I’m interested in seeing if there is a significant portion of the guardian community that would be interested in having better condition damage options for the guardian profession.
We have some pretty decent options for Burning our targets but have NO other forms of condition damage. Every other class has options for maintaining at least 2 different damaging conditions.
A solution that could slide neatly into our current kit is making Retaliation scale with condition damage. I think this would fit nicely into the Guardian persona as well as requiring little to no change to traits and skills. The problem that I see with this solution is that A-Net has already stated that they would like make Retaliation into a “counter a flurry of attacks” mechanic rather than the permanent status that we can currently maintain.
A wild suggestion style solution would be to implement one handed and two handed axes into our kit. These weapons could have bleed and crippling options and would fit our aesthetic quite well imo.
TLDR: Are you interested in having the option to build for condition damage?
More variety is always welcome, but the big deal here is trying to make that balanced. Making retaliation scale up with condition damage could make it a little overpowered, since you could get rabid stat itens and be toughy with kittentons of retaliation damage, which would be imbalanced, specially on spvp. For some reason, to me, retaliation feels like a really strong boon, i guess that gets evident whenever you see a thief unload you from distance and the retaliation starts to tick up.
Retaliation is easily countered in pvp. Your enemy does not have to hit you… They can easily hit your friend instead. Or strip your boon. The balance would obviously be in the numbers. As it is currently people build Power/Vit/Tough and retaliation scales with power (albeit only slightly).
They way I see it a tanky retaliation player can be ignored or at least saved for last. It could be too strong on a Power/Prec/Cond spec’d glass cannon though because you would be guaranteed to win any “race to the bottom” type scenario.
Retaliation is easily countered in pvp. Your enemy does not have to hit you… They can easily hit your friend instead. Or strip your boon. The balance would obviously be in the numbers. As it is currently people build Power/Vit/Tough and retaliation scales with power (albeit only slightly).
They way I see it a tanky retaliation player can be ignored or at least saved for last. It could be too strong on a Power/Prec/Cond spec’d glass cannon though because you would be guaranteed to win any “race to the bottom” type scenario.
Not having to hit somebody is a big deal actually, whenever its necessary to burst down that guy that hits like a truck and you cant do it because retaliation is too strong. Plus, we aren’t just talking about guardians here, since other classes can have retaliation aswell as we can give it to them
Not having to hit somebody is a big deal actually, whenever its necessary to burst down that guy that hits like a truck and you cant do it because retaliation is too strong. Plus, we aren’t just talking about guardians here, since other classes can have retaliation aswell as we can give it to them
Yes I understand that it would take balancing (just like EVERYTHING else). That is not the point. It would have to be powerful enough to dissuade attackers but not so powerful that you absolutely couldn’t be attacked. Furthermore “whenever it’s necessary to burst down…” sounds like a situation where you should be doing some boon stripping anyway. You know, for protection and aegis.
Specifics were not the intention of the original post though. Is there interest in a more condition damage based Guardian? Or opinions that it wouldn’t fit well with the lore?
Having played a lot with condition builds on both my thief and my guardian, I can see why it’s unlikely that the Guardian options for conditions will be adjusted for two reasons.
1. Condition damage has a strong position in our arsenal as a secondary, concurrent damage path (unlike other professions where it’s a primary source of damage)
2. If it was adjusted to accommodate interests in applying it to more difficult boss-like encounters, it would be too OPed more simple ones.
While condition damage is not considered a serious substitute for crits on guardians, it does have it’s advantage of being a concurrent damage path independent of your primary weapon damage. It should stay that way. Therefore, I don’t think that Ret and Conditions should share any mechanics.
If we are talking about methods to improve condition damage application, I believe it would be quite interesting to find a way to give guardians a long range burn. The actual durations and damage we currently have with burning options is quite reasonable.
Greatsword #5 does relatively high condition damage
BTW, burning is a very interesting condition. High-damage, but not really compatible with the idea of burst. It seems that ANet indeed tried to design the Guardian with sustained damage in mind.
I personally don’t like Retaliation. I just don’t like how it punishes ppl for attacking you while requiring no effort on your part.
I would much rather see something like:
—Burning scaling better with condition damage
—Increased duration on our burning skills
—Burning proccing twice every .5 – .75 seconds. That way +condition duration would be more viable, as right now you need +100% condition duration to see any benefits.
But in all honesty I don’t think Guards need anything like this as they are in a pretty solid place at the moment.
You are right in stating that Burning is the condition that you put on the target just to have another source of damage. It is the same for anyone who can apply it. No body concentrates on burning because it stacks in duration and can be easily maintained. Even if you can maintain burning on a target 100% of the time you will get little benefit from concentrating on condition damage. The maximum effect you can get out of condition damage with burning alone is 25% of your condition damage per second to a single target or 125% of your condition damage per second across 5 targets.
The way I see it, Guardians have strong builds that include any or all of the stats except for condition damage. Being left out of the bleed train is why Guardians do not have any condition damage specs. As far as I know every other class can maintain ~10 stacks of bleeding on a single target giving them 50% of their condition damage to the target per second on top of maintaining poison (10%) or burning (25%) or both (ranger/engineer)
I think guardians need both stronger base condition damage or access to more conditions.
also stronger retaliation i don’t even use retaliation now except stand you’re ground.
in the first 2 weeks after the game came out retaliation had a decent duration.
but there was some problems like wrathful spirits could last as long as 1 min without any +boon duration instead of 10 seconds like intended.
Arenanet keep nerfing all the retaliation skills and for them to have a useful duration now you have to sacrifice so much its not worth it.
But their philosophy is too use boons to survive with their low levels of health. we do have quite a lot of access to protection but currently there is too many bad traits and wrathful spirits is one of them unless you build high boon duration.
i think it would be better if they instead of making retaliation useless give us more boons. more fury more regeneration etc.
