Guild Wars 2

Cecilia.5179:

What would you do with the -% condition duration food?

Leave it alone completely. to answer your question.

Sartharina.3542:

How is a food that can be completely negated by a slew of powers available to everyone be OP?

1. It’s not a slew of powers, it’s a single foodstuff.
2. Because it is so dangerous, it has to be negated, there is no option. This reduces player choice of food, runes etc, when they are constantly trying to get condi timers down.

Again, the issue is not with food making conditions more powerful.

But let’s ask this question another way around. Suppose you have two foods:

• One gives +40% condition duration and +70 condition damage.
• The other gives +100 condition damage and +28% condition duration.

Would you pick the second one?
Let’s be real, no, ofc not. But why is that? Because condition duration is an extremely powerful stat, and you would never opt to weaken it for a “lesser” stat.

This is a classic situation in which you create an arms race condition, which is never good in MMO balance. It leads to a very unstable balance situation as very powerful effects cancel each other out, so even one breaking away (say due to a bug) ruins all balance in a cascading manner.
It is usually better to create the same overall balance with much smaller individual components. One breaking away from “balanced” no longer has a devastating effect.

10% should be max imo.

Maybe 20% , considering direct damage can get up to 10% and DoTs have to be stronger over time.

Svarty.8019:

Sartharina.3542:

How is a food that can be completely negated by a slew of powers available to everyone be OP?

1. It’s not a slew of powers, it’s a single foodstuff.
2. Because it is so dangerous, it has to be negated, there is no option. This reduces player choice of food, runes etc, when they are constantly trying to get condi timers down.

It’s not, because not that many people run reduction food. Maybe I’ll take a few screenshots or videos. I just don’t see that many people running reduction food because condi builds run +food. The only consistent class I see is Warrior.

The foods I see the most common are +condition duration food, power/ferocity, power/vit, precision/vit, precision/ferocity, power/precision. If warriors didn’t use -duration food so well I don’t know if many people would think it’s so popular.

Dogged march/melandru/lemongrass combo has synergy with a popular traitline it makes sense. If Earth magic or Inventions was a good trait line for builds I run on my Ele and Engi I would consider using the food too but I don’t go deep into either of those lines so I don’t run it.

On my 7 classes I run Power/Precision on almost all my classes DPS builds except my Warrior.

Carighan.6758:

Again, the issue is not with food making conditions more powerful.

But let’s ask this question another way around. Suppose you have two foods:

• One gives +40% condition duration and +70 condition damage.
• The other gives +100 condition damage and +28% condition duration.

Would you pick the second one?
Let’s be real, no, ofc not. But why is that? Because condition duration is an extremely powerful stat, and you would never opt to weaken it for a “lesser” stat.

This is a classic situation in which you create an arms race condition, which is never good in MMO balance. It leads to a very unstable balance situation as very powerful effects cancel each other out, so even one breaking away (say due to a bug) ruins all balance in a cascading manner.
It is usually better to create the same overall balance with much smaller individual components. One breaking away from “balanced” no longer has a devastating effect.

Which one I would choose would be totally dependent on how many conditions actually reach the next 1s mark. Conds, unlike crit dmg/power, often gain little or nothing from increasing the duration an additional 12%.

Aberrant.6749:

Which one I would choose would be totally dependent on how many conditions actually reach the next 1s mark. Conds, unlike crit dmg/power, often gain little or nothing from increasing the duration an additional 12%.

That is assuming you fight 1v1 only, which is rarely the case. And that you only ever apply single conditions of non-stacking ones, never refresh, never extend.

Carighan.6758:

Aberrant.6749:

Which one I would choose would be totally dependent on how many conditions actually reach the next 1s mark. Conds, unlike crit dmg/power, often gain little or nothing from increasing the duration an additional 12%.

That is assuming you fight 1v1 only, which is rarely the case. And that you only ever apply single conditions of non-stacking ones, never refresh, never extend.

What are you talking about?
How does basing a discussion on how it effects specific condition application skills durations, have anything to do with how many opponents your fighting?

Nothing you said makes any sense in relation to the post you quoted. He is stating that the original duration of a applied condition is directly relevant to duration percentage value. For example, the engineers fragmentation shot applies a 2s bleed. No matter how you cut it, this food does not in itself, effect that skills damage in any way. Engineer pistol static shock is a 3s blind/confusion. 40% food adds 1s. You only get a 33% possible damage increase.

Numbers change a lot in WvW. This is the ONLY reason conditions are not the sole builds played. Zergs with support and water blasting allow for rapid AOE condi removal to the point where they barely even get applied to begin with.

This is why you’re seeing complaints that conditions are OP and UP – roamers find them extremely oppressive to due how tanky they leave people and how difficult it is to overcome the application, and thus the necessity in running condi cleanse and -40% food. Zerg heavies, though, with plenty of backline support and water blasting, run power builds because there is so much condi removal going on that only choice is to run power. That’s also not to mention the fact that condition stacks are capped at 25, making them possibly less effective in zergs, and even less so with PUGs.

The issue with condition damage is that it scales only on one stat by gear and only some synergy via traits.

As of how condition damage is currently handled, there is no way to balance the stat. Unlike power-oriented builds, which in order to maximize DPS require three stats (Power, precision, and ferocity), condition builds only need condition damage and maybe power (Carrion) if they’re really tryharding for low-toughness target kills. The only other synergy they get is either in the form of a few off-traits, or the 40% food.

Frankly, I feel as though it would have been smarter to implement conditions in general as status ailments and not as a form of damage due to the sheer impossibility that is truly balancing them.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Carighan.6758:

Aberrant.6749:

Which one I would choose would be totally dependent on how many conditions actually reach the next 1s mark. Conds, unlike crit dmg/power, often gain little or nothing from increasing the duration an additional 12%.

That is assuming you fight 1v1 only, which is rarely the case. And that you only ever apply single conditions of non-stacking ones, never refresh, never extend.

What are you talking about?
How does basing a discussion on how it effects specific condition application skills durations, have anything to do with how many opponents your fighting?

Nothing you said makes any sense in relation to the post you quoted. He is stating that the original duration of a applied condition is directly relevant to duration percentage value. For example, the engineers fragmentation shot applies a 2s bleed. No matter how you cut it, this food does not in itself, effect that skills damage in any way. Engineer pistol static shock is a 3s blind/confusion. 40% food adds 1s. You only get a 33% possible damage increase.

Depends if you take into account skills that have a low base duration but also a very short recharge (or you have enough skills with the same conditions on them to make a chain)….then the duration that is wasted on one execution of the skill can potentially get get stacked for full to near full value since the engine does not immediately forget the actual duration of the applied condition.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Nothing you said makes any sense in relation to the post you quoted. He is stating that the original duration of a applied condition is directly relevant to duration percentage value. For example, the engineers fragmentation shot applies a 2s bleed. No matter how you cut it, this food does not in itself, effect that skills damage in any way. Engineer pistol static shock is a 3s blind/confusion. 40% food adds 1s. You only get a 33% possible damage increase.

Oh, sorry, I’ll try to explain.

Yes you’re right. In a way. If all you did was use a single fragmentation shot, you’d get a 2s bleed without the food, and a 2,75s bleed with the food. Which ticks once at 1 second elapsed, and once at 2s elapsed, and no more. Either way.
Ofc, if you had another 10% from a giver’s weapon or a trait line, you’d get another tick at 3s, but let’s ignore that for now.

As I said, that’s assuming a single application. And no other players (hence the single-target thing) on your side in a group fight applying the condition.

Because what actually happens is this:

1. You apply Fragmentation Shot. The game checks whether a DoT timer is ticking already, let’s assume it’s not, so it starts one at 0,00s counting. The Frag Shot bleed lasts 2,75s at this point.
2. 1,00s later, the timer completes a full second, and checks for existent DoTs to deal damage with. It finds a bleed, and deals damage with it (note how this works, the timer deals the damage every 1,00s). It then resets to 0,00s, and runs again.
3. 2,00s have elapsed in total. The timer completes a full second, checks, finds the sole bleed, it deals damage.
4. 2,75s have elapsed. Bleed expires. The game checks whether the timer is still needed (timer is at 0,75s right now!), it is not, so it throws it away to free up CPU.

Ofc, like I said, that’s assuming just the Bleed. Here’s another scenario:

1. 0,00s. Your attack applies Incendiary Powder, lasting 4,25 seconds. The game finds no timer, and starts one.
2. 1,00s. As above, times cycles, finds the burn, deals damage.
3. 1,50s – you hit the target with Fragmentation Shot, applying a bleed. The game checks for a timer, finds an existing one, and all is well.
4. 2,00s, the timer completes a second and cycles. It finds a Burn and a Bleed, each deals damage.
5. 3,00s, same thing again.
6. 4,00s, same thing again, and note how the bleed now dealt three ticks of damage despite only lasting 2,75s!
7. 4,25s, Bleed expires. Burn expires. The timer is no longer needed, and cleaned up.

And that is why even partials of a second are in most situations the very extra damage you would expect. Because in any real combat situation, there’s a constant stream of various effects flying around, keeping timers ticking. And if there’s one already ticking, that’s the only timer deciding when DoTs deal damage. 2,75s has a much greater chance to fit 3 DoT-ticks inside its duration than 2s.

I think you misunderstand how the function processes. Your explanation does not coincide with how the servers actual calculate the DoTs. I deduce that you do not work in either the gaming or programming industry. Is that correct?

That’d be an extremely roundabout and resource-intensive way to handle condition timers o.O

I sincerely doubt that’s how it works, just based upon how the conditions tick; they don’t get applied on the same tick because the servers (and I can tell you this now as a fact without even needing to know anything about the servers) are not using seconds as a means of telling time or determining tick cycles.

why not just remove ALL food from WvW..

Can one of you explain why food in wvw is a must?!

DeceiverX.8361:

I sincerely doubt that’s how it works, just based upon how the conditions tick; they don’t get applied on the same tick because the servers (and I can tell you this now as a fact without even needing to know anything about the servers) are not using seconds as a means of telling time or determining tick cycles.

Well, obviously it’s going to be a refresh-tick.
I don’t know how often GW2’s server calculates, though. But it’s a constant speed of refreshing. And yes, the timers which get spawned will always adhere to such an update tick for “counting time”, because every Xth update also executes the timer (or doesn’t, if it has been thrown away).

The point is, a Necro tested what I described above, and if you have one you can also test this. Trait for damage on Fear, then DS#3 something (1,5s Fear). 1 tick. Apply another condition first, Fear after. Try that a few times, you’ll get 2 damage ticks often enough.

So yes, maybe the way is bad. Honestly being a programmer I’m not sure how I’d do it, I got 0 expertise coding video games (and I just read a rather interesting piece about the Titanfall physics update rate which destroyed some of my assumptions about how you’d do it). But it seems that in GW2, entities genuinely spawn their own timer function when necessary.

Basically, if you try to argue based on single application duration boosting, then yes, it would look as if you rarely ever get the full value of the duration boost in damage ticks.

Which is a version of lies, kitten ed lies, and statistics.

Which why I earlier refused to sit down and go to the effort of doing math I knew would be cherry picked and misrepresented, when I already knew what happens in combat. You have to take into account the whole picture not just a misleadingly favorable on paper calculation.

Also, why waste my time when those that want proof have already been told where the water is. Can’t make a horse drink.

It’s like arguing with the people that take it as holy writ that Dire gives full possible condi damage potential yet ignore that power coefficients are often better, have a greater amount of easily available multipliers, and don’t have to deal with stack mechanics past the target cap that everything deals with.

The info they need is already documented. They’re the ones that refused to educate themselves.

Power coefficients should naturally be higher, though, seeing as condition damage ignores toughness.

Ultimately what keeps conditions behind is the stack cap, and massive AOE cleansing in zergs, and in PvE, the relatively low toughness but high health pool of monsters/bosses, the rate at which regular hits can be applied versus conditions, and of course, the stack cap.

Conditions are a build path which simply just appears to be impossible to balance due to the way they work. Can’t make coefficients or application too high without then working on better/more consistent mitigation options, and situational mitigation/damage reduction is one of those things I don’t believe to be considered as good game design. Forcing players to build in a way to shut down others’ entire builds because their damage application becomes obscenely and wildly overpowered without doing so in my opinion is just a tricky mechanic which doesn’t really seem feasible to balance, especially when other non-damage control conditions which are affected by duration modifiers are thrown into the mix, too.

It’s particularly why I don’t support duration +/- food in WvW; I deem it, just like conditions in general, something too potent if ignored but too weak if heavily countered. By getting rid of both types of food, ultimately the worst-case scenario for conditions improves by a fair margin, allowing these builds to be more consistent, which is something I think a lot of people want more of when it comes to condi builds.