"Condi Burst"

The whole buzz surrounding "condi burst" is a red herring and a silly attempt at rationalizing the problem as something other than what it actually is. Let's just drop this absurdity and call a spade a spade - condition damage is (generally) over-tuned and in need of significant nerfs. Being able to drop a lot of conditions quickly shouldn't be an issue, and wouldn't be if condition damage was properly tuned.

Condi being over-tuned is quite plainly demonstrated by the fact that it typically outperforms direct damage even against glass builds and low-armor mobs. Isn't the entire purpose of condition damage to bypass armor? Why, then, does it do more damage even when the target has low armor? That's completely wrong-headed. You should expect a power build to outperform a condi build against a low armor target no matter how long the fight lasts. Condi's advantage is that it circumvents high armor, which power builds should and do struggle with. This is one of the main reasons why Toughness is undervalued in pretty much all game modes. What's the point when it's usually conditions that kill you anyway?

Two years of condi being OP has also pushed the proliferation of cleansing and resistance mechanics to give players and mobs ways of dealing with it, and the whole combat system has suffered for it. Toughness hardly matters, players are forced to build around condi cleanse/immunity, non-bunkers die way too fast while bunkers are even more annoying than they should be. By nerfing condi damage, we can effectively scale all of this back and restore a modicum of balance and control to the combat system.

Everyone (including Anet) acts like conditions are the same as generic DoTs from other games, when that isn't how they were designed. They were largely designed with quick stacking and short duration because they need to be balanced in both PvP (short fights) and PvE (long fights), which is why balancing them primarily around fight duration as opposed to armor doesn't make any sense and will never lead to good balance. Again, let armor largely determine which is more effective, that way they both have a competitive place in the meta in both PvP and PvE.

Here's an example of how it should work, barring any gimmicks or specialized mechanics:

low armor - physical has advantage right out of the gate and never loses it, no matter how long the fight lastsmid-range armor - physical has advantage at first, but swings slightly in favor of condition damage probably starting at around the 6 second mark.high armor - condi has the advantage by the 2-3 second mark and maintains it from there.

And that's not even getting into the attribute dependency imbalances that exist between physical damage and condition damage builds.

Most condition attacks allowing for a mid to high range of stacks are only 1 condition (reaper whirl or any other whirl in fields, flurry or flameflurry, 1 condition is easily cleansable. Problem lies in running into a fight and somone spreading conditions and stacking multiple stacks from your friendly party warrior/ rev staying alive on resistance or returned conditions from mallyx or necro, and allowing you to eat 25 poison, 25 bleeds a set of troment and if your lucky some confusion and burning to top it off... And you, yourself, killing yourself, trying to activate your condi cleanse.

While condi burst is seemingly a really overtuned thing, it's mostly 2 or 3 ppl hitting you at the same time using preplaced wells, marks, corruptions and traps, while being attacked by 1 or more players... which results in roughly the same as a (multi-)dragonhunter multitrap with Immo. both are the same and have roughly the same effect.

You die. FAST.

Luckily I've played WVW and I have been steamrolled by the enemy zerg more then once, when solo. So everything is relative.I never died in PvP in >3 seconds. That's die, not getting downed. And rerun...again, and when unlucky again, and when farmed again if they are smart enough to predict where I'd go on the 3rd try.

My view of the whole thing is, damage has gone up consistently since hot with little to no increase in negating effects. I feel like vitality for every class needs to be increased for wvw in particular. I would like to see10k health added to each class upon entering wvw.

You cannot keep increasing the damage without increasing the things that negate the damage particularly vitality cause toughness is useless against conditions. Also power hasn't seen as much of a rise in damage as conditions.

Depends on what you call burst, but it does exist. Burst in every game I've played has been damage dealt in about the first 3 seconds of combat.

Power - if I stand there and take it, I expect 3 seconds to be enough to down me (even with 33k HP and 3400 toughness-which most classes don't have and can't get). I can evade, escape, use mitigation. Whatever I need to do to survive the other players initial burst. If I live, I have the chance to reciprocate.

Conditions (at the moment) - the amount of conditions certain classes can apply in the first second of combat is enough to down most classes (regardless of build/health). Most classes don't have endless dodges, cleanses, etc. Not everyone can remove the endless stacks of conditions I've seen after 3 seconds of combat against 1 player.

At least the power player has to stand around to fight you to down you usually. The condition burst is just run by, quick spamfest and the player runs away knowing you are downed and that the next player behind can finish you.

The creep from both power and conditions is making it so that most classes can down you in under 2 seconds of combat, and a lot of the time there is no counterplay. Where is the fun in that?

@Frostwolve.2916 said:My view of the whole thing is, damage has gone up consistently since hot with little to no increase in negating effects. I feel like vitality for every class needs to be increased for wvw in particular. I would like to see10k health added to each class upon entering wvw.

You cannot keep increasing the damage without increasing the things that negate the damage particularly vitality cause toughness is useless against conditions. Also power hasn't seen as much of a rise in damage as conditions.

Yeah, that's also a valid point, but it applies mostly to conditions. Power damage has not gone up nearly as significantly.

But some of the power classes can down you instant, too. Take P/P thiefs, shatter mesmers, a lucky warrior... As the last expansion shows ANet loves conditions and seems to increase the amount of condi builds. Guess you have to live with that and modify your build.

@Galmac.4680 said:But some of the power classes can down you instant, too. Take P/P thiefs, shatter mesmers, a lucky warrior... As the last expansion shows ANet loves conditions and seems to increase the amount of condi builds. Guess you have to live with that and modify your build.

P/P thief maxes at around 24k DPS last I checked. Most every condition build has nearly 50% more than that.

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Galmac.4680 said:But some of the power classes can down you instant, too. Take P/P thiefs, shatter mesmers, a lucky warrior... As the last expansion shows ANet loves conditions and seems to increase the amount of condi builds. Guess you have to live with that and modify your build.

DPS has nothing to do with burst dmg. It's actually quite the opposite. DPS is only useful when we talk about long static fights, not burst scenarios and it's especially useless in spvp encounters.

There are plenty of power builds who can pump out 20k+ dmg in under 5 seconds at the start of a fight. This is impossible to achieve with any condition build even if you precast marks, traps or other skills. (unbuffed of course)

@Adenin.5973 said:

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Galmac.4680 said:But some of the power classes can down you instant, too. Take P/P thiefs, shatter mesmers, a lucky warrior... As the last expansion shows ANet loves conditions and seems to increase the amount of condi builds. Guess you have to live with that and modify your build.

Depending on how much might I have, I can do burn ticks for 16-22K for about 3-4 seconds seconds on my firebrand before it drops down to 6-11K burn ticks. It takes about 2 seconds to set that up. This is on top of the power damage

@Adenin.5973 said:

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Galmac.4680 said:But some of the power classes can down you instant, too. Take P/P thiefs, shatter mesmers, a lucky warrior... As the last expansion shows ANet loves conditions and seems to increase the amount of condi builds. Guess you have to live with that and modify your build.

I... don't think this is true. I also don't think the game should be balanced around fights that last fewer than 5 seconds. Of course, part of the problem here is that PvP is too bursty in general. Relative to defense, power damage is probably overtuned; condition damage is just more overtuned.

@Spurnshadow.3678 said:

@Adenin.5973 said:

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Galmac.4680 said:But some of the power classes can down you instant, too. Take P/P thiefs, shatter mesmers, a lucky warrior... As the last expansion shows ANet loves conditions and seems to increase the amount of condi builds. Guess you have to live with that and modify your build.

Show me the footage of you, unbuffed and solo pulling 20k fire ticks in under 2 seconds after the beginning of a fight. The fact is simply: If you're on a power build and press every dmg skill you have, you do more dmg when you've activated all skills than someone that has a condi build.That's the nature of instant damaging skills. They're good at doing instant dmg. There is no question that power builds have higher burst dmg.

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Adenin.5973 said:

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Galmac.4680 said:But some of the power classes can down you instant, too. Take P/P thiefs, shatter mesmers, a lucky warrior... As the last expansion shows ANet loves conditions and seems to increase the amount of condi builds. Guess you have to live with that and modify your build.

Well, you can think many things but unless you explain why you think this way there's no point in writing about it.The game is not balanced around fights <5 seconds. The game is balanced around having 2 different concepts of dealing dmg, where you have to choose the right dmg type for the right environment or enemy.

If you have long single target fights, then go with condition, if you have multiple foes that need to be quickly dealt with then choose power dmg.It's like in PvP. Assuming two equally good players, not every class and every build will be able to beat another class/build. This is why we play an MMORPG, you choose one single role and if you need another role you invite more people to your party.

Also, in PvP, if you lower burst dmg and increase defence or whatever to make the fights longer, then you get complaints about the "bunker meta". The thing is, you will never please the PvP- players. Because whenever someone wins, someone else loses.

@Adenin.5973 said:

@Spurnshadow.3678 said:

@Adenin.5973 said:

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Galmac.4680 said:But some of the power classes can down you instant, too. Take P/P thiefs, shatter mesmers, a lucky warrior... As the last expansion shows ANet loves conditions and seems to increase the amount of condi builds. Guess you have to live with that and modify your build.

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Adenin.5973 said:

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Galmac.4680 said:But some of the power classes can down you instant, too. Take P/P thiefs, shatter mesmers, a lucky warrior... As the last expansion shows ANet loves conditions and seems to increase the amount of condi builds. Guess you have to live with that and modify your build.

The game is supposed to be balanced around having two different concepts of dealing damage - one that is dealt immediately but met with passive defense, and one that distributes over time but bypasses passive defense. "The environment" is not, or should not be "is it one target with a lot of HP, or multiple targets with low HP", it's supposed to be "is/are the target(s) high-armor, or is/are the target(s) low-armor?" Single vs. AoE shouldn't even really be part of the equation, and typically isn't.

Thing is, that makes no sense when conditions out-damage power-based builds against glassy targets because they're trying to balance around a fight lasting a few seconds. If the balance team is trying to make conditions competitive with power in the span of a 5 second engagement, or even a 10 second one, without even factoring in the target's defense, conditions will always be be generally overpowered, and they'll continue having to come up with silly gimmicks to keep power relevant particularly in PvE.

It's a bad paradigm. Power damage should be expected to outperform condition damage against targets with low armor, no matter how long the fight lasts. High armor should translate into it taking more than 4 seconds to kill someone, which swings the balance in favor of condition damage.

@Frostwolve.2916 said:My view of the whole thing is, damage has gone up consistently since hot with little to no increase in negating effects. I feel like vitality for every class needs to be increased for wvw in particular. I would like to see10k health added to each class upon entering wvw.

You cannot keep increasing the damage without increasing the things that negate the damage particularly vitality cause toughness is useless against conditions. Also power hasn't seen as much of a rise in damage as conditions.

Exactly this. Many other games when you increase damage you also increase health to balance it out. What anet has doing is instead pumping boons into the system to try and compensate for the damage, and yet investing heavy on corruption at the same time. Now they've also been bringing more one shot skills into the system, even toughness feels meaningless these days.

It's a mess that I doubt they will ever fix properly, and every expansion with more elite specs will make it worse.

This problem exists because of Protection and Aegis being easily applied, unlike Resistance. I disagree that condition needs to be toned down, rather they need to give players access to more Resistance.

In my opinion, instead of skills that only cleanses conditions, they should also apply Resistance for at least 2s per conditions cleansed (e.g. Resistance lasts 6s if the skill cleansed 3 conditions). The long cooldown of cleansing skills just makes it useless in the current meta.

I like to play as a shortbow thief, please don't nerf me because some OP class can cover the world in AoE's.

I think the dps of conditions needs to decrease, durations need a very substantial increase, and application frequency needs to go up. Condis began going in the wrong direction as soon as skills applied multiple stacks for only a few seconds... that's moving closer to burst dps instead of the sustained dps that condis were designed for. This means that necro scepter AA should be applying 15s bleeds and non-AA skills like Necro scepter 2 could still apply >1 stack for 20s or so. I also think power scaling on condi weapons should increase and condis should be delivered from many more skills, specifically from power-based weapons.

Like Ubi.4136 said above, condi damage should not be threatening within the first 3 seconds of combat (despite 3 seconds is kind of an arbitrary number). Condis should ramp up overtime. If players decide to clear condis at an early stage, then they will suffer for it later on. If they wait until the condis are already stacked and space out their clears, then they should be able to deal with condis effectively while slowly losing health overtime. Condi clears should be on short cooldown if they clear 1-2 condis and long cooldown if they clear >5 condis or so. Take Smite Conditions and Contemplation of Purity, for example. Although Smite Conditions would be a little too frequent if these ideas were to go through. Effects that clear condis every interval would have to be looked at too.

Condi damage cannot "ramp" if it peaks within mere seconds and drastically falls off shortly after. It should be a slow and steady increase. One problem is that some of the hardest hitting condi skills activate instantly and apply multiple conditions or apply multiple conditions in one packet (e.g. "burst" condi). Like with power-based skills, some of the hardest hitting skills are channeled (hundred blades) or situational (backstab). I think in order for condi damage to appropriately ramp, more skills with cast times need to apply long duration conditions that individually (i.e. at one stack) deals insignificant damage. Condis will ramp via skills that have casting times and therefore cannot "burst" because condition application is soft-time-gated behind casting times.

The bigger problem is a players ability to have a 100% up time to condition immunity. This can't be done against physical damage, so why can it happen with conditions. If anything before conditions are touched, immunity from them needs to be removed completely.

The longest time, people simply blobbed around in PTV gear and ran over other groups simply pressing 1, that's all it was. The players that have a problem with this now seem to be those that want to run around bunker gear pressing 1 all day long. There is now a counter to this, conditions, or condition burst. There is also a counter to this, ranged, something zergs seem to frown upon. Oh no, don't bring that ranger and don't you dare think about bringing that thief/deadeye. Think of it like rock paper scissors, it's just that some players want to play rock and be completely immune without having to worry about paper. Then when someone brings paper to the fight and annihilates the rocks, they get all uppity. Little do they know, paper has a dire fear of scissors, but fortunately for paper, many WvW commanders and other zerg leaders don't like scissors in their group. Quite frankly, that's your problem, stop complaining about conditions.

Even a dire ranged condition class gets destroyed rather quickly by rangers and deadeyes. Maybe Anet should start nerfing them into the ground? In response to your comment about doing more damage to low armor. Well the player that has low armor likely has high damage output where the condition class wouldn't stand a chance anyway.

But if there is 1 thing I would change... Condition damage would scale against targets with higher toughness. The more toughness a player has, the more condition damage they take (even more than they do now, consider like double it). The only way to escape this, lower toughness, which will force a new element in the game, because if you're low armor, you still likely won't survive in a blob melee clash. This is the perfect way to blow the blobs wide open.

Now I could be totally sounding silly here but I'm pretty certain a lot of it has to do with condition armor sets (viper namely) are more of a hybrid than straight condition damage. We're not looking at a "ramp up" because the power is already pretty close to regular power builds, except every class has some sort of condition on their weapons which instantly make it a better set. At this point, why even have power and condition a separate stat? Roll them into one stat called Attack Power and call it a day. Now that would be a heck of a balance job and I doubt it'd happen, but right now our devs seem to have it in their head that condition damage doesn't have any power in its build and it's all in the condition damage.

Gist version:Condi = Hybrid not straight Condi

@Kalocin.5982 said:Now I could be totally sounding silly here but I'm pretty certain a lot of it has to do with condition armor sets (viper namely) are more of a hybrid than straight condition damage. We're not looking at a "ramp up" because the power is already pretty close to regular power builds, except every class has some sort of condition on their weapons which instantly make it a better set. At this point, why even have power and condition a separate stat? Roll them into one stat called Attack Power and call it a day. Now that would be a heck of a balance job and I doubt it'd happen, but right now our devs seem to have it in their head that condition damage doesn't have any power in its build and it's all in the condition damage.

Gist version:Condi = Hybrid not straight Condi

It's a bit more complex than this, but, yes, the attribute dependencies for direct vs condition damage is a part of the overall equation.

@Kirin.7306 said:I like to play as a shortbow thief, please don't nerf me because some OP class can cover the world in AoE's.

The shortbow is a very weak weapon that needs buffs independently of any changes that are made to condis - you can't not make needed systemic changes because you're worried about how it may impact one weapon on one class - that's what ongoing balance patches are for.

@Frostwolve.2916 said:My view of the whole thing is, damage has gone up consistently since hot with little to no increase in negating effects. I feel like vitality for every class needs to be increased for wvw in particular. I would like to see10k health added to each class upon entering wvw.

You cannot keep increasing the damage without increasing the things that negate the damage particularly vitality cause toughness is useless against conditions. Also power hasn't seen as much of a rise in damage as conditions.

The substantially healthier solution is to lower damage output instead of needlessly buffing everyone more.

anyone would think there is no way to remove convert or pass on to your enemy every condition.

if you wanna nerf values on one OP class then fine, but don't just nerf the baseline.

Agree with those who think condi is imbalanced vs defense or power. This vipers stat builds is also making imbalanced because it's giving those condi pumping skills direct damage as well, giving a kind of burst of both damage type. We are so neck deep in this mess that I think we should really get a default buff to toughness and vitality at least in pvp and wvw.

Lowering damage output will further cause imbalance because each class and elite specs currently are imbalanced. Take the weaver sword for example. There are class balances where some things are simply not doing enough damage on power or condi at its baseline. Reducing output will cause a potentially greater discrepancy, when it isn't enough to overcome anything already. Also reducing damage output if it affects pve will make us all unable to deal with the increasingly difficult pve content. I think the only way Anet has given itself is just buffing creep...

@takatsu.9416 said:Agree with those who think condi is imbalanced vs defense or power. This vipers stat builds is also making imbalanced because it's giving those condi pumping skills direct damage as well, giving a kind of burst of both damage type. We are so neck deep in this mess that I think we should really get a default buff to toughness and vitality at least in pvp and wvw.

Lowering damage output will further cause imbalance because each class and elite specs currently are imbalanced. Take the weaver sword for example. There are class balances where some things are simply not doing enough damage on power or condi at its baseline. Reducing output will cause a potentially greater discrepancy, when it isn't enough to overcome anything already. Also reducing damage output if it affects pve will make us all unable to deal with the increasingly difficult pve content. I think the only way Anet has given itself is just buffing creep...

Yeah, I decided not to go into this in my original post, but part of the problem is that condi builds are more weighted toward Malice than burst builds are weighted toward Power. This effectively translates into condition builds having a lot more flexibility than burst builds do - they can optimize too well with Viper, or they can pick up utility or defense stats without sacrificing nearly as much damage, which is especially a problem since direct damage have to stay engaged and therefore arguably need better defense than condition builds.

The problem with buffing Toughness and Vitality is that will impact direct damage more than it impacts condition damage, and that's the opposite of what needs to happen. I think the only real solution is to just go through every class and nerf various sources of condition damage. There are some that are fine - someone mentioned Thief SB above, and that's hardly overpowered as a condition weapon - but more of them are OP than are not. However, I would not be opposed to a buff to base health and would actually make the case that it would benefit PvE as well.

@OriOri.8724 said:

@Frostwolve.2916 said:My view of the whole thing is, damage has gone up consistently since hot with little to no increase in negating effects. I feel like vitality for every class needs to be increased for wvw in particular. I would like to see10k health added to each class upon entering wvw.

You cannot keep increasing the damage without increasing the things that negate the damage particularly vitality cause toughness is useless against conditions. Also power hasn't seen as much of a rise in damage as conditions.

I feel like it would be a step backwards to nerf stuff. I have always had the mindset of Bringing stats up to balance instead of nerfing them down to lowest common denominator. It seems more fun that way.