Guild Wars 2

I’ve noticed that the GW2 Conditionmancer builds seem to be specifically focused on stacking bleed damage as much as possible, and there aren’t really any other focuses for condition-damage based builds for the Necromancer. Either you stack bleed, or you choose a build that isn’t based around conditions. Personally, I think it’s a little odd for the developers to go through all of the trouble of making bleed damage the primary focus of the only Conditionmancer build in the game (even allowing the Necromancer to stack up to 133% additional condition damage if tweaked right), but leave the bleed cap at 25. This pretty much makes Conditionmancers and any other bleed-based builds among all classes more or less useless in group events.

But, I think I might have a compromise. If you want to nerf bleed stacking, but make it so that people who are trying to stack bleeds aren’t utterly useless, why not just apply diminishing returns to stacks passed a certain number.

For example:
First 20 stacks are full damage.
Next 40 stacks are half damage.
Next 80 stacks are quarter damage.
Next 160 Stacks are eighth damage.
Etc, etc.

I’m not saying these would be the exact numbers, just an illustration to get my point across. I would rather have players do less damage and feeling helpful than players doing no damage and feeling useless. I also don’t want ridiculously overpowered and underpowered mechanics in the game. I think with correct tweaking, a system of diminishing returns applied to bleed stacks over certain thresholds would be an excellent compromise. Players would probably be happier no longer being completely useless and redundant.

They’ve stated multiple times that the bleed cap is in place to keep a check on the amount of crap the server has to send to and from players in real time.

Your idea would only work if the amount of data they can send (and you receive) would be, quite literally, infinite. Which is obviously not the case. Thus, your idea wouldn’t really work.

Also, another flaw in your idea is that with that kind of diminishing returns, it’s just about elementary to compute a point after which adding more stacks, rather than letting old ones expire, would be detrimental to your DPS. And then you end up with a situation where the potential optimal playing style is to not play. Which is a very bad approach to design.

Do note that the 25 cap also applies to Vulnerability and Might. Granted, they’re much simpler to deal with.