Hello there,
I main a necro and basicly PVE nearly all the time. At the start of gw2, it was awesome, figuring out mechanics and whacking my scepter around as if there was a butload of bugs plaging me.
After a while however, everything in PVE got “figured out” and everyone ran the same gear, Berserker. This is, in itself not a problem, mind me, running gear with no defensive stats requires at least a few months of skill. But it still plagues me that every build is now a power based build. I think there are 2 main reasons for that:
1) Power builds ALWAYS deal more damage then condition builds.
2) Bleeding has a cap. Alone, you can reach it, The moment someone else in a 5 man group also has a condi build, Both of your dps’s are going to fall so low that you’re depressed for the rest of the run. I know gw2 personnel have informed us that this is because of server limitations. This does not fix the meta though.
My idea would be to just redesign bleeding to be more like burning and poison. Those stack over time and mostly don’t have any problems. It would need a twist to keep it interesting as well and provide something that makes a condition build work like this:
A condition build in my eyes should Do medium to low damage at the first few seconds of the fight, over a time of 30 sec to a minute, that dps should ramp up, to heights where berserker players can only get with a burst. Meaning that at world bosses and bosses that need to be damaged consistently (aka dps races) condi builds would have the upper hand. Bosses with breaks in dps and mob packs would still be dominated by the fast and furious power builds. Everybody gets to be special….
How does bleeding come into this?
Bleeding is a condition that inflicts damage over time and stacks in duration. The more time is left for the target to bleed, the more damage this condition does. However, there is a cap at 25 stacks for this condition, meaning that the duration for this condition will only be increased by the first 25 sources that apply it, and all stacks that would normally increase the duration beyond the first 25 stacks will be ignored. Once the duration from the first application of bleeding has run out, another stack can be applied, further increasing the duration of bleeding.
This way, you don’t stack up bleeding stacks, you just stack up time. This would be done by lowering the time of all bleeding mechanics in game so that auto attacks would basically just keep the remaining time of the bleeding stacks where it is (thus not increasing dps, but keeping it where it is) and other weapon skills would provide significantly longer bleeding, but have a cooldown. Bleeding would this intensify the longer the fight lasts, overpowering power builds after a certain time, as long as the player providing the bleeds isn’t stopped.
What do you think? Is this possible, is it just a plain bad idea? Do you like it? How would you change it?