Guild Wars 2

I’ve always wondered how stacking conditions, for example bleeding, with a large group works out.
I know that there is a limit of 25 Stacks for Bleeding and Vulnerability.
So, there is a Champion and lots of people apply conditions on them. Even if I can see 25 perma bleeding stacks on it I can still use my own bleeding skills and deal damage with them, even though the limit is 25 stacks.

My theory is that each player can stack his own 25 stacks and add his own condition times to the existing ones. So, the condition and boon display on a target is mostly just there to show if you could abuse for example a trait that increases your damage on burning foes by x% even if its not your own burning.
But if someone else causes vulnerability on the target, everyone does benefit from it.

Are my thoughts right about group conditions or could someone correct or add something important I didn’t mention?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Effect_stacking

Basically you all contribute to the 25, once 25 stacks are hit any new ones will overwrite the oldest ones.

So if you stack 15 of them and then someone stacks another 15 themselves you’ll have 10 left on the enemy, they will have 15, if you then apply another 5 you’ll STILL have 10 on and they’ll still have 15 but it will now be 5 – 15 – 5

This means multiple condition users basically nerf each others damage out put unfortunately but apparently thats all the game can handle.

There are no examples about stacking over 25 unfortunately but it seems like as a condition type player you should rather solo or ask anyone in your party if they are going to destroy your conditions…

I never noticed that the burning I applied sometimes didn’t even damage the target if it was already in the burning state by someone stronger.

Duration stacking conditions only work from the strongest “condition damage” player as long as he can keep his own conditions apllied. So there is no place for more than one condition build in your party. I thought about doing a condition build but now I’m hesitating since I like to play in groups/dungeons.

with intensity stacking, newer replaces older and you get ticks for however many of your bleeds are still in the stack (all condition stacks are tracked seperately)

With duration stacking it takes it in turns, if you apply 5s burn then someone applies 10s of burn then you apply 5s of burn for the first 5 seconds you’ll see the tick based on your damage, then they’ll get 10 seconds of it ticking from their condition damage (you don’t see this tick) then after you get 5 more seconds of it ticking from your condition damage.

So in general Bleeds get the biggest penalty for having multiple condition dealers in (as they actively get replaced past 25 regardless of how much time they had left or which deals higher damage), duration stackers are less penalized specially over a longer fight but are still less effective in general with multiple applications from different sources.

Tbh I wouldn’t worry too much, its fairly rare that you end up in a team with more than just yourself as a condition applier and those times you do well your still bringing some direct damage and other utility, your damage will be less but not so much that you’ll not be able to complete the dungeon at all and of course it almost guarantee’s permanent up time on those conditions on a target while solo you may not quite reach it.

It says: “If there are two unique sources of Burning, the effect with the greater condition damage value will be used until that source ends”

If I understand it right; an elementalist who could perma burn or a thief who could perma poison someone would never let anyone else damage the target with these conditions if their condition damage is the highest. Since their time never runs out the other people that sometimes apply that stuff will never get their turn and lose damage over a large fight. Time stacking conditions lose alot of damage from different sources. I think many champs die with over 1 minute duration left.

basically yeah, though poisons not that big a loss :P

In general any time there is more than 1 condition dealer both sides are going to end up most likely loosing damage.

Would mention though that it would only happen like that if that thief or that elementalist had stacked more condition damage than anyone else, as they don’t get any inherent boost to the condition damage, if they are applying it constantly but have even 1 point less damage on their conditions yours would pop up.