Guild Wars 2

so I recently got to 80 on my thief, i decided to play him primarily as condition damage: I spam DB and whatever poison i can lay down using utility and other skills, wield d/d as my primary weapons and shortbow swap. I started upgrading my equipment to exotic and got to wondering how much condition damage I actually need to stack. I figure that diminishing returns is a factor but I don’t know what the “cap” is for a condition damage before it becomes pointless to add more.

At the moment my condition damage is 1,181. my armour and d/d set are all Carrion prefixed since I figured vitality would be useful as i hardly stealth except for Vanish in shadows. my armour has Afflicted rune set and my daggers are Agony (bleed duration) and sup. Corruption (not as useful in PVP but whatever)

I’m now getting around to replacing my trinkets and i’d like to know if it’s a good idea to continue with the Carrion prefix or if I should get another set i.e. survivability.

Is this for PvE, PvP or WvW?

I myself run full carrion except for soldier on the armor for WvW and (sometimes) use food for condition duration, sigils of corruption and agony on the daggers, hydro on the SB.

I haven’t tried sPVP yet, so mostly PvE but I do run around with zergs in WvW when things are slow. my SB at the moment is just an MF bow, probably won’t change it for a while.

full carrion with chrysocola jewelery will probably be the easiest to use. there is no diminishing return on condition damage. you could also try 3 krait 3 afflicted runes, you lose a bit of condition damage, but will gain 2 extra ticks from DB bleeds. what is your build? if you go the full 30 into shadow arts, toughness/condition damge/healing gear for your jewelery would be beneficial for the extra toughness and healing.

Full carrion. Also, if you utilize stealth alot, the healing in stealth trait is invaluable.

thanks for the replies, good to know there isn’t diminishing returns for cond damage. my build at the moment is 20 deadly arts, 30 acrobatics, 20 trickery. mostly relying on dodging via V and DB spam to not die as opposed to stealthing. I was also considering dropping 10 points from acrobatics to another field but i didn’t really like the look of anything else, and i figured 100 extra vitality was okay. I didn’t know there was a toughness/condition damage/healing set, at the moment i’m leaning towards that since it won’t detract from my damage output.

pugo.8039:

thanks for the replies, good to know there isn’t diminishing returns for cond damage. my build at the moment is 20 deadly arts, 30 acrobatics, 20 trickery. mostly relying on dodging via V and DB spam to not die as opposed to stealthing. I was also considering dropping 10 points from acrobatics to another field but i didn’t really like the look of anything else, and i figured 100 extra vitality was okay. I didn’t know there was a toughness/condition damage/healing set, at the moment i’m leaning towards that since it won’t detract from my damage output.

it will detract from damage output, just not by a lot. the majority of the damage loss is non condition damage, which adds up if you are in full carrion. I’ve seen the math somewhere before. it is also worth noting that set is usually used more in p/d builds, or if you stealth somewhat often, combined with 30 points into shadow arts, so you recover hp while in stealth while not taking a lot of damage due to high toughness. if your gonna brawl it out, carrion will probably serve you better. you will kill faster in it, and if you know what to dodge you wont take many of the big hits people can throw your way.