Guild Wars 2

The next LS patch will introduce a new condition: Toxin. There’s a lot of speculation as to what exactly toxin will be. What I hope it will be, and if not what Anet will do in the future…

A new condition that acts similarly to bleed. It will stack in intensity, up to 25, just like bleed. The damage will be similar, perhaps differing in that it ticks every other second but for more damage per tick, or vice versa.

The idea will be to then replace existing bleeding on many skills across all professions to this new condition, toxin. This will diversify conditions and allow another one to be applied and tracked separately by the servers. This would alleviate the quickly achieved 25 bleed stack in dungeons (hopefully).

Then simple tweaks to the numbers of conditions cleansed for various skills would occur. And since bringing a lot of condition removal is already apparently a part of the meta, not a big change for builds.

Given that torment was introduced recently, this is apparently well within Anet’s ability to implement.

Well, separating bleeding into bleeding and toxin wouldn’t solve the problem. Assuming they’d evenly spread the two new conditions, it’d equal setting the condition cap to 50 instead of 25. Like “we have trouble with our servers enabling more than 25 bleedings, but we can handle 25 bleedings and 25 other bleedings”. The only difference would be cleansening. While conditions are already pretty strong in PvP/ WvW, it’d just make them stronger.
Torment is a way towards what I just described, but it’s far from stackable. The current sources of the new condition is pretty low. It’s not like you see 25 torment stacks on bosses; not even tequatl.

Different condition types for each class would solve the problem a little, at least it wouldn’t reach 25 stacks everytime. Currently nothing can solve condi cap problem completely, they have to rewrite game engine to allow 25 stack condition space for every single player. Condition damage against structures(doors, yellow objects etc.) is also another serious problem.