I found out pretty late about dire gear, just 2 months before ascended armor was introduced. I really liked the idea of a tanky condition set that could utilize maintenance oils to the maximum and get more dmg with the vitality->condition dmg trait. So I could end up with a reasonable amount of precision to benefit from incendiary powder and 33% chance of extra bleed.
I am running at the moment 2 kits (grenades and toolkit) and rocket boots. Weapons are P/S with healing turret. I use undead runes and sigils of torment and corruption. Food is rare veggie pizza.
I play mostly pve atm, running fractals and a bit of wvw.
What are your thoughts on dire gear and my current build?
Why is dire gear so unpopular (maybe because pvers don’t like conditions that much)?
Arijani-(Engineer)/Hrothgar Ironblade-(Warrior)/Brynja Aardeth-(Elementalist)
Desolation EU [APR]
You mentioned crit, but it sounds like you have none. Generally crit traits and gear are not useful with Dire, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t great ways to use it.
To answer your question, I think what you’re hearing is just the general dislike of conditions in PvE. Due to the way they stack (or not stack) having more than 1 high condition user in a group isn’t very beneficial.
In WvW I think it’s unpopular for the opposite reason. It’s very very good. Conditions by definition take a longer time to deal their best damage. With Dire gear you’re very tanky. Putting two and two together here… you could be very hard to kill while still dealing supreme damage through conditions.
Oh, and the reason you didn’t hear about it until a couple months before Ascended gear came out is because that’s when it was introduced.
don’t use blood injection. the alchemy tree is one of the best defensive trees in the game. there are waay better traits in there. protection injection, invigorating speed, backpack regenerator, and automated response.
i personally run dire weapons and armor with rabid accessories. the result is about 30% crit chance which is plenty.
Conds in PvE doesn’t do nearly as much single target dps vs direct damage. It is decent AOE damage though… but most trash mob packs are skipped… hence why that isn’t very popular in PvE.
If you go full dire you’re only condition damage (and then no on crit condition procs) though…. in large scale fights in WvW conditions get cleansed quickly and frequently. If you’re doing small scale roaming dia skin ele/eng with auto response/another small group with good cond removal then you won’t be adding much to the fight. Not a good thing.
Mixing in a little dire with rabid is great though. I use two rabid/dire split earrings and everything else rabid. On crit things still proc very frequently. Bombs still pack enough damage to punch through the random roaming troll dia skin ele’s that I seem to come across semi-frequently in WvW.
Btw, you might wanna look at getting some Koi Cakes instead of veggie. Less expensive and same effect (20m timer vs. 30m though, but even including that it’s less).
The condition stack limits are why conditions are shied away from in PvE content. In a dungeon/fractal group, getting 25 stacks of bleed is very easy, and burn and poison only stack duration, so 100% uptime on that is common too. This is even more true when dealing with world bosses and huge zergs. Conditions are constantly getting over-written and that’s just lost dps. That’s why direct damage is favored in PvE.
In WvW though, it’s great for smaller groups. Those huge zergs have so much aoe condition cleansing that it doesn’t have much affect. However, in small groups it can be devastating since players have less aoe cleanse help from allies and the constant rolling damage puts some major pressure on. Add to that most condition builds have increased condition duration, that means control skills are more effective. So even if your chill and immob don’t deal damage, they’re lasting long enough to potentially force a cleanse from your target, allowing your torment and bleed to stick around.
.