Guild Wars 2

Carighan.6758:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Problem: Most bleed and torment applications do so one stack at a time. This suggestion would make them hugely overbearing.

Could be fixes indirectly. Make them 10x stronger but 10x less likely to proc. And so on.

This defeats the purpose. As someone said above, condition damage in any other game has always been the most consistent and ‘safe’ way to put down damage. It’s never been a beat all end all type of playstyle. The purpose is consistency. It leaves your party with more room to experiment, adapt to what the boss is doing, etc. without worrying about doing top notch DPS 24/7 and nothing else, regardless of how inefficient that can truly be at times. Boss jumps away? Damage is still ticking until you catch up. Someone goes down, damage is still ticking as the group picks them up. People need to back up and heal? Damage. Still. Ticking.

Mind you, yes, damage is definitely still ticking on bosses with max stacks, but a cap makes multiple condition builds in group play or massive PvE significantly less useful as an individual. As I’ve said already, when a warrior can both DPS extremely well AND stack conditions as well as I can, what in the kitten is the point of having a Conditionmancer in your group? There absolutely isn’t one.

Removing a cap and making conditions consistent with a good damage per tick will make people that can stack 10+ conditions individually extremely beneficial to any group in any situation. Not because it would be overpowered, but guaranteed. You’re not going to think twice about a Necro or Condi Engi joining your party if you already have a Condi Warrior because the more ticks the better. Taking a page from current state Necros, Condi Engies or Warriors could have their weapon DPS reduced or increase in cooldowns to remain balanced. The name of the game is damage over time. Not hard hitting fother muckers. That’s what the power stat is for.

Vox Hollow.2736:

What if they let people spec into the Contagiousness of a Condition?

This too is another great solution. Make conditions less damaging but for potentially longer periods of time if it’s able to bounce. More of an AoE control kind of deal and less direct damage+DoT for massive total damage.

Brew Pinch.5731:

ANet know about this issue, they agree it sucks and hopefully one day we’ll see a fix. Until then, try not to think about it, it’s too frustrating.

Tell that to Conditionmancer mains. You can’t NOT think of stuff like this when it has equal rights to being as effective as power builds. As it stands almost every other class can put down conditions (maybe more or less than a Necro can) but still holds solid DPS. Conditionmancers don’t. Scepter/staff is by far the best condition stacking setup at the cost of being slightly under par for solid DPS and they STILL decided to nerf them! (Although I agree with Dhuumfire getting toned down they didn’t compensate for the loss in PvE). Losing out on our ability to stack conditions, as well as our ability to stack a condition not many people use (Dhuum), or have the damage carried over, is horribly crippling in PvE content.

ANet is making it really hard to love my favourite class.

That being said the way conditions work affects all condition builds, some more than others, and it’s kind of just crap. They need to address this as soon as possible.

MrBlueDragon.8457:

I would like to offer some sort of compromise since it seems to be a technical limitation for a 25 stack limit on bleeds. At least for world bosses designed for many players there should be a way to convert a failed or knocked out stack of bleeding into direct damage(possibly at a reduced % of original damage). So for example the boss has 25 stacks of bleeding and another stack is applied that would have ticked for a total of 100 dmg would instead just do 50 instant direct damage as if it were a direct attack. This would help condition heavy builds be helpful without causing overpowering damage.

I really like this idea, actually. Doesn’t seem like a hard calculation, either. I mean the game already knows it’s doing X amount of damage over Y seconds. So when the stack is full just take X divide by 2 and apply directly instead of over Y. I’m sure it’s more complicated then that, but it’s still significantly easier than calculating individual stacks.

Substance E.4852:

Imagine how OP conditions would become if you could hit a player with 5 separate stacks of 15 bleeds each

They have made changes in the past specific for PvP/WvW and PvE seperately. My argument is for PvE. Still, I’m assuming you’re referring to Epidemic? Make it so that it only transfers YOUR conditions to nearby enemies, not everyone elses . Top stop 5man necro squads from completely obliterating a Zerg make epidemic a debuff so that they aren’t affected by another for 30-45 seconds.

For the calculations it’s completely viable when they realize making an MMO CPU intensive is a horrible idea and split the load between the CPU and GPU. As it stands now I’m sure only high end computers would be able to handle it if they implemented it without proper optimization.

Though to be fair, both better optimization and condition caps will be looked at when pigs fly. I’m just sharing my opinions.

The more and more I think about conditions in PvE, the more annoyed I get, and it comes down to one thing. Stack caps. Two condition necromancers can reach a 25 bleed cap by themselves. Two people. Now, let’s imagine if the game itself actually dictated and said alright, there are 5 of you here, the cap is 25 stacks, everyone has a dedicated 5. That would definitely be ‘fair’ by general standards but at the same time restrictive. With the recent world boss additions a great many people are doing them. Yes, more than 5. Which means two things.

1) People are being forced out of an option for damage. Say there are 30 people fighting a world boss, 25 stacks at a maximum, and even if the game did say everyone gets ONE, 5 people are forcefully unable to place said condition. Mind you, this is for a few seconds, but for those few seconds it’s still NOT POSSIBLE.

2) Classes and builds that rely heavily on conditions are at a huge disadvantage in PvE content. This not only limits the effectiveness of those builds, but conditions as a whole.

Sure. You still killed it. Got your chest, some rares you can salvage for ectos and maybe even a TPable exotic. But how much did those 3 condition necros REALLY help in that fight? Saying this as a conditon necro myself, their combined DPS was probably irrelevant. “But, but, it’s a team effort”. Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand that. But at the end of the day they comparatively did nothing. They were operating at maybe 25% of their potential because they can’t consistently have 10+ stacks of bleeds up, individually, at all times.

This. Is. Wrong.

Classes that do heavy physical damage don’t get their damage reduced because there are too many people with swords hitting a dragon in the shins. Bow and Gun users don’t have their projectiles nullified because there are too many blacking out the skies. Why are conditions the only source of damage affected by a cap? Inevitable “if everyone could have 10+ stacks on a boss it’d be OP and it’d die to fast” . Give bosses resists, weaknesses, cleanse, more health even? Hell, something fun. A challenge. Conditions can be tweaked, bosses can have more variables. It’s completely possible to make this a viable system. But simply deciding this isn’t allowed because it would be too broken is ignorant.

Edit: This is a great example of how conditions can be tweaked to increase PvE potential.

MrBlueDragon.8457:

At least for world bosses designed for many players there should be a way to convert a failed or knocked out stack of bleeding into direct damage(possibly at a reduced % of original damage). So for example the boss has 25 stacks of bleeding and another stack is applied that would have ticked for a total of 100 dmg would instead just do 50 instant direct damage as if it were a direct attack.