Guild Wars 2

Shadow.1345:

sinject.4607:

Question for any developer feeling cavalier enough to answer, why do balance changes take 3-4 months? is there any internal logic within the balance team to justify why we experience changes in the seasons more often than balance changes?

Any chance of getting a response or do I have to post about it on the subreddit to elicit one?…

I’m not a developer but I have had some experience in the field and balancing is harder that people think it is. Over buff something and it becomes OP, underbuff something and it’s still too weak. Same with nerfs. Under nerf it and it’s still too powerful, over nerf it and it becomes useless.

to be fair, balancing isn’t actually overly difficult. The problem is that what player’s think a balanced game looks like, is not eeven remotely similar to what a balanced game is.

See the problem is that most players tend to believe that a balanced game is some sort of nirvana where all classes and builds are equally viable even at high levels of play, and the “meta” doesn’t exist.
This is a fallacy.

Example: Chess. Chess is symmetric and therefore perfectly balanced. However Chess still has a meta. Out of the thousands of strategies and plays than can be performed in Chess, only a very small handful of them are actually useful. Moreover many strategies in Chess are unilaterally weaker than other strategies.

The same is true with PvP games. Balanced PvP games will still have metas, and will still have inferior builds and inferior stratagies. The difference between a unbalanced and balanced game is that in a balanced game the meta will change from time to time without any developer input. A example of this is how DH went from being considered OP to UP without the devs lifting a finger.

Mez Koo.9510:

Apolo.5942:

Yes because it has no propulsion, not because it cant gain altitude, its a glider not a parachute.

This

Gaining altitude without a source of propulsion results in a loss of airspeed unless you have some alternative source such as a updraft. Loss of airspeed invariably results in loss of lift which if not corrected results in a stall. (and subsequent fall from the sky.)

Besides HoT gliders are closer to a wingsuit or hang-glider than any type if gliding aircraft. So yes they are closer to parachutes than gliders.

By physics, HoT gliders don’t even make sense because you start your glide from a standstill jump with no airspeed. If we wanted to be realistic, we should have to drop a few hundred feet before gaining enough speed to pull up and being gliding.
Heck that’s not even going into the fact that the basic glider isn’t even a airfoil.

ReaperJr.5967:

Foefire and forest are top picks for sure. I think the reason why forest may be favored is because it is easier to rotate around bunkers on that map.

Foefire and Forest have always been top picks, at least as long as I’ve played this game. It has nothing to do with rotating around bunkers. People just like the dull and bland maps.

panda the chop chop.4712:

‘Ranked arena’ Cannot join in parties aka ranked random arena.

AND!

Ranked Team arena must be at least 3 ‘partied’ to join, AND people can still (solo q) but knowing they will be put in a team that is 3/5, 4/5 against other pre-mades.

Except since solos in your team mode can only be paired with a team of 3 or 4, they will have really really long queues which will likely result in them quitting for the pure solo mode, which of course leads to 3-4 man groups never getting pops, so they will quit too, which would result in even longer queue time for the remaining 5 mans.

There are reasons why few games differentiate team and solo.

Collero.7963:

Okay – It took 2-3 hours but I finally got a match. I lost it as the game was decided before it even began due to them having regulars and I had 3 unknowns. I gave it all I had though, but it was impossible…

2-3 Hours? / 1 Match / -1 Pip

I don’t even know what to say anymore…

Seriously?
You can’t get matches because you went super hardcore in the first days of the season and got way ahead of everyone else. And since you are way ahead of everyone else, the matchmaker doesn’t have anyone comparable to match against you.

What did you expect Anet to do? Magically summon high-division players out of thin air?

Give it a week and your queue will be fine.

You act surprised that you are expected to buy the expac. It’s common convention in pretty much every single mmorpg to date that you need to buy the current expac to stay competitive.

You should be glad this isn’t like WoW or SW:TOR where you can’t even queue endgame or ranked if you don’t have the expac.

But hey kitten the devs for trying to stay in the black.

And lets be honest, if you look at the dominant “condi builds” such as rev and reaper, they are not actually full condi builds. They are doing half and sometimes more of their damage in power attacks.

This is the problem, since a mixed power/condi build requires the target to have both cleanses and blocks/toughness/prot to defend against.

Strages.2950:

While I do agree that condi damage is out of control due to the sheer amount of condis that can be applied at once on a single toon and how high they stack, there is an actual solution to the problem you are stating and it is, in fact, very simple: greyed out or colored HP bar/circle. You could even go as far as color coding the damage according to the type of condi.

You have 10K Hp, you get hit with 3 conditions that will sum up to a total of say 5K HP (if left uncleansed)… grey out 50% of the HP circle and begin to tick down. Its that simple, there’s a visual queue equivalent to big numbers or the HP circle dropping when you get hit with a power build.

Should be simple to implement, and its been suggested before. Why it still hasn’t been applied is beyond me.

The grey out may not have been done because of technical reasons. Determining the future damage dealt requires calculations, which adds complexity which is more work.

Additionally such a system isn’t even accurate since the damage dealt by condi can change between ticks due to gaining of boons. I.e you get a condi on you, the bar does it’s grey out, but then you gain the resistance boon and now that grey out is wrong.

ragnarokda.1805:

Crinn.7864:

NeXeD.3042:

Toughness is a semi counter to power, vitality is a semi counter to condi.

Toughness is partial mitigation. Vit is just a raw TTK increase.

Neither are counters. Countering implies negation of a mechanic. Cleansing is a counter to condi. Blocks are a counter to power.

The value of toughness is that it’s constant partial mitigation. Against a single power attack the value of toughness is marginal. Over the course of the fight however toughness adds up to a lot of mitigated damage. Toughness works great against sustained pressure as it decreases the amount of healing required to keep up with the pressure.
This is why cleric support guards are so vulnerable to power spikes despite having some of the highest toughness in game, yet at the same time are nearly impossible to kill by attrition. (which is a counter example to the “toughness counters power” claim because spikes are nearly always done with power attacks, yet the high-toughness support guard is extremely vulnerable to spikes.)

Vitality is another story. Vit merely gives a increase in health pool. This is great against burst (from anything) but is terrible as a sustain because it doesn’t actually mitigate any damage, and a large health pool also means you need way more healing to replenish.
This is why Carrion necros (high vit, low tough)almost never manage to completely top off their health pool in combat, but almost never get spiked to death. (which is counter example to the “toughness counters power” claim, since most spikes are done with power yet the low toughness Carrion Necro can’t realistically be spiked.)

The only way you could argue that Toughness is a counter to power is if you believe that high toughness prevents death by power. This is also a fallacy, as toughness only really decreases the effectiveness of attrition by power attacks, and even then only if you have the heal capabilities to back it up.

ragnarokda.1805:

That’s the point he’s trying to make with “vitality counters condi” is that no matter how much health you have, condi deals the same.

So if you have 12k health, 1k/s condi will kill you in 12 seconds. But if you have 20k health, it’ll take that SAME condi 20s instead of 12s to kill you.

However, with power damage, vitality is a much smaller cushion if you don’t have toughness coupled with it because even though you have more health, you’re going to be getting hit HARDER without toughness or something like protection.

Vitality is a equal cushion.
A power attack dealing 1k damage with a 1sec cast would take 12 seconds to kill a 12k HP target and 20 seconds to kill a 20k HP target. Exactly the same TTK as condi.

Saying “well toughness decreases power damage, and thus increases TTK against power without a vitality increase” doesn’t all of a sudden make vitality a counter to condi, and it sure as hell doesn’t make vitality less effective against power.

In fact toughness just augments the effectiveness of vitality against power.

This guy is in the right. But with everything said I still don’t think toughness affecting conditions is the answer. Maybe have protection work for condi, too? I mean, it kind of makes sense.

imo protection should affect condi. They would probably want to drop the mitigation provided by protection somewhat and poassibly reduce it duration, if that change went through.

Alternatively it would have been interesting if they made resistance work like prot but for condis. The duration and availability of resistance would need to go up naturally, but it would be interesting.

Vieux P.1238:

fun gun hitting 20k dps every time he pops it.

Wait, rifle does twenty thousand damage per second?

Interesting.

Phantom.5389:

Crinn.7864:

Thiefz.3695:

I think Warriors would disagree.

Things need tweaking, but lets be real. Every single class in the game has threads calling for it’s nerf. The 20k gunflame thread being the warrior one.

Balancing a game is easy, getting the playerbase to believe that it’s balanced is impossible.

It’s sad that people still believe gunflame is op.

To you and all the other people that quoted me and started debunking the 20k gunflame.

I wasn’t saying gunflame hits for 20k, nor was I trying to claim that warriors need nerfs.

I was referring to a thread on this board entitled Warrior 20k gunflame hit, really??? using said thread as a example that every class has threads QQ’ing about it.

displacedTitan.6897:

At one point it was beneficial to eat blinds used by noobs because you would max resistance just as fast as a stun but with none of the effects.

You mean it allowed you to take advantage of your opponent making a mistake? And you’re complaining about that?

Hell because of that kitten system almost ALL CC is totally worthless to use and is actively discouraged if you are trying to win.

Obviously you never played ranked either in 8v8 or 4v4. Hell the entire 4v4 meta is built around CC. Guess you never did hardswitches or knew about healer/tank lockdown.

choovanski.5462:

all stun immunity means is the attacker needs to space out their stuns because players become immune after you stun them. no extra skill there. in fact, for the player being attacked you get free stability for not dodging stuns. seems like less skill to me, considering stun immunity is already in the game. I can’t see how free stability after you get stunned makes the game more skillful, seems actually like it makes it easier.

That’s not what I was getting at. I was thinking of something similar to TOR’s resolve mechanic.
The way the resolve mechanic works is that you get a resolve bar. Getting CC’ed adds points to the bar. The longer the stun to more the points are added to the bar.
When the bar is filled, it begins to drain, while it is draining the player is immune to CC, although snares and immobilizes are still effective.

It’s like GW2’s PvE breakbars but in reverse.
The reason it added depth was that throwing CC at immune players was bad play, and moreover coordinated teams would coordinate the rate of CC in order to prevent a target from getting the immunity.

PvP games should be punishing. bioware makes easy casual RPGs. no reason to listen to their design guidelines for a PvP game. apples and oranges homes.

Google before you post. GSF is a PvP gamemode attached to TOR that is notorious for being extremely brutal and punishing for new players. New players are generally referred to as “foodships.”

It failed so hard that the developer stopped mentioning the existence of the gamemode less than 6 months after launching it.

Thiefz.3695:

I think Warriors would disagree.

Things need tweaking, but lets be real. Every single class in the game has threads calling for it’s nerf. The 20k gunflame thread being the warrior one.

You have to realize that no player base will ever believe that asynchronous classes can be balanced. Players will go to great lengths to be able to declare one class better than another.
Balancing a game is easy, getting the playerbase to believe that it’s balanced is impossible.

Besides having a perfectly balanced game may not even be what you want.

choovanski.5462:

it’s a mechanic that rewards bad players who eat cc. its basically free stability for eating cc.

it makes the game easier & less punishing.

So something that makes players think strategically where they otherwise would not have is “easier”

Oh and for the record, punishing is never a good quality for a game, just look at Bioware’s GSF.

Patchi.9061:

BALANCE THIS FREAKING GAME ALREADY.

[sarcasm]
I just simply don’t understand why Anet hasn’t called the gw2.BalanceGame() function already. Obviously their programmers must be incompetent.
[/sarcasm]

The amount of irrational anger in this thread is insipid. You lot probably can’t even come to a consensus on what a balanced game looks like, let alone understand how to execute on it.

choovanski.5462:

Crinn.7864:

choovanski.5462:

stun resistance is just a way for scrubs to care less about CC so they can hungry hungry hippo even harder.

Oh please, stun resistance adds more depth. Just look at TOR where a entire portion of the strategy revolves around when to apply CC, since in that game you only get a couple CCs before the target goes immune, so teams must be strategic with it.

Compare that to GW2 where there is literally zero reason to not press CC buttons on cool down, since over here the CC is available both in bulk and on (relatively) short cooldowns.

its a passive resistance that lets you play badly

Let me guess you didn’t even read what you quoted?

Having a mechanic that prevents chain stunlock actually increases the amount of skill required, because it forces the CC’er to think about the best timing of their CC, and penalizes players that mindlessly spam CC on cooldown.

NeXeD.3042:

Toughness is a semi counter to power, vitality is a semi counter to condi.

Toughness is partial mitigation. Vit is just a raw TTK increase.

Neither are counters. Countering implies negation of a mechanic. Cleansing is a counter to condi. Blocks are a counter to power.

The value of toughness is that it’s constant partial mitigation. Against a single power attack the value of toughness is marginal. Over the course of the fight however toughness adds up to a lot of mitigated damage. Toughness works great against sustained pressure as it decreases the amount of healing required to keep up with the pressure.
This is why cleric support guards are so vulnerable to power spikes despite having some of the highest toughness in game, yet at the same time are nearly impossible to kill by attrition. (which is a counter example to the “toughness counters power” claim because spikes are nearly always done with power attacks, yet the high-toughness support guard is extremely vulnerable to spikes.)

Vitality is another story. Vit merely gives a increase in health pool. This is great against burst (from anything) but is terrible as a sustain because it doesn’t actually mitigate any damage, and a large health pool also means you need way more healing to replenish.
This is why Carrion necros (high vit, low tough)almost never manage to completely top off their health pool in combat, but almost never get spiked to death. (which is counter example to the “toughness counters power” claim, since most spikes are done with power yet the low toughness Carrion Necro can’t realistically be spiked.)

The only way you could argue that Toughness is a counter to power is if you believe that high toughness prevents death by power. This is also a fallacy, as toughness only really decreases the effectiveness of attrition by power attacks, and even then only if you have the heal capabilities to back it up.

ragnarokda.1805:

That’s the point he’s trying to make with “vitality counters condi” is that no matter how much health you have, condi deals the same.

So if you have 12k health, 1k/s condi will kill you in 12 seconds. But if you have 20k health, it’ll take that SAME condi 20s instead of 12s to kill you.

However, with power damage, vitality is a much smaller cushion if you don’t have toughness coupled with it because even though you have more health, you’re going to be getting hit HARDER without toughness or something like protection.

Vitality is a equal cushion.
A power attack dealing 1k damage with a 1sec cast would take 12 seconds to kill a 12k HP target and 20 seconds to kill a 20k HP target. Exactly the same TTK as condi.

Saying “well toughness decreases power damage, and thus increases TTK against power without a vitality increase” doesn’t all of a sudden make vitality a counter to condi, and it sure as hell doesn’t make vitality less effective against power.

In fact toughness just augments the effectiveness of vitality against power.

Wolfric.9380:

All depends of how they see GW2´s lifetime. Of course money is the driver and if GW3 or something similar is already in their mind, then GW2 is already lost. They will never tell and try to keep the players hope so GW2 survives till GW3 is anounced.
So if they are down to do business and not to create the best product for long term experience we can´t expect much.
But a lot of things do hint to keep GW2 long. Also some are for money like the hated power creep. Problem is, players usually accept power creep and go for stronger characters.

GW2 is a mmo, and is based on thee idea of a perpetual game. They don’t plan for sequels while the existing game is still functioning.
Although arguably expacs are sequels.

Wolfric.9380:

The game has three game modes and a wide varity of player skill….
It is hard to impossible for the less skilled to get a balance, when there are powerful strikes, that can be outplayed. The casual won´t outplay and dies.. the pro wonders why. I see it myself and i am an average player. I read the complains about reapers and dragon hunters. I see why but i don´t encounter this problems. I have much fun killing the reapers and kiting the dragon hunters. I need more training to get by a shield. I enconter more and more shield users bunkering and don´t have the timing i need till now. But i am shure there will be the moment i get more of them down with training.
So the game is very much balanced about L2P. But this is obvious a problem for casuals.

This might be of interest to you.

For the record some people probably don’t watch the tourney live. I for instance wait till the next day so that I can skip all that annoying commentary between matches.

StickerHappy.8052:

And we will continue to be in infancy if the balance devs dont step up. 3 freaking years frequent balancing is the problem, so why can;t they fix it?

IKR, just look at League where half the champions are trash, and we all know how utterly failed League is competitively.

/eyeroll

Azukas.1426:

NeXeD.3042:

Your tests are so biased its unbelievable.

No its not. I did what you asked I tested GS on warrior using the power amulets.

Those are the results.

I’m sorry you don’t like them, but I did what you asked. In the end my point was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. The best part is I changed to a more power based weapon to appease you, but never changed the damaging condition. Bleeds are by far the worst damaging condition in the game.

/facepalm

1) You didn’t use a actual build, and therefore didn’t simulate a realistic situation.
2) You didn’t bother looking at the base damage on the abilities you used and didn’t account for it.
3) You used a abysmally small amount of trails. Power unlike condi has a RNG mechanic, and therefore needs a very large number of tests.

also what Cog said.

Azukas.1426:

zxstanyxz.8769:

Azukas.1426:

So where does it all fit in? When the masses are yelling that your game is unbalanced and is not fun to watch/play then you need to pay attention if you really want to get where you want to go as a company.

the masses? there are a small number of people complaining about it on the forums, and if you look through enough of the posts then you will find people complaining that every class is OP (well except for the poor ol’ warriors)

the only im-balance in the game is that warriors need a buff, and a few very minor tweaks may be needed on some other classes. otherwise the game is actually fairly well balanced at the moment, more so than it has been in the past and tbh the dev’s are doing a kitten ed good job of trying to make sure every class has a viable build.

but as you said, everyones entitled to their opinion, just realise that the small sample of players you see on the forums here is not necessarily representative of the “masses” that actually play pvp

With the numbers of players who play this game dropping significantly, and the fact you only get 5k viewers for the pro league I think my statement holds weight.

All the forums are littered with negativity, and the reason you don’t see 90% of it is due to the forum mods. The negativity is also all over chats in game as well.

You can’t play like an ostrich and stick your head in the sand. If you want to make this happen you need to take firm ownership of your actions.

Every game’s forum is littered with negativity. Have you seen WoW’s forum? Have you seen TOR’s forum? Have you seen Wildstar’s forum?

People only open their mouths when they have an axe to grind, otherwise they just play the game and don’t give a crap about the forums.

Zdenny.2704:

Did you watch ESL yesterday? This meta is about bunkering and holding the points. Anet wants to be it played this way. You cap the point and try to hold it as much longer as you can. Nobody is going for kills, the cap points win the game. Ppl are fighting for minutes on one point just to protect it. Stick to it and you win the video game too. Go for dps, kill everybody, but if you don’t capture you will never win. This happens so many game those days for me.. Half of my team is usually only fighting and nobody is going for capturing, every single random game.

Edit: Go bunker, win the video game.

You realize that you have to kill people to get capture points right?

choovanski.5462:

stun resistance is just a way for scrubs to care less about CC so they can hungry hungry hippo even harder.

Oh please, stun resistance adds more depth. Just look at TOR where a entire portion of the strategy revolves around when to apply CC, since in that game you only get a couple CCs before the target goes immune, so teams must be strategic with it.

Compare that to GW2 where there is literally zero reason to not press CC buttons on cool down, since over here the CC is available both in bulk and on (relatively) short cooldowns.

Nova Stiker.8396:

I disagree, GW2’s problem is the inflation of CC. There is simply to much and it needs to be toned down.
There is no reason to have an elite skill to have 2 second AoE stun that can hit 5 players within 600 range with 8 seconds of chill. Tweek the numbers, less CC, more utility.

I have no issue with individual abilities, let alone a elite skill with a 90second cooldown. A single stunbreak or cleanse fixes that.

The problem lies more with classes have large amounts of CC abilities, and can thus chain them.

Josh.3590:

So I’m sure someone has already posted this somewhere, I just haven’t found it… I’m pretty new to the game but have been PvPing most of the time I’ve played, was just wondering if there was ever going to be an arena implemented into the game? A 2v2 or 3v3 map type. Whichever team kills the other first wins… Kinda self explanatory… Also, should be a rating system as well sort like WoW has theirs. DISCLAIMER, I DO NOT PLAY WOW NOR HAVE I EVER. Just seen streams, so in before the rage of people telling me to go back to a game I’ve never played haha.

No, just no. no-respawn TDM should never become anything more than something done in guild halls and practice arenas.
I’ve played games with that game mode. It’s extremely build limiting, absolutely hellish for new players, and has the most simplistic and insipid strategies ever.

Floplag.4032:

Honestly this game is on the lighter side CC wise in PvP. After playing WoW and SWTOR this is a welcome respite from the constant CC wars.

tbh having done almost 4 years of pvp in sw:tor, that game’s CC is far less punishing than this one. TOR has a built in immunity mechanic to prevent chain stunlocking, and only a couple classes have more than 1 stun.
WoW is a different story though.

GW2’s problem is that while the duration of individual CCs is much shorter than in other games, there is nothing in place to discourage spamming the crap out of CC, and moreover builds often have access to many different forms of CC.

I’m going to bump this. At this juncture most of the time it’s not worth trying to even defend the lord because it’s a exercise in futility.

I dunno about you guys but I actually check the end-of-match statistics, and my direct damage taken is pretty much always 4 to 5 times greater than my condition damage taken

Azukas.1426:

NeXeD.3042:

Azukas.1426:

Crinn.7864:

Azukas.1426:

StAllerdyce.3941:

What is this test trying to prove? That using hybrid stats with a hybrid weapon kills faster than using zerk stats with a hybrid weapon? Seems logical.

I’m sorry but Carrion out performed the power amulet. In fact it performed just as well as zerker until zerker got an extremely good run of crits.

…until it got a good run of crits.

Of course it didn’t, power unlike condi has a RNG chance to perform better, because of this power must therefore be weaker to condi without favorable RNG since otherwise condi would be strictly inferior.

You fail to see that carrion is out performing the power amulets using only bleeds. This is 8-9 stacks of bleeds and only in the viper amulet did we see 12. Guess which had the fastest times?

Now when you look at the OP of this thread it actually supports his statement.

Why don’t you compare a zerk with a GS, against carrion with sword if you really want to do a fair comparison….

Go ahead be my guest. I went with eliminating as many variables as possible.

Eliminating variables is only good if it reduces bias in the experiment. Using sword for both is extremely …arbitrary…

nearlight.3064:

Actually messiah, the jokes on us. I tuned into noscoc’ streak today and he was showing off his secret condi build that he doesn’t want to talk about. But I knew what it was because I he tried it out. It’s wanderer’s with master of corruption (cpc, cb, cc) and thorn runes of all things (I knew it was thorns because I tried that out the other day and it gives you a stacking buff icon). So yeah it’s too hard to be hipster with our own builds, but it looks like we’re going to see another curses necro build, possibly in tournaments, it’s just not the exact one we had originally wanted for ourselves.

I doubt it will get popular with other necros though, since corruptions takes more thought to play compressor signers and nos played with corruptions on celestial in the preHOT meta and no one really copied his build.

The 6pc on thorns is a stack? Huh, I was looking at it yesterday but figured there was no way that would be stackable.

I don’t get the DH trap hate, if anything on DH is OP it’s the longbow

Azukas.1426:

StAllerdyce.3941:

What is this test trying to prove? That using hybrid stats with a hybrid weapon kills faster than using zerk stats with a hybrid weapon? Seems logical.

I’m sorry but Carrion out performed the power amulet. In fact it performed just as well as zerker until zerker got an extremely good run of crits.

…until it got a good run of crits.

Of course it didn’t, power unlike condi has a RNG chance to perform better, because of this power must therefore be weaker to condi without favorable RNG since otherwise condi would be strictly inferior.

Ronin.7381:

What bugs me is the forced-emphasis on crafting. I’m someone who hates tradeskills with a passion. So when I found out about collections, I was excited. Now I can be rewarded with items for my collection list that help me progress to my legendary but if Tier 2 and Tier 3 require mats so you can craft – that just annoys me. Figured they’d just rehash the same method to get the pre-reqs =/

Crafting is emphasized because it’s a closed system. Crafting doesn’t put gold into the economy, which means it doesn’t contribute to inflation.

Dirame.8521:

Sorry dude, you’re wrong. 5 stacks of bleed kills a 11k health player faster than it does a 20k health player. You can argue semantics and say it’s a “soft-counter” to condis but that’s about it.

Power attacks kill a 11k health player faster than it does a 20k health player.

Raw health pool isn’t a counter to anything beyond burst. All vit does is give you a larger margin of error regardless of whether you’re fighting condi or power.

Morwath.9817:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Plus, most Reapers are running Consume Conditions or Your Soul is Mine!

Please, please! Check Pro League or Metabattle builds, Signet of Vampirism is the most used healing skill., e.g. in Pro League each Necro used SoV…

So it’s like engi healing turret since forever.

On second thought, the majority of classes tend to only have 1 maybe 2 “good” healing skills.

Winrate really shouldn’t be used kitten the end-all of balancing. There are too many other factors that affect winrate that have nothing to do with balance.

The name you’re looking for is a “dire” amulet.

Anet has specifically said they won’t put Dire amulets in sPvP because of concern of making condition builds strong.

Jace al Thor.6745:

I understanding what you are saying Seyiwaji, but for me that is a grind. I can PvP for hours on end but repeating the same events for hours is boring to me. And if something is boring it feels like a grind. And I’m by no means an achievement hunter either.
And I’m sure I’m not the only person like that.

Masteries are a replacement for a linear leveling system.

They didn’t want to increase the level cap since it would require increasing gear tiers, thus introducing even more grind. However they still needed a way to control how fast the new PvE content was consumed, thus enter masteries.

Burtnik.5218:

snip

Condition builds are countered by everything (except toughness) that power builds are. If a attack is blocked, the attack can’t apply conditions. Same with evades.

• Condition build is hard countered by;
  Massive amount of cleanses, which not every class has access to.

Not every build has access to blocks either, so by the logic of this thread, Power builds must also be OP

Exedore.6320:

Ya, no.

Case in point: d/d ele. It was hands-down the best build for so long I don’t even remember and nothing could counter it or compete with it.

“Perfect Imbalance” means that a build has strengths and weaknesses.

nobody said it was executed on perfectly

Juba.8406:

Minion of Vey.4398:

Vuh.1328:

Just allow rangers to tame warriors as pet.

But that would be a ranger nerf

I wanted to work as a pet for my fellow Ranger but …………

How fitting, the thread is necro’ed by a player that plays a necro.

Centurion.7296:

It feels like Anet makes one thing OP and nerfs the rest to the ground and then a month later; nerfs the OP thing and makes something else OP. Can’t Anet just make everything balanced and leave PvP alone?

They may not be in their best interests to

Cogbyrn.7283:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

ANet stated that each profession should be able to perform each role.

I think, if anything, this is their mistake. They are trying too hard to appease everyone, but if they want spvp balance, i think they should limit classes to very specific roles. Unfortunately this is an MMO,so attachment is so strong that they almost can’t. It is a doomed genre for competitive balance.

It’s not a doomed genre for competitive balance. It’s that players cannot and will not accept any game as balanced. Humans have a natural desire to rank things mentally, and it’s mentally impossible for humans to accept two different things as equally powerful.

Xillllix.3485:

This thread is just the best: People complaining about Diamond skin then we get 1-shot all over the place by skills that hit over 10k/sec from heavy classes.

Really, you’re gonna complain about a 10% threshold when you can just 1-shot the class down?

I didn’t realize condi builds had power attacks that hit for 10k.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Trigr.6481:

Solution: Diamond skin – Reduces the duration of all incoming conditions by 40%

I don’t think that’s a good solution because it doesn’t offer counterplay. It’s just a passive effect, which isn’t very interesting. It’s also a little too strong number-wise stacked with other condition duration reductions. I still think the best solution follows:

Diamond Skin: Gain Resistance for 4 seconds when attuning to Earth.

The counterplay here is to either strip the Resistance or to condition burst the Elementalist after the boon has run out while Earth Attunement is on cooldown. This also rewards effective play on the Elementalist’s part better, as they can counter an incoming condition burst by saving Earth and swapping to it when it hits.

I like this idea.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Hakuryuu.8634:

And in a very subtle way, it’s a way of saying kitten you to the braindead condi reapers, so I see nothing wrong with this. Move on and l2p.

I love seeing the “braindead” argument about other classes/specs. Ironic how you tell people to l2p against a passive immunity to an entire type of damage/utility, whereas you don’t seem to feel you should l2p against a class actively managing condition application on a target.

But I forget. Everything that beats us is classified (hilariously, I might add) as “braindead”, and everything we do in the game is the highest form of skill.

Braindead:
adjective: a term used to describe a class or object that the speaker does not play or identify with.
see also: spammy

LegallyBinding.4937:

I cannot see how it would be that technically challenging to implement.

If I had a dime…..

Melanion.4892:

Condi classes have a higher ramp up, sure, but they also have a greater ability to kite. You could apply condis, kite around while the condis tick, then apply more (or apply more as you’re kiting). There are few (almost 0) condi classes that can apply damage while not actively attacking or even l.o.s.ing. With a power class, I could pressure you off a point and you’d have to leave to heal. With a condi class, I could be pressured off point but the damage still ticks. Not saying this is bad. It’s what you get when you go condi, but you can’t have it both ways. Condi takes longer to get the damage out, but the damage lasts longer once the condi is appplied.

I’d respond with a fuller argument, but it appears Sunshine’s beaten me to it.

You literally identified the only reason a person would ever use condi in the first place. If it wasn’t for the fact that condi’s tick while you’re away you would never use condi in the first place, since it would basically be a power build with tons of a ramp time.

I simply cannot understand why you seem to think Condi are going to take over the meta if Diamond Skin goes away. There are more counterplay options to use against condi than there are to use against power. Add in the fact that condi usually takes much longer to kill a target in a gamemode that puts extreme emphasis on kill targets quickly and you ought to be able to see why Reaper is the only condi build that qualifies as viable.