Guild Wars 2

I’ve read a couple times that the magic numbers are +50 and 100% condition duration and that anything in between is a waste of stats. Anyone care to explain why this is?

This isn’t entirely true, but 50% and 100% are usually safe numbers due to the following:
All conditions that deal damage over time (except confusion) will tick damage every WHOLE second.
For example if you have a 5.25 second burning that does 500 damage every tick:
At 0 seconds – the burn is applied
At 1 seconds – you take the first 500 damage tick from burning
At 2 seconds – you take the second 500 damage tick from burning
At 3 seconds – you take the third 500 damage tick from burning
At 4 seconds – you take the fourth 500 damage tick from burning
At 5 seconds – you take the fifth 500 damage tick from burning
At 5.25 seconds – the burning ends.

The bottom line is that conditions do damage in one second intervals so in order to maximize damage you always want your condition’s duration to be a whole number. That extra 0.25, 0.5, or .75 of a second will not give you any additional damage.

So the reason that people say 50% and 100% are magic numbers is because most (if not all) skills that apply a damage condition have a base duration of a whole number (3s poison, 4s bleed, etc). So no matter what, if you have 100% duration, you’ll double the duration, which will always be a whole number. The 50% only works for condi durations with a base duration that is an even whole number.

The thing that you need to know is always aim for the next full second when determining condition duration on damage-over-time conditions and when calculating duration remember that GW2 always rounds to the nearest 1/4 of a second.

For conditions that act as debuffs (cripple, weakness, etc) more duration is always better, because the effect is not ticking but rather a continuous, so a 5.75s cripple will be better than a 5.0s cripple.

This is the most basic description of it and is really all you need to worry about. In bigger fights when there are multiple sources of non-stacking conditions (burning, poison) this idea is flawed due to the timing based on the first application, but that’s really something more for theorycrafting rather than actual playing.

75% is a decent number on engi, brings incendiary powder to 7 seconds and makes shrapnel grenade bleeds an even 21 seconds.

Just gotta look at the base duration for bleeds/burning/poison and calculate it.

3 second bleed (sharpshooter trait) gains 1 tic every 33% roughly.

5 second bleed gains 1 tic every 20%.

4 second bleed gains 1 tic every 25%.

Etc… non damaging ones it doesn’t matter the duration.