Guild Wars 2

I was just wondering this, condition builds suffer heavily outside of PvP due to their nature of the damage going to whomever in group has the highest condition damage (so having two condition players would always be a waste).

Would it really hurt balance if some, if not all, damage conditions were applied personally. That is, one person can apply 25 bleeds, and another person can apply their own 25? It seriously stifles build creativity when players are locked out of an entire component.

This is the obvious solution and the devs said it would work great in theory but in practice it costs too much money. NCSoft won’t pay for all the additional hardware it would require to make this feasible. So this will never happen.

The official word on the subject is that the servers would require a very expensive upgrade to be able to handle the significantly increased load that personal condition stacks would add.

I think they should consider removing the cap on stacks.

I think it’s ridiculous that the game has direct & condition damage and plenty of build and gear combinations…but the limitaion of combat system forces everyone to run direct damage. A whole sub-set of builds and gear largely ignored by people who run instances & DEs. And, while a solution is there to basically allow the game’s combat to exist as it was supposed to, the suits won’t spend the dough. No wonder musicians are producing their music themselves or on independent labels more & more. Shame developers can’t do the same.

I say Kickstart the server upgrade for personal condition stacking!!

Each client needs to know the conditional state of the mob. Some traits/skills get extra benefits if the mob is under the effects of a certain condition. Why shouldn’t players be able to benefit off of a condition applied by a teammate? Then there is chill, reducing skill recharge rate and movement speed, along with other cc conditions, these will need to be seen by all clients. Then there are conditions that do damage. The drain on hp would need to be seen by everybody.

The reason for the limit is bandwidth issues. I’m assuming that the state of the mob, including current conditional state, is applied every cycle. However, even if that wasn’t the case and info was only sent when there was a change, with 100 players beating on SB, it would be worse otherwise. Think of it, if info was sent at every change. 100 people constantly pooring conditions on, limiting to an update cycle would be what saves bandwidth allowing for the stacks we can get already.

They would need to condense the information. If they can condense the info (or otherwise remove the amount of info) while not taking too much of a performance hit (compressing and decompressing more info would hurt performance) then that would free up bandwidth and allow for higher stacks.

Namica.2951:

I was just wondering this, condition builds suffer heavily outside of PvP due to their nature of the damage going to whomever in group has the highest condition damage (so having two condition players would always be a waste).

Would it really hurt balance if some, if not all, damage conditions were applied personally. That is, one person can apply 25 bleeds, and another person can apply their own 25? It seriously stifles build creativity when players are locked out of an entire component.

A better way to say it is that the only thing that fix condition damage in the game is to account for it by player. This is where all games end up when they finally bite the bullet and fix it. Direct damage is now properly accounted for by player, however condition damage is accounted for by stacks on a mob. For this reason, if you add 5 more condition players you haven’t really increased the groups damage output. This is the problem. Account for condition damage by player (damage per tick times a number of ticks) and the problem is solved. Anet played the technical difficulties card and that may be an aspect of their current implementation, but all major games do it this way—there are no technical difficulties in doing it the correct way.

mtpelion.4562:

The official word on the subject is that the servers would require a very expensive upgrade to be able to handle the significantly increased load that personal condition stacks would add.

I think they should consider removing the cap on stacks.

- Sure if you want to send out individual packet for each individual application of condition. If you stack bleed to 10, you get bleed damage notification ten times per second, which is silly. Why not count all bleeding damage per second and then send it out?

They could also rebuild the stackable conditions around a cap of 5. This would require a rebalancing of traits, skills, and damage values but it would mitigate the server problem to a degree.

I really think they need to redesign the whole system. Either that or just come out and admit “well, we kinda messed up a bit, and its really too far past the point of being able to fix it. Everyone should just forget about condition damage.”

Its even worse that they seem to design some things with “everyone’s zerker these days” in mind, which is rough on other builds.

Is there a significant difference between tracking it per person vs upping the cap count? Make the cap count 125 to allow for 5 person parties and be done with it.

Unless they’re using a complex method of tracking stack counts which somehow compresses multiple stack types, there is no data size difference between 25 and 125 so it wouldn’t affect memory in any way. (If they’re using char/short for single stacks for some reason and have avoided the pitfalls of default promo to int elsewhere, like in equations, maybe you’d see some increase, but I really doubt they’re doing that, and even if so, 125 still fits into either).

There are multiple suggestions in the …. suggestion section of the forum. At least Cpt. Obvious said so. Alot of them might give the players a bit more room to deal conditions while keeping the stress (called optimization) and very few of them even change the system to reduce the stress and lets players deal their condition individually. In this thread any discussion or suggestion is pointless. The posters here don’t seem to graps the problem or a possibly working solution.
As said before, it’s not a design issue (could be discussed here), but a technical issue. So it’s not “should it be improved”, but “how could an improvement look like”. So please keep those things in the suggestion section.

@OP
The main issue is bleeding, not burning or poison. Bleeding is individual and only duration stacking conditions have the “strongest first” rule.

Increasing the bleeding cap to 25 per player would increase the server stress on worls bosses to ~20x the current stress.

@Unleashed
So you say each world boss only uses a char (8 bit) value to keep track of the bleedings ? Duration, Malice, and Source of 125 bleedings fit in 8 bits ?

As I said, keep suggestions in the … suggestion section.

At the moment, intensity-stacking durations (like bleed) tick more often as they get more stacks. I suggest to let them tick only once or twice a second, while additional stacks increase the damage instead of the amount of ticks.