Guild Wars 2

I strongly suspect the short answer is “no” but I just want to confirm it: if burning (or bleeding or whatever) ticks every second then a 5% increase over 4 seconds would have no effect (as it’s just 0.2 of a second), right?

I presume the intention is to stack several of these bonuses (from runes, traits or sigils) so that they are useful? Or is there some magic I’m missing here?

No to burning, yes to bleed.

Burning damages every second, bleed goes damage… 9x per second?
So even if you increase the duration of burning, it wouldn’t have an extra tick at 4 seconds, but bleed would do some extra damage.

If you’re using Sigils the change won’t reflect in the tooltip, but Traits do. If you want to compare, go to the Mists and set a Trait that grants this effect and check if the skill’s damage goes up (and it’s duration). (You can check simply by spending points in the extra condition duration)

And yes, they are useful, but mostly solo and/or to other specific effects. Condition duration is great when you’re applying cripple or freezing for example, and can also greatly increase the damage per use of a skill (such as burning/bleed), but it’s wasted if the monster has max stacks of that condition already. This happens alot on world boss monsters, but it’s useful for solo/dungeons.

interesting question, but usually you have mulstiple burn skills, so they should add up(if u stacked several bonuses) but i wouldn’t take runes/sigils for that, there is much better stuff to take.

Thanks very much for your help guys.

Danicco.3568:

Burning damages every second, bleed goes damage… 9x per second?

My experience is that both bleed and burning tick once per second. The difference in appearance is that since bleed stacks intensity, you will see the damage from each stack of bleed (which would be 9 numbers when you have applied 9 stacks of bleed) whereas there is only a single number from burn each second.

All of my bleeds, regardless of when I apply them, tick a the same time. It also appears that my burning ticks on the same schedule. This implies that there is a fixed schedule for applying condition damage.

However, when you hit an enemy with an attack that inflicts bleed/burn/poison, they receive the condition immediately—it isn’t, so far as I can discern, deferred until the next tick.

Based on these two, I believe that a 5% burn duration increase will be applied as just that. Since it is less than a full second increase (unless you somehow have a 20s burn skill), you are not guaranteed to receive any additional damage—that extra 5% duration must overlap the time during which condition damage ticks are processed.

For example:

At t=0s the enemy has no conditions.
At t=0.4s you apply burning with a 1s duration.
At t=1s the burning deals damage.
At t=1.4s the burning fades.

If you increased the duration of the burn by 5%, it wouldn’t make a difference; it would just fade at 1.45s instead of 1.4s.

However, if the burn was applied at t=0.96s, then at t=1s and t=2s the burn would deal damage and at t=2.01s it would dissipate.

I haven’t invested a significant amount of time into researching this (although it is on my to-do list), but it is consistent with my experiences. I’ve never seen anything to suggest otherwise.

Danicco.3568’s answer is incorrect -_- (Why would he even bother answering if he doesn’t know how game mechanics work?)

Bleed as well as ALL dots only tick once a second. Increasing duration does nothing unless you can increase it to at least a second longer.

Dibrom.6408:

Danicco.3568’s answer is incorrect -_- (Why would he even bother answering if he doesn’t know how game mechanics work?)

Bleed as well as ALL dots only tick once a second. Increasing duration does nothing unless you can increase it to at least a second longer.

agreed, i would listen to fildydarie on this subject since he gets it alot better.