Guild Wars 2

To what extent does condition duration really matter in wvw?

To matter, the condition must tick for that extra duration and that is not always going to happen.

On the other hand, say you pick a food that is not +condition, would you normally get more or less value?

Use WvW as the play style.

I tend to find I get less value with condition damage boosting food than with duration food (pizza has both hence why its commonly used). Condition damage is only going to apply to bleeding, confusion, torment and poison where as duration food will affect those + all the others (except fear I think though I might be wrong on that one). Plus you can get condition damage from armour, trinkets, weapons, runes and sigils where as duration has far few options so the extra +100 or +70 condition damage isn’t going to matter as much as +40% duration in the long run.

The main thing is that many people, due to the popularity of conditions, will have anti-condition setups. This means Melandru+ poultry soup for 65% duration reduce.

Fortunately, you probably are putting some points in explosives so it’s not as bad as feared.

On the other hand, if you have 20% from explosives and 40 from pizza, you’d get 60%. 160-65= 95, which still sucks but at least it’s a lot more effective.

The results are pretty dramatic, I must say; using the food makes it much easier to defeat warriors and the like. It doesn’t seem like I can get enough duration to counter their Dogged March trait though.

You could pick a non-condi food in zergs (maybe poultry soup itself?) since your stuff will get cleaned off mostly anyways and maybe you don’t want to be condi bursted yourself to holy heaven, especially with necros running around. In those scenarios, you’re just going for sudden bursts on people. In those cases, I could see my mere 30% from traits to be enough, but usually I use the pizza/koi cake unless feeling exceptionally lazy.

Basically if you have conditions that last 3 seconds or longer as a base, it’s probably a good idea. If you have bleeds that last 2 seconds normally, you’d obviously need 65% duration at least; any less and it gets rounded down to 1s if they have 65% reduce.

i laugh at people running condi builds and not pizza, they do nothing. and i automatically lose against decent players without my -duration food when theyre using pizza.

(and if i go back and fight them again with food on i can usually kill them)

against engis specifically i usually have enough survival time to rocket boots away and turn on my food