Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, on my Guardian I am starting to collect different types of gear – in order for the main two (on my Guardian at least) Burn and Bleed seem to be the most common damaging conditions I apply.. (I cant even think of how you would get poison as a Guardian)

My question is, has anyone experimented with maxxing out Condition Damage, and played a fire-heavy build?

At what point does Condition Damage start to play a big part of your damage?

I have about 500 Condition Damage atm, but am thinking about redoing gear to about 1000, maybe 1500.

I wonder where your bleed comes from? The only possible way of getting it is the sigil of earth on your weapon(s)

Maxing condition damage is terrible for guardians in general since the only reliable condition we have is burning with is a strong bleed. (essentially 7 stacks of it)
DIVA

Well, if you can reliably apply Burn -and Gods do we ever have a ton of ways to apply it- then Condition Damage at least makes more sense than Condition Duration, if we’re talking Traits. With Gear I’d shy away from an overly heavy investment. Power, Precision, Vitality and Toughness all seem far more relevant to an efficient playstyle.

Now, if a certain level of Condition Damage improved non-damaging Conditions such as Vulnerability or Blind or, even better, Retaliation Damage (even though it’s a Boon) it might be more relevant.

Hmm thanks, yes I was referring to the Weapon Sigil. With sword, you get a lot of hits, and a lot of chances for bleeding.

Thanks Schakal, just wanted to confirm that Condition Damage is not the best stat to go for on gear… im heading towards Pow/Vit/Tough, although it is hard to find that itemisation sometimes…

If you’re looking to stack condition damage, it’s probably more beneficial to go for a might stacking build since might gives both power and condition damage. Guardians can easily keep up 15++ stacks of might with the correct build and equipment.

In PvP, guardian burn builds with heavy spec into condition damage is not viable. The problem is, many classes have ways of cleansing conditions, and you as a guardian do not have enough conditions that would tax even the weakest condition removing class.

Or in another way of putting it, there are not enough on demand debuff that will bury burn onto a player target to make it not be cleansed by 90% of skills that cleanse conditions.

PvE on the other hand, it could work, especially if you work with purging flame and you trait it, because with a standard 10/30/30 build with meditation heals, you get plenty of crit, and full condition damage from the radiance line, so I don’t think that would be an issue. Aside from that, if you want a lot of condition damage, don’t sacrifice everything else for it. It might work, but I haven’t explored too much into PvE so far to really tell if condition based builds on a guard work well in PvE end game.

Condition damage isn’t terrible for guardians at all. I’ve only been able to play around in the mists (and oddly enough their stats are a bit different, I’ll get into that), and I came up with a decent build that at least works well for me. (http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.3.3.7.17.0.24.27.25.0.54.62.61.68.76.6.6.29.0.0.0.167.175.176.185.186.0.196.203.0.0.0.0.0.30.20.20.0).

For whatever reason, Shaman items are Toughness, Condition Damage, and Healing in the Mists, which is incidentally exactly what I want. It’s pretty durable, you can stack and reapply burning very fast and often (I should mention too, that unless you pop VoJ, your passive VoJ does 1sec burning. It’ll deal its damage long before most would even recognize they have burning on them, nor would it be worth trying to remove a 1 sec burn, which you’ll apply again after another chain, or any other 5 max hits.) , and you get intermittent healing that helps a lot with survivability. Your main heal completely fills your health pool, which is about 12k or so (it mostly should anyway) and is reduced to a mostly 30sec heal. Sword’s sigil could be moved around, but otherwise, it’s pretty easy to kill almost whatever you’re up against.

Now in PvE, Shamans gear gives Vitality instead of Toughness (which hurts the build overall I’d say) and I can only deal with my current just-dinged-80 gear. I did gear towards condition damage first, and each tick of burning does more than my auto attacks (or inbetween two and three hits of sword’s 3rd chain. 3 hits does more, 2 hits less compared to each tick). You’ll need quite a bit of condition damage, but if you want to go for it, it can be a big help with your total damage output. I’ll admit however, that high condition damage is probably good for making up not having much power. If you’re gearing for power, then you might not need to invest much (or any) regardless.

I’m playing with condition damage and I can’t say I’m complaining. I believe burning is the strongest conditition (in terms of pure damage) and since Guardians have a lot of ways of applying and re-applying it, it makes sense to get the most of it.
My interest doesn’t lie in sPvP, so I can’t talk about that, but so far, having condition damage build with shouts as a support, works just fine in PvE and WvW.

Condition Damage is never going to be useless on a Guardian, but I’m not sure it’s ever going to be great either.

Burning has a 0.25 ratio of Condition Damage/damage per second. Bleeding has a 0.05 ratio. So, CDmg is as good on Guardians as it would be on a class that could never apply more than 5 stacks of Bleeding.

We do have tons of sources of burning, and can keep it up indefinitely on multiple targets in the right builds. Plus we can apply bleeding through runes and racials. I feel like Power is still going to be better in most situations, however. It’s not subject to condition removal in PvP, it allows for more upfront damage in solo play, and you don’t have to worry about overwriting or being overwritten by other players’ conditions in dungeons. Plus most of our skills have at least a 0.25/sec ratio for Power anyway.

Condition Guard sPvP build is not viable. Even though you have a few ways of igniting flame on someone, and burn is technically a stronger condition, you don’t have enough ways to apply condition to make it STAY on your target. I’ve tried all sorts of condi builds and it simply doesn’t work, not if you’re trying to fight anyone with half of a brain.

If you fight my guard with a condition build like that, it wont last long. First, burn is easy to cleanse. Everytime you apply it, I’ll have smite condition because it’s a 16s CD, and smite condition gets a damage boost from having that burn applied. Secondly, you have to sacrifice way too much damage or crit or toughness/vit to have it.

PvE like I said, it could work, but I’m sure just straight up power/crit can be effective as well. Guards are one of the strongest pve classes, if it aint broken, why fix it?

About the condition overwriting, I think that doesnt happen, at least not with burning. Since it stacks durations and not intensity, the person with the highest cond dmg stat will get the first “turn” when the condition is applied, then the damage from the other sources of burning will get applied based on their cond dmg stat.
Example: Person A with 80 cond dmg applies 3s burning, person B with 100 cond dmg applies 5s burning.
The target first takes 5s burning applied by B, then 3s from A.

Right, but if you’re keeping burning up permanently with higher condition damage, any burning from allied guardians, elementalists, rangers, whatever, is never going to tick at all.

Zahmahkibo.6375:

Right, but if you’re keeping burning up permanently with higher condition damage, any burning from allied guardians, elementalists, rangers, whatever, is never going to tick at all.

This ^ is the main problem with burning.

If someone can keep it up indefinitely or for a long period of time on a target & they have more + condition damage then you any burning you apply is basically wasted or at the very least not counted in your favor..

Currently guardians can keep up burning between 1/4 -1/6 of the time by themselves & almost permanently if in a group of 5 people focusing on a single target.

However Engineers can easily keep up burning about 1/3 – all the time depending on how they spec.
Elementalists can also easily keep burning up allot of the time – permanently depending on their spec.

Both of the later professions not only have better reasons to stack + condition damage (such as applying conditions via critical hits) but also have a much wider array of conditions that they can stack up on a target making + condition damage immensely more useful for them.