Guild Wars 2

Let’s make an additional assumption as an extension of #1 above:
1a. Illusion generation is not a factor. Obviously it is, but you can get it down pretty well with Deceptive Evasion. We can come back to it later if we need to.

Traited cooldown for Mind Wrack is 10.2s, CoF 21.25, Diversion 12.75, Distortion 16.15.
Duration for torment is 12s, Confusion is 6s, by your numbers.
If you can keep all four shatters on cooldown, never shattering at less than 3 illusions:
Mind wrack: 4.67 stacks of torment up with 100% uptime, 4 stacks of confusion with 58.8% uptime.
CoF: 4 torment with 56.5% uptime, 8 confusion with 28.2% uptime
Diversion: 4 torment with 94.1% uptime, 4 confusion with 47.1% uptime
Distortion: 4 torment with 74.3% uptime, 4 confusion with 37.2% uptime

Normalizing these numbers,
Average torment stacks per second: 13.67
Average confusion stacks per second: 7.98

At the per-tick damage numbers I quoted above, average per-second damage is
No triggers: 1995.9
Torment but no confusion triggers: 3381.3
Confusion but not torment triggers: 2443.4
Confusion and torment triggers: 3838.8

So an always-moving enemy that makes no attacks will be close but not quite to our bleed numbers.
It’s not until you add some skill usages on an enemy that moves a lot (or an enemy that moves a little but attacks like a thief) that you pass up the bleeds respectably.

How many more bleeds would we need to catch up to full triggers?
3828.8-3400 = 428.8. 428.8/136 = 3.2 stacks of bleed. So 28.2 stacks of bleed is evenly matched to the shatter build with a constantly-moving enemy that makes 2 attacks every 6 seconds.
What if the enemy makes more attacks than that? Well, we can calculate how many stacks of bleeds we’d need to make up for one extra attack every 6 seconds.
At 168.25 damage per attack, one extra attack every 6 seconds gives 28.04 extra damage per second on average per stack. With average stacks at 7.98, that’s 1342.6 extra damage per extra attack in 6 seconds. That means you need 9.87 stacks of bleed to make up for it.
So if there’s anywhere for the confusion/torment build to gain the most ground, it’s here. Even a single extra attack in 6 seconds is almost as much extra dps as the entire torment moving-penalty (3828-2443=1385).

So against enemies that use a skill 4 or more times per 6 seconds, shatter wins.
Against enemies that attack 3 or more times per 6 seconds, and move a fair bit, shatter wins. Against anything else, bleed wins.
Are there other factors that can change our math?

^ Your calculations cant compare to 100% of bleeds because -
while the 100% bleeds your calculating is with everything included, your auto attacks, clone and phantasm attacks included. you probably apply 3-5 stacks of burning at max while sitting in staff, cause there’s no way you can play bleeds in scepter, correct me if i’m wrong here.
what your calculating is only the shatters damage without any application of exterior skills, namely confusing images, lets not add illusionary counter. but there’s still scepter auto attack granting you 4-5 stacks of torment, not to mention the bleeds that your illusion crits.
Your calculations above are for example – 20 seconds of bleed build all skill usage vs 20 seconds of shatter skills only*** (this is only an example, but i hope you get where i’m coming from)

First are our assumptions.
Loosening assumption 1 to assumption 1a still leaves us wondering if you can keep up the kind of illusion generation needed for constant shattering. If this is not true, the shatter build loses even more average dps. I’ll say this could be reasonable, though. I really don’t know, I don’t use f3/f4 offensively that much. I know I can keep f1/f2 on cooldown if I want to, using Deceptive Evasion for clone generation

We already tackled Assumption 2 by considering how much faster an enemy would need to attack.

Weapon skill rotations is too complicated, imo. At the point you start to account for that, I think you’d need to start doing real-kill comparison trials, as things start to get really complicated really fast. I think the basic assumption is theoretically sound, however, given that both builds appear to be using the same weaponry. There is some consideration to be given to the shatter build’s focus on confusion/torment durations over bleeds, as they’ll get more mileage out of the scepter weapon skills.

Stacking bleeds up to 25 or higher? You’ve already admitted you think the norm is about 30, so we’re agreed that my estimate of 25 was conservative.

^ Lets not change the assumptions now for keeping it strictly within bounds of your calculations

Is there anything else?
Yes, actually.

Ryouzanpaku.1273:

I have not played my mesmer for a long time.
Now I am slowly hoarding Damask cloth so I will be in 2 weeks able to craft set of cloth ascended armor. Question is – what stats?
Month ago it would be quite easy – Zerker all the way… but now I am intrigued to go condi torment/confusion mesmer… it seems to have lot of synergies in trait lines/signets?

I have zerker warrior and would like to try something different but also do not want to waste resources on something sub-par…. another intriguing on condition build is full set of ascended jewelery I have got as side product of LS….

Maybe someone has experience with these builds? I do mostly silwerwastes and EoM lately… but also open word and occasional daily fractal.

Condi mes is absolutely awesome in PvP, all forms of it in WvW and sPVP. However, be warned, as awesome as it is in PvP, it is completely opposite in PvE. It is by far, the worst you can do of any build on any profession in the game as far as PvE DPS goes. You will be outdone by heaps even by necros, which is pretty bad.

My recommendation to you is go do some SPVP to get the hang of it a bit before moving elsewhere in the game and start off with carrion, not rabid amulet. My personal favorite is PU / condi shatter, scepter/torch and staff.

After you get the basics of build functionality, get a cheap exotic set, stuff you can get from temples for karma or WvW badges or cheapy crafted etc. Go with crafted if you like using expensive runes so you can easily break them down and get your runes back.

After you find your comfort build that you like to stay with, thats when you go with ascended.

FYI, if you run a condi with PU and you dont use torch, you are denying yourself a HUGE chunk of dmg, stealth, survivability and overall utility that the other off hands cant compare with.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

Won’t the shatter build still get some conditions from the illusions it creates?
Yes!
Not as much as you might think but it’s still there.
Shattering constantly is pretty hard, so I’m going to go on a limb and suggest that conditions from clones will be pretty low, based on how they apply conditions. So let’s just consider phantasms for the moment, specifically the iDuelist.

Since you get a volley off the iDuelist before you shatter it, you’ll get some bleeds every time you summon one. Now, we won’t be able to leave it up for a second volley (and you don’t want us to anyway), so on a 20second cooldown you get 1 volley every 20 seconds.
Average bleed stacks per volley is 5, at 5 seconds each. That goes up from our generic condition duration, but since we aren’t specced for bleeds, we don’t get as much out of it as the bleed build does. That’s okay, it’ll still be something like 7 seconds or so.
So that’s 5 stacks at 7 seconds per 20 seconds, which is 5 stacks with 35% uptime, which averages to 1.75 stacks per second.
That’s not a lot, but it’s something, and we need to consider it. We can do so by saying that we need to add 1.75 to our 29.2 stack estimate on the bleed build, leaving us at needing 31 stacks of bleeds consistently to match the shatter build on a constantly moving enemy that attacks twice per 6 seconds, and probably unable to match on an enemy that is much faster than that.

Anything left?
Sort of.
If I can keep 30 stacks of bleeds up with staff clones, or 2 clones and an iDuelist, I can pop Cry of Frustration and be back up to full illusions at least as often as iDuelist comes off cooldown, which is more often than Cry of Frustration comes off cooldown.
So I can keep Cry of Frustration on cooldown, and still have nearly 100% illusion uptime. This is, in fact, how I generally play when I’m trying to do sustain damage.
That gives me the same 8 stacks of confusion as the shatter build for CoF, on the same cooldown, but with lower duration. For my build, it’s at about 5s.
That’s 23.5% uptime on 8 stacks, which averages to 1.88 stacks of confusion sustained.
At no triggers that’s less than 2 stacks of bleed, but at higher triggers that’s more. At our assumed 2 attacks per 6 s it’s about 1 for 1 (1.83 stacks of bleed), so that brings us back down to our previous 29.2-30 stacks…which as you’ve already admitted is achievable.

We could pick up some torment on that CoF too, if we gave up Phantasmal Haste for Maim the Disillusioned, but…I’m dubious whether that would give any dps increase. You’d be trading iDuelist bleed stacks for Torment stacks, and I don’t like that tradeoff.

Lastly, I think it’s certainly possible to be using Mind Wrack on top of CoF with the bleed build while still keeping illusions up, but you’d be losing iDuelists so often that you might as well go shatter at that point. More likely, you’d get Mind Wrack as an occasional burst option, right after you shatter a CoF but before you get a duelist up, if you can get clones up fast enough.

^ For the first part, your underestimating the illusion spawn rate in scepter.
I’m not gonna count the interrupts reducing pistol skills as well and go with your numbers.
For the most part u’ll end up with atleast 69% bleed duration due to chaotic persistence + signet of midnight + food in a shatterbuild. that’s 8 seconds each atleast.
You’v only calculated bleed stacks from iduelist, and no extra stacks from other illusions at all.
Regarding my gameplay, for the most part.. i’m good at interrupting targets, yes even dungeon bosses.. you need to be quick about it at the right times.with chaos storm and other interrupts, you break the present defiance stacks very quickly. i did upload a video of my dungeon run in a pug the other day, and you can notice the interrupts even during a boss fight.
If you just stand and attack a boss, in a full dps sinister condition build, you can keep up 13 stacks of torment, the bleeds as you mentioned and 12 stacks of confusion.. without interrupts** on a single target, now lets come to the damage you get with confusing images spam off cd and illusionary counter torment stacks and ineptitude.

And most importantly, your illusions and phantasms dont stay alive for the most part in pve, silverwastes etc.. but since we’r talking about a hypothetical situation.. just for the numbers :-)

Tongku.5326:

Condi mes is absolutely awesome in PvP, all forms of it in WvW and sPVP. However, be warned, as awesome as it is in PvP, it is completely opposite in PvE. It is by far, the worst you can do of any build on any profession in the game as far as PvE DPS goes. You will be outdone by heaps even by necros, which is pretty bad.

My recommendation to you is go do some SPVP to get the hang of it a bit before moving elsewhere in the game and start off with carrion, not rabid amulet. My personal favorite is PU / condi shatter, scepter/torch and staff.

After you get the basics of build functionality, get a cheap exotic set, stuff you can get from temples for karma or WvW badges or cheapy crafted etc. Go with crafted if you like using expensive runes so you can easily break them down and get your runes back.

After you find your comfort build that you like to stay with, thats when you go with ascended.

FYI, if you run a condi with PU and you dont use torch, you are denying yourself a HUGE chunk of dmg, stealth, survivability and overall utility that the other off hands cant compare with.

^ Doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Silverkey.2078:

Which is why it is harder to estimate shatter sustained DPS than the usual PvE rotation 11111111111111111….

Record yourself while in a dungeon. Review the video and record all actions/skills into a spreadsheet with a timestamp the action happened. Theorycraft dmg estimates for every offensive action. There ya go, now any “playstyle” can be estimated/min-maxed. Not that hard after you do it a few times

@Telekinesis:

Things I didn’t calculate for shatter build:
-Torment and confusion from scepter 1/2/3
-Bleeds via sharper images from clones
-Conditions from interrupts
-Ineptitude procs
-Sigil condition procs (if any)
-Conditions from Chaos Storm (if used)
-Torment via scepter clones
Questions: Do you take Mistrust over Deceptive Evasion? If so, how do you get clones up fast enough to keep your stacks of confusion/torment up? If not, how are you getting conditions on interrupt?
Do you have a Sigil that procs conditions on crits?

Things I didn’t calculate for the bleed mesmer:
-Torment and confusion for scepter 1/2/3
-Burning from staff clones
-Ineptitude procs
-Conditions from Chaos Storm

Bleedsmer loses somewhat on scepter attacks due to slightly lower confusion duration, and significantly (?) lower duration on torment.
Shattersmer clones don’t live very long, so they won’t be getting all that many Sharper images procs, and the shattersmer bleeds are lower duration. Still, it’s there, and that makes up some ground.
Bleedsmer picks up damage from burning stacks, but you don’t really get all that many stacks, especially since you’re flipping over to scepter periodically to get more iDuelists up, and drop Torment/Confusion stacks. In fact, doing some math really quick, I would only expect 3 staff clones + myself to sustain only 2.12 or so stacks of burning.
At this condition damage, that’s equal to about 6.64 stacks of bleed in damage per tick. It’s decent, but not overwhelming.
Ineptitude procs are pretty close, but the shattersmer is slightly ahead again because of confusion duration.
How long are your clones up on average before you shatter them? That is, how many torment procs do you think they’ll actually give you?

Where’s the wiggle room?
1. All our assumptions about shatter timing so far favored the Shattersmer. The shattersmer can not, in fact, keep all his shatters on cooldown without losing dps from small-clone shatters, I don’t think. These gains are partially offset by torment and bleeds from clones, but the timing is too complex to calculate. We’d need to test it.
2. The Bleedsmer needs to keep his illusions up. As you noted, it’s not actually that easy a lot of the time. I can keep 90-100% uptime on most Silverwastes enemies, depending on the situation. That took a lot of practice, by the way…the best way to lose a clone is by letting it get in the way of a Vile Thrasher. Proper geometry helped a lot. I stopped trying to use scepter clones on Vile thrashers, btw, since they pop right next to the target and get instagibbed by the torment trail. Keeping up clones is a lot easier, thanks to Deceptive Evasions and Phase Retreat, but losing iDuelists to clones is a net dps loss, I think.
3. How many attacks? As we saw, confusion gains or loses ground heavily depending on how many attacks your enemy makes.
4. How much movement? Stationary targets lose torment dps, but as we saw, Confusion variance outweighs torment variance. A slow-acting, stationary boss is just gonna be harder for the shatter build to keep up with. Manglers and Thrashers, I’m looking at you. The flip side is fast-attacking, highly mobile targets.
5. Both builds can apply torment and confusion via weapon skills, but the shattersmer has the advantage in duration.
6. Both builds apply bleeds, but we calculated the bleedsmer’s bleeds in the original calculations. Bleeds from the shattersmer are gonna be tougher to calculate, because they depend on knowing how long the clones are alive before shattering. The same applies to torment from scepter clones.

The numbers say that without accounting for the extras, Bleedsmer has the advantage for sustained damage on most content. Picking up the shattersmer’s torment/confusion advantage and extra bleeds gains ground, while losing uptime on shatter cooldowns loses ground.

The best conclusion I can come to, then, is that the builds are dang close.

After that, we’ll have to do some in-game testing to determine condition uptime.
I’ll pop into the mists and test my condition stacks against Golems tonight.
If you pop in and test the same on your build, then post your stack numbers and uptime, I can calculate the damage based off that.

That way we won’t have to worry that golems don’t trigger torment/confusion, since we can just calculate based on stack sizes like I did above.

What will be missing after that are interrupts and reactives. Specifically, we’ll be missing the damage from Mistrust if you have it, and we’ll be missing the damage from Illusionary Counter. We can add that back in afterward, though, just assuming that you can proc it every time it’s up.

you dont shatter instantly, you shatter mindwrack when your full on illusions, and your about to summon your scepter auto attack clone, cof shatter is on cooldown though, the other shatters can be blown away alone or just 1 illusion… they’r just dps boost
Timewarp is your friend during scepter auto attack clone generation.

and if it’s openworld, you pretty much hit illusionary counter everytime.