The WVW Condition Plague And The Cure

[Azsouth.3184]

I'v just come back from a 5 year break and now, as a Warrior (no xpacs) with really good gear (though not top of the line obviously) if I'm in any fight w/ any amount of numbers opposing the group I'm fighting w/, I literally can't walk into some lords rooms as the red circles of death are everywhere and even if I have no boons on me at all I still end up w/ 6 debuffs and bleeds and almost instantly die. Nevermind, if I'm on a piece of siege and the line is slowly advancing or sometimes it's just a rush and before you even have time to react the red circles have made it to you and your already rezzing at the nearest uncontested waypoint. I played LOTRO pvp for years as a monster player and I thought that was masochistic, but trying to play against zergs that are primarily made up of these classes that spam the red circles of death is somehow beyond that, it's almost sickening that this not only has happened, but continues to exist, with minor tweaks to see if it bring balance. ANET has messed up here and I personally think it's time to just wipe everything and roll back to year 1 skills were they where at least balanced/manageable. A couple weeks of dealing w/ this has brought me to the forums and I'm already reconsidering if I should make a full return and buy the xpacs or leave again and forget about this game, before I again realize I spent $60 on it at the time and come back inevitably in a few years if this game is still running. I'm sure the rest of the game is fun, but right now trying to make gold w/ Boss Trains and playing WvW when I can is keeping my attention until I make up my mind to stay or go. I do have a Necro and stuff I could lvl up w/ all these tomes of experience the game spams but, I prided myself on playing a single class in LOTRO w/o ever jumping to the ezmode class of the patch, I hoped to do it in this game as well but for the first time for purposes of WvW I'm considering doing it because it's just pointless to play anything else when as soon as you run into these red circles of death your dead.

[Lord of the Fire.6870]

> @"anduriell.6280" said:

> Um buffing ele is not the answer for the condi plague. Ele already has an spot in squads (well mostly) and this change would make them too strong in small groups.

>

> The answer for the condi plague is simple: **when you cleanse a condition you get a buff which make impossible to reapply that conditions for few seconds.**

>

> That way you cleanse and the cleanses are impactful. The amount of second could be fixed (like 2 or 3 seconds in each condition) or could be stack dependent (like 0,5 seconds by stack)

>

> This change does not impact small scale because it doesn’t change how classes behave, but it is a huge help against condition heavy builds.

>

> This also would fix the extremely unfun situations where you are CC’ed to oblivion for 5 seconds because it is as simple as spam those and using stunbreaks does nothing because you are CCed again is as soon as you use the skills.

 

This has the same problem like the idea to not let aoes stack it maybe work when big zergs rushing into each other but when you playing in low numbers lets say 5 vs 1 those 5 are condi classes only one of them can make dmg on the other which make this screwed. Counting the numbers of players in a battle and applying a buff which gives toughness ,vitality and maybe shorter condi duration out of a table is a much better way. The only counter question is how much CPU time of the server it takes to run a thread every few seconds for it and yes it takes a test server for tweaking the numbers and those numbers can be changed in the future with the power creep.

 

I think besides that those big battles are just a clash of aoes and conditions it makes defending your territory much harder which makes the situation very unpleasant its got better after the last big condi balance patch for wvw but its still not so that the defending side has a better standpoint which the usually should do because of shorter ways.

It also depends how the rest looks but I believe mounts will come in wvw one day.

 

 

 

[Dawdler.8521]

What if... AoE circles simply doesnt last so long when the player is beyond max range? A zerg can dump the best of bombs in front but if it backs up or run the long way around... poof AoE circles gone. Even active AoE like meteor storm would cancel if the ele run too far too fast. No more carpet of necro death waiting to be popped while they can move with no care. Like a lifespan of 1-2s if you are further than 1400 from it (1200 plus some leeway for radius).

 

This would have little to no impact on small scale.

[BMW.2951]

As a warrior with little to no condition cleanses, I have no interest into zerging because of lame Necros and their massive AOEs everywhere. I am focusing ranked pvp right now to get ascended gears so I can move on over to wvw but zerging is not a good option for me. I am forced to roam but in a way, I do like small team battles better than mind-numbing boring zergs.

[Hyper Cutter.9376]

> @"Rezzet.3614" said:

> blame whoever designed scourge and spellbreaker , balance got thrown out of a window and into a shredder then out of a window again when these two got implemented

Almost as if they were explicitly designed to counter the boon-spam meta in PVP/WvW, or something.

[XenesisII.1540]

> @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> What if... AoE circles simply doesnt last so long when the player is beyond max range? A zerg can dump the best of bombs in front but if it backs up or run the long way around... poof AoE circles gone. Even active AoE like meteor storm would cancel if the ele run too far too fast. No more carpet of necro death waiting to be popped while they can move with no care. Like a lifespan of 1-2s if you are further than 1400 from it (1200 plus some leeway for radius).

>

> This would have little to no impact on small scale.

 

Then you would have to adjust meteor cast time to make up for it, because 3.8s cast time of having to stay rooted and within 1200 range the entire time is enough to get trucked over or 1500 ranged pewpew, which would lead to no one bothering with staff ele again.

 

[Israel.7056]

I mean the obvious thing in my mind is to start with Sand Savant. Fundamentally the issue with scourge is that it covers too much ground with too little effort. The second thing would be to consider changing the "scourge counts as a shade" thing. A lot of the big pressure comes from a combination of massively overlapping savants and the double tick of the shade and the scourge.

[Orpheal.8263]

> @"Applesauce.5271" said:

> maybe if all condition clear skills/traits had 2 seconds of non stacking resistance it'd be a bit easier

 

resistance shouldbt be a boon, it needs to be changed into an Attribute, which when you build for it, increases your immunity time to Conditions, meaning that whenever you cleanse a condition, you become immunue to the clenase conditinos for a certain amoutn of time and the Resistance Atttribute helps then increasign this amount of time, so that the removed conditions can#t be instantly reapplied to you again.

 

This would instantly solve the whole condi spam problem and aoe spam problem all at once and would bring power damage again more in line and equality to condi builds, because if you can become finalyl for longer times immune to the removed and cleansed conditions, then is weak aoe spam damage not very helpful over much more powerful power damage attacks, so that condi spam will become more of tactical use and not the braindead easy number one method with that you just wipe out everythign in a matter of seconds, that doesnt run away from you instantly while beign still with more than enough range between you away so that you cant reach them with your ranged overpowered instant nukes with mass red circle galore spam that you can't even see anymore your own skill leffects from all the massive overlaying red circles that are by now more effectful and irritating, than anythign else in this game ....

 

Can repeat only myyself, beest and most neccessary solution is to reduce finalyl the amount of the overall effect spam in this game DRASTICALLY by reducing the amount of boons and conditions to the least minimum needed amount that is neccessary - which is 8 on both sides, cause not every boon and not every condition is absolutely needed to have, some are under batter game design even totally obsolete, if they effects woudl juzst get reworrked into either skilsl, traits, or upgrade effects to focus them eventually more onto just only specific classes, because the access to most of all boons and conditions is way too broad in this game, than it is good for this games balancing.

Some boons and conditions like for example Torment and Might have been used lately way too excessively.. everythign runs aroudn with 25 stacks of might way too easily and the scource ad a total torment machine, much worser than even the mesmers.. and they even have already really braindead easy lot of access to torment, if build for it ...plus together with even confusion ...

 

But fixing the Boon and Condition Systems/Effect Spam problem alone are by now absolutely no solution anymore for this game. anet has so massively crashed this games balance by their 6 years of ignorance of all other combat system mechanics, that the game balance can eventualyl be fixede by now only, if they finalyl start looking upon all other elements, which have seend for 6 years no love at all from Anet, like

 

- Readjusting and Rebalancing the Max Health System finally, which is totally outdated and in no way or form anymore fitting to the game state of GW2 now.

This system was designed and balanced around the state of the game from GW2 at 2012, when there existed no elite specs, when there existed no Taunt, Tortment, Alacrity, Slow and Resistance, when there existed alot of Traits all not and the trait system workred completely different.

Its finalyl time that the health system gets redesigned and rebalanced, that Vitality becomes much more impactful and doesnt increase per point the HP anymore by just only ridiculous 10 HP, but instead increases the maximum HP per point by +25 HP.

That would make a big difference then and woudl help making defensive builds become more eual too all the overpowered DPS powercreep that the game received over the last 3 years after the implemention of HoT, while ANet did absolutely nothign at all to readjust the defensive gameplay aspects to all this offensive powercreep to keep them equal.

That is in factthe reason, why CC spam was at HoT times so massively overpowered, because ANet did nothing on the defensive side to give us ways to protect us from all this massive CC spam they added via Hot, because it was neccessary to have all this CC spam for HoT PvE, where enemies receives Breakbars and were CCing became essential to beat the new bosses right in time...

Where is the Breakbar System implemented for players that helps us gettign temporarely immune from gettign cced, so that we cant get cced to death, cause stability wont do this - it has been nerfed into total uselessness...

 

If ANet would fix alone these three things - Condi/Boon System redesign/reduction, make resistance an Attribute and readjust7rebalance the Health System with making Vitality now signficantly more impactful for raising your Max Health, then the game woudl be alot more balanced and all this effect spwam especially in WvW would be nmo problem anymore, cause then wouldnt die people left and right of you within seconds anymore, but woudl be in fact able to react in situations and have actualyl healthy long battles that make in fact fun and aren#t already over and lost, before you were even able to do anythign at all !

[joneirikb.7506]

One option would be to change slightly how cleansing worked.

 

Split cleansing into 2 different types:

* The current one, remove all stacks of a single condition.

* New one, remove 1 stack of all conditions on you.

 

Make it so a few skills or traits etc uses the second one. But make certain that any group cleanse (like guardian shouts etc) only uses the first one, so the "new cleanse" or "De-Tox" is used more for self condi management.

 

It could also be linked up to or used on lots of stunbreaks.

 

(Also liking the idea of a 1-2 seconds immunity to conditions after cleansing them)

[Adamsdjr.1350]

The easiest and most effective solution needs to be a nerf to Scourge, sorry necros. The idea of an expansion shouldn't be to invalidate a previous expansion, if I wanted that I'd just play WoW. The scourge has pretty much totally replaced Reaper in every aspect of the game, WvW, Fractrals, Raiding. It's overpowered and it really is that simple.

 

HOWEVER, Scourge is good because boonspam is common and effective. There needs to be a shift in how WvW plays out in terms of group battles. Boons ( aside from swiftness ) need to be more strategic and more punishing for messing them up, but less spam means that scourge/spellbreaker are probably even more busted because boons are harder to come by and corrupting them because even more important, which is why it's important to get class balance in a better place before we make any changes to how we use boons in wvw.

[coro.3176]

Scourge should be the focus of any nerfs. Fact is, most condi builds are not viable in WvW at all, much less in large-scale fights. When was the last time you saw a condi ranger or a condi revenant or condi engi. You hardly even see condi thief these days.

 

If anything, the game needs less condi cleanse. Since the condi rebalance patch extended the duration but reduced the stacks of many skills, it effectively amounts to a heavy nerf on those classes because players can still cleanse at the same rate. Scourge is still a problem though because most of its power comes from corrupting boons, which you can't avoid having.

 

I would start by doing something like changing corrupts to simple boon removal.

[Kiroshima.8497]

As long as Firebrand is the top support, Scourge and Spellbreaker are required for things to not be an unending sustain fest. Heal Druid can only heal and provide might, and Tempest Aura uptime is incredibly low (and long cooldowns on shouts). Firebrand would have to be nerfed to these two's levels in order for spellbreaker and scourge to get the proper balance changes.

[Aeolus.3615]

> @"XenesisII.1540" said:

> I personally I really hate conditions, like really hate them, like really, really hate them, I don't think you understand like reeeeeally, really hate them hate them type of hate.

>

> But I think after the numerous changes, conditions are in an ok place now, you don't instantly die and have a chance to react to it, they still put pressure on you and those builds are still viable. Certain things need to be fixed such as the resistance to immobilization boon corruption, which was an absolute terrible change.

>

> Rather than adding anything else to the game I prefer if things were toned down because all adding does is continues the cycle of garbage of adding new boons to the game, adding new conditions to the game, adding boon sharing, adding corruptions to now deal with boon sharing, adding light fields to help clear conditions because are too numerous, adding more aoes corruptions, adding more cleanses because too many conditions again.... please lets just stop adding to this cycle and tone down stuff to play with each other better.

 

Condition system on gw1 was really good if your *team* knew how to gank and spike the desired targets once in a while even 2 monks couldn't handle the pressure.

Even skill type wise and their respective counters was more than excellent in gw1, here is stack stack stack staaaack! :(

Look at the AOE spam this game reached, and we have to expect more easy aoe spam caster or even aoe denials design to counter the current aoe spam... game is lost if Anet dont restructure the AOE gameplay itself.

[Hyper Cutter.9376]

> @"coro.3176" said:

> Scourge should be the focus of any nerfs. Fact is, most condi builds are not viable in WvW at all, much less in large-scale fights. When was the last time you saw a condi ranger or a condi revenant or condi engi. You hardly even see condi thief these days.

It's actually kind of amazing the double standards you see with condition vs power builds: people who get mad at a specific power build want that profession/build nerfed, but when they get mad at a condition build (and it's _always_ a necromancer's) they want all condition builds gutted across the board.