Guild Wars 2

Was wondering if anyone had any thoughts about the following build;

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcmc0mz9MMLnrmMLnrmaGG0GzVaVazk

Domination 10 – I Mental Torment
Dueling 20 – V Desperate Decoy, X Deceptive Evasion
Chaos 20 – V Debilitating Dissipation, X Chaotic Dampening
Illusions 20 – I Precise Wrack, VII Illusionary Elasticity

Utilities: Aether Feast, Mirror Images, Feedback, Null Field, Time Warp

Rampager’s Staff with Perception Sigil for main weapon
Berserker’s Sword with Fire sigil for MH secondary
Berserker’s Focus with Force sigil for OH secondary

Carrion armour with 6/6 Rune of the Centaur (combine with Focus for 100% swiftness uptime)
Rampager’s trinkets with Coral jewels

The concept here is to main the staff, using Retreat and dodge rolls to get up staff clones as fast as possible, then use those staff clones to stack conditions, bleeds, and then shatter them to stack up confusion. Swap to sword to roll in for a fire AOE and drop a Warden. Choice of utilities is to maximize Ethereal combo fields for Chaos Armor uptime.

I didn’t take Phantasmal Fury, and also skipped the additional 10 points in Domination because the idea here isn’t to generate direct damage from your Illusions, but rather to get them to stack bleeds / other conditions, which take damage from you directly. Carrion armor with Rampager’s trinkets provides very high crit chance, for taking good advantage of Sharper Images.

Does this sound it could be viable for general PVE, or is it lacking in something? Assume that I don’t have access to Rabid at this time, so it’s either Carrion, Rampager’s or Berserker. Should I be going Berserker jewellery to increase crit damage, or is the Rampager’s the better idea because of the condition dependence? And lastly, with this build, when I ran into DE’s, would it be still viable and work if I swapped on a greatsword for assistance tagging, or should I also carry around a set of Berserker’s for that?

I’d probably go split Rampager/Carrion. Both crank Power/Cond. Dmg., and the Precision from Rampager’d help out yer crits. You should be fine for business. And, yea: Rabid can take some time, considering for the Exotic options, a guy has to traipse all over Orr temples – which on a server with minimal Orr-love sucks. (Except for the trinkets, those are sittin in the Dwayna temple.) Now, for a final spec – if you don’t mind a bit of glass – perhaps Rabid weapons & armour/Rampager trinkets (or vice versa)? I can imagine the Precision being rather sicknasty.

Go figure, I went Rabid armour/trinkets. Weapons are Carrion or Apothecary … I do ok, but I’ll admit I’m more concerned with full Condition Damage. Now you’ve got me curious to what I’d pan out like with Rampager weapons/trinkets.

Full Exotic Coral Jewelry and Rampager gear (Armor and Weapons) with Coral Orbs in your armor will net you 70+% crit chance w/o food.

Obviously that can be increased with food, sigils, etc.

Drop desperate decoy, take sword cooldowns instead.

Drop feedback or null field and take decoy.

The focus is a strange choice for this build. I would think pistol would work better because of the bleed stacking from the duelist. Wardens will bleed stack as well, but it takes a long time and the target has to not move.

Using carrion armor does not synergize well with rampagers or berserkers gear, as it gives no crit chance. I’ll come back to that.

You mentioned this is a pve focused build. You need to make a choice, however, between focusing on condition damage or direct damage, as this makes a big difference in traits. Right now your traits are sorta floating in-between being a good condie build or a good power build, and are bad at both of them.

It seems to me you are leaning toward condie with your mentions of rabid and carrion. This being the case, forget about shatters. They do nothing for pve condition damage, as confusion is objectively the worst pve condition in the game. Go 5 points into illusions and that’s it. You could also drop mirror images because of this.

You need to focus on getting rabid and rampagers gear. This builds survivability, crit chance, and condition damage. This allows you to take full advantage of sharper images.

Go 30 into dueling. This raises your crit chance and also allows you to trait sword, pistol, and phantasmal fury. In a non-shatter pve build, you don’t need deceptive evasion, and your best bleeds come from the pistol phantasm.

25 into chaos gives you a ton of condition damage, you should hit that as well. Lastly, take your 10 out of Dom and put it into inspiration. This can reduce your glamour cooldowns, provide condition removal, vigor, or other bonuses. The 10 points in Dom really do nothing for a pure condition damage build.

VERY viable indeed. I run a similar build, 10/25/20/0/15. Extra 5 in dueling for confusing combatants and I also pick up debilitating dissipation in Chaos. You can pump out clones almost faster than you can shatter them with the staff and deceptive evasion, so I like having them drop conditions on folks when they pop due to being killed or me summoning a 4th illusion.

To the above poster who said zerker doesn’t synergize with carrion, phooey! It all depends.

For pvp I’m carrion amulet/rampager jewel, runes of Lyssa. Staff, sword/X.

For Pve I just go full zerker power/crit, cause why not? :P

For WVW I run all zerker armor, Chrysocola/carrion jewlery and orbs. I have around 1900pwr, 40% crit, 50% crit dmg ~800 condition dmg and 19k health. Sigil of minor corruption gets condition damage over 1000 before food/buffs.

While I don’t burst as hard, I can put out heavy sustained damage regardless if they are stacking toughness or vitality. Staff retreat with combo fields can give you VERY high uptime on chaos armor.

I’m considering dropping the 10 in domination, but I like being able to swap between extra illusion damage, mind wrack damage or clone cripples depending on the situation.

Less burst obviously than full power/crit shatter or phantasm, but you pump out consistent damage and are very difficult to bring down.

Ah, I thought you were asking in general, not just pve. I’m obviously more of a pvper :P

For PVE mesmer condition builds felt pretty weak to me. Phantasm power/crit was probably the best damage output. Power/crit shatter sometimes, depending on the fight.

kodesh.2851:

Ah, I thought you were asking in general, not just pve. I’m obviously more of a pvper :P

For PVE mesmer condition builds felt pretty weak to me. Phantasm power/crit was probably the best damage output. Power/crit shatter sometimes, depending on the fight.

My post was from a PvE perspective, being that’s how he described the build at the start. In a pvp setting, my opinion would be significantly different.

Thanks for the replies all, that’s a fair bit of info to digest and think about. I’ll chew on it and make some adjustments…

Decided in the end to go 20/20/0/0/30 for now, power focused. That build lets me swap between Osicat’s Shattercat Hybrid build and Lazy Kai’s GW build without retraiting (just swap over a few of the major traits and a weapon swap), plus some other fun stuff in between. For WvW with that build I can run Staff & Sword/Sword, and then when I go for PVE I can swap around the major traits and run GS & Sword/Focus or GS & Sword/Pistol.

Thanks for the input all, I’ll chew on what I can do with a Staff PVE build. I like the staff, but I think I’m better off with GS for now with what I do.