Guild Wars 2

I was just throwing this out, as I’m a big fan of the 20/0/30/20/0.

But it really is the same build — staff & scepter/torch. The stealth, burning, toughness are the exact same (minus the 20% condi duration, really the biggest loss). And in return you get vigor and bleed on crit, not to mention DE (and let’s face it, the minor traits in Domination serve little purpose in this build; what I’d really like is for someone to weigh the 20% duration vs. the damage from bleed on crit). The only other differences are that you lose 6 seconds on the torch 4 skill, and debilitating dissipation, which I really like. And sure, the iMage cures more conditions, but how often does it survive long enough to attack 2, 3, or 4 times. And given that the huge regen is most of the healing here, the drop off from MoR instead of Ether Feast is negligible.

Lyssa is just an option the synchronizes a little. I haven’t tried them yet, as I’m still running Melandru, which works fine too.

Anyway

Personally I hate DE while using a stealth heavy build as if you dodge in stealth the clone generation gives a away your position. I agree that the minors in Dueling are better but the cripple from the clone death is great and I can’t give up the conditon removal and CD reduction of the stealth. Like I already said the Veil CD is also a huge hit if you switch to Mendures. If you take the glam CD and mendures then you lose out on the block CD reduction and more often applying of torment.

What you suggest does sound like it would do more damage but it loses survivability. my iMage survives pretty ok but even if it doesn’t it is on a 21s CD.

As far as Duration Vs Crit Bleed. You are already getting some bleed from your staff clones. You will stack more with crit on death but the duration of all your other conditions is going to suffer. More conditions for longer is much harder to deal with than higher stacks of a single condition. Plus since many people run condition duration down food and melandru thx to the current meta of condition build I really do think you would be losing out in the long run. ^^

Bunda.2691:

I was just throwing this out, as I’m a big fan of the 20/0/30/20/0.

But it really is the same build — staff & scepter/torch. The stealth, burning, toughness are the exact same (minus the 20% condi duration, really the biggest loss). And in return you get vigor and bleed on crit, not to mention DE (and let’s face it, the minor traits in Domination serve little purpose in this build; what I’d really like is for someone to weigh the 20% duration vs. the damage from bleed on crit). The only other differences are that you lose 6 seconds on the torch 4 skill, and debilitating dissipation, which I really like. And sure, the iMage cures more conditions, but how often does it survive long enough to attack 2, 3, or 4 times. And given that the huge regen is most of the healing here, the drop off from MoR instead of Ether Feast is negligible.

Lyssa is just an option the synchronizes a little. I haven’t tried them yet, as I’m still running Melandru, which works fine too.

Anyway

I would argue the minor traits in Dom being worthless, when I drop chaos storm on someone I often get 10-20 vuln which even though I am not a power build a portion of my damage is direct damage. If you are not spamming auto attacks you are losing out on a lot of damage over the length of a fight. My scepter attack hits for around 230 non crit that is more than 2 ticks of bleeding for me. Add in the bonus of applying another condition to cover your prestige geomancy combo and those minor traits do work well with the build. Along with all these things gaining 200 power is far better than crit damage in a non power/crit build 200 stats is not something to be ignored as it is a linear increase in damage.

As far as gaining vigor and clone bleeds on crit I would have to lose a fair amount of healing power to gain enough crit rate to make the clone bleed proc worth it and vigor is not missed in this build as you have so many stealths that endurance has lots of time to regen without vigor.