Guild Wars 2

How is Debuff count handled in other MMO?

Since its a major issue here in GW2, I am curious about how other MMOs solved this similar issue.

From my own personal experience, debuffs in other MMOs are generally more unique to the class, which makes it much easier to balance around. Because there is so many generic conditions in Guild Wars 2 that classes share, a cap is a bit more difficult to balance around. Because this is the case, I can not personally think of a way to actually fix it.

Most MMOs dont cap conditions at all, but also dont throw them out like candy.

All of those X% chance for Y on crit that are often minor traits just oversaturate the game with conditions.

Most of the time games dont even have conditions like GW2, dots simply do damage over time that is damage and not some weird as debuff.

Sorcs in Tor for example have dots that ignore armor too, but those are just dots that ignore armor, not conditions in any shape or form and you can freely stack them if you have several Sorcs in a raid.

They are typically allowed to overlap unless there is a specific clause that says they will not that tends to be noted in the description. Like if you have 10 warlocks in WoW, everybody is allowed to have a separate copy of their own DOTs.

In other games there’s rarely caps. Instead each effect is unique and there’s sometimes less overall effects or more, depending on how their severs handle them. Some can be removed, some can’t.

In GW2, there should be two caps: The number of boons and conditions a creature can maintain, and the number the creature can have on.

This cap should be based on creature rank, so normal creatures can have less than the baseline, players and veterans can have the baseline, elites a bit more, champions much more, legendaries even more, and epic bosses the max possible cap.

That way you remove stacks from creeps that will die from direct damage anyways and they are instead moved to the boss yo really want dead, without increasing the overall number of stacks. An pic boss would be able to both have stacks up to 250 bleeding on, and 250 stacks of bleeding spread among all players fighting it, while the normal enemies it ca summon would only be able to keep up 5-10 conditions and have 5-10 on.

In Rift it could look like this :
(sadly i lost my own screenshots of a bossfight so i had to use this low quality image)

Beldin.5498:

In Rift it could look like this :
(sadly i lost my own screenshots of a bossfight so i had to use this low quality image)

Holy kitten…

In the now-defunct City of Heros, DoT’s stacked, and debuffs (-damage%, -hit%, -regen, etc) all stacked multiplicatively. it was possible, with enough debuffers, to completely floor even a boss’s stats so they hit once in a blue moon and for very little damage. Meanwhile, you could debuff the kitten out of their defense and damage resistance as well. “Support” builds were weak one-on-one, but godlike when you started force-multiplying.

Lakanna.2073:

In the now-defunct City of Heros, DoT’s stacked, and debuffs (-damage%, -hit%, -regen, etc) all stacked multiplicatively. it was possible, with enough debuffers, to completely floor even a boss’s stats so they hit once in a blue moon and for very little damage. Meanwhile, you could debuff the kitten out of their defense and damage resistance as well. “Support” builds were weak one-on-one, but godlike when you started force-multiplying.

Oh yes. I miss my trapper, I really do…

(speaking for wow/swtor and eso)

Classes have their own conditions which mean there is less overlapping. Not every class has enough conditions to make focus on them a viable option (for example condi warrior doesn’t exist in wow). If you want to build condition based DPS character you have to choose a specific class and invest into specific traits which mean condition dealers are much more rare compared to GW2.

GW2 did it completely wrong. Every class can apply almost every condition in game without spending any points into condition related traits. Conditions are (mostly) applied as a byproduct of basic attacks. All classes have same DoTs.

This will never be fixed. They would have to redo every class, every weapon and pretty much everything that has something to do with conditions and since it has 0 potential of making money on it they won’t do it.

GW2 made the mistake of spamming conditions and keeping high precision.

A 25 stack of bleeds in GW2 is the equivalent of 25 different DoTs in every other MMO. When other MMOs stack DoTs (on a personal level), they combine them into a single DoT, making it more powerful and simply refreshing its duration. That method is much cheaper to process. Even the DoTs that don’t stack in GW2, such as burning, stack in a queue rather than simply combining their duration. A full stack of burning is like 9 different DoTs.

DoTs in GW2 also constantly update based on your power, whereas in other MMOs, they tend to be static at the time they were applied.

Healix.5819:

DoTs in GW2 also constantly update based on your power, whereas in other MMOs, they tend to be static at the time they were applied.

This was changed in WoW with the new expansion.