Guild Wars 2

So as a newbie who joined this community during that astounding discount, I’ve seen a lot of people on these forums scoff at the idea of using a condition build in PvE…

I was actually wondering why this is? If anything at all.

I’m still a fairly low level, but I love to theory craft the most I can out of games when I play them. Pretty sure I spend more time on the wiki than I do actually playing the game. Haha. So far I’ve been playing a slight condition thief. I want to know if I’m making this game harder than it has to be as I try to play and level.

Thanks in advance! I’m super excited to dig into this game.

Condition are very powerful while you are doing sPvP are WvW Roaming. But in PvE, condition have a couple of problem.

1) Condition is capped for technical reason. So if one condition build is alright, two or more will fight each other for dps. The cap for bleed is 25, so if you have two guys putting 20 bleeds each, then there will be 15 bleeds wasted. Same with duration condition. If we put 2min of burning on a boss that die in 1min, then half of the burning is wasted. Since more than one condition will be useless, nobody want to play condition because you never know if you gonna be useful or not. Additionally, power build also put condition. Not much, but when you have 5 of these, they add up. For exemple, a guardian and an elementalist can keep perma burning even with power build, meaning that any burning condition build will have to compete with them. An engineer and warrior can put a serious amount of bleeding even in power build.

2) First come, first served. The first condition put on an enemy will be the condition that is use, even if that condition come from a power build with terrible condition damage. On my guardian power build i’ll put burning for 5 second and that burning will do small damage, the guy next to me have a condition build and put another 5 second of burning but with higher damage. During the first 5 second of the fight it’s my low damage burning that will tick.

3) No damage modifier for condition. In PvP condi and power are similar in dps, but very little damage modifier are use there. In PvE on the other end you stack as much damage modifier as you can. These little percentage are so much powerful that they can more than double your damage and are the key of high dps profession like Elementalist because it can stack A LOT of damage modifier. But these damage modifier only affect power damage, not condition. So in high end PvE the condition dps is too low compare to power dps. This is not so bad in solo situation, but in group the difference can be higher than 33% more dps for the power build.

4) Ramp up time. This isn’t really a problem by itself. In my opinion condition should take longer to reach their top dps, but have higher total dps compare to power build. But in reality it take longer AND have lower total. Condition don’t do their maximum damage right away. They need a couple of second to reach their maximum stack and do their full dps. With the current meta most mobs are dead before condition build can reach their full potential or at least shortly after. This is mostly a problem with easy dungeon (CoF, AC), or with speed run group.

Thank you so much Thaddeus! Your reply was perfect. I never took into thought that each players conditions are in a way, competing. Super interesting stuff! I guess I’ll have to save my condition build for PvP then~ Or find ways around it…

I’m probably going to keep coming back to your answer in the future. Super informative and articulate answer. Thank you.

Isnt.5037:

Thank you so much Thaddeus! Your reply was perfect. I never took into thought that each players conditions are in a way, competing. Super interesting stuff! I guess I’ll have to save my condition build for PvP then~ Or find ways around it…

I’m probably going to keep coming back to your answer in the future. Super informative and articulate answer. Thank you.

Keep in mind that during the closed beta of HoT there were no cap on bleeds or at least you could get to 99. After that the bleed had a little ‘’!’’ on them. It was only a test, but it could mean that Anet is working on ways to improve condition for PvE.

The only use of Condition Damage that is currently an issue is during large World Boss or Champ battles (many players / ONE target encounters) or in Dungeon Parties that have multiple Condition Damage players. All these are due to current condition damage stack limitations (see above).

All other forms of PvE can be done easily with a Condition Damage build but it may take longer (as much of your damage takes time to build up and apply). It also requires some different tactics than a Power / Crit based build to kill mobs efficiently while avoid being overwhelmed. Most of the scoffing comes from Power / Crit builds being able to kill mobs faster and with potentially less work (or potential danger).

One other item that is usually not a big deal but can be frustrating is attacking objects with a condition damage build. Objects are immune to condition damage (and criticals) so only direct (POWER based) damage is more effective against them.

I run a Hybrid Power / Condition Damage build on my Necro, so I get scoffed at by both sides…..

On the other hand PvE in this game is easy enough (even at end game) that you don’t need an optimal guild to complete it.

As long as you’re aware of the limitations and prepared to change your build when necessary, which is a fairly common aspect of playing GW2 in general, you can use a condition build.

I’ve even done dungeons with 2-3 condition characters. Fights take longer, but these are always casual runs that take longer anyway so it doesn’t matter. Just as long as everyone in the group is ok with it.