Guild Wars 2

Sorry to bother with this but I wanted to know how useful the stat POWER actually is.

Does it add 1p of damage to each spell for 1p of power? As in does an Elementalist with 800 power deal fireballs with 200 more damage than the elementalist that only has 600 power?

Does condition damage work similarly? Are the coefficients different?

Thanks for your time and effort.

Every skill has got a different power-ratio. Flame Grabs dmg, when hitting a burning enemy, scales for 1.1 with power for example. Elementalist Autoattacks have a much lower ratio, sth between .1 – .3… if you want to try out whats the ratio for a specific skill just read the tooltip dmg, then add or remove some power and read it again. Now you can see how much more dmg you deal per point of power.

Conditiondamage gets improved by the “conditiondamage” stat, not by power. Ratios are:
Bleed: 0.06 extra dmg / point conditiondmg / sec
Burning: 0.25 extra dmg / point conditiondmg / sec
Poison: 0.1 extra dmg / point conditiondmg / sec

Thank you very much for your post it has all the information I wanted. I was aware that POWER affects only direct damage dealing spells and that CONDITION DAMAGE is for DoTs.

I just wasn’t sure about the coefficients and whether it is wiser to go for Power or Condition Damage. Obviously that differs based on the current attunement, where fire has more direct damage dealing spells with the occasional DoT as opposed to Earth that has lower hitting direct damage spells but much better DoTs via bleeds that stack.

I was just wondering if anyone was intrigued/bored enough to find out whether it is more beneficial to go for Power and Fire or to go for Condition Damage and Earth, purely damage dealing wise.

It depends entirely on the weapon sets and traits you’re using but you’re correct in stating that power/fire go together nicely when combined with improved precision and crit damage via Air.

Earth is our bleed attunement so Condition Damage together with a Scepter works nicely if built for it, I personally find it boring though effective.

I’d suggest deciding up front what weapon set you prefer and take it from there otherwise you’ll eventually need multiple armour and jewellery sets.

Condition damage, and why it’s (currently) not worth the hassle in PVE:
@ lvl 80:
Bleeding: 42.5 + 0.05 * Condition Damage per stack per second. Max 25 stacks per target.
Burning: 328 + 0.25 * Condition Damage per second. Stacks duration.
Poison: 80 + 0.10 * Condition Damage per second. Stacks duration.
Confusion: 65 + 0.075 * Condition Damage per stack per attack. Stacks intensity. Depends on enemy using attacks/skills. Max 25 stacks per target.

Condition Damage thus scales linearly. Condition Duration increases total Damage done, but does not increase DPS.

Condition stacks are capped against each monster in the following manner (from what I can tell):
Burning and poison use the condition damage of the player with the highest condition damage. All other players attacking the target with burns/poison get no credit, though they do add to the duration.
Confusion stacks intensity, capping at 25 stacks per target. Multiple players’ stacks add, on a first-come-first-served basis. Players attempting to add stacks after 25 do no damage and get no credit.
Bleeding stacks intensity, capping at 25 stacks per target. Multiple players’ stacks add, on a first-come-first-served basis. Players attempting to add stacks after 25 do no damage and get no credit.

In general, 1-2 players will be able to keep the bleed count at 25 stacks. Further condition damage users are useless.

Confusion is good in PVP, since players reliably use abilities. It’s poor in most PVE, especially with slow-high-damage champion/boss attack patterns.

Bleeding is generally the best DPS condition, followed by burning, or confusion if the target can be relied on to keep using abilities.

Gear stats in GW2 have major or minor levels (% based stats also do, but of course with different numbers not relevant here).
Major: Head: 45 Shoulders: 34 Chest: 101 Gloves: 34 Legs: 67 Boots: 34
Minor: Head: 32 Shoulders: 24 Chest: 72 Gloves: 24 Legs: 48 Boots: 24
Similar for accessories & weapons.
Each gear piece has one major stat and the remaining stats are minor.

Condition DPS scales with one stat: Condition damage.
Normal DPS scales with three stats: Power, Precision, and Critical Damage.
Due to the major/minor scaling, the amount of Power you can get is identical to the amount of Condition Damage you can get.
Thus, with a Normal damage build you can get more stats than you can with a Condition damage build. Also, the stats for Normal damage are multiplicative with each other: The more Power you have the more valuable each point of Precision and Critical Damage becomes. Likewise for the other two. Effectively, Normal damage scales proportionally with the cube of your stats. Therefore Normal damage can do more DPS. That said, Condition damage is not offset by armor, so in solo situations vs high armor targets it can provide better DPS.

TL;DR:
At most 3 condition users per group: 1 Burn/bleed, 1 poison/bleed, 1 Confusion/burn/poison. Further condition users are useless. The higher the target’s armor the better Condition damage gets, and the more you want to have 1-3 Condition users in the group. For 5-man dungeon groups Condition Damage is viable. For sPVP/tPVP condition removal is prevalent, but it’s still viable. For WvWvW and world PVE events, Condition Damage is a poor choice. Always try to stack for one damage type. Mixing Condition Damage and Normal Damage is suboptimal stat budgeting, but there’s no Condition Damage/Toughness/Vitality set in the game, so go with Condition Damage/Power/Vitality (Carrion) if building Condition Damage. Condition Damage/Precision is a poor combo, because Precision adds less to damage than Power if not already stacking Power and Critical Damage.

I guess if fire for instance you can focus more on power, and get increased burning duration on some kind of rune to increase burning dmg instead of using condition dmg. Fire still has some (relative to our other spells) nice hitting damage even tho they put burning after. I’d still pick up a power+condition amulet tho.

For instance Fire attune – arcane blast – some other burn maybe auto attack for long burn duration – earth – bleeds. Doesnt take that long to set up and benefits greatly from condition damage and duration. When the time comes i like to use air as my ‘execute’. possibly 20% more dmg on double lightning strike and RTL. Updraft then switch to fire and dragon tooth. These things in turn benefit from power.

I guess it depends, and you can always try out your amulet/runes on the target dummy golems in The Mists.