Guild Wars 2

So I have spent a lot of time thinking about sustained condition dps in a purely PVE sense. I am not interested in how much damage it does versus a power build or even how much damage it does versus other class condition builds, but rather from a maximum effectiveness standpoint in a raiding environment for the purposes of ranged condition application with necro (very specific I know).

I spent at least a few days doing a completely all-in build related to condi reaper burns (balefire runes), which stacks up damage quickly, and has great might uptime, but has a significant drop in DPS when either melee range can’t be held or if RS has depleted completely.

So it got me to thinking about what you actually get from the Reaper tree that can be used in a ranged condi build. There turns out to be a very strong synergy there and can even leverage RS for a burst of poison damage if melee range is okay.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNArYWnc0Ad3gV3AmbCs3gFcBL+K2FHjQXtAQLIaD0BGBA-TxRAABA8AAsW9HxU+ZxJAQa9Bvs/QbKBJFwiKrA-e

Building in this way with the nerf to pizza, you still end up with 100% bleeds and reasonable durations on both poison and chill, which are the other two primarily leveraged conditions that deal damage.

Rotation would be simple enough by using the most high impact skills and using RS for the burst poison damage. Having access to epidemic and yourself stacking around 25 consistent bleeds, chill uptime that is pretty good (though not 100%), and reasonable torment coverage as well.

I really think that if they follow through with difficult pve content there will always be a need for epidemic because of how well it scales in add fights and multiplication of damage. And I think this build tends to (because of the might stacking and chill damage), fair better than an old ranged condi build with DS. The chills for me were ticking over 900, generally better than poison stacks I could maintain below 50%.

Anyone found a better way to improve condi uptime and damage under these criterion?

Also in case anyone was curious the hard cap of 100% on conditions is still there, the tooltip shows the extra but it doesn’t work as before.