Counterplay to conditions currently consists of a line – There’s no triangle, like rock-paper-scissors.
If you stack enough condition removal, you beat condition builds. If you don’t stack enough, you lose to them. That’s literally it. There’s no other counter to it.
Here’s why.
-“Kill them before they can stack enough conditions.” Because conditions can be removed before they deal significant damage, their theoretical DPS is higher. And because condition damage revolves around high-DPS DoT, you’d think one counter would be killing them before they can stack enough conditions on you. The game mechanics work against this. To maximize direct damage, you typically need 3 stats. Power, Precision, and Critical Damage. To maximize condition damage, you need only 1-2. Condition damage and a bit of precision if you want crit-procs. Condition builds can get very tanky with those extra stats.
-“Interrupt or prevent the key skills that apply dangerous conditions.” Many powerful condition damage abilities have extremely quick cast times or even none, such as Incendiary Powder, Pin Down, or Necromancer’s scepter autoattack. What are you gonna do, interrupt a passive trait? Feeling lucky enough to dodge a 1/4 cast time projectile? What about blocking an autoattack? Compare to Jump Shot, Eviscerate, or Life Blast, all of which have very large tells, cast times, and appropriate counterplay.
-“Outlast them until their DoT abilities are used up.” GW2 does not have an energy system, except on the thief. If you last long enough, they’ll just throw even more conditions onto you. Not to mention, many condition attacks are noticeably cheap in terms of cooldown. Drake’s Breath and Fan of Fire are two very low-cooldown attacks with high condition damage attachments. Compare to Fire Grab and Arcing Arrow. Condition damage builds will typically outlast you, rather than the other way around.
If you can’t prevent application, you can’t outlast application, and you can’t outdamage application, then…
The only counter to conditions is to remove them after they’re on you.
In other words:
-Condition damage is only countered by condition removal.
Right now, almost ANY build will lose to a condition build if it doesn’t take condition removal, due to how easy it is to apply conditions and how effective they are. I don’t think it’s balanced that tanky condi will beat any other build unless it’s specifically built against. You may say that “it’s your choice” to choose not to take condition removal, as most say about builds that have no stunbreakers. However, I’d say many specs can survive without a stunbreaker, but almost no spec is useful if it doesn’t have condition removal. If there is one, I’d really like to see it.
Now, about condition removal…that’s also broken.
-Condition removal is only countered by MORE CONDITIONS, or just outright NOT PLAYING condition damage.
Condition removal is a defensive option. It’s a counter to conditions. But there’s no counter counterplay. Blocking and evading are defensive options which do have counters. Unblockable abilities exist. Weakness stacking works wonders on evade-happy enemies. All a condition damage build can do against someone who’s taken condition removal is to literally just keep spamming attacks and hoping the next condition sticks without being removed. (A large part of this is due to the number of instant-cast condition removals which deny CC prevention.)
Clearly, both options need stronger counterplay.
Solution ideas:
-Add more tells and longer cooldowns to big condition damage attacks. This would make it so we could interrupt, block, and dodge them. Longer cooldowns would punish misuse.
-Tone down condition application, and instead make each condition application worth far more. In other words, you could remove bleeding from a lot of skills, and remove such high stacks on some others, but also make each bleed worth a lot more damage.
-Allow conditions to crit, but tone down base damage. This would somewhat lessen the tankiness of condition damage builds, and also mean that they would have to invest in roughly the same stats as direct damage builds in order to achieve such high damage.
In turn, we could:
-Lessen condition removal. If conditions are easier to prevent, it shouldn’t be as easy as it is now to remove them.
-Add more specific condition removal. More of “This skill removes X and Y condition,” rather than “Removes a condition.” This way we could build around what conditions we didn’t like and ignore the conditions that were less detrimental to our build. We’d have little niches like poison counter builds and bleed counter builds rather than some builds having nigh-immunity to condition damage. Instead, you’d be able to see which removals your enemy took, and consciously focus on using the conditions that they were weak to.
(edited by Aegael.6938)