Guild Wars 2

In regards to your post about going full viper without Sigil of Malice and taking Earth instead. So this has been one of the things I was most excited about last patch. Being able to go almost full viper and gain another sigil like Earth or Bursting, but after running numbers the past few days I’m actually not sure if it’s all that much of an increase. I’m fully aware viper pieces give more stats compared to sinister so in theory it should be a gain. However comparing my live character against the build you made I see these differences without condi infusions:

Live-
2183 power.
1754 precision (39.90%).
1780 condition damage.

Your suggested build-
2250 power.
1671 precision (35.95%).
1707 condition damage.

You gain a nice chunk of power but lose quite a lot of condition damage and precision at the same time. I’ve never really played condition builds in the past and I’m not well-versed in calculating conditions. But assuming my math is correct, the loss is bigger than the gain from the sigil. Mostly ignoring the power here and looking at the condition damage and crit chance.

Am I missing something?

Wahoo Bovan!

I’m just about to calculate the best outcome with the new gear stats and I’m in love with a full Viper set with one Sinister ring.

Unfortunately the build editor does not include (yet) the Sabetha’s Viper back item, so it’s a bit messy and I have to test it ingame with my own Char®.

But lets talk about these:

Life:
2183 power
1777 precision (41% | 86.24% full buffed)
1760 condition dmg

This build is with Malice and Geomancy, the old setup I used.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQJAqalUUhSsYfWwWLQ7FLpFFYJuiHw4PmGF53TFANAA-TBiHQBkTPwuU6pHlgA4EAQQlB0T9na9AAK3+BkCYRlVA-e
(no 6th Rune of the Berserker because it bugs in the editor)

Suggestion Alpha:

2240 power
1698 precision (37.24% | 82.48% full buffed)
1798 condition dmg

This was my first experiment – if it would be worth it to exchange Malice with Bursting and get expertise for condition damage. The result is: Yes! You gain 57 power and 38 condition damage at the cost of 79 precision. The only thing that hurts us is the reduction from 86% to 82% crit chance because of sharpshooter (trait).

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQJAqalUUhSsYfWwWLQ7FLpF14PmGFJYJuiHw3TFANAA-TBiHQB6RJ4uUKQP1fIneACqsDAnAAa9AAK3+BkCYRlVA-e
(no 6th Rune of the Berserker because it bugs in the editor)

However this was only the beginning! I once tought Bursting would be stronger than Earth, DGraves (I guess) however has considered me to take a deeper look into this and we have proven Earth to be much stronger than Bursting. This basicly mean that even if the “Suggestion Alpha” is only “as good” as the Live version, the moment you swap Bursting for Earth I’m sure it will be stronger.

Earth is a strong sigil, wich deals around 2500 damage every theoretical 2s, but more realistic 3s. Depends on the attacks you’re using, nades or bombs or whatever :P Still it’s around 1k DpS wich is great if not as good as Geo with it’s ~1.6k DpS but way better than crappy Air with only 600 DpS…

TL;DR:

So what I want to say here is that I’ll try to get around 100% condi duration with bleed ’n burn (maybe 1% more or so) while using the Sabby back item (no Sinister back item x_x) and try to use Earth and Geomancy.

For ranged I’d then use Earth and Bursting, for cheap runs Malice and Geo (or Earth on ranged) while not using Toxic Focusing Crystals.

Yes – I have 4 asc Viper Pistols :’D

Greez!
- Ziggy

Before I say anything, thank you so much for the long detailed response.

Now I kind of find it funny that I came to the same conclusion at first regarding gear and Sigil of Earth and Bursting and then somewhere in the middle things started to not make sense anymore. Full viper with bursting seemed like a rather strong upgrade but I was fully aware of how poor bursting really performed. Earth was a clear winner over bursting, but once I started running numbers with that the loss in precision and condition damage started to look like it made a negative impact on my DPS. I’d link you the entire document with notes and calculations like I originally intended in my first post, but it flat out doesn’t even fit in a forum post.

Also as I’m writing this post and going over the numbers you just mentioned I actually found out where I went wrong. Seems like I completely overestimated the amount of Sharpshooter procs you’d gain from 4% crit chance. Somehow, somewhere, for some reason I had it set to gaining 24 procs per minute just from the 4% crit chance which is completely unrealistic. I honestly have no idea what I was smoking at the time considering it’s such a massive oversight. Not to mention not catching this any sooner.

From here on I can at least start working with the small condition damage loss, which I’m fairly sure won’t make as much of an impact on my DPS compared to Sigil of Earth procs. But I’m not going to jump to conclusions before running numbers.

Already thanked you at the top of my post but I’m going to say it again. Thank you so much for your help. I was having sleepless nights over this for days now and I just could not figure out what caused the discrepancy between math and logic.

Wahoooo!

I’m always happy if people can make us of my work

As for Sharpshooter, I included it into each skill. This way I won’t do any “in theory I will proc it X times a minute”-things, wich are very inconsistend anyway.

Using this formula:
= 3 * (1 + bleeding duration) * bleeding damage * 0.33 * crit chance
(I had “1/3” instead of “0.33” before, changed that now :P small difference from the spreadsheet.)

Sharpshooter on the live build deals 429 average damage per hit.
Sharpshooter on the new build deals 402 average damage per hit.

So Sharpshooter gets weakened by 6.3% at the cost of Superior Sigil of Earth.
Both, condi damage and crit chance taken into consideration (full buffed values).

TL;DR:
So – aslong as you won’t hit the enemy at least 31 times PER SECOND, taking Earth over Bursting is better than the lower Sharpshooter damage! :’D
(assuming Earth procs every 3 sec, but with 31 hits per sec it surely would proc every 2 sec wich yea … rises the required hits per sec even further xP)

Greez!
Ziggy

Wahoo!

I’m about to update the original post with slightly changed gear / traits, to get better results with the new easier optainable gear.

Condi Engi

For condi this means that more Viper gear will be added and some Sinister gear removed.

I found full Viper and one single Sinister Ring to be the best combination to have. You will overcap condi duration with burn and bleed with about ~101.5%, but that’s still stronger than having a 2nd Sinister piece that drops you down to 98%, especially since you think that for confusion, poison and cc conditions the duration is not wasted.

It will also include a Superior Sigil of Earth proc every 3s. I know the CD actually is 2s, but it has only a 66% chance on a crit to proc. It is not always the case that the next attack hits right after those 2s. So I’ll do it like I did with Air, to be more realistic: 3s.

Power Scrapper

For power it’s basicly about the “Shrapnel VS Siege Rounds” we already did, just more precisely.

I’ve made a basic rotation over 20 sec. I then counted the explosive hits and multiplied them by 1.5 (20s → 30s) and compared it to the increased damage of a second Orbital Strike hit over it’s 30s CD.

Traiting Siege Rounds:
1x double Orbital Strike every 30s → 24278 damage

Traiting Shrapnel:
1.55x Bomb autohit instead of OS → 16384 damage
70x (explosive only) Shrapnel procs → 19799 damage

With an overwhelming victory of 49.04% more damage from Shrapnel compared to Siege Rounds, I’m gonna pick Shrapnel for future calculations.

What this actually means for the DpS increase you might ask?
Siege Rounds increased the overall DpS by 809, while Shrapnel increases it by 1206. So we’re talkin about a 397 DpS boost + cripple for the price of longer lasting Mortar fields and a second blast.

Siege Rounds is still great! But it’s good to know what the actual difference is and to pick Shrapnel unless you know you can make good use of the Mortar trait.

That’s it for now! I’ll let you know when the Update is there!

Greez!
- Ziggs Ironeye

It’s no problem, it was a personal tool and you did build it, but I can’t use it. I was just curious if perhaps I could syphon a little and skip some steps in work but this is why we should all just do our own I guess. Bah.

still prefer full rabid or rabid + dire with undead rune

EvilZombie.6801:

still prefer full rabid or rabid + dire with undead rune

This thread is about minmax and raids (PvE)

Looks like Rocket Boots instead of Flamethrower Kit is a good choice if you need to quickly move around in a fight (ex: Matthias), not a huge dps loss.

I’m actually surprised to see Flamethrower Kit being the worst one given how hard it is to get the cooldown right and have the bosses stand in the aoe for its whole duration.

Wahoo! UPDATE TIME!!!

Update: 18. Mar. 2016

• both builds changed to optimize max damage
• increased the possibility to be affected by Frost Spirit, since the buff lasts twice as long as the ratio it gets applied
• Shrapnel procs added to some Explosives I forgot about
• traits that give 33% duration changed from 1/3 to actual 33% (dunno why I did this in the first place ._.)
• imaged updated

Greez!
- Ziggy