Assassin Conditions.

Assassins will be the first class in Guild Wars to inflict two conditions with a single skill. The order in which conditions are applied is a serious issue- cripple shot rangers would not be half of what they are now if apply poison didn't act as a cover. So I was a little surprised to see that temple strike applied the blind, then covered it with dazed, even though dazed is the rarer and typically more expensive condition.

It's a very minor thing, but it would go a long way towards making the assassin skills everything they can be. Please cause those skills which inflict two conditions to cover the rarer with the more common.

(The other two-condition strike was twisting fangs, inflicting both bleeding and deep wound. Bleeding should cover deep wound.)

Melandru's arrows apply bleeding and you can use pin down. There is more than just apply posion and crippling shot that can do this, even though apply poison is rather effective at doing so. Then there are other skills like virulence that work to enhance existing condition stacks.

Twisting fangs is trying to imitate a sword warrior, so by going through the natural progression of things, bleeding comes before the deep wound. If it were trying to imitate axes or hammers the deep wound would be covered by weakness, blindness or crippled.

SwordFisher: I agree with your basic premise, so I won't belabor this point overly, but Virulence applies 3 conditions, and Barbed Trap applies 2.

The order on these Assassin skills, as you say, is quite backward.

i smell "Victory is Mine!" Assassin's?=]

I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but the issue is balance. If the better condition is immediately covered, assassins become more powerful. In the world of balance, this requires some penalty with respect to the other order of application.

Of course, there will be balance issues as there always are, and multiple iterations of fixes.

Then your nerf would have to start with rangers and then work its way down to assasins.

You could also just bring a ritualist and wipe out 2-3 conditions per casting and not worry about bringing an eliete slot for condition removal or change the existing game mechanics. In addition to this, you could also have a monk secondary with draw conditions working as utility supporting the group rendering the condition stack, no matter how deep it is, invalid on the intended target.

Frankly, this isn't the sort of thing they normally balance, but since this was a preview, hopefully they will make an exception?

/beg