Guild Wars 2

since im tired of the hurrr meta zerk, and i always liked the DoT builds im curious about the condi mancer, now my questions are:

-How is condimancer in pve and wvw? since those are my game modes, i barely pvp
-whats is better? dire, rabbid or sinister? keep in mind that i plain on having 1 set for both modes
-Traits, runes, sigils, etc

also a small rotation for pve if its possible

keep it clean, dont try to make me stay power, its been 1 year just playing power, and i want a change

thx in advance

I do only PvE and sPvP, so I can’t offer any insight on WvW.

PvEwise, condimancer is about as good now as it was before the condition patch. We have decent sustained dps, but a monstrously long ramp-up time. Our bleeds are very long lasting, so we hit our highest dps about 20 seconds after we start a fight. There are very few situations in which that long ramp-up time can be used, and even in those situations, it doesn’t really put us above our direct damage builds. I still have a half-finished ascended sinister set with Krait runes, because I am eternally optimistic that they’ll make our pve conditions not terrible, but I wouldn’t recommend that you follow my lead.

As for PvP, you don’t care as much so I won’t say as much, but it’s basically not terrible but not great. Terrormancer is still really fun to play, and can surprise some people who are expecting every necro to be celestial signet or minion master.

But reaper is awesome in condition settings (reaper’s shroud).

If you can effectively Epidemic – it is great. You may need to change your combat tactics somewhat to pull as much as you can, stack up condis, then spread. Perhaps one way to look at it – Condi is more like 5 kills in 20 seconds, instead of one kill every 4 seconds with zerk

Here is the build/traits/runes that I use currently:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNArYWjc0QzNWdDe3A7NWKGs4e4QMJS1EmC3qoAwAIBA-TByCABAcIAU4EAc8TAALlfXq+zM7Pon+gxUCGA4AY36W3dDM+4jP+4j3u7u7u7ubpAgZZF-e

This is pretty much the most condition damage a necro can currently do. I use rabid gear since scepter and staff have such pitiful direct damage that the loss in toughness is basically never worth the extra 50dps you get from taking sinister gear. With reaper shroud it may be more beneficial to use sinister gear, but I am not sure yet, we will see how hard raids are.

You can swap out reaper for blood magic if you aren’t buying HoT or want more support and less conditions.

This build lets you keep up high poison, bleed and chill damage, with the occasional burn burst. It also has very high weakness and chill uptime for debuffing.

This is my raid build, it is subpar for dungeons because the wind up time for the damage is too long for current content.

You can forgo the infusions, they cost me about 500g in total but I like having the maximum possible condition damage.

thank you all for the insight, i forgot to point out, im not sure when im getting or if ever ill be getting HoT, so can we talk solely about base necro?

thank you all for your time here

As thehipone noted, Condi necro’s power is all in epidemic. Epidemic is one of the highest damage skills in the game in a perfect scenario (fully loaded large monster hitting many adds). On the other hand, Condi necro in general is somewhat anemic damage, as the ramp time is too long. Unfortunately, burning is much better than every other condition right now, and it is the one condition that Necromancers don’t get (Dhuumfire is in the wrong trait line for condi).

It’s decent, but not great. Rumor has it sceptre is getting buffed eventually, so it may improve.