Guild Wars 2

So bleed, torment, and confusion only stack to 25. This is a problem when you have a bunch of players attacking the same target as any additional conditions overwrite the old conditions. My solution is another condition. I call it Fester.

Fester – For the next three seconds all new applications of bleed, torment, and confusion are converted to stacks of Fester. When the 3 seconds are up Fester explodes doing increasing damage for more stacks. Stacks duration.

In a boss fight (if players can keep it up) Fester can explode 25 stacks of conditions every three seconds. The beauty is that once fester maxes at 25 stacks of bleed, confusion, and torment become regular stacks. Also this condition scales so it can still be useful in smaller scale fights as a condition spike.

So condition stacking is mostly solved because we still need a way to handle the excess of poison, burning, and to a lesser degree vulnerability. Any ideas?

Here’s a previously posted solution on this subject, which goes into quite a bit of detail:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestion-Elegant-Fix-to-Condition-Stacks

I’ve always thought that bleeding (and any other intensity stacking condition) could be easily handled (maybe even with less server load) with some mechanic overhaul.

Based on the following:

• The dynamic variation on condition damage (caused by might stacks or whatever) is completely unnecessary.
• The UI information is quite vague. While the amount of stacks provide an idea of how much damage you’ll receive, there’s no way to know how strong the source is and the duration indication gets completely masked by the longest stack.

Instead of a finite stack list including duration and source information, the game could use some kind of circular time array, each cell of the array representing a real time second.
Whenever you apply an intensity stacking condition, the damage per tick would be directly calculated and added to as many cells as full second duration the condition has.
When the 1s timer ticks, the damage from the “current” cell would be directly applied to the target and the “current” index would move to the next one.
Since your client is notified about surrounding condition cleanses, any information about your own damage for displaying purposes can be managed also by the client too. There could be some issues with condition duration reduction foods, runes and traits, but I guess the server could provide the client with this information the same way it does with, for example, blocked attacks.
For UI purposes, since there are no stacks anymore, the server/client could manage an aditional variable, the total expected damage (basically the sum of each cell) and, instead the number of stacks, display how many 1k damages the target is expected to receive (this is probably a much better indicative of how dangerous the bleed you received is).
With this system there’s still a cap, in this case a duration one (the size of the time array indicates the longest achievable duration for any application). Luckily enough, a really small amount of skill apply bleed with duration over 12s, so a 25 cell tiem array could cover almost everything even when then source has a 100% bleed duration increase (affected skills could be slightly modified).

I don’t really think we need serious changes on poison and burning stacking. PvP wise, it would be completely gamebreaking (so a complete mechanic split between game modes should be needed), and allowing condition builds to fully operate in any enviroment isn’t probably the best idea for PvE either.

Yalora Istairiea.6287:

Here’s a previously posted solution on this subject, which goes into quite a bit of detail:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestion-Elegant-Fix-to-Condition-Stacks

Thanks. He does a great job laying out the issue but I’m not suggesting a passive “second tier” condition. I’m suggesting a new condition that players actively cast that can be used in pvp and pve.

nopoet.2960:

Yalora Istairiea.6287:

Here’s a previously posted solution on this subject, which goes into quite a bit of detail:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestion-Elegant-Fix-to-Condition-Stacks

Thanks. He does a great job laying out the issue but I’m not suggesting a passive “second tier” condition. I’m suggesting a new condition that players actively cast that can be used in pvp and pve.

Right, but what would be the point of that? That would just be another condition to hit a cap on. Even if it “explodes” after three seconds, will it stack intensity? Or will it only be a single instance of it? If it’s the latter, it will just get overwritten the next time something within that 3 seconds procs the “Fester” condition, and it will never explode.

If it’s the former, well then, you’re just going to have the same problem with that capping as well.

I won’t say I have a solution what to do with condition damage, but:

Firstly – all light classes are mages.
Secondly – all light classes do not inflict MAGIC damage, just raw physical damage when zerkering. Same damage as warrior and all anything else. Which can be reduced by armor. Armor reducing magic damage? Seriously? “Spatial Surge” doesn’t seem to be “physical”, but it is.
Thirdly – All magical classes inflict SAME conditions. And not only “lighters”.
Wouldn’t be kind of option to separate elementalists, necros and mesmers debuffs/conditions? Each class could have their OWN conditions. And save bleeding for physical damage classes like war, thief. I don’t want to kill creating condition classes other than “mage”. But separate magic from physical bleeding. It’s just an example.

Here comes my idea:
You have Your skills as, for example, a necro (my favourite class, but I forget about playing necro cuz it’s unplayable in dungeon pve. So selfish profession Just reminding You, Anet). Blood curse AA chain #1. You add tons of bleeding. Single necro can stack like 15+ bleeds with AA. 2 necros are capped at 25 with AA. Funny. And here is my thought. You autoattack and instead of bleed You can apply “blood curse” effect, lasting for the same time as actual bleed. You cast “Grasping Dead” and You apply effect named “Grasping Dead” which deals condition damage over some time.

It’s some kind of creating “personal” conditions. But Grasping Dead still could be capped at 25 if 26 necromancers would hit one mob at the same time. Someone could name it “Hey, it’s ripped from WoW”. He wouldn’’t lie. But for me spell creating its own effect, stacking with the same spell, is better, than effects stacking from different spells.

Same thing is about boons. Let’s look at Lineage2, not WoW. NCSoft binds GW and L2 :P. In L2 You have so much buffs, debuffs, effects… I have never learned it all cuz of my short engagement into this game. You could consider it as disadvantage. Sure. It’s way easier to have for example 10 buffs and 10 debuffs instead of very big variety of them.
Conclusion: Every class still has ability to play as condi. There will be no problems with overstacking bleeds unless there are 26 people of same class, using same skill at the same time. Problem could be in condi removals. But I’m sure this thing also could be fixed.
P.S. You can see it’s already implemented! Go and fight risen drake in orr. You’ll get ichor debuff (33% slow, can’t be removed). Fight offhand sword warrior. #4 and You get impale. ONLY warrior can impale the enemy. This idea is just half-introduced. Maybe not even half… But still.

P.S.2 You can’t be 100% original in MMO. You have lot of MMOs. Lot of MMOs using same stuff in a lot of things. There are already good things You can just use, Anet. Attract people to play Guild Wars 2. Do not scare them with this title. Just my thoughts.

ShadowDragoonFTW.3418:

Right, but what would be the point of that? That would just be another condition to hit a cap on. Even if it “explodes” after three seconds, will it stack intensity? Or will it only be a single instance of it? If it’s the latter, it will just get overwritten the next time something within that 3 seconds procs the “Fester” condition, and it will never explode.

If it’s the former, well then, you’re just going to have the same problem with that capping as well.

For clarity:
1. Fester explodes every 3 seconds no matter how many stacks have been converted
2. You can increase the damage of the explosion by adding stacks of bleed, confusion, and torment
3. When Fester explodes the stacks are reset at zero
4. The duration or Fester can be increased by reapplying
—
Fester is essentially a condition that eats 25 condition stacks every three secs and turns them almost immediately into damage. Yes it will cap but when it does you shouldn’t still be at 25 bleed stacks. In theory I see Fester maxing out then bleeding maxing out but as soon as you hit 25 bleed stacks Fester has exploded and starting to convert bleed stacks again giving time for the bleed stacks to get used up.

To simplify Fester slows down the application of bleed, torment, and confusion to give them time to be used and not overwritten.

That seems… awful. And complicated. Users aren’t going to understand and take full advantage of a debuff that “eats” DoT stacks in order to do burst damage. That’s just a really weird way to do things.

Plus, a lot of abilities traits require X amount of stacks of Y condition on a target. If you have it devour all the stacks at a time, you’re going to end up messing with people that would want to make condition builds. Maybe taking 10 stacks if the stack is over 20 would be an interesting concept, but again, having stacks just disappear is going to be a strange concept to people.

I would have to object based on a clearly subjective viewpoint. The reason I like condition damage more than physical damage is because I have a sadistic streak. I like seeing small numbers tick away on my opponents, mostly ignored until they realize those small numbers are going to kill them and they start to panic. It’s even more fun when they run out of condition clears and try to run, as if they can outrun damage that’s already inflicted on them.

Yes, I’m a sick puppy. That’s why I main a mesmer.

Objectively, the biggest issue is the amount of calculations that the server has to do for each stack of each condition that each person uses. Using the present system, any improvement to conditions would have to lower that amount of calculations. Your idea actually add a condition which will add more calculations. It might work if the condition cap was lowered more and Fester was strong enough to make up for it but that just adds complexity and confusion. I don’t see it being viable solution.

ShadowDragoonFTW.3418:

That seems… awful. And complicated. …

I’m doing a bad job explaining. Here is an example how it works.
-Enemy has 20 stacks of bleed
-Someone applies Fester
-Someone applies 10 stacks of bleed
-The 10 stacks of bleed are added to Fester instead of Bleed
-The 20 stacks of bleed continues to tick as normal
-Fester explodes with 10 stacks and expires
-After fester is gone Bleeds are applied as usual

Fester doesn’t interfere with the condition stacks already on the enemy. It just coverts new conditions stacks to Fester

Perhaps I’m missing some part of the issue here, but I don’t understand why they don’t just let more than one person stack conditions of the same type. Other games have done it in that way just fine.

If they’re worried about PvP, they could just add an exception that it stays the way it is now when applied to players.

Crossplay.2067:

Objectively, the biggest issue is the amount of calculations that the server has to do for each stack of each condition that each person uses. Using the present system, any improvement to conditions would have to lower that amount of calculations. Your idea actually add a condition which will add more calculations.

Not necessarily. We would end up with one calculation every three seconds with two variables; 1. Number of stacks and 2. condition damage of the user. Bleed is much more complex than that.

Labjax.2465:

Perhaps I’m missing some part of the issue here, but I don’t understand why they don’t just let more than one person stack conditions of the same type. Other games have done it in that way just fine.

If they’re worried about PvP, they could just add an exception that it stays the way it is now when applied to players.

This is what i wrote few posts earlier. Somebody linked topic where guy wrote, that letting everybody to have “personal” conditions cannot exist. But i can’t understand why. It’s so mystic for me…

Labjax.2465:

Perhaps I’m missing some part of the issue here, but I don’t understand why they don’t just let more than one person stack conditions of the same type. Other games have done it in that way just fine.

If they’re worried about PvP, they could just add an exception that it stays the way it is now when applied to players.

Well, there are a couple reasons behind that. For starters, every new stack of a constantly-ticking condition is just more calculations that the game has to go through every second, on top of other things already going on. In huge boss fights like Teq, having 100 players each have their own stack of Burning or Poison or Torment on Teq would just be awful. Who knows what kind of issues we’d see from that? It wouldn’t be pretty, I’ll say that.

Secondly, is that they might be doing it to cap damage numbers as well. Since condition damage circumvents armor ratings (at least partially), conditions deal more damage on average than regular (physical) weapon attacks. If they let people do individual stacks instead of group stacks, we would see the meta shift purely to a Rabid/Carrion meta, and the condition damage would mean enemies would burn down far quicker than they do under Berzerk meta. Which means people complaining about staleness and easiness of enemies will have more reason to complain…

ShadowDragoonFTW.3418:

Well, there are a couple reasons behind that. For starters, every new stack of a constantly-ticking condition is just more calculations that the game has to go through every second, on top of other things already going on. In huge boss fights like Teq, having 100 players each have their own stack of Burning or Poison or Torment on Teq would just be awful. Who knows what kind of issues we’d see from that? It wouldn’t be pretty, I’ll say that.

Secondly, is that they might be doing it to cap damage numbers as well. Since condition damage circumvents armor ratings (at least partially), conditions deal more damage on average than regular (physical) weapon attacks. If they let people do individual stacks instead of group stacks, we would see the meta shift purely to a Ravager Rampage meta, and the condition damage would mean enemies would burn down far quicker than they do under Berzerk meta. Which means people complaining about staleness and easiness of enemies will have more reason to complain…

Fair points. I think the engineering of it is largely in the implementation though. Yes, it’s more calculations, but if other games have done just fine managing it, then it’s clearly not a guaranteed engineering problem.

As for the meta, it would undoubtedly require some tweaking, but any significant change to the condition system is going to require that. The only no-risk/no-work way to handle this situation is to let it continue as is.

kuben.9826:

This is what i wrote few posts earlier. Somebody linked topic where guy wrote, that letting everybody to have “personal” conditions cannot exist. But i can’t understand why. It’s so mystic for me…

Weird. I certainly can’t see why not on a technical level. It’s been done before successfully.

@Labjax – It may have been done before in other MMO’s, but is it done in the same way?

I’ve played a good bit of Warcraft, and I know Rogues for starters have poisons they can attribute. The differences here? For starters, the poisons only stack up to 5, not to 25, so that’s already a significant difference in the number of calculations that will have to be done (if the system works how I think it does, anyway, not 100% sure on that). Secondly, though you can have about the same number of players doing any one event, most classes can only have a single stacking debuff or condition on an enemy, simply because they don’t have the ability to generate multiple conditions. (About the only exception to this I can think of is the DeathKnight, who had three types of poisons the last I could remember.) Whereas there are plenty of classes in GW2 that can stack three or four debuffs/conditions per person, which again ramps it up even higher.

Also, the last I saw in WoW, 25-man raids were the high-end. The 40-mans were being phased out. That also puts a huge cap on the number of effects being calculated at once. Fights like Teq and Triple Trouble have four times the number of players participating in them than the common Raid instances WoW has, and over double that of even the larger-scale ones that might not even exist there anymore.

The point I’m trying to make is, though other games have done condition DoTs in a similar way, there are actually a ton of things that you might not consider that will actually make huge differences in the calculations being made. GW2 has a deeper conditions system, which means it might not be able to support the same breadth that other MMO’s are able to employ. That being said, if you do know of any other MMO’s that do it to a similar scale of GW2, I’d be happy to hear you out, because I personally don’t know of any.

ShadowDragoonFTW.3418:

The point I’m trying to make is, though other games have done condition DoTs in a similar way, there are actually a ton of things that you might not consider that will actually make huge differences in the calculations being made. GW2 has a deeper conditions system, which means it might not be able to support the same breadth that other MMO’s are able to employ. That being said, if you do know of any other MMO’s that do it to a similar scale of GW2, I’d be happy to hear you out, because I personally don’t know of any.

Rift is what I think of. I can’t remember now what the highest stacking DoT was for a single player to achieve, but although they don’t have as robust a system for open world as GW2, they certainly have world bosses where you can have a lot of people at them at one time. I’m not really sure what the concrete numbers are on that, comparatively (I’m not sure I ever new).

I just know it’s significantly more than their raids, which were (I guess I should say are – that game isn’t dead yet) 20-man at the largest.

But yeah, the whole 25 stack thing might need to be toned down if it was changed in the way I’m referring to. It really comes down to how powerful the DoTs actually are at 25 stacks.

The solution is fire-and-forget conditions. There’s way too much data transfer right now with each condition stack needing to check the condition giver’s condition damage every tick.

Rather than come up with convoluted mechanics and systems, lets take it a back a step and have a look at it another way.

The biggest problem with multiple condition users, from a hardware perspective, is the sheer number of calculations being forced on the servers.
Condition specialists want to be in a position to contribute to the fight but their damage is spread over a very long duration.

Instead of being susceptible to conditions like standard targets, HP sponge targets, world bosses, legendary and certain champions would have an extra function to their defiance buff. As it stands, defiant stacks are dependent on the number of players present. I’ve seen stacks go up to 70+ meaning CC’s are pointless unless they’re coordinated across the whole mob which is impossible.

What I propose is that degeneration conditions that can go up to 25 stacks, i.e bleed, torment, confusion would stack as normal but as soon as the cap is hit, a stack of defiance is removed. Given the speed with which bleed builds up in particular, this will make condition users contribute to the fight much more effectively than before as they would have to constantly rotate their condition skills to keep the stacks flowing and thus the damaging ticking.

To counteract this, the target would scale up as normal depending on the number of players in the event but the number of defiant stacks increase by 50%, although I could see this going up by 75% or even 100% if the stack removal was too efficient. The removal of the last defiance stack would have the same effect as usual, i.e. target is vulnerable to CC’s

For vulnerability, I wouldn’t suggest much in the way of a changing anything. It already scales up the damage done to the target by 25% and given how many players are present, that’s already a metric tonne of kittens being dropped. Poison and Burn don’t really need to be changed as their duration is generation very short

All they need to do is increase damage on conditions but decrease duration to compensate.

A lot more simple solution.