Guild Wars 2

I’ve mostly played Guardian (support) and am now branching out into other classes. The big choice in DPS is obviously Condition or Burst.

I’d be interested to hear which type is better in WvW and why.

(Please keep the discussion civil).

I don’t see in an WvW environment condition damage being superior to burst specially due to how easily they can get removed there also there is the amount of time you have to spend applying them in the open being an easy target trying to stack bleeds for example.

white damage>condition damage in WVW. In WVW when running condition damage and your enemy is with a group that has a guardian or warrior or ele or engineer(lol) or necro and they are within visible distance, your target will probably cleanse those conditions by accident. There are so many ways to cleanse in a group the you shouldnt have any conditions on you TBH most of the time.

You cant cleanse white damage.

And that’s why condition necro sucks in WvW, did i mention that the damage bleed does to warrior or guardian or even thieves is abysmal? but this isn’t a necro thread, so yea Burst> condition.

The Pros and Cons of Condition Damage in WvW:

Pro:
+You can get Food to increase Condition Duration up to 40%.
+Deals damage even when disengaged
+ignore armor/toughness

Con:
-Doesn’t scale with %-based damage increases.
-Targets have more time to run away
-Condition Removal
-Targets have more time to heal up
-Kill windows are generally very short in WvW.

The last point especially is the reason why Condition Damage is problematic in WvW. With people able to run away, cleanse conditions, random people roaming around etc. kill windows in WvW are generally very short. And that’s why burst damage has the upper hand.

That doesn’t mean Condition Damage can’t be effective but it needs a very special class or playstyle to work (Pistol/Dagger Thief for example).

Condition damage is great in small fights (1v1, 5v5), but when you;re up against numbers, you just can’t follow someone long enough to keep the conditions going for them to die. There’s too much surging in and out of the front lines to keep the pressure applied until they die; if you follow them to keep the pressure on, inevitably you end up behind their front lines.

On more pro to condition damage is that it ignores armor, so it’s helpful for taking down builds that stack a lot of toughness. But just like the other replies said, burst usually beats condition.

It greatly depends on play style. Is condition damage great if you are hitting 30+ with 5, no it is not. Is condition damage great in a 1vX where you are built to outlast your opponents, yes.

Niim.9260:

It greatly depends on play style. Is condition damage great if you are hitting 30+ with 5, no it is not. Is condition damage great in a 1vX where you are built to outlast your opponents, yes.

I agree with this. CD against small groups is very effective when you are trying to get everybody to blow their cleanse cooldowns. Apply just one set of conditions, wait to see it clear, spam CD and then switch to burst. Having a good balance of both CD and burst, I’ve found, works really well.

Short answer: have both.

Well if you compare condition damage to the burst of glass cannon classes it’s clear that the second one will prevail.
To have a good burst you gotta use 3 stats togheter, power prec & crit damage.
For conditions you basically only need condition damage, then you can focus on more valuable stats, that can still be power & prec, but can also be tough, vit or whatsoever.
That’s why condition builds are usually more survivable than bursty ones.
If you go with power only with 0 crit chance & 0 crit damage your output will be lower than it would with Condition damage. (in most cases).
The problem right now is that they’re just to easy to remove, and most of the ways to do it right now are skills that players just spam mindlessly

I recommend that if you do decide to go condition damage, you go necro. Epidemic is an amazing skill in WvW. Yes, your target just cleared all of his conditions, but the 5 enemies around him have equal stacks of bleeding/burning/confusion on them. Epidemic is a potent force multiplier.

It really depends on the situation and thats alot of factors. Most glass cannon builds are meant to get in do some burst pop some form of damage reduction or mitigation and get out heal up come back in repeat. Its kind of like asking whats better glass cannon or tank.

Like someone said condi builds are usually more attrition based it also depends on class too. If you have good interrupts you can interrupt heal and cleanse if it has a cast time making condition damage just as effective as burst. I honestly thin there is no clear winner really have both if you can.

I play condition style and the only time I have a problem say 1v1 killing something is bunker guardian and bunker ele. The bunker ele is more doable than the guardian. Condition take more of a hit if there is some passive condi removals traited on the enemy. If its bunker guardian Ill see how the first moments of the fight go but usually its not worth it to stick around because backup will be coming soon either for you or him.

The presence of conditions does a lot to stop the back line ranged from just running back a few yards to auto-fill their hp much faster than their personal heal could, but the actual situation where you get to apply lots of conditions to enemies is fairly rare in the way WvW is currently played: you need to have a more durable group than your enemy and also flank them and charge in so that there’s not a safe little colored door to run into nor a nice open field where they can go back to ranged-poke mode.

Likewise the actual potency of conditions is very dependent on the fraction of players with you that apply conditions and class composition. When you’ve got a dozen different conditions on a lot of players very few personal purges will still be able to wipe the slate clean, and the few that still can do that to a group tend to just drop them one at a time.

There is a much more important consideration though: if a player blows his condition removal to drop a stack of bleeds this tends to also (often) means that he no longer has a way to remove immobilize/cripple/chill effects. With some communication you can be the person that sets players up to get badly pwnt by everyone else, or if you’re numbers hungry you could instead be the person adding effects after they blow that purge to get out of the movement impairing effects I listed.

But none of that is very meta, and it would mostly require that you have a party with somebody calling focus targets, etc. If you’re in a guild that wants to roll a condition-burst group then maybe it will work out for you but if you just kind of swarm around a commander most of the time you’re in WvW conditions aren’t very fun, and you gimp yourself badly for damaging pieces of siege.

I still obviously encourage having a good portion of players in WvW rolling conditions, but for reasons very different from eating up health bars.

Burst all the way. Condition takes time to apply and there is too much condition removal.

Straegen.2938:

Unless the math has changed points in power directly contribute to total damage output at a much better ratio than pumping points into condition damage. Putting points into condition damage is almost a waste by comparison. Even condition builds should consider power over condition.

It’s not so cut and dry as that. Depends on duration and what % of your base damage comes from condition. Running a condition build on Necro up to 70% of your damage can be condition, and adding equal amount of condition can double the damage of the same power, provided conditions run their full time. Of course in PVP they often don’t and then you have to assess as a tradeoff how much potential damage you want to risk getting removed vs having some more consistent type in direct that comes from power.

But there is also something to be said for straight overwhelming the condition removal of opponents, and you need a lot for that. Bonus of condition over direct to attrition playstyle is its fire and forget, you don’t have to stay in the battle, even in range for it to keep doing damage.

In WvW, large fights, there are so many abilities removing conditions and combofields-Light (cause lets face it, there are a lot of Guardians and they litter the place with these) That conditions are very unreliable to keep up.

Add to this that scaling for conditions isnt good either. Only condition damage works, and condition duration but you cannot stat for that.
Now for Power based damage. Precision scales, critdmg scales, vulnerability scales. And what damage is done, is done.
With conditions you need to do 2 critical passes to deal damage. Is the initial hit avoided (block/dodge/immune) and, is the damage cured. Unlike with Power damage, which just has to pass the hit-criteria (block/dodge/immune). And damage is done in full.

Condition damage has but one advantage, it ignores Toughness. Unfortunatly the kind of people that stack toughness generally also have good condition removal.

So in short, dont put your money on condition damage in WvW. Maybe Confusion if you can stack it. That hits like a truck, and in the chaos of a lot of WvW fights people blindly spam and spam, allowing confusion to rake up mad damage.

In small scale fights, personally, I would say there is never a substitute for coordinated and well timed burst.

Let us refocus on the op topic. This is about WvW, not sPvP or solo roaming. If you are solo roaming condition/survivability builds are great, I loved my bleed/lifedrain tank build on my thief. I could 1v2 and 1v3 pretty easily unless they had an abundance of cleanses(guardian) Especially in lower tiers people run less cleanses in WvW when roaming.

BUT, when actually playing with more than 1 party of people condition builds handicap your teams DPS. (random cleanses i mentioned above)

eithinan.9841:

Let us refocus on the op topic. This is about WvW, not sPvP or solo roaming. If you are solo roaming condition/survivability builds are great, I loved my bleed/lifedrain tank build on my thief. I could 1v2 and 1v3 pretty easily unless they had an abundance of cleanses(guardian) Especially in lower tiers people run less cleanses in WvW when roaming.

BUT, when actually playing with more than 1 party of people condition builds handicap your teams DPS. (random cleanses i mentioned above)

Solo roaming and small group play is as much a part of WvW as zerging, what gave you the impression it wasn’t?
Personally I feel the only true indictment and argument against condition damage is when in large group situations, it is very unintentionally removed. It is the primary argument against it, and a very big negative. Condition damage is a great compliment to smaller engagements and works amazingly in 1 v 1 too provided you can pursue your opponent.
Reality is most people dont carry many condition removals.

But do you know what the greatest upside to condition removal is? Siege.
Most siege weapons can apply bleed which benefits from individual condition damage attributes. Similarly they benefit from power but since Siege cannot crit it is negligible for the most part.
I run a full condition damage toon and i apply individual bleed stacks that deal ~120 damage per tick, and since an arrow cart can apply multiple stacks, it disperses crowds insanely quickly. Have 3 full condition damage players manning 3 arrow carts can apply insane amounts of aoe bleed and the upside is theyll die even after retreating.

Except for necros, all classes have a source of regeneration in various forms.

If you could see their self heals and regeneration, you’d understand how a necro can stack bleeds for 15 seconds, and still not do any damage.

…and that’s not even mentioning all the ways to automatically remove conditions that players have access to.

Burst is more effective and much more simple to use… I see thieves killing people just hitting Heart Seeker like a boss (two two two like a boss).

But condition is not that bad, just harder to use. You have to be more tactical.

In resume with Burst you will probably kill more people and faster, but it all depends on playstyle.

Neither is better, it simply just depends on your build.

• Damage over time slowly drains the health of your opponent, so obviously you need more survivability. The upside of this is that you also have a higher chance of escaping encounters.
• Burst damage rapidly drains the health of your opponent, so you don’t need to spend as much time in combat. But the downside of being able to defeat your opponents fast, is that you don’t have a lot of survivability, as all your stats go towards damage.
• It is possible to do burst damage with condition damage, or damage over time with direct damage. If you quickly stack a lot of conditions on an opponent, you drain their health very fast. If you don’t have a lot of critical damage on top of your power, you will slowly drain the health of your opponent instead.