With Heart of Thorns Anet is planning to make changes to how conditions stack to a cap, to allow condition builds to cooperate instead of overwrite each other’s conditions.
Currently just more of the same
The direction for the condition rework seems to indicate raising/removing the 25 bleeding stack cap, and theories are poison and burning will receive similar treatment. But I would like to suggest an alternative to how condition stacking is handled. That affects all conditions, not just the stacking damage ones.
Depending on the person that applied them, 1 stack of bleeding can already differentiate itself from another stack applied by someone else. Because those 2 players might have different amounts of condition damage. Considering might stacks, 2 stacks of bleeding applied shortly after one another by the same player might even differ from each other because the player could have gained or lost several stacks of might in between the applications.
- What if we take these differences further?
- What if condition builds improved quality instead of quantity of conditions?
- What if ‘applying a generic condition’ became ‘applying your superior condition’
There are already motions in this direction, Guardians have the Amplified Wrath trait, Elementalists have the Serrated Stones trait, Necromancers have Terror and are getting a new trait that causes them to take 10% less damage from foes affected by poison. These traits all function to turn ‘a default condition’ into ‘your personalized condition’ and I think we should shift the focus of condition builds away from +duration traits all over the place, and instead towards improving conditions with traits to make them personalised.
Personalised Conditions
So instead of a 25 stack cap shared by everyone, maybe a power build can only stack up to 5 average dps bleeds, while a condi build can have their cap upgraded to 15 stacks through traits and their bleeds also deal significantly more damage and have additional effects.
These would be personal stacks, that do not interfere with each other. Each player has their unique stack that uses their condition damage and applies their additional effects.
But simply replacing ‘duration bonus’ traits with ‘increased stacking’ traits isn’t what will really make the difference to a player saying:
“That is your what conditions do. Here’s what MY conditions can do!”
It is enhancing conditions with additional effects that will really let condition builds differentiate themselves, and adapt to the task at hand (WvW, PvP, World Bosses).
Having to make choices between ‘increased max poison stacks’ or ‘your poisons cause foes to take 50% more damage from all bleeds’ seems like it would really be an interesting decision for condition builds.
Other effects that trigger when a condition was cleansed, when it expired, when the target suffering the conditions died. Not just damaging conditions, you would also be able to add additional effects to vulnerability, weakness or blindness. All depending on how you wanted to focus your build.
What do you think?
It could really let classes emphasise that they are better with certain condition than other classes. I would like to see what people think would be good modifiers to personalize certain conditions to the class that inflicted them.
Here are a few examples of possible class specific enhancements for conditions.
- Elementalists could cause burning that will spread to nearby targets if traited.
- Warrior cripples could reduce endurance regeneration if traited.
- Engineer vulnerability could retain half the stacks when cleansed, if traited.
- Necromancer weakness could reduce received and outgoing healing, if traited.
What condition improvements fit with what class, do you think?
Would you prefer this over the generic +duration and ‘<condition> on crit’ traits all classes seem to share?
(edited by Zwets.3785)