Guild Wars 2

It has been stated in the past that condition cap shouldn’t be raised because it put a lot of stress in the servers. However, is that happening because of the calculations that it would take to the servers if more than 25 stacks of each condition needs to do? If that’s the case, I suggest to adapt the way conditions stack.

Right now a single player can make 25 bleeds on an enemy just by himself. That shouldn’t be the case. A player should be only able to put 1 bleed on the enemy, but the damage of that own bleed should be adapted to the skills he/she uses for it.

Example:

• Player uses BleedA attack: deals 100 damage per second, duration 3 seconds.
• Player uses BleedB attack: deals 240 damage per second, it last 4 seconds.
• Result of both at same time: Bleed damage on the enemy is 340 for 4 seconds.

Previously you would have 2 different stacks of bleeds on the enemy, but now you only use 1 stack and the enemy is still getting damage from your bleeds. The condition builds would be fun again while they try to keep the bleed active. Keeping the bleed open would result in the damage upscaling with each bleed until you can’t keep it up or the boss cure that condition, which would allow players to choose when exactly use a bleed skill or another one.

Pros:
1: The cap could still be at 25 like it’s right now, but that would mean that 25 players can use bleeds on the enemies instead of just 1 player doing 25 stacks.
2: It would also allow to condition builds to be useful since their damage would be incremental for each bleed.
3: No problems at all in dungeons/fractals or places where you need less than 25 players.

Cons:
1: All bleed skills in the game should be adjusted for this. Skills that put 6 stacks should have just longer timing or improved damage or even less cooldown to compensate.
2: Replacing a bleed stack if 26 players put bleeds on enemy or ignore the player number 26th?

That said, it’s not a perfect solution (but it’s a solution for 95% of the game) because a level 10 player (or a non-condition build player) could still bleed the enemy and take 1 of those 25 for his own useless damage. However, it would be only 1 and it’s unlikely that you will find 25 of those in a big fight. The game is evolving slowly and we’re not required to gather 100 players on an enemy anymore. Tequatl can die with less than 50 and the 3 headed wurm split the groups, so it’s highly complicated to get to the 25 bleed caps anymore with the new conditions system that I suggest.

TL;DR. 1 stack per player per condition.

it sounds nice but…

I have several skills that deal bleeding on my S/S & LB warrior:
Sever Artery: 1st/ 12 sec base (sword auto)
Gash: 1st/ 12 sec base (sword auto)
Riposte: 4st/ 16 sec base (sword #5)
Flurry: 8st/12st/16st stacks for 3 sec base (depending on adrenaline) (burst skill)
Pin down: 6 st 18 sec base (longbow #5)
Precise strikes: 33% chance on crit: 4.5 seconds (no cooldown) (trait)

I alrady have torment (sword #4), cripple (auto&#2), fire (burst LB, #2), immobilize (LB #5 and Burst sword), blindness (LB #4) and vulnerability (traited) as additional conditions. without using my utility skills…

Sigils
Earth …
Geomancy …

How would you want to compress this? without dropping warrior DOT to much?

I have 1170 condition dmg, which I can modify with
- A banner (strength 170 condi and power)
- food (tuning crystals, or normal foods)
- food wich lengthens DOT (toxic tuning or toxic sharpening stones / koi cakes or pizza)
- WvW the stacks influence, and I sometimes use stacking sigils and / or bursting.
All these I could calculate but:
- might ( variable but max 875 condi & strength), (changes rapidly and often)
is a problem… as it can chenge on a second by second base.

Warriors can easily fill 25 stacks of bleeding…alone.

The biggest problem is and remains that there are too many skills that apply bleed too quickly, and too many skills (and traits) that allow bleeding to be applied by the “1” skill.

And it’s not something that can be fixed in large scale battles without completely overhauling the entire system, which Arena.net isn’t going to do at this point in the game.

The condition mechanic needs to be completely scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up. There’s no “fixing it.”

Real issue, trying to squeeze large scale combat, into a 5v5 conquest engine.

As I just said in the cons section, for that to work the Anet team should change most (or even all of them) of the skills of our characters.

The cond. cap stack is a well known issue and we never had an official pronunciation about it, how could it be fixed or if they will do it someday.

As a Dotter from every mmorpg I played, I can just accept my truncated necro DPS.

Conditions could be reworked so that each target only ever has a single stack, and each hit throws a certain number of “points” onto that stack.

Every tick, a formula would inflict damage or rescale the effect (weakness, damage per skill use, etc) based on the number of points, subtract some points, and update the condition icon based on the scale and the remaining duration.

The formulas would be set up so as to simulate the stacking characteristics of conditions, as implemented by a condition-focused character; with bleeding, for example, the DPS would scale up from a base rate to up to 25 times that rate; with burning, the initial DPS would be much higher, but the rate would be stable and only the duration would increase.

The formulas should be balanced so that conditions on players or vet NPCs and below remain about the same, but conditions on tougher mobs run through their points at a scaled up rate, with a higher maximum DPS in exchange for much shorter durations. The simplest implementation would be leaving the “stack” caps the same, but scaling up the number of points per stack.

The reason stacks exist is that individual durations have to be tracked. Appling 2 stacks as in the OP example needs to be two separate stacks because of the different durations. Combining these would change the damage being done, lowering the damage of the 3 second bleed to apply the same damage over 4 seconds would be an option. But what if the bleed damage is removed after 3 seconds?
Also ‘at the same time’ is a definition that is a more difficult that in seams, within this context a more precise definition would be ‘applied within the same second’. Again what happens if the two stacks with a duration of 3 seconds are applied with a 0.5 second interval and a cleanse happens after 2 seconds?
And what would happen if you add another stack after say 2 seconds, should it add duration, replace the existing stack? Replacing it would remove damage potential. Refreshing the stack (adding x seconds to the remaining time) would stretch the duration making it easier to mitigate the damage.

I am not trying to invalidate the suggestion I just want to illustrate some of he issues that may be involved. As bran noted the problem is more that the condition system works for 5v5.

Looking at the issue from a completely different angle, I think a solution for most PvE events would be to apply conditions as if the are normal DPS, i.e. not tracking the stacks but just apply the damage. This because the majority of world bosses/champignons do not cleans conditions. It may be over simplified, but would change the usability of condition builds.

The problem with your idea is that a lot of bleed will be useless anyway. Fire is hard hitting because it only stack in duration. Poison also only stack in duration so it limit healing capabilities. But bleed is really bad at doing dmg unless you can stack a good amount of it. If you stack it only in duration by yourself, then it will be bad in term of dps. If you increase the dmg per second it won’t be much different than fire, but will be OP in large scale battle where you can put 25 stack of bleed doing 25 times the dmg of fire.

My solution would be to decrease the duration of condition, but increase it damage by the same number. For exemple, the scepter auto-attack for the necro give 5second of bleed that will do 92.5dmg per second at 1000 condition dmg. If you make it 2.5second of bleed that do 185dps. That way the total damage of a skill is not increased or decrease. But the amount of stack someone can put it decreased. Usually a condition build could do between 15 and 20 stack of bleed by itself. You can do higher, but it’s hard and usually putting everything in bleed is not the ideal build. If you divide the time of bleed you can put, you could have 2 condition damager in your party and still leave a little room for bleeding from direct dmg ppl so nobody lose dps. If you divide it by 3, then you can have 3 condition damagers.

The more you divide the closer condition damage will come to direct damage. If you divide too much, condition will be too close to direct dmg to be really different in gameplay. And the less you divide, the less ppl can use condition wihtout interfering with other player dmg. The goal would be to find a balance. Of course, this won’t work well against big blob boss. 2-3 Condition build will fill the boss, but it wouldn’t much worst than right now. At least it would fix instance content with 5 ppl where you could bring 2-3 condition build without hurting your global dps.

none of you didn’t seem to understand my example, please scroll up and read the numbers again: the duration was NOT increased, the DAMAGE was increased. That way works same as mesmer Greatsword autoattack :P.

The longer you can keep making bleeds, not duration but damage would be increased, to a point where you can do even 50k damage bleeds each second (if you manage to keep a bleed that long while attacking with more bleed skills to upscale the damage).

That way the condition builds would be forced to keep spamming bleeds to the time never goes to 0, and each time they spam a bleed the damage increases (but not time, the time should be always between 3-4 seconds). The only problem that i see is that punishes lagging players.

Elrey.5472:

none of you didn’t seem to understand my example, please scroll up and read the numbers again: the duration was NOT increased, the DAMAGE was increased. That way works same as mesmer Greatsword autoattack :P.

The longer you can keep making bleeds, not duration but damage would be increased, to a point where you can do even 50k damage bleeds each second (if you manage to keep a bleed that long while attacking with more bleed skills to upscale the damage).

That way the condition builds would be forced to keep spamming bleeds to the time never goes to 0, and each time they spam a bleed the damage increases (but not time, the time should be always between 3-4 seconds). The only problem that i see is that punishes lagging players.

But that the same thing as stack of bleeding in the code. The game will still have to keep record of at which level of dmg every single of the 25 person putting bleed on a target. That make the system problem even worst.

Each time you attack, the game will have to keep that information so it can increase the dmg with your next attack, keeping record over record over record. That take more calculation and that the reason why they put a cap on it on the first place.

If the limitation is how the server calculates the bleed, then I very much doubt this would help seeing as it still has to track all of those different sources of bleed. Even if there’s a reduction in calculations on a per player basis, it would be applying those calculations for up to 25 players. At the moment, those 25 stacks are simple (apply x damage every second for y seconds). In your system they are far more complex. It wouldn’t get around the server issues as a result.

Also, in response to the person that suggested doing the same damage over a shorter time: that would drastically change how conditions work. Doing the same damage in half the time would like the Ranger rapid fire buff for EVERY DoT condition! The reason why condition removal is quite important is that, even now, conditions hurt a lot if you don’t remove them. That change would halve the opportunity a player has to remove them.

You could, of course, make the change only apply to PvE mobs, but even that would make condition damage extremely potent at ‘spiking’ compared to now.

The Comfy Chair.7265:

If the limitation is how the server calculates the bleed, then I very much doubt this would help seeing as it still has to track all of those different sources of bleed. Even if there’s a reduction in calculations on a per player basis, it would be applying those calculations for up to 25 players. At the moment, those 25 stacks are simple (apply x damage every second for y seconds). In your system they are far more complex. It wouldn’t get around the server issues as a result.

Also, in response to the person that suggested doing the same damage over a shorter time: that would drastically change how conditions work. Doing the same damage in half the time would like the Ranger rapid fire buff for EVERY DoT condition! The reason why condition removal is quite important is that, even now, conditions hurt a lot if you don’t remove them. That change would halve the opportunity a player has to remove them.

You could, of course, make the change only apply to PvE mobs, but even that would make condition damage extremely potent at ‘spiking’ compared to now.

I know, but they can then adjust it to reach a balance. Of course this would change how condition work. They just don’t work right now in group content. My point is, there is place for 25 stack, why make it so that 1 person can almost use all that place by itself.

I really don’t think getting conditions to work in group content is even remotely on the design teams’ honey do list.

Grassrab.9302:

Looking at the issue from a completely different angle, I think a solution for most PvE events would be to apply conditions as if the are normal DPS, i.e. not tracking the stacks but just apply the damage. This because the majority of world bosses/champignons do not cleans conditions. It may be over simplified, but would change the usability of condition builds.

This is probably the easiest/least disruptive solution. Once a target reaches 25 stacks, any further condition of the same type just gets applied as direct damage. Damage wouldn’t be ‘wasted’ and this idea would (maybe) just affect beefy things like World Bosses. I’m just a layperson but hopefully it should be just a straightforward damage * time calculation though it might be wise to add some form of diminishing returns on this ‘surplus’. I mean there’s only so many places to bleed from.

Another possible idea could be inspired by Mesmer Staff Phantasm’s Mage Strike attack (and the Engineer Modified Ammunition trait). It does extra damage based on how many different conditions a target has. What if all these bleed attacks get their basic physical damage lowered, but get bonus percentage of damage based on the stacks of bleed it has?

Thaddeus.4891:

My point is, there is place for 25 stack, why make it so that 1 person can almost use all that place by itself.

Exactly my thoughs. That’s why I suggested something that wouldn’t make most of the players useless (if they go condition builds)

Its not only a problem when you have more than one condi build fighting the same enemy. It is also a problem because many direct damage builds will still inflict conditions (via crits, etc). So not only are we competing against other condi players we are also competing vs direct damage builds.

One or two condi players can strike a good balance and maintain decent dps between them, but as soon as you introduce a third player, both condi player’s dps drops. The trade off with most condi builds is better survival, but there comes a point in that trade off when the more players there are fighting one mob the less benefit that survival becomes and the more of a penalty condi damage becomes.

Without reworking the system from the ground up it is very difficult to find a solution that works across the board. The problem is, as people have already rightly stated, Anet tried to change the DoT system from GW1 to accomodate more players attacking the same mob, but made each player capable of reaching the limit. This effectively made the change pretty reduntant, and in some ways worse.

I think the only solution, without redoing the entire system, would be to adjust every skill to stack less bleeds but adjust the damage in some way so it does the same damage over the same duration. For example, Death Blossom could do 1 stack instead of 3 that did the same damage as 3 stacks would have done over the same period of time. This would mean skills that only applied 1 stack per use, such as Thief’s Vital Shot, would have to change. For example, instead of applying bleeding every attack the attack could change to a 3 part attack (like melee attacks) that only applies bleeding on one of the 3 attacks. That way, it could inflict 1 stack causing the same damage over the same time.

Bleeding damage would increase, but stack application would be reduced across all professions. This is the only way I can see it working in the current system. You would still have the problem of players competing for stacks, but the problem would be greatly reduced and only really noticable in larger groups.

In big groups I can maintain between 1-2k condi dps on my thief. But that takes real effort. With a change to the way bleeding is applied, this could change to 2-3k, which would be much closer to the max dps I can achieve when solo and this in turn would be a more tolerable penalty. The penalty will never be removed completely, but it would be nice if that penalty was greatly reduced, because at present it is very restrictive.