Guild Wars 2

Every Mark on the Necro Staff has a 3/4ths second cast time. There’s a character model movement associated with the cast that you can watch for to see when it happens. For Scepter #2 and Dagger #5, both have 3/4ths second cast times. You can roll a level 2 Necro, go to sPvP, and watch them to learn. As it happens, 3/4ths of a second is just enough time to be able to react comfortably without needing to necessarily be a ninja.

The difference in animations between the marks exists for the most part, but it’s so subtle that it might as well not exist. But at least there are cast animations. They are no less subtle than other animations that require watching in order to not die. Evading the mark also triggers it, so it effectively does nothing.

I went through a period where I thought Condis were too strong. I really did. Then I looked at them as individual skills instead of just picturing a “condi burst” feeling, and really it isn’t that bad, in my opinion.

I just put together a full Dire + 6% condi dmg sigils + condi dmg runes + veggie pizza + potent crystal + 25 stacks of +10 condi dmg on gw2skills.net, and it puts it up around 2000 condi dmg.

In this case, Mark of Blood does 3 stacks of Bleeding at 5,739 damage over 13.5 seconds. Grasping Dead is 4,856 damage over 11.75 seconds. They both have low cooldowns, and any additional damage is probably crit procs from sigils or traits. Scepter #1 does a 883 dmg bleed over 6.75 seconds.

I don’t know if these numbers are completely exact for the true damage it would do, and yes, it isn’t effected by Toughness. Yes, the cooldowns aren’t very long for these, and the damage totals are fairly high. But they have to be, because at the end of the day, condis can be cleansed.

With Direct Damage/Power, you can spec all of your stats and see gains instantly. With Conditions, you have to gear into Condi Damage, find Condi Duration, and if you want to truly max your damage potential, also grab Precision, just to hope that your condis don’t get cleansed or returned to you anyway.

I play a Powermancer, and I’m constantly swapping my utilities around depending on what I’m fighting. That’s just what I have to do. However, I don’t have to give up anything on gear in order to counter Conditions, whereas Conditions have to give up potential damage (in Power, for example) in order to counter Direct Damage so their condis have a chance to build. Just because many players let condition classes faceroll through their abilities to apply as many bleeds as they can, as though on an NPC, doesn’t mean you can’t do some crafty dodging and preparation.

As a Zerker, you try to make the fight last as short as possible. For conditions to really work, condi players have to extend the fight. So they bunker. What does a Zerker do to counter what was done to counter them? Go to the forums and complain, or rethink how they approach condi classes to deal with them?

Mek.2947:

Yep…huge animations…this coming from a necro…What exactly is the animation? The insta PBAOE that appears under your feet? Even classes that CAN cleanse…meaning they have more than two options to remove conditions cannot keep up with the spammable conditions that classes like necros, warriors, rangers, and engis can put out. The only class that has avoidable conditions would be a PU mesmer where you just avoid marinating in their clones breaking around you.

The point is ….zerkers had to give up survivability for their damage…condis do not. That’s why it’s imbalanced, and that’s why everywhere you go the majority of players are condi bunker.

The majority of players in WvW are power…. by a significant margin…. The majority of thieves, warriors, mesmers, guardians, rangers, and eles are all power. The majority of necros, engineers are conditions.

Roaming actually has a nice split of power/condi warriors, thieves, rangers, eles, mesmers. Necros again are normally condi , along with engineers.

Quite a few of the necro skills do have significant tells; Enfeebling blood, SOS, Dark path, deathly swarm, tainted shackles… the marks have an obvious tell but cast too fast for people to react ( a problem in my opinion).

Of course you can’t see any of those tells on asurans, but such is life. Asuran master race.

Cogbyrn.7283:

I guess no one likes to carry condi cleanse, probably because they want to bring their damage-dealing utilities. It’s too bad evade spam doesn’t dodge condi ticks, am I right?

The problem arises when most condi builds apply conditions faster than another class can remove them. Conditioning has become an all or nothing sort of fight. A build with excellent condition management does well but hybrid to low condition removal builds perform poorly. Many players just put more damage/escape on their bar since partially managing conditions isn’t much better than no condition management. Even worse is that some classes have relatively poor condition management no matter they do.

Straegen.2938:

Cogbyrn.7283:

I guess no one likes to carry condi cleanse, probably because they want to bring their damage-dealing utilities. It’s too bad evade spam doesn’t dodge condi ticks, am I right?

The problem arises when most condi builds apply conditions faster than another class can remove them. Conditioning has become an all or nothing sort of fight. A build with excellent condition management does well but hybrid to low condition removal builds perform poorly. Many players just put more damage/escape on their bar since partially managing conditions isn’t much better than no condition management. Even worse is that some classes have relatively poor condition management no matter they do.

Some classes have poor direct damage management as well. Some classes can spec into incredible direct damage management.

Imagine a world where you could gain endurance and dodge/evade more than direct damage classes could keep the pressure on. That’s hard-counter territory, and no one is saying that should even exist for either type of damage.

Even if you don’t go full condi removal, a well-timed condition drop/transfer can make all the difference. A single Putrid Mark has been the difference between life and death for me on several occasions. You don’t blow your condi cleanse when you see a few bleeds added, you blow it when they’ve just gone through their cycle and all of their condi pressure is on cooldown but before the condis have ticked fully. Or you identify what is applying the most pressure and remove it.

For example, take Necro. Let’s say a Necro drops Grasping Dead, Mark of Blood, and Dark Path. You have 9 bleeds (before any procs), chill, cripple, and potentially burning. That whole combo maybe takes a couple seconds, and dropping as soon as it’s over means that they have to wait several seconds for Burning to be available, even more seconds for Dark Path to be back, and have no momentum on you. It’s maybe 10k+ damage you just mitigated that bought you time to respond.

Conditions aren’t perfect, and I’ve balked at the amount of condi burst I’ve done to people in WvW back when I ran around testing a condi Necro. But I’m sure Thieves balk when they burst 20k damage in 2 seconds on players as well.

Either way, recognizing your build’s drawbacks and playing to minimize them through utilities/playstyle/timing/etc. is all part of the game. I’m fortunate as a Necro in general to have more options to help deal with Condis, but I also have far less options to deal with other things, like CC chains. It isn’t unreasonable to expect a class with a little less on the condition removal side to have to try to adjust and have a more difficult time with condi pressure.

Mek.2947:

RlyOsim.2497:

makes me laugh.

‘i cant faceroll wvw with my full zerks, nerf plz’.

i know this isnt quite what you meant but still this is what it boils down to.

No that’s what YOU boiled it down to. The faceroll right now are all the condi set it and forget it builds that can spam condis for high damage with no sacrifice to survivability. I get that condis take time to do their damage, but they also take zero timing to apply and have zero animations. Usually power builds require key abilities to land, and if you miss those abilities then all your damage just got thrown out the window until your abilities reset. It’s simply not balanced.

And to the poster who said that only 10% of sPvP tournaments are condi bunker builds…lawlwut?! have you queued at all in the past ..ooooh I don’t know….6 months?

so what youre saying is both builds have pros and cons?
who would have guessed.

Mek.2947:

Yep…huge animations…this coming from a necro…What exactly is the animation? The insta PBAOE that appears under your feet? Even classes that CAN cleanse…meaning they have more than two options to remove conditions cannot keep up with the spammable conditions that classes like necros, warriors, rangers, and engis can put out. The only class that has avoidable conditions would be a PU mesmer where you just avoid marinating in their clones breaking around you.

The point is ….zerkers had to give up survivability for their damage…condis do not. That’s why it’s imbalanced, and that’s why everywhere you go the majority of players are condi bunker.

Of course we have to give up something. Condi does not work so wel on large parts of the game. Be it in PVe or WvW there are times you are just not very usefull because of either insta cleansing of condi or in pve max stacks are reached.

WvW is so fkd up it’s a joke, The whole pvp side of gw2 is run by muppets. Just play it out until there is something else to move onto because GW2 is in the quicksand.

What is a condis bunker? Are you talking about people that run conditional removal builds?

CajunSinjin.3410:

What is a condis bunker? Are you talking about people that run conditional removal builds?

It is the generic term for anyone who uses a condition build regardless of stats and said with extreme derision.

In reality it should only apply to full dire condition builds, but there really are no full offensive stat combos except rampagers, arguably one of the worse stat combos, so it isn’t like condition users have much of a choice. Not taking the defensive stats is not an option.

Atherakhia.4086:

RashanDale.3609:

Atherakhia.4086:

RashanDale.3609:

Grumpdogg.6910:

Do any WvW guilds run condition necros? Wellomancer is the meta.

my guild doesnt. with the ridiculous amount of cleanse in general (and especially on heavies) it’s just not viable

So they’re running power then? I highly doubt that…

Of course they run power. why not?

Never seen a power necro in a zerg, but if you say it’s so, it must be so.

If I run in zergs I only run power, because conditions are near useless there. Almost every necro I see does that same thing. Power > conditions in zerg.

Personally I don’t put all my eggs in one basket, and I go hybrid.

Anyway, not a lot of people have done math on the issue. What most people get is the tooltip, and that is misleading to a large degree. The tooltip assumes 2600 armor, and since the minimum is 1836, this means it can be up to 41.6% higher.

So, with that in mind, I’m going to make an arbitrary comparison between a guardian’s auto attack with his sword, and a Necromancer’s auto attack with their scepter. This is assuming a few things: Full PVT / MVT gear, exotic level gear, 300 in the relevant damage stat, and an appropriate rune/sigil. Off-hand weapon will not be considered. So, in full PVT/MVT we get the following bonuses:

Guardian:

Vitality: 698
Toughness: 698
Power: 1003 from gear + 165 from rune + 300 from stats = 1,468 Power
Runes of the Ogre bonus: 4% damage increase
Sigil of Force bonus: 5% damage increase

Total effective power: (916 + 1468) x 1.04 × 1.05 = 2603 power

Necromancer:
Vitality: 698
Toughness: 748
Malice: 1003 (from gear) + 300 (from stats) + 183 (from runes) + 83 (run undead bonus) = 1569
Total Malice with Sigil of Bursting: 1663

At 1663 condition damage, bleed does about 126 per tick, and poison does about 250 per tick. This means that the necromancer’s scepter auto chain will do 4 (126) x 2 + 4 (250) = 2008 damage over the course of 7 seconds (3 seconds to initialize the damage, 4 for the poison to tick). If you want to get technical, the motions to inflict all the damage is done in 3 seconds, so we’ll just go with that. Note that the auto attack also has a direct damage component (118 + 118 + 168), so the real total damage comes to 2,421 in 3(+4) seconds, factoring in crit chance and crit damage.

At 2603 power, the sword auto attack will do 764 × 2 +1,432 damage, or 2,960 damage in 2.5 seconds. Now, this isn’t assuming any crits, but if we factor in a 4% crit chance along with a 1.53 crit damage, we will get a further 2% increase, or about 3023 damage in 2.5 seconds.

This tooltip damage is also assuming 2600 armor. That is actually more than the necro has ATM (2584), but assuming we were fighting something like a GC mesmer, who would only have 1836 armor, then we would do 41.6% more damage, up to 4281 damage in 2.5 seconds. But, we’ll just go with the tooltip for now.

Ultimately, the guardian is doing more damage, doing it faster, doing it in power, and doing it while in heavily defensive gear. A lot of people constantly point at zerker gear, saying it is the only way to run a damage build. It really isn’t. I’ve been running a PVT guardian build in sPVP for a long time, and it does hit things quite kitten its own. One of my favorite things to do is just go around auto attacking people with the greatsword, since the combination of power + bulk means I’ll win the auto attack war. I’ve even played around with Valkyrie, which I recommend to many people, as it hits really kitten crits, and still has plenty of vitality for defense.

Those “builds” above are merely skeletons. The more modifiers you throw at it, the more things change up. But if you do throw modifiers on, you have to remember to do it to both classes: if you include trait abilities, you do it for both. If you include additional stats, you do it for both. If you include consumables, you do it for both.

We do see a lot of condi spam, and it is not because it is stronger, but because it is easier. Most condi attacks are ranged, which means they are easy to execute. They are also done in an AoE, which means they have an accumulating group damage, which is higher. They also have more passive abilities, which means it requires less skill shots or timed attacks. They have less obvious animations, making them harder to avoid. They have less direct build counters, instead yielding almost exclusively to cleanses. This makes it so that, for pole positioning and kiting, conditions are the best bet.

Power, while being stronger, is harder to use. You’ve got to be in melee range to do the best damage, and with big hits you are often relying on control effects, which have their own counter in stability and stun breakers. When it works, it pays off. Up in t1 we have melee trains, which are groups of warriors, guardians, thieves, and sometimes Rangers and Mesmers who rush in with movement skills in a large wave, and just mow everything down with power based melee attacks. These melee trains are capable of mowing down groups much larger than themselves, often splitting zergs in half once they march in.

MFWIC.6091:

ok so for all you defenders of condi bunker builds: WAKE THA kitten UP!
and realize its broken. Dire stats give you c/t/v so you max out your dmg your toughness and your vitality. Yes its not effective in zerg play but the issue is not there but in solo roaming/dueling.
Go to OS and see who is it dominated by. Condition necros, mesmers, thief, engies and even eles and warriors.
Regular power builds stand little to no chance against your regular condition build with dire stats/perplexity runes.
The reality is that in those situations delivering direct damage is a lot harder and is a lot less rewarding than delivering passive damage and just kiting around.
So where is the balance?

So PVT is max damage gear too.