Guild Wars 2

I know, I know. We’ve been posting about this for really close to two years now. You’re all probably tired of it.

Is there any update on what’s going to be done about the cap on condition stacks in PvE? It’s a design decision that eliminates dozens of potentially fun and useful builds from group PvE content because it utterly cripples their ability to do damage. I can’t understand the logic behind it, either. There’s no cap on how many characters in Assassin’s/Berserker’s gear can tear into an enemy; what would be so unbalancing about letting condition-specced characters do the same thing?

Last I heard, something like a year ago, ArenaNet wanted to implement some sort of change. So I’m wondering if there’s been any news since then.

Nothing changed so far.
The cap in cond damage is because the server couldn’t handle the calculation of instanced stacks od conditions, so they made it global.

The developers had not spoken a word on it since january of last year, when they stated that fixes were being worked on.

Belzebu.3912:

Nothing changed so far.
The cap in cond damage is because the server couldn’t handle the calculation of instanced stacks od conditions, so they made it global.

Really? That seems… really odd, given that other games seem to do similar things just fine. I wonder if the open world content, where dozens of players could be applying conditions to the same target, is the reason.

It’s disappointing to hear that there’s been no real progress. I like playing Zerker builds as much as the next guy, but I’d love to take a condition Necro for a spin in PvE one day.

Yeah sadly nothing has changed yet.

The main reason (I believe) is condi damage (and boons like regen) are calculated based on your current stat value instead of when it was first applied, gain/lose might after you apply that bleed, your damage reflects that on the next tic. So instead of having to keep track of ~3 numbers per condition stack (damage, duration, type/who applied it) for each enemy with up to 25 stacks for bleed. You’d have up to ~75 numbers having to be transferred per PC per enemy. And remember each second you need to do a check to see if you need to recalculate (and potentially recalculate) the damage of each stack. The easiest thing may be to just “raise” the global cap instead of making all the caps personal, or just figure out a way to convert the “wasted” condi stacks into direct damage so we can at least do something.

The other problem besides the logistical problem is balance. And I don’t think there’s a way to make conditions better in all game modes without spiting up how it’s done, which is something I doubt they want to do. Arguably you have 4 “game modes”.

PvE Open world (including world bosses)
PvE Instances (dungeons, fractals, story missions)
PvP
WvW

Considering you have a limited number of people in PvE instances and PvP, they could possibly handle a large global or even a person cap. But is that fair? In PvP many people already claim that conditions are king and complain that they are too strong. In most PvE conditions kinda suck. It only takes 1 other person using conditions (or a power build that happens to apply conditions with their weapon/trait) to screw each other over.

I’ve always felt that conditions should do more damage than direct attacks because they have a time component to them. It’s fine if a killshot or eviscerate hits for 13k+ or you can be constantly stunned to not do anything, but it’s not okay for my Flurry to do 6-9k damage over 3 seconds, as that’s too strong. Or a single bleed to do 100-200 damage a second when some AA’s on power build do 2-4k per hit. Conditions should do more damage because they take longer to apply that damage and give people time to cleanse them. But at the same time there are limited ways for classes to cleanse.

Agent Noun.7350:

I know, I know. We’ve been posting about this for really close to two years now. You’re all probably tired of it.

Is there any update on what’s going to be done about the cap on condition stacks in PvE? It’s a design decision that eliminates dozens of potentially fun and useful builds from group PvE content because it utterly cripples their ability to do damage. I can’t understand the logic behind it, either. There’s no cap on how many characters in Assassin’s/Berserker’s gear can tear into an enemy; what would be so unbalancing about letting condition-specced characters do the same thing?

Last I heard, something like a year ago, ArenaNet wanted to implement some sort of change. So I’m wondering if there’s been any news since then.

It will not get fixed.

Complaints have been been posted about this since beta to no avail.

Well there’s been one thing suggested a billion times that could help and the developers still haven’t even done that. Conditions currently update their damage each time they tick, so if you throw some conditions on then get might, the damage is increased on the existing condition, and decreases as that might falls off.

Removing that would get rid of something the of server has to constantly check and calculate for, giving them more resources, and buffing PvE condi builds since you could now burst boons on yourself then lay your conditions instead of constantly maintaining boons in a condition build, when it’s impossible to build both condi and boon duration except in traits.

Conncept.7638:

Well there’s been one thing suggested a billion times that could help and the developers still haven’t even done that. Conditions currently update their damage each time they tick, so if you throw some conditions on then get might or whatever other buff, the damage is increased on the existing condition. Removing that would get rid of something the of server has to constantly check and calculate for, giving them more resources, and buffing PvE condi builds since you could now burst boons on yourself then lay your conditions instead of constantly maintaining boons in a condition build.

I’m baffled as to why they’d update based on your current stats in the first place. That seems like such an odd thing to implement.