Guild Wars 2

@Kamahl

I have an engineer too, and I know that 25 stacks of bleeding is completely realistic, and that is a major part of the problem. People who aren’t specced for condition damage can readily achieve numerous stacks of bleeding, hindering players who are specced for damage. The game becomes a hassle for people playing condition builds when other players are constantly overriding their conditions. Even if the 25 bleed stack remains in place, Arena Net should somehow make it so that the highest damage bleeds take priority. This would leave condition duration in the dark though, so ideally the bleed cap should be individualized. This way, you can keep your less damaging bleeds, and condition builds can keep their heavy damage bleeds. It’s unnecessary to hinder condition builds so harshly.

If Arena Net can balance the damage between a condition based offensive builds and power/precision offensive builds everyone can have their own condition cap. Players should never be hindered by other players because of their playstyle, it’s pointless.

Main complaints:

1) Condition cap (25 for bleed, 1 for everything else) — This severely limits damage for condition based builds when more than one or two condition based builds are present.

2) Gear availability for condition based builds — There isn’t much variety with condition damage armor and some armors cannot be crafted. For example, Rabid armor cannot be crafted. It can only be bought with large amounts of karma or hours of dungeon grinding.

Possible solutions:

1) Condition caps — Keep the caps the way they are, but make it individualized (25 bleed stacks and 1 of each other condition per player)This prevents someone from being able to stack obscene amounts of bleeding, making it imbalanced, but allows condition builds to show their full potential in dungeon/boss/team situations. After all, what’s the difference between a high powered power/precision build dealing large amounts of damage and a condition build dealing a large amount of damage? To remedy the problem of Epidemic spreading 100+ bleed stacks, make it so that only the conditions that the necromancer applied get transferred.

2) Gear — Make more diverse gear for condition players available. The best way to do this is by making variants of Knight’s, Berserker’s, etc. Simply replace the power stat in each armor and make it condition damage. Power is a waste in most condition builds since the attacks typically deal miniscule amounts of damage, but precision is vital in order to proc bleeds (like Sigils of Earth). By replacing power, we rid ourselves of pointless stats and encourage better build diversity.

This issue is very fixable, it just might take a bit of tweaking to get right. This may include lowering the bleed cap for individuals if condition builds deal too much damage after getting individualized caps, but it can be done.

That’s it for my suggestions. I hope they are heard and I hope this issue can be remedied.