Guild Wars 2

I started using more burning utilities like Judge’s Intervention etc, but I noticed that virtue of justice is being applied while the target is already burning..

and since burning only stacks in duration and not amount, won’t the higher burning attack be removed by virtue of justice?

and if so, doesn’t this make every single burning ability guardians have useless if they are all being overwritten by a lower burn value of VOJ?

or am i missing something?

That middle paragraph is pretty much it. For anyone else’s sake, I’ll explain it further. If you’re by yourself, you can only increase burning duration, so I’ll give an example with a teammate.

Lets say you as a Guard are running 10 in Zeal to grab Fiery Wrath (+10% damage while burning) and 0 Condi damage. Your Engi friend is running Flamethrower and has something like 1.7k condi damage.
At the beginning of a fight, there’s no burning at all, and so all your attacks deal normal damage. You decide to pop a burning skill (Judge’s Intervention, Zealot’s Flame, w/e) and you’ve given the target a 4sec burn. For the next 4 secs, you’re dealing +10% from Fiery Wrath.
By now your engi friend has plopped down Napalm, which ends up stacking a good 12sec of burning. This happened 2sec after your burn, so the target has 14sec of burning left. You now have 14sec of +10% damage, but you deal no more burning damage, as the higher stacks from the Engi are first in line.
After 5 hits, your passive VoJ procs, and you add another second. Lets say this happened after 5sec, and so theres 10sec of total burning. 7secs at 1.7k from the engi, then 2sec at 0 from JI or ZF, and 1sec at 0 from VoJ.

Each time the Engi adds another form of burning, yours get shuffled to the back, and his go first, because they’ll deal more damage. Its also worth mentioning that Might stacks apply “now”. Which means if your Might runs out before your burning is done, you damage goes down when the Might drops, even though you keep burning. The only way to have different damage burns by yourself is if you were somehow able to swap equipment during combat.

As far as has been know, (and from what I remember about it) the game remembers each packet of burning (and other conditions) and with what amount of condition damage. It then arranges the packets to apply the highest damage per tick while keeping the duration as it would’ve been.

Burn duration is important until you can keep 100% uptime (as any amount of `300-1k dps is always welcome). After 100%, only condition damage matters, which isn’t as helpful to Guardians as it might be. (Duration can also help for things like stacks of Vuln or chill or something, but we don’t have a whole bunch of conditions to even increase the duration of)

so how does that work in practical terms?

if you apply a higher damage per tick burn, then overwrite with VOJ, will it extend the time and during this extended time only be ticking for less?

it’s really hard to see when playing because it comes up so fast and the duration is so short.

Yea that’s pretty much what he said.

Keep in mind that all burning you apply is the same damage anyway, although some tooltips are bugged and show “stacks” of burning. Spirit weapons do have their own damage however.

thanks, that explains it totally clearly. Now I understand why anet keep saying to people “forget about single DPS, gw2 is different mechanics to other mmos”