Guild Wars 2

This is something I’m not proud to post, but if enough people look at it, I feel it can eventually (maybe) lead to some new strategies for not just necros, but any class that is dependent upon conditions.

I have spent a long time on my necro. I’ve tried many different builds, almost all of them I’d say, but I always came back to the bleeding build. It is by far the most fun to play for me, because it feels like the perfect blend of survivability and damage. It can tank a lot of damage and put out even more. I’ve managed to do a lot with this build, some incredible things for any class, but I keep running into some problems. One is nothing that I can really do about, which is facing a Champion with other players that stack bleeds. Only 25-50% of my bleeds ever get through, and if it’s a world map Champion it can sometimes feel like none. But this is oh well. There’s really nothing that can be done, except bleeds be tracked by individual players, which would kinda be OP.

The other is structural damage. This is where my build falls face flat. Since I’m Rabid, I’m traited into Condition Damage and Precision, and nothing into power. The problem is, THAT NEITHER OF THESE MATTER. Since you cannot apply Conditions nor crit on a structure, I can barely damage them. Best best choice is DS auto-attack. Seriously, my kitten Flesh Golem hits harder than me.

This being said, I thought up some ideas to improve the damage that Conditions do to structures. These ideas have not been inspired by anything else, I just thought them up at work. If this has already been suggested, I promise you I’m not trying to steal any credit. With that out of the way, I present with you the Damaging Condition Conversion.

It’s a simple idea, you take conditions that do damage, and convert them to different conditions that do damage to structures upon application. Since a Reinforced Gate can’t bleed, be poisoned, or confused we come up with new ones to substitute. I spent some time thinking about this, but I’m still open to ideas. Please let me know if you come up with anything better.

Bleeding (does damage per second, stacks in intensity) could be converted to something like Erosion (does damage per second, stack in intensity and ends on 25 stacks).

Poison (Does damage per second, 33% heal reduction, stacks in duration) could be converted to Acid (Does damage per second, %5 increase in incoming damage, stacks in duration).

I feel Burn could almost be left the same, cause ya know, it makes sense.

Confusion is something I’m still working on, because it’s mental, and structures don’t have minds. I was kinda thinking something like Empower (grants a random boon and cures a random condition upon attack. Cool-down is 30 seconds, stacks in duration.

Like I said, I’m still thinking about this, and I feel it would level out the game a little bit more. Also, if there’s a better way for me to damage structures within the confines of my build, please let me know.

This is something I’ve noticed, despite being a power-necro from release. And it’s quite problematic. Especially when the content requires you to destroy objects, e.g. burrows in AC.

So, +1 to you.

This affliction doesn’t just plague necro’s, engineers have this problem too.

I think a problem with that solution is that powerbuilds also have conditions on their auto attacks and would also deal more dmg.

From a wvw point of viewconditions on gates would mean that these go down much faster, especially with stacking conditions and +% more dmg.

It would mean gates would have to have higher “health” to stay as defensive, which would mean a condition build still doesn’t really do more dmg.

I do like the Idea in generell though.

WvW wouldn’t be a big issue, if you are really trying to force a gate down quickly, you aren’t doing it with auto attacks, you are doing it with siege. If you are planning to auto attack a gate down, you’ll need a ton of people, in which case they’ll end up hitting the condition cap, which wouldn’t result in tons more damage. Basically, in the scheme of things, attacks are pretty meaningless when it comes to breaking doors down, so them doing a bit more damage wouldn’t mean much (I would imagine its possible to just have this work in PvE as well, if it really is an issue).

Bhawb.7408:

WvW wouldn’t be a big issue, if you are really trying to force a gate down quickly, you aren’t doing it with auto attacks, you are doing it with siege.

Gates no, but every other piece of siege, yes its a problem. When you have to destroy arrow carts on walls, cannons, catapults or ballista left over in the field, opponent rams still sitting at gates, etc, it is a major annoyance. And comes up a lot.

It’s basically wait for the ele to come around and kill it 10x as fast as you. The only time a condi Necro can do structural damage fast is if its up against a wall and your flesh golem can ram up against it repeatedly with his charge.

Condition dmg have been a huge problem since release and there have been 0 changes about it even when it came to taggin people in wvw you ended up with nothing or world events same deal ( although its easier to tag now its a really bad fix ).

Oh well atleast they fixed it in super adventure box.

I think that, while Bleeding and Poison don’t make much sense at all to be applicable to structures, that Burning should. Seems only natural to set things on fire. Besides, we do have Flesh Golems to slam structures down ASAP.

Flesh Golem really only works when the structure is big enough for him to charge and not go right through. Otherwise, he doesn’t do that much damage. It feels like unless you’re a dagger-wielding power build of some sort that you aren’t going to ever do much to structures.

To be honest though, I wasn’t really thinking of WvW too much when I thought this up. Yeah, it would speed up damage output to the gates, but 90-95% of it comes from the siege. My biggest problem is when you’re alone or with a small group. In regards to the AC Explorable paths where you have to kill burrows, I’m useless. If we have an Elementalist in the group I usually ask for an ice bow, but without that, I’m better off killing mobs meaninglessly. When running CoF 1st path, if they want me to kill the Gate Controller, the entire group is gonna die trying to survive that wait time. There’s many other instances in dungeons where you’re required to destroy structures, and like stated above, you just have to wait for someone else to come along and do damage.

It just sucks that we’ve been given this amazing class with this awesome build, and it has such an apparent and undoinganythingaboutitable weakness. Some might argue that every build should be bad at something, but it doesn’t seem like other builds have this big of a flaw.

As for the above poster, that’s why Bleeding would convert to Erosion, and Poison would convert to Acid. These things make more sense to structures, since they can’t be inflicted with disease.

Mechanics should never cede way to fluff or ‘Making sense’ logically.

You can blind, poison, and bleed trees, skeletons and machines in this game, as well as stuff like rock and fire elementals. It doesn’t make any less sense to bleed a door, which is made from the same stuff as a veteran oakheart.

Just developer silly thinking that makes our class weaker that our abilities don’t damage these structures.

I played a condition build from launch up to about 2 months ago and loved it. I still love it. But the problems you pointed out are the exact same issues that caused me to start experimenting with power builds, and I love those as well and will probably stick with it for awhile. The situations mentioned are not nearly common enough to permanently cripple the build in dungeon runs, but they come up just often enough to make it a problem. I actually made a 3rd set of armor with knights stats and slotted with ruby orbs and carried it (along with a zerker axe, focus, and war horn) at all times just so I wouldn’t be utterly useless for those instances. Without a complete build it wasn’t gloriously effective, but a hell of a lot better than before. I would love to see the changes you mentioned implemented.