Now I suppose for the differences, I’ll let you decide if it was worth it or not.
Bleeding while still being widely available across professions, was not the highest damage dealing condition in Guild Wars. The way that bleeding and stacking bleeds is handled in Guild Wars 2 is the way that it is because they chose to do away with hexes. Hex spells such as Seeping Wound and Rising Bile no longer exist. As such they had to make up for the lack options in the damage over time department via homogenization.
Disease was removed from the game, and honestly needs to be put back in. As some sort of short ranged aoe dot that spreads upon dealing damage. In Guild Wars Disease was equal to the damage of poison, but a much more rare commodity. Only Necros and the rare Grenth dervish were capable of applying disease, however if disease found it’s way into your party, well it would wreak havoc as seen in The Great Snowball Fight of the Gods and Grenth vs Dwayna matches.
Poison was weakest of concepts in Guild Wars for a condition, as it was essentially disease without the ability to spread between species of the same type. The upside is that it was much more accessible, not as common as bleeding, but still more common than disease.
Blind Blind in Guild Wars was often times a game winning condition, instead of leaving the enemy after a single attack, it stayed on for the full duration. It could absolutely shut down melee. However it only affected Melee/Projectiles/Missle-Spells. Regardless if a team was capable of covering a blind on a spiker, it was likely that team wouldn’t have to worry about losing a team mate.(Until Sight beyond sight was added)
Cracked Armor Was another game winning condition. It would reduce your armor by 20. Armor in itself was an incredibly complex system as was the damage, seriously the formulas take days to explain. As far cracked armor is concerned, it reduced armor by 20, but would not take a target below 60(which is base armor at 20, and considered light armor). So using cracked armor to it’s fullest potential, a player could expect a 41% damage increase. This was replaced with Vulnerability, which isn’t even half as useful.
Daze Another Grammy Nominated condition, daze in gw1 unlike gw2, was a condition and as such followed all the condition flags, on top of that Daze was often lasted 5-15 seconds depending on how it was applied. Now the big difference is that Daze was not a silence, even though it originally was called silence. Daze would double your casting time and make it so any direct damage you would sustain could interrupt what ever spell you were casting.
Burning was one of the shortest duration condition, but it was the highest degen available to conditions, unlike how Bleeding in GW2 complete trumps Burning in both availability and raw damage potential. Burning alone was able to put pressure on a single monk if it was applied to hit whole team. Burning could also be applied to non-fleshy targets, which was especially useful for dealing with Spirits.
Deep Wound GvG All-Star. I’ve seriously lost matches due to a single deep wound being applied on a guild lord at the last second. Anyways, deep wound functioned as the anti-heal condition, reducing healing by 20% on a target, but also reducing a targets total hp by 20%. As you know it never made it to GW2, which is kind of lame, but at the same time it made poison useful, we’re still missing the 20% health reduction part however.
Cripple Remained the same, however more readily available due to the homogenization of hexes into conditions.
Chill Didn’t exist, instead hexes would be the only form reduced attack speed, and cooldown times, on top of interrupts that would increase cd times.
Weakness The final game changing condition, and the most nerfed condition in it’s transition to GW2. Weakness would reduce physical damage by 66% and all attributes by 1(which roughly averaged out to 8-12%). It could even break some builds if a character was put below the attribute thresh-hold to use a weapon because of weakness. Weakness now only reduces damage by 25% and doubles the time it takes your endurance to recharge. Which is cool and all, but it doesn’t hold a candle to what it could do.
Hope this turns out right, typing on a tablet with windows 8 is annoying.
