From playing the Guild Wars 2: Heart Of Thorns Beta yesterday, many players noticed that the condition cap on Bleeding has been removed. As a result, players are now able to exceed 25 stacks of Bleeding on a single target and at some points, the Wyvern reached well over 100, resulting in an exclamation point (I’m assuming that represents the “oh shit, that’s a lot of stacks!” mark).

Unsurprisingly this news has gone down well with the Guild Wars 2 community who have been asking for years for the condition cap on bleeds to be removed. It never made any sense considering power based skills aren’t limited in their damage output, so I really couldn’t get my head around the logic. Limiting bleed stacks was like saying to a power player that once they’d dealt 5,000 damage they weren’t allowed to do any more for a period of time.

There’s no news yet on burning stacks, but it also looks like confusion has no limit. There’s an official statement on this change from Jon Peters.

"Hey Everyone,

As you may have noticed bleeding stacks go above 25 stacks when playing in the demo map. This is not a mistake, rather as we have said for a while now, we know that the current stack cap creates problems for condition players who want to work together. What you saw today was the first test in solving some of these problems. Keep in mind, it is not necessarily final and absolutely not the entire plan. I see many questions about how this will work and how it impacts other conditions, balance, etc. Rest assured that as soon as we have a final plan we will be revealing it and letting you all know exactly how it will work.

Jon"

We’ll keep you updated on any other big Beta changes.