi burst especially in an offensive manner or via traps. Insta applying 6+ nasty condi on your opponent especially with being able to insta stack massive amounts of burning, bleeds or torment just melting the victim’s HP so fast is not fair in my opinion. It is extremely difficult for many classes and build combos to deal with such a overwhelming application of condis.