Benefits of weakness and cripple etc?

I often pass up the opportunity to use skills that cause cripple, weakness and other conditions similar to this for skills that cause me to do more damage or cause health degeneration....

Reading in the forums a lot I have noticed, depending on the build, people often recommend using these types of conditions - but what do they do? How do they benefit the player?

I often play PvE and have no need to cripple an enemy to stop him from running away - but I feel as though I'm not seeing the benefit of these.

Cripple reduces enemy movement by 50%
Weakness reduces the damage of all attacks from target foe by 66% and reduces all his attributes by 1 (can't drop below 0)
Blind gives target foe a 90% chance to miss with attacks.
Dazed makes enemy spells cast 100% slower and causes them to be easily interrupted (i.e. they're interrupted every time that foe is hit with an attack)
Deep Wound causes a 20% health reduction (taken off the bottom) and reduces all healing on target foe by 20%
You're right. In PvE you don't need cripple at all. The others can be really useful, but monsters hardly kite anyway, so stopping them is not important.

In normal PvE the use for those conditions indeed isn't that great. For example, why bother crippling something that isn't going to run far but rather going to die in a couple of seconds anyway?

But come Hard Mode, things look entirely different. It is very hard to chase down a kiting monk who has a permanent speed buff, for example. Crippling, or snare hexes, normally almost completely ignored in PvE, suddenly become very attractive.

Same goes for weakness. Weakness will greatly reduce the damage output of physical damage dealers. In an average PvE encounter warrior mobs simply don't live long enough to inflict a lot of damage, and some half-decent monking will easily deal with that. But in some areas (and again, Hard Mode), weakening warrior mobs can make the difference between "a very hard time surviving" and "tough, but not impossible". Although there are of course other methods to achive the same effect (blinding, wards, protection prayers...).

And Cripple can be useful in Normal Mode when you have foes with runaway AI, such as hekets. It can allow you to kill them before they have made you aggro every mob in the area.

A lot of builds in here are for use in PVP, and in PVP, conditions are your friend.

Does this affect just the running or does it effect all movements (attack etc?)

WOW - This is very interesting - Now My question is why don't they give descriptions like this in game? I guess they may - I just haven't checked as I am often in the middle of a battle and don't have time to look at it.. It would have been helpful to be able to look at this stuff ingame though when choosing skills...

If you suffer from weakness and cripple, etc you can scroll over it and see it say what it does like any hex or enchantment on you in the status window.

Anyway, cripple only affects movement speed. Not that useful in normal mode PvE, but very useful in PvP where enemies kite (ie move around while you attack them, thereby greatly reducing the damage you can do to them) and in hard mode where monsters run 50% faster then the players all the time.

Deep wound is also AWESOME in pve because many monsters don't have condition removal. However, at the start of the game, its not AS useful because monsters die so fast anyway. Its definately helpful though in later stages of the game when it starts to lower enemies health by around 200 hp.

Blind is also very nice in PvE, but only certain builds (like an air elementalist) can keep it up on foes for long periods of time.

Weakness is quite useful in PvE, especially against foes that hit for a lot of damage over an aoe (jade brotherhood axe warriors with triple chop/cyclone axe or FoW rangers with barrage for example). With the new -1 to attributes, it can also be useful to impede the enemy monk's healing ability.

I'm almost 100% sure it's in the manual, you should read it next time.

This was the one thing that surprised me the most, you say its new huh? How new?.... I've been playing since the beta - just not as in depth as most... Everything I learn is from these forums.

Since February First '07.

Weakness used to only lower physical damage output (thus it was worthless to put in on a caster).
They added the -1 attribute in a skill balance update (as Lotrfish said in Feb 2007). A.net periodically changes the stats of many skills and rarely a whole attribute or condition to rebalance the game.

They do. If you suffer from these conditions and mouse over it, it'll give a description. Or go to the isle of nameless outside great temple of balthazar for a tutorial. And it's probably in the manual too, and the updates are on their website.

Expecting them to put the condition descriptions in the skill is just ridiculous. Imagine if desperation blow read like this: "If this attack hits, you strike for +10...34 damage, and your target suffers from one of the following conditions: Deep Wound, a condition that reduces the maximum health of the sufferer by 20% (up to 100 health) as well as reducing healing they receive by 20%, (for 20 seconds), Weakness, a condition that reduces the damage of your attacks by 66% and all of your nonzero attributes by 1, (for 20 seconds), Bleeding, meaning they suffer from -3 health degeneration or 6 health per second, (for 25 seconds), or Crippled, meaning they move 50% slower, but their attack speed is not reduced, (for 15 seconds). After making a Desperation Blow, you are knocked down."

There's a reason why this game has tutorial areas to teach you the basics. You can't expect them to babysit you the whole game...it's not that hard to know the couple conditions after progressing through the game.

honestly though, a lot of the conditions effects aren't specified exactly in the mouse-over descriptions. it can definitely be confusing to understand these conditions if you don't know exactly how they work. For example, the desc. for Weakness is as follows:
Condition. While suffering from this Condition, you deal less damage with attacks and all of your attributes are reduced by 1
this doesn't say how much less damage you do, whether bonus damage is affected, etc. So, what I mean to say is, while the game does a decent job of giving you a general idea, the specifics come from outside sources

As to the point of the OP, weakness and cripple are utility conditions, not damage conditions, unlike the steady degen stuff you usually see around. The problem is mainly with weakness. It doesn't really earn its place amongst the other conditions. In both pve and pvp, weakness is overshadowed by a skill that can actually do damage, rather than something that prevents damage. The advantage of weakness is that it has synergy with other skills. Many necromancer skills deal with weakness, as do many hammer skills.

Since no one mentioned this: weakness reduces only the base damage, not +damage.

You mean 50% slower.

Deep wound is capped at 100hp.

No, weakness reduces all kinds of base damage, not just physical. Thus it wasn't worthless to put on on a caster if that caster was wanding for a fairly high damage. It's not rare to see high level casters or bosses to hit ~30-50.

In HM cripple, dazed, weak, etc helps a lot. It is not to keep them from kiting you so much as to allow your monks, ellys, etc to kite them. They have speed boost so your dunkaro cannot get away from them, but if the are cripple it allows your Dunkaro to stand a chance to kite them. Charge is another skill I find myself using more and more in HM for the same reason, my team can get away from their attackers

Just the running. There's no condition to reduce attack speed (daze reduces spellcasting speed though), but you can use certain hexes for that.
They do give those descriptions in game I think if you mouse over the condition icon. Not sure though.
It was added in a recent update. It's not the interesting part though, that's the 66% damage reduction. -1 on an attribute isn't generally a big difference. The only situations where it will make a real difference is if your target has specced just enough in an attribute to hit a big breakpoint (such as 5 air magic for gale) and weakness drops them below it. Things like -5 healing on LoD or something aren't going to win you the game though.
A 1 second cast spell would take 2 seconds under dazed. That's one additional second. 1 second is 100% of the original 1 second, so it casts 100% slower.
It would be worth it if it reduced the damage from skills. As it is, it's still fairly worthless to use on a caster (-6 dmg on lightning orb? yeah, that's going to save a spike...), unless you hit an important breakpoint, like the 5 air on gale, the 14 dom on energy burn, 4 inspiration on Spirit of Failure, that sort of things.

No, the casting takes 100% longer. This means that the casting takes twice as long, which means that the spell is cast at half of the original speed, which is means that it goes 50% slower. 100% slower means that the casting is going at 0% speed. Yeah, I fail at English.

I think it could be intresting if weakness would reduce damage from non-armor-ignoring spells.

But anyway, I'm NOT casting weakness on casters nor saying you should cast weakness on casters. I'm saying that if weakness somehow gets applied on an enemy caster or casters, maybe because a hero set to curses had nothing "better to do", it's not complete waste of energy.

This was my problem reading the descriptions in the game left a lot of room for the mind to "guess" what was happening...

I did read the manuals back when I was playing the beta - but never felt I needed to do it again until recently when I have seen a lot of debates about using weekness - all of a sudden I knew there was some benefit that I did not know about.. Now I know though - thanks for all the responses!