Guild Wars 2

Everyone knows that currently damaging conditions simply aren’t working right now when used in large groups. I know that are some implementation problems with fixing it.

What I suggest might be an easy way to fix the issue. So here it is:

Make all damaging conditions, that wouldn’t have an effect because of over stacking it, to apply some part of that damage instantly.

/Signed, won’t happen though, since all the zerkers will cry out against it for being op.

I don’t know why ANet didn’t simply have all incoming conditions as part of the same condition stack. That’d solve the “conditions suck in large groups” issue, right off the bat.
Another fix would be to have the dmg/stack a certain % higher, but lower the overall stack cap. Degradation of stacks would occur at the same rate, but it’d at least be easier for a condi-spec to hit cap, and thus, do acceptable dps compared to a power build.

The basic design fro conditions and boons are a mess from the word go.

There are two reasons people don’t take condition geared players into a dungeon:

Reason one: Even with full condition damage gear and extended duration traits/sigils/runes, no one can maintain 25 bleed stacks by himself. And because condition damage is not so great they don’t come near the damage of a zerg geared character, and are therefore a dps loss to a group. So there is no reason to take one.

Reason two: Even if “lets say in theory” they would come near the dps of a zerk geared character, you still wouldn’t take 2 or 3 condition geared players into a dungeon. Because they would be overwriting each others bleeds, which would again lead to a dps loss, giving you again no reason to take them.

But here comes the trick! :
The bleeds mainly come from all sorts of ranged based weapons. I said mainly!
So it (bleed damage) is mainly considered to be a ranged type of damage. With that in mind we can now take a look on bleed damage from a different perspective. In other words we compare zerg range damage to bleed damage and find out that they are roughly the same, meaning that bleed damage is well balanced as a ranged type of damage compared to zerg ranged damage.

But what about bleed damage as melee type? And here is where the dilemma starts to happen. If we take a warrior with a sword and full condition gear/traits/sigils for example, we will see that he is not doing as much damage as with zerg gear with an axe or GS and we all know that. So what can Anet do in this case? If they increase the condition damage so that melee con. dmg can compare to zerg, they tip the range balance off. They could add more condition procs to melee weapons or extend their duration. But that wouldn’t change anything, because others could/would overwrite them and Anet would basically need to extend the bleed cap in order to prevent the overwriting to happen. But they have technical limitations which prevents them to do that?

My solution to the problem:
If Anet has no technical limitations to extend the cap, then they should do so. It would prevent the occurrence of overwriting bleeds of happening in dungeons at least. On top of that they should also add some more bleed procs to melee weapons, or at least extend their duration, or a mixture of both in order to add some dps so that they can keep up with a melee zerg weapons. All this would prevent any kind of dps loss in a dungeon, leaving you a free option to really take any class with you.

If however Anet has technical limitations to extend the cap, than that is fine, don’t extend it. What they should do is revamp the bleed damage and all bleed weapon skills on their current existing model. How? Here is how from a PvE perspective: Reduce the duration of all bleed skills and increase the bleed damage by the same factor, so that the dps will stay the same.

Example: 6 ticks of 100 dmg is 600dmg and is the same as 3 ticks of 200 dmg and is the same as 2 ticks of 300 dmg and is the same as 1 tick of 600 dmg.

As you can see from the example, there is no dps loss in shortening the bleeds and increasing their damage by the same factor. The only difference is that, since they are shorter, there is room for more bleeds, meaning the end of overwriting your party members bleeds and the end of dps loss. This also adds room to add more bleed procs for melee bleed weapons to keep up with zerg melee dmg.

As said before it’s only my own suggestion which would work in PvE but i have no clue if it would work for PvP, because i don’t have Anets damage and balance spreadsheets which run the numbers.

Technical constraints restrict conditions to their current stack counts of 25. Each applied condition is independently tracked server side. Raising the cap means increasing the already existing lag issues.

In my opinion technical limitations are not good balancing tools, and conditions could use a significant change in order to ease server load and encourage more balanced game play. The concept of stacking a condition should be taken under serious scrutiny and shifted to a more fluid design. Instead of stacks that needed independent tracking for each, a system that sets a varied coefficient for one stack as it is applied would be simpler. For example if a bleed is inflicted by a player and this bleed deals 100 damage per second, and then another player inflicts a bleed that does 50 damage per second the coefficient of the bleed condition changes additively to generate the appropriate damage number from bleeding to equal 150. Conditions would then be based off of the amounts calculated at application and be static for the inflicted duration, so gaining might after applying a condition would no longer increase the damage of already inflicted conditions. Also making the duration of a given condition additive would simplify the system positively. If a player applies 10 seconds of bleeding at 100 a second and another applies 5 seconds of bleeding at 50 a second, the target suffers from 150 bleeding a second for 15 seconds. Making the damage and durations additive however may require caps to preserve game balance. Even still, under this reformatted system servers would only need to track the player with the condition and not be constantly updating them with information from their sources. Stack numbers would still be present to indicate the intensity of the inflicted condition, but would no longer be relative to the number of packets bouncing between the server and the players involved in the condition.

Introducing a Condition Resistance attribute that is based on a players Healing Power would also prove to be beneficial in condition rebalancing for WvW and sPvP. A scaling coefficient of say .0001 would translate that 1000 healing power equals 10% Condition Resistance reducing only the damage dealt by conditions since the balance against duration of conditions is already present in condition removal. Ultimately making the whole applied condition experience simpler, easier on the servers, and more malleable to balance in development.

Notably making it simpler in practice is easy but programming this is a presumably nightmarish scenario given the level of code integration.

My necro can bring the best of both worlds because the conditions I bring do not focus on damage. Until this gets “fixed” I would think more people would bring a hybrid build similar to this for party sized groups like dungeons. The problem is that when a condition person groups with other people who do not spec for condition damage but still bring skills that do conditions, these people still use those skills rather than leaving those soley for the “condition” person to apply.

Personally I spec for PPT or PVT and do lots of damage and life siphon as a necro. I dont bother with bleeding or poison anymore. I use blood is power and wells to give myself might and groups of creatures 25 stacks of vunerability. I then add wells to blind them, and now my whole party benefits by being able to take them down faster and take little to no damage.

I know they cannot stack more than 25 due to server lag issues, so implementing where anything over 25 equals to instant direct damage could be a solution for PvE. Another one would be to add a few new conditions like Toxic, Naked, and Main Artery. Make it so 25 stacks of bleeding now transfers to 1 stack of Main Artery. It would take 625 stacks of bleeding to make 25 stacks of Main Artery. Main Artery does x amount of health degen. Same with poison to Toxic and vunerability to naked..etc.