Guild Wars 2

I kind of expected Power PU to out-damage Condi PU. Based on playing both though, Condi PU seems to do more damage. Does that make sense?

Power PU
GS & Sw/T
Illusions/Dueling/Chaos
Zerker

Condi PU
Staff & Sc/T
Illusions/Dueling/Chaos
Rabid

Edit:
For Power PU, I actually started with Dom/Duel/Chaos. It performed so poorly, I switched to Ill/Duel/Chaos (since it worked so well for Condi PU).

garland.5193:

I kind of expected Power PU to out-damage Condi PU. Based on playing both though, Condi PU seems to do more damage. Does that make sense?

…what

How on earth are you managing to convince yourself that a condie build does more damage? I’m honestly really curious.

Edit: part of the problem is that you’re taking illusions instead of domination.

Fay.2357:

…what

How on earth are you managing to convince yourself that a condie build does more damage? I’m honestly really curious.

Edit: part of the problem is that you’re taking illusions instead of domination.

I agree it sounds crazy. I was roaming WvW on both today. Condi just seemed to do so much more damage, and I’ve even got more Ascended pieces for the Power build.

garland.5193:

Fay.2357:

…what

How on earth are you managing to convince yourself that a condie build does more damage? I’m honestly really curious.

Edit: part of the problem is that you’re taking illusions instead of domination.

I agree it sounds crazy. I was roaming WvW on both today. Condi just seemed to do so much more damage, and I’ve even got more Ascended pieces for the Power build.

Specifically, what do you mean by ‘Condie just seemed to do so much more damage’. Are we talking burst damage, camp clearing, dueling, what?

To be fair, cry of frustration hits way harder in condi build than mind wrack in zerker even if the enemy is not spamming skills all the time.

Silverkey.2078:

To be fair, cry of frustration hits way harder in condi build than mind wrack in zerker even if the enemy is not spamming skills all the time.

Nothing about that is even remotely true.

CoF, 4 clones, will apply 4 torment and 8 confusion. With 2000 condition damage:

• 4 torment will do 850 damage per second to a moving target
• 8 confusion will tick for 624, and activations of skills will hit for 1368

Assuming 4 skill activations and 4 seconds of continual movement, the total damage will be a little over 11k.

Mind wrack, 4 clones, full glassy build in a burst activating mental torment will easily hit 4k per clone, totaling 16k damage instantly.

I do not know how you get that or maybe I’m completely missing how mind wrack works. MW damage is not linear. So the first clone + IP does high damage, but 3+IP is barely better. On the other hand, CoF is linear and hits up to 12 confusion (4 + 4 from minor +4 from blind) and 4 torment which is painful.

Fay is right and Garland may right too

is all in your gamestyle and how you calculate your dmg output versus time of fight

if you know how to time your shatter in power build at the right moment than Power out shine any condi builds by far

but if you miss or get blocked, blind, evades than with condi which is DoT can do better is some rare cases

if you think condi does more dmg than you are probably better player with condi buils than power build

although i can see some hybrid build which on theory can do more dmg than power and condi build . the difference is with burst dmg

Silverkey.2078:

I do not know how you get that or maybe I’m completely missing how mind wrack works. MW damage is not linear. So the first clone + IP does high damage, but 3+IP is barely better. On the other hand, CoF is linear and hits up to 12 confusion (4 + 4 from minor +4 from blind) and 4 torment which is painful.

its only 1 from blind and not 4 so total from 3 clones +1 ip is 9 stacks

Silverkey.2078:

I do not know how you get that or maybe I’m completely missing how mind wrack works. MW damage is not linear. So the first clone + IP does high damage, but 3+IP is barely better. On the other hand, CoF is linear and hits up to 12 confusion (4 + 4 from minor +4 from blind) and 4 torment which is painful.

After a bit of testing, I can say that my numbers are slightly on the high side, but still right. It’s not difficult to get 3.5k damage x4 from mind wrack that’s properly set up, not to mention the additional 5k-7k instant burst you’ll get from mirror blade. Just the mind wrack alone there will do 14k damage, more than that CoF burst. Additionally, mind wrack is on a lower cooldown, and happens instantly, while CoF is subject to condition removals.

Ok, sorry for my mistake. I will be honest, I haven’t played power-shatter very much. I used to (try to) play lockdown and now I play condi shatter. So I haven’t experienced the actual damage of MW, I was basing my comment on calculations but wiki is not very clear on how to compute MW damage. I am trying to find the right numbers in the game directly.

My observations were based mostly on camp clearing (just started PU yesterday, so I haven’t done that many 1v1’s yet).

I started with Condi PU, and I was shocked at how fast it cleared camps. Other than a full glass Ele, I’ve never had a build that could do it as fast. If an enemy player arrived and tried to intervene, I wasn’t terribly concerned.

Power PU was as bad as Condi PU was good. I had to use 2-3 heals just get thru a camp. If an enemy arrived, I was in no condition to fight, so I had to stealth and flee. I actually started with Dom/Duel/Chaos, but after the initial bad results, I tried Ill/Duel/Chaos (since that worked so well for Condi PU).

messiah.1908:

…
but if you miss or get blocked, blind, evades than with condi which is DoT can do better is some rare cases
…

Blinds, you say? The scouts at supply camps can throw out a lot of blinds. That might be part of the problem.

Ok, first, thanks Fay for your help about MW’s damage. So from your values, one would expect a full MW to hit about 8k without modifiers, so 13k with 14 vuln + anguish. Assuming your values for condition damage and 4s confusion, 6s torment, 1 attack/s, we get 12.5k. Since we’re unlikely to use a GS, we won’t build up vuln as much, so this is close to the highest we’ll get.

From this, we see that CoF is as powerful, but can get more if the enemy is a spammer (I think in general 1 attack/s is in the low range) and much less if the enemy has condi cleanse. If the enemy has some toughness (which is not so rare in WvW), MW will get less potent.

Also, the 4 shatters do some decent damage in condi build while MW is the only one in power build. On the other hand, power builds have more source of damage than just shatters.

I think in the case of garland, the key is that guards don’t have condi removal, have a rather high armor (but attack less), and most importantly, have too much HP to be bursted down by one MW. Power shatter mesmer becomes less efficient after the first shatter while condi can hold a bit better in the long run.

So garland: your experience may be very different against actual players.

As someone who does a ton of camp clearing, I find there can be a lot variability between any two attempts with the same gear.

Especially if you aren’t stacking the mobs in a really tight spot, you can just have a lot of different situations.

I would bet that, assuming equal skill, a power build would clear a camp faster. A condi build (using Dire gear) would be more forgiving which is why I tend to use it. I think it’s cool you’re testing both and finding what works best for you.

In all forms of PvP, the power PU and condi PU variants seem to be roughly comparable. Some will come up on top of the others depending on situation and your opponents build. For example if you’re running condi and going against pure zerker with little or zero defensive traits and utilities.

In PvE however, condi mesmer is the worst of the worst professions and builds you can play right now. You can play the inturrapt variant for some bursts, but its useless on most bosses that are immune to your inturrapt burst, you can play a steady condi shatter, but you will do literally only a fraction of the damage that I do on my condi engi or ele or guard. And by fraction, I mean an actual small fraction. You will be straight out amazed at how much you are missing when you switch to the other professions, even necros do almost twice what we do and they’re in a pretty bad shape.

Going back to PvP. As a condi mesmer I eat power / crit mesmers for breakfast, unless I seriously mess up, or I’m typing, or semi AFK or something like that.

Overall, if I had to go for a flexible build for whole game, I would go with power / crit, but for PvP only, condi rules.

I will eventually have both, once I have full ascended condi and power set, but right now its too much of a pain to switch gear sets between PvE and WvW.

As soon as you enter more organized PvP, I think condition are not as good as you say. There is too much AOE cleanse. In lower tier, conditions are definitely worth using.

As for PvE condi mesmer, I would say that there are condi or hybrid builds which get close zerker mostly thanks to the bleeding of pistol. But that is still theoretical since duelist’ discipline is buggy, and also, you should not try it on non-crittable boss (like in Twilight arbor which I played in hybrid after the update and I was like "something’s weird, he has no bleed on him while he should have 50 with my duelist… o.O " before I understood my mistake)

I’ll have to see if can get the hang of camp clearing on Power PU. Actual PvP may be my goal, but I’ll be doing more camp clearing than actual PvP (that’s just how roaming goes).

Silverkey.2078:

As soon as you enter more organized PvP, I think condition are not as good as you say. There is too much AOE cleanse. In lower tier, conditions are definitely worth using.

this is a huge assumption of doing 4v4 against 2 eles/ guard
but if you go far and draw 1 enemy to you than condi is viable but if 2 ele come to you just disengage same with power builds
so it all depends on rotation/ composition. but as for now the powerzerk rules becuase of the huge dmg.
also with condi build you can support your team while doing nice 1k dps like with blind, stability, boon share etc..