Guild Wars 2

I’m having a rough time trying to prioritize my stats. I would think the most idea piece of gear for us would have +power and condition. However I have a hard time choosing gear where there is either a large amount of power or a large amount of condition damage. For instance I have two staffs right now, and I cant figure out what would be better:

One with 74 power and 53 precision with a slightly lower weapon strength, or one with a slightly higher weapon strength with 57 vit and 80 condition damage.

Does it all depend on how you build your traits? Do we want that initial burts from power, or the higher damage from burns, bleeds, etc. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

On Elementalist I prefer power, cause we don’t have all that much conditions. Maybe consider using condition damage if you spend most of your time in fire and earth?

See I spend most of my time between earth and fir on S/D. Combo on fire for the burns switch to earth to gain more might with the blast finisher there and then bleed, and then back again, so I either have burns, and/or bleeds up at all times.

I like power/crit over condition. Ele conditions are a bit wonkey in that you end up with a CD if you want both burn and bleed. This makes it so your bleed stacks drop if you go to burn.

The only weapon that seems able to do more with condition than power is scepter earth. And it does do good dps if you’re alone.

Now for the big problem.
The condition cap. If you spec to make bleed on scepter good you’re gona eat a good 18-20 stacks of bleed on the mob. If any other player in your group or dynamic event has a bleed build, you only do a fraction of your damage as it caps out at 25.

Burn has the same issue, as if one person is spamming burn and has a 100% uptime on a boss, a second person burning adds ZERO DAMAGE

If you go power and precision.. you can have as many people beating on the target as you want and not lose a single point of damage.

I see.. I was running a power crit build and that was working really well.. I think I might try to focus on that. I had it as high as 40% at one point with the fire signet

Typhoonturki.1065:

I see.. I was running a power crit build and that was working really well.. I think I might try to focus on that. I had it as high as 40% at one point with the fire signet

a good crit rate also lets you take advantage of the groovy sigils like strength (30% on crit to get 10 seconds of might)

I use a full CD build as Ele. I use Rare Veggie Pizzas (+40% condition duration, +70 condition damage), and with that food buff my signet of fire lasts almost the full 16 seconds of the cooldown.

I use a full Carrion set of gear which gives me plenty of power, condition damage, and vitality. In the group situations where I do less condition damage I still have enough power to hit hard, but I do lack the crit chance. For soloing though the condition damage is quite awesome, and I find it also useful in WvW since everyone seems to attack different targets at random and a lot of people don’t spec for enough condition removal.

I think whether you go toward Power or CD is probably more dependent on play-style and which skills you use a lot.

I’ve been pretty much entirely ignoring power and pumping traits and item stats into Condition damage and here’s what I’ve learned (using Scepter/Dagger):

• I don’t have too much trouble killing mobs in PvE; I can usually lay down enough bleeding that if I’m taking damage I can run back and heal a bit while they continue to bleed.
• I’m super weak underwater. There’s not much in the way of condition damage skills underwater, and since my power is so weak, I’m pretty much useless.
• Someone else in the forums tipped me off to this, but it does seem to be the case: the first few points you put into a stat make a bigger difference percentage-wise. So in my case, with so few points in power, adding just 5 or 10 Fire trait points will significantly increase my damage output. I haven’t got around to trying it yet, but an 80/20ish split might yield better results than putting 100% into one stat.