Guild Wars 2

I believe that all other damage DoTs such as bleeding and poison stack, I would spec my guardian into a condition damage spec straight away if burning would stack, but because my burning can be overwritten so easily I dont feel like its viable, so why does burning not stack while the other DoTs do? I hope in the future it is changed into a stackable DoT

Burning as well as poison stack in duration not in intensity. That means if you apply two 3s burns you will get a 6s burn instead of a 3s burn with double the damage.

Coming from the top of my head, I do believe each person’s burning (from say, VoJ pop or their own source etc) deals damage based on their own cond. damage. Now, when I pop my VoJ, I stack an eternity of burning on the target, but the damage numbers no longer pop up, so that may be what people are referring to when they say “overwritten”. Other than the numbers not showing for each tick, The burning still seems to be working the same as if only I had applied it. The only difficult part is determining who’s burning it’s count at a given time. Basically, it still works, it just doesn’t quite show you its working.

as Eijolend stated it does stack, just in duration, not intensity. It is also (I believe) by far the highest damage per tick condition in the game, which is why it doesn’t stack in intensity.
As far as other conditions I think it’s only bleeds and confusion which stack in intensity. Bleed is the lowest of the condition damage per tick, and confusion is dependant upon skill use and tends to have a short duration.

I believe you all missed the OP’s point.

Condition damage- that’s a stat that increase the damage done from Burning.

Problem is, since burning doesn’t stack in damage, your burning damage can be overwritten by somebody else who uses a burn effect on the same target.

Only stacks in duration, so you condition damage was negated

Knighthonor.4061:

Only stacks in duration, so you condition damage was negated

Not only that, but it gives them more time to dispel it.

I believe burning also does the most damage of any condition, and most Guardians will have burning up all the time.

We’ve not reason to think that buring applications overright the preceding burn. If you think about intensity stacking as “vertical stacking” and duration stacking as “horizontal stacking” there is still stacking occuring…. It’d be the difference between placing a bunch of tiles on top of each other, or placing them alongside each other.

stacks on duration only

I figure the damage is calculated one of two ways, either:

1) A kind of “Rolling Ignite” system
like in WoW whereby the person with the most Condition damage is used and each time Burning is applied, if a new source is higher then it is used instead.

As an example, say you have a full party of a Thief, Warrior, Ranger, Necro, and Guardian and here’s how much Condition damage they all have:

• Thief (200),
• Warrior (50),
• Ranger (100),
• Necro (700),
• Guardian (800)

They all hit a monster at the same time and all proc Burning at once roughly simultaneously. Here’s what a combat log parse wherein 10 seconds of Burning once per second is displayed (made up numbers):

800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage

The optimal situation in this case would be one person stacks Condition damage and is able to apply short duration Burning very often (to constantly keep the damage of the Burning always at max), the rest stack Burning Duration

2) A stack or queue, as it were, for Burning
Whereby each person adds ticks based on their own Condition damage

Using the same group, I would expect a parse like this (made up numbers):
200 Damage, 200 Damage, 50 Damage, 50 Damage, 100 Damage, 100 Damage, 700 Damage, 700 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage

This would be pretty bad if that’s the case as in this situation you have periods of Burning where you’re burning for low damage (or lower than max), and have to wait for the weak Burning (or Bleeding, or Poison) dots to fade until you get to the strong ones. The ideal setup to take advantage of Burning here would be for whoever can apply Burning continously (say, an Engineer with Flamethrower and Traits) with the most Condition damage to apply Burning / Poison / Bleeding and no one else to apply those dots.

However, I haven’t done any sort of testing, so I really don’t know how it works exactly.

Burning used to actually stack in intensity back during the closed betas & it worked much better then it does now due to the fact that you could have an unlimited amount of people applying it & not have to worry about it being negated or lasting far longer then the mob being alive & thus being wasted.

However Arena.net changed it to stack in duration because they felt it was too similar to bleeding in that form.

While that was better from a standpoint of making it unique it also made it slightly less powerful.
Sadly this change also made stacking condition damage a very bad choice compared to stacking power/precision due to how burning scales now.

Also sadly that ^ problem cannot really be solved short of redesigning burning or giving guardians another condition that they can apply (maybe via a new weapon or redesigned/new trait.)

It stacks in duration, like poison. and like all damaging conditions the person who applies it that has the highest condition damage is the one that gets the ticks.

if the person with higher condition damage gets the ticks, then i dont care if someone overwrites mine. Dont see a problem with it at all

Knighthonor.4061:

I believe you all missed the OP’s point.

Condition damage- that’s a stat that increase the damage done from Burning.

Problem is, since burning doesn’t stack in damage, your burning damage can be overwritten by somebody else who uses a burn effect on the same target.

Only stacks in duration, so you condition damage was negated

No it doesn’t. If two ppl cast burning on the same target, priority is given to the higher condition dmg and the duration stacks. Basically it goes like this:

Player A casts burning for 5 seconds.

Player B casts burning for 3 seconds.

If player B has higher condition dmg, the result would be as follows:

Player B’s burning ticks first for 3 seconds, then Player A’s burning ticks for 5 seconds. At no point in time will your burning be overwritten. It will just be shuffled around in the load order, with the highest dmg burning ticking before the other ones.

Doesn’t burning -33% to healing?
Pretty good if it does

I kinda wished it stacked like bleeding, myself.
I’ll use any of my fire skills (which are about all of my skills), and by the time I’m done using it my target’s already extinguished.

I would really like to know the math behind this.
At some point it needs to be released, we really need to know if we’re wasting time and damage while an Ele is applying burning, or we’re contributing.

Bump.

I would also like to know the math behind how this mechanic works. I don’t want to spec into condition damage to have it negated by someone who just used a burning skill for the hell of it.

Kipz

Burning does more damage than the other dots (until bleeding is stacked high) by default. It also gets more contribution from +condition than bleeding (again until stacked) or poison (because of the heal debuff).

Yes it is easier to strip, but again it does more damage right off the bat so it is actually more quickly lethal than the other two dots. Actually it’s debatable even as to the stripping issue, if you consider losing 15 stacks of bleeding and having to build up to it vs losing burning and then applying it again.

Condition dmg is extremely poorly designed for pve in this game.

It completely contradicts the “public raiding” aspect of dynamic events.

You’ll just have to deal with it. As far as the Guardian’s justice effect, just like most proc-sharing abilities it will act as though the person you gave the effect to, applied the burning. So it will use their condition dmg, and not yours.

I would love to see all proc-sharing abilities like that use YOUR stats instead. Another example is the ranger’s Sun Spirit, if I’m a condition dmg Ranger, and an ally procs burning from my Spirit it uses THEIR condition dmg and not mine.

burning doesn’t -33% healing. that’s poison.

hmm correct me if i am wrong.
say if i am running with another class who can apply burning and they have higher condition dmg than i do.
and then burning stacks in intensity.

using made up numbers, say i burn for 100 for 3s and the other person burns for 200 for 3s.
then if we both burn at the same time, and it takes the higher dmg (assuming) then technically, we’re left with a burn of 200 for 6s, which is better no?

unless if it just takes the dmg based on chronological order of who is setting the burns, i.e. if someone with lower dmg, sets a burn after one that is higher, does it go to the lower condition dmg? then i see a problem.

amradio.2513:

Knighthonor.4061:

I believe you all missed the OP’s point.

Condition damage- that’s a stat that increase the damage done from Burning.

Problem is, since burning doesn’t stack in damage, your burning damage can be overwritten by somebody else who uses a burn effect on the same target.

Only stacks in duration, so you condition damage was negated

No it doesn’t. If two ppl cast burning on the same target, priority is given to the higher condition dmg and the duration stacks. Basically it goes like this:

Player A casts burning for 5 seconds.

Player B casts burning for 3 seconds.

If player B has higher condition dmg, the result would be as follows:

Player B’s burning ticks first for 3 seconds, then Player A’s burning ticks for 5 seconds. At no point in time will your burning be overwritten. It will just be shuffled around in the load order, with the highest dmg burning ticking before the other ones.

This person explained it very well, but it seems to have been lost in the shuffle.

I understand how it works, and since it stacks duration, its cool and all as long as my condition damage is higher. Burning is basically the only reliable damaging condition I can apply as a Guardian. I can’t bleed or poison anything. is boosting condition damage a waste (burning will be shuffled down if someone boosted it higher) or simply required (so my only offensive class mechanic can be used?)

I think burning does 7x more damage than bleed, so its basically 7 stacks of bleed, which means bleed can do several times the damage once stacked up. And confusion hurts the most, i was hit for 1000 damage from confusion, i didnt see how many stacks it was butkittenit hurts.

amradio already explained how it works the best. Everyone’s burning gets put into the queue, with the first “in line” always being the highest condition damage. So basically you’re adding your burning damage to the line, but that line gets shuffled based on highest damage first.

I believe I read that “tick” bonus damage from the “Condition Damage” was 25%. So if you have 100 Condition damage power (whatever the stat is called) you would get 25 of it as burning ticks.