Guild Wars 2

On my guardian I noticed that when done in a certain order, staff 3 does not add swiftness time when used in conjunction with other swiftness skills. Basically if you already have a swiftness buff on you, running through staff 3 symbol does not add extra time. However if you have nothing on, use staff 3 to give you swiftness initially, then use utilities such as retreat and save yourselves, both utilities will add time to the existing swiftness boon.

I was alone so I couldn’t test with other swiftness skills like mesmer focus 4, ranger/warrior horn, etc, but I’m guessing this is still a bug where staff 3 for guardians won’t add time if the player already has a swiftness boon.

Guardian’s staff swiftness pulses multiple times (each second). If you already have swiftness it adds 1s, so while standing in it it does not lower the total duration.
If you don’t have swiftness it adds 8s (+ 0% boon duration).

If it’d give you 8s each tick, you’d simply stand in there and wait all 5 pulses and get 40s of swiftness.
Mesmer’s focus #4 is worse since it doesn’t even give you one additional second of swiftness. But it doesn’t add to existing, because you could forth and back multiple times.

That makes sense, though I guess I was hoping both were designed in a way to add the time to existing swiftness boons on a once per character (or an internal cooldown sort of deal) per walking through the field. It seems odd that both the boon and the damage pulse for guardian staff. I would think if you were trying to run from something, you wouldn’t want to stand in the symbol waiting for the time added. What a waste of a skill if you already have the boon. :P