Guild Wars 2

Noticed this with my guardian, but curious if other classes/skill combinations are causing a similar problem.

Scenario 1:
I lay down staff 3 – “Symbol of Swiftness” to get 8 sec of swiftness and then I (nearly) immediately pop “Retreat.” Altogether this gives me a swiftness boon with 28 sec duration; everything is working fine.

Scenario 2: “Retreat” first and then I wait until the swiftness boon has below 8 sec left. At this point, laying down Staff 3 and letting some pulses hit me resets the icon for swiftness boon, but does not add any time to the duration. My thinking is that I should have at least 8 sec of swiftness after getting hit by a pulse of my “Symbol of Swiftness,” but that is clearly not occurring.

My guess is that it has something to do with AoE pulsing messing with the stacking, and it makes sense that this should be a bit complicated: if you already have the boon from one pulse, you should not have the effect stack from later pulses of the same cast.

In any case, this should be dealt with, or at least the tooltip should be updated so that this is more clear.

I would like it if others could try this with different skill combinations to see if this is occurring with other boons/conditions, please only post when the boon/conditions you are stacking have the SAME intensity (eg don’t post 33% movement speed stacked with 10%) , we already know that is a more complicated situation.

tl;dr When stacking is applied from a pulsed effect but the condition/boon is already present (even from a different source), it doesn’t actually stack.