Q:
How does burn duration work?
A:
Some of the tooltips on burning skills can be confusing. Ones that reapply the burning multiple times show the total damage for full reapplies. This is indicated by a number ontop of the burn icon. So tooltip shows full damage, with a timer of just one apply – confuses quite a few people. Especially when they pick up a Fiery Greatsword, “holy kitten #2 does 12k burning damage in 3seconds!”.
Burning duration, condition duration work the same. They are added from the base duration, “additive”.
For example with your spec you should get 6*(1+0.1+0.2+0.15+0.15+0.4)=12seconds of burning alone, with 12 seconds of cooldown.
So you have WAY too much burning, you’ll be stacking it up to 1 minute, which is useless.
You should drop 2 of the utilities for something else. I would say drop the turret and get toolkit instead.
Personally I would drop flamethrower and get any of the survival Elixirs, you are speccing alot into pistol anyway so spamming in flamethrower is not so optimal. Or bombkit if you feel extra manly.
Think of burning as the extra bonus that can do great damage in the background, and turn your eyes into Confusion. Magnet→ pry bar → pistol 5→ bomb 3&5 → pistol 3 and watch those 4k+ confusion ticks fly. After you cry yourself to sleep for what monster you have become.
[TA]
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Burning
Burning you apply does a fixed amount of damage per second; this does not increase with stacking, Instead, stacking multiple burns means the target burns for longer – the extra damage adds up over time.
E.g. Hit a target with 9.5s burning (blowtorch) plus 1s burning (flamethrower #1) and then run away. Result, the target will burn for a total of 10.5s. Come back 10s later and the target will still be burning.
Keep in mind that burn is removed a single condition. So even if you hit the enemy with 5 different skills that inflict burn, it is still considered one condition applied to the enemy. So if they remove a condition, it will remove the entire duration of the burn. For instance, if you somehow stacked 5 minutes of burn on someone, they could remove that entire 5 minutes with a condition removal, removing a lot of the potential damage.
So burn duration will only get you so far, unless your opponent just doesn’t have condition removal at all.
It’s a bit difficult to compare mathematically since you can’t reliably factor condition removal into the equation, but you need to take this into account when making a build and when fighting the enemy. I’ve always been a fan of higher condition damage with higher frequency of application rather than condition duration. That way, you can apply more smaller stacks of burn, which makes it harder for the enemy to negate the burning damage with precise condition removals. Traits like Incendiary Power in the Explosives line would help with this.
A lot of people will put enough condition duration to get the extra “tick”. For instance, if you burn someone for 3.5 seconds, that last 0.5 seconds is wasted because burning only damages every second. However, if you get your condition damage up a bit higher to get a 4 second burn from the same skill, it will now effectively inflict 33% more damage since it now ticks 4 times instead of 3.
It’ll be a balance you have to work out, but if you use the Rare Veggie Pizza, then you can probably dump a lot of the traits you have to boost burn duration. In particular, the Rare Veggie Pizza (40% condition duration) combined with a giver’s weapon (10% condition duration) will be +50% condition duration, which is a nice number to have since it makes 2 second durations into 3 seconds.
Thanks a lot guys. I’ll take what ya’ll said into account.
Pretty happy at the moment. I’ll pick up either Elixir Gun or Tool Kit instead of Flamethrower.
I only took the flame turret for the ranged Napalm and the smoke field. Could probbbly use a bomb kit but that would bring me too close for comfort.