Condi balance paradigm

[Einlanzer.1627]

I genuinely don't understand. In a macro sense, the way to balance condi is obvious to me, but the dev team is in a totally different place with it, and the last balance patch basically did the opposite of what I would do - which is to leave durations alone and nerf base damage/condi damage scaling, and eliminate various sources of cleanse and immunity. I'm looking for some insight into why what's obvious to me is not the direction they're going.

 

This isn't EQ, and condis aren't supposed to work like long duration DoTs that you see in some other MMOs. I don't understand why Karl and the others seem hung up on this idea. Combat is dynamic, and **conditions have a specialized role of ignoring armor**, so they should in fact do less base damage than physical skills and have short durations to make them attractive and balanced in all game modes. Instead, the ratio is skewed way in the other direction, and cleanse and immunity mechanics have crept in everywhere in a poor attempt to control it.

 

This introduces all kinds of problems - combat in general is way too clutchy, armor/toughness is underpowered, damaging conditions are too prolific across classes, damage is generally too high relative to passive defense, and you have to build your kit around anti-condi, which is uninteresting and restricts build customization. Perhaps worst of all, conditions and physical will never be balanced - conditions will always either be underpowered in PvP or overpowered in PvE with mobs having to have specialized mechanics to make them seem balanced. It really makes no sense whatsoever. Balancing them around target armor values allows for a more natural balancing path where condi takes on a specific role relative to physical damage, and would allow both to be balanced through encounter design in both PvP and PvE contexts.

[Swagg.9236]

Conditions are in such a managed spot becausethey have no real role in combat. Conditions were never good at launch because all conditions have ever done is damage and soft CC (the latter being a jumble of hamfisted effects which are typically ignored by channeled invulnerability, teleports, stealth and/or general cleanses). In anet's infinite wisdom, and urged by a vocal minority who doesn't know anything about what makes video games fun, conditions were arbitrarily turned into DPS (despite the fact that GW2 already had a functional system for scaling and calculating outgoing damage). Then anet made viper armor and condition powercreep was basically on the same tier as Revenant: a hollow shell without substance made only to sell an expansion pack. They never looked back since.

 

If you ever find yourself wondering why somethingis balanced in some way, remember that GW2 is a game so shallow that untyped damage is bloat. A player, if trying to play optimally, can actually use the *wrong type of untyped damage*. That's how bloated this game is. There is no sense of identity or role in anything. It's why engineer gets a laser sword, but it's worthless next to a weapon that has been powercreeped since launch. It's why ranger is randomly made into a healing class. It's why rev PoF spec is worthless. Every update is just a huge gamble because this game hit bloat saturation back in 2010 (yes, I mean the alpha). Everything beyond that was just shuffling the same cards around and telling people that it's a new deck.

[Einlanzer.1627]

> @"Swagg.9236" said:

> Conditions are in such a managed spot becausethey have no real role in combat. Conditions were never good at launch because all conditions have ever done is damage and soft CC (the latter being a jumble of hamfisted effects which are typically ignored by channeled invulnerability, teleports, stealth and/or general cleanses). In anet's infinite wisdom, and urged by a vocal minority who doesn't know anything about what makes video games fun, conditions were arbitrarily turned into DPS (despite the fact that GW2 already had a functional system for scaling and calculating outgoing damage). Then anet made viper armor and condition powercreep was basically on the same tier as Revenant: a hollow shell without substance made only to sell an expansion pack. They never looked back since.

>

> If you ever find yourself wondering why somethingis balanced in some way, remember that GW2 is a game so shallow that untyped damage is bloat. A player, if trying to play optimally, can actually use the *wrong type of untyped damage*. That's how bloated this game is. There is no sense of identity or role in anything. It's why engineer gets a laser sword, but it's worthless next to a weapon that has been powercreeped since launch. It's why ranger is randomly made into a healing class. It's why rev PoF spec is worthless. Every update is just a huge gamble because this game hit bloat saturation back in 2010 (yes, I mean the alpha). Everything beyond that was just shuffling the same cards around and telling people that it's a new deck.

 

But that's exactly the point - condi _does_ have a role in combat, it's just one that's been overlooked and underplayed due to the hamfisted way it's been balanced - **ignoring toughness/armor**. Condi damage should be natively inferior to physical damage (or, at best, equal to) but should a.) be applied fairly quickly, and b.) specialize in bypassing armor against tanky targets as well as undermining outgoing healing efforts especially through regeneration.

 

Every class should have viable power-based and hybrid builds with limited condi application, while not every class should have a viable condition-hyperspecialized build. It should be thought of as a somewhat more specialized role that only certain classes can excel with - similar to healing or tanking - where it can be extremely useful, but not as general purpose as physical damage.

 

The bottom line is that the idea that conditions should be omnipresent and should do a lot of damage spread out over a long period of time is just bad reasoning rooted in EQ/WoW conventions that don't apply well to GW2. Conditions should be able to be applied quickly, and do moderate damage (only significantly beating physical damage against high armor targets) over a relatively short duration (3-5 seconds on average). Most of all, they should not as all-over-the-place as they are now.

 

Regarding your comment on players not knowing what they want - most players simply wanted Anet to remove the condition cap. Having a 25 stack cap when most of the new content they were designing was for large player groups in the open world was silly and needed to be changed. It would have been sufficient if they had simply done that and not tried to rebalance conditions to be a fully versatile damage dealing role the way physical damage is.

[Swagg.9236]

> @"Einlanzer.1627" said:

> But that's exactly the point - condi _does_ have a role in combat, it's just one that's been overlooked and underplayed due to the hamfisted way it's been balanced - **ignoring toughness/armor**.

 

Armor ignoring damage is a different role than damage? So, instead of packing blindness, daze, knock-down, movement speed increases, a random teleport and weakness, Guild Wars 1's Air Magic Line should have just been Lightning Strike? Because armor-ignoring, untyped damage is something entirely unique to a game's already pre-existing damage calculation system (which also uses untyped damage)? As in one is somehow unique to the other in how it deletes red from a person's health bar? So why did the Viper meta supplant the Zerker meta? If condi is just another role, surely it should co-exist alongside direct damage? Because the Viper meta's untyped damage is somehow a different role than the Zerker untyped damage and not just exactly the same thing in application except it arbitrarily produces higher numbers on most classes due to bad game design philosophies?

[Einlanzer.1627]

> @"Swagg.9236" said:

> > @"Einlanzer.1627" said:

> > But that's exactly the point - condi _does_ have a role in combat, it's just one that's been overlooked and underplayed due to the hamfisted way it's been balanced - **ignoring toughness/armor**.

>

> Armor ignoring damage is a different role than damage? So, instead of packing blindness, daze, knock-down, movement speed increases, a random teleport and weakness, Guild Wars 1's Air Magic Line should have just been Lightning Strike? Because armor-ignoring, untyped damage is something entirely unique to a game's already pre-existing damage calculation system (which also uses untyped damage)? As in one is somehow unique to the other in how it deletes red from a person's health bar? So why did the Viper meta supplant the Zerker meta? If condi is just another role, surely it should co-exist alongside direct damage? Because the Viper meta's untyped damage is somehow a different role than the Zerker untyped damage and not just exactly the same thing in application except it arbitrarily produces higher numbers on most classes due to bad game design philosophies?

 

This post really doesn't make any coherent sense. Yes, it absolutely is a different role. Or, at least, it would be if it was balanced better. But I was never making an argument about non-damaging conditions one way or the other. I was specifically talking about damaging conditions and their role in the game.