Nope. wounding >= stunning > bleeding.
Only exception are hp-bloat bosses or monsters you aren't supposed to fight yet, where the tactic of choice is to stack enough DoT and try to keep at least one party member alive until the dot finishes the job. For example beholders, elder yotums, or if you want to tackle the ogre early. And in these rare cases shuriken and gaulens poison strike do the job pretty well.
you neglect the fact that while bleeding to death the enemies keep their full combat capabilities and still hit like a truck.
Here's my take: wounding = stunning = bleeding. And you, in fact, want to have all of those available at any given moment. Because I've tried all of them so I know what I'm talking about.
vs. Trash mobs / Avegage mobs / Boss-tier
Wounding = unnecessary / useful / very useful
Stunning = useful / very useful / usually too weak
Bleeding = very useful / useful / very useful
Any 2 (or all 3) together = OP / OP / OP
There is no significant difference between a mob having 10 and 20 wounds, unless the mob in question is boss-tier (then you want as many wounds on them as possible). If your frontliners' defence is decent, a mob with 10 wounds on it will already have a very hard time hitting them. 10 wounds is roughly 3 attacks with a wounding weapon, or 1-2 attacks with wounding strike. Weak trash mobs are already too weak, so wounding is unnecessary.
Stunning works best versus mod-tier mobs since those you can both stun well and will benefit most from delaying. Versus the strongest mobs stun is usually least useful because their resists are too high. But if it works, then it's super-useful.
Bleeding is always good. Versus weak mobs you can quickly spread it around, reducing the tedium of trash fights. Versus super strong mobs that aren't immune to bleed, it's extremely useful since it works better the longer it stays on the mob (and the fact that you will have hard time hitting the bosses, while the bleed stays on and does its dirty work). It's "only" ok versus evenly-matched mobs since
I know that those can still hit you while they bleed to death. Except they still die faster and that means that they hit you less in the long term.
And evenly-matched enemies don't hit like a truck unless you fucked up in the defense departament. And if your defense is good, and they still hit like a truck, well then they aren't exactly evenly-matched, are they?
yes, the documentation of the game isn't that good existent, so telling what wounding does is rather obscure compared to the obvious stunning and bleeding results. My theory, which is based on pure assumption: Hit chances, damage and the success chance of spell effects are mainly derived from the level disparity between attacker and defender. Wounds seem to negatively affect the level you're bringing to the table while attacking, thus missing/miscasting more often and dealing less damage. With enough wounds, you just become incapable of hitting the enemy, and if you do, you deal almost zero damage.
The wound threshold where a combattant is basically useless scales throughout the game, of course.
Applypoison already gave the good explanation of how things work. Additionally, if you mouseover the wounds icon on the char, it shows the exact modifiers. And from there you can see that wounding a lot effectively shuts down an enemy (in time, you still need a few attacks to stack those wounds).
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