Guild Wars 2

When it comes to condition engineers, is it better to focus on bleed duration increase or burn duration increase. ? I cant get both to 100% with the spec I want.

Focus on burn duration. Burn is equal to 6 stacks of bleed which makes it far more valuable and easier to keep up. bleeds wear off very quickly and need you to constantly be firing at the target to keep the stacks going.

Here’s my build. I use blowtorch and rocket kick to apply fire and there’s incendiary powder trait which adds even more fire from crits. There’s 40% extra burn time in total and 20% to all other conditions. The extra durations let me keep fire and poison up continuously along with 5-6 stacks of bleed.

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fcQQJAqalIqqb37SdF2NJyoCfWoCSIoH5FexXfUwWPIA;TgAqmMNJay2krJZTjKmEA

How exactly will you be applying Burn? If you’re applying it frequently enough, you’ll want to focus on Bleed, since Burn can’t stack in severity. If you’re having trouble keeping Burn on the enemy permanently, then yes, go for Burn duration, as one second of that is the same as six seconds of Bleed. However, if you’re applying Burn frequently enough that it’s kept going without boosting its duration, you’ll want the Bleed.

In addition, take into account how you’re applying the Bleed. It only helps to get the duration up to an integer. 4.9 seconds of Bleed will do the same damage as 4 seconds of Bleed, so if you can’t bump it up to 5 seconds, you might as well focus on the Burn.

imho dont focus on one condition. you can easily get +50% on both, burn and bleed (thus get 3s duration):
2x krait runes
2x afflicted runes
2x lyssa runes
sigil of smoldering
10 points into explosives
20 points into firearms to get napalm specialist trait

example build:
http://tinyurl.com/bxpn6dt
great crit chance with fury buff thus you can proc burn and bleed from crits very often.

I agree that you shouldn’t focus on one condition. If you end up in a situation where you need to choose though, Burn duration will always win out on the Engineer. The vast majority of our damage comes from Burns.

Achieving 100% duration for both burn and bleed is possible. My explosive and my blow torch duration has doubled. I’m seeing over 400 damage bleeds on my pistol #1 and 8K+ burns on my blowtorch. My build is 30/30/00/10/00

What you need to do is buy condition duration food like rare veggie pizza, put 30 points into explosives for the duration boost, equip the burn duration talent point, buy runes that increase condition duration by 10% and then in the last two armor pieces put runes in that increase bleed duration by 15%.

You will effectively have a bleed and burn that is now 100% which effectively doubles damage.

HOWEVER, your explosive shot bleed will not say 4s, but 3 1/2, it’s lying to you. So what I would do is disable auto-attack and shoot the target once, you’ll see that it is actually ticking for 4 times instead of 3. Same thing goes for blowtorch, you will see it tick twice as much as before.

The only problem is that when you go P/P your poison and confusion duration is just shy of 100% so it will still only tick for the 50% level.

Once they fixed the Givers gear (weapons) so the condition duration actually is applied I could see people rolling 20/20/00/30/00 and stacking 11+ stacks of might and having double condition duration on all skills. I could see condition builds being just as viable as Berserker builds for damage.

The key to unlocking +100% condi duration is the Pizza.

Yep! You want this:

2x Lyssa +10% duration
2x Mad King +10% duration
2x Afflicated +15 duration to Bleed
Naplam Spec +20 Duration to Burn
Rare Veggie Pizza +40 duration

30 Explosives (30%), Nightmare 4/6 (20%), Lyssa (10%), and Pizza (40%) works as well.

What about condition dmg? I am generally more interested in the dmg because of removal by all the classes.

Is there a sweet spot between the two?

Condi engineers have to worry about condition removal the least of any condi user. That said, it obviously affects us. Generally though, Condition Duration is so much stronger then Condition Damage where you can get access to it so don’t worry about it. I mean I personally have a base of ~1200 Condi-Dmg in sPvP with the build I run and can add up to 700-800 condition damage at times to it from Might and Corruption. With +50% duration (which without Pizza is all you should aim for), that provides plenty of damage.

In WvW go for the +100% duration if you can. In sPvP go for the +50% duration. The Condi-Dmg will fill in from there.

Varqov.6984:

What about condition dmg? I am generally more interested in the dmg because of removal by all the classes.

Is there a sweet spot between the two?

No there is not sweet spot, until ANET implements condition duration armor (stand alone from runes) to fill this void. Raw damage in the form of Power/Prec/Crit Dmg from Berserkers gear/Divinity Runes(or cheap rubys) will always be better damage.

Tbh I would love to see ANET remove the 1% boon duration per armor on Giver’s gear and replace it with 5% condition duration, but the bigger problem is that Giver’s armor/weapons Boon/Condition duration is broke (stats do not work).

Right now I am rolling Rampagers except weapons (lol they’re Givers) and I’m cranking out 8K burns, about 4-6k bleeds with many stacks, but that’s pretty sad compared to that if Berserker style Rifle Engineer pushing out 20k pretty easily in the same time.
Jump Shot 8K, Blunderbus 5-6k, Auto-Attack 2.5k, & Char Racial 8K
……darn more like 24-26K.

Pretty much condition damage is a protest in disgust to ANET lol…..

Ayestes.1273:

30 Explosives (30%), Nightmare 4/6 (20%), Lyssa (10%), and Pizza (40%) works as well.

Unless the PvP version of this rune is different, 4/6 Nightmare is only a 10% increase total (4%+6%).

I’ve tested it in PvP, it is 20%. The tooltip is incorrect. I haven’t tested it outside of PvP however. Specifically, it’s 4% / 16%.

Ah. Yeah, that seems to be how the PvP runes are. I’m not sure if 100% duration is possible outside of what Goloith suggested.

Say Ayestes, you were running your build with Carrion before, weren’t you? Did you switch to Rabid to apply more on-crit conditions? If so, do you miss the Power? Would you miss the Power in PvE/WvW?

I’m trying to build something like Mask’s Pistols and Pots for PvE and WvW, but with Grenade conditions as well.

Yeah I had Carrion before. I switched to Rabid because by dropping Bombs I had room for Incendiary Powder (which needs that crit) and lacked the Burning from the Bombs themselves. I’m unsure as to whether I’d miss it in PvE/WvW, as I still have Carrion there. I intend to find myself some Rabid gear though and try it out though. Rampager’s would even be more damage, but I wanted some better survival in it.

Condi Grenades are awesome. Dropping the Bombs though is not fully my idea, it came from some of the streams which I think the initial build came from someone named Hiba. Honestly by dropping them, I’m coming to realize that Bombs really aren’t that great in their current shape for sPvP as I don’t really miss them.

Edit: Build discussion link on PZ forums – http://teampz.com/threads/offensive-condi-engineer.1121/

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcMzz9mMaoGMMaoGMxG0G0MVqVkoa8kiT7khd7070c7kGW70V

What I’ve been using lately. Gets those conditions up nicely. I mostly WvW and got tired of power grenades so decided to check into condition grenades and think i got the basis of the build from Silix.1452. Blows kitten up and is so much fun.
Currently running full rabid armor, weapons, trinkets with carrion jewels and 6/6 undead runes. Also use rare veggie pizza and tuning crystal.
Current stats are with food:
power: 1306
precision: 1624 crit chance:38%
toughness:1574
vitality:1206 health:17982
condition damage:1549
condition duration:70%

For anyone inquiring it costs 540,000 karma for all the rabid armor and trinkets from the exotic karma vendors in orr. Another alternative for rabid armor is the Vatlaaw’s named armor set.

I’m actually using a 30/30/0/0/10 build that gets full on pistol traits, and grenadier.
I went rampagers armor with divinity, and karka/solaria/lunaria(all stats) and berzerker ear/neck/back.
Pistols are both rampager as well, with sigil of generosity(free cond removal 10s) and accuracy.
Gives me 3k power, 57% crit before sigil/permafury, 57% crit damage, 830 condition damage, with around 16.5k hp and 2200 armor. With veggie pizza it puts me at 70% base and was thinking of changing weps to Givers but the loss of cond dmg is already kinda low.

Its kinda average across all the dps stats really, but it just stacks damage like crazy. With the perma 83% crit chance and bleed/burn on crit, grenades and pistols stack some crazy condition easily, while still hitting hard. Ive really been diggin it lately though it can be squishy if Im off my game.

Giver’s armor and weapons boon/condition duration is broken atm. Anet is yet to fix this.