Guild Wars 2

So with the recent flare up about condition damage, I thought I might chime in and give some possibly solutions/suggestions.

As we all know, the issue with bleeds currently is that it is limited by server and current technology. I’m sure game designs are usually done without considering too much of the technical limitations, but like all things in a game, they’re going to hit that technology wall and they’ll have no choice but to design around technology limits.

My solution(s) is rather simple, but I think should effectively “bypass” the bandwidth limitation by a larger amount. So here’s the proposal:

Bleed stacks intensity with the most recent bleed duration
You basically stack intensity with the remainder of the previous bleed, and duration to be the most recent bleed application duration.
To make this easier to understand, I’ll write out a scenario

-Let there be a bleed, called “A”, that has a duration of 10s, ticks every 1s for 100 damage, for a total of 1000 damage over the duration of 10s
-Let there be a bleed called “B” that has a duration of 20s, ticks every 1s for 50 damage for a total of 1000 damage over the duration of 20s

Scenario 1:
You apply bleed “A” at time 0s. You then apply another bleed “A” at time 5s. Instead of stacking and counting each bleed separately, we take the remainder of the first bleed “A” and divide it by the next longest bleed. In this case, it would be 10s. So the first bleed “A” still has a total of 500 damage from 5s left (each tick being 100 damage). You add this to the total damage of the 2nd bleed “A”, which gives you a bleed that is 1500 damage over the duration of 10s, about 150 per tick.

Essentially, you’re able to keep the same amount of damage with this setup, WITHOUT stacking each bleed individually and saving bandwidth. The only minus is that you’re not going to see your bleed damage numbers popup like a ton of individual number. It’ll just be one bigger number.

Let’s try a more complicated scenario to test out possible effects.
Scenario 2:
You apply bleed “A” at time 0s. You apply another bleed “A” at time 5s. Then you apply another bleed “B” at 10s. If all is calculated right, the first bleed “A” should be diminished enough that it ends pretty much at 10s. Now, at time 15s, you apply another bleed “B”, and immediately after, a bleed “A”. At 20s, you apply a bleed “A”. So let’s calculate it out.

At time 0s, your bleed is doing 100 damage/sec, for 1000 over 10s
At time 5s, it is doing 150 damage/sec for 1500 over 10s
-Remainder from previous bleed is 500 damage out of 1000 of 10s (5s has past, so 500 damage has already been used). 500 + 1000 = 1500.
At time 10s, it is doing 87.5 damage/sec for 1750 over 20s
-Remainder from prev. bleed is 750, so 1000 + 750 = 1750.
At time 15s for application of “B”, it will do 115.625 damage/sec for 2312.5 over 20s
-Remainder from prev. bleed is 1312.5.
At time 15s for application of “A”, it will do 331.25 damage/sec for 3312.5 over 10s. Note that the duration is replaced with the most recent.
-Remainder from prev. bleed is 2312.5.
At time 20s, it will do 265.625 damage/sec for 2656.25 over 10s
-Remainder from prev. bleed is 1656.25.

Continued next post…

Okay, so if you’re still with me after all my rambling lol, I’m going to point out how this affects bleed gameplay. If you’re stacking intensity and duration by the most recent duration, this can lead to a type of gameplay where you choose to apply a long duration bleed, and then apply a short one to make it tick much faster. Or, you can decide to apply your short ones first and then apply the long one to spread your bleed over a longer time. You’re still getting the same amount of damage over the course of time though (provided that the target does not remove it).

There are issues with this though. In some classes, their weapon auto attack applies a short bleed, so it might be an issue if you’re not happy with your autoattack shortening your bleeds and increasing the intensity.

Since that can potentially be too drastic of a change, another variant of my proposed solution is to choose the duration of the longest duration. However, that also has a drawback of the case where you happen to apply something that is 30s long, then all your future bleeds will be spread over this very long duration.

Okay, so now to how it handles in group situations.
Group Situations:
-bleeds stack to a max of 25, but only from different players/objects. This means a max of 25 people can bleed. That should be enough to let bleed groups be viable while keeping bandwidth as much as it is right now.

Bleed is only one part of the condition builds though. We still have burning and poison :P… Unfortunately those have a single stack, and several people applying burns/poisons only stacks duration. I’m guessing the damage is done by whoever does the most damage, and then people who hit less just increase duration (I could be wrong, just a guess). Balancing these for group play would probably require a whole re-write of the burning and poison formulas.

Burning and Poison:
If burning and poison were handled by stacking intensity and by most recent duration like the bleed mechanic I proposed above, then the damage / sec calculation of burning/poison would have to be reduced or “nerfed”. That’s the only way for burning and poison to stack per person though without being excessively strong.

By the way, for reference from the gw2 wiki of current condition formulas:
Bleeding: 42.5 + (0.05 * Condition Damage) per stack per second
Burning: (0.25 * Condition Damage) + (4 * Level) + 8 damage per second
Poison: 4 + Level + (0.1 * Condition Damage) per second

If you’re solo, burning and poison does a whole lot more than bleeding in a stack of one. But because of that, you can’t stack burning and poison from different people or that would be pretty OP.

Okay, so that’s just the tip of the ice on condition damage. There’s so many other conditions, but I’ll just point out the 3 usual ones I know.
Remember, the idea of conditions is damage over time. That means it should never out-damage a direct damage build or you’ll have some serious balance issues. The advantage of conditions is exactly what it lets you do: Damage over time, which is to let you apply and get out of the way of harm.

By no means am I proposing a buff to condition damage. I’m just proposing another system that gives you similar damage to the current system while cutting down the bandwidth usage.

Thoughts?

I wouldn’t mind it being more technical tbh. Any reasonable substitute would be good in my book, I hate the current system though.

I <3 the idea of being able to shorten long bleeds in favor of intensity. I don’t think that’d really be a problem, since you’d still get the same damage, and there’s a myriad of ways to remove conditions in pvp.

I could make it more technical but I think people just skip right over those details xD.

As far as the server bandwidth theory goes… I give some guesses in how more efficient it’ll be.

From what I can figure, the current system has to send each and every stack of bleed there is to the clients, and in addition, it has to keep separate timers on each of these bleeds. So if you got a group of 20 or so, I imagine you’re going to be sending over 20×25 with a stack of 25. That’s just super simplified though.

Now, with this system, you do the calculations beforehand, and math computations are super fast and cheap on the machine compared to sending packets and consuming bandwidth. With this, a person has a max of one bleed vs 25 stacks of bleeds, and the server only keeps track of one bleed per person instead of 25 stacks for everyone. It’s a lot cheaper in terms of bandwidth and computational power.

I have never noticed a problem with how the current system works. Besides, such a major rework to the entire system would require so much work that it’s just not really a good idea.

Why try to fix something that isn’t broken?

Well, the complaint people have is that once you max out at 25 stacks, you can’t put more bleeds on. So in an event or when you’re grouped up, having too much people do conditions is bad.

Like just with two necros, you could probably hit the 25 stack bleed very quickly and then you’ll both have your damage capped.

The cap mostly affects group play for condition builds, not solo play.

Nels the Cornwhisperer.8025:

I have never noticed a problem with how the current system works. Besides, such a major rework to the entire system would require so much work that it’s just not really a good idea.

Why try to fix something that isn’t broken?

It kinda is broken atm. Not so much in spvp, or too much of an issue in wvw but pve is horrible. Many skills have condition effects, whether they are intentional or not players stack them to 25 really quick with 2-3 players. All those other stacks are goin to waste and thats what is broken. DD can keep goin and it doesn’t have a cap but conditions do and it hurts them significantly in world events. Especially hurts when a non-cond build is stacking conditions rapidly while the cond-spec guy is trying to cover up their mistakes.

Wvw is hardly an issue, things die no matter if you got 25 bleeds or 1000 bleeds from how many people are usually taking something like a champion or legendary npc out. Spvp is fine but cond removal should be tweaked in there to be more balanced across the 8 professions.

I’m sorry to say this, NinjaEd, but you’re horribly wrong. When a person with a conditions spec and more condition damage/malice applies a bleed, it stacks in over the other bleeds.

For example, with my Shortbow on my ranger, I auto-attack for 8 stacks of bleeding. I’ve got high condition damage gear. Against a dragon, with fourty other people attacking, I still see all my ticks from bleeding on the screen, because my bleeds take higher priority than the weaker bleeds.

As for sPvP, I’ll admit, it’s been a while since I found a good tournament, but it was balanced last I checked pretty well. Everyone has good condition removal, and every profession has at least one good conditions build.

PvDoor never counts for anything, especially conditions discussions, because the doors you’re fighting are immune to them anyway.

I don’t think there’s an issue with bleeds in sPvP and WvW situations. By the time you get close to 25 stacks, that person is probably going to die really soon from everyone else lol.

The problem is in PvE. As you said, your ticks are stronger so are seen by you, but everyone else that has weaker ticks might not even see theirs apply. This can be problematic for necro condition builds in dungeons. If you got around 2 necros, they’ll be competing with each other for that bleed tick.

Anyways, my suggestion should decrease average bandwidth usage by bleeds, which is a plus for everyone.

If you’re a necromancer, and you join another necromancer, and you both have exactly the same build, and both depend on the condition damage, that’s kind of your own fault, and regardless, the rest of your team can carry you.

If you have five people, all conditions builds, you’ll find it a bit harder, but you can still eventually complete the dungeon. Again, any trouble you have from building terrible teams is your own fault, and no reason to change the game though.

It’s not like this change will drastically affect play style though. All this change proposal is to optimize bandwidth usage and server computation power while keeping bleeds with similar damage, and less bleed cap issues.

You could say the fault is yours for picking a bad team lol. But what about situations where you’re in the open world PvE and you’re fighting a champion with 40+ other players? You’re all competing for that bleed stack.

Also, I leave it up to Anet to implement. All I want to hear is whether this would be a good solution for the issue at hand now and whether or not this will drastically affect your gameplay or even break it.

PS: “Don’t fix what isn’t broke” doesn’t roll well with computer programmers/engineer. I’m sure most of us look for ways to optimize code as well as possible when given the chance.

When you’re fighting a dragon with 40+ people, it doesn’t matter what you do. You’re not competing for anything, because after you get your gold support tag in (A stupidly low total amount of damage) you can leave and come back when it’s dead to open the chest.

And while optimizing code is one thing, here’s how your suggestion would actually work:

Crossfire = 3 second bleed, ever .5 seconds.

Apply bleed1 at t0.0 300 damage over 3 seconds, 100 damage per second

Apply bleed2 at t0.5 300 damage + 250 remaining from bleed1 = 550 damage over 3 seconds, 183.3 damage per second.

Apply bleed3 at t1.0 300 damage + 200 remaining from bleed1 + 250 remaining from bleed2 = 750 damage over 3 seconds, 250 damage per second.

Apply bleed4 at t1.5 300 damage + 150 remaining from bleed1 + 200 remaining from bleed2 + 250 remaining from bleed3 = 900 damage over 3 seconds, 300 damage per second.

Apply bleed5 at t2.0 300 damage + 100 remaining from bleed1 + 150 remaining from bleed2 + 200 remaining from bleed3 + 250 remaining from bleed4 = 1000 damage over 3 seconds, 333 damage per second.

Apply bleed6 at t2.5 300 damage + 50 from bleed1 + 100 from bleed2 + 150 from bleed3 + 200 from bleed4+ 250 from bleed5 = 1050 damage over 3 seconds, 350 damage per second.

That’s some pretty heavy condition damage for an auto attack. What’s worse is, current duration will reset to 3 seconds every 0.5 seconds, and my 350 is constant from auto-attacking.

Your necromancer throws out his 10 second, 1000 damage bleed, and then my bow resets it’s duration to 3 seconds, and ups the intensity…

Now, my six stacks and the necromancer’s bleed
50 + 100 + 150 + 200 + 250 + 300 + 1000 = 2050 damage over 3 seconds, 683 damage per second.

Let’s say I exploit this in a dungeon party. Four necromancers use their 1000 damage, 10 second bleed on top of my auto attack.

1000*4 + 50 + 100 + 150 + 200 + 250 + 300 = 5050 damage over 3 seconds for 1683.3 damage per second. This would get a little crazy, especially in PvP, where the amount of damage you take per tick would suddenly and violently change in a variety of situations.

Next, condition duration could potentially hurt your overall dps in cases of bleeds with longer cooldowns. While benefitting the shorter cooldown bleeds.

For example, Crossfire, with 30 points in marksmanship, for a 30% condition duration, is a 4 second bleed. That same 300 damage stacks 8 times, for 37.5 + 75 + 112.5 + 150 + 187.5 + 225 + 262.5 + 300 = 450 damage per second.

That’s an increase, but let’s look at the Greatsword ranger’s Maul skill.

Maul bleeds for 500 damage over 4 seconds with a 6 second cooldown without condition duration, for a damage per second of 125. With condition duration, it would do 500 damage over 5 seconds, if the value is rounded, for 100 damage per second, or 96.15 damage if the value isn’t.

I could push this farther, and show you the numbers for myself, 8 seconds of quickness, sharpening stone, two pets applying bleeding, and crossfire. I alone can get 21 stacks of bleeding. If all of that damage was turned in to a single stack, and could be stacked with up to 25 other people…

This will dramatically change play style. It’s so exploitable, in so many ways…

Nels the Cornwhisperer.8025:

If you’re a necromancer, and you join another necromancer, and you both have exactly the same build, and both depend on the condition damage, that’s kind of your own fault, and regardless, the rest of your team can carry you.

If you have five people, all conditions builds, you’ll find it a bit harder, but you can still eventually complete the dungeon. Again, any trouble you have from building terrible teams is your own fault, and no reason to change the game though.

Although it may be your fault in the current system, that’s no excuse for the terrible bleed system in place and more so completely goes against Arenanet’s thesis of breaking the trinity, having many viable builds, and allowing the players to play whatever style they wish to play. It is simply undeniable that the current bleed mechanics go against that.

Direct damage has no limits to being on a target. Why should condition damage? Before people being up the usual ignorant arguments, let me address them here.

1) armor is ignored by condition damage, it’s OP!

Direct damage has three stats to increase its output. Precision, power, and crit damage. If you choose to go glassy, you can scale very well. You can also go more balanced at the cost of damage. This is the same for condition damage. Condition damage can grab more precision if they wish for crit proc effects and such, grab more power for the direct damage components of abilities, or balance survivabity as well. Condition simply doesn’t have the excellent scaling potential of power, prec, %. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining and conditions ratios are fine all stack and cap issues aside)

2) it would be too strong in Pvp and stack too high

There is so much condition damage in Pvp it LIKELY wouldn’t be an issue as one condition removal would remove every single stack of bleed assuming bleed is the targeted condition. I would be fine with a hard cap in Pvp if it was an issue.

There is also the issue of condition damage not affecting structures. That certainly needs to be adjusted.

Tyr.7890:

Nels the Cornwhisperer.8025:

If you’re a necromancer, and you join another necromancer, and you both have exactly the same build, and both depend on the condition damage, that’s kind of your own fault, and regardless, the rest of your team can carry you.

If you have five people, all conditions builds, you’ll find it a bit harder, but you can still eventually complete the dungeon. Again, any trouble you have from building terrible teams is your own fault, and no reason to change the game though.

Although it may be your fault in the current system, that’s no excuse for the terrible bleed system in place and more so completely goes against Arenanet’s thesis of breaking the trinity, having many viable builds, and allowing the players to play whatever style they wish to play. It is simply undeniable that the current bleed mechanics go against that.

Direct damage has no limits to being on a target. Why should condition damage? Before people being up the usual ignorant arguments, let me address them here.

1) armor is ignored by condition damage, it’s OP!

Direct damage has three stats to increase its output. Precision, power, and crit damage. If you choose to go glassy, you can scale very well. You can also go more balanced at the cost of damage. This is the same for condition damage. Condition damage can grab more precision if they wish for crit proc effects and such, grab more power for the direct damage components of abilities, or balance survivabity as well. Condition simply doesn’t have the excellent scaling potential of power, prec, %. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining and conditions ratios are fine all stack and cap issues aside)

2) it would be too strong in Pvp and stack too high

There is so much condition damage in Pvp it LIKELY wouldn’t be an issue as one condition removal would remove every single stack of bleed assuming bleed is the targeted condition. I would be fine with a hard cap in Pvp if it was an issue.

There is also the issue of condition damage not affecting structures. That certainly needs to be adjusted.

#1: There are many viable builds, and you can play however you want. That does not mean you will always be doing as good as people who play better than you. I’ve done dungeons in pugs with a shortbow conditions ranger, a couple conditions necromancers, a domination/dueling/illusion mesmer, and a fire elementalist. It’s possible to complete all game content with horribly built parties, you’re just not going to be as fast or have it as easy as people who put together builds specifically for the task at hand.

#2: Condition damage has limits because as shown in my post right above you, it would get out of hand, to thousands of damage per second, incredibly quickly if the OP’s suggestion was taken.

In PvP especially, this suggestion would be an issue, as it would cause rapid, harsh changes to how much damage each tick of bleeding was giving you. If one stack does 300 damage, but two stacks does 1600 damage… You can see how that would be a problem.

The current system, while not perfect, only really shows it’s flaws in massive unorganized fights that would be impossible to balance, and horribly made teams, that should never be as good as well made teams.

I think you’re misunderstanding my suggestion.

Bleeds from other people do not affect/boost your own stacks. Bleeds from other people count as their own stack, up to 25 stacks from 25 different people. That’s a plus compared to the current system because just 2-3 people applying bleeds will hit cap. Also, your bleeds take the remainder of the previous bleed, not the total sum of everything every time you re-apply.

In case you haven’t noticed, that auto-attack sample does the same exact amount of damage as the current system. The whole intention of my suggestion is to propose a more efficient bleed handling way that allows more people to apply bleeds on a target before hitting cap, without changing the damage of the current system.

As I’ve shown in my first two posts, as long as your conditions are not removed, they will do the same damage as they do now.

Nels the Cornwhisperer.8025:

Crossfire = 3 second bleed, ever .5 seconds.
…
Apply bleed3 at t1.0 300 damage + 200 remaining from bleed1 + 250 remaining from bleed2 = 750 damage over 3 seconds, 250 damage per second.

Your maths is wonky. Bleed 1’s dps is slowed from the adjustment from bleed 2. At t1.0 there isn’t 200 remaining from bleed 1 but 208. Carry this forward at each step and instead of 350 dps at t2.5, you would have 499 dps.

That’s some pretty heavy condition damage for an auto attack. What’s worse is, current duration will reset to 3 seconds every 0.5 seconds, and my 350 is constant from auto-attacking.

The thing is, you would expect 600 dps from the 6 constant stacks of bleed that you can keep on a target with crossfire, assuming a bleed does 100 a tick. Far from an exploit, It actually takes much longer to build up to the expected output following the OP’s plan.

1000*4 + 50 + 100 + 150 + 200 + 250 + 300 = 5050 damage over 3 seconds for 1683.3 damage per second. This would get a little crazy, especially in PvP, where the amount of damage you take per tick would suddenly and violently change in a variety of situations.

5 person doing that kind of damage is low, even with the current 25 stacks limit. And each person is supposed to have their own stack, so you can’t use someone else’s short bleed to burst your own long bleed. I’ve had a quick look, the best burst you can expect is about 10k over 2 seconds, repeatable every 20 seconds.

Maul bleeds for 500 damage over 4 seconds with a 6 second cooldown without condition duration, for a damage per second of 125. With condition duration, it would do 500 damage over 5 seconds.

With condition duration Maul would bleeds for 625 damage over 5 seconds. Your overall output will scale with duration bonus.

I could push this farther, and show you the numbers for myself, 8 seconds of quickness, sharpening stone, two pets applying bleeding, and crossfire. I alone can get 21 stacks of bleeding. If all of that damage was turned in to a single stack, and could be stacked with up to 25 other people…

But why shouldn’t bleed be stacked with 25 other people? The direct damage stacks indefinitely.

The only valid complain you have, is that it would be possible combine a strong bleed effect with a short bleed duration to do 10k damage over 2 seconds that ignores armor. I can see that being a game changer, but it’s not completely out of whack.

If bleeds from other people count as their own stack, my current easily reachable 25 stacks of bleed = 1 stack in the proposed method. That would mean, dungeon parties in the proposed method could be applying bleed damage equal to 125 stacks of the current bleed. In larger world events, the proposed system would allow damage equal to 625 current bleed stacks.

Also, crossfire, if you make the remainder after each attack the total.

At t0.0 you apply bleed1 for 300 damage, 3 seconds.
At t0.5 you apply bleed2 for 300 damage, 3 seconds. 250 damage is remaining from bleed1, for 550 damage over 3 seconds, 183.33 damage per second.
At t1.0 you apply bleed3 for 300 damage, 3 seconds. The remainder from the 550 damage at bleed2 is 458 for 758 damage over 3 seconds, or 252.66 damage per second

The numbers remain close enough to the same to stop there, although slightly higher.

I cannot stress enough that this WILL NOT do the same damage as the current system, simply because other people will also be able to stack bleeds.

Quickness + Crossfire = 18 stacks of bleeding. Sharpening Stone = 5 stacks of bleeding. Feline Pet using Maul = 4 stacks of bleeding.

I alone, without weapon changing, using one attack, two utility, and one pet skill, have achieved over the possible number of bleeds that you can currently get. If more people could stack more bleed damage on top of mine, it would break the game.

Uhm, as someone else said: A single necro can deal up to 3k DPS as a conditionmancer. A zerker warrior, however, can put out up to 6k DPS.

If you stack up to 5 necros shouldn’t there be 5 * 3k = 15k DPS? Because if you stack up to 5 zerker warriors you WILL get 5 * 6k = 30k DPS.

As others said, direct damage currently scales indefinitely. Conditions do not.

Yet I do get your point. If you could ramp up your condition stack indefinitely this would be a problem. But not if you cap each player’s stack at the right point. ANet would have to figure out how much max DPS they would allow for a condition.

Well, the whole idea of this is to provide the same damage in theory if you were going on a 1v1 basis, while allowing this same damage to extend to everyone else so there is less of a chance of people blocking each other off with bleed stack limits.

Of course it “seems” like a lot of damage if the situation is ideal… However, you do notice that it is still less than direct damage? If you got 5 glass warriors doing Thousand Blades, you can probably get a burst of 15-18k per warrior, equaling up to 75k-90k of damage over a couple seconds.

Currently, direct damage people have no limitations, but bleeds do. If you read what Anet intended, they didn’t mean for the stack to be at 25. They said it was a technical limitation related to bandwidth. 25 was a decently high stack limit for 1v1, so that’s how it arrived there. If they had infinite bandwidth, they probably wouldn’t have it limited to 25.

Anyways, it’s very very hard to ramp up infinite stacks of bleeds. By the time you hit 25 stacks, your bleeds will start to diminish and wear off in a couple seconds. Even with this idea, you’re not going to get infinite damage of bleeds because it’ll wear off by the time you get high enough. In a 1v1 situation, it’ll be pretty much the same as now due the difficulty of getting high stacks of sustained bleeds.

Allowing 625 stacks of bleed may well break the net code, but why would it break the gameplay?

Would you agree that what your overall dps with 25 stacks of bleed all to yourself, is on par with the overall dps of what one person could do with direct damage only? If so, why shouldn’t 25 condition damage players, be on par with 25 direct damage players? The indefinite stacking of direct damage didn’t break the game.

Kenshinakh, I fully agree with you and I like your idea. Actually I came up with an idea similar to yours.

If ANet really tracks each bleed of each player on each mob then no wonder they cannot handle large groups. It might work in a 1vs1 situation very well because it gives precise data. But it collapses in large group settings.

As so very often with performance: you have to make sacrifices

Bust Nak, you don’t have to track each bleed of each player. You can do some math to precalulate the remaining damage. Think more of damage objects per player.

Ok, the forums just bugged out on me, and I’m not doing it again.

Do the math on Sharpening Stone + Crossfire + Quickness + pet maul + crippling shot, weapon swap and pet swap for quickness again, Crippling Talon and Splitblade.

I can easily get 38 stacks of bleeding all by myself. If you reduce that to one, and then let me get one critical, with Sharpened Edges traited, the 1 second bleed duration would kick in and spike 13,000 damage per second.

The buildup time for this is 6.375 seconds, meaning in a PvP environment, I could stack 38 stacks (potentially more with sharpened edges) and then spike all that bleed damage in one second on my next critical. With fury and quickness up, that will happen almost always in under a second.

An armor ignoring 13,000 damage spike that can only be stopped by condition removal, and can be rebuilt faster than the cooldown on most condition removal skills is bad.

The fact that it’s from range, and still leaves me with multiple interupts makes it a definate no in PvP.

As for PvE, a dungeon of five people coordinate a 13,000 damage spike on a boss, to deal 65,000 armor ignoring condition damage in 7 seconds.

These figures do not even count the actual damage that is included in every one of those attacks.

That’s some impressive bleeds, I would like to see your working though. So you wouldn’t have a problem with this scheme if the spike is removed? That can easily be removed by not replacing the duration but by adding to the duration. Or do you still think 25 condition players should be less effective than 25 direct damage players?

Yes, I did mention in my design above that changing the bleed duration to the most recent can bring up the issue of bleeds ticking too much in a short amount of time. I said if that’s an issue, you can change it so that duration is based on the longest current bleed where the duration either stays the same if the bleed is shorter than the current, or the new longer bleed.

However, that also has an affect on bleed damage in a time duration. You’re still getting the same damage, but it’ll now be spread over a longer time period, which can be an issue for those who want to quickly stack short, strong bleeds.

The reason why I proposed the first idea is because it does make condition builds more dynamic and interesting. Although you may burst that quickly, you should know that doing so will make you very vulnerable and burns your cooldowns. It’s no different from direct damage burst, except it still does less damage than direct damage burst builds.

Well the most obvious fix would would be to consolidate identical stacks of bleed into one powerful one. Minimal change that allows more stacks with zero extra network traffic.

Nels the Cornwhisperer.8025:

Tyr.7890:

Nels the Cornwhisperer.8025:

If you’re a necromancer, and you join another necromancer, and you both have exactly the same build, and both depend on the condition damage, that’s kind of your own fault, and regardless, the rest of your team can carry you.

If you have five people, all conditions builds, you’ll find it a bit harder, but you can still eventually complete the dungeon. Again, any trouble you have from building terrible teams is your own fault, and no reason to change the game though.

Although it may be your fault in the current system, that’s no excuse for the terrible bleed system in place and more so completely goes against Arenanet’s thesis of breaking the trinity, having many viable builds, and allowing the players to play whatever style they wish to play. It is simply undeniable that the current bleed mechanics go against that.

Direct damage has no limits to being on a target. Why should condition damage? Before people being up the usual ignorant arguments, let me address them here.

1) armor is ignored by condition damage, it’s OP!

Direct damage has three stats to increase its output. Precision, power, and crit damage. If you choose to go glassy, you can scale very well. You can also go more balanced at the cost of damage. This is the same for condition damage. Condition damage can grab more precision if they wish for crit proc effects and such, grab more power for the direct damage components of abilities, or balance survivabity as well. Condition simply doesn’t have the excellent scaling potential of power, prec, %. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining and conditions ratios are fine all stack and cap issues aside)

2) it would be too strong in Pvp and stack too high

There is so much condition damage in Pvp it LIKELY wouldn’t be an issue as one condition removal would remove every single stack of bleed assuming bleed is the targeted condition. I would be fine with a hard cap in Pvp if it was an issue.

There is also the issue of condition damage not affecting structures. That certainly needs to be adjusted.

#1: There are many viable builds, and you can play however you want. That does not mean you will always be doing as good as people who play better than you. I’ve done dungeons in pugs with a shortbow conditions ranger, a couple conditions necromancers, a domination/dueling/illusion mesmer, and a fire elementalist. It’s possible to complete all game content with horribly built parties, you’re just not going to be as fast or have it as easy as people who put together builds specifically for the task at hand.

#2: Condition damage has limits because as shown in my post right above you, it would get out of hand, to thousands of damage per second, incredibly quickly if the OP’s suggestion was taken.

In PvP especially, this suggestion would be an issue, as it would cause rapid, harsh changes to how much damage each tick of bleeding was giving you. If one stack does 300 damage, but two stacks does 1600 damage… You can see how that would be a problem.

The current system, while not perfect, only really shows it’s flaws in massive unorganized fights that would be impossible to balance, and horribly made teams, that should never be as good as well made teams.

I agree that a well made team should be better than people simply playing whatever they want, and it certainly is. The two glaring problems are simply how much more powerful entirely uncoordinated direct damage is than condition damage, and condition damage being entirely non-effective on structures or objects.

I only stress the point that people should be able to play the game the way they want as that is the mantra arena net emphasizes. Also, while on this topic, 5 warriors in a party vs 5 necromancers. Neither qualifies as “well made and properly thought out group composition” yet there will be a MASSIVE difference in the effectiveness of both. I’m not asking for overpowered never ending condition stacks, I’m simply asking for some system where there can be a bit of a common ground between the two, and players aren’t punished for playing with friends and others that share a common interest.

P.S. this actually exists in the current group of friends I’ve brought to the game. Two play GS warriors and never have a problem ever, the other three play condition damage classes and aren’t nearly as effective when together.

I dont understand why there should be technological boundries. If the server cant handle 1000+ bleedings just add them up and calculate the dps. If the amount of bleeds change within a second the next tick (even if its only .3 seconds away) will consider this changes. In my experience it already works that way: go to the heart of mists and try it. Add 10+ bleeds to the testing golems. The damage number appear to be randomly popping up but if you look at the golems health bar you see, that the bleed only does damage once a second and not all the time.
My suggestion is, that you dont see the damage of every single tick but the whole damage your ticking bleeding does atm. So you can better understand how much dps you are doing and you can still see how much other skills do.