~Megathread~ Balanced discussion.

[Clipzy.9483]

Hello everyone and welcome to the thread.Please let’s keep this thread clean and please only use to post ideas to restore balance.

Also please do not just shoot down other people’s ideas. If you want to reply to someone keep it orderly and try to explain reasoning behind why you believe something would not work or not be a good idea.

I will start this post off with a topic that I see a lot of displeasure coming from amongst the gaming community with a fix idea to help build diversity while not jeopardizing a players class.

My topic: Conditions in the gameWe all know that conditions are a large problem in guildwars and just steadily got worse with the release of new expansions.I will follow this topic with some questions and explanations to the questions I am asking all of you.First Why doesn’t toughness decrease condi damage? And Wouldn’t that help a little on balancing it? Well that is one idea but not a total fix and I know this. Which is why I have such a long post.

There is so much on condi damage and duration in this game. But wouldn’t it also be easier to tweak the numbers on damage to be more balanced if they cut the duration down a lot

What do I mean on this

Like have it where it hits harder and faster like power damage but have it effected by toughness and precision. This way condi builds that bunker have same outcome as a power that bunkers. Less damage but more sustain.

My thoughts on this are as follows. Say a power build full zerk can hit for 5k with a huge hit but it’s instant.

Why couldn’t they make it same for condi zerk. 5k total damage with a big hit but only last 1-2s but the zerk condi build is very squishy to compensate just like the power and just do away with all the condi stacking duration stuffs working on primary damage condis.

This way stacking condis isn’t gonna work cause they don’t last long enough. Resistance can act more like Protection due to the fact that the condi duration won’t last through it so easily.

Then could work on the stacking of some boons and reduce their durations.

Condi is a problem in this game in the sense that it makes power obsolete.

The devs wanted to build up the build diversity when they made condi stronger but what they actually did was that they just removed one thing to have another.

And yes you can say but won’t that make condi duration useless? But no it wouldn’t because there are plenty of really good non damagin condis to want to have longer durations on.

The main problem in this game is that condi is just so much safer to play than power builds.

Power builds can be kited and LoS’d which can prevent them from even damaging.But with condi if you get hit then it doesn’t matter if you kite unless you cleanse fast.

Which brings me to my next point.

What about cleanses. Wouldn’t that kill condi? And my short answer is No.Long answer is No because the short duration of the damaging condis would force a person to have to be able to cleanse really fast just to avoid some damage but if the damage was fast with short condi duration then the usage of the cleanse would have to be pre-planned just like timing of aegis just to avoid damage.

Sorry about the block post on the forums but I am just hoping to get dev attention to this. I have worked with games that had poor utilization on their Damage over time effects and I was hoping to just share insight on some key things that could be tweaked to better build up the diversity in their beautiful game.

Please feel free to post informative ideas on this thread and I have faith in the gaming community to keep the thread clean.

Thank you all for your time.~Xaimz~

[Dadnir.5038]

The issue is the purpose. Is it worth it to have 2 different kind of damage with the same purpose?

Power damage are short burst of damage and condition damage are long lasting debilitating damage. What you propose is removing the purpose of the condition damage.

In the vanilla game (before HoT) I believe, conditions were meant to be countered by vitality in very much the same way toughness counter power damage. Now, even in the vanilla game people hated being down by condition but they could basically disregard them most of the time. The changes on condition that came with HoT made conditions relevant but it didn't made them loved and didn't took into account the fact that vitality became outdated as a counter to them.

I like the idea of toughness affecting condition damage but I don't like the idea of short lasting high damage conditions (Nobody like it, proof is that nobody like to be nuked by confusion which work/used to work in this way)

[Silinsar.6298]

The way condis are supposed to work isn't flawed. They are supposed to do damage and pressure that does it's work (partly by ignoring toughness) long term and enables you to run more defensive stats to buy you time for that approach to work. The flip side is, unlike power damage, they can be countered after you applied them, meaning there's two major ways of countering conds: prevention (dodge) and cleansing. Vs power you can only dodge, once you missed that chance you already received all the damage. That's why there's also toughness as a direct counter to it.

The problem lies within the condition metagame and how you build:

You can fine tune and choose how much toughness you want to run to be more resilient to power in pretty much any build. However, they availability of effective condi clears depend heavily on what utilities, trait lines and in some cases weapons you choose. Condi builds, depending on what they fight, have to hit a certain threshold of condi application to do relevant pressure to enemies. Otherwise their damage is too easily negated. On the other hand, when someone doesn't bring that required amount of cleanses, or there are too much conds inflicted too frequently, condi builds usually overperfrom. Put differently: everyone has a more or less decent basic access to the main ways of countering power damage (dodge / toughness) and applying it (strong condi skills also tend have decent power coefficients) but the access to cleanses and condi application in different builds varies a lot. That's why, for example, Heralds / Revs aren't in the meta even when their kit isn't bad at all. They're just too vulnerable to conds. This is also why some classes' condi builds are quite suboptimal. A warrior for example has problems inflicting enough conditions frequently enough to keep up with the cleansing some classes can easily provide.

Condi application and cleansing should be something that requires skill and timing - you cleanse when having x stacks of y condis to maximize the value of your condition clears. Condition builds should try to bait out condi clears to increase their pressure. In practise however, condi builds will just try to overload you with so many different conds that anything but a full condi clear becomes unreliable at removing them. Many cleanses remove only 1-2 conditions and it's not clear which conditions get removed when you're subject to more than that. I did not test this recently, but in the past there were skills that "favored" different condis (not talking about skills that explicitly state they remove certain conds here but general removals) and others just removed them randomly. Even if all condi cleanses were a clear LIFO (last in, first out) that wouldn't make much sense in how conditions work in GW2 (stacks). E.g. you'd not cover your bleeding with another condi application when that condi applications also triggers (default or randomly by a trait) bleeding. And your allies that increase the stack will actually make it easer to remove highly damaging conds. Also, with dozens of attacks and triggers around your condi bar changes too rapidly to "target" conditions with any removal that has a cast time. Due to this, the condi application / clearing metagame simply doesn't work and is a hit or miss that swings fights in a random direction. I guess everyone knows the moments were your condi cleanse removed some criple / blind / vulnerability over the high burn or confusion stack, leaving you in the dust. Or when there's 5 conds on your enemy and he happens to exatly remove the one that'd do enough damage to kill.

All that isn't necessarily limited to conditions; sustain, evasion, boons (+removal), stuns (+breaks, stab) and damage application have become more "spammy" in nature. Especially stuns, stunbreaks, boons and boon removals share the problem of either being too much or irrelevant. Current specs aren't at the power level the game / the combat system was designed for. This only shows in PvP however, and GW2 has long shifted focus towards PvE. And the quality of combat (not necessarily the balance, since many things are equally unbalanced) took a huge hit with the expansions.

[BikeIsGone.8675]

Imo people are blowing this whole condi thing out of proportion.It really is just 2-3 classes that have overperforming condi-sepcs (mirage, scourge and thief). And I would even argue that scourge is mostly fine now, so as far as I am concerned, it really is just CMirage and CThief.

The main issues I have with these 2 specs are:

a) the way they apply conditionsIts basically hitting the target with 1 skill and proccing several traits at once that just add a plethora of conditions to that 1 hit. Cover conditions are really annoying most of the time as well. Cripple is a perfect example for that. Doomed if you cleanse it (since you dont cleanse the dmging conditons instead), doomed if you dont.

b) their ability to apply hit and run tacticsNow I dont mind classes being able to engage and disengage really quick ....its actually one of my prefered playstyles. But considering what I said before: "getting condi bombed in a matter of seconds" and not being able to retaliate is simply frustrating. And I think that this concept of "condi-drive-by"s is one of the main reasons why people are so fed up with these specs. A scourge at least has to commit to their condi bombs, leaving themselves vulnerable to counterpressure.

[Archer.4362]

I believe that the great problem is the lack of diversity of builds.

Before the expansions, with the old Traits you had more options and almost never people had the same build.Now there is no diversity, we would need more feature options as an explanation of the statistics.

No matter how hard you get, you're paper is not well explained or compensated.

my opinion restructuring traits and more options of them

sorry my bad english

[Crab Fear.1624]

weaver and herald no buffs

[Abazigal.3679]

The big issue to me is that it lacks skills such as " ignore conditions for 5 seconds or so ". Right now, if we compare physical damage and condition damage, it'd be like.Physical damage :

• Easily viewable ( you can anticipate or at least see animations from hundred blades, eviscerate, thief spikes, ranger longbow skills,..)
• Many skills to mitigate the damage ( endure pain, any block,..) in addition of passives

Condition damage :

• Hard to see ( mirages/phantasms, wand hits,..) and like BikelsGone, it takes 1 hit to get xx conditions sometimes
• Not many skills to mitigate the damage, and you usually have to spam boons to remove these

If you consider some beginners, they will have " panic " buttons for physical damage, but most are going to drop like flies to any condition spamming build, without really understanding. That's where the balance should be to me, make a balance between physical and condition.

[Frostmane.9734]

HoT and PoF just introduced way too much condi spam. The number of conditions available to each class and applied by each skill went up exponentially. If you wanted to play Condi before the expansions, you mostly focused on applying large stacks of bleed, burn, poison, or confusion. After the expansions, some classes just became a shotgun of conditions that apply strong stacks of everything without being too focused on one type. Countering this is a lot more difficult because cleansing may not remove the primary source, or even secondary source, of damage. Add in that a lot of skills now cause soft control effects and the chances of cleansing the right conditions is much much lower. In the end, direct damage can be mitigated by the players inputs by dodge, block, invuln, kiting, etc. but mitigating condition damage by cleansing is not directly controlled by player input and relies on luck to cleanse the right ones which is further impaired by the sheer number of conditions that can be put on a target now.

[Hiki.9310]

There are only two classes with viable condition builds, mirage and thief, and they're only viable because they are OP with them. Conditions were supposed to be sustained damage where the players had to play the long game by surviving long enough to whittle down the enemy, but that became impossible when all the tanky amulets got deleted and power builds were allowed to nearly one shot anything.

[FyzE.3472]

@Hiki.9310 said:There are only two classes with viable condition builds, mirage and thief, and they're only viable because they are OP with them. Conditions were supposed to be sustained damage where the players had to play the long game by surviving long enough to whittle down the enemy, but that became impossible when all the tanky amulets got deleted and power builds were allowed to nearly one shot anything.

Um... Scourge?

[Hiki.9310]

@FyzE.3472 said:

@Hiki.9310 said:There are only two classes with viable condition builds, mirage and thief, and they're only viable because they are OP with them. Conditions were supposed to be sustained damage where the players had to play the long game by surviving long enough to whittle down the enemy, but that became impossible when all the tanky amulets got deleted and power builds were allowed to nearly one shot anything.

Um... Scourge?

I forgot..

[Sampson.2403]

IMO Condi Thief and Condi Mirage are miles ahead of Scourge as far as OP Mechanics go. Scourge is pretty well balanced now. The main issue with condi thief and mirage is their ability to condi bomb and then "disappear + do it again" mechanics. Against scourge you can apply pressure/interrupt/prevent/put them on the defensive.

[lLobo.7960]

@"eyesrutherford.1357" said:My topic: Conditions in the gameThere is so much on condi damage and duration in this game. But wouldn’t it also be easier to tweak the numbers on damage to be more balanced if they cut the duration down a lot

I think it should be the opposite.Conditions need less (base) dmg and more duration.They are supposed to be the ramp-up dmg style, where they can build up more and more.

The issue right now with conditions in PvP is that, mostly to balance things in PvE, conditions were increased on a lot of specs.Skills dealing a large amount of stacks of dmg conditions were added to single skills to many specs. And traits giving more conditions to conditions (bleed on chill, confusion on blind, etc) and more dmg to conditions...

Conditions are just another way to deal dmg. Instead of being mitigated by thoughness and armor, they are mitigated by cleanses and high health pools.This is all good, and toughness should not reduce condi dmg, just as much as cleanses should not reduce power dmg.

But...A lot of traits and skills need to be looked at to move some condition application to critical hits.Therefore, if you want to deal high condi burst, you will need to invest in precision, making builds with stats such as carrion or trailblazer (in wvw) more of a bruiser and less of a high burst-high defense thing, meanwhile people in griever/sinister and other heavily offensive sets will maintain their offense but they have invested on it.

[Clipzy.9483]

@lLobo.7960 said:

@"eyesrutherford.1357" said:My topic: Conditions in the gameThere is so much on condi damage and duration in this game. But wouldn’t it also be easier to tweak the numbers on damage to be more balanced if they cut the duration down a lot

I think it should be the opposite.Conditions need less (base) dmg and more duration.They are supposed to be the ramp-up dmg style, where they can build up more and more.

The issue right now with conditions in PvP is that, mostly to balance things in PvE, conditions were increased on a lot of specs.Skills dealing a large amount of stacks of dmg conditions were added to single skills to many specs. And traits giving more conditions to conditions (bleed on chill, confusion on blind, etc) and more dmg to conditions...

Conditions are just another way to deal dmg. Instead of being mitigated by thoughness and armor, they are mitigated by cleanses and high health pools.This is all good, and toughness should not reduce condi dmg, just as much as cleanses should not reduce power dmg.

But...

A lot of traits and skills need to be looked at to move some condition application to critical hits.

Therefore, if you want to deal high condi burst, you will need to invest in precision, making builds with stats such as carrion or trailblazer (in wvw) more of a bruiser and less of a high burst-high defense thing, meanwhile people in griever/sinister and other heavily offensive sets will maintain their offense but they have invested on it.

I actually agree with this a lot. A condi that is a slower killer that has more sustain sounds about like how they were in the earlier stages of this game where yes condi were less viable but there still was condi builds that were tough and could win the 1v1 engagements that they needed to.Yes the condis were not as good back then in team fights but they weren’t useless by any means