Guild Wars 2

TLDR: Stack for condition damage and not duration if you want the most out of burning

So I was testing burning damage and believe I ran across a bug in how burning is applied or it is a game mechanic that makes condition duration less useful for burning.

In the pvp zone (mists) with no gear or traits selected and auto attack off, the baseline for burning is: 328 damage a second. Burning stacks in duration not intensity so applying more stacks prolong that burn time allowing for more ticks.

Virtue of Justice does 328 per 1s of damage. On 5 attack proc you get 1s of burn and on activation of the virtue you get 5s of burning totaling 1640 damage as is shown on the tooltip.

While testing I notice that Virtue of Justice activation only ticks 4 times instead of 5 times so the actual damage is 1312.

this leads into the condition duration problem. when you increase burning duration you get a tooltip that states 1 1/4s of burning damage. This gets rounded down to only 1 second of burning with only 1 tick.

If you have 5 1/2s of burning damage you only get 5 ticks. Well what if you combine two abilities with the same burning duration such as Purging Flames and Virtue of Justice.

Putting 8 points into the Zeal trait line you get a 5 1/2s burn on both of those abilities. As stated earlier Virtue of Justice only ticks 4 times instead of 5 times, but Purging Flames ticks the full 5 times. The expected result when combining these two abilities should be: 5 1/2 + 5 1/2 = 11 seconds of burning with each second ticking for burn damage.

End result is you only get 9 ticks of burning. Subtract 1 tick because Virtue of Justice seems to be bugged and you would expect 10 ticks from the original 11, but the two 1/2 second burning duration did not add together resulting in a lost tick due to being rounded down to the nearest second.

Game mechanic, or overlooked bug? Either way shoot for burn duration by whole seconds not fractions of a second because they do not count.

And as an added bonus, I found that blocking projectiles while having Defender’s Flame traited will not apply burning with with skills like:

Sanctuary (only projectiles)
Shield of Absorption (only projectiles)
Zealot’s Defense (only projectiles)

Great find!

I have been running a solo PvE condition damage build for a few days and never noticed it. I do focus mostly on the re-application of the Burn Condition, and of course condition damage rather than the actual duration, which is likely why I never noticed there was an issue.

They should alter the condition damage from “ticks” to something more fluid. Prehaps set it up to produce the damage every 10th of a second, this way even fractional increases to damage duration would be benefical.

This is because it’s hard for Guardians to consistently apply longer lasting burns. However, my general rule of thumb is: if the condition stacks in duration (burn, poison), get condition damage.

I noticed that neither the active or passive effects of virtue of justice are effected by runes that prolong burning. I tested this using 2 runes of balthazar, 2 runes of the flame legion, and 2 runes of lyssa. Burning should have been increased by 40%, however virtue of justice was not effected. Other skills that add fire damage were effected. Judges intervention and such.

I want to go with a Permeating Wrath build, that sets on fire your surrounding foes every 4 hits.
Knowing that the burn duration produced by Permeating Wrath is only 1second, is it better to put points into zeal for more damage per hit, or radiance for more condition damage from Permeating Wrath.
My guts say to better go for zeal.

unless you can get the condition duration to round up to a full extra second, it is not worth it to stack duration. More often than not the safe bet for burning is to stack for condition damage.