Guild Wars 2

This is something I’ve never understood. When you’re fighting a single target boss, say in a dungeon or on the world map, why does the bleeding cap at 25? Say you run in, hoping to get in some damage and have a role, but the stacks of Bleed are already up to 25. If Bleeding is your main source of damage, you’ll be hitting like a girl in a pillow fight. Why have this cap?

To my understanding, Bleeding damage is supposed to be like Critical Damage, just used in different situations. Precision and Critical Damage determines hard hitting, and then Condition Damage and Duration determines lots of bleeding. Critical Damage is for bursting, while Bleeding is for damage over time. Critical Damage is affected by a targets armor, while Bleeding is not but can be removed or cleansed. Both do not affect structures, but both are good for multiple targets. The biggest problem is see with this though, is the fact that Crits do not cap, while bleeding does. If you have 5 Crit Damaging builds fighting, and 5 Bleeders, the Crit aren’t going to suffer a damage negation while fighting. They can keep on swinging and hitting their 5-9k’s. The bleeders won’t be able to do this, because the stacking cap, and will only be able to pump out around 5k per second between all of them. So in a big boss fight, 5 bleeders is the equivalent to one hard hitter. Why do these builds suffer this much? Even worse still, why even make the cap so low that it would only take one person to fill it? My necro can easily stack 25 bleeds in only one rotation of both weapons. This is amazing for soloing, but sucks when I’m in a group of people like me. So why are bleeding builds forever meant to be away from each other to be effective, while the Crit guys do so much damage while they’re in a group with their own? I don’t really see any trade-off that Bleeding has over Crits to make it worth capping And if the cap was lifted, would it be so bad? I don’t really think so. It would just allow for people to do the damage that their intended to do.

Does anyone else agree with this?

According to ANet, the cap is a technical limitation brought on by the way conditions are tracked. Basically, the servers have to track all the conditions on every entity on that server, limiting it to 25 stacks limits the maximum amount they would need to track at any time, and increasing that limit would increase possible server load. Take that how you will.

I take that as ugh. Just ugh.

so this long, and it still is a technical limitation?

It isn’t like they are going to change it with time, or that 3 months is going to fix it. It was a technical limitation when they built the game, it isn’t something that they will be able to just fix in a few months, it is a matter of massive server strain increase if they raise the limit.

Conspiracy theorists say the bleed cap is to ensure bosses are not taken down solely by ranged attacks and kiting.

If they did have a cap you would see mobs with 200+ stacks on them.

Anchoku.8142:

Conspiracy theorists say the bleed cap is to ensure bosses are not taken down solely by ranged attacks and kiting.

Puts on tinfoil hat.

This is why there are bleed caps. Without them, bleeding, ranged, and kiting would be king and would roflstomp everything in its path.

Then the complaint would change to:

“This game sucks. It’s too easy. I can just stack up scores of bleeds on an enemy, sit back, and watch them bleed out. I can solo every boss and champion in the game with my eyes closed. No challenge at all. When are they going to introduce real challenge and stop designing the game for casual baddy care-bears?”

And, thus, you have bleed caps.

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

“This game sucks. It’s too easy. I can just stack up scores of bleeds on an enemy, sit back, and watch them bleed out. I can solo every boss and champion in the game with my eyes closed. No challenge at all. When are they going to introduce real challenge and stop designing the game for casual baddy care-bears?”

[sarcasm]Man, I know right. Its a great thing ANet put on bleed caps to preserve the hardcore gameplay we have now. I just couldn’t imagine seeing this game becoming faceroll easy.[/sarcasm]

Bhawb.7408:

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

“This game sucks. It’s too easy. I can just stack up scores of bleeds on an enemy, sit back, and watch them bleed out. I can solo every boss and champion in the game with my eyes closed. No challenge at all. When are they going to introduce real challenge and stop designing the game for casual baddy care-bears?”

[sarcasm]Man, I know right. Its a great thing ANet put on bleed caps to preserve the hardcore gameplay we have now. I just couldn’t imagine seeing this game becoming faceroll easy.[/sarcasm]

Agreed. PvE is facerole easy. Was just trying to answer the OP’s question of why ArenaNet felt compelled to implement bleed caps. I’m not saying it was a good solution. Just that it was an attempt at a solution.

The thing with the bleed caps is I’m still not sure how it works. Say I (a necro) have 1500 condition damage and a ranger has 1200 and a thief has 1400, and the three of us capped bleeds at 25, I’m responsible for 12, ranger 8 and thief 5.

It makes the most sense that my 12 ticks does my condi damage and the thief’s 5 gets his condi and ranger his, but there’s no real way of knowing how many ticks each person is responsible for.

Also if I’m on my zerk warrior or thief and doing 3-4k damage per autoattack, I don’t really care if the guy next to me is doing 1k damage or 7k, it doesn’t affect my damage output at all. If I’m with another condi necro now its like “hey do you have more condi damage than I do? You do? Well kitten , I guess I’ll try to get out of your way then…”

There needs to be a better solution to bleeds. Perhaps leave the cap at 25 but make it 25 per person so each person gets their own bleed ticks and they feel less useless

Silver.4798:

The thing with the bleed caps is I’m still not sure how it works. Say I (a necro) have 1500 condition damage and a ranger has 1200 and a thief has 1400, and the three of us capped bleeds at 25, I’m responsible for 12, ranger 8 and thief 5.

It makes the most sense that my 12 ticks does my condi damage and the thief’s 5 gets his condi and ranger his, but there’s no real way of knowing how many ticks each person is responsible for.

Also if I’m on my zerk warrior or thief and doing 3-4k damage per autoattack, I don’t really care if the guy next to me is doing 1k damage or 7k, it doesn’t affect my damage output at all. If I’m with another condi necro now its like “hey do you have more condi damage than I do? You do? Well kitten , I guess I’ll try to get out of your way then…”

There needs to be a better solution to bleeds. Perhaps leave the cap at 25 but make it 25 per person so each person gets their own bleed ticks and they feel less useless

You’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head with regards to the argument against bleed caps. I believe ArenaNet has hinted they may revisit the issue of individual caps at some point. Sorry, I don’t have anything to back that up other than just a vague memory of something mentioned in passing in an interview or blog post.

The other option is to give the bosses the same kind of skills as players, including condition cleansing etc. Rather than relying on a “hacky” solution of stacks of defiant, how about some boss skills that allow them to stun break when feared on a fairly fast rotation.

Silver.4798:

The thing with the bleed caps is I’m still not sure how it works. Say I (a necro) have 1500 condition damage and a ranger has 1200 and a thief has 1400, and the three of us capped bleeds at 25, I’m responsible for 12, ranger 8 and thief 5.

It makes the most sense that my 12 ticks does my condi damage and the thief’s 5 gets his condi and ranger his, but there’s no real way of knowing how many ticks each person is responsible for.

Also if I’m on my zerk warrior or thief and doing 3-4k damage per autoattack, I don’t really care if the guy next to me is doing 1k damage or 7k, it doesn’t affect my damage output at all. If I’m with another condi necro now its like “hey do you have more condi damage than I do? You do? Well kitten , I guess I’ll try to get out of your way then…”

There needs to be a better solution to bleeds. Perhaps leave the cap at 25 but make it 25 per person so each person gets their own bleed ticks and they feel less useless

WoW does something similar to that personal bleed cap. For warlocks, they can use their dots on an enemy boss but instead of capping the dots out to one debuff, they have multiple instances of the same dots on the enemy.

Say I’m using the warlock corruption spell and another warlock comes up and uses it. His corruption will not increase the duration of mine, but will rather be set right next to mine on the debuff location, both with individual countdown timers and damage.

There is a problem with this set up that rises then. If we all had our own personal bleed cap of 25, think of how many people are applying bleeding to that boss. Five people could run a bleed build, get to 25 stacks each, thus making the boss bleed 125 times a second. If everyone, and most likely they will be, was running with exotic condi-gear, we’re looking at a large, REALLY large number of bleeding damage being done. and thats just 5 people.

Zergs tend to be 40+ people. Even with the compensation events do to scale enemies up for multiple people, 125 bleeding a second from 5 fully decked out guys is a lot and would probably wreck most legendary bosses. I know my condition damage can do anywhere from 130-170 depending on the location buffs, so if say we had 5 people doing 125 bleed a second at ~150 a tick per stack.. You’re looking at 18,750 damage a second. From 5 people. let that sink in.

It’s not just server load that would have an issue, its the mechanics of the game. It needs to be capped out like it currently is otherwise we would see bosses with like 500 million health or 5 billion health like in WoW. Do you honestly want to sit there fighting a Destroyer legendary or a Risen legendary with 5 billion health? That would make me wonder how much an elder dragon would have if we actually fought one.

Then you would have elitists who would require you to be able to hit 25 stacks mandatory if you wanted to group/speed run with them.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if they increased the cap to 50. 25 is very easily reached in zergs and sometimes in just a full party. Hell, 30 or 40 would be cool too, but thats just something I’d like to see, not necessarily required for my personal enjoyment of the game.

ArtemusHunter.9521:

Silver.4798:

The thing with the bleed caps is I’m still not sure how it works. Say I (a necro) have 1500 condition damage and a ranger has 1200 and a thief has 1400, and the three of us capped bleeds at 25, I’m responsible for 12, ranger 8 and thief 5.

It makes the most sense that my 12 ticks does my condi damage and the thief’s 5 gets his condi and ranger his, but there’s no real way of knowing how many ticks each person is responsible for.

Also if I’m on my zerk warrior or thief and doing 3-4k damage per autoattack, I don’t really care if the guy next to me is doing 1k damage or 7k, it doesn’t affect my damage output at all. If I’m with another condi necro now its like “hey do you have more condi damage than I do? You do? Well kitten , I guess I’ll try to get out of your way then…”

There needs to be a better solution to bleeds. Perhaps leave the cap at 25 but make it 25 per person so each person gets their own bleed ticks and they feel less useless

WoW does something similar to that personal bleed cap. For warlocks, they can use their dots on an enemy boss but instead of capping the dots out to one debuff, they have multiple instances of the same dots on the enemy.

Say I’m using the warlock corruption spell and another warlock comes up and uses it. His corruption will not increase the duration of mine, but will rather be set right next to mine on the debuff location, both with individual countdown timers and damage.

There is a problem with this set up that rises then. If we all had our own personal bleed cap of 25, think of how many people are applying bleeding to that boss. Five people could run a bleed build, get to 25 stacks each, thus making the boss bleed 125 times a second. If everyone, and most likely they will be, was running with exotic condi-gear, we’re looking at a large, REALLY large number of bleeding damage being done. and thats just 5 people.

Zergs tend to be 40+ people. Even with the compensation events do to scale enemies up for multiple people, 125 bleeding a second from 5 fully decked out guys is a lot and would probably wreck most legendary bosses. I know my condition damage can do anywhere from 130-170 depending on the location buffs, so if say we had 5 people doing 125 bleed a second at ~150 a tick per stack.. You’re looking at 18,750 damage a second. From 5 people. let that sink in.

It’s not just server load that would have an issue, its the mechanics of the game. It needs to be capped out like it currently is otherwise we would see bosses with like 500 million health or 5 billion health like in WoW. Do you honestly want to sit there fighting a Destroyer legendary or a Risen legendary with 5 billion health? That would make me wonder how much an elder dragon would have if we actually fought one.

Then you would have elitists who would require you to be able to hit 25 stacks mandatory if you wanted to group/speed run with them.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if they increased the cap to 50. 25 is very easily reached in zergs and sometimes in just a full party. Hell, 30 or 40 would be cool too, but thats just something I’d like to see, not necessarily required for my personal enjoyment of the game.

the damage argument never makes sense to me because condition damage is damage over time instead of all at once. Not more or less, just a different time scale. If EVERYONE went power builds, those bosses would be down a lot faster than with kitten condition builds like now.

I’d actually be interested to see if it would be a big change. Someone look up how much DPS 25 stacks of bleeds would do, along with about 50% burning and 100% poison uptime would do compared to what is now done by direct damage. If each person could output the same DPS or close to it, condition wins easily because of the ranged nature compared to generally melee high DPS.

Also, seriously guys stop with the conspiracy. ANet might have settled on the specific 25 bleed cap for balance reasons, but again its a technical limitation. It isn’t that they were all manically laughing in an office going “we know how to keep those idiot condition users down, mwahahah!”, they did it because of the server stress caused by having to track so many conditions. If they do ever fix it, I would imagine it would be down to a complete rehaul on the condition mechanics backend.

ArtemusHunter.9521:

Silver.4798:

The thing with the bleed caps is I’m still not sure how it works. Say I (a necro) have 1500 condition damage and a ranger has 1200 and a thief has 1400, and the three of us capped bleeds at 25, I’m responsible for 12, ranger 8 and thief 5.

It makes the most sense that my 12 ticks does my condi damage and the thief’s 5 gets his condi and ranger his, but there’s no real way of knowing how many ticks each person is responsible for.

Also if I’m on my zerk warrior or thief and doing 3-4k damage per autoattack, I don’t really care if the guy next to me is doing 1k damage or 7k, it doesn’t affect my damage output at all. If I’m with another condi necro now its like “hey do you have more condi damage than I do? You do? Well kitten , I guess I’ll try to get out of your way then…”

There needs to be a better solution to bleeds. Perhaps leave the cap at 25 but make it 25 per person so each person gets their own bleed ticks and they feel less useless

WoW does something similar to that personal bleed cap. For warlocks, they can use their dots on an enemy boss but instead of capping the dots out to one debuff, they have multiple instances of the same dots on the enemy.

Say I’m using the warlock corruption spell and another warlock comes up and uses it. His corruption will not increase the duration of mine, but will rather be set right next to mine on the debuff location, both with individual countdown timers and damage.

There is a problem with this set up that rises then. If we all had our own personal bleed cap of 25, think of how many people are applying bleeding to that boss. Five people could run a bleed build, get to 25 stacks each, thus making the boss bleed 125 times a second. If everyone, and most likely they will be, was running with exotic condi-gear, we’re looking at a large, REALLY large number of bleeding damage being done. and thats just 5 people.

Zergs tend to be 40+ people. Even with the compensation events do to scale enemies up for multiple people, 125 bleeding a second from 5 fully decked out guys is a lot and would probably wreck most legendary bosses. I know my condition damage can do anywhere from 130-170 depending on the location buffs, so if say we had 5 people doing 125 bleed a second at ~150 a tick per stack.. You’re looking at 18,750 damage a second. From 5 people. let that sink in.

It’s not just server load that would have an issue, its the mechanics of the game. It needs to be capped out like it currently is otherwise we would see bosses with like 500 million health or 5 billion health like in WoW. Do you honestly want to sit there fighting a Destroyer legendary or a Risen legendary with 5 billion health? That would make me wonder how much an elder dragon would have if we actually fought one.

Then you would have elitists who would require you to be able to hit 25 stacks mandatory if you wanted to group/speed run with them.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if they increased the cap to 50. 25 is very easily reached in zergs and sometimes in just a full party. Hell, 30 or 40 would be cool too, but thats just something I’d like to see, not necessarily required for my personal enjoyment of the game.

So much text…
Now tell me would 5 warriors do more or less damage per second then your precious magic bleed numbers?

The game lags when 100 people are in 1 keep spamming 1 or 2 buttons in wvw.

If the game had to keep track of 800 bleeds, the condi damage of the applyer, the duration, and personal caps, on top of the current 100 players spammin 1 button, servers would explode.

Anchoku.8142:

Conspiracy theorists say the bleed cap is to ensure bosses are not taken down solely by ranged attacks and kiting.

Fortunately, combat is as diverse as:
1) Kick boss into an object (as long as he has no defiant buff),
2) Stack inside boss,
3) Auto-attack-dps it to death

Bhawb.7408:

I’d actually be interested to see if it would be a big change. Someone look up how much DPS 25 stacks of bleeds would do, along with about 50% burning and 100% poison uptime would do compared to what is now done by direct damage. If each person could output the same DPS or close to it, condition wins easily because of the ranged nature compared to generally melee high DPS.

Assuming a Necromancer with a high condition damage of ~ 2350 (@ 10Might-stacks + 25 Corruption-stacks) we’re looking at:

4000 DPS from 25 Bleeding stacks (100% uptime 160 per individual tick)
458 DPS from Burning uptime (50% uptime = 916 per individual tick / 2)
319 DPS from Poison (100% uptime)
—————————————————————————
4777 DPS from Conditions

It would take me 9 seconds to kill a Veteran Ice Brood Claymore, using conditions, assuming I could inflict above mentioned scenario in one hit, sit back, and watch it die. Of course, this doesn’t happen because you have to ramp up those stacks in multiple attacks.

Just to have an in-profession reference, I know others can and will do even better: That’s less DPS than bursting being on a 30/25/0/0/15 glass cannon Dagger build, 100% Crit Chance, fully stacked sigil, self-buffed 13 stacks of Might, self-debuffed 25 stacks of Vulnerability on foe. Takes de-/buffing process (2,5 seconds), flashing DS for Fury, and killing it within Fury’s duration with dagger auto-attack. = max. 7,5 seconds.

In reality, you will have higher DPS uptime on a condition build, because of range (i.e. less dodges/heals/downed/etc).

But under optimal circumstances (you know your foe and minimize DPS downtimes) raw power based damage always wins in this game, because of how it is designed, and zerg-stacking bosses to death (even in a 5-player-dungeon) will always get the job done faster. This is simply because “zerg-stacking” isn’t punished (enough).

A wise man once said: “Meleers take higher risk, which is why they deal more damage”… It’s just that those risks are minimal to non-existant.

To get back to topic: Even if there was no Bleeding cap, assuming 100% DPS uptime, condition damage would still be behind power based damage. The only case in which conditions clearly win is Epidemic and you suddenly hit 6 targets for that ~5k DPS (=30k)

So, having that Bleedcap because of how faceroll the game would be if it wasn’t there, makes no sense (to me). In fact, it puts condition damage in a worse spot than it already is compared to power damge, if you bring more than one condition damage dealer to a fight.
Yes, it totally has the potential to outperform direct damage, but we lack content that justifies bringing a Conditionmancer to a fight instead of a Powermancer.
Except Crown Pavillion and the Gauntlet, that is, which is why I dusted off my condition gear rotting in my Bank

Edit:

You’re looking at 18,750 damage a second. From 5 people. let that sink in.

Sigh, I didn’t want to do this because it makes me sad: 
You’re looking at roughly double that number, if you take 5 Warriors alternating between 100b and axe auto-chain.

I think it’d be interesting to eliminate (or generously increase) the bleed cap on Champions, or at least dungeon bosses. If we take Anet at their word that increasing condition caps across the board would lead to an exponential jump in server load, perhaps increasing the cap for no more than 5-6 creatures per map and 1-2 creatures at a time in dungeons would make for a much more manageable jump while solving most of the trouble people have with running into the cap.

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

Anchoku.8142:

Conspiracy theorists say the bleed cap is to ensure bosses are not taken down solely by ranged attacks and kiting.

Puts on tinfoil hat.

This is why there are bleed caps. Without them, bleeding, ranged, and kiting would be king and would roflstomp everything in its path.

Then the complaint would change to:

“This game sucks. It’s too easy. I can just stack up scores of bleeds on an enemy, sit back, and watch them bleed out. I can solo every boss and champion in the game with my eyes closed. No challenge at all. When are they going to introduce real challenge and stop designing the game for casual baddy care-bears?”

And, thus, you have bleed caps.

Exactly…

Think about having 600 bleeds on a keep lord in WvW and then EPIDEMIC that… hahahahaha… GeeeeeGeeeee

Nemesis.8593:

Think about having 600 bleeds on a keep lord in WvW and then EPIDEMIC that… hahahahaha… GeeeeeGeeeee

Point well made… :O Remove the 5-target limit while you’re at it Anet!

ArtemusHunter.9521:

There is a problem with this set up that rises then. If we all had our own personal bleed cap of 25, think of how many people are applying bleeding to that boss. Five people could run a bleed build, get to 25 stacks each, thus making the boss bleed 125 times a second. If everyone, and most likely they will be, was running with exotic condi-gear, we’re looking at a large, REALLY large number of bleeding damage being done. and thats just 5 people.

Zergs tend to be 40+ people. Even with the compensation events do to scale enemies up for multiple people, 125 bleeding a second from 5 fully decked out guys is a lot and would probably wreck most legendary bosses. I know my condition damage can do anywhere from 130-170 depending on the location buffs, so if say we had 5 people doing 125 bleed a second at ~150 a tick per stack.. You’re looking at 18,750 damage a second. From 5 people. let that sink in.

My original reply was a lot longer, so to not write an essay I’ll try to be concise.

Ok lets work with those numbers. If geared and traited a necro can get to 25 stacks of bleed on his own, but most other classes can’t, and even then it is hard to maintain a constant 25 stacks of bleed. So lets take a reasonable route and say 20 stacks of bleed for these 5 people, at 150 ticks a second. This is 20 × 150 = 3000 DPS, and 5 people are doing this so 15,000 DPS. In theory if all 5 guys can have 25 stacks of bleeding uptime – unlikely but let’s consider it – thats 3750 per person, 18.750 per 5 people.

Let’s take 5 melee characters, say 3 warriors (30/0/0/10/30) and 2 thieves (25/30/0/0/15). I originally listed all the traits and skills warriors and thieves would use but those details aren’t relavent to my argument. It boils down to basically:

1. 100% fury uptime
2. 100% uptime of 25 stacks vulnarability
3. Let’s say about 10 stacks of might.
4. 100% fury uptime + Banner of discipline + generally high crit % of the above builds = pretty much EVERY HIT CRITS, and these builds give them about 110% CRIT DAMAGE.
5. Banner of strength + empower allies gives +320 power to all.
6. Can immediately reach max damage output, dont need time to build up 20 stacks of bleeds and whatnot.
7. Things get 20% more interesting when boss is under 50% health as thieves’ executioner trait kicks in and deals 20% more damage.

Melee DPS is a kitten to try to figure out as it takes into account the armor and skill coefficient, and the range of damage it can do, also 4 or 5 different skills, not to mention the buffs I just talked about above. I’m going to save myself a massive headache and avoid doing the math and just look at the tooltip for 100 blades alone, which for my warrior (no exotic trinkets besides amulet) says it does ~4k damage for 8 hits 1k for last hit, so ~5000 damage in 3.5 seconds, round down to 1400 DPS, raw. No food, no stacks of bloodlust, no adrenaline, no boons.

Now enter complications:
1. As stated above, the fury uptime + Banner of discipline + my own traits and gear gives my warrior something close to 85-90% crit chance, and my warrior has 110% crit damage. THIS ALONE PUTS MY DPS TO 2940.
2. The 1400 raw DPS above also doesn’t count in Berserker’s Power (which gives 15% damage at full adrenaline).
3. Add in the +320 power from banner of strength and empower allies.
4. Add in 25 stacks of vuln, 10 stacks of might, another 35% damage.

Do you think it is reasonable to conclude, therefore, my DPS will be a lot higher than 3750 when I’ll do almost 3k dps just on a critical hit from one slash of Hundred Blades, stripping off all boons and support buffs? 5 condi toons with ideal 25 stacks of bleeding and 150 ticks per second would do ~19k DPS. Given that I can do 3k on a crit cold turkey, let’s agree that my 1 warrior alone can top 4k DPS with all the buffs mentioned with absolute ease. (In reality I think his DPS is a lot more than that under those ideal circumstances).

Lowballing then, 5 melee toons therefore would have 20k DPS to 19K from 5 condi toons. A zerg of 40 condimancers would do 152k DPS, whereas a zerg of 40 melee toons would do 160k DPS. Now, yes 5 melee toons will need to move and dodge whereas the condimancer will have an easier time staying at range and keep up the DPS. However my calculation is severely underestimating the actual melee dps, it still doesn’t add up.

There’s also objects don’t take condi. Think under the argument that fire turrets can’t burn, tho Im pretty sure I’ve seen Ele’s destroy them with fireballs before…

Same reason dragons and world boss’s wont trigger marks.

Same reason we can no longer use DS as a shield to keep up with other class’s vigor/block/invul on a dungeon boss.

The Conspiracy is that necro’s are built to be bad, unrewarded and un-wanted in PvE… (Or we could try a PvE Power build for that side of the game)

Silver.4798:

ArtemusHunter.9521:

There is a problem with this set up that rises then. If we all had our own personal bleed cap of 25, think of how many people are applying bleeding to that boss. Five people could run a bleed build, get to 25 stacks each, thus making the boss bleed 125 times a second. If everyone, and most likely they will be, was running with exotic condi-gear, we’re looking at a large, REALLY large number of bleeding damage being done. and thats just 5 people.

Zergs tend to be 40+ people. Even with the compensation events do to scale enemies up for multiple people, 125 bleeding a second from 5 fully decked out guys is a lot and would probably wreck most legendary bosses. I know my condition damage can do anywhere from 130-170 depending on the location buffs, so if say we had 5 people doing 125 bleed a second at ~150 a tick per stack.. You’re looking at 18,750 damage a second. From 5 people. let that sink in.

My original reply was a lot longer, so to not write an essay I’ll try to be concise.

Ok lets work with those numbers. If geared and traited a necro can get to 25 stacks of bleed on his own, but most other classes can’t, and even then it is hard to maintain a constant 25 stacks of bleed. So lets take a reasonable route and say 20 stacks of bleed for these 5 people, at 150 ticks a second. This is 20 × 150 = 3000 DPS, and 5 people are doing this so 15,000 DPS. In theory if all 5 guys can have 25 stacks of bleeding uptime – unlikely but let’s consider it – thats 3750 per person, 18.750 per 5 people.

Let’s take 5 melee characters, say 3 warriors (30/0/0/10/30) and 2 thieves (25/30/0/0/15). I originally listed all the traits and skills warriors and thieves would use but those details aren’t relavent to my argument. It boils down to basically:

1. 100% fury uptime
2. 100% uptime of 25 stacks vulnarability
3. Let’s say about 10 stacks of might.
4. 100% fury uptime + Banner of discipline + generally high crit % of the above builds = pretty much EVERY HIT CRITS, and these builds give them about 110% CRIT DAMAGE.
5. Banner of strength + empower allies gives +320 power to all.
6. Can immediately reach max damage output, dont need time to build up 20 stacks of bleeds and whatnot.
7. Things get 20% more interesting when boss is under 50% health as thieves’ executioner trait kicks in and deals 20% more damage.

Melee DPS is a kitten to try to figure out as it takes into account the armor and skill coefficient, and the range of damage it can do, also 4 or 5 different skills, not to mention the buffs I just talked about above. I’m going to save myself a massive headache and avoid doing the math and just look at the tooltip for 100 blades alone, which for my warrior (no exotic trinkets besides amulet) says it does ~4k damage for 8 hits 1k for last hit, so ~5000 damage in 3.5 seconds, round down to 1400 DPS, raw. No food, no stacks of bloodlust, no adrenaline, no boons.

Now enter complications:
1. As stated above, the fury uptime + Banner of discipline + my own traits and gear gives my warrior something close to 85-90% crit chance, and my warrior has 110% crit damage. THIS ALONE PUTS MY DPS TO 2940.
2. The 1400 raw DPS above also doesn’t count in Berserker’s Power (which gives 15% damage at full adrenaline).
3. Add in the +320 power from banner of strength and empower allies.
4. Add in 25 stacks of vuln, 10 stacks of might, another 35% damage.

Do you think it is reasonable to conclude, therefore, my DPS will be a lot higher than 3750 when I’ll do almost 3k dps just on a critical hit from one slash of Hundred Blades, stripping off all boons and support buffs? 5 condi toons with ideal 25 stacks of bleeding and 150 ticks per second would do ~19k DPS. Given that I can do 3k on a crit cold turkey, let’s agree that my 1 warrior alone can top 4k DPS with all the buffs mentioned with absolute ease. (In reality I think his DPS is a lot more than that under those ideal circumstances).

Lowballing then, 5 melee toons therefore would have 20k DPS to 19K from 5 condi toons. A zerg of 40 condimancers would do 152k DPS, whereas a zerg of 40 melee toons would do 160k DPS. Now, yes 5 melee toons will need to move and dodge whereas the condimancer will have an easier time staying at range and keep up the DPS. However my calculation is severely underestimating the actual melee dps, it still doesn’t add up.

Hmm.. Well with that in mind, that would then put condition users closer to to being on par with melee bursters right?

ArtemusHunter.9521:

Hmm.. Well with that in mind, that would then put condition users closer to to being on par with melee bursters right?

… Umm I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but no the entire point of what I said is that melee bursters do significantly more single target DPS than condi. In a multiple mob fight is where the AoE conditions really shine but in terms of single target DPS it’s not even close

Play what you want how you want………….but not condition spec unless your the only one doing it.

This problem have been something that really makes me not wish to play, you dont feel usefull in events at all, dungeon groups is a gamble to see if your the only condition spec. Majority of content favors power and event boosts its dmg, quickness does nothing for condition spec in pve if your already able to get 25stacks without it.

Powerburst > ALL

Whether or not its technical limitations on their part this problem should never have been in the game to begin with, its an mmorpg you know lots of ppl doing stuff together, so how is it possible to make condition dmg a main source of dmg but forget about the part where more than 1 player using it is a problem.

@Silver No aoe conditions shine only in very very limited situations rest of the situations its cleave > aoe

Um, I know that i should take a wide berth around this entire thread, but i just can’t help myself. I want to say that i think its a matter of perspective. I have had a necro since launch and have tried all sorts of different builds in PVE, power, condi, hyb, etc. And honestly i always go back to condi. I feel VERY powerful and VERY effective when zerging with my condi necro. I am able to DOT multiple targets and support the meleers while they go to work. We have a different job than the warriors. If i wanted to do a warriors job then i would dust off my war. But I like my job as a necro. I melt entire groups of mobs around the wars as they go to work on the boss. I res them if need be, provide a bit of condi management etc. In the end i get gold for every encounter and always feel like i have done my part and played my role. Perspective, that’s what im getting at.