Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing some condition damage based builds lately, and this is something that’s bugging me. Why is there a single, shared condition stack for targets? Why do my bleed stacks get added to a shared 25-stack limit, and then discarded when the stack is exceeded? And with burns/poisons, sometimes the duration is already up to 20+ seconds, so my burn/poison ticks don’t even trigger before the target is dead.

Players doing direct damage don’t have this issue. There is no limit on the number of people that can hit one target, and their damage is not reduced based on that number. To compare it to condition damage, It would be like if 5 people were hitting a target, that target became immune to damage from all other players. seems like nonsense, right? Well that’s basically how it is for condition damage.

The solution for this is to create independent condition damage stacks for each player. I get a stack for bleeds that goes up to 25, player A gets a stack, player B gets another stack, etc. Same for burn/poison stacks with their own durations.

We’ve been barking up this tree since about day 1, and apparently they are “looking into it”.

Vaguely remember a dev response about a bandwidth issue capping it 25

Yep completely agree it’s what Rift had to do in order to adequately handle it all. I remember the launch where a whole ton of people were on a Rift miniboss and the game autoadjusted to the number of player tags but when you tagged the boss you could see a large list of dots and conditions on the enemy boss because every single one of them were counted and no the boss didn’t die right away they went down like any boss usually does when the server handles it properly.

ShinraGuardian.8053:

We’ve been barking up this tree since about day 1, and apparently they are “looking into it”.

And by that they mean they hope we’ll forget about it while they spend all their time adding more and more dishonest RNG items.

This horse has been so viciously beaten it is less than dust at this point.

Technical limitations. The amount of stat tracking the servers would have to do would balloon out of proportion. Not going to happen.

Bear on the job.6273:

I’ve been playing some condition damage based builds lately, and this is something that’s bugging me. Why is there a single, shared condition stack for targets? Why do my bleed stacks get added to a shared 25-stack limit, and then discarded when the stack is exceeded? And with burns/poisons, sometimes the duration is already up to 20+ seconds, so my burn/poison ticks don’t even trigger before the target is dead.

Players doing direct damage don’t have this issue. There is no limit on the number of people that can hit one target, and their damage is not reduced based on that number. To compare it to condition damage, It would be like if 5 people were hitting a target, that target became immune to damage from all other players. seems like nonsense, right? Well that’s basically how it is for condition damage.

The solution for this is to create independent condition damage stacks for each player. I get a stack for bleeds that goes up to 25, player A gets a stack, player B gets another stack, etc. Same for burn/poison stacks with their own durations.

Problem is bandwith, AFAIK.

The limit is set to 25 because each tick of each stack does different damage depending on how much condition damage the player that applied has, so basically for each tick of a condition the game has to communicate to your client 25 bits of data to your client, even if you don’t have anything to do with that condition your client still needs to know how much health is being substracted from the enemy so that it shows you properly. Multiply that for each different kind of condition, and now you have a LOT of bandwith needed to transmit them all to your client, and since it’s a bandwith problem it’s not something they can fix by just throw more servers at it, since the lines that connect your client to their server is beyond their control.

One way I’ve suggested in the past (that was buried on the forum) was to add a new condition, and make it so that every time a condition reaches 10 stacks (for example), then if an 11th is applied, the first 10 are consolidated in a stack on the new condition, where this stack would apply as much damage as those 10 previous ones. I’ve only taken basic programming (hey devs, doesn’t it suck when a non programmer thinks he knows everything???.. ), but the way I see it, if the limit is for bandwith if you make conditions consolidate like this, using bleeds, for example, if you have bleed that stacks up to 10, then consolidates into a new condition that stacks up to 10, then those 10 stack into yet another condition that goes up to 5 you still have 25 bits of data transmitted, but the condition limit is raised to 500 instead of 25 (10×10×5)

easy fix.

additional stacks after 25 stacks converts it directly into direct damage. everyone is happy!

ProxyDamage.9826:

This horse has been so viciously beaten it is less than dust at this point.

Technical limitations. The amount of stat tracking the servers would have to do would balloon out of proportion. Not going to happen.

Why is this different in other MMOs? Is it because of the stacking? The only other MMO I played extensively is LOTRO, and each skill had it’s own debuff. I guess they picked stacking instead of 1 per skill but then had to limit the stacking? (just curious)

Follow up question:

When there are bleeds on the target from multiple sources, which player’s damage is being done? Or is it both?

Example:

Player A puts 10 stacks of bleed for 10 seconds with 1000 condition damage. Player B then puts 2 stacks of bleed for 10 seconds with 500 condition damage.

Would Player A’s tick because their condition damage is higher? Or would Player B’s tick because their bleed was triggered last? Or would they both tick? I AM SO CONFUSED haha

Lohre.9031:

ProxyDamage.9826:

This horse has been so viciously beaten it is less than dust at this point.

Technical limitations. The amount of stat tracking the servers would have to do would balloon out of proportion. Not going to happen.

Why is this different in other MMOs? Is it because of the stacking? The only other MMO I played extensively is LOTRO, and each skill had it’s own debuff. I guess they picked stacking instead of 1 per skill but then had to limit the stacking? (just curious)

Follow up question:

When there are bleeds on the target from multiple sources, which player’s damage is being done? Or is it both?

Example:

Player A puts 10 stacks of bleed for 10 seconds with 1000 condition damage. Player B then puts 2 stacks of bleed for 10 seconds with 500 condition damage.

Would Player A’s tick because their condition damage is higher? Or would Player B’s tick because their bleed was triggered last? Or would they both tick? I AM SO CONFUSED haha

Both tick if I remember correctly. If player A’s bleed is 100/tick and player B’s is 50/tick. The enemy will get 150 bleeding damage per tick.

This is why condition builds really are inferior to direct damage builds. Unfortunate, but true.

And it all has to do with technical issues and server load. That would be a lot more load on the server, and they are not ready to add that expense to their table. A dev discussed it in a post a while back.

Here is the long post: (3 months old….)

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Comfirmed-Nothing-being-done-re-conditions/page/4

defrule.7236:

Lohre.9031:

ProxyDamage.9826:

This horse has been so viciously beaten it is less than dust at this point.

Technical limitations. The amount of stat tracking the servers would have to do would balloon out of proportion. Not going to happen.

Why is this different in other MMOs? Is it because of the stacking? The only other MMO I played extensively is LOTRO, and each skill had it’s own debuff. I guess they picked stacking instead of 1 per skill but then had to limit the stacking? (just curious)

Follow up question:

When there are bleeds on the target from multiple sources, which player’s damage is being done? Or is it both?

Example:

Player A puts 10 stacks of bleed for 10 seconds with 1000 condition damage. Player B then puts 2 stacks of bleed for 10 seconds with 500 condition damage.

Would Player A’s tick because their condition damage is higher? Or would Player B’s tick because their bleed was triggered last? Or would they both tick? I AM SO CONFUSED haha

Both tick if I remember correctly. If player A’s bleed is 100/tick and player B’s is 50/tick. The enemy will get 150 bleeding damage per tick.

Yeah, but the way I remember reading (might be wrong), if player A puts 25 stacks of bleed with 1000 condition damage, and player B has 500 condition damage and tries to put a new stack, that stack is discarded because it’d do less damage than the already existing ones, while at the same time if player C has 1500 condition damage and puts a new stack, then one of the 25 existing stacks is discarded. Probably also takes into account time, though (so that player A with 1000 CD for 10 seconds is taken more into account than player B with 1500 CD but for 2 seconds).

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

easy fix.

additional stacks after 25 stacks converts it directly into direct damage. everyone is happy!

If they can’t do individual stacks then I would go for this.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

easy fix.

additional stacks after 25 stacks converts it directly into direct damage. everyone is happy!

Yes, everyone is happy, except for the developers at ANet, who didn’t think of the idea first, so it doesn’t get implemented.

There have been lots of good ideas tossed around about how to correct this flaw, but it’s really doubtful it will ever be fixed. IIRC, even Colin J. said it wasn’t going to happen.

I only mess around with conditions on one character, a mid-level thief who almost exclusively solos everything. When I do events with him, I swap to direct damage weapons.

Yes, this one’s been beaten to death but will continue until Anet manages damage by player rather than stacks on a mob. The fix is easy: damage and ticks, by player, for condition damage—problem solved.

Yes, Anet did play the technical issues card, but since all other games have solved this problem they’ve had to take a step back. They will eventually fix this as it will continue to be a major problem with the game until it’s fixed.

Thanks for all the info. I agree it’s a major issue :/. I don’t want to have to retrait in groups just because there are already condition users in there. At least it’s being worked on (or was 3 months ago :/).

NumStacksPerPlayer = number of players / 25. If number of players > 25, then 1 stack per player.

That would at least make it fair…

ProxyDamage.9826:

This horse has been so viciously beaten it is less than dust at this point.

Technical limitations. The amount of stat tracking the servers would have to do would balloon out of proportion. Not going to happen.

Oh please spare us this apologetic pathetic excuse. Citing technical limitations when you have no clue how stuff works.
This is far easier solved than many other problems that pester GW2. In fact there are numerous solutions to this that have already been suggested several times such as reducing the number of bleed stacks attacks do or reducing their tick rate but upping their damage. Yes there still need to be caps or limitations but this issue definitely can be solved.

Here is another solution, but it will only work in dungeons or instances. Because the servers can only handle 25 stacks right now, split that into five stacks of five (one for each player in a party), and scale the stacks so that each new stack is a little more powerful than the last, adding enough extra damage per stack so that each player’s five is equal to 25. You can adjust timing and application chance accordingly so that reaching the equivalent of 25 stacks is just as challenging, that way balance isn’t horribly effected. In essence it is kind of a “sub stack” algorithm that can compact a stack of 25 down to 5 while maintaining damage, duration, and difficulty.

This would be meaningless in the open world of course, but at least it would fix the issue in instances.