Guild Wars 2

Given that Critical Damage is being changed in order to fix scaling issues it would cause in future content, is the same being done to other %-based stats?

Most notably Condition Duration and Boon Duration?

I ask, because they follow the same logic as Critical Damage and would cause the same scaling issues in future content.

They also cause massive balance issues given that +40% Condition Duration food is 4-times over budget when compared to Power food (10% Condition Duration = 100 Power).

If Condition Duration was given the same treatment as Critical Damage (ergo 15 C. Duration = 1% C.D) we would see the +/- 40% Condition food being reduced to +/- 7% Condition Duration.

Kind of a big deal.

Anything, nothing?

OK. I’ll give this a go just for the sake of understanding the difference here.

Critical damage is being changed to ‘Ferocity’ in order to balance the stat across multiple pieces of equipment. Before this change there was no way to use a fraction of a percentage for the Crit Dam stat. This caused the 14 pieces of equipment to ‘round up’ the Crit Dam stat for roughly an “EXTRA” (unbalanced) 10% Crit Damage. The ‘Ferocity’ stat allows them to balance this discrepancy out where now they can have closer to the ‘intended’ value for this stat. Crit Damage is scaled off of DIRECT damage, which is where the difference comes in.

Condition Damage is ALWAYS calculated by the second allowing FAR LESS ‘packets’ of damage to be delivered. Condi Damage ticks by the second to the ‘next whole second’. It is not as sensible to have fractions of percentages here because Condi Dam has no way to ‘stack’ in the manner that Crit Dam does. Boons are in a similar situation where their ‘stacking’ mechanism is built in to the application itself much like conditions are.

It is also important to note that Crit Dam can never OVERwrite other Crit Damage and this is another huge difference between Condi and Crit damages. Conditions can very easily be balanced through the skills that apply them as the rounded percentages have a ‘hard cap’ of only rounding to the next higher second. For example (referring back to how Crit Dam was ‘stacking’) if I have an ‘extra’ 10% Crit Damage to a 5,000 damage attack, then I have a very measurable difference. However, if I have an ‘extra’ 10% Condition Duration to a ‘4.5 second’ condition, the net result is STILL the exact same five ‘ticks’ of damage.

Two other things of note are: 1) Conditions have many hard and soft counters via condition removals, condition transfers, and overwriting conditions. 2) Abilities/traits that reduce Condition Duration (is. Rune of Melandru, etc) apply to the FINAL applied Condition Duration meaning that ‘- Condition damage’ is actually more potent than + Condition Damage. For example, if I have +50% Condition duration and I cast a 10 second Bleed, my Bleed will tick for 15 seconds. However, if I cast that same Bleed on somebody with -50% Condition Duration, the Bleed will only tick for 8 seconds (7.5 rounded up.)

I went way further into this than I meant too! I might have answered your question and half a dozen others. Hope this helps you understand the vast difference of balancing these things.