Guild Wars 2

This is an excerpt from a Bleeding Guide I posted to Reddit. For more details, see here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/10009b/bleeding_and_you_a_guide_and_a_warning/

Suggestions to make Bleeding builds more viable:

Improve the 25-Stack limitation

Significantly expand or eliminate the 25 stack limitation entirely for enemies with large health pools. This will allow Bleeding builds to be effective during those battles, and the large health pools are already designed to take significant damage from each participating member and to scale per member. This is especially important to do during Group Events and in Dungeons.

Change the algorithm for how the stack limit is enforced to be more optimal for DPS. I suggest the following:
When another stack of Bleeding is applied to a target, check if the number of stacks is at the limit. If so, perform the following:
A. Calculate the damage remaining on all existing stacks of Bleeding and store which one is lowest, not including any Boons or Conditions currently on the target which are improving that stack’s damage.
B. Calculate the total damage of the Bleeding to be applied, with the same limitation on currently existing Boons and Conditions.
C. If the new applied Bleeding will do more total damage than the stored lowest value, replace that old Bleeding with the new one.
This new algorithm will preserve the highest total damage by Bleeding done to a target given the limitation on how many stacks of Bleeding can exist on a target. This algorithm would at least lessen the cases where incidental Bleeding stacks are harming a Bleeding heavy build, but will not solve the issue of two Bleeding heavy builds working together.

Make the damage conditions Bleeding, Burning, and Poison apply to inanimate objects.

Very often, a Task or Event will require destroying inanimate objects, such as a supply cart or a turret. Condition heavy builds have a lot of trouble with these, as those targets do not gain any Conditions. If an Earth Elemental can be harmed by Bleeding, Burning, and Poison, I see no reason a supply cart or turret can’t be.

Make all generic damage boosting Traits affect Conditions applied.

It is just strange that there are so many ways to gain extra damage through Traits, but none of them affect damage via Conditions. Why shouldn’t Condition-heavy builds benefit from these Traits? It honestly feels more like a bug than a balance or design decision.

Bleeds are quite underpowered on some classes and are ok on others.

I’m sorry but it doesn’t make much sense to poison or bleed an object…burn would be fine though

Azaziel – it makes as much sense as poisoning, bleeding, or burning an Earth Elemental. However, it’s important for balance, as destroying inanimate objects as a condition damage spec is very difficult at the moment.

I would absolutely love this. I play Shortbow on my Ranger, so we can get 8-10 stacks of bleeding just on our own, without traits or pets, and that 25 stack limit -really- sucks on group bosses.

What I’d like to see on bleeds (playing a bleed-heavy Shortbow Ranger and DD thief myself) is to have “overflow damage” for bleeds. Basically, if the mob in question already has 24 stacks on him, and you apply three in a row, then the first stack sticks normally, and the last two “overflow,” dealing half their total damage instantly. This means if you’re applying a 25 damage per tick bleed over five seconds, for 125 damage total, it would instead deal 62 damage directly (twice, in this case).

This allows Bleeders to continue contributing, and would only be a factor in extreme situations like boss battles anyways, because a single character applying 25 simultaneous bleeds is fairly tricky (I think my max was closer to 18).

This should also be a factor for poisons and burns, which stack for duration but presumably end up stacking into the several minute range on boss fights, so instead once the duration exceeds perhaps 30-40 seconds (which is plenty to kill a non-boss mob), subsequent stacks could instead just deal direct damage equal to half or less the total amount.