Edit: I might just make a new post that’s super short because people have a hard time reading huge walls of text
Do you want to be effective using condition damage builds in PvE group content?
I’d appreciate it if you guys could leave an opinion on the matter, maybe even your own ideas (after you read the issues part, so we don’t keep repeating the same stuff over and over again) and what could possibly be done to make it better for our condition damage comrades in PvE.
Here, I have come up with something that may allow such builds to thrive.
TL;DR: My idea is this: Applying Conditions after the cap is reached causes condition damage immediately. This is called Overflow damage.
The rest of the post explains the issues of condition damage, what the suggested mechanic is, actual numbers, and thoughts on other stuff about it. If you don’t care much for numbers and stuff, feel free to skip the 2nd post.
The Issues
With some googling and forum stalking its clear that many people agree or believe that:
1) Condition Damage’s main issue is the cap limit. This includes conditions like burning, which only 1 person could potentially be using at a time. This is the biggest issue on why going pure condition damage in group PvE content a total waste.
2) Increasing the cap limit or adding more conditions will solve the cap limit. Unfortunately, we cannot raise the cap over 25 for server reasons. Even if we could, it still wouldn’t be good enough to cater to content that may potentially have 10+ people. It becomes inconsistent if you make it for only certain enemies and it just isn’t a good solution, explained later down the post.
3) Ramp Up Time (explained a bit here) causes condition damage to be too slow to achieve its peak DPS and will always be much slower than power based builds. This is an issue whose problems can’t be proved: in some cases, for an all-power party we are able to stack bleeds and cap out burn and poison durations to the max in little under 3 to 4 seconds, yet some parties we hardly get any burns or bleeds. For sure, on a smaller scale, it could be a problem, but don’t tell me there’s ramp up time when world bosses are involved.
In that same post linked in Ramp Up Time, the talk about why condition damage can’t have competitive maximum DPS is true. Unfortunately, it is also true that condition damage can’t have good DPS without bonus power, period.
4) Increase the damage for conditions. You can’t do this because the damage curve concerning the amount of people in a group will skew too high the fewer people there are. There are also issues of upsetting balance between PvE and PvP, but as seen with confusion, you could have seperate values. This doesn’t help the issue that in group PvE content conditions are terrible.
Condition Damage in Group PvE Content
Here I use an example of a somewhat fully buffed condition damage user who has a value of 2600 Condition Damage: This is more than achievable through the use of might stacks, exotic gears, weapon stacks, food and utilities. Using the damage formulas for bleed, burning, and poison, the three most common damaging conditions, we can see the bulk of most condition damage.
In an ideal, unrealistic situation where one person has control of the conditions, we are able to achieve decent numbers over a span of 10 seconds: the average cooldown of most damaging abilities. With 20 stacks of bleeding from a single condition damage dealer using those stats mentioned we get 34,600 bleed damage, 9,780 burn damage, and 3,440 poison damage over 10 seconds at its peak: a total of 47,820 condition damage, yielding a bit less than 4.8k DPS. If we include possible power damage dealt while applying conditions, we could tack on about 1-2k DPS, considering we have almost 0 additional power from gear or traits and only have might to work with. But even with the vague power damage bonus, it is nowhere near the competitive DPS of power based builds, nor could you achieve it fast enough to make it really count, but its still decent. Also, this situation is highly unrealistic, as many classes naturally apply conditions, whether they are built for it or not.
Bump the number up to 2 people: now, you must share the stack limit. Again, a highly unrealistic scenario where these people have control over the condition stacks: each person gets either 12 or 13 stacks of bleeding, and basically half the damage of burn and poison assuming they are both equal in condition damage and using the stats shown above. About 12 stacks of bleeding alone gets your around 20,760 bleed damage: about 60% of the potential bleed damage you could have done if you were by yourself. Already, a huge loss in DPS.
(edited by WEXXES.2378)