Guild Wars 2

I’m not going to even start with bleed stack caps or anything like that.

Why is it so difficult to get good condition stats on armor? Rabid? Shaman? A medium armor class needs to farm karma and dungeons in order to get gear with the appropriate stats…let alone its impossible to get jewelry.

This does not allow build diversity.

Look at an engineer who uses P/P or P/S
pistol 1: bleed
pistol 2: poison
pistol 3: blind/confusion
pistol 4: burn
pistol 5: immobilize

shield 4: reflect/push
shield 5: block/stun/daze

So what MF gear do I want to pick in order to help acquire mats for my legendaries? the POWER/precision or POWER/condition? Why do I need a useless stat if I want to play pistols? Okay okay fine use a rifle and grenades, they scale well with power.

Also a lot of condition builds rely on precision in order to proc more conditions (Sigil of Earth, traits, etc…) so I need some precision with my condition damage. I guess that means the best gear is Rampager’s gear since its the only one with condition and precision…and POWER…

Okay okay so enough about the difficulty of getting good condition gear…lets say we farmed the karma and dungeon tokens to get the correct stat gear…and wear our partially useful jewelry…its time to…break inanimate objects which are immune to condition damage! I mean seriously it takes tookittenlong and most condition builds just pick up their power weapons and break stuff or they just ignore breaking any inanimate objects.

So coming from someone who doesn’t have anything left to do in game besides farm mats for my legendary weapons, why shouldn’t I just play a power based build or a class that uses power builds that are fun for me to use?

Good condition gear is too hard to acquire.
Condition MF gear sucks.
Good condition jewelry does not exist.
Conditions suck against inanimate objects.

Can we have a change?

Condition damage is inferior in scaling to normal damage.

Normal damage scales with power, precision, and crit damage. The three stats multiply, the more of one you have the more valuable each point of the other two becomes. The scaling is cubic.
Condition damage scales with Condition Damage. It’s linear scaling.
The max Power you can get is identical to the max Condition Damage you can get. So at linear scaling they’ll do the same damage.
Now, normal damage is reduced by armor, while condition damage isn’t, but armor scales linearly (like condition damage) and not cubically (like power) so power will quickly overcome armor as stats improve.

SAI Peregrinus.8410:

Condition damage is inferior in scaling to normal damage.

Normal damage scales with power, precision, and crit damage. The three stats multiply, the more of one you have the more valuable each point of the other two becomes. The scaling is cubic.
Condition damage scales with Condition Damage. It’s linear scaling.
The max Power you can get is identical to the max Condition Damage you can get. So at linear scaling they’ll do the same damage.
Now, normal damage is reduced by armor, while condition damage isn’t, but armor scales linearly (like condition damage) and not cubically (like power) so power will quickly overcome armor as stats improve.

I’ve noticed power is a % increase on your base dmg (from some testing in the mists), while condition dmg just adds a flat amount to your base condition dmg.

It was sort of like, at 80 with just base Power, every 100 power is slightly over 10% increase to your base dmg. Where as 6% of your condition dmg stat is added to bleeds per tic. Doubling your base of 43 bleed dmg won’t take as much condition dmg as it would to double your base dmg with power. (900 power vs +53 to bleeds for 900 Condition Dmg)

I’m like 90% sure, but I could be wrong. =p

Of course Power/Crit can scale harder, but that just means Power/Crit is more viable for going glass cannon, Condition Dmg will usually have to have some tanky stats, or even extra Power and still match dmg (depending on the class/wep/spec). Then there are a few things that apply conditions on Crits so Crit has some minor condition scaling as well.

Then there’s the difference of, how many conditions can you apply versus how much direct dmg your weapons can put out. And then there’s the fact that conditions ignore toughness. High toughness, low HP targets, direct dmg starts to reduce in effectiveness vs conditions.

It’s not that simple.

To the OP, condition dmg in this game is poorly designed as far as PVE goes. Just in the sense that their goal was to not have players conflict with other players, but instead work in harmony with one another. The condition caps in PVE contradict this. Not to mention just how Old School this problem is. =p

It could’ve been made seperate for each player, though probably was just was too messy to deal with. As far as arguments about condition dmg becoming overpowered in PVE if the caps were removed, adjusting mob HP vs Toughness could balance it out easily, but again, probably too much effort.

It would be nice to see a portion of your Condition Dmg act as Power when it comes to attacking objects, very similar to League of Legends with Ability Power turning into Attack Power for Turrets. It can really suck being a condition dmg spec in pvp against trebs/gates, or even some events in PVE.

Runes of the Undead can help with condition bonus, but with its fairly weak PVE performance and the ease of condition removal in PVP it is not really worth it. I have condition damage bonus buffs in every slot and trait option plus maxxing out my condition damage bonus trait and the damage is still sup par compared to my other options.

I use a condition dagger/dagger thief in PvP and PvE and it feels good in both.

It seems a little slow, but the damage is actually pretty ridiculous.

If anything gets to 30% or lower vs me (pvp or pve), it’s already done for. Even if you get away, I can shadowstep or steal my way back and drop another set of stacks of bleed and let you bleed out.

After setting my traits to let me get back more initiation and also start a fight with more, there was a huge difference in my condition power. Even if they knock off the first few stacks, I can immediately stack them back up. Combined with a fair amount of crit and power, the damage is amazing. If you use Ravager, you also get a good bit of vitality.

There’s also no hidden cap on enemies hit with Death Blossom (that I’ve seen).

It might not be for everyone though, my friend has been messing with a condition Necro…

He swears a lot now. XD

edit Also, as far as I know, condition damage ignores defense other than traits or skills that specifically effect CD.

I never said condition damage is bad…its pretty good actually…its the ease of obtaining gear for your character.

Want to get some power tanky healing gear? Just craft up some Cleric’s gear.

Want to get some condition tanky healing gear?…..yep…

Want to make some power glass cannon MF gear? craft some Explorer’s

Want to make some condition class cannon MF gear?…yep…

Want to make any piece of jewelry that doesn’t have power on it?…ha….

Lets go to WvW and break down the walls so we can capture the fort! Let me just buy this battering ram while the warrior just needs some 100b action.

Condition builds are strong but its difficult to find gear that is built around condition damage. Considering that every single piece of jewelry has power on it, I assume the game designers intended that every single class utilize power in some way.

Then again…why give engineers the pistol anyway? It scales horribly with power and every single skill utilizes a condition.

A condition build needs precision in order to proc more conditions:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Incendiary_Powder
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sharpshooter
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Precise_Sights
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil_of_Earth

Only Rampager’s gear gives precision and condition damage, so if you are an Engineer for example that chooses to use condition damage…you are forced to wear Rampager’s. You are forced to be a glass cannon. You are forced to have power in your stats even though you do not need it. Wear another set of gear, become more tanky, have your low crit rate so that all your traits and sigils become borderline useless. Then just keep in mind that power build that does not need to sacrifice anything in order to be strong.

what about instead of applying the usual condition, a condition attack on an object applies a unique condition effect? That way you could balance the condition damage on an object around how effective that one condition is rather than what bleed does to players or whatever.

forum was bugged, can be deleted.

k, didn’t work.

@Jon
Good to know. Are you also planing to change the Bleeding cap or at least make Bleeding stack for each player individually?

Or, if you want to keep the caps as is… have the most powerful effect take priority.

Hopefully not, this would have a devastating effect on those which inferior gear.

Have all the condition damage be converted to a special “burning” effect on the object.

The object will literally be set on fire and lose health like any DoT condition would.

Conditions need to crit IMO

Moonthrower.1406:

Or, if you want to keep the caps as is… have the most powerful effect take priority.

See, that’s not a good idea. If I go as a scepter and use either Fire or Earth builds, they are all about conditions, fire being burning and earth being bleeds. Fire can do some decent direct damage, but earth is really all about condition damage.

The way you mentioned is how it works already and is not all that great. If I go with earth it is all about bleeds, very little direct damage. I like Earth when playing solo as I like getting 15-16 stacks of bleeds up and watching the numbers tick away. But if I’m doing a group event and there are 20+ players there, there will be 25 stacks of bleeds up non stop, but the only damage that I will do is from the direct damage portion as my bleed damage is overwritten by someone who has more +condition damage. Yes, I could swap to fire/lightning, which is what I do, but the way it works is horrible.

The only possible thing I could see happening is either allowing multiple stacks, maybe just for PvE and not PvP as it could cause balance problems. You really can’t have multiple condition players fighting the same big boss because of this and it’s really limits build diversity.

If I remember correctly they do/did the same thing in Aion, at least at the start as I don’t know if they changed it. If you are fighting a dragon it makes the fight take a LOT longer as well as there are usually 50+ people fighting them, if not more, but only the top +condition damage player gets to actually have his conditions do damage, everyone else is out of luck.

@Artorous

Nononononono, sorry, you misunderstood.

Bleed cap is what, 24? If MY bleeds are stronger than YOUR bleeds, (which they are, as I’m condition Ranger) then my bleeds overwrite your bleeds.

Same with fire, but separately; same with poison, but separately.
We’re talking about the same idea, I think… WoW did it, too.

But with this game, I think each person needs their own stack.

Bleed cap is 25, and I do agree that each person should have their own stack for their own effects, but the major downside to that would be that a lot of the bosses and such in the game would be downed far easier if each person could pile on their own set of 25 bleeds. If they were to give us individual stacks, the number of stacks would be dropped to a lower number, like 10, and that would make builds that use bleeds (like a Warrior who uses Criticals and a Sword to drop Bleed damage quickly) weaker because they’d cap out their damage output easily and have to spend more time wearing down the enemy using conventional means.

My idea would be to make the base cap for Bleeds, Confusion, and Vulnerabilty stacks be 25. Then, once the enemy is over level 25, the number of stacks they can hold of each of those three statuses increases to equal their level (i.e. 80 stacks of Bleeds for a L80 enemy). This way, players can still apply bleeds for a bit before they cap out, and it doesn’t get to out of hand to make bosses pushovers with conditions. The main reason I focused on the three conditions that I did is because they stack intensity (or each stack deals damage), where as most of the other ones stack duration.

And so far, I haven’t had any survivability problems while wearing Rampager gear. Then again, I’m not even in the L80 areas yet… and I am a Warrior… and it could be that I’m specced to allow me to regen health quite easily while still using bleeds as damage output… So yeah, my opinion is probably nil on this subject, but at least I figure it wouldn’t hurt to at least to speak.

Most chars can’t get to a full stack of Bleeding, much less they can keep them up for more than a few seconds. And even if they could, 25 Bleedings are just ~3k-3.5k DPS (with condition gear), which isn’t that much compared to what the same number of chars that do direct damage would dish out.

If there is a limit for Bleeding it can’t be below 250 since there are so many professions and builds that use Bleeding as a side effect. Don’t forget, you fight world bosses with raids of 30+ players (often far more) and it takes less than 3 to reach the Bleeding cap.

If it tends out, that bosses go down too fast it’s still possible to increase their HP. But I seriously doubt that this would be necessary.

Bosses will not be down easier without bleed caps.

Someone made a really good post the other day about this, but I can’t find it now. Anyway, you have to keep in mind that bleed ticks do less damage than raw warrior damage. Essentially, if a warrior does 1000 damage per second with just his auto attack, and a condition engineer ticks at 500 damage per second with his bleeds, then his ability to stack his bleeds is the only thing that brings him up to the warrior’s raw damage.

Condition builds do not do high initial damage. Without the ability to continue placing bleeds, they lag far behind other classes. Currently, the bosses are taking far too long to go down, because some of the people attacking it are not able to do a proper amount of damage to it.

had a similar prob with this with my guild on a Sorrow’s Furnace Story Mode run. 4 of us were traited for condition damage. The whole dungeon went fine except for one golem that could pull conditions off all the time. We did this a few weeks ago when we were still under the impression that you could take a team of skilled players and run whatever you want. We did, and that one boss was a total pain in a dungeon that was otherwise a walk in the park. I am glad Jon thinks it needs fixing because I couldn’t agree more.

@Moon. The way I read your post was you wanted to keep it the way it was now, which is the person with the highest +condition damage gets the DoT up. I do agree that there should be separate stacks per person because if you made a condition build you are borderline useless if someone else has more + Cond Dmg. I don’t think that should be fair.

Now, the way it is currently set up is completely OK in PvP. I think it should remain that way. Just needs the change in PvE.

For those saying condition builds aren’t worth it because they do less damage, who cares? I like seeing the geyser of numbers popping off a mob when I have all my bleeds going. You should be able to spec the way you want but the current set up leaves very little choice. You can have 1 condition player and everyone else needs to be direct damage. Limited choices aren’t fun.

Warjin.8942:

Conditions need to crit IMO

I think the better solution would be to add more “condition on crit” procs instead.

nachtnebel.9168:

Don’t forget, you fight world bosses with raids of 30+ players (often far more) and it takes less than 3 to reach the Bleeding cap.

This really is a huge problem and is very constrictive of player choice.

There are condition damage based builds, with accompanying weapons and traits, available for all 8 professions. It’s not some small niche mechanic that only a few players are likely to be utilizing. Yet multiple players built for heavy condition damage will constantly overwrite and cancel out each other’s effects, especially in PvE.

If I’m playing a direct damage build, I can still hit my target at full effectiveness even if there are 20 other players there all doing the same thing. However, if I’m playing a condition damage build, I may have half or more of my damage cancelled out by just 2 other players present trying to do the same thing.

This really makes condition damage builds seem unappealing. Why would I want to invest a ton of resources into crafting a full set of condition damage equipment just to see it not work at full effectiveness much of the time?

Stice.5204:

This really is a huge problem and is very constrictive of player choice.

There are condition damage based builds, with accompanying weapons and traits, available for all 8 professions. It’s not some small niche mechanic that only a few players are likely to be utilizing. Yet multiple players built for heavy condition damage will constantly overwrite and cancel out each other’s effects, especially in PvE.

If I’m playing a direct damage build, I can still hit my target at full effectiveness even if there are 20 other players there all doing the same thing. However, if I’m playing a condition damage build, I may have half or more of my damage cancelled out by just 2 other players present trying to do the same thing.

This really makes condition damage builds seem unappealing. Why would I want to invest a ton of resources into crafting a full set of condition damage equipment just to see it not work at full effectiveness much of the time?

direct damage build in large group content, even in small party content only gets better. the more fury/might/banners/etc I have from other ppl the more my 100b hits. look at traits like “more damage for every boon” or more damage for every condition on target too.
so 30 direct damage players = around 40 x “solo” version of them.
with conditions we have 30 = 3.

Where are the heavy armor Precision/Toughness/Condition Damage shoulders? Did I just overlook them when checking the temple vendors?

Also, I like the idea of converting a portion of CD to power for purposes of hitting objects (ie the League of Legends solution someone mentioned above).

yeah. condition damage is proving to be WAY underpowered. Or, technically, direct damage and CRIT is overpowered.
But there are a few condition damage design problems. duration and how it works. cond stacking with multiple players. and % damage buffs not effecting cond damage.

+duration is the closest thing to actual scaling for it.
But, it seems there is a giant problem with this. It only works in whole second intervals.
example. if you have a 1s burn, or 2s bleed. which many classes have, as you might note.
A +10% rune, trait or whatever, will make it a 1.1s burn, or 2.2s bleed. The debuff will appear on the target for the 1.1s, and 2.2s. But damage will only be the same as if it was simply a 1s burn, or 2s bleed. Presumably, -10% duration via food or melandru runes would likely completely cripple such short duration conditions. do the various 1s burns not tick any damage at all being reduced to .9s?

Damage scaling traits not effecting condition damage. I don’t understand this. As an engineer, examples. 5% damage to bleeding targets. 1% damage boost for every boon on you. 5% damage when end is not full, 5% damage to immobalized foes, etc.
5% damage of force sigil. These only effect direct damage.
Vulnerability, a condition, is no longer tied to armor, but just a1% damage debuff, also only effects direct damage.
Exotic weapon direct damage, is scaling with higher stat totals, AND higher weapon damage.

How about removing the bleed cap, but having each stack of bleeding above 25 do less damage? For example stacks 26-30 only do 50% damage, 31-35 do 40% damage and so on.

There’s an armor type that has precision/toughness/condition damage. Along with undead runes which increase your condition damage by 5% of your toughness. Along with the food that increases your condition damage by 6% of your toughness and 5% of your vitality.

I do agree with the stacking issues, but getting armor and weapons isn’t very hard at all. The accessories I just use precision/condition/power since you already get all the toughness from your armor, weapons and runes. It’s not a bad thing to have your normal attacks hit for a bit more on top of having condition damage.

I never said precision/toughness/condition(Rabid) damage armor doesn’t exist, it is just significantly harder to get than precision/toughness/power(Knight’s).

Rabid gear selling on trade post (this gear can NOT be crafted):
(light)Khilbron: 6~12g per piece
(medium)Vatlaaw: ~5g per piece
(heavy)Galrath: 2.5~4.5g per piece

Alternatives to the above gear can be bought from karma merchants in Orr for 42k a piece or certain dungeon rewards for tokens.

Knight’s gear on trade post:
(light)Exalted: 2.5~3g per piece
(medium)Emblazoned: 2.5~3g per piece
(heavy)Draconic: 2.5~3g per piece

All Knight’s gear can be crafted by their respective profession at level 400 as well as Knight’s jewelry.

Rabid can NOT be crafted on jewelry…but it can be bought in the trade post or from Karma vendors at MASTERWORK at best.

As for jewelry, power scales horribly for certain weapons and other stats would benefit significantly such as toughness for example. Increase survivability by 25% or increase attack power by 5%? I’ll play the numbers and take the 25% more survivability.

What’s needed is some different stat mixes, some new insignias.. maybe using 4 and 4 or 10 and 5 or 3 and 2 instead of 8, 15, and 5 for the various insignias.

Stat mixes I think are needed:

Condition Damage
Precision
Vitality

Condition Damage
Precision
Magic Find

Condition Damage
Precision
Toughness

Condition Damage
Toughness
Vitality

Condition Damage
Vitality
Magic Find

etc.

Not many people get use out of both power AND condition damage on the same set. Thieves can, because they might be like me… using a sword pistol (power based) but both of your ranged options require some condition damage in order to function. (Carrion’s if you use stealth a lot and get 100% crit chance out of stealth.. rampagers if you need precision for crit.), but Precision and Condition Damage are often complimentary because of traits/sigils that proc conditions on crits.

on the power side of things, it’d be nice to have Power Precision Vitality as another option rather than Power Precision Toughness.

Some mobs later in the game transfer conditions, just wanted to point that out. Krayt with pulls, bleeds, knockbacks, and slow downs in large groups with others who have AoE poisons is bad enough.

I have a simple solution suggestion for Condition Damage vs. objects. Just remove the benefits of Power and other stats from the equation. Make it so that a purely Power-specced character would deal the same damage to the object as a Condition-specced one. Of course you’d then have to reduce the overall health of the object so it would take the Power-specced player the same amount of time to destroy it as he does now, but this would then balance it so that the Condition character would destroy it just as fast as well.

I don’t think that the cap can be increased for balance reasons. Mobs aren’t programmed to deal with 50 stacks of bleed.

Having more than 25 stacks would make it incredibly OP in PvP.

I personally think the cap should be dropped to 20 stacks, and every stack over 20 deals 50% of the damage it would have done.

So for example if you have 20 stacks and someone applies a 5 seconds bleed that deals a total of 500 damage, it’ll deal 250 straight up as mitigatable damage.

For those who think more than 25 Bleeding´s would be OP:
A necro’s Bleeding ticks vor ~120 damage per second if he has ~1500+ condition damage so a stack of 25 Bleedings would deal just do ~3k DPS. But in fact he probably won’t have more than 7-9 Bleedings on his target at the same time, an even if he has, some of them won’t do damage since they only tick every second and additional duration is wasted.

Removing the cap wouldn’t change that, it would just allow more players to attack the same target. Yes, sometimes people would go down faster in PvP, but that’s no cause of only one or two attackers. If you get focused by 5 chars that stack Bleedings on you, you should suffer the whole damage, not just 3/5 of it.

How would you direct damage dealers feel if all targets would be caped at 3k or even 5k DPS? What would you say if anything above that amount would just be wasted?

nachtnebel.9168:

For those who think more than 25 Bleeding´s would be OP:
A necro’s Bleeding ticks vor ~120 damage per second if he has ~1500+ condition damage so a stack of 25 Bleedings would deal just do ~3k DPS. But in fact he probably won’t have more than 7-9 Bleedings on his target at the same time, an even if he has, some of them won’t do damage since they only tick every second and additional duration is wasted.

Removing the cap wouldn’t change that, it would just allow more players to attack the same target. Yes, sometimes people would go down faster in PvP, but that’s no cause of only one or two attackers. If you get focused by 5 chars that stack Bleedings on you, you should suffer the whole damage, not just 3/5 of it.

How would you direct damage dealers feel if all targets would be caped at 3k or even 5k DPS? What would you say if anything above that amount would just be wasted?

Yeah I really don’t understand all of this “It would be OP” nonsense.

In PvE all this means is everyone will be doing their full dmg if zerging the same boss, which means the boss will die faster, solution : More HP scaling.

In PvP, if someone has 25 stacks of bleeding, they are F*****D anyway, but the cap is fine in pvp, that shouldn’t change.

I think that there should be no cap on bleeds at all, and that each payer should have their own seperate stack of conditions on the target. I don’t see how this would be overpowered, because condition damage isn’t that much higher than direct damage.

In PvP I don’t see anything wrong, because who can ever keep up 25 bleeds on his target against anyone remotely skilled? It’s not like they don’t have condition removal or ways to interrupt you from applying conditions, and you’re not putting any pressure on them while stacking your conditions, the damage only comes in the end.

If it turns out overpowered then just reduce the skill’s condition damage output, but at least allow each condition player to do the full extent of his build’s damage.

I never understood why people think of DOTs as so different than direct damage. Like the guy who said up there that said bleeds have to be capped. Why? How is eight Necromancers stacking their bleeds any different than eight Elementalists shooting their Fireballs? In fact, I would much rather have the bleeds on me than the Fireballs. At least the bleeds won’t burst me down.

Yeah, the thing to remember with bleed stacking is that bleeds are not permanent. They wear off constantly, so even though my Thief is built to stack bleeds very rapidly, I don’t think I’ve gotten more than 20 at once before the first ones started wearing off (DB, DB, DB, Thief, DB, Roll, DB, that’s 15, maybe a couple more from Caltrops if I’m lucky), and if I managed to break 25 most of those would drop before I could apply any more.

This isn’t an issue where if a character could stack infinite bleeds that would make him overpowered, it’s just a matter of when multiple characters are attacking a single enemy, they should deal their potential damage, the damage they’ve earned as much as any Power-built character has earned his damage. They don’t have it set up so that when five or more players are wailing on an enemy the Power stat becomes worthless and Power-build characters start dealing almost no damage, so why, for balance reasons, would that apply to Condition builds?

If a Power build character dealing hits for 500 damage each is balanced against a Con build character hitting ten seconds of 50 damage ticks, then if ten of the Power characters are dropping five such hits per ten second period, for a total of 25000 damage over that period, then why would it be unbalanced to allow ten Condition characters to drop five of their hits, also dealing 25000 damage (spread across 50 stacked bleed effects)?

I really don’t think this is a balance issue, so much as it is a tracking issue, that they can’t, or just don’t want to track more than 25 bleeds on any given mob. Keep in mind that this is a lot to track, since each distinct bleed has its own duration, damage amount, and that damage amount changes. For example, my thief has an ability to give me Might when I dodge, and if I put bleeds on an enemy, and then dodge, the ticks of damage from that bleed rise with it, so it knows which of those bleed ticks are my bleed ticks, That’s a lot to track if they had unlimited stacks, since in a big melee with dozens of people laying bleeds, it would have to keep track of dozens of different bleed types, whereas right now they only really have to track probably 3-5 different types of bleeds before they cap it off.

But yeah, I definitely like the idea of letting bleeds stack to the cap, and then instantly applying some fair portion of the potential bleed damage as direct damage for all subsequent stacks, rather than having them do nothing.

^Great post. Nailed it.

@Ohoni
If Might really increases your bleeding ticks we just found another necro bug.

It definitely does. As I said, I gain a stack of Might each Dodge, so I might apply DB and it ticks 46 46 46, then Dodge, 48, then Dodge again, 52 52 52, etc. (those aren’t the actual numbers, but it’s something like those numbers). It definitely makes a huge difference.

SAI Peregrinus.8410:

Condition damage is inferior in scaling to normal damage.

Normal damage scales with power, precision, and crit damage. The three stats multiply, the more of one you have the more valuable each point of the other two becomes. The scaling is cubic.
Condition damage scales with Condition Damage. It’s linear scaling.
The max Power you can get is identical to the max Condition Damage you can get. So at linear scaling they’ll do the same damage.
Now, normal damage is reduced by armor, while condition damage isn’t, but armor scales linearly (like condition damage) and not cubically (like power) so power will quickly overcome armor as stats improve.

Somebody doesn’t understand what linear and exponential scaling are. Two or more different variables multiplied together is still linear. Power scaling is only exponential if the formula for the bonus damage is something like, Damage Bonus = (5)Power^2.

Here is my view on the whole topic:

First of all the damage versus objects definitely has to take conditions into account as Jon Peters said. I also think the easiest and best way to do this would be implementing a unique condition for structures that sums up all conditions that are applied in one damage over time.

Blazing:

• no max stacks
• burning adds 8 stacks
• poison adds 2 stacks
• bleeding adds 1 stack
• overall damage per tick balanced around bleeding (somewhere between 40 and 100 damage dependend on cond. dmg. stat on gear)

Now for the general cap on non structure targets: I really think it should just flat out get removed. A cap is the worst solution they could have come up with and extremly player unfriendly. At one point simply every additonally added condition is 100% wasted. Bad bad design Arenanet. Remove a hard cap as soon as possible!

My personal solution would be to attack the problematic at its origin. They made the cap because unlike direct damage and armor (which can scale up on bosses when multiple players are around) overly stacked condition damage would fast become extremly strong. So basically we just need an armor equivalent for condition damage. The most logical way here that actually is already in the game is giving bosses scaling condition duration reduction. A boss that would scale in a way that his armor reduces direct damage by 50% would also have a 50% condition duration reduction buff. This actually helps all conditions at the same time while removing the cap for bleeding would still leave burning/poison at its single stack (being always filled with 50 people attacking).

TLDR:

1. New combined condition for any condition damage applied to structures (i.e. “Blazing”)
2. Removal of caps for bleeding. Scaling condition duration reduction system for “big” PvE targets.

To answer my own question from earlier, there’s apparently only one set of precision/toughness/condition damage heavy armor shoulders in the game.

no max stacks
burning adds 8 stacks
poison adds 2 stacks
bleeding adds 1 stack
overall damage per tick balanced around bleeding (somewhere between 40 and 100 damage dependend on cond. dmg. stat on gear)

I get why from a lore principle burning would do more damage to a structure than poison (but then that would also apply to things like earth elementals and zombies where it actually doesn’t in gameplay), but it doesn’t make sense for balance. Why would burning be allowed to have a much stronger effect than bleeding? Not every Condition build has equal access to all types of condition damage. Thieves, for example, cannot apply burning, while Elementalists cannot apply Poison.

Furthermore, Bleeding, which you rant only one stack, is based around building numerous stacks, and does far less damage per stack than the other two types, while Burning and Poison are both abilities that do not stack for magnitude, only duration.

How do you see your solution as being balanced between the three damage types?

Just make every damage condition do instant damage against structures, treat it like direct damage. That wouldn’t be too strong since conditions damage isn’t as strong as power is (you just get 25% for it on burning/poison and 5% per tick on bleeding). This would just allow condition damage dealer to take down structures almost as fast as direct damage dealers.

JonPeters.5630:

I certainly agree that we need to improve effectiveness of condition damage builds against objects. We have some ideas, but none of them are simple and easy to implement/test. Rest assured it is something we recognize as a problem.

Jon

Objects? Um, no, that’s nice you’re improving that, but it’s barely an issue.

How about we get condition damage build viability improved for ALL NON SOLO PVE.

I really thought we would have seen at least a little balancing done by now, jeez.

There needs to be more choices for condition damage on gear. Plain and simple. I do not want POWER on my gear. I want condition damage/vitality/toughness. Where exactly are these stats easily obtainable? Currently, I can’t find any.

I think people also forget that condition damage is very easy to remove.

I did some extensive calculations via excel. And It seems very very few builds besides the very extreme makes sense at all.

Conditions bypass toughness, but condition cant crit and got very bad scaling. Not to mention the time it takes were the other player can either heal or remove the condition.

Toughness is vastyly inferiour to Vitality for the same reason.

So now we are alrady down to Power/Precision/Vitality/Healing/Critical Damage builds. When you big even deeper down to the current stats on gear. You either go full Berserker or Valkyrie due to the benefits of going extreme.

How to fix it is up to Anet. But we need the stats shuffled more. Not to mention the effects one one another.

Conditions needs to be able to crit and scale with power. Critical Damage bonuses needs to be lowered perhaps for gear. Vitality vs Toughness also needs to be looked at. Toughness is basicly only worth it against some hardcore PvE boss mobs.