Q:
New condition overwrite exisiting?
A:
A little clarification on Gummi’s post:
Intensity conditions (like bleed) keep track of each stacks own damage and duration. You can apply a 100 damage over 1 second bleed, and a 200 damage over 2 seconds bleed, and the mob will take 200 damage for one second, then 100 damage for one second. Intensity can reach up to 25 stacks, whereupon each additional stack will overwrite the oldest.
Duration conditions (like poison and burning) will not stack in damage, rather it will increase in durationo. You can apply a 100 damage over 1 second burn, and a 200 damage over 2 seconds burn, and the mob will take 100 damage each second for 3 seconds. Like intensity, a hard ceiling exists for the duration. You cannot, for instance, stack up to a minute or more of any duration. I’m not entirely certain where the limit runs, unfortunately. Somewhere around 20-25 seconds. Note that this is total current duration; technically you can repeatedly add 5 more seconds onto the timer without diminishing returns.
As for the overall damage? An important note: your character’s condition damage is always normalized for damage per 1 second. (Poison, Burn, and Bleed have different damage modifiers, mind you, so you aren’t doing the same amount of damage with each.) That means, every time you apply a burn, poison, or bleed, the damage output is your normalized damage multiplied by the length of time. So if you have 5 skills that each deal 1 second of poison damage, they will all deal exactly the same amount of poison damage. When you look at your skills and one says “700 damage burning” and the other says “400 damage burning”, you aren’t actually doing more damage per second with one over the other, you’re just applying a longer duration.
The trick is what happens when multiple players use dots. Remember that bleeds keep track of their own damage, so neither player affects the other. But both players contribute to the 25 stack limit, and having bleed-heavy characters fight the same mob can sometimes result in a dps loss when they overwrite each other’s stacks.
For burn and poison, however: presume player A and player B both use burn on a mob. Player A’s burn does 100 damage over 1 second. Player B’s burn does 50 damage over 1 second. The highest damage modifier takes control, and the burns add together, so that the mob takes 200 damage over 2 seconds. This means that if player A uses a burn for 100 damage over 1 second, and player B uses a burn for 200 damage over 4 seconds (50 damage/second), the mob will take 500 damage over 5 seconds (100 damage/second).
TL;DR: yes.
(edited by Pinder.5261)
for bleeding, confusion and other conditions and boons that stack in intensity it just adds that extra dmg on top until 25 stacks. conditions and boons that stack duration well stack duration infinitely (could in theory stack a year of condition on a mob, well if it wouldn’t be dead long before that happen).
Now the next part im not 100% sure on, but my impression is for 25 stacked of condition/boons that stack intensity or for duration stacking ones, it is the hardest hitting one that counts as for its duration (so say you put a 10sec burn on that do 50dmg per tick, and then another put a 5sec burn that deal 100 dmg per tick(100% made up numbers) and you will get 5sec of 100dmg per tick, and the other 5 second of 50dmg per tick)
So. with bleeds. As long as we are ‘at’ or under the 25 stack limit, neither player effects the other as they are independently measured. HOWEVER. AT the limit, a player whos applying weaker bleeds might be occupying slots that the other player could use with his more intense bleeds. hence the drop in dps?
Yet , the other dot effects of burning and poison arent subject to any penalty from different targets?
To the best of my understanding, yes, that’s how it works. Granted, to lose damage on bleeds it’s not necessary that bleed slots are overwritten by players with weaker condition damage. Imagine 2 players, who deal equal amounts of condition damage, and can each put out 16 stacks of bleeds with regular consistency. Put them together, and you’re 7 stacks over the limit, which means neither player can maximize their damage potential. Even if the system were to weed out lower damage dots, and only overwrite stacks if the new dot led to greater damage, it still gimps the fight because damage is lost either way.
This has, of course, led to common complaints about bleed stacking mechanics, since a large group in WvW or a Dynamic Event, or even a having a few bleed-heavy players in the same dungeon, can lead to over stacking. I haven’t kept up with the dev posts to see if they feel it requires a change. For now I assume the system is here to stay (though I’m open to information on the contrary).
I find it odd that bleeds have a stack limit but not burns or poisons.
…?
Yeah, just realized I forgot to talk about that part:
As for burns and poisons, depending on the situation (and your outlook) they might get penalized, but they might also get a boost. Duration stacking removes the capacity for burn-spiking. Assume a situation with 4 sources of 2 second burns, where the dot can only last for, say, 3 seconds (before a condition removal skill is used, or some similar property). In this case it penalizes players for stacking 8 seconds of burn, thus wasting 5 seconds, regardless of the damage per second.
Yet thanks to that, preventing burn-spiking allows burns to deal much higher damage-per-tick than bleeds. This can create interesting situations where player A burns for 100 damage over 1 second, and player B— who has low condition damage, but high condition duration— burns for 200 damage over 4 seconds. Were they bleeds, you’d end up with 300 total damage. Since they stack duration, you end up with 500 total damage. Technically you’re ditching player B’s 200 damage, which is a loss. But the total benefit becomes a net positive.
There’s a whole complicated set of reasons as to why it works this way. Like previously mentioned, it allows the dots to use separate damage coefficients while withholding certain setups from insane spike burst. It ties in to the Combo system better: a player with high condition damage can trigger a high damage burn, then lay down a fire field to bolster the duration with their teammates projectile finishers. (Note that no combo produces bleed stacks.) And certain effects, like the Healing reduction from poison, are plain more useful if extended by duration than by intensity. And there are other nuanced reasons, blah blah.
Ultimately, it just works that way. Bleeds aren’t necessarily doing it wrong, they just need a more sophisticated way of dealing with mass stacking.
Thanks for the clarification, you’ve (all) answered my question, and more.
If I understand correctly – and going to build implications – to maximize debuf effects you’d want to increase condition duration, to maximize dot’s damage you’d first increase condition damage, then duration?
For duration stacking dots because the lower damage is used, for intensity because increased duration means a stack-slot is occupied longer and the limit is thus reached more easily. For both, condition removal removes relatively more of your dot when duration is increased.
Would be interesting if condition damage statistic were to influence debuf effects.
That’s pretty much it. Which is why you often see trait trees pair up Power and Condition Duration, even though Power heavy builds don’t always include many DoTs. It’s important to note that Condition Damage is far, far easier to come by than Condition Duration. Duration bonuses are generally relegated to traits and specific upgrade components (runes and such). So you’re naturally going to build a lot more Condition Damage if your build heads that way.
Beyond that, the duration addition itself gets a little tricky. While non-dot statuses increase by minimum increments of 0.25 seconds, DoT damage only increases by increments of 1.0 seconds. This means if you have a bleed that does 100 damage over 10 seconds, you need at least 10% more condition duration to hit 110 damage over 11 seconds. 9% duration will give you 100 damage over 10 seconds, and the 0.9 seconds left over effectively does nothing.
I wouldn’t worry so much about how Condition Removal plays into it. It’s more important to consider how easily you can reapply the dots, not how much damage you’re losing, versus an opponent with Condition Removal.
Also, I’m glad I could help answer your questions. You are very welcome.
Pinder, thanks for all the excellent info here. I had one question to add to this post. I’m wondering if conditions take only the value when applied, or if they update on the fly. For example, I have a weapon with bonus condition damage and a few might stacks for 3 seconds. If I apply a 5 second burn under those conditions, will all 5 seconds receive that amplification? And will swapping to a different weapon with less or greater condition damage modify the remaining ticks? This exact area seems quite complicated, especially if you include additional people extending your buffed burn/poison.