Guild Wars 2

hello guys.
Im new on mesmer, im having fun playing with condi build.

Which armor better for PVE Rabid or Rampager ?

Carn.9473:

hello guys.
Im new on mesmer, im having fun playing with condi build.

Which armor better for PVE Rabid or Rampager ?

Dungeons, or open world?

Dungeons mostly but also open world.

Whatever anyone says, just listen to AlphatheWhite, he’s like the condi mes emperor.

Yet for pve, in the end you probably want to use sinister wich is condi damage, precision and power, the glassiest yet most offensive version of condi damage.

Rampager for dungeons.
Sinister/Rabid for open world.
Rabid for low-tier pvp.
Not condi for high-tier pvp.

And for some dungeon paths, don’t bring condi gear at all, bring assassin’s (as frifox points out, there are some encounters that make conditions totally worthless, and some dungeon paths that are so reflect-heavy that you’ll want more oomph on your reflects.).

Here’s the thing, though: Rampager’s actually demands a pretty different rotation style. Because it’s heavier on the power damage than the condi damage, you want to work to accommodate that. Sinister and Rabid, though, work on pretty much the same wavelength. So it ends up depending at least partly on how you want to play :P

Edit: In my opinion, you should do just fine in Sinister for most purposes, but if you want to run with dungeon pugs who like to go fast, Rampagers will do better, if they don’t kick you for not bringing Assassins.

Edit 2: One reason for Rampager/Sinister over Rabid is objects take no damage from conditions, and you can’t crit them, so rabid builds do squat to them.

Thank you very much.

When I used to run full rampagers, i usually ran it as GS + scepter/pistol for open world. GS clones are great at stacking bleeds with the higher crit rate and the berzerker does great AoE physical damage and spreads the bleed love around. Then for dungeons I’d swap out GS for Sword + Focus.

@Alpha
Have you run the numbers on what an optimal crit percentage is in a condi build? I always feel like I lose a lot of extra bleeds as soon as I drop below about 60%… There has to be a cut-off where the extra condi damage becomes more valuable than the extra bleeds from crits. With how poorly bleeds scale though, I’m thinking that sweet spot is probably higher than what full sinister offers for most weapons (basically everything but staff clones…). Specifically, I’m mostly thinking of x3 pistol phantasms… but a breakdown for all weapons would be really cool to see.

Mikkel.8427:

When I used to run full rampagers, i usually ran it as GS + scepter/pistol for open world. GS clones are great at stacking bleeds with the higher crit rate and the berzerker does great AoE physical damage and spreads the bleed love around. Then for dungeons I’d swap out GS for Sword + Focus.

@Alpha
Have you run the numbers on what an optimal crit percentage is in a condi build? I always feel like I lose a lot of extra bleeds as soon as I drop below about 60%… There has to be a cut-off where the extra condi damage becomes more valuable than the extra bleeds from crits. With how poorly bleeds scale though, I’m thinking that sweet spot is probably higher than what full sinister offers for most weapons (basically everything but staff clones…). Specifically, I’m mostly thinking of x3 pistol phantasms… but a breakdown for all weapons would be really cool to see.

Bleeds are actually decent scaling, in terms of all conditions. In fact, the higher your condition damage is, the better bleeds fare against burns. At lower condition damage, a burn stack is worth about 3 bleed stacks. But at the highest condition damage levels (3k or so, achievable from might stacking), a burn stack is worth about 2.5 bleed stacks.
Now, the value of that still depends on how many bleed stacks you can get, but it shows that as you scale up condi damage, bleeds become more competitive.

As far as damage, I didn’t check rampager’s in my last numbers run, but the last time I did, Rampagers fell behind rabid in total dps, which is currently falling behind sinister.

So I’d say the sweet spot is probably somewhere between Rampager and Sinister.

Rampager has that extra benefit on reflects though, which should never be underestimated.

I think the real weakness of Rampager relative to Sinister/Rabid though, is that Sharper Images depends entirely on illusion stacks. So if you find your illusions dying too fast, Rampager falls off in condi damage, which is when you need to make up for it in personal dps, which isn’t exactly a straightforward process.
I’ve not played Rampager enough to be confident in understanding how the optimal rotations change from Sinister/Rabid, but I know there’s a few who have (Silverkey was one? Am I remembering that right?).