Guild Wars 2

It’s a fine change for PvE since very few enemies actually heal.

But against healers, (meaning every other player in PvP and WvW) the heal reduction is a LOT more useful than the actual damage (which is negligible, really) and I’d much rather drag out the duration of the heal reduction than get a slight damage bump from the poison.

So stacking is actually kind of a nerf against players, and particularly the effectiveness of poison against players with constant regen builds.

I fail to see how this will change with the stacking change. Can you elaborate?

If your poison CD is lower than the poison duration you maintain 100% uptime.
If your poison CD is longer than the poison duration you maintain the same % uptime
If you poison CD is exactly the same as the poison duration you maintain 100% uptime

What situation are you referring to?

You don’t really know until it rolls out. But I’m pretty sure Anet thought of this. They’re changing the formulas a lot. They haven’t released actual details, you don’t know, maybe the -33% healing potency will get a buff. Or the amount of times poison proc’s will increase.

At the moment, Poison will only stack 9 times for duration, so you can only add poison duration up to the 9th application.

They’re increasing the number of stacks and decreasing the base duration. So maybe after the changes rolls out, 15-25 stacks of poison might actually have the same duration as 9 stacks now.

I don’t really think you should pre-judge it before you have more facts.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

What situation are you referring to?

Engineer poison skills in general. mostly.
Fumigate, Poison dart Volley and Poison Grenade all have multiple ticks of really short poison duration. If you hit someone with the full skill, you’ll stack up about 5-10 seconds of poison, but unless they get a rework, you’ll instead have 5 stacks that burn themselves out right as the skill finishes. It’s a bit more short-term damage but you lose out on heal reductions.

And then, if you have multiple sources of poison in your rotation, you need to make more of an effort to space them out rather than spiking them. So if you switch to a weapon with sigil of doom, you don’t want to waste the poison duration by then using an attack that causes poison.

ChoChoBo.6503:

I don’t really think you should pre-judge it before you have more facts.

I’m expressing concern rather than pre-judging it to be awful. I’ll definitely need to see how those skills are reworked to make a call. But taking those engie poison attacks again, if they instead gave each hit a longer, weaker duration, that might actually be an over-buff because then you’d only need to graze the target for 1 hit of the attack for the 4-5 seconds poison. So it’ll be interesting to see how they handle it.

It’s an issue for burning and flamethrower power builds, too. Flamethrower damage is increased by 10% against targets with the burning condition. Right now you can get a good long burn with incendiary ammo and napalm, but with these changes it will be much harder to keep the burning condition going.

Engies already say you shouldn’t bother with FT1, and unless they rebalance it with shorter burns in mind it’s going to get worse.

Overall, I think I like the changes, but there are definitely some concerns about them as well, depending on how everything shakes out.