Guild Wars 2

I was running through CM the other day on my conditoin based necro with two other players both running D/D ele. Obviously we were just doing it for fun, and speed was not the goal (I think they are both PVT mostly).

But what I noticed about the 25 stack limit really concerned me.

This really only pertains to PVE, as in PVP these sort of things never happen, but what I found was the following:

Once you have hit 25 stacks of bleeding, the game deals with each new applied bleed in a first in first out stack. Meaning, no mater what, if the mob has 25 bleeds on, and I apply a new bleed, it will push off the oldest applied bleed on the target.

This brings me to what I found in that run in CM. Both eles would churn, and that drops 8 bleeds for 8 seconds each (16 total). Since I normally keep a boss mob at 20+ bleeds, I noticed that when their churn bleeds ended, the target bleeds would drop down drastically (from 25 to ~12) for a few seconds before building back up to 20+.

What seems to be happening, is that regardless of the duration of a bleed, once it is last in line, it gets pushed off no matter what. So if I use blood is power, and it lasts 60 seconds, once my team builds up to 25, my mesmer/ele allies push it right of the stack, even though it would last much longer than any of their bleeds. It also hits much harder than their equivalent.

Can anyone confirm different findings, or perhaps I am getting it wrong? Testing this is so dificult because we have no combat log entries.

I would really prefer the system prioritize longer bleeds over shorter bleeds… It would be even better if it prioritized based on damage of condition, but I could see how that would be a problem in open world events for under-geared condition based heros, where their bleeds would never make it on a mob.

Also noting bleeds and burns. Each player application of the effect will increase the existing effect duration (assuming the mob is already afflicted with the condition), but what also happens is the last player to put the effect on steals the condition damage so to speak. So if I have a non-condition thief poison a target, he will actually prevent my very strong poison from ticking until I reapply poison and steal the stack back.

It bothers me quite a bit that the various limits to conditions on PVE mobs continue to hamper conditoin based hero DPS, but the system really should be tweaked to prevent the above. Oh and remove the bleed cap in PVE.

EDIT: Formatting bug.

That is correct, it pushes the old ones off. It is why you really only ever want 1 or 2 people doing bleeds in a dungeon. I agree that it sucks when you are pugging it, and someone isn’t really doing their job and paying attention it can suck, but it brings up teamwork. If you aren’t doing condition damage, you shouldn’t really be using abilities that apply conditions that damage.

Also, bleed caps are kind of necessary in PvE. Imagine having 100 bleeds on a boss, with each person doing 100 damage per tick, 10000 damage per second? The game is currently balanced with the bleed cap in mind, if they didn’t have it, they would need to increase boss HP, which would make power builds worse off.

I have been curious about this for months, but I couldn’t find a good answer anywhere on the forums. I was distinctly under the impression that poison / burn always ticked the highest intensity version first, but that was based more off of ‘well that would make sense’ than any actual observations.

Somewhat related, but I’m really having a hard time deciding how I would prioritize bleed stacks myself. Which ones you would remove to give the most damage changes based on the situation, and it’s hard to tell from the perspective of a computer that doesn’t know your group’s play style.

I think this could be fixed really easily if they just made the highest DOT tick first, that way you would always wanna aply conditions if you are in a cond dmg spec. It would also fix the issue with guardians stealing all the burning ticks from the condition dmg specced players.

Modimor.4319:

I think this could be fixed really easily if they just made the highest DOT tick first, that way you would always wanna aply conditions if you are in a cond dmg spec. It would also fix the issue with guardians stealing all the burning ticks from the condition dmg specced players.

My concern there is that someone with 1000 condition damage can apply a 2 second bleed and replace a 7 second bleed applied by someone with 700 condition damage. It’s more damage up front, but it can be significantly less damage over time, especially in PvE where condition removal is pretty rare.

You can get similar problems if you just switch it so it’s based on duration remaining. I wish I had a good answer for this but I really don’t right now. :S

Bhawb.7408:

Also, bleed caps are kind of necessary in PvE. Imagine having 100 bleeds on a boss, with each person doing 100 damage per tick, 10000 damage per second? The game is currently balanced with the bleed cap in mind, if they didn’t have it, they would need to increase boss HP, which would make power builds worse off.

Condition damage is not, on a per skill basis, any better then power damage – in fact it’s almost always worse. A skill that does 500 power damage vs a skill that does 100 power damage and 400 condition damage total, how is the condition damage one overpowered if you manage to stack it up to 100 bleeds?

Given equal damage (which, again, due to crit/critD condition almost always does less damage) condition is actually WORSE then power. Imagine how much damage is wasted when that boss dies with 100 bleeds on it – virtually no damage is wasted if all power chars kill the boss.

Power skills don’t do more than 4k damage to a boss in general. Condition skills can easily top that (cough warrior sword offhand cough) and they require only cond dmg stat while getting 4k crits on a boss requires 3 stats (power/prec/crit %).

Yeh… But conditions arent instant… Sure I can apply a bleed that hits for a total of 16k over 1m via Blood is Power… How much dmg does a power build dish out over 1 minute? Answer is probably around several hundred thousand.

The cap only gimps condition builds while making power builds alot better. Conditions never crits for one… My warrior who is by means a zerker can do 15k easily two or three times over with Hundred Blades at the same time our second most powerful bleed runs it course(Enfeebling Blood), especially on an almost stationary target like a boss.
Sure Condition builds stacks bleeds and other hurty conditions so that over a long period of time we can maybe equal a power build in PvE, but with the cap and the way stacking works we will never equal them in effectiveness if there are more condition builds in the group. Which in turn actually limits the effectiveness of condition builds in PUG groups for dungeons, whereas power builds are never limited…

Sure… If we get a group of condition builds and we have a cap of 100, which we will never actually reach since most bleeds die out in a few seconds and do hypothetically 10000 dmg every sec with our 100 bleeds… How much dmg would a full group of power builds do every second, probably way more given that most power builds can hit for 3-5k every second which would equal 15-25k as a group.

The cap is utter and complete bullkitten, it serves no purpose whatsoever.

How much damage do you actually do in a power build, sustained over time? Not that much. In fact, even maxing out power/precision/crit damage, you aren’t going to be doing much more than 3k DPS (even Lich form in a full power build does 5k DPS). A condition build can do over 2.5k DPS easily (even without max investments), and that is using ONE stat, and ONE condition. Add in poison or burning and they are already out damaging power builds, with only one stat compared to three. And this is with the cap, the reality is that some condition builds can go over the cap, heck even my necro can stack 12 bleeds just auto attacking.

Now then, lets say you stack 100 bleeds onto a boss. Hopefully he doesn’t had any adds, otherwise guess who gets to have a complete, overpowered field day? Epidemic. You think Epidemic is an amazing ability now? Wait until it can transfer 100 bleeds to everything in the radius, every 12 seconds. But no, I’m sure that isn’t OP at all…

I haven’t heard ANet’s official stance on the condition cap, but frankly, it doesn’t take a lot to see why it is definitely needed.

To be fair, the only thing that will ever come anywhere close to having even 40 bleeds on it is a giant PvE boss. Any player is dead by then.

The dragons are all immune to condition damage anyway (this DEFINITELY needs to change), so removing the bleed cap as-is would do nothing to them. Other bosses can just have their HP scaled to compensate, though this scaling must be dynamic with the number of players (roughly 10% of the player population at any given event is probably a condition build, ANet would have better data to draw this on)

Bleeds are not a first come first serve. The more powerful bleeds push off the weaker ones. So a 1000 × 3 bleed womb bump a 700 × 5 bleed. And so on. He who has the most condition damage wins.

This is also why you should only run two condition main players in a dungeon. One, main bleeder and one burner or hybrid is great.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180???
Almost no mobs (and for a fact no dragons) except the ones that you are forced to avoid on one god kitten annoying heart or DA (dont remember there is a joke threat about it here on necro forums) are immune to conditions…

If the condition caps were increased/removed Epidemic would have to be nerfed into the ground or even removed though. Imagine being able to spread 50+ bleeds on 5 enemies.

That said, conditions are worse off than direct damage builds in almost every way atm. Not just because of the cap, but because there is hardly any synergy for damaging conditions.

The synergies for direct damage are too good, mainly because of +%crit damage on top of everything else.

Conditions:
- condition damage
- condition duration (although even without any of this you can easily go over 15 bleed stacks with a single necro).

Direct damage:
- power
- precision
- crit damage increase
- vulnerability

Twice as many for direct damage and they all increase the potential of one another. Couple that with the fact so much condition damage is wasted (by hitting the cap, by the target simply dying with multiple stacks on him or by cleansing) and the small advantage of conditions bypassing mitigation just isn’t enough to compare.

The main reason you still see condition builds at all is some classes are being very forcefully pushed in that direction by the utilities and traits they get and that’s mostly because of the tPvP meta which is all about very focused small scale combat.

Conditions are actually stronger than power builds for the very thing you said: there isn’t much that affects their damage. It means that all I need is condition damage/duration, and I have nearly the same damage that power/precision/crit damage would do; less stats for equal damage is a win in my book.

Also, conditions (especially because of things like epidemic), are much stronger in AoE. Are conditions better than direct damage? No, they both have their roles, and I think they are fine as is. Right now, it makes you balance out; two condition damage, some direct, some support, etc. in a group, instead of just going 100% condition damage because it is stronger, or 100% direct. It is fine as is.

Snafoo.2869:

Twice as many for direct damage and they all increase the potential of one another. Couple that with the fact so much condition damage is wasted (by hitting the cap, by the target simply dying with multiple stacks on him or by cleansing) and the small advantage of conditions bypassing mitigation just isn’t enough to compare.

The main reason you still see condition builds at all is some classes are being very forcefully pushed in that direction by the utilities and traits they get and that’s mostly because of the tPvP meta which is all about very focused small scale combat.

While i do agree that crits are too strong in terms of general damage (it by importance it should be Power=>Precision>Crit Damage not Precision>Crit Damage=>Power), remember that all of direct damage also gets reduced by armor/toughness, conditions plain do damage to hp.

Bleed is the red headed step child really. You’d hear a lot less complaints about condition damage being low if you doubled the base damage coefficient but halved the base duration.

You’d have bleeds that were far more dangerous because they’d get in far more DPS before getting cleansed, and more effective DPS in 25 stacks.

Burns do pretty nasty damage as is, and poisons…well, you don’t really use those for the damage.

Overkillengine.6084:

Bleed is the red headed step child really. You’d hear a lot less complaints about condition damage being low if you doubled the base damage coefficient but halved the base duration.

You’d have bleeds that were far more dangerous because they’d get in far more DPS before getting cleansed, and more effective DPS in 25 stacks.

Burns do pretty nasty damage as is, and poisons…well, you don’t really use those for the damage.

That sounds a lot like something i remember, oh yes confusion, it was op as hell in pvp till the 50% cut.

Brew Pinch.5731:

Direct Damage hits per second caps are kind of necessary in PvE. Imagine having more than 1-3 players hitting an enemy at a time for 2000 damage every half second, that could reach WAY over 10000 damage per second! The game is currently balanced with the damage cap in mind, if they didn’t have it, they would need to increase boss HP for some illogical arbitrary reason.
See what I did there?
Getting sick of seeing that ridiculous argument to be honest…

Despite my hate for some of Bhawbs logical gymnastics that would break the spine of every being alive, he was actually right here because direct damage does have a cap, its called the armor of the boss and crit chance. Good exaple is Claw of Jormag who while not weakned by imafirinmahlazor asura cannons takes about 40% of normal direct damage while still taking full condition damage.

Bhawb.7408:

Also, bleed caps are kind of necessary in PvE. Imagine having 100 bleeds on a boss, with each person doing 100 damage per tick, 10000 damage per second? The game is currently balanced with the bleed cap in mind, if they didn’t have it, they would need to increase boss HP, which would make power builds worse off.

Direct Damage hits per second caps are kind of necessary in PvE. Imagine having more than 1-3 players hitting an enemy at a time for 2000 damage every half second, that could reach WAY over 10000 damage per second! The game is currently balanced with the damage cap in mind, if they didn’t have it, they would need to increase boss HP for some illogical arbitrary reason.

See what I did there?

Getting sick of seeing that ridiculous argument to be honest…

Snafoo.2869:

If the condition caps were increased/removed Epidemic would have to be nerfed into the ground or even removed though. Imagine being able to spread 50+ bleeds on 5 enemies.

It would have to be modified, yes. Perhaps epidemic only allows spreading to a cap of 25 bleeds otherwise no bleeds are transferred.
E.G.

• target has 20 bleeds. surrounding enemies have 6. epidemic spreads 19 bleeds to a cap of 25.
• target has 5 bleeds. surrounding enemies have 60 bleeds. epidemic spreads 0 bleeds as the cap has been surpassed.

There are ways to balance epidemic without destroying the skill.

The bleed cap needs to be removed however, it is entirely bad design.

Bhawb.7408:

Conditions are actually stronger than power builds for the very thing you said: there isn’t much that affects their damage. It means that all I need is condition damage/duration, and I have nearly the same damage that power/precision/crit damage would do; less stats for equal damage is a win in my book.

I think what you’re trying to say is ‘condition builds’ here because conditions themselves don’t get any stronger by not scaling with anything else and they don’t scale better than power in general, certainly bleeds don’t.
Except there is no condition/toughness/vitality armor, so you have to invest in another damage stat anyway unless you use Apothecary, but healing power is a fairly poor defensive skill for necros (compared to toughness or vitality).

Bhawb.7408:

Also, conditions (especially because of things like epidemic), are much stronger in AoE.

Conditions are a kind of damage, which is different from how you apply said damage, an important distinction.
In and of themselves conditions have 0 advantage for AoE, necros simply get more Condition based AoE skills. Which, as I said, is one of the many ways in which we are pushed in the direction of conditions despite it overall being sub-par to direct damage.

The basic problem here isn’t down to one thing, the basic design is conditions have advantages and disadvantages as does direct damage and that sounds good.
In practice however condition damage reaches the cap if as little as 2 or 3 condition specced players hit the same enemy.
Add on top of that the multiplicative scaling direct damage enjoys (mainly through +crit damage), which as the addition of Ascended gear and even bigger multipliers shows us will only get worse as time goes on, and Condition damage just doesn’t measure up.

Now people are very creative and they look for other ways to make classes work, because of that there are effective condition builds for necros and rangers for instance (less so for engineers), but that is in no way due to the nature of condition damage.
It is because they find ways to stack fear, or to kite and do incredible healing or they simply make use of the fact that because condition damage is at such a disadvantage it is quite rare and many people run without good condition removal.
Most of these builds are also tailored to very specific (PvP) situations whereas direct damage simply always works to some extent.

Direct dmg over conditions… A warrior can hit for 5k DPS pretty easily, a zerker warrior will probably vary in between 2-7k+ dmg every second… A condition build with pretty much max stats will have bleeds hitting for 150-160(with 10 stacks of Might) dmg every second at most and can sustain 15-20 bleeds on their own, which all take alot of time to apply, and thats around 2.2k to 3.2k dmg every second. I’d say any zerker character wins in dmg output, now group 5 of those and that dmg will be much higher than a group of 5 bleedbuilds even without a cap.
Now add in that many powerbuilds have ways to further increase their dmg output with Might, Fury, Vulnerability and Quickness and their dmg will skyrocket, whereas a Conditionbuild gains very little from these things other than Might.

And well, if we can spread those kitten-ton of bleeds with epidemic, cool, maybe the community will finally come to respect necros as bringing something to the table that other classes just cant equal or exceed… which they can with most things right now.

And this would mostly just affect PvE anyway, which is not a competitive area. Hell grinding dungeons is just plain boring, at least to me, and I am forced to do it over and over again just so I can get gear so I can then do what I find fun – WvW.

Bas.7406:

Bleeds are not a first come first serve. The more powerful bleeds push off the weaker ones. So a 1000 × 3 bleed womb bump a 700 × 5 bleed. And so on. He who has the most condition damage wins.

This is also why you should only run two condition main players in a dungeon. One, main bleeder and one burner or hybrid is great.

Lets all focus off of which is better conditions or direct damage and see if anyone else can verify what Bas has said, because my findings are not in line with this at all.

I have never noticed a system like this in place, and it is very apparent in open world when 30 people are attacking a champion. I apply a lot of bleeds, and on one of those open world bosses, based on the pop up numbers, I may be getting 4-5 bleeds if I am lucky. My condition damage trumps 95% of the people around me or more at all times, and its very easy for me to maintain 20 bleeds. I have 100% bleed duration as well.

What evidence do you have to back this up? What criterion are used to determine who takes over a damage spot on the stack (is it based off of total condition damage per tick, or total condition duration, or total damage dealt of the course of the stack?)

The reason I think this doesn’t work this way, is because and up leveled necro trying to damage a mob with a sceptor would essentially get no stacks of bleeding in open world against champion with just me + one other conditoin hero on the boss. I think Anet would want that up level to feel like he is contributing and not put him at the bottom of the priority list.

The problem with that is it creates issues in teams with a condition based hero, and other hybrid heros that can’t control their bleeds, like mesmers.

I really wish there was a combat log for conditions so this could be confirmed. Can anyone else verify what Bas is saying? I am going to go back to my ele friend with the poison sigil and get him to test this with me later, and come back to confirm.

They could have the cap act similarly to Defiant, in that it increases with the number of people present. Events and such scale with the number of toons present in the fight anyways.

The major issue here are not dungeons, nor mob swarm, but open word bosses. While the impact of conditions hit a hard cap, direct damage scales pretty much linearly with the number of toons present. Meaning that once you hit a 25 stack of maxed out bleed, that is as much bleed damage as will be done for the duration of the fight. But bring in more direct damage toons and more damage will continue to be done as they keep coming to the fight.

Another aspect of this issue is that event rewards appear to be focused around damage done as a gauge of participation.

digiowl.9620:

Another aspect of this issue is that event rewards appear to be focused around damage done as a gauge of participation.

There is some more to it than just damage done, however you are right; that is probably the easiest way for most people to get credit. Although I haven’t ever really noticed it being an issue with big bosses, since the amount of damage you need to do is so small, the only issue I could see is if you came in on the last 5% of HP and couldn’t stack up enough bleeds to get that damage credit in.

Andele.1306:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180???
Almost no mobs (and for a fact no dragons) except the ones that you are forced to avoid on one god kitten annoying heart or DA (dont remember there is a joke threat about it here on necro forums) are immune to conditions…

They aren’t immune to conditions, they are immune to condition damage. There is a definite difference. I know it’s rare, but there are times when they are not bleed capped so you know your bleed is ticking. Guess what? No damage.

The Nightmare Tree (TA explorable) is likewise immune to condition damage.

The bleeds, burning, and confusion do absolutely nothing except count for traits or skills that get bonuses against foes with those conditions. I only know of one of those bosses that heals (Shatterer), so poison at least has a small effect on that one.

Okay, so I was able to test the burn/poison aspect of this:

How those effects work is this, based on what I tested. (poison works the same way)

If I apply a 10 second burn, the mob takes 10 seconds of fire damage based on my conditions every second. If during this time someone else stacks on 10 more second of burning, at say 5 seconds left on my burn, his burn does nothing for 5 seconds, and then will take over all the damage for the next 10 seconds.

What is really disturbing about this, is that if you have someone that can keep 100% uptime on an effect, having someone else in the team using that effect (especially not geared to deal condition damage) it has the potential to ONLY hurt the team.

So say I have a team of 2 power eles, and 1 condition ele…. the condition ele will constantly be fighting for the fire stack, only able to keep his damage component up a third of the time (assuming same skill usage). The power eles would literally have to AVOID fire to prevent decreasing the condition ele DPS.

So if we look at poison, which I can upkeep 100% of the time, and I have a hybrid ele in my team that likes to use the poison-on-attack after skill swap, everytime he poisons the target, I have to wait for his poison to do its damage before I can get damage back from the poisons I am constantly applying.

I would love to get confirmation on exactly how this works with bleeds, but it seems nearly impossible to test since 25 stacks of bleeding are not easy to get on one target without it dying soon after, and the bleed durations would be all over the place.

If I could get a battery of 13 necros using blood is power on the same champion, that would be 25 stacks of 30 seconds each of bleeding. Then I could have someone just auto attack with sceptor (without duration traits/food), and if bleeds started to fall off after 5 seconds or so, we would have the proof. Hell for that matter everyone could start auto attacking and then stop and see what happens. If what Bas says is correct, nothing should change on the mob and he should sit at 25 bleeds until the end of the 30 second timer.

I believe the way it is working is that the most recent applied bleed pushes off the oldest bleed, duration/condition damage not a factor. This would be consistent with the above and how the game looks at and processes first-in first-out.

Can I have 13 necros that want to guest over to assist this evening in testing

I apologize I was slightly incorrect and confused the way durations and bleeds stack. However, it seems that many of you have never read the wiki. In the stacking section, this is stated.

When a boon or condition stacks in intensity from multiple sources, its intensity is the cumulative total of each individual stack.

It also states that intensity stacks are a first come first serve type of application, so if someone stacks 10 of a lower intensity it would behoove you not to try and stack 20 because your last five would not apply until space allowed.

Rennoko.5731:

Okay, so I was able to test the burn/poison aspect of this:

How those effects work is this, based on what I tested. (poison works the same way)

If I apply a 10 second burn, the mob takes 10 seconds of fire damage based on my conditions every second. If during this time someone else stacks on 10 more second of burning, at say 5 seconds left on my burn, his burn does nothing for 5 seconds, and then will take over all the damage for the next 10 seconds.

What is really disturbing about this, is that if you have someone that can keep 100% uptime on an effect, having someone else in the team using that effect (especially not geared to deal condition damage) it has the potential to ONLY hurt the team.

So say I have a team of 2 power eles, and 1 condition ele…. the condition ele will constantly be fighting for the fire stack, only able to keep his damage component up a third of the time (assuming same skill usage). The power eles would literally have to AVOID fire to prevent decreasing the condition ele DPS.

So if we look at poison, which I can upkeep 100% of the time, and I have a hybrid ele in my team that likes to use the poison-on-attack after skill swap, everytime he poisons the target, I have to wait for his poison to do its damage before I can get damage back from the poisons I am constantly applying.

I would love to get confirmation on exactly how this works with bleeds, but it seems nearly impossible to test since 25 stacks of bleeding are not easy to get on one target without it dying soon after, and the bleed durations would be all over the place.

If I could get a battery of 13 necros using blood is power on the same champion, that would be 25 stacks of 30 seconds each of bleeding. Then I could have someone just auto attack with sceptor (without duration traits/food), and if bleeds started to fall off after 5 seconds or so, we would have the proof. Hell for that matter everyone could start auto attacking and then stop and see what happens. If what Bas says is correct, nothing should change on the mob and he should sit at 25 bleeds until the end of the 30 second timer.

I believe the way it is working is that the most recent applied bleed pushes off the oldest bleed, duration/condition damage not a factor. This would be consistent with the above and how the game looks at and processes first-in first-out.

Can I have 13 necros that want to guest over to assist this evening in testing

You are incorrect on one small part of the burn. If the secondary source applies their burn in the middle, and their condition damage is higher, it will interrupt yours until theirs has run out. Read the wiki and then test it. Duration stacking uses an interrupt. If say a 900 cond damage ranger applies a burn, which ticks for 500 for 10 seconds, and you with 1400 cond damage apply a burn of 800 for 3 seconds, your burn interrupts his until your burn is done than his will resume. I have tested this with multiple guild mates.

This prevents weaker damage players from preventing you from doing damage.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Effect_stacking

Bas,

So what does that mean practically?

If a mob is sitting at 25 stacks of bleeding, and I apply 3 bleeds, nothing happens? The stack actually has to have room before I can even get my bleeds in?

And the reason I don’t read or rely on the wiki for things like this, is because the wiki has a habit of not understanding finer mechanics points. Its also populated by normal players, who may or may not understand the mechanics.

Bas.7406:

Rennoko.5731:

Okay, so I was able to test the burn/poison aspect of this:

How those effects work is this, based on what I tested. (poison works the same way)

If I apply a 10 second burn, the mob takes 10 seconds of fire damage based on my conditions every second. If during this time someone else stacks on 10 more second of burning, at say 5 seconds left on my burn, his burn does nothing for 5 seconds, and then will take over all the damage for the next 10 seconds.

What is really disturbing about this, is that if you have someone that can keep 100% uptime on an effect, having someone else in the team using that effect (especially not geared to deal condition damage) it has the potential to ONLY hurt the team.

So say I have a team of 2 power eles, and 1 condition ele…. the condition ele will constantly be fighting for the fire stack, only able to keep his damage component up a third of the time (assuming same skill usage). The power eles would literally have to AVOID fire to prevent decreasing the condition ele DPS.

So if we look at poison, which I can upkeep 100% of the time, and I have a hybrid ele in my team that likes to use the poison-on-attack after skill swap, everytime he poisons the target, I have to wait for his poison to do its damage before I can get damage back from the poisons I am constantly applying.

I would love to get confirmation on exactly how this works with bleeds, but it seems nearly impossible to test since 25 stacks of bleeding are not easy to get on one target without it dying soon after, and the bleed durations would be all over the place.

If I could get a battery of 13 necros using blood is power on the same champion, that would be 25 stacks of 30 seconds each of bleeding. Then I could have someone just auto attack with sceptor (without duration traits/food), and if bleeds started to fall off after 5 seconds or so, we would have the proof. Hell for that matter everyone could start auto attacking and then stop and see what happens. If what Bas says is correct, nothing should change on the mob and he should sit at 25 bleeds until the end of the 30 second timer.

I believe the way it is working is that the most recent applied bleed pushes off the oldest bleed, duration/condition damage not a factor. This would be consistent with the above and how the game looks at and processes first-in first-out.

Can I have 13 necros that want to guest over to assist this evening in testing

You are incorrect on one small part of the burn. If the secondary source applies their burn in the middle, and their condition damage is higher, it will interrupt yours until theirs has run out. Read the wiki and then test it. Duration stacking uses an interrupt. If say a 900 cond damage ranger applies a burn, which ticks for 500 for 10 seconds, and you with 1400 cond damage apply a burn of 800 for 3 seconds, your burn interrupts his until your burn is done than his will resume. I have tested this with multiple guild mates.

This prevents weaker damage players from preventing you from doing damage.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Effect_stacking

I literally just tested this withe a guardian and an ele. I applied my 8 second burn… He applied his 3 second burn… his burn ticks for 420, while mine ticks for 387.

If I start, I keep the stack until my burn runs out, then he takes over (previously he saw no numbers, now I see no numbers). If he starts, I don’t see numbers until his burn has run out.

Actually the wiki is maintained by anet, but it can be updated in a discussion panel after review by them. You are confusing Wikipedia.

Yes if a mob has 25 stacks where 5 stacks have 3 seconds left, and you apply a seven second 5 stack, after 3 seconds your bleed would apply, and be a 4 sec stack of 5. Does that make sense?

I’ve made a couple of changes to the wiki without needing to go through any process. One was a tooltip update (making it match the game’s tooltip and performance) and the others were notes on skill interactions.

Rennoko.5731:

I literally just tested this withe a guardian and an ele. I applied my 8 second burn… He applied his 3 second burn… his burn ticks for 420, while mine ticks for 387.

If I start, I keep the stack until my burn runs out, then he takes over (previously he saw no numbers, now I see no numbers). If he starts, I don’t see numbers until his burn has run out.

Were you in the same party? It sounds like something was broken in the last patch. The last time I tested this was on my ele in December with a guardian and ranger. We were worried about spirit pet burns affecting my burning damage. When tested it worked as the wiki stated.

So in your example, at 25 bleed stacks, 20 bleeds have greater than 10 seconds left to expire, and 5 bleeds are going to expire in 3 seconds. I then apply 8 bleeds with 8 second duration (churning earth). Are you saying that 5 of my 8 bleeds will “wait” until the 5 currently on the target with 3 seconds left to go expire, and then apply? Or that all 8 are wasted because the stack was full?

And also from the wiki to explain my testing:

*When a boon or condition stacks in duration from multiple sources, its strength is applied in the order of application, using the relevant stats for each source. For example, a stronger stack of poison applied over a weaker one must first wait for the weaker stack’s original duration to expire before the increased damage takes effect.(except in the previous example supplied above) *

Meaning if I burn a target with crap condition damage for 10 seconds, its taking crap condition damage for 10 seconds no matter what. After that, if someone with superior cond damage has added say 20 second of burn on, it will tick up as it is using them as the source. Now if we both continue to apply burns consistently to keep burn going, I will get credited for his increased damage when its my turn to burn, as long as he is still putting burns on as well.

The point still remains that the stack shifts around to different players. I guess it is good that at the very least it is using the highest coefficient no matter what, meaning overall damage stays the same. (except in the just stated example).

EDIT: And yes, same party.

I checked over the Wiki and I don’ think it goes into enough detail about what happens at 25 stacks of bleeding. The working for intensity stacking is very generic.

One of four things happens at 25 stacks of bleeding: .

1. New bleeds applied do nothing. Stack is full, bleeds don’t apply.
2. New bleeds applied push off oldest bleeds, regardless of duration.
3. New bleeds applied push off only older bleeds that are shorter in duration, and if none are available, they do not apply.
4. New bleeds applied are looked at for total damage done over their applied duration, and any bleeds sitting in the stack with lower total damage done over duration are kicked off. If none are available, bleed isn’t applied.

The best possible case is 4. It also is the least likely to be happening. I still think case 2 is what is happening. I am open to suggestions on testing.

Still all the cap does is gimp condition builds who already suffer against many bosses and such, them being objects(having yellow healthbars)… And objects cant really be hurt by a condition build who derives their dmg from things that dont affect objects.

Other than that, power builds still outdamage condition builds even if you can keep up 20 stacks of bleeding on your own… And even if you are a whole party where everyone keeps up 20 stacks for a total of 100, five power builds will still outdamage the conditionbuild party.

Cap on Bleeds is just utterly and completely silly… Amongst other things because it is a condition and can be wiped away with the press of one button for most classes, poof 25 stacks of bleeds gone with one button push… Thats alot of dmg and many skill uses for the condition build that just gets wiped away, direct dmg dealers do not have to deal with that at all.
The only reason that condition builds are semi-viable is because not everyone packs condition removal.

Drachshyish.2319:

Cap on Bleeds is just utterly and completely silly… Amongst other things because it is a condition and can be wiped away with the press of one button for most classes, poof 25 stacks of bleeds gone with one button push… Thats alot of dmg and many skill uses for the condition build that just gets wiped away, direct dmg dealers do not have to deal with that at all.
The only reason that condition builds are semi-viable is because not everyone packs condition removal.

I think you are underestimating conditions. Since you are taking pvp let’s look at pvp. Every single tourney team brings condition dealers, because they are an amazing source of damage. I can not remove stacks as fast as you can reapply them. If I use them too early, you will hit me with the hard stack. In this case, no matter what I do, you will always have damage ticking. Lets add that not only is it ticking at. 2.2 you are still hitting me with direct damage.

Are you as high as a power build no. But you still deal serious damage. To top it off almost every burst build can be dodged, and is heavily reliant on cries to drop someone down fast enough. You have ticking damage as well as consistent direct damage followed by the fact that you can keep moving during this time. Only guardians and elementalist can cleanse at 10 seconds. No one else can this is why condition builds are effective. Plus any time someone is doing something besides damage that’s a plus. A cleanse works as well as a blind.

Lets hit one more of your common complaints. 3 condition guys find me in pvp, they stack conditions I cleanse, they restack the conditions, it doesn’t matter if I escape the damage is still going to hurt me. I could not cleanse fast enough to clear it. In the same vein 3 direct damage guys find me. If they don’t lock me down. I can avoid their damage and keep hitting them. They lock me, I stun break and escape with minimal damage.

The only time condition builds really see a negative is in dungeon runs if you have three bleeders, and no one decides to bring a different utility.
Both direct damage and condition damage has their advantages and disadvantages. The difference is its easier to see when direct damage works perfectly because you get cool effects.

For example, a necro who hits me with 25 bleed stacks, a poision, and a chill when ,y health is on cd will kill me just as fast as a 100b warrior, except I can’t dodge out of the 25 bleeds.

Snafoo.2869:

If the condition caps were increased/removed Epidemic would have to be nerfed into the ground or even removed though. Imagine being able to spread 50+ bleeds on 5 enemies.

That said, conditions are worse off than direct damage builds in almost every way atm. Not just because of the cap, but because there is hardly any synergy for damaging conditions.

The synergies for direct damage are too good, mainly because of +%crit damage on top of everything else.

Conditions:
- condition damage
- condition duration (although even without any of this you can easily go over 15 bleed stacks with a single necro).

Direct damage:
- power
- precision
- crit damage increase
- vulnerability

Twice as many for direct damage and they all increase the potential of one another. Couple that with the fact so much condition damage is wasted (by hitting the cap, by the target simply dying with multiple stacks on him or by cleansing) and the small advantage of conditions bypassing mitigation just isn’t enough to compare.

The main reason you still see condition builds at all is some classes are being very forcefully pushed in that direction by the utilities and traits they get and that’s mostly because of the tPvP meta which is all about very focused small scale combat.

If they lifted the condition cap only on champions and legendary mobs, you would not have this issue.

champions don’t ragequit when they get nerfed.

300 people stacking conditions on a dragon the size of a medium fortification with a max cap of 25 stacks is “S T O O P I D” stupid.

Because PvE content in this game is just so hard we need to make it even easier… right?

Bhawb.7408:

Because PvE content in this game is just so hard we need to make it even easier… right?

We need to make condition specs capable of getting credit sir.

Right now, you get 300 people whacking away at a dragon. They all clobber one another’s bleeds, and the only person who gets credit is the one with the highest condition damage on his gear.

meanwhile, the fight takes for EVER because the max cap is 25 per mob.

That’s pretty f-in stupid.

Either make it 25 max per attacker on champion rank and above, or simply move the condition cap to 65535 on champion rank or above.

Rennoko.5731:

I checked over the Wiki and I don’ think it goes into enough detail about what happens at 25 stacks of bleeding. The working for intensity stacking is very generic.

One of four things happens at 25 stacks of bleeding: .

1. New bleeds applied do nothing. Stack is full, bleeds don’t apply.
2. New bleeds applied push off oldest bleeds, regardless of duration.
3. New bleeds applied push off only older bleeds that are shorter in duration, and if none are available, they do not apply.
4. New bleeds applied are looked at for total damage done over their applied duration, and any bleeds sitting in the stack with lower total damage done over duration are kicked off. If none are available, bleed isn’t applied.

The best possible case is 4. It also is the least likely to be happening. I still think case 2 is what is happening. I am open to suggestions on testing.

They could also prioritize the bleeds based off of condition damage, so the lowest damage per tick bleed gets taken off regardless of duration. It could also be a hybrid of any of these ideas.

I really wish that I could come up with a good way to test this… I can think of ways to test if stacks are applied, but no good way to tell which stacks are removed.

To test application, you’d have a stack of 25 bleeds with at least 4 seconds of duration remaining on all 25 bleeds by the time they get on there, applied by other people.

Then immediately apply a few short-duration bleeds (1-2 seconds?) yourself with much higher / lower condition damage and see if you get numbers boucing off of your target. Since you don’t see the bouncing numbers for other people’s conditions, you’d know yours were on there. (You’d need to do it twice: once with high Cond. D, once with low Cond. D).

You could do a similar thing with blood is power to test if long duration bleeds (blood is power is easily one of the longest out there, so it’s easy to outweigh anyone else’s in that regard) get a bias for pushing other bleeds off the stack, at high or low Cond. D.

EDIT: Something like 3 necromancers providing the bleed stack and 1 testing for removal at various levels of Condition Damage? If they all use blood is power, deathly swarm, enfeebling blood, mark of blood rapidly, that’s 27 bleeds with at least 6 seconds of duration remaining, (assuming no bonus condition duration) which is more than long enough to test how throwing additional bleeds affects the stack.

plasmacutter.2709:

We need to make condition specs capable of getting credit sir.

If you don’t get credit for fighting a boss, its your own fault. Even condition-heavy specs deal direct damage. It doesn’t take much to get credit on these big fights, just sit there with your weapon and auto attack.

The only reason I am leaning towards 2 above is by the simple fact that I build for condition damage, but every event that bring more people (like champions at orr), I see less and less numbers bouncing off the target, but I am doing the same rotations. I can tell you for a fact that very few people are running around with more condition damage than me.

I am not entirely sure I believe the wiki on poison bleed. But, I did not test the exact scenario they mentioned, and I would need someone else reporting back their poison damage to verify. In either case, it doesn’t matter to much to me, as I know the best way to go in the PVE world is to tell my guildies to keep poison off their bar.

As far as all the discussion above about conditions vs. direct damage builds, you are overstating the case. If conditions were really as good as you point out, there would not be such a huge disparity between condition/hybrid/direct builds.

Like this comment from above:

*For example, a necro who hits me with 25 bleed stacks, a poison, and a chill when my health is on cd will kill me just as fast as a 100b warrior, except I can’t dodge out of the 25 bleeds.

That has got to be the worst example in favor of conditions being in a comfortable place. You ignore the time required to get to 25 stacks of bleed (assuming you could actually get there in PVP). A warrior has 100 blades at an 8 second cooldown. It would require an extraordinary effort to stack up anywhere close to 25 bleeds in 8 seconds in PVP, and even if you could, you couldn’t do it again after a clear.

I think conditions are fine in PVP, but stating they are equal or better than direct damage builds isn’t true. The use of conditions vs. direct damage is always going to be a case by case situation where the effectiveness of one over the other is completely determined by the enemy build. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but not categorically better.

Rennoko.5731:

I checked over the Wiki and I don’ think it goes into enough detail about what happens at 25 stacks of bleeding. The working for intensity stacking is very generic.

One of four things happens at 25 stacks of bleeding: .

1. New bleeds applied do nothing. Stack is full, bleeds don’t apply.
2. New bleeds applied push off oldest bleeds, regardless of duration.
3. New bleeds applied push off only older bleeds that are shorter in duration, and if none are available, they do not apply.
4. New bleeds applied are looked at for total damage done over their applied duration, and any bleeds sitting in the stack with lower total damage done over duration are kicked off. If none are available, bleed isn’t applied.

The best possible case is 4. It also is the least likely to be happening. I still think case 2 is what is happening. I am open to suggestions on testing.

I think only damage pr tick is taken into account, not duration at all.

Meaning that a 1 second 25 damage bleed can push out a 5 second 20 damage bleed simply because the pr tick damage is lower.

Softspoken.2410:

Modimor.4319:

I think this could be fixed really easily if they just made the highest DOT tick first, that way you would always wanna aply conditions if you are in a cond dmg spec. It would also fix the issue with guardians stealing all the burning ticks from the condition dmg specced players.

My concern there is that someone with 1000 condition damage can apply a 2 second bleed and replace a 7 second bleed applied by someone with 700 condition damage. It’s more damage up front, but it can be significantly less damage over time, especially in PvE where condition removal is pretty rare.

You can get similar problems if you just switch it so it’s based on duration remaining. I wish I had a good answer for this but I really don’t right now. :S

What Anet should do is to figure out what the average direct damage dps is(for a direct damage player), against champs and bosses. Then allow condition damage players to maintain their own individual condition stacks against enemies, modified by boss/champ stats like Defiant (i.e., a champ with Defiant limits each players bleed stacks to 12), to achieve something similar to the avg direct damage dps . As for Epidemic, just cap the stacks of the conditions it can spread to match whatever ceiling is set by the enemy.

I main WvW, not sPvP or tPvP. Finding that your recently spread Epidemic just vanishes instantly is very common, all it takes is one bunker ele or guardian with the right stuff and poof.
And to top it off… 150 dmg per tick from bleeds with 1800 condition dmg and 10 stacks of Might. Getting much better than that is rare indeed. So most direct dmg builds do actually out damage a condition build quite easily in PvE. Especially at lower lvls than 80.

I still maintain that the bleed cap is complete bullkitten, and will always do so. Not even Bas’ and Bhawbs arguments can sway me from that viewpoint given that they dont agree with the math ive done or my experiences ingame.

Sure, I do agree that it can become very powerful in very rare instances with no cap. But no more so than thieves hitting for 19k with a backstab, which someone supposedly experienced.
Especially in WvW where many thieves can have permanent stealth due to the culling issues… which of course is a whole other problem.

Rennoko.5731:

I checked over the Wiki and I don’ think it goes into enough detail about what happens at 25 stacks of bleeding. The working for intensity stacking is very generic.

One of four things happens at 25 stacks of bleeding: .

1. New bleeds applied do nothing. Stack is full, bleeds don’t apply.
2. New bleeds applied push off oldest bleeds, regardless of duration.
3. New bleeds applied push off only older bleeds that are shorter in duration, and if none are available, they do not apply.
4. New bleeds applied are looked at for total damage done over their applied duration, and any bleeds sitting in the stack with lower total damage done over duration are kicked off. If none are available, bleed isn’t applied.

The best possible case is 4. It also is the least likely to be happening. I still think case 2 is what is happening. I am open to suggestions on testing.

I try never to quote myself, but I thought I would go ahead and end the speculation:

As it turns out the above option 2 is what actually happens in game, contrary to what people are saying.

I had 3 level 15 elementalists with no gear churn the same champion mob in wvw that I already had 20+ bleeds on… want to hazard a guest what happened?

It knocked off all of my bleeds but one. I can tell based on the fact that my damage tick bounced up once per second… pretty definative proof that the system DOES NOT prioritize damage on bleeds, or duration, or anything. New bleeds knock off old bleeds, simple as that.

This is really awful for condition based heros in PVE events…. and it really should be looked into. Everyone elses incidental bleeds knock off my high damage bleeds… pretty sad. Not happy at all with this realization.

Rennoko.5731:

Rennoko.5731:

I checked over the Wiki and I don’ think it goes into enough detail about what happens at 25 stacks of bleeding. The working for intensity stacking is very generic.

One of four things happens at 25 stacks of bleeding: .

1. New bleeds applied do nothing. Stack is full, bleeds don’t apply.
2. New bleeds applied push off oldest bleeds, regardless of duration.
3. New bleeds applied push off only older bleeds that are shorter in duration, and if none are available, they do not apply.
4. New bleeds applied are looked at for total damage done over their applied duration, and any bleeds sitting in the stack with lower total damage done over duration are kicked off. If none are available, bleed isn’t applied.

The best possible case is 4. It also is the least likely to be happening. I still think case 2 is what is happening. I am open to suggestions on testing.

I try never to quote myself, but I thought I would go ahead and end the speculation:

As it turns out the above option 2 is what actually happens in game, contrary to what people are saying.

I had 3 level 15 elementalists with no gear churn the same champion mob in wvw that I already had 20+ bleeds on… want to hazard a guest what happened?

It knocked off all of my bleeds but one. I can tell based on the fact that my damage tick bounced up once per second… pretty definative proof that the system DOES NOT prioritize damage on bleeds, or duration, or anything. New bleeds knock off old bleeds, simple as that.

This is really awful for condition based heros in PVE events…. and it really should be looked into. Everyone elses incidental bleeds knock off my high damage bleeds… pretty sad. Not happy at all with this realization.

Ugh, that’s depressing. I assume you had at least two bleeds on there that were really long (+8 seconds at time of Churn) duration too?