Guild Wars 2

Again, this skill gets nerfed to oblivion, offering one stack of burning for 3s each hit, not to mention you’ll most likely only hit once or twice, or none; it’s kind of a hard skill to hit with against a decent player. I feel like this skill was overlooked in the recent patch, and i’m wondering if there’s a chance it could either get its duration back, or apply two stacks each hit? It’s saying something when the majority of my burning comes from people entering my ring of fire, rather than drake’s breath, and I feel like it has gotten real kitten out, y’know? Thoughts?

“Drake’s Breath: Increased the burning duration from 2 seconds to 3 seconds.”

Such nerf!

It’s still a nerf because it did more damage before.

zalcs.9701:

It’s still a nerf because it did more damage before.

Ya if no one removes it in the 10 sec that it use to stack to now it just stacks like bleed so its a bit less dmg but a lot faster.

In theory yes, but not in practice.

Before the patch changes, drake’s breath would inflict a base total of 8s of burn (4 times 2s). But in fact, most classes would have plenty of opportunities to cleanse this burn before it did its full damage, so a large part of our potential damage was wasted.

Now, since burning stacks in intensity, a much larger part of the damage we inflict is effective even before we finish channelling the breath.

I find that this really balances the damage nerf that each burning stack does.

Also, it forces our targets to react to the breath itself rather than just tanking it and nonchalantly cleansing the burn when they want. With the new changes, our enemies must try to avoid being hit by the breath, and due to its low cooldown this becomes a serious recurrent threat.

Okay, can we conclude on that it’s worse for 1v1/1vx and better for team-play? I get that it got “buffed” in a sense that it stacks now, but other classes don’t suffer losses like this. Well, a few cases such as guard f1, but most do not, e.g. engi

Drake’s Breath has such a low cooldown that cleansing is ineffective against it.

I would say the new version is a PvP nerf and PvE buff.