Guild Wars 2

You can only interact with one combo field at a time – but what if there are two down in the same place? Which one takes priority? No one seems to know, or rather, everyone seems to “know” but no one seems to agree. I’ve heard that the first one to go down gets priority, and that the last one to go down gets priority, and that some fields take priority over others. But my own experiments haven’t gotten me very far. When stack different fields on my ele and blast them with arcane brilliance, I get inconclusive results.

For instance I tried dropping the following combinations of fields on my own head, followed by a blast (and I made sure that both fields were still active when I blasted):

Static Field (lightning) followed by Healing Rain (water) and vice versa
Healing Rain (water) followed by Lava Font (fire) and vice versa
Frozen Ground (ice) followed by Healing Rain (water) and vice versa

All of them yielded seemingly random results. For water/fire sometimes I got healing and sometimes might, for ice/water sometimes I got healing and sometimes frost armor. It seemed like a coin flip. Then there was a weird exception: dropping water followed by lightning and then blasting gave me healing every time and never swiftness. I think I tried it eight times in a row and it was healing every time. Did I just “win” eight coin flips in a row, or is there something going on with combo fields I don’t understand?

Has anyone else done experiments like these, and if so what were the results? I really want to get this sorted out. It’s bugging me that I don’t know the mechanics behind multiple combo fields in the same spot, and I haven’t found any online resources that aren’t either vague or mutually contradictory.

The first one that gets placed on the ground will always have the highest priority.

I just tested in Lion’s Arch – several times I put down healing rain, then frozen ground, and then blasted with Arcane Wave and Arcane Brilliance. I didn’t always get healing – sometimes I got frost armor. Sometimes I got frost armor on one blast and healing on the other. And these are skills with 5 and 6 second durations, so they weren’t expiring before they got blasted. It doesn’t look to me like the first placed always has priority.

The first placed will always have priority. If you are having different effects, your blasts may not be centered inside of the fields, causing them to have different effects, depending on placement.

With projectile finishers, the first field the projectile encounters will apply to it. Same with leap and whirl. Additionally, certain whirl finishers will apply the combo to all of their attacks even after the field has disappeared.

Esplen.3940:

The first placed will always have priority. If you are having different effects, your blasts may not be centered inside of the fields, causing them to have different effects, depending on placement.

With projectile finishers, the first field the projectile encounters will apply to it. Same with leap and whirl. Additionally, certain whirl finishers will apply the combo to all of their attacks even after the field has disappeared.

Go test that with a static field and Symbol of swiftness. You will get retal 99% of the time regardless of which field was put down first.

I believe the correct answer is fields have a prioritization over which was placed first/second, but some fields take prioritization over others regardless of whether they were placed first or second. Also, there are some issues regarding registration with combo field and finisher that cause inconsistencies.

Esplen.3940:

The first placed will always have priority. If you are having different effects, your blasts may not be centered inside of the fields, causing them to have different effects, depending on placement.

With projectile finishers, the first field the projectile encounters will apply to it. Same with leap and whirl. Additionally, certain whirl finishers will apply the combo to all of their attacks even after the field has disappeared.

When I tested this I dropped both fields directly on my head, centered on me, and the blast finishers were both directly on my head as well. I dropped healing rain followed by frozen ground many times and got healing sometimes and frost armor sometimes. I tried similar things with other fields – the first field dropped does NOT necessarily take priority.

As per the wiki:

“The finisher will trigger on the oldest initiator; a blast finisher will give Might instead of Healing if a water field overlaps an existing fire field.”

So, first in first out.

As well as:

“Some projectile finishers (most skills in the first slot of the skill bar as well as multiple projectile skills) only grant a 20% chance of applying the effect for each projectile; this is usually noted on the tooltip for the skill.”

Testing above suggests that the wiki article (based on earlier tests) might not be correct now.

I suspect that it’s a combination of things that people are saying:

• It’s FIFO unless something else overrides it.
• Certain fields might be prioritized over others. Certain finishers might trigger some fields more easily.
• We might think of the fields as overlapping, but they might not be. What if they have different centers, different bits that are overlapping, or different heights.
• Some fields also pulse and that seems to effect when they can be finished.
• Similarly, finishers are different. Some center on the caster, some on the ground. This might affect how they interact.

I think a completely rigorous set of tests would be complicated to set up, so we might never have a definitive answer to this question.

There may also be an issue with the arcane brilliance… I say this because I cannot get the kitten thing to combo underwater with a static field consistently, the field is often quite far from where I think the blast should hit for combo. I say static because it’s the easiest to see the boundaries of and I can get the swiftness combo if I use the arcane blast utility rather than brilliance. So, perhaps trying a different blast might change your results.
But, I don’t know.

eyestrain.3056:

There may also be an issue with the arcane brilliance… I say this because I cannot get the kitten thing to combo underwater with a static field consistently, the field is often quite far from where I think the blast should hit for combo. I say static because it’s the easiest to see the boundaries of and I can get the swiftness combo if I use the arcane blast utility rather than brilliance. So, perhaps trying a different blast might change your results.
But, I don’t know.

Arcane Brilliance is a finisher centered on the caster, therefore likely of different height (z-axis) then a lot of fields, depending on how they were applied.

It would explain a lot of the conflicting reports if we assumed that proximity of the finisher to the field mattered and that each field and finisher can be centered at different heights, not just different geographic (x- & y-axes) locations. If this is true, people would have to be very careful when testing to control all the relevant variables.