Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I play a Necro, one of the many powerful condition damage classes in the game. As you all know, the bleed stacks on any enemy in the game is capped at 25, which at decent condition damage is around 4000dps. This is a reasonable amount of damage for one player to inflict on a PVE boss, but it is not a reasonable amount of damage for 10 players to inflict on a PVE boss, or, indeed, 100 players. Poison does not stack intensity, nor does burning.

Let’s assume that a reasonable proportion of all the people fighting the boss use condition damage. Perhaps this is how Arenanet have balanced this fight. What if every player there uses condition damage? Most of them will be doing almost zero damage to the boss. Their bleeds won’t actually work, their burning and poison will be useless.
I heard that the reason for the 25 stack limit is because of technical limitations – something about having to tell every client the damage of every tick of every bleed they do. This sounds like an issue, but there has to be a workaround.

Surely all that the client has to know is their current condition damage plus how many stacks of bleed they have on the boss? They don’t have to be told by the server how much each bleed ticks for, because there is no condition damage mitigation in the game. I’m no coder so perhaps this wouldn’t work, but predicting (incredibly accurately) the bleed damage on the client seems to be a good solution to this problem, because this is not fair to condition damage players. You cannot just balance a PVE boss fight in this game around only having a certain number of condition damage users. Most of them are not doing any significant damage to the boss, and yet the boss presumably gains an equal amount of scaled health because of those players doing the event.

This is also the issue of which bleeds overwrite which, what if a warrior’s sword auto-attack is hitting the boss without much condition damage, what happens to the existing bleeds from someone with max CD gear?

Thoughts, anyone else, or with any luck someone from Arenanet?

Personally I’ve always though that when the bleed stack is reached that every additional bleed applied should be converted into direct damage that scales off condition damage instead of power. This way the technical limitation of a 25 stack isn’t a problem and having it scale off condition damage instead of power would still make it useful for rabid builds.