Guild Wars 2

I’ve been looking at making my own take on a burning guardian for levelling, and have some questions that I haven’t been able to have satisfied by the wiki/other sources.

1. Does Inner Fire still not proc when you “set yourself alight” with the torch? From what I can tell, the answer is no, yet the tooltip texts seem so… unaccidentally matched and the IF trait so useless without that combo, that I’m inclined to believe that the combo not working is a bug that will be or has been fixed.

2. If I’m reading this right, you’d need large amounts of cond. duration to get small amounts of burn time increases:

Wiki: Duration of conditions is rounded to nearest quarter of a second in skill tooltip’s list of effects (0s, ¼, ½, ¾ and 1s) and conditions which inflict damage over time (bleeding, burning and poison) only deal damage each full second.

So for short burns like 3s (Zealot’s Flame, Judge’s Intervention), 2s (Shattered Aegis, some others), 1s (passive VoJ) you would need large amounts of duration (at least 82% +duration for 1s burns!) increase to see nonzero improvement, correct?

Yes, burns stack but do the fractions stack? What about when more than one person is applying the burn? The engine could be rounding out most of the duration if the rounding happens early.

3. Fiery Wrath: Increases damage by 10% against burning foes.
Radiant Power: Deal more damage (10%) to foes inflicted with conditions (which obviously includes burning).

Do these damage increasers increase condition damage as well? If so, any additional stacks you apply after the target begins to burn would have +20% damage over normal.

I can answer 1. easily. It doesn’t work like that. The tooltip is very misleading there.

Was afraid of that, that question was more a hope than a question, I guess.

The other two are far more difficult, but also more important. After all, if you can only use “on burning” damage enhancers to enhance non-burning damage, then stacking cond damage means you’re not going to be multiplying what you’re stacking.

2. Where are you getting the +82% duration to get a bonus for a 1s burn from? You’d need +100%. It ticks once per second. That said, it’s not that simple, because fractional durations do stack. So with +50% burn duration, if you applied 2 1s burns in a row (second one before the first runs out) you’d get 3 ticks of burn damage. If more than one person is applying burning, it goes through the durations in the order they were applied, like so:

Person A has 0 condition damage, person B has 1000 condition damage.
Person A applies 5s of burning, Person B applies 5s of burning, Person B applies 2s of burning, Person A applies 2s of burning.

First 5 burn ticks deal damage using A’s condition damage. Next 7 use B’s condition damage. Last 2 use A’s again.

3. No, +% damage modifiers never boost condition damage, only raw damage. And even if they did, it wouldn’t matter if the stacks were applied after the initial one or not. These damage modifiers work on damage you do regardless of whether or not you applied the effect/used the skill before meeting the condition. Might, for example, can be applied after you inflict burning and will increase the burning damage. This works the other way, too – might wearing off after applying burning will cause the burning to start doing less damage.

Thank you. A further question on the damage modifiers:

I’m guessing that crits only take into account the base damage before traits, so that would mean that someone wanting to take advantage of those traits must stack power instead of cond damage or crit, since the traits only magnify the effect of power.

Also, might gives you the best of both worlds because it increases power, which is magnified 20% and it also increases cond damage. Is that the way it works?

Thank you for your patience, by the way. It’s much appreciated.

My recommendation on the matter, after trying and trying to make a burn build work: Don’t center your build around burning. It doesn’t seem it was designed as a focal point, but rather as supplemental damage for nearly every build if desired.

With that out of the way, I’ll share what knowledge I gleamed from about 60 hours of in-game testing:

1.) No, it only works when you have the burning condition on you.

2.)Conditions “remember” the fractions of seconds, but round down and do not apply them if they do not equal a full seconds worth. What I mean is this: Lets say you have a duration of 1 1/2 seconds for one burn application, and 3 3/4 on another. If you apply the 1 1/2 one and let it run its course without stacking another burn, it will only do 1 seconds worth of damage. But, if you stack the 3 3/4 burn with it, it remembers the 1/2 and 3/4, and will round up to 5 seconds, while remembering, but not applying, the remaining 1/4 second. if you continue to stack enough partial fractions to equal a whole before the duration runs out, you WILL benefit from the extra time. If not, you won’t.

3.) The 10% damage modifiers from those skills will not yield increased condition damage. That only applies to direct damage. The might boon, however, will increase both.

And to answer your other question further down about crits, base damage, and traits: Critical hits DO factor in bonuses from traits before final damage is applied.

Thank you very much, Bobobejumbo. That was an extremely detailed answer.

I’ve almost got my build down, but there’s one last thing I need to know to avoid making a stupid newbie mistake. And since it’s a stupid newbie question, it’s likely not written down anywhere.

Can a combo field be reused for as many finishers as you can throw out while the field is active? Specifically, could I Purging flames for a 5s fire field, swap in a greatsword, then whirl finisher GS 5, yank em’ close with the second step, Whirl finisher again with GS2, wait a couple seconds till they work off their blindness, then leap finisher GS3 for fire armor and end up with large duration burning as a result?

Oh, and the wiki doesn’t say what the duration of a fire whirl’s burning is. I’m not kidding.

You can do as many skills as you can as long as the field is still up. Its pretty common for me to remove conditions with whirling wrath and then using a burst finisher for retaliation right before it dies out.

Thanks everyone. I now have a plan (assuming a Fire Whirl gives any kind of significant duration). I’ll post it in the builds section when I register with a calculator site.

Uh, it doesn’t matter if damage boosts affect base damage or final damage since it’s all multiplicative. Third grade math. 100 × 1.1 × 1.5 = 100 × 1.5 × 1.1.

Well, the question was actually under what circumstances the multipliers kicked in at all.

If they don’t kick in, they obviously don’t count. But that’s fourth grade math, we’ll cover that next year.