Guild Wars 2

I’m attempting to start some discussion on things that COULD be different that would make condition damage classes competitive in a pve setting. I said competitive and not viable because condition builds already work just fine, however they are fast enough for the speed kill groups, and the general community is just plain against them because of the cap.

I dont pvp in GW2 as it just doesnt interest me, PvP discussion is welcome in this thread, however keep it civil please

So here goes my list of possibilities

1) Remove the cap, its there for technical limitations currently, however I believe in Anets ingenuity to make it work, there is currently no balance reason behind why it is capped at 25. There is no reason to punish your team for having more than 1 condition spec

2) Allow conditions to crit, maybe at a reduced rate since on crit effects is where almost half of conditions come from currently, do not let condition crits cause on crit effects, (otherwise it would be possible to get a chain reaction going and everyone would just play that, start the crit chain, and watch the numbers fly)

3) Allow force modifiers to affect conditons (sigils of %damage, closer to death, etc)

In my eyes I think this would bring condition sustain closer to zerk sustain, letting conditions crit and have thier damage modified by effects. I dont think this will bring it up to warrior zerk damage but that is not the goal, they go melee they are meant to be higher

#1 is probably what Anet will do eventually. They’re getting culling turned off which is another annoying technical limitation, so I figure they’re working on things like this, even if they take forever to do.

They’ve got a few other options too. They could change skills around and make bleeds more of a big thing. Double the scaling damage on bleeds, and halve the rate at which they’re applied (e.g. if a skill puts two stacks now, just put one stack with double the damage). That would require going through a *lot* of skills though.

There’s also the idea of merging bleeds; this is more of a behind the scenes thing, where the damage is clumped into single ticks so they might not have to track every everything about the bleed stacks the entire time. All the different durations might make that impractical though.

I highly doubt #1 will ever happen. Instead, I think they’ll go the route of Torment: i.e., rather than increase stack count, they’ll increase the number of types of conditions that can be applied.

As it stands now, conditions are in a pretty good place except for caps in group situations, so I don’t see a need for #2 or #3. If the force modifiers affected conditions, there would be a huge cry for a nerf to necros.

They would need to completely change the entire condition system to get #1 to work, or they’d have to probably up their server’s strength by a massive amount (at least 5 times what it is now, if not more). It sounds nice to say “just fix it”, but go zerg in WvW, or do a world boss fight and check out that lag; that lag is with the condition cap, if they removed the cap, the server would have hundreds more conditions to track. That is a lot of excess strain for something they could easily fix by redoing dungeon mechanics so they weren’t bad.

The easiest way to make condition builds more viable is to change the toughness/HP ratio on boss mobs to be higher toughness and lower HP. They could strike a balance where you actually want one-two condition classes that have the right combination of conditions to be maxing your condition stacks, while the power builds do their power thing. It’d also help if they made dungeons harder, and less about 1-shot mechanics that are 100% learning the boss fight, and nothing about actual skill.

The reason conditions are not a preferred method of damage now is because power scales so much higher than conditions ever can, boss toughness/hp ratio is part of it too, however you can only lower boss HP so much before they are no longer bosslike.

Anyway, power can be made better by precision and crit chance, and then even further with crit damage, and then again with force multipliers, conditions have a hard cap in the game.

You keep the exact same eHP, but you lower HP while raising toughness. Meaning power builds take exactly as long to kill the boss, but now condition builds can keep up as far as %HP damage dealt per period of time, whereas now they don’t.

Bhawb.7408:

You keep the exact same eHP, but you lower HP while raising toughness. Meaning power builds take exactly as long to kill the boss, but now condition builds can keep up as far as %HP damage dealt per period of time, whereas now they don’t.

Simply incentivizing condition builds, even heavily, won’t help alone. Without changing anything else, the problem would be that good condition builds could still completely cap out alone anyway, and some classes can’t even help but put on bleed stacks with their direct damage skills / traits.

So even if it were theoretically beneficial to maybe bring one, just one, condition build, pugs would risk being stuck with 2 condition builds, making one of them completely useless. If anything, it would make matters worse I think.

They have party chat, they most likely have brains. Use them. Once you find your condi build you stop getting more, but it remains that they could fix the biggest PvE problems simply by axing their terrible mechanics, instead of balancing the entire game around terrible mechanics.

I’ll bet they could implement #1 without too much additional server strain if they limited it to champions and boss monsters. The cap shouldn’t matter too much for trash mobs (which die pretty quickly anyway and don’t typically receive the focus of 40+ players at a time) or in PvP (where, as I understand it, most players get a cleanse off before they take even 10 stacks).

This way, condi-specced characters could still feel like they were contributing to Claw of Jormag fights or in champ farm zergs without causing the server to crash when a Necro pops Epidemic and suddenly copies 200 bleeds onto 5 nearby adds.

I do suspect we will see champion and higher mobs have the bleed limit removed, but that alone will not lessen the huge gap in damage between power and condition based builds, it will only stop groups from bringing more than one

Another problem with conditions, specifically in pve, is their ability to effect objects. AC p1 is a perfect example of this – as far as I’m aware you cannot damage the graveling burrows at all with conditions. It’s not as big a deal as the cap, but it’s yet another thing that makes conditions harder to work with.

I sort of hope the devs look at these other, peripheral issues with condition damage, because I’ve seen devs fob off questions about condition damage in pve with a “caps are there for technical reason, we might develope a work around at some point”, when in fact, it’s more complicated then that and there are some small things they could change that would help.

For the objects vs conditions thing, to be fair, while it may ‘break immersion’ somewhat, as its a needed mechanic you should be able to put conditions on objects (and crit them for that matter).

For conditions in general, why not a system where any newly applied conditions over a certain amount do some damage immediately instead. Eg…

Bleeds: Keeps stacking to 25, once at 25 stacks, then all additional bleeds (until one falls off) do X% of their damage instantly via Hemorrage. Once a stack is off, the next bleed added will go as normal.

Burn/Poison: Once the duration hits X seconds, all added burn/poisons do instant damage in the same manner.

The numbers would obviously need significant balancing, but it would allow for multiple condition users in a group (or a zerg) and basically just turning them into DD once the cap is hit.

Another, probably quicker to implement idea, that would hold it off for dungeons at least. Any ability that stacks multiple bleeds on a single hit could have a new condition type that is basically a stronger bleed, works in the same manner but would ‘split the stack’.

Things like Enfeebling Blood or Blood is Power (2 stacks per cast) would add 1 stack of “Gushing Wound” (I suck at names) instad of 2x Bleeds. This wouldn’t fix the problem as a whole, but would make it possible for 2x condition users to exist in a group together which would resolve a bunch of issues in PvE, even though it does nothing really to help Zergs.

Another possibility if they adjust caps would be to allow poison/burning to stack in intensity and duration, and make it individual to the player. So I myself could only maintain 1 stack of poison, and only increase its duration, if another player adds poison it will stack on its own, but he can only increase duration of his own poison

Taerik.3405:

Another possibility if they adjust caps would be to allow poison/burning to stack in intensity and duration, and make it individual to the player. So I myself could only maintain 1 stack of poison, and only increase its duration, if another player adds poison it will stack on its own, but he can only increase duration of his own poison

Would make burning/fear massively stronger.

Bhawb.7408:

Taerik.3405:

Another possibility if they adjust caps would be to allow poison/burning to stack in intensity and duration, and make it individual to the player. So I myself could only maintain 1 stack of poison, and only increase its duration, if another player adds poison it will stack on its own, but he can only increase duration of his own poison

Would make burning/fear massively stronger.

Yes but only in pve (since we are talking about pve) and only really against champions/bosses anyway. This is one of the major reasons why everyone is pressured a little to bring a power build, is because most of your damage wont ever even be applied if your a condition build (bleed cap) and another portion wont even matter (poions/burnings)

Anyway, Im just throwing ideas around, not all are good

I think it could be good as a PvE only change. It’d at least mean that you could have two condition builds (so long as they were complementary, and weren’t just two bleed builds) in the same group, and probably wouldn’t increase the server load that much.