Guild Wars 2

In WvW, I’ve been playing with Balthazar which seems quite nice for the AOE 2 burn stacks and burn duration.

In PvP, it seems you only get one burn stack when the runes proc.

Any other runes highly recommended?

Several. Offhand perplexity, tormenting, and nightmare

If you can’t decide between torment and confusion, you can take the middle road with Undead.

With rabid or dire gear, the extra condition damage you get will offset the loss of duration on your confusion or torment stacks.

Krait is also not a bad choice for those bleeds

apharma.3741:

Krait is also not a bad choice for those bleeds

Agreed as a general point, and because of that poison on elite, but for pvp specifically you’ll probably get more out of torment/confusion.

I thought you couldn’t get torment or perplexity in PvP.

Rune of Nightmare is pretty good for condition WvW

pvp – nightmare best, traveler second best
wvw – perplexity, torement

What messiah said.

In pvp nightmare is the best if you’ve got an organised team and you plan to stay on point a lot, traveler is good if unorganised and you need to be flexible to rotate at the drop of a hat.

Wvw obviously Tormenting, Perplexity, Nightmare and Traveler are all good choices – personally I take Traveler until Chronomancer comes along because I hate being slow in wvw.

For simplicity, the comparison between the runes suggested so far:

Tormenting

• 175 condition damage
• 45% torment duration
• 2 stacks Torment on heal (cd=20s, dur=??)

Perplexity

• 175 condition damage
• 30% confusion duration
• 3 stacks confusion when hit (chance=25%, cd=25s, dur=5s)
• 5 stacks confusion on interrupt (cd=15s, dur=8s)

Nightmare

• 175 condition damage
• 15% condition duration
• Fear when hit (chance=50%, cd=60s, dur=1s)

Krait

• 175 condition damage
• 45% bleed duration
• 1 stack bleed when hit (chance=25%, cd=15s, dur=10s)
• 1 stack bleed, 1 stack poison, 1 stack torment to nearby foes on elite use (cd=30s, dur=8s)

Undead

• 175 condition damage
• 100 toughness
• 7% toughness as condition damage (1909*.07=133 condition damage in full rabid with carrion jewels)

Traveler

• 39 condition damage (36 condition damage, plus 3 from toughness via Chaotic Transference)
• 36 to all other stats
• 15% boon duration
• 10% condition duration
• 25% movement speed

Then, a quick rundown of what I think their advantages are.
Except for Traveler, all have the same base condition damage bonus. Of those, only Undead gives any condition damage beyond that, so we’ll take that as assumed, and address Traveler and Undead’s differences separately.

Tormenting

• 45% torment is tied with Krait for most condition-specific duration. Unfortunately, we don’t have as many ways to apply torment as confusion or bleed (since MtD got nerfed anyway), but there are some decent ones, and torment tends to have a decent duration built-in.
• Torment is the #2 most effective condition in pvp by numbers, but is less dependent on your target than confusion (everyone moves, not everyone has thief attack speeds).
• 2 Torment on heal is nice, but without knowing the base duration, I can’t say much about how useful it is. 20s cd suggests you won’t be able to keep up stacks all the time, but you’d still need Mantra healing to take full advantage of what you can. In all, it’s a nice burst supplement, but not a core stack source.

Perplexity

• 30% confusion duration is less than tormenting or krait, but with the built-in confusion duration we already get, I’ll be surprised if you don’t hit cap easily (30% rune + 33% MoM + 40% food = 101% and you’re done). This can be a disadvantage, as running Signet of Midnight boosts both confusion and torment/bleed, and gives you 93% base duration, but if you have at least 2 boons, you’ll be at 99% from Chaotic Persistance. If you picked Nightmare runes, you don’t even need any boons. That said, if all you care about is confusion, these runes give you some freedom to dump Signet of Midnight for more utility.
• Confusion when hit is a nice quality of life boost, but 5s base duration over 25s cd makes it nice, but not a heavy stack provider.
• Ah, the REAL reason to grab perplexity runes. 8s base duration means 16s full duration, which means if you can interrupt every time it comes off cooldown, you can sustain a cool 5 stacks of confusion on target. With all the other interrupts bonuses available, this can become pretty potent.

Nightmare

• If you’re about 50/50 on torment/confusion application, Nightmare gives a cool 15% to each, which is a total of 30% specialized. If you have enough bleed stacks (from Sharper Images, for example, or iDuelists after DD gets fixed), that’s an equivalent to 45% specialized duration. It all depends on what you are stacking.
• Even though it’s only 1s of fear, on a 60s cooldown, this is almost a “get out of gank free” card when thieves are around. Pretty hilarious watching a backstab “oh kitten” moment turn into the thief running like a wuss, and getting eaten by your counter-burst.

Krait

• 45% bleed puts it on par with torment for specialized duration, and it’s easier to get consistent bleed stacks than torment. That said, bleed is the weaker of the three conditions, as it doesn’t add extra punishment to behavior that players tend to exhibit. It’s also the hardest to mitigate though, as you can’t stop moving or attacking to take less damage. I’d still say focusing on bleeds yields the lesser benefit in pvp (still more than burns for us poor mesmers though), and general board sentiment seems to support that.
• As with the other stack-on-hit penalties, this is just a side benefit. The durations work out to a possible permanent stack or 2 though, which is interesting.
• 3 different conditions on elite is pretty cool, especially as one is poison. For condition layering to counter cleanse, this is one of our few really good options. That said, the durations are pretty low for the cooldown (30s isn’t really 30s, it’s 90s…the cooldown of our shortest cd elite skill). Makes for a good opener against heavy-cleanse builds though.

Undead

• In general, it seems consensus that sources of condi duration give more bang for your buck than condi damage, up to the duration cap. Still, 131 condi damage is a lot of extra damage. If you’re already hovering close to the cap, Undead can outperform on raw damage. At that point, I’d say that only something hefty like the interrupt stacks on Perplexity would possibly outweigh the extra condi damage of Undead.

Traveler

• Very, very low condi damage, relatively speaking. If you sum up all the stat bonuses together, you only gain 2 stat points total, spread out over all stats. Not very good compared to celestial gear, which at least gains a little more than that in total stat to compensate for the loss of focus. Still, you’ll be harder to kill, and you’ll kill structures a little faster.
• 10% condi duration isn’t much, but it could get you nearly to cap with some setups. So, it’s workable.
• The impact of movement speed cannot be calculated. If there were no duration or condi damage at all, people still might take these runes. For combat, it’s a very clear sacrifice of total power. But…movespeed…

In my conclusion:

• Perplexity is better for some very specific builds, depending on how you use interrupts, or whether you have any utilities you really want to mimic, etc. It allows for some rotation flexibility, and some absurd interrupt abuse.
• If you stat right, you can get Torment runes and still hit cap on confusion. If you don’t have many bleeds (like if you swap Dueling for Domination), this lets you double down on both torment and confusion. It’s also the #1 option for raw torment, but there’s no need to specialize specifically in torment, when you can just do both.
• If you stick with dueling, you can get decent stacks of torment, confusion AND bleed. This gives Nightmare a solid place. Such a build will do slightly less burst damage, do more sustained damage, and be less vulnerable to cleanse, as they have to chomp through 3 different conditions to eliminate your damage.
• If you like all the sources of duration, Undead will probably outperform for raw damage, because you can pretty much hit duration cap on everything if you do it right in WvW.
• If you are slow (you are, you’re a mesmer), and you don’t like being slow, Travelers can still trump.
• Krait just doesn’t measure up for pvp.

Thx for all the detailed answers!

I have a long-term plan for my condi chronomancer.

In the short term, looks like my balthazar runes are a bit underwhelming…

eldenbri.1059:

Thx for all the detailed answers!

I have a long-term plan for my condi chronomancer.

In the short term, looks like my balthazar runes are a bit underwhelming…

Yeah. I did some testing a couple nights ago, and at most I was stable at 7 burning stacks….with everything working perfectly, and after my iMages being up for a while.
The iMage just doesn’t apply stacks fast enough for burning to keep up with confusion/torment in burst, and in the long term it’s less stable for a little less damage than bleeding.
If they upped the stacks from iMage, or increased the duration from Chaos Winds, it might be viable. Maybe. At the very least, in testing it was better than I thought it’d be.

I know in WvW you have super powerful runes like perplexity and tormenting to choose from. In my PvP condi build, I use Travelor’s. Those are definitely more offensive, but I hate being a slow Mesmer,. It truly makes a difference once you get used to it. You’ll never go back.

And besides, Travelor’s gives you a little overall condi duration [and boon] as well instead of it being geared towards just one.

Great summary Alphathewhite!

I don’t rate Tormenting runes that highly anymore as before the patch for several reasons.

Traiting manipulations and taking mirror heal does not mesh well with the 6th bonus.
MtD nerf means less torment stacks applied.

Once Chrono 25% movement speed comes along I’d honestly take Nightmare ot Perplexity over Tormenting – assuming our torment application remains in its current state.

At the moment though, unless using a focus or signet of inspiration (or speed sigils if you want to be different), Traveler is the best in wvw.

How does a combo of 4 Nightmare/2 Trapper runes compare to full Nightmare? With the nightmare/trapper combo, you lose 75 condi damage but gain 10% condi duration.

Leodon.1564:

How does a combo of 4 Nightmare/2 Trapper runes compare to full Nightmare? With the nightmare/trapper combo, you lose 75 condi damage but gain 10% condi duration.

I was just thinking about this (yesterday?), and I think you’d probably miss the 75 condi more than the 10% duration in PvP. I haven’t the foggiest about pve, though.
For now, I’ve been swapping out the 6th nightmare run with an orb for pve calculations.

You also need to keep in mind that competent people are going to cleanse your bursts, which makes condition duration less effective. For PvP, I generally value condition damage over duration to front-load damage. The only thing i value more than condi dmg/duration is mobility… so my rune choice usually boils down to Undead vs Travelers.

I put Aristocracy on my ascended Assassins armor when I started playing with Hybrid again. Even switching back to full power I quite like them since it’s great for might stacking, and the bonus ticks from condi’s is all good.

+45% might duration, 3 stacks on heal (14.5s every12s with Mirror) 2 stacks on weapon swaps (29s), and 3 stacks on F1 with BD (22s).