Guild Wars 2

Hello, I’m a new player and still much enchanted by this beautiful game. As time passes and I play and read more about the game the saddening issues regarding conditions began to linger in my mind, specially since I started playing a necromancer and noticed how many traits and gear options hint to strong hybrid paths.

Anyhow, as things are, the cap on bleeds is necessary to reduce bandwith costs. Poison only stacks in duration and I read that burn is a recent addition and works similarly to poison.
In other games (as was probably mentioned a million times by many player) each player damage over time is tracked independantly, but this conflicts with our bandwith problem. Now the thing is… when you look at how poison works, it can make you wonder. The damage is weak, it reduces heal, but what im getting at is how it ‘stacks’. It just increases duration.
Now bear with me, currently the machines need to keep track of bleeds duration and strength, and everything gets mish-mashed as players overwrite each others conditions. Why not….

Just make bleeds stack in duration as well – But! – Make them individual, as well as poison and burning being player individual as well?
To further reduce obscene amounts of data tracking and calculations, bleeding skills would be overhauled so that they all have same condition damage scaling modifier and the only thing that differentiate them in a numbers point of view would be the duration itself?

Then to further consolidate this, the traits that cause bleed on critical hits could add and X amount of seconds to the player’s own condition applied or simply apply a fresh one (remember that for simplicity this would have the same ratio).

I don’t know if it would spare enough bandwidth to allow it but it could hopefully help a lot. I’m sure player that have long anticipated would appreciate any step forward to seeing their damage contribution always be meaningful no matter the source.

This would probably lower individual condition damage but it would make it feel meaningful in groups instead of detrimental at a certain point as well as making balance with condition tracking and cleaning simpler (I think)

I don’t even know if this was the right place to place a suggestion, and this was probably already suggested somewhere as I don’t see myself as an innovator but in case it wasn’t tossed out there, I sincerely hope it’s useful and Anet or someone that knows how to bring it to the proper channels attention can make use of this idea.

TLDR: Conditions could be overhauled for individual player tracking at low bandwith cost by making them scale at same ratio and only the base durations be different

Best wishes to the staff, player community and everyone that keeps this bad kitten game rocking!

Won’t happen

/15chars

That’s a shame

But is it something technical on your opinion or is this coming from the disillusion I notice from some long time players that say too much time is invested in only certain aspects of the game? (wvw, world story)

There’s been a lot of suggestions on how to fix it. They don’t really care, and they’re kind of right.

Look at what the focus of the game is on at the moment: dungeons and fractals have been abandoned by the developers, and their focus is on personal instances and open world events.

Personal instances doesn’t have this problem, because you’re the only person there.

In open world events your DPS is of little significance, so it doesn’t really matter.

That’s really bad for dungeons party diversity, so sad

Burning has existed since launch and stacks in duration b/c it is incredibly powerful. It’s the ‘burst’ of conditions. Poison stacks in duration to maintain the pressure of other conditions so condi users aren’t fighting an eternal uphill battle against every/any other build (passive healing and/or short cooldowns).

I don’t, at all, understand how you’d intend to balance this proposed idea though tbh.

Tman.6349:

Burning has existed since launch and stacks in duration b/c it is incredibly powerful. It’s the ‘burst’ of conditions. Poison stacks in duration to maintain the pressure of other conditions so condi users aren’t fighting an eternal uphill battle against every/any other build (passive healing and/or short cooldowns).

I don’t, at all, understand how you’d intend to balance this proposed idea though tbh.

Each player has their own stack of burning. Make conditions be affected by vulnerability. Remove the condition cap.

If they manage to do that somehow, condition builds might become viable in PvE.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Each player has their own stack of burning. Make conditions be affected by vulnerability. Remove the condition cap.

If they manage to do that somehow, condition builds might become viable in PvE.

Huh? Is there any pve content that you cant manage to complete because you run a condi build?

Papaminas.6713:

That’s a shame

But is it something technical on your opinion or is this coming from the disillusion I notice from some long time players that say too much time is invested in only certain aspects of the game? (wvw, world story)

I can’t speak for the poster you addressed. However, this is, I believe, what’s going on with the bleed problem.

Bleeds are a play-style of themselves. One player can stack his own bleeds to 25 with the right build and play. Targets can build to cleanse often, but doing so means they are not building for something else. This creates the potential for the kind of rock/paper/scissors play and counter-play that makes for more engaging PvP. I’d bet a great deal that that was part of the thinking about the way bleeds were designed. It seems more engaging to stack bleeds than to just drop a DoT on someone and kite, especially given GW2 invulnerability frames.

Now, given they are designed that way, the bandwidth issue means that in PvE, where large-group content is the center of game design, bleed builds cannot generate the kind of damage they can solo or in PvP. In WvW, bleeds are bad in large, less organized groups, though a purpose-designed group can get a lot of return by including a condition build or two. Obviously, the smaller the group, the easier that is.

The one major technical issue with redesigning builds to work in large group settings is that so many skills apply them. Changing the way bleeds work would require a major overhaul to the skill system. It would also require a compete revision of how bleeds work in PvP and PvE. This would entail in all likelihood a change in vision. While ANet has shown a willingness to make large changes to systems, they have shown little willingness to change their vision.

@Wanze: It’s not that it can’t be done it’s that it feels like player work against each other if they share interest in condition heavy build because of bleed overwriting

Exactly Indigo! That is why this proposed ides could never be balanced.

First off, the idea of players applying/maintain their own burn would be so ridiculously OP the tears would cause local floods. Never mind the idea of ALL conditions being personal. A good condi can dish out 1k burn ticks.

Vulnerability affecting conditions would cause wild fluctuations in condi damage and be that many more calculations that need to be handled.

As for bleeds being setup like burning and poison, it would be impossible to balance this proposed system. How would the damage be “scaled”/calculated if it was like burning and poison? Just 1 stack would be modified to do the same damage as 25 stacks does now? Or would it be equal to 12.5 stacks? What about the rate these conditions can be applied vs cleansed? Bleeds are very abundant and you have to build them up to do maximum damage right now. This is balanced with condi clears right now.

How crazy would it be for a condi user to use FIVE SKILLS and be doing their MAXIMUM DAMAGE? The are tons of skills with conditions on the b/c how they’re implemented right now. This proposed idea would make condition clearing futile. Now this is just in a 1v1 scenario. What happens in a 1vX or even zerg clashes when all the condi users maintain their own stacks AND are doing maximum personal damage with just a few skills (4-5 secs tops)? You have people everywhere blowing up to 20-50k condi bursts is what would happen.

So again, how could this possibly be balanced? Remove most of the condition application from most skills? Then you don’t have ‘condi weapons’ anymore making skill sets seem bland and limited. Do you add condition removal to 75% of the skills in the game? Do you heavily reduce the scaling of the Condition Damage stat so condition users aren’t bursting as heavy as full Berserker builds? Well then you have the problem of conditions going from inefficient in large groups to them being absolutely pathetic for any solo/small group play. That would make power specs a necessity for anything other than large fights.

The point is, as Indigo seems to agree, the only way to balance this would be a complete and radical overhaul of the entire combat system and almost every skill, trait, rune, and sigil in the game.

They’ve changed a lot in condis’ favor since launch. Necro just screams, “Use condition gear!” right? Everyone wants to be different. Forget those mean ole ‘zerkers’…those conformists! This, seemingly innocent, idea might appear to be a solution in a short brainstorm, but, when looked at logically, rationally, and objectively, it would only break the game in every way. The Devs did a pretty good job imho.

Tman.6349:

Exactly Indigo! That is why this proposed ides could never be balanced.

First off, the idea of players applying/maintain their own burn would be so ridiculously OP the tears would cause local floods. Never mind the idea of ALL conditions being personal. A good condi can dish out 1k burn ticks.

Vulnerability affecting conditions would cause wild fluctuations in condi damage and be that many more calculations that need to be handled.

You don’t even have to go into the math on this one. If everyone applying their own burn would be OP, then every elementalist and every guardian would be using a burn build on solos, which is clearly not the case.

There’s already wild fluctuations in condi damage due to changing tick values as conditions are overwritten.

I don’t really see how seeing improvements to condition builds rationally would suddenly make it seem like a stupid idea. Heck, having damage mechanisms which don’t work in a group setting in a *MMO*RPG is pretty rationally silly.

Like I was saying, conditions tuned down so players don’t overwrite each other, I thought this was clear in the post. It’s not about what a player can do alone, its about how more than 1 player working together can negatively affect each other. It makes no sense. They wouldn’t be op, they would be weaker but not denied by allies, which is silly

Wanze.8410:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Each player has their own stack of burning. Make conditions be affected by vulnerability. Remove the condition cap.

If they manage to do that somehow, condition builds might become viable in PvE.

Huh? Is there any pve content that you cant manage to complete because you run a condi build?

You can complete most dungeons naked and without any traits… so…

Does that mean if traits break we shouldn’t fix them? If armor suddenly is removed from the game we should just not care?

Conditions should be fixed because they are broken, period.