HoT and Condition damage.
The better designed enemies are, the more useful conditions are against them. This can vary from condition damage (husks) to chill/cripple/immobilize (teragriffs, mordrem wolves) to poison (menders and leechers), to weakness (anything that hits hard). I’ve heard a rumor HoT will include enemies that use dodge rolls, so Weakness will get better by limiting those.
I don’t think condition damage will be viable against bosses, due to the stack cap, but for the rest of the game, I think it will become much more attractive to run conditions.
If anet in 2 years havent done nothing in that regard, i doubt this expansion will, so keep your berserker gear as its going to stay.
Also it’s not a hard problem to solve, you could simple give each player his own stacks of conditions on the enemy with the same cap and scale the damage ticks down to match that of a “similar” power build as conditions are only a problem in group player, nothing else. Perhaps there are other problems this would involve but for a quick fix this would work just fine. WoW already did it many years before… but dunno… maybe this is patented?!?!?
@otetas They already said the reason they can’t/don’t do this is because the server can’t deal with crunching that many numbers, in theory they could make the stacks infinite but it’s a decision that was made for them because of server constraints.
Wow doesn’t deal with DoT damage in the same way (it’s just one skill on the target most of the time as opposed to stacking stuff like bleed and the number of players in an encounter typically don’t exceed 30) and WoW also makes a lot more money, gw2 is no slouch but they don’t rake in 150,000,000 a month (15$ * 10mil) from subscribers plus another 60$ a year per subscriber when they ship expansions. Sometimes it’s less a question of “can they” and more a question of “can they afford to”
why instead of adding a nr it extends the time and when certain intervals are reach the damage is ramped up lets say each 45sec of stacked time.
That way it dont matter how many 3 seconds of bleed you get on a mob it will still ramp up damage and it dont matter if mob die to quick since the ticks that do get in hit harder the more of them the are.
Then they need to find a way to make it work. Like rather than bleed rolling 25 separate numbers that have their own duration, each should just increase a single number and refresh the duration, with damage being decreased to compensate.
So rather than keep track of 25 different entries of bleed, each player could just have a single bleed that goes 70 , 140, 210, 280 … 1750.
It shouldn’t be acceptable to just say “We can’t be bothered to fix this” in the same vein that it would be seen as unprofessional to ship a game with lots of crashing and freezing and just not release a patch for it.
One of the main reasons it’s calculation heavy is because it has to calculate every single tick. If your condition damage changes then the ticks will do more or less damage. They need to be fire and forget where the damage per tick is calculated only 2 times: at application and/or at removal. If you max stacks then any new application either doesn’t apply until their is a slot. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we have.
Another problem is that ArenaNet made it possible for a single person to max out stacks. How about we increase the damage and duration on a single stack of bleed instead of having every skill apply 2-3 stacks? Poison and burning also need to stack even if it reduces their damage/scaling. Obviously if we decrease the number of stacks people apply then removals will also need to be nerfed in order to keep PvP fair. I vote for removals only removing a certain number of stacks. If it’s a poison removal then let it remove a few stacks, if ti’s a general removal then maybe only 1.
One of the two major damage types should not be completely crippled in PvE. That’s just a sign of poor design and the fact that it’s been in game for 2+ years is unacceptable. It’s 2015 and there are games 10 years ago that have better dot/condition systems. If they could solve it a decade ago, what’s the issue?
I apologize for my ignorance as i didn’t knew about the restraints that the servers have with the calculations, thow after 2 years it is still unacceptable this haven’t got fixed.
I kinda like Distate’s idea, but every class would get dramatic changes and it would take a lot of years to anet to do it considering how slow they work.
Also this is clearly a problem in how anet prioritizes their objectives. I wouldn’t mind having to wait 3 or 4 months with no new content whatsoever if that meant to fix this pve problems. As a conditiomancer i feel so useless when in dungeons i notice that i don’t provide decent damage compared to my other party members, and so I’ll have to resort the only way to play in groups in this game which to me feels boring.
Stacks and duration could be by player, them they could calculate the tick based in the current player status. Like a normal hit would do, without snapshot.