Bleed + Burning Rune

[ZephyrusSpring.5728]

14 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

and once again, for the x-th time you are dodging doing the calculation for a stat combination of Condition damage, power, expertise. Which as mentioned is not available yet, but might become available in the future and would represent the best in slot damage 3-stat combination for condition builds (which are not as power heavy as Willbender, which has inherently higher power scaling than most other condi builds).

Long wall of text to basically say: I might be wrong, the math is to hard, let's add a pointless side-grade anyway.

That's not how competitive builds work. There is a break-point of how much expertise is useful, unlike PvE where it usually always ends up being 100%, and that break-point is the intersection of opponents necessity to react and devote more resources to condition denial/defenses and conditions becoming an "I WIN" mechanic. That break-point usually is around 30-40%, condition duration at which point opponents are required to react to those conditions or strait up lose in an exchange.

There is no "longer conditions" aspect here since past 30-40% opponents either have dedicated enough resources to deal with conditions, which usually also means significant amount of cleansing, or they haven't and you win as condition build.

Making it easier to reach those 30-40% in what ever way possible not only allows for far easier access to defensive stats, it also support the vastly superior stat options for condition builds in regards to defensive-condition hybrid builds. Not that it matters that much with celestial already shoving aside most other stat combinations.

Different types of power creep exist. This is a poor cop out of finally admitting that adding this rune will either be a pointless side grade or power creep and who would have guessed, most players following this topic disagreed with the idea.

I already gave my thoughts on a 3-stat vipers-clone.  It would have more expertise than vipers, making a hybrid rune even less appealing than trappers.  It would push it in the opposite direction and you’ll have some guy asking for a rune with more condition damage and less duration.  A full set of vipers has 633 precision and you would drop all of that to gain roughly half of it as expertise, which is roughly 20% duration.  A lot of builds are already struggling with too much expertise.  This stat combo would not be as strong as you’re thinking.

The whole point of this rune is to provide a new building piece to increase the diversity of builds.  Of course if you try to shove it into an existing build it’ll just be a side grade.  That’s an indication that’s it’s balanced.  If you’re just going to handwave that then you clearly aren’t appreciating the potential.

As for competitive, I feel like you’re just grasping at straws.  Celestial and viper have the same amount of expertise, so this rune changes nothing in wvw that it won’t also change in pve.  If your concern is with bunker stats like settler or dire then I would argue that using Balthazar runes to pump your burning and using your bleeds as cover conditions would be superior.  Just another sidegrade right?  In PvP anet can simply block this rune there like they do to so many others.

[Cyninja.2954]

5 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said:

I already gave my thoughts on a 3-stat vipers-clone.  It would have more expertise than vipers, making a hybrid rune even less appealing than trappers.  It would push it in the opposite direction and you’ll have some guy asking for a rune with more condition damage and less duration.  A full set of vipers has 633 precision and you would drop all of that to gain roughly half of it as expertise, which is roughly 20% duration.  A lot of builds are already struggling with too much expertise.  This stat combo would not be as strong as you’re thinking.

Yes, it would have more expertise, which is why it would get mixed with a set like Sinister which has less expertise, or any other set which increases non condition related stats, given condition damage would be at it's all time peak.

Your math is also off in regards to expertise versus condition damage or 3-stat versus 4-stat.

A complete set of 3-stat gear (not sure why you need to take 1 slot, we have the values for a complete set) gives 3,303 stats total (1,381 primary, 2x961 secondary) while 4-stat gives 3612(2x1,173 primary and 2x633 secondary). That's an increase of 9.3% on total stats, at the expense of the 3-stat primary stat.

Your hybrid rune would  give a total of 5% first condition and 15% secondary condition worth of expertise over Trapper, which results in a total of 300 points worth of expertise for 125 condition damage. This alone almost covers half the gap between 3-stat versus 4-stat sets and the "loss" of condition damage would be more than made up by the 208 condition damage from the 3-stat set.

In the end maximizing condition damage builds in PvE is about:

1. Capping condition duration as efficiently as possible

2. maximizing condition damage as much as possible (slightly depends on how innate hybrid a build is, willbender being one of the most power friendly condition builds there is)

3. getting as much power and precision (priority depends on how many on crit effects a build has) as filler damage stats

EDIT: now plugging in YOUR numbers, we end up with 83 additional condition damage with the 3-stat set (208-125) versus the 134 stat bonus of the 4-stat set (3,612-3,303-175[300-125]) and we see a change of: 3,569 dps (43x83) versus 2,278 (134x17). That's a net gain of 1,291 dps. Not realizable yet because we lack some of the appropriate stat combos (cd,p,f and cd,p,exp).

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The whole point of this rune is to provide a new building piece to increase the diversity of builds.  Of course if you try to shove it into an existing build it’ll just be a side grade.  That’s an indication that’s it’s balanced.  If you’re just going to handwave that then you clearly aren’t appreciating the potential.

Again admitting that this might lead to power creep. You are not accounting for any balance happening around this rune, given you are only looking at current available puzzle pieces. It would very well be possible that as this rune buffs certain builds in performance, those same builds might se nerfs which then make other builds fall out of meta.

So once again, this might result in a rune which joins the pile of useless filler runes, or it causes meta shifts for which we have no idea yet IF more builds remain viable compared to now.

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As for competitive, I feel like you’re just grasping at straws.  Celestial and viper have the same amount of expertise, so this rune changes nothing in wvw that it won’t also change in pve.  If your concern is with bunker stats like settler or dire then I would argue that using Balthazar runes to pump your burning and using your bleeds as cover conditions would be superior.  Just another sidegrade right?  In PvP anet can simply block this rune there like they do to so many others.

The fact that celestial is so overpowered that it potentially hides another weaker issue is no argument. Your argument essentially boils down to:"well celestial is so overpowered already for WvW, adding this will not be an issue, ever" which is nonsense.

Edited May 27 by Cyninja.2954