Guild Wars 2

It appears that +% boon duration (all boons) and +% boon duration (specific boon) are now additive instead of multiplicative. This means your boons don’t last as long if you used to mix the two.

This is going by the tooltips.

This issue is likely to apply to many classes looking to boost a specific boon, but I’m just going to deal with the ranger and Nature’s Bounty in this post, and how that trait synergises with others.

I was fairly certain that pre-patch Rejuvenation and Oakheart Salve were providing 8s of regen with a 20% all boon bonus (from 4 Nature Magic, or 20 in old money) and a 33% regen bonus because these used to multiply:

5s base * 1.2 (all boon bonus) = 6s.

6s * 1.33 (nature’s bounty) = 8s.

Post patch the tooltip reads 7 3/4s, which suggests the bonuses are added now for a 53% bonus:

5s base * 1.53 (combined) = 7.65s.

What this means for Nature’s Bounty is that it is providing only 1 extra tick of regen healing instead of 2. Its effectiveness with Rejuvenation and Oakheart salve has been halved.

Restoring it to provide the second extra tick would require Nature’s Bounty to give +40% regeneration instead of +33%. Either that or the player is forced to go all the way to 6 Nature Magic or look to runes, but my personal example is 4 Nature Magic with Melandru Runes and they don’t have a boon focus.

So the balance question becomes, should Nature’s Bounty give 1 extra tick of regen or 2 with a 4 point Nature Magic investment. I thought it used to give 2, so I took the trait. But if it only gives 1 now, I would have to be desperate.