Guild Wars 2

Thought I’d do some silly forms of theory crafting, and so I was playing around with this trait, and rune of the flock. So it looks like the (4) bonus will trigger for birds that come from other rune levels; for example, with 4 superior flock runes, and 2 major flock runes, you’ll get blind ( and by association confusion ) to proc whether or not the bird comes from the major runes, or the superior ( they do different base damage ). Based on my testing against lvl 30 fire flies, the superior bird does about the same damage as my sword #1, while the major bird does about 75% of that. I know that the tool tip internal cooldowns tend to have…. problems ( sometimes they are 15 secs vs. the tooltip’s ten seconds ). Regardless… without crunching the numbers, I’ve found the firefly will trigger one of the birds somewhere between 2-3 times a minute, which may be do to factors of their attack rate, and the internal cool down. With auto-cast on my heal skill, the firefly ended up killing himself in 4 minutes do to the birds and confusion(+blind) alone.

This is mostly a for kittens-and-giggles thing, but regardless, thought I’d see what the community thought of it? Also, if someone was able to crunch the math for me, regarding what are the chances that ONE of the birds will proc on hit ( based on 10%, and 7% ), that’d be appreciated.

EDIT: After thinking about it, I realized that the chance that one or “both” (only one as far as I can tell) to proc is IN THEORY 16.3%.

Someone correct me if my math is wrong:
.7% (both) + 9.3% ( chance that superior procs, but major doesn’t) + 6.3% ( chance that major procs, but superior doesn’t) = 16.3% chance that a bird will attack.

So what this means is that you have a 16.3% chance, when you are hit, to inflict blind and confusion, ( and a minor amount of damage ), with an internal cooldown of 10 seconds. Granted, this is still kinda really bad, however I can see this being pretty interesting if the numbers are brought up to have some more viability.

your math is right! actually: 0,90 (bird one doesn´t) * 0,93 (bird two doesn´t) = 0,837 (no bird hits)…
1 – 0,837 = 0,163 = 16,3% (bird one or bird two or both hit) (both ofc not possibly because of internal cooldown)

I must say I enjoy this kind of wacky theory crafting, viable or not.

Kudos to you OP for providing a mildly interesting read :P

what about the mad king runes that summon crows? do those blind? Just wondering.

Been using these on my confusion mes for a while- i have a 40%crit chance and the bird blind(confuse) seems to proc every 2- 3 minutes in a wvw fight doing 400-500 damage (+confuse). Still not sure if its worth it for 4 runes.

Interesting, but unfortunately condition duration runes will serve you much better, the occasional extra blind/confuse is negated by all of your conditions being shorter. It’s also more reliable.