Weakness is the Worst Mechanic (I will make this post forever)

First of all, Scourge is still pretty broken and definitely not going to lose its place in the meta. Still makes any other necro spec a joke and is still totally impossible to fight as melee but the reason isn't its damage (which I will grant you, is nuts). It's WEAKNESS. It is too powerful of a condition to have such tremendous up time on. It clearly does not work the way it was intended to work.

The intention? You lose a considerable amount of direct damage.

The reality? You no longer do damage.

Because the mechanic is designed in a convoluted, arbitrary, and moronic way that has literally every problem it could conceivably have.

Let me explain. Condition DPS outdoes, in the long run, power DPS. A Net already made their (very poor) justification as to why this has to be. It accomplishes this with one stat: Condition Damage. Power doesn't work that way. Power needs THREE stats to work. Power. Precision. Ferocity. If you are weak on any of those, you will do less damage than any condition spec utilizing its one stat.

Weakness is a 50% chance to lose 50% of your power on a strike. But it's also a 50% chance to lose 100% of your precision and 100% of your ferocity. So it's a 50% chance to lose 75-80% of your damage in a given attack.

First of all, that's WAY TOO MUCH damage loss. Waaaaay too much. But second of all, WHY IS THIS A RANDOM THING? You want to be competitive, e-sport level PvP? Minimize the randomness. A 50/50 RNG should not decide if your major resource-using cooldown that you conserved and timed does its full damage or literally NOTHING.

Just make weakness: YOU DO 20-30% LESS DAMAGE. Very simple. Far more balanced.

I am sick of having abilities that I have dumped EVERY STAT I have into, that should hit for 15-20k damage, hitting for 2 or 3k damage because weakness is such a stupidly broken mechanic.Seriously, fighting something that has a nearly constant up time on a debuff that says "Almost all of your stats no longer work" is so clearly broken. It will continue to baffle me that whoever is in charge of balance (which I think we all know is a monkey behind a typewriter) STILL doesn't get this VERY SIMPLE issue.

Okay. I'm done. Have a good day.

Condi was buffed to increase vuln damage.

Condi won't be nerfed to have its damage reduced with weakness.

OpieOP

resistance negates the effect of weakness

Many classes do not have access to resistance. In fact, most sources of it are just when you happen to get lucky and convert chill.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Resistance

Resistance is not a sound argument, unfortunately. If they made it way more common, that would be awesome and I would change everything in my spec to get it.

Nerfing mechanics that have been in the game since launch just because of how they interact with an elite specialization is precisely the opposite of how ANet should balance their game.

Nerf scourge if that's the issue, not weakness.

Actually, at launch, Weakness did not negate critical strikes. It's still a terrible mechanic.

However, I will grant you it would be far more balanced if it wasn't up indefinitely.

Unfortunately more classes then just scourge use weakness for example weaver...and it's important for sword builds for example. So should weaver be nerfed because scourge is too easy to play below plat? I bet we could make more examples like that. Sir...When you propose something think about larger picture first.

I genuinely think Weakness is too strong of a mechanic as it is. There is no equivalent to counter condition users.

My build uses it and I would happily take the nerf. Until something is done about it, we'll just enjoy our condi meta. Also, the RNG aspect of it is absurd. The way it doesn't just hit power but hits two other major stats (much harder) is absurd. if the builds that use it suddenly became crap because we fixed this awful mechanic, then we could roll survivability into them by other means.

If weakness affects power why not make it affect condi aswell....why does condi damage get a free pass 100% of the time to do 100% damage with only 1 stat, while power gets shut down 100%. Weakness needs to be reworked to either affect power, or percision, or ferocity not all 3 stats at the same time no less.

@"Jackalrat.5493" said:I genuinely think Weakness is too strong of a mechanic as it is. There is no equivalent to counter condition users.

My build uses it and I would happily take the nerf. Until something is done about it, we'll just enjoy our condi meta. Also, the RNG aspect of it is absurd. The way it doesn't just hit power but hits two other major stats (much harder) is absurd. if the builds that use it suddenly became crap because we fixed this awful mechanic, then we could roll survivability into them by other means.

inb4 classic condition user cop out "you have cleanses and resistance to mitigate conditions!"

To be fair.

Weakness is counteracted by a few things. Condi swaps, Condi Cleanses, Resistance, And you can continue your damage via dumping condi onto someone else. If Weakness is a severe problem, run away and avoid engaging again till it breaks.

@Jackalrat.5493 said:I genuinely think Weakness is too strong of a mechanic as it is. There is no equivalent to counter condition users.

My build uses it and I would happily take the nerf. Until something is done about it, we'll just enjoy our condi meta. Also, the RNG aspect of it is absurd. The way it doesn't just hit power but hits two other major stats (much harder) is absurd. if the builds that use it suddenly became crap because we fixed this awful mechanic, then we could roll survivability into them by other means.

Of course there is, it's called resistance. Which is much more potent compared to what weakness provides.

Why ask for a change to weakness as a whole to fix a scourge issue? If Scourge outputs too much Weakness duration, then ask for reduction of Scourge's weakness output duration . Not saying Scourge need / doesn't need more nerfs, because I dont know.

Lmao why do people keep bringing up resistance when only like 1-2 classes got access to it and only 1 can have it for anything longer than a measly few seconds?

Smh.

high damage gameplay plus almost every class can vulnerability stack.

Weakness is a fine and good condition. In theory. HOWEVER, its application needs to be much more limited than it is. It is almost as strong as immobilize. It needs to be something you have to apply deliberately, not just a by product of all the other things you do.

Weakening Shroud is a big offender here. 50% weakness uptime for free as a by product of a trait that triggers a boon corrupt and weakness AoE is just stupid. A necro can inflict permanent weakness from this single strait. Imagine if druid's Ancient Seeds had the pvp split removed, and on top of that inflicted 3 seconds of immobilize on crit, with its own separate 10 second cooldown. That is about how strong this trait is.

Also, if we want parity between power and condi, one idea is to have weakness reduce the duration of outgoing conditions by 50%

@Leo Schrodingers Cat.2497 said:To be fair.

Weakness is counteracted by a few things. Condi swaps, Condi Cleanses, Resistance, And you can continue your damage via dumping condi onto someone else. If Weakness is a severe problem, run away and avoid engaging again till it breaks.

This only works if weakness is relatively uncommon. Instead it's almost as freely applied as cripple in some builds.

Baffling that ANET forgot why they added stat decreases to Weakness in GW1. Short of it...Weakness greatly decreased martial attacks (bows, and swords) and their skills. They later added -1 stat decrease so it had effects on spell casters/non-physical attacks.

Weakness currently harms power more than it does condi users (what I gathered from the OP). It's a shame that this is in the spvp forums, but maybe balance is viewed more here? Also I can see scourges' application of weakness can be high in some settings.

The OP's simplified version is better than "50% Fumble." Where else in this game is "Fumble" used to describe mechanics? D: (not forgetting to mention the tacked on -50% energy regeneration because this condition needs to do a little bit of everything for some reason just like this parenthesis needs to be super long).

100% sure that this discussion never would happened if SCOURGE didn't have weakness.

@Trigr.6481 said:

@Jackalrat.5493 said:I genuinely think Weakness is too strong of a mechanic as it is. There is no equivalent to counter condition users.

My build uses it and I would happily take the nerf. Until something is done about it, we'll just enjoy our condi meta. Also, the RNG aspect of it is absurd. The way it doesn't just hit power but hits two other major stats (much harder) is absurd. if the builds that use it suddenly became crap because we fixed this awful mechanic, then we could roll survivability into them by other means.

Look at the wiki page I linked. Look at how many sources of resistance exist in this game.

Stop talking about resistance. Basically nobody has it.