Guild Wars 2

The more and more I think about conditions in PvE, the more annoyed I get, and it comes down to one thing. Stack caps. Two condition necromancers can reach a 25 bleed cap by themselves. Two people. Now, let’s imagine if the game itself actually dictated and said alright, there are 5 of you here, the cap is 25 stacks, everyone has a dedicated 5. That would definitely be ‘fair’ by general standards but at the same time restrictive. With the recent world boss additions a great many people are doing them. Yes, more than 5. Which means two things.

1) People are being forced out of an option for damage. Say there are 30 people fighting a world boss, 25 stacks at a maximum, and even if the game did say everyone gets ONE, 5 people are forcefully unable to place said condition. Mind you, this is for a few seconds, but for those few seconds it’s still NOT POSSIBLE.

2) Classes and builds that rely heavily on conditions are at a huge disadvantage in PvE content. This not only limits the effectiveness of those builds, but conditions as a whole.

Sure. You still killed it. Got your chest, some rares you can salvage for ectos and maybe even a TPable exotic. But how much did those 3 condition necros REALLY help in that fight? Saying this as a conditon necro myself, their combined DPS was probably irrelevant. “But, but, it’s a team effort”. Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand that. But at the end of the day they comparatively did nothing. They were operating at maybe 25% of their potential because they can’t consistently have 10+ stacks of bleeds up, individually, at all times.

This. Is. Wrong.

Classes that do heavy physical damage don’t get their damage reduced because there are too many people with swords hitting a dragon in the shins. Bow and Gun users don’t have their projectiles nullified because there are too many blacking out the skies. Why are conditions the only source of damage affected by a cap? Inevitable “if everyone could have 10+ stacks on a boss it’d be OP and it’d die to fast” . Give bosses resists, weaknesses, cleanse, more health even? Hell, something fun. A challenge. Conditions can be tweaked, bosses can have more variables. It’s completely possible to make this a viable system. But simply deciding this isn’t allowed because it would be too broken is ignorant.

Edit: This is a great example of how conditions can be tweaked to increase PvE potential.

MrBlueDragon.8457:

At least for world bosses designed for many players there should be a way to convert a failed or knocked out stack of bleeding into direct damage(possibly at a reduced % of original damage). So for example the boss has 25 stacks of bleeding and another stack is applied that would have ticked for a total of 100 dmg would instead just do 50 instant direct damage as if it were a direct attack.

I think a big part of the problem is trying to make this work but also keeping the system from affecting players themselves. Imagine how OP conditions would become if you could hit a player with 5 separate stacks of 15 bleeds each.

I think it also boils down to a server capacity issue. Large world fights lag enough as is. Things could get a whole lot worse if the system has to suddenly keep track of several condition stacks per player, on top of calculating durations along with the regular damage packets from the attacks themselves.

Not saying this shouldn’t be fixed, but this may be one of those rare times when something isn’t being done because it’s genuinely a difficult thing for anet to tackle how people want it.

I would like to offer some sort of compromise since it seems to be a technical limitation for a 25 stack limit on bleeds. At least for world bosses designed for many players there should be a way to convert a failed or knocked out stack of bleeding into direct damage(possibly at a reduced % of original damage). So for example the boss has 25 stacks of bleeding and another stack is applied that would have ticked for a total of 100 dmg would instead just do 50 instant direct damage as if it were a direct attack. This would help condition heavy builds be helpful without causing overpowering damage.

Substance E.4852:

Imagine how OP conditions would become if you could hit a player with 5 separate stacks of 15 bleeds each

They have made changes in the past specific for PvP/WvW and PvE seperately. My argument is for PvE. Still, I’m assuming you’re referring to Epidemic? Make it so that it only transfers YOUR conditions to nearby enemies, not everyone elses . Top stop 5man necro squads from completely obliterating a Zerg make epidemic a debuff so that they aren’t affected by another for 30-45 seconds.

For the calculations it’s completely viable when they realize making an MMO CPU intensive is a horrible idea and split the load between the CPU and GPU. As it stands now I’m sure only high end computers would be able to handle it if they implemented it without proper optimization.

Though to be fair, both better optimization and condition caps will be looked at when pigs fly. I’m just sharing my opinions.

Substance E.4852:

Imagine how OP conditions would become if you could hit a player with 5 separate stacks of 15 bleeds each.

Sooo…. basically, imagine how OP it would be for one player to be focused fired by 5 other players.

If you’re in that situation, you are dead, whether it’s conditions or power is irrelevant.

MrBlueDragon.8457:

I would like to offer some sort of compromise since it seems to be a technical limitation for a 25 stack limit on bleeds. At least for world bosses designed for many players there should be a way to convert a failed or knocked out stack of bleeding into direct damage(possibly at a reduced % of original damage). So for example the boss has 25 stacks of bleeding and another stack is applied that would have ticked for a total of 100 dmg would instead just do 50 instant direct damage as if it were a direct attack. This would help condition heavy builds be helpful without causing overpowering damage.

I really like this idea, actually. Doesn’t seem like a hard calculation, either. I mean the game already knows it’s doing X amount of damage over Y seconds. So when the stack is full just take X divide by 2 and apply directly instead of over Y. I’m sure it’s more complicated then that, but it’s still significantly easier than calculating individual stacks.

Rhyse.8179:

Substance E.4852:

Imagine how OP conditions would become if you could hit a player with 5 separate stacks of 15 bleeds each.

Sooo…. basically, imagine how OP it would be for one player to be focused fired by 5 other players.

If you’re in that situation, you are dead, whether it’s conditions or power is irrelevant.

You can kite attacks. Unless you have massive condition cleanse you are just going to be instagib’d by the bleeds. Which also brings up the idea of how exactly are cleanses supposed to work when you have multiple stacks of conditions with their own orders?
How am I supposed to keep track of all the crap affecting me? WvW zerging is already enough of a pain without 30+ individual condition timers on my screen.

The only think I don’t like about conversion is that it’s basically turning Condition builds into Power ones, instead of trying to actually make an identity and a purpose for them.

Honestly, the more I think about it,
I kind of think Condition Damage needs to go.

Wait, wait, before you jump down my throat for that.
I think building your character to Specialize in Conditions should most definitely Be A Thing. I’m just not sure Potency was really the way to go about it.

In other games Conditions are the ‘thriftier’ resource choice, or the ‘secure’ choice that follows your enemies behind cover, or the ‘technical’ choice that puts threatening pressure on the enemy convincing them to concede territory. Conditions in GW2 are ‘the same thing as direct damage but slower’. They have no overarching reason to exist, and scaling up the damage of them doesn’t give them one.

What if they let people spec into the Contagiousness of a Condition?

This would dictate how many targets a Condition can ‘bounce’ to from a person that received the condition, and how much of a distance from the person it can transmit. Like bouncing attacks, it can bounce to the same person multiple times if they don’t have enough sense to GTFA from other people. This effect continues over the duration until the number of target hits is used up.

They’d probably have to scale back the AOE target cap limit to 3 like how they did Splash Damage both in order for this to truly have meaning. And they’d need to tone down some of the sillier cases of conditions stacking, acknowledging that positioning will account for the stacks now. They’d have to find some happy medium point of how much damage they want conditions to do.

But at the end of that, I think you’d have something nice.
You wanna’ hit one guy? Direct damage is still your best bet, caps being what they are. You wanna’ hit, like, ten guys? Highly contagious Fire. Each major category of damage would have it’s niche.

Pros

• Raises skill ceiling and floor of Conditions; you get more stacks with better positioning
• Encourages counterplay for Conditions beyond taking Yet More Flippin’ Condition Cleanse (by physically spreading out)
• Gives Conditions a niche in PvE
• Anti-clumping mechanic; Enemies using conditions on you is an Anti-stacking mechanic in PvE, and this would be a Anti-zerg mechanic in WvW.
• Without potency levels, there can be no such thing as ‘junk conditions’ cluttering up the stacks.
• With less stacks given out initially on skills, the stacks don’t get filled up as quickly on singular targets so multiple condition players can play well together.

Cons

• So very much rebalancing. Oh lord. The workload.
• The stacks don’t get filled up as quickly on singular targets. A bit of a double edged-sword in that you’re less useful on a boss that doesn’t feature any Adds.
• 1v1 battles would favor direct damage….but the game supposedly isn’t balanced for that anyway.

The common misconception is that this has anything to do with PvP balance.

Condition stacks simply prevent multiple players being effective together.
Imagine if direct damage had the same caps. 3 burst players attack a target, one does full damage, one partial and the other none. This is exactly the case for condition builds with these caps.

The cap exists purely to maintain server stability, so until ANet come up with a creative solution (something called for by the playerbase since before release) nothing can change.

ANet know about this issue, they agree it sucks and hopefully one day we’ll see a fix. Until then, try not to think about it, it’s too frustrating.

Brew Pinch.5731:

ANet know about this issue, they agree it sucks and hopefully one day we’ll see a fix. Until then, try not to think about it, it’s too frustrating.

Tell that to Conditionmancer mains. You can’t NOT think of stuff like this when it has equal rights to being as effective as power builds. As it stands almost every other class can put down conditions (maybe more or less than a Necro can) but still holds solid DPS. Conditionmancers don’t. Scepter/staff is by far the best condition stacking setup at the cost of being slightly under par for solid DPS and they STILL decided to nerf them! (Although I agree with Dhuumfire getting toned down they didn’t compensate for the loss in PvE). Losing out on our ability to stack conditions, as well as our ability to stack a condition not many people use (Dhuum), or have the damage carried over, is horribly crippling in PvE content.

ANet is making it really hard to love my favourite class.

That being said the way conditions work affects all condition builds, some more than others, and it’s kind of just crap. They need to address this as soon as possible.

Vox Hollow.2736:

What if they let people spec into the Contagiousness of a Condition?

This too is another great solution. Make conditions less damaging but for potentially longer periods of time if it’s able to bounce. More of an AoE control kind of deal and less direct damage+DoT for massive total damage.

there is a very easy way to “workaround” conditions issue in the margins of the current limitations (25 stacks…), and its:

lower the amount of stackable conditions each attack applies (bleeds and confusion) to minimum (1) and increase their relative damage to match burn.

this way the individual player will not lose its DPS and a group of 5 people will be able to benefit from 3-4 condition classes.

Lalangamena.3694:

there is a very easy way to “workaround” conditions issue in the margins of the current limitations (25 stacks…), and its:

lower the amount of stackable conditions each attack applies (bleeds and confusion) to minimum (1) and increase their relative damage to match burn.

this way the individual player will not lose its DPS and a group of 5 people will be able to benefit from 3-4 condition classes.

Problem: Most bleed and torment applications do so one stack at a time. This suggestion would make them hugely overbearing.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Problem: Most bleed and torment applications do so one stack at a time. This suggestion would make them hugely overbearing.

Could be fixes indirectly. Make them 10x stronger but 10x less likely to proc. And so on.

Carighan.6758:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Problem: Most bleed and torment applications do so one stack at a time. This suggestion would make them hugely overbearing.

Could be fixes indirectly. Make them 10x stronger but 10x less likely to proc. And so on.

This defeats the purpose. As someone said above, condition damage in any other game has always been the most consistent and ‘safe’ way to put down damage. It’s never been a beat all end all type of playstyle. The purpose is consistency. It leaves your party with more room to experiment, adapt to what the boss is doing, etc. without worrying about doing top notch DPS 24/7 and nothing else, regardless of how inefficient that can truly be at times. Boss jumps away? Damage is still ticking until you catch up. Someone goes down, damage is still ticking as the group picks them up. People need to back up and heal? Damage. Still. Ticking.

Mind you, yes, damage is definitely still ticking on bosses with max stacks, but a cap makes multiple condition builds in group play or massive PvE significantly less useful as an individual. As I’ve said already, when a warrior can both DPS extremely well AND stack conditions as well as I can, what in the kitten is the point of having a Conditionmancer in your group? There absolutely isn’t one.

Removing a cap and making conditions consistent with a good damage per tick will make people that can stack 10+ conditions individually extremely beneficial to any group in any situation. Not because it would be overpowered, but guaranteed. You’re not going to think twice about a Necro or Condi Engi joining your party if you already have a Condi Warrior because the more ticks the better. Taking a page from current state Necros, Condi Engies or Warriors could have their weapon DPS reduced or increase in cooldowns to remain balanced. The name of the game is damage over time. Not hard hitting fother muckers. That’s what the power stat is for.

To me, the best solution would be to vary caps on different types of enemies. For example:

• Trash mobs can cap at x total stacks between all conditions, instead of y per condition. They don’t live long enough to accrue many conditions anyway.
• Veterans and elites keep this sum-cap mechanic, but raise the number.
• Champions switch to per-condition capping, and very importantly: they all acquire regular condition removal and/or transferring, to keep the stacks from hitting that cap.
• Legendaries are like champs, but with much higher caps and more vigorous clearing.

Conditions having a cap is probably a technical limitation moreso then anything.

Conditions are just really poorly designed in GW2, as if they were simply never intented as a primairy means to focus your damage.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Lalangamena.3694:

there is a very easy way to “workaround” conditions issue in the margins of the current limitations (25 stacks…), and its:

lower the amount of stackable conditions each attack applies (bleeds and confusion) to minimum (1) and increase their relative damage to match burn.

this way the individual player will not lose its DPS and a group of 5 people will be able to benefit from 3-4 condition classes.

Problem: Most bleed and torment applications do so one stack at a time. This suggestion would make them hugely overbearing.

Not a problem at all.

most of the skills actually put stacks of 2 or 3 of these conditions, even torment (warrior offhand sword put 5 (!) torments for 12 seconds(!!!)).
but for the sake of the argument, you can play with its duration.
the auto attacks will put 1, 1.5 second of condition, the long CD skill will put 3 to 5 seconds of conditions.
currently there are lots of skills that put 3-5 stacks of bleeds/confusions for base of 7-8 seconds which is the problem for reaching the cap so fast. etc.

DrEchocide.5217:

Substance E.4852:

Imagine how OP conditions would become if you could hit a player with 5 separate stacks of 15 bleeds each

They have made changes in the past specific for PvP/WvW and PvE seperately.

When was that, and what exactly did they change? (i play gw2 since december 2012, so i wouldn’t know about any changes before that)

Because looking at the forum History, it rather seems like a-net splits the Game into
PvE/WvW and PvP balancingwise, and not into PvP/WvW and PvE. Just look at the Ferocity update, which will make the Condition-meta in WvW smallscale/roaming even more over the top than it already is, just because some PvE'ers were sad that some other PvE'ers wouldn’t want to play (passive-play) tankbuilds in Dungeons (i mean, what the kitten? Why would i care if someone does the content faster than me, especially if i choose to play some error-forgiving tanky build myself?).

Back on topic: While the limitation of Condition Stacks does make sense for play-vs-player encounter, i have to agree that it absolutely kittens Conditionplayers in PvE. Increasing the Count of Stacks per Condition on one Boss wouldn’t be much of a problem performance wise, but wouldn’t really solve the problem as well (50 stacks ob bleeding will still be inflicted within a few seconds). Having 25 Stacks of bleeding (for example) per Player would be better, but it would severely impact on the server’s performance, so it isn’t a solution either.
I really like MrBlueDragons idea, though. Converting the OverTime-Damage of applied conditions into direct damage seems to be a good idea (unless the Boss has condi-removal mechanics, which somehow wouldn’t fit the concept); the damage would have to be strongly reduced though, since Conditionbuilds not only have an above-average Damage/Skilluse ratio (which is usually balanced by the fact that it happens over time), but most of the time also more survivability (see dire gear).

There are a lot of not needed calculations done, when it comes to condition damage.

The damage per second of a condition is not calculated once its applied, it is calculated every second. If you get a might stack, you bleed deals one more damage, if you lose it, one less…. Over all there is no difference if my new conditions deal more damage or every condition applied deals more for a short ammount of time. The average damage stays the same.

So why not calculate the damage a condition deals once its applied, with the condition duration, condition damage at this time.

Right now its like this every second for every condition:

• get condi duration player has
• get condi damage player has
• get -condi duration enemy has
• calculate damage
• reduce the time by 1
• deal damage

While it could be that simple, do the above once and then do this every second:

• deal damage
• recude time by 1

This will save a lot of server Performance and will then allow to atleast increase the condition cap.

DrEchocide.5217:

Carighan.6758:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Problem: Most bleed and torment applications do so one stack at a time. This suggestion would make them hugely overbearing.

Could be fixes indirectly. Make them 10x stronger but 10x less likely to proc. And so on.

This defeats the purpose. As someone said above, condition damage in any other game has always been the most consistent and ‘safe’ way to put down damage. It’s never been a beat all end all type of playstyle. The purpose is consistency. It leaves your party with more room to experiment, adapt to what the boss is doing, etc. without worrying about doing top notch DPS 24/7 and nothing else, regardless of how inefficient that can truly be at times. Boss jumps away? Damage is still ticking until you catch up. Someone goes down, damage is still ticking as the group picks them up. People need to back up and heal? Damage. Still. Ticking.

Mind you, yes, damage is definitely still ticking on bosses with max stacks, but a cap makes multiple condition builds in group play or massive PvE significantly less useful as an individual. As I’ve said already, when a warrior can both DPS extremely well AND stack conditions as well as I can, what in the kitten is the point of having a Conditionmancer in your group? There absolutely isn’t one.

Removing a cap and making conditions consistent with a good damage per tick will make people that can stack 10+ conditions individually extremely beneficial to any group in any situation. Not because it would be overpowered, but guaranteed. You’re not going to think twice about a Necro or Condi Engi joining your party if you already have a Condi Warrior because the more ticks the better. Taking a page from current state Necros, Condi Engies or Warriors could have their weapon DPS reduced or increase in cooldowns to remain balanced. The name of the game is damage over time. Not hard hitting fother muckers. That’s what the power stat is for.

This expose the second issue with group PVE tho, the kitten backwards nature of combat. Taking it slow and defensive is actually more dangerous than going banzai DPS, because it means more time for the big bad to release his spike damage attack that can’t be tanked. And with more times that said attack gets released, the more likely it is that too many of the group miss their active defense for one reason and other. End result, group wipe.

Right now the game is in the awkward position of having the control scheme of a traditional MMORPG, but playing like a over the shoulder action RPG.

I can’t remember playing an Action RPG where the dungeon experience was so utterly bereft of actual combat. It doesn’t play like an Action RPG, it plays like a Bad Action RPG. Which is a shame for a game that otherwise seems to have it’s ducks in a row.

The way conditions work in GW2 right now reminds me of and are very similar to WoW back when it launched in 2004. In fact, if I remember correctly Blizzard made same / similar statements with regards to the technical limitations. Anyone who has played a warlock, rogue or feral druid will understand what I mean.

Now a few years later (I think around 2007?) they changed all that and surpassed the technical limitations and the way DOTs work in that game, including raid content and 40man+ PvP content.

So the question becomes:

If Blizz surpassed all these problems more then 5 years ago, with far inferior technology back then, why can’t a-net with the superior and far more financially efficient tech available today ?