Guild Wars 2

Mostly thinking out loud, but:

High damage in this game is primarily achieved through modifiers such as crit/crit damage, traits, boons, and conditions. A list of things that increase our damage are:

30% crit damage (valor trait line)
10% to burning (Fiery Wrath)
10% to targets with conditions (Radiant Power)
10% when endurance not full (Elusive Power)
20% if aegis active (Unscathed Contender)
1% per unique boon with a max of 9% damage (Power of the Virtuous)
5% with greatsword (Greatsword Power)
5% with scepter (Scepter Power)
5% with mace (Mace of Justice)
5% with spear and sword (Powerful Blades)
1% per vulnerability with a max of 25% damage

I think a majority of us understand most of the above, but what we tend to forget is that vulnerability is an additional way of gaining extra damage with higher stacks. Most of our traits give us somewhere between 5-10% extra damage and 5-10 vulnerability stacks is not out of the question.

Typically when we analyze the traits we see 10% and pick it because it is a bigger number, but we need to look at a bigger picture.

So a good damaging build should try to incorporate vulnerability into it as well as a mix of 2-3 of the above bonuses.

if you take a look at Silven’s sPvP guide, he has a Binding Bunker build incorporates well, Binding Jeopardy.

It’s not in his build links, but if you also include Signet of Wrath
SoW – 5 stacks
Zealot’s Embrace – 5 stacks
Chains of Light – 5 + 3 stacks

for a total of 18 stacks. which is 18% extra damage.

and of course, blind exposure with the Greatsword is a great one to have, especially if the supposed “bug” hasn’t been addressed yet.

though i have been thinking, would it be worth it? for my e.g. above, say we have 10 pts invested in Zeal. and we take Binding Jeopardy. it takes 3 skills to achieve close to 20% increased damage, but putting them on CD as well. whereas say, if we just took Fiery Wrath, 10% extra damage on burning targets, which happens quite often, especially if you’re using a fast / multi hitting weapon / skill.

don’t get me wrong, not shunning the idea, because i’ve been looking at incorporating vulnerability into some builds i’m working on. of course, i’d be taking Radiant Power as well for another extra 10%.

You are better off leaving the vuln stacking to the engineers and mesmers in your party, at least for PvE. Guardians lack good ways to consistently stack vulnerability, and the tradeoffs they have to make for those stacks too severe. Even for skills that give you ‘free" vulnerability (vuln on immob or blind, Chains of Light, etc.) you actually end up losing DPS because the vuln duration is so short and the damage boost so small that you would have been better off just attacking normally. The only skills that can apply vuln without a DPS loss are Leap of Faith and active Justice, and those are both long-cooldown skills, so your DPS gain is so marginal you might as well not even bother. Active Justice gives 3 stacks of vuln for 5 seconds every 30s, which is worth .5% extra damage total, and Leap of Faith (15s CD) is only worth 1%. That means that best, Blind Exposure with a greatsword will give you +1.5% damage. Might as well just take A Fire Inside on the off chance a mob in the dungeon you’re running has a burn.

Guardian can quickly stack vulnerability on large packs of big weak mobs with Justice is Blind, Blind Exposure and Renewed Justice. Just jump in, activate Justice and use it on cooldown. Together with Inspired Virtue, it also allows you to stack Might as crazy.

However, in the dungeons or high level content there is not much opportunity to use this, the mobs simply don’t go down fast enough. Its also less useful agains bosses. Its fun for leveling though.

i had a feeling the tradeoff between stacking vuln as a Guard is not the most efficient. been trying to find that balance for fun. in PvE, i’d say it’s not worth it. though in PvP or even WvW though, i’d imagine it’d be useful for setting up DPS. blinds are ever useful and Leap of Faith is great for closing the gap as well as does decent dmg. VoJ if traited gives might so that helps. especially if you went the immob route, you could technically set up your opponents so your allies can better land 100% of their DPS rotation while them being immobilized, given they aren’t able to react quick enough to get of them and counter.

but like said, if you take my e.g. above, SoW and hammer 3 both have a long windup in terms of activation time, in addition to being SoW’s passive is argubly useless and hammer misses easily. still interesting though. if you are able to land all 3 immob’s. then pair torch with scepter for e.g. you could stack 18 vulns, then Zealot’s Fire + Flame, so add another 10% with fiery wrath, i assume. and then radiant power as well (why not go for RHS with the scepter). then again, you’re going out of your way to achieve this and like i mentioned above your vuln stacking CDs are long.

The original concept of compiling the damage abilities together and racking/stacking them was more for pvp/wvw in setting up burst.

dps and burst are two different things and in pve you want more sustained dps, so a cooldown damage increase is not as effective over longer duration fights as a steady damage increase.

So depending on the scenario vulnerability stacks can provide a little bit more push when cooldowns are ready, but again, on a long fight it will be lackluster versus other traits and abilities.

agreed, CMF. definitely more applicable to WvW/PvP and even better if you’re able to coordianted with a party or allies perhaps to set up and complete that burst. and ideally, you’re taking people down fast enough this way so you can afford to blow some CDs.

and i feel definitely adds some color to the play. actually looking into trying some of these with guildies when i get more time to play.

have you come up with any builds specifically to use vuln?

For a vulnerability build your best bang for your buck would probably be;

20/25/0/25/0

Traits being:

Fiery Wrath
Binding Jeopardy
Blind Exposure
Inner Fire
Writ of Exaltation
Writ of Persistence

Only problem is you’re going to be squishy squishy.

I was toying with an idea of double symbol burst with greatsword and staff since they had the highest damaging symbol (hammer will net more dps in the long run, but gs/staff has more burst).

Symbolic Exposure + Blind Exposure + Fiery Wrath as a base.

Can hit 10-20 stacks of vulnerability depending on group size, and it works wonders farming.

Horrible right now as a pvp thing since targets move out of symbols. I did have one amazing moment where a guy was running to a capture point and I was running to defend it, dropped a wall of warding with staff right in front of him and he got knocked down, laid out two symbols and whirling wrathed him dead in a couple of seconds.

His response was “At first I was kitten ed off, then I was impressed, wtf was that”.

My conclusion – symbols are horrible in mobile pvp :P Maybe in wvw or as a mid-distance support fighter where no one is focusing you.

Our other reliable forms of vulnerability are from blinds using greatsword+sword/focus or immobilize using scepter and binding jeopardy+zealot’s embrace/signet of wrath.

Still muddling around, those will work better in mobile fights and we already have builds based on blinds.