Guild Wars 2

Hello there!

With the introduction of ferocity pushing critical damage to the set of secondary attributes it got me thinking on the other poorly scaled stats, i.e. Boon- and Conditionduration.

Poorly scaled because:
- Boonduration on all armor pieces (Giver’s armor) has the same bonus of 1%
- Boonduration on all trinkets has the same bonus of 2% (trinket itself and jewel each at 1%)
- Condition duration on weapons (Giver’s weapons) have an insane bonus of 10% per weapon. !!! 2-handed weapons have the same bonus as 1-handed weapons !!!

Why mention this now?
I’m aware that those items are niche products but in perspective of the big changes to critical damage those stats which are used quite a lot (though almost only in WvW) should deserve some love.

Why I think these two stats on equipment got discarded by abandonment:
Simple and short: Balance! There is a lot of finetuning with the different classes going on, so I suppose making boon duration a viable secondary stat on armor/trinkets gives the balance team chills.

Is this looked into or at least under consideration for adjustments? Are there plans to maybe handle those stats like critical damage with ferocity?

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance to the balance team for responding!

They should:

• Add a new stat for Boonduration and Conditionduration in the same way as they did with Critcal damage, like ferosity. So its once and for all ballanced.

• Add Boonduration and Conditionduration stats to Celestial.

That’s exactly my point. Boonduration is the critical damage for supportbuilds, condition duration kinda for condition builds ;-).

they have a toxic sharpning stone +100 power + 10 condition duration !
that should make one for +10 boon duration

This is a horrible idea for one main reason… power builds still use boons. There’s already a huge problem with condition classes needing 1 primary stat and power builds needing 3. If ANet wanted to improve things for the better instead of just slightly nerf crit dmg, they would have removed the stat entirely. But the absolute last thing this game needs is another stat you need to stack ontop of power, crit, and ferocity vs condition and nothing…

I like how you say “needing” instead of “getting”, Atherakhia. No wonder condi builds are as weak as they are. On top of a prohibitive stack limit and that’s just in 5mans, there’s just no scalability behind it beyond the (frankly overpowered) food.

Carighan.6758:

I like how you say “needing” instead of “getting”, Atherakhia. No wonder condi builds are as weak as they are. On top of a prohibitive stack limit and that’s just in 5mans, there’s just no scalability behind it beyond the (frankly overpowered) food.

If it were a food problem PvP wouldn’t be in month 10 of the worst condi meta any mmo has ever seen.

PvE is an entirely different problem and not worth discussing.

Atherakhia.4086:

Carighan.6758:

I like how you say “needing” instead of “getting”, Atherakhia. No wonder condi builds are as weak as they are. On top of a prohibitive stack limit and that’s just in 5mans, there’s just no scalability behind it beyond the (frankly overpowered) food.

If it were a food problem PvP wouldn’t be in month 10 of the worst condi meta any mmo has ever seen.

PvE is an entirely different problem and not worth discussing.

These are 32 words I agree with, Atherakhia. Conditions are absurd right now.

Well, in my opinion either drop boonduration equipment (do the same as was done with magic find equip) or make it a stat-combo that gives at elast a reasonable amount of boonduration. 1% on each armor piece is just so out of balance.

For conditions, in particular giver’s weapons, it’s obvious, adjust 2handed to 1handed weapons.

Addint those or at least one of those stats to celestial would (maybe) be viable in case there is no adjustment after the ferocity changes.

Atherakhia.4086:

If it were a food problem PvP wouldn’t be in month 10 of the worst condi meta any mmo has ever seen.

PvE is an entirely different problem and not worth discussing.

Atherakhia.4086:

and not worth discussing.

Figures.
I’d say the problem is sPvP especially. Remove it, and most of the serious balance problems and many of the more toxic community members would be gone. :P

Atherakhia.4086:

Carighan.6758:

I like how you say “needing” instead of “getting”, Atherakhia. No wonder condi builds are as weak as they are. On top of a prohibitive stack limit and that’s just in 5mans, there’s just no scalability behind it beyond the (frankly overpowered) food.

If it were a food problem PvP wouldn’t be in month 10 of the worst condi meta any mmo has ever seen.

PvE is an entirely different problem and not worth discussing.

and here we have a perfect example of the mess we have from trying to balance everything between the game modes, yet not having the game modes behave the same.

conditions are OP in PVP thanks to the tighter numbers between offense and defense (numerically a soldier warrior will win against a zerker warrior in a tank and spank exchange), and conditions allow for bunker builds to do constant damage.

But in PVE the mechanics make conditions UP, because the pr target stacks are shared (1 condition necro and 5 condition necro will do just as much damage against a mob once the stacks are maxed out) and the way they make mobs “threatening” is by upping the health pool (taking down anything above trash mobs while in a bunker build and the biggest danger is loss of concentration because of the drawn out fight).

And frankly, jiggling the numbers will do nothing. The problem is that PVE and PVP play nothing alike. And i suspect they can’t make mobs more PVP like because that would overtax their server farm. Each zone instance is after all perfectly tuned to max out a cpu core and a specific amount of ram when a certain amount of players are in there. Up the AI complexity of mobs, and they either have to set up more instances or decrease the mob density.

Upping the complexity alone won’t help, however. Frankly, RPGs cannot be balanced for smallscale combat. Either multiple players have to fight a boss, where you can use scripted mechanics to balance the classes, or you need to make sure that the number of players/entities on each side is significant enough to blur the class differences.

Just making PvE/WvW more like sPvP would make balancing easier, but at the same time break balance. If WoW’s arena proved anything it’s that smallscale balance doesn’t work together with “interesting” classes, at all. Either your class is largely homogenized and abilities are shared left and right and centre, or you need to accept a lack of smallscale balance.

(This makes sense. As you homogenize, you effectively reduce the number of classes, and hence bring down the per-side count required for balance.)