Guild Wars 2

Every build I read, every guide says that staff is a low DPS defensive weapon, and going MH Sword is best, and for range greatsword is best DPS. I can’t really bring myself to understand that when I look at the math.

Preface: I recognize the problems with condition stacking limits in groups. Small groups haven’t been a problem, and zergs I just tag with chaos storm.

This is my build

In basic exotics you can get when you just hit 80, Winds of Chaos shows 167 direct dmg on the tooltip, with 1053 dmg from bleeds. In practice from looking at the logs it actually does about 230 Direct damage against a random mob in orr, plus the bleed. With Illusionary Elasticity it hits 3 targets, one likely being myself. That means it hits the mob 2x, dealing a total of ~450 direct damage and 2100 bleed damage from 3/4 of a second of casting. So 2500 damage per cast. The game claims that happens every 3/4 of a second, and I’ve read elsewhere that it actually happens every 1.35 seconds. Either way that DPSC (dmg per second casting) is pretty decent, and could get better…. And that is all ignoring the extra bleeds from crits.

Not to mention I get fury or might when it bounces to me, which is almost always up in practice, which procs additional bleeds from crits.

On top of that very decent DPSC from just my own casting, staff clones cast winds of chaos and DO benefit from Illusionary Elasticity. They do no upfront damage, but DO generate bleed stacks both from the normal spell and extras from crits. They cast slower, but 3 clones up adds a significant amount of extra dps and is very easy to maintain. Throw in a iWarlock for good measure and all the conditions cause it to hit really hard – though clones may hit harder.

Against a random non-veteran mob in orr I can regularly get above 2000 dmg per bleed tick, and the target is burning for more than half the time as well (another 600ish dmg)

Compare this greatsword (the tooltip on spatial surge is the total for all 3 hits, not per hit) and I think it is obvious that staff is better.

Compare to MH sword, which requires you to stay in melee range (not always ideal for continued living) and it still seems to come out on top, even if you assume the sword is cleaving 3 enemies at all times.

The biggest issue with it is that the playstyle is so easy that you can almost literally AFK through fights

So despite everyone dumping on the staff, it seems to be the mesmer’s highest DPS weapon?

First thought when looking at your build – ofc the staff has solid damage as a condi weapon over GS or sword in a condi build… that is its main source of dps. In power builds it clearly falls behind.

If this is for dungeon PvE, the problem with condi damage is that it caps, while power damage doesn’t. At 25 stacks of bleeding, you stop gaining damage, same with vuln (and others but those are specific to staff). For burning, any added burning simply stacks duration making it spread over more time. Imho, having one condi on a PvE group is not completely awful – any more than that you will probably lose dps.

As for mesmer condi….you seem to be forgetting that in PvE we use phantasms for the majority of our damage (iWarden and iSwordsman). What does iWarlock bring to your damage to make it equal the dps iWarden and iSword have in power builds? Sword has the highest power dps for a 1h weapon, and iWarden/iSword are our best phants, therefore s/f and s/s are used.

If this is for general PvE, do what you want…its not hurting anyone.

It has been known and recognized for quite some time now that a staff condition build is an extremely strong build for soloing in dungeons. Nobody is disputing this.

The problems come when you consider literally any other situation. If you’re in a party for dungeons, condition stacking will remove the vast majority of your dps. If you’re in open world PvE, mobs have so little health that a zerker build can delete them before you’ve even really started stacking conditions. Since it takes a while to actually ramp up your damage to the full potential, it means that any mob with less than the amount of health it takes to live that long is better killed with a zerker build.