Guild Wars 2

Edit: What is stated below is not entirely correct. Read further for more explanations from helpful players.

Its Been a Year
Its been about a year now since ANet used a work-a-round to patch up Temporal Curtian’s swiftness buff. Its been about a year of the most annoying experience repeated over and over as players try to help other players. In the course of that year, TC has had two major debuffs. The most recent of these has severely affected its use as a movement ability when traveling solo in PvE. Now you enter combat if a mob follows you through it, negating any benefit of placing it down. Players must now either cherry pick locations to drop this skill, or avoid using it entirely as a means of traveling. TC is broken, and its brokenness is effecting mesmers and non-mesmers alike. I would really like to know when on the time-table we can expect the skill to be working properly.

For Those Who Don’t Know
Temporal Curtain is a mesmer’s focus 4. You probably all use it to get around because it drops a line effect that grants swiftness to allies that pass through it. Some of you may not have noticed that the swiftness buff you get from TC does not stack with other swiftness buffs. If you have 1 sec of TC swiftness left, and a warrior tries to give you a fresh one from their horn, you’re out of luck. The same works in reverse, if you have any other swiftness on and you drop TC, you won’t get more swiftness, or a replacement with a longer duration. Why? Because it originally did stack in duration and people were passing back and forth through it to get never-ending swiftness. In response, ANet fixed it, though not really.

Impact
Every mesmer should now know that, if you are in a zerg, and you want to be helpful, then do not place down a temporal curtain. For every fool you trick into going through that line effect, you cause one more player to get un-stackable swiftness which causes the tail of the zerg to get ever longer and longer. If you really want to be helpful, ask a warrior if you can get a banner and spam 3 instead. I’ve tried recently to travel on maps with my wife, who plays a guardian (the other slow moving class) and we try to pass swiftness off to each other. It gets annoying though since our buffs don’t stack and often times I’ll get a buff that she won’t or we will accidentally waste one of our abilities with no effect.

What I Would Like to See
Ideally, each instance of TC should stack swiftness on a character once so that multiple TC effects grant longer and longer durations of swiftness. Ideally, TC swiftness should stack with other sources of swiftness so that it isn’t detrimental to a zerg when someone tries to help by placing TC. I think you can make this happen ANet. I just want to know if you are even working on it.

I also hope Anet will fix this, at least entering combat. Now it’s better to wear Traveler runes instead of using focus.

Wait wait wait… hold on a second:

Quaygal.5327:

If you have 1 sec of TC swiftness left, and a warrior tries to give you a fresh one from their horn, you’re out of luck.

No.

Quaygal.5327:

if you have any other swiftness on and you drop TC, you won’t get more swiftness, or a replacement with a longer duration.

Yes.

Quaygal.5327:

Every mesmer should now know that, if you are in a zerg, and you want to be helpful, then do not place down a temporal curtain. For every fool you trick into going through that line effect, you cause one more player to get un-stackable swiftness which causes the tail of the zerg to get ever longer and longer.

Absolutely no. The only thing that might happen is, that your temporal curtain is wasted. Un-stackable swiftness doesn’t exist.

Quaygal.5327:

I’ve tried recently to travel on maps with my wife, who plays a guardian (the other slow moving class) and we try to pass swiftness off to each other. It gets annoying though since our buffs don’t stack and often times I’ll get a buff that she won’t or we will accidentally waste one of our abilities with no effect.

And that’s probably why you got that wrong. The swiftness from Guardian staff doesn’t stack, but refresh it (the swiftness you have on you) to uhm what was it… 10 seconds or so (too lazy to look it up right now) if you’re below that duration. That means if your wife casts it right after you’ve ran through your curtain, it will be wasted. If she casts it when you have 2 seconds of swiftness left, it will increase the duration of the swiftness-boon on you. Just if you cast temporal curtain while having any other swiftness-buff on you, your curtain will be wasted (believe me, it happened to me many times already, haha).

Quaygal.5327:

What I Would Like to See
Ideally, each instance of TC should stack swiftness on a character once so that multiple TC effects grant longer and longer durations of swiftness.

I agree, but I think that’s nearly impossible to code. I guess the most that we can hope for is, that it will work similar like the swiftness-skill from Guardian staff.

Quaygal.5327:

so that it isn’t detrimental to a zerg when someone tries to help by placing TC.

Like I’ve explained before, that’s not the case.

Saturn, you are correct and I am wrong. This behavior does seem different then what I remember. I’ve been playing for well over a year and I have read all of the patch notes. Yet I sometimes get the impression that not all changes are announced. Thanks.

Easy fix, make it stackable with an internal cooldown of ~10 seconds (or however long TC lasts, too lazy to look it up).

And yes, it’s very annoying that they still haven’t addressed this.

Saturn, you’re not (completely) right either.

There are two sources of swiftness which have a peculiar stacking behaviour, because they have a similar abusive possibility – being ground-duration based. First is Temporal Curtain (TC), second is Symbol of Swiftness (SoS).

TC:
If it’d stack swiftness (it did in the beta), players would lay it on the ground and run through it four times getting four times the swiftness duration. ANet saw this and made TC not giving you any swiftness when you already have some.

SoS:
It’s quite similar here. Instead of triggering when you enter the field, SoS triggers once each second. If it’d actually add 8s of swiftness each second, you’d get quite alot by just standing in the area. If it’d only give 3s per pulse, you’d NEED to stay in the area to get the full swiftness. So ANet fixed this by SoS giving you the full 8s (+boondur) when you have no swiftness and 1s when you have. Because it pulses once a second, the timer gets refreshed while standing inside of it.

Possible fixes:
There have been suggestions multiple times before and ANet simply ignores them.

• Each swiftness-stack has a source. You could check if there’s a source from the mesmer present and then ditch the swiftness. So it’d fully stack with others but not with swiftness from other skills from the same mesmer.
• You could check the current duration (left) and set it to 12, if it’s below. That’d not really make it stack, but not waste a TC when you have a single second of swiftness left.
• You could make swiftness stack 5 swiftness stacks of 2.4s. Since swiftness (and several other boons) now only stack up to 5 times, it’d grant you the full 12s when you have no swiftness, but only 9.6s when you have another swiftness; or only 7.2s when you have two stacks of swiftness; and 0s when you run through two TCs (within 2.4s).

I noticed this too sadly, I was like wtf? Am i seeing things? kitten bugs