Guild Wars 2

I’ve noticed in DEs that quite often a Champion/Veteran mob is sitting constantly at 24-25 stacks of bleed and I can’t tell how many of those stacks are from me.

It seems as a necro that most of my weapons damage output ability is in the form of bleeds, which means I’m adding very little in the way of damage via bleeds.

Direct damage weapon skills have CDs, as do wells/marks. DS output falls with lifeforce.

I just wonder if our bleed-centric damage is a problem or not.

On the other hand, I usually get gold in DEs, so I don’t know if it makes a practical difference.

It is depending on the number of people stacking bleeds, and where you entered on the scenario/attack, and where you are on the rotation of stacking bleeds.

This is why I went hybrid, to where i could split damage across power (initial hits) vs bleeds (sustained damage).

I dislike the bleed stack limit because if doing a dungeon with others who can stack bleeds (most classes can slap a fair few on), your addition to the bleed stack could be negligible and therefore you as a necro aren’t doing much. Makes condition builds in general across all classes dubious for such things.

Yea, I personally believe Necros should have access to a unique condition. Confusion is in general a mesmer skill, although other classes have access to it to a lesser degree. Poison would fit well with the theme of the Necro, but it isn’t powerful enough

The stack limit is a bummer on most end-game dynamic events, where it involves killing one big boss for example. Those bleeds stacks pretty fast and we usually fall a little behind before the stack reaches the max limit. The way you can see if you are contributing a lot or not is to notice if your bleeds ticks of very fast, very slow or somewhere in the middle (I usually end up on the very slow end of the scale depending on the other professions that are present). If it ticks very fast, like the numbers are flying off the screen, you could guess that you are contributing with at least 10+ of those bleeds, if it goes very slow then it usually isn’t more than 5ish bleeds from you there. So either something needs to be done so we can be viable bursters (outside of DS), or we need a damaging condition of our own like a disease or something that can increase in power over time, i.e you apply the disease and at first it isn’t that powerful, but the longer it stays, the more damage it does. This could help on tough bosses that takes a long time to kill.

A unique condition would certainly help remedy the problem. It seems bizarre that a class seemingly based around condition transfer is hindered so stupidly but a bleed stack limit disallowing half our damage if working in a group over the size of 2.

Slightly off topic but not by much.

How many stacks can a bleed focused necromancer reliably get on their own? I was curious how close we can get to that limit without a party. If it is to close then they REALLY need to up the limit.

I’m not a very good condition master, but when I tried it I’ve seen arouns 8-12 bleeds consistently

Silverrey.2471:

How many stacks can a bleed focused necromancer reliably get on their own? I was curious how close we can get to that limit without a party. If it is to close then they REALLY need to up the limit.

I get about the same: 8-12 without really trying.

yeah, with decent duration, i get a solid 16 bleeds or so on an opener, scepter attack 1, scepter 2, dagger 5, BiP, scepter 4 (send bip bleeds on me to target), and then autoattacks, wash rinse repeat. I would say you can swap to staff and drop staff 2, but the cooldown to switch weapons back is slow and your bleed count goes down.

@Gryph

switching weapons wont be that bad if you accomodate for the time of weapon swap back to scepter…

example being scepter 1, 1, 1… after poison lands follow up wtih 2, then dagger 5, BiP, throw back with dagger 4… then assuming you have Geomancy on both weapon sets you weapon swap but go to DS (weakening shroud), hit skill 2 (dark path), pop out, staff 2, 3…. weapon swap back for another geomancer… then rinse and repeat. Constant stacking… assuming you are awesome at never missing a beat and laying on your target. I’d like to think being necromancers we are the only class that can just keep adding bleeds in that manner, although I know thats not true as I have seen other classes slam 10 on me in a matter of 2 key strokes…. I also tend to stick with one class and have not ventured past warrior, theif, mesmer low levels to be in any position to make assumptions about them.

But yeah, I actually posted this combo in another thread the other day about mastering death shroud. Assuming you are using a pvp set up from the mists, that can get you about 18 bleeds. Probably more if you focus on extending your duration. In pve, the target will most likely be dead way before you can rinse and repeat, so just hit epidemic and watch any poor unfortunate souls catch the reprecussions of standing too close.

almost forgot to mention two important things. sorry i got lost in the rotation advice i put out.

one being the reason for 25 limit would most likely be if there were no limit then most people would use conditions. at the moment of 100 stack it is basically ticking 10k a second… assuming you are any kind of decently condition geared, that would instantly drain any big boss forget little veterans or mobs. I make stuff melt with my necro when I focus purely on bleeds in a group. My ticks with food buffs are at about 125… easily can be made more if I get some of the exotic gear and fit the slots with plus bleed duration and extra condition damage.

The second thing was to say that it is possible to hit 25 all on your own as a necromancer. It is tough, but if you get the right timing and have everything off cooldown and don’t miss a beat you can hit it with the above rotation I mentioned. You also have to have the best of the best gear and set up with traits and runes and such. But, at the point of 25 stuff melts… seriously melts. It happens briefly so don’t expect to epidemic the surrounding mobs or people. But still tossing 15 or more steady bleeds to anything near by is still going to hurt.

I myself am not so great at the combo, but here and there I see it happen in those choice moments.

XXVI Red.5718:

one being the reason for 25 limit would most likely be if there were no limit then most people would use conditions. at the moment of 100 stack it is basically ticking 10k a second… assuming you are any kind of decently condition geared, that would instantly drain any big boss forget little veterans or mobs. I make stuff melt with my necro when I focus purely on bleeds in a group. My ticks with food buffs are at about 125… easily can be made more if I get some of the exotic gear and fit the slots with plus bleed duration and extra condition damage.

that’s not really a decent argument though – quite the contrary it outlines why there shouldn’t be a stack limit.
obviously no single person can achieve or maintain a 100 stack of bleeding
why should there be a difference in treatment between ten players doing 2k dps of direct damage and ten players applying conditions – each maintaining 20 stacks of bleeding doing 2k dps – on a big boss?
at the moment if you bring 4 more direct damage dealers to a fight you are doing over 500% damage (in comparison to 100% being alone) if you bring 4 more condition damage dealers your are doing less than 200% dmg.
does that seem right?

Even if necros got their own unique class debuff that stacked and did damage, basically a necro-only bleed, that wouldn’t fix the issue. The issue is that condition damage builds are damage capped in group play due to how debuff stack, and that puts any condition based build at a severed disadvantage to regular direct damage based builds. This also puts gear that has only condition damage, but no power to supplement damage output, at a severe disadvantage.
Now personally I do love the concept of a new necro only debuff, for the sake of argument we’ll continue calling it the previously suggested name “disease”. Rather than making disease stack per application for an intensity boost, let it have one application stack per source. Then, allow a trait or something that enables either stacking condition damage, or solely boosts the damage of disease damage. So with each attack that applies disease you extend the duration, increase the potential damage per second you can do with the attack, and update the damage potential possible on your application of disease. By concept, I think that was somewhat the original intent behind bleeds, but they were tweaked around too much and their original purpose was lost to the mess we have now.

As to bosses melting super fast. I do agree to that to an extent. At the same time though, apart from a few Orr bosses, most world bosses melt in a matter of minutes at best, seconds at worse, and that is because more people are switching back to direct damage based builds, where artificial damage caps don’t exist.

@craygz

I cant really account for what class does exactly how much damage in any given spec. The only thing I can account for is what I have gotten hit with. Firstly, I am not really agreeing with the 25 cap. Just putting it out there because i’d hate for people to look at it as that because it becomes a you vs. me kinda thing. I am just trying to theorize why they would implement the cap.

Second, from my perspective burst damage is large but comes in spurts. Theif unloads 25k damage in 3 seconds, 10 seconds later rinse and repeat. Just an example and not the exact numbers. I myself alone can maintain a stack of 15 or more. They tick for 100 to 125 depending on buffs and gear and set up im using. thats 1500 per second of damage. It doesnt go away and with time and rotations and probably better gear I can make that stack a little more and possibly hit for harder considering some necro’s say they do about 140 a tick. In that respect, I really think if there were no cap, most people would logically pick conditions to do damage because its sustained and it hits like a truck after a given amount of time.

Taking that into account if “everyone” were to jump on that band wagon and you fight a dragon it could really hurt the event. If something that is supposed to be a fight for 20 min gets cut to 5 min cause you have 50 people doing 20 bleeds ticking at 140 every second and the bosses health bar just melts away… you might get a different tune out of people. Maybe people will say the events are too easy, or things are too short, perhaps everyone will roll conditions and create a bottle neck to trait choices because people could possibly deem it the most “viable” source of damage for pve or whatever…

Honestly I have no real numbers to back anything up. But I have played enough games to know that in most encounters or player teams or set ups or tournements… call it what you will the DoT’s should never be ignored along with standing in the fire. For a player to use that system, there has to be a control somewhere. Sure I see where the cap hurts most players. However, I never seem to have a problem getting gold in DE. That is just me so I can not speak for everyone. More to the point, maybe the cap should be higher. Most people seem to think 25 is too small, if they raised it to 50 would it be better… noone really knows.

I just thought it would be a possible reason as to why they would want to put a cap there in the first place.

I do see your arguement of how a bunch of people using conditions lose their overall dps. That is where maybe a higher cap could be implemented. If it was based off a 5 man group I think that would be the sweet spot, I just think that anything more then that basing would make large scale events rediculous. Even if the devs added extra health to the boss should that possiblity hit that they melt away, then what happens? If you dont have condition based players at the event it takes a millenia to kill the thing. I dont know, either way the devs are the final judges on this kind of thing. They know the potential of what the DoTs in their game can or can not do. Perhaps it is for a reason altogether different then what I think. But I don’t think you should overlook the possibly reprecussions that could happen if they just altogether threw out the cap.

Much like XXVI Red stated, I have absolutely no idea what the developer’s intentions were behind the bleed cap. Although, a few possibilities certainly come to mind:

1) The most likely reason the cap was instituted was so that the game could be balanced around survivability against both power and condition damage separately. Power/Crit is largely affected by the targets armor, and the more armor the target has, the larger the amount of damage is that gets reduced. Essentially, you’re still losing the same percentage of damage, but it makes dealing incredible amounts more difficult as you begin stacking those stats higher and higher. Conditions, on the other hand, are affected only by vitality. Increasing the vitality of a mob to make an encounter in PvE more difficult while using (specifically) conditions also has a negative impact on power users. The only easy alternatives are to give said encounter a condition removal on a relatively short cool-down, or to instead limit the amount of damage you can deal regardless of how much condition damage you’re using.

2) I have absolutely no numbers to back this up, but it would be easy to assume that they would design condition damage around lower, more consistent damage. Where power/crit builds may be limited to which moments they are easily able to unleash their burst potential, condition based damage continues to add up. Regarding only the effectiveness of killing potential over a longer duration, condition damage would be uncontested if not for a limitation set in place.

3) And of course removing the bleed cap would affect several abilities very negatively. Epidemic and Plague Signet (once fixed) just to name a couple. Imagine pulling up to 100 bleeds onto yourself in any large scale fight in WvW. You’d either be forced to completely forgo the signet, or accept the possibility that it will forcibly be on cool-down 80% of the time it would be of any use. Likewise, epidemic alone would make any add spawns during a mob encounter completely nonexistent. I believe ArenaNet designed the abilities around a bleed damage limitation to specifically make it easier for both game production and further balance at a later date.

4) Additionally, nobody likes to go from 80% > dead simply because they got condition focused in pvp, even while managing to escape.

4) Additionally, nobody likes to go from 80% > dead simply because they got condition focused in pvp, even while managing to escape.

If people actually had a good reason to take more condition removal, there might be less omgwtf levels of burst dps flying around thanks to reassigned utility slots.

The stack limit is arbitrary and unfair. Why should it not be OK to die from a condition focus given that method gives you more time to react and address it, while a burst dps focus usually ends up with you being splattered before you can react?

Only unique condition we have in those situations is Fear.

If you trait/build to get it to 2 seconds with the dmg trait it can do about 1500 per 2 sec fear.

My maths is bad and I should feel bad but if they raised the cap from 25 > 50, the damage exponentially rises because of some mathematical formula associated with it. It’s on the forums somewhere..

Know it would not be ideal but could they just turn additional bleed stacks into direct damage (damage would have to be discussed). So you do not lose out but the scaling would not go over the 25 limit ?
This could also give us a chance of doing some damage to “bleed immune” targets like cannons….

CLS.7681:

Know it would not be ideal but could they just turn additional bleed stacks into direct damage (damage would have to be discussed). So you do not lose out but the scaling would not go over the 25 limit ?
This could also give us a chance of doing some damage to “bleed immune” targets like cannons….

Damage could be all of the DoT in a single instant but the damage produced would be halved or 3/4’d

brickforlife.1364:

My maths is bad and I should feel bad but if they raised the cap from 25 > 50, the damage exponentially rises because of some mathematical formula associated with it. It’s on the forums somewhere..

The formula for bleeding damage is given as follows:

0.5 * Level + 0.05 * Condition Damage + 2.5 = per stack per second damage

Either this formula is incorrect or your statement is incorrect. There is no hidden effect from having multiple bleeds applied to the same target.

I think the 25 limit is fine in PvP, WvW and on non-silver and silver mobs, but it would be nice to raise the limit on champion and dungeon bosses. Kol Skullsmasher and the Nightmare Tree don’t ‘melt away’ with 25 bleeds and it seems silly that a party of condition damage doers would take forever to kill these bosses compared to a party of DPSing glass cannons.

The really sad bit is that we have a minor trait that grant us extra damage when the target has a high number of conditions, but is the grandmaster minor on curses. The one you likely pick up because you want the major that gives 30% extra duration on scepter conditions.

And when we talk about balance, forget PVE of any kind. The balance focus is squarely on PVP esport.

Anyways, looking at our arsenal beyond scepter things get messy.

Staff is ok-ish standing back and blasting in groups, but forget mobility if you try to use it solo. Laying down ground targets while trying to stay out of enemy reach (and not blunder into some others aggro range), ugh…

Axe, bah. I keep trying it, and keep finding that i do better with scepter. Scepter delivers better range and faster damage once the stack is in place. Axe basically makes the fight a long, grinding, experience. And stacking weakness is a bother when going against groups of mobs. Once we drop one of them we need to start over on the next (or pop epidemic, and perhaps anger some fauna in the process) because weakness stack on the mob while, say, might stack on us.

And dagger is a virtual suicide note outside of the DS recharge rate, unless vampirics are clearly bugged to heck (and so far i lean towards working as designed, because there have been little or no indication towards a fix).

Agree Digiowl. I will likely finish my Arah set and shelve my necro until such time as I deem the class upgraded/polished up a bit. We are in need of a lot of help, just to fix bugs, let a lone fine tune it. I really do feel like I am beta testing. Meanwhile, I am watching Mesmers get buffs, while watching the large number of them in WvW create utter havok. I think It WvW is starting to be swarmed with Mesmers, Guardians, Thieves, and a few warriors (though they are decreasing), wherease ele and necro are not there as much.

with the odd sprinkling of ranger (tho i wonder if there are more ranger bots than ranger players at present) and engineer?

I am not surprised tho. Thiefs can deliver as much hurt as warriors, but without the issue of being spotted from far off. Guardians are simply tanks, no ifs or buts about it. Mesmers however are something of a odd duck, as they can be a pain to play in PVE because the mobs are not as easily fooled by the clones. But in PVP their fellow players is likely to have a hard time keeping track of where the actual mesmer is in the middle of any sizable group.

Really? You are going to derail this thread with the standard “Mesmers are op lawlz” comments?

This is a good thread, let’s keep it on topic.

@XXVI Red.5718
i understand your argument. looking at a single individual character there is in fact a sustained dmg (dps) gap between direct damage and condition damage. your gut feeling is considerably over-exaggerated though.
my tests with my full exotic equipped guardian and necro and my warrior show that on your own conditions roughly have a 30% damage advantage over direct damage. that is under the assumption that whatever opponent you have does not remove any conditions and has enough hp to allow you to maintain your max stacks (which are roughly 19 if you go for duration at ~110/tick – buff food/potions and insane might stacks applied by someone else excluded) for a considerable amount of time.

in a group scenario where the 25 stack limit actually mattered that advantage is nearly completely eaten up by the 25 vulnerability stacks on the mob, which increases all direct damage (but not condition damage) by 25% (vulnerability is btw. a condition that imo requires a stack limit, as multiplicative effect that apply to every player are highly dangerous) and boons like quickness and fury.
so allowing unlimited bleed stacks on a world boss would in fact not make him melt away in any shape or form – other than that condition speccs would finally be able to do their fair share of the damage.
even if there would be a damage gap even after calculating in vulnerability, quickness and fury the developers need to consider if it is acceptable to lower the damage of condition speccs by up to 80% just for the sake of preventing the boss to be downed maybe 10% faster. at least to me that doesn’t sound at all reasonable.

@Kayotik.5790
1)+2) independent of the bleed stack limit there already is a very powerful element in place that keeps condition damage in a PvP scenario in check. it’s condition removal. using a condition removal skill once your opponent has reached his max sustainable stack halfs his dps.
as i’ve already outlined there is no such thing as overbearing superiority of condition damage when sustained dps is considered. so those encounters would not require any change (aside from calculating in that condition speccs now do equal damage to direct damage speccs)

3) is indeed an issue. but already broken skills can’t be the justification for a bad system. adds in any encounter epidemic could be abused on with >25 stacks are already insta-wasted by (mostly direct damage) aoe effects placed on the boss.

4) what the hell is condition focused supposed to be? and why shouldn’t you die when you are focused by a big group of people?
assuming i understand your concept of “condition focused” correctly you envision giving 5 players 5 seconds to stack 10 conditions each (i’m really generous here) on you and you would consider it unfair if you die from it even though you “manage to escape”. imagine what would happen if 5 warriors hundred blade you for 5 seconds – each for 10k damage – do you think you would even have the remote chance of “escape”? you can’t magically stack 10 conditions on someone without a considerable ramp-up time – if the opponent is a guardian there is a good chance he would even be able to survive that 5 second encounter without actively using a condition removal ability!

@brickforlife.1364
there is no exponential increase in bleeding damage with higher stacks – the increase is strictly linear.
either the person making that claim was horribly misinformed or you misunderstood him.

For PvE it makes sense for there to be no condition limit on enemies since it is just a detriment to condition damage builds that serves no real balance purposes.

However for PVP, I would keep the stack limit simply to avoid certain abilities from randomly causing an extremely negative effect. It is extremely rare in PVP situations to ever achieve a full stack on a single player for any length of time, let alone theoretically exceed that stack by a large amount. This is due largely to two things: condition removal and mitigation effects in general. Players are always dodging and stunning and attacking and stuff, making it so the condition build has to spend a lot of their time stunning and dodging and stuff, too. It isn’t like with PvE where you can sit back and just hit the enemy with bleed after bleed. Condition removal makes it so the cap is nearly never reached, and you’ll have to apply conditions continually to maintain a decent offense.

There are a couple of abilities that draw conditions or duplicate conditions, and it is here where having no stack would cause a problem. It would make things like the Plague Signet and “Save Yourself” pure suicide in many instances, and more or less just kills the usefulness of those skills.

CLS.7681:

Know it would not be ideal but could they just turn additional bleed stacks into direct damage (damage would have to be discussed). So you do not lose out but the scaling would not go over the 25 limit ?
This could also give us a chance of doing some damage to “bleed immune” targets like cannons….

This is exactly what I would suggest appealing to ArenaNet for. Unless somebody wants to make a graph showing the damage a person does at specific levels of condition damage against targets of various health pools, while simultaneously doing the same for power/crit against a target at differing levels of armor/vitality while taking into account conditions which affect said damage such as weakness and vulnerability, I’m going to presume ArenaNet has a reason for the limitation.

Asking ArenaNet to change something as drastic as this would require a lot of dedicated balancing, something we already know ArenaNet is struggling to maintain.

I can usually get 10-18 stacks a bleed just by myself. Using a scepter dagger combo.

I’ll throw out blood is power. Then number 4 skill. Number 5 skill. Number 2 skill. Number 1 skill spam.

That is how it is done. When you have 5 out of your 9 skills throwing out bleeds, that is absurd. Not to mention well of sufferring and corruption hurts them pretty bad too. In PvP scenarios, I dominate 1v1. Two people though, then I have to go Shroud.

craygz.6143:

as i’ve already outlined there is no such thing as overbearing superiority of condition damage when sustained dps is considered. so those encounters would not require any change (aside from calculating in that condition speccs now do equal damage to direct damage speccs)

Unless you have specifically done the damage comparisons with various elements taken into consideration, what you’re saying is merely speculation. I backed my statement by saying that I didn’t know what ArenaNet hoped to accomplish with the bleed cap- A “Gut Feeling” isn’t going to change the way bleeds currently stack, and if ArenaNet didn’t have a reason, the system would not have been implemented in the first place (Of course, I would personally like to see a dev response to justify it).

craygz.6143:

4) what the hell is condition focused supposed to be? and why shouldn’t you die when you are focused by a big group of people?

This was an edited addition to my post, a one liner reminding players that if the cap is removed and your condition removal is on cool-down, you’re as good as dead without even having been in direct contact with the player(s) who applied it. I’d like to think that this game won’t turn into a “fire-and-forget” game where you DoT the target up, hit tab, and repeat. Most condition removals have longer cool-downs than the duration of the bleeds anyway, and without a cap a group of condition based characters would arguably be more dangerous than a power based one.

You’re not going to fear, kite, knockdown, knock-back, or daze that 10k condition damage. You make it out to sound like condition damage is easier to counter than power/crit. Unless you’re running 2+ condition removals with relatively short cool-downs, this isn’t the case. Making condition damage even more effective would turn this into Condition Wars 2. Although playing a necromancer, I could understand why you want this to happen.

Kayotik.5790:

Unless you have specifically done the damage comparisons with various elements taken into consideration, what you’re saying is merely speculation. I backed my statement by saying that I didn’t know what ArenaNet hoped to accomplish with the bleed cap- A “Gut Feeling” isn’t going to change the way bleeds currently stack, and if ArenaNet didn’t have a reason, the system would not have been implemented in the first place (Of course, I would personally like to see a dev response to justify it).

i did, and you can read my conclusion in the post above. it’s not a gut-feeling on my part but the test i did with my chars – i specifically stated that, so i don’t understand why you are pulling the speculation card now – especially considering your whole argument is based on the speculation that condition damage delivers considerably more dps.
feel free to test it out yourself if you don’t want to believe me.

Kayotik.5790:

This was an edited addition to my post, a one liner reminding players that if the cap is removed and your condition removal is on cool-down, you’re as good as dead without even having been in direct contact with the player(s) who applied it. I’d like to think that this game won’t turn into a “fire-and-forget” game where you DoT the target up, hit tab, and repeat. Most condition removals have longer cool-downs than the duration of the bleeds anyway, and without a cap a group of condition based characters would arguably be more dangerous than a power based one.

You’re not going to fear, kite, knockdown, knock-back, or daze that 10k condition damage. You make it out to sound like condition damage is easier to counter than power/crit. Unless you’re running 2+ condition removals with relatively short cool-downs, this isn’t the case. Making condition damage even more effective would turn this into Condition Wars 2. Although playing a necromancer, I could understand why you want this to happen.

this does not make any sense. removing the cap would not magically allow condition specced players to deal huge amounts of damage in comparison to direct damage.
you can’t apply a decent stack of conditions without being in direct contact with a player. if he can hit you with his condition applying skill you can hit him with your direct damage applying skill.
i just don’t understand why you are supposed to die if you wasted your block and now can’t escape a (few) hundred blades, but are not supposed to die if you wasted your condition removal and let the other player(s) put 10+ stacks of bleeding on you.
you are reasserting that a group of players doing condition damage would be more dangerous than a group a players doing direct damage – do you have any evidence for that? because logic and experience clearly dictates that if condition damage and direct damage are within a comparable dps range (which my tests showed: they are) then in any group scenario focused direct damage is considerably more effective as it does not require any ramp-up (thus takes a number of opponents out of the equation before they can do considerable damage) and can not be cut in half by abundant condition removal.
the functionality of conditions itself – applying damage over a considerably amount of time – denies the possibility of a group of people instagibbing another player via conditions in a way that would not be significantly more easy with a group of direct damage dealers.

condition damage IS easier to counter than direct damage. to apply conditions a player needs to cast skills. those skills can be dodged, blocked, dazed, stunned, etc. pp. just like direct damage skills.
blocking a Grasping Dead negates the damage just as good as blocking a hundred blades.
in addition to those elements that work for both damage types, condition damage can also be countered by condition removal, which is in my experience more than abundant in group settings (which might be due to my main being a guardian – <3 light fields) while direct damage can be mitigated but not negated via armor (which you have depending on your class a relatively small wiggle room) and the protection boon (which is hard to keep up and does not scale with higher numbers of players).

I’ll back up the claim about range. A common stack from a single scepter necro is 10 bleed. That is on par with a warrior running around with various melee weapon auto attacks, even before considering things like the potential of maintaining permanent critical and doubling damage output (or more) via the critical damage modifier.

And that is the big thing here, condition damage do not crit. A single landed critical hit will remove several thousand health. But a stack of bleed only have the potential to do that damage. It still needs to run its duration for that to happen. And at any point during that duration it can be removed by the target or an ally of the target. As such, any increase in in condition duration is a lesser modifier when going for damage via conditions.

in other words:

Direct damage attack = realized damage

Condition damage attack = potential damage

Honestly, i wonder why PVE mobs do not use boons more. They seem downright incapable of doing anything more than push, pull, launch and fear.

If the triviality of condition stacking is as potent as you’re suggesting, then the bleed cap becomes inconsequential. One could even suggest that the cap is a deterrent to prevent everyone from using such a “useless” mechanic.

This, of course, is not the case. And I sincerely doubt that your conjecture about conditions dealing an equivalent amount of damage holds any water. There are too many variables to look at a couple numbers and say, “oh, I’m doing 30% more damage per second against this target, so all targets must be affected in the same way.” Unless you have numbers at varying amounts of toughness with damage-affecting conditions, at numerous levels of condition damage, you’re basing a claim on a large assumption.

Your misconceived notion that I’m defending the bleed cap is preposterous. I’m not saying the bleed cap isn’t annoying; I’m saying that the game was designed around the condition damage limitation. I should hope ArenaNet knows exactly why the cap was put in place, because unless they give a definitive response, anything discussed here is merely speculation.