Guild Wars 2

I’ve been using Assasin’s and Berserker’s for a while now, and in both cases I’m always rocking grenadier with grenade kit in my builds. While I’m doing a bit of condition damage it’s pretty negligible, I feel a set like sinister might give me a bit more bang for my buck.

Has anybody used this set to any success? Does the condition damage increase offset the ferocity damage reduction? Assume we’re talking about a personal damage output perspective.

in high might situations youre gonna lose about 1/8 of your power (zerk)… and the ferocity loss takes crit damage from ~200% → ~150% for about 1/4 dps loss. for sin gear, you lose about 20% crit rate instead of power, going from ~80% to ~60%.

so sinister will do ~62.5% of the power dps of zerk, or ~56.25% of sin. ish. with just high might.

in zerk, w/ high might, my condis do maybe 1.5k dps. thats a good stack of bleeds, burning, and usually poison cuz im a bad person and always use poison nades, especially when i see a fire field. in a condi build, i can stack up to a 3k tick on bleeds alone when im careful about managing nades 2 cd with high might, thats about another 1k dps from a torment sigil, burning, and poison, maybe 1.2k.

so you go from 1.5k condi dps → 4.5k condi dps (being generous).

with everything ideal, engi in assassin or zerk does like what, 12k dps? 13k? and 1.5k of that is from condis.

so you sacrifice something like 5k-6k dps ideally to gain 3k dps. (ignoring confusion, big disclaimer… more later)

aka… dont use sinister in highly organized situations.

in nonideal situations, a lot of what you lose is pure power damage that doesnt really affect your condis. you only get marginal increases from crit procs, cuz burning uptime is nearly maxed already (shouldnt even take IP, short fuse is better), shrapnel isnt on crit, sharpshooter blows and just “guarantees” the enemy is bleeding w/o doing big dps, torment sigil doesnt get much out of fury or prec banner when using nades. so condi dps will stay about constant. the power component … you prolly go down to about 8k dps in zerk. 8.5k in sin. ballpark. take out the condi damage → 6.5k / 7k power dps. to switch to condi, youll lose like 3.5k / 4k power dps and gain 3k condi dps. with just might. and no confusion again.

now… confusion is a real wildcard. it does insane dps when the enemy acts a lot. can you guarantee tons of actions in a short period of time, like nochtli does in dry top? kitten no. shes the only boss in the game who you should go out of your way to prioritize confusion on over every single other skill you have. every other boss ever (i dont think im forgetting any, i might be tho) has to be in range of you to act and proc damage, which means your wildcard damage is highly dependent on how much you (or your friends) can afford to tank and mitigate. which is almost nothing for you. so you cant get a lot out of confusion (which would easily put you over zerk/sin damage levels if you can afford to take perplexity runes while maintaining just high might). at best, itll add like 1k dps in all but the nochtli situation. its why confusion is so op against players. we constantly act. our skills are small and do small things relative to enemy mob hp, so we do a lot. and were smart and act on predictions, where mobs only act as reactions, significantly reducing their actions. so to balance, confusion does tons of damage per action.

(btw, fun thing to try: putting a 10 stack of condi build confusion on noch takes her down to ~1/2 in 1 shot when she does the slow spin fast attacks)

anyways, looks like it should be about the same in nonideal, but crap in ideal.

I swapped mostly to sinister, and so far i’m liking it. The thing about condis is they’re a frontload damage mechanic – you don’t need to be continually hitting the boss for them to be effective, so in movement or downtime heavy fights where you just get short periods to stack damage, i find them hugely effective.

Of course, for ordinary stand-and-shoot encounters, zerk will outperform. Power/Prec/Feroc just synergize too well. Condi has only passing synergy with power and prec, and none at all with ferocity, so until ANet figures out some way to fix that (or just does the obvious thing and doubles condition damage values or condition damage contribution) then straight damage will always outperform condition DoTs (for pve at least)