Guild Wars 2

So just as the title says i am having a hard time picking either condition , Staff/Sc+F with massive bleeds and confusion, or Power S+S/f with high precision and weak as hell bleeds. what is all of your oppinions? I love playing with conditions and post patch ramp up time is now minimal but i feel like im missing something. I mainly fight world bosses, run around SW, and every now and again sneak a fractal or two into my week. and is their a build that would mash Staff/S+F that would be amazing

Well the efficiency of sword-sword/focus is above any condition builds at the moment. hybrid (rampager) sword-pistol/focus is quite decent thanks to the bleeds from sharper image and duelist’s discipline (when they will be fixed). Then hybrid (rampager) scepter-pistol/focus is not bad but still a bit under because of the phantasm overwrite of the scepter AA and the fact that confusion and torment are not that great in PvE.
The staff phantasm can hit hard if you keep some power, but the AA is not that strong. Staff is excellent for solo PvE in rabid gear (very defensive while decent condition stacking).

Wouldn’t warden stack much bleed aswell. Sure not as much as duellist, but hey utility + cleave.

Overall you can say: elitism is power, fun is what you prefer. You can go conditions, it is viable, pretty ok in open world, and just ok in dungeons / fotm. I prefer power because I am rather an elitist and all condi weapons can be played as power weapons aswell, but not vice versa.

Well pistol and focus are power weapons but we are mentioning using them as condition weapons

Warden stacks bleed indeed which is why I always mention it as second weapon in condi builds (+ of course projectile absorption/reflection). But less than duelist because less proc/s and no duelist’s discipline (assuming it is fixed at some point). As a matter of fact, warden in rampager is superior to warden in assassin. Rampager is loosing everything in the AA, which is sad. If scepter did not overwrite phantasm or had a better AA, it would make things quite different….

The biggest problem with Warden is positioning:
It has a hard time (still) staying on target for its second round of attacks.
It doesn’t move while it attacks, so it’s useless for mobile enemies.
It’s melee, so it has to be up close and personal with a target that can probably squish it like a bug.

So summary, It stacks more bleeds on average if you can get it on target, but it’s not as survivable, harder to get the full attacks to hit, and is unlikely to get more than one volley off.

That makes it great shatter fodder against stationary targets though, since if you’re shattering you wouldn’t be expecting a second volley anyway.

I just made an interesting calculation. I already computed the damage in a 30s encounter with the usual assassin gear and the hybrid (sword-pistol/focus) rampager build. Now I added also the hybrid scepter-pistol build. I write only pistol because in the rotation, I used both duelist but no warden since it would be overwritten (so I assume you don’t want reflects and anyway I didn’t spec inspiration).
For the damage of the scepter to reach the damage of the sword hybrid, you would need an attack rate of 1 attack/s. Assuming 1 attack every 3s, you loose about 600 DPS compared to the sword hybrid. As I already said, the assassin has the same DPS as the sword hybrid but lower ramp time.
I thought it was interesting as it gives an estimate of how fast would enemy need to attack to be worth it. Just as a note, the confusion DPS is very low, about 700 with 1 attack every 3s. The torment DPS is about 400… One good note is that I didn’t include scepter 2 which would increase the DPS if timed properly.

One note: with this scepter hybrid, time warp is not very much our friend. On the other hand, the build only really depend on illusion and dueling, which gives a bit more freedom in the other choices.

Neap.5402:

So just as the title says i am having a hard time picking either condition , Staff/Sc+F with massive bleeds and confusion, or Power S+S/f with high precision and weak as hell bleeds. what is all of your oppinions? I love playing with conditions and post patch ramp up time is now minimal but i feel like im missing something. I mainly fight world bosses, run around SW, and every now and again sneak a fractal or two into my week. and is their a build that would mash Staff/S+F that would be amazing

Power / crit all the way. You can do condi for novelty but it currently sucks. Inturrapt condi builds are worthless due to boss immunities to inturrapts and the otehr ones tag too slow. Most targets in PvE will be long dead before you can even get full stacks up.

Also, Confusion and torrent both do reduced damage in PvE because PvE targets are too stationary and do not use abilities enough for them do do enough of the full damage.

If you go condi PvE, you will literally be missing a zero at the end of your numbers as compared to a condi engi, an x10 multiplier. It is that bad.

^ Still doesn’t know what he’s talking about.