Guild Wars 2

JonPeters.5630:

Actually this is not true and is something we are actively looking at. We have a number of solutions that we are talking about and when we are able to figure out which one will have the least impact on balance, performance, and testing we will put that solution in place as soon as possible.

Jon

While I really, really look forward to this and I thank you for speaking here I really hope that as soon as possible is actually soon and not in another 6 months.

This has been a known problem since the beta and so far nothing has been done to address it. We hear a lot about how you’re talking about these kind of issues and that’s great but you guys don’t seem to be focusing on and solving them.

I’d be happy if you’d let some of my conditions work on Objects, like Burning for Example….I can understand bleed/poisoning..but if hitting something wooden, I’d think my Burn would do damage.

Xsorus.2507:

I’d be happy if you’d let some of my conditions work on Objects, like Burning for Example….I can understand bleed/poisoning..but if hitting something wooden, I’d think my Burn would do damage.

But it is a magical burn that only works on living things, you know :o)

JonPeters.5630:

It is true that letting each player have a stack is unlikely to be the solution, however we do intend to solve this problem.

That’s good news, thanks Jon. I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with. I agree that individual stacks would not be the best solution, but would you consider the haemorrhage idea mentioned earlier in this thread? Or do you see issues with this solution?

I posted this question in a different thread by mistake, as I was following both.

Would it be feasible if after the stack is capped, all conditions applied after were merely damage multipliers? The multiplier would be based upon the player’s condition dmg/duration stats. Or is that just as server processor intensive as what they are already trying to do?

I guess it’s nothing but direct damage build for everyone forever.

Makes you wonder why they even put bleeds in the game.

I really wonder how their internal structure looks like? In the most basic form it would be something like an simple array that could hold up to 25 bleed objects. Each bleed object might contain data such as the player ID, the damage and the remaining time. This solution would starve very quickly, though.

A better approach might be one bleed object per player. Whenever a player re-applies a bleed the damage of the bleed object gets increased and the timer resets. For example, initially you had [{id: 1234, dmg: 125, time: 10}] and afterwards: [{id: 1234, dmg: 250, time: 10}].

The problem is, though, this wouldn’t be entirely correct. Because it doesn’t honor the fact that each stack of bleeds has its own timer and that there are actually only certain “windows” where the damage of both stacks would add up.

JonPeters.5630:

It is true that letting each player have a stack is unlikely to be the solution, however we do intend to solve this problem.

Why not? You can’t solve the problem if individual players can’t maintain their own stacks. How is it that other MMOs such as WoW and Rift can do this but you guys can’t figure it out? I know that DoTs in those games are handled differently (i.e. they don’t have the stacking mechanic that this game does), and that is why you guys are having such a hard time balancing conditions. The mechanic is just flawed and needs to be redone.

Players want to feel like they are contributing to damage and not just overwriting each other’s conditions.

kidbs.8920:

JonPeters.5630:

It is true that letting each player have a stack is unlikely to be the solution, however we do intend to solve this problem.

Why not? You can’t solve the problem if individual players can’t maintain their own stacks. How is it that other MMOs such as WoW and Rift can do this but you guys can’t figure it out? I know that DoTs in those games are handled differently (i.e. they don’t have the stacking mechanic that this game does), and that is why you guys are having such a hard time balancing conditions. The mechanic is just flawed and needs to be redone.

Players want to feel like they are contributing to damage and not just overwriting each other’s conditions.

Correction: They can’t solve the problem like you want them to.

This was already clarified in the interview. Conditions require bandwidth and parsing that many queries would be too much burden on their servers.

Ishiga.6053:

kidbs.8920:

JonPeters.5630:

It is true that letting each player have a stack is unlikely to be the solution, however we do intend to solve this problem.

Why not? You can’t solve the problem if individual players can’t maintain their own stacks. How is it that other MMOs such as WoW and Rift can do this but you guys can’t figure it out? I know that DoTs in those games are handled differently (i.e. they don’t have the stacking mechanic that this game does), and that is why you guys are having such a hard time balancing conditions. The mechanic is just flawed and needs to be redone.

Players want to feel like they are contributing to damage and not just overwriting each other’s conditions.

Correction: They can’t solve the problem like you want them to.

This was already clarified in the interview. Conditions require bandwidth and parsing that many queries would be too much burden on their servers.

Again, how is it that other MMOs have figured how to do that? How does condition damage use anymore bandwidth than direct damage? I just don’t buy that excuse.

Because in other games debuffs often do not stack! As simple as that.

Sometimes you have to make sacrifices in order to get maximum performance. Sure it would be nice to be able to track each bleed stack by each player. But this puts a big load on the system.

A more pragmatic solution would be to have one bleed (object) for each player on a mob as I described somewhere else.

Heck, you could even use some kind of a “damage structure/object” per player. Whenever a player adds another debuff to the mob you can recalculate how much damage the mob is going to take in the next n seconds, given the remaining damage the new incoming damage.

I don’t understand why gw2 became so reliable on conditions. In gw1 the only heavy conditions build as far as I remember was that fotm team build with necro bombers and spirit spamming ritualists. We didn’t have a stack of 25 blinds or bleeds but 1 and everyone had a fast condition removal it was often about applying the condition in the right time not about spamming and stacking them and relying on them for dmg.
Same with bunkers it’s the meta for gw2 cause dmg is just too high and pvp is about holding points and you’re forced to run it. Closest thing I remember from gw1 is the fotm HA zerkway with paragons and warriors. And those fotm builds were always nerfed. Dunno it’s like the game did a 180° turn.

woeye.2753:

Because in other games debuffs often do not stack! As simple as that.

Sometimes you have to make sacrifices in order to get maximum performance. Sure it would be nice to be able to track each bleed stack by each player. But this puts a big load on the system.

A more pragmatic solution would be to have one bleed (object) for each player on a mob as I described somewhere else.

That is what I said. The stacking mechanic is flawed. In other MMOs any stacking of a DoT is actually representing individual DoTs from multiple players rather than multiple stacks from a single player. This why conditions are so complicated in this game. They just need to be redesigned to use a more common mechanic that is used by other MMOs.

Each player should have only one bleed, one burn, one poison, etc…

JonPeters.5630:

Xsorus.2507:

I’d be happy if you’d let some of my conditions work on Objects, like Burning for Example….I can understand bleed/poisoning..but if hitting something wooden, I’d think my Burn would do damage.

This is a second problem as well that we are also addressing. Thanks for bringing it up here.

Not just damage, but more damage… because you know.. super effective.

woeye.2753:

Because in other games debuffs often do not stack! As simple as that.

Sometimes you have to make sacrifices in order to get maximum performance. Sure it would be nice to be able to track each bleed stack by each player. But this puts a big load on the system.

A more pragmatic solution would be to have one bleed (object) for each player on a mob as I described somewhere else.

Actually, Looking at the GW2 wiki, only 3 conditions stack in intensity.

But I know in other MMO’s you’re able to stack DoT’s upon DoT’s, of different types and stacks. They may not all be "debuffs"** but they serve the same function.

**Though, GW2’s conditions are not all debuffs…of Vulnerability, weakness, blind, freeze, and blind, only vulnerability stacks in intensity

emikochan.8504:

Sigh, everyone should just have their own cap, it wouldn’t even be slightly overpowered.

I think you’re underselling the effect of every person getting 25 stacks of Bleed on their own. I keep pointing out due to how the rules work, anything done to fix it in PvE would also wind up on WvW, and while some people have condition removal all day long others don’t.

Think of how much you’d see getting done to, say, glass cannon builds if they ate 12x 25 Stacks of Bleed? Heck, even a tank-like build might be really in trouble at that.

That is a very good question, iriyabran. Maybe to comfort the WoW or CoD crowd? I don’t know. Then again players always complained about the crazy burst some classes could dish out. However, when it comes to burst damage, GW2 sets a new record here

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

emikochan.8504:

Sigh, everyone should just have their own cap, it wouldn’t even be slightly overpowered.

I think you’re underselling the effect of every person getting 25 stacks of Bleed on their own. I keep pointing out due to how the rules work, anything done to fix it in PvE would also wind up on WvW, and while some people have condition removal all day long others don’t.

Think of how much you’d see getting done to, say, glass cannon builds if they ate 12x 25 Stacks of Bleed? Heck, even a tank-like build might be really in trouble at that.

How is that different than being hit by 5 different 100b warriors at the same time? Why should a team of direct damage dealers be more effective and capable of dishing out damage than a team of condition dealers?

In other MMOs such as WoW and Rift a person can have DoTs from multiple players at a time. It’s not like DoT damage is so much more powerful than direct damage that this should even be an issue.

kidbs.8920:

Ishiga.6053:

kidbs.8920:

JonPeters.5630:

It is true that letting each player have a stack is unlikely to be the solution, however we do intend to solve this problem.

Why not? You can’t solve the problem if individual players can’t maintain their own stacks. How is it that other MMOs such as WoW and Rift can do this but you guys can’t figure it out? I know that DoTs in those games are handled differently (i.e. they don’t have the stacking mechanic that this game does), and that is why you guys are having such a hard time balancing conditions. The mechanic is just flawed and needs to be redone.

Players want to feel like they are contributing to damage and not just overwriting each other’s conditions.

Correction: They can’t solve the problem like you want them to.

This was already clarified in the interview. Conditions require bandwidth and parsing that many queries would be too much burden on their servers.

Again, how is it that other MMOs have figured how to do that? How does condition damage use anymore bandwidth than direct damage? I just don’t buy that excuse.

Their current system just does require a lot of bandwith. World of Warcraft had a limit of 40 on a target before Wrath of the Lich King, until that limitation was lifted. But that’s a very old and well developed engine by now. But anyway, you can stack 25 bleeds in GW2, and that’s only one type of condition. Imagine if every player could stack their own conditions? I can see why Jon says they have to find another solution if they’re still sticking with the stackable conditions.

It’s more a matter of flawed design. The idea is good though, but the amount of data it sends is just too much. Seems to be a case where a game designer wasn’t aware of the technical limitation and saw the appeal of gradually building up damage over time so you’re never punished for using the same bleed skill more than once. And it also gave the developers really fine control over bleed-skills (internal timer with varying durations, bleed strength by stacks).

Here’s a reddit-comment on the bandwith, take it with a grain of salt as I think it’s easy to exaggerate.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/196rii/comfirmed_nothing_being_done_on_conditions_cap/c8lezq6

nethykins.7986:

woeye.2753:

Because in other games debuffs often do not stack! As simple as that.

Sometimes you have to make sacrifices in order to get maximum performance. Sure it would be nice to be able to track each bleed stack by each player. But this puts a big load on the system.

A more pragmatic solution would be to have one bleed (object) for each player on a mob as I described somewhere else.

Actually, Looking at the GW2 wiki, only 3 conditions stack in intensity.

But I know in other MMO’s you’re able to stack DoT’s upon DoT’s, of different types and stacks. They may not all be "debuffs"** but they serve the same function.

**Though, GW2’s conditions are not all debuffs…of Vulnerability, weakness, blind, freeze, and blind, only vulnerability stacks in intensity

The thing is, though, in other games debuffs stack per player, not per type!

Taking WoW for example: a priest casts Shadow Word: Pain and a warlock Corruption. Both spells a very similar, doing the same job. Both are tracked on the mob.
If another priest casts Shadow Word: Pain you get a third debuff on the mob.

This way debuffs cannot interfere with each other (priest B does not overwrite the debuff or priest A).

Yeah, this is inexcusable. They need SOME fix for condition damage caps and they need to implement something, if not a complete solution, in the near future.

I fully understand that they can’t simply raise the cap for technical reasons. Fair enough, but they need to do something more once players hit that cap so that their total damage potential does not drop.

At the moment, if you have one Warrior, he does a given amount of damage. If you have five identical Warriors, they do exactly five times that much damage. Is that unbalanced to them? If so, why allow it, and if not, then why would having five Condition Necros being able to deal their full damage potential be unbalanced? They need a system in which five identical Condition Necros would deal five times as much damage as any one of them could to a single target, simple as that.

Condition damage isn’t a bonus, it’s the way that a Condition build deals its primary damage. If they didn’t want people to spec for it, if they meant it to just be a bonus side effect that people shouldn’t worry about then they shouldn’t have provided a Condition stat, or the many traits and runes that buff the application and duration of conditions.

The solution that I tend to favor would be to have
Hemorrhage/Overdose/Blister damage added to the game. Any time that you try to apply a 26th stack of bleed, or a 26th second of Poison or Burn, then the damage would just be applied as straight direct damage instead of damage over time.

So for example using the raw wiki stats, if an enemy already has 25 stacks of bleed and he’s hit with a level 80 Death Blossom, instead of dealing three hits of 201 damage each and zero additional bleeds, it would deal three hits of 201 damage and also three hits of instant 400 bleed damage. If absolutely necessary the “hemorrhage” damage could be treated as standard damage, countered by Toughness, rather than as Condition damage which is not, but it definitely needs to use the Condition stat to raise it since that’s the state the player will have invested in.

Keep in mind that the above would only really apply to bosses and dungeon mobs anyways, if players are being hit by more than 26 stacks of bleed in short order then they would already be in trouble.

I made a suggestion for the bleed stack issues that should keep the current bleed damage relatively the same, while raising the limits of how many people can stack on, all while keeping it maxed at 25 stacks/25 people.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Possible-Change-for-Condition-Handling/first#post1506056

It’d be nice if condition advocates can read it and give some feedback. You could leave your comments to bump it if you think its a good idea.

Andrige.5609:

It’s more a matter of flawed design. The idea is good though, but the amount of data it sends is just too much. Seems to be a case where a game designer wasn’t aware of the technical limitation and saw the appeal of gradually building up damage over time so you’re never punished for using the same bleed skill more than once. And it also gave the developers really fine control over bleed-skills (internal timer with varying durations, bleed strength by stacks).

This. It’s pretty much over-engineered. Yes it would be cool to be able to track the data at this kind of granularity. But with a large group of players and its huge amount of debuffs flying around you simply put up too much load.

If they really track each debuff stack of each player on each mob – then they cannot simply increase the cap because it would put way too much load on the system for sure.

kidbs.8920:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

emikochan.8504:

Sigh, everyone should just have their own cap, it wouldn’t even be slightly overpowered.

I think you’re underselling the effect of every person getting 25 stacks of Bleed on their own. I keep pointing out due to how the rules work, anything done to fix it in PvE would also wind up on WvW, and while some people have condition removal all day long others don’t.

Think of how much you’d see getting done to, say, glass cannon builds if they ate 12x 25 Stacks of Bleed? Heck, even a tank-like build might be really in trouble at that.

How is that different than being hit by 5 different 100b warriors at the same time? Why should a team of direct damage dealers be more effective and capable of dishing out damage than a team of condition dealers?

In other MMOs such as WoW and Rift a person can have DoTs from multiple players at a time. It’s not like DoT damage is so much more powerful than direct damage that this should even be an issue.

. . . because you can dodge Hundred Blades. You can’t dodge ticks from conditions.

It doesn’t matter how much water you put in the glass, there is a physical limit to how much water the glass can hold. It’s either you drastically reduce the amount of water you can pour or remove the ability to pour the water.

My suggested fix (admitting I haven’t read through everything and just thought of it and Arenanet probably has better)

For bleeds don’t track stacks on the server side. Track time slots and add to each slot. Each ping only happens once a second. You need a maximum time slot allocation for the maximum reachable bleed duration in seconds. Longest possible bleed is 14.3 sec you need 14 time slots. As a bleed is applied, for each time’s slot that falls within its duration starting at the current slot, add the damage for that bleed. Iterate through the time slots. You end up with one damage number for each second.

On client side if you want to display to someone their damage or stacks you can without worrying about bandwidth. Alternately you can display total damage or everyone’s damage. Since stacks are cleared all at once you send a clear message and it removes all ongoing stacks. If a bleed is applied I’m sure this is already returned. As a result you don’t need to return information on multiple bleed stacks.

This seems to me to be a simple solution. This removes the need for a cap and as a result a solution for at cap. It does require going through the time slots (up to the length of the bleed being applied each time a bleed is applied) which could require too much processing but that’s your call.

As for balance.
- Epidemic will need to be reworked (its one skill).
- If it isn’t balanced for multiple players to be applying bleeds, why is it balanced for an individual player. Its not like vulnerability which gets stronger with more people.
- Condition damage ignores toughness, but it takes time to apply, and can be removed. This was what I thought was the balance.
- To people who will argue it will be too strong when multiple people attack, if those same multiple people were hitting with direct damage you would be dead too.
- In the end Arenanet has more info on damage per second than I do and can easily determine if above certain damage thresholds incoming damage needs to be multiplied by a decimal, but I don’t see why it would.

Why this is important:
People who focus conditions can run together.

And in conclusion. This is simple. I’m sure you’ve thought of it and know the problems with it. I just wrote it to add encouragement that this be fixed soon. Best of luck finding the optimal solution.

I have no idea of how it is currently designed behind the scenes, but I think what is needed is some sort of data consolidation. I like the current system for it’s flexibility, but what we have here is a major issue.

What I’d propose at a meeting of some sorts is a solution that deals with adding up the damage values and a tick timer. A 100 strength bleed that lasts 3 seconds would setup 3 values one for each of those 3 seconds. At each second those values would expire and the damage would be dealt. Add on a 50 strength bleed that lasts 5 seconds at the same time and you’d have 150/150/150/50/50 for tick intervals. You’ve effectively in this case wrapped the 3 second bleed into the 5 second bleed. The strength of the system would be when you get thrown x70 bleeds of various strengths that only last varying degrees of duration between 2s and 10s. At most, those 70 bleeds only require 10 chunks of data to be transmit back, one for each of the intervals remaining. This would also allow partial ticks to be added fairly easily, since a 2.5s duration bleed could simply throw out 50% of it’s tick strength at the 3s interval.

The problems this solution deals with though, is there may be trouble attaching ownership to Bleeds. Making sure things always align with the tick timer could have some interesting race conditions to deal with as well. Extremely long bleeds also can create huge chunks of data required to maintain it while previously it was probably much less. It’s an idea though. Data consolidation is one way of trying to tackle the problem, but you do generally lose some information while doing so.

there is a multi-fold problem here. the players are looking at it from perspectives only focusing on certain aspects of the game. players should have condi caps on them. monsters shouldn’t. let conditions affect certain yellow objects in pve. don’t let them affect stuff in wvw.

It’s not a player or monster issue. It’s a technical issue. If there is no cap on 20 people shooting direct damage on a player per second, it makes no sense there would be a cap on 20 people shooting condition damage on a player per second.

This thread makes me wonder exactly how much stress conditions cause in large scale player events like World vs World.

I’d be very curious to test the performance results in an enviroment without any conditions.

Why not just cut down on the stacks of bleed each class can apply and make them stronger? IE no “applies five stacks of bleed”, it’ll just apply one strong one? It’s not the perfect fix, but it’d be a vast improvement and allow a lot more breathing room, at the very least letting multiple condition users to exist.

Don’t forget that all players get a free condition clear on downed. Burst/direct damage heros can just continue bursting downed heros to finsh them off, while if you run conditions you have to re-stack up conditions, or hope you have a safe-stomp (sorry necros).

I just wish they would put in a priority system, so that if we are stuck with a 25 cap limit, and I know I can easily hold 20 of those stacks of bleeding, I would get the damage and my 2k+ condition damage applied, instead of having my bleeds pushed off by the zerker mesmer clones who have base condition damage. This is painfuly apparent in open world, and can be horribly painful in dungeons with a few people that do incidental bleeds and a primary condition hero.

Ayestes.1273:

It’s not a player or monster issue. It’s a technical issue. If there is no cap on 20 people shooting direct damage on a player per second, it makes no sense there would be a cap on 20 people shooting condition damage on a player per second.

It does make sense from a technical PoV. Because DoTs require a different “tracking” system. Even if the player isn’t doing anything at the moment one of his DoTs might still be working. And you have to sent update events to all clients so that this nice tiny number gets updated

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Think of how much you’d see getting done to, say, glass cannon builds if they ate 12x 25 Stacks of Bleed? Heck, even a tank-like build might be really in trouble at that.

kidbs.8920:

How is that different than being hit by 5 different 100b warriors at the same time? Why should a team of direct damage dealers be more effective and capable of dishing out damage than a team of condition dealers?.

. . . because you can dodge Hundred Blades. You can’t dodge ticks from conditions.

You can however remove conditions. No matter how many bleed stacks you have on you, one condition removal takes care of it completely. It’s as if you had an effect type that removed all damage you have received in the last x seconds.

Astralporing.1957:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Think of how much you’d see getting done to, say, glass cannon builds if they ate 12x 25 Stacks of Bleed? Heck, even a tank-like build might be really in trouble at that.

kidbs.8920:

How is that different than being hit by 5 different 100b warriors at the same time? Why should a team of direct damage dealers be more effective and capable of dishing out damage than a team of condition dealers?.

. . . because you can dodge Hundred Blades. You can’t dodge ticks from conditions.

You can however remove conditions. No matter how many bleed stacks you have on you, one condition removal takes care of it completely. It’s as if you had an effect type that removed all damage you have received in the last x seconds.

Thats an issue in spvp, I think the main idea of this post is about stacks being capped in pve when you have multiple cond builds. PVE in world events(depending on the event) you get multiple cond builds becoming useless since the cap is reached but spvp is hardly the case. Wvw is a hybrid of the 2 so hard to approach that but I’m sure someone has ideas.

Astralporing.1957:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Think of how much you’d see getting done to, say, glass cannon builds if they ate 12x 25 Stacks of Bleed? Heck, even a tank-like build might be really in trouble at that.

kidbs.8920:

How is that different than being hit by 5 different 100b warriors at the same time? Why should a team of direct damage dealers be more effective and capable of dishing out damage than a team of condition dealers?.

. . . because you can dodge Hundred Blades. You can’t dodge ticks from conditions.

You can however remove conditions. No matter how many bleed stacks you have on you, one condition removal takes care of it completely. It’s as if you had an effect type that removed all damage you have received in the last x seconds.

Is that part of what you’re proposing, that one removal removes all “Bleed”/“Poison” effects? That’s a difference, then.

On the more visual side of things, would this mean I’d have to look at like 20 Bleed icons? :P

Couldn’t each Class have it’s own Conditions, each with it’s own “haemorrage”?

Instead of Bleed, Necro’s get Disease. Once a Disease reaches the 25 cap the next application becomes an Acute Disease, which is burst damage. No other Class can apply Diseases.

Thieves get Toxins. At the cap, the next application becomes a burst of Virulent Toxin. No other Class can apply Toxins.

Guardians get Fervant Fire, a type of burning effect… that has blue flames instead of orange. No other Class does this kind of damage.

Ele’s have Fire, Rangers have Poison, Warriors have Bleeds, Mesmers have Confusion and Engineers have… um… Acid.

That’s the gist of it. Each Class has a unique condition. The cap remains at 25, but each application after that 25 bursts the oldest stack’s remaining damage, as smeone described earlier. By giving each Class their own unique Condition, this negates the problem of having three different people of three different Classes all competing for the same spot on the stack… while also preventing Condition dealers from just dealing constant haemorrages after the first few seconds fighting a Champ because every single class is applying the same Condition.

NinjaEd.3946:

Astralporing.1957:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Think of how much you’d see getting done to, say, glass cannon builds if they ate 12x 25 Stacks of Bleed? Heck, even a tank-like build might be really in trouble at that.

kidbs.8920:

How is that different than being hit by 5 different 100b warriors at the same time? Why should a team of direct damage dealers be more effective and capable of dishing out damage than a team of condition dealers?.

. . . because you can dodge Hundred Blades. You can’t dodge ticks from conditions.

You can however remove conditions. No matter how many bleed stacks you have on you, one condition removal takes care of it completely. It’s as if you had an effect type that removed all damage you have received in the last x seconds.

Thats an issue in spvp, I think the main idea of this post is about stacks being capped in pve when you have multiple cond builds. PVE in world events(depending on the event) you get multiple cond builds becoming useless since the cap is reached but spvp is hardly the case. Wvw is a hybrid of the 2 so hard to approach that but I’m sure someone has ideas.

See, it’s balance of WvW and PvE I worry about. People have said in sPvP that the condition issue wasn’t as big as it was in PvE . . . but since WvW is in essence PvE with other players being targets . . .

They don’t have the same health pools as Champions or dungeon bosses, where the condition stack thing really comes into play. Just saying “oh just remove conditions” ignores the fact I can only remove conditions two ways on myself right now as a ranger. And both of them have long reset timers, to the point that the fight will be over when they’re back.

Those are my concerns about “just let more stacks accumulate”.

The idea of “oh just turn the stacks of Bleed into direct damage as they fall off for newer applications” also feels like it’s ripe for abuse in the right situations . . . which then become highly favored like what we have on the DPS side of things. That’s replacing one problem which lots of people say is an issue with another problem lots of people have been saying is an issue already.

Sokar Rostau.7316:

Couldn’t each Class have it’s own Conditions, each with it’s own “haemorrage”?

Instead of Bleed, Necro’s get Disease. Once a Disease reaches the 25 cap the next application becomes an Acute Disease, which is burst damage. No other Class can apply Diseases.

Thieves get Toxins. At the cap, the next application becomes a burst of Virulent Toxin. No other Class can apply Toxins.

Guardians get Fervant Fire, a type of burning effect… that has blue flames instead of orange. No other Class does this kind of damage.

Ele’s have Fire, Rangers have Poison, Warriors have Bleeds, Mesmers have Confusion and Engineers have… um… Acid.

That’s the gist of it. Each Class has a unique condition. The cap remains at 25, but each application after that 25 bursts the oldest stack’s remaining damage, as smeone described earlier. By giving each Class their own unique Condition, this negates the problem of having three different people of three different Classes all competing for the same spot on the stack… while also preventing Condition dealers from just dealing constant haemorrages after the first few seconds fighting a Champ because every single class is applying the same Condition.

I really like the idea of professions having their own set of conditions, however, I’d prefer it if there weren’t three different sets of “poisons” competing with one another. For instance, in a fight you may have a necro, a thief and an engi, they’ll all be throwing their unique poisons to full effect, each utilizing the skill for maximum damage. But when there are three thieves in the party, the same problem will rear its head again, as each of them will be competing for toxin dominance. This will cause the same professions to rather not party together.

I think the amount of overall shared conditions should be lessened, which will make classes feel more distinct. At present, all profession except for the guardian can cause bleeds, while six can cause burn. What makes them so special if they can all replicate effects? I’d rather say they should share less conditions, but specialize a bit more in the conditions they have. For instance, two professions should share bleed, and two share burn. Add in extra conditions such as disease, albeit different than poison, such as escalating damage, but lowish duration, and has a chance to jump to nearby enemies. And give deep wounds to the warrior. Stuff like that, so each class starts to have more of a unique purpose rather than sharing almost all conditions across the board. The guardian is actually a good example of what I’m trying to illustrate, as he only has burn, and has a unikittenfect in aegis, which no other profession shares.

I also like the idea of spike damage. This will solve the PvE problem to an extent. When players of the same profession stacks a damage dealing condition, it will go into a burst, for instance, burn will get periodic fire explosions that deal aoe damage. Whereas something like bleed will have deal added damage whenever the target suffering a bleed burst takes an action.

The obvious solution is to remove the cap and change poison and burning (and maybe regeneration) to stack in intensity, not duration, like bleed. Doing this for poison and burn (and definitely regeneration) may require some careful balance considerations, but at large this would obviate the problem and allow all classes to group with all classes without fear of screwing each other over. The very idea that certain team compositions completely ruin each other’s effectiveness goes against the grouping paradigm of GW2, and needs to be addressed.

NinjaEd.3946:

Calae.1738:

Removing condition damage is not a solution it is THE solution. You just haven’t figured out any creative way to do it yet.

If any Conditon Damage exists on gear, you can replace it with Power. If Power already exists you replace it with Precision.

Traits that have anything to do with Condition Damage will have to be redesigned. Arenanet created a ton of traits in GW1. I’m sure they’re smart enough to think of some.

Weapon skills that have Bleed, Burning, Confusion and Poison can be redesigned to inflict more direct damage and ANY of the following; Vulnerability, Weakness, Chilled, Immobilize, Cripple, Fear and Blind.

If arenanet leaves conditions in this broken state; we as the community should not tolerate it. Developers should not expect thier players to continue playing a broken game.

Thats about the most kitten idea ever. It isn’t working right now, so just remove it…. They replaced magic dmg(common mmo element) and replaced it with cond dmg and I like it a lot more. No longer have to worry about hp, mag def, phy def, elemental resistance, etc. It is much easier to handle. Not to mention, this cond issue isn’t game breaking. If you need a moment to clear your eyes maybe this game isn’t for you. Cond dmg isn’t great, but its not broken.

Play a Necro to 80, do WvW and dungeons, then come back and give an opinion….
If I want to range with my Necro, condition is what I have. Sounds like you don’t care about the issue, so therefore it’s not important.

Curiosity question. Let say you have two individuals stacking bleeds, and one person has higher condition damage than the other, it still shows the stacks on top of each other. Does the game track each bleed per person, although, they are all stacked on top of each other? Just curious if it actually does that

Remember Bleeds aren’t the only issue. Poison and Burning have stacking problems as well. The whole stacking on a duration thing is fine when you are alone, but when you mix in other players it’s a bit silly when there is 40s of Burning on a target and your Burn you just applied won’t take effect until 40s have passed, even though you had no Burns on them to begin with. It’s incredibly unintuitive to a new player. (“Why isn’t my damage being dealt now?”)

So like, there is no actual way to see Anet staff posts in a thread other than by fishing through pages?

Sundays.2807:

So like, there is no actual way to see Anet staff posts in a thread other than by fishing through pages?

Dev Tracker on the front page will show you, but you still have to look through it.

Sardonia.8196:

Curiosity question. Let say you have two individuals stacking bleeds, and one person has higher condition damage than the other, it still shows the stacks on top of each other. Does the game track each bleed per person, although, they are all stacked on top of each other? Just curious if it actually does that

The way intesity stacking damaging effects work is this:

Each player who puts a bleed on, gets their own bleed with its associated duration and the bleed counter goes up by 1. Damage of each bleed is relative to the source (player who put the bleed on) condition damage.

This system works great until you reach 25 stacks, then here is what happens:

At 25 stacks the next bleed placed on the target, regardless of duration/damage, will push off the oldest tracked bleed. So think about 25 bleeds like a silo or stack. The oldest applied bleed (even if it had 20 seconds of duration left and deals 150 per tick) gets kicked off for the new bleed (even if it deals a third the condition damage and only lasts for 1 second).

So the effect if you ever watch over-world mobs, like Champs with 20 people attacking at the same time, is that bleeds like necro sceptor that can last for 13 seconds, are constantly being pushed off by things like barbed precision (1 second bleed), mesmer clone bleeds (5 second bleeds) etc. This is evident as the bleed stacks on those mobs fluctuate from 20-25, where if a priority system was in place, they would sit at 25 stacks constantly.

In effect, if you want to play a condition build, and you are happily rotating away casting your bleeds on a mob, you may only be getting 3-5 bleeds attributed to you, because so many other players are applying short weak bleeds pushing off your longer bleeds. If you were alone, you may be able to get 20+ bleeds, but not with others around.

The system works differently for duration stacking conditions. They use a first in first out system, where if someone applies a 30 second poison, it will deal its damage based on that player for the full duration, and anyone else who puts poison on will enter that stack, and have their damage and duration applied on the mob to take effect after the other poison runs out.

Supposedly there is some marker in this situation that makes sure the highest damaging multiplier is used for all stacking duration skills, but I have been unable to verify this is the case. My testing seemed to indicate it just uses applier condition damage and duration in order of who applied.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

kidbs.8920:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

emikochan.8504:

Sigh, everyone should just have their own cap, it wouldn’t even be slightly overpowered.

I think you’re underselling the effect of every person getting 25 stacks of Bleed on their own. I keep pointing out due to how the rules work, anything done to fix it in PvE would also wind up on WvW, and while some people have condition removal all day long others don’t.

Think of how much you’d see getting done to, say, glass cannon builds if they ate 12x 25 Stacks of Bleed? Heck, even a tank-like build might be really in trouble at that.

How is that different than being hit by 5 different 100b warriors at the same time? Why should a team of direct damage dealers be more effective and capable of dishing out damage than a team of condition dealers?

In other MMOs such as WoW and Rift a person can have DoTs from multiple players at a time. It’s not like DoT damage is so much more powerful than direct damage that this should even be an issue.

. . . because you can dodge Hundred Blades. You can’t dodge ticks from conditions.

but you can dodge the attack that applies the condition the same as a warriors 100b or even remove the stacks altogether…. Not to mention it takes a hell of a lot more to even get to 25 stacks of bleeds than it does for a warrior to hit you with one burst attack. You can’t even begin to compare it.

As Jon is now tracking this thread and speaking with the playerbase, should the title be changed to be a bit less hostile and promote more conversing on the subject? Just a thought