Guild Wars 2

So I am a conditionmancer, copied my build from Chained Nemesis, it’s working out pretty well.
But yesterday this guy comes running up to me and tells me that staying around 23-24 stacks does more DPS/dmg/whatevz than 25 stacks??
I asked him how it worked and he said I’m apparently ‘deleting’ my previous stacks when i apply new ones when I’m at 25…

I really don’t know what to think of it, since alot of Nemesis’ builds do really good.

Can somebody help me with this?

-Is it true? > Why? How?
-Is it not? > Why? How?

If possible, I would like a detailed explaination, but not too complicated.

Regards, Shivu Dreamchaser

Link to the conditionmancer guide of Nemesis > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXhjICMN5No

Why didn’t you just ask the other guy? :P

Anyway I can see how that can be the case. Lets say your bleed duration is so long that you can effectively have 30 stacks of bleeds but because of the 25 cap 5 are going to waste. In that situation you could(and probably should) get rid of some duration and increase your condition damage. Few stacks but more damage per stack.

The 23-24 stack thing would just be a simple method to know that you aren’t wasting any stacks. You could probably calculate the optimal balance of duration and damage to stay at 25 stacks without wasting anything but that would require more work.

I’m interested to know how it works too. Especially on bosses like Melandru with 10+ people, or dungeons with 5 people. There are a lot of stacks of bleeds, and it wouldn’t make sense for weaker bleeds to cancel out my stronger bleeds when I have investment in Condition Damage.

I’m especially interested because my main character is a Necromancer called Princess Midna, that focuses on bleeds and such. (Mainly following Nemesis’s build)

Somebody tested it a while ago, and it’s seemed to work FIFO, First In First Out. They tested it with Blood is Power (2x 30 sec bleed) and 3 Ele doing Churning Earth to add 24 bleed, then one auto attack to bring it to 25. The 2x 30 sec bleed got overwriten as the 25 stacks only lasted Churning earth duration.

Normally you won’t be able to maintain 25 stacks by yourself (except with scepter and condition duration) so you shouldn’t worry. But the biggest problem lies in a group, where others smaller bleed like warrior’s crit can overwrite a full one minute bleed like Blood is Power.

technically deleting your own bleeds isn’t really a damage loss unless you’d be able to do some other form of attacks that wouldn’t apply bleeds that would do more damage than the bleed applying attack, instead its more refreshing your oldest bleeds so you keep 25 on constantly as long as the bleeds are up they are all doing the same damage per second regardless of how long they’ve been there, as others said though if your hitting 25 stacks lots due to long durations it does mean you can probably drop a bit of duration for something else thus increasing your damage simply due to higher stats rather than the not replacing bleeds.

In groups its first in first out as Panhaura says, if the group is capable of putting more than 25 bleeds on everyone relying on bleeds in that battle are going to do less damage as they fight for bleed spots replacing each others bleeds and so on, this is an annoying mechanic of conditions in this game which is why many people focus on the pure direct damage builds instead.

This also happens for the other conditions albeit in a slightly different way, if you have 2 people that can keep burn up impermanently and they are both attacking the boss, the durations stack and the person with the highest condition damage will tick their durations first, but because they can maintain it permanently that means the other person will never get a chance to deal damage with the burn, if neither can maintain permanently it will tick the highest damage duration first then the other persons.