I don’t see the problem with damage calculations itself. It shouldn’t matter to the server or the network connection if there are calculations for 100x hundred blades with different power, crit DMG, might stacks and crit chances behind it (with armor of the opponents to be taken into consideration too) or 1000 (assuming 10 stacks by each of a group of 100 people) bleeding ticks with different condi DMG and might stacks behind it. Actually the condi ticks should be the easier ones to calculate since they are only affected by condi DMG and might stacks and directly go through armor.
These calculations already work partly – introduced with the new condition icons adding up all your bleeding stacks. I guess adding up all stacks of a map could be the next step. But not without balancing boss/enemy HP or even the whole game around these changes in the same step.
I think the main reasons for the caps initially introduced was the fear of enemies melting too fast under the combination of direct DMG and full condition DMG and also the impact of condition dmg on large scale PvP/WvW.
For PvE – apart from global HP adjustments – there are already new enemy mechanics in place, that could help. Enemies are already dodging, healing up, even have down states. Active condition removal could also be used by enemies when a certain amount of condition stacks is reached. That way players could/would need to continuously apply conditions to keep them up. That’s at least what I could imagine for PvE and map bosses.
In PvP and WvW balancing this would be difficult. There should not be a difference if you are insta killed by simultaneous direct DMG of many players or a huge amount of condition stacks applied by the same amount of players. But there are classes that can do both high direct and condition dmg. And lots of conditions can be applied ranged. To me that sounds very difficult to balance and by changing the condi DMG mechanic, ANet would need to do severe changes to every aspect of the game. So I understand the underlying problem here…
I hope there will be some solution in the future. Currently condition builds are mostly considered not viable in PvE (especially boss fights – see also current LS Knights) and generally in large scale combat. Most condition players will be asked to switch to zerker gear (not always in the friendliest way). I think that’s a situation that should never arise in a well balanced game. Instead of a trinity we have zerker – zerker – zerker now…
EDIT: I forgot to mention that I don’t think an infinite condition spam (no stack limit) would be a good solution. Also personal stack limits are not the best solution. That’s clear to me too and has also been mentioned by the devs.
They are looking into it but won’t implement either of those two “solutions”. I’m curious though, what they come up with – the problem obviously is very complex.
