ArenaNet:Skill feedback/Warrior/Swords and Bleeding

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Symbol's Issue -- 01:49, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Discussion

Issue

Bleeding is balanced as a long duration, low intensity condition. This means for it to be effective it has to get on multiple people and stick for long periods of time. With the prevalence of cheap and easy conditional removal (RC, dismiss, mend touch) this only happens in condition pressure builds. Furthermore, swords can't spread bleeding effectively, and the skills they use to inflict bleeding are uniformly bad. This makes their reliance on bleeding for deep wound a serious liability. As a consequence swords are by far the least popular weapon line in PvP, used only in overload builds and occasionally to annoy people with coward on Frozen.

Suggestion

There are three options as I see them:

1. Rebalance bleeding to be a medium or high intensity condition with a shorter duration. This makes it more effective in the common case where it sticks only on one person. This could be done as simply as raising the degen to 5 or 6 while halving the bleed durations across the board. However, this is potentially dangerous in the case of condition pressure builds.

2. Make the non-elite options for bleed (sever artery, barbarous slash) not suck. This means either drastically buffing the ease of application (I made one such suggestion on the sever artery page), or have them do something useful at the same time. The most straightforward (though not necessarily the best) option would be do give SA minor +damage (along the lines of +1...15).

3. Make one of the elites cause bleeding. Good candidates are Quivering Blade and Hundred Blades. This would give swords more bar compression and more spike compression.

== Billy Bob's issue --

Issue

Same as above.

Suggestion

Make bleeding a DoT condition. instead of literal degen, have it deal 6 health loss (that doesn't trigger any skills or hexes or etc) So that bleeding will be much more noticable and viable target, and Skills like Seeping wound/Ulcerous lungs are more enticing, and degen builds are complimented.

Signed as- Billy Bob.