Guild Wars 2

First, English is not my first language, so bear me with( and my grammatical errors :P)
I’ve returned from a month-long hiatus from GW2, and I’m searching for some help on making my condi build up to date. I used to run a 0/30/20/20/0 build for some well-team support and still sustained AoE damage, with full rabid an undead runes. Seeing the new trait and abilities I could use the trait point for well cooldown reduction elsewhere ( because they got theyre cooldown reduced), and use a terror build for WvW. I’m not sure of what to use for PvE tough: does terror inflict damage at enemies with defiant(never used a terror build if not in PvP)? If that isn’t the case, what could I use? Signet? Keep wells? I’d be very thankful if you could help me

No one can help me?

Condi and PvE not good.

30/30/10 is the ‘flavor of the month’

Close to Death, is going to be more useful than Dhuumfire in PvE.

Stuff like ‘Rune of Divinity’ are going to help, as it’s ‘all stats’. So Power/Pre/Cond/Tuf/Vit.

The reason your going to want to worry about power in PvE is, many objects like doors/turrets take NO damage from Conditions.
Group events, it’s only 25 cond for everyone, so you’ll be fighting to damage enough to get credit for the event.
Lots of Champ/Dungeon boss’s have ‘reduced condi’.

I run condi necro in PVE sometimes. They can be epic when done right. A few things to note:

#1: Run carrion, not rabid. Carrion gives you power, which does more damage than rabid’s precision. Necros don’t have good on-critical traits to take advantage of crits, so just go with carrion to get more power. Both provide the same amount of survivability for complicated mathematical reasons I’ve explained elsewhere.

#2: Use epidemic. This is the strongest skill a condition necro can have in PVE, and it is one of the best skills in the game. It can take everyone’s conditions, and spread them about everywhere. But, it uses your condition damage, so if you have 1800+ condition damage you can do a ton of damage with conditions.

#3: Your best condition damage comes in an AoE. Epidemic is great, but also you have Scepter skill #2 (grasping dead), daggers kill #5 (enfeebling blood), and staff skill #2 (mark of blood). For AoE conditions in general, the staff does it better than the scepter/dagger combined, however scepter/dagger can be better if you use epidemic.

#4: You’ll want 100% bleed duration, and as high condition duration as possible in PVE. This is because epidemic is more powerful with longer lasting conditions. There are a couple of ways of doing this, but for now, I will assume you use Rare Veggie Pizza (40%) + Hemophilia (20% bleed). This is using that pure condition build you listed. To get the last 40%, there’s a couple of ways to do it:

A) Use Giver’s Scepter + Giver’s Dagger, both with Superior Sigil of Agony. This cuts condition damage by quite a bit, but it does give you long condition duration. Also, this doesn’t work with the staff, who only gets you to 80% bleed duration.

B) Use 2x Superior Runes of the afflicted, 2x Superior Runes of the Krait, and 2x Superior rune of the Centaur. This will give you up to 45% extra bleed duration, putting you at 100%. This is better than the above since it will give you full weapon stats and frees up the Sigils.

C) Use x2 of any of the runes in B, and x4 Superior Rune of the Mad KIng. This gives you 40% bleed duration, and also more power. However, this is quite expensive.

D)I personally use x3 Runes of the Afflicted, and x3 Runes of the Krait. This only gives 30% bleed duration, but it gives a lot more condition damage than the above. In your build, you can just put a Superior Sigil of Agony somewhere and get 100% duration.

Now, currently the build that a lot of people use for PVE conditions is 30/30/10/0/0. With that, they use the trait Dhuumire to get burning, Terror to get damage on fear, and also either Greater Marks or Staff Mastery. For PVE go Staff Mastery, since the enemies aren’t that hard to hit with marks. With Dhuumfire, you only need a crit rate at around 25%, so a few rabid or rampager pieces of gear will get you that high.

I do not know if terror goes through defiant. I assume it doesn’t, however terror is still good in PVE. This is because Spectral Wall now causes fear to enemies who cross it. In PVE enemies are stupid, so they’ll keep running into the wall over and over again, getting a lot of terror damage.

Thanks everyone
I originally switched from Carrion to Rabid Months ago, but after going back to read some of your post, Arachnid, I’ve decided to give Carrion another chance
I’m going to go find ome carrion gear and Krait and Afflicted Runes and see how it goes.

It depends entirely on your group makeup. If you have your heart set on conditions, there are several builds that will literally do zero damage if the group already has bleeders/burners/poison, of such excess that yours only tick occasionally.

If this is open world, I agree that no condition build is worth-while in group play. The group size in that environment is uncapped, and when something already has 25 bleed stacks, you will end up with the odd tick of bleeding at best.

In dungeons, 30/30/10/0/0 is not flavor of the month, it was the staple for hybrid necros. I would say now with rampagers gear, you could get by with either close to death or burning depending on your group makeup. If you have a guard you likely don’t need burning much since he gives it to the group in AOE, or an engi, or an ele.

Nothing has really changed today, except that you could find a good home in a dungeon group in rabid or carrion as long as they don’t have excessive bleeders. If they have some bleeders, but no devoted bleeders, you are better off hybrid with rampagers. If they have multiple offtask bleeders (mesmers, engi, ranger), you would be better off in a power build with zerker gear.

nolop.8095:

I’m not 100% sure about the exact mechanic but from what I found conditions with higher condition damage overwrite ones with lesser condition damage.

As a result your conditions will get overwritten more often and most likely before they expire. So the extra duration is wasted.

This is incorrect. The game deals with all bleeds as first in first out. Meaning if you drop a very strong, very long bleed, the game will allow that bleed to stand until you hit 25 stacks of bleeding, or the bleed expires. At that point the oldest bleed goes off for the next applied bleed regardless of condition damage, duration, source. So you could have 30 seconds left on your blood is power bleed dealing 160 damage per second, and it will potentially be knocked off by a 50 damage bleed from a warrior/mesmer with a duration of less than 5 seconds.

So if your party has lots of mesmer style bleeds (short duration, low damage), they will push off your bleeds one way or the other (if you are up around the bleed cap).

I still advocate for duration, but it is only valuable if your group is not hitting the bleed cap.