I’ve got notes scattered around in numerous posts here and over at guru. I’ll try to pull some of that together for a more complete guide on DPS in general.
You will do more direct damage by using nade2 nade4 and grenade Barrage on cooldown.
You should not lose any time with the kit swaps if you are doing it correctly.
On top of doing more direct damage, you’ll also add bonus condition damage for “free”
Using the 8k Damage bombs as a reference, you’ll do the following damage with the other kits:
B1 – 8,000
B2 – 5,120 + 10s burning @ 585
B3 – 3200 + 1420/attack for 6.5s – this becomes worthwhile @ 4 attacks
G2 – 10560 + 3×15s bleeding @ 94 damage per tick (4230 if it ticks through completely)
G4 – 9600
Barrage – 19200
G5 – 3840 + 3×5×6s poison @ 187/tick (about 17k damage on anything that lives long enough)
EG4 – 27200/1.1 since it isn’t an explosion = 24727
When you account for the number of ticks and cast times, I don’t see how the numbers don’t support the claim.
Bomb1 is your baseline number at 1.25/0.9s = 1.389
Bomb2 would be 4×0.2/0.9 = 0.889 + 10s of burning @ 585 per tick.
Bomb3 is borderline depending on the attack rate of the mob, but is 0.556 + 1420 per attack.
G2 is 3×0.55/1 = 1.65 + 3×15s bleeding @ 94 damage per tick
G4 is 3×0.5/1 = 1.5
G5 is marginal on short fights, but the poison duration is so absurdly long that you should use it for long fights.
Grenade Barrage is 8×0.375/1 = 3
EG4 is 0.85×5/1 = 4.25
All of those should be significantly better than bomb1 spamming.
From a full zerker perspective, you should be able to crank out more damage as 30/15/0/0/25 using grenades, bombs and EG.
You’d basically use grenade 2, 5, 4 when available (no poison on the target for 5), EG 4, Bombs 2, 3, 1.
It’s certainly more involved than just using the bomb Auto, but it should be the best possible damage you can get with 25 might stacks.
As i said above, use symbols (combo field light) and WW on GS to cure ~3 condis.
This does not remove conditions from yourself. Only the people around you.
pve caters to berserker gear classes with projectile reflect utilities. seeing as how the damage for berserker engi builds pales in comparison to warriors, thieves, etc
This is completely untrue. The maximum damage output of an engineer in full group buffs is just as high as a warrior or guardian. The number of ways that you can screw up and not deal that maximum damage is far greater on the engineer though.
Average damage across the full spectrum of skill levels certainly makes the engineer a less desirable choice when dealing with strangers, but in the hands of a good player, they are every bit as effective as the alternatives.
Might of the protector is pretty weak for the investment unless you are running Shelter for your heal.
Courageous Return and virtue of retribution are pretty weak in general.
Those 3, combined with the 3 in zeal, make up 40% of the minors available.
I’ll also say that Renewed Justice is either insanely overpowered or incredibly weak depending on what you are fighting.
I’m not saying that they are bad traits, I just think that they aren’t useful enough across the board to be baked into the trees.
I think the best way to achieve that is by making the minor traits more generally useful for multiple types of builds.
A potentially very worthwhile exercise would be to articulate what each trait line “does” and what the GM traits should be that would make people want to go into the tree.
For extra credit, what are the 3 minor traits that would be flexible or useful enough to make them somewhat forced on people?
A good minor trait setup is something like the 3 in honor (although I think the 15 and 25 pointers should swap places) because everyone can get good use out of them.
An example of fairly weak minors is the zeal line. If you aren’t using a symbol weapon they are nearly useless, and even if you are, they are pretty weak traits (compare 10% symbol damage vs. 10% damage on mobs with conditions).
This is a pretty strong all purpose build for grenades.
I used the centaur runes on my engy back before the buffs to healing turret. AoE swiftness can be very helpful in WvW.
The power and bleeding both work well with rampager grenade setups.
The support-oriented theme isn’t that bad. The problem with the Virtues trait line is that it tries to do two things that run counter to each other:
1. Improve passive virtues.
2. Effects for activating virtues, including cooldown reduction.It would be so much better if it focused only on effects for activating virtues. The passive-only ones could be moved to a different line.
The damage increases in the line are pretty weak. 20% increase is huge, but having Aegis up regularly is highly unusual. At 1% per boon, power of the virtuous is pretty lackluster. The other damage adders are basically more burning, which seems nice, but guardians can’t really make enough use of condition damage stats to turn those traits into significant boosts (outside of AoE farming).
I’d like to see the 25 point trait become “virtue passive effects continue while on cooldown” and make power of the virtuous into a 20 point trait, “4% (maybe 3%) damage increase for each recharging virtue.”
That gives you options to go offensive or defensive with the tree, and cleans up some of the conflicts made by the design of the tree.
I’m mainly concerned with the lack of traits that are really desired.
The Zeal GMs are awful.
Radiant Power is the real reason to go into radiance (in almost every possible situation, it adds more damage than RHS), and the signet trait is nowhere near strong enough. Compare RHS @ basically 300 precision vs. 36 additional stats per signet that you never use.
The Valor GMs are very strong choices, which is probably why so many people gravitate towards them.
Honor GMs are also very strong, although I think Battle Presence makes more sense in Virtues. Empowering Might is also a great trait, but is probably misplaced in this line (Bump up the power a bit and make it a Radiance GM trait)
Virtues has a lot of good ideas, but it kinda stumbles on itself. It’s also too support oriented. Permeating Wrath is a strong trait, but it basically keeps you from using the virtue that you’ve invested in. Shielded mind is certainly a useful trait, but the long cooldown on VoC keeps it from being the kind of trait that you really spec to get.
My post is gone now, so feel free to spread out some more.
Not 100% true, the target area is the same no matter what range but nades spread out as they travel so if your close they will all land in the center of the target area (i.e. all hit 1 person) and st max range they all land at the outside edge of the target area.
While I agree that they should work that way, they currently do not, unless they were changed very recently.
The flight of the grenades are to some fixed spot randomly selected as angle and radius away from the center of the targeting marker. The maximum radius does not change with distance from the target.
Throw a poison grenade about a foot in front of yourself a few times, and you’ll actually have some of the grenades land behind you.
If you are next to a target, they’ll typically hit and explode on impact, giving the illusion of reduced spread, but with no interference, it is pretty easy to see.
The spread on grenades is the same at max range as it is at close range.
If the grenade hits something in flight, it will detonate, so very very close range can seem like there is almost no spread.
It still works against poison. It is just less effective. The majority of the thread has revolved around damaging conditions.
The way I see it, the real problem people have is with Burning and Terror.
Burning is a bit too strong in tPvP and too weak in PvE, which makes it hard for the balance team to adjust for both environments, and I imagine that a fairly core mechanic like how a condition works is not the type of thing that anyone wants to split between PvE and PvP.
Terror is a different kind of problem. It does both CC and fairly high damage at the same time, while preventing many of the things that allow you to defend against those types of attacks. In PvE, this is mostly just a DoT because anything that you really need CC to protect yourself from is probably immune to fear anyways.
Terror can probably be put in a better place by reducing the damage in PvP, but the problems with burning are probably more structural in nature.
Burning has stacks just like bleeding does. They cap at 25, just like bleeding. The stacks just tick sequentially rather than concurrently.
Air blast doesn’t add duration to an existing stack, it just adds an additional stack if burning is already up.
This part is important:
Burning stacks DO NOT tick in the order of highest damage to lowest. They seem to be First In First Out for normal circumstances, although I haven’t tested enough to know how the over 25 stacks situation is handled.
My thought on how to clean up some of these issues, which is covered in much more detail in another thread is to boil all the condition damage down to a single stack per player and let the damage accumulate over time.
Each condition should have a fixed duration (my rough starting thoughts based on relative GW1 scaling are Bleed – 8s, Poison – 6s, Burning – 3s) these values would be universal for all instances of these conditions. The conditions would be applied as a raw damage number (1200 flat bleeding damage for example as opposed to 12 ticks @ 100 damage each), and they would get spread across the time window for that condition. If a new instance of a condition is applied, you’d take whatever damage remained from the previous iteration and roll it into the new application, and re-spread that number across the same fixed time window. Each person would have their own instance of those conditions, but only 1 ‘stack’ to manage per person. Condition cleanses would have to remove all instances of that specific condition.
From a math and tracking standpoint, you’ll basically need to keep track of the owner and 2 numbers per condition: Damage = D and Remaining Time =T
When adding new condition damage C to the current stack or creating a first stack from 0:
D1 = D0 + D
T1 = Tmax for the condition type
Ticks = D1/T1
Every second on the tick:
D1 = D0 – D0/T0
T1 = T0 – 1
So in this case, the conditions would all stack in both intensity and duration to some extent because of the rolling nature of the damage.
Do you sleep with your money stuffed between your mattresses by chance?
The problem is that the micro is mixed in with the macro, and the futures commodity market is not elastic enough to make the credit default swaps mitigate a broad enough risk profile.
Did it occur to you that the inflation rate is high to try to combat the massive rate of farmer unemployment?
This is the post where we spew random economic sounding words with no real clue what we’re talking about right?
TLDR: I’d like to short this guy’s ideas and conspiracy theories.
Would a more gradual ramp up of condition damage (that ultimately did the same damage) be a good compromise?
This would make condition removal more powerful, without reducing the overall damage potential of condition builds.
Thoughts?
1 isn’t really any different than increasing the condition cap from the server loading point of view. You’ll simply have 25 bleeding and 25 torment instead of just upping the limit to 50.
2 and 3 are both things that would be excellent for the game on multiple levels and should probably be done.
4 would be fairly easy to “game” by stacking a single short burn and following it with several weak ones.
(edited by Knox.8962)
Copying this from a similar thread:
The basic skeleton for a damage build for guardians is something like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQFAxERh77YFORYzIgAsqQ8wUgR4D-jAyAYLAqAQyTZN7JIWZLiGraBTdSEV7OKiWNA-e
You can pretty much make that work with any weapon choices you want by picking the last 15 points. Obviously you can swap in more damage gear as you’re more comfortable with the class, but that’s a decent place to start.
With that setup, you’ll have access to Aegis, numerous AoE blinds and pretty high damage while being sturdy enough to survive most situations.
Some of the traits that are really powerful and easy to pick up are:
Zealous Blade for the Greatsword
2H mastery for the Greatsword
Right Handed Strength for the 1h Weapons
Writ of Persistence for the Hammer
Pure of Voice for extra condition removal
Master of Consecrations for extra long Wall of Reflection (which is one of your most powerful skills in many situations)
I’ve really enjoyed reading the interaction with the community over the last few days, but I do feel like this is relatively isolated to the sPvP section of the forums. I realize that the majority of this communication is coming from people focused on sPvP, but there are also large numbers of players who don’t follow sPvP that would really appreciate similar feedback in other areas as well.
TLDR: Thanks so much for doing this. Can we get something like this in other areas too?
I know acid bomb does great direct damage, but I tend to save it for the blast finisher on demand.
I had no idea that the #2 skill scales well with power, it’s normally obstructed or out of range.
Either way, with a ton of condition damage stats, neither of those abilities will be doing a ton of damage.
You can do plenty of damage using the bomb kit, but having the option to effectively use nades when you need to attack from range is really handy.
I wouldn’t take Deadly Mixture if I wasn’t using the FT since most of the EG damage is condition based.
10 points in the firearms tree is worth 5% crit, but since your best damage gear options are rampager or rabid, you’ll probably have enough crit to be effective.
Was this build for one of those “roll a dice to assign random traits” tournaments?
If that’s the case then I apologize for the harsh criticism.
Could someone give me the ideal final damage of 100 blades? I’m talking about the number you see on the final hit, something like 15k? If so, that’s 15k divided by 3 seconds for 5k per second, which is roughly equal to full condi stacks, but the 100 blades is only executed every 8 seconds, whereas the condi stacks are affecting the boss 100% of the time.
Buffed completely up and hitting a 2600 armor target with 25 stacks of vulnerability, using a build designed pretty much to do nothing but crank out damage a warrior’s 100 blades will Average 46849 damage over 3.6 seconds for a total of 13,014 DPS. If the warrior is very lucky and all of the hits were to crit, they’d get 49,669 damage for a total of 13797 DPS. In the meantime, you can always swap back to the axes and auto attack for 9084 DPS.
That’s kinda a lot more than 5000.
(edited by Knox.8962)
It’s hard to beat something like this for versatility and effectiveness.
You’ll have access to Bombs/EG/Rocketboots with the option to swap to grenadier and grenades if you need long range for something.
You also have essentially permanent swiftness, vigor and regeneration which makes you pretty sturdy as well.
You can swap to rampager gear if you want to do additional direct damage at the cost of some survivability, depending on your preferences.
For solo play, I’d recommend using the GS for leveling. You can pick up traits in Honor that buff 2H weapons, which will allow you to maximize the use of staff for swiftness while you’re exploring.
The basic skeleton for a damage build for guardians is something like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQFAxERh77YFORYzIgAsqQ8wUgR4D-jAyAYLAqAQyTZN7JIWZLiGraBTdSEV7OKiWNA-e
You can pretty much make that work with any weapon choices you want by picking the last 15 points. Obviously you can swap in more damage gear as you’re more comfortable with the class, but that’s a decent place to start.
With that setup, you’ll have access to Aegis, numerous AoE blinds and pretty high damage while being sturdy enough to survive most situations.
Some of the traits that are really powerful and easy to pick up are:
Zealous Blade for the Greatsword
2H mastery for the Greatsword
Right Handed Strength for the 1h Weapons
Writ of Persistence for the Hammer
Pure of Voice for extra condition removal
Master of Consecrations for extra long Wall of Reflection (which is one of your most powerful skills in many situations)
Something to consider is that if you don’t need the condition removal from Pure of Voice, Writ of Persistence drastically increases DPS from the hammer.
For those of you who are going to be using the hammer for your primary DPS weapon, you’ll probably do more damage by swapping in Persistence instead of Pure of Voice and slotting soldier runes.
I don’t think you need to delete the post. Just take out the references to “excellent DPS” in the OP.
Currently, damage done to objects only scales with power. Precision, crit damage and conditions don’t do anything to increase your output against structures. This means that somebody in full PTV gear will do the same damage as somebody in full zerker gear, and somebody in full rampager gear will do less than both. This also makes most condition builds practically useless against them.
I assume that the combat mechanics are different for objects vs players since crits and conditions don’t apply to them.
I am guessing that a complete overhaul of this system is a pretty low priority, but could you make the following tweak to the damage calculation for objects:
Add up all offensive stats including Power, Precision, condition damage, prowess, and possibly condition duration, and use that number in place of Power in the damage formula. You’d obviously need to adjust the armor value or divide everything by some scaling factor to keep it roughly in line with current damage.
This will allow people who have given up survivability for offensive output to benefit from that investment, and also allow condition damage users to do damage to structures as well without trying to make the conditions actually hit the objects.
You keep missing my point about the amount of damage the boss is feeling. Right now it’s capped at 25 stacks of bleeding. Remove that and who the hell knows what it will be? 100 stacks? 500 stacks? I wouldn’t be surprised. That’s extra damage the boss is taking. The faster you can kill the boss, the more trivial it is. The more trivial, the more boring. That’s why they would need to increase the HP to compensate, or else trivialize the content. Do I wish condi builds were more viable in pve? Hell yes, condi builds are my favorite. But I don’t want to see Jormag die the way the jungle worm does. That’s just silly. I would like to see the fight go longer, but be based around tactics and mechanics (the way Anet originally advertised) but that’s a whole other issue.
So rather than just doubling the HP of the boss to make a fight go longer, and allowing conditions to work on them, you’d prefer that conditions are broken, but the boss has the same HP pool? This doesn’t make any sense. Adding an additional direct damage dealer will reduce the bosses time to live by roughly the same amount (1/# of people). Adding a condition damage spec does this for the first one, maybe even the second, but after that, you’re only adding fractions of a person’s worth of damage.
The problem with the engineer class isn’t what it is capable of. In the hands of a skilled player, it is clearly a powerful tool. The problem with the class is that, in the hands of an average player, you don’t get nearly those same kinds of results.
Warriors don’t do significantly more damage than other classes. People like running in a random group with tons of warriors because it’s hard to screw one up. Even just standing there auto attacking with an axe, a warrior will do almost as much damage as a weapon swapping pro.
If you’re going to run a group with a bunch of random people you’ve never met, you don’t filter your choices based on the max output level of the classes; you filter on the people you ‘typically’ get. It is definitely easier to play an engineer ‘badly’ than it is to do so on a guardian or warrior.
You can get right around 3000 condition damage if you go all in with consumables and runes etc.
A fully ramped up rampager geared grenade engineer can keep up 100% uptime on burning, bleeding, and poison, and will do right around 8,000 dps with maxed might, vulnerability, and fury.
A guardian or warrior specced in full zerker gear will do almost the exact same damage in those same circumstances.
This isn’t an issue of conditions do too much damage. They’re not really stronger than direct damage setups even before you factor in the condition cap. The cap makes condition damage users absolutely less useful than their direct damage counterparts.
The problem with “overflow conditions” is that you’re just making additional stacks for the servers to handle. Yes they’d be higher density, and less likely to cap, but they’ll likely make the issue of loading worse than it already is.
I left out confusion because it is a different kind of animal completely. It acts as a deterrent to skill use, and punishes skill spamming. It isn’t really the same as the dots.
I also ignored Torment, but it’s basically bleed 2.0 with a twist.
Some additional examples of new gameplay that this change might open up:
The current setup for Guardian’s Virtue of Justice allows a guardian with a 1h sword to keep burning up at 50% uptime per target by using just the sword Auto Attack and the VoJ passive proc. The active VoJ is basically 20s of burning every 30s adjusted by virtue recharge rate. This means that just by having a guardian in your group, you will nearly cap out on burning duration without any effort on the part of the group.
In the proposed system, you have more flexibility to modify the numbers for the active ability, since you don’t specifically have to balance it against the uptime on the passive version. Using the skill can become a choice of “do I want to give up some overall DPS in exchange for some additional burst damage” which is a much more interesting decision than “do I want to apply this damage every other second for the next 30 seconds, or 20 out of the next 30”
The same basic principles also apply to poison, but the other side of the coin shows up for those skills. Instead of stacking up 50 seconds of poison with a single toss of poison grenades, you’ll be able to do the same damage, but the poison will only tick for a few seconds. If you want to prevent healing with the skill, you’ll have to actually time the application of the poison to reduce the healing on the target. At any given point in time, you’d never have more than [max poison duration] additional seconds in the future covered with poison. If you wanted to keep a target poisoned, you’d have to keep reapplying the condition.
Some additional considerations:
The +condition duration stat would probably have to become something like +condition effectiveness, to allow for duration scaling for things like cripple, chill, vulnerability, etc, while still allowing the damaging conditions to scale up in damage.
Assuming you used the same basic scaling values for condition damage that you have for direct damage, you’d be able to total up what you thought the damage on a skill should be as a function of ‘offensive stats points’ and then just split some ratio of condition vs. direct damage.
The glaring differences between this and the current system are the fact that you could potentially have 20k DPS worth of bleeding ticking on you. That is clearly the biggest change from today’s system, but in order to get to that level, a group would have to stack up 200,000 worth of bleeding damage, which would obviously completely destroy if it was direct damage.
Burning and poison will also stack in intensity given enough applications. Burning would become the burst condition that it was in GW1, and also basically what it is in sPvP today, but it won’t be completely useless in PvE / WvW.
By removing the “ticks x damage per tick” mechanic, it becomes fairly simple to create a slow simmer type of burning damage if you desire since you’re no longer constrained by the packet size of 1000/tick burns. You would be able to design skills so that you can constantly reapply burns that would build up to your sustained burning DPS over several seconds. (I’m looking at you Virtue of Justice).
This management of condition damage as a raw number also allows more flexibility in trait design. Traits like Shrapnel (Explosions have a 15% chance to cause bleeding for 12s) which is really tough to balance between the bomb kit and the grenade kit can become something along the lines of "explosions do an additional 10% of their damage as bleeding, which both rewards people with additional damage for investing in offensive stats, and also cleans up some of the balance issues between the two kits.
It also allows you to fine tune the numbers for damage, particularly for skills that apply burning today since you can use essentially any damage number you like on the abilities. Skills like the Flamethrower Auto Attack can do small levels of burning on every hit without making the damage uncontrollably powerful.
One other side effect is poison damage can be managed relatively independently of the healing reduction effects. If you feel like a dagger thief should be able to apply poison for the utility it provides, you can put a small damage poison on the attack, and let the fixed duration keep poison up without trying to balance the damage numbers around some fixed value per tick. This will allow potentially more skillful use of poison skills since the condition won’t basically always be up.
At the end of the day, you’ll be basically guaranteeing that condition damage gets dealt at the right amount, without ever allowing uncontrollable burst damage unless multiple people converge on a target. Even in that scenario, the damage will be spread out over some period of time as opposed to the instant death you’d get from multiple 100 blades hitting you at once.
The reality is, if 25 people want to hit you, you should melt quickly, rather than taking 1000 damage per second over the next 25 seconds.
What I think would be a cleaner implementation, and more universally applicable across the multiple game types is something like this:
Each condition should have a fixed duration (my rough starting thoughts based on relative GW1 scaling are Bleed – 10s, Poison – 7s, Burning – 4s) these values would be universal for all instances of these conditions. The conditions would be applied as a raw damage number (1200 bleeding damage for example as opposed to 12 ticks @ 100 damage each), and they would get spread across the time window for that condition. If a new instance of a condition is applied, you’d take whatever damage remained from the previous iteration and roll it into the new application, and re-spread that number across the same fixed time window. Each person would have their own instance of those conditions, but only 1 ‘stack’ to manage per person. Condition cleanses would have to remove all instances of that specific condition (burning from all sources at once for example).
From a math and tracking standpoint, you’ll basically need to keep track of 2 numbers per condition: Damage = D and Remaining Time =T
When adding new condition damage C to the current stack or creating a first stack from 0:
D1 = D0 + D
T1 = Tmax for the condition type
Ticks = D1/T1
Every second on the tick:
D1 = D0 – D0/T0
T1 = T0 – 1
So in this case, the conditions all stack in both intensity and duration to some extent because of the rolling nature of the damage.
This would completely do away with the concept of ticks and stacks for dealing the damage, and replace it with a raw damage number. Instead of a skill like blunderbuss dealing 5 stacks of 4 second bleeds @ 100 damage per tick, you would just apply 2000 bleeding damage and let it tick out over the next few seconds. The reality would probably more like applying some (coefficient x Condition Damage) bleeding damage.
Each player would have 1 ‘stack’ per unique condition represented by those 2 numbers as opposed to 25 unique stacks per condition on each target. The potential exists for additional stacks to be managed due to additional damage dealers in large fights, but I doubt that would be more than the reduction in stacks required to track for the majority of the content.
You’d control the ‘burst’ of the different conditions by adjusting the durations for each one, and then the balance for the damaging conditions is independent of what type of condition it is. You’d be able to just set a coefficient for each attack and pick a condition type that works either thematically or from a damage throttling standpoint.
At that point, you’d be able to just assign some coefficient number for the amount of damage you want an ability to do, and let the rolling mechanics take care of the rest. Things like Virtue of Justice becomes a question of do I want to deal a fairly large burst of burning damage over the next 4 seconds, or am I better served by sitting on this and keeping steady damage over time for the next 30 seconds. This also makes things like poison more useful as a skill based tool. By applying a fixed tick duration, you’d need to apply it within the correct time window for the healing reduction effects to matter, rather than just stacking up 30 seconds worth of it up front every 25 seconds or so.
The end result would be better granularity for balance of damage, allow more cooperative play with condition damage dealers, and clean up some of the goofy things like 30 second long bleeds that (with +condition duration) will keep ticking for up to a minute.
Your condition damage would take slightly longer to ramp up to full speed (roughly 4x the full duration for it to level off), although the number gets pretty close to the average relatively quickly. You’ll only ever lose the last few seconds worth of damage from a condition attack when the target dies, and condition cleanses become much more powerful tools because you wipe out the ramped up value and force the rolling total to start all over again.
The long term average would end up at 480 (1200*2/5) using those numbers, but eventually, all of the applied damage will tick through, or the target will die. At the 40 second mark, damage per tick would be up to 479 in this example, as an idea of what the ramp up time would look like. I think the ramping effect and somewhat implied additional value in condition removal will also help to clean up some of the condition spam that is going on in sPvP areas currently. Ultimately, you’ll be capable of taking more total condition damage than you are today, but it will always be spread out over time, and removable, as opposed to direct damage, which has no caps at all.
The basic thought that I’m trying to convey is that the scaling and use cases for conditions, particularly damage over time conditions, isn’t consistent in actual use across multiple play types (burning is strong in sPvP and pretty awful in PvE for example) because of the issues with condition caps and the poor granularity available for tuning these conditions.
What is right with the current system:
Each damage over time condition has a specific purpose and feel that makes each one work to fill a specific niche. They seem to actually fill these roles in sPvP currently, but my interpretation of the intended use for each is as follows:
Burning – Burst condition damage;
Poison – Healing reduction and somewhat incidental damage;
Bleeding – Steady sustained damage over time.
What is wrong with the current system:
The problem you end up with, outside of a few situations (tPvP, soloing), is that burning and poison are completely saturated on almost all targets, and they no longer serve the purpose they were designed for. Bleeding when fully stacked, (which can be done by numerous single characters or easily accomplished with 2+ condition damage characters) does quite a bit more damage than burning, and the limited scaling of burning basically drops it down to around 5-6 stacks worth of bleeding at high condition damage values.
Some people would suggest that burning just be made more powerful, but that makes the packet size available for burning damage difficult to balance. A single burning tick at max levels of condition damage is roughly 1000 damage. Going from 1 tick to 2 ticks potentially adds a full 1000 damage to a skill, and if you increase the scaling even more, you’ll make that granularity of tuning even worse.
Additionally, condition damage specs need to apply multiple stacks of numerous conditions in order to be really effective. This works reasonably well in solo play and sPvP, where most of the fights are very small group encounters. However, this system breaks down for several builds in many PvE and WvW environments due to the 25 stack condition caps. Once you hit the 25 instance limit for each condition, you start completely losing damage for your conditions as new conditions are applied replacing old ones. (There seems to be a misconception that the highest damage conditions are the ones that get priority, but this doesn’t appear to be the case in testing). So you’re basically just giving up damage any time you have 2 or more condition specced players hitting a target for a sustained period of time. It has been implied that this cap on conditions is a technical limitation around the management of all the condition stacks rather than a design decision, and I hope that this solution would help to eliminate this limit or make it much harder to reach.
A quick example that is probably at the far end of the ‘bad’ part of the design currently in place:
Elementalists with a dagger mainhand gets a Drake’s Breath skill with a 5 second cooldown that causes 12 seconds of burning without any traits at all. If you add a dagger offhand, you get another 5 second burn on a 15 second cooldown using Ring of Fire. Put those two together, and you’re sitting on 29 seconds worth of burning applied over a 15 second period. This is before you add in condition duration from traits and food, which would take it up to 48s of burning applied in 15s. If you have any of the additional burn procs that you can spec into in the fire tree, it gets even worse. I assume the intent of those skills wasn’t “stack up a ton of burning and then come back in a minute to refresh it.” This is obviously even more of a problem when you get in a group that has burning from other sources. Nobody can actually effectively play this mythical Fire Ele as a spec because so much of the damage is burning based that you’ll never actually see any of it tick after the first few seconds of a fight.
(edited by Knox.8962)
For the record, the spread doesn’t seem to be related to distance from the target at all. If you are very close, you may have your grenades detonate on the target as they pass through, instead of behind, but they don’t actually fly out in a V shape pattern when throw them. They target some random angle and radius from the center of the ground target and fly directly to the spot.
Condition builds utilizing Permeating Wrath or other AoE burns can be useful for AoE farming type scenarios, but outside of that, it isn’t really something that works well for guardians in the current system. The limiting factor is the way burning damage stacks in duration instead of intensity, so you don’t really have any way to increase your damage output beyond what 1 stack of burning provides.
The good news is that burning has a fairly high base damage, so you do a baseline level of condition damage all the time anyways even without investing gear/traits into those stats.
Technically, you’d still have the trait saying “increase grenade damage by 50%” in order to get back to where you are. That trait would be slightly less mandatory because it wouldn’t increase the proc chances like the current one does, but it would still be a 50% bump in raw direct damage from the untraited version.
The FT does about 20% more damage than the guardian staff auto-attack. That’s a pretty poor comparions in my opinion, because the staff doesn’t even pretend to be a damage weapon.
Again, I think the kit is great as a collection of utilities, but for damage, you’re not getting much out of it other than the #2 skill.
A condition specced grenade engineer who isn’t afraid to use bombs every few seconds can sustain 25 stacks of bleeding, 100% burning uptime, 100% poison uptime, 25 stacks of vulnerability, and some confusion as well. It isn’t a great burden on any of the condition specs to get up to 15+ stacks of bleeding, and most of those specs have access to poison, torment, or burning in addition to the bleeds.
So, potentially 1 shrapnel grenade toss if you get lucky with procs. A truly herculean effort.