Guild Wars 2

I know Weakness isn’t a Necro specific condition, but in some of my builds I can get to keep permanent or very long duration of Weakness on bosses while maintaining high dps. I only have a Guardian aside from Necro, so I havent had a chance to try Weakness centric builds in other classes yet. Anyway, I returned to a version of spoj’s build not long afterwards when I heard from some people that Weakness isn’t much needed on bosses.

But why? Is it that Weakness doesn’t apply to the boss’ attacks? Is it because of its on chance mechanic? Is it because its effect doesnt stack with other damage mitigation? Or it is trivial since even if it works the hits are 1-shot anyway (but that also makes Protection irrelevant too)? What is it that makes my favorite condition irrelevant for boss encounters? Thank you.

If I had to wager a guess, it’s because you can either handle collateral damage with regular heals, or you use active mitigation via blocks/dodges/evasion/invuln to deal with heavy hits. If every they design a boss that keeps a lot of pressure on beyond the group’s ability to actively mitigate it, Weakness combined with some support might be how it needs to be handled.

I’m not a PvE guru by any stretch, but from what I’ve seen, until they up their mechanical game with their boss design, many interesting mechanics (support, boon-stripping (though there are some places for this I think), certain condis, etc.) will fall short of simply zerker gearing with active mitigation.

In dungeons its very much the case because most attacks which work with weakness and/or doing overkill you twice over are too weak for weakness to make a notable difference.

Weakness is very good in fractals but its difficult to get enough long lasting weakness without sacrificing damage. Alternatively if your whole group uses scale venom then every mob/boss should have perma weakness on them. So theres not really a reason to spec for it. CPC, withering precision (kind of bad because of icd), offhand dagger and enfeeble are generally the best things to take for extra weakness if you need it and dont have a group using scale venom.

In dungeons you really dont need it at all. Nothing in dungeons is that dangerous.

Yeah I usually try to sacrifise least damage as possible and use the sources of Weakness you (spoj) mentioned to keep it up without investing a lot. And yeah Weakness is useful in mobs. So does that mean that not just Weakness, but damage mitigation as a whole (Protection, gimmick signets, Frost Aura etc) for boss encounterments are subpar? I just want to be useful without becoming a damage and vulnurability bot and not be weight to group.

Ah thank you guys for answering in such short notice. I guess I have to return to my Guardian for PvE, where he is always welcome.

Because their attack chains have big enough gaps that you can just avoid most of their big hitter damage natively, and they are usually so poor at tracking a moving target that running around like it was an episode of Benny Hill handles the rest.

I’d argue that it’s underrated because the effect is difficult to notice. A ~25% reduction in incoming direct damage is pretty substantial for any boss that hits with regularity, but tough for players to detect a difference with, so I can’t imagine it’s a particular priority. It’s a poor man’s Protection, I’d say, which I think most will agree is very valuable. I play hybrid necro so it’s relatively easy to fit weakness into my build with the Curses Grandmaster trait.

I haven’t tested it to ensure it works as it says on the tooltip, but on paper it seems quite good, and something people rarely take so I go for it.

Important hits that we would be trying to mitigate shouldn’t be generalized I think. So for those dangerous hits, taking the displayed effect on proc, %50 damage mitigation, rather than the average %25 would be more realistic, as the hits are usually not that frequent but often comes in a big package.

Though Weakness is still poor compared to Protection, there isnt a reason why we should choose between them. I guess for most boss fights, off hand dagger and Signet of Spite usage would both be good damage and good source of dps, so no specialization is needed.

it depends on how cordinated your group is, and how much you value staying alive. My dungeon group runs with a few zerkers, and a few “Tanky” specs, and even some pure boon bots sometimes. And being able to keep weakness on enemies helps you just plain FACE tank enemies honestly. A boss with weakness on it AND your hammer guardian with full up time protection, and Frost aura(im wishing more and more engi had frost fields…..) you are pretty much unkillable, its pretty sweet. is it worth all the effort? no, but it does show case the millions of ways to play this game.

WTB more zerker nerfs tbh.