condition stacking
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no. On bosses full power without crit is about comparable to the current condition damage system. But conditions get capped. Imagine conditions would deal equal damage to zerker and then you’d limit your critting to 13 times per second. So the first 13 may crit, the others are disabled. You find that fair ?
Crit is disabled on most world bosses, indeed. But it’s enabled on buildings. And I think there’re more buildings than world bosses. Just think what you fight more often. I run alot “xyz on crit”, which is also completely disabled on world bosses, but also on buildings. Not because I can’t crit there, but “bleed on crit” is pointless on world bosses AND buildings.
And disabling crits on world bosses is most likely due to technical reasons.
Don’t complain when you’re on the long side of the stick.
For the sake of discussion, I’m going to take it for granted that the issue is bandwidth, as ANet says it. The question I come up with is, “Knowing the bandwidth issues, why were DoT’s not treated as DoT’s are in other games, where applications of the same DoT by different players are treated separately, but individual players can only have one of the same DoT at any given time?” It’s pretty evident what the shortcomings of the current system are. It’s a lot harder to see what advantages it provides — if any.
The main issue with that is the fact that it would make conditions more or less completely worthless, unless they got extremely buffed, which would make them very unbalanced.
I fail to see why the only alternative to “completely worthless” is “unbalanced.” Other games seem to be able to balance DoT’s with direct damage.
Okay, as a software engineer, I’ll give you my two cents on this. You can take this for what you will, but it is definitely more than ignorant conjecture since this is what I’ve been doing as a career for the last 15 years of my life.
The bandwidth has NOTHING to do with this. The conditions are still being sent to and processed by the server, and the server is sending the output back to the clients. Literally nothing is lost in packet exchange as you can see based on the fact that all the player-applied conditions show on enemies, even if they don’t all apply.
The issue is supposedly the CPUs aren’t strong enough to continuously calculate all the incoming conditions. To this, I call BULL****! My development SQL server, which is over 7 years old and about 10 times slower than my production server, has no problem calculating millions of transactions per second. And if it started slowing down, I’d just add another rack to it. Racks are cheap as dirt, and they could easily triple their performance for the cost of just one of these temp-content dev’s annual salary.
The issue is that they just don’t care enough to do so. They don’t care that their stinginess is undermining one of the most core components of their game and literally makes certain builds/professions completely useless. They care about the bottom dollar. It’s as simple as that.
For the sake of discussion, I’m going to take it for granted that the issue is bandwidth, as ANet says it. The question I come up with is, “Knowing the bandwidth issues, why were DoT’s not treated as DoT’s are in other games, where applications of the same DoT by different players are treated separately, but individual players can only have one of the same DoT at any given time?” It’s pretty evident what the shortcomings of the current system are. It’s a lot harder to see what advantages it provides — if any.
The main issue with that is the fact that it would make conditions more or less completely worthless, unless they got extremely buffed, which would make them very unbalanced.
I fail to see why the only alternative to “completely worthless” is “unbalanced.” Other games seem to be able to balance DoT’s with direct damage.
Exactly. The major difference is when you apply your bleed to a target you instead applied 15 bleeds, which means in 1 skill you apply 15 dots that need to be tracked. But why? As for the other conditions, they roll but not only with your own skills but instead with everyone in the area, making them very complex. Again… Why? There is no benefit for the player for the dots to interact this way, and there is little benefit for the back end as well. Bleed, poison and burning should and could easily just be 1 stack dots that you refresh, there is little reason for them to work differently than that.
In fact the only reason I can see for the current way dots work is that the devs can drag and drop them generically across the board. Burning, confusion, torment, poison and bleed do the same damage across the board for all abilities and classes currently. they just have a multiplier applied to them. Unlike those other games where every single DOT is unique to the specific class that uses it and scaled to such. I can understand how that makes building new skills easy…
If skill one is a high damage skill designed to DPS but add torment as a bonus,
Make it torment x1
If skill two is a low damage skill designed to be your primary torment application,
Make it torment x5
(Though for some reason we only see the stack size of bleed and Torment. The multiplicative effect of the other conditions are still there just unseen.)
I get why this is nice for the devs, but you can keep this ease of application and instead move it to the player side as damage and get rid of the whole interaction between characters so that dots are player based, and removing the visual stacking of bleeds wouldn’t change anything but put Condition builds back in the running for DPS builds in all content. Making the 15x stacking bleed do instead bleed damage x15 (this is how they do all the other conditions) does not change how much damage the skill does at all.
If you think about it this way, you may adjust yourself to understand WHY they did it the way they did…
In other games, for example, Dark Age of Camelot, if ONE person puts poison on a monster, then another Player cannot cast poison on said monster unless a) the other players poison runs out or b) their spell is higher level (or stronger)
In GW2, they use a system that allows each player to try and get some DoT in, however, the speed at which the conditions stack is the problem.
If conditions weren’t so easy to cleanse, then they could make durations LONGER and Ticks less frequent, but increase the Damage. By doing this each player could get 1 Stack. Even if it is just PvE side. Higher damage ticks over longer duration = 25 players with 1 stack each all doing higher damage over time. This obviously would be a PvE fix only, and WvW/sPvP would have to stay the way they are.
Blackfang’s Demon Alliance [BfDA]
If you think about it this way, you may adjust yourself to understand WHY they did it the way they did…
In other games, for example, Dark Age of Camelot, if ONE person puts poison on a monster, then another Player cannot cast poison on said monster unless a) the other players poison runs out or b) their spell is higher level (or stronger)
In GW2, they use a system that allows each player to try and get some DoT in, however, the speed at which the conditions stack is the problem.
Firstly what you are talking about only applies to Bleeds and Torment.
Secondly burning and poison, currently have the same problem you are describing, As more than one person applying them has no effect past the damage of whoever has the most damage on theirs.
Thirdly that game was made 12 years ago. MMO’s have fixed that problem a very long time ago.
Just let everyone cast their own dots on the enemy. Simple.
Okay, as a software engineer, I’ll give you my two cents on this. You can take this for what you will, but it is definitely more than ignorant conjecture since this is what I’ve been doing as a career for the last 15 years of my life.
The bandwidth has NOTHING to do with this. The conditions are still being sent to and processed by the server, and the server is sending the output back to the clients. Literally nothing is lost in packet exchange as you can see based on the fact that all the player-applied conditions show on enemies, even if they don’t all apply.
The issue is supposedly the CPUs aren’t strong enough to continuously calculate all the incoming conditions. To this, I call BULL****! My development SQL server, which is over 7 years old and about 10 times slower than my production server, has no problem calculating millions of transactions per second. And if it started slowing down, I’d just add another rack to it. Racks are cheap as dirt, and they could easily triple their performance for the cost of just one of these temp-content dev’s annual salary.
The issue is that they just don’t care enough to do so. They don’t care that their stinginess is undermining one of the most core components of their game and literally makes certain builds/professions completely useless. They care about the bottom dollar. It’s as simple as that.
As I am also a software engineer hear out this possibility. To prevent user lag, all conditions are managed on the server but reporting continuously to the client every detail regarding the conditions of the object the user has targeted. Therefore for each condition stack on the targeted mob you are sending back to the client a full detailed object for every single server tick.
While this seems like a wonderfully accurate system it requires sending multiple extra objects of data to to the user every millisecond which if left uncapped could add up to ridiculous amounts.
Imagine if you got to 500 bleed stacks on a boss, depending on the size of the condition objects they use and how they are serialized we could be talking a ton of bandwidth use purely for those conditions.
Now if this is expanded to sending complete details for every entity in the viewable area that could get astronomical.
The bandwidth has NOTHING to do with this. The conditions are still being sent to and processed by the server, and the server is sending the output back to the clients. Literally nothing is lost in packet exchange as you can see based on the fact that all the player-applied conditions show on enemies, even if they don’t all apply.
The issue is supposedly the CPUs aren’t strong enough to continuously calculate all the incoming conditions. To this, I call BULL****! My development SQL server, which is over 7 years old and about 10 times slower than my production server, has no problem calculating millions of transactions per second. And if it started slowing down, I’d just add another rack to it. Racks are cheap as dirt, and they could easily triple their performance for the cost of just one of these temp-content dev’s annual salary.
The issue is that they just don’t care enough to do so. They don’t care that their stinginess is undermining one of the most core components of their game and literally makes certain builds/professions completely useless. They care about the bottom dollar. It’s as simple as that.
Well good to see that I’m not the only human being left on these forums.
Amazing how half of the time people can’t even be bothered to read the small paragraphs I wrote, thinking I asked for “unlimited” conditions when I merely suggested raising the cap.
When the community is collectively that vapid, I don’t see any problem with the way they are proceeding. I hope they purchase everything on the cash shop twice fold. Milk them for all they’re worth.
Let it be a lottery tax on a different kind of ignorance. My biggest issue is that it’s not stinginess, but sheer laziness: they can’t be arsed to change that property for mobs, so they make up excuses for not doing so in lieu of solving the issue … and no, it doesn’t require additional hardware.
(edited by crestpiemangler.7631)
As I am also a software engineer hear out this possibility. To prevent user lag, all conditions are managed on the server but reporting continuously to the client every detail regarding the conditions of the object the user has targeted. Therefore for each condition stack on the targeted mob you are sending back to the client a full detailed object for every single server tick.
While this seems like a wonderfully accurate system it requires sending multiple extra objects of data to to the user every millisecond which if left uncapped could add up to ridiculous amounts.
Imagine if you got to 500 bleed stacks on a boss, depending on the size of the condition objects they use and how they are serialized we could be talking a ton of bandwidth use purely for those conditions.
Now if this is expanded to sending complete details for every entity in the viewable area that could get astronomical.
As I said, they packets are already being sent and received, even if most of them aren’t doing anything. There would be nothing changing in terms of bandwidth if we just raised the effective cap on CD, save some relatively small amounts of extra metadata. The only change is on how many calculations the server has to perform, and that shouldn’t be the user’s burden.
As I am also a software engineer hear out this possibility. To prevent user lag, all conditions are managed on the server but reporting continuously to the client every detail regarding the conditions of the object the user has targeted. Therefore for each condition stack on the targeted mob you are sending back to the client a full detailed object for every single server tick.
While this seems like a wonderfully accurate system it requires sending multiple extra objects of data to to the user every millisecond which if left uncapped could add up to ridiculous amounts.
Imagine if you got to 500 bleed stacks on a boss, depending on the size of the condition objects they use and how they are serialized we could be talking a ton of bandwidth use purely for those conditions.
Now if this is expanded to sending complete details for every entity in the viewable area that could get astronomical.
Firstly, I never asked for removal of the cap. I merely asked for an extension.
Secondly, not every tick of the DoT is sent from the server to the client and even if it were the case, then by their very reasoning epidemic wouldn’t even be a viable ability as it too would have to be restricted to the required 25 stacks.
Fill a single instance full of necromancers with multiple high hp mobs (let’s say >= 4) with 25 stacks each. Since this, by their own reasoning, should theoretically require more bandwidth than the server currently possesses they had better remove epidemic from the game.
There are so many counterexamples you can find to their ridiculous claim that it’s a bandwidth issue that it boggles the mind.
Dynamically set the cap of stacks based on how many individual users are attacking the NPC. Don’t let 2 people drop more than 25 stacks, but don’t let 50 people get stuck at 25 stacks.
If that still isn’t enough, prioritize stacks by who is doing more damage. If my stack would do more damage than bob the warrior, give my stack priority. Why? Because it likely means I am condition build and he isn’t, and his stack is just being dropped as an afterthought by skull cracking skill he just used on his hammer.
For the sake of me actually getting credit in the monster kill, I need that stack on the mob more than him.
As I am also a software engineer hear out this possibility. To prevent user lag, all conditions are managed on the server but reporting continuously to the client every detail regarding the conditions of the object the user has targeted. Therefore for each condition stack on the targeted mob you are sending back to the client a full detailed object for every single server tick.
While this seems like a wonderfully accurate system it requires sending multiple extra objects of data to to the user every millisecond which if left uncapped could add up to ridiculous amounts.
Imagine if you got to 500 bleed stacks on a boss, depending on the size of the condition objects they use and how they are serialized we could be talking a ton of bandwidth use purely for those conditions.
Now if this is expanded to sending complete details for every entity in the viewable area that could get astronomical.
Firstly, I never asked for removal of the cap. I merely asked for an extension.
Secondly, not every tick of the DoT is sent from the server to the client and even if it were the case, then by their very reasoning epidemic wouldn’t even be a viable ability as it too would have to be restricted to the required 25 stacks.
Fill a single instance full of necromancers with multiple high hp mobs (let’s say >= 4) with 25 stacks each. Since this, by their own reasoning, should theoretically require more bandwidth than the server currently possesses they had better remove epidemic from the game.
There are so many counterexamples you can find to their ridiculous claim that it’s a bandwidth issue that it boggles the mind.
I never mentioned anything about changing/removing the cap I was putting in a possibility that it could in fact be bandwidth related like ArenaNet told us it was.
Also can you really get higher than 25 stacks on a mob using epidemic? If so, then that was poor planning. If not then it is subject to the restriction and working as everything else, so I don;t understand your point.
They never said it was a problem of the server bandwidth maxing out. I believe they said it was an issue with causing major lag and rubber-banding for low bandwidth users, which could also effect details returned to the server.
If that still isn’t enough, prioritize stacks by who is doing more damage . If my stack would do more damage than bob the warrior, give my stack priority. Why? Because it likely means I am condition build and he isn’t, and his stack is just being dropped as an afterthought by skull cracking skill he just used on his hammer.
I like this idea a lot. I would even take it a step further:
1. If the cap is reached and your condition is stronger than at least the weakest condition on the stack, the weakest one gets replaced.
2. If the cap is reached and your condition is weaker than every other condition on the stack, it doesn’t get applied at all.
Also, I don’t believe for one second that this is a bandwidth issue. It sounds to me too much like Anet looking for a scapegoat for an oversight in their game design.
Borlis Pass
Azman – Asura Necromancer, Kemena – Human Guardian
Emracool – Sylvari Elementalist, Lyra Lightbender – Sylvari Mesmer
Azman – Asura Necromancer, Kemena – Human Guardian
Emracool – Sylvari Elementalist, Lyra Lightbender – Sylvari Mesmer
If that still isn’t enough, prioritize stacks by who is doing more damage . If my stack would do more damage than bob the warrior, give my stack priority. Why? Because it likely means I am condition build and he isn’t, and his stack is just being dropped as an afterthought by skull cracking skill he just used on his hammer.
I like this idea a lot. I would even take it a step further:
1. If the cap is reached and your condition is stronger than at least the weakest condition on the stack, the weakest one gets replaced.
2. If the cap is reached and your condition is weaker than every other condition on the stack, it doesn’t get applied at all.Also, I don’t believe for one second that this is a bandwidth issue. It sounds to me too much like Anet looking for a scapegoat for an oversight in their game design.
Regarding #2 – I think it actually worked like this at one point, though I could be wrong. Either way, this would prevent non-optimal condition builds from contributing to a fight in any meaningful way during large PvE events, or mass 1vX events, since their conditions would never make it into the stack as long as there was 2 or 3 well-made condition builds present. Possibly to the extent of preventing them from getting kill credit.
Mixing insults with your post is like pooping in a salad.
It’s pretty obvious, and nobody’s impressed.
It’s pretty obvious, and nobody’s impressed.
I never mentioned anything about changing/removing the cap I was putting in a possibility that it could in fact be bandwidth related like ArenaNet told us it was.
Also can you really get higher than 25 stacks on a mob using epidemic? If so, then that was poor planning. If not then it is subject to the restriction and working as everything else, so I don;t understand your point.
They never said it was a problem of the server bandwidth maxing out. I believe they said it was an issue with causing major lag and rubber-banding for low bandwidth users, which could also effect details returned to the server.
No. You can, however, get 25 stacks on multiple mobs by multiple people with ease (obviously necromancer would be easiest with the low cooldown AoE blood from staff along with scepter + epidemic), contradicting the claim that somehow multiple people seeing so many ticks at once would cause such issues, since that is their entire argument.
Regarding #2 – I think it actually worked like this at one point, though I could be wrong. Either way, this would prevent non-optimal condition builds from contributing to a fight in any meaningful way during large PvE events, or mass 1vX events, since their conditions would never make it into the stack as long as there was 2 or 3 well-made condition builds present. Possibly to the extent of preventing them from getting kill credit.
Wouldn’t they still get full credit just for attacking and using skills on the enemy anyway? I was never entirely sure on how that works.
Borlis Pass
Azman – Asura Necromancer, Kemena – Human Guardian
Emracool – Sylvari Elementalist, Lyra Lightbender – Sylvari Mesmer
Azman – Asura Necromancer, Kemena – Human Guardian
Emracool – Sylvari Elementalist, Lyra Lightbender – Sylvari Mesmer
For the sake of discussion, I’m going to take it for granted that the issue is bandwidth, as ANet says it. The question I come up with is, “Knowing the bandwidth issues, why were DoT’s not treated as DoT’s are in other games, where applications of the same DoT by different players are treated separately, but individual players can only have one of the same DoT at any given time?” It’s pretty evident what the shortcomings of the current system are. It’s a lot harder to see what advantages it provides — if any.
The main issue with that is the fact that it would make conditions more or less completely worthless, unless they got extremely buffed, which would make them very unbalanced.
Remember that conditions represent, principally, damage. The damage is essentially the same as direct damage in that it reduces a health pool of a mob. The difference, and hence all the trade-offs, is that condition damage is delivered over time. This is the distinction.
It is not worthless to deliver damage over time, except in GW2 where it is currently not properly accounted for. Direct damage is, and once condition damage is accounted for, by player (as in other games), the problem will be solved.
Regarding #2 – I think it actually worked like this at one point, though I could be wrong. Either way, this would prevent non-optimal condition builds from contributing to a fight in any meaningful way during large PvE events, or mass 1vX events, since their conditions would never make it into the stack as long as there was 2 or 3 well-made condition builds present. Possibly to the extent of preventing them from getting kill credit.
Wouldn’t they still get full credit just for attacking and using skills on the enemy anyway? I was never entirely sure on how that works.
They might, but I know there’s a particular threshold for how much you have to attack to get credit.
Then again, I guess that threshold has been lowered over the game’s lifetime, hasn’t it? Maybe it’d still be enough. Still, it’d be blocking actual contribution if someone had ‘only’ 1000ish condition damage in their build, as long as a couple people out there were in full condition damage gear with 30 in the right trait line and some condition duration.
Mixing insults with your post is like pooping in a salad.
It’s pretty obvious, and nobody’s impressed.
It’s pretty obvious, and nobody’s impressed.
Umm… for those who are suggesting it, condition stacks already are prioritized by who does the most damage. I have a full condition duration/condition damage/toughness earth elementalist build and my bleed stacks override anybodys I come across. It’s been that way since launch.
(edited by Conncept.7638)
Umm… for those who are suggesting it, condition stacks already are prioritized by who does the most damage. I have a full condition duration/condition damage/toughness earth elementalist build and my bleed stacks override anybodys I come across. It’s been that way since launch.
Conditions are based on a rolling 25 stack. The first one applied is the first one dropped once it meets its cap. If you stacked 25 bleed, and someone comes through and stacks 10 poison, your first 10 stacks of bleed are gone. It’s been like THAT since the beginning of the game, and the whole point of this topic.
Umm… for those who are suggesting it, condition stacks already are prioritized by who does the most damage. I have a full condition duration/condition damage/toughness earth elementalist build and my bleed stacks override anybodys I come across. It’s been that way since launch.
Conditions are based on a rolling 25 stack. The first one applied is the first one dropped once it meets its cap. If you stacked 25 bleed, and someone comes through and stacks 10 poison, your first 10 stacks of bleed are gone. It’s been like THAT since the beginning of the game, and the whole point of this topic.
Back in the beta forums one of the devs states that the rolling doesn’t just apply to the very last stack, a few (unknown amount) stacks from the bottom can drop out early if new stacks coming in have a certain amount of more time and damage.
And that isn’t what the thread is about anyway. Even if this were true of all 25 stacks, that would still alienate most players in a groups condition builds in virtually the same way.
(edited by Conncept.7638)
Supposedly there’s technical limitations due to having to keep track of each stack on everyone, but reality suggests that 25 stacks was too easy to reach.
I just don’t think this was well planned.
This is actually correct, while i can’t speak for GW2 specifically, most games have a limitation to the number of dots on a target. World of Warcraft’s limit is actually pretty high though they have created most of the spells to deal with it in other ways. Aion’s limit was low though they tried to raise it once or twice. I honestly can’t give actual numbers as i don’t keep track of that sort of thing but just know there is actually technical limit in most games. Unless GW2 has found a way around the issue and are intentionally holding back, they my not have much wiggle room on the issue.
Is it possible they just put a cap because if everyone was able to apply their own stacks against the mob (eg Shadowbeast) and reach 100+ stacks of everything that the mob would melt in mere seconds?
As I am also a software engineer hear out this possibility. To prevent user lag, all conditions are managed on the server but reporting continuously to the client every detail regarding the conditions of the object the user has targeted. Therefore for each condition stack on the targeted mob you are sending back to the client a full detailed object for every single server tick.
While this seems like a wonderfully accurate system it requires sending multiple extra objects of data to to the user every millisecond which if left uncapped could add up to ridiculous amounts.
Imagine if you got to 500 bleed stacks on a boss, depending on the size of the condition objects they use and how they are serialized we could be talking a ton of bandwidth use purely for those conditions.
Now if this is expanded to sending complete details for every entity in the viewable area that could get astronomical.
As I said, they packets are already being sent and received, even if most of them aren’t doing anything. There would be nothing changing in terms of bandwidth if we just raised the effective cap on CD, save some relatively small amounts of extra metadata. The only change is on how many calculations the server has to perform, and that shouldn’t be the user’s burden.
I don’t think the issue is data being sent to players. Mobs in the game already have to update their HP continuously to all players around them due to direct damage changing their HP a theoretically limitless number of times a second.
Though no one commented on it, I think the issue might be that the calculations for conditions on the server is needlessly complicated. The server refers back to internal databases in order to continuously acquire the identity of the condition user, as well as their level, their malice, and then use this preform the condition damage calculation for every stack every second. It is because of this that condition damage updates the moment a player changes weapons, gains might, or gains a level.
If they just made condition damage so that it is calculated ONLY when the condition is first applied, then that damage data is stored in the condition itself, this could easily cut down the processing needed with conditions by a substantial amount. If the servers only needed to preform half of the operations they do now, then the stack limit can be doubled and maintain the same load.
I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.
GW2 was meant to ‘revolutionize" MMOs, yet it doesn’t even have basic functionality MMOs have had for a decade.
“I swung a sword, I swung a sword again, oh look I swung a sword again!”
- Colin Johanson while spamming key 1 in GW2
- Colin Johanson while spamming key 1 in GW2
They dont want to adjust their servers to handle condition stacking.
therefore, condition builds aren’t viable.
You meant to say, not viable to you, as many people still run condition builds, even on PvE-as darn well they should, as it’s their free choice.
The cap is a weakness, but that doesn’t make conditions less viable. More annoying than the cap, I hate how inanimate objects are almost unharmed by non-power, high condition builds-that should be improved, though I can’t imagine how. Still, monsters-even Champions-do fall fast to good/high condition builds on PvE (the “not as fast as with full Zerk Warrior!” is invalid, because not all Professions should be Warrior-like just because of their usual direct damage, high DPS.)
Condition builds can be quite valid… so long as you are by yourself. Premade dungeon groups can be quite effective with a condition user, due to their AoE nature and how well they bypass toughness + protection.
I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.
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