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The only guard minor that causes condi at all is new, and its 33% chance to burn from SYMBOLS, which only 3 guard wep sets have, none of which are part of the normal fire build, unless you’re going for block spam, which is somewhat viable I guess.
And if we’re specifically talking damaging conditions, I ONLY have burning. One condition. There is no condi soup here. If you stop my ONE condition, I have no damage.
Can agree though that there seems to be a habit of making traits only affect direct damage despite them being in the middle of condi trait lines, and occasionally some of the opposite as well. And the lack of condition duration is strange considering they decided to make it available as a sat in the first place, although I generally prefer increased applications over duration anyway, especially now with stacking intensity.Guardians don’t have a trait, because they automatically get passive burn applications with VoJ. Who needs 33% chance to burn on crit when you automatically get a burn every 5 attacks? (3 if traited? Haven’t loaded my guard alt since patch)
The problem with condi procs on minor traits is that conditions aren’t an interesting build choice, they come automatically lump in on specializations, and on guardians it’s more automatic. That being said, guardians at least have some neat major traits they can choose to synergize with VoJ, so at least there’s that for build diversity…
And again, to make myself clear—I don’t want to nerf burning. In fact, I want it to keep doing the massive damage it’s at currently or more—if you play right. I want guardians who focus on burns to play differently than necros who focus on bleeds, and right now the only difference is that burn hasn’t been nerfed into the dirt yet. Once it is the two classes will be virtually the same as far as condi damage goes.
Hm. I see your point about the minor traits at least. Some of the interesting choices were always majors though, like Burn on Block. Actually sorta made Mace/Focus have a nice damage component along with utility tools, which comboed with ANOTHER trait that gave aegis on block for more party support. But thats probably a niche build most people wont run.
The only thing I might suggest is that instead of making BURN the conditional one, as it IS powerful right now, why not let it get a SLIGHT nerf, so that when stacked properly is still is a powerful condition on its own, and make BLEED the conditional one? Significantly more classes have it, and I assume no one else is STUCK with it like guardian is with fire, so it wouldn’t significantly hamper any classes if they end up hating the mechanic. So the classes that you’re saying play with condi soup all day wouldnt even notice, while the ones that do have a new mechanic to play with.
I mostly say this because lots of guardian abilties, the best ones anyway, do not have any significant ENEMY CONTROL components like the ones you’re saying should be comboed. AKA immobilize/stun/etc to keep them from moving. Guards rely on blinds and aegis mostly. Scepter has ONE immobilize. And we have a few fields to nullify/reflect projectiles. If you make burn reliant on control, which most guard builds have fairly little of, you run the risk of making 90% of guardian builds unusable with condition damage entirely.
It literally even says in the video description
“Published on Jun 24, 2015
server far shiverpeaks we can sharing all the buffs for all the ppl”
And if you listen to them talking they’re stating some of the ridiculous buff durations that its causing. It probably IS making burning numbers stupid high, because now they’re actually USABLE IN THE FIRST PLACE. but the PROBLEM in that video isnt burn damage, its the buffs. Which the guy recording is GS/Shouts, which wouldn’t have anything to do with high fire damage anyway.
I liked the idea one other poster had on a different thread—make burning deal more damage to stationary targets, like torment with the formulas flipped. That gives burning a niche, and you can probably just copy-paste the torment code and move some numbers around.
Oh god anything but that. Burning is literally Condition Guardian’s only damage. Why would you think making it a niche skill would make any sense? It’s our bread and butter. If it doesn’t work under normal conditions, then the ENTIRE BUILD doesn’t work under normal conditions.
Maybe ‘niche’ is the wrong word. What I want, is for burning have a special place outside of “a bleed that hits harder.” As it stands right now, ANet could replace every burn with 3 stacks of bleed and there would be no difference. That’s boring.
In fact, more than any other problem with conditions, this is the real issue. Conditions are boring. One of the things I like about GW2 is that “every profession can do anything,” with an implicit “…but they all do it differently.” If you want to maximize survivability, you are going to play a LOT differently if you are a thief, versus a mesmer, versus a warrior. Same goes for maximizing damage—all those “+% damage” traits trigger on different conditions, like having buffs or HP levels or in certain attunements, that encourages certain playstyles and makes the professions play uniquely, even if they can all deal out roughly equal damage.
Conditions don’t have that. Almost without variance, every single condition build uses 1-5 skills to dole out stacks. _ Every single condi build trait is “X% chance for condi on crit,” that you automatically get from a minor trait from choosing a specialization._ _ Every single class has access to all but one or two of the damaging conditions, so they always dish out condi soup with no regard needed for whether a particular condition is good for the situation where it’s applied._
If I had my dream, this is what would happen with conditions:
- Change the mechanics of burning. Maybe not the “more damage while holding still,” but I’m favorable toward “melt the flesh from my enemies if I properly control the engagement” so I’m still biased toward that one. The idea is, you wipe the floor with your enemy if you land big stacks followed by some CC.
- Greatly reduce the number of conditions available to each class. Since it’s possible for all conditions to be viable in PvE now you can get away with this. Note this doesn’t mean to reduce the STACKS, just the VARIETY—instead of 3 stacks each of bleeding, burning, poison, and torment in the skills, consolidate to 9 stacks of bleeding and 3 of torment.
- Take the boring “X% chance to proc” traits out of the minor traits, and move one of the major traits in to replace them. Adjust proc sigils (earth, blight, etc) with lower cooldowns so people can still build a crit-proc condi build with them if they want.
- Replace the displaced major traits with INTERESTING condi traits. Add 100 Condition damage for 3 seconds after a successful block/dodge/distortion. Extra 300 condition damage while dancing (OH DEAR GOD THAT ASURA NECRO IS DOING THE ROBOT! THE HUMANITY!). Maybe repurpose some of the “+X% damage” traits to add condi damage instead, especially in the condi-focused specializations. Bear in mind, though, that since condition damage happens over time, you can add bonuses from things that aren’t attacks and still give players a boost to damage.
- Give us more choices to boost condi duration.
- Balance after you make the fixes, because you know the fixes are going to play hell with the balanace when they first roll out.
- For the love of Zommoros, refund hero points so people can start for scratch if you’re going to overhaul the skills/traits system.
All of this would require an overhaul that makes the current patch look like a minor balance update, so I’m not holding my breath. It’s nice to hope, though…
The only guard minor that causes condi at all is new, and its 33% chance to burn from SYMBOLS, which only 3 guard wep sets have, none of which are part of the normal fire build, unless you’re going for block spam, which is somewhat viable I guess.
And if we’re specifically talking damaging conditions, I ONLY have burning. One condition. There is no condi soup here. If you stop my ONE condition, I have no damage.
Can agree though that there seems to be a habit of making traits only affect direct damage despite them being in the middle of condi trait lines, and occasionally some of the opposite as well. And the lack of condition duration is strange considering they decided to make it available as a sat in the first place, although I generally prefer increased applications over duration anyway, especially now with stacking intensity.
To anyone specifically saying Sinister is a problem, don’t forget about Rampager. Same three stats.
The whole hybrid thing does kinda sound like a problem now that I’m hearing people talk about it. But don’t suggest nerfing conditions as a way of balancing this. If hybrid gear is OP, do something about hybrid gear/ skills that have high damage in both.
Realistically, once the numbers are balanced, the main tipping point should be in the traits. If having high direct damage or high condition damage requires traiting for it, then you wouldn’t be able to spec to have ridiculous amounts of both.
I specify ridiculous amounts. If you trait to be a hybrid on purpose, your conditions combined with your direct damage should still end up with, over the course of a long fight, equivalent total dps to a full direct or full condition build. Having hybrids not be OP is a good thing, but making hybrid not an option wouldn’t be so great.
Let’s be clear, this version of condition stacking and condi builds being viable in all games modes is a large part of our goal. We just want to make sure we don’t create imbalances that actually make the game less fun. Don’t expect huge balance swings, but rather our balance goal has always been to make more small adjustments.
Since you’re re-balancing conditions, is there any talk about doing something with burning to make it at least a little unique? Right now it’s exactly like bleed, except harder-hitting. There’s no tactical difference.
I liked the idea one other poster had on a different thread—make burning deal more damage to stationary targets, like torment with the formulas flipped. That gives burning a niche, and you can probably just copy-paste the torment code and move some numbers around.
Oh god anything but that. Burning is literally Condition Guardian’s only damage. Why would you think making it a niche skill would make any sense? It’s our bread and butter. If it doesn’t work under normal conditions, then the ENTIRE BUILD doesn’t work under normal conditions.
Casual PVE Guardian here. Mostly just doing Dungeons/Low Fractals while trying out gear and builds. Was previously doing 500 damage burn ticks against most normal monsters while stacking duration, which doesn’t help at all if I die regardless of tank stats, because they’ve never been balanced to do enough damage mitigation to be useful. Sudden spike up to ~3k Burn if I bust my autos/fire teleport/purging flames. While the spike might be a bit intense, and I specify that this is ONLY IN REGARDS TO CASUAL PVE, burn damage felt nearly USELESS before even if I built specifically to do as much of it as possible and ignore all else. Which is not how you should ever build any character. I’m extremely happy that I can actually do damage with THE ONLY DAMAGING CONDITION I HAVE ESSENTIALLY. My damage has always felt ridiculously subpar compared to EVERYONE ELSE IVE PLAYED WITH. If you need to nerf it a bit to bring things to an equilibrium, I can certainly see some wiggle room, but the new setup is a million times better than it was previously. My build actually feels playable now, as opposed to just being carried by everyone else I meet that’s running the usual straight damage build AKA zerks/assassins. I feel like it’d be a much better improvement to just make the tank stats have a stronger effect on gameplay so that they would be actual viable choices for direct damage users, so they can stop complaining about how glass they are while doing 10-20x the dps I have. Rolling is nice, but there’s no point putting tank/heal stats in the game if they’re going to be unusable. Other than Jade Maw or gimmicky fights where the WHOLE POINT is that they should one-shot you, if you’re building tanky, NOTHING ELSE SHOULD. If someone in givers can’t tank someone in zerkers, your tank stats mean absolutely nothing.
PS: Great job responding to all of this in such a clear manner while dealing with all of the ridiculous feedback from biased sources that are just surprised burning is actually killing things AT ALL now. Feel free to tone it down a bit if the numbers actually DO prove that it’s stronger than intended.
(Have always heard the complaints about necro though, really hope they don’t get nerfed into the ground, I have always wanted to try one.)
Also, World Boss kill times are not in any way a good way to tell whether conditions were buffed too hard or not. The whole point is that they didn’t work properly AT ALL before, so now they have a starting point to figure out where the numbers need to be, now that the ridiculous 25 cap was removed. And Vuln actually applies to conditions now, like it should have in the first place. Do you have any idea how many traits exist that are useless to condi builds because they only apply to direct damage? I’ll give you a hint. 90% of the ones that the meta builds tell you are pretty much required. I’m glad my profession just got like triple the amount of variability that it had previously. Anyone who thinks this limited their choices is just freaking out about things that are OBVIOUSLY going to be fixed soon.