Guild Wars 2

Just go do it. I did it a few nights ago with only one other random person there. It was a little long (not much more time consuming than any WB, really), but challenging enough not to be tedious.

“There’s a Lupicus kill (1.5 million HP) with a pure condi-warrior which took like 6 1/2 minutes, which is on par with direct damage kills.”

The key word in that sentence is “a”.

“Condition damage rocks in PvP. Who cares about PvE DPS?”

People who play PvE.

“You in a hurry or something? Killing monsters is killing monsters, slow, fast, who cares really?”

People who participate in fights with a hard time limit.

Would be nice if, when adding content that they intend to be elite, they gate it with some small bit of instanced solo content that A) trains people in any new mechanics, and weeds out people who are going to be a problem for groups.

I don’t see why they even need to bother with stacks, especially if it’s a bandwidth issue.

If I was totally overhauling conditions the way they did MF, I would just give each condition skill a condition “damage” rating, which would be comparable in size to normal damage numbers. Every time you hit someone with a condition, it would add the “damage” to an “energy” pool for that condition, up until it reaches a cap which is somewhat proportional to max health (such that you can stack a lot more condition on a Legendary than a normal mob). Every time the condition ticks or triggers, it would remove some condition “energy” and (for some conditions) do some damage.

DOT and triggered damage would be a function (differing for each condition type) of the amount of energy in the pool, with the net impact being that stacking is basically simulated, and there would be a much higher actual and max-possible rate on someone getting zerged by 40 people than on a veteran being solo’d.

Duration would just be a question of when the energy ran out, and UI info should be more of an advisory.

I can see a couple of issues arising:
1) You can’t feasibly distinguish between condition damage and condition duration, since each is an automatic function of condition energy.
2) Condition removal gets a little murkier, or possibly too powerful.
3) Without stacks, it is hard to convey how much condition is present on yourself or your target.

With regard to the first two, I think the best solution is to merge the offensive condition attributes into a single Condition Power attribute, and then add a Condition Resistance attribute. Condition Resistance would passively increase a condition’s energy loss with each tick or trigger (reducing duration) and would also boost the effect of Condition Removal skills. Conditional Removal would, in turn, be reworked to also have a “damage” rating rather than a yes/no. The “damage” could either hit a random condition or be spread out, as balance dictates, and would reduce the energy pool of each condition accordingly.

As for the UI, using parallel health bars might make more sense, especially if condition power is scaled to max health.