Guild Wars 2

So I put on my old exotic set recently because I wanted to see if there had been any changes in the backdrop of condition damage types and their damage ratios and I wanted to see if they could crit for anything significant.

Imagine my surprise when I learned thru tracking on my engineer that bleeding seems to be 5 times more powerful than any of the other condition damage forms. They’ve gotta know this is a problem because no all classes use bleeding and those that do have a max stack when fighting the same boss.

My question is why aren’t the other forms of condition damage more balanced to do closer to the max I’m seeing on the bleeds? Why aren’t burning/poison doing more to the enemy and leveling off the bleeding damage? Wouldn’t this effectively help with the problems that the condition damage builds have in PVE immediately if this were done?

As I see the Mesmer’s Staff’s autoattack, burning deals 7 times more damage than bleeding. But if I try, I can manage 15+ stacks of bleeding onto a target.

Poison additionally lowers healing effects.

It’s kinda balanced imo. But stacking with multiple players is broken is all kinds anyways.

Nretep.2564:

As I see the Mesmer’s Staff’s autoattack, burning deals 7 times more damage than bleeding. But if I try, I can manage 15+ stacks of bleeding onto a target.

Poison additionally lowers healing effects.

It’s kinda balanced imo. But stacking with multiple players is broken is all kinds anyways.

It is and it has been done before on other titles where the conditions are more evenly balanced as well as every condition was counted per attacker so not sure why they thought it was impossible to do.

Hmm I’m pretty sure that Burning is the best for damage….

Well I mean it does more damage faster. Sure maybe bleeding does more in the long run because it’s more spread out thus giving you more time to add more stacks to it.

I think the biggest issues with condition damage especially where bosses are concerned and max stacks is the fact that there are weapons/skills that cause condition damage straight from the auto attack skill 1. This should NOT be the case. Conditions (especially damage type) should be from skills with cooldowns only. The issue is clearly seen in any Meta event or champ fight when you have more than a couple of people using the same weps on the same classes.

If they really wanted to address the problem with condition damage especially when it comes to boss fights I can see 2 ways they could do it:

1 – Remove condition effects from skill 1 auto attacks.
2 – Another choice could be to turn ALL condition damage into strict normal damage for the purposes of fighting champs/bosses to avoid the max over stacking problems.

As for making control skills useless vs them heck I don’t know could they not instead have some control removal methods? Or in the least have certain bosses/champs strong vs certain controls (such as dredge vs Blind) and perhaps give them a weakness as well to counter balance this….

Most conditions stack in time and not in intensity. If all conditions stacked in intensity and had different active times depending on what they are used for that would be a lot better. Poison is pretty much crap in PvE, unless you do fotm and there’s a lot of healers in a zerg.

I rather have all conditions stack intensity and not duration. Bleeding is the best for damage, yes.

Burning has the highest base and scaling by far (except for fear which is almost identical, but very rare) and stacks over time, allowing you to put long term DoTs on something. Bleeding, by comparison, is pretty weak, having only about an eighth the base damage and a fifth the scaling compared to burning and stacks intensity instead of duration, allowing for a little bonus damage for those not specced to apply it, but a lot of damage rather quickly for those who are.

Poison’s heal debuff speaks for itself in a game where there is so much health regeneration and healing going on at all times.

Basically, burning and poison can be used by everyone, and have added benefits, whereas bleeding is only really useful on those specced for it, and comes with nothing but pure damage.

Paulytnz.7619:

Hmm I’m pretty sure that Burning is the best for damage….

Well I mean it does more damage faster. Sure maybe bleeding does more in the long run because it’s more spread out thus giving you more time to add more stacks to it.

I think the biggest issues with condition damage especially where bosses are concerned and max stacks is the fact that there are weapons/skills that cause condition damage straight from the auto attack skill 1. This should NOT be the case. Conditions (especially damage type) should be from skills with cooldowns only. The issue is clearly seen in any Meta event or champ fight when you have more than a couple of people using the same weps on the same classes.

If they really wanted to address the problem with condition damage especially when it comes to boss fights I can see 2 ways they could do it:

1 – Remove condition effects from skill 1 auto attacks.
2 – Another choice could be to turn ALL condition damage into strict normal damage for the purposes of fighting champs/bosses to avoid the max over stacking problems.

As for making control skills useless vs them heck I don’t know could they not instead have some control removal methods? Or in the least have certain bosses/champs strong vs certain controls (such as dredge vs Blind) and perhaps give them a weakness as well to counter balance this….

Stripping autoattacks of conditions is a terrible idea. Why should zerker players benefit from their autoattack but conditioners have to use cooldown skills? That’s ridiculous, effectively rendering all conditioners worthless while skills are on CD. Why even have autoattacks for them?

The problem is that Anet has capped the bleed stacks. In PvP or WvW it’s fine. But in PvE against champs, world bosses, and in dungeons it becomes hampering to conditioners. It’s a technical limitation of their servers. But it needs to be addressed. Something like your 2nd solution. It’s not like those champs ever condition cleanse anyway, so letting the extra stacks of bleed act as direct damage should be fine.

As for the other damaging conditions:
- poison deals less damage, stacks duration, but reduces healing
- burning deals a lot more damage, stacks duration
- torment deals the same damage as bleed, stacks the same, and deals more damage to moving foes

They’re balanced

Seras.5702:

Paulytnz.7619:

Hmm I’m pretty sure that Burning is the best for damage….

Well I mean it does more damage faster. Sure maybe bleeding does more in the long run because it’s more spread out thus giving you more time to add more stacks to it.

I think the biggest issues with condition damage especially where bosses are concerned and max stacks is the fact that there are weapons/skills that cause condition damage straight from the auto attack skill 1. This should NOT be the case. Conditions (especially damage type) should be from skills with cooldowns only. The issue is clearly seen in any Meta event or champ fight when you have more than a couple of people using the same weps on the same classes.

If they really wanted to address the problem with condition damage especially when it comes to boss fights I can see 2 ways they could do it:

1 – Remove condition effects from skill 1 auto attacks.
2 – Another choice could be to turn ALL condition damage into strict normal damage for the purposes of fighting champs/bosses to avoid the max over stacking problems.

As for making control skills useless vs them heck I don’t know could they not instead have some control removal methods? Or in the least have certain bosses/champs strong vs certain controls (such as dredge vs Blind) and perhaps give them a weakness as well to counter balance this….

Stripping autoattacks of conditions is a terrible idea. Why should zerker players benefit from their autoattack but conditioners have to use cooldown skills? That’s ridiculous, effectively rendering all conditioners worthless while skills are on CD. Why even have autoattacks for them?

The problem is that Anet has capped the bleed stacks. In PvP or WvW it’s fine. But in PvE against champs, world bosses, and in dungeons it becomes hampering to conditioners. It’s a technical limitation of their servers. But it needs to be addressed. Something like your 2nd solution. It’s not like those champs ever condition cleanse anyway, so letting the extra stacks of bleed act as direct damage should be fine.

As for the other damaging conditions:
- poison deals less damage, stacks duration, but reduces healing
- burning deals a lot more damage, stacks duration
- torment deals the same damage as bleed, stacks the same, and deals more damage to moving foes

They’re balanced

The idea would be that if the conditions were removed from the auto attack skill the direct damage output would have to be bumped up of course. Also the conditions would then be placed in amongst the other skills or utilities which are simply just not used as often of course because of the cool downs. You can see how that can help somewhat when it comes to mass players. Less of it being applied every second vs every 30 seconds or whatever the cool down is.

Btw NOT everyone is a berserker who does not use conditions…..it’s simply just plain normal damage. Which again is what you would be getting with either of the 2 options I put up on offer.

ANets development team isn’t the smartest, nor do they ever see issues that are inevitably going to arise.

Condition damage has been completely forgotten about in pve and no one knows why they used such terrible restrictive coding so we can only have 1 stack of 25 bleed.

Best bet is to just go raw damage.

Mathias.9657:

ANets development team isn’t the smartest, nor do they ever see issues that are inevitably going to arise.

Condition damage has been completely forgotten about in pve and no one knows why they used such terrible restrictive coding so we can only have 1 stack of 25 bleed.

Best bet is to just go raw damage.

I don’t see why anyone would use conditions in PVE regardless, heck even in WvW or sPvP for that matter. The damage can be removed, does not effect stationary items/enemies such as turrets, siege etc. Really for PvE it’s only for a novelty tbh. Unless they actually decided to do a Final Fantasy type system of conditions where certain enemies are strong/weak against them it’s all just novelty….

Mathias.9657:

ANets development team isn’t the smartest, nor do they ever see issues that are inevitably going to arise.

Condition damage has been completely forgotten about in pve and no one knows why they used such terrible restrictive coding so we can only have 1 stack of 25 bleed.

Best bet is to just go raw damage.

It’s not that they aren’t smart enough to do it, it’s just that it would require the servers to do so much more work if you could have infinite stacks of anything on anything. MMO’s don’t really require much bandwidth, but when you have hundreds of thousands of players on simultaneously, all applying varying amounts of boons/conditions to other things, it already starts to take a toll on the servers and the connection. There’s already problems with skill lag in huge groups due to the servers not being able to keep up, and allowing easily dozens of times more conditions to be applied would absolutely destroy playability for large group events.

Paulytnz.7619:

The idea would be that if the conditions were removed from the auto attack skill the direct damage output would have to be bumped up of course. Also the conditions would then be placed in amongst the other skills or utilities which are simply just not used as often of course because of the cool downs. You can see how that can help somewhat when it comes to mass players. Less of it being applied every second vs every 30 seconds or whatever the cool down is.

Btw NOT everyone is a berserker who does not use conditions…..it’s simply just plain normal damage. Which again is what you would be getting with either of the 2 options I put up on offer.

If a player is running with Dire gear, why would they want to lose conditions on their autoattack in favor of more raw damage? A condition set hits like a limp noodle. You’re saying to limit a conditioners ability to dish out conditions. How is that helpful for the player? Conversely, should we remove all raw damage from any skill that applies a condition then? It’s not a solution to the problem. You’re just making it harder to apply conditions, and ignoring the problem of the stack limit. In the Teq fight, you’ve got 80+ people. If even half of them apply 1 single stack of bleeding, you’re still over the cap by 15. Fail.

And I never said everyone plays zerk; just making an analogy. And what is plain normal damage if not “not conditions”? Even a hybrid build is hampered by the condition stack limit.

The entire condition system is just terrible, it needs a complete overhaul to work.

There shouldn’t be stacks of anything at all imo. It’s an issue that people were telling ANet during beta, but they just ignored it and now look everyone is zerker.

They’ve been ‘looking into this’ for a year now lawl.

I don’t see how their coding can be so horrible when WoW has handled separate condition counters for years even in 40+ man raids. ???

Millillion.5914:

Mathias.9657:

ANets development team isn’t the smartest, nor do they ever see issues that are inevitably going to arise.

Condition damage has been completely forgotten about in pve and no one knows why they used such terrible restrictive coding so we can only have 1 stack of 25 bleed.

Best bet is to just go raw damage.

It’s not that they aren’t smart enough to do it, it’s just that it would require the servers to do so much more work if you could have infinite stacks of anything on anything. MMO’s don’t really require much bandwidth, but when you have hundreds of thousands of players on simultaneously, all applying varying amounts of boons/conditions to other things, it already starts to take a toll on the servers and the connection. There’s already problems with skill lag in huge groups due to the servers not being able to keep up, and allowing easily dozens of times more conditions to be applied would absolutely destroy playability for large group events.

This excuse has already been disproven as a problem. Either someone over there doesn’t know how to setup servers or they made a very big booboo and won’t own up to it.

It’s been done countless times. Rift is a great example, almost every class has a DoT system in most of their builds each DoT is counted every time for every player. The only thing they did to streamline the process was allow the UI to hide the other players DoTs so that it wouldn’t overload the UI of the client. All of the DoTs are still there and have been the whole time this game’s been out all the way thru going F2P and it’s by no means the only one that’s done this.

They have forgotten that they told us the combat was going to be balanced and that each play style would be their own personal new trinity replacing that of the old. It still hasn’t happened and it’s been a year? something’s not right at this point.

Seras.5702:

Paulytnz.7619:

The idea would be that if the conditions were removed from the auto attack skill the direct damage output would have to be bumped up of course. Also the conditions would then be placed in amongst the other skills or utilities which are simply just not used as often of course because of the cool downs. You can see how that can help somewhat when it comes to mass players. Less of it being applied every second vs every 30 seconds or whatever the cool down is.

Btw NOT everyone is a berserker who does not use conditions…..it’s simply just plain normal damage. Which again is what you would be getting with either of the 2 options I put up on offer.

If a player is running with Dire gear, why would they want to lose conditions on their autoattack in favor of more raw damage? A condition set hits like a limp noodle. You’re saying to limit a conditioners ability to dish out conditions. How is that helpful for the player? Conversely, should we remove all raw damage from any skill that applies a condition then? It’s not a solution to the problem. You’re just making it harder to apply conditions, and ignoring the problem of the stack limit. In the Teq fight, you’ve got 80+ people. If even half of them apply 1 single stack of bleeding, you’re still over the cap by 15. Fail.

And I never said everyone plays zerk; just making an analogy. And what is plain normal damage if not “not conditions”? Even a hybrid build is hampered by the condition stack limit.

I’m saying a big part of the stack limit problem is because of the fact that auto attack skills are applying them far too fast, this needs to be addressed to help limit that. Hey if Anet decides to make all conditions duration based instead of intensity based to help fix this problem then maybe that’s the way to go….

TBH I don’t know the best solution but I can see that a big part of the problem is the nonstop application of conditions from auto attacks.

The OP brings up one of the many design flaws of the condition system in this game. The caps wouldn’t be so bad if every class inflicted different DoTs. But every class inflicts the same DoTs. I was kicking around the idea of making each class emphasize different condis, so they won’t become redundant nearly as quickly. It is a bit boring that if you make a condi build, its all about bleeding and not much else.

I do think the problem with the condi limit is the server processing power. The way GW2 handles conditions is… problematic. The problem is, the server re-calculates the damage done for every tick of every condi on the enemy. This means that, while direct damage does its calculation only once, a condition attack does its calculation a dozen times. It has to constantly pull from memory the identity of the player, the level of the player, the malice of the player, and then calculate and apply that to each condition, which keeps track of its duration and stack limit.

25 stacks per enemy can get pretty stressful when you have players all over the map fighting different enemies. A simple solution to this would be to change it so the condi only calculates its damage at application, then simply subtracts that amount each tick. Doing this, you could save a whole load of processing power, and with that you can easily triple the current condi limit.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The OP brings up one of the many design flaws of the condition system in this game. The caps wouldn’t be so bad if every class inflicted different DoTs. But every class inflicts the same DoTs. I was kicking around the idea of making each class emphasize different condis, so they won’t become redundant nearly as quickly. It is a bit boring that if you make a condi build, its all about bleeding and not much else.

I do think the problem with the condi limit is the server processing power. The way GW2 handles conditions is… problematic. The problem is, the server re-calculates the damage done for every tick of every condi on the enemy. This means that, while direct damage does its calculation only once, a condition attack does its calculation a dozen times. It has to constantly pull from memory the identity of the player, the level of the player, the malice of the player, and then calculate and apply that to each condition, which keeps track of its duration and stack limit.

25 stacks per enemy can get pretty stressful when you have players all over the map fighting different enemies. A simple solution to this would be to change it so the condi only calculates its damage at application, then simply subtracts that amount each tick. Doing this, you could save a whole load of processing power, and with that you can easily triple the current condi limit.

This is what I am inclined to believe. That it isn’t exactly impossible for this to work in GW2, but that they might have made the mistake of designing how conditions work early enough in development that it would be a massive undertaking to dig through all the game code to fix it.

If you want another example of this sort of thing, look at League of Legends. It takes Riot very long periods of time to fix things that technically could have been avoided since the start, but due to how early the mistakes were made, how far deep into the code they are, and the fact that new content is being regularly released that might work with the old systems but not some new systems (that you would have separate groups working on, making this almost impossible to test for), that it is a truly massive undertaking to fix even some seemingly simple problems.