Guild Wars 2

Hello, i’m playing a condition necro. I have some question for the necromancer’s comunity. I’m playing a full “rabid” set for pve (condition dmg+precision+thoug), and 30/30/10/0/0 on traits. As you know when wintersday cames, ANet gave us a new stats for weapons (condition duration+vit+precision).

I’m here to ask you what is better, condition duration or condition damage. Another question is: what do you think is better if i play rabid set, 30/30/10/0/0 or 0/30/30/0/0 using afflicted runes? on this way i will have a lot of condition damage, but less condition duration.

Should will i go back to carrion set? or is better rabid set for conditionmance on pve? For utility skills i use corruption+blood is power, but not sure what to use as third utility skill, poisoning cloud don’t a real damage.

Thanks

I prefer duration, as my build relies a lot on non-damaging conditions like weakness.

Poison Cloud goes well with an off-hand dagger, as you can apply a lot of weakness over a group and even more on a particular target. If your build is neglecting support abilities, though, then you probably won’t care about reducing incoming damage.

Duration depends on what conditions you’re doing.

For some conditions, the duration doesn’t really matter. Poison and blind mostly don’t benefit a whole lot from bonus duration. Blind because it’s going to wear off as soon as it works, and poison because with necromancer it’s easy to get it going for a long time, and once you get a long duration on a foe they’re going to die or remove it anyway.

But condition duration helps a lot for non-damage conditions like weakness, vulnerability, and fear. And it works with bleeding.

So it just depends on what you want. Condition damage doesn’t work on things like weakness, so if you want to use a lot of weakness I’d look at duration.

Solo play: Duration. Group play: Damage

groups usually hit 25 bleed stacks ridiculously fast and you’ll never flesh out your damage unless you have enough damage to make a difference and make up the majority of the 25 stacks. However, playing in solo play, you want duration to maximise bleed stacks before you epidemic.

With the bleed caps, I think DMG is the better stat to build around. In a group, even builds not spec’d to add bleeds, will do so during regular play.

brickforlife.1364:

Solo play: Duration. Group play: Damage

groups usually hit 25 bleed stacks ridiculously fast and you’ll never flesh out your damage unless you have enough damage to make a difference and make up the majority of the 25 stacks. However, playing in solo play, you want duration to maximise bleed stacks before you epidemic.

Pretty much this. Also, things may die so fast you’ll never get full benefit of duration.

Airdrie.1706:

Hello, i’m playing a condition necro. I have some question for the necromancer’s comunity. I’m playing a full “rabid” set for pve (condition dmg+precision+thoug), and 30/30/10/0/0 on traits. As you know when wintersday cames, ANet gave us a new stats for weapons (condition duration+vit+precision).

I’m here to ask you what is better, condition duration or condition damage. Another question is: what do you think is better if i play rabid set, 30/30/10/0/0 or 0/30/30/0/0 using afflicted runes? on this way i will have a lot of condition damage, but less condition duration.

Should will i go back to carrion set? or is better rabid set for conditionmance on pve? For utility skills i use corruption+blood is power, but not sure what to use as third utility skill, poisoning cloud don’t a real damage.

Thanks

1) The Giver’s weapons appear to be bugged. There are numerous posts on the Game Bugs forum about this. I tried them yesterday and could not get any duration extension on my conditions. So it seems its not just a tooltip bug like with runes with Cond Dur.

2) For PVE, I’d go for duration.

3) For build, you don’t mention the weapons you use, so not sure what to suggest. I’m running rabid gear w/20/20/0/20/10 with scepter/dagger & scepter/focus and am happy with it. For runes, I’m using 2xLyssa (for duration) and emerald orbs everywhere else. I use BiP,Epidemic, and the third is usually WoS/Undead Signet/Locust Signet depending on situation.

For power builds you might want longer condition duration for things like vuln.

Condition damage builds already have optimal condition duration with master traits that add 33% duration and a minor that add 20% duration to bleeds and can get great rune sets that add +15% duration to bleeds even 30% to bleed duration.

You should stack condition damage you have the rabid set, undead runes give a nice boost to condition damage due to decent toughness. Running a 30/30/10 build you already have an extra 30% duration on conditions that most condition builds do not have.

Neither is better. It depends on situation. But there are 3 main factors:

1) Conditions are usually quickly removed – Because of this, you do want to do as much damage as you can before the condition is gone.

2) Condition duration benefits all conditions, instead of just poison, bleed and burning – So it would benefit conditions like Chill and Fear.

3) Condition duration works very well with Epidemic – When you cast Epidemic, only those duration that remains after will hurt the enemy. For example a standard Fear only lasts 1 second. As a result Fear is useless with Epidemic.

All in all, I would give the slight edge to condition durations. But damage is also important. Overall, I would recommend an upgrade ratio of 1.5 to 1. That means when you improve duration by 15%, you should also improve damage by 10%. 30% to 20%, etc.