Guild Wars 2

I like the new patch. It gave more builds a viability. It gave more variability. It gave a lot of things that made this good game better.

What it took away was A LOT of boon duration.

With the patch, ANET raised all base stats, but they did not raise boon duration, unless it was a shadow raising. Even healing got a boost, but boon duration and condi duration did not.

The only current ways to increase boon duration are food and runes. Maximum I could find is 55% condi duration and 55% boon duration using a combo of runes and food.

PLZ ANET: GIVE US A VISIBLE BOON DURATION PERCENTAGE OTHER THAN WHAT FOOD AND RUNES GIVE YOU.

Condition duration can still hit +100% generic.

+40% Koi Cake, +20% Giver’s weapons, +10% Sigil of Malice, +10% Toxic nourishment, +20% runes (requires 2 Trapper, and 2 of each of two of the following: Mad King, Lyssa, Lich, Nightmare).

They can a couple of options they can do:

1) Do nothing

2) Add boon duration to gear, which will take the place of one of your stats
2.5) Change boon/condi duration to a formula (like ferocity) and introduce new stat combos

3) If they introduce 500 jeweler they can let us craft infusions. +~2% boon/condi duration infusions (personally my favorite solution). Make even more sense if they introduce some kind of base agony through Masteries in HoT

I still think they should just let Healing Power decide Boon Duration, similar to how Ferocity is increasing Crit Chance.

Would give Healing Power that desired buff it’s been needing for a long time.

TheSwede.9512:

I still think they should just let Healing Power decide Boon Duration, similar to how Ferocity is increasing Crit Chance.

Would give Healing Power that desired buff it’s been needing for a long time.

Slight correction, Ferocity increases Crit Damage, not Chance (that’s precision).

Also, those aren’t related at all. Ferocity was created when Crit Damage % was removed. It functions identical in nature to how precision affects Crit Chance. Currently no stat “double dips”. The idea isn’t bad, but I feel that it really only helps cele builds, which specifically had it’s boon duration removed a long while ago.

Healing power already has a purpose, it increases all healing skills and regen. And they’ve already shown their idea on how to increase it’s effectiveness with the introduction Benevolence.

Not saying it’s perfect, it doesn’t make you a better tank in the slightest, it’s just there for support. Though it does teeter on the edge of trinity on the Rev (which to be fair it’s pretty much just what the rev does), with ~195% healing to allies, or something like that, with only a mediocre self heal.

I suppose that one of our masteries will be boon duration and condi duration.

That would work, and would not take the slot of another stat.

I still don’t like that the durations didn’t get a bump if they took all boon duration trait lines out of the game. I think that is why people are dying faster in pvp and wvw. We don’t get the protection duration unless we run the runes, but they suck otherwise and people LOVE Hoelbrak, because of the 20% condi duration decrease, so they get a 35% Might increase.

People might love Hoelbrak as you state, but using it for the decrease in condi duration isn’t really that benificial, in fact it has a minor impact seeing the current post-patch status of durations and stacks.

Let’s take mesmers Winds of Chaos :
- Bleeding (7s): 298 Damage

That is, when using all the foods and sigils like described above, increased by 100%, which doubles that to a whopping 14 seconds. With Hoelbrak this is reduced by 20 percent : 2.8 seconds (and numbers are always rounded in GW2).
Basically you shave off 3 seconds on that particular condition, leaving 11 seconds of one condition.

Is it less long ? yes. But the lenght reduction of it is negligable since most wont last that long when several stacks and several conditions are tickin away.
Count to eleven out loud. That’s long in a fight. 3 seconds won’t make a huge difference. And a 20% reduction on a condi that lasts 5 seconds or less only takes 1 tick away (all is rounded down)

Taken from wiki :

Conditions which inflict damage over time (bleeding, burning, torment and poison) deal damage each full second and a fractional damage either at the beginning or end of their duration. Thus, if a skill that inflicts poison with a duration of 6 seconds has its duration increased to 6.9 seconds through traits, it will show 7s in its tooltips, but will actually only deal full damage 6 times, the remaining duration will deal a fractional damage. Condition duration cannot be increased over 100%

By the way, as far as boon duration goes, one thing comes to mind :

-Platinum dubloon : +4% Boon Duration
Double-click to apply to an item with an unused upgrade slot.

Combine a few of those into items together with foods/utilities, and you can reach a respectable increase in boon duration.
If it’s worth it ? probably not.

Lingering Might ( ranger trait ) +20% boon duration
Bowl of Nopalitos Saute +20% boon duration
Bountyful xxx +10% boon duration
Superior Rune of Water +20% boon duration

total: 70%

Wallace MacBix.2089:

They can a couple of options they can do:

1) Do nothing

2) Add boon duration to gear, which will take the place of one of your stats
2.5) Change boon/condi duration to a formula (like ferocity) and introduce new stat combos

3) If they introduce 500 jeweler they can let us craft infusions. +~2% boon/condi duration infusions (personally my favorite solution). Make even more sense if they introduce some kind of base agony through Masteries in HoT

ANET : We…choose….1

I’d like more choices in adding boon duration too. Right now boon duration is very limited.

SirDrygan.1823:

Wallace MacBix.2089:

They can a couple of options they can do:

1) Do nothing

2) Add boon duration to gear, which will take the place of one of your stats
2.5) Change boon/condi duration to a formula (like ferocity) and introduce new stat combos

3) If they introduce 500 jeweler they can let us craft infusions. +~2% boon/condi duration infusions (personally my favorite solution). Make even more sense if they introduce some kind of base agony through Masteries in HoT

ANET : We…choose….1

They’ve always been on 1 for a very long time if you haven’t noticed.
Anet hates boon duration. Giver stat on gears has been practically abandoned since day1. It is unlikely they are going to put boon duration on gears all over again.
For PS/EA warrior your best solution is rune of strength @ insane 15g a pop. Plus consumable. I’m not sure about other classes.

Easy ways ANet could and should fix boon duration:

Raise Giver’s armor contribution.
If Giver’s got a significant boost, not the painfully low +1%, I’d consider adding a piece or two to make up for the utter gutting of my warrior’s boon duration. Considering the actual stat spread is garbage, +3% to +5% isn’t such a terrible trade-off.

Return boon durations (and condi durations) to the skill lines they came from.
It’s actually a bit insulting that some classes got to keep their support line benefit, while others got gutted. Adding +10% to +20% at the fifth step in the support line would return that boon duration. Or, if the devs are afraid of “locking” people into trait lines, add half the bonus to two trait lines, and make their bonuses stack. Support-minded players are going to take those lines anyway, while offense-minded players might get a bonus out of it.

Add 1% boon duration per 100 Healing Power.
Or some similar ratio. There’s precedent with Revenant now, and it’s a trait that could be introduced to every support line, and it would make HealPow more useful, which it needs to be. It would even help HealPow add a wee bit of offense by extending Might/Fury durations.

I didn’t miss the stats from trait lines until I finally logged on to my character that used boon duration from that trait line and found I now had none at all. The runes and sigils that would help it are completely useless to my build. Boon duration wasn’t pivatol to my build (the traits I was using were), but it sure was nice and now I miss it.

Personally, I would like that they standardize boon duration like they did with Critical damage.

In Giver’s armor 1% Boon Duration = 96 points of stats.

From foood 20% = between 100 and 70 points of stats so 1% = between 5 and 3.5 points of stats.

From Runes 15% = 100 points of stats or 1% = 6.66 points of stats

They should make a stats like Ferocity and standardize the amount. That way, gaining boon duration would be harder and buffing your team will be harder. We would actually need to work a little to gain that 25 stack of might.

Boon spam is pretty crazy on classes that’d want duration, I don’t think it’s that much of a problem really. Look at how DD eles and bunker guards are doing in PvP atm. Just a couple examples but yeah I barely notice the lack of duration.

What they need to do is change condition and boon duration to work like ferocity (arguably, combine them) and normalize them on gear and food. Right now you get way too much of it from food and way too little from anywhere else.

This would also clean up the attribute system and provide some symmetry, which is currently just kind of an in-cohesive mess.

I’m not sure about the merging condition/boon duration. They are way too different. Because they could decrease the base duration of boon and condition and boost the effect of those 2 stats to make them more important.

That way 1-2 zerker guy with food or runes couldn’t max might, vulnerability, etc. They would either need the 5 of them to work, or need someone with boon/condition duration to max it. Right now, it’s kind of easy to max those thing out.

Thaddeus.4891:

I’m not sure about the merging condition/boon duration. They are way too different. Because they could decrease the base duration of boon and condition and boost the effect of those 2 stats to make them more important.

Merging is definitely arguable, but regardless they should both work more like ferocity and critical damage.