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Conditions as Combo Finishers?


Swagg.9236

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If high-volume condition application were tied exclusively to combo-finisher attacks, condition application would not only be more dynamic (ability to rely on teammates and timing in order to set-up for condi bursts via field placement; possibility of forcing risky, position-based attacks from leaps or whirls) and also more fairly telegraphed (presence of a combo field in tandem with particular classes or weapon sets would potentially signal an incoming condition burst; also firmly sets condi burst into cycles rather than just relying on constant, passive spam). Conditions being tied to skills without any real justification beyond "tHIs iS a COnDi wEApON" only encourages low-effort, passive playstyles since they don't rely on anything except having a target selected. It would be easy to re-balance combo finisher outputs in order to make them mostly condition-centric. The only thing to do beyond that would be to convert all Projectile Finishers into exclusively 100% chance instances and then remove them from auto-attacks. From there, it would even be possible to re-work a plethora of current traits and runes into combo-boosting or combo-support effects.

This is all mostly worthless banter since this video game is over anyway. I only thought about this after making a Mesmer meme build which relied on Feedback to RNG-generate mass stacks of confusion on a target. Felt hilarous and satisfying, but also somewhat fair since the payload of confusion outside of Feedback's cooldown wasn't super overwhelming; and the build itself didn't really carry any other condis in lethal volumes. Conditions dealing stat-scaling damage was a mistake regardless because Power already exists.

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"Conditions being tied to skills without any real justification beyond "tHIs iS a COnDi wEApON" only encourages low-effort, passive playstyles since they don't rely on anything except having a target selected."

As opposed to those "high-effort" power builds that...do exactly the same thing? Seriously, remove the condi from the weapon skill and you have a power skill that has the same requirement of "having a target selected". What's the difference? Oh, right. You need to land about 100 condi attacks to deal any damage, and then you have to hope they don't cleanse it. But condi is "low effort".

But wait! Condi damage only requires 1 stat! OMG! Err wait, nevermind, they removed the other stat entirely from PvP amulet selection and even if you run sinister or grieving apparently you're a passive condi tank anyway. Go figure?

Anyway, your idea is broken. Requiring condi builds to stand in little circles and utilize only combo field interactions to deal damage is a fail idea from every direction. Nice try, though. Next time just come out with it and say you want to remove condi from the game. It's what condi whiners really want.

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@Dawdler.8521 said:Great, so only elementalist will remain as a condi class.

Then again they are also immortal to conditions so fights would be... interesting.

You think that a paradigm change like this wouldn't also entail skill changes? GW2 is already DROWNING in combo field oversaturation. There's no actual reason why something like even Lava Font OUGHT to be a combo field. There's also no particular reason why you couldn't just add a poison field to the Ranger Shortbow set (lord knows that it would be a welcome change considering how the entire weapon set is just basically the auto-attack copied 5 times with different effects slapped onto it). On top of this, the idea that made me consider this came from using a combo field from the utility pool rather than relying on weapons. You just have to imagine the moving parts; see the variables.

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@"AliamRationem.5172" said:"Conditions being tied to skills without any real justification beyond "tHIs iS a COnDi wEApON" only encourages low-effort, passive playstyles since they don't rely on anything except having a target selected."

As opposed to those "high-effort" power builds that...do exactly the same thing? Seriously, remove the condi from the weapon skill and you have a power skill that has the same requirement of "having a target selected". What's the difference? Oh, right. You need to land about 100 condi attacks to deal any damage, and then you have to hope they don't cleanse it. But condi is "low effort".

But wait! Condi damage only requires 1 stat! OMG! Err wait, nevermind, they removed the other stat entirely from PvP amulet selection and even if you run sinister or grieving apparently you're a passive condi tank anyway. Go figure?

Anyway, your idea is broken. Requiring condi builds to stand in little circles and utilize only combo field interactions to deal damage is a fail idea from every direction. Nice try, though. Next time just come out with it and say you want to remove condi from the game. It's what condi whiners really want.

There's nothing in GW2 that is "high effort," but conditions, as DoTs, inherently reward only the initial hit and discourage further engagement so long as that DoT sticks to its target. I can technically kill a target with conditions by striking once and then hiding behind a box for a few seconds whereas at least if its just raw power damage, I would have to keep hitting the target while in line-of-sight until its red bar empties. Moreover, condition stacks generally do not function as triggers for bonus effects (and if they were, it would be silly and overpowered because even power builds can apply substantial conditions without even trying), so its difficult to give them a role aside from just "generic damage" despite the fact that this game already has a "generic damage" stat in power. In all realms technical, condition damage is just power damage but better because at least power damage generally involves consistently striking the target over time in order to inflict damage; the only thing that stops conditions from being better than power in any respective case are patch notes.Instead of having "damage" and "other damage," there's no reason why conditions couldn't have just been set-up triggers for more powerful, conditional effects on other skills as they were in GW1 (or plenty of other games which involve 16-30 active abilities slapped onto any single player's skillbar). Instead, conditions are just power skills with all of their damage off-loaded into a brief DoT that can actually skill kill players in seconds. It's just a waste of code. At least if they're going to be damage, they might as well be tied to the legible presence of certain fields or attacks rather than just relying on passive procs, pre-casting a few buffs and/or any old, throwaway attack in order to murder someone from off-screen.

You need to land about 100 condi attacks to deal any damage, and then you have to hope they don't cleanse it. But condi is "low effort".Yes, but thankfully, you can still do that all within a second; or you can front-load several conditions onto a single, near-instant active so that what would have normally just been a somewhat threatening ability now instantly kills a target if they don't cleanse within 2 seconds. As for cleanses themselves, THEY ARE NOT UNIVERSALLY DISTRIBUTED. The fact that nobody can consistent cleanse a baseline amount of conditions while using any given build INVALIDATES anyone's "just cleanse it, bro" argument. If this sort of thing were standardized, then you could talk about how "bad" players are using their cleanses "poorly" or "too early" because they aren't reading the flow of the game or something, but in a world where Mesmer can only cleanse 1 condition on weapon swap while Elementalist or Guardian are basically immune to them, you cannot make the argument that equates to "just cleanse it, bro lol." You can't make some blanket assumption for multiple subjects when they all have individual variables at play; you have to lock the variables in place first in order to test your blanket assumption.

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@"Swagg.9236" said:There's nothing in GW2 that is "high effort," but conditions, as DoTs, inherently reward only the initial hit and discourage further engagement so long as that DoT sticks to its target. I can technically kill a target with conditions by striking once and then hiding behind a box for a few seconds whereas at least if its just raw power damage, I would have to keep hitting the target while in line-of-sight until its red bar empties.

Tell that to oneshot mesmer, literally any thief or oneshot ranger, they can do their "initial burst" and discourage further engagement.

Next two scenarios have the same end effect:

  • Power build doing 10k initial burst in 2-3 seconds and running away
  • Condi build doing the initial burst in 2-3 seconds and running away, which deals 10k in 4-5 seconds

In the end you got damaged for 10k and the enemy ran away after a few seconds.

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@Swagg.9236 said:

@"AliamRationem.5172" said:"Conditions being tied to skills without any real justification beyond "tHIs iS a COnDi wEApON" only encourages low-effort, passive playstyles since they don't rely on anything except having a target selected."

As opposed to those "high-effort" power builds that...do exactly the same thing? Seriously, remove the condi from the weapon skill and you have a power skill that has the same requirement of "having a target selected". What's the difference? Oh, right. You need to land about 100 condi attacks to deal any damage, and then you have to hope they don't cleanse it. But condi is "low effort".

But wait! Condi damage only requires 1 stat! OMG! Err wait, nevermind, they removed the other stat entirely from PvP amulet selection and even if you run sinister or grieving apparently you're a passive condi tank anyway. Go figure?

Anyway, your idea is broken. Requiring condi builds to stand in little circles and utilize only combo field interactions to deal damage is a fail idea from every direction. Nice try, though. Next time just come out with it and say you want to remove condi from the game. It's what condi whiners really want.

There's nothing in GW2 that is "high effort," but conditions, as DoTs, inherently reward only the initial hit and discourage further engagement so long as that DoT sticks to its target. I can technically kill a target with conditions by striking once and then hiding behind a box for a few seconds whereas at least if its just raw power damage, I would have to keep hitting the target while in line-of-sight until its red bar empties. Moreover, condition stacks generally do not function as triggers for bonus effects (and if they were, it would be silly and overpowered because even power builds can apply substantial conditions without even trying), so its difficult to give them a role aside from just "generic damage" despite the fact that this game already has a "generic damage" stat in power. In all realms technical, condition damage is just power damage but better because at least power damage generally involves consistently striking the target over time in order to inflict damage; the only thing that stops conditions from being better than power in any respective case are patch notes.Instead of having "damage" and "other damage," there's no reason why conditions couldn't have just been set-up triggers for more powerful, conditional effects on other skills as they were in GW1 (or plenty of other games which involve 16-30 active abilities slapped onto any single player's skillbar). Instead, conditions are just power skills with all of their damage off-loaded into a brief DoT that can actually skill kill players in seconds. It's just a waste of code. At least if they're going to be damage, they might as well be tied to the legible presence of certain fields or attacks rather than just relying on passive procs, pre-casting a few buffs and/or any old, throwaway attack in order to murder someone from off-screen.

You need to land about 100 condi attacks to deal any damage, and then you have to hope they don't cleanse it. But condi is "low effort".Yes, but thankfully, you can still do that all within a second; or you can front-load several conditions onto a single, near-instant active so that what would have normally just been a somewhat threatening ability now instantly kills a target if they don't cleanse within 2 seconds. As for cleanses themselves, THEY ARE NOT UNIVERSALLY DISTRIBUTED. The fact that nobody can consistent cleanse a baseline amount of conditions while using any given build INVALIDATES anyone's "just cleanse it, bro" argument. If this sort of thing were standardized, then you could talk about how "bad" players are using their cleanses "poorly" or "too early" because they aren't reading the flow of the game or something, but in a world where Mesmer can only cleanse 1 condition on weapon swap while Elementalist or Guardian are basically immune to them, you cannot make the argument that equates to "just cleanse it, bro lol." You can't make some blanket assumption for multiple subjects when they all have individual variables at play; you have to lock the variables in place first in order to test your blanket assumption.

Hmm. So condi rewards the initial hit while power does what? And some builds have better/different cleansing? What's the problem here exactly?

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