Guild Wars 2

shankyu.6154:

Seems like others didn’t quite catch what you were saying, but I get it. To put it simply you think condi damage is a viable source of damage for those builds that don’t have a viable way to output damage because they’re more focused on providing support. For instance, a healing/support guardian can throw around burns for dps.

I would like to agree, except to incorporate condi damage into traits or gear on a healing specc’ed class could kitten it. For instance, on a 0/10/0/30/30 d/d bunker ele designed for aura sharing and healing any trait points thrown into earth or fire would stop it from doing its job as effectively and may also hurt its survivability. Gearing for it would do much the same where you could have a pvt or clerics piece in place of say a rabid piece.
Also pure damage still might be a better option over whatever you’d be getting from conditions. On such a build you’d probably end up doing more damage just from might stacking.
Furthermore, whatever conditions you’d be throwing around as a support specc would be significantly weaker than anyone actually built for pure condition damage and you’d only make it harder for them to do damage.

We caught it, we just dismissed it out of hand because support specs are relatively non existent and extremely niche in this game because, again, the game design works against you on it by severely limiting what support you can actually provide.

That said you wouldn’t run something like this on a D/D Bunker ele. You’d do it more as the Staff build on a 0/0/20/20/30 build in Shaman Gear (Vit/Heal/Condi) and Passiflora Jewelry (Tough/Heal/Condi) as part of Zerg group support for healing.

@Shankyu
Well let’s see!
for 0/10/0/30/30 with a major in power, if you try to spam Lightning Whip as much as possible while maintaining a rotation to keep perma fury and might stacks, your average damage per second on a 2600 armor target will be around 1046 dps (then modified by trait choices, like bountiful power).
With this same set-up, but just using Dragon breath and Impale (some direct damage + 4 bleed stacks + 70% burning uptime) you will deal around 961 dps.
Now if you put only just a minor in condition damage, same set-up, no power, that condition rotation will deal 1019 dps..

My point is that conditions take less resources to be decent. This is particularly true when you are a bunker, because your direct damage is low anyway.

This result is not surprising at all. I remember that when I used to run this spec, a long time ago in PvP I unconsciously used spells that had conditions components like Drake’s Breath as often as possible.

I am not saying that the bunker ele should necessarily go for condition gear, and this is just theory, with quite a number of odd assumptions, it would need to be confirmed in practice.
But maybe if you are running cleric you could consider trying apothecary instead, or a mix of the two. Some trait changes could then be considered (for example: the protection sharing).

Kodiak you are wrong: the bunker ele is all about support and it one of the most run build in the community. It is quite existent. I wouldn’t consider that a niche.

Bumping. I agree with this post and it needs something done.

Kodiak.3281:

mjharrison.3209:

Fundamentally, condition Ele is broken because of the long attunement switching timer – if you need to switch out of Earth/Fire, you can’t do any appreciable damage for at least 9 seconds – and that’s if you have 30 arcane, which offers little to a condition build.

Attunement times need to come down for Ele. You shouldn’t need 20+ point in arcane just to play the class fluidly.

If you’re going to talk fundamentals any Condition based spec is pretty bad by virtue of game design. Conditions basically have everything working against them.

In PvE Conditions can be stacked at maximum for 25 for bleeds or duration for other effects. This largely means your damage is going to have to wait in line to be done if at all. On my Mesmer I passively apply 10+ bleeds without wanting to (minor trait) with 0 condition damage. That means any class that seriously wants to apply them are unable to because even more powerful bleeds won’t overwrite weaker ones. In addition for stacking duration conditions a weaker burn/poison is also not prioritized lower. Even if they were prioritized based on effect power, if two people intentionally apply a high damage burn as part of their damage only one will take effect meaning by game design one person will always be doing lower damage.

In PvP (and/or WvW) things are even more grim because of the number of counters. The huge advantage raw damage has over condition damage in PvP is you can’t quickly or easily “erase” raw damage where as all classes have a wide variety of options to remove condition based damage. There is also an entire stat (-Condition Duration) dedicated to countering condition durations which forces you into +Condition Duration options to give you base durations in the best case scenarios. Except the base duration on many conditions is so pitifully small because they were balanced around the idea you could increase said condition duration. Also with the stacking nature of Bleed it’s extremely difficult to “cover” them as the last condition applied because Bleed was designed to be stacked and is available on most spam abilities.

This is not to say Condi specs are impossible to pull off, have fun with or even that they can’t excel. It’s just the very way the game is designed is set against them (regardless of class) which makes them and abilities like this seem so lackluster.

Yeesh, if these details are true about conditions, then they really do get screwed over. That means in group settings that if 3 people each stack a 5 sec burn but the strongest one is applied last that it would be the last one to do damage, correct? That really sucks, since it means in WvW or the like, you’re praying that your conditions will be the ones at the front of the queue and won’t get cleansed right away, while direct damage dealers get all their damage delivered right up front.

Kodiak.3281:

innocent ouarior.1954:

Bloodmage spec (which sounds 10 times cooler than Condimentalist), that being full Rampager perma 25bleed+burn using does incredibly good single target PvE damage as long as your team doesnt use much bleeds and burn. With sharing poison Thief or Poison Filed supplied its even more impressive.

Of course its a very niche.

Yea if you can go Asura for the Radiation Field plus stack condition duration you can get a really crazy source of Poison. Almost makes me wish I hadn’t deleted my Asura Elementalist for a Human one. As it is I tend to run with Reaper of Grenth instead but that’s a huge recast for limited duration, but also is extra Chill.

There is also an onswap sigil to get poison, though I assume you would use the on crit bleed one for the bleeds when not in earth. I use the onswap poison in PvP, very usefull

Kamui.3150:

Yeesh, if these details are true about conditions, then they really do get screwed over. That means in group settings that if 3 people each stack a 5 sec burn but the strongest one is applied last that it would be the last one to do damage, correct? That really sucks, since it means in WvW or the like, you’re praying that your conditions will be the ones at the front of the queue and won’t get cleansed right away, while direct damage dealers get all their damage delivered right up front.

Yeap. It’s all pretty bad when you really get into the details of it.

That said it’s hilarious when you see people not prepare their build to deal with conditions. You literally just melt their HP away.

The problem with condimentalist is that it is only 1v1’ing. It has such little AoE to it that if you brought it to a group fight you might as well (insert suicide action here.)

TGSlasher.1458:

Kodiak.3281:

innocent ouarior.1954:

Bloodmage spec (which sounds 10 times cooler than Condimentalist), that being full Rampager perma 25bleed+burn using does incredibly good single target PvE damage as long as your team doesnt use much bleeds and burn. With sharing poison Thief or Poison Filed supplied its even more impressive.

Of course its a very niche.

Yea if you can go Asura for the Radiation Field plus stack condition duration you can get a really crazy source of Poison. Almost makes me wish I hadn’t deleted my Asura Elementalist for a Human one. As it is I tend to run with Reaper of Grenth instead but that’s a huge recast for limited duration, but also is extra Chill.

There is also an onswap sigil to get poison, though I assume you would use the on crit bleed one for the bleeds when not in earth. I use the onswap poison in PvP, very usefull

I thought all the “on swap, your next attack does X” sigils are bugged with attunement switching?

Aether McLoud.1975:

I thought all the “on swap, your next attack does X” sigils are bugged with attunement switching?

As far as I know they are working with attunement swap. This might explain some things depending on what your using for sigils (from the wiki:)

Sigils with cooldowns
All sigils that have a cooldown share the same cooldown timer; while the timer is active, no other sigil with a cooldown can trigger. For example, if you are using a Sigil of Fire (flame burst on critical) and a Sigil of Battle (might stacks on swap), you will have to wait after swapping weapons (Sigil of Battle activated) before the flame burst can trigger on critical.

Sigils will enter cooldown even if you do not gain any benefit. For example, a Sigil of Purity will trigger and enter the 10s cooldown even when the wearer has no conditions.
All things equal, the mainhand cooldown sigil will trigger before the offhand cooldown sigil.

More on topic, I’d rather see grandmaster traits that change play-styles rather than just stat adjustment. It offers both more satisfaction in using a trait when its effects are immediately obvious in requiring a play-style shift and creates a greater interaction in trait choices beyond simply min/maxing stats. It also leads to some of our more popular traits currently in Fresh Air and Evasive Arcana.

The Game Slayer.7632:

The problem with condimentalist is that it is only 1v1’ing. It has such little AoE to it that if you brought it to a group fight you might as well (insert suicide action here.)

I’ve found Condi builds to be fairly useful in group fights. That’s building for Condi Duration more than Condi Damage, though. Long duration bleeds, burns, chills, cripples, and immobilize combined with our usual buffs, healing, and damage is pretty effective if thrown on top of 1 or 2 decent bursters on your team.

This was with Staff, however. I found Condi Scepter to be very 1-dimensional and clunky to use.

dukevonart.2691:

More on topic, I’d rather see grandmaster traits that change play-styles rather than just stat adjustment. It offers both more satisfaction in using a trait when its effects are immediately obvious in requiring a play-style shift and creates a greater interaction in trait choices beyond simply min/maxing stats. It also leads to some of our more popular traits currently in Fresh Air and Evasive Arcana.

This is what I like about the idea of adding a poison proc on crits instead as a final trait similar to the way Necros got with burning. It would open up gear choices like Rabid and make new traits that add a lot of Fury (such as Persisting Flames adding Fury on Might Combos) a lot more tempting. I’d be much more tempted to go with something like Rabid Armor in that scenario than I am currently where there’s really zero reason to focus on Critical at all in our current condition spec. I then also wouldn’t necessarily feel the sting of losing Signet of Earth on use because with Rabid gear my Toughness would be much higher than it is now (at the cost of my ultra high Vitality).

I had a slight different idea about this, rather than adding the third damage condition to elementalists. I thought that it would be interesting if elementalists were able to compound conditions through trait choices in a similar manner to traits like the mesmer’s Illusionary Membrane. So something like replacing Tempest Defense with a trait that applies bleed for a duration whenever the elementalist applies vulnerability (Similar to icebrood abilities normally work). While I had not originally thought of it this way, this general idea could be expanded to provide cover conditions for the long duration bleeds and burns an elementalist can apply.