Conditions Should be Damage Over Time, not Spike Damage.

When i see complaints about conditions, which are a problem game wide, I often see people criticize the rate of application. Personally, I believe the real issue is how conditions are able to do their damage right away when applied in large numbers. Reducing the rate of application would just be a bandaid fix - it would just make them an inferior option to power. Conditions need to be viable, but they should not just be instant damage.

One possible solution is to have conditions do much less damage when initially applied, and start to do more and more damage the longer they are applied. For example (I'm just using made up numbers here):

Bleed: Attack applies 10 seconds of bleed. At 1-3 seconds it deals 25 damage per tic. At 4-7 seconds in does 75 damage per tic. at 8-10 seconds if does 100 damage a tic. If you increase the duration it continues to do 100 damage a tic at 8 seconds+. The stacking system can stay as is.

Now, I think Burning could actually do the opposite, dealing much of its damage up front but doing less as time goes on, while having shorter duration in general. Maybe have condition duration extend the first part instead of the last part. Poison should be like bleeding but does less damage overall but continues to reduce healing as it does now. Torment should not ramp up, but should do almost no damage while standing still and only punish you for moving (probably different for PvE to make it have any use). Confusion likewise should do very little damage when not using skills. They do this now, but personally I think it would be better if they made it more extreme. This would mean that if you're bombarded by a ton of different conditions you can at the very least react by standing still more and minimizing skill use to avoid a lot of the damage. In theory this should give you more time to react and use your cleanses instead of just being melted and you either have the removal or don't like things are currently.

In order for a system like this to work though, cleanses on some classes will have to be reduced, heavily. In addition, some cleanses should be more specific than they are currently. For example, Warriors have traits focused on removing movement impairing conditions, and this could be applied more widely to other classes. For example Eles could be adept at removing damaging conditions but terrible at removing movement impairing ones.

I don't want conditions made useless, they have a place in the game. That being said, them being basically the same as power but more easily applied in general will mean that unless a power build is really good it will never be taken if condition is an option. Reaper actually seems pretty decent now, but why take it when you can do so much more on Scourge?

TL;DR: Conditions should be damage over time. Bleed and Poison should ramp up the longer the stack is applied. Burning will be the opposite but with less duration. Torment and Confusion will deal less passive damage but more when walking/using skills. Reduce some broad cleansing in favor of more specific cleansing depending on the class.

They need to balance out damage vs cc condi accesability, right now condi is broken because it offers top tier damage wich ignores armor as well as the fact they debuff amd shut down power builds, via weaknesa, blind, stun, chill, and also completely shut down boons wich power builds rely on mostly via corruption and adding more condi

Perhaps we should make conditions counter conditions for a month so the condi defenders get a taste of their idea of balance by making conditions pause their effects while the applicant is under the effects of blind, daze and stun and ticks deal damage 60 percent slower when chilled

Ironically, that was the balance team's aim.

Rate of application is the problem. No need for complex systems like the OP suggests.

If skills apply less conditions stacks (either a straight nerf or as a trade for longer duration in order to keep the same damage), then you give players time to react and get out of the way or remove the conditions before they deal a ton of damage. Healing over time abilities now more valuable as a counter to condition damage, like they were originally intended. In addition, total types of conditions applied, particularly cover conditions, should be evaluated.

Further, with a nerf to ramp-up time, condition users would need to continually hit you with abilities to have high DPS. Right now they typically launch a bunch of instant-cast or near instant cast abilities in a tiny window which will take a third of your life while they can play safe (move back or use avoidance abilities) and not even need to hit you further. Lower DPS means their fights are longer and cleanses come back off cooldown or can be used more judiciously.

By lowering ramp-up time, PvE DPS isn't heavily affected for longer fights. But power becomes more valuable in PvE for short fights (which is a problem there).

2300 torment dps plus 1800 burning dps instantly applied in 1 second not fine?

800 confusion dps (1500+ if you use a skill) and 1000 torment dps not fine?

What are you, an actual intelligent human being?

@Rezzet.3614 said:Perhaps we should make conditions counter conditions for a month so the condi defenders get a taste of their idea of balance by making conditions pause their effects while the applicant is under the effects of blind, daze and stun and ticks deal damage 60 percent slower when chilled

I love this idea. Weakness fumbles = 50% chance to not apply condition on attack.

If a fumble can completely eliminate the benefit of my power, precision, AND ferocity (all 3 main stats) then it should definitely do something to condi users.

I admire their persistent for bringing Power build on par, can they not see what was the problem behind all of these? Can't blame them, i mean playing on a Chess board with Rock, Paper and Scissor is really dang difficult to handle.

The key problem with the rise of condi spamming is that the game interface doesn't support spike condi damage.As the interface is unlikely to be changed that means 'correction' - if deemed necessary - should be to place a restriction on the caster, i.e. skill-up the casting.

My suggestions have been:-

(a) to add a 1% - or 0.5% or whatever. - slow on the caster for every active condition.(b) allow the stacking limit to vary with the armour stats, PvP only.© introduce stacking rollover, PvP only.

I would see this as compensation of the Line-of-Sight limitation on DD - which are extremely annoying as PvP is much faster paced than PvE.

I particular like (a) as it would leave the spammers to retain the 'poison pawn' element of holding a point, whilst at the same time stop spammers running around like crazy spamming conditions on everyone they cross with no regard to what the other players are doing. It's this latter element of spammer builds I hate because other than running around there is little onus on the caster to display care. The key to successful spamming is ofc to spam with spammers, which is a bit more trickly if there are different movement speeds involved.

@Exedore.6320 said:Rate of application is the problem. No need for complex systems like the OP suggests.

If skills apply less conditions stacks (either a straight nerf or as a trade for longer duration in order to keep the same damage), then you give players time to react and get out of the way or remove the conditions before they deal a ton of damage. Healing over time abilities now more valuable as a counter to condition damage, like they were originally intended. In addition, total types of conditions applied, particularly cover conditions, should be evaluated.

Further, with a nerf to ramp-up time, condition users would need to continually hit you with abilities to have high DPS. Right now they typically launch a bunch of instant-cast or near instant cast abilities in a tiny window which will take a third of your life while they can play safe (move back or use avoidance abilities) and not even need to hit you further. Lower DPS means their fights are longer and cleanses come back off cooldown or can be used more judiciously.

By lowering ramp-up time, PvE DPS isn't heavily affected for longer fights. But power becomes more valuable in PvE for short fights (which is a problem there).

The benefits of my system is also that it makes stacking condi duration worthwhile for once. Right now it's mostly about doing big damage outright with a lot of stacks. Making the damage ramp up means you'll actually want to make your conditions last. This will mean for once condis will need other stats to be effective besides just condition damage. You can take tankier ammys but there's an actual trade off.

Also, reducing the rate of application won't help in situations where multiple condition builds are attacking together, it'll still make you melt. My suggestion would help WvW as well.

Just let toughness reduce condition damage as well and add an internal cooldown to confusion.

@BurrTheKing.8571 said:The benefits of my system is also that it makes stacking condi duration worthwhile for once. Right now it's mostly about doing big damage outright with a lot of stacks. Making the damage ramp up means you'll actually want to make your conditions last. This will mean for once condis will need other stats to be effective besides just condition damage. You can take tankier ammys but there's an actual trade off.No, your proposed systems doesn't do that. If conditions ramp up, then smart players will wait to cleanse until that ramp-up goes into effect or until they get a sufficient stack. That completely negates any benefit of the condition duration stat. Meanwhile, the conditions have dealt minimal damage. If you just reduce base quantity and increase base duration, you still have some danger up-front - just not as severe.

Your system also has problems with varying lengths of conditions. Some may apply a 1s bleed and will be totally worthless. Another my have a 5s+ bleed and would increase in power. How can players track that in a UI when being hit with multiple abilities that apply bleed? Your system adds complexity and confusion for zero benefit.

The problem of condition builds with tanky stats is more fundamental. Conditions scale quickly in order to keep up power scaling. That causes problems, but it's hard to avoid because players can readily remove conditions, whereas PvE monsters almost never do. You can't make condition damage in PvP/WvW too dependent on duration because many conditions never last to their duration. If you tried to add another stat - for example, something which increases the rate at which conditions tick - then you have to nerf condition damage scaling more, which further divides power and conditions (conditions are useless to power builds while weapon damage is useless to condition builds).

post after post of people not getting what are the two only real problem whith condis:The prblems are:1: excesive cleansing utilities and cleansing procs. with the actual amount of cleansings on the table if condis arent spikey condis will become unusable. the dmg not dealt in a frame of 5 secs max will be ignored by some cleansing active or proced2: Some clases can shitloatd tons of multiple low stacked condis whith only one action.

if condies shoud be debuff stacked in time basis cleansings have to be rares and in long cd unless this you only want to remove condi play from game

@Exedore.6320 said:

@BurrTheKing.8571 said:The benefits of my system is also that it makes stacking condi duration worthwhile for once. Right now it's mostly about doing big damage outright with a lot of stacks. Making the damage ramp up means you'll actually want to make your conditions last. This will mean for once condis will need other stats to be effective besides just condition damage. You can take tankier ammys but there's an actual trade off.No, your proposed systems doesn't do that. If conditions ramp up, then smart players will wait to cleanse until that ramp-up goes into effect or until they get a sufficient stack. That completely negates any benefit of the condition duration stat. Meanwhile, the conditions have dealt minimal damage. If you just reduce base quantity and increase base duration, you still have some danger up-front - just not as severe.

This system would make it a good time to stardardize the base length of condition attacks/traits so you know that once you get hit with one of the damage conditions you know around how long it will last, and when it will start to hurt the most. This will actually make fast application fine because if you do that you make it very easy for your enemy to avoid the most dangerous portion of the damage.

Also, I said in the OP that they would have to reduce the number of cleanses as a result of this system.

Jumping back to stardarizing the condition length, they should probably go back and rebalance the damage of everything to be nice, round numbers. Why they had to make all the numbers so much bigger compared to GW1 I have no idea. You talk about unneeded complications but the current system is needlessly complex already. They made balance way harder on themselves.

I think everyone in this thread who's complaining about conditions fundamentally does not understand the game. Every class has tools to completely negate either the applications, the damage or completely remove conditions. And good players usually do.

If your getting condi bombed in one rotation PUT. SOME. DAMN. CLEANSE. ON. YOUR. BAR.

We have the tools for them, if your running your right bar with no defensive skills and no condition cleanse YOU DESERVE TO DIE VS CONDITION CLASSES. You cannot readily negate power damage like condition so oftenly and with 1 button, or often passively like ele's and guardians and engineers, hell some classes can even send them BACK TO THE ENEMY, and other CAN TURN THEM IN BOONS FFS.

GOD DAMNIT, i swear every god damn bronze player comes to the forums and complains about condition damage with out even attempting to put 1 or 2 skills on there bar to remove said conditions.

@Genesis.5169 said:I think everyone in this thread who's complaining about conditions fundamentally does not understand the game. Every class has tools to completely negate either the applications, the damage or completely remove conditions. And good players usually do.

If your getting condi bombed in one rotation PUT. SOME. kitten. CLEANSE. ON. YOUR. BAR.

We have the tools for them, if your running your right bar with no defensive skills and no condition cleanse YOU DESERVE TO DIE VS CONDITION CLASSES. You cannot readily negate power damage like condition so oftenly and with 1 button.

kitten, i swear every god kitten bronze player comes to the forums and complains about condition damage with out even attempting to put 1 or 2 skills on there bar to remove said conditions.

Condi cleanse isn't effective, if conditions can be reapplied again and again, but the real issue with conditions isn't fact they are persistent, but that they kill Quaggan as fast as Power damage, while they are supposed to kill him slowly. What is worse, they aren't affected by toughness, Protection nor Weakness, which makes many of us completly helpless... and even if you dedicate all your traits, runes, amulet and utilities to battle Scrouge and Mirage, then you're rather pounching bag for remaining 3 players on enemy team. So, foooooooo.

There's a lot of problems regarding condis, some solutions fixing some of the problems while ignoring others. They each have their own problems in each game mode.

An example in WvW: pairing condis with cancer stats (trailblazer)

An example raids/fractals: Just plainly better than power because these game modes involve bosses with a lot of health.

An example in Open world PvE: In PoF, the awakened have lots of weakness and slow, both of these conditions decimating power builds, additionally, enemies have protection at times too. Meanwhile, none of this truly affects condition damage, and enemies don't clear conditions. On paper, this is balanced because power delivers instant damage while condition damage builds up, but this is just not true, condi can burst as hard as power.

In PvP: A bunch of things affect power damage: blocks, blinds, weakness, protection etc. On paper, this is balanced by conditions being able to be instantly cleared with condi removals , but again this just is not true. Conditions can be applied super quickly and constantly, and bring additional annoying effects along with damage (poison, torment, confusion), while additionally also having okayish power damage because most amulets also have the power stat. Conditions just completely overpower power.

How to balance these problems? Rework conditions and power damage for every mode, but anet wont do that. My solution is to revert back to how conditions worked in GW1: mainly used for debuffs and providing some damage but capped damage (like in gw1).

@Morwath.9817 said:

@Genesis.5169 said:I think everyone in this thread who's complaining about conditions fundamentally does not understand the game. Every class has tools to completely negate either the applications, the damage or completely remove conditions. And good players usually do.

If your getting condi bombed in one rotation PUT. SOME. kitten. CLEANSE. ON. YOUR. BAR.

We have the tools for them, if your running your right bar with no defensive skills and no condition cleanse YOU DESERVE TO DIE VS CONDITION CLASSES. You cannot readily negate power damage like condition so oftenly and with 1 button.

kitten, i swear every god kitten bronze player comes to the forums and complains about condition damage with out even attempting to put 1 or 2 skills on there bar to remove said conditions.

Your gonna say condition cleanse isn't effective because they can reapply conditions, so dodge rolling isnt effective either because you can just be auto attack again amirite?Man you bronze guys, i have a suggestion when you have an opinion about something apply it to other similar things in the game if your opinion cannot be recreated in any of those situation you have an objectively wrong opinion sir.

Next you gonna say invuls and blocks don't matter because there cooldowns are gonna rotate and your gonna get hit anyways.

@Genesis.5169 said:I think everyone in this thread who's complaining about conditions fundamentally does not understand the game. Every class has tools to completely negate either the applications, the damage or completely remove conditions. And good players usually do.

If your getting condi bombed in one rotation PUT. SOME. kitten. CLEANSE. ON. YOUR. BAR.Lol, your'e so ignorant. Have fun dealing with 15 stacks of confusion or 10 stacks of torment + 5 stacks of burn which are applied in 2-3 seconds while you're CC'ed (or CC'ed immediately after). Then deal with the fact that condi clear may only remove the pile of cover conditions instead of the huge damage stack.

This is NOT a "learn to play" problem.

@Genesis.5169 said:

@Morwath.9817 said:

@Genesis.5169 said:I think everyone in this thread who's complaining about conditions fundamentally does not understand the game. Every class has tools to completely negate either the applications, the damage or completely remove conditions. And good players usually do.

If your getting condi bombed in one rotation PUT. SOME. kitten. CLEANSE. ON. YOUR. BAR.

We have the tools for them, if your running your right bar with no defensive skills and no condition cleanse YOU DESERVE TO DIE VS CONDITION CLASSES. You cannot readily negate power damage like condition so oftenly and with 1 button.

kitten, i swear every god kitten bronze player comes to the forums and complains about condition damage with out even attempting to put 1 or 2 skills on there bar to remove said conditions.

No, I gonna say I can just apply weakness to power user (and reduce his damage by ~60-70%), give myself protection (and again reduce incoming power damage by 33%), or even pick runes and/or amulet which has Toughness (so I will mitigate even more power damage). Idk who uses dodge rolling vs auto attacks.

It's kinda funny you throw "you bronze players" @ people with 1600 and above rating, but its nice you share with us your wisdom.I guess Helseth dies to Scrouges, because of his bronze player mentality, as does Zan, or Misha.

@BurrTheKing.8571 said:This system would make it a good time to stardardize the base length of condition attacks/traits so you know that once you get hit with one of the damage conditions you know around how long it will last, and when it will start to hurt the most. This will actually make fast application fine because if you do that you make it very easy for your enemy to avoid the most dangerous portion of the damage.Length of conditions is a perfectly valid tuning mechanism. You can have a hard to land ability apply many stacks in a short duration, and easy to land things apply single stacks for longer durations. If you remove duration as a tuning knob, then all you're left with is the number of stacks, and that's hard to fine tune on shorter cooldown skills and traits.

@Exedore.6320 said:

@Genesis.5169 said:I think everyone in this thread who's complaining about conditions fundamentally does not understand the game. Every class has tools to completely negate either the applications, the damage or completely remove conditions. And good players usually do.

If your getting condi bombed in one rotation PUT. SOME. kitten. CLEANSE. ON. YOUR. BAR.Lol, your'e so ignorant. Have fun dealing with 15 stacks of confusion or 10 stacks of torment + 5 stacks of burn which are applied in 2-3 seconds while you're CC'ed (or CC'ed immediately after). Then deal with the fact that condi clear may only remove the pile of cover conditions instead of the huge damage stack.

I play a firebrand, i generally get cleanse those conditions atleast 3-4 times before i can consider my self bombed, maybe you should learn to play the game ill help you start here's some infomation about my class and just a peer into how i deal with conditions its not hard to do doesn't require timing like dodges or blocks can't be baited like an aegis can its just straight up Condition denial which could remove those said stacks that you have no idea how to get rid of.

Major Adept - Smiter's BoonCast Lesser Smite Condition when you use a healing skill.

Chapter 2: Radiant Recovery ¾ 4

Release magic from pages detailing the rebuilding of Vabbi, cleansing conditions on nearby allies. Allies are healed for each condition removed.

Chapter 4: Stalwart Stand ¼ 10

Recount the stand of Elonian loyalists against Palawa Joko, granting resistance to your allies.

Epilogue: Unbroken Lines ¾ 12

Recalling the memory of heroes past, enchant nearby allies with formidable defense

And just for you heres a direct link to what a straight condition removal skill looks like https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Smite_Condition_(PvP)

P.S. Most condition removal breaks stun and on the rare occasion it doesn't break stun which is rare if you die before you stand up from conditions You need to learn to not face tank necros like bronze players, secondly this is a learn to play problem.

@Genesis.5169 said:

@Exedore.6320 said:

@Genesis.5169 said:I think everyone in this thread who's complaining about conditions fundamentally does not understand the game. Every class has tools to completely negate either the applications, the damage or completely remove conditions. And good players usually do.

If your getting condi bombed in one rotation PUT. SOME. kitten. CLEANSE. ON. YOUR. BAR.Lol, your'e so ignorant. Have fun dealing with 15 stacks of confusion or 10 stacks of torment + 5 stacks of burn which are applied in 2-3 seconds while you're CC'ed (or CC'ed immediately after). Then deal with the fact that condi clear may only remove the pile of cover conditions instead of the huge damage stack.

Ancient Quaggans would say Exceptio probat regulam, which stands for the exception proves the rule , Firebrand is an exception, thats why hes anyhow viable.

@Genesis.5169 said:I think everyone in this thread who's complaining about conditions fundamentally does not understand the game. Every class has tools to completely negate either the applications, the damage or completely remove conditions. And good players usually do.

If your getting condi bombed in one rotation PUT. SOME. kitten. CLEANSE. ON. YOUR. BAR.

We have the tools for them, if your running your right bar with no defensive skills and no condition cleanse YOU DESERVE TO DIE VS CONDITION CLASSES. You cannot readily negate power damage like condition so oftenly and with 1 button, or often passively like ele's and guardians and engineers, hell some classes can even send them BACK TO THE ENEMY, and other CAN TURN THEM IN BOONS kitten.

kitten, i swear every god kitten bronze player comes to the forums and complains about condition damage with out even attempting to put 1 or 2 skills on there bar to remove said conditions.

What division are you in btw?

@Morwath.9817 said:

@Genesis.5169 said:

@Exedore.6320 said:

@Genesis.5169 said:I think everyone in this thread who's complaining about conditions fundamentally does not understand the game. Every class has tools to completely negate either the applications, the damage or completely remove conditions. And good players usually do.

If your getting condi bombed in one rotation PUT. SOME. kitten. CLEANSE. ON. YOUR. BAR.Lol, your'e so ignorant. Have fun dealing with 15 stacks of confusion or 10 stacks of torment + 5 stacks of burn which are applied in 2-3 seconds while you're CC'ed (or CC'ed immediately after). Then deal with the fact that condi clear may only remove the pile of cover conditions instead of the huge damage stack.

Okay, So.MiragesWarriorsEngineersNecros

Have more cleanses then firebrands....and so those guy are exceptions too right? Wait actually.Every class can put more then 3 versions of condition clear.

I guess the whole game is riddled with exceptions.