Guild Wars 2

spoj.9672:

Vulnerability is fine. It only stacks up nicely in dungeons with a decent group. Its actually pretty hard to get sustained 25 vuln with unshakeable.

So it’s not fine. If it ONLY stacks up nicely in dungeons, then it’s broken everywhere else. Any group event out in the open world has you instantly hitting the vulnerability cap without even firing a single shot.

It makes vulnerability irrelevant. You might as well not have vulnerability skills at all in the game, and have every boss in the game have a stack of 25 vulnerability on them by default. Because that’s what it feels like.

Something has to be done about vulnerability, so that it has lasting value during a battle, even if you reach the cap, and want to add more.

spoj.9672:

If you make it individual you ruin another aspect of debuff support and team synergy.

There is no such thing as debuff support and team synergy in PVE. It’s a total mess. Everyone spams their skills at random, until you reach the cap. That’s it.

Something would have to be changed about the importance of something like vulnerability. It is not something every class should have equal access to, to fix some of the current class unbalances. And it should have a bigger impact at lower quantities. For example, it could work similar to aegis, where it triggers on the very first attack on a target, and applies bonus damage, and then it is gone. This would remove the stacks of vulnerability faster. But to make up for the loss of stacks, the effect should be stronger. This would force players to time their synergy better. In a dungeon, this would mean a warrior would wait for vulnerability, before hitting his 100 blades.

spoj.9672:

This is another reason why I dont think bleed cap should be removed. You start to make things look messy and how would traits like target the weak work on a boss that has 3 sets of bleed stacks.

You don’t think it looks messy right now?

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

So it’s not fine. If it ONLY stacks up nicely in dungeons, then it’s broken everywhere else. Any group event out in the open world has you instantly hitting the vulnerability cap without even firing a single shot.

It makes vulnerability irrelevant. You might as well not have vulnerability skills at all in the game, and have every boss in the game have a stack of 25 vulnerability on them by default. Because that’s what it feels like.

Something has to be done about vulnerability, so that it has lasting value during a battle, even if you reach the cap, and want to add more.

Im struggling to understand why you are trying to justify that vuln is bad because it max caps on world bosses. Ofcourse its going to max cap on world bosses with 100’s of people hitting it. You cant remove the cap otherwise the bonus damage everyone will recieve will be something like 500% increased damage.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

There is no such thing as debuff support and team synergy in PVE. It’s a total mess. Everyone spams their skills at random, until you reach the cap. That’s it.

So thats why we specifically include vuln traits in our dps builds? Because it has no team synergy and doesnt improve group dps? Maybe I should stop using vuln because it obviously has no use!

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Something would have to be changed about the importance of something like vulnerability. It is not something every class should have equal access to, to fix some of the current class unbalances. And it should have a bigger impact at lower quantities. For example, it could work similar to aegis, where it triggers on the very first attack on a target, and applies bonus damage, and then it is gone. This would remove the stacks of vulnerability faster. But to make up for the loss of stacks, the effect should be stronger. This would force players to time their synergy better. In a dungeon, this would mean a warrior would wait for vulnerability, before hitting his 100 blades.

This idea isnt too bad but then you will introduce further imbalances like people taking slow larger burstier attack builds and scrap fast attacking builds like dagger necro. You also take away the benefits of having a group that is good maxing vuln for a short duration but cant sustain it constantly. Ironically this would make necro even worse for vuln stacking because of its bursty nature. Which im sure you dont want.

Also going back to using this on world bosses. You would get some people doing something like 500% bonus damage on a single hit every now and again. It would be unbalanced and unfair. I admit bleed cap and vuln cap are a problem on world bosses but they need to be resolved in better ways. Id suggest raising the cap to 100 for both vuln and bleed (only on world bosses) and making higher duration/condi damage take priority.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

You don’t think it looks messy right now?

Seems pretty clean to me. Im not sure what you see as messy. Everything works clearly, its just that things like unshakeable unbalance some classes. Bleed cap is fine so long as they change it so high condi damage stacks take priority.

spoj.9672:

…Bleed cap is fine so long as they change it so high condi damage stacks take priority.

I disagree.

In your solution…
If I play a Necro with ~1300 condition damage and I am in a world event or a dungeon with two other Necros who have 1301 condition damage… I will do literally <20% of the bleed damage I would do when solo. I may do no damage from bleeding if the other two Necros can each maintain 13 stacks. My character is invalidated because there are already two other condition characters in the group who have a better condition damage stat than me? That is not acceptable.

Again, if this applied to direct damage it would be easy to see how silly this is:
Imagine if bosses were capped at losing no more than 5,000 hit points every second. So a Warrior hits the boss with hundred blades and a ranger hits it with a long bow auto attack…. At the same moment, your thief hits the boss with a back stab and does no damage because the cap has been filled by the warrior and the ranger!!! That is not acceptable… but it is the situation with condition damage right now.

Ulari

Theres no easy solution for bleed cap on world bosses. But the only place its an issue is on world bosses with a huge zerg. Something should be done but they have said removing the cap is not an option due to limitations. Which is why im suggesting alternatives that dont inbalance conditions in other areas but also help reduce the issue on world bosses.

spoj.9672:

Theres no easy solution for bleed cap on world bosses. But the only place its an issue is on world bosses with a huge zerg. Something should be done but they have said removing the cap is not an option due to limitations. Which is why im suggesting alternatives that dont inbalance conditions in other areas but also help reduce the issue on world bosses.

Understood.
But I am trying to point out that your proposed solution of keeping the cap and prioritizing who gets stacks is not a ‘good enough’ solution.

I keep coming back to:
—This is an MMO with very friendly grouping and group content.
—And the game encourages many condition builds
—And the game does not support those condition builds in groups
—And ArenaNet has acknowledged that his is a problem (going back to October 2012).
—And WoW solved this in 2008!!!

I realize my frustration is showing… but I feel that we the players need to tell ArenaNet what we see as the problem and let them figure out how to fix it. And I do not want to endorse only easy solutions…

Ulari

spoj.9672:

Im struggling to understand why you are trying to justify that vuln is bad because it max caps on world bosses. Ofcourse its going to max cap on world bosses with 100’s of people hitting it. You cant remove the cap otherwise the bonus damage everyone will recieve will be something like 500% increased damage.

Well that is why it should be redesigned. Dealing 500% increased damage would indeed be silly. Yet if I join any world boss event, the boss is already at max invulnerability at the start of the battle. Kind of defeats the whole purpose of the mechanic does it not? What they need to do, is introduce something that makes players coordinate their invulnerability better, so it isn’t just a giant spam fest.

I’m not saying my idea is the best solution. But something should be done about it.

spoj.9672:

So thats why we specifically include vuln traits in our dps builds? Because it has no team synergy and doesnt improve group dps? Maybe I should stop using vuln because it obviously has no use!

Do any of your team members actually pay attention to when you put up invulnerability, and use their most devastating attacks then? Or do they just go through their usual skill rotation, till the boss drops dead? Because the latter is my personal experience with “team synergy”.

spoj.9672:

This idea isnt too bad but then you will introduce further imbalances like people taking slow larger burstier attack builds and scrap fast attacking builds like dagger necro.

Dagger necro already needs to be looked at, since we don’t have any access to cleave. The problem here is more with dagger, than with my suggestion.

spoj.9672:

You also take away the benefits of having a group that is good maxing vuln for a short duration but cant sustain it constantly. Ironically this would make necro even worse for vuln stacking because of its bursty nature. Which im sure you dont want.

I don’t quite understand your point here. Maybe you can elaborate?

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

spoj.9672:

So thats why we specifically include vuln traits in our dps builds? Because it has no team synergy and doesnt improve group dps? Maybe I should stop using vuln because it obviously has no use!

Do any of your team members actually pay attention to when you put up invulnerability, and use their most devastating attacks then? Or do they just go through their usual skill rotation, till the boss drops dead? Because the latter is my personal experience with “team synergy”.

Yes. Good players shouldnt be using axe 2 on warriors, sword 2 or focus 4 on guard all the time. They should only use them when the vuln drops to about 20. I understand many people dont pay attention to this, but thats often because not many groups can max vuln anyway so spamming them on cd becomes pretty much the best thing to do in a lot of situations. Against trash mobs you definately shouldnt be wasting vuln attacks though, theres no unshakeable to screw it up.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

spoj.9672:

You also take away the benefits of having a group that is good maxing vuln for a short duration but cant sustain it constantly. Ironically this would make necro even worse for vuln stacking because of its bursty nature. Which im sure you dont want.

I don’t quite understand your point here. Maybe you can elaborate?

Basically if you have a group that can stack 25 vuln instantly all that bonus damage gets wasted on one attack especially if they cant reapply that much vuln for quite some time (high cd vuln like on my mark, well of suffering and reapers touch). If you have say an engi that applies constant vuln, or several warriors. The damage is spread out to multiple attacks. Which results in better overall dps. With it going to one attack theres a chance that it gets wasted on a really weak hit.

Necros dont have any sustained vuln except axe auto. But thats pretty terrible sustained vuln. Necros best vuln is from well of suffering and reaper’s touch which are both bursty vuln stackers. Basically it becomes a situation where the best type of vuln is vuln on crit traits. And all other vuln abilities are only good for boosting something like a backstab hit. Its a pretty flawed revamp of vuln basically. But its a creative idea so Ill give you that.

spoj.9672:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Spam about vuln being mindless…

Spam about it not being mindless….

Its mindless, since most skills that apply vuln have close to no cooldown and can keep their vuln up on a boss at least for 50% of their downtime (so 5 people each being able to apply 10 stacks of vuln constantly; aka every power build ever = boss with permanent 25% damage buff). Please stop filling the section with it.

Andele.1306:

… since most skills that apply vuln have close to no cooldown and can keep their vuln up on a boss at least for 50% of their downtime (so 5 people each being able to apply 10 stacks of vuln constantly…

Yeah ok……

just a thought, would it be possible to balance a system where each player’s damage condis fuel a single stack that can stack indefinitely, but you inherit some of each extra player’s damage into your own universal ticks from it?

I’m thinking the cap is mainly there to avoid the engine choking from numbers just as much as the damage concerns, so that would fix both things…. if it could be balanced. :P I’m just thinking, not only does the damage need to be balanced, it also needs to compete with the bursty nature of direct damage.

I don’t really understand why the engine would choke with more than 25 conditions on one target.

In world boss events you can have hundreds of people spamming all sorts of fast direct damage attacks – many with multiple hits.

You would think that tracking conditions, which do slow and predictable damage over time, would be much easier than the randomness and rapid pace of instant direct damage hits.

Ghostextechnica.3270:

I don’t really understand why the engine would choke with more than 25 conditions on one target.

In world boss events you can have hundreds of people spamming all sorts of fast direct damage attacks – many with multiple hits.

You would think that tracking conditions, which do slow and predictable damage over time, would be much easier than the randomness and rapid pace of instant direct damage hits.

I hate comparing MMO’s but…

A very old engine from another mmo can accomodate seperate debuffs for every player hitting the boss, up to a maximum of 40. I can understand that right now, the gw2 engine can’t handle more than 25 stacks of bleeding. That being said, if an old engine can be changed to allow more conditions, there is absolutely no reason a much more advanced engine can’t do it either.

Anet should just realize having that cap is bad, and then just remove it (and they can). It just takes a bit of work, that’s all. Just like fixing culling was hard and then succesfully done.

That old engine still craps over pretty much all of the newer mmo engines when it comes to playability though

Ontopic:
I like how vulnerability works in groups. You keep up like 5~10 or whatever solo, for another 5~10% damage multiplier. When in a group everyone throws together their stacks and ends up with a 25% damage boost for the whole group. That’s how I think grouping and group buffs should work.
Now looking at damaging conditions… as soon as there is another player present you are dramatically losing damage. Complete design failure.

Bawi.9541:

Now looking at damaging conditions… as soon as there is another player present you are dramatically losing damage. Complete design failure.

Yeah and it’s a fairly critical one too – especially for the Necromancer class who has a significant number of skills, talents and weapons designed around dealing out, improving and manipulating conditions.

We want control builds and condition builds to have more of a place in high end PvE.

Condition damage build is just damage.

For world bosses, just reduce bleed cap to 1. After that, turn condition damage into pure damage. This means every bleed applied will instantly do damage instead of bleeding over time. Dungeons can be the same but at a 25 bleed cap. PvP/WvW will not change at bleed caps.

For Control builds, the problem is at the mobs. Mob ai is bad that you can just stack them up by hiding behind a corner. Therefore, you can just dps the cluster of mobs down. Stacking destroys situations where immobilize, cripple, and chill to be useful. Mob need to avoid corners like a plague.

When it comes down to it, the mechanics of this game would have to be rebuilt from scratch, so all this nice theorycrafting and posting suggestions is moot anyway.

The major flaws are in the most basic concepts. Scaling gap between condi and power, the way condis stack, etc.

Dire is comparable to kittening Soldier gear (stats being Xvt) – one being extremely viable as an ‘offensive’ set for certain wvw builds and the other one gets made fun off as soon as it’s mentioned in context with damage.
Berserker is somewhat similar to Rabid (being the highest dps gear for the corresponding builds) – and the result can be seen in the LFG tool.

Condition damage is okay with little investment (focus on 1 stat, plus a pizza if you will), but doesn’t really scale up from there.
Power damage is bad with just power, but shoots through the roof with buff stacking and going all out on the 3 stats that push damage.

I don’t know if it’s entirely moot. Jon Peters mentioned they want Condition builds to have a place in high-end PvE – which suggests they have at least some ideas and are open to doing something.

Unless they just give up on fixing it and incentivise taking a condi build in groups…

NEW: 10 x the gold and loot if you invite a poor condi necro into your group!

By the way, I noticed how a lot of the Risen mobs have way longer fear duration than the player does. And it annoys me, because they have a functional fear, and we don’t. I can fear an enemy away for 1 or 2 seconds, and he comes running right back. But if I get feared, he sends me running halfway across the map (it’s around 4 or 5 seconds I suppose). If I could do that, it would be a viable defense.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

By the way, I noticed how a lot of the Risen mobs have way longer fear duration than the player does. And it annoys me, because they have a functional fear, and we don’t. I can fear an enemy away for 1 or 2 seconds, and he comes running right back. But if I get feared, he sends me running halfway across the map (it’s around 4 or 5 seconds I suppose). If I could do that, it would be a viable defense.

It’d have to be PvE only (it’d be obviously broken as hell in PvP), and lets face it, how many mobs that really put you at risk of death could even be feared like that? Most of them that I notice have immunity of some sort.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

By the way, I noticed how a lot of the Risen mobs have way longer fear duration than the player does. And it annoys me, because they have a functional fear, and we don’t. I can fear an enemy away for 1 or 2 seconds, and he comes running right back. But if I get feared, he sends me running halfway across the map (it’s around 4 or 5 seconds I suppose). If I could do that, it would be a viable defense.

Yes please! I swear I will not abuse 5 second fears in wvw

Bawi.9541:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

By the way, I noticed how a lot of the Risen mobs have way longer fear duration than the player does. And it annoys me, because they have a functional fear, and we don’t. I can fear an enemy away for 1 or 2 seconds, and he comes running right back. But if I get feared, he sends me running halfway across the map (it’s around 4 or 5 seconds I suppose). If I could do that, it would be a viable defense.

Yes please! I swear I will not abuse 5 second fears in wvw

that’s another problem i’ll never understand…

Dev1: ok we have WvW where every player has <30k hp and there will be zergs of 50+ players all fighting each other and fights lasting about 20 seconds.

Dev2: Well in PvE we will have players fighting single bosses with 20millionbillion hp with fights lasts 5-6 minutes.

Dev3: Seems about the same, we’ll apply the same balance to both those game modes.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

that’s another problem i’ll never understand…

Dev1: ok we have WvW where every player has <30k hp and there will be zergs of 50+ players all fighting each other and fights lasting about 20 seconds.

Dev2: Well in PvE we will have players fighting single bosses with 20millionbillion hp with fights lasts 5-6 minutes.

Dev3: Seems about the same, we’ll apply the same balance to both those game modes.

Dev 1: Hey guys, we have over 850 skills in the game, and its already difficult to keep them all bug-free and error free, and it takes a lot of resources to keep them all functional.

Dev 2: What if we took those 850 skills, and made them 2550 skills, that way we could fix each one individually!

Dev 3: Perfect! There couldn’t be any issues with that!

And yes there are over 850 skills in the game, its actually a lot closer to 900, solely including the profession skills, so I’m leaving out all the bundles that thieves get, environmental skills, stuff like that. If you think splitting every single skill into three totally individual skills would make balancing better, you aren’t looking at it from ANet’s perspective. Everything they split becomes a brand new skill. That is another skill that could become bugged, another skill that could have tooltip errors, another skill that could need to have functionality with a trait.

They multiply their workload by 3 if they split every single thing we have, and we all know that they are barely capable of maintaining what they already have.

I’m pretty sure Burn stacks in duration, so your 900 Burn isn’t overridden by a 400 Burn from another source.

MercenaryK.4180:

I’m pretty sure Burn stacks in duration, so your 900 Burn isn’t overridden by a 400 Burn from another source.

Sure, but if you have a Necro with Dhuumfire and another profession or two with burning (Ele and Eng have burn-on-crit) if it takes 1 min of people applying burning to a boss to get to the point where it goes for the whole fight, then every application of burning after that 1 min is completely pointless and a loss in dps vs dps when soloing.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

By the way, I noticed how a lot of the Risen mobs have way longer fear duration than the player does. And it annoys me, because they have a functional fear, and we don’t. I can fear an enemy away for 1 or 2 seconds, and he comes running right back. But if I get feared, he sends me running halfway across the map (it’s around 4 or 5 seconds I suppose). If I could do that, it would be a viable defense.

Defense – I do not think Fear was ever meant to be a defense for Necromancer. It is effectively an interrupt even though it is not counted like one, which I think is unfair. Certainly Warrior’s 3 second, close-range shout, Fear Me, dwarfs any Fear from a Necro but the Necro has more access to its short-term Fears. Sometimes I wish that, instead of Terror, the profession’s Fear became a true interrupt. If any trait-boost to Fear were to substitute for Terror, I would want one that made Fear strip all stacks of Defiant and keep them off for a few seconds.

Not sure if its mentioned already but they could also limit the amount of bleeds accessible to profession and instead making them very powerful. Instead of warriors, engi`s, mesmers etc. spiking 25 bleed stacks on a boss that does 4k dps, make them do a single stack of bleed that deals 4k dps.

Situation now: bleeds do 100-200 damage per tick per stack depending on condi damage
Situation fixed: bleeds do 4000 damage per tick per stack. each class only has acces to 1 skill that has 1 bleed.

The 4000 damage bleed stack would only tick this high if someone build for maximum condition damage. Power based builds that would use this one skill would still tick for 100-200 damage.

Another alternative is to make bleed as much aviable as torment right now. You ever saw a 25 stack torment on anything? Compensate the dps loss in another area like increasing damage per stack discribed like above.

Of course longer fear durations would be overpowered and annoying in wvw, but in PVE it just seems unfair that the devs kinda realized Fear is pretty useless, and thus gave the monsters far longer fears than the players. Either give them the same fear as us, or give us longer fears in PVE. It’s hard enough to get through all those stacks of Defiant, but the least they could do is make the fear actually force the enemy to run away for a while. Now any boss runs back instantly, or doesn’t move at all… and thats if Defiant doesn’t stop the fear. What is the point really?

I would love to know if any devs are reading this.

It’s a pretty good summary of the state of conditions in PvE at the moment, and a huge range of idea to throw around for addressing the issue.

Last night I actually tried to get through all the Defiant. I don’t remember which open world boss it was, but it took us the whole fight to peel down the stack of 30 Defiant, just to get 1 second of Fear, and then the boss was dead. And not because of the devastating power of that 1 second fear. We’d been going at that boss for so long, that by the time we got rid of the last Defiant buff, he was pretty much dead already.