Guild Wars 2

I’m looking for a Staff build. Which runes, sigil and traits. Do I need more power or condition damage?
Please give me some suggestion, kindly.

I’d suggest Osicat’s 0/20/20/0/30 build with mostly zerkers and some Knights and or valk mixed in.

It’s a great build for staff and works very well in mob heavy PVE where PBAOE is important such as path 2 of CoF.

Also Osicat has documented the build extensively so you’ll have tons of great info to start with. He has a youtube channel that you might subscribe to if you’re so inclined.

Staff really shines with shatter builds.

Thank you! Which runes you’d suggest?

I suggest rampager gear as it has power, precision and condition damage. If you need more defensive stats, try rabid gear. Superior Sigil of Earth has a 60% chance to inflict bleed on crit with a 2 second internal cooldown. I can’t think of a better sigil. Superior Runes of the Undead are cost effective, give a lot of condition damage and a bit of toughness.

For traits, Chaotic Dampening is a given for staff cooldown reduction. Deceptive Evasion spawns a clone on dodge and that is extremely powerful for this build. Illusionists Celerity, which reduces the cooldown for illusion powers, is good too. Sharper Images will make your clones inflict bleed when they crit and that pairs well with Empowered Illusions which gives them 15% more damage. Crippling Dissipation inflicts cripple on illusion kill which is very good for kiting. Anything else you get is icing on the cake but I would suggest traits that either cause conditions on illusion kill or strengthens illusions.

The basic playstyle is to spawn clones, stay just out of melee range and kite like hell. If you know an enemy is just about to hit you, use Phase Retreat to make them hit your clone instead. If they kill it, they will be crippled and that will make kiting easier. Place Chaos Storm on you and your enemy so you get the boons while they get the conditions. Don’t forget to phase retreat out of it for free chaos armor. Be sure not to let your chaos armor skill overlap too much with the combo finisher one and try to save it for when you know you’re going to get hit. Get into the habit of shattering with the enemy is low enough. This will save you some time.

Pip.2094:

Thank you! Which runes you’d suggest?

Runes of air are great in wvw and runes of the wurm for pve.

I’d also back up the other suggestion of using full rampagers with runes of wurm. Rampagers is one of my favorite stat sets hands down.

Crossplay.2067:

…good stuff…

Sharper Images will make your clones inflict bleed when they crit and that pairs well with Empowered Illusions which gives them 15% more damage.

…other good stuff…

??? I thought that the only thing that affects bleed damage is the condition damage stat, and that %dmg increase traits only affect direct damage. Certainly that’s how it works for all the Necro traits. Is that different here?

No, any +% damage has no effect on condition damage.

Empowered Illusions is a relic from Beta, when Clones actually did pretty good direct damage. Back when we actually had Clone Power builds… now it’s pretty much a second copy of Phantasmal Strength.

Embolism.8106:

No, any +% damage has no effect on condition damage.

Empowered Illusions is a relic from Beta, when Clones actually did pretty good direct damage. Back when we actually had Clone Power builds… now it’s pretty much a second copy of Phantasmal Strength.

He’s right and I mixed up terms. I meant to say Empowered Illusions is for phantasms. While it does work on clones, their damage is so low, it won’t matter.

Godmoney.2048:

I’d suggest Osicat’s 0/20/20/0/30 build with mostly zerkers and some Knights and or valk mixed in.

It’s a great build for staff and works very well in mob heavy PVE where PBAOE is important such as path 2 of CoF.

Also Osicat has documented the build extensively so you’ll have tons of great info to start with. He has a youtube channel that you might subscribe to if you’re so inclined.

Staff really shines with shatter builds.

I agree except you should change out “Illusionary Invigoration” for “precise wrack” in the illusions tree. In general, you don’t need nearly the defense in PvE as you do when roaming.

Someone’s asking for a staff-build and everyone suggests power-based builds… I think I’ll go cry in a corner.

^^

Oh well. Condition Mesmer is the way to go if you want to use staff as your main weapon (and with “main weapon” I mean you’ll be using staff most of the time). Here’s the build I used from 1 to 80 (actually, longer than that):

Credits go to MrPrometheus. He’s the reason why I’ve eventually decided to try Mesmer (and it quickly became my main and is my main ever since then). I’ve changed the build several times since then to fit my needs. But the build he’s using in the video served me very well, and I can only recommend it to learn the playstyle with a Mesmer (and staff). If you like the concept of conditions, that is.

Thank you all, guys! And what do you think about sword? What’s the best off-hand for it? I think torch gives a lot of conditions, not sure if I’m right though.

Your sword/offhand in a condition staff build is mostly just for survival/utility/swiftness with focus in my opinion.

I rock a 0/25/25/0/20 build that I’ll link to at bottom of post. I run with almost entirely Rabid gear, have about 1400 condition damage, 30% armor reduction and 16k hp. I am VERY hard to kill, and if you don’t have condition removal – you die. My burns tic for 750~ and my bleeds for just over 100 per tic, per bleed. That’s somewhere close to 2-3k damage/tic a few seconds into battle.

Works great solo PvE, decently in dungeons (it’s mostly a suicide clone build, I rarely shatter), decently in WvW roaming. Not sure about tPvP.

Build: http://tinyurl.com/abjrqyy

You also have 3 different spells to get chaos armor from, so I have chaos armor like 75% of the time I’m in combat. (Feedback, Null Field, Chaos Storm + Phase retreat = chaos armor).

I really like having a character that can stay alive, and I really like conditions. So this is hands down the build for me. Tried a shatter build, amongst a ton of other builds, but could never get into it. I’ve solo’d end bosses in Explorable mode dungeons when everybody else has died for the last 25% at times.

Edit: 6x Rune of the Undead, for the extra 5% Toughness into Condition damage, giving you a total of 10% of your toughness (mine is around 1800) into condition damage, which equates about 150-200 depending on your gear.

It looks awesome, thank you! And which Sigil would you suggest?

I usually use the Sigil that gives +10 condition damage on kills, or +7 if you can’t afford it. If you’re playing for longs periods of time, and nto getting downed (which you shouldn’t be a lot with this build/gear), then you usually keep an extra 200-250 condition damage from it.

I haven’t found anything really more beneficial than that. Because you don’t weapon swap very often, from my playstyle at least, anything on swap isn’t that great. You could consider the Fireblast AOE on crit, or bleed on crit, but it’s mostly playstyle.