Guild Wars 2

Here are the choices:

Carrion Condition Damage Power Vitality
Rabid Condition Damage Precision Toughness
Dire Condition Damage Toughness Vitality
Giver’s Condition Duration Precision Vitality (weapon only)
Rampager’s Precision Power Condition Damage
Settler’s Toughness Condition Damage Healing Power
Shaman’s Vitality Condition Damage Healing Power
Apothecary Healing Power Toughness Condition Damage
Celestial Power Precision Toughness Vitality Condition Damage Healing Power Ferocity (Small Bonuses)

At the moment, I’m thinking Carrion is best for PvE while Dire is best for WvW… I never liked the Rabid attribute combo mixing condition damage with precision (unless you have a condition trait/sigil that activates on criticals).

Rampager’s doesn’t seem like the best way to maximize condition damage and seems like a middleman between a full condition dmg setup and berserker gear.

Settler’s, Shaman’s and Apothecary all seem a little bit too defensive to me but I keep hearing about “condi tanks” in WvW and maybe they mix dire pieces with a few of these or do they go full dire builds? Maybe they fit in some Rampager’s or Celestial’s as well?

Any suggestions for condi gear for all classes overall? or should I specify a class like engineer, necro, Mesmer, ranger, or warrior?

This chart was a bit helpful… http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Nomenclature_graph.png

Because of Barbed Precision plus Haemophilia, Rabid-speccing a Necromancer results in the highest condition damage spec possible (4780 dps pre-patch… I haven’t bothered to recalculate post-patch). Most of the other bleed-on-crit proc rates for other classes are too low for Rabid to make any sense at all, but Necromancers do benefit from them. Necromancers don’t actually benefit as much from the Vitality on Dire as other classes will because of their large default HP pool plus their class mechanic’s secondary HP pool (of 60% default HP pool). Condition warriors also don’t have as much of a survivability improvement, but crits help them less, so Dire’s still the default for those.

In most other cases, Dire ends up being the best for condition builds in general, since the increase in damage from the Power Carrion gives you is not much – you’d have only 400 damage per second from direct sources on Dire for a necro/ranger/pistol engi/conditioner mesmer; when upping it at most you can get about 600 damage per second. It’s an additional 200 ish, out of a total DPS of ~ 4000+. For that paltry +5% damage, you sacrifice a LOT of toughness.

The only class I know of that can use Carrion properly is Engineers because they can swap from condition to direct damage mode at will by simply swapping between kits. In all other cases, a weapon combination that gives you enough conditions to be viable in that mode also ends up giving you hopeless power multipliers, and vice-versa.

Rampager is generally quite useless, because precision doesn’t do anything significant to damage without ferocity, doesn’t contribute as much to condition damage via oncrit traits as condition damage, and has no defensive stats to pull you out of the fire.

It’s a long, long story to explain it all, but essentially, aside from the Berserker that works as a standard option in most classes (except Necros (no cleave) and Rangers (horrible power multipliers on all weapons)), the other viable stats for the classes are:

Guardian – Sentinel, Knight, Soldier, Cleric
Warrior – Dire, Knight, Soldier
Ranger – Dire
Engineer – Carrion, Dire, Cleric, Settler
Elementalist – Celestial (Berserker not recommended at high level content because repeated death)
Necromancer – Rabid, Dire
Mesmer – Assassin-Berserker mix, Dire
Thief – Dire (venomshare, otherwise Berserker usually works better because of how utterly hopeless the class’s survivability is outside of stealth)

Giver, Rampager, Shaman, Apothecary, Zealot (Healing power without toughness is seriously out of point), Cavalier, Valkyrie (Doesn’t matter how high your crit is if you never crit ESPECIALLY post-Ferocity nerf), Magi (Healing power and precision don’t interact at all and there’s zero damage stats on this thing) stats are all suboptimal. If you wanted a Valkyrie playstyle for instance, you’ll have better results by mixing Berserker and Soldier gear than by using full Valkyrie in both damage and survivability.

Also note that specific combinations of stats and classes are pretty much suboptimal. There are people who enjoy using them, which is fine, but they’ll never be optimal. For instance putting any form of Healing Power on a Thief is ridiculous, stacking Power on rangers is suboptimal (not thief-HP bad, but still nowhere as good as sticking it on any of the other 6 classes aside from necro), stacking Vitality on a Warrior without adding Toughness is pointless because its HP pool is already large but its HP regen is more or less fixed, and stacking Condition Damage on a Guardian is… just… no.

Thanks Hayashi.