Guild Wars 2

Any ANET Staff that lurk past here, yes you, please could you give me a reply to the best of your ability? And stop ignoring all of the game’s community on this oh-so-popular topic.

What is with the bleed/torment Stacking to 25 cap for EVERY PLAYER IN THE AREA?

I mean, I’m seriously starting to wonder if ANET even PLAY their own game, or just take random guesses at what may/may not work and see how it goes.
Condition builds (In PvE Especially) are useless, if there’s more than one condition-built player, they severely suffer in DPS.
What is the actual Reason for the 25 Stack cap?

Can’t you make the cap Personal to each player?

This has probably been posted a billion times, and still nothing has been done. I honestly think the class balance in this game is dreadful, and it’s such a shame.

I’ll leave this thread here for you to look at,
and please get some ideas from the comments section…

(Take this seriously ANET…)

I’m pretty sure they said that it is because of their $ cost to keep track of each individuals conditions.
Something to do with bandwidth.

Part of a quote from colin, the only thing i could find right now.

“Colin: Currently no. Interesting statistic for you: every condition in the game costs server bandwidth. ‘Cause we have to track how often the condition is running, what the duration of that condition is and what the stack is. So the more stacks we allow them more expensive it gets because we’re tracking every additional stack on there.?

If increasing the 25 stack cap is not possible, they could experiment with adjusting the scaling of the condition damage stat and the amount of stacks each player skill inflicts on an enemy.

By increasing condition damage, decreasing condition duration and amount of stacks applied, it might be possible to allow a single player to do the same damage with 7 stacks of bleed as they would with 15, giving more room in the potential stack for other players to add in their condition stacks and not be brushed off.

This idea is only based around small scale encounters however, huge world events would most likely be unaffected.

my impression of how they handle conditions is that when you have 25 stacks applied to you, that’s 25 data packets sent, then multiply that by how many times they tick. with big groups, this is a lot of data, especially compared to direct damage which is ~one time per second. if it wasn’t limited to 25 stacks, that could be as much as 500 stacks on a meta boss, which is the equivalent bandwidth of 500 players attacking. I think we have enough lag with just 50 players at these events.

Budg.3064:

If increasing the 25 stack cap is not possible, they could experiment with adjusting the scaling of the condition damage stat and the amount of stacks each player skill inflicts on an enemy.

This would make the game much, much burstier. ANet seems to be trying to reverse this trend so battles are more tactical and less a matter purely for twitch reflexes.

Blaine Tog.8304:

This would make the game much, much burstier. ANet seems to be trying to reverse this trend so battles are more tactical and less a matter purely for twitch reflexes.

No it wouldn’t, an ability that gives 4 bleeds being changed to 2 bleeds that tick for twice the damage is the same net damage, but half the bandwidth.

that makes crowded boss fights unfair for condition build users. (to deal damage to a boss with 25 stack of conds and get an event prize/loot like other physical attack builds)
they can just remove this cap and increase boss hps for populated/scaled events.

If there is a cap, they should replace 25 stacks of bleeds with another condition called: Open Wound, which stacks up to 25 and does the same amount of damage as 25 stacks of bleeds, open wound is applied to basicly a set amount of 1500 condition damage. (It does 25 stacks of bleeds with 1500 condition damage worth.) Only affected by bosses/events.

Daecollo.9578:

If there is a cap, they should replace 25 stacks of bleeds with another condition called: Open Wound, which stacks up to 25 and does the same amount of damage as 25 stacks of bleeds, open wound is applied to basicly a set amount of 1500 condition damage. (It does 25 stacks of bleeds with 1500 condition damage worth.) Only affected by bosses/events.

This is a good idea. There are a lot of ways this could be developed further.

+1

emikochan.8504:

Blaine Tog.8304:

This would make the game much, much burstier. ANet seems to be trying to reverse this trend so battles are more tactical and less a matter purely for twitch reflexes.

No it wouldn’t, an ability that gives 4 bleeds being changed to 2 bleeds that tick for twice the damage is the same net damage, but half the bandwidth.

And that would work if all abilities that applies Bleeds applies an even number of them, but the game is set up with more granularity than that. Many abilities apply only one bleed stack, so their DPS would simply have to go up, even if their total damage over time stayed the same by reducing durations.

There are many points raised in the Reddit thread, Such as once the cap is reached, any bleeds after that are changed to do raw damage instead.

Or what about if they changed bleeds to be like Burning, each tick is alot stronger, and it stacks duration instead.

The fact that condition build are so useless at the moment is stupid, and something needs to be done.

If the servers being unable to handle more condition stacking then what is already in the game and that is the REAL reason then shame on you Anet. What kind of joke is that. You balance your game around what your servers can handle? You should take all the money you get from your RNG chests and do something useful with it.

If you can’t increase the stacks then you need to change how conditions work. Regardless something needs to be done. It shouldn’t be a negative thing to bring 2+ condi built players to a party.

Daecollo.9578:

If there is a cap, they should replace 25 stacks of bleeds with another condition called: Open Wound, which stacks up to 25 and does the same amount of damage as 25 stacks of bleeds, open wound is applied to basicly a set amount of 1500 condition damage. (It does 25 stacks of bleeds with 1500 condition damage worth.) Only affected by bosses/events.

SO many people have thought of decent ideas like this or better ideas…but Anet aren’t interested in raising the cap or changing the way condi’s work…they’re too busy adding a whole new condition

….

Wait, What?!

At least your new condition is nearly impossible to stack up to 25…

Don’t forget that condition damage can change after it has been applied by the stat Might. So, if might goes up or down, the condtion damage is changed and the order of the conditions is resorted.

Not that this changes the argument, but…yeah that constant rechecking with thousands of players eats alot of cycles.

Somehow the balance issue has been completely ignored here between player and NPC. Take the level cap off conditions and guess what comes next? Condition mitigation. Be careful what you wish for.

I did rough-and-probably-wrong information analysis on what condition damage will require once. I figure that each condition keeps track of several things:

The User
Malice of the User
Duration of the Condition
Stack value of the condition.

And each of those requires a certain amount of bytes to process. stack value of the condition requires 2 bytes, duration of the condition (if calculated on a quarter-second basis) requires 2 bytes, malice of the user requires 4 bytes (if it is possible to ever go above 4096 condition damage, otherwise it requires 3 bytes), and the user identity probably requires 5 bytes or so.

The hard part is that, because of their quarter second system, it goes through this calculation 4 times a second even though the damage only ticks once a second. For 25 stacks, we get

(2 + 2 + 4 + 5) bytes x 4 / second x 25 stacks = 1.3 KB per second.

It doesn’t seem like that much, but this information has to be kept up on every single enemy in the zone. If you have 20 condition users running around a zone, each hitting 5 different enemies with the bleed cap, then this comes to 130 KB per second to process. Repeat this for pretty much every zone and every dungeon, and in the end the servers have to process a lot to maintain conditions.

Personally, what I would recommend is increasing the condition cap, but only doing it on mobs that are champion rank or higher. When wandering around in the overworld, the enemies die too fast to care about the cap. When in dungeons, silver enemies may take longer for condition users to kill, but they also tend to attack in groups, allowing condition users to delegate targets with their conditions, so the cap isn’t a problem there. Where the cap is a problem is when fighting champions: You get 15 or so people there, and then once each of them applies 2 bleeds you hit the cap really quickly. Then condition users can’t contribute much at all.

So, double the cap on Champions and higher. It’ll require twice as much information to process, but also champions are a whole lot rarer than regular enemies, with less than a handful on any map at any time.

The sugestion are good but only for PvE.
I don,t want take more than 25 stacks of bleed at same time
Today in sPvP, a new record was broken. A thief hit me 43k ONLY BLEED, and kill me in less of 5s. Was ridiculous insane mix of burst dmg + condition dmg.

I agree with sugestion only in PvE, but in PvP or WvW are inviable.

Would it be horribly unbalanced if excess stacks of bleed deal some amount of flat damage but not be added to the bleed stack unless there was space?

Numbers should be tested, but maybe something like half the total damage the bleed would have done over the duration being applied directly?

Because its not your game, this is how it is. Now re roll your build. Gogogo

Hosen.6801:

If the servers being unable to handle more condition stacking then what is already in the game and that is the REAL reason then shame on you Anet. What kind of joke is that. You balance your game around what your servers can handle?

They designed their game to function on the technology of the day. That’s totally reasonable.

nethykins.7986:

SO many people have thought of decent ideas like this or better ideas…but Anet aren’t interested in raising the cap or changing the way condi’s work…they’re too busy adding a whole new condition

….

Wait, What?!

That’s because improvements are targeted at PvP where the condition cap isn’t a problem.

The cap is really only a problem with PvE and WvW bosses.

Now that ANet have finally got Necros up to speed in PvP, maybe they’ll turn their attention to class balance and build diversity in PvE and WvW. . . . Here’s hoping!

Blaine Tog.8304:

Hosen.6801:

If the servers being unable to handle more condition stacking then what is already in the game and that is the REAL reason then shame on you Anet. What kind of joke is that. You balance your game around what your servers can handle?

They designed their game to function on the technology of the day. That’s totally reasonable.

Do other MMOs have the same condition/affliction limitations?

Someone posted something like this before and one of the comments someone said was something like “Once the conditions get capped at 25 just have the condition damage turn into direct damage” Now obviously this only works for bleeding, confusion and torment. But it is a nice alternative that seems possible, and I would say just keep vuln capped at 25 no matter what.

Fernling.1729:

I’m pretty sure they said that it is because of their $ cost to keep track of each individuals conditions.

That’s exactly the kind of bullskritt that only matters in PvP…

In open land PvE ya just strip off the individual mods and just merge them all together like the Mods do to all these threads posted here…. average out the modifiers and durations and into a single array that “simulates” stack size. Yeah that’d lop off a lot of ppl’s durations at the knees but with a higher cap around 256, who flippin cares?

Ok so no raising the cap, how about alternative effects/damage whenthe max is reached. Bleed turns into gush, stuff like that. Why are there so many conditions skills if they do not even work well together, this is still an MMO right.