Guild Wars 2

Is it just me or is maintaining conditions on people harder than it should be.. I’ve tried a condi build on every class, but it feels so sub par to just straight damage output. It takes a while for the damage to start sticking, and if they have ANY condi removal it just dominates your build. Any thoughts? :\

1. it is harder to build around conditions if your class mostly has random condition causing abilities.

1. there are many sigil, talents and set bonuses that increase condition duration.

1. Any time you build a 1 trick pony, there are always gonna be simple ways to keep your pony out of the race
   Hint: build around conditions primary and something secondary, not 100% conditions.

My rule of thumb is, I’d rather have the tick hit hard, than have a lot of ticks.

Condition removal in this game is pretty rampant, so keep that in mind.

As an elementalist, I run condition damage+power.

Right… I run condi + power too. Usually running about 3.2k Power + 1.3kish condi dmg on my characters… So far I’ve only been able to do it well with thief. Caltrops + death blossom is insanely easy to stack 15-25 bleeds quickly. But on other characters I’m working hard to put these condis up, taking MY time to do this, for them to be removed by simple skills. All bleed stacks at once makes you start from square 1.

Thank GOD an actual PvP topic to discuss rather than whining.

2 things I’ve found about conditions, and condition damage:

1) Ranged users have better luck with keeping conditions up.

2) It seems that you have to invest a lot of points into condition damage AND duration to get the desired effects.

What this means to me is, it seems difficult to make a survivable class that needs said surviviability to keep and apply conditions without sacrificing the potency of the conditions.

So for me, mobility seems to be the key for any serious condition user. Building a medium to light survival build with insane duration and keeping yourself out of range/dodging effectively/using defensive CDs at just the right place.

Also, there are several classes that are speccing into heavy cleanse builds lately, and that doesn’t help either, but remember, at best a person can cleanse 3 times, maybe 4, generally speaking, so don’t try to frontload all your conditions at once, put a few small ones up, force a CD, then load the opponent up with your big conditions when you know they’ve wasted their counters. Since they ignore armor you can drop any class like this.

In my experience the condition/showrbow ranger and also the death blossom thief works well, even if they work only with bleeds mainly, with occasional weakness/poison/cripple.
If you play condition necro, I think your 3 utility slots are kinda fixed in stone imo: plague signed, corrupt boons, epidemic.
Also, target classes that have it hard removing conditions, like thieves, most mesmers, etc or that have high toughness, thus less HP to start with usually.

With a condition build you should get used to kiting really well. 15 stacks of bleeds, at 100 dmg/tick/bleed will kill a target with 19k hp in around 13 seconds if they do not heal/remove conditions. There is no condition build that does not deal some damage, so it should be even faster in reality.