Guild Wars 2

Three months ago there was a lengthy conversation on condition damage which evolved into the negative impacts of the cap on bleed stacks:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/No-love-for-condition-builds/page/2#post621056

Jon Peters acknowledged the issue in the above post:

JonPeters.5630:

Might as well chime in and say big crowd events where condies are stack capped is also a problem we are investigating.

Jon

JonPeters.5630:

3+ heavy bleeders, but yeah…

Is there any update on how this will be addressed or when?
It has been three months since the Jon’s comments and I tried unsuccessfully to resurrect the thread two months ago.

The short version:
Any number of direct damage dealers all do their full damage to a target.
Only 2 or 3 condition damage dealers do their full damage to a target. Any more than that and the bleed stack is maxed at 25 and further applications of bleed do nothing.
This has led me and other folks I know to abandon condition damage builds… especially for dynamic events and dungeons. I have even seen the bleed cap met in WvW. The forum post I linked above explains why this is a problem (many users contributed to the conversation).

I suggest that in the interest of build and class diversity that the plan for how the game will address the bleed stack issue should be shared.

Ulari

It’s even worse for burning… 1 condition damage dealer is enough for perma-burning with certain builds (or just a single elementalist) making burning even worse.
If you also keep in mind that 6 stacks of bleeding equal Burning damage but bleeding can be applied up to 25 stacks, makes bleeding cap at 4 times the damage of burning!

More love for conditions please, and especially burning, needs a lot more than bleeding

Agreed maddoctor.

All the damaging conditions suffer from the arbitrary stacking limit: bleeding, burning, poison (the damage portion only).

I have no issue with vulnerability, chill, and healing reduction being capped. Just like buffs (protection as an example) do not stack intensity.

But it is very frustrating to enjoy a build (my current necromancer) and realize I only do my full damage if nobody else is applying significant stacks of bleeding… Compare this to a direct damage class who knows their full damage will always be applied, regardless of who else is attacking the target.

And the real point of my thread was to suggest that this situation could be improved/resolved if ArenaNet followed up Jon Peters’ acknowledgement, and told us how and when this will be addressed.

Ulari

He posted about “looking into it” 3 months ago (!!) so I don’t think we’ll see a change soon, I hope I’m wrong though

Main complaints:

1) Condition cap (25 for bleed, 1 for everything else) — This severely limits damage for condition based builds when more than one or two condition based builds are present.

2) Gear availability for condition based builds — There isn’t much variety with condition damage armor and some armors cannot be crafted. For example, Rabid armor cannot be crafted. It can only be bought with large amounts of karma or hours of dungeon grinding.

Possible solutions:

1) Condition caps — Keep the caps the way they are, but make it individualized (25 bleed stacks and 1 of each other condition per player)This prevents someone from being able to stack obscene amounts of bleeding, making it imbalanced, but allows condition builds to show their full potential in dungeon/boss/team situations. After all, what’s the difference between a high powered power/precision build dealing large amounts of damage and a condition build dealing a large amount of damage? To remedy the problem of Epidemic spreading 100+ bleed stacks, make it so that only the conditions that the necromancer applied get transferred.

2) Gear — Make more diverse gear for condition players available. The best way to do this is by making variants of Knight’s, Berserker’s, etc. Simply replace the power stat in each armor and make it condition damage. Power is a waste in most condition builds since the attacks typically deal miniscule amounts of damage, but precision is vital in order to proc bleeds (like Sigils of Earth). By replacing power, we rid ourselves of pointless stats and encourage better build diversity.

This issue is very fixable, it just might take a bit of tweaking to get right. This may include lowering the bleed cap for individuals if condition builds deal too much damage after getting individualized caps, but it can be done.

That’s it for my suggestions. I hope they are heard and I hope this issue can be remedied.

I was doing some testing today. I hit 25 bleeds alone in Heart of the Mists (engineer via shrapnel grenade + shrapnel trait). I can do it again if you want with a screenshot, I took one but I didn’t realize my screenshot folder was full. My point regardless though is that if one player alone can hit the stack, he can prohibit it for any other player with a condition oriented build. Even worse is that I run shrapnel anyway in PvE, but no condition damage, and can hit 15-18 stacks without breaking a sweat, and no bleed duration runes or anything. By just playing the game normally, I limit someone who would be condition oriented (Carrion-armor or rampager-armor sporting, bleed-focused engineer, necro, or warrior, for example).

@Kamahl

I have an engineer too, and I know that 25 stacks of bleeding is completely realistic, and that is a major part of the problem. People who aren’t specced for condition damage can readily achieve numerous stacks of bleeding, hindering players who are specced for damage. The game becomes a hassle for people playing condition builds when other players are constantly overriding their conditions. Even if the 25 bleed stack remains in place, Arena Net should somehow make it so that the highest damage bleeds take priority. This would leave condition duration in the dark though, so ideally the bleed cap should be individualized. This way, you can keep your less damaging bleeds, and condition builds can keep their heavy damage bleeds. It’s unnecessary to hinder condition builds so harshly.

If Arena Net can balance the damage between a condition based offensive builds and power/precision offensive builds everyone can have their own condition cap. Players should never be hindered by other players because of their playstyle, it’s pointless.

So here is another side of the coin look.

What happens when you allow condition damage to be stacked indefinitely, or independently by each player?

You now have outgoing player damage fluctuating on a very large scale depending on if there are lots of condition or very little.

Now think about encounter balances.

Do you adjust the encounters to anticipate very high damage or low damage? In order to not trivialize encounters and keep things challenging and not having overpowered players, game developers often err on the side of harder encounters.

Now think about the build diversity, everyone must go condition damage because the encounters are developed with higher damage output in mind.

With a condition cap ANet can have hard control over the encounters and balances can be made that account for a smaller diversity of outgoing player damage.

Is this right though? Should we be limited so everyone can be the same so that balance is easier? Or will giving us free reign cause us to limit ourselves and only one build is good.

For sure a middle ground must be found.

Was just doing more thinking. The great thing about conditions is that they are not affected by armor and will do full damage to higher level and higher armored targets.

The bad thing about conditions is that they are hard capped and your damage output diminishes when other players stack the same condition. Additionally conditions can not crit.

At initial looks, it looks like conditions are used to supplement low attack versus high armor.

This gives defensive builds that stack toughness and/or vitality and have no room for power the ability to still do damage at a fixed rate. Also this allows us to maintain damage on harder targets.

Question is now, are conditions worth it, and can you get high attack and high condition duration/power and still be effective? Or is it only good if you go one or the other depending on the encounters.

CMF.5461:

So here is another side of the coin look.

What happens when you allow condition damage to be stacked indefinitely, or independently by each player?

You now have outgoing player damage fluctuating on a very large scale depending on if there are lots of condition or very little.

Now think about encounter balances.

Do you adjust the encounters to anticipate very high damage or low damage? In order to not trivialize encounters and keep things challenging and not having overpowered players, game developers often err on the side of harder encounters.

Now think about the build diversity, everyone must go condition damage because the encounters are developed with higher damage output in mind.

With a condition cap ANet can have hard control over the encounters and balances can be made that account for a smaller diversity of outgoing player damage.

Is this right though? Should we be limited so everyone can be the same so that balance is easier? Or will giving us free reign cause us to limit ourselves and only one build is good.

For sure a middle ground must be found.

Its not really like that at all, though. If you build for condition damage, you usually sacrifice raw power to do so. So you’re outputting less up-front damage, in exchange getting damage over time from conditions. Either way, you’re outputting roughly the same damage (average anyway, though I’m sure there are some power builds that win out over condition builds and likewise some crit builds that beat other power builds), just in a different form.

Having per-person conditions would not increase the amount of damage a single player would do, and it wouldn’t cause “fluctuations” based on the number of condition builds. Condition damage wouldn’t (on average) be doing more damage than straight up power attacks.

There would be more damage output than there is now on enemies, but only because conditions right now are hard-capped and very limited. And the damage only increases overall if you factor in a bunch of condition damage characters, if you consider only 1-2 condition damage players and a bunch of power-based characters, the damage would remain the same overall.

You are focusing on a single player, but what I was trying to get at is the bigger picture. If you have a group of 5 people who can stack bleeds/burning/confusion/poison higher than what is currently available then damage potential is increased.

If you have an open world fight where there is no limit to the people available to hit that target, then you could have a few hundred stacks of bleeding with ease.

Depending on what action you would like to see taken you could have 25 stacks per a character, or more if there isn’t a cap and everyone’s bleeds stack together.

Put 8 people together that can stack bleeds and you have a stack of 200 bleeds potentially. Now like you posit, is this a bad thing? Would 200 bleeds increase damage drastically, or would the loss of power/precision/crit damage balance the condition builds? (In every trait list, it seems that power/precision/condition damage/condition duration are easy to obtain together. Crit damage is harder to factor in on some cases)

I suggest that if there is no limit on condition damage then a combined group of people can break the damage per a second limit of melee/ranged hits which are on an animation timer and attack cool downs. Maintain the stacks at a high rate and you have damage ticking consistently and pretty fast.

Individually, conditions are not dangerous. As a group, they can be unbalancing. If conditions have no limit, then they possibly could be reduced in base damage to accommodate for more people using them, making them pointless for solo builds but required for group builds.

Again those are two extremes of the scenario as I’m just debating both sides of the problem. Personally I want conditions to have more impact in group play, but I don’t want to break the system and balance so we need to find the right avenue.

I’m not even sure why there was a cap in the first place. Can anyone explain the reasoning behind it? They didn’t cap the amount of direct damage a foe can take per second, so why cap condition damage? It makes no sense to me.

The arguement that it is unbalanced, I just don’t get. Is it unbalanced if everyone is specced to deal direct damage? No. So why limit how much damage condition builds can do? If a foe is resistant to direct damage they can have high toughness, if a foe is resistance to conditions, they can have condition removers. I really see no need for a cap.

Lets try some numbers:

• Bleed Damage
  2.5 + (0.5 * Level) + (0.05 * Condition Damage) per stack per second

So a level 80 with a build something like this (not an optimal build just stacking condition damage)
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQBRExKiA6BAAAAwnHvVaBhA;TgAAzCpoay0koJbTumkNB
(copy and paste into browser, link will not work on forum due to semicolon in the link)

They would have 1406 condition damage with bleeds that last for 15 1/2 seconds.

2.5 + (0.5 * 80) + (0.05 * 1406) = 112.8 damage per a second of bleeding per a stack.

at 25 stacks that is 1800 damage a second.

Now remove that 25 bleed cap and give it 200 stacks of bleeding, that is 14102.5 damage every second. (remember stacks drop off so how long can 200 stacks be maintained and how many people would it take to keep it at this rate or higher).

if a fight lasts for 60 seconds that is 846,150 damage done.

Now what about weapon skill damage. Not sure what profession/weapon you want to use, but I’ll take a thief as an example because they can do similar numbers of damage in a short time, but with longer cooldowns (a buffer in damage that a high stack of bleed would not have).

Backstab has been seen to do damage from 5-20k in one hit. I’ll go somewhere in the middle and say each backstab will do 10k damage.

Backstab relies on being stealthed so if it is a double dagger thief they can stealth every 6 seconds with offhand (other sources of stealth but making simple example).

So every 6 seconds a thief can do 10k damage. In 60 seconds they could do 10 backstabs.

10*10,000 = 100,000 damage done.

That is 846,150 damage versus 100,000 damage.

Put that in terms of DPS then bleed will do 14,102.5 dps versus backstab will do 1,666.66 dps. So there does seem to be a disparity on direct damage and condition damage if you let bleeds stack too high.

This is not a complete example as there would be other attacks to supplement the backstab damage, and maybe it is not the best damage per a second attack. So if someone has other ideas to compare direct damage versus condition damage please share.
_

In retrospect if you needed 8 people to stack 200 bleeds then lets take 8 thieves doing backstab, that would make the outgoing damage fall closer together. That is around 800,000 for each.

Balanced?

Yes, actually. Note how 800k and 846k are not very far apart.
A condition build and a power build will not output a terribly large difference in dps. Conditions should generally be expected to be higher, since they have to deal their damage over time instead of immediately, but it’s not that big of a difference.
But with the stack limits, condition builds do almost no damage at all when there’s a few of them there, while direct damage is not limited in such a manner.

CMF.5461:

…stuff…

Why did your thief stop attacking while they wasn’t stealthed? My condi thief usually does about 1.5-2k for a full cycle of the slot 1 chain + poison. A crit thief will usually do 2.5-3.5k per slot 1 cycle + poison. Then you have the vulnerability from Cloak & Dagger increasing this direct damage.

Another thing to note, is my condi thief uses traits to gain more ini, so that I can stack more bleeds quickly, so a direct damage thief will most likely do the same. Traits to gain ini on stealth (a 6 ini C&D becomes 4 ini), ini gain on crits, ini gain on signet use, etc. So 1 C&D every 6 seconds is quite low, when a C&D every 4 seconds is easily achievable. So add that and all the slot 1 attacks into the mix, and the difference is not as wide as you make out.

Another thing you missed in your equations is that you are comparing 200 stacks (something no one player can achieve) vs ONE direct damage player.

Lets assume that a good condi player can avarage 20 stacks (show me any video where someone can maintain more than this over 60 seconds and I’ll retract this statement), at a rate of 115 damage per stack. That comes to 2.3k damage per second, plus lets say 1.5k per second from the slot 1 attack, x 60 = 228k damage.

Now we do the math for the direct damage thief. If we average the damage of BS to 6.5k and the C&D hits for 2.5k, that is 9k every 4 seconds, which equates to 2.3k per second. Now lets say we add 2k for the slot 1 skill, which brings our DPS to 4.3k, x60 seconds = 258k damage.

Direct damage is reduced by toughness, which would probably reduce the amounts to be nearer each other.

Condi damage is capped, which means only 2-3 players can contribute, so lets say the full cap of 25 is reached at max damage giving 115 × 25 × 60 = 138k damage, not including the slot 1 attacks.

Now compare that to 3+ direct damage dealers. Do you really think this is a good thing? The damage as it is (without the cap) is not that different from each other, so again I really don’t see the reason for the cap.

Why should you deal condition damage at all?

Let’s say you stack your condies and they are like a minute but the target goes down in 30 seconds. So 30 seconds of your condies (potential damage) are just wasted.

I’m not entirely sure what you mean, raubvogel. If the target goes down after 30 seconds, why would you continue to try stacking bleeds on them afterwards?

It doesn’t take 60 seconds to reach your maximum damage potential, nor does killing your foe in 30 seconds waste it. Bleeding can be stacked very quickly, so it is irrelevant how quickly a foe is killed.

I completely agree with the argument to remove the condition cap. The dev’s are inconceivably handicapping a build type for no reason. It has always been accepted that condition damage would outpace burst damage over a period of time, but not by a gigantic factor.

The trade-off would be that power builds are better for shorter encounters, and against opponents that can remove conditions. The fact that the damage must be placed and maintained allows for more skillful gameplay than burst. To make a build less viable because more people are contributing is the opposite of cooperative gameplay that was promised by the dev’s.

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Yes, actually. Note how 800k and 846k are not very far apart.

I went back and that point myself, but it is balanced only if the number of players it took to reach 200 stacks meets the number of players to do that much backstab damage. So you say that like you were disproving me when I made that point “for” you.

Rin.1046

Why did your thief stop attacking while they wasn’t stealthed?

I pointed out in my post (tldr for some I guess) that I only factored in backstab and there should be more attacks supplementing that attack, this was simply an attack for attack based scenario that isn’t true combat conditions but trying to evaluate how good stacked conditions really are.

Rin.1046

Another thing you missed in your equations is that you are comparing 200 stacks (something no one player can achieve) vs ONE direct damage player.

Go back and look at the bottom of my post about if there were 8 engineers stacking 200 bleeds then if you have 8 thieves doing backstab the damage seems to equal out.

Simply put, I am evaluating “both” sides of the conversation here. The player base that wants conditions to be better (I am included in this) and the developer side who I believe put a cap on conditions to have better control on large group fight balance.

This is all pivoting on how much condition damage can one person actually stack. If one person can feasibly get up to 200 damage by themselves then that is too much. (dont think this can happen with bleeds dropping off at a rate of 2-3 bleeds every 15 1/2 seconds not counting crits and what not).

I think my own posts help disprove the possible dev answer that conditions are too strong if left uncapped. If anything they look really balanced.

Now as far as what Kwishin.5124 said.

Kwishin.5124

The trade-off would be that power builds are better for shorter encounters, and against opponents that can remove conditions.

This is the traditional thought about damage over time versus direct damage. It seems to be the case here too, in that my Guardian can stack burns all day long, but it prolongs the fight for 1 burn tick per a second. It is faster if I just direct damage a target no matter how high I get my conditions to stack.

In the end it looks like conditions were never meant to be a primary form of damage, but a supplemental form of damage. They help get through armor and provide small periods of burst for short times.

Group play allows for conditions to be stacked for prolonged periods of times to maintain steady damage no matter what the targets armor is.

On paper that sounds good. In effect, we as the players get frustrated that we can’t go all out in a group and stack more and more conditions because there is a cap.

Should there be?

What happens to professions that are not able to stack bleeds at all, or just simply not good at condition stacking. Guardian comes to mind in not having access to bleeds and the mechanic of burning buffers it to only happen once a second versus bleeds that will allow each stack to tick for damage at the same time.

Stacking in duration conditions are bad versus stacking in intensity. So a group doing condition damage would only want other bleeders to join possibly?

I really think that caps should be per-player basis (1 stack of Poison/Burn and 25 Bleed each)

Since, as shown, Condition damage for a single person (With dramatically reduced initial damage due to lesser amounts of Power and a lot of Condition applying abilities have lower initial damages) doesn’t do huge amounts more than Direct Damage builds (Of course the math in this thread was constant upkeep of 25 stacks of bleed for 8 people vs 1/8 people spamming a single attack per 6 seconds, not accounting for additional attacks, bleeds falling off for split seconds etc)

This also would be a godsend for anyone who uses Burns as well, since it’s possible for a lot of classes to apply large amounts of burning, yet the way it stacks means it’s unreliable for personal damage in an encounter that has multiple people applying Burn.

Having unlimited stacks of bleed on a target and everyone sharing it would mean that those people who can get more than 25 stacks of bleed up would start doing a lot more damage than direct damage builds (Since people can already get 25 stacks without using %Bleed duration effects) so I do thing the individual stacks thing would work out well (Of course Vulnerability should be shared, otherwise a lot of support debuffing will go to waste)

The simplest way I can say it is:

When playing with other people who do condition damage I would like to do the same amount of damage per second as I do when I am fighting solo.

A thief’s back stab always does the same range of damage regardless of how many other thieves attack the target. Why should the number of bleeds inflicted by my scepter be reduced just because some other characters are inflicting bleeds.

The development team has acknowledged this is an issue (see the Jon Peter’s quote in the initial post of this topic).

My suggestion remains, that to support build diversity they should tell us how and when this will be addressed.

Ulari

+1. However I believe this should only apply to World Event bosses like Champions or Legendaries. If you allow groups to just bust out full conditions on one guy and raise the limit of burning or poison or bleed it just gets out of control. I run a condition thief and I sometimes get upset when I see others spamming conditions when they arn’t even a cond build. I imagine it would be extremely difficult to approach this even so, since enough people doing conditions would just facemelt the boss’s health away when combined with strong direct damage.

All this talk of conditions and no mentioned of all the stuff that are completely immune to condition damage?

@NinjaEd – I do not agree with this. The cap should be removed for everything, not just bosses.

@Taril – This idea could work, though I’m still not sure why you would want to hard cap it anyway, it already has a cap as it is (as in you cannot maintain this level of bleeds anyway). If they capped each player individually, then they should cap how much direct damage a player can produce to even it out, even if that cap is unreachable. Though 25 stacks is more then enough, I still feel the cap is unnecessary.

Providing both forms of damage dealing are equal, I see no reason to limit one of them.

Rin.1046:

I’m still not sure why you would want to hard cap it anyway

From what I can tell by the math, hitting the 25 bleed cap as a condition build does similar damage to direct damage builds.

Maintaining the cap would mean that the introduction of new items wouldn’t or rather shouldn’t change discrepancies between the damage dealt as the cap will stop people from going over a certain amount of damage (If that certain amount of damage happens to be equal to the maximum damage a direct damage build can put out)

Then of course you have to consider: If 25 bleeds currently = A power build and that single players can easily reach and maintain 25 bleeds without building for bleed duration. Then not having a cap would mean that their damage output would skyrocket as they’d be able to build towards 30+ bleeds constantly on their targets (Which would make them the highest damage dealing specs in the game at that point)

NinjaEd.3946:

I imagine it would be extremely difficult to approach this even so, since enough people doing conditions would just facemelt the boss’s health away when combined with strong direct damage.

It would be no different that bringing along Direct Damage builds instead of condition builds.

As it stands now, taking a condition build oftentimes lowers the damage dealt by a group of people by overwriting/being overwritten by other people conditions (Which are often a side effect of Power/Crit builds since so many classes get Bleed on Crit minor traits)

Having Condition builds do the same damage whether they’re in a group or solo would only make bosses get killed the same speed as if you’d replaced them with a Direct Damage build anyway (Who’s damage doesn’t reduce or get reduced by other players, and often gets increased due to higher uptime of boons)

I get what you are saying there, Taril, and I agree with your theory. But providing the damage between the two build types (full specced power & crit vs full specced condition build) is as equal as it can be (taking into consideration the maximum amount of stacks the best condi build can maintain), there really shouldn’t be any need for a hard cap. In fact, as it stands currently, stacking 25 bleeds and keeping that amount of stacks is not an easy task. Very few builds can achieve it and (as far as I am aware) none of them can maintain that level of stacks for long. So as the game currently stands, the damage difference between the two styles is just right, in my opinion, so no cap is needed.

If they introduced items, traits, etc. that increased how many stacks you could maintain, then I would assume they would add things to increase direct damage also, to compensate. If they keep the cap then introduce items to allow you to stack beyond this, it would be highly inefficient.

I would much prefer they balanced each damage style, instead of adding a cap. But at the end of the day, so long as each style can produce similar damage outputs, in all situations (with the exception of rare bosses immune to conditions or bosses that have high damage resistance), then I don’t mind what they do. So long as they are equal, which at the moment they are not.

Rin.1046:

In fact, as it stands currently, stacking 25 bleeds and keeping that amount of stacks is not an easy task. Very few builds can achieve it and (as far as I am aware) none of them can maintain that level of stacks for long.

Theives, Engineers and Necro’s can get up to 25 Bleeds with little effort (Heck my Brother showed my his Thief the other day, within seconds he got 25 stacks of bleed on a target and maintained it throughout the fight, whilst my Necro can easily apply large amounts of Bleeds especially on multiple targets and my Engie causes a lot of bleeding through crits)

This is without using any % Bleed Duration/Condition Duration Runes and Sigils (Which are currently in the game) and often it’s done without putting any points into the Trait line that provides Condition Duration.

This means removing the cap, even without adding in new items/traits to add more possible stacks, would allow people to stack higher.

Rin.1046:

If they introduced items, traits, etc. that increased how many stacks you could maintain, then I would assume they would add things to increase direct damage also, to compensate. If they keep the cap then introduce items to allow you to stack beyond this, it would be highly inefficient.

in a way vulnerability already does that for DD builds

If this is indeed possible, it is no different to the spike damage builds available to some professions (which can take out players in 3-4 seconds). There will always be extreme builds, and if these are not intended Anet will fix them. I have never reached 25 stacks on my condi-thief and certainly could not maintain it if I could achieve it, as it would require blowing all my cooldowns and ini.

Perhaps my build is not very efficient (I have tried a high crit earth sigil build and this only gained me 3-4 extra bleeds), but I can usually get 18 stacks and can maintain 15 pretty consistently. So I would love to know how your brother managed to maintain 25 stacks.

The fact remains though, that in its current form, bleed builds suffer severely when fighting world bosses and this needs to be fixed. Also, my previous comment still stands. So long as both playstyles are relatively equal in terms of damage output, I see no need for a cap. If they are not equal, then it needs to be balanced not capped.

Edit – If they added a cap (on a per player basis like you suggested) to both playstyles, or even if they added a direct damage cap to world bosses, like we currently have with bleed stacks, then I would be happy with that too. So long as each style is equal.

they just need more condition removal skills and to reclassify some of these stacking condition damages to “plague, sickness, ailment” whatever. so someone planning on running into a lot of conditions wont have to worry about 50 stacks of “bleeding” if he can remove them just as quickly and almost as often as they can be inflicted. they should also reduce the damage DOTS do to compesate to that condition removal doesnt become mandatory making blindness weakness and chilled useless (could also reclassify them as hexes to make them more difficult to remove.

currently I run dungeons/fractals as a Condition Mesmer. me and my condition thief generally keep it bleed stacks at a constant 20 to 25. as it is if anyone runs any bleed we pretty consistently hit the cap (so 99%). if it takes 2 people in a 5 man party to hit a cap there is a problem. it seems conditions were also balanced around 1v1. so why was the cap ever party wide? 25 per person sure. but really why the cap? if the goal is to keep them around that number you BALANCE the classes to keep it there. a cap feels like a unneeded band aid. and a party wide one feels as silly as not being able to bleed a box when i can bleed robots…

Just keep the defensive cap per player to address any PvP balance issues, and ensure current encounter balance with condition-dealing mobs remains unchanged. Ensure the non-damage effects of conditions don’t stack. Basically, have players, defending against conditions, act the way they work now. You couldn’t take more than one burn to a single target, poison, only 25 bleeds, etc.

After all, if you’re ganking with enough condition builds you’re going to quickly throw defensive condition removal utilities in to disarray in pvp, as the meta would undoubtedly switch to “condition burst” groups as a bunch more applicable DoTs is much more reliable when faced with an unchanged number of ways to remove them. It’d just be 100% ranged condition spam with a handful of power builds to finish targets because it’d be a much more reliable way to kill people in mass combat.

For PvE I don’t see any problem at all with allowing the damage component of conditions stack per player on enemies. The damage is already comparable to non-condition builds, so the overall effect of encounter difficulty would be unchanged while allowing parties to bring more than a handful of condition dealers, and allowing burn-centric builds to be useful when not alone in their role.

Rin.1046:

@NinjaEd – I do not agree with this. The cap should be removed for everything, not just bosses.

@Taril – This idea could work, though I’m still not sure why you would want to hard cap it anyway, it already has a cap as it is (as in you cannot maintain this level of bleeds anyway). If they capped each player individually, then they should cap how much direct damage a player can produce to even it out, even if that cap is unreachable. Though 25 stacks is more then enough, I still feel the cap is unnecessary.

Providing both forms of damage dealing are equal, I see no reason to limit one of them.

Could you explain the reasoning of removing the bleed/poison/burn cap on everything?
I completeley agree removing the bleed/posion/burn cap for big bosses is needed, thats a lot of damage the cond builds miss out on but for smaller targets? 1 good build can maintain 25 stacks alone, who knows maybe more. That is about equal to a full power build and you’re asking to allow multiple people to drain a targets health beyond control. WvW would become very annoying very fast if everyone could stack max conditions on entire groups. As a condition thief, I see no problem with the cap in small scale enviroments. It’s only for large scale events.

Burning, bleeding and most importantly CONFUSION must be completely reworked for pve. When i hear someone saying “spend some points in power for your shatter confusion build to deal higher damage” makes me sad because confusion scales 100% with cond damage not power. Anet, come on now! You did increase its damage since beta but that is FAR from being enough, so, do something. Hopefully in the next two moths these tree conditions will work as they should have since day one.

NinjaEd.3946:

Could you explain the reasoning of removing the bleed/poison/burn cap on everything?
I completeley agree removing the bleed/posion/burn cap for big bosses is needed, thats a lot of damage the cond builds miss out on but for smaller targets? 1 good build can maintain 25 stacks alone, who knows maybe more. That is about equal to a full power build and you’re asking to allow multiple people to drain a targets health beyond control. WvW would become very annoying very fast if everyone could stack max conditions on entire groups. As a condition thief, I see no problem with the cap in small scale enviroments. It’s only for large scale events.

And then i ask you, if you could explain the resoning behind capping condition damage, when DD is left uncapped and as outlined earlier in this threat the 2 damage forms deal about equal damage?

Nuka Cola.8520:

Burning, bleeding and most importantly CONFUSION must be completely reworked for pve. When i hear someone saying “spend some points in power for your shatter confusion build to deal higher damage” makes me sad because confusion scales 100% with cond damage not power. Anet, come on now! You did increase its damage since beta but that is FAR from being enough, so, do something. Hopefully in the next two moths these tree conditions will work as they should have since day one.

tbh even if you increase confusin dmg in pve by 100000 times it still wont be enough for bad people, the problem is not really the damage, but that mobs uses skills way too slowly so you need extreme good timing and some luck to get 2 hits on a stack, even 1 hit can be hard at times even

GummiBear.2756:

NinjaEd.3946:

Could you explain the reasoning of removing the bleed/poison/burn cap on everything?
I completeley agree removing the bleed/posion/burn cap for big bosses is needed, thats a lot of damage the cond builds miss out on but for smaller targets? 1 good build can maintain 25 stacks alone, who knows maybe more. That is about equal to a full power build and you’re asking to allow multiple people to drain a targets health beyond control. WvW would become very annoying very fast if everyone could stack max conditions on entire groups. As a condition thief, I see no problem with the cap in small scale enviroments. It’s only for large scale events.

And then i ask you, if you could explain the resoning behind capping condition damage, when DD is left uncapped and as outlined earlier in this threat the 2 damage forms deal about equal damage?

Nuka Cola.8520:

Burning, bleeding and most importantly CONFUSION must be completely reworked for pve. When i hear someone saying “spend some points in power for your shatter confusion build to deal higher damage” makes me sad because confusion scales 100% with cond damage not power. Anet, come on now! You did increase its damage since beta but that is FAR from being enough, so, do something. Hopefully in the next two moths these tree conditions will work as they should have since day one.

tbh even if you increase confusin dmg in pve by 100000 times it still wont be enough for bad people, the problem is not really the damage, but that mobs uses skills way too slowly so you need extreme good timing and some luck to get 2 hits on a stack, even 1 hit can be hard at times even

DD isn’t capped. infact many people cry that some professions (thief Q.Q posts) should have lowered damage since they can hit so hard. I bet the reasoning behind this is since if you want high DD you gata sacrafise some defences such as vitality or toughness. Condition builds however can build quite beefy and if good enough maintain high DoT on an enemy. Its a trade off. Conditions have a cap (although it could be raised slightly to some extent) but it should still be there. Just because a few people can’t put their bleeds/confusion/burn etc on a target in WvW or pvp doesn’t mean they should just throw out old ideas and give everyone complete freedom. You generally don’t see a dozen condition builds argeuing over who gets to put their stacks on a veteran or normal enemy as it usually dies before anything of the sort can come up. Champions and Legendaries however…

In a way, direct damage is “capped” by the extent the targets armor value versus the attacker attack value. A hard npc target could have an armor rating much higher than is currently possible by the available gear/stats that players could achieve thus reducing possible damage done. Conditions bypass these mitigation barriers, thus the only cap on them doing damage currently is the stack cap and duration times.

If condition damage is the same as direct damage, there is no need for any kind of cap. Let’s imagine that there is no cap and that the highest bleed stack count that can be achieved by one player is 30 stacks. Now if the damage output of this build is equal to the damage output of the best crit build, why do we need a cap? They deal the same damage, just in different ways.

If one can be built with better defense than the other, then this is a build balancing issue, not an issue from having no cap.

But like I said, so long as both builds output the same amount of damage in all situations, I don’t mind what they do. But as it stands now, condition builds suffer severally when in groups. This includes WvW. Let’s say you have 3 condition builds running around and the majority of their damage comes from bleeds, which if uncapped they could achieve 60 stacks of bleeding. Now any foe they attack will only ever take 25 stacks of bleed damage. Now picture the same situation with 3 uncapped crit builds. Which group do you think would defeat their foe fastest in most situations?

Whenever you have 3 or more condition builds running around together, you will have lost damage potential, while crit builds do not suffer from this at all.

@CMF – Defense against direct damage is armor, protection and evades/blocks. Defense against condition damage is condition removal skills (which removes almost all of your damage output) and condition duration reduction. If this is not equal then these things need to be balanced. Using the cap as a means of balancing things is very unbalanced in groups and not very efficient..

Rin.1046:

If condition damage is the same as direct damage, there is no need for any kind of cap. Let’s imagine that there is no cap and that the highest bleed stack count that can be achieved by one player is 30 stacks. Now if the damage output of this build is equal to the damage output of the best crit build, why do we need a cap? They deal the same damage, just in different ways.

If one can be built with better defense than the other, then this is a build balancing issue, not an issue from having no cap.

But like I said, so long as both builds output the same amount of damage in all situations, I don’t mind what they do. But as it stands now, condition builds suffer severally when in groups. This includes WvW. Let’s say you have 3 condition builds running around and the majority of their damage comes from bleeds, which if uncapped they could achieve 60 stacks of bleeding. Now any foe they attack will only ever take 25 stacks of bleed damage. Now picture the same situation with 3 uncapped crit builds. Which group do you think would defeat their foe fastest in most situations?

Whenever you have 3 or more condition builds running around together, you will have lost damage potential, while crit builds do not suffer from this at all.

@CMF – Defense against direct damage is armor, protection and evades/blocks. Defense against condition damage is condition removal skills (which removes almost all of your damage output) and condition duration reduction. If this is not equal then these things need to be balanced. Using the cap as a means of balancing things is very unbalanced in groups and not very efficient..

Makes sense but as you pointed out simple raising the cap wouldn’t solve much. Removing the cap would probably just get out of control though. In the sense of lost damage, they should rework condition removal skills rather than just let you stack more because what is the point of stacking 30+ bleeds if 1 skill/trait can remove it. Perhaps they could make condition removal work a set amount on stacks/duration rather than completely removing it like:

Bleed- removes 10 stacks.
Vulnerability- removes 10 stacks
Poison- removes 20 seconds
Confusion- I do not have a profession that uses this so I couldn’t speak for those who do use it.
Burn- remove 10 seconds
Stun/daze/knockdown/fear- simply removes.

Thats just an example btw. I’m sure there could be a better approach but still, I don’t believe increasing the cap of bleed or w/e will solve much for smaller targets. Champions and legendaries are easily approached by raising the limit since they don’t normally remove any conditions.

NinjaEd.3946:

Rin.1046:

If condition damage is the same as direct damage, there is no need for any kind of cap. Let’s imagine that there is no cap and that the highest bleed stack count that can be achieved by one player is 30 stacks. Now if the damage output of this build is equal to the damage output of the best crit build, why do we need a cap? They deal the same damage, just in different ways.

If one can be built with better defense than the other, then this is a build balancing issue, not an issue from having no cap.

But like I said, so long as both builds output the same amount of damage in all situations, I don’t mind what they do. But as it stands now, condition builds suffer severally when in groups. This includes WvW. Let’s say you have 3 condition builds running around and the majority of their damage comes from bleeds, which if uncapped they could achieve 60 stacks of bleeding. Now any foe they attack will only ever take 25 stacks of bleed damage. Now picture the same situation with 3 uncapped crit builds. Which group do you think would defeat their foe fastest in most situations?

Whenever you have 3 or more condition builds running around together, you will have lost damage potential, while crit builds do not suffer from this at all.

@CMF – Defense against direct damage is armor, protection and evades/blocks. Defense against condition damage is condition removal skills (which removes almost all of your damage output) and condition duration reduction. If this is not equal then these things need to be balanced. Using the cap as a means of balancing things is very unbalanced in groups and not very efficient..

Makes sense but as you pointed out simple raising the cap wouldn’t solve much. Removing the cap would probably just get out of control though. In the sense of lost damage, they should rework condition removal skills rather than just let you stack more because what is the point of stacking 30+ bleeds if 1 skill/trait can remove it. Perhaps they could make condition removal work a set amount on stacks/duration rather than completely removing it like:

Bleed- removes 10 stacks.
Vulnerability- removes 10 stacks
Poison- removes 20 seconds
Confusion- I do not have a profession that uses this so I couldn’t speak for those who do use it.
Burn- remove 10 seconds
Stun/daze/knockdown/fear- simply removes.

Thats just an example btw. I’m sure there could be a better approach but still, I don’t believe increasing the cap of bleed or w/e will solve much for smaller targets. Champions and legendaries are easily approached by raising the limit since they don’t normally remove any conditions.

could work for intensity maybe to only remove some of it, but could again make stacking conditions a bit too effective, however for duration stacking conditions if you only removed X seconds of it trying to remove those with condition removers would be all but useless tbh

I think this is a leftover artifact from guild wars 1 where there was a hard cap on both regeneration and degeneration (which came from conditions and hexes).

One additional thing to consider is that since there are no healers to constantly rip conditions, it’s pretty easy to find yourself unable to remove conditions. Now there are plenty of arguments for “you have to have condition removal” but everyone gets armor (ie anti direct damage) for free. I still think one of the worst moves made so far was changing “vulnerability” to just increase damage rather than remove armor.

Anytime a game mechanic goes from being “situationally good” based on time and effort to mindlessly always good is a bad thing for the game play. Removing the condition cap would just make conditions always good. Vulnerability got moved from being a good debuff when in a direct damage group to just spam as much as you like and dont worry if you have conditions because it works there too; which makes no sense, how can you become more vulnerable to bleeding?

The other remnant/failure relative guild wars 1 is that boss encounters were always instance based groups that could plan ahead. There were not really any “stack conditions forever builds”. You could keep conditions up but they were more like blind/weakness debuffs, not damage. The flipside was many bosses had awesome mechanics which could transfer all conditions to the party so you had to be careful with timing.

Conditions in guild wars 2 only have a problem because there is a mindless zerg spam in large battles. They could fix the problem across the board by giving champions condition removal and healing but that presents all sorts of other challenges with gameplay design which would make the game better, but probably requires more resources than the game designers have time/money to fund.

I am not saying nothing should be done. I am just saying making condition damage a mindless mechanic where more is always better (especially considering how many advantages it has now) is not the right solution.

An example of why condition damage has a lot going for it (not against bosses because it’s pretty mindless there) but in PvP WvW encounters is, once you apply it to an enemy you are free to do whatever you want while the damage still occurs. You may have to wait for a time to realize the damage output, but you also dont have to worry so much about being interrupted or mistiming a skill which lowers your output. If you die, your damage still happens on the target. So part of the balance seems to be damage output while not being focused on damage. IF the game is meant to force flexibility in dynamic fights, people who over spec for one thing, should be punished. They could spec for more support so that when they see 25 stacks up or a long duration burn, they do something else.

You have a point, phantom. Bleeding does have the advantage of ticking away while you dodge, etc. So your damage output does not drop as much as a direct damage build when being defensive. However, direct damage builds far out damage condition builds to compentate and they do not have the majority of their output stripped in one go. The way I see it is direct damage is an active attack with a mostly passive defense, while condition damage is a mostly passive attack with an active defense. They work in opposite ways, but so long as each sides attacks and defenses are equal then there shouldn’t be a need for a cap. I would rather see them balance these things, which would be more beneficial in the long run, than to simply add a cap.

As to the defense against direct damage being automatic, you are partially right. But unless you spec into toughness, your armour alone will not help you by much, which is not that different from not taking condition removers.

Like I said, if they are not equal then balance them out, don’t add a cap. Or, if they are going to stick with a cap, at least make it fair on condition builds when playing in groups. Don’t punish them for being social.

It’s not just conditions.

It’s AoE too. Lots of AoE skills are capped at a maximum amount of targets.

More notably, in WvW, a trebuchet will only be able to hit a max of 5 players. Even if you nail a mob of 20+, 15+ are going to be immune to the impact.

Personally, I’ve found that the Flamethrower’s 1skill can only hit 3 targets.

It’s all kind of depressing…

ANet needs to remove all these illogical condition/aoe caps so we can really see how far we can go.

Yeah, I agree. AoE caps should be removed too. I can kind of see why they added it, but do not agree with it. If enemy players all want to stand in the nasty red circle then that is there stupid fault.

Also, siege weapons should NOT have an AoE cap (I didn’t know it did). It’s not very siege like if it only effects 5 targets. If they want to stop trebs from wiping out armies unexpectedly, then add a red circle where it will impact, so enemies have a chance to dodge it.

Good conversation… many branches.

But what I was really intending in this thread was to highlight:
— A character’s condition damage is reduced as other characters apply conditions.
— Direct damage does not suffer from this.
— ArenaNet acknowledged this as an issue three months ago
— I and others have shifted away from condition builds (reducing build diversity)

My suggestion is that ArenaNet should share with us how and when they will address this, to keep players from focusing on direct damage builds in challenging PvE or PvP environments.

Ulari

After fighting a dual dagger elementalists with my dual dagger cond thief, I can say 1v1 is quite shaky with condition builds. We could not kill one another. (s)he ran to his veteran guards in WvW when reaching low health but aside from that (s)he would simply switch to water, heal to full health and remove all the conditions I was working hard on to stack. I see where attention is needed versus weaker targets for condition builds as it was simple a draw for how strong cond removal worked. Something along the lines of removing durations/intensity could definitly help condition builds work a bit better in pvp since current condition removal skills/traits are a tad bit too effective.

I’ve been wondering the same thing, I head months ago that they were talking of “fixing” the issues with condition damage. I LOVE my epidemic necro, unfortunately between the fact that my normal group consisted of 2 other bleed based toons and the fact that I couldn’t beat up a box/wall/etc to save my life I ended up switching mains. Very depressing

Kethraveris.6053:

I’ve been wondering the same thing, I head months ago that they were talking of “fixing” the issues with condition damage. I LOVE my epidemic necro, unfortunately between the fact that my normal group consisted of 2 other bleed based toons and the fact that I couldn’t beat up a box/wall/etc to save my life I ended up switching mains. Very depressing

And that is exactly what I am hoping the ArenaNet crew will see. People abandoning enjoyable classes is not healthy for the game… and is very frustrating for the users.

Sharing the plan/schedule for fixing this with the community would be a very good thing.

Ulari

GummiBear.2756:

NinjaEd.3946:

Could you explain the reasoning of removing the bleed/poison/burn cap on everything?
I completeley agree removing the bleed/posion/burn cap for big bosses is needed, thats a lot of damage the cond builds miss out on but for smaller targets? 1 good build can maintain 25 stacks alone, who knows maybe more. That is about equal to a full power build and you’re asking to allow multiple people to drain a targets health beyond control. WvW would become very annoying very fast if everyone could stack max conditions on entire groups. As a condition thief, I see no problem with the cap in small scale enviroments. It’s only for large scale events.

And then i ask you, if you could explain the resoning behind capping condition damage, when DD is left uncapped and as outlined earlier in this threat the 2 damage forms deal about equal damage?

Nuka Cola.8520:

Burning, bleeding and most importantly CONFUSION must be completely reworked for pve. When i hear someone saying “spend some points in power for your shatter confusion build to deal higher damage” makes me sad because confusion scales 100% with cond damage not power. Anet, come on now! You did increase its damage since beta but that is FAR from being enough, so, do something. Hopefully in the next two moths these tree conditions will work as they should have since day one.

tbh even if you increase confusin dmg in pve by 100000 times it still wont be enough for bad people, the problem is not really the damage, but that mobs uses skills way too slowly so you need extreme good timing and some luck to get 2 hits on a stack, even 1 hit can be hard at times even

I know that and i never said to increase confusion damage. Unless they increase it to 100% its not exactly damage i want them to increase but proc on all mobs and if during confusion duration it doesn’t proc one, confusion explodes and deals aoe damage equivalent to the amount of confusion the enemy had the most before confusion expiration. Or the easy way would be to increase confusion duration by 200%.

Nuka Cola.8520:

GummiBear.2756:

NinjaEd.3946:

Could you explain the reasoning of removing the bleed/poison/burn cap on everything?
I completeley agree removing the bleed/posion/burn cap for big bosses is needed, thats a lot of damage the cond builds miss out on but for smaller targets? 1 good build can maintain 25 stacks alone, who knows maybe more. That is about equal to a full power build and you’re asking to allow multiple people to drain a targets health beyond control. WvW would become very annoying very fast if everyone could stack max conditions on entire groups. As a condition thief, I see no problem with the cap in small scale enviroments. It’s only for large scale events.

And then i ask you, if you could explain the resoning behind capping condition damage, when DD is left uncapped and as outlined earlier in this threat the 2 damage forms deal about equal damage?

Nuka Cola.8520:

Burning, bleeding and most importantly CONFUSION must be completely reworked for pve. When i hear someone saying “spend some points in power for your shatter confusion build to deal higher damage” makes me sad because confusion scales 100% with cond damage not power. Anet, come on now! You did increase its damage since beta but that is FAR from being enough, so, do something. Hopefully in the next two moths these tree conditions will work as they should have since day one.

tbh even if you increase confusin dmg in pve by 100000 times it still wont be enough for bad people, the problem is not really the damage, but that mobs uses skills way too slowly so you need extreme good timing and some luck to get 2 hits on a stack, even 1 hit can be hard at times even

I know that and i never said to increase confusion damage. Unless they increase it to 100% its not exactly damage i want them to increase but proc on all mobs and if during confusion duration it doesn’t proc one, confusion explodes and deals aoe damage equivalent to the amount of confusion the enemy had the most before confusion expiration. Or the easy way would be to increase confusion duration by 200%.

hmm, i like the AoE explosion if not proccing once, (maybe for less dmg to amek up for it) would give a choice whether you want a lot of dmg on one mob or a little less on multiple, and then having to time it accordingly

I have seen other posts questioning the logic behind the bleed stack cap (all condition caps basically). There seems to be an overwhelming majority of forum posters who agree that there is an issue.

The rough consensus seems to be that conditions should be limited… but they should be limited for each character applying them rather than a global limit on the target. This allows each character to do the same damage when grouped that they do solo, but a character’s condition damage would not be increased (because each character would still have their current limit on conditions).

I still suggest that the ArenaNet team could make a lot of people happy by announcing how they plan to address condition damage. It has been nearly 4 months since this was acknowledged as an issue, and it has been discussed on the forums since the betas…

Ulari