Guild Wars 2

Probably should have researched this before investing in making my full set of berserker runes, but that double 5% damage increase sounded to sexy not to try on my sinister geared berserker.
Still I’m curious if anyone has crunched the numbers on this, does the duration increase of balth on just the burning do more for me than the 5% damage increases on my bleeds, burns, and direct damage?

I don’t crunch numbers but logically speaking you’d probably get more mileage out of runes that buff multiple damage types. Having longer bleeds, longer burns, and better physical/condi damage all in one rune set will be amazing for hybrids like me who use full or close to full Sinister gear.

Condition duration is the best way of increasing DPS. Without Viper’s / other condi duration gear, and runes, you can have…

Food: 20%
King of fires: 20%
Smoldering: 20%
Oil: 10%

= 70% burning duration

Bleed is 83% instead (due to Arms traitline).

The bulk of your damage comes from burn, in a 2:1 ratio (burn:bleed), probably. Idea would then be to find the optimal mix of gear to get both conditions to 100%. My guess is that balthazar runes aren’t very good since they give power, a suboptimal stat (though not awful) and don’t help with capping bleed. My guess is that a mix of viper (or giver) + nightmare OR berserker runes is the best mix. I’m guessing nightmare are better since condi duration is so expensive on gear.

I just need to know the values on viper’s.

Bal runes give malice and burn duration, pretty nice and dirt cheap compared to some other alternatives.

If you’re running a hybrid build, a la sinister armor, then Berserker runes make a lot of sense but if you’re purely burning focused then Balthazar runes are the way to go. There is one caveat, however, and that’s the co-efficients on the weapons you’re using to apply conditions in a hybrid spec. Warrior tends to have weapons that are solid no matter how you swing them so it’s probably okay, but don’t try this on ranger. In a pure DPS shoot-out with one warrior running sinister-based hybrid vs something like rabid-based burning warrior.. I’d go with the hybrid because burning application still feels a bit too spotty to compete with raw damage.