Guild Wars 2

If you set the golem to “all conditions”, you can see damage ticking away. Does the time start when that passive damage starts to tick, or when the player strikes the golem? Either way, is the all conditions setting standard for obtaining dps benchmarks? If so, why? I’d think the best thing to do is to put on 25 vuln, and other non-damaging conditions that might proc a damage modifier for a particular class.

The time starts when the Golem is struck by the player.

All condition is standard because it’s the fast/lazy way and it usually doesn’t affect anything (apart from couple builds, like Power Engi).
Applying 25 stacks of Vuln + the required build conditions will give the same output, just takes longer to apply.

the conditions that the console applies don’t do any damage, so it counts from your first hit

IonoI.3956:

the conditions that the console applies don’t do any damage, so it counts from your first hit

Place conditions on the golem by console and go afk for half an hour. After you return the golem has lost some percent of his HP. Those conditions do near to no damage, but they deal damage.
They still don’t trigger the DPS measurement.