Guild Wars 2

Ok, so here is what I have come across many time with both Healing over time (HOTs) and Damage over time effects (DOTs).

Damage over time effects

Bleeds stacking damage: These work fairly well, aside from one major problem with them. The stack is total for all players, meaning that you can run an dungeon with a total of 2 engineers or 2 rogues and meet the bleed cap very easily on just about all fights. This also makes bleed damage a poor choice to build for with world bosses because you will just about never get your stacks of bleeds on the target.

Proposed Fix: Allow each player to have their own stacking effect of this or greatly increase the maximum stacks well past 25.

Poison stack duration: This doesn’t work well at all. If more than one player has a poison in their build (most building for condition damage do) the DOT effect will only affect the one person who applied it first on the target. In addition to this, the higher condition damage only affects the first person who applies this, so more than one person in a group who build for condition damage will not benefit this condition.

Proposed fix for stack duration: Add a stacking feature such as bleeds stacking or increase damage with its duration stacking also allow each player to have their own stack as well.

While this does work well for some builds on some professions, play styles such as the Thief’s dagger builds with venom do not well with this at all and often turn away people from using any venom (this as a problem as many others). This also significantly hurts the engineer’s elixir gun build for its very few damage abilities as well.

Burning stack duration: This also doesn’t work well for the same reasons that the poison does not work well.

Proposed fix for stack duration: Add a stacking feature such as bleeds stacking, while this does work well for some builds on some professions, play styles such as the Thief’s dagger builds with venom do not well with this at all and often turn away people from using any venom (this as a problem as many others). This also significantly hurts the engineer’s elixir gun and pistol build for its very few damage abilities as well.

[/b]Proposed fix for stack duration:[/b] Add a stacking feature such as bleeds stacking or increase damage with its duration stacking also allow each player to have their own stack as well.

Just like the poison, this may work with some builds, however the elemental takes a major hit with this build with just about all fire weapon sets.

Healing Over Time Effects

Regeneration: It has the same problem as the Damage over time effects but it is much worse. The scaling is terrible on this ability, it is a very slow healing pulse and the more health you have the less effective it becomes. In general it is not reliable for most support builds to revolve around this.

Every class has a support build that applies this to all party members and it does scale off of Healing. However it is a stacking duration so the first person who applies it, it will stack from that. so the person in the group who is built for more healing will have to apply it first otherwise it is not effective.

The only cases that regeneration will outlast a fight is on boss fights and when you get hit it is to hard for this to be useful. Where it is at right now, it makes most if not all support builds have a very limited utility to a team and worse as a solo.

Proposed fix: While the stacking duration can work in some cases on Damage over time builds, it will never work for regeneration. So my proposed fix is remove the stacking duration completely and make it into a stack similar to bleeds.

Almost all fights are far to short to make use of this and you often get a 30 stack regeneration on a fight that lasts for 5-10 seconds and while you may get a DOT on you during this, the regeneration effect is still to weak to even heal through the DOT effect due to its poor scaling.

Both Healing over time and Damage over time

Item sets: There are very few sets with either of these two or even both of these two.

Proposed fix: Add a build for Toughness/Healing/Vitality for players wanting to play as a tank/support playstyle. Also add a Condition Damage/Healing set as a build for hybrid players.

All Sigils: There are very few Sigils that benefit either HOT or DOT builds, the proc based Sigils will either proc off of hits or critical strikes, there are no Sigils that proc based off of Healing, HOT, or DOT ticks.

Proposed Fix: Simple, just add Healing, HOT and DOT sit based proc Sigils, also add more hit based Sigils as well so less people feel forced into playing Critical Strike based builds.