Cleric gear vs Shaman gear
Most damage from guardian is direct damage though, so logic would dictate that in most situations / specs cleric is better.
Most other classes that run condition damage builds have ease of access to Bleeds and or Burning/Poison (in the case of Mesmers, Confusion) others can get confusion, just not the same level as Memers.
Guardians have no weapons that bleed on auto-attack, all you have are burns. While others can supplement Bleeds with another DoT, you will only get those from Sigil of Earth and Burns. This makes conditions as a general whole a very very small percentage of your total damage output. Power > Condition damage for Guardians.
I beg to differ, I run a Burning Teleport Guardian and I have every single trait possible devoted to burning conditions and +% damage to burning enemies and I just melt players left and right with it. + Sigils and Runes that add more burn.
I’m also 10/30/30 on Power, Precision Toughness
And my Armour is Lvl 80 42k Karma Whispering. The sigil is burning, you could also switch the torch for the shield and get the +90 toughness trait if you feel like pushing burning corpses from cliffs and hills which also works with the trait 5% toughness is given to precision.
cheers.
Officer [VILE] – Desolation
(edited by Blutkrieg.1320)
Actually you have more condition damage / dot.
With a decent amount of condition damage you can do:
1. Burn ticks for ~600
2. Greatsword 5 ticks for ~400 (pulling the enemies towards you wil cancel the dot)
3. Greatsword 2 (symbol) ticks for ~250
Now that is very decent damage.
@Blutkrieg
The links to GW2Builder rarely work, you should try and use Guildhead, they are much more reliable.
I really like Condition Damage builds. Its quite easy to gear for, and the Burn condition is quite easy to stack up duration, so even when you are knocked back, or controled in some way, you are still damaging the mob. The damage is very substantial if you trait correctly for it, and can work with several types of builds including Spirit Weapons if that is your thing.
@ImariKurumi
I lost my main Guardian to a hacker and started over, so I don’t have any level 80 experience. I tend to bounce back and forth between 2 builds. One is a highly defensive Shout/Boon build with a heavy emphasis on Symbols. It works quite well for events and in dungeons when I know I will be playing support/control. With this build I tend to wear a lot of Healing, Toughness, and Vitality gear. I could see wearing Cleric’s armor while running this build as you need to be a bit tanky, and still have a very substantial amount of +Healing to prevent death to yourself and others.
My other build is a Condition Damage build with Spirit Weapons. I have been using this build when soloing, but did run through AC with it with my group (a set team of folks over Vent) and it worked very well. I felt like I was doing quite a lot of damage, but had to rely a lot more on dodging, and actually had to switch out to a scepter a few times and let my Spirit Weapons stay in melee range to help my damage. This worked well even though I was not in melee range. The burning condition stayed upnearly 100% of the time between my Scepter, and the trait A Fire Inside (spirit weapons cause burning damage). For this build I would likely use the Shaman gear, as the extra Vitality would go a long ways, and of corse the added Condition Damage is the key to this build.
This is more along the lines of PvP, but part of the reason other classes do very well with condition specs is because not only do they have other damaging conditions to use, they also tend to have a variety of other conditions that can be used to cover their main damaging DoTs.
Engineers can cause Bleed, Burn, Poison, Cripple, and Confusion (Blind is really short so it’s not accounted for) with Dual Pistols easily.
Mesmers stack Bleed, Burn, and Vulnerability with just Staff auto-attack alone.
Thieves depending on which poisons they take can bring repeated applications of Poison, Chill, Immobilize, Weakness, and Vulnerability on top of their bleeds.
I think you kind of get the point?
Guardians in general do not have as many ways to cover the burn application after all, we do not have the same options when it comes to other negative effects. Skills that only remove one condition (not even the most potent of removals) can easily take off a good chunk of your overall damage output should you be heavily invested in condition damage.
This is not me saying all condition guardians are bad, it’s just my opinion we should invest more lightly in it than other classes.
(edited by Lumines.3916)
@Lumines
I understand you may not enjoy the Guardian burn build for various reasons, and that is fine, not every build is for every person .. but to say that it is unwise for guardians to invest heavily in condition damage is not entirely accurate.
I assume when you say “cover the burn application” you mean because in PvP people have so many ways to remove conditions that you want to “hide” your DoT under less powerful conditions. As a properly spec’d Burn Guardian you can easily reapply your Burn condition every 1-2 seconds, with some exceptions. It wouldnt matter if someone could spam every condition remove they had to remove the burn effect, you would be reapplying it as soon as they were done casting the spell.
I only have experience with the Guardian class, so I do not know how quickly Mesmers/Thieves/Engineers etc. can reapply their conditions, but from what you are saying, it can not be nearly as fast as what we can do with Burn.
Valkyrie.
Burn doesn’t scale well with condition damage, it makes no big difference stacking it or not. At the same time, our pitiful heals doesn’t scale well with healing power either, so you are better off taking a hybrid approach and build with valkyries and zerkers.
@Kindread,
I think you should try out other classes if anything to see how they work in PvP! I’ve played all classes except for Elementalists and everyone can apply conditions at a much faster rate than one can remove.
It’s just most classes can apply more than just burn in the same time frame as opposed to the Guardian. I’ve tried a similar Spirit Weapon Burning build and it works out pretty well in Hot-Join, but I don’t know whether to attribute that to the lower skill level of other players as just about anything works. But I have yet to see a Guardian run a burn-centric spirit build successfully in tPvP.
To the discussion about burn duration and covering conditions/etc, i think duration is less a concern for guardian. If it gets stripped, another burn is only a few strikes away. If you’re reapplying, it doesn’t really matter otherwise. Long duration doesn’t matter if the target dies with 30 more seconds left to burn.
I think the discussion of whether condition damage is overall useful for a build on a Guardian or not is kind of wasted. We’re not talking about a DPS-burning Guardian, we’re talking about the difference between cleric and shaman gear.
The overall answer is: if you’re stacking healing power, you’re probably doing so on a mace or staff build with high Honor/Valor/Virtues. On these builds, you wouldn’t want Shaman because you don’t have very good access to conditions. If you’re stacking condition damage, you’re probably going for a sword/torch build with high Radiance/Virtues. Most builds that want one don’t want the other.
I guess you could try a mace-torch build, going some combination of Honor/Virtues/Radiance, but the end result would strike me as being a little awkward.
I see shaman gear as being more useful for Engineer and Elementalist support builds, rather than Guardian.