Guild Wars 2

Hey all. I was thinking today and i don’t know if this idea has been suggested before, but why don’t stacks of conditions indicate sources instead of aplications?
Take bleed for example: world event or dungeon, a sigle engineer can easily reach the 25 stacks of bleed, making others condition damagers kind of useless, even if they have a higher condition damage than the engineer. But imagine if the bleed condition changes to be a fast dot damager, ticking 2 or 3 times per second, increasing the duration each time an especific source applies it. You could have 5 sources, 5 stacks, dealing diferent amounts of damage per bleed. Would be OP in some cases? yes, but at the same time, it would promote the use of other types of equipment ingame.
Think of WvW or SPVP: no longer full berserker would be the go to spec, considering you could be facing several stacks of a condition from diferent sources, diferent players, that would require for some vitality if you don’t want to be dead in a matter of seconds. With this change, cleric would become much more useful and even magi (the most useless armor spec ingame) could play a role in crit builds. Imagine a zerg of 20 ppl, with 10 of them causing 10 stacks of bleed with diferent durations. Or think of a 2v1 fight of a necro and engineer vs warrior. No longer would that berserker warrior just jump in to kill both, since it could be afected by 2 sources, 2 stacks of bleed and burning of maybe hard dealing dps with conditions (yes burning should stack like bleed and not just increase duration of the condition since in the end its just a slow hard hitting dot). What do you guys and gals think?

TL:DR stacks sould indicate sources (players and mobs) and not amounts of applications made to the target by particular skills.

“Think of WvW or SPVP: no longer full berserker would be the go to spec”

wait…… wat? u serious? only rally bots are full zerkers in wvw

The ONLY time u should run zerkers in wvw is if u have a wicked good frontline to cover your butt.
And your example of a full zerker warrior killing a necro and engi is just funny, said warrior would get insta downed if said Necro and Engi knew how to play even a little.

Seriously, Condi’s are fine as they are, every aspect of the game has it’s pros and cons

I recall reading that it is the way the server handles this information; basically it’s too stressful to calculate the condition damage of a target as an individual event from each player. So while the ideal would be that everyone has their own condition spot, the reality is that it is not currently possible to do given how condition damage is calculated.

You might then go to the next logical question of “Well then why is the game able to keep up with thousands of players physically attacking at widely separate times?” to which I might say “I don’t know.” I’m going to guess it has something to do with some difference between how damage-over-time and direct-damage is calculated, with direct-damage being a one time claculation that doesn’t need to be persistent.

Warkupo.1025:

I recall reading that it is the way the server handles this information; basically it’s too stressful to calculate the condition damage of a target as an individual event from each player. So while the ideal would be that everyone has their own condition spot, the reality is that it is not currently possible to do given how condition damage is calculated.

You might then go to the next logical question of “Well then why is the game able to keep up with thousands of players physically attacking at widely separate times?” to which I might say “I don’t know.” I’m going to guess it has something to do with some difference between how damage-over-time and direct-damage is calculated, with direct-damage being a one time claculation that doesn’t need to be persistent.

This is exactly why. The stack limit is a server limitation, not a design choice.

Martrim.1078:

“Think of WvW or SPVP: no longer full berserker would be the go to spec”

wait…… wat? u serious? only rally bots are full zerkers in wvw

The ONLY time u should run zerkers in wvw is if u have a wicked good frontline to cover your butt.
And your example of a full zerker warrior killing a necro and engi is just funny, said warrior would get insta downed if said Necro and Engi knew how to play even a little.

*Seriously, Condi’s are fine as they are, every aspect of the game has it’s pros and cons *

This part I disagree with. Conditions need to be fixed on a PVE level, not a PVP level. T

I think the main problem in Conditions is that they don’t function like regular dots or disables. If you look at other games, a single player has an entire skillbar of different dots. They’re all dots, sure. But they’re identified as different abilities, so even in small groups, you can keep a consisitent damage output on your part because they’re all tagged as individual abilities.

In GW2, that’s not the case, Bleed is universal, as is poison, Cripple, and all the rest. There’s no uniqueness, and as a result, even if you had a bunch of players not even equipping condition gear they’d still be able to stack plenty of conditions regardless because conditions are not individualized as well as true Dots.

Seven Star Stalker.1740:

Martrim.1078:

“Think of WvW or SPVP: no longer full berserker would be the go to spec”

wait…… wat? u serious? only rally bots are full zerkers in wvw

The ONLY time u should run zerkers in wvw is if u have a wicked good frontline to cover your butt.
And your example of a full zerker warrior killing a necro and engi is just funny, said warrior would get insta downed if said Necro and Engi knew how to play even a little.

*Seriously, Condi’s are fine as they are, every aspect of the game has it’s pros and cons *

This part I disagree with. Conditions need to be fixed on a PVE level, not a PVP level. T

I think the main problem in Conditions is that they don’t function like regular dots or disables. If you look at other games, a single player has an entire skillbar of different dots. They’re all dots, sure. But they’re identified as different abilities, so even in small groups, you can keep a consisitent damage output on your part because they’re all tagged as individual abilities.

In GW2, that’s not the case, Bleed is universal, as is poison, Cripple, and all the rest. There’s no uniqueness, and as a result, even if you had a bunch of players not even equipping condition gear they’d still be able to stack plenty of conditions regardless because conditions are not individualized as well as true Dots.

Altho i do agree that condition builds are not optimal for large scale fights it would break pvp beyond repair if they would buff them.

In pve i don’t run Condi’s and only use it for pvp/roaming in wvw.
Maybe they could give them a slight buff in pve only or actualy make coordinated smaller groups more viable so condi’s don’t “overstack”.

it’s because with conditions, every single application is calculated separately. so a stack of 25 bleeds is the same calculations as 25 physical attacks. one stack of 25 bleeds is the same computations as 25 other players mashing ‘1’. If there were no limit, 25 bleeds from 25 players would have the same lag as 625 players – which is about 4 times as many players as can fit on a single map instance. by ‘lag’, I mean skill/player location lag from the server not able to calculate everything in real time – which is different from you getting lower fps because of lots of special effects.
It would be pretty hard to get around that problem. I’ve read some suggestions: anything above 25 and it would just deal physical damage instead, at 25 it converts those 25 into a single condition and creates a new stack (so instead of 25 bleeds, each dealing 200 dmg it would be 1 ultra-bleed, each dealing 5000). None are perfect solutions: conditions would become OP from someone maxing bleed, then dealing instant damage (conditions are stronger than physical because it’s damage over time, so 5000 dmg over 20 seconds vs. 2000 direct damage). all applications of bleed are different: one source might be 200 dmg each for 10 seconds, another might be 300 dmg each for 2 seconds, etc. would probably be more resource-intensive to add all those up and create the ultra-bleed than just removing the cap – would also alter how good conditions were (you applied 300 dmg/sec for 2 seconds, but then it got turned into 100 dmg/sec for 6 seconds because it was merged with others, and another source of 100 dmg/sec for 30 seconds got turned into 500 dmg/sec for 6 seconds)