Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 was designed to support a wide variety of builds AND support large scale cooperative play. While both realities are true and applied to the game, both do not happen at the same time.
Malice, or Condition Damage, is an alternative way for a character to deal in contrast to Power. Abilities based on Power have their own unique variable coefficient, while abilities based on condition damage have variable duration.

The four type of damage dealing conditions (ignoring traited fear) are:

Bleed: Arguably the best condition in terms of damage dealing. It has a low Condition Damage ratio per tick, but usually has very long duration and the most important: It stacks quantitatively.

Burn: Deals a very high burst of damage with high Condition Damage ratio. In compensation, it usually has very short -and only stacks with duration.

Poison: Moderate damage that cuts the regenerating capabilities of the target. Usually lasts for long and stacks with duration.

Confusion: A special condition that damages foes when they attack. Stacks with intensity and is usually applied in moderated quantities (about five stacks) that lasts for a moderate amount of damage.

Both Confusion and Poison are “PvP” conditions that shine at crippling the actions of their targets, while Burn and Bleed are general DPS’ing conditions. While I agree that conditions are fairly balanced for sPvP, WvWvW and solo play, a Malice-based character’s usefulness can be dragged down to close to zero in group play, and it happens because of the way Conditions stack.

Confusion is admittedly accepted as not useful for PvE because it requires the enemy to attack. Your goal is to make the enemy attack as least as you can, by out-ranging, CC’ing, interrupting and chilling. Also, for longer battles, you probably want to reapply your confusion only when the last one has ended/is ending, so you can keep a higher uptime and have a more consistent DPS with it (if you apply 15 stacks of Confusion for four seconds and your and your opponent doesn’t attack once, you dealt zero damage with your condition. But if you keep 5 stacks for twelve seconds, you get a much higher chance of it being triggered. Even works against players, forcing them to either take damage or be controlled for a longer period of time). Poison doesn’t deal enough damage to be your main source of DPS, but it shines at keeping enemies “tagged” (because it lasts long and stacks with duration), making them unable to get out of battle regeneration (you know how frustrating it feels when you end a battle with a Risen Hylek and realize you have 20 seconds of stacked poison duration and no condition removal).

Bleed has the potential do deal greater DPS than Power-based damage. It stacks to 25, which some professions can easily maintain. The downside is that it takes time for it to stack and until then, you don’t deal your maximum DPS, making it very bad at dealing with low health enemies in comparison of the burst damage that comes from Power and Burn.

Burn deals “decent” burst damage, and has a very short duration. Some professions, if dedicated to do so, can apply 100% uptime burn. DPS-wise, it’s worse than bleed at 7 stacks.

Now that we’ve got through what those conditions do, let’s see what’s the problem with them:

Bleed has only one problem, that is common to both of them: When conditions hit their maximum intensity cap (25 for bleed, 1 for burn), any additional stack is gone. It disappears. Only the 25 stacks that deal the most damage remain.

Let’s see how this is a problem in a theoretical situation: Imagine a group event where you’re required to defeat a champion monster. Now imagine that doing this event, there’s two bleed-based grenadier engineers. One of them has a SINGLE POINT of condition damage more than the other. As soon as the first hits his 25 stacks, the DPS of the second drops down abysmally. He’s been trying to get his gear for months, has bleed duration for runes and a rune of the earth on his weapon. He’s not that worried about condition removal because he know his build is good at re-applying it. But now all his 104s that popped at the bazillions from the bleeding enemy now disappear because the first one has a food with more condition damage. How fair is it?

The second hypothesis goes like this: A FT engineer is doing a dungeon. He’s got a pug that has a guardian. This guardian decided to try his amazing 100% uptime burn build. He also has better gear than the engineer. Do you know when the engineer is going to see the damage from his burn? The result of all the time farming karma for his Rabid Temple gear? Never.

Burn also suffers from an even worse scaling problem: It only ticks every second. Do you know how many 1 second burns there are? A lot. Do you know how much do those benefit from having 95% extra condition/burn duration? Zero. In order for condition duration to affect these short lived burns, you have to stack them with more burns, until you get a number that’s >= the next natural number. And if you stack all your burns at once so you can have your cooldowns sooner, do you know what happens? A single condition removal breaks all your dps.

With this problems in mind, here are suggestions for fixes:

For condition stacking, make it so that, against monsters:

Bleeds: Maximum stack is 25 + (number of nearby players x 5), being the maximum 25 from each player. It’s still bad for those two bleed engineers if they’re the only two DPSing, but being able to get to 50 when there are 5 players nearby, or 75 with 10 people seems feasible. This way you can increase your “number of bleeders per group” to a reasonable amount (that is higher than 1).

Poison and Burn: Maximum stack is equal to the number of nearby players, being the maximum of one stack of intensity per player. This way everyone can play the way they want, deal the damage they want without worrying about never seeing their damage because other player has more condition damage.

Another fix for Burn: Make it so it ticks every .5 seconds, so builds with 50 Condition Duration can benefit from it.

And that’s about it! Hope to hear from Anet and opinions from other players.

The devs have stated that the reasoning behind capped stacks is bandwidth issues. Keeping track of more conditions costs them a lot of money.

This is why the stacks are limited, and also why a lot of condition durations are short.

AntiGw.9367:

The devs have stated that the reasoning behind capped stacks is bandwidth issues. Keeping track of more conditions costs them a lot of money.

This is why the stacks are limited, and also why a lot of condition durations are short.

But it doesn’t make any sense how showing and adding a couple of numbers to their script could drastically increase bandwidth, seeing the servers already have to calc each condition applied and how much condition damage the applier have at the moment, every second, so it can decide which ones are in effect.

Back in the day, I used to play Ragnarök Online. The game was really famous in my country and it was very common to see dozens of guilds in every castle. If anyone conjured an AoE spell at the head of 200 people, it would calc the damage based on the magic resistance, flat and fixed of each one of them and apply the damage instantly. Now imagine 50 people spamming their AoEs at the castle doors, (which we called “pre-casting”) while hordes and hordes of players would try to run pass it. My guess is that if a game from 2002 could do it, Guild Wars 2 that probably has some pretty amazing codes regarding positioning of the players in a 3D environment and projectile scanning could add a few more stacks of damage and increase the frequency of appliance of burn damage.

The official explanation:

There’s a cap on condition stacks of 25. In a scenario where you have two thieves attacking a boss and one of them can achieve a stack of 25 by themselves, the other one essentially becomes useless because they’ve got nothing to stack on. Is anything being done to address that to make them less redundant?

Colin: Currently no. Interesting statistic for you: every condition in the game costs server bandwidth. ‘Cause we have to track how often the condition is running, what the duration of that condition is and what the stack is. So the more stacks we allow, the more expensive it gets because we’re tracking every additional stack on there. And so we could say, you can have infinite stacks. Number one: that becomes really unbalanced. But number two: it’s actually extremely expensive for us, on a performance basis. That’s one of those weird, kind of back-end server issues that can help make game designer decisions regardless of what you want to do with it.

I think you may have confused some things.

For example bleeds stack in a first one on first one off fashion, if player A applies 25 stacks of bleeds then player B applies 10 stacks you now have 15 stacks from player A on and 10 stacks of bleeds from player B on the target, irregardless of how much condition damage people have.

What your working on is how the duration ones stack, if player A puts 5 seconds of burn on the target with 200 condition damage and player B then puts on 3 seconds of burns with 201 condition damage player B will get the damage ticks for the first 3 seconds then afterwards player A will recieve the ticks for the remaining 5 seconds.

However if during the first three seconds player B then applies another 3 seconds player B then gets 3 more seconds of having the damage ticking before player A’s damage will happen, if player B then keeps his own burn up permenately player A will never see the damage from his 5 seconds of burn happen.

As for the condition duration issue, bleed, poison, burn and fear all only do their damage every second so they all suffer the same issue, however bleed potentially suffers the most as its duration doesn’t ever stack so a 1 second bleed with +50% duration increase will only do 1 tick ever, while a burn can potentially be reapplied to give a total of 3seconds duration allowing for 3 ticks. And all conditions have similiar variances in durations from different sources.

As for the solution to this diminishing returns from condition users… well it all comes down to how the game is coded and how much effect increased numbers take, though how conditions are that much worse than people hitting constantly with direct damage attacks… welll… yeah.

For stuff like burns, your already tracking individual conditions at the same time, all would be needed is to tick them in tandem, player A puts a 10 second burn on that ticks for 100 damage, player B puts on a 5 second burn that ticks for 50, for the first 5 seconds both player A and player B see their burns tick, for the next 5 seconds only player A see’s their damage tick.

On the icon on the enemy Player A see’s a 10 second burn while Player B see’s a 5 second burn, once player B’s wears off he just see’s a burn symbol denoting that the enemy is still burning but not from his own burn.

For bleeds one big change could be to add the damage up so if your bleeds are hitting for 100 damage instead of seeing 25 hits of 100 every second you instead see a single tick of 2500 damage every second, then you basically do the same the duration stacking.

You see your own personal stack of bleed number on the icon (if you have none you just have a bare bleed icon letting you know the target is bleeding but not from your attacks) and then they tick in tandem.

In total that wouldn’t be a massive increase in numbers over say people utilizing stuff like whirlwind attacks or spamming fast hitting autoattacks the main issue would be the big encounters like claw of jormag which would need some thought perhaps converting conditions on these specific encounters into singular direct damage hits (which hundreds of which are already happening every second)

But when it comes down to it, its upto anet to figure out wether they wan’t to spend time working on any sort of way to make condition builds work in a better way within their own coding and resources etc etc which is unlikely as stated by colin, we just got to get used to condition builds not really being all that viable.

@Dasorine
You’re right, but I know how it works.
Let me use your own example:
Player A puts all his burns that combine into 20 seconds for 100 damage per tick. Player B does the same, but his only deals 50 damage per tick. The monster died in less than 20 seconds.
How much damage player B did with his burn?

Also, bleeds have much higher (and even) durations (you can get Shrapnel Grenades to apply 4 stacks every 4 second for more than 20 seconds) and can easily be reapplied, so the DPS lost from the fractions of seconds that didn’t tick aren’t proportionally as important.

@AntiGw
Now that is really silly.
“Number one: that becomes really unbalanced.”
So if 10 players deal 1000 damage in a course of 10 seconds, it’s unbalanced. But if 10 players deal 1000 damage in 1 second, it’s totally fine. And it’s not like it needs to be infinite: Just raise the cap proportional to the number of players attacking.

“Interesting statistic for you: every condition in the game costs server bandwidth. ‘Cause we have to track how often the condition is running, what the duration of that condition is and what the stack is. So the more stacks we allow, the more expensive it gets because we’re tracking every additional stack on there. "

So if you do all the calculations for condition damage and duration (otherwise, you wouldn’t know which one are in effect and which ones are in queue. Also it gets updated every second, confirmed by getting might on yourself and seeing that the dot damage increases), it’s bandwidth free, but if you apply it to the enemies (enemy health – damage you just calculated), it costs a truckload of money.

EDIT: Just read the rest of the interview. Thank god for this:

One of the things people have been talking about is having their own individual stack limit that they can apply, rather than an infinite amount on one boss.

Colin: Yes, it’s tough. It’s certainly something we can look at, it does drastically change the way that the professions play, right? It does say “you can no longer stack all of one type of condition”. It might change the skills on each profession if we were to do that. It would encourage a little more group play to some extent. It’s not something we’re really talking about, but it’s an interesting idea. I’d have to think a lot about what the effects of that would be overall, but it’s an interesting… interesting idea.

It wouldn’t encourage a little more group play, it would encourage it by a lot.

“it does drastically change the way that the professions play, right?”
Sure it does! And that’s an awesome thing! You’re not Riot Games, ANet, you don’t need to force a meta. Let people have more diversity!

Cleyran Knight.8291:

@Dasorine
You’re right, but I know how it works.
Let me use your own example:
Player A puts all his burns that combine into 20 seconds for 100 damage per tick. Player B does the same, but his only deals 50 damage per tick. The monster died in less than 20 seconds.
How much damage player B did with his burn?

Also, bleeds have much higher (and even) durations (you can get Shrapnel Grenades to apply 4 stacks every 4 second for more than 20 seconds) and can easily be reapplied, so the DPS lost from the fractions of seconds that didn’t tick aren’t proportionally as important.

Well as I said, if player A keeps his up until the mob dies currently player B will never see any damage from his burn.

As for the bleed durations, theres a fair few 2s bleeds and due to the non stacking of durations on it all those fractional seconds are gone unlike duration stacking ones.

There are, as far as I am aware, no burn skills that only apply a single instance of 1s burn which means unless a target happens to dodge away or such those fractional seconds will rarely go completely to waste for them and while they don’t get bleeds higher base duration the fact that bleeds cannot be extended themselves by reapplication (rather they just get replaced with fresh versions) it sort of works out fairly even.

But all in all, it is pretty ridiculous/annoying that condition builds get this fairly massive downside while any other style of build doesn’t.

Cleyran Knight.8291:

Burn also suffers from an even worse scaling problem: It only ticks every second. Do you know how many 1 second burns there are? A lot. Do you know how much do those benefit from having 95% extra condition/burn duration? Zero. In order for condition duration to affect these short lived burns, you have to stack them with more burns, until you get a number that’s >= the next natural number.

Just like to point out:

Due to the way that all conditions tick at the same time (Based off the first condition applied)

Applying a 1.5 second burn 0.5/0.4/0.3/0.2/0.1 seconds before the next tick occurs will actually give 2 ticks of damage. So having 99% condition damage when using 1 second burns is not useless (You end up with a large chance for the second tick if there are currently conditions on the target)

Cleyran Knight.8291:

EDIT: Just read the rest of the interview. Thank god for this:

One of the things people have been talking about is having their own individual stack limit that they can apply, rather than an infinite amount on one boss.

Colin: Yes, it’s tough. It’s certainly something we can look at, it does drastically change the way that the professions play, right? It does say “you can no longer stack all of one type of condition”. It might change the skills on each profession if we were to do that. It would encourage a little more group play to some extent. It’s not something we’re really talking about, but it’s an interesting idea. I’d have to think a lot about what the effects of that would be overall, but it’s an interesting… interesting idea.

It wouldn’t encourage a little more group play, it would encourage it by a lot.

“it does drastically change the way that the professions play, right?”
Sure it does! And that’s an awesome thing! You’re not Riot Games, ANet, you don’t need to force a meta. Let people have more diversity!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Comfirmed-Nothing-being-done-re-conditions/page/4#post1505411
;(