A Zerker has a higher burst while the Condi has a higher sustain. Sustain and AOE are what I tend to value most considering how frequently I run fractals and dungeon.
Zerker necro doesnt have burst. It has sustained high single target dps and burst aoe. The burst aoe is less dps on a single target than the regular dagger rotation. Also a good player wont have any downtime on zerk necro dps in full melee.
Condi does have better sustained aoe and thats a reason to consider it for certain fractals. Everywhere else zerker is better.
They mentioned axe and staff in their talk about zerker builds so at best they might be using a 30/x/x/x/30 build and counting axe 2 and DS 4 as burst. I don’t recall them talking about dagger at all until the 30/25/0/0/15 build was mentioned by SolemnMalevolence, which apparently takes competitive fighting game type reflexes to play. If it was some kind of axe/staff build that was used it’s no wonder the DPS was low.
I’ve known people who like to play zerker with staff in WvW. I personally don’t like using staff as anything besides a defensive/control weapon. So that is why I mentioned it. My Zerker build is 30/10/0/0/30 and it is quite burst. The Dagger does match the damage of life blast if no wells are up. However, being up close in PvE isn’t ideal in most situations especially with 1.8k armor. So this is why I call it burst damage because their sustained damage is suicide. If they can do it, more power to them.
My weapon Choice for Zerker is Main weapons Axe+Focus secondary weapon Dagger+Warhorn.
That might’ve been where your misunderstanding was coming from. o: The primary zerker build is 30/25/0/0/15. At least, as far as dealing the most damage goes. You mostly use dagger/warhorn for dealing all of your damage, and there’s no burst involved. You’ll be dealing consistent damage with the dagger auto-attack. When I played it, I occasionally switched to axe/focus strictly for applying vulnerability if whatever I was attacking didn’t have 25 stacks, and maybe using axe #2, and from my understanding, that’s how most people play it.
It actually does quite a bit of damage, especially in group settings. And unlike the death-shroud centric build you don’t have to worry about life force too much and your damage output isn’t controlled by how easy of a time you’ll have staying in death shroud and controlling your life force in any given fight. Using axe/focus, or death shroud itself as the primary method of dealing damage tends to give either lesser or downright lackluster results from when I tried a build like that.
I lose my hold. I will let go.
The one thing I liked about 30/10/0/0/30 is that it was so Death Shroud-centric. I really wanted to play something that utilizied our mechanic as much as possible, so that’s one thing the build had going for it. I’ve always thought Death Shroud, as a concept, was pretty cool. I’m not so sure about Vital Persistence though…life force may decay slower, but damage taken will drop it just as quickly, and that tended to be what pre-emptively ended my Death Shroud duration more than it just running out.
I lose my hold. I will let go.
