Guild Wars 2

Hi, I was hoping to find someone who has a better grasp on runes than I do. I have been trying to find the right set for my condi necro. I currently run the metabattle build, and I understand they suggest the Runes of Thorns.

Now, a friend of mine uses two Trapper Runes and 4 Afflicted Runes. I have tried using 2 Trapper Runes and 4 Runes of Nightmare. Essentially, my question is what the big difference would be – I’m mainly focused on the condi duration here.

Runes of Thorn only boost your poison duration (45%), Trapper/Afflicted would boost poison 15%, bleeding 10% and “conditions you apply” last 10% longer overall. My combination of Trapper/Nightmare, in theory, would boost condition duration in general by 25%. I understand you cap out on bleeding, but what about chill? Is it broken right now? In my mind, the third option sounds better (especially since I am lazy keeping up with food sometimes), but when I run all options through a skill builder with my other gear, none of the condi durations add up at all. So I am severely confused. I hope someone knows more about this than I do!

I run 4 Nightmare 2 Trapper myself. 25% duration on all conditions I don’t think is possible to beat. It applies to bleeding and poison, like everyone focuses on, but also works on Torment, Fear, and Burning for damage, plus your utility conditions like Chill and Weakness.

In-game hovering over you’re condition duration will show the actual duration for each condition. In the skill builders, you have to add them up yourself (total duration plus specific duration). Choosing a rune will depend on determining where you most of your damage comes from. If it’s almost exclusively poison, or if you have high poison uptime, them Thorns is really nice for the extra condition damage. If your damage comes from having multiple conditions on the target, then improving generic condition duration will benefit you more.

Bleeds and poison are your main damaging conditions, hence you focus on them. Take into account that sigils and trinkets are slightly different on each setup.
At the end of the day aim fot 100% bleed and poison duration and then add as much condition damage as possible

Thanks all for your input. The issue I had when checking condi duration in game is that it oddly will also not reflect condi duration in the hero tab correctly…. or at least I don’t think it does. With 2 Trapper/4 Nightmare runes it lists my overall condi duration 55.13% , bleeding as 95.13% and chilled as 75.13% (without foods). It doesn’t even mention poison duration, as it does when I use Afflicted runes instead. Yet another thing that baffles me. Sooo I’m not even sure what my actual poison duration is right now.

Unless you have specific modifiers (like when you use Afflicted runes), your duration is whatever the generic condition duration is (55.13%). If you kept the Nightmare runes, but added a Sigil of Venom, you’d have a tooltip for Poison read 75.13%.

I use trapper and nightmare runes too with sigils of bursting and malice. It gets me 100% chill and bleed, but 81.4% poison. if I use toxic crystals i get 91.4% poison.

I think thorn runes rely on the #6 to stack at least twice in order to give you more condi damage than nightmare runes, but that seems too situational for me.

I can simply swap sigil of bursting for sigil of venom to get 100% bleed, chill, poison with toxic crystals. But I wanted to be able to use cheep food for non raids content while still having 100% bleeds.

this is my cheep fractal and non tryhard raids build:
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNArYWjM0Q3NWdDO3AHOWKGMpPQIoDEFAGAJg4eYRMJC-ThSAQBhUZw6WYIanAAAcEAwmSPvsPQEV/xmKBDo+Ap9IAIFgiitA-e

Swap sigil of malice for venom and use toxic crystals for 100% poison.

Full Thorns with a Sigil of Agony here. The reason metabattle suggests this is because it achieves max duration on bleeds/pretty close with poison while giving you an extra (pretty consistent) 150-300 condition damage from thorns 6.

They aim for bleeds and poison instead of general condi duration because torment’s damage is real weak—even if the mob is moving—and in most PvE settings you don’t need to worry about things like chill/weakness/fear duration, as raid bosses aren’t even affected by a lot of these outside of traits that deal increased damage based on the number of conditions on a target—but even if they were, you’re going to have the rest of your raid hitting him with these conditions as well, so they’ll end up having a 100% uptime anyways.

I guess an argument could be made for general condition duration in fights where you’re using a lot of Epidemic, as it’d scale with burning and confusion, but, like, 90% of your damage output is coming from bleeds/poison, and metabattle is usually all about min/maxing your dps, with very little focus on utility.

Long story short, you seem to be aiming for condition duration > condition damage up to 100%, so you’re doing it right! The actual dps increase from Thorns over Nightmare/Trapper isn’t game changing or anything…

narcx.3570:

I guess an argument could be made for general condition duration in fights where you’re using a lot of Epidemic, as it’d scale with burning and confusion, but, like, 90% of your damage output is coming from bleeds/poison, and metabattle is usually all about min/maxing your dps, with very little focus on utility.

Epidemic doesn’t calculate condition duration. It copies over remaining duration of each stack.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Epidemic doesn’t calculate condition duration. It copies over remaining duration of each stack.

It doesn’t recalculate the remaining duration using your stats tho? That’s weird, I always thought it did since it recalculates the damage based on your active stats.

What I mean is I thought that if, say, a Guardian (with 0 expertise) has Spear of Justice’s Burning on a target with1 second remaining and you have +100% condition duration you’d copy it with 2 seconds remaining because (Spear of Justice: 2 sec duration, 1 sec remain —→ 100% Condition Duration: 4 sec duration, 2 sec remain.)

Epidemic copies the duration of conditions, but considers you the source of all newly applied ones, so it uses your condition damage. The duration was already set, however. My guess is that they did this to prevent “double dipping” on condition duration.

In your example, the copied duration is only 1 second.

Come to think of it, I should try using Epidemic to see if traits like Bitter Chill apply. I can’t believe I haven’t done that yet.

I’m running 2 trapper 4 lich (because Nightmare runes require PvE) right now in WvW, and I’m finding that it works really well, because your cripple and chill actually lasts longer than .5 seconds. However, we are still limited by other things, so we need support to not become focus fodder.

Cecilia.5179:

I’m running 2 trapper 4 lich (because Nightmare runes require PvE) right now in WvW, and I’m finding that it works really well, because your cripple and chill actually lasts longer than .5 seconds. However, we are still limited by other things, so we need support to not become focus fodder.

Isn’t there a Twilight Arbor reward track?

You have to beat story mode(?) to permanently unlock the track, do someone that upset at any pve might not do it.

Yeah, but it’s still available on a rotation basis.

Yeah, I’m not doing the story mode again (I did it before reward tracks), and the rotation was not any time soon when I geared up my necro.