Runes for Condition Necro?
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I rely heavily on Terror, so i usually use Runes of the Necromancer. That said, my build is mostly rabid and it helps to have extra HP. basic goal for me with this was to hit atleast 100% fear duration using master of terror, food, and also runes themselves. I take staff as my along with scepter and dagger for my condi set, but I mix some carrion and hp in on weapons and acc.
Khloe Deschanel – Human Necromancer/ Ami Ginju – Human Ranger [DOLO] -SBI
I stream sometimes: http://www.twitch.tv/kidtofu/
“Revenant is actual proof that devs read the necromancer forum”
I stream sometimes: http://www.twitch.tv/kidtofu/
“Revenant is actual proof that devs read the necromancer forum”
(edited by Loyo.8526)
If you are Carrion, I believe Nightmare is the best.
Runes of the Undead – Use these for high bleed ticks. Useful in PvP since condition clears get thrown every which way which makes duration pointless.
Runes of the Necromancer/Nightmare – Useful for terror builds. You can get 100% fear duration with these, the 50% fear duration trait, and condition duration food.
2x Krait, 2x Centaur, 2x Afflicted – Bleed duration set. Use this in dungeons. Enemies live long enough for duration to actually mean something. With duration you do more damage over time than with just pure condition damage.
Stuff goes here.
I go with full Nightmare but runes of the Undead, Necromancer and Grenth are also good options (grenth for heavy chill builds).
Everlasting Sacred Path [ESP] (www.espguild.com)
If you are Carrion, I believe Nightmare is the best.
Oh please no, don’t make me go back to TA, say it isn’t so! But you’re probably right. Nightmare looks the best about now.
I was thinking of bleed stacking like Kravick said, but I’m worried that even in a 5 man dungeon that the bleed cap will get maxed out as I’ve seen that happen plenty already.
I use rabid armor and full runes of the undead. Works very well on a condition build.
‘would have/would’ve been’ —> correct
‘would of been’ —> wrong
‘would of been’ —> wrong
a full set of Carrion armor
Why? Carrion is there to compliment other sets. If you’re a condition build 90% of the time you want Rabid. The only thing Carrion “hybrids” are good at is being bad at both conditions and power.
Make a rabid set if you wanna be a condition build. Enjoy the benefits of high toughness and good crit chance for “on critical” triggering.
If you want to be a power build then berserker’s for PvE, and a mix of knight’s, berserker’s and/or soldier’s for PvP (depends on your build).
Thank me later.
Either ways, Runes of the Undead are my favorite with rabids for max condition damage. Runes of the Necromancer and Runes of the Nightmare are also good options.
Rabid + Undead is a standard combo, to take advantage of Rabid Toughness.
Also, Undead runes are extra cheap, so it’s a good starting set – you can look to some more specific/interesting stuff later.
Seafarer’s Rest EU – PvE/WvW – 8 × 80 chars.
Most used: Guard/Mes/War/Nec/Ele.
Yes, i use 5 chars at time. Because REASONS.
Most used: Guard/Mes/War/Nec/Ele.
Yes, i use 5 chars at time. Because REASONS.
Rabid + Undead is a standard combo, to take advantage of Rabid Toughness.
Also, Undead runes are extra cheap, so it’s a good starting set – you can look to some more specific/interesting stuff later.
Well, the runes are cheap. The armor isn’t.
Rabid + Undead is a standard combo, to take advantage of Rabid Toughness.
Also, Undead runes are extra cheap, so it’s a good starting set – you can look to some more specific/interesting stuff later.
Well, the runes are cheap. The armor isn’t.
Karma and WvW tokens.
The option, Carrion, isn’t an option.
Really? Rabid vs Carrion again?
This is just one of the threads about this topic:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Carrion-or-Rabid/
You know nothing about his build except for the weapons he is using. Therefore you can’t tell which prefix will benefit him the most.
The bottom line will be: does he rely on crit-procs. If he doesn’t then there’s no point to having pure rabid.
Also, Undead runes on rabid vs carrion:
difference in WvW/PvE: 600 toughness (trinkets: carrion only available as exotic, rabid only ascended)
difference in sPvP: 644 toughness
That means the Undead rune combo will add a staggering 30 or 32 with rabid to your total amount of condition damage.
Now, that is about as good as nothing considering a full condi build will have 1500+ condition damage.
Just a point to throw in here, if we do get that burning on crit in the Spite tree, I think that will be the knife in the coffin for Carrion. Low crit procs was okay when you were just missing out on earth/barbed, but losing the burning proc as often as it comes up?
I’m not sure I’d go 30 in Spite with pure Rabid… but yeah, as it will be a crit-proc trait you’d be better off with more precision, oviously.
However, you could still time the ICD of burning with Furious Demise and you’ll most likely end up triggering it with carrion too.
You know nothing about his build except for the weapons he is using. Therefore you can’t tell which prefix will benefit him the most.
I can tell you that regardless of what his build is, Full carrion vs. Full rabid, rabid wins every single time. Full carrion is bad. No "if"s, "and"s or "but"s.
Power without crits hits like wet noodles and might as well not be there.
Conditions can live without crits, though they benefit heavily from them.
Vitality is complimentary to Toughness. High vitality is only worth anything if you also have high toughness. Vitality is a flat survival increase, toughness is exponential (before diminishing returns, becoming parabolic once you include those). Vitality’s “worth” is exponentially increased by toughness, as each point of health absorbs “more points of damage”, per say. Otherwise it’s like having a reinforced steel door on a crap straw shanty.
Necros have inherently high vitality, and enough ways to deal with conditions (that ignore armor), but low armor. They benefit more from toughness than vit.
End result is that Carrion offers you 1 stat that’s dependent on another stat you don’t have (power), 1 stat you don’t really need (vit) and condition damage, while Rabid offers you 1 stat you need (toughness), 1 that’s really useful either ways (precision) and condition damage.
Mixing the two is another matter entirely, and depends heavily on build.
Feel free to show me one good build that benefits from full carrion though. It’d be the first I’d ever see. Full carrion just makes you worse at everything.
In a vacuum Power outdamages Precision until you get ginormous amounts of Power, an amount which isn’t practical outside of keeping max might stacks up or something.
The only way Precision can pull even is with on crit affects like Sigils of Earth. But even with those, kill times are basically equal in both sets from a lot of testing that I’ve done on my builds.
Only difference is Precision damage is about half contributing via conditions and conditions can and are cleansed profusely in PVP, at which point Rabid builds are prone to falling behind Carrion on damage.
Something like Death Shroud, which gives you free fury upon entering is much more benefited by power already being high, as then your crits actually do good damage. You can also ‘flash’ DS for something like Doom, then still have the fury for 4 seconds for your normal attacks. DS in rabid is just about useless outside being a sponge. Your Life Blasts do piddly damage and your Transfer is weak as well. Wells are also weak. You are just so one dimensional.
Full Rabid actually gives you a bit too much toughness in terms of finding the ideal EHP balance. And Carrion vitality scales much better with Death Shroud as it heals in percentages, negating the normal advantage toughness has over vitality for normal life.
It’s purely a playstyle choice as far as I can tell, arguing that one is massively better than the other, I see no basis or evidence for it, by the math or otherwise.
There is actually no ascended carrion gear so can’t say about going full carrion. I do have some precision there, but it’s not doing a whole lot as far as adding damage.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
Just a point to throw in here, if we do get that burning on crit in the Spite tree, I think that will be the knife in the coffin for Carrion. Low crit procs was okay when you were just missing out on earth/barbed, but losing the burning proc as often as it comes up?
If the patch notes are correct, your precision won’t be that relevant as long as you have at least 20% crit probably. Because you just need one, it’s not a chance on top of crit, like say barbed precision which really fractions down chances to proc. If you get one crit, you have burning.
Because you can only get burning once per 10 seconds. All you need to do is crit one time in that window and you will keep your burning limit met. All those extra crits you get at 50% crit rate will do nothing.
Even with a lower crit it would still be ridiculously easy to jump into Death Shroud for the fury and get your burning proc’d from that, life transfer hitting 9 times is about guaranteed one. Looks like Shackles will be a channel too.
Necro has so many AOE attacks going around, if you only need 1 crit in a window, such as in the new burning or withering precision trait, you really don’t need high crit to proc it. Especially in any team fight situation bigger than 2 v 2.
I suspect burning is going to end up in more hybrid builds than condi actually. The investement so deep into spite is really forcing sacrifices of points in curses, or no master of terror.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
I think it is 4 seconds of burning every 10 seconds, not 20. But no I agree in AOE situations and using DS4 you easily proc it once. But you need to proc it as fast as possible every 10 seconds. Even a few seconds delay is a few seconds of less burning. With duration I should have around 70% uptime on the burning, and I can guarantee that I will have it going every 10 seconds.
In a vacuum Power outdamages Precision until you get ginormous amounts of Power, an amount which isn’t practical outside of keeping max might stacks up or something.
In absolute vacuum you could say so. In the sense that precision is a multiplier, so a multiplier without a base (or a very low base) is meaningless. A million times 0 is still 0.
In the actual game power without precision and crit damage hits like a dry leaf being blown by a gentle breeze. Particularly because you’ll have a decent “base” anyways (lvl 80 exotic weapons have decent damage already, regardless). So if you want to do any decent power-based damage you’ll need both power and precision. If you don’t have precision don’t bother with power-based weapons for actual damage.
The only way Precision can pull even is with on crit affects like Sigils of Earth. But even with those, kill times are basically equal in both sets from a lot of testing that I’ve done on my builds.
Data if you’d please.
Also are you matching power with conditons? Power is a lot faster in plain “killing speed”, this is a well known fact. Or a “normal” power build with no precision, vs. a normal power with precision but no power? If so why sigil of Earth? You have no condition damage or condition improving traits… Sigil or Air/Fire on the other hand, would be an improvement. You could also go with sigil of blood for some damage and extra leeching.
Only difference is Precision damage is about half contributing via conditions and conditions can and are cleansed profusely in PVP, at which point Rabid builds are prone to falling behind Carrion on damage.
Conditions are cleansed for Carrion as much as for Rabid. Except rabid will stack more conditions, leading to more damage before being cleansed, and higher survivability through higher toughness.
Something like Death Shroud, which gives you free fury upon entering is much more benefited by power already being high, as then your crits actually do good damage. You can also ‘flash’ DS for something like Doom, then still have the fury for 4 seconds for your normal attacks.
Fury is a flat 20% increase. It’s awesome when you already have decent crit chance, but otherwise it’s 1 in kittens that crit, for a couple of seconds. Not significant.
DS in rabid is just about useless outside being a sponge. Your Life Blasts do piddly damage and your Transfer is weak as well. Wells are also weak. You are just so one dimensional.
On the contrary. DS #1 is lackluster regardless (way too slow for how much damage it does), so the higher crit chance will help procs regardless.
Full Rabid actually gives you a bit too much toughness in terms of finding the ideal EHP balance.
If you’re not going over 3k you’re not wasting anything, just being a little less efficient. Better have a bit too much for perfect efficiency than nothing at all.
And Carrion vitality scales much better with Death Shroud as it heals in percentages, negating the normal advantage toughness has over vitality for normal life.
Last I checked toughness affected the damage received in DS as well, so… It’s not that big an advantage… If there’s an advantage at all… And that’s only while in DS.
In a 1v1 you wold notice the delay the most of getting your burning restarted upon the window opening at say 50% vs 20% crit. It’s going to take an extra 2-4 attacks probably. But which is probably only 2 or 3 seconds of real time. Would have to do some math and experimentation to see how much DPS those 2 or 3 seconds additional ramp up time is costing you.
I really think if all these changes are true, the entire cannon of necro builds are going to be massively shuffled. Hard to really see the best way to go until we see every detail.
I can tell you that regardless of what his build is, Full carrion vs. Full rabid, rabid wins every single time. Full carrion is bad. No "if"s, "and"s or "but"s.
Since this is obviously your first time on the necro forum I’m gonna let it slide :P
Just read the thread I posted. A lot of people have actually made an effort to calculate the damage, both direct and condition dmg.
Power without crits hits like wet noodles and might as well not be there.
More like the other way around. Pure Rabid hits for a lot less direct damage.
Conditions can live without crits, though they benefit heavily from them.
Nope, conditions don’t benefit from crits. Barbed Precision does, the Sigil of Earth does, Dhuumfire apparently will…
All you have to do is weight the damage you’ll get from those against the higher direct damage from carrion.
Btw you’ll still have like 20% crit chance with carrion.
Vitality is complimentary to Toughness. High vitality is only worth anything if you also have high toughness. Vitality is a flat survival increase, toughness is exponential (before diminishing returns, becoming parabolic once you include those). Vitality’s “worth” is exponentially increased by toughness, as each point of health absorbs “more points of damage”, per say. Otherwise it’s like having a reinforced steel door on a crap straw shanty.
Wow, if it’s “parabolic” then I guess you’re right -.-
Again, just read the other thread. It’s just one out of hundreds that shows calculations of healing effectivness vs vitality scaling with Death Shroud etc.
End result is that Carrion offers you 1 stat that’s dependent on another stat you don’t have (power), 1 stat you don’t really need (vit) and condition damage, while Rabid offers you 1 stat you need (toughness), 1 that’s really useful either ways (precision) and condition damage.
Wrong, and again: read the thread!
Mixing the two is another matter entirely, and depends heavily on build.
True.
Feel free to show me one good build that benefits from full carrion though. It’d be the first I’d ever see. Full carrion just makes you worse at everything.
There doesn’t need to be “one good build”. Many players made the switch to Carrion after they player Rabid the whole time… with their exact same condi build.
Maybe all they did after that was switch out their Sigil of Earth for Geomancy or Hydromany.
Here’s some more reading material for you.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/Damage-Power-Precision-and-Golden-Ratios/
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Finding-the-Diminishing-Returns-in-Stats/
Let’s not make this thread anymore about armor prefixes.
After all, the OP asked about runes…
^ I had a long response typed out to him, but yeah well… suffice to say power crushes precision unless you have massively high base attacks like a thief and/or crit damage at or surpassing +100%.
Procs can make up a lot of that damage lost, if you are content that your bleeds will run 5-10 seconds without getting cleansed. Procs that go on cooldown via one target from our AOE’s while Power continues to boost vs every target hit. To each his own, wrong thread for this.
Sigh…
You’re stuck on the conceptual part of whether power without precision is better than precision without power for direct damage in a vacuum. That’s not what I’m arguing. I know this… Read everything again. Those calculations disregard “on critical” activations, attack power scales, defenses, etc, etc, etc… They’re purely a matter of “if I’m doing direct damage, how much power should I sacrifice for precision?”. That’s not what I’m arguing.
Perhaps I might have gone too fast for you, so I’ll go again, slowly:
Carrion, as a stat, is useful. What I’m telling you is that a full carrion Necro hybrid build is bad.
First of all, we have to assume he’s a condition build at least partially, otherwise Carrion or Rabid is irrelevant. If condition damage isn’t being used the right answer is “neither”, evidently.
Second, we know his weapon set: “use Scepter/Dagger mostly while occasionally swapping to Axe/Focus.”
If you’re going to go full hybrid Carrion with those, regardless of what traits you’re using, you’re just going to be bad at both.
Scepter has terrible power scaling. We know this. So power on Scepter/Dagger is irrelevant. This is a condition damage set. That’s fine. In this case, Rabid is more beneficial, as neither power or critical hits will significantly improve your damage output by themselves, but criticals will add additional bleeds and/or other effects.
So we turn to Axe/Focus. Without power and critical hit/damage, it’s not going to hit worth kitten. It has “meh” DPS as is, for full power oriented builds, but as Carrion you have neither Power as a major trait (such as Soldiers/Berserkers) or critical chance/damage (Knight’s/Berserkers), so your performance will be very, very underwhelming.
When it comes to survivability, you can argue which of them is better in Death Shroud (Knight’s diminishes damage received, while Carrion gives you more life to soak it up, and since life in DS is received in percentages, they’re more or less the same) – but outside of DS (and no you’re not going to stay in DS all day or you’re basically just a damage sponge as DS attacks are VERY underwhelming with either stats) Toughness helps you a lot more.
So there ya go. To reiterate my initial post, if you wanna go hybrid you need to mix it up, but the best idea is to just stick to condition build or power build and gear accordingly. Carrion hybrids are just bad at both.
Well I had this huge post typed out and then when I went to post it, Anet ate it somehow. Awesome.
Basically what I was going to say was that I’m glad that the thread got derailed in this manner because it’s given me an even better insight into what I needed to know.
I was kind of going for a hybrid build as I have not chosen my weapons or trinkets yet, I just have 6 pieces of Carrion armor and no runes. I got my necro to 80 recently and I’ve read the leaked patch notes so I haven’t equipped the armor yet in case there’s something in the patch that drastically changes the way I want to play my necro.
Scepter/Dagger is full condition dmg and I realize that whereas axe is for power/raw dmg. I use axe in my second weapon set because I enjoy it over all of the other weapons. I feel like staff might make more sense for my build, but the cooldowns are just so kitten ed long it frustrates me.
My other concern is that even in dungeons, max bleed stack happens quite frequently. I don’t like the idea of putting all of my eggs in 1 basket as far as dmg is concerned. I’m fully aware that not going 1 way in the extreme, either condition or power, makes me weaker overall, but I would much prefer to have some diversity with my damage output even if it leans more towards condition dmg.
The importance of toughness is not lost on me, I do know that I’m going to have to equip some on my trinkets or weapons and that vit is useless without it. I also read a very detailed and informative post the other day that if you’re not relying on crit procs, that having more precision than power was much worse for your damage overall. This wasn’t calculating in condition dmg however.
About the main topic:
I’ve noticed on the rune of the Nightmare that the 2nd and 4th bonus = 10% condition duration whereas on runes of Lyssa and Mad King the 2nd bonus is a flat 10% condition duration. Would using 2 Lyssa and 2 Mad King with 2 other runes be a bad idea?
(edited by Zindrix.1750)
So I noticed there’s a lot of options for a condition necro as far as runes go, but which ones are the most useful/why?
I haven’t picked out my accessories or weapons yet, but I do have a full set of Carrion armor and I use Scepter/Dagger mostly while occasionally swapping to Axe/Focus.
Any ideas/help appreciated!
6 Necromancer for a fear build to max the duration and get that extra tick of damage. 2 Krait, 2 Centaur, 2 afflicted for a pure bleed build, again for the duration which helps maintain high stacks.
By the way, you shouldn’t use Axe/focus in a condi build, unless those conditions you are talking about are vulnerability which is technically referred to as a burst build. For bleed/poison stacking you want scepter/dagger + staff.
Also, you should be able to get at least one crit proc every 10 seconds using all your staff marks, scepter auto attack, and DS auto attack, assuming you have 30 curses + rabid gear. Meaning the burning trait will be just as useful to a pure condi build, not just power or hybrid.
cut for size
Ok, there are several issues here you need to take into account, and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability, hoping to be clear:
- You can do PvE with just about anything, but, if you want a solid PvE build, especially if you don’t have another character that can do PvE very well, go power build. Specifically, Berserker. In my experience the best build in this area for Necros is a well build with dagger mainhand. PvE is the world of the full-glass cannon power build because of a myriad of reasons:
- In PvE monsters don’t dodge or avoid you. Meaning you get to DPS them outright. Even without accounting for skills such as a Warrior’s HB, knowing your opponent won’t actively avoid your hits removes one of the biggest advantages of conditions and DoT. Against other players, who will actively avoid your hits, your direct damage will be inconsistent, whereas a condition once applied can’t be avoided, only cleansed. A stack of bleeds will continue ticking even if your opponent moves out of your range or hides behind a wall. Since monsters don’t avoid damage, the much higher DPS of direct damage shines.
- PvE monsters have more health than armor. As discussed above vitality is flat whereas toughness/armor provide fractional damage mitigation against direct damage. Therefore, direct damage is countered by high toughness (and protection). Meanwhile, conditions generally tick for much lower DPS, but ignore toughness completely. Therefore, their counter resides in high vitality. With very few notable exceptions (like the Karkas in Southsun) monsters in PvE, particularly the big ones, don’t come with too much toughness, but instead with a bucket load of health. And the ones that come with some toughness come with even more health… Particularly champions and “above” (legendary and world bosses) have metric tons of HP, naturally favoring direct damage and countering condition damage.
- Finally, due to the way the condition system was developed and technical limitations, conditions have stack limits per enemy, and not per player. Once an enemy has 25 bleed stacks they can only be replaced (by someone with higher condition damage), not increased, regardless of how many people are fighting. Burning and poison can only be increased in duration. This means that the effectiveness of condition builds decreases exponentially to the amount of condition builds around. In a 5 person dungeon 1 condition build is working at 100%. 2 will start stepping on each other’s toes, particularly when it comes to non-stacking conditions (like burning and poison), and more than that start becoming redundant. In big world events with many people, most condition damage will be rendered null.
- Additionally to this, it’s a well known issue of the PvE world of GW2 that there is no tanking – Monsters you can tank you don’t need to (you can, instead, spike them down, which is far more beneficial), and monsters you’d want to tank you can’t (because they’ll 1/2 hit even bunker builds), so everyone relies on killing things fast and natural mitigation (dodging, vigor, blocking, etc).
Together this means that while you can do most PvE content easily regardless of build (the PvE is mostly simple that way) if you want a “serious” PvE build, go full power and berserker’s.
- If you’re going for an “everything” approach, “one set fits all”, then I’d honestly recommend one or the other, especially if you’re a relatively new player to necros. Hybrids can work, but they require a fine mix of rabids, rampagers and carrion, and you will necessarily give something up for it. You won’t be as good as either specific build individually. Personally I started out trying this and it simply didn’t work for me. Additionally there’s no real reason to, seeing as acquiring different gear sets and exchanging builds is easy enough as is.
And that’s my 2 cents. If you need anything else feel free to ask.
Sigh
Carrion is better then rabid in tpvp.
The current meta is condi, toughness does not protect you from condi DMG.
Necros get more out of health then any other class do to life force.
Sigil of geomancy is better than earth.
There’s a reason ALL top necros use carrion over rabid in tpvp.
Good day
What Login said.
Also, Zindrix, first choose your build, then the runes accordingly.
Stating things like yxc-rune is the best is only counterproductive.
The one thing you can say for sure is this: Undead runes will give you the highest amount of condition damage, even with pure carrion gear.
2 krait/cent./affl. will extend your bleeding duration the most.
Does that mean you will take either of those runes? Who knows…
I know a necro who uses 6 runes of Divinity with a hybrid build.
I know of necros who use 6 Lyssa or Mad King (<- myself) to combo the 6th bonus with the golem.
Some use Baelfire or Balthazar for their access to vigor or haste, which might become more popular with Dhuumfire.
Some chillmancers will take runes that extend chill duration.
There is a huge variety of viable rune combos, so don’t get too hung up on the idea that you need to have some sort of condition related trait or attributes on them.
This is PvE, PvP is irrelevant entirely.
4 Mad King, 2 Lyssa = +20% condi duration, +15% bleeding
Sigh
Carrion is better then rabid in tpvp.
The current meta is condi, toughness does not protect you from condi DMG.
Necros get more out of health then any other class do to life force.
Sigil of geomancy is better than earth.
There’s a reason ALL top necros use carrion over rabid in tpvp.
Good day
I still find this to be debatable. Personal experience has shown me that carrion just gets you killed faster. I cannot sustain in group fights using carrion, and a thief will break me in half when using carrion, where as using rabid I can live a hell of a lot longer in a group fight, and even survive and beat thieves if I get jumped by them using rabid. When I play other classes, and run into necromancers using carrion, I just wreck them in a matter of seconds. They’re so easy to kill. The rabid users actually survive long enough to give me trouble, and live a hell of a lot longer than carrion users.
Yeah, vitality scales well with life force, but it still degenerates at the same rate, and still gets two shot by power builds since you have no toughness. Honestly, with carrion, it feels like my life force pool disappears faster when being attacked despite having more of it. I have enough condition clears that I don’t need to worry about boosting my HP against other condition builds. Without toughness to go with vitality, your still getting hit for obscene damage, and having 6k extra HP only means you can survive 1, maybe 2 extra auto attacks.
Top teams are more about coordination than they are about builds. Builds help, yes, but having the best builds in the isn’t going to do you any good against a team with the best coordination, but using suboptimal builds.
I agree with you on geomancy. Even using rabid I still use geomancy. Nothing beats the on demand bleed stacks.
Stuff goes here.
(edited by Kravick.4906)
Playing the game generates a lot of perceptions but the mechanics are based on hard math.
Rabid requires lots and lots of healing to start noticing a big difference from carrion. Your initial health pool will handle the exact same amount of direct damage between carrion and rabid, with the extra health exactly balancing out the extra mitigation, but obviously the bigger health pool eats conditions better.
Lets say you heal a total of 7500 in a fight, one main heal a few regens, the mitigation difference in favor of rabid is only about 1500 effective health. Yet if you have taken your healing amount in condition damage over your entire pool in that time (so 7.5k condition out of say 30k total), the extra mitigation will be entirely negated out.
It’s easy to move most long bleeds out, but stuff like confusion, burning, terror, even first few ticks of poison, and indeed even bleeds that other profs can stack in big bursts (say 5 or 10 at a time) will still tick some on you, its just impossible to think you aren’t still taking a fair good bit of condi damage in a big fight with conditions flying all over.
If you are in some prolonged zerg fight with a coordinated team blasting healing water fields all over, as well as quickly cleansing conditions, then the difference would start adding up meaningfully.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
Playing the game generates a lot of perceptions but the mechanics are based on hard math.
Rabid requires lots and lots of healing to start noticing a big difference from carrion. Your initial health pool will handle the exact same amount of direct damage between carrion and rabid, with the extra health exactly balancing out the extra mitigation, but obviously the bigger health pool eats conditions better.
Lets say you heal a total of 7500 in a fight, one main heal a few regens, the mitigation difference in favor of rabid is only about 1500 effective health. Yet if you have taken your healing amount in condition damage over your entire pool in that time (so 7.5k condition out of say 30k total), the extra mitigation will be entirely negated out.
It’s easy to move most long bleeds out, but stuff like confusion, burning, terror, even first few ticks of poison, and indeed even bleeds that other profs can stack in big bursts (say 5 or 10 at a time) will still tick some on you, its just impossible to think you aren’t still taking a fair good bit of condi damage in a big fight with conditions flying all over.
If you are in some prolonged zerg fight with a coordinated team blasting healing water fields all over, as well as quickly cleansing conditions, then the difference would start adding up meaningfully.
Healing scales better with toughness. I also think someone screwed up the math some where in regards to carrion. EHP means nothing when you don’t have anything to compare it too. Even my friends notice a huge difference in survivability and longevity in team fights when I use rabid instead of carrion. I also notice the difference immediately rather than over time like you’re suggesting.
Long story short, I’ve tested both carrion and rabid extensively in actual fights (not controlled circumstances or through theorycrafting math), and found that rabid allows me to live much, much, longer. You are also so much more susceptible to burst with carrion. As I said before, conditions are not a problem considering I have so many ways to transfer them.
Stuff goes here.
(edited by Kravick.4906)
Sigh…
…
You were told power is more effective than precision without factoring procs, you asked for data, you were given it, you responded with ‘but procs’ and implied that he was an idiot. Take a deep breath and think about what you’re posting.
I’ll add this to the argument: most procs don’t make up the difference anyway. You can get 2 or perhaps 3 extra stacks of bleed out of earth sigils, which doesn’t come close to making up for the difference in stat quality between power and precision plus the loss of other sigils (geomancy for example). You can get 30-50% uptime on another stack with barbed precision. If dhuumfire is a real thing, crit will gain a lot of value, but right now, carrion is simply better than rabid for dps.
I haven’t done the math on EHP, but I’m inclined to agree that rabid gives more survivability than carrion. The EHP calculations I saw had necro base armor/health right at the spot where toughness and vitality are worth the same in terms of EHP. As soon as you heal once, toughness is ahead.
If you’re not playing to win, don’t complain when you lose.
(edited by Mammoth.1975)
Healing scales better with toughness. I also think someone screwed up the math some where in regards to carrion. EHP means nothing when you don’t have anything to compare it too. Even my friends notice a huge difference in survivability and longevity in team fights when I use rabid instead of carrion. I also notice the difference immediately rather than over time like you’re suggesting.
Long story short, I’ve tested both carrion and rabid extensively in actual fights (not controlled circumstances or through theorycrafting math), and found that rabid allows me to live much, much, longer. You are also so much more susceptible to burst with carrion. As I said before, conditions are not a problem considering I have so many ways to transfer them.
I transfered over to carrion and don’t see any difference in survivability, that’s why I said its perception. And I do more damage consistently because cleansing removes less of my overall DPS. The top tourney necros run carrion. You take more damage yes, its easy to notice, but you also have 5-6k more health to absorb that damage.
It could very well be that having the bigger health pool fools people into playing more aggressively because they haven’t adjusted. They see 20k health left and mistake that it is worth the same as 20k with Rabid, so wade into risky situations.
As soon as you heal once, toughness is ahead.
That’s certainly not always true, situational at best.
Let’s leave DS out of it and assume that your necro only takes direct damage, which will be mitigated by armor.
The difference in damage mitigation for rabid vs carrion is about 20% (like 10% vs 30%… if I remember correctly)
Hp pools are 18k vs 24k. So the EHP with direct damage only will be 23,4k vs 26,4k.
Let’s assume that both players heal for 7k with Consume Conditions once before they go down.
That’s (18+7)x1,3= 32,5 for Rabid
vs (24+7) x1,1 = 34,5 for Carrion.
So, bottom line: taking direct damage only and healing once will still put carrion before rabid.
Only after a second 7k heal the EHP will change to 41,6k for rabid and 39,4k for carrion.
But: that is so far from actual gameplay.
Especially in PvP you’ll take a lot of damage in conditions.
Still, without considering DS and the vitality/lf-scaling, let’s say 50% of the damage you take is in conditions.
That means damage mitigation is cut in half for both prefix types.
With 5% vs 15% you’ll need to heal 5 times with Consume for 7k to break even:
Rabid (18+ 7×5) x1,15 = 60,95
Carrion (24+ 7×5) x1,05 = 60,1
Those are all very rough calculations, leaving out a lot of variables in actual combat (like healing from team members..).
But one thing is certain:
Better survivability with Rabid? That’s an illusion, especially with the condition heavy meta in pvp atm.
I used full Carrion in PvE for some time, but felt that my damage was just really lacking.
So what I do nowadays is run Carrion Armor but Rampager (Power+Precision+Condition Damage) Trinkets.
You can usually survive in PvE and WvW without a ton of Vitality and Toughness if you are careful.
As a plus Carrion armor is cheap and there are Ascended Rampager Trinkets.
Exotic Rampager trinkets aren’t all that expensive either, at least not the last time I checked.
In PvP people often spike your Death Shroud right off you but in PvE Life Transfer and Life Blast are actually pretty decent sources of Power based damage.
I also like how the Ground targeted Wells is in Curses.
Combining Well of Suffering with a bunch of Condition Damage from Scepter is interesting.
Benight[Edge]
(edited by LastDay.3524)
I transfered over to carrion and don’t see any difference in survivability, that’s why I said its perception. And I do more damage consistently because cleansing removes less of my overall DPS. The top tourney necros run carrion. You take more damage yes, its easy to notice, but you also have 5-6k more health to absorb that damage.
It could very well be that having the bigger health pool fools people into playing more aggressively because they haven’t adjusted. They see 20k health left and mistake that it is worth the same as 20k with Rabid, so wade into risky situations.
Its not perception when I have 4 other people, people whom I play with on a daily basis, all seeing the same thing I am. Hell, I’ve had people that I play against notice the same thing. I got a whisper from someone I’ve played a few games against also noticing this difference.
I don’t really care what top tourney necros run. They’ve openly admitted that survivability isn’t why they run carrion. They run carrion because of the slightly increased damage because of all the condition clears that fly every which way. Its easy to burst down a carrion user with a power build. I do it all the time on my thief, and its immediately noticeable when they drop in no time at all. I can’t burst a rabid user. They eat the entire chain and still survive. At this point I’m just repeating myself.
Better survivability with Rabid? That’s an illusion, especially with the condition heavy meta in pvp atm.
Most of your post is theorycraft. I don’t like discussing theorycraft as it fails to take into consideration what actually happens in a fight. ANet used theorycraft to create this so called “attrition” that necromancers have (inflated HP doesn’t make us attrition. Look at warriors and guardians for proof of that). Look at how thats worked out so far.
Its also no illusion. I can see it plainly with my own eyes. So can other people. I fight with a thief, a very good thief, on a regular basis. I’ve never been able to beat him with the build he uses. With carrion, he beats me in under a minute, every single time. Its kind of silly how much he chunks my health when using carrion. Yes, I know what stun breaks are. Its unlikely that he ever gets to finish his opening combo, but I simply cannot sustain a prolonged fight against him using a carrion amulet. With rabid, I last 4-5 minutes against him easily. Still haven’t beaten him, come close a couple of times, but like I said, he is very good. His build is based around healing in stealth, so every 7 seconds he basically comes out with a near full HP bar. He wins by attrition. Based on experience, actual combat, not theorycraft, rabid has shown to be superior against burst DPS. Most of the threats I face in PvP are from burst builds, not condition builds. Conditions do nothing to me. They end up working in my favor, actually.
As far as condition being the meta? When was the last time you played tPvP? The only classes that ever run condition damage are bunker rangers (most of their damage comes from the pet, not conditions), HGH engineers (seeing a lot less of this build type these days), and of course other necromancers. Everyone else runs power based builds.
As far a carrion doing more damage, I’ll concede to that, but that was never my point anyway. You also don’t do any damage when dead, and you’re certainly not in any position to help your team while dead either.
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(edited by Kravick.4906)
Its not perception when I have 4 other people, people whom I play with on a daily basis, all seeing the same thing I am. Hell, I’ve had people that I play against notice the same thing. I got a whisper from someone I’ve played a few games against also noticing this difference.
Some people “seeing” or “noticing” the same as you do would be the definition of perception.
All we can tell you is that the math behind it favours carrion.
And that means that either the formula for damage calculation is wrong or that coming to a different conclusion empirically can only be due to circumstances other than your amulet prefix.
As soon as you heal once, toughness is ahead.
That’s certainly not always true, situational at best.
Let’s leave DS out of it and assume that your necro only takes direct damage, which will be mitigated by armor.
The difference in damage mitigation for rabid vs carrion is about 20% (like 10% vs 30%… if I remember correctly)
Hp pools are 18k vs 24k. So the EHP with direct damage only will be 23,4k vs 26,4k.Let’s assume that both players heal for 7k with Consume Conditions once before they go down.
That’s (18+7)x1,3= 32,5 for Rabid
vs (24+7) x1,1 = 34,5 for Carrion.So, bottom line: taking direct damage only and healing once will still put carrion before rabid.
Only after a second 7k heal the EHP will change to 41,6k for rabid and 39,4k for carrion.But: that is so far from actual gameplay.
Especially in PvP you’ll take a lot of damage in conditions.
Still, without considering DS and the vitality/lf-scaling, let’s say 50% of the damage you take is in conditions.
That means damage mitigation is cut in half for both prefix types.
With 5% vs 15% you’ll need to heal 5 times with Consume for 7k to break even:Rabid (18+ 7×5) x1,15 = 60,95
Carrion (24+ 7×5) x1,05 = 60,1Those are all very rough calculations, leaving out a lot of variables in actual combat (like healing from team members..).
But one thing is certain:
Better survivability with Rabid? That’s an illusion, especially with the condition heavy meta in pvp atm.
You’re estimating. I’m thus more inclined to trust the first set of numbers I saw, which did not estimate. When I choose between the 2, I choose carrion 90% of the time, but I accept that I’ll be squishier.
If you’re not playing to win, don’t complain when you lose.
Its not perception when I have 4 other people, people whom I play with on a daily basis, all seeing the same thing I am. Hell, I’ve had people that I play against notice the same thing. I got a whisper from someone I’ve played a few games against also noticing this difference.
Some people “seeing” or “noticing” the same as you do would be the definition of perception.
All we can tell you is that the math behind it favours carrion.
And that means that either the formula for damage calculation is wrong or that coming to a different conclusion empirically can only be due to circumstances other than your amulet prefix.
Like I said, its theorycraft. Theorycraft does not take into consideration even half of what actually goes on in a fight. So I’m inclined to believe that the math is flawed. I would suggest you actually try it yourself instead of come to a conclusion based on raw numbers. Mathmatically speaking, warriors and necromancers should survive a hell of a lot longer than guardians with their inflated HP, but we all know this to be untrue.
Your EHP also fails to consider damage sources. If you’ve ever played a game called EVE Online, you’d recognize how EHP can fluctuate wildly depending on what kind of damage you take, and raw numbers never allows you to anticipate what is really happening. Does carrion work better against condition users? Sure, I can see that, but there are a heck of a lot more power builds than there are condition builds being run.
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(edited by Kravick.4906)
Like I said:
Those are all very rough calculations, leaving out a lot of variables in actual combat
Also, I did not theorycraft anything. There was no build at all. I created a model purely based on the assumption that you’ll take direct damage only with either a rabid or a carrion amulet. That’s why the EHP in my example is correct, because I defined it to be just that: an extension of what your armor can mitigate.
I know that in an actual fight there are a lot of other things to consider, but one thing remains the same: rabid mitigates 20% more direct damage than carrion.
With that in mind you can tell exactly what amount of hp needs to be healed to give rabid the edge over carrion.
If you want to talk about different damage sources for EHP fluctuations, alright: in gw2 there are exactly 2. Direct damage and conditions.
I picked direct damage for my calculation to show the limits of carrion, when you consider a variable amount of conditions as well then all you do is shift the EHP in favor of carrion.
Now, before you say that this is all theory and I should try for myself:
This principle underlines every real fight in game, there is no way around it.
If you get burst down with a carrion amu by a thief in one go, then you sure as hell wouldn’t have survived the same with rabid. Why? Because math!
If your experience tells you something else, then it’s not because of your armor or healthpool.
Now, before you say that this is all theory and I should try for myself:
This principle underlines every real fight in game, there is no way around it.
If you get burst down with a carrion amu by a thief in one go, then you sure as hell wouldn’t have survived the same with rabid. Why? Because math!
If your experience tells you something else, then it’s not because of your armor or healthpool.
It was theory the minute you admitted they were rough calculations. No, I will not get burst down in one go with rabid. Why? Because I’ve already had this situation occur many, many times by fighting the same opponent using the same build multiple times per stat set. Your math is flawed, this much you yourself have already admitted. I cannot accept it as anything but theory.
Besides, actual in game evidence has already shown me all that I need to see. I don’t need theoretical numbers. With carrion, you’ll do slightly more damage, but you’re squishy. With rabid, you’ll do a little bit less damage, but you can eat bursts and still survive. Heals heal for a flat amount. Toughness increases the effectiveness of healing. Having a bigger HP pool but no increased healing means you’ll just have a bigger initial HP pool, but you’ll be unable to fill it back up because of fixed healing amounts. Each HP healed will be lost quicker without toughness as well. Condition damage is a wash thanks to condition transfers. Their weapon becomes my weapon.
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(edited by Kravick.4906)
It was theory the minute you admitted they were rough calculations.
It’s a mathematic model based on facts.
No, I will not get burst down in one go with rabid. Why? Because I’ve already had this situation occur many, many times by fighting the same opponent using the same build multiple times per stat set.
Did you test this without defending yourself, just to see how much damage you can take with each prefix type? Did you take a look at your combat log? Checked how many times he landed critical hits?
Please tell me more about how I didn’t consider actual in-game combat mechanic, while you experienced it “many, many times”.
Your math is flawed, this much you yourself have already admitted. I cannot accept it as anything but theory.
How is it flawed? And how did I admit to it??
Personally, I have Ogden’s armor set (Carrion) with Rabid jewelry and weapons for WvW small-ish group roaming. I’ve got my overall armor stat at roughly 1/10th of my HP.
I did this because I run a support build using plague signet. I wanted the vitality so I could stack conditions on myself prior to sending them over to the bad guys. My build is heavy blood magic and leeching on minion hits, as well as my criticals, to try and keep me topped off. It works for the way that I play and support my teammates.
As far as runes go, I use 4xRata Sum and 2xKrait. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else use this combo, but I like it.
Lastly, power vs. precision:
A flat % increase in power is a flat % increase in direct damage. For example, if you have 1k power and you add 100, you end up with (100/1000)=10% damage increase. As you have more power, the effectiveness of adding more diminishes.
At level 80, 21 precision is 1% crit chance. The formula for figuring out a DPS % increase from critical chance is roughly, ((DPS-DPS*CritChance) + DPS*CritChance*(1.5+CritDMG))/DPS. As you can see, you get a second variable, your crit damage.
All that said, the best way to figure out what you benefit from is to look at what you already have. It is all case by case. Further, once you stack power above a certain point, it becomes more effective to grab traits or sigils that add flat % dmg increases as opposed to putting points into spite for pure power (assuming you aren’t already 30 into spite).
Asuran -Engineer, Elementalist, Necromancer, Mesmer, and underlevel Ranger
(edited by Wenrolio.8063)
@flow: The reason your assumption is flawed is because the chart you are refrencing assumes the optimum EHP base: 1 armor per 10 health. Necros start very health-heavy on that scale, so the additional toughness of Rabid gear increases our EHP far more than the additional Vitality on Carrion does.
I didn’t reference any chart.
There is also no assumption being made other than the formula for damage calculation being correct.
Beyond that logic dictates that if your armor mitigates X % of direct damage, then you’ll have the same result if you increase your total hp pool by that amount.
10k hp with 10% mitigation = 11k hp without mitigation by armor.
That’s all there is to it.
Btw I checked with the build calculator:
In sPvP, depending on the type of runes you are using and how many points you invest into Death Magic: you’ll have between 26% and 35% damage reduction with a rabid amulet, and 0-18% for carrion.
The highest EHP is when health=armor*10. This is the assumption we should work on.
Necros start with high health, but low armor. As such, adding Toughness does more to increase EHP than adding Vitality. EHP determines how durable you are in a vacuum. (other factors, such as signets, Protection, Weakness, dodges, blocks, heals, etc. are not factored in and would be practically impossible to calculate).
As such, your claim that Carrion is just as good for suvivability as Rabid on a necro is laughable.
Yes, Carrion does make you more durable, but not as much as Rabid does. There are no perceptions involved in this, just math.
As for increasing our health to match the EHP, yes, you can do that, but now you are dealing with exponential increases. You hit the point where it is easier to just get Toughness to increase your EHP rather than more Vitality. Necros actually start beyond this point.
(edited by Drarnor Kunoram.5180)
I’ve run in game tests taking on/off various amounts of toughness and the accepted formula’s listed on the wiki and other places hold up perfectly.
But when we are down to the point of people arguing whether they win or lose in random fights, how they feel in combat, really not much the forum is going to gain from it. I’ll go with the math everytime.
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