Guild Wars 2

Hi folks, i was thinkng about condition damage and eles in www. I never heard about a good cond damage build for www, is there anyone with any kind of experience? Does it works or is a total waste of time and $$$? for my experience, direct damage is really effective, especially while playing in a guild warband as i do, but i am curious if condition damage could be effective in www, that’s why i’m asking it to you. You may say that the best way to know if cond damage is effective is trying by myself, but i’m concerned about investing gold on something i could dislike.

Can’t recommend too much. Unless you want to be really limiting yourself I would say.

For good condition setup you could ask yourself “do i have”
1. Multiple different conditions to hinder condition removal
- Like for example engineer pistol pistol and toolbar 10s Burn + 2-4confusion&blind + 5confusion + poison+ cripple&immobilize + spam bleed. All applied in under 10seconds.
or
2. Can I quickly apply massive amounts of bleeds or confusion on demand. (burn is a sort of bonus, as it cannot increase in DPS – especially when alot of guardians in wvwvw already doing burns, so someone is loosing ticks if not you)
- Like staff&scepterdagger necro 20+ bleed stacks solo, engineer 14+ stacks of confusion (4k+ ticks), mesmer multiple sources of aoe confusion

To both I would say answer is no. On (1.) ele can push out decent number of decent conditions, but we cannot do it fast and triggering all of em would destroy our follow up, as only earth attunument can do reasonable condition damage.
And on (2.), ele can push full 25 stacks of bleed solo with simply spamming eruption with all out bleed and condition duration. Insane damage and nothing to laugh about.
But doing it requires alot of time – not on demand, hitting the eruptions not always reliable and doing nothing but what earth offers you. And the instant you have to leave earth your damage really cuts down.

I can imagine it being super fun few times defending behind a keep door. As you don’t get owned by retaliation (like you would with fire) and you can freely do insane amounts of damage without needing to pop in water or air for CC or heal.

Also in solo play the bunkery D/D ele with 25%-50% condition gear can work good too, making sure burn is always ticking, churning hits and bleed spam instead of lightning whip. Wouldn’t go all out condition.

Try making necro, hit the mists, 0/30/20/20/0 staff+scepter&dagger+all wells. Just spam through all ur skills to get a example. And then you realise: ok so this is what actual condition class/spec feels like. Ele really doesn’t feel near the same :P.

I used to be all healer then I went for condition damage and burst and though condition damage works the burst is beast. but the condition damage is easier to combine with survivability making it viable for wvwvw.

I wouldn’t recommend investing too much into condition damage, because whether you are small-group skirmishing or with your server zerg against another zerg, I’ve noticed many players have built in a lot of condition removal and aoe cleansing for their group. Eles condition damage lies with bleed (burning doesn’t scale well) and we’re not built to stack a lot of conditions all at once, so cleansing it would be easy for your enemy – compared to necros, mesmers, and engineers that can apply 3+ conditions at once and are practically the reason why everyone has some sort of condition removal.

The problem with elementalists and condition builds is the attunement swapping mechanic. Bleed damage can be quite powerful, but only if not cleansed, and sitting in earth attunement to keep bleeds up limits cover condition application. As soon as you switch to do anything else, you lose your main source of damage for at least 10 seconds.

In WvW, condition builds which lack both poison and confusion are not particularly effective either solo or in groups, and we have neither (without taking odd racial skills anyway, and those are even weak compared to the true condition profession’s basic utilities).

I’d recommend checking out the “Pure Condition Build” here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1aun6t/ive_written_up_three_diverse_elementalist_staff/

It’s fairly decent. MANY people in WvW (at least in Tier 1 and 2) don’t cleanse, and for those that do, you’ll at least be able to keep burning on them (through the signet or the Staff’s Flame Burst) because they don’t have nearly enough cleanses to keep it off. This build is also nice because all your conditions (like weakness, chill, cripple, and immobilize) last for a long time. Remember that Glyph of Storms is a very nice defensive spell when you’re getting focused or when your group is making a push through a lot of enemies.

If you’re running with a class that can drop poison fields or ethereal fields, make sure you spam your Earth projectile finishers through them so you’re applying those as well.

I didn’t like the lower duration on my boons/swiftness and the lack of condition removal (though Ether Renewal and Healing Rain are both solid choices). Taking down siege weapons was also a bit more annoying, but on the flip side, it was quite easy to kill siege users. Tossing glyph of storms for glyph of elemental power is pretty fun if you’re running with a group and want to dish out massive snares – it actually makes Unstable Ground pretty useful, if the added cripple (8 seconds) procs.

I don’t run any condition damage at all in my gear because it is all but a waste on an ele. Even if people didn’t cleanse conditions ever, you would still be far better off increasing your ability to hit harder and maintain DPS longer via survivability. This isn’t true for other class/build combos though.

It boils down to the fact that we cannot keep enough stacks of enough conditions on enough enemies for it to be worth more than just hitting them harder with the front load. Never mind the fact that any decent player/group with the ability is going to keep removing conditions anyways.

In my opinion, condition damage for an Elementalist is better suited for supporting your regular damage rather than something to be focused on. It’s true that a lot of people use negative condition duration food or carry at least one condition removal, but I believe the role of an Elementalist (specifically a dagger/dagger Elementalist) is to pressure opponents, and extra condition damage is nice for that.