Guild Wars 2

Having a hard time deciding on gear for my 80 mesmer for PVE.

Power/prec/crit seems to go more with swords and greatswords, right? but condition damage is very powerful for staffs and bleed builds… arrgg this is a hard decision.

from what i have read and every one i have spoken to – Condition is pretty useless – what weapons do you use? I use Conditions more as being a pain rather then relying on them for damage

I’ll be swapping Staff/Sword+Focus and GS+Sword/Focus I think. But I just found a helpful thread here too: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Is-the-Rampager-s-set-worth-it

I prefer the Staff and Sword/Pistol combo myself

Thinking of going with Knight’s set for some survivability too… just is a big decision since I’m ready to drop 15g on level 80 gear.

But is it worth speccing sharper images without any condition damage?

Between those two, Precision/Power/Condition Damage.

The decision is purely about DPS. The 2nd set gives you more precision, which is more important, and the Condition damage you get out damages the crit damage you get with just about every build you can use, most notably warden/duelist bleed builds.

Note that condition damage will not help you tag mobs in the crappy Dynamic Events where everything dies in 1 second though. ANet said they were working on that.

Even without condition damage Sharper images are still worth it, your “Base” ticks with no condition damage is around 45. Specced into condition damage that will more than double.

Alright thanks, so +crit% doesn’t sound so appealing now. the question remains is whether i want to sacrifice power or crit in order to squeeze in some surviability. (or is 25 inspiration good enough?)

i would choose cond dmg, but i haven’t tested so i can’t say, but i was thinking about a toughness/prec/cond build, but again, yet to test

Look man, I don’t really know. I’m using all rampagers (power/precision/condition damage) and I’m specced 10/30/0/0/30 (So all precision and condition damage) and my survivability seems fine. The only time I die it’s usually my fault. I don’t know if my gear is optimal, or even good, but it’s what I got and money is too annoying to come by to have me get another set. All I know is that power/precision/condition damage works pretty well, though I think if you truly want to compensate that I would do it via traits. 300 toughness and vit is roughly as much as you would get from more survivable gear. Though, I just cant live at all without illusory persona. It’s too good being able to tag mobs instantly, get 1s of godmode whenever I want no on global cooldown, etc. Illusory persona is something I can’t live without, so I figured instead of having my only condition damage be +300 from traits I would also get it on my pieces of gear. I don’t know if this is awful or not or even if it works (I have only done Arah, CoF and a few other explorables) but that’s my input.