Guild Wars 2

Did a small burn procing experiment with Guardian

Setting up the experiment
Your F1 shows you have 1 1/4 burn damage. You trait for Supreme Justice to do burn damage every third hit instead of 5. Greatsword’s Whirling Wrath hits 14 times if you count its projectiles. That’s 4 burn procs. At 1 1/4 burn duration, that equals to a solid 5s burn duration.

There’s a glitch in damage scaling when fractions are finishing up on the stacks.

Before Patch
764
764
764
764
764
Total: 3820 burn damage

After Patch
764
535
305
76
765
Total: 2445 burn damage. This is a difference of 1375 damage.

Another Example
Torch’s 3.75 burn duration skill (says 4s on tool tip, but burns only proc 3 times)
Judge’s Intervention 3.75 burn duration skill (says 4s on tooltip, but burns only proc 3 times)

Before patch you would have gotten a total of 7.5 burn duration or 7 full burn procs. Now its 3 full procs, a very low burn damage number, then another 3 full procs.
I think it suppose to be 1/4 of your burn damage but the fraction is a whole lot less.

Anyways, the above represents the current burn damage for guardians when burns are stacked. It has to be a glitch in burn calculation some where, because the math doesn’t quite add up. A 1/4 fraction of 764 damage is 191. Even if you subtract 764 from 191 you get 573, not 535.

I noticed that too on my ele in SW yesterday. At first I thought that my mind is playing tricks on me.

I will check this again in detail today using the combat log.

I hope this gets fixed soon, since for condi builds, that already have a disadvantage to direct dmg builds, this is a huge problem…

This damage reducing per tick is happening to me as well with Bonfire and Flame Trap, both Ranger skills. Another weird aspect is that if I stack the two upon each other, their burn damage won’t stack. However Torch is ticking for the same, correct damage throughout.

If you have 0 condition duration and apply high amounts of burns via stacks, you’ll do double burn damage. Not sure if this is intended… i’m assuming it’s glitched also.

I didn’t want to mention it because I kinda like it lol…

Someone yesterday had 1 stack of torment on me and it did 1000 dmg per tick. gg.

Haven’t done any stats ~ due to guild events tonight, but also noticing substantial increase in burn damage on my character. I sustained 4 full deaths to crabs before Megadestroyer even started, at L80 in full Ascended.Though I rallied off one destroyer crab, burn killed me before I could cast Healing Spring. These were just common destroyer crabs…

Stealth nerfing shows bad character to the company backing it. You ALWAYS should show your reasoning on why you are nerfing something, and what your “idea” behind the nerf is.

God man, this reminds me of EverQuest where Wizards were useless until after the Ruins of Kunark expansion.

Ele’s are glass canons, stop nerfing what they do best: Conditional Damage/DPS. Ele’s are pointless to play otherwise.

I have a feeling with the expansion coming out there is a reason for this because of the “masteries.” I feel like they are nerfing certain things, only to get that back with the expansion and the masteries.

That’s my conspiracy theory at least. So new players feel like they are getting more powerful.

Good thing this is F2P/B2P or I would of quit this awhile ago.

The stability nerf was bad enough. Now this? Come on now, stop with this crap.

Wow, how ragey. It’s clearly obvious that this isn’t intended.

Valento.9852:

Wow, how ragey. It’s clearly obvious that this isn’t intended.

This is a VERY specific change. I don’t see how them kittening up chat and other things, would affect conditional damage from fire. Why fire? What line of code would accidentally do this?

This doesn’t seem like an “oops” to me. It’s way too specific.

If it can get bugged during development, then it will. I wouldn’t look too much into this. The fluctuations seem too drastic and random to make much sense mechanically.

Nafeasonto.8925:

Ele’s are glass canons, stop nerfing what they do best: Conditional Damage/DPS. Ele’s are pointless to play otherwise.

Not to take this conversation off the rails, but in the current meta, a properly played ele is all but unkillable. They currently one of the most survivable classes, while maintaining high damage and functionality. They can be played as glass canons sure, but so can every class.

Either way, as someone else pointed out, let’s see where they’re going with this before we all rage quit. If in fact they’re going anywhere and this isn’t just a mistake.

Nafeasonto.8925:

Valento.9852:

Wow, how ragey. It’s clearly obvious that this isn’t intended.

This is a VERY specific change. I don’t see how them kittening up chat and other things, would affect conditional damage from fire. Why fire? What line of code would accidentally do this?

This doesn’t seem like an “oops” to me. It’s way too specific.

Many of the bugs that popped up because of the latest big patch could be called “VERY specific change[s]”. The bug with the downed state color changing, for example. But it was a bug. It seems like they merged (at least parts of) their HoT development branch and it caused the main branch to react in some unexpected ways. Not very shocking, imo.

You know they messed with stability, right? Well that’s a boon and perhaps the way they went about it also affected condis. It’s impossible for you or I to say, but considering all the other bizarre and seemingly unrelated bugs that popped up this week I think it’s safe to not ragequit yet. And it may not just be fire – some users are investigating torment as well.

Considering how up front Anet has been about nerfs (fgs comes to mind), I just don’t think this is working as intended.

Some Douglas Adams advice: DON’T PANIC.

Thank you to those crunching the numbers; I’m sure the devs appreciate the added specificity you can offer up as insight into the problem.

This destroys the viability of my favorite pvp guardian build – amplified wrath. In this build, virtually every block (of which you have soooo many) leads to a burn, where burn damage is amplified by the grandmaster trait “amplified wrath.”

This is definitely a bug, and effects all damage-dealing conditions. I’ve seen Poison ticks for 50, and bleed ticks for 6 (that’s right, S-I-X). I’ve also seen burn ticks for 1500+.

If I had to guess, I would imagine this is somehow related to the stability change. Whatever they did to convert stability from duration-based to stack-based has probably spilled over to conditions, and is somehow scaling damage based on invisible “stacks”.

Either way, this has completely screwed up any builds based solely on condition damage. While sometimes you will see higher damage ticks, much more often you will see lower damage ticks. This has resulted in anywhere from 10-50% less overall damage, and has hugely effected gameplay. This should be the #1 issue to fix right now, it’s killing PvP for a lot of players I know.

Saiyan.1704:

Did a small burn procing experiment with Guardian

Setting up the experiment
Your F1 shows you have 1 1/4 burn damage. You trait for Supreme Justice to do burn damage every third hit instead of 5. Greatsword’s Whirling Wrath hits 14 times if you count its projectiles. That’s 4 burn procs. At 1 1/4 burn duration, that equals to a solid 5s burn duration.

There’s a glitch in damage scaling when fractions are finishing up on the stacks.

Before Patch
764
764
764
764
764
Total: 3820 burn damage

After Patch
764
535
305
76
765
Total: 2445 burn damage. This is a difference of 1375 damage.

Another Example
Torch’s 3.75 burn duration skill (says 4s on tool tip, but burns only proc 3 times)
Judge’s Intervention 3.75 burn duration skill (says 4s on tooltip, but burns only proc 3 times)

Before patch you would have gotten a total of 7.5 burn duration or 7 full burn procs. Now its 3 full procs, a very low burn damage number, then another 3 full procs.
I think it suppose to be 1/4 of your burn damage but the fraction is a whole lot less.

Anyways, the above represents the current burn damage for guardians when burns are stacked. It has to be a glitch in burn calculation some where, because the math doesn’t quite add up. A 1/4 fraction of 764 damage is 191. Even if you subtract 764 from 191 you get 573, not 535.

Here’s whats going on. Take your character and make him/her have ZERO condition duration. You’ll notice your burning damage has increased a lot. Add back any amount of condition duration back to your character and you get random numbers per tick.

It’s possible that they were trying to implement additional damage for conditions that weren’t ticking at a duration to a ‘whole number’.

So say you have skill A that does 1 second burning and you throw on a Sigil of Smoldering for an additional 30% increase in burning duration. Well, since it ticks per second, you wouldn’t see the additional 30% damage.

Saiyan.1704:

Did a small burn procing experiment with Guardian
After Patch
764
535
305
76
765
Total: 2445 burn damage. This is a difference of 1375 damage.

Hm… Do you have ~30% condition modifier?
Cause it looks like they are applying it wrong:

764
764 – (764 * ~0.3) = 535
764 – (764 * ~0.3) * 2 = 306
764 – (764 * ~0.3) * 3 = 76
repeat…

Oh no this is bad for my shoutbow warrior =[

Red post pls

I didn’t get a screen shot but I noticed strange behavior this morning on Scepter/Torch Guardian.

I have seen similar issues to my burning damage too. Would really want to know what is going on.

Definitely noticeable, not just for burning, and easily reproducible.

Take an engineer to the mists and throw your poison grenades on a target golem. Watch as the poison damage fluctuates per tick.

edit – this is a sample of the damage fluctuations from the above test.
http://imgur.com/Sf21NLw

All of these ticks were evenly spaced out – some of them have reduced damage for no reason.

Bugabuga.9721:

Saiyan.1704:

Did a small burn procing experiment with Guardian
After Patch
764
535
305
76
765
Total: 2445 burn damage. This is a difference of 1375 damage.

Hm… Do you have ~30% condition modifier?
Cause it looks like they are applying it wrong:

764
764 – (764 * ~0.3) = 535
764 – (764 * ~0.3) * 2 = 306
764 – (764 * ~0.3) * 3 = 76
repeat…

That’s exactly what’s happening.

The Guardian’s Zeal Trait line is .30 to condition duration. I knew it wasn’t random but I couldn’t find the math. Haha gj.

Nafeasonto.8925:

Valento.9852:

Wow, how ragey. It’s clearly obvious that this isn’t intended.

This is a VERY specific change. I don’t see how them kittening up chat and other things, would affect conditional damage from fire. Why fire? What line of code would accidentally do this?

This doesn’t seem like an “oops” to me. It’s way too specific.

I take it you have never done any sort of programming. I have seen many “very specific” bugs in my life. Software is often very complex, with very complex interactions. And there are many cases where it takes a complex path for a bug to be realized.

Mangoes.5163:

Definitely noticeable, not just for burning, and easily reproducible.

Take an engineer to the mists and throw your poison grenades on a target golem. Watch as the poison damage fluctuates per tick.

edit – this is a sample of the damage fluctuations from the above test.
http://imgur.com/Sf21NLw

All of these ticks were evenly spaced out – some of them have reduced damage for no reason.

I wonder if you have any on crit sigils/traits? With, say, 25% crit chance? Was this on rifle or two weapons as base equipment before using grenade kit ? (I presume two weapons with different sigils, one probably doom?)

Time to re-test! New patch has arrived
Incidentally, 1.5 seconds of burning should now produce a buffed-up tick (as fractions will be slumped into previous or next one-second tick)

Bugabuga.9721:

Time to re-test! New patch has arrived
Incidentally, 1.5 seconds of burning should now produce a buffed-up tick (as fractions will be slumped into previous or next one-second tick)

You should never get a buffed up tick, like we were seeing before the patch. You should never see a double damage burn tick, that was a bug. You should only see fractional damage ticks, based on the percentage of time the condition had remaining after the last full tick (or before the first tick).

For example, you have an ability that applies 2 seconds of burning, and you have 30% condi duration, increasing it to 2.6s of burning. When you apply that burning, your first and second ticks should be full damage (but not more), and you should see a 3rd tick that is 60% of the full damage tick.

Also, say you already have a long duration poison ticking on your target, and you apply the same 2.6s burn exactly between 2 ticks of poison. Your first tick of burn will be at 50% damage (since it was applied 0.5 seconds before the next poison tick), then you will see 2 full damage burn ticks, then a 4th burn tick at 10% damage (because you had 0.5s + 2s = 2.5s of burning so far, with 0.1s remaining).

Before this patch, it was bugged and sometimes the calculations would not line up correctly. Instead of a new burn application extending the duration of your current burn, it would create 2 separate invisible burn stacks, sometimes doing double damage, sometimes doing 2 low ticks in a row.

Overall though, this is a buff to all condi damage, as you should have no wasted condi duration now. You don’t need to get every duration to the next full second to see the tick, you will get all residual duration added to a fractional tick at the end.