Guild Wars 2

I’ve noticed it some time ago and that’s been a problem for me ever since: the swiftness from focus’s temporal curtain NEVER stacks with other swiftnesses, even with itself!

That’s a major nuisance when roaming with a group of people and it’s even documented in the wiki. For example, I received swiftness from signet of swiftness, and once I see that is almost over, I cast a temporal curtain. However, even though I ran over it, I got no swiftness increase, and I have to GO BACK and run over it again once my previous swiftness is over only… So, to get somewhere faster, you should first go back (sounds so Lewis Carrollish to me)!

There obviously is a stacking mechanism with swiftness duration, and the stacking cap is obviously not the case here, so the only other answer to this is that it’s a bug. The broken swiftness is especially annoying because the only source of it for mesmers is focus which (to many people) leaves no other options for that slot. Many professions have speed signets for free, while mesmers have only a trait which increases speed for each active illusion – which automatically means being in combat with reduced speed. Many professions have analogues of Blink, so that’s not a limiting factor either. Many professions use runes with specific features (and damage modifiers which wouldn’t transfer to illusions) while mesmers have to spam their slots with speed runes if they want to roam. So as I see it, such a limit to the exclusive and limited swiftness we get is just too much.

Focus is, IMO, has 3 big problems:
- Swiftness that doesn’t stack.
- Pull with a 1s internal CD, which make it very predictable and most of the times you fail.
- Bugged iWarden. Sometimes he dies trying to catch the enemy, cause is freaking slow at it due to the attacking CD. Sometimes, it even doesn’t attack a single kitten time…

This is not a new thing, and the mechanic is well understood. Back in the betas, you could walk back and forth over the line to get infinite swiftness easily. To prevent that, they made the line not apply swiftness if you already have the buff.

It’s a band-aid fix, but here in GW2 band-aid fixes are permanent

Pyroatheist.9031:

This is not a new thing, and the mechanic is well understood. Back in the betas, you could walk back and forth over the line to get infinite swiftness easily. To prevent that, they made the line not apply swiftness if you already have the buff.

It’s a band-aid fix, but here in GW2 band-aid fixes are permanent

Your sigil gives you might on crit. But to ensure you don’t get too much might, you won’t get it at all if you already have might.

No. It can’t be. It’s just… wrong on so many levels.

Assign a unique ID to each temporal curtain. Make it an array and fill it with IDs of players who trigger it. Run an if-else statement to check whether to give swiftness (player not in array) or not (player already in array). Fixed!

Give the skill a cooldown of the same duration as the skill uptime with mechanics similar to sigils (tied to players). Half-fixed!

That said… Getting multiple stacks of swiftness through going back and forth makes perfect sense. It will be of limited usability to players because of its requirements; the swiftness duration cap is still there; the pulsing symbol of swiftness does it, so why naturally slow mesmers’ temporal curtain shouldn’t?

All they need to do is make it go back to 12 if you’re under 12 (modulo boon duration). No infinite stacking, you can only get max 12 seconds of swiftness going away from the curtain spot in any direction, and it’s still useful if you accidentally run over it with 1 sec left over from some other source.

^
Third viable solution.

Lishtenbird.2814:

^
Third viable solution.

One that everyone and there momma have stated ever since the initial nerf. I’m an amateur programmer and I could have fixed this easily so it boggles my mind why professionals haven’t done so already.

Crossplay.2067:

One that everyone and there momma have stated ever since the initial nerf. I’m an amateur programmer and I could have fixed this easily so it boggles my mind why professionals haven’t done so already.

I think the solution lies in the payment system of the game: things like Living Story is something very clear and appealing to new players who are looking for a new game to buy, while bugs become annoying once you master your profession only (which is, of course, once you’ve already bought the game and probably some extras). So naturally, priority goes to things which give more money.