Guild Wars 2

The Condition and Control system works well in pve, but not in pvp (wvw and spvp) modes. This has to change, and I’m going to lay out the problems and possible solutions. The CC issues in pvp modes have been around long enough so I hope these suggestions are taken with a bit more seriousness.

I know we can go into tons of variables here, but I’m going to stick to the core issues outside of individual professions and team make ups and focus on the general CC system as a whole.

Problem

Some Conditions are damage over time (dot) damage that have status effects tied to them correct? Yes, so what’s the problem here? Well, players are hit with direct damage, critical damage, Condition dot damage PLUS all the status effects from CC skills… Those are way too much when combined from one player, let alone multiple players.

Solution

The Toughness stat should reduce “soft” Condition dot damage and status effect duration as well.

Problem

Individual builds are capable of applying multiple different “soft” Conditions and status effects over and over and over… and that is too much.

Solution

Add more and improve current Condition removal skills, and tie in immunity timers to Condition removal skills.

Problem

The rate at which you can be hit by “hard” Control skills vastly outweighs resistances and Stun Breaks.

Solution

Add more and improve “hard” Control resistance skills. Add immunity timers after you manually Stun Break and also when the effect ends naturally if you were not able to use a Stun Break.

Immunity Timer Stuff

The below quote is about the immunity timers that City of Heroes implemented in pvp…

“Every time a character recovers from a Hold, Immobilize, Disorient, Sleep, or Fear status, that character becomes immune to all five of those effects from other players for 15 seconds. Every time a character suffers a Knockdown, Knockback, or Knockup effect, that character becomes immune to all three of those effects from other players for 10 seconds. These two timers are independent. It should be noted that Confuse effects, while technically mezzes, are on a separate 15-second timer than the other mezzes listed above.”

So let’s tailor the above quote for GW2… The basic gist is that a character goes on an immunity timer to all “soft” Conditions after using removal skills and “hard” Control effects after the effect ends or the player uses a Stun Breaker. Moa must finally go into this “hard” Control category as well.

For “soft” Conditions there are two ways to do it…

First is an immunity timer on a 1 cleanse-1 condition basis.

Or

Immunity timers to groups of “soft” Conditions. Some grouping examples below…

Group 1… Blind, Confusion, Vulnerability and Weakness.

Group 2… Chilled, Crippled, Immobilize and Slow.

Group 3… Bleeding, Burning, Poison and Torment.

The direct damage from weapons and skills that produce these Control and Condition effects remain unchanged.

Visual Indication of Immunity Timers

Visual indicators can be assigned to a character in the form of auras and an icon on the UI so both player(s) and attacker(s) know that CC immunity timers are in effect.

Balancing Damage

Condition damage and status effects will be reduced following these suggestions, so I would like to suggest increasing direct damage from weapons designed more for condition application.

Recap

Have Toughness reduce condition damage and duration. Improve Condition removal. Improve Control resistance. Add immunity timers after being hit with CC. Increase direct damage to compensate for the changes.

I’ll have some edits…

No. You just want to turn all condition damage users into power users. You might as well have titled your post “remove conditions from the game” because what you suggest would make conditions completely ineffective.

Armor choice generally focuses on reducing power damage. Utility and trait choices focus on reducing condition damage. It is not the fault of the condition users that other players do not slot utilities or traits designed to reduce condition damage.

Also, in general, this game has FAR too much immunity. Now you want even more immunity introduced and PASSIVE immunity on top of that. Getting stun locked by 10 players focusing on you is not imbalanced because it is 10 v 1. It would be unbalanced if you could run a single clear for poison, bleed, confusion and become immune to those conditions for a period of time, not even counting a time reduction from toughness.

If we are talking 1v1, with particular classes, then we can talk about needing more condition clears (active ones at least) and the relative imbalances therein.

saerni.2584:

No. You just want to turn all condition damage users into power users. You might as well have titled your post “remove conditions from the game” because what you suggest would make conditions completely ineffective.

Armor choice generally focuses on reducing power damage. Utility and trait choices focus on reducing condition damage. It is not the fault of the condition users that other players do not slot utilities or traits designed to reduce condition damage.

Also, in general, this game has FAR too much immunity. Now you want even more immunity introduced and PASSIVE immunity on top of that. Getting stun locked by 10 players focusing on you is not imbalanced because it is 10 v 1. It would be unbalanced if you could run a single clear for poison, bleed, confusion and become immune to those conditions for a period of time, not even counting a time reduction from toughness.

If we are talking 1v1, with particular classes, then we can talk about needing more condition clears (active ones at least) and the relative imbalances therein.

CC is problematic in many scenarios. Even individual builds can pump out more CC damage and status effects than can be managed, along with direct and crit damage, and these are the issues. There are a plethora of scenarios where we are not fighting the player, we are fighting the CC system, and this is also exacerbated by the lack of decent support roles to play comparatively. Yes, certain builds can manage CC better, but even those builds can be overwhelmed over time.

This game was built around pve designs and those doesn’t always port over well to pvp, and this can be seen with the CC system. These issues have been brought up before and even acknowledged by developers, but so far we haven’t seen any changes in pvp. Perhaps now that the devs are taking stronger steps to balance between modes this will be evaluated strongly.

Individual builds should be balanced individually.

Yes, it is easier to balance if you make everyone have the same stats, give everyone the same kind of damage output, and remove any kind of control effects from the game. But that makes the game less interesting to play.

Once they implement the Zerg button, everything will balance itself out and everyone will press that one button. (wait, isn’t that the #1 button)

What I see is… condi’s aren’t ridiculous when you have condi builds built for this purpose. They have a job of slapping players down with condi’s … but no one wants to play a direct counter, full condi removal … because that’s just boring. Why would one player get to play offence while another is built solely for surviving those condi’s.

The problem occurs when … you take that one person, and have 10+ others who all have some form of condi/CC and your bar all of a sudden looks like it’s the next advertisement for a hazmat video. Even in 10v10 or 20v20 … if your targeted by 1 or 2 groups … your gonna blow all your invulnerables/condi removals … only to have them reapplied seconds later. The struggle is real.

saerni.2584:

Individual builds should be balanced individually.

Yes, it is easier to balance if you make everyone have the same stats, give everyone the same kind of damage output, and remove any kind of control effects from the game. But that makes the game less interesting to play.

Sure, different professions and builds should be different and unique in ways, I will not dispute that.

I’m not asking for professions to have the same stats or same damage output or to remove CC from the game. Professions still remain varied enough and bring different toolsets, but the overall cc system needs to be more sensible in pvp modes.

saerni.2584:

Armor choice generally focuses on reducing power damage. Utility and trait choices focus on reducing condition damage. It is not the fault of the condition users that other players do not slot utilities or traits designed to reduce condition damage.

The problem with this method is that condi damage is pretty much all or nothing. In large groups condi clear is ample making condi near useless. In small scale, condi becomes OP because few classes lack the ability to cleanse condi fast enough.

Condi should work like direct damage only over time. By moving away from all or nothing and into resistance (like toughness/armor for power) ANet could balance condi in small and large scale more effectively.

I agree that there should be some way of reducing condi damage in the same way as armor reduces direct damage, but I really don’t think toughness is the right attribute for this. It would not be right because a build with a high toughness would then counter both condi and direct damage. It would not be balanced for a single defensive stat to reduce both damage types, when a strong condi damage build requires players to choose different attributes to a power direct damage build.

I saw a post on here a month or two back that suggested the healing stat could be used to reduce condi like toughness reduces direct damage. I liked the idea at the time and I still like it, especially since the healing stat is little used at the moment.
It would also make sense: good toughness is a physical attribute that helps you ignore physical damage while good healing helps you recover faster from bleeding or poison.

Yuffi.2430:

I agree that there should be some way of reducing condi damage in the same way as armor reduces direct damage, but I really don’t think toughness is the right attribute for this. It would not be right because a build with a high toughness would then counter both condi and direct damage. It would not be balanced for a single defensive stat to reduce both damage types, when a strong condi damage build requires players to choose different attributes to a power direct damage build.

I saw a post on here a month or two back that suggested the healing stat could be used to reduce condi like toughness reduces direct damage. I liked the idea at the time and I still like it, especially since the healing stat is little used at the moment.
It would also make sense: good toughness is a physical attribute that helps you ignore physical damage while good healing helps you recover faster from bleeding or poison.

That’s interesting. I used Toughness because it seemed to make most sense, but other attributes could work as well.

For healing, though, hmm the only issue is that there are tons of builds that don’t need a healing stat because of build and how it scales, so I’m thinking that maybe vitality would be better.

Swagger.1459:

For healing, though, hmm the only issue is that there are tons of build that don’t need a healing stat because of build and how it scales, so I’m thinking that maybe vitality would be better.

Toughness don’t scale with anything other than direct damage defense. What’s the problem of healing since it scale with so few things?
Vitality already increase you HP, which is a light defense for both types of daamage.

Yeah – I considered vitality too but thought healing was a better choice because vitality already counted against both direct and condi damage.

Jeknar.6184:

Swagger.1459:

For healing, though, hmm the only issue is that there are tons of build that don’t need a healing stat because of build and how it scales, so I’m thinking that maybe vitality would be better.

Toughness don’t scale with anything other than direct damage defense. What’s the problem of healing since it scale with so few things?
Vitality already increase you HP, which is a light defense for both types of daamage.

Well, toughness could also be made to grant defense against condition damage.

Most builds have zero use for healing and the gearing options with healing stats are really poor. Conditions and condition damage are ever present so a more common and useful stat like toughness or vitality would be best overall.

Swagger.1459:

The Condition and Control system works well in pve, but not in pvp (wvw and spvp) modes. This has to change, and I’m going to lay out the problems and possible solutions. The CC issues in pvp modes have been around long enough so I hope these suggestions are taken with a bit more seriousness.

I know we can go into tons of variables here, but I’m going to stick to the core issues outside of individual professions and team make ups and focus on the general CC system as a whole.

Problem

Some Conditions are damage over time (dot) damage that have status effects tied to them correct? Yes, so what’s the problem here? Well, players are hit with direct damage, critical damage, Condition dot damage PLUS all the status effects from CC skills… Those are way too much when combined from one player, let alone multiple players.

Solution

The Toughness stat should reduce “soft” Condition dot damage and status effect duration as well.

Other solution : reduce the amount of condis and CC to a selected few, or switch them to a pip mechanic lik GW1 had. In a nutshell : simplify.
Same for CC’s.

Swagger.1459:

Problem

Individual builds are capable of applying multiple different “soft” Conditions and status effects over and over and over… and that is too much.

Solution

Add more and improve current Condition removal skills, and tie in immunity timers to Condition removal skills.

I disagree with immunity timers for condis. There’re roughly 2 ways of dealing damage : direct and condis. It’s not easy to have both of these ways efficient at the same time. A solution would be to fuse protection and resistance, or have resistance work the same (30% reduce of condi damage). In the current status, resistance is lame because there’s no way to mitigate direct damage that much (regardless of profession specific mechanics).

A second solution would be to drastically boost the healing stat, so that regeneration could effectively compensate for condi damage.

Swagger.1459:

Problem

The rate at which you can be hit by “hard” Control skills vastly outweighs resistances and Stun Breaks.

Solution

Add more and improve “hard” Control resistance skills. Add immunity timers after you manually Stun Break and also when the effect ends naturally if you were not able to use a Stun Break.

I totally agree on this one. Stunlocks should strongly nerfed. Fights are about skills, and tactics. Not about handcuffing your opponent to his chair while you strike him down. I actually would totally remove CC’s and add more interrupts mechanics (like, on the fly, or “your next action fails” status etc.)

Swagger.1459:

Balancing Damage

Condition damage and status effects will be reduced following these suggestions, so I would like to suggest increasing direct damage from weapons designed more for condition application.

Recap

Have Toughness reduce condition damage and duration. Improve Condition removal. Improve Control resistance. Add immunity timers after being hit with CC. Increase direct damage to compensate for the changes.

I’ll have some edits…

I disagree on this one. Direct damage and Condi damage should work in a parallal fashion like :

• Direct damage : Stat : toughness ; Boon : protection ; Heal : direct heal (skill 6 etc.)
• Condi damage : Stat : vitality ; Boon : resistance ; heal : regeneration

Something like this…

If Healing were used to reduce condi damage then perhaps build diversity would improve:

• Zealots (Power, Precision, Healing) would make a hard hitting condi surviving build.
• Nomads would still be the ultimate tank build, although Givers would perhaps become another option.
• Clerics, Shamans, Apothecarys and Settlers equipment would become more useful.
• Celestial would again become a reasonable compromise for everything.

You’ve given me a lot to work with, Swagger, I really like that.

Swagger.1459:

Problem

Some Conditions are damage over time (dot) damage that have status effects tied to them correct? Yes, so what’s the problem here? Well, players are hit with direct damage, critical damage, Condition dot damage PLUS all the status effects from CC skills… Those are way too much when combined from one player, let alone multiple players.

Solution

The Toughness stat should reduce “soft” Condition dot damage and status effect duration as well.

This is just a straight boost to Toughness which I’m not necessarily convinced it needs. Bunkers can already be very hard to bust; I don’t see why they need to become even more unbustable.

Swagger.1459:

Problem

Individual builds are capable of applying multiple different “soft” Conditions and status effects over and over and over… and that is too much.

Solution

Add more and improve current Condition removal skills, and tie in immunity timers to Condition removal skills.

This first one I like; the idea of buffing condi removal skills. There are tons of unused skills that could be beefed up with condi removal and CD lowering, which seems to broadly be a good idea considering they were implemented when there were less condis in the game.

The second one- adding Resistance to more utility skills?- I am not so sure about. It’s interesting, I’ll give it that, but it’d need to be given to specific places and specific classes.

Swagger.1459:

Problem

The rate at which you can be hit by “hard” Control skills vastly outweighs resistances and Stun Breaks.

Solution

Add more and improve “hard” Control resistance skills. Add immunity timers after you manually Stun Break and also when the effect ends naturally if you were not able to use a Stun Break.

I disagree on this one. We don’t want to push the game into a position where you always have as many or more defensive options than your opponent has offensive options. Fights have to end.

Swagger.1459:

Immunity Timer Stuff

The below quote is about the immunity timers that City of Heroes implemented in pvp…

“Every time a character recovers from a Hold, Immobilize, Disorient, Sleep, or Fear status, that character becomes immune to all five of those effects from other players for 15 seconds. Every time a character suffers a Knockdown, Knockback, or Knockup effect, that character becomes immune to all three of those effects from other players for 10 seconds. These two timers are independent. It should be noted that Confuse effects, while technically mezzes, are on a separate 15-second timer than the other mezzes listed above.”

So let’s tailor the above quote for GW2… The basic gist is that a character goes on an immunity timer to all “soft” Conditions after using removal skills and “hard” Control effects after the effect ends or the player uses a Stun Breaker. Moa must finally go into this “hard” Control category as well.

For “soft” Conditions there are two ways to do it…

First is an immunity timer on a 1 cleanse-1 condition basis.

Or

Immunity timers to groups of “soft” Conditions. Some grouping examples below…

Group 1… Blind, Confusion, Vulnerability and Weakness.

Group 2… Chilled, Crippled, Immobilize and Slow.

Group 3… Bleeding, Burning, Poison and Torment.

The direct damage from weapons and skills that produce these Control and Condition effects remain unchanged.

So this is diminishing returns.

I wouldn’t like this as a base system but I think it could be interesting to add traits which function like this to some of the unpopular traitlines. Gain resistance/stability when x/y

Swagger.1459:

Visual Indication of Immunity Timers

Visual indicators can be assigned to a character in the form of auras and an icon on the UI so both player(s) and attacker(s) know that CC immunity timers are in effect.

So basically, bigger tells for Resistance and Stability. Resistance already has a huge tell but Stability could use one.

Swagger.1459:

Balancing Damage

Condition damage and status effects will be reduced following these suggestions, so I would like to suggest increasing direct damage from weapons designed more for condition application.

This is more complicated than you give it credit.

I started to write a reply post for this like 5 times.. and every time I get back to the same conclusion… conditions really messed up this game, to the point now that fights are about who has more conditions and boons, lopsided balance between applications and removals. I’m sure pve enjoys it quite a bit, so it isn’t going to change.

The fun of combat just isn’t there anymore.