My take on build diversity and burning damage
As was pointed out in the stickied Pyroclasm thread, burning damage for guardians scales reasonably well with the number of targets if you are using Permeating Wrath. For individual targets, the scaling is pretty limited.
What is really nice about burning is that the base damage is fairly high, so even in builds with no investment in condition damage, you’ll be able to do some damage with it if you can get burning on enough targets.
As far as the new trait goes, it just doesn’t provide enough additional damage to be worth grabbing for any serious build. You’d probably be in the 2-3% additional damage range for most builds.
Base damage seems high versus bleeds, but then you have to take into account availability of stacks, and typically on the auto attack they can maintain 3 to 4, sometimes even 6 stacks of bleeds with ease. Also they have the availability to spike bleed damage for short periods of time with multiple stacks.
Base damage of bleed is 170.
170*3=510
Base damage of bleed is 43
Base damage of burn is 328
Bleeding would need to maintain 7 stacks to match burning at 328 damage. Is that unheard of? It may fluctuate but possible.
So burning is not a better damaging condition with no condition power added.
Poison is less damage, but its application provides 33% reduction in healing. Very powerful in PvP and even PvE on some mobs.
Confusion has a very low base damage of 65, but is fairly unique to mesmers and to some degree engineers. It acts much like retaliation in the sense of punishing attackers for attacking, so it is throttled back to not be overpowering. Still they can maintain a stack of 3-5 resulting in consistent 195-325 damage, allowing for higher spikes of 1625 at full stacks…not practical as a means of dps but meant as burst.
I do not believe chill has damage associated with it. It’s main function is control by slowing down enemy attacks and movement.
Once again I rally to have burning receive a secondary effect to its damage the same way poison and chill have one.
My solution would be to allow guardians to trait to have burning also reduce attackers damage, making burning a defensive and support condition unique to the guardians archetype.
I have participated in the pyroclasm thread and encourage more looking into it. As pointed out, Permeating wrath makes burning scale well with AE fights.
What was not mentioned in that thread is that if you are adding burning to up to 5 targets around you, you can now receive the benefit of Fiery Wrath and Radiant power for a 20% increase in physical damage for the ae situation.
This is as opposed to doing AE and only single target burning. So the greatest benefit of Permeating wrath is to enhance physical damage once again with burning as a supplement. Still a very worthwhile investment if you are building for an AE scenario, such PvE farming or WvW zergs.
The biggest take away from pyroclasm that I got was the idea of increasing burning damage by stacking multiple burns on multiple targets, not multiple burns on a single target.
(edited by CMF.5461)
Base bleeding damage is actually 43, not 170, but all of your points are still basically valid. Burning is worth about 7 stacks of bleeding on average.
The other issue is that a single guardian can virtually keep 100% burning uptime on a single target with just VoJ activation.
Engineers with bombs can maintain over 100% coverage on burning for 5 targets without the rune/sigil/food gymnastics that a guardian has to go through.
Elementalists can keep up 100% burning in AoE as well with a relatively minor investment.
Warriors, necromancers, rangers, and mesmers all also have some access to burning as well, but in less mainstream setups.
The end result is that it is very easy to get completely saturated on burning, which basically renders any additional burning completely useless.
I think burning needs to behave as the burst condition, and have far shorter durations, but hit significantly harder than it does today.
Ah, my mistake. Took it from a tooltip that didn’t have a bleed stack icon, but it did have a 4 second duration, so I needed to break that down to 1 sec.
With that in mind, burning is more damaging than other conditions, but does not scale well with further applications.
I still contend that burning is supplemental and not a focus. Or a better way to put it, burning provides pressure and bleeds provide burst.
Given that conditions tick on strongest application to weakest, group play makes it even less viable.
The biggest benefit of burning for the guardian is the fact that it is even on the target in the first place, which provides us 20% more damage done. Do we need that 20% more damage in our gameplay comes up to preference and opinion.
If you don’t go 10 in zeal and/or 25 in radiance, the burning condition matters very little to you.
25 stacks of bleeds with 1454 condition damage would do 2881 damage. Practically speaking it would not be maintained by a single player. so we will figure 4 stacks of bleeds like originally mentioned which would maintain 460 damage a second.
100% Burning up time with 1454 condition damage would do 692 damage.
So again, one is spike the other is pressure. Supplement 692 damage to any attacks we do and it is a nice bump in damage, but not by itself.
A Grenade engineer can keep up 25 stacks of bleeding with a veggie pizza. I haven’t looked in a while, but I assume that a condition necro can do that as well.
Messing with a build calculator on burning duration with the new traits and it starts to look pretty scary on burning damage if someone can pull it off
100% condition duration
2288 condition damage
900 burning damage
2 burning every VoJ proc = 1800 burning damage every 2 seconds/5 hits
Just min/maxing so this is not an optimal build or even the right weapons to use with it. It also has absolutely no condition cleanses.
What I would like to see is that kind of damage with permeating wrath, but you have to switch runes around to make up for a loss of radiant fire and lose some condition damage from rune of undead.
(edited by CMF.5461)