Guild Wars 2

For the conditionmancers/terror necros what condition duration do you like either bleeds or overall?

I’m sure everyone likes different durations I am learning necromancer I know on my thief and mesmer condi builds I like 75% at a minimum. On my necro I am going with something about there at 80% overall. I don’t run hemophila or lingering curses.

I was running the master of terror but I find I like spiritual marks better for the LF regen.

One of the things I like the most about necro is that you can have high condi damage and good duration something that you have to chose between usually on a condi thief or mesmer.

What do you guys that run condi like to sit at for duration?

Are we talking PVE, WVW or PVP?

PvP: I don’t realy care I mostly play fear crowd control so just stacking different conditions without signet of spite is my interest.
I usually take the duration that comes with the traits.

PvE: The most i can get and spread without dying.

For my standard condition damage build, the only duration increases I consider are Lingering Curse and Master of Terror (rare veggie pizza/koi cake in PvE and WvW too). I prefer making my conditions hit as hard as possible over making them last long due to the prevalence of condition removal. Master of Terror is a different story, since it guarantees a second tick of Terror from DS#2 with a possibility of a third and, more importantly, means the target is locked down just a bit longer.

Lingering Curse I take because I don’t really have a better option, but it also means my DPS doesn’t drop as much if I can’t attack for a couple seconds and makes kiting easier (Grasping Dead).

WvW, My bleeds are at 95%. Rest is at 50%.

In PvP I only get 10% increase from runes, the rest I get if I go into Spite, and maybe Master of Terror; otherwise I don’t touch duration there as it isn’t all that helpful.

PvE/WvW I go a lot more towards maxing out durations, although I forget what it is.

Overall duration I find much better than bleed specific. If you notice most of our bleeds are really long by default, 8 seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, etc.

If you then have overall duration on top of it such as from Spite, Food, or Runes, it starts becoming counter productive to take bleed specific stuff like Hemophilia, because rarely will your bleeds be running that long (except in PVE) before being cleansed to gain the additional time. Even in PVE, most common stuff is dead long before those bleeds run out.

I dislike Lingering Curses for a similar reason. It’s only effecting 3 skills, and with my condi already at 70% in WvW, my grasping dead going from 12 to 15 seconds and weakness from 8 to 10 isn’t really doing that much. The extra poison time on Scepter 3 is a bit better but you don’t get it off that many times in a fight.

In PVP, I usually run a minion master. But, whenever I use a conditionmancer in PVP, I end up with around 50-70% condition duration on bleeds, 10-30% for other conditions, terror included. I built this way mostly out of limitations: it is really hard to get much higher than that.

In PVE and WvW, my condition necro has a 100% bleed duration, 70% for all other conditions. 40% of both comes from Rare Veggie Pizza, which I made hundreds of while leveling cooking on an alt.

I’ve considered going for more, because there is always something awesome about the 100% duration for every condition build. However, I went with the 100/70 spread for a couple of reasons:

#1: Higher stats overall. To get 100% duration you have to sacrifice quite a bit in the stat area.

#2: The majority of damage a condition necro does is with bleeds, and bleeding is a whole lot easier to get to 100 than any other condition. Building up other conditions to that duration is nice, but it just decoration on a cake at that point.

#3: For other conditions, 70% is enough.

All in all I’m satisfied with the 100/70 duration spread on my necromancer.