Curse

Cymboric Treewalker · Jul 29, 2005, 03:02 PM // 15:02

Martyr draws all the conditions to you; right?

So you would get them for the remaining duration or have to use purge conditions or mend ailment to clear these things yes?

Martyr has a ten second cool down, purge conditions has a 30 second cool down.

When you draw them the conditions can just be reapplied right?

For 21 seconds the person who used Martyr is either going to take damage or they are going to need use Mend Ailment. So I when facing a group of people that are prepared for conditions you are going to take out of the fray one person for 21 seconds as they will worry about getting the drawn conditions off themselves.

Or...

They would have two people able to do it... but then you have two people who have taken up two to three slots on their tool bars to deal with conditions.

Phades · Jul 29, 2005, 03:14 PM // 15:14

Consider the time it takes to fully reapply 10 pips of health regen to 8 people. Compare that against removing 3 conditions via mend or more with purge.
Draw conditions on a prepared character can be effective as well.

Yukito Kunisaki · Jul 29, 2005, 04:38 PM // 16:38

Odd, I didn't think I'd get a reputation and be known for conditions...

However, the reasons I went conditions come partially from Sauletus Rex's guides and I follow them religiously to a degree...

Warrior being my favorite class, I've learned easily that we just don't do the damage it takes at times to kill someone and when we do, someone casts Reversal of Fortune. [watching a warrior knock me down and then my monk casts Reversal is funny cause I get healed for a nice chunk vs. losing a nice chunk when Aftershock headbutts me]

Warrior's only condition is bleeding which causes hp to drop a meager percent. 20dps? What's your team doing, watching them drop? 20dps ON EACH enemy AND your swinging and shooting them is what you're forgetting here. People forget that one uses skills AND REGULAR attacks. Not just degen and watch...

I'm an axe user so I don't have the luxury of bleeding, however I DO have the luxury of free Deep Wound and Cripple vs. the sword's hefty 10e. cripple.

A crippled enemy is only good when everyone's almost dead? I LOVE cripple at the start of a battle. That means the enemy is already using energy to try to get up and running and what's more, I now run Rush instead of sprint so getting 100% crit rate is easier for me to sustain at a longer rate.

Conditions do what damage does not. "If damage is a means to an end, conditions delay the inevitable." - Rex

Couldn't have said it better myself.

I don't see as much panic factor coming from a spike warrior vs. a warrior that does a bit of extra damage AND conditions... Conditioning axe swings alongside Swift Chop or Exe. Strike means you'll be getting in a bit of extra dmg AND force the enemy to deal with conditions.

Think of it this way as well. What's easier to heal? Dmg or conditions? If you have a single player turning your entire team's hp bars green with both shaded and purple arrows downward [hexes + disease + poison], I'd like to see your Matyr save you now. That recycle time is trash compared to how easy it is to disease and poison the enemy team again. You do Matyr, and the ones who casted Disease can just do it again. What's worse, I'll just use Plague Touch when I get diseased to restart the cycle. Apply poison turns martyr into a nearly wasted skill slot since it's long lasting and when u remove them all, they're all over you again well under 10s.

Last I checked, Martyr doesn't heal teammates when conditions are removed so if you run a heavy condition build team, that monk will be drained dealing with conditions and NEVER get the chance to pull off a worthwhile heal. Why? Everyone is losing hp at the same time. Heal Party is trash, and Martyr isn't spammable... A smart ranger can easily poison your entire team indefinitely. Let's not get to Death Necros.

I run Victory is Mine! conditions engine about 70% of the time. Rarely do I switch to my Battle Rage extreme dmg build. Why? Cause then condtions effectively turn me into mincemeat. Can't battle rage if I'm plague touching and then run out of energy now can I?

Everything exists in this game for a reason, some skills are better than others, true, but when you look back on them, you'll realize you're glad they're there...

I used to play Ragnarok Online, a cutesy game which has classes just like any other mmorpg. Swordman was my role and I switched up to Knight. Problem? Game has no conditions, I only bop things and then bop them harder, very dull.

Here, I can do something that no other game does, anything I want. W/X can do anything. ^_^ Conditions are a very nice idea in GW and is probably one of THE reasons I play this awesome game. NO other game uses its unique combat system.

Prince_Ayreon · Jul 29, 2005, 04:53 PM // 16:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by rii

Ok, firstly, this isnt about pve, in which case i dont have a problem. This isnt about team arenas or competition arenas either, since you could run through it naked and noone would notice.

They noticed me! =(

~runs away~

Darc.Syde · Jul 29, 2005, 06:02 PM // 18:02

Quote:

Darc.Syde raises the point that there are a lot of hexes that can shut down a condition remover. This seems inconsistent with the theory that everyone uses nature’s renewal, surely? Signet of Humility is however, a fair point, due to it being a signet (ive recently come to love primal echoes :/), but then again, identifying the martyr is dam hard, since a) babysitting is not a mesmers job, so if your doing that is that not one up to me?, and b) as Dudededu points out, martyr can often be found on unlikely targets, and when a Mesmer baby-sits a warrior/monk looking for one skill is the day ill laugh in joy.

Battlefield awarness and the ability to analyze what your opponent is running is key to making you a better team. Most good teams know how to do this, that is what makes them good.

before spirit spam was king of the meta, we used a condition build knowing people are going to have martyr, couple copies of mend ailment on 2 different people. so i designed 4 people to shut them down. ofcourse this meant using hexes, but this is why my build doesnt work anymore. i wont go any further than this, or else itl turn into a nerf NR thread...

if its too hard to count the number of monks on your opponents team, then dont expect to go too far. its like if you cant find the ranger who is spamming the spirits, how do you expect to stop them? in a 5 ranger team, a 5 mo/x x/mo team, its the same idea.

rii · Jul 29, 2005, 06:31 PM // 18:31

Yukito: Martyr will drain a monk? 5 energy o.25 second cooldown and 10 second recharge. not as spammable as say tainted flesh but thats not any sort of drain and while its not relatively as short it is short nonetheless. In a battle of offense vs defense a guy whos spamming martyr vs a guy spamming disease will obviously loose, but thats putting it in isolation. Whatsmore, as has been mentioned, martyr is often run on /mo or protectors, who dont have to worry about 'getting the heals in' but have to concentrate on protecting the team, so it doesnt apply there.
You say what is easier to heal, conditions or damage? They are both easy to get rid of, but conditions have less of an effect and things like martyr make it even worse. Theres no healing version of martyr, although: all damage suffered by party members is transferred to you would be amusing. Thinking about it like that, conditions so really seem inferior to damage. What if that skill existed? It would be amusing to watch, but it puts across the point that conditions arent as potent as damage.

Personally, i think that people who heal away stuff like cripple are asking for it. As can probably be seen from AXE STRATEGY, i put speed buffs over attack rate buffs, so even if they removed it they would still be in trouble.

'Id like to see your martyr save you know' While this focuses on martyr, this is about conditions as a whole, and therefore, condition removal as a whole. If a team member had that many conditions on em then mend ailment.

Im not 'forgetting' the swinging and shooting, im saying that inflicting a condition is something that could be much more efficiently replaced by some other skill, maybe a buff or attack skill.

In this game, i can cast rust. No other game has ever had rust, and i love this game for it

lol prince

edit: darc.syde, do you run those shutdowns now?

Darc.Syde · Jul 29, 2005, 06:39 PM // 18:39

you cant run alot of hex shutdown spells now, due to NR. i had to set the build aside until balancing is redone again.

rii · Jul 29, 2005, 06:51 PM // 18:51

Then at the moment, its hard to shutdown a martyr user, aside from getting a ranger intterupter, and hoping for the best. (Unless you have a mesmer who can interrupt 0.25 seconds, in which case im very impressed)

Darc.Syde · Jul 29, 2005, 07:03 PM // 19:03

yoiu dont need to interupt it...

slap shame, diversion, fragility, or backfire on em. they do their job. theres more than 1 way to shutdown someone, and trying to interupting their every skill is inneffective.

rii · Jul 29, 2005, 07:04 PM // 19:04

What i meant that was if natures renewal was up then using hexes and so forth may be a bit unreliable.

Darc.Syde · Jul 29, 2005, 07:07 PM // 19:07

ya, i said that like twice already. if you can run a condition build NOW and stilll be able to have martyr counters. good for you. im out of ideas, so i put the build aside and think up another

Sammiel · Jul 29, 2005, 09:55 PM // 21:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by Darc.Syde

ya, i said that like twice already. if you can run a condition build NOW and stilll be able to have martyr counters. good for you. im out of ideas, so i put the build aside and think up another

Signet of humility?

N/Me

Death 12
Curses 12

Signet of Agony
Chilbains
Plague Sending
Rotting Flesh
Epidemic
Virulence {E}
Enfeebling Blood
Signet of Humility

Yukito Kunisaki · Jul 31, 2005, 05:15 AM // 05:15

Very good Sammiel. My salute!

Also, going all dmg or all conditions is just easier to stop. I never said go conditions only.

It's most likely hardest to stop someone using both decent dmg skills and multiple conditioning skills. Here is a warrior slamming you with high dmg or unblockable attacks at the same time causing 3+ conditions at once.

A person doing both conditioning and damage is always more useful than someone doing only conditions or only damage.

In the end, the game needs both. I wouldn't play this game if it wasn't for conditions. Also, remind me to tell one of my teammates to hit you in the face with Concussion Shot or Skullcrack, let's see how useless of a condition that is when it's Martyred and everyoned dive bombs on the one with daze...

I think there should be more than 2 classes only that can inflict dazed on someone... That'd be neat to see in an expansion. But yeah, Dazed is the shizz0rs....

arredondo · Jul 31, 2005, 08:25 AM // 08:25

OK, so we went from bragging about the uber-ness of Mend Condition in the first post (which was promptly put in its place) and then changed the subject to Martyr. Well ask yourself - if you need to take your only elite that's available to one class to best deal with Conditions, doesn't that in itself show you Conditions are something to reckon with? Doesn't that contradict the entire first post of this thread? If you need your elite slot for pure defense to handle one play mechanic of several tactics that I'm doing, I must be doing SOMETHING right. Oh, and with a 10 second recharge, let's say you had the timing and awareness to help a Fragility+Virulence teammate during all that is going on in the field, that spike combo kills in less than 10 seconds when played right. Let's hope your last Martyr attempt wasn't Diverted or isn't still recharging when your buddy is suffering.

Even with your elite, I can still kill you with conditions. I saw a Martyr happy monk yesterday. Sometimes he knows what Conditions are attacking his teammates, sometimes its just general cleanup. But since he was in the sacrificial mood, I laid down Fragility+Virulence on him when I saw Martyr pop up and enjoyed the panic session that ensued.

When he tried to predictably heal himself? Power Drain, then Shame, followed by another case of Virulence in due time. And as mentioned above, I can grab a non-elite (Signet of Humility) to deal with your one elite. Then we're back at square one - careful use of Conditions creating havok. You can stop anything I just described. But the fact you even HAVE to invalidates the first post, let alone the fact that I can stop whatever it is you stopped on me. Which you then can also stop. And so it continues.

rii · Jul 31, 2005, 09:20 AM // 09:20

1) We didnt drop the subject of mend ailment, its still a goddam amazing skill, and it was not 'put in its place'.
2) We went on to martyr because its the biggest condition counter of them all, so kind of personifies the whole thing, methinks.
3) Frafility builds arent countered with condition removal, in fact, thats stupid, since say they stack 4 conditions, doing er, 125 damage or something like that, and then someone does martyr, thats doing more damage :S. Frag is countered by hex removal, and so isnt really anything to do with this thread.
4) Im not saying conditions are crap. As i said in the very first line, this isnt about pve, team or competition arenas. Why? Because there, people often are either a) too stupid to do anything (pve), b), havent prepared properly (comp arenas) or c) thought something else was more useful for their team (team arenas). In those situations, fair enough. What im talking about is the fact that the counters to conditions are much more powerful than the conditions themselves, which includes martyr, mend ail etc.
5) Sorry to point this out, but it seems that your talk of countering martyr in the last paragraph is saying: mesmers > monks. Why, as someone else in a different thread said, congrats. stop. Youve found out one of the basic rules of gw class balance. stop.
If I was running a martyr build to counter your conditions then lol, id run teh mesmer whod pwn uR shutdown LoL!<!<!<!<. Theres little point in talking about these sorts of counters (that was sarcasm above btw

), since in no strat, anywhere ever, was it not the case that mesmers are capable of easily killing monks.
If you want to go down the route of 'i have a build that will kill your build', then let me suggest this:
Ignorance
after ive id' the guy whose running the signet, i own him. Lets not continue. This is conditions vs condition removal, not condition removal vs any counter anyone can think of.

arredondo · Jul 31, 2005, 12:53 PM // 12:53

Well its good to see you've come to your senses. The first post was all about the utter worthlessness of Conditions. Myself and others went ahead to show you all the ways they are useful. Now you're agreeing that the counters can be dealt with, as well as the counters to the counters.

My last post in no way suggested that Monks > Mesmers... just showing examples of how one can deal with your stated uber counters to Conditions. I clearly stated in the last paragraph that my posted strats can be stopped by counters which I can stop as well, back and forth, on and on. Your summary paragraph from the first post about Mend Condition and Martyr is just flat out wrong, plain and simple:

Quote:

Originally Posted by rii

well, im not going to continue, but from this one skill alone (not going into the details of martyr, can we see that conditions are not effective in any role, and if anything only serve to help people heal their teammates??

rii · Jul 31, 2005, 01:30 PM // 13:30

Monks > Mesmers eh?

The first post was about how conditions are ineffective when compared to other means of offense, due to the nature of their counters. Not as you so bluntly stated, conditions being worthless.

I concede that all things can be countered, its just, as I mentioned... somewhere.... some counters come under 'standard' and some come under 'obscure', whilst others come somewhere in between. Standard can be found everywhere, obscure is the kind of things only really found in forums as possible holes in theoretical builds, and the 'somewhere in between' can be found sometimes, but equally as often not. I think that condition removal comes under 'standard', since tomb pugs use martyr whereas everything coming after it in the thread falls into one of the two other catergories, albeit more somewhere in between rather than obscure.
This means I considered that most people do not make use of conditions to the extreme that they find it neccesary to come up with complex counters to stopping martyr as a singular skill, and therefore martyr is more often than not found as a good counter, and thus leading onto the conclusions of the first post.

My position has been somewhat moved by darc.syde, who stated that he used a condition team and did in fact run anti-martyr as standard. This is probably the first team ive come across to do so. He then went on to say that he can no longer do so since it was so based on hexes. Therefore the point goes back to martyr still being a threat, except for signet of humility, which wasnt shafted by nr methinks. Therefore, this lone skill has come up against the lone skill of martyr. However, this still leaves the other condition removal... draw condition mend ailment, etc.

So as you said, through the discourse from the thread we have come back to square two, not one, in that martyr is often countered by signet of humility, but due to the nr spam nature of the meta, other forms of condition removal seem to be non-counterable, or at least are much harder to counter.

And so are we coming to that as a conclusion? The original point of the thread wasnt to say what i said and then expect everyone to become a convert, it was to provide some viewpoints to make a reasoned judgement as to whether conditions can work, since there are more experienced people here than me

Sammiel · Aug 01, 2005, 02:58 PM // 14:58

Quote:

Originally Posted by rii

Monks > Mesmers eh?

The first post was about how conditions are ineffective when compared to other means of offense, due to the nature of their counters. Not as you so bluntly stated, conditions being worthless.

I concede that all things can be countered, its just, as I mentioned... somewhere.... some counters come under 'standard' and some come under 'obscure', whilst others come somewhere in between. Standard can be found everywhere, obscure is the kind of things only really found in forums as possible holes in theoretical builds, and the 'somewhere in between' can be found sometimes, but equally as often not. I think that condition removal comes under 'standard', since tomb pugs use martyr whereas everything coming after it in the thread falls into one of the two other catergories, albeit more somewhere in between rather than obscure.
This means I considered that most people do not make use of conditions to the extreme that they find it neccesary to come up with complex counters to stopping martyr as a singular skill, and therefore martyr is more often than not found as a good counter, and thus leading onto the conclusions of the first post.

My position has been somewhat moved by darc.syde, who stated that he used a condition team and did in fact run anti-martyr as standard. This is probably the first team ive come across to do so. He then went on to say that he can no longer do so since it was so based on hexes. Therefore the point goes back to martyr still being a threat, except for signet of humility, which wasnt shafted by nr methinks. Therefore, this lone skill has come up against the lone skill of martyr. However, this still leaves the other condition removal... draw condition mend ailment, etc.

So as you said, through the discourse from the thread we have come back to square two, not one, in that martyr is often countered by signet of humility, but due to the nr spam nature of the meta, other forms of condition removal seem to be non-counterable, or at least are much harder to counter.

And so are we coming to that as a conclusion? The original point of the thread wasnt to say what i said and then expect everyone to become a convert, it was to provide some viewpoints to make a reasoned judgement as to whether conditions can work, since there are more experienced people here than me

The other forms of condition removal suffer from meta game considerations too. They are almost all in the protection line, which has been hurt considerably due to NRs enchantment stripping and cast speed impact. So I am not sure how many teams would still be willing to go with a heavy prot monk, all things considered.

rii · Aug 01, 2005, 03:57 PM // 15:57

the only thing about prot that got shafted were the long lasting long recharge enchants like mark of protection. Short lasting stuff like rof, shielding hands, prot spirit, etc are more than acceptable to use, since they all have reasonably short cooldowns, and their duration does not have to exceed 10 seconds, which is what is going to happen in nr builds. Prot is reasonable, just dont use life bond :/

Sammiel · Aug 01, 2005, 05:44 PM // 17:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by rii

the only thing about prot that got shafted were the long lasting long recharge enchants like mark of protection. Short lasting stuff like rof, shielding hands, prot spirit, etc are more than acceptable to use, since they all have reasonably short cooldowns, and their duration does not have to exceed 10 seconds, which is what is going to happen in nr builds. Prot is reasonable, just dont use life bond :/

Cast times are increased across the board too. And the enchant you just dropped might last 10s, but it might get sheared immediately, such is the gamble when spirits are being dropped.