Guild Wars 2

This is likely a question best answered by Anet, but I’d like to throw this up for discussion in any case. While this is not a topic unique to Engineers, I’ve really been enjoying playing a P/P condition-based build and am particularly feeling the sting of this one.

Why is there a stack limit on damaging conditions? Specifically, why should Bleed be limited?

I’m going to use some incredibly simplistic and arbitrary numbers which SHOULD demonstrate my point, but I’ll start with the disclaimer that I understand classes are not 100% balanced, and that the numbers I’m giving are not real-game examples. They are simply given to give a context for my question.

Let’s say two characters are 100% balanced to have equal damage output. Each is attacking a target 10 times. The first (we’ll call him Joe) is dealing direct damage. The second (we’ll call him Bob) is specced for condition damage.

Joe: 10 attacks at 100 direct damage each
Bob: 10 attacks at 50 direct damage each, plus 50 condition damage applied over 2 seconds

I’ll further push this and say that both Joe and Bob are attacking once every 2 seconds.

Joe and Bob will both deal a total of 1000 damage. Joe has an advantage since his damage is instance and can not be removed, but is disadvantaged in that toughness will decrease this figure. Bob is disadvantaged since it takes longer for his damage to actually affect the target, and any condition-removing abilities will further reduce his total damage output. He has a leg up on Joe because Toughness doesn’t decrease that bleed. It can be argued that they’re both dealing the same “ideal” damage, and this is balanced. Bob’s damage just takes 2 seconds longer to “kick in”.

Now, let’s put 25 Joes and 25 Bobs to task on taking down a target. They each attack 10 times.

10 Joes: 25,000 direct damage
10 Bobs: 12,500 direct damage and 12,500 condition damage

Again… balanced. Keep in mind that in our example, we’ve just manufactured an instant, 25-deep stack of bleed that is refreshed the very instant it runs out. Let’s kick it up another notch and assume 50 Joes and 50 Bobs on the target.

Joes: 50,000 direct damage
Bobs: 25,000 direct damage and 12,5000 condition damage

Gah, what happened? Well, the Joes are holding strong and doing 50k damage to the target, but the Bobs have gone over their stack cap. Only the first 25 bleeds actually affect the target. The rest of the attacks still deal their direct damage component, but the target is essentially bleed-proof to any additional condition damage. In our setup of completely arbitrary numbers, the Bobs are dealing 75% of the damage that the Joes are.

I’d like to know the reasoning behind this, and used bleeds for my example since they’re without any additional effect placed on the target. This scenario assumes every player can only maintain a single stack of the bleed, when we know in practice GW2 allows multiple professions ways to stack those multiple bleeds. I’ve seen it argued that a stack of 100 bleeds would be ridiculous, but I don’t see how that’s different from 100 greatswords to the face. The damage is the same, so why is one being penalized?

Because bleeding would probably force every1 into condition specs in order to bring bosses and such down as fast as possible together, instead of varying builds in order to maximize the damage output.

Every stack makes the bleeds faster multiplying them, which would encourage party-bleeders, not to mention epidemic necros.

Without a cap every1 would go for bleeds instead of greatswords for short.

Rfreak, thanks for responding… but if the bleeds come faster, what does that matter? The total damage output would still be the same as those doing direct damage. Even if the condition damage were “sped up” to the point of applying instantly for all intents and purposes, it’d still just be 50 direct and 50 condition, vs. Joe’s 100 direct. There’s no advantage.

@Zarathustra.2091

No let’s consider this, a 1s bleed causes 100 damage

1 stack ticks for 100 damage through 2-20 seconds?
2 stacks tick for 200 damage in Xseconds

And so on, this means that multiple characters dealing bleeds help mantaining sustained and easy to apply conditional damage which will trigger no matter what happens because bosses usually don’t have means of removing those conditions, however they may have lower condition duration buffs.

Anyway what I meant to say wasn’t that conditional damage is stuck at max stacks because of numbers, but the general behavior of the players stacking bleeds.

Bleeds are EASY to apply, VERY easy, almost all auto-attacks would generate a bleed, be it by itself or due to the classic minor-precision-tree-trait which almost every class got.

If the stacks weren’t there what would stop players from going full bleed builds for bosses?

To maximize damage you should rely on multiple types of damage anyway, not to mention multiple conditions.

@Rfreak.6591

Is my base assumption wrong, then? I considered Anet as attempting to roughly balance damage output, so a direct-damage only build would be doing about the same as a condition-focused build.

If one character is dealing X damage, and another is dealing Y+Z damage, and X=Y+Z, why do we have a need to limit Z?

Comparing single players against targets, I wasn’t aware bleeds were doing so much damage that they had to be nerfed.

Because every damage has its conditions (no pun intended) to fulfill in order to occur and bleeds have the easiest, especially considering all of’em are ranged, most even spammable.

Please, don’t take this as argument. I’m trying to understand the logic here, and definitely appreciate the discourse.

That said, how are bleeds easier to apply than direct damage? We don’t limit how many greatswords are allowed to hit a target.

Don’t worry, I find it constructive I’m not fighting or smtg.

The most damage a greatsword can achieve is in the hands of a warrior, possibly with means of getting a bit of “haste” to speed up the process, but in order to do so he/she has to play actively in order to:

1-getting close to the target
2-preventing as much damage as he/she can
3-keeping tracks of the enemies
4-positioning correctly

The most damage a bleeding can achieve is given solely by your gear (though necros kinda best at it), it requires close to no effort to land a hit, or 10 hits or even 20, and can be contributed (and will) by the whole team anyway, while keeping the distance and just autoattacking, without any kind of stress to the player besides bosses’ hard hitters and heavy aggro, which are pretty basic elements.

Rfreak.6591:

The most damage a bleeding can achieve is given solely by your gear (though necros kinda best at it), it requires close to no effort to land a hit, or 10 hits or even 20, and can be contributed (and will) by the whole team anyway, while keeping the distance and just autoattacking, without any kind of stress to the player besides bosses’ hard hitters and heavy aggro, which are pretty basic elements.

Damage of condition skills can be increased by:
-Cond damage
-Cond duration

Damage of “direct” skills can be increased by:
-Power
-Precision
-Crit damage

Also, there is triggering effects, on-crit-effects etc but they are available to both.

What I wannt to say here is, they are way more ways to increase direct dammage than there are to increase cond damage. The Gear argument is already invalid even before pointing out, crit dammage is way more readily available than cond duration.

The only difference between physical and cond damage is, cond damage does not get reduced by armor.
But as there is no way for cond damage to apply beyond a certain point in a boss fight, especially the cond duration is useless for anything other than confusion…(and fear and immobilize but they aren’t that good against many bosses anyway :>) because the boss will have ~2 minutes of cheap burning etc queued up anyway and be constantly on 25 stack bleeding from low profile rifle warriors with low cond damage.

The real reason was likely it was an easy programming/design choice to make. Most MMO’s make the same mistake in some kind of debuff limit early in their lifetime.

The sustained damage output of a condition class is slightly higher then that of a direct one too, but I don’t think it’s enough to justify the lack of a direct damage class. Even the devs have said that the “bleed limit” is a problem. This likely has nothing to do with balance, since as stated before it’d be seen as completely silly to limit direct damage taken per second.

@naphack.9346

You’ve just confirmed my own argument by stating that it takes many other stats to increase direct damage, while it takes just condition damage and duration to run the condition damage build, sure you might want to spend smtg into precision to proc more but usually prec and condition damage are paired together in trait trees AND equips.

Direct damage implies you WILL have to spend something to get some vitality and possibly toughness too. So it’s 5 stats to be considered.

I think there’s no point in wanting to discuss about something when you don’t seem to even want others’ opinions, at least that’s what I kinda feel from your posts.

Also consider it like this, would you actually believe devs would remove bleeds cap without giving some sort of condition-removal skills to mobs/bosses?

Anyway I was talking about the effort it takes to do one thing or the other and the bleeds are the easiest to apply, period.

Newsflash, this game has numerous desgin issues one of which is the general superiority of burst / direct damage over condition, isn’t the best DPS in PvE a direct damage warrior with life on crit food?

Not merely the 25 cap which renders more than one condi build in a party pointless (certainly of classes that can stack a bunch of bleeds), but things such as the poorly thought out way loot is calculated for events which again favours direct burst, becuase most mobs will go down before you apply enough damage as a condi build.

Then there is PvP, again, you can feasibly have an all direct damage team (as long they have condi removal), but thanks to the 25 cap the other way around would be ineffective, then there is the issue of counters, condi damage is easy to counter, you simply have to spec for a resonable amount of removal or simply get a team mate (necro) to handle it if you will be fighting alongside them, this is much easier to avoid than burst, where often if you fail to dodge in the 0.8 seconds allocated, even a build with reasonable toughness (say 1500) will go down or be put at such a deficit it is game over.

Frankly I’m not even convinced dungeon bosses would be easier with condition damage builds compared to the direct damage ones we have now. Each skill use still does X damage, it doesn’t magically magnify to the extreme because the cap is removed. If a single condition user is a balanced choice between no condition users in a party, then why would it change if suddenly there were more then one.

I think they worry too much honestly. I played rift and there was no such restrictions on conditions. It was awesome, the whole screen could be filled with the debuffs condition style damage against a world boss.

They just need to spread out the kinds of damage. If they changed engineer for example to do more burning on everything it would be fine. there’s a ton of abilities that just don’t do burning that should including napalm blasts, rockets, mines….if they changed our class to more of a burn focus it would be better then it is now, but we’re stuck with an even more limited burn on crit trait. They have some weird practices to say the least.

It’s an issue because one grenadier engineer can hit the bleed cap against bosses. This isn’t a problem for us – it’s a problem for other classes. We’re hampering their bleeds usually (say, a condition specced necro), and if we chose to eat the Pizza buff, well we’d hit 25 bleeds in pretty much no time at all.

A Sword Warrior as well can hit the bleed cap on their own. I don’t see many people advocating how powerful Sword Warrior DPS is. Heck I originally want to be a Condi-Dmg Warrior until I realized how bad it is compared to what other builds the Warrior has and what other Condi builds the other classes have.

I’m not entirely sure how you hit the Bleed cap with just grenades though, the proc chance on that one skill isn’t really that high. Is there something I’m missing with it…?

15% chance of bleeding on explosion (trait) X3 due to grenadier plus the first minor firearms trait, maybe the sigil of earth too coupled with accuracy, use shrapnel grenade and that’s a 1-hit wonder if all 3 hits connect and proc (there’s no CD on the minor trait), it can effectively reach the bleed cap yes, but still… grenades scatter.

15% chance isn’t really that much, you’d be on the lucky side to get a single proc over six grenade hits. Earth Sigil is only going to give you one bleed in this as well. Shrapnel Grenade gives three stacks of course, but even then Shrapnel Grenade + Poison Grenade is probably only going to give you 5 stacks of Bleeding. The bleed cap is 25. I’m confused.

Ayestes.1273:

15% chance isn’t really that much, you’d be on the lucky side to get a single proc over six grenade hits. Earth Sigil is only going to give you one bleed in this as well. Shrapnel Grenade gives three stacks of course, but even then Shrapnel Grenade + Poison Grenade is probably only going to give you 5 stacks of Bleeding. The bleed cap is 25. I’m confused.

Because math. You get three chances for shrapnel to proc with every grenade attack. The shrapnel bleeds last 15 seconds with 30 points into power. The chances of getting at least one bleed per attack is (1 – 0.85^3), or 38.5875%. That’s before the minor trait, or any earth sigils one may be using. If you happen to use 3 sets of bleed runes, the duration is ramped up to 22 seconds.

I understand you get three chances at the 15% per grenade toss. I also realize the duration on the Shrapnel Trait and Shrapnel Grenade are rather long, but I wasn’t thinking about the Bleed Runes. I also didn’t see the capability of volume during that 22 second window. The Shrapnel Grenades themselves would produce 18 stacks by the time 22 minutes rolls around, and the trait gives an average of .45 stacks per volley (since average stacks has nothing to do with “at least” or “at most”, and that’s what we are concnerned over). Could probably gain an extra 4 or so stacks sustained from Earth Sigil as well.

Only issues like you said were, you’d have to land all the grenades. It also takes a lot of time to get the bleeds up that high and certainly has a lower condition damage output. It just doesn’t seem practical to me, which is what interfered with my ability to see how it could get to the stack cap. Which is also why I think it’s silly to have a bleed cap. I also still don’t think Engineer’s are good Bleeders, but certainly not as bad as I viewed before.