Guild Wars 2

What do you guys run for condition (shatter)? I’m crafting ascended gear and not sure what to use.

Rabid has the advantage of toughness, which syncs better with healing and improves clone survivability. Precision is supposedly more useful than power.

Carrion gives shatters that extra damage boosts and will probably sync well with Chronomancer wells. Vitality defends against incoming condition damage.

Settlers is for full cancer set, but with PU getting a nerf I don’t see mesmer tanks getting any stronger with HoT.

If Duelling – Rabid for sharper images.

If no Duelling – Carrion

Once Chrono 25% runspeed is available, then Settlers + Undead runes + Chaotic Transference will be nice. Or Rabid + Undead if taking Duelling. And Carrion + Scavenging is another nice option.

The only reason I stack toughness currently is Chaotic Transference.

Bear in mind, Rabid is full glass vs incoming conditions.

Yeah, i just can’t see myself running anything other than dueling most of the time. The blindness confusion stacks and (of course) deceptive dodging is just so critical to my success. maybe chronomancer will change that?

I typically use Rampager in PvP condi shatter. Yeah, it’s glassier, but condi Mesmer still does a ton of Power damage that we can’t afford to give up. And, as Curunen said, crit is super important to maintain Bleed pressure via Sharper Images.

I’ve been running Rabid weapons and armor with Rampager’s trinkets for a touch more precision. Currently I’m using Aristrocracy runes since they came with the CM Rabid armor, but these will probably get swapped to Undead.

I spent a ton of time lately watching Xerrex who is a pvp addict. Serious, sometimes I’ll get up at 8am and he’ll stream till 3 in the morning.

Anyways he pointed out that Rabid is better for a PU sword,torch,scepter, pistol type build where you’re relying on clones to proc bleeds.

Carrion is superior for condi shatter. I switched a few weeks ago and yeah, i think he’s right.

So in my opinion and Xerrex’s Carrion>Rabid for shatter. Rabid for phantasm/clone type builds.

I have no idea about sinister.

So the options are more or less as follows: rabid, carrion, dire, sinister, settlers.

Sinister

Sinister is the condie version of zerker gear. It’s pure glass cannon, not a single defensive stat to be seen. This is not recommended for PvP or WvW. Condie, even condie shatter, is an attrition playstyle to some extent. Pure glass cannon is going to have you eating dirt regularly.

Settlers

Settlers is…also not recommended. It doesn’t have precision, and this means you lose a lot of both offense and defense. Precision matters for illusion crits (producing sustained bleed pressure). Additionally, crits produce vigor for you. This means more dodges, and more dodges in a shatter build is both offense from clones and defense from avoidance. Losing precision means you lose a lot.

Settlers also has healing power, but Mesmer doesn’t really scale the best with healing power. Our heals generally have high base values and fairly low scaling. Healing power is generally regarded as unnecessary unless you really want to focus on that sustain.

Dire

Dire is the standard full defense set. Condition damage, toughness, vitality; pretty straightforward. Your offense suffers because of the lack of precision just as in settlers, but the enormous health pool makes you very difficult to kill. This is an ok choice, but I find that a stronger offense is a better defense than a big health pool; taking someone out of a fight is the biggest damage reduction of all.

Carrion

Carrion is an interesting set. You’re actually quite squishy in it because it has no toughness, giving you an effective mitigation equal to zerker gear. It has vitality though, which theoretically gives mitigation against conditions. Unfortunately, condition pressure is so insanely potent these days that the only effective mitigation is from removals, not raw health.

Carrion also lacks precision, which means you’re losing all of the benefits of critting. It does have power, boosting the raw damage of your shatters, but this is ultimately a really small difference. Power damage without crits is really wimpy. Back in my immortal build I ran with close to 3000 power but no crit. My mind wracks did practically nothing, hence why I relied on retaliation for my damage instead. Ultimately, your power damage in rabid is going to be very similar to your damage in carrion, purely because rabid allows you to crit.

Ultimately, I feel that carrion is essentially inferior both defensively and offensively to rabid.

Rabid

Rabid is, in my opinion, the best choice for almost every situation. It has the precision for crit support and toughness to boost your damage mitigation. The only thing it lacks is health. In PvP, this is pretty much just something you have to work with. In WvW, I’ll use the ascended dire/rabid stat mix on my trinkets to get about 20k hp, which is comfortable for me.

You’ll also need condition removal (no matter what you run). I use the condie removal mantra with traited torch, and that’s enough removal for any situation as long as you don’t go poking signet necros too much.