Guild Wars 2

I have played for a while now having two guardians and a elementalist. I have explored a bunch of builds and recently I’ve become interested in the condition for burning. Though as what people say about burning, it’s pretty meh, and not as good as it is made out to be. Bleeds also Outshines it due to how frequent you can apply it as well as stacking in intensity. With other conditions they all carry a secondary benefit(aside from bleeds but it stacks) Though here are some suggestions that might make Burning a more attractive condition to utilize.

1) When you apply burn, for the duration nearby foes are afflicted with the burning condition and the damage tick scales by a percentage for for each nearby burning unit.(This one might be a little far fetched or a bit to complex to implant though one of my ideas.)

2)When you apply burning, For every tick of burning your target takes, the total damage of the tick scales by a percentage(effected by Condition Damage).-

3)This one would be simple. inflict burning damage(Tick) and a % of your targets health(Non scaling percentage and severely reduced to NPC champion mobs).

Forums ate my last post due to the thread being moved to suggestions, never to be seen again.

Basically, I want to suggest a major overhaul to burning, which changes how it stacks and gives the idea of fire flaring up and dying out over time.

- Burning now stacks in intensity according to the total burning damage added by players. The stack tracks the current damage of the burn. The damage reduces by some amount per second, e.g. 1 per level of the victim (80 per second at level 80)
- Duration is removed entirely and replaced by the burn dying out over time.
- Burns have their base damage scaled based on the duration they had before; a 1 second burn would have a base damage of 80, a 10 second burn would have a base damage of 800. Some may need a reduction to help balance it (and stop it from ramping too quickly)
- Condition damage is used as a multiplier to base damage instead of an addition; this is to keep the effect of condition damage on duration as equal between a 1 second burn or a 10 second burn
- Add some cap on burn damage per unique player contributing to the burn, so burn stacks can cap out somewhere at the same level as bleed stacks solo, and get higher in group situations. Damage per second may need to reduce at an increased rate above certain thresholds to make sure this doesn’t lead to parties of one condition player and 4 guardians allowing the 1 condition player to effective reach 15k DPS – ideally one player should at most be able to maintain an amount of burning somewhere around the cap for a single contributor.
- All contributors to the stack receive credit for the damage they add to the stack as if it was direct damage, calculated to include the amount of duration that damage adds to the stack. This way, multiple contributors receive appropriate credit for loot/events.

End result: Burning as a condition is initially weaker, ramps up, doesn’t truly suffer from the condition cap in group scenarios. Guardians get an effective condition build which works better in groups (Virtue of Justice active ability) seeing as ANet are pushing for guardians to have condition damage when they only have access to burning.

To make it different I would suggest different changes that are far less complex while keeping burning a low duration condition.

Burning counts as 3 conditions in regards to cleansing, any ability that specifically can cleanse burning now loses the ability to cleanse burning unless it ONLY cleanses burning.
As long as a player is on fire they cannot become untargetable (hi…you are ON FIRE)…this means a thief can stealth but they are still seeable and targetable aslong as they are burning.
Burning causes war adrenaline to fill slower (countered by the tactic to gain adrenaline on damage).
Burning reduces the amount of soul energy necromancers gather.
While burning, elementalists cannot swap elemental attunement and engineers cannot use their f skills (known as utility belt skills), rangers cannot swap pets.
Burning puts it’s duration ontop of the cooldown for guardian virtues, thus if a guard uses a virtue and gets hit with a 5 sec burning, that burning pushes back the cooldown on the virtue by 5 seconds.
While burning, a mesmer cannot use shatter skills.

Yes, this seems harsh, remember that burning lasts for a few seconds at most…I would also severely limit what abilities cause burning (the flamethrower places only 1 second burns so seriously people, don’t even try and point to this, though I would increase the damage of the flamethrower after removing a few burning conditions from the skills).
Also by not having burning stack the durations are kept low and unobtrusive while making this few second debuff now tactical to use.

Runiir.6425:

To make it different I would suggest different changes that are far less complex while keeping burning a low duration condition.

Burning counts as 3 conditions in regards to cleansing, any ability that specifically can cleanse burning now loses the ability to cleanse burning unless it ONLY cleanses burning.
As long as a player is on fire they cannot become untargetable (hi…you are ON FIRE)…this means a thief can stealth but they are still seeable and targetable aslong as they are burning.
Burning causes war adrenaline to fill slower (countered by the tactic to gain adrenaline on damage).
Burning reduces the amount of soul energy necromancers gather.
While burning, elementalists cannot swap elemental attunement and engineers cannot use their f skills (known as utility belt skills), rangers cannot swap pets.
Burning puts it’s duration ontop of the cooldown for guardian virtues, thus if a guard uses a virtue and gets hit with a 5 sec burning, that burning pushes back the cooldown on the virtue by 5 seconds.
While burning, a mesmer cannot use shatter skills.

Yes, this seems harsh, remember that burning lasts for a few seconds at most…I would also severely limit what abilities cause burning (the flamethrower places only 1 second burns so seriously people, don’t even try and point to this, though I would increase the damage of the flamethrower after removing a few burning conditions from the skills).
Also by not having burning stack the durations are kept low and unobtrusive while making this few second debuff now tactical to use.

IMO i think that would be a little to complex to implant into the game tbh, and making it counter core mechanics.