Guild Wars 2

note: this is about tpvp.

will condi eles ever be worthwhile? i made one for kicks and discovered i had pretty good stats: unbuffed i had ~3300 armor, 14k hp, 1300 condi dmg, and 900 healing with really good sustain. i just couldn’t apply enough conditions. here are some issues that i’ve found.

in terms of bleed application, stone shards just has an awful, awful cast time. other skills don’t apply bleeds quick enough (impale, ring of earth) or have too long of a cast time/delay (churning earth, eruption). then there are skills that i feel should apply bleeds but don’t (shatterstone, hurl)

eles don’t have any poison which means dealing with a class/build that has a lot of sustained healing will be difficult if not impossible. sigil of doom only helps you so much and using a sigil of doom means you can’t use other much more powerful sigils like battle or energy.

i feel like condition eles play similarly to a condition warrior but much, much, much, much, worse. the warrior at least has an added bonus of torment plus extremely rapid bleed application.

thoughts?

Runes of Scavenging with Sigil of Doom or Sigil of Geomancy help a lot with damage. Also try to take advantage of your fire/earth dodge for damage, because they do good condition damage. Fiery Greatsword 2, for instance, with 50% condition duration and good condition damage can do upward to 20k burning. Dragon’s Breath does a good job at putting out pressure as well since it has such a low cooldown.

The problem I had was that they don’t have access to enough different types of conditions-burning and bleeding. I tried using Sigil of Doom with Perplexity runes, and that worked really well. I wouldn’t say Sigil of Doom is “weaker” than Sigil of Battle for condition elementalists, because it gives you what you’re missing, and that makes it more powerful.

Scepter auto attacks in fire and earth are rather cumbersome. The scepter is an odd fellow, because apparently it is the go-to weapon when you want condition, yet we only have two types of conditions to apply and that is difficult enough with the weapons we have as mentioned.

Let’s look what the weapons provide:
Staff has potential, but can only apply burning somewhat reliably. Getting Eruption to land takes a lot of planning, CC skills and a stack of bleeds is easily removed. Much work with little reward. Shockwave should have 4x bleed stacks lasting 5 secs instead of a single one, lasting a whopping 20 secs.

Scepter has painfully slow and doubtful auto attacks in fire and earth and otherwise provides little means of applying condition damage as Dragon’s Tooth is harder to land than Eruption (in my experience).

Dagger mainhand can apply burning well enough with Drake’s Breath, but fails in the bleed department. Why is it that skill 1 and 2 applies one stack of bleeding only but with an insane duration, rather than two-three stacks and shorter duration? (Impale 2x bleed for (4 secs). Ring of Earth 3x bleed (4 secs)).

Dagger and focus offhand doesn’t do much in terms of reliably applying conditions, as Flamewalls main purpose is being a fire field (and you can run across it with swiftness without burning at times, if not all the time) and Churning Earth is tricky to land and on a long CD.

Playing a condition build demands you have EA for the burning and bleed. I have played with sigil of doom too, but it only works mildly well if you have a high enough crit chance to proc Renewing Stamina as you will be needing all the vigor you can get to use EA. You will want to dodge roll in almost all attunements and that can be difficult without sigil of energy.

TL:DR: Yes, we need access to other means of condition damage and have ways to apply bleeding more reliably. Burning is the only thing we’re good at.

What I am saying is that condi ele isn’t and will not be viable in tpvp until we get access to other types of condition damage. Bleeding needs to be applied slightly easier. Currently it won’t work effectively.

i just scrapped my ‘condition’ build.. it finally sunk in that it’s just so much easier to go a diff way

Yeah, it’s pretty dookie in tPvP or even sPvP. But it’s not terrible in WvW as you have access to high damage caps and different runes/food to help you out where you need it.

The standard PvT D/D with sigil of battle/ sigil of force/ runes of strength/ sharpening stone/ bowl of orrian truffle and meat stew is still really strong as you can have up 3k armor (with lust/in earth attunement), decent HP pool, and can maintain 11-13 stacks of might in a battle by yourself netting around 3.6-4k attack depending on how much ascended gear you have. When you have that much might, your condition damage isn’t the worst either.

Shinoobi.1259:

Yeah, it’s pretty dookie in tPvP or even sPvP. But it’s not terrible in WvW as you have access to high damage caps and different runes/food to help you out where you need it.

The standard PvT D/D with sigil of battle/ sigil of force/ runes of strength/ sharpening stone/ bowl of orrian truffle and meat stew is still really strong as you can have up 3k armor (with lust/in earth attunement), decent HP pool, and can maintain 11-13 stacks of might in a battle by yourself netting around 3.6-4k attack depending on how much ascended gear you have. When you have that much might, your condition damage isn’t the worst either.

i had good stats in tpvp. the issue was the actual condi application. you could have 5000 condition damage and 500% condition duration and still be bad if you can’t actually apply conditions.