One of the routinely stated design goals about Guild Wars 2 is that you should be able to wander out in the world and be happy to see others. Interacting and working with other players should be welcome. But it’s hard to welcome others when you’re playing a build focused around stacking bleeding effects on the target, since in the live game there’s a hard limit to how many stacks of that debuff can be applied, making your bleeding useless past a certain point.
Good news, though: That limit is being removed for Heart of Thorns, allowing players with condition-based damage to work together more comfortably with the expansion launch. Game design lead Jon Peters posted about this on the official forums, stressing that while there was a need for more balancing and testing, it was indeed an intentional change to make group play more satisfying for condition-based players. More information about how this system will work for other conditions and more potential balance changes is incoming, but it’s definitely a step toward making the bleeding cycle feel less exclusionary.
[Source: Official forums via TTH]
