Guild Wars 2

I try to avoid double posting a video, but I wanted to get a rise out of the general forums. Since there will be absolutely no useful discussion there on the video and what it shows, I wanted to post it here where people can talk about what is happening.

For some reason, fear is reduced by 75% by just the meldandru runes. You need +75% duration just to get the first tick of terror on reapers mark.

Something interesting I went on to test, was what happens when you add in lemongrass. Theoretically, that would be reducing fear by 115%, which would mean fear would not even show up on the target. Turns out the target still gets feared, just for a millisecond or so.

I will say however that as with my other testing, if you can add in enough duration, say 115% fear duration, you can cancel out lemongrass and melandru completely, but again that just gets you back to the base 1 second fear more or less. And it is a huge sacrifice to get that much fear duration.

So for anyone curious, fear still is a stun and a condition, in every way, except that the stun sigil will no longer apply to it. All the downsides of no increased duration, but we get to keep more than what is listed in reductions.

I would have prefered they left burning out if this sort of thing is going to continue.

Well, you necros got only little problems with this, as you often stack cond duration anyway.
Warriors on the other hand got that amazing shout “fear me”, which gets absolutely butchered by melandru runes and lemongrass. Point blank “fear me” lasted not even half a second on an opponent, I fought yesterday.
Something needs to be done about this and Anet again shows its capabilities to leave things finished halfway.
After taking out sigil of paralyzation, the logical conclusion would be also taking out stun reducing effects from fear duration.

Counting stun duration twice, or perhaps multiplying it? As we know the + stun duration on Sigil of Paralyzation was multiplying off base, and they never really fixed that (?) but just made it not work with Fear. So perhaps negative stun duration works also as a multiplier just to the negative.

However the math adds up, its clearly hypocritical and we are getting the shaft again.

So I guess they did fix those runes already, except the tooltip is still wrong, it should just say “immune to fear!” -_-

Btw multiplying would actually decrease the effect of the rune if done after substracting condition duration first. A 100% duration would end up being 56,25% instead of 50%. So there must be a different reason for getting -75%.

Pendragon.8735:

Counting stun duration twice, or perhaps multiplying it? As we know the + stun duration on Sigil of Paralyzation was multiplying off base, and they never really fixed that (?) but just made it not work with Fear. So perhaps negative stun duration works also as a multiplier just to the negative.

However the math adds up, its clearly hypocritical and we are getting the shaft again.

Even if it is a multipler it doesn’t work out right. The only evidence so far anyone has posted is that it is reduced twice by a 25% multiplier, which isn’t how condition duration reductions work, having retested that.

It all revolves around the stun duration reduction, as the condition duration seems to be working as intended. The stun reduction just seems to be a MULTIPLIER of 33% reduction.

Not sure about everyone else, but that seems a little excessive for one bonus.

I have been running the temple Melandru set on my Warrior for months with little desire to change it.

My guess is that when they went to change the Sigil, they also looked at the Melandru runes. However, instead of making it so that Fear was only reduced by 25%, they messed up and made it so it was only 25% as long.

Only explanation I can think of that explains the values.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

My guess is that when they went to change the Sigil, they also looked at the Melandru runes. However, instead of making it so that Fear was only reduced by 25%, they messed up and made it so it was only 25% as long.

Only explanation I can think of that explains the values.

Or it could be the multiplier for stun reduction is rounding up to 33% from 25%, but I am not sure why.

This issue got bacically zero traction in the general forums, and I realized after I posted it that really the only people who have any vested interest in seeing this fixed are:

1. Condition Necromancers
2. A very small subset of warriors that depend on fear me.

Since that accounts for I would say easily less than 10% of the forum community, I think the short answer on this one is… “no one cares”. Everyone else would like to see them remain “OP”, and I am sure anyone in SPVP is going to keep his mouth shut about this as well.

Oh well, I can only do the testing and post the findings.

Rennoko.5731:

Or it could be the multiplier for stun reduction is rounding up to 33% from 25%, but I am not sure why.

I think you made a mistake here.
33% of 75 is indeed 24,75.
But that would mean a 67% reduction for stun duration, not -33%.

flow.6043:

Rennoko.5731:

Or it could be the multiplier for stun reduction is rounding up to 33% from 25%, but I am not sure why.

I think you made a mistake here.
33% of 75 is indeed 24,75.
But that would mean a 67% reduction for stun duration, not -33%.

Well I was refering to my last test that showed melandru reduced 1.75 seconds of fear to exactly 1 second.

Since we know it is reduced by condition duration reductions, and we know condition duration reductions apply before the stun sigil USED to apply, we can assume the runes work the same (but opposite) of the sigil.

I increase duration by 75%, he reduces it with melandru runes condition duration reduction by 25%. The altered duration is now 1.5 seconds. 1.5 seconds mutliplied by a 33% reduction would be 1.0 seconds.

I believe this is likely the case, and here is why:

In WvW, I had a friendly guy from FA help me out by running lemongrass on top of Melandru.

Based on the fact that if it really did reduce by a flat 75%, adding an additional 40% to that would reduce fear by 115%, which would make you essentially immune to fear as the effect would last less than zero seconds. Since that DID NOT happen (very short fear instead), it seems more likely this is what happened…

I have 0% duration, and he is running lemongrass and melandru, which together reduce the fear by 65%. So now my base duration is 1 second, and the multiplier is (1-.65) or 0.35.

Then we use our 33% multiplier from the stun duration reduction and get .35*.33 = 0.12 seconds.

If you watch the video, it seems consistent with a 0.1 second fear or so on my last test (roughly).

I guess I should just be glad it isn’t a flat 75% reduction from melandru, which really would make people immune to fear with lemongrass.

Some freaking consistency in design would be nice. Right now they are heading towards making Fear a binary feature that you have to either go balls deep to get decent use of it or completely ignore it thanks to how they are trying to cherry pick when it counts as a condition or stun.

We know that sigil of paralyzation was being applied multiplicatively, but most condition duration modifiers are applied additively. I bet what is happening is it is subtracting the condition duration first and then multiplying by the stun modifier.

(1.75 – .25) * .75 = 1.125 s

So you get just over 1s of fear for 1 terror tick. A small reduction to the initial 1.75 would mean no tick.

Edit: If my theory is correct, then my calculations say that you should be able to put 9 points into spite and use master of terror for 59% increased fear duration. Then the calculation becomes

(1.59 – .25) * .75 = 1.005 s

If you change it to 8 in spite it is

(1.58 – .25) * .75 = .9975 s

So try using 9 in spite and then 7 in spite (to account for possible rounding issues) and see if you go from 1 tick to no tick.

I’m not one to be bitter over bugs or nerfs, but it’s hard not to scoff when the paralyzation bug was fixed immediately when it became widely known, but this one wasn’t touched.

Brienson.7319:

I’m not one to be bitter over bugs or nerfs, but it’s hard not to scoff when the paralyzation bug was fixed immediately when it became widely known, but this one wasn’t touched.

Yeah, some kind of dev acknowledgement that they know this issue even exists would be nice. At this point it seems like they just want to ignore it because of balance.

krippler.9826:

We know that sigil of paralyzation was being applied multiplicatively, but most condition duration modifiers are applied additively. I bet what is happening is it is subtracting the condition duration first and then multiplying by the stun modifier.

(1.75 – .25) * .75 = 1.125 s

So you get just over 1s of fear for 1 terror tick. A small reduction to the initial 1.75 would mean no tick.

Edit: If my theory is correct, then my calculations say that you should be able to put 9 points into spite and use master of terror for 59% increased fear duration. Then the calculation becomes

(1.59 – .25) * .75 = 1.005 s

If you change it to 8 in spite it is

(1.58 – .25) * .75 = .9975 s

So try using 9 in spite and then 7 in spite (to account for possible rounding issues) and see if you go from 1 tick to no tick.

So if you watch the video I show 74% duration and 75% duration vs. Melandru.

At 74% duration, you do not get a terror tick.

By the supposed forumula :

1 (1 + (.74-.25))
1 (1+ (.49)
1.49 seconds

1.49 * .75 = 1.1175 seconds

It should terror tick at 74% then, and it does not. That is why I believe the multiplier is 0.3333 for the stun (or 0.66666 reduction)

I tried to do some testing with a friend at lunch. But I was getting inconsistent results. He would have no conditions on him, but once he ran into a mark or spectral wall, sometimes he would get a terror tick and sometimes he wouldn’t – without changing the trait setup. So we got confused and gave up.

When you do your testing, are you able to consistently get a fear tick or not get a fear tick every time you try it?

Yes, tried it a few times in a row. Made sure to use a clean no debuff target. At 74% no tick possible, at 75%, tick every time. I did not use spectral wall though, only reapers mark.

Overkillengine.6084:

Some freaking consistency in design would be nice. Right now they are heading towards making Fear a binary feature that you have to either go balls deep to get decent use of it or completely ignore it thanks to how they are trying to cherry pick when it counts as a condition or stun.

All skills or effects of the same type not following the same rules is garbage design to be frank. Just shows incompetence in balancing if this doesn’t get addressed.

It would be like if there was a sigil to increase burning time, but they just selectively decided not to make it work on a certain ele burn skill because it was deemed too strong.

But yet then the food and runes that in turn reduced that skill would work just fine.

Choose a lane Anet.

•Rune of Melandru: Fear duration is now only reduced once by this rune set. The negative stun duration bonus no longer reduces incoming fear duration. This is also true for food consumables that offer a negative stun duration bonus.

I love when I make a video and someone cares.

So it looks like they’re going to commit to Fear being a condition, not a ‘stun’ (or both). Good times?

Looks like they are going to consider it only a condition, except in the case of stun break, which I am sure will still work on it.

Rennoko.5731:

•Rune of Melandru: Fear duration is now only reduced once by this rune set. The negative stun duration bonus no longer reduces incoming fear duration. This is also true for food consumables that offer a negative stun duration bonus.

I love when I make a video and someone cares.

:)

I instantly thought of you when I’ve read that part of the patchnotes. ^^