Guild Wars 2

I was following this thread, some interesting ideas on how to deal with condition damage “stacking” problem:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Bleed-Stack-Plan

Instead of removing the stack limit on Conditions, why not add a limit to all other stats? The two huge sides of build optimization at the moment are Burst damage and Toughness/Healing, the first to kill an opponent as fast as possible, the second to survive as much as possible, any other build just isn’t as “optimal”

There are lots of threads out here about people speccing heavily in defense and being near un-killable in PVP or players 1-shotting enemies. Granted all those builds have various disadvantages but their potency on those certain situations can’t be neglected. We also get various nerfs to skill power to compensate for stacking of healing and damage abilities.

What I’m proposing here is to add first a soft-cap on all stats and then a (much higher) hard-cap. This would keep all skills the same at reasonable levels of an attribute while reducing their effectiveness when a stat reaches higher amounts. This will be important in the game with the advent of Ascended gear, with more numbers in stats, will come more imbalances, instead of waiting for those 1-shot builds to appear, act now and reduce stat effectiveness.

For example if a skill appears to be healing too much on certain builds, because it scales too well with Healing Power, nerfing the amount of healing gained by the skill isn’t optimal, because it becomes “overpowered” at higher levels of the stat, a reasonable amount won’t make it imbalanced, thus instead of nerfing the skill individually, nerf Healing Power, so at higher levels, more Healing Power is needed to increase it by 1 (soft cap) and a (higher) hard cap that nobody can surpass.

The system isn’t new to the game so not much “coding” should be required for this, because Precision is already using a similar mechanic to determine how much is needed for a 1% increase in Critical Chance, although it scales with character level, not Precision levels.

In conclusion, I believe a soft/hard cap is needed for all player stats, so stats can’t reach excessive numbers and make builds broken, nerfing individual skills will only make them useless, or a lot less viable, for those players who aren’t using an “optimized” build on them. Stacking of stats with Runes/Traits/Items/Food etc isn’t always good for balance, adding a soft/hard cap will make a thousand more builds more viable