Guild Wars 2

For a Condi build, which is better?

Depends on what you’re aiming for and how well you feel you survive.

If you want more offensiveness and alot of condition on crit procs Rabid is the way to go. It’s the zerker set of conditionmancers with 2600-2700 armor (Rampagers basically is too and is a hybrid set for probably the most DPS a necro can get, but why be glassy? ). Your able to easily stack lots of conditions (Dhuumfire, Earth/Torment sigils, Barbed Precision) within seconds and maintain them all indefinitely as their CDs come up. Your normal attack damage while low because of no power, will still do adequate damage in addition to your heavy condition damage due to 40-50% critical chance.

Dire gear is really good for making you a tanky conditionmancer. You lose the on critical procs for about 8-10K extra health and would probably be better off with geomancy sigils like other non-crit condition builds. Your DS is going to feel a lot more cozy too with the added vitality. Because you don’t have high critical chance Dhuumfire becomes less of a requirement and you can build your conditionmancer with more defensive traits outside of Spite.

The difference is very much the same as the difference between Soldiers gear and Knights.

For WvW, I assume..?
If you want to be less tanky and do more damage than in full Dire, you should mix Rabid with Carrion. Pure Rabid is weaker in regards to both offense and defense.

flow.6043:

For WvW, I assume..?
If you want to be less tanky and do more damage than in full Dire, you should mix Rabid with Carrion. Pure Rabid is weaker in regards to both offense and defense.

Weaker in regards to OFFENSE? How that?

Also, I’d mix Dire with Rabid, and not with Carrion. Condition Necromancers benefit so little from power, it would be totally useless. The precision from Rabid on the other hand would give some nice critchance, which in turn helps offensively.

Do you use traits and sigils that proc on crit? That is the only way to really approach your question.

Saturn.6591:

Weaker in regards to OFFENSE? How that?

Because that:

Saturn.6591:

Condition Necromancers benefit so little from power, it would be totally useless.

…is not true.

Saturn.6591:

The precision from Rabid on the other hand would give some nice critchance, which in turn helps offensively.

Crit chance for what?
With a carrion/rabid mix you’ll have 30% instead of 50% crit chance, plus the occasional 20% from Fusious Demise. The only thing that really profits from that extra crit chance is Barbed Precision because there’s no icd. Dhuumfire or sigils will proc equally reliable. Imo geomancy beats earth anyway, even more so if you do more direct damage.

I wouldn’t recommend Carrion as Saturn is correct. Even when focusing full on power gear wise, the base damage on Staff and to a lesser extent Scepter/Dagger is so low that you don’t see any real damage changes. So putting on a few carrion pieces is going to do absolutely nothing for your DPS except give you a little more cond damage at the end of the day, while lowering your toughness and precision, which is a strength of Conditionmancers. The Carrion mix was really the only way to go before the implementation of Dire, but now Dire is the best combo in keeping your defensive stats up if you’re going to mix and match.

The issue with lowering crit chance from 50% to 30% is that you’re not going to be able to keep on crit conditions up as much. In many games it’s easy to see the difference between something happening 1/3 of the time and 1/2. This gets worse when you have a percentage chance for something to proc on critical hits. I would rather have a 30% or 66% chance of proc on 50% crit than on 30% crit. Also if you’re going to use Torment Sigils or Earth/Torment on Scepter/Dagger, you need a great crit chance to keep it the extra Torment indefinitely.

Think of any turn based game with a chance to hit like Fallout 1/2. At 30% chance you don’t even try to hit the person, 50% chance you usually go for it, 70% chance your beginning to hit most of the time, but get a few dry spots/misses.

Although I agree if you want more survivability you should mix with Dire. I personally hardly never have a problem with survivability playing full Rabid though (and it’s not the purpose of the set, lots of DPS with high defense is).

That’s why I wouldn’t recommend Geomancy Sigils for a Rabid focused set. I love Geomancy but it completely changes your mode of play. Instead of doing all your DPS at 900-1200 range and having a good 2600-2900 armor for stray hits, you are now forcing yourself to be within 240(?) range of your enemies when switching weapons every 10 seconds while “meat grinding.” Now you’re skirmishing in melee range of Warriors, Guardians etc. all the time when you really shouldn’t. You should be burning them down from a far and dodging incoming hammer attacks etc. Same goes for heavy hitting enemy AI. Full Dire and Apothecary are more tuned to melee/meat grinding Condimancer with Geomancy+Staff+Scepter/Dagger combo.

So, having my Necro at 80 now, I’m going to buy some rabid gear. I come from thief, so figured surviving won’t be that hard, or harder than glass cannon thief. However, I need a build. Do any of any of you (I’m sure you do) have a good build I could use with rabid gear. Right now I’m running 30/20/0/20/0. Just tried to maximize dps with vitality.

I run dire armor with runes of scavaging. mix of rabid and rabid/dire trinkets.
weps are all dire, running 0/30/20/20/0

close to 2.8k armor
25k hp
a bit over 2k condi dmg without any stacks just food.