Cautery Signet

So... Cautery Signet. 2s activation time, 15s recharge, removes all conditions from everyone and gives you 1s burning per condition.

I feel that this skill needs help to be viable... even if we only consider paragon skills, cautery signet is inferior to the alternatives. Song of Purification provides mass condition removal and gives you energy, and IJAFW recharges much faster and has no activation time. With non-paragon skills you have Pure Was Li Ming (mass condition removal), Draw Conditions and Foul Feast (remove all conditions, .25s activation), Mend Body and Soul (heal + remove many conditions) and powerful elite condition removal such as Restore Condition and Peace and Harmony. The elite skill most similar in function to Cautery Signet is probably Martyr, but Martyr recharges faster and activates faster.

Given all of the above it's easy to see why Cautery Signet doesn't see much use. The question is, what can we do to make it better. Reducing activation and recharge time is obvious but I'm wondering if we can do something better.

Most classes have a lot of condition removals, so it's pretty easy to switch to an alternative class and use their condition removal. I think if it was to be any good use it should keep everything the same (cast, recharge, remove the condition removal) and just remove one hex from every party member. It would be powerful enough because Paragons aren't full support nor full damage, so it could remove a hex every fifteen seconds and not be weak either since you would be helping the monk a lot by just removing some pressure.

Even if that is still too powerful then just make it all other party members affected and thanks to fifteen seconds you can't spam it so it should be pretty balanced. That's just my opinion though, I'm not really going to continue talking about all the other Paragon skills since they are still working on the Dervish as well as other updates so I'm letting anet fix one thing at a time.

Cautery Signet is fine at what it does. In fact, it's great at what it does. When I'm facing party-wide condition spreading, it's always a choice between Extinguish and Cautery Signet. It's unlinked to any attribute, it removes ALL conditions without any requirements, and the drawback of burning is negligible (it certainly kicks Martyr's ass in that regard). Most of the other skills mentioned in the OP are single-target, only remove a few conditions, have clauses that need to be met for the skill to work, require attribute point investment to be useful, or some combination of these drawbacks. Song of Purification has the additional problems of needing the players to activate skills to remove conditions, and not being available on demand.

Not needing to spend att points to get the skill to function alone is reason enough to leave it as-is. This is like complaining that Empathic Removal is worthless because there are better hex/condition/healing elites available for monks.

The skill is not useless but it's fairly niche, basically mandragors and cleaning Abbaddon's daze. I would buff the recharge to 10s and still leave it in it's niche. There are plenty of completely worthless paragon elites like angelic bond to rework if you want something new.

1 sec casting time. Seriously give a Gon a bone.

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Hexbreaker aria uses to be 1s recharge, and was changed for some very unknown reason to push hex builds. I would just put some nominal motivation requirement on it (5?) and pull it to 1s, its not like hexes are hurting in the pvp meta.

In terms of party wide condition removal that pretty much smash it theres Pure Was Mei Ling (the condition pot, forget proper name), recovery (spirit that reduces condition duration by about 55-60%, martyr (party wide draw).

I like the turn they took with IJAFW, giving the ally whose condition was removed a variably offensive or defensive buff to run faster. I think Cautery should be changed to leadership

Cautery Signet (Elite) 0 Energy, 1 Second cast time, 10 Second Recharge
All party members within earshot lose all conditions. For each condition removed you suffer from burning for 2....1 second and attack 33% faster for 0...1...2 seconds.

Its biggest issue atm in my opinion is that if your facing a condition heavy team which is the only situation thats gonna make it really worthwhile is they almost always have a ranger. Signets have a nice sexy symbol above their head alerting everyone observing that your casting a signet, and with a 2 second cast it would be to easy to select you and fire off a d-shot to knock it out. 1 Second is still easily ruptable with even moderate ping. You do still get burnign, but ive increased the length of burning at low leadership to punish secondaries using it. I was thinking of giving it 0 seconds at 12+ leadership, but thought that might be a bit op.
Finally the IAS in it. This would be a good way to give paragons an IAS without the downsides of AR/Soldiers however it wouldn't be op, because if you verse a team without conditions your not going to have an IAS available.

Another I wasnt sure if leadership or motivation would be a better option. Leadership would give it more versatility as part of a command or motivation support gon, and motivation already has 2 condition removals. Option 3 could be command or spear mastery with a >4 leadership req.

For those who think Cautery Signet is fine as is... at the moment, it is the best way to deal with Murakai and Abaddon and Mandragor mobs. However other than these corner cases it isn't very useful. Martyr has the same issue but I'll let people in the monk forums worry about that.

I like both of the suggestions made so far. I might as well post my own suggestion and see what people think of it. The intent is to make something unique that has synergy with other paragon skills.

Cautery Signet. 1s activation time, 15s recharge
Removes all conditions from all party members.
Target foe and all nearby foes are set on fire for 1 second per condition removed.

Aside from removing conditions from the party, this punishes enemies that use condition spam and has good synergy with They're On Fire, Glowing Signet, etc. The 'burning on all nearby' feature is delivered by plenty of non-elite skills.

I alway wondered why there was such a high cooldown, isn't the burning there to discourage you from using it too much?
No cooldown might be problematic, but I could see a 5sec MAXIMUM (I honestly prefer 2-3 sec) with the current functionnality, at least so it could work as an "offensive" condition immunity. Takes off a lot of condition-pressure and give a source of burning.

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