Guild Wars 2

I am fairly newb still – I keep coming and leaving GW2 since the beta, I’ve tried many times to play different classes and usually got bored after few weeks. So I’ve decided to give a go to the necromancer and leveling went like a blast, I could solo events that I couldn’t do before on other classes, take multiple opponents without a sweat, all thanks to the Scepter/Dagger condition build. Now I’ve hit 80 and I still stack Condition damage.

But wherever I look I can see people recommend dagger/dagger and the berserker as the One And Only True Build. Whats wrong with scepter and stacking bleeds? Is there an issue with the bleed stacking? I’m not trying to be elitist, I’m having fun with it, but from the other hand I don’t want to be like a guy I’ve met in MMO that I won’t name, who rolled a mage and was auto attacking with dagger…

Scepter is a bad group pve weapon, more specifically. The main issues with bleeds stacking and all condition builds are the stack cap and the ramp up damage. First, you can’t put more than 25 bleeds, one burning, one poison on a target. This isn’t noticeable in solo, but in a group content, many direct damage spec will also apply damaging conditions via on crit effects or burst abilities. For instance, my assassin engi will keep 20 bleed stacks on a boss, burning, and poison if i decide to use it. That means your damage will get reduced by a lot, since you rely on those conditions to do the damage. Secondly, the ramp up: conditions are slow. It takes a while to reach your maximum dps by stacking the maximum amount of conditions. During that time in an organized party, most mobs are already dead.

The implementation of sinister’s stats may see the rise of one single condi player in all level fractals, but I highly doubt it. There’s also smaller issues like the damage on objects and the number of cleanses available to bosses, not even speaking of condi reduction.