Guild Wars 2

So it’s clear that condition damage (specifically bleeding and burning) have their damage-over-time applied in discrete amounts. That is, rather than a slow continuous drain on the enemies’ HP, their HP drops in small jumps.

My understanding is that this damage occurs once per “pulse”. Does anyone know how long a “pulse” is? And is it the same for all condition damage effects?

Related to this question, is how increased condition duration affects the total damage done by a condition. If a pulse happens twice per second, and I have a 10% duration bonus on a 3-second condition, the condition will only last for 3.3 seconds, which isn’t enough to get a whole extra pulse of damage in. If that’s the case, for a 3-second condition damage skill, any duration bonus less than about 17% wouldn’t actually increase the damage output (though non-damaging conditions like crippled would still be increased a little, I guess).

I just logged in to look at my sceptre-1-earth tooltip.

I was down-leveled to 76 because of location.

The tooltip said 2046 bleeding dmg over 7 3/4 seconds.

The pulses I am getting are about 98.

While this is not conclusive, I think this lends support to a general theory of a pulse being a damage instance set to occur 3x per second.

as always….I am frequently wrong…this is not gospel, just dirty arithmetic.

I have a lot of questions about condition damage. When in groups conditions are capped— so how does that work for individual damage and condition damage/duration?

parrk.4690:

I just logged in to look at my sceptre-1-earth tooltip.

I was down-leveled to 76 because of location.

The tooltip said 2046 bleeding dmg over 7 3/4 seconds.

The pulses I am getting are about 98.

While this is not conclusive, I think this lends support to a general theory of a pulse being a damage instance set to occur 3x per second.

as always….I am frequently wrong…this is not gospel, just dirty arithmetic.

Just as an aside, the tooltips on condition damage are often incorrect, as they don’t seem to take into account anything that raises the duration of the condition.

parrk.4690:

I just logged in to look at my sceptre-1-earth tooltip.

I was down-leveled to 76 because of location.

The tooltip said 2046 bleeding dmg over 7 3/4 seconds.

The pulses I am getting are about 98.

While this is not conclusive, I think this lends support to a general theory of a pulse being a damage instance set to occur 3x per second.

as always….I am frequently wrong…this is not gospel, just dirty arithmetic.

Since the scepter first skill applies 3 bleeds, it is not 3x a second, but instead, once a second for 3 bleeds over 7 3/4 seconds.

Each pulse for each condition is once per second at the end of the first second since getting applied. What this means is that condition duration increases will generally want to look for breakpoints as long as you’re not stacking together duration stacking conditions such as burns, which will always benefit from extra time.

Proximity.5186:

Each pulse for each condition is once per second at the end of the first second since getting applied. What this means is that condition duration increases will generally want to look for breakpoints as long as you’re not stacking together duration stacking conditions such as burns, which will always benefit from extra time.

That’s a good point about duration-stacking conditions always benefiting, but it only works if you’re always going to be staking the condition (which nearly always is the case, I suppose).

One per second is a little disappointing though because it means that with a scepter/dagger build, I’d need a 13% increase to notice a difference in Churning Earth, and I’d need to go all the way to 17% before Stone Shards sees a change. I suppose if I’m going with items and traits to reach that, it’s less of a big deal, but it means I can’t put 10 points into Fire and see any difference. I don’t know if this the proper forum for a suggestion, but calculating bleeding damage more than once per second would be a nice plus.

(To be fair, I suppose adding points into Fire and expecting Earth skills to be better seems a little silly…)