Guild Wars 2

I’m new to Mesmer, but I’ve always noticed that Temporal Curtain has never stacked with swiftness on a player that already has swiftness. Why is this the case? Every other skill that gives swiftness to allies is able to have its duration stacked upon, except Temporal Curtain. I’m just wondering if this is how the skill was meant to be, or just an long overlooked bug/mechanic. Thanks ahead of time!

Working as intended … sadly. It was made/changed to the current “No Swiftness Boon, if the ally/player who crosses over the wall already has Swiftness” to prevent a maxed out duration of Swiftness from one skill by any opportunistic players.
Even Symbol of Swiftness from Guardians only gives out 1s of Swiftness per pulse, to any allies that is standing in its field while already having Swiftness, rather then the 8s it gives to anyone without.

All other Swiftness skills, that I can think of off the top of my head, are not fields/walls but rather instant effect for the boon.

So all the other Swiftness skills have a max ally limit, usually 5 people. Temporal Curtain is only limited to how many people run over the line … if they don’t already have Swiftness.

That doesn’t mean its bloody annoying to place down a Temporal Curtain and suddenly be caught by someone else’s 5s Swiftness boon right before you run over your Curtain. Bloody annoying that is.

They should make it where it sets your Swiftness Duration to that 15s+Boon Duration increase, if your current Swiftness Duration is under that amount. Otherwise, nothing occurs when you hit the Temporal Curtain wall.

Like what MLieBennett said, this is very an intentional behavior. You can see something similar with Spectral Wall from Necromancers: it applies about 6 seconds of protection, as long as you don’t already have protection.

I’m pretty sure that any skill that applies a long-duration (>2s) boon in an persistent area acts like this, and I’m betting it’s because they haven’t found a good way to code “Apply this boon to any given ally only once” and had to choose between “Apply every time someone approaches the area” or “Apply only if they don’t already have this boon.”

Ah, ok. Thanks for the clarification.