Guild Wars 2

I’m a numbers geek and I love looking into how different systems are implemented. Recently I’ve been looking at condition damage. For my first test, I took my thief, which is set up to inflict both bleed and poison damage, and recorded her killing a few enemies at 25fps. I then did a frame-by-frame analysis of the video to see when the conditions were applied, ended and when damage ticked.

Poison was very straightforward. Every 25 frames (+/-1) I could see a tick of poison damage. Poison was processed on a fixed schedule--the time between inflicting the condition and the first tick of damage varied, however the frame number for each tick mod 25 yields a value of 10 (+/-1), implying that all poison damage is processed on the same once-per-second interval across all enemies. This is what I expected to see.

I expected bleed damage to follow a similar pattern, but it did not. In fact, the pattern was quite unusual, and borders on not being a pattern at all.

The first bleed I looked at had 32 frames between when the bleed was inflicted and the first damage tick. The last tick of damage was 7 frames after the effect ended. The 4 ticks were 101 frames apart total, and had approximately 25 frames between them (+/-2).

The second bleed ticked 35 frames after being inflicted. This was the only damage tick, as the foe died soon after.

The third bleed ticked 25 frames after being inflicted, 25 frames later, then 38 frames later, then 25 frames later. The effect ended before the fourth tick, but 101 frames after it began.

The fourth bleed ticked for the first time 28 frames after being inflicted. This was the only damage tick, as the foe died soon after.

Across all of these, the frame number mod 25 yields values around 22 some of the time, 0 some of the time, and 9 some of the time.

At no time was bleed refreshed / stacked.

Before going back and doing an analysis of other conditions/effects on the enemy and expanding my analysis to the remainder of the video I have, I was wondering if anybody else had looked into bleed in detail and had any information to share.

If a dev would like to step in and give an answer that would save me hours of staring at spreadsheets and video, that would be awesome too :-)

Is this what you’re looking for? http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition_damage

No, the wiki has very general information only. Detail like when ticks happen is well beyond the wiki.

I am pretty sure they even fail to mention how existing bleed stacks are modified by adding a might boon to a player.

It shows a formula on each condition’s page, saying it does X damage per second (pulse).

Bleeding, for example: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bleeding

For might, the formula applies to both power and condition damage. You would plug your total condition damage into bleeding’s formula to figure out damage.

Might: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Might

If this isn’t what you’re looking for, then I guess I don’t understand your question. I tried. :P

What I’m looking for is exactly when the ticks happen (and after I have this figured out, I’ll be looking at how fractional-second increases in duration benefit/fail to benefit condition damage). Conventional knowledge says damage from conditions happens “once per second” but this is an assumption that doesn’t actually hold up to scrutiny when looking at bleed—the damage even happens after the bleed effect ends.

I’m actually interested in this as well. I’ve noticed that bleeding doesn’t follow much of a set pattern when used on enemies in combat. You’d expect it to be like poison, every second, but it seems to be more erratic than that.

I have a hunch that bleed is calculated at the same time as the other damage over time conditions, but the damage appears staggered for the sake of appearances. The damage appears based on the condition “slot” that the bleed occupies. Each stack of bleed occupies a different slot (so that it has that nice staggered effect) but other conditions beginning or ending can cause it to shift a few slots. This would explain ticks after the condition has ended and the nice “stream” of bleed damage numbers when you have many stacks on the target.

Regardless, I’m not planning to use bleed as my baseline damage-over-time condition for looking at the effects of partial-second durations.

Fildydarie.1496:

I have a hunch that bleed is calculated at the same time as the other damage over time conditions, but the damage appears staggered for the sake of appearances.

This, which is why when something dies from bleeding you see numbers continuing to fly off them well into their death.