Guild Wars 2

assumption: put fear without any condition on target!
My staff skill says 2s fear, but it ticks only once if target has no other conditions.
All tests done on npcs and golems at Mists.
So is it “normal” intended behavior?
And fear at downstate (4.1/4s) – it doesn’t tick 4 times even with conditions on target – only 3 times(it looks like it is trigered for only 3s so for sure bug)

Additional question: why spectral wall when put it on not moving enemy will not triger fear ,but will triger protection at the same situation on me ?

2 reasons:

1. Tool tips are inaccurate. They always round to 1/4 of a second. So if your fear duration is +90% a 1 sec fear will be displayed as 2 sec but of course only last 1.9 sec.

2. Since the last patch I’ve been getting some weird numbers in the HotM here and there as well. Similar to your 4.25 sec Fear, I had the occasional tooltip that was a lot higher than the actual increase. My guess would be that there’s some conflict with PvE gear, but at that time I didn’t investigate any further.

Either way, just don’t rely on tooltips. The increased duration from your gear is always applied correctly.

ok i did some more tests and now i think that it is just random behavior
so don’t look at tooltip, just turn on terror and master of terror traits and try on golem clean fear skill 5 on staff(which always ticks 1 time) and try skill 2, 5 on staff and now fear ticks 2 times in almost every try (but sometimes it can also tick only 1 time)

So is it intended or not ?

It has to do with Condition timer check. Your fear must be 1.9 sec, by adding another condition first (let’s say bleed), the game checks after 1 sec of the first bleed if damage must be done, if Fear is present it deals damage too.

There was a long post explaining damage timing with conditions, but I can’t remember where it was, just search for it if you want the maths in detail.

Panhauramix.2784:

There was a long post explaining damage timing with conditions, but I can’t remember where it was, just search for it if you want the maths in detail.

No need for a long post or detailed math to explain it.

It’s simple: the first condition applied to any target (by you or anyone else) sets up a timer that ticks every second and also applies to every condition that is inflicted later.

For example:

Style.1092:

so don’t look at tooltip, just turn on terror and master of terror traits and try on golem clean fear skill 5 on staff(which always ticks 1 time) and try skill 2, 5 on staff and now fear ticks 2 times in almost every try (but sometimes it can also tick only 1 time)

In this case you had +50% fear duration, so it was very likely for you to get 2 ticks of fear if you cast mark 2 and 5 in a row because the cast time is 0.75 seconds.
You started your condition timer with bleeding at T(zero), then apllied a 1.5 sec long fear from T(0.75-2.25). So it overlapped with the full seconds of the pre-existing timer twice, hence giving you 2 ticks of fear.