Guild Wars 2

oh, quick note – given your condition damage or duration is high enough, what do you guys thnik of using on-swap or on-crit sigils on weapons for other conditions? like foofad mentioend briefly i think once to use Sigil of Earth. i was experimenting the other day with doom and geomancy – which added bleed and poison to my arsenal.. wasn’t bad. not amazing, but wasn’t bad. given it’ll only be for a short bit, but you can in a sense, you get a slight chance of keeping burning up longer should your enemies use single condition cleanses.

if i’m not using those, then i’d probs use smoldering. but is that still bugged? forgot to check / test yesterday.

just a thought.

I haven’t run the actual numbers yet but with about a thousand condition damage and decent crit, you get roughly 300 DPS out of Earth. That compares more favorably than Fire sigils against a single target. So that’s neat. But Fire gives you a ton of AOE. Geomancy is IMO not worth it, because it’s at most one tick of bleed, maybe two if you have it on your other swap as well. So you’re looking at adding 100-200 DPS AOE that way, but if you have Permeating Wrath you’re already doing pretty good on that front.

The main advantage is in PVP giving them yet another condition that procs very often that they have to cleanse. It’s great for saturating out your target’s cleansing ability, which gives you a better chance of landing things like immobilize on scepter or Signet of Wrath and so on.

Something I just realized, It is actually possible to get up to 1k burn damage through just empower use and gear… If only it didn’t require almost glass cannon stats and lack of most defensive options to do -.-

Empower + Purging Flames is a great combo, followed by a swap for Whirling Wrath or Mighty Blow.

doesn’t Sigil of Geomancy inflicts 3 stacks of bleeding for 7s? at least according to the wiki. i haven’t tested this in detail yet so will have to map it out. and if you have say at least 50% condition duration, that brings it to 10s. and with about 1k condi dmg, that’ll be about ~270 AoE/s, for 10s. until they cleanse it that is. [NOTE: assuming condition duration affects sigil procs. i needa do more hw! XDD]

although, i agree, with permeating wrath, you’re doing more than that already, though i felt it might be fun to augment that with another condition. it really isn’t much though with only 3 stacks. i will have to test this a bit more (and i’m a sucker for the animation when you swap lol)

also, you’re spot on regarding conditions on target vs targets being cleansed vs being able to keep up the conditions you DO want to keep on them. and i am bearing in mind more 1v1 situations while theorizing, since in a group setting, you have a lot more leeway and more variables.

i have been trying to figure out a way to stack might as well to increase condition damage in addition to boosting regular dmg. but it’s proven to be quite hard, namely trying to keep 30 in Virtues. XDD though Empower is definitely very strong and like you said foofad, if Staff #1 does count kitten hits right there, it’s worth taking for sure.

That first sample build has 100% might duration and can keep a minimum of 12 stacks going indefinitely, it tops out at about 20-22 and can hit 25 in dungeons.

My impression was that Geomancy only put one stack out. If it is 3, then that’s much more worthwhile if you’re constantly weapon swapping.

Thanks for the report. I hope the devs improve burning dramatically now that it’s been studied in detail.

i’ll check it out again and try to fit it in with what’ i’m trying to build. ; ))

ah, i’m just basing this all off Wiki at the moment. haven’t had time to go in-game to play much lately. i’ll have to take another look and test more anyways.

Oh hey, it is three stacks on Geomancy! I’ll add that to the guide. That’s neat. That definitely helps tip things toward condition damage, but not a lot.

Edit: Woah. Not only does it give three stacks, it also counts toward VoJ hits. If you hit 5 enemies, VoJ goes off too.

So foo, I have to ask how you feel about racial skills that give extra conditions instead of burning, such as the asuran utilities, some of the norn transforms, and reaper of grenth for humans. Do you think they are worth it to try or is it better just to run with just physical damage/burning?

Poison doesn’t do very much damage, so the ones that give poison you can probably pass on but I’ll give them a look. It’s also not clear to me how much of your gears stats carry over into transformations. If stats carry 1 for 1, any transformation that has access to either a lot of bleeding or multiple conditions would be good. That said, snow leopard is the only Norn one I would ever use on account of not being able to attack and move at the same time with the others.

Pain Inverter used to be quite effective at giving a roaming build some breathing room ( or catching out an unsuspecting burst opponent ).

I haven’t slotted it since retaliation and confusion were nerfed though, and the lack of trait synergy is a real “pain”.

Perhaps the combo fields have more utility in this situation – poison and weakness procs could be very useful ( especially since the last patch ). But I doubt the damage will be high enough to justify it beyond any other kind of build ( although poison’s effect on healing is always welcome )

nice, foo. did you test it in game? and didn’t even think of weapon swap effects proccing VoJ. that is a pretty nice find.

i was looking for a way to add poison along with burning but it seems you sort of have to go out of your way to be able to achieve that. and yes, mainly along the lines for the effect on healing.

hydromancy i’ve thought of as well. always, always been a big fan. however, the damage tied to it aren’t related to condition damage. the slowing effect will always be nice though and effects on CD. and cause it’s AoE. but most likely will leave it out of this build.

Yeah, I checked in game before I posted.

very cool. so last night was messing around with a few different burning builds, of condi damage buidsl rather, 100% burning duration, 70% condition duration. in PvE, it works EXTREMELY well.

i was trying to keep track of how i apply burning, etc and the duration but it’s tough lol because you really do keep applying it almost nonstop. though one comment i WILL have is that with Permeating Wrath it seems like you really need to be next to your opponents / mobs for the AoE burn to take effect.

so seeing how i’ll be able to translate this to WvW and be able to survive while doing so will be interesting. more testing to be done!

PW has exactly the same range as Purging Flames, so you can use that as a guide for how far it reaches. It’s 240 radius, or twice your autoattack range.

foofad.5162:

Burning stacks in duration, not intensity. However, the highest damage burning takes priority.

Question: have you been able to test this yourself? Because I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how stacking and condition removal order works (please, please do not refer me to the wiki on this, I find it conflicted) and it seems like burns tick through on a first-in-first-out basis, rather than having a prioritization system based on condition damage.

That said, I haven’t been able to do really good testing myself just yet, so I was curious if anyone else had researched this.

You really need two people to test it thoroughly and I haven’t done the work myself, but I’ve seen other people’s verification and believe it to be the case. Not only does the highest condition damage take priority, it also updates every tic based on your CURRENT condition damage. In other words, if you go to the Mists and burn something for a long duration and then Empower yourself, your damage will go up. So who’s burns actually fire can change in the heat of the moment (forgive me).

I just got a nice person in the Mists to help me test it, and it turns out that there is no priority. If you apply burning after someone else does, with higher condition damage, yours doesn’t tic first. So I’ll need to amend that. Wiki (or wherever I got that from) got it wrong.

foofad.5162:

You really need two people to test it thoroughly and I haven’t done the work myself, but I’ve seen other people’s verification and believe it to be the case. Not only does the highest condition damage take priority, it also updates every tic based on your CURRENT condition damage. In other words, if you go to the Mists and burn something for a long duration and then Empower yourself, your damage will go up. So who’s burns actually fire can change in the heat of the moment (forgive me).

I knew that burning’s damage would change as you gained/lost condition damage: it’s something I think is mighty cool, given other limitations of the GW2 system.

I just got a nice person in the Mists to help me test it, and it turns out that there is no priority. If you apply burning after someone else does, with higher condition damage, yours doesn’t tic first. So I’ll need to amend that. Wiki (or wherever I got that from) got it wrong.

Thank you for testing this. I was following around a player (seemed like a bot, but who knows really?) and it seemed like priority was based on application order, not intensity.

I believe that higher damage priority exists for once you’ve reached the burning cap, but I haven’t tested it in a long time, so that may require verification as well.

What is the max cap for the duration of a condition on a target? I know it exists (I’ve hit it in the Mists while testing with burns actually) but I don’t know how high it is.

Some wiki comments here mention that bonus condition duration is capped at 76% ( except under certain rare circumstances ).

However I’ve not found any references to a total duration limit for a condition applied to a target. I guess testing is the only way.

Oh, that. Yeah, conditions and boons are limited to a total of 100%. Any additional duration bonus goes out the window and is wasted, though it does defend you against -duration on enemies. I’ve personally checked that out when testing boon durations etc. If it were capped at 76% you wouldn’t be able to get double Justice procs from having 100% duration, but that’s one of the things I outlined being able to do in the guide.

Most boons and conditions have a 25 stack limit, even if they stack in duration. There are a few exceptions to this, like retaliation, but generally 25 instances of a condition is the limit.

That makes perfect sense. Why is Retal an exception?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates/2013-02-26#Update_1_-_26_February_2013

Profession Skills

General
Reduced the number of maximum of stacks of Retaliation allowed to five (was 25). Duration still stacks.

This was done, I think, in response to endless retaliation builds, which still haven’t really gone away =p

Oh, I thought he meant Retaliation didn’t have a cap, as opposed to a smaller cap. I vaguely remember that patch, but I think I was kitten deep in schoolwork at the time so it went over my head.

I wish burn could crit.

It’s a shame so much of our tree is dedicated to applying/altering/improving our burns when the condition itself is so lackluster. Maybe if one of our grandmaster traits made it able to crit then Guardian could have some fun with the trees instead of just power builds all day.

I dunno… I’m just spitballing.

Either way, this is a great writeup and I’m stoked to see Jon Peters sticky it. I hope that’s a sign the devs are looking into this sort of thing. It’s never good when an entire aspect of a profession is regarded as trash and ultimately ignored.

Off a whim, I stacked every possible form of condition damage and condition damage conversion stats on a build website and came up with 3507 condition damage on a guardian with 25 might and 25 sigil of corruption stacks.

This results in a 1205 damage per a tick burn.

Against a moderatly geared person with 15000 hp it would take 12 seconds to kill
A stronger opponent with 20000 hp would take 16 seconds
and a max hp target with around 33300 hp would take 27 seconds

Very unrealistic numbers but kind of shows how little burning does alone, even with the best numbers.

Combined and with damage modifying traits it is good, but I just don’t think it is worth it for large amounts of condition damage for us. Condition duration is also tantalizing but just seems like not enough to push it, since it won’t help us kill in fewer seconds with more stacks.

Back on topic though, I just want to reaffirm that permeating wrath is a nice tool for AE damage when combined with radiant power or fiery wrath.

Also the best way to increase “dps” is through AE burns like foofad has explained, so it seems that multi target burning and AE damage is our niche with conditions.

Yeah, that’s basically it in a nutshell. Even akittens best, Burning isn’t that great against a single target.

I haven’t finished rewriting the condition damage section yet, but I’m getting there.

CMF.5461:

Off a whim, I stacked every possible form of condition damage and condition damage conversion stats on a build website and came up with 3507 condition damage on a guardian with 25 might and 25 sigil of corruption stacks.

This results in a 1205 damage per a tick burn.

Against a moderatly geared person with 15000 hp it would take 12 seconds to kill
A stronger opponent with 20000 hp would take 16 seconds
and a max hp target with around 33300 hp would take 27 seconds

Very unrealistic numbers but kind of shows how little burning does alone, even with the best numbers.

Combined and with damage modifying traits it is good, but I just don’t think it is worth it for large amounts of condition damage for us. Condition duration is also tantalizing but just seems like not enough to push it, since it won’t help us kill in fewer seconds with more stacks.

Back on topic though, I just want to reaffirm that permeating wrath is a nice tool for AE damage when combined with radiant power or fiery wrath.

Also the best way to increase “dps” is through AE burns like foofad has explained, so it seems that multi target burning and AE damage is our niche with conditions.

I honestly think we just need one more condition just to make it worth it. Be it bleed, poison, confusion or torment, just something else to make it so burning isn’t our only source of condition damage.

Not to start a debate here as this thread is an excellent source of information but …

if we were to get another condition, what do you think it’s damage output (in terms of DPS) would have to be with no condition damage modifier to ensure it’s not unreasonable when compared to other ‘all-out’ damage builds? IMO, it would have to be pretty low … probably 50% of what burning is now.

I’m still working on a useful set of metrics to compare condition damage to direct damage, but in my opinion what should happen is skills which currently do very low to zero damage should be given Torment or Bleeding. I’m thinking specifically of Flashing Blade, Zealot’s Embrace, Chains of Light, and potentially Signet of Wrath. You can replace the already garbage or nonexistent damage of these abilities with a damage condition and then balance around how many stacks of that condition get applied.

I think that Guardians are an awesome candidate for Torment, personally – but I know that’s not a popular opinion.

i do enjoy the idea of Guardians getting Torment. from a practical standpoint, it’s often said that Guardians aren’t that mobile, so having Torment does add to our arsenal and matches up well for “punishing” those that try to flee.

that’s an interesting idea, foofad, for replacing the low damage skills by throwing another condition on top of it.

So, Might gives power and condition damage.

The new grand master trait gives condition damage for power.

Staff gives 12 stacks of might.

Did staff just inadvertently become a condition weapon?

Realistically though, I think the grandmaster needs to give us more than 10% condition damage.

I know that might scream OP! But, since we have one condition, how much damage would burning need to do alone to equate to other professions condition damage per a second?

What ever the disparity is there, could be made up with guardians having access to higher possible condition damage which would in turn be burn doing as much by itself as other professions can do with burn+bleed+poison+torment+what ever.

Maybe too much? but it could create a niche of power/might/condition damage for guardians.

like 2 or 3 random thoughts merging together into a mesh of gibberish…maybe some good ideas in there if anyone wants to search for them

It’s only ten percent, is indeed the issue. With 25 stacks of might you’re looking at 962 Condition Damage as opposed to 875, which is a whopping 22 more burning damage per second with the trait as opposed to without it. Massively underwhelming. But that’s just from might; If you add in your base power as well you’re looking at another 220~ condition damage or so, which is 55~ more damage per second on top of the 22, so… Yeah, still sucks. :/

No matter how you slice it, condition damage is always inferior as a stat for Guardians on account of only having access to one condition. I’m getting close to finishing up my metrics for making that statement a little more concrete.

lets count how many stacks of other conditions is needed to have same dmg as from burning.
and then lets count how easilly we can have 100% burning uptime on enemies and how difficult they have to keep these stacks on us….

Lord Trejgon.2809:

lets count how many stacks of other conditions is needed to have same dmg as from burning.
and then lets count how easilly we can have 100% burning uptime on enemies and how difficult they have to keep these stacks on us….

5-6 stacks of bleeding, depending on how much condition damage is involved.

Edit: No idea why I thought it was as low kitten or 6. As Obtena points out just below, it’s 7-8 stacks for bleed to out-do burning. (7 stacks once you hit a respectable amount of condition damage.)

So, potentially 1 shrapnel grenade toss if you get lucky with procs. A truly herculean effort.

Softspoken.2410:

Lord Trejgon.2809:

lets count how many stacks of other conditions is needed to have same dmg as from burning.
and then lets count how easilly we can have 100% burning uptime on enemies and how difficult they have to keep these stacks on us….

5-6 stacks of bleeding, depending on how much condition damage is involved.

I always took this at face value when people said it but just to check, I went to gw2buildcraft and checked it.

If you simply take any profession with no gear, you get this:

Bleeding Damage/stack 43/s
Burning Damage 328/s
Poison Damage 84/s

With my full carrion build, I get:

Bleeding Damage/stack 111/s
Burning Damage 672/s
Poison Damage 222/s

The interesting part for me is that Bleed and Poison have the same multiplier for a given condition damage value but burning is different (and lower!) Confusion is also scaled different. I wonder what the reasoning is for that.

I don’t think I clarified what I was saying in my previous post.

Burning is constant damage at a good to moderate level with little effort or gearing to gain. Additional stacks prolong the burn but do not make the effect stronger.

Bleeding is low damage, but easily applied and maintained to we will say 4-5 stacks. Additional stacks will increase the damage per a second resulting in a short duration of burst.

Poison does not stack in intensity, but has a secondary effect to it (reduced healing) to make the stacking in duration beneficial.

Chill does not stack in intensity, but has two secondary effects on it (reduced movement and increased skill cool down time) to make stacking in duration beneficial.

Confusion stacks in intensity, causing more threatening damage if the afflicted target attacks. Resulting in potential burst.

Torment stacks in intensity and does more damage than bleed if you move (150%) and less if you stay still (75%). Another form of potential burst, but getting high stacks of this are seemingly difficult, so it isn’t as bad as as issue “right now”.

So the burst conditions: Bleed, Confusion, Torment
Sustained damage conditions: Burning
Utility conditions: Poison, Chill

In a 1v1 sense, there is a potential limit to the stacks/duration of burst conditions, which can be countered with smart application of condition removal. Some tweeking may be needed to manage the reapplication of conditions at an easy rate, but it is decent enough as it is.

In a team based fight, high stacks and high duration are easily achieved with the plethora of condition applications available. Condition removal is almost moot at this rate.

If burst conditions are to remain used as burst, they need to be throttled back in frequency of application. Otherwise they are just high constant damage all the time.

Currently the meta is condition based, and it is increasingly difficult to not have conditions on yourself. Even with the 25 stack cap on conditions, they are difficult to manage.

Additionally AOE condition application is fairly strong, making it difficult to survive as a group, and easy to apply against a group.

Taking all that into consideration, burning and condition damage are bad for guardians because:

More burning results in longer time to see results (25 stacks of burning takes 25 seconds to do damage)

Burning damage is already high enough, and many find it difficult to find a balanced enough build to let them wait 25+ seconds for burning to tick if they go for condition damage.

This is as opposed to spike damage conditions that will see the result of 25 stacks on the very next tick, but they are supposed to be short in duration, so that high intensity of damage “should” not persist.

I have suggested previously that guardians have the capability to trait for burning to do more utility instead of “just” burning. Such as reduced damage by attackers with burning on them. That would make guardian burns more unique and maybe open up more builds.

The other option may be to reduce spike condition duration so that high stacks are more difficult to maintain in group situations…but that will now hinder the solo player, and that is bad as well.

How do other condition damage classes achieve such high burst with conditions? Is it bleed alone? Does our condition damage suck because it is “just” burning, or are we missing a crucial aspect to our game play to make conditions good.

I don’t think giving guardians bleed will answer our condition damage dilemma, but I don’t know why burning is so bad for us if it is so good on paper.

It is difficult for a tanky/bunker guardian to get high condition damage to make use of the prolonged effect right now. Maybe our traits and stat combos are not aligned right?

As of now, the best use of burning is to modify our physical damage via radiant power and fiery wrath, as well as proc voj in conjunction with our melee attacks to supplement an extra hit or two in our skills.

CMF.5461:

How do other condition damage classes achieve such high burst with conditions? Is it bleed alone? Does our condition damage suck because it is “just” burning, or are we missing a crucial aspect to our game play to make conditions good.

I don’t think giving guardians bleed will answer our condition damage dilemma, but I don’t know why burning is so bad for us if it is so good on paper.

I’m not particularly qualified to say this, but I think that a condition necromancer could/can maintain about 7 stacks of bleeding and a poison stack quite comfortably, alongside some other non-damaging conditions. (Even before the latest patch) then when the opportunity arose, they could ‘burst’ their target either with more bleeds they’ve been holding in reserve, or fear. The point here is, necromancers appropriately built for conditions were maintaining the same level of condition damage (to a single target) that a guardian does at peak.

A thief with some condition duration and a pistol / dagger can maintain at least 8 bleeds, and taking a few traits / utilities can add poison to that equation. A D/D thief would maintain a lot more, 12 or 15 at least, and neither of those scenarios involve Caltrops, which adds burst potential or just a higher bleed floor.

So what I’m saying is: builds that focus heavily on conditions / condition damage tend to do a lot more damage at baseline than what permanent burning can do for a guardian. I honestly think adding bleed options to at least one guardian weapon would be an acceptable solution. Although I suspect that would annoy just as many people as it would appease.

A condition specced grenade engineer who isn’t afraid to use bombs every few seconds can sustain 25 stacks of bleeding, 100% burning uptime, 100% poison uptime, 25 stacks of vulnerability, and some confusion as well. It isn’t a great burden on any of the condition specs to get up to 15+ stacks of bleeding, and most of those specs have access to poison, torment, or burning in addition to the bleeds.

Lets put the topic back on track and discuss what guardian’s do have in terms of burning and how we can best utilize it.

Kind of a square one basics idea is how do we apply burning?

Virtue of Justice

• Active (best for group play, or if traited for secondary effects)
• Passive (procs every 5 or 4 depending on traits)

Traits

• On aegis break
• On block
• On percent of life
• With spirit weapons

Utilities

• Purging Flames
• Judge’s Intervention

Weapons

• Torch

Lets go down the list and evaluate the sources of burning.

Virtue of Justice
This is our primary way of applying burning. Best left passive to proc every 4 or kittens to gain the most damage out of it. If you have traits that give might or blind, then it can be triggered early for different reasons. Or if you have refresh on a kill, then you are wasting it if you are not triggering it before each kill.

On the other hand if in a group situation, VoJ should be triggered which can create a long enough burn that will last until VoJ is off cooldown, effectively creating 100% burning up time.

VoJ does add damage on top of our normal physical attacks which in effect adds additional hits to the targets.

Verdict: VoJ is a good source of burning, but limited to sword or groups to maintain 100% uptime on burns

Traits
These sources of burning are unreliable and very situational.

Aegis is not up frequent enough to cause a long and steady stream of burning via the trait. Best used to combine with boon removal if you burn the target trait I feel.

On block is decent, but our blocks are only found on Aegis, as mentioned above, mace, and shelter. Projectile blocks do not cause burning last I tested. So these are also situational and limited.

On low percent of life burning is a last ditch effort to gain a kill while we are staying alive. Almost pointless, but can be gimmicky to down or kill something while you are maintaining yourself in the downed state.

Spirit weapons are widely though of as a joke, but they have been buffed to cause the same burning damage as the player. Still too limited for my likes.

Verdict: Traits are too situational and not frequent enough to cause pressure via burning.

Utilities
We have two, and they are decent for the secondary effects and not the burning.
Purging Flames is great for AOE condition removal but you have to run in an out of the AOE to trigger it. Long cooldown and not a good source of burning.

Judge’s Intervention is great in terms of mobility, but not a sustaining form of burning. Combined with increased damage to burning and condition targets, this creates a nice opening burst moment.

Verdict: Utilities are good, but not because of the burning effect. Ineffective for the reasons of burning.

Weapons
Torch is the only weapon that causes burning. This can create 100% uptime of burning to a maximum of 3 targets at a time. The down side to torch is that with 100% uptime, the procs from VoJ become pointless as the torch is doing all the burning you need. At that rate you might as well trait to have VoJ provide a secondary effect on active use.

Verdict: Weapons provide no burning by themselves, except for the torch. Having more burning on weapons make VoJ passive effects pointless.

So to sum it up. VoJ is our primary and only form of reliable burning, but it causes our class to be punished if we go searching other ways to burn. It helps define us but also limits us.

The only way you can maintain 100% uptime is via sword or torch. Possibly scepter but different scenarios such as mobile fights or multiple targets hinder its ability to maintain a burn.

Other weapons hit too slow or do not have enough overlapping damage to cause multiple strikes frequent enough to proc a lot of burning. Greatsword with symbol and whirling wrath can create a good amount of burning via burst but typically not a sustained burn.

I think our class mechanics lead us to not pursue burning actively but utilize VoJ passively to cause extra damage in supplement to our physical damage.

CMF.5461:

(1)More burning results in longer time to see results (25 stacks of burning takes 25 seconds to do damage)

Burning damage is already high enough, and many find it difficult to find a balanced enough build to let them wait 25+ seconds for burning to tick if they go for condition damage.

(2)It is difficult for a tanky/bunker guardian to get high condition damage to make use of the prolonged effect right now. Maybe our traits and stat combos are not aligned right?

(1)erm… no? burning is ticking every second and applying more burning gives more ticks. so there is no situation with “wait 25+seconds for burning to tick” I have no idea from where dod you get that.

(2) just swap every cleric’s gear from cleric’s bunker into apothecary

EDIT: @CMF Lastly I just discovered, that orb of wrath (scepter skill nr 1) actully is projectile by all mean – even as a combo finisher (but tooltip sais nothing about that) – so when we are poping out of fire combo fields (Purging flames and hallowed ground) and atacking with scepter through that we will have burning combo efect.

@ Lord Trejgon
OH! really, they “do” count as projectiles? Quite interesting… Like you said, ground fire fields, but really I am looking at how that works as far as group play and other fields, since we get a majority of our burning from VoJ.

As far as the #1 bullet. More burning (more stacks of burning) do not increase damage in intensity, but it does increase in duration. If I put 25 stacks of bleed on I get 25 different bleed ticks in 1 second.

If I put 25 applications of burn on (25 stacks) I have to wait for 25 full second ticks to see the burn happen, thus the 25 seconds to see the damage remark. Burn does not have a “burst” capability, it will always do the same damage no matter how many burns I put on a target.

So if my tool tip says it will do 3000 damage in burning….but I read that it has a duration of 10 seconds. In essence that is 10 stacks of burning doing 300 damage a tick for 10 seconds.

If I read that bleed will do 100 damage per a stack in 3 seconds, then I put 3 bleed stacks on. I am now doing 300 damage a tick in 3 seconds. If I put 10 bleeds on, now I’m doing 1000 damage a tick in 3 seconds. If I put 25 bleeds on, now I am doing 2500 damage a tick in 3 seconds.

So 2500 damage in 3 seconds bleed, or 3000 damage in 10 seconds burning.

One is more overall damage, the other is more damage per a second. High DPS is more threatening in pvp scenarios and faster kills in pve scenarios as well (if it can be maintained and not just burst).

Addressing bullet #2, apothecary is meh? I have not seen any functioning builds utilizing it…yet. So I will not discount it, but I have not seen a revolution on condition bunker either.

Browsing around in spvp forum and I run across this post which states that burning is what makes other condition builds viable.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/We-need-a-way-to-Reduce-Condi-Damage/first#post2435223

So the argument there is that burning is what is good and other conditions are just mediocre by themselves.

What is the opinion on that?

Maybe they go hand in hand and burning by itself is not good enough and the others also alone need burning.

It’s not really helpful to think of burning as a total damage figure. Saying burning will accumulate 3000 damage over 9 seconds doesn’t really get you any closer to a real, practical value judgement for the condition. Instead, it’s better to say that burning does X DPS, with Y uptime, and then determine the expected length of your combat (Z seconds) and go from there. Then you can refine your model for uptime as much as you want, while working with static X and Z values in order to come up with some sort of indication of effectiveness.

The main point of contention that I have with the post you linked is that they are talking about engineers and necros, whose power based damage is attenuated to compensate for access to conditions in order to throttle their maximum DPS. Guardians are designed from the outset to be a power based class, not condition damage. So to reduce the engineer or necromancer’s burning damage would throttle their DPS by a wider margin than it would for guardians. Guardians would likely not notice it at all if they completely lost burning.

The real issue for guardians and condition damage is, as I have stated previously, it’s not possible to stack condition damage in such a way as to overcome the net loss in power with superior burning damage. In other words, every point you put into condition damage on your gear is not going to give you an equitable exchange from one form of damage (direct) to another (condition). It’s massively stacked in favor of power. This makes intuitive sense. The coefficient for burning is lower than virtually every direct damage skill we have.

What would change this is if we had another damaging condition. Suddenly instead of relying purely on one coefficient, you can be making use of two at the same time. At some point, the condition damage requirement to reach parity with a similar damage output power build is going to be much, much more attainable than it is now.

I mean, think about it – all the classes that have viable condition damage builds either have access to multiple damaging conditions or can stack bleed easily. Engie, necro, thieves to some extent, and warriors to some extent spring immediately to mind.

So the next question is, do we “need” a condition based build?

Meta seems to be condition heavy at the moment.

Is our above average (if not the best?) condition removal enough to keep up with the meta in a defensive sense?

Do we have a real position anymore in the meta pvp game.

In PvE power and crit/crit damage run the show, since conditions are not as valuable there. WvW things get skewed a lot too since the large onslaught of numbers, you can pretty much run anything.

Foodfad, you started off with a really positive outlook on burning and seemed to have found a niche, which I was totally excited for. Yet as we go down this path it seems you have stepped back and are now almost saying it still isn’t good enough.

Does burning need to be changed, or is there something we haven’t figured out just yet.

In the past the devs have said that guardians have some amazing damage through burning. Maybe we are looking at it the wrong way.