Guild Wars 2

I reckon domi/dueling full power will still be a thing in HoT, though I’m interested in the possibility of hybrid or condi after duelist discipline trait (you and illusions deals 2 stacks of bleed on crit), sharper images and confusing combatant (confusions on crit). In HoT confusion will deal fixed damage per second + additional damage on skill use, and confusion is less likely to be washed out by your party members, even if there is still 50 limited cap or whatever around.

What do you guys think? Will rampager or rabid be a thing after HoT? With the new trait changes staff AA may not be the only viable condition options. So you’re not limited to soloing with staff AA, unlike in the past where staff auto DPS gets diluted by party members etc.

A bit early to theorycraft maximum damage before confusion coefficient comes out though, so I apologize for this early post. Just don’t want it to slip off my mind before I put it down.

I messed around with the new traits for a possible new PvE condi build and didn’t find any obvious winners just yet. On one hand we will lose out on the Staff trait and Debilitating Dissipation but on the other hand we’ll gain some extra condi duration from Chaotic Persistence and some good source of confusion dmg from Confusing Combatants. Seems like both nerf and buff so we’ll have to wait and see how sever each is before making any decisions.

Chaotic Transference will still be in play, so I believe Rabid will still be the goto gear.

Btw frifox, Confusion will tick for its duration along with on skill procs. That’s a buff

If by “losing out on the Staff trait” you’re referring to IE ( +1 bounce) trait, that is being turned into baseline so you will always bounce one more then currently on all bounce skills.

With Confusion improved and it looks like Burns also being made stackable, I think the Staff will be an excellent close-quarters Condie weapon as it applies bleeds, burns, and Confusion & Bleed on crits.

It could be that GS Clones will outshine that though by pure speed & range of stacking bleeds & confusion on crits. I guess that also depends on build a little bit. If you get that crit chance up high along with decent Condie damage, I could see GS simply being more practical and reliable.

Oh and Poisons are also turning into stacks, so you might get more DoT damage from that too. (Although we don’t have a lot of that.) I could see Condie damage in PvE becoming more competitive for sure with all these different stackable DoTs and stack limits doubled.

I agree that especially Confusion will come primarily from Mesmers, so I could see that being significantly more viable in PvE then it is now. (Probably won’t surpass Power based builds though.)

Yeah we don’t actually have any staff traits removed, in fact they’re buffed with CD reduction in chaos armor. IE will be made baseline so there should be no worries there.

I’m more interested in pistol illusions though, with signet of ether and F5 you can deliver 3 pistol illusions very quickly. You get roughly 24 shots in each barrage, every crit shots have 33% of getting 2 stacks of bleed, plus sharper image will stack 3 bleeds in that crit shot. If we calculate crit chance into it we can get 15-20 bleeds easily in one barrage. Not to mention confusion (no CD yet) means you can get 20ish confusion in one barrage as well in rampager or precision gears. Though having precision as primary stat is probably necessary as you can’t trait duelist discipline with phantasmal fury.

Having such high condi pressure immediately makes phantasm builds having every fast ramp up DPS as well as sustain, as long as you place iDuelist at the right place. But I’m not sure whether duelist discipline makes iDuelist more powerful than iSwordman though.

Plan:
F5 – phantasm, switch weapon, phantasm,ether, phantasm, shatter – phantasms respawn and attack.
f2 and end F5.
SoI and repeat.
then repeat again.

18 phantasm attacks and 6 shatters plus a free double time warp and some autos. This does assume f5 also switches weapons back but you can work without it.

How many stacks is that?

Miku Lawrence.6329:

Btw frifox, Confusion will tick for its duration along with on skill procs. That’s a buff

Yeah, I saws that in the PoI. It was quite weak but still, additional rarely capped by party dmg source is always nice to have.

Windwalker.7421:

If by “losing out on the Staff trait” you’re referring to IE ( +1 bounce) trait, that is being turned into baseline so you will always bounce one more then currently on all bounce skills.

The IE trait is universal, by “staff trait” I was literally referring to the staff trait – current Chaotic Dampening, which meant faster Chaos Storm and a drop of +5 condi dmg.

Knowing ANet, they won’t simply buff the burn/poison stacking and confusion ticking without nerfind something else in return. My hopes they leave the dmg coefficients untouched but there is a pretty good chance they won’t…

frifoxy.6014:

Knowing ANet, they won’t simply buff the burn/poison stacking and confusion ticking without nerfind something else in return. My hopes they leave the dmg coefficients untouched but there is a pretty good chance they won’t…

They’d have to do a PvE/PvP split if they didn’t touch damage coefficients. Stacking current damage burns in PvP would be 12 types of broken.

They’ve already hinted at having to change the coefficients during the 4-hour Specialization reveal when they kept cracking jokes.

“Hmmm, when you have X stacks of burning. That’d be great in a world where burning stacks. Something would obviously have to change about burning’s damage in such a world though” … believe that happened multiple times during those 4 hours.

Toeofdoom.6152:

Plan:
F5 – phantasm, switch weapon, phantasm,ether, phantasm, shatter – phantasms respawn and attack.
f2 and end F5.
SoI and repeat.
then repeat again.

18 phantasm attacks and 6 shatters plus a free double time warp and some autos. This does assume f5 also switches weapons back but you can work without it.

How many stacks is that?

First off, in your plan you likely will need some clones to F5 shatter in the first place, if in fact this adds to the duration of CS. If you just use a no Clone shatter then I don’t think you’ll have nearly enough time to complete all the actions you were pondering, nor are you calculating in that any opponent worth a lick is going to rain on your parade…like literally rain fire and brimstone on it! ;-)

A little Mortal Kombat quote comes to mind…

“Get over here!!! Silly Mesmer!”

You are tethered to your rift! If you think you can play time-traveler for too long, you’re going to get an ugly surprise.

frifoxy.6014:

Miku Lawrence.6329:

Btw frifox, Confusion will tick for its duration along with on skill procs. That’s a buff

Yeah, I saws that in the PoI. It was quite weak but still, additional rarely capped by party dmg source is always nice to have.

It really makes me wonder how a Reflect/Confusion build using Rampager or Sinister stats could perform when the spec changes hit live. X/Duel/Ill with Mistrust. I think you could go finish this off with either Blinding Befuddlement + Blinding Dissipation or MoF + Evasive Mirror, depending on whether you want to focus more on conditions or reflects (I can see changing this up for different content). For the third line, I’m split on whether Domination or Chaos feels better. My first instinct is Chaos so you can take Chaotic Dampening and Bountiful Disillusionment, but Domination could be better for the all the Vulnerability generation (unless you’re on a team that provides this for you).

Windwalker.7421:

If you just use a no Clone shatter then I don’t think you’ll have nearly enough time to complete all the actions you were pondering, nor are you calculating in that any opponent worth a lick is going to rain on your parade…like literally rain fire and brimstone on it! ;-)

Alright, so hit mirror images or de to start and when repeating hit f5 with the 3 phantasms instead of F2. you could probably have filled that detail in yourself. :P
Also, this thread is about pve so you should be able to handle rift placement.