Guild Wars 2

It seems the way Anet has decided to deal with conditions being on the weak side in the game, is to create more conditions, more access to conditions, in order for specifically the Necro to have better coverage and protection for their heavy bleed dependent builds.

If the leaked patch notes are correct though, this does not seem to be achieved. With Burning on a GM trait power line, this will be very difficult for conditionmancers to give up other things for. Most will figure not to have burning. At best you might go for 30/10/10/0/20 to get it and keep Master of Terror, but it is giving up a lot of condition damage only going 10 into curses.

Weakness applying abilities have also been shortened in duration due to them affecting criticals, and this then actually hurts our coverage.

The Poison increase on Scepter would be a slight help, but reality its not always realistic that you are going to reach your 3rd scepter chain attack that many times in a typical combat.

Leaving only Tainted Shackles or whatever the new DS ability is called, as a solution to cover. But considering many necros can’t get into DS more than once every 10s, and this ability looks fairly powerful and to have a long cooldown, even if you do get the easier to reach DS cooldown, I do not really see anything changed or solved with the problem of massive cleansing all over team fights.

What I was really hoping to see from the new skill / and changes was something that punished enemies removing our conditions so easily in some way.

Even as a means to lock down opponents to meet our professed philosophy, the new ability is just as susceptible to removal and hence enemy escapes, as is cripple and chill right now, which we have plenty of access to, but does not do the job.