Guild Wars 2

Hi guys,

I was wondering what everyone made of Searing Flames in Radiance. The description is that you kill a boon on your target when you apply burning to them, with an internal cooldown of 20 seconds.

The wiki is pretty sparse for this trait. My main questions are how boons are selected for removal – is it always the furthest to the left, like condition removal? Or does it select boons randomly? Can it be used to pierce Aegis before applying damage normally? Does it apply to the burning hit given to others when Justice is activated? It would be disgusting if you could completely deboonify someone with a mass Justice attack, but I’ve never seen that happen so I doubt it’s possible.

I run Shelter rather than the healing signet whose name escapes me at the moment, so I almost never pick the signet cooldown trait. Searing Flames is one of the better options for adept Radiance traits, though it’s something of a lesser of evils rather than a shining star. The thought of ripping Protection off of people, or even Regeneration, appeals to me greatly though. That said, I’ve never done any testing with it, so I don’t have any idea how effective it is. It’s very difficult to test on the bots in the Mists.

What’s everyone’s experience with it?

lol @ deboonify. While I can’t entirely answer your question, I can say that Aegis cannot be removed with this trait because the burning needs to be applied for the trait to trigger. Since Aegis will block the attack that would have caused the burning, the burning is never applied. Subsequent burning would continue to strip boons once the Aegis was removed, though.

The description clearly state that it activate when YOU apply burning to a target, not for allies. So I am sure it doesn’t work for others when you active VoJ since the virtue itself doesn’t apply burning (it create a boon that make the next attack inflict burning.) But I have no idea how the trait select which boon to remove.

However, this trait is on a 20s internal cooldown which I personnally think make this trait really weak because :

1. If your target have more than 1 boon then you have to wait 20s for each boon after the first one if you want to remove all theirs boons. Ironically boon normally doesn’t last 20+ seconds therefor by the time you can active this trait again chances are your target’s boons are over.

2. If you are using a build that focus heavily on applying burning, you only get the effect from this trait once per rotation of your skills which mean this skill doesn’t really help burning builds much.

I would like if the trait actually encouraged applying more burning to your target. Something like : “Your target lose 1 boon for every 5s of burning that you applied. Timer reset when burning ends or is removed.” This would make the trait more interesing without having to actually count in your head when your trait is ready to proc. I simply hate internal cooldowns on traits, because you have no indicator on your UI that tells you when they are ready to active. (exception being those with like 1s of internal CD which is there to avoid abuse with AoE skills)

@Istaril, the description for Empowering Might clearly says it applies might to allies and yet it works on yourself. I stopped paying too much heed to tooltips a while ago, because they’re often wrong.

The trait isn’t really powerful enough to expect it to remove all of a target’s boons. That said, plenty of classes have the ability to stack longish to nearly permanent boons – Guardians with no boon duration can stack 20 seconds of protection or more with the right combo of skills, Rangers get something absurd like 20 seconds or 30 seconds of fury off their horn skill, and so on. There are plenty of opportunities to negate someone’s expensive cooldown.

I think the skill is pretty build agnostic because of the fact that everyone’s got Justice and is applying burning every 5 attacks anyway. That’s pretty regular, especially if you’re a sword user.

The nice thing about your suggestion is that it would automatically proc off of manual Justice usage, so you’d have control over it.

I suggested cooldown timers on traits and such in the Suggestion forum ages ago and got no responses. I think it’s shameful that they obfuscate those timers so badly – half the time you can’t even tell if something is working because it’s so rare.