Guild Wars 2

Sorry in advance if this becomes a wall of text. I play a condition mesmer, which so far works great in PvE (haven’t tried it on PvP yet), but as everyone knows is limited by the condition cap anytime I’m fighting a large boss or a dungeon with another condition damage character.

The issue, as far as I understand it, is server bandwith. Each condition applied to a mob has two different attributes, duration and damage per tick. The limit, I believe, is set in place to a stack of 25 because both need to be transmited by the server to the client, and since each stack can be applied by a different character, then every tick you’re transmitting up to 25 pieces of data (the damage for each stack, the duration can be tracked in the server and just informed of when it ends). If there wasn’t a limit, then the amount of bandwith needed increases. “Adding more servers”, as people put it, would be useless since the limit is the bandwith, some of it being each client’s bandwith since it needs to receive all that data.

The way I’ve read is being done is that if a new condition is applied, if it’s condition damage and duration makes it do more damage than an existing stack, then that stack is overwritten, if the condition will do less damage than all existing stacks isn’t applied (would be nice to have confirmation or denial that this is how it’s done, BTW, but I know it’s very unlikely to have devs confirmation of that and I understand the reasons), but that can also mean that specced to condition damage but with less than the best gear might be in a position where their damage and contribution is continuously discarded, and in groups if 2 or more condition damage characters are together, they overall DPS tend to suffer for it. With my current build, my mesmer, for example, can very easily put 10 or more stacks of bleed by his own in land in the first few seconds of a fight, and underwater I been able to max the 25 stacks myself.

So, one way I see that it could be done is with an aggregate condition. For example, let’s put the limit to 10 (since there must be a limit for the bandwith reasons I mentioned earlier). Let’s say that 10 stacks of bleed are applied to a boss, when the 11th stack hits it, then the previous 10 dissapear, but a new condition is created, let’s call it profuse bleeding, that does the agregate damage and duration of all 10 previous stacks (averaging the damage per tick of all 10, prorated to the duration of each stack and multiplying by 10, for example, I’d leave the math to you). If an 11th stack of profuse bleeding is created, then the first 10 become another condition, let’s say “hemorrage” that can stack up to 5.

So, in the end the amount of data transmitted to the client might end up being the same (the hit would be in the server that needs to calculate the new conditions, though), but where it would previously track the damage of 25 stacks, it would now track and apply the damage equivalent of up to 500 stacks (10×10×5). Even if you don’t want to clutter with even more icons, add the more rows of numbers to the bleed icon (right now it shows 25, for example, it might show 5 – 10 – 10 instead).

So, good idea, bad idea, shut up Loco?.. discuss ahead..

TL:DR: instead of a single bleed condition, 3 conditions, bleed, profuse bleed that each stack does damage equivalent to 10 bleed stacks, hemorrague that each stack does the damage equivalent to 10 profuse bleeds, so that more conditions can be applied and tracked by the client without having to increase bandwith.