Guild Wars 2

Who’s condition damage applies? Since it stacks intensity rather than duration, I was curious what happens if say a Mesmer and a Necro make the same target bleed.

From what I’ve personally experienced, it seems like the rule “Who comes first, goes first” applies. If lets say a boss has 25 stacks of bleeding, you can apply bleeds all you want but you won’t do any damage with them, as other players were first with their bleeds. You’ll have to wait for a stack to run out before you can apply your own.

But if for example Player A applied 5 stacks and Player B applied 8 stacks, player A does 5/13 of the damage and B does 8/13. Every stack of bleed applies damage on it’s own, the damage isn’t applied as a whole.

^^This is why condition stacks need to be increased, because as it stands now for example my condition bleed warrior is useless for dynamic events, because with all the bleeds being thrown around its VERY easy to hit the 25 stack cap, and therefore all that wasted bleed damage………

karma.8763:

^^This is why condition stacks need to be increased, because as it stands now for example my condition bleed warrior is useless for dynamic events, because with all the bleeds being thrown around its VERY easy to hit the 25 stack cap, and therefore all that wasted bleed damage………

Interesting suggestion, though it may be difficult to make it work.

In an event, the maximum amount of bleed stacks on a boss can scale up as more players are participating. However, to balance things out I can think of two options:
1) Have each stack of bleed do less damage.
2) Further increase the boss’ health.

There are problems and downsides to both options though. Reducing the damage of bleed stacks would reduce the overall damage of bleed builds, and thus make not much of a difference in the end.
Further increasing the health pool of the boss will be problematic if not enough bleeders are engaging in the fight. Lets say you give all bosses a 5% HP buff to compensate for the extra damage from increased bleed stacks.
This HP buff will be around regardless of how many bleeders their are (as you can’t scale such a buff based on the builds people are running, for as far as I know. The only way to do this is increase the HP for every bleed stack the boss receives, technically making it some sort of heal. That wouldn’t work either). This results in a much longer, and probably more boring, fight if not enough players with bleed builds are aren’t to compensate for this increased HP buff.

I’m totally for this suggestion, as 25 stacks is really not enough in large group fights with the current duration on bleeds (it’s not difficult to get bleeds to last longer than 10 seconds). I just think it will be too difficult to actually make it work properly.

They are considered individually

PowerCat.5738:

They are considered individually

no they are not

In cases where you go over 25 stacks of bleed or the other conditions that stack (confusion, vulnerability, weakness?) if you’re hitting the cap, the fight is going to be a win, regardless. So don’t fret about it, just ride on the coattails of the other people.

Or, make a build/carry a weapon that doesn’t depend on bleeds.

It’s even worse for burn and poison people, cuz those you only get one stack of. All you can do is make it last longer. Most boss fights, it seems the corpse would burn in a poisonous cloud for an hour after death… :p

The main open question about intensity stacks are what happens when the stack is full and more gets piled on. Best i can tell, the stronger ones in terms of duration and/or DPS push the weaker ones out of the way.

This unlike pure duration stacking, burn and such, where the stronger one gets put ahead of the queue while the total duration grows.

Bleeds stack intensity, and use the bleed that has the longest duration for the duration.
So let’s say 2 bleeds:
1. 500 damage over 4 seconds
2. 750 damage over 3 seconds

Result: 1250 damage for 4 seconds, and it shows as 2 stacks on the icon.

Things like burn stacks duration and uses the largest damage.
So let’s say 2 burns:
1. 500 damage per seconds for 4 seconds
2. 750 damage per second for 3 seconds

Result 750 damage per second for 7 seconds.

This is how I understand it to work.

Once the stack in bleed is full I am pretty sure it is like digiowl says, the stronger ones push the weaker ones aside. They also seem to always reset the timer, even if it is a weaker one.

Condition stacking is explained here

I appreciate how that’s supposed to work. But my experience on the matter has been very different. Just taking burn and bleed, the most common conditions:

Bleed – I’ve seen this have seriously crashed damage, if a player with max cond damage applies a bleeding affect, so has a naturally high tick damage from bleed, and then another character with no condition damage applies bleed, the whole tick is ruined, and I’ve seen the damage go from huge amounts to nothing thanks to this effect, it’s painful and renders bleed useful. (Rangers shortbow in particular can crash a bleed stack)

Burning – Now this is a truly godawful condition, it should be amazing, but there’s no stacking (durations just seem to overwrite each other) and I’ll be kitten if the burning damage is ever added. It just seems to fail across the board.

My best experience of this was in CoE p1 when it was bugged and the boss couldn’t hit the towers, so we had to condition him to death. Two of us were using bleed and two using fire, and I actually found I did more fire damage when the other person switched to bleed based attacks than overwrote my fire damage.

Maybe it’s just bad experience but in my opinion the conditions need looking at as I’m sure they don’t work as intended.

dandamanno.4136:

Bleeds stack intensity, and use the bleed that has the longest duration for the duration.
So let’s say 2 bleeds:
1. 500 damage over 4 seconds
2. 750 damage over 3 seconds

Result: 1250 damage for 4 seconds, and it shows as 2 stacks on the icon.

Things like burn stacks duration and uses the largest damage.
So let’s say 2 burns:
1. 500 damage per seconds for 4 seconds
2. 750 damage per second for 3 seconds

Result 750 damage per second for 7 seconds.

This is how I understand it to work.

Once the stack in bleed is full I am pretty sure it is like digiowl says, the stronger ones push the weaker ones aside. They also seem to always reset the timer, even if it is a weaker one.

Actually, each unit of bleed (or confusion, the other damage dealing intensity stacker) operate independently. So your example would be 1250 for 3 seconds and 500 for the last second (and during that second it would show only a single unit in the bleed stack).

And the burn example would be 750 for 3 seconds followed by 500 for 4 seconds.

Never mind that the tooltips shows expected damage if the DOT gets to run for the full duration, not the pr second damage (making DOTs look way stronger than they actually are).

digiowl.9620:

dandamanno.4136:

Bleeds stack intensity, and use the bleed that has the longest duration for the duration.
So let’s say 2 bleeds:
1. 500 damage over 4 seconds
2. 750 damage over 3 seconds

Result: 1250 damage for 4 seconds, and it shows as 2 stacks on the icon.

Things like burn stacks duration and uses the largest damage.
So let’s say 2 burns:
1. 500 damage per seconds for 4 seconds
2. 750 damage per second for 3 seconds

Result 750 damage per second for 7 seconds.

This is how I understand it to work.

Once the stack in bleed is full I am pretty sure it is like digiowl says, the stronger ones push the weaker ones aside. They also seem to always reset the timer, even if it is a weaker one.

Actually, each unit of bleed (or confusion, the other damage dealing intensity stacker) operate independently. So your example would be 1250 for 3 seconds and 500 for the last second (and during that second it would show only a single unit in the bleed stack).

And the burn example would be 750 for 3 seconds followed by 500 for 4 seconds.

Never mind that the tooltips shows expected damage if the DOT gets to run for the full duration, not the pr second damage (making DOTs look way stronger than they actually are).

Actually no, the burn would deal 750 per second for 7 seconds. It only stacks in duration, the damage is calculated from the highest condition damage user.

Say we have a guardian buffing the group, giving their next attack burn.

Player 1: 50 condi damage
Player 2: 100 condi damage
Player 3: 150 condi damage
Player 4: 200 condi damage
Player 5: 300 condi damage

They all inflict two second of burning, thats 10 seconds total, damage is based on player 5’s condition damage. All the other players only count their duration to the burn attack. Same deal with poison.

If that is the in game observed behavior, either the wiki needs a cleanup or there is a bug on the loose…

This is a very informative thread. I’ve never really thought about how my bleeds correlate with other’s.

Really makes me rethink some choices I’ve made with my characters. I’d really like to see bleed stacks increase. Possibly with a diminishing return? That way those with bleed builds can balance the stack of bleeds.

To be honest, I’ve no idea of how to really adjust this so everyone gets their due damage. Very interesting issue, and thanks very much for bringing this up!

digiowl.9620:

Actually, each unit of bleed (or confusion, the other damage dealing intensity stacker) operate independently. So your example would be 1250 for 3 seconds and 500 for the last second (and during that second it would show only a single unit in the bleed stack).

And the burn example would be 750 for 3 seconds followed by 500 for 4 seconds.

This is how it should be and what was observed during the betas when it was initially tested.

Other things to note,

Any bleeds applied after 25 stacks are ignored. A player with 0 condition damage stacking 25 bleeds is screwing over a player with stacked condition damage.

The damage of conditions change in real time with your stats. For example, stacking might after you have already applied bleeds will increase the damage of the bleeds.

the condition behavior, alongside the poor returns on point investment regarding healing power, is why people find themselves running some variation of “glass cannon”. That or don’t bother with dynamic events (if you can find one these days) at all.

Healix.5819:

digiowl.9620:

Actually, each unit of bleed (or confusion, the other damage dealing intensity stacker) operate independently. So your example would be 1250 for 3 seconds and 500 for the last second (and during that second it would show only a single unit in the bleed stack).

And the burn example would be 750 for 3 seconds followed by 500 for 4 seconds.

This is how it should be and what was observed during the betas when it was initially tested.

Other things to note,

Any bleeds applied after 25 stacks are ignored. A player with 0 condition damage stacking 25 bleeds is screwing over a player with stacked condition damage.

The damage of conditions change in real time with your stats. For example, stacking might after you have already applied bleeds will increase the damage of the bleeds.

Feel free to edit the wiki to reflect in game behavior then, unless we can prod a dev to detail their planned behavior of condition stacks. Because the claimed observed behavior and the wiki described behavior are wildly divergent at this point.

karma.8763:

^^This is why condition stacks need to be increased, because as it stands now for example my condition bleed warrior is useless for dynamic events, because with all the bleeds being thrown around its VERY easy to hit the 25 stack cap, and therefore all that wasted bleed damage………

This is another example of the poor design of the buff/debuff system, especially when combined with the open-world zergfests. All of that time/energy you spend into specing your character, developing optimal skill rotation, switching weapons… is absolutely useless when in practice.

digiowl.9620:

Feel free to edit the wiki to reflect in game behavior then, unless we can prod a dev to detail their planned behavior of condition stacks. Because the claimed observed behavior and the wiki described behavior are wildly divergent at this point.

The bleeding example on the wiki is correct.

The duration section is just a mess, giving three different possible outcomes with only 2 expected.

From the description, it states that:

1. If the sources are the same, the highest condition damage is used for the entire duration
2. If the sources are different, the highest condition damage is consumed first, then the next

From the notes:

3. They will be consumed in the order they were applied

The guardian example would be #1, since all burning is from the same ability. This sounds like a bug/limitation where the game can’t tell the difference between the same ability from different people.

Your example is #2 or #3.

#2 and #3 are conflicting. If #2 is correct, damage is either not queued and the player with the highest damage will see theirs popup first, or the player with the higher damage who applied theirs last is increasing the damage of the other players.

Since the example given for #2 is healing, maybe only healing is #2 whereas damage is #3.