Guild Wars 2

The subject is the self corruption conditions that the corruption skills put on you. Is this kind of a failed mechanic? It sort of feels that way to me.

The problem I have with them is the corruption skills are very situation dependent for when you want to use them. Especially Corrupt Boon and Epidemic, and even Blood is Power is best as an opener because of its long cast time and you want to get those might stacks spread over your full rotation for damage.

The tradeoff is you are left with these conditions sitting on you, and while I get the idea that you can quickly send them off again, its going to cost you a second skill, and usually a very vital transfer skill, Putrud Mark, Plague Signet, Deathly Swarm. Most of the time right after you cast the situation dependent corruption, it is not the best time to waste these skills to move one condition. Though with BiP and Corrupt Boon especially, those self conditions will inflict over 1000 damage to you easily as a conditonmancer if you let them sit. You can also blow your heal to get rid of them, also not always optimal.

So my question is do Necro’s feel these skills really are good enough to justify the self corruption, and/or giving you the ability to move an extra condition, but at the cost of your precious transfer skills? It seems to me wasting your transfers is actually not worth the condition that gets moved, and the initial effect from the skills, while some of our strongest ones, may not yet be strong enough to justify the self punishment and choice to make.

I think you can kind of see what they were going for here, but the Necro is juggling so many ball at once to be competent, and has to be so precious with his utility slots, I’m not sure we actually get a fair deal with these skills.

I don’t use them. I know certain ones are great when combined with epidemic, but I’m not speccing for conditions.

I don’t even notice the self inflicted conditions TBH. The vulnerability you get from using epidemic is something I completely forgot about until you made this thread. The bleeding from Blood is Power is always used with dagger offhand or staff 4 to turn it into additional bleeding on target. The poison from Corrupt Boon is never even noticed due to the fact that poison as a damage condition is so weak and insignificant, and the -33% healing is completely circumvented by Consume Conditions, which 90% of necromancers run anyway. No one uses Corrosive Poison Cloud because the skill is such kitten. I didn’t even know it gave you self inflicted weakness until I looked at it just now. Of all the self inflected conditions, I’d say weakness would be the most detrimental due to us not having access to vigor. Shame CPC is such a garbage skill.

I find the self inflicted conditions to be completely insignificant and I just ignore the fact that they exist except for the case of BiP, which I use offensively.

I dunno about all the Corruptions but I love Epidemic and Corrupt Boon, even with the self-conditions. I’m also perfect fine with using Dagger or Staff 4 to hand them off.

Kravick.4906:

I don’t even notice the self inflicted conditions TBH. The vulnerability you get from using epidemic is something I completely forgot about until you made this thread. The bleeding from Blood is Power is always used with dagger offhand or staff 4 to turn it into additional bleeding on target. The poison from Corrupt Boon is never even noticed due to the fact that poison as a damage condition is so weak and insignificant, and the -33% healing is completely circumvented by Consume Conditions, which 90% of necromancers run anyway. No one uses Corrosive Poison Cloud because the skill is such kitten.

I find the self inflicted conditions to be completely insignificant.

The vulnerability doesn’t bother me too much, I think for what Epidemic does that one is a fair trade.

Blood is Power, yes I usually transfer with Dagger 4, but when you blow a transfer for one condition – unless you get lucky coincidence and have more, and multiple enemies to move them all – this actually puts you in a hole as master of conditions. If you don’t have plague signet, suddenly you just have Staff 4 left for conditions the enemy is going to place on you. Adding 2 more bleeds, when we have so many other avenues to apply them, isn’t really worth a transfer to me, but you pretty much have to do it or suffer a lot of pain.

The reality is those 2 bleeds hurt you far more than 2 more on the enemy. Because when the enemy already has a bunch of stacks, say 8, and it becomes 10, once he clears them he is going to clear them all at once, the entire bundle. While you have just used a transfer for 2 measly bleeds, that are still too painful to ignore.

Poison – you say is insignificant. At 50% duration and high condition the posion from Corrupt Boon will hit me for nearly 2000 damage if I let it run 9 seconds and don’t clear it. Hardly insignificant.

I don’t think these utilities are sooo much better than what other professions have access to, that they make the self corruptions worth it. They are certainly not worth it to waste transfers on, you are in a lose/lose either way with that side of them to me.

And you never want to blow you heal just to get rid of one condition you put on yourself. If it just so happens that you have a bunch of others, have lost enough health, to want to heal at that exact point, great, then it works. But because of the situation dependent usage of them -based on enemy action- its not usually a timely spot to be using your heal.

In PvE, its totally worth it to blow a condition transfer to throw BiP self bleeds back, since very few areas actually require the condi transfer we have. Personally I don’t know of many people that use BiP in WvW, but realistically you should be fine here too just blowing a transfer (I don’t notice myself dying to condi that often).

If you are in PvP you’re using BiP for the might, not the bleed damage, so you can just cast it with out a target. Gives you the 10 might without the bleeding.

I think you may be missing the point of corruption skills. If you are using them, then you are most likely condition based, lots of bleeds ect, which make the corruption skills very good.
The aim is to hit the 25 bleed cap or get very close to it which means that with blood is power followed by deathly swarm is great for stacking up bleeds.
As to “wasting” deathly swarm on one condition, BIP counts for 2 because of the 2 stack of bleed, and deathly swarm only moves 3 conditions anyway. You still have consume and staff #4 for condition removal if you are worried about survival.
The main question to ask is if you are PVP or PVE based (does not say in your post), PVE most of the time if you can dodge and work around your skills/heals, you really wont have that much in the way of conditions on you to worry about, i don’t PVP so i will have to hand off that side of things to someone else. think of the self conditions as bonuses rather than failings, as a necro you can use them far more than they can hurt you.
My condition build has over 32k Hp at lvl 80, so 1000 damage from a few bleeds i should be handing off anyway isnt that big an issue, depends again on your gear and talent setup
hope this has been helpful

For PVP Hound. I agree in PVE they are fine, the corruptions even help you because you don’t need the transfers for other things. But in PVP I would far rather wait till that Ranger sticks 10 bleeds on me, or Mesmer stacks 5 Confusions, before blowing that Dagger 4. Conditions are flying fast and furious at you every few seconds, and you need all the transfers you can get.

As someone said you forget they are there, but they are there all the same, either doing damage to you, increasing the damage you take, or making you blow transfers for not that great of an effect.

If the skills themselves weren’t made for such specific scenarios you might think of a build where you let lose all your corruptions at once, a corruption build, then transfer them all with staff 4. But because you are waiting for the right time, to turn a lot of boons, or for a group to epidemic, they don’t really set up to be used that way.

Blowing a transfer isn’t that big a deal, to be honest. If you’re under any sort of focus you’ll probably have a bunch of conditions you want to transfer anyway and if you’re NOT under focus, then you can either eat the damage or blow the transfer and wait through the cool down. Compared to most other professions, Necros have a lot of condition clears. Being down one isn’t that big a deal.

YES, worth the trade.

BIP
EPI
COR

These are our best skills.

I like that kind of skills.

If anything, both, the effects and the self-conditioning should be stronger.
Especially Epidemic could need self-conditions that hurt more.

RashanDale.3609:

I like that kind of skills.

If anything, both, the effects and the self-conditioning should be stronger.
Especially Epidemic could need self-conditions that hurt more.

If they hurt more they would actually be more worth transferring indeed. Right now they are just strong enough to hurt you if you leave them on (about 2000 damage) but not quite strong enough to make them as valuable as losing a transfer that otherwise, could be saved for swapping much more powerful conditions, or multiple conditions on you.

Right now if you asked most other professions do they want a self corruption on any of their utilities that puts a stack of 2 bleeds on them for 10 seconds, or a 5 second poison, but hey, you can blow a cleanse to move it to an enemy, they are going to say no.

Which means if the self corruptions are more harm than good, the initial base skill should be that much better to account for it. Debatable if they are good enough for the penalty.

I don’t think the skills are powerful enough to warrant a self-inflicted condition as balance.
If the conditions are a 0 sum though I really question how hurting yourself can be considered 0 sum.
Condition removal/transfer are supposed to be counters to enemies, not to ourselves.

I think this is just another example of how Necros were implemented as designed without much play-testing to see if the bloody design worked.

Kiriakulos.1690:

I don’t think the skills are powerful enough to warrant a self-inflicted condition as balance.
If the conditions are a 0 sum though I really question how hurting yourself can be considered 0 sum.
Condition removal/transfer is supposed to be counters to enemies, not to ourselves.

I think this is just another example of how Necros were implemented as designed without much play-testing to see if the bloody design worked.

Agreed. There’s no good reason we should be burdened with wasting our condition removal on our own skills! Getting rid of the self-inflicted conditions on these skills would be a small start toward de-gimping the necro profession.

Sort of a side penalty, using either of BiP or Corrupt Boon I think straightjackets you into dagger off hand. I have many times wanted to try, and done so briefly, off hand Focus for condi necro, but can never get over the hump of not having Deathly Swarm to move that poison or self bleed off myself, since I always have one of those two corruptions. It’s not even close to worth it to blow Consume Conditions or Staff 4 to clear those conditions. But if the other option is leaving them on, suddenly you don’t want the skills nearly so much in the first place.

On our water death shroud we have transfer a condition on our auto attack! Now if this was on normal Life Blast, or even on Staff 1, suddenly you start having a little more freedom or synergy in a corruption build.

In pve corruptions are borderline OP. In pvp the ones people listed are beneficial too but not as OP as in pve. If you know how to manipulate the self conditions properly you can plan out some very nice combos. Formerly corrupt boon was pretty worthless in pve but now with karkas constantly putting on boons and stuff it’s become much more useful and I imagine we’ll be seeing more like that in the future. As far as manipulating the self conditions, you have several options: deathly swarm, putrid mark, using them to power up your heal with consume conditions, a scepter/signet spike in hybrid builds (plague signet, signet of spite, feast of corruption), and of course plague blast underwater which is why most people bring at least 1 corruption underwater. A power build could still benefit from this for the use of charging up consume conditions alone, although not always a viable tactic in pvp I know.

I disagree with Nay of the Ether for the following reasons:

BiP- The might stacks are good but PvE condition damage is far outshined by direct damage coming from Zerker gear, so Bleeds are low damage and you need to use another skill besides this to send the total 4 stacks to your enemy.

Corrupt Boon – Boon enemies are few and far between. The only enemy in Southsun with many boons are the reef riders and that’s because they steal them from players.
The self inflicted poison also is a condition that needs to be cleansed by a secondary skill or you just take damage. Karkas rarely stack boons and instantly reapply stability while their shells are up and are immune to fear.

Epidemic – This would be useful if as I said before, conditions weren’t small damage compared to direct burst in PvE. The enemies rarely dodge/block/evade or heal, so direct damage stacks far quicker on them. Also, spreading conditions to trash mobs isn’t really doing much, they’re trash mobs, they just die quickly from all the AoE.

Corrosive Poison Cloud – This is actually the best PvE corruption in the game. Enemies have small crit chances so a stacking weakness is almost a guarantees 25% damage reduction on enemies. Self weakness also isn’t that big an issue on a player since, direct damage crits enough so the burst isn’t diminished and condition builds ignore weakness.

Also as I said before, I don’t think that having to use a cleanse because of our own actions is a good design choice. The only worthwhile use for these is to empower a consume conditions because the enemies don’t deal condition damage and in that case you really should have brought Well of Blood or the Fiend.

Honestly, I barely even notice the self-conditions. What you get out of them is way more important IMO.

Let’s put it this way, the conditions never run their full course. If they do, the battle is usually already won and it’s irrelevant. I have at least a full condition clear every 20/25 seconds. If my enemy hasn’t loaded me with sufficient conditions within 10 seconds to justify me using at least one of them, then either they’re not a condition build (so condition clear isn’t an issue), or they’re not a significant threat. If I’m using dagger as offhand I will often send the condition off right away.

By the way, you can use BiP with no target, and you get the 10 stacks of might with no self-bleed.

It’s just another throw back to GW1 like our high base HP, but this one is poorly thought out, as wasting condition cleanses to remove self inflicted conditions is not a good thing, and the aren’t strong enough (well, corrupt boon and epidemic are) to justify the self condition – so honestly there is no reason for it to do so, it’s just a needless throwback.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Blowing a transfer isn’t that big a deal, to be honest. If you’re under any sort of focus you’ll probably have a bunch of conditions you want to transfer anyway and if you’re NOT under focus, then you can either eat the damage or blow the transfer and wait through the cool down. Compared to most other professions, Necros have a lot of condition clears. Being down one isn’t that big a deal.

This for pvp, although I’ll add something else. Corrupt boon used right is a free kill on a guard, and those don’t come around too often. BiP is 8k+ damage and ten stacks of might. Epidemic can deal north of 50k damage with a single button press. There’s no point trying to play down the strengths of these skills. I’ve tried them all pretty extensively, and imo corrupt is by far the best, then epidemic, corrosive poison cloud, bip.

Kiriakulos.1690:

BiP- The might stacks are good but PvE condition damage is far outshined by direct damage coming from Zerker gear, so Bleeds are low damage and you need to use another skill besides this to send the total 4 stacks to your enemy.

Entirely situational – if totting up damage in practice or say, something insignificantly easy wherein the player is not punished for investing in survivability, this is certainly true (such as CoF).
However, try running full berserker in a level 30+ fractal for instance, you’ll find you get very little returns in terms of damage whilst you’re flat on your back and rotting.
Bare in mind that the stats on the average conditionmancer’s gear is precision, toughness, condition damage i.e: two offensive, one defensive as opposed to all three being offensive – given this, I would say the damage dealt is considerable.

Either way, this is off-topic – carry on fair ’mancers.

Corrupt Boon: Yes, one of the best skills we have, period.
Epidemic: No, but the condition has very minimal effect on us anyway.
Blood is Power: Yes, if you combo it with Dagger-4, Staff-4 or just Consume Conditions.
Corrosive Poison Cloud: No, considering its long cooldown, low condition time and fixed positioning but has very minimal effect on conditionmancers.

I replied to a few things, not trying to argue just clarifying my points.

Kiriakulos.1690:

I disagree with Nay of the Ether for the following reasons:

BiP- The might stacks are good but PvE condition damage is far outshined by direct damage coming from Zerker gear, so Bleeds are low damage and you need to use another skill besides this to send the total 4 stacks to your enemy.
Yes in a zerker setup BiP isn’t always top choice

Corrupt Boon – Boon enemies are few and far between. The only enemy in Southsun with many boons are the reef riders and that’s because they steal them from players.
The self inflicted poison also is a condition that needs to be cleansed by a secondary skill or you just take damage. Karkas rarely stack boons and instantly reapply stability while their shells are up and are immune to fear.
You might wanna look closer at those karkas, they now stack tons of boons, one of them being near constant retaliation, and I did say while most enemies in PvE don’t use boons currently, I think the revamped karkas are a sign of things to come and hopefully we’ll see more enemy boons in the future

Epidemic – This would be useful if as I said before, conditions weren’t small damage compared to direct burst in PvE. The enemies rarely dodge/block/evade or heal, so direct damage stacks far quicker on them. Also, spreading conditions to trash mobs isn’t really doing much, they’re trash mobs, they just die quickly from all the AoE.
In large zergs (PvE) yes, epidemic isn’t all it’s touted up to be simply because there’s already so much direct damage AoE flying around it becomes useless, but in smaller parties or even solo, this skill is pretty OP for condition builds

Corrosive Poison Cloud – This is actually the best PvE corruption in the game. Enemies have small crit chances so a stacking weakness is almost a guarantees 25% damage reduction on enemies. Self weakness also isn’t that big an issue on a player since, direct damage crits enough so the burst isn’t diminished and condition builds ignore weakness.
Agree with you 100% here, CPC has forever been one of my favorite necro skills

Also as I said before, I don’t think that having to use a cleanse because of our own actions is a good design choice. The only worthwhile use for these is to empower a consume conditions because the enemies don’t deal condition damage and in that case you really should have brought Well of Blood or the Fiend.
It’s not necessarily a bad design, just another way of doing things. There’s nothing wrong with it in my opinion