Guild Wars 2

Lopez.7369:

I really don’t understand why people are trying to think up different reasons. ArenaNet has explicitly said bleed cap exists because of technical limitations. The end.

The question is when ArenaNet is going to design around the limitation instead of ignoring it and neglecting build diversity.

Great, so you can answer my questions in my earlier post quoted below?

That is the part that confuses me. If 100 necromancer in Sparkfly cause 25 stacks of bleeding each to 100 enemies, can the server cope with that? If yes, than why can’t it cope with 2500 stacks on ONE enemy? And if no, than the limitation doesn’t work.

So what is the technical problem with condition stacking?

if bleed didn’t have a cap, burning and poison would need to stack intensity, too

Lopez.7369:

Sagittario.8102:

I agree and it’s not just conditions, but also critical damage. All your precision, crit chance and crit damage are nothing.

This is a problem, but it honestly doesn’t belong in this thread. You do approximately half your damage without crits as a berserker build. Condition builds do like 5-10 percent if you count base damage on weapons that are built for conditions and therefore have really low base damage. It’s just not comparable.

What about my guard. Pre & Heals gear. His spec works around crit = vigor to himself & might to everyone around.
Not only dose he have the issue, of struggling to do enough damage to get loot because he’s support. But that he can’t maintain 16 stacks of might to allies, and now can’t even dodge enough to get thru the waves?

Crits should ‘work’ even if they do no more damage than a non-crit if they feel they have to ‘balance’ it by braking the way there damage class’s work rather than increasing his life pool.

Kashrlyyk.5364:

Lopez.7369:

I really don’t understand why people are trying to think up different reasons. ArenaNet has explicitly said bleed cap exists because of technical limitations. The end.

The question is when ArenaNet is going to design around the limitation instead of ignoring it and neglecting build diversity.

Great, so you can answer my questions in my earlier post quoted below?

That is the part that confuses me. If 100 necromancer in Sparkfly cause 25 stacks of bleeding each to 100 enemies, can the server cope with that? If yes, than why can’t it cope with 2500 stacks on ONE enemy? And if no, than the limitation doesn’t work.

So what is the technical problem with condition stacking?

Sorry, I missed the post.

Do you really know if the server could handle that? Are you sure that interacting with 100 mobs that are spread out is the same as interacting with one mob in a focused area? What happens if those necromancers now Epidemic those 2,500 bleeds?

I obviously disapprove of the bleed cap, but I’m sure ArenaNet is telling the truth about it being a technical limitation, although that should warrant designing around the limitation, not the status quo of build diversity.

lupercaleb.6041:

if bleed didn’t have a cap, burning and poison would need to stack intensity, too

Maybe if they reworked how much damage one stack of burning does, but letting the current iteration of burning stack would be crazy. Poison, not so much, but there are reasons to prevent a healing debuff from doing too much damage.

In other words, you’re citing a different problem. Burning and poison are limited because of balance; bleeds are limited because of a technical limitation.

Bweaty.9187:

Lopez.7369:

Sagittario.8102:

I agree and it’s not just conditions, but also critical damage. All your precision, crit chance and crit damage are nothing.

This is a problem, but it honestly doesn’t belong in this thread. You do approximately half your damage without crits as a berserker build. Condition builds do like 5-10 percent if you count base damage on weapons that are built for conditions and therefore have really low base damage. It’s just not comparable.

What about my guard. Pre & Heals gear. His spec works around crit = vigor to himself & might to everyone around.
Not only dose he have the issue, of struggling to do enough damage to get loot because he’s support. But that he can’t maintain 16 stacks of might to allies, and now can’t even dodge enough to get thru the waves?

Crits should ‘work’ even if they do no more damage than a non-crit if they feel they have to ‘balance’ it by braking the way there damage class’s work rather than increasing his life pool.

I think crits should work on objects. My point is that bleed cap is a much bigger issue.

If there’s technical issues it’s their own fault for bad design but they get around it pretty simply.

Just imagine various conditions called bleed and they would have “levels of power”.

1) Players can only inflict bleed lvl 1 and it can stack to 25 (pretty much the actual case)
2) When the 26th lvl1 bleed hits all bleed lvl 1 is removed and replaced for bleed lvl 2 which would stack to 25
3) When the 26th bleed lvl 2 hits all bleed lvl 2 is removed and replaced for bleed lvl 3 which would stack to 25
4) and on, an on, depending on how many conditions players can inflict

So now we would just have to balance in terms of duration of the lvl 2-lvl n bleeds and how to calculate the damage it would do.
Option 1:
Damage bleed lvl n = Sum the damage of each bleed lvl n-1 ticks
Option 2:
Make each bleed lvl n tick have a fixed damage (even if lower than option 1 it would still stack in intensity and in the long run total Cdmg would be higher)

If bleed lvl 2-lvl n wouldn’t be affected by player status (increase Cdmg/duration) the technical issues would be minimal at best right?

This is a huge shame. I go around the world solo, doing my world completion and have a really fun time, but once I hit some group events I feel so worthless because I do such little damage due to bleed cap :[

Lopez.7369:

….
Do you really know if the server could handle that? Are you sure that interacting with 100 mobs that are spread out is the same as interacting with one mob in a focused area? What happens if those necromancers now Epidemic those 2,500 bleeds?

No, I don’t know if the server handles that. But since that scenario isn’t mentioned in all the “technical limitations” talk at all and because there doesn’t seem to be a limitation on the amount of Condition Damage characters that are allowed into a map I assumed that the servers could handle it.

Which would leave the second question as an explanation for the limitation. But why should 2500 counters counting down to zero cause a problem if they are connected to only one enemy instead of 100?

Lopez.7369:

I obviously disapprove of the bleed cap, but I’m sure ArenaNet is telling the truth about it being a technical limitation, although that should warrant designing around the limitation, not the status quo of build diversity.

I am not sure about that, main reason is that they haven’t explained WHAT the limitation really is. And again there is my scenario above and the questions it causes. “technical limitation” could be just a lame excuse to hide bad programming and/or design or the problem is really hard to explain and they just can’t explain it properly.

Colin Johanson specifically said calculating bleeds takes a lot of bandwidth. I’m not really sure they need to go in further detail.

The reason they do nothing about it is quite simple: the cap is fine for spvp, so nothing will be done about it.

With the two week content machine they don’t have time to fix anything that relates to open world or wvw or dungeons, and all ‘balance’ is designed around spvp, no matter how badly it affects other areas of the game.

As bleed takes a lot of bandwidth keep the cap at 25 and apply half of the total damage that any additional bleeds would cause directly and instantly (sort of like how melee works) to bosses and champs, as others have suggested. This would make condition builds viable and mean Anet aren’t excluding quite so many build choices from open world content.

They have people working on technical problems on the side. If I remember correctly, it’s still a minority of their staff that’s working on Living Story.

I absolutely love conditions, but they’re totally useless on any content with more than 3 people.

Why won’t they respond to this thread?

Derek.9021:

Why won’t they respond to this thread?

They only ever seem to respond to threads that praise them and/or compliment them for their decisions. So I wouldn’t get your hopes up for a response.

I give them a little more credit than that. I’ve seen them respond to controversial topics before, especially in the structured PvP forums.

Lopez.7369:

Colin Johanson specifically said calculating bleeds takes a lot of bandwidth. I’m not really sure they need to go in further detail.

So does 2500 stacks of bleeding distributed over 100 enemies cause less bandwidth than 2500 stacks on one enemy?

I have seen a guildmate kill several enemies with epidemic and bleeding. I am pretty sure the total amount of stacks over all enemies was higher than 25 which would support that the 100 enemies scenario can actually be handled. Well, maybe not 100 enemies, but 10 or 20 shouldn’t be a problem.

I have no idea what the bandwidth limits are. I assume you don’t, either.

Why else would they keep a limitation that they’ve said hurts condition builds too much?

My ranger and mesmer support this thread :/

My necromancer supports it, too. :P

Another day without a word on this topic. Disheartening :[

This takes more than a few days to fix. Still, I would hope a statement could be prepared within 30 days to at least acknowledge Arenanet has reviewed the arguments and suggestions.

This thread will not hear from them. There is no percentage in it for them. The thread will disappear along with this sub-forum in a few days anyway.

“Epidemic” destroy any single way of possible condition improvement (only thing is possible to make – destroying structures with condi)

Epidemic could be capped at 25 bleeds. It should probably be capped at even less, to be honest.

knbBlackTemplar.3059:

“Epidemic” destroy any single way of possible condition improvement (only thing is possible to make – destroying structures with condi)

Lopez.7369:

Epidemic could be capped at 25 bleeds. It should probably be capped at even less, to be honest.

Or, if the proposed idea that stacks above 25 get converted into direct damage is implemented, then Epidemic will only transfer a max of 25 stacks of condition damage.

As this forum will be archived soon, I’ve created (and linked) a topic on the GW2 Discussion forum to continue the conversation, as it clearly has relevance outside of this episode of the Living Story.

I’ll start hopping on that thread.

Seriously, you expect too much!

Conditions are on the same level as a fully-fledged zerker warrior. That’s a simple fact. But I will show: Assume that I have 25 stacks of bleeding through necro. With anything between 1,5k and 2k condition damage, bleeding does (I say I’d have 1,75k since it is in the middle) 130 damage per stack per second. That means I do 3250 damage/second without doing anything else, I can even be ranged. My zerker geared warrior can hit up to about 35k per target, maximum stacks needed for (might/vul). Even here, a warrior has (with traited GS of course) 9,9sec. effective cooldown, skill casting time already additioned. That means in 9,9sec, it is about 3,4k. If I hit with other attacks while CD, it goes up of course, but:

1.) A necromancer can have any other related attributes, it doesn’t matter at all. He just needs condition damage while a warrior needs full zerker gear, making him much more vulnerable.
2.) A necromancer can even protect himself much better because he only needs one trait tree (curses) at maximum and can choose for the rest whatever he wishes; a warrior has to take all skills for getting maximum damage.
3.) A warrior cannot move while channeling, and with that melee range, he is an open spot himself. Evade means rapid damage drop. A necromancer can move around and has much more options to evade because damage comes from itself.
4.) A warrior hits up to 3 targets. A necromancer just needs to hit 1 more target than a warrior with epidemic to deal much, much more damage than him. Even if a warrior would deal 4k/sec each, one more would mean a necromancer hits up for about 12,8k damage/second. WITHOUT being in melee-range, withoug getting any kind of danger! And all that goes of course only for bleeding, no other damage-related condition. As something also important, other conditions like vul and weakness are spread too, increasing the groups damage much more too.

Don’t you understand why there is a cap limit?
If there’d be none, it would look out like this:
Groups consists only of 5 necros. Lets say there is a group of 5 enemies. Necros have trated any kind of what they want except for conditions. Since one could do about 25 stacks bleeding, it would look like:
one does 25 stacks bleeding. Necro 1 casts epidemic, giving 25 stacks per mob. Nec 2 does epidemic on one mob, doubling bleeding on other mobs. Nec 3 does the same with one of the other mobs, stacking bleeding already up to 100. Now the Nec 4 casts it, stacking up to 200. Nec. 5 casts, now it is about 300-400 stacks bleeding per mob. This would mean an amount of about 39-52k damage per second on one mob! No other class can even be comparable to that! A damage amount like that’d kill most mobs instantly and most dungeon mobs only in a few seconds.

I fully agree about the problem of objects being hitten or the amount of damage for a conditioner that is absolutely low in world events. But please consider the balance if you really want something like that!

So while groups of 4warrs+mesmer should be allowed to blaze through the game, downing champs and legendaries in seconds, necros and other condition damagers should stay away of most content, seems fair…

Using an extreme situation (necros overpowering mobs) as an excuse for another extreme situation (necros useless in game) isn’t exactly the best way to make any sort of comparison…

Of course some limitations will have to be imposed but the state of the game currently punishes so much than any subpar alternative to zerker is still better than relying on cdmg.

For example you could limit the damage according to the type of mobs:
regular max of V stacks, veteran W stacks, silver X stacks, champ Y stacks, legendaries Z stacks.
In opens world you could set a multiplier based on the number of people that are currently doing the event. They already scale number of mobs, level of mobs, hp of the mobs and defiant stacks on champs/legendaries, why not the bleed cap be based on that too?

Any explanation that goes beyond technical limits is a waste because the developers have explicitly said that bleed cap exists only because of technical limits.

The most bizarre part of that long post is that it ignored the simple suggestion to keep a cap on Epidemic. Alternatively, Epidemic could be rethought entirely because one utility skill shouldn’t hold back every condition build in the game.

25 stacks of bleed should = a new condition called open wound.

25 Open wounds = Gushing wounds.

25 Gushing Wounds = a new condition ect ect.

Same Bandwidth usage.

Flameseeker.1563:

So while groups of 4warrs+mesmer should be allowed to blaze through the game, downing champs and legendaries in seconds, necros and other condition damagers should stay away of most content, seems fair…

Using an extreme situation (necros overpowering mobs) as an excuse for another extreme situation (necros useless in game) isn’t exactly the best way to make any sort of comparison…

So what?
The risk is much higher for that group. A warrior standing at the front always casting 100b is immovable, highly threatened DD while a necro casting conditions is…what exactly? Only needing 30 points to cause devastation while warrior needs them all to come on the same level! You cannot even switch your support skills since everything is needed and in place. You stand around one third of your time, only attacking with one skill exactly while the boss could cleave you down in 2 hits if you have bad luck.

It was always Arenanet’s Philosophy that high threat for yourself results in a high reward. But what is a conditioner exactly? A high rewarded DD in Dungeons with very_low threat, namely ranged and with so much support traits that it is nearly impossible for him to go down. A necromancer can have any other kind of support attributes besides condition damage while a warrior needs power, crit and crit damage to come on that level.
I fully understand that argument about being useless. But this cannot result in buffing in what is strong already (even in not all situations)
Better they should buff direct damage of the necromancer.

Flameseeker.1563:

For example you could limit the damage according to the type of mobs:
regular max of V stacks, veteran W stacks, silver X stacks, champ Y stacks, legendaries Z stacks.
In opens world you could set a multiplier based on the number of people that are currently doing the event. They already scale number of mobs, level of mobs, hp of the mobs and defiant stacks on champs/legendaries, why not the bleed cap be based on that too?

You don’t understand the problem, right? It’d be much fairer to convert more stacks of bleeding than already on the boss into direct damage than giving more opportunity to take more conditioners.

I understand higher risk for higher reward, gw was always about that even in the previous game. You sacrifice safety for attack power to be faster and more efficient but the gap at the moment is just absurd.

Look at gw1, warrs did the most dmg but had the most counters (mostly through blind, hexes and protection enchants). Casters, particularity necros that focused on killing stuff, did lower packets of armor ignoring damage while being relatively safe.
Elite missions completion time would vary a lot if you were on a hardcore speedfarm team or a safer version for pugs, and i never complained about the time i took to finish since i knew i would never have the skill to join the hardcore farmers.

What i want is the same balance and has passed enough time for us to get an update on this issue.
Note that i don’t want necros to burn through mobs the same speed as zerker warriors, it should never be allowed have high damage and safety on the same build.

Comparing to my early gw1 days my ranger summoning bone minions and flare spam elementalist were far more useful in a team than my current necro dedicated to conditions…

Melee range means burst. Long range means steady pressure. That would remain true even without bleed cap. It’s totally fine.

Pwr is instant damage, CDmg is DoT therefore you sacrifice being able to do damage fast for MORE damage/utility over time, else whats the point?
I totally agree with most of you guys. CDmg should be produce more damage in longer fights or at least let our CC work on bosses for more than half a second…

Lopez.7369:

Colin Johanson specifically said calculating bleeds takes a lot of bandwidth. I’m not really sure they need to go in further detail.

Every other MMO I’ve played that had DOTs/Debuffs/Buffs/Conditions/Boons handle this fine. Computers be good at calculating & storing numbers.

Wouldn’t it be less server load to not deal with direct damage?
That has to worry about Vuln stacks, Trait Modifyers, Rune Modifyers, Armor Values, Crit %, Crit Dam…
Surely more calculations than Condi Power & Duration.

Well in PvP Conditions really need a nerf, but in PvE they would need a buff, the stack size at least.

But according to the leaked patch notes for Oct 1st all stackable boons and conditions get limited to 5 Stacks, so basically rendering them completely useless in PvE

Here’s what I might be okay with: extra stacks get converted into a single burst of damage, equal to a fixed percentage of the total damage the stacks would have dealt over their duration and your current level of condition damage at the time of skill activation.

It has to be lowered from the full value so players can’t spoof higher damage by slamming conditions out right before their might expires. This also compensates for the fact that some mobs can clear conditions, and many would normally die before the conditions can run their course.

still no response O-O this is ridiculous…

Totally agree, these bad Game Mechanics completely destroy half the builds in this game.

Honestly why would anyone need to make or use a condition class after the other five or so players have already turned up and pasted theirs to whatever it is they are fighting..

Lopez.7369:

Burning and poison are limited because of balance; bleeds are limited because of a technical limitation.

I found this a curious double standard. For some reason, the argument seems to be that it’s OK to put 2500 stacks of bleeds on a boss, but having multiple stacks of burning and poison isn’t?

ATMAvatar.5749:

Lopez.7369:

Burning and poison are limited because of balance; bleeds are limited because of a technical limitation.

I found this a curious double standard. For some reason, the argument seems to be that it’s OK to put 2500 stacks of bleeds on a boss, but having multiple stacks of burning and poison isn’t?

I’m sure he meant balance in spvp. If not… i dont want another infraction points for saying ugly truth, teeheehee