Guild Wars 2

As most of you (hopefully) well know by now, there’s a cap on condition stacks of 25. This means that in a scenario where you have two thieves attacking a boss and one of them can achieve a stack of 25 by themselves, the other one essentially becomes useless because they’ve got nothing to stack on. Quite a while back Colin Johanson said in an official interview that the reason this was so was due to hardware issues, and strongly implied that nothing was going to be done about it. The quote is in here:

After a gigantic thread was made about this, what Jon Peters had to say about it was:

JonPeters:

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

Happily placating many players that were indignant about a core game mechanic being so fundamentally flawed.

It has been 3 months since.

3 months, and not even a smidgen of news regarding any changes to the way conditions work against other players supposedly helping you. 3 months, with no updates on how condition builds are just outright worse than Berserker builds on a fundamental basis.

Is this their definition of “actively looking at it”? I suppose if you read that literally then yes, they’re definitely looking at it, and not actually doing anything about it.

Can we get an actual status update on the condition cap problem, and not a damage control, crowd-pleasing lie? Does arenanet actually care about this?

This deserves a bump for great justice.

Its more complicated than you think.

From what I understand its an overall bandwidth issue allowing more than X number of ticking conditions per enemy. Obviously it isn’t a concern in a dungeon when you are updating just 5 players. but when you are updating a lot of players in open world and wvw with tons of condition stacks ticking on each one it starts taking a large amount of server resources and bandwidth. From what ive seen is they are slowly making changes and optimizations to the server/netcode that will fix the condition issue from a server load and bandwidth point of view. After that is done then they can look at the total condition stacks and adjust it.

So from what I understand the fix will take a long time to implement due to its multiple steps that have to be complete before they can adjust condition caps.

Also, no news on laurels for anything other than daily which makes it really hard for the altaholics here to get BIS equipment for all their toons.

Bringing this up not to threadjack, but just to point out that when it comes to followup communications, ANet has a bit of work to do.

As a condition Ranger, I too am eager to hear news.

When I am going into battles with lots of players, I have a condition damage weapon and a non-condition damage weapon. That is my solution.

If you go to the extreme on any strategy, you are penalized in situations where that strategy doesn’t work well. Going full berzerkers against some of the guild bounties will hurt you, as it will in any situation where you cannot avoid a significant portion of the damage. My guardian has to be very careful fighting boon stealers (with riders, your retaliation owns you). Bouncing attacks hurt you in fights near hard-hitting neutral creatures. Blinding is useless v dredge and burning useless v destroyers. Stealth won’t save you from a long, hard-hitting attack chain. The list goes on.

This is rarely a problem in the most difficult content if you plan. If you are a bleeder and see a necromancer in your party, coordinate your strategy before entering the dungeon.

In the big group fights, players will step on each other. People will CC or lead enemies out of your zones. Your boons will only affect a few allies (and maybe not affect the NPC you are trying to protect). Allies will throw up flashy effects so you cannot see telegraphs.

So why does no other game have the same redonky town cap on their dots. And if they do have a cap it’s much higher. You can’t tell me after 3mil box sales and destroying peoples credit with the RNG boxes that you don’t have money to upgrade the servers to handle more than 25 dots ticking at once?? REALLY?!?!

My solution:

In open world its a crap shoot, but in anything instanced everyone is allotted X amount of a particular dot (so for 5 people 5 stacks), and if someone isn’t using their stacks those then get divided among those using them (so if you have 2 bleeders they can each get 12.5 stacks). Complicated code, but could be implemented.

Across the board though since one has to sacrifice some offensive stat (power, precision, crit dmg) to get Condition Damage they need to change how condition damage is calculated and make it subject to both crit and crit damage. This would make the number of stacks you individually apply less important and the damage your stacks generate is comparable to a full Zerker build that does not rely on Condition Damage.

+1 for the title alone. Now back to your regularly scheduled thread.

Aeonblade.8709:

So why does no other game have the same redonky town cap on their dots. And if they do have a cap it’s much higher. You can’t tell me after 3mil box sales and destroying peoples credit with the RNG boxes that you don’t have money to upgrade the servers to handle more than 25 dots ticking at once?? REALLY?!?!

Because you rarely see a single toon pile on 25+ DOTs on their target in a random PVE fight. The most i seem able to maintain on my SWTOR toon for instance is 3-4.

Where did i get the 25+ from? Bleedx25 (each item in the bleed stack has its own duration timer!), burn, poison, confusionx25 (not really a DOT though). That is a whole lot of timers to track.

Never mind that you have other non-dot conditions, and also the boons, to deal with using the same overall mechanic.

IMO, the way to go about this is to drop the individual timers and instead have stacks on all. This would enable the same to simply reduce the various stacks by 1 each second, rather than track a massive number of timers at sub-second accuracy.

This would mean that condition and boon duration would be replaced by a +stack mechanic.

It could also allow for “boon hate” mechanics in that certain builds could reduce boon stacks on attacks. So if you have a boon at 25 stack and i attack you with my boon hate build, your boon afterwards may be reduced to 24 stack or lower.

digiowl.9620:

Aeonblade.8709:

So why does no other game have the same redonky town cap on their dots. And if they do have a cap it’s much higher. You can’t tell me after 3mil box sales and destroying peoples credit with the RNG boxes that you don’t have money to upgrade the servers to handle more than 25 dots ticking at once?? REALLY?!?!

Because you rarely see a single toon pile on 25+ DOTs on their target in a random PVE fight. The most i seem able to maintain on my SWTOR toon for instance is 3-4.

Where did i get the 25+ from? Bleedx25 (each item in the bleed stack has its own duration timer!), burn, poison, confusionx25 (not really a DOT though). That is a whole lot of timers to track.

Never mind that you have other non-dot conditions, and also the boons, to deal with using the same overall mechanic.

IMO, the way to go about this is to drop the individual timers and instead have stacks on all. This would enable the same to simply reduce the various stacks by 1 each second, rather than track a massive number of timers at sub-second accuracy.

This would mean that condition and boon duration would be replaced by a +stack mechanic.

It could also allow for “boon hate” mechanics in that certain builds could reduce boon stacks on attacks. So if you have a boon at 25 stack and i attack you with my boon hate build, your boon afterwards may be reduced to 24 stack or lower.

+1

digiowl.9620:

Aeonblade.8709:

So why does no other game have the same redonky town cap on their dots. And if they do have a cap it’s much higher. You can’t tell me after 3mil box sales and destroying peoples credit with the RNG boxes that you don’t have money to upgrade the servers to handle more than 25 dots ticking at once?? REALLY?!?!

Because you rarely see a single toon pile on 25+ DOTs on their target in a random PVE fight. The most i seem able to maintain on my SWTOR toon for instance is 3-4.

Where did i get the 25+ from? Bleedx25 (each item in the bleed stack has its own duration timer!), burn, poison, confusionx25 (not really a DOT though). That is a whole lot of timers to track.

Never mind that you have other non-dot conditions, and also the boons, to deal with using the same overall mechanic.

IMO, the way to go about this is to drop the individual timers and instead have stacks on all. This would enable the same to simply reduce the various stacks by 1 each second, rather than track a massive number of timers at sub-second accuracy.

This would mean that condition and boon duration would be replaced by a +stack mechanic.

It could also allow for “boon hate” mechanics in that certain builds could reduce boon stacks on attacks. So if you have a boon at 25 stack and i attack you with my boon hate build, your boon afterwards may be reduced to 24 stack or lower.

Your idea is rubbish, they would significantly need to change many of the skills and conditions for this to work right.

Example:
Vulnerability would need to be nerfed into the ground completely to the point of it not being useful at all.
Bleeding/Confusion stacks would have to be multiplied by the number of seconds they currently last and the damage would need to be multiplied by the current number of stacks.
Burning/Poison wouldn’t change at all, which would make them weaker comparative to the others.

Not to mention, Condition Damage would have to be reworked to affect all the changes meaning it would need to be boosted up in some way to work correctly or worse nerfed in some instances. Example, Burning/Poison would need a bump where as Bleeding/Confusion would need a tremendous nerf.

This doesn’t include things like chill, immobilize, etc which would not work like this, so ultimately the idea is sound, but implementing it is a lot more hassle than you think.

I feel the need to mention that the fact that their hardware can be so obviously causing a flaw in their game is just terrible design. They should have planned their condition system -around- their hardware limitations, not the other way around.

I think the problem has to do with skills tied to weapons.
It would be easier if each player is able to apply only one stack of each condition.
if there is another player that’s 2 stack…. 25 players 25 stacks.
but this won’t work unless they change the weapon/skill system and traits .

Aeonblade.8709:

So why does no other game have the same redonky town cap on their dots. And if they do have a cap it’s much higher. You can’t tell me after 3mil box sales and destroying peoples credit with the RNG boxes that you don’t have money to upgrade the servers to handle more than 25 dots ticking at once?? REALLY?!?!

It’s because they’re using the old modified GW1 engine. The server does all calculations of how long the condition lasts, for how much does it tick for every single stack.
If there was 50 people, every single one of them doing different condition stacks for different duration and different damage on the same enemy the server would literally crash.
So yes, this is more difficult than just buying a new server box.

Assyrian.4827:

I think the problem has to do with skills tied to weapons.
It would be easier if each player is able to apply only one stack of each condition.
if there is another player that’s 2 stack…. 25 players 25 stacks.
but this won’t work unless they change the weapon/skill system and traits .

In other words a new game.

They basically placated people imo. It’s been happening in the forums for engineers ever since launch. Welcome everyone to engineer’s hades. This is what we’ve been dealing with in PVE.

Basically, no they haven’t looked at it just like they haven’t looked into how DR affects the players either, they said they did, they posted on Reddit how they loved loot farmers and never dreamed of DR ever harming us but they didn’t do a thing about that either despite claiming that they were actively adjusting DR to not affect players and here we are now with T6 dusts costing 50 silver a pop.

This has been one of the biggest problems not just for the dungeoneers but especially for the world boss fights. Dungeoneering has the cost of having to deal with everyone demanding Zerker gear and specs while open world you can be anything you want but you’re DPS is still affected by this cap AND they are using a DPS based credit system when people are all attacking the same thing, so the higher DPS players (ie Zerker builds) will be the ones to get the best drops EVERY time.

It’s a really bad design. There are ways of adding credit for the other activities in a fight like rezzing people, healing, and removing conditions but it would require a serious programming look and lots of time and REAL testing not the QC that passes for testing they are using now.

Yes this needs to be changed, Everyday when I play on my thief (that is 100% conditions thief and even if I go full zerk gear the way my traits are set up I still would be doing low damage, yes it would be more damage than 2 CD thiefs, but still isnt justified).

Everyday I play and I get a thief with me in my party I always ask (before even doing into dungeons or events etc…) “Are you a CD thief?” if they say “Yes” then I chance characters right away.

This is a big problem, lots of groups will have multi condition builds, and conition bunker builds being the most popular for dungeons and group events.

There are times in dungeon runs we have 3-4 condition builds and when I find out there is only 3 things to do, stop and change characters, leave the group or ask people to change armor/weapons most of the time players jsut say Im not changing and we try the dungeon anyways, making a 25-30m dungeon into a 1hour + run…. very not fun.

Yep 3 months on Conditions are still useless.

I wonder to myself, when Anet says something will take quite a bit to deal with because its a serious mechanical flaw, is that code words for we do not have the man power to deal with it?

What if Bleeds applied after 25 stacks were converted straight into direct damage (condition’s tick damage x full duration) and allowed to crit? This will effectively function as a “reward” for achieving 25 stacks, and solve the “Condition builds are inherently indisputably worse dps than Berserker builds” as well as the “Condition cap” problems.

Look at it this way. Let’s say you have a Bleed that lasts 17s and does 131 damage per tick. The full duration of that bleed will cause… 2227 damage. That’s far, far worse than what a Berserker warrior can do with his axe autoattack, which can go up to 4.4k or even more. Even allowing that bleed to crit doesn’t measure up (3340 without crit damage, which you’re going to be hard-pressed to spec for with condition damage gear)

With Burn they could just make it stack on an individual basis, since it’s always just a single stack. It’s basically the worst group damage deal condition to exist with the way a second person’s burn on the same target immediately becomes 0 dps. At least bleed has some small leeway before it hits 25 stacks!

^Technically poison is the worst DPS condition. It is only good for its anti-heal ability, and in PVE this is incredibly rare.

That said, I’d make a modified “convert to direct damage” system for poison and burning, since I am not sure that the game can handle giving everyone individual stacks for poison and burning.

For poison and burning, I would suggest there be a time cap instead of a stacking cap. For Burns it will be 15 seconds, and for poison it’ll be 1 minute. Any condition applied that would extend beyond this cap will instead do direct damage equal to the difference between the current duration and the cap, multiplied by how much damage that condition would do.

So, lets say you have a 10 second burn on an enemy. A 100% condition duration engineer does an 8 second burn with their crit proc. When this happens, the burn duration goes up to 15 seconds, and then the rest of the burn will do 3 x (burn damage) in direct damage to the enemy.

In addition, the poison and burning dots will retain the highest condition damage from whomever inflicted them, with lower condition damage just contributing to duration or doing direct damage. I’m fairly confident in saying that there isn’t need to be any changes to how confusion works, since achieving 25 caps is an incredibly difficult feat, let alone sustaining 25 caps of confusion or even surpassing them.

Aeonblade.8709:

So why does no other game have the same redonky town cap on their dots. And if they do have a cap it’s much higher. You can’t tell me after 3mil box sales and destroying peoples credit with the RNG boxes that you don’t have money to upgrade the servers to handle more than 25 dots ticking at once?? REALLY?!?!

Very few games have dozens of people in the open world all fighting the same thing. Remember in most games, when you tag a mob, only the guy who tagged it gets credit. So you don’t have this open world issue.

In raids you have 20 people stacking conditions in most games.

In Guild Wars 2, meta events can scale up to 100 people. It’s not quite the same, is it?

Vayne.8563:

Aeonblade.8709:

So why does no other game have the same redonky town cap on their dots. And if they do have a cap it’s much higher. You can’t tell me after 3mil box sales and destroying peoples credit with the RNG boxes that you don’t have money to upgrade the servers to handle more than 25 dots ticking at once?? REALLY?!?!

Very few games have dozens of people in the open world all fighting the same thing. Remember in most games, when you tag a mob, only the guy who tagged it gets credit. So you don’t have this open world issue.

In raids you have 20 people stacking conditions in most games.

In Guild Wars 2, meta events can scale up to 100 people. It’s not quite the same, is it?

This isn’t really much of an argument, and here’s why: the games that do feature huge amounts of open world content, like Rift, handle this sort of thing far better than Guild Wars 2 does. Even though there can be dozens of players dropping dots on something in Rift, only rarely to different abilities from different players interfere with one another— and it’s usually the debuffs/buffs, and it’s usually handled with overwriting and prioritization.

You bring up 20 man raids, as if this helps your argument, but frankly this only underscores the seriousness of the issue. As it stands, GW2 could not possibly handle 20 man content, simply because 20 separate players would more than likely hit the cap limit several times over.

The problem with the condition stack would be far less if conditions were relatively hard to apply to something, or relatively unique from profession to profession. For example, it’s rare, in my experience, to see a stack of 25 confusion on a mob, because confusion is almost completely unique to mesmers. A quick look at the wiki, however, lists 27 separate weapon skills (and weapon skills only) that apply bleeding, over seven out of eight professions. So, yeah. That’s probably part of the problem.

In most other games, if you want to do a mass of DOT you line up multiple skills in a row and apply them all. If you then apply the same skill again before the old is out you refresh the timer, rather than extend it. This means that in smaller fights the number of timers needed will be low and fixed. Only in larger fights will the number of timers active potentially cause a problem.

Xomic.5792:

Vayne.8563:

Aeonblade.8709:

So why does no other game have the same redonky town cap on their dots. And if they do have a cap it’s much higher. You can’t tell me after 3mil box sales and destroying peoples credit with the RNG boxes that you don’t have money to upgrade the servers to handle more than 25 dots ticking at once?? REALLY?!?!

Very few games have dozens of people in the open world all fighting the same thing. Remember in most games, when you tag a mob, only the guy who tagged it gets credit. So you don’t have this open world issue.

In raids you have 20 people stacking conditions in most games.

In Guild Wars 2, meta events can scale up to 100 people. It’s not quite the same, is it?

This isn’t really much of an argument, and here’s why: the games that do feature huge amounts of open world content, like Rift, handle this sort of thing far better than Guild Wars 2 does. Even though there can be dozens of players dropping dots on something in Rift, only rarely to different abilities from different players interfere with one another— and it’s usually the debuffs/buffs, and it’s usually handled with overwriting and prioritization.

You bring up 20 man raids, as if this helps your argument, but frankly this only underscores the seriousness of the issue. As it stands, GW2 could not possibly handle 20 man content, simply because 20 separate players would more than likely hit the cap limit several times over.

The problem with the condition stack would be far less if conditions were relatively hard to apply to something, or relatively unique from profession to profession. For example, it’s rare, in my experience, to see a stack of 25 confusion on a mob, because confusion is almost completely unique to mesmers. A quick look at the wiki, however, lists 27 separate weapon skills (and weapon skills only) that apply bleeding, over seven out of eight professions. So, yeah. That’s probably part of the problem.

Not to mention that WoW does have open world bosses, and there are hundreds and hundreds of players tagging them for loot now in MoP. Just adding that in, not going to say much else on Conditions and their poor state. >.>

AlietteFaye.7316:

Not to mention that WoW does have open world bosses, and there are hundreds and hundreds of players tagging them for loot now in MoP. Just adding that in, not going to say much else on Conditions and their poor state. >.>

from what I remember though WoW didn’t have conditions. Especially ones that could be of different length and strength and ones that the server would have to calculate for how much, how fast and for how long will it tick with every person adding extra ticks of different strength and length.

Mirta.5029:

AlietteFaye.7316:

Not to mention that WoW does have open world bosses, and there are hundreds and hundreds of players tagging them for loot now in MoP. Just adding that in, not going to say much else on Conditions and their poor state. >.>

from what I remember though WoW didn’t have conditions. Especially ones that could be of different length and strength and ones that the server would have to calculate for how much, how fast and for how long will it tick with every person adding extra ticks of different strength and length.

It didn’t have “conditions”. But it had several different debuffs and DoTs. And they were tracked separately per character. All the time.

AlietteFaye.7316:

It didn’t have “conditions”. But it had several different debuffs and DoTs. And they were tracked separately per character. All the time.

was their length and strength different? Did they come in stacks that would increase their intensity?
Because I’m pretty sure that such conditions as fire wouldn’t be a problem. Fire extends in length only and has only 1 tick a second, meaning that making different fire conditions stack would not be a problem. Now full stack of bleeds tick for 25 bleeds a second, force the computer to calculate 100 stacks of 25 bleeds and you’ll have a problem.
The only viable way that I see to solve it is when there’s 25 bleed stacks convert the other ones being put on by other people into direct damage.

Mirta.5029:

AlietteFaye.7316:

It didn’t have “conditions”. But it had several different debuffs and DoTs. And they were tracked separately per character. All the time.

was their length and strength different? Did they come in stacks that would increase their intensity?
Because I’m pretty sure that such conditions as fire wouldn’t be a problem. Fire extends in length only and has only 1 tick a second, meaning that making different fire conditions stack would not be a problem. Now full stack of bleeds tick for 25 bleeds a second, force the computer to calculate 100 stacks of 25 bleeds and you’ll have a problem.
The only viable way that I see to solve it is when there’s 25 bleed stacks convert the other ones being put on by other people into direct damage.

Yes. There were several per class and all of them were different strengths and lengths. Some debuffs did stack, but not to 25. But the fact is that there are older games out there that are still capable of pulling off things like this and GW2 seems a bit behind in this aspect.

AlietteFaye.7316:

Yes. There were several per class and all of them were different strengths and lengths. Some debuffs did stack, but not to 25. But the fact is that there are older games out there that are still capable of pulling off things like this and GW2 seems a bit behind in this aspect.

Well GW2 is using the same engine as GW1.

Couldn’t they make it just in PvE to cause conditions to increase DPS and decrease in duration once it reaches past 20 stacks?

Or make a code that converts 25 bleeds into a Deep Wound, which also stacks to 25 (and can be cleansed at once) but is equivalent to 25 stacks of bleeding? The damage would be the median of the bleeds applied. This would allow a maximum of 625 stacks of bleeding.

They can’t simply make conditions hit harder and last less because of balance issues. So they’re only bet honestly is using the two solutions above.

Mirta.5029:

AlietteFaye.7316:

Yes. There were several per class and all of them were different strengths and lengths. Some debuffs did stack, but not to 25. But the fact is that there are older games out there that are still capable of pulling off things like this and GW2 seems a bit behind in this aspect.

Well GW2 is using the same engine as GW1.

WoW still predates GW1, and just because GW2 runs off of the same system, it does not mean they should not try to fix this oversight. (Not saying you said that, but there is definitely no excuse for these kinds of serious issues.)

Jzaku.9765:

It has been 3 months since.

3 months, and not even a smidgen of news regarding any changes to the way conditions work against other players supposedly helping you. 3 months, with no updates on how condition builds are just outright worse than Berserker builds on a fundamental basis.

Is this their definition of “actively looking at it”? I suppose if you read that literally then yes, they’re definitely looking at it, and not actually doing anything about it.

Can we get an actual status update on the condition cap problem, and not a damage control, crowd-pleasing lie? Does arenanet actually care about this?

a.) As Mirta said, you’re looking at a fundamental change to the game’s engine. That’s gonna take some serious man-hour investment.

b.) You’re also looking at an improvement that goes in the queue alongside all the other improvements like a new LFG tool, fixing PvE cull, and the other dozens of changes that are still being looked at.

So if a dev wants to chime in, sure. But this is likely yet another issue that gets filed under ‘patience’.

This is a big issue with a core game mechanic. Complex as the solution may be, the devs need to know we are anxiously waiting, feet a-tapping. Bump for Great Justice.

Uruz Six.6594:

Jzaku.9765:

It has been 3 months since.

3 months, and not even a smidgen of news regarding any changes to the way conditions work against other players supposedly helping you. 3 months, with no updates on how condition builds are just outright worse than Berserker builds on a fundamental basis.

Is this their definition of “actively looking at it”? I suppose if you read that literally then yes, they’re definitely looking at it, and not actually doing anything about it.

Can we get an actual status update on the condition cap problem, and not a damage control, crowd-pleasing lie? Does arenanet actually care about this?

a.) As Mirta said, you’re looking at a fundamental change to the game’s engine. That’s gonna take some serious man-hour investment.

b.) You’re also looking at an improvement that goes in the queue alongside all the other improvements like a new LFG tool, fixing PvE cull, and the other dozens of changes that are still being looked at.

So if a dev wants to chime in, sure. But this is likely yet another issue that gets filed under ‘patience’.

a.) Yes, I agree. It will take some effort and time. But how much? The game has been out for almost a year. Just because the issue wasn’t as evident on day one as it is now, does not mean it did not exist since day one.
b.) This is something that already exists in the game and is supposed to be one of two ways to deal damage. Many weapons, traits, and builds are not as viable as they could be because of this system. How much more does it need to affect before it becomes a priority?

AlietteFaye.7316:

a.) Yes, I agree. It will take some effort and time. But how much? The game has been out for almost a year. Just because the issue wasn’t as evident on day one as it is now, does not mean it did not exist since day one.

The question is is it even possible. There are dealing with an old engine that originally was not made to do such things. Chances are that the problem is too complicated to attempt to tackle it right now.

Mirta.5029:

AlietteFaye.7316:

a.) Yes, I agree. It will take some effort and time. But how much? The game has been out for almost a year. Just because the issue wasn’t as evident on day one as it is now, does not mean it did not exist since day one.

The question is is it even possible. There are dealing with an old engine that originally was not made to do such things. Chances are that the problem is too complicated to attempt to tackle it right now.

That’s entirely the wrong attitude to take.

I saw Paragon pull off some pretty impressive stunts with CoH’s ancient code. Its not impossible. It is, however, likely thakittens a time intensive job requiring an innovative solution.