Fights: Condi vs Power Balance Issues, and Stability

The biggest complaint from the core group of players relates to fighting, as it should be with a PvP game type.

So, what’s wrong with the fighting?

Condi’s have been buffed to a point that they make it the smarter choice than power, for most (if not all) classes. “But Scrub! Anet has balanced this out more in the recent patches and it’s making power a little better to use!”

While this isn’t inherently wrong, it will always be wrong until we fix one fundamental problem:

There is no downside to using a condition build.

You can get away with using full Dire armor, and still bursting somebody as hard as a player in a full glass Zerker gear, all while being insanely tanky. Condition damage, in and of itself is strong for 2 reason:

1. You only need 1 stat, Condition Damage, to do your damage. Compare that to anything in the Power family: In order to do more Power damage you need to take Crit Chance (Precision) and Crit Damage (Ferocity). Sacrificing any other stat for extra damage is inherently weaker in our current structure.

2. Toughness. Power has a stat that counters it, and makes your attacks weaker. Condition damage is NOT affected by your armor or your toughness. You will do the same amount of Condition damage to a level 20 in blue armor, that you would do to a level 80 with ascended armor.

“That’s why Arenanet made Resistance!” Yeah, a BOON that makes you unaffected by Conditions for a certain period of time. This was exactly where Arenanet went wrong with balancing. We created a temporary, capable of being removed, boon that just fully negates condition damage.

That would be the same as removing Toughness/Armor and giving us a Boon that negates all Power damage for a certain period of time. It just doesn’t makes sense.

This is extremely unbalanced, and honestly just needs to be removed and reworked into a new idea.

Instead of a Boon, Resistance should have been a new stat. Give all players a base of 0 resistance, and create an equation similar to this:

Condition Damage Reduced (percentage) = (Resistance / 3000)

Where you calculate the Condition Damage done, and then scale it back a certain percentage on a scale of 1–100%, where 100% reduction is 3000 Resitance (which would be impossible to achieve in theory).

The maximum resistance that a player would be able to get would be around 1600–1800, making it so that player took around 50–60% less Condition Damage.

The other balance issue: Stability. Just gives us back the Duration-Based Stability that we used to have. It’s stronger, better, more fun, and just makes more sense. I haven’t found a single player that thinks that Stack-Based Stability was a good choice for the game mode.