Mesmer and condition damage
Staff’s a really good one. Your shatters do a pretty kitten good job with confusion too. Scepter does an okay job. Better than that is to take a sword/GS and go with “Condition on crit” traits/sigils though. Those’ll usually get a lot of bleeds down quite quickly. There’s a good deal of them for phantasms/clones too, so that they apply bleeds/confusion on crit or combo field too.
would u say berserkers is better or rampager?
Scepter does an okay job. Better than that is to take a sword/GS and go with “Condition on crit” traits/sigils though. Those’ll usually get a lot of bleeds down quite quickly.
I’m confused, wouldn’t the scepter crit just as often as sword/gs to apply the conditions? It wouldn’t have as high direct damage, but you don’t have the power for that anyway and scepter provides the confusing images skill. iirc sword & gs have no skills that directly cause damaging conditions.
(edited by Shinigami.5932)
The build is 0/20(II and X)/0/20(V [or IV if you have a problem with conditions on yourself] and VII)/30(V, VII, X) for dungeons. The weapons are Staff and Scepter/Pistol with the utility skills Mirror Images, Decoy or Feedback for ranged enemies, and Signet of Illusions. Time Warp is your elite. When you start a fight, throw down iDuelist and Mirror Images. After they unload, use Cry of Frustration and Confusing Images for 11 stacks of confusion that should do well over 2000 damage. Switch to staff, cast Warlock and Retreat along with a dodge for an extra clone. Throw down a Chaos Storm and spam 1. The target should get tons of bleeding and anyone standing near it should get some boons. When Mirror Images is almost back up, switch and repeat. Then, all you have to do is give quickness to your melee teammates every once in a while.
Scepter does an okay job. Better than that is to take a sword/GS and go with “Condition on crit” traits/sigils though. Those’ll usually get a lot of bleeds down quite quickly.
I’m confused, wouldn’t the scepter crit just as often as sword/gs to apply the conditions? It wouldn’t have as high direct damage, but you don’t have the power for that anyway and scepter provides the confusing images skill. iirc sword & gs have no skills that directly cause damaging conditions.
No, actually, the animation and attack rate of the scepter is just.. Slow. Like the staff, in all honesty. While “Crit damage” will be about the same because of the way crits scale depending on how fast you attack, the amount of bleed stacks you get from crits will be lower since the GS can get up to 3 stacks per attack while the scepter can only do one. (If you’ve never used GS, it attacks 3 times with ever auto attack animation, all with the chance to crit.) The sword’s “attack speed” is good for this too.
It’s hard to say between staff and GS.
Staff clones can inflict burn,bleed or vulnerbility and if the clones auto attack crits, it’s 1 more bleed if you have the sharper images trait. The rest of the staff skills are more defensive with the exception of iWarlock. Chaos storm can be dropped at an enemy’s feet, but it’s probably better dropping it on your feet as a defensive skill.
On the other hand, if you’re using GS, you need to dodge (traited) to create clones, use skill#2 (which places the clone at the enemy, not so useful), or use utility skills to summon the clones to attack. And to cause bleed, you MUST have sharper images so that each crit will put in 1 stack of bleed. You will need to have Phantasmal Fury and lots of precision to proc the crits. GS other skills are also more offensive based, with the exception of #5.
This is comparing bleeds, not cond damage from confusion.
Confusion is not very useful on mobs because they don’t always spam skills. This makes confusion very unreliable on mobs. This debuff is probably much better if you’re pvping because people are constantly using and spamming skills.
Confusion is not very useful on mobs because they don’t always spam skills. This makes confusion very unreliable on mobs. This debuff is probably much better if you’re pvping because people are constantly using and spamming skills.
I couldn’t disagree more. Bosses in dungeons have Defiance, so CCs don’t interrupt as often. It’s quite easy to predict a swing and even putting it on randomly might end up with a high burst of damage if you stack it correctly. Trust me, after years playing Monster Hunter, learning tells gets easier. Even if the monster doesn’t look at you funny, it’s better to apply confusion rather than not just in case. Clones and illusions are easy to replace. With bleeding and confusion, you’ll be out damaging many other condition builds as a Mesmer.
I agree with you on looking at the boss attack pattern or even randomly stacking the confusion. But sometimes it just feels disappointing when you’ve managed to stack 10 stacks of confusion and the boss doesn’t do anything. I’m not saying that it’s bad to stack confusion, all I meant is that it’s just unreliable if you intend to use it as a main source of damage.
Besides, as you have mentioned, it doesn’t take alot of effort to re-clone.
I would say Trident.
The Clones created by #3 (and from Mirror Image) stack absurd amounts of Confusion very very quickly.
If I lure enemies into the waters in the middle of the zone, I can easily kill them just by completely overloading them with Confusion, then they blow themselves up in 3-5 seconds.