Guild Wars 2

I’m about to hit level 80 and my guildmates and I are eager to start earning those dungeon tokens I’ve been using a condition damage build in PvE so far, using Carrion gear and my primary weapon is Staff. I was wondering if condition damage builds are viable in dungeons or if I should go with something else. I’ve pretty much focused traits in Earth, Water and Arcane. I haven’t bought my final stat book yet, so I can change those if I need to. Also, what dungeon armor should I be trying for? Looks don’t matter, just the stats. Thanks for taking the time to give advice!

Hard to say without knowing your dungeon group makeup.

Do you have a thief/necro in the group? If so your bleeds might be severely diminished to the point where you will not be able to get a single stack in. (max 25stacks on any target) It depends on how they are specced however.

I’m not at all familiar with the Engineer profession, but when I ran a condition build, I had a lot of trouble with my burns actually doing anything when our Engineer was around. Even though I had a good amount more +cond damage than him, I was seeing my damage numbers drop well before they should have been.

You also face issues with many bosses that naturally shed conditions faster than normal. These numbers are completely made up, but say your signet of fire normally puts 12secs of burn on your target. Certain bosses will only burn for 4seconds.

It’s a fun spec to play and the damage is great, but the game just does not play nice with multiple people applying damaging conditions. Burning especially. The bosses shedding conditions thing was the nail in the coffin for me. You’d be better off with any other setup and gearing for it accordingly.

Build&gear are kind of combination of your personal liking and playstyle.

I use staff with power build. 30/0/0/20/20. Staff generally works better with raw power than with condition gear. Scepter is better with conditions.

Build
I do not like that I need to take only signets/cantrips/glyphs as utility to make my build work. I want to change spells according situation. I run with this build: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQFAWhImmbwx0gjDAEFmgS4BBMkQRxM7A
Utility skills are totally optional, the build above shows what I run most of the time in Ascalonian Catacombs (stability for Kohler hook/Graveling scavengers, Flash for OhNoes-situations, etc). Take what you like, build is not depending about having certain skills on utility slots.

About the traits, as you can see I took 30 Fire for 300 extra power.
- Internal Fire (10% more damage with fire) is kind of easy choice.
- Pyromancer’s Alacrity is also important, 20% cooldown reduction will take Lave Font from 6 seconds to 4 3/4ths a second.
- Pyromancer’s Puissance will let you keep up stacks of Might while attacking. One might is 35 power at lvl80, that stack can go to 25 on long WvW fights. That is 875 extra power. On dungeon bosses I usually hang around 14 stacks of might. All spells cast while attuned to fire will add stacks.

Then I go to Water to get some vitality, this will boost my HP pool and give some support to dungeon group.
- Cleansing Wave will heal 1,302 at 0 points and 1,602 at 30 points. I have only 20 points but heal is still a sizable amount.
- Vital Striking is there to deal extra 10% damage when health is above 90% (note this boost is not limited to any attunement,)

Finally Arcana gives me +20% boon duration and also allows faster attunement swaps due recharge rate boost.
- Elemental Attunement is easy pick, it applies a boon based on the attunement you switch to, which just general synergizes well with each build.
- Blasting Staff just makes AoE staff abilities bigger (this includes your healing areas).

Gear:
Head, Shoulders, Chest, Legs, Gloves and Boots are Power+Toughness+Vitality aka Soldier’s gear. You can get these easily from Ascalonian Catacombs (AC) dungeon and you will also get some money with those runs. Power+Toughness+Vitality is good gear to start with, after you get more familiar with instance/boss mechanics you can swap your gear to more damage oriented and return to this “balanced” gear when this are unpredictable.

My Back Item is same Soldier’s prefix as other armor, you can get rare back from TP. Mine is Soldiers Spineguard. it cost ~80silvers when I got it from Trading Post. Exotic back piece can be purchased with 5g from Guild Armorer, but personally I rather go with rare until I get Ascended item with Fractals of the Mists (FoTM) dungeon tokens.

Armor runes are
- 2x Superior Rune of the Monk. these you get with AC gear
- 2x Superior Rune of the Water, craft or buy
- 2x Major Rune of the Monk (you get plenty of these from AC)
As you can see I have picked these for boon duration. Longer might, fury, swiftness, etc.

I have +Toughness. +Power +Precision Necklace aka Emerald Orichalcum Amulet of the Knight. Rings and Accessory are currently +Power +Precision +Critical Damage aka Berserker’s, tho I change these to Emerald ones when I know I will face tough boss.

About weapons, I have
- Berserker’s staff with Superior Sigil of Force (+5% damage) it is nice and easy bonus without any hassle. I mostly use this on dungeons that I already know.
- Shaman’s staff from AC with Superior Sigil of Force. This is for hard hitting bosses and new encounters.
- Shaman’s staff from AC with Superior Sigil of Energy (Gain 50% of your endurance with attunement swap, 9sec CD). I got this for Crucible of Eternity (CoE) boss that likes to throw stuff at ranged. So I need to dodgle a lot.

I do not have any points on Earth line that is why I go so heavily to +toughness with gear. In places like arah I rather survive than deal a bit more damage before I get downed/defeated.

Below you can see my stats: