I don’t really care about the PvE part, i mainly see this from my standpoint as a duelist/roamer in WvW. And this 10% damage nerf to zerkers strikes me as devastating.
Passive-Play-Conditanks are not only incredible boring (and easy) to play, they are also (in most cases) stunningly superior to any powerbuild they come across. if you’re a tanky Powerbuild user, there is a high chance that your hits won’t even be noticed by a condition-tank opponent (vitality and toughness both counter powerdamage) – unfortunately this doesn’t count for the opposite direction, since a condition tank (dire) will still do insane damage to the powertank.
The Damage/Skilluse ratio (efficience of skills) is also much higher for the condition tank. One Scepter-Rotation from a dhumbfire-necro can hit for something over 7,5k in total (if dhumbfire actually triggers), Pin down can hit for a total of 18355 damage with one use (if specced that way), one use of Riposte can very well hit you for a total of 12672 damage, and Impale will (again in total) hit you with 8640-17280 damage.
All of that while having the same defenses as an equally tanky Powerbuild.
This enables them to play almost fully defensively, since they can lean back and stay on defensive as soon as they managed to land a few lucky hits on their target.The only downside to conditioners is the possibility to remove conditions before their usual lifespan – not that it would be much of a threat to a tanky conditionplayer, since applying conditions tends to be much easier than their removal, and the tankyness will usually mean that tehy can survive long enough to reapply them as well.
The only Way for a Powerbuilduser to kill any halfway-decent Conditiontank is, to spec as offensively as possible while taking as much conditionremoval as possible. You have to get at least to the point, where your Powerdamage leads to a higher average Dmg/skilluse ratio than the conditiondamage of your Condition-using opponent does – how much higher it has to be, obviously depends on how much greater his defense (this means more than the pure stat-differences) is compared to yours.
For most classes this means running zerker-gear at least to some degree, since missing it will usually result in a huge potential damage loss (especially compared to the gain in survivability) – too much in a fight against passive-play-conditiontanks. Of course this varies between different classes: Warriors for example have the highes Base HP (and armor) alongside fairly high damage-modifiers on their Attacks and easy access to perma-Fury – this means that they could easily swap some of their zerker gear for more defensive ones (running part soldier as an example) and still do enough damage to compete well against any Conditiontanks they run across. Now think of a Mesmer fighting a dire-Longbow-Sword/Sword Conditionwarrior. Even if the Mesmer runs a full-zerker set, he still only barely has the damage output to break through his opponents passive defense alone (thanks to the fairly low damage-modifiers). On the other Hand, the warrior could “oneshot” the mesmer by simply pressing #5 on his keyboard while wearing the longbow, if it doesn’t get avoided or removed by a condition-removal.
So even nerfing the overall damage of zerkers by 10% is already a punch in the face of every class, that can’t allow itself to mix it’s gear in response to Conditiontanks (not every Class has perma-Fury to compensate for a lack of precision, to name just one of multiple points), reducing it even further would be a disaster. But it doesn’t stop here – nerfing crit-damage itself will hit every single player relying on it, not just full zerkers.
The only ones not affected by this are Users of Condition-based-builds…
