Guild Wars 2

Supcutie.2538:

Another issue I hear discussed a lot is mesmer damage. Much of the damage shatter mesmers put out (shatter being basically the only viable tpvp spec) is condensed into mind wrack. This is volatile because if someone doesn’t avoid/mitigate one mind wrack, they are then at quite a bit of a disadvantage. It’s like taking a class in school and there’s only one test with a few questions that are quite hard. If you can’t get just one question you lose a disproportionate amount of points relative to your knowledge.
Again, this said, in higher tier play shatters are avoided, predicted, and mitigated all the time. Of course it’s always a battle of thinking ahead. Like I prefaced with, I’m not sure how to approach this, but I think that in terms of balancing around low-tier play, this might just be a case of the players needing to practice and get better (i.e. it’s how the game is, hard to cater to everyone)

This definately is the biggest balancing razor they need to walk upon at the moment. From my own experience no abilities that are so heavily pass/fail should exist at all in the game. It promotes a play style that in many cases is to niche for high level play (shatter mesmers wouldn’t be as common without portal/timewarp) while being horribly “overpowered” at the lower less skilled playing brackets.
The issue is brought into glaring focus down at the bottom level as I pointed out in a previous thread when you get abilities like this (and BS thieves and early 100b warriors) and they become the dreaded ‘fotm’ status. This creates an enviroment where not only does a class have the huge pass/fail attack that if you do not anticipate and avoid it you pretty much instantly lose but it is present across 5-10 of the players in a 16 man match. You cannot possibly avoid that many, thus you die… repeatedly. Then you get frustrated and stop playing.

I’d like to join in to this conversation as a average player who more often than not is down the lower end of players.
People suck at pvp because the current balance of the game is frustrating beyond all reason to learn.
Those of you that were already good sat around the top and learned quickly, for those of us that want to learn we play for a little and get frustrated and leave.
Why is that you may ask?
Because in every single patch, nerf after nerf someone finds a build of a class somewhere that has the simple premise of ‘If your opponent isn’t quick enough or doesn’t know how to counter it yet he dies… instantly. Basically a build that is easy to do well with (if in some cases hard to do very well with) and whose difficulty is only made by facing opponents who have already learnt to counter the iwin button’
First it was 100blades, then it was backstab thieves, now its d/d elementalists and shatter mesmers.

Now of course I could learn to stop these builds… and over time I do. The problem really kicks into gear when it becomes common knowledge and suddenly a 16 person match contains 5 elementalists and 7 mesmers….
Taking from my own experience I know I can use x/y/z to counter that mesmers ‘look at me spam clones and shatter while I GS zap you’ but I then proceed to die to the other 3 mesmers cause hey look, my skills and dodges are all gone and without the mitigating abilities you instantly die. Because the build takes skill to avoid but only takes skill to pull off if you are against someone who already has the necessary skill to avoid it in the first place.
This is frustrating. This turns people off wanting to learn the game. When almost everybody in hotjoins is running the same FOTM insta gibb builds and it is physically impossible to have enough access to skills and dodges to not die over and over again you really cease wanting to play, and without that experience no one gets better and if no one gets better the player base at the top stagnates gets boring and then they start leaving

sPvP/hotjoins necros aren’t doing the best. This is because our niche is slow conditions and anti bunker based builds and with 95% of people playing glass cannons in hotjoins it can really get frustrating playing as the class with what has to be the lowest maneuverability of all classes and very little defense outside of our high health pool.
That said we do have our place in tournament based play so its not all bad… it just gets really frustrating down here at the low levels.

Eye of Rodgort is my necros goal..
https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/23093/fPLNB.jpg

cause.. hell just look at the thing. Meteorlogicus can suck it.

Its not just for necromancers but male light armor norns stick out because you just never see them. Especially when you rock t1/t2 cultural gear.
I also use the malefactorum and deathwish cause both look awesome. Currently using the t1 cultural scepter skin (its bones on a stick!) until I can grind up enough to use lidless eye/eye of rodgort

daydream.2938:

Are you running solo? because if not , saving the necro from theif pressure is a great way to utilize a team.
If your are running solo, make two necros, one a little bit less squishy and good for fights w theives, the other glass wells build or basically what ur using now.

then during the countdown look at your enemy roster and pick betwen both those necros.
But, if your with a team, get them to help you, it doesnt take much pressure to send a burst thief running for the hills.

Also, i would never recommend running with no stun breakers. Every class has to sacrifice some dps for this.

I’d like to point out to not rely on this strategy. As was pointed out in a previous thread being able to swap characters like this is not an intended strategy and is on their list of stuff to be fixed (although at anets pace you may have another few months worth)

SteepledHat.1345:

Schwahrheit.4203:

Still a brainless class with too much “I messed up” buttons, map control, and team fight presence. Seriously a godly Mesmer will be a trash Warrior or Ranger, that’s just how the skill relation is between the Mesmer and those two other classes are.

Ha, this post sounds like you’re mad. Mesmer requires a great deal of strategy, quick reflexes, and great positional awareness. You have to monitor your health and the the health of three clones/phantasams. You’re squishy as hell so you need to be fast to distortion/clone/dodge or else you fall quickly. It takes a bit more than just sicking a pet on the target and firing away or popping quickness and lunging into combat.

It requires thinking.

At the higher levels where its good players against good players yes. The major problem is that mesmers (and I find thieves to) are to easy to initially pick up and succeed with.
Bluntly put a bad mesmer will beat a bad-average player of any other class just through the inherent abilities the class has. It only becomes difficult when players become better and learn to counter those abilities that you have to start being smart with using them.
Now you might think this is a perfectly reasonable thing and I’d almost be inclined to agree with you except for the fact that it is issues like this causing this games pvp to stumble.
When relatively inexperienced players join and get roflstomped by a team that is 1/2 to 2/3 mesmers they either a) get frustrated and leave or b) roll a mesmer believe they are awesome decide to eventually try tournaments and get beaten by the smart players there and decide not to again.
Both of these instances make it decidedly unenjoyable for new players and frustrating for the veteran players as the player base they have to go against isnt growing.

I’m expecting ‘rebalancing’ to wells and marks because people complain. Wouldn’t be surprised if greater marks gets moved trait wise to a spot where we already have something useful.
What I’d like to see is minion fixes and plague signet fixes to give the necro a little bit of identity. I’m not saying were a horribly broken class but other than epidemic and corrupt boon (when it works) there really isn’t anything the necro does better than any other class that makes us stand out. Plague signet working as the tooltip states would actually make us the master of conditions and attrition we are supposed to be.

Also agree that just across the board they need to change what works underwater what doesnt. There is no reason for lich and golem to not work, same as there is no reason for theives guild and dagger storm for theives not to work… really just seems like they cbf making extra animations so they just disable them

Thrumdi.9216:

Kelthos Doombringer.9032:

Braxxus.2904:

Kelthos Doombringer.9032:

Necromancer is probably the weakest profession in WvW at the moment.. Hopefully we get some buffs.

What is this I don’t even….
Necro condi bombs cover the world in badge farming insanity. Necros are AMAZING in group combat. Flat out terrain denying, hp dropping nuclear bombs in wvw.

Well considering I was covering staff, and not the utilities (except for minions). Necromancer Epidemic is pure damage. No support. No control. We have no support other than our under-powered, huge cooldown wells.

There is no power build for Necro, there is no tanky build for Necro. We can provide extremely minor healing to our allies and we can only cure conditions with a 60 CD well with ticks 5 times and with an extremely buggy signet.

Not sure how you see 4 marks as being terrain denying and HP dropping nuclear bombs when all they do is 3 bleeds, a chill field and a potential area weakness, topped off with a 3/4 second fear..

I don’t even play Necro, but isn’t there a signet that continually transfers conditions from allies to you? Then obviously you send those conditions to the enemy with the off-hand dagger or other signet.

I mean, that’s what I get from reading the class specs.

There is… in theory. Of course since release all it actually does is copy those conditions to the necro thus giving people effectively free condition damage. You would probably see more necromancers if that actually worked.

Raasclart.6719:

This post assumes everyone who does WvW wants to be on a tier 1 server which is certainly not the case

No but people like to win. You saw this when there was no penaltys and only a 1 day limit and everyone would swap to the winning server in the middle of every week. This is what has happened in tier 2 now and by the sound of it in tier 1 as well. I’m sure this has happened in some other tiers as well but most definately at the top the fun competition is gone and its nothing more than 1 overpopulated server 1 mid pop server and 1 empty server getting stomped on (that would be us poor folks still on SBI lol)

Randoms, we’re rather bad. Organised tpvp however we aren’t to shabby (although I still want some love). Mostly its because we are the anti bunker class currently with unblockable marks, conditions that eat the high toughness low health guys, and 3 possible forms of boon stripping for the boon stacking types.
However we need babysitting because we are pretty much meat for any decent burst roamer

2 Words.
Chilling
Darkness

Turns plague from not bad to holy crap kill it kill it now!
Seriously blinds were annoying enough but you can get through it with multi hit attacks. 20s+ of chill thrown in though is just obscene

I doubt it. The abilities that they will be mostly targetting (from what I understand they want to tone down) is AoE abilities that are more powerful on single targets than single target abilities. Necro wells (as much as I hate it being i main a necro), theif shortbow, mesmer mind wrack etc. Basically I think they want that if an attack is an AoE, it shouldn’t do more damage to a single target than a dedicated single target ability. ie attacks should do say 10 damage to a single target, AoE’s should do 6 damage but to up to 5 targets. Currently there are AoE hits out there that do 11 damage and the fact that they AoE is just considered a bonus

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiant
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unshakable
Basically every time a creature with unshakable gets CC’d (ie basically every boss and some champions) they gain a stack of defiant for every player in the area. Each of these defiant stacks stops 1 CC effect. So in a 5man party basically only every 6th CC used against the boss will work

Lukin.4061:

Well if you want scoring I’d stick to necro (condition) – aoe attacks give you more points when enemies die, since you “tagged” all of them in point fight. I get ~300-400 points a match, but only play 5×5 you can probably reach more if you can bare 8×8.

Why hate thieves? They are probably my favorite enemies, especially ones that read in the forum how OP that class is and in reality have no idea what they are doing, just start pressing hs and do no dmg – free frags : )

I would recommend against a necro for sPvP. Not that necro’s are bad, just that we are pretty heavily countered by theives which are EVERYWHERE in hotjoin. I’m not on a nerf theives rant or anything but they are pretty much designed for necro ganking and the best case scenario against a decent theif is a stalemate where he runs away :P

Nope. Because for some reason necro heal on hit abilities are already to powerful by the developers thoughts and are the only heals in the game that do not in any way scale with healing or power. Vampiric, Vampiric Precision and Vampiric Rituals heal for 25 (38), 31 (51) and 42 respectively (with the numbers in brackets being if you have the Bloodthirst trait, Rituals isnt affected by it) and will never heal for any more than that.

Bugged, not really.
Bad design however yeah. Basically from what I’ve seen it seems to have a projectile component that functions the same way as spectral grasp (with the same problems) but to make things more fun its not a visible projectile so all we see is it simply not work.

I’d agree with the marks here. Especially with the effects coming from the ground and both fears and bleeds. Certainly more useful in this situation though if you hadnt blocked the chat window and SS it with the combat log active.
Most likely he was placing marks on the ground and making you chase him into them cause they only have a range when placing them no range limit on the damage once their triggered.

Nope definitely all about the boon stripping against ele’s. Played one myself and if played right the spec basically keeps up permanent might, fury, protection, vigor, regen, swiftness. They rely on the might stacks to do any meaningful damage without vigor they don’t get the extra heals and blast finishers from as much dodges. Worst case if you corrupt em right they ride the lightning the hell outta there and try again in a bit (which as a necro unless your using a MH dagger your really not gonna do anything about)

I only really lose to mesmers if I screw up and don’t dodge the blurred frenzy/shatter combo (either out of endurance or fighting someone else). Of course I might not be facing good mesmers either.
AoE conditions + epidemic with 20% less cooldown. You will either load the condis up on the illusions ruining his shatters/heals or you will double up on the mesmer.
I’m also a big fan of since we have no buffs really to speak of stand in the chaos storm and wail on the chaos armor before corrupt boon/putrid mark and send all his big cooldowns right back at him.

Subutia.2645:

emikochan.8504:

Ljiona multiboxing gets you banned in gw2

Source?

As long as 1 button press equals 1 button press, it doesn’t matter how many instances of GW2 that 1 button press triggers on.

It does if you are unable to push that one button on all instances without the use of third party software. The fact that you have to use programs such as auto hotkey etc technically makes it against the TOS of just about every online game. Blizzard just turned a blind eye because that guy was paying 5x what you were paying.

Of course if you were running 5 seperate machines hooked up to a hardware system that did the same keystroke simultaneously on all 5 then that they can’t do anything about… its a fine line really.

I’m more of a fan of epidemic bombing a group trying to take on the grub or other similar creature. Since they’re both enemies and it’s more than likely maxed on all conditions the damage is rather spectacular

Yeah… showing a situation in which none of the glaring weaknessness are shown is fantastic proof of the viability of a spec.
Did you know that hundred blades warriors are fantastic when the enemy just stands there and doesn’t have a stunbreak?
Or that glass cannon staff eles are great if everyone stands in one spot at range?

Seriously though MM is not as terrible but the glaring flaws that it does have make it near to useless is 50% of the game despite it being perfectly viable outside of those points.
1) You have to sacrifice utility skills for all minions. Completely removes any flexibility and leaves you with only the flesh worm as a stun break/escape mechanism. The worm while useful suffers from the fact that you have to preemptively have it available as it is immobile.
2) AoE death… you have no control over your minions. They will happily stand there in that giant circle of death or right next to that boss with the massive PBAoE insta kill. Even rangers can call there pets back if they are quick enough you just have to stand there and watch em go splat
3) In a situation with multiple targets you have no control over who your minions attack. Suddenly you can’t kill a priority target because your bone minions are on separate targets, your bone fiend is on another, your worm is now out of range and fleshie is either on the phone to the missus or stuck on a rock somewhere.

Maybe its just my experience playing at odd hours but I keep getting really frustrated at the asuran levelling zones (metrica and now into brisban). I’m sticking with it because I’ve done the other starting areas enough times for them to be boring but my god can asurans/skritt not hold on to a single waypoint!
It seems every time I die (and as a lowbie elementalist its a lot) I end up having to respawn 5mins across the map because all the closest waypoints to me everytime are contested by an event or champion. Other starting areas have these same events but they generally are outside of a waypoint and don’t block the place off so often I end up getting frustrated and logging
I have never seen even half the amount of contested points on a map in any of the other levelling zones and its a little ridiculous.

Keep playing with your character, go to trainer and reset your traits if your unhappy with them its not expensive at all.
On the topic the main reason nobody uses air/earth is simply because arcana and water are so freakin useful (both help the main problem of elementalists being really really squishy)

For PvE focused on conditions you really want to be running epidemic and blood is power. The third choice is a true utility slot. Pick up everything and swap it around depending on what your doing. For general PvE stuff I like to run with corrosive poison cloud as my third and a stunbreak for PvP.
This is also another reason why dagger offhand is so great deathly swarm (dagger 4) gives you another way to transfer conditions from yourself to your target (1 condition per bounce) and all the corruption put conditions on yourself as well as your enemy. BiP bleeds you, epidemic = vulnerability, corrupt boon poisons and corrosive weakens.

getzzzonked.7609:

Woohoo I want one too

Not a bloody clue how to make it though :P

Don’t think there is a direct recipe for it. It’s all up to if zommoros decides he likes you when you mash things together in the forge

Have only done a few explorable’s myself so far but my most hated is the worm at the start of TA explorable.
Not cause of the worm.. it wasn’t that bad.
But moving out of the way of the huge area of worm spit to have a kitten flower spawn under you and explode before you even saw it was so kitten annoying! And to make it worse because its a huge poison cloud unless your a mesmer you are guaranteed to be dead because your downed state heal is less than the damage and kitten if anyones coming over there to res you.

http://www.guildhead.com/trait/2247/tempest-defense
http://www.guildhead.com/trait/1878/autodefense-bomb-dispenser
http://www.guildhead.com/trait/2425/retaliatory-subconscious
http://www.guildhead.com/trait/2218/mirror-of-anguish
http://www.guildhead.com/trait/2332/reapers-protection
http://www.guildhead.com/trait/1356/hide-in-plain-sight
http://www.guildhead.com/trait/2354/hard-to-catch
http://www.guildhead.com/trait/1081/last-stand

Every class has an ability that does x when CC’d with an internal cooldown. It is a choice on behalf of the player to take this. Yes it is often more powerful than a standard stunbreak as it is passive and cannot be controlled and thus if your actually smart about what you do it can be easily worked around. Hell, the mesmer one is far from being the best of them…

Here’s an idea… you have the ability to change your skills any time out of combat. If you see said player and know he has one of those traits slotted throw a smaller CC at him. This proc’s the ability, puts it on cooldown and then you can go to town!

Shocking I know, it’s an ability that makes you have to think beyond ‘hit 5,6,7 and 2’ but there’s nothing imbalanced about it when every single class has access to similar mechanics and you are giving up another passive trait to gain it.

I’m going to simply point out the 1 greatest flaw. You named your movie 2 minutes to midnight and neglected to have iron maiden somewhere in there… for shame!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPbqQOf41Qc

On a serious note impressive gameplay, length as others have stated a bit much which makes it feel like it drags on a little and the whole ‘montage’ thing was really a waste of space and not entertaining at all even though i could see what you were trying to accomplish I and I’m sure many others simply ended skipping it.

I agree. Just saying that you would have to tweak the encounters first because otherwise you would swing too far to the other direction.
There is to many massive one shots and killing of ressing people currently that if you just straight tacked a ‘you can’t run back’ thing on some encounters would go from a too easy graveyard zerg to near impossible.

They would have to seriously redesign a lot of encounters for that to be viable. I mean I’m all for a challenge but there is very clearly some bosses (and almost all champion world events) that have some sort of a ‘you die instant like now’ ability.
Throw in the fact that boss AI currently prioritises anyone trying to res downed players and its pretty much guaranteed in a lot of boss fights people are dying and running back and it seems like it is intentionally designed to be as such.

It’s fine. It’s a meta shift. This is coming from someone who has not played a tournament ever but have followed all sorts of e-sports everywhere for some time. It happens, a tactic comes along and suddenly omg its OP till teams start countering it and it becomes the norm.
Especially one that’s as easy as this to deal with. We saw the slight trickle of stability/stealth/quickness stomps in mostly spvp and it won’t be long before we start seeing this for ressing too.
Give it a week or so and I guarantee you people will start bringing stability/stealth/quickness in order to res these people you leave in a downed state thus forcing you to start having to stomp them asap to keep them out thus beginning the whole lovely cycle again till in a few months a happy medium is found where all the strategies are viable and people change up depending on the situation.

People really need to look at things like this and actually wait a while before they yell and scream that its broken. The meta game of something like this changes so rapidly that something really isn’t ‘broken’ or ‘overpowered’ until it goes for a few months without finding a counter to it. Because once someone does then everyone counters it and suddenly its completely useless without them having to change a thing

Been playing around for a few hours with ye old dagger mainhand power build. So far loving it a lot more than the standard condition based build.
http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.5.1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.106.127.108.112.130.2.2.10.306.309.312.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.366.362.0.30.0.0.0.25
is the basic skeleton of what I was using but I still can’t seem to nail down what best to add on to it.
The build revolves around using 3 possible burst damage options to kill things:
1) BiP, Well of suffering, blowing up bone minions and going to dagger auto attack happy town on their faces.
2) Some power based lich explody goodness (was hitting some poor glass cannon thief today for 4.5 each hit :P)
3) Death shroud life blast hitting which is piercing, stacking might and vulnerability.

What I am after opinions on is which offhand/second weapon set do people feel would work best. I quite liked the chill and extra vulnerability/regen from focus but at the same time the swiftness, cripple and daze from warhorn was nice. Second weapon wise its really only between axe or staff and both seem really underwhelming but seems like a lesser of two evils situation as a ranged weapon is needed.

Currently using the runes of strength for the extra damage under might and the longer duration to really get the most out of reapers might and the new BiP but wondering if there might be a better choice out there with some utility that I’ve missed.

And the biggest question is where the hell to stick those last 15 points. All the adept talents in the remaining 3 trees seem really lacklustre in this build.
Death gives the extra toughness (and might duration) as well as perhaps a slight extra cleanse or protection.
Blood gives the life siphon and the not supposed to be a blast finisher but is mark of evasion.
Curses gives me some extra precision and furious demise to really beef up the death shroud option of my burst possibilities.

So many choices so many pros n cons to each one so I figured I’d see what the assorted necro community thought…

CeCaKonVeu.5734:

Necros are fun to play and can be very powerful despite what most people say on forums

Maybe its just that pve pet builds are not very good in pvp …

Necro’s problem is that they suffer quite heavily in sPvP purely because of the sheer amount of class cannon builds out there. Condition specs are currently one of the few viable builds for 8v8 and it means we have a huge ramp up time and due to starting with 0 life force and the standard scepter/dagger/staff having very little life force gain get insta gibbed pretty easily by all the burst.

Give us a good team and all that is holding necro’s back is the metric ton of bugs and crappy minion AI.

Grizor.6543:

Actually the engineer can interrupt twice, the #3 ability(aoe knockback) is on a 20 sec cooldown though so good luck getting that off before you die.

Another thing, the engineer #2 ability is a pull – why would you want to pull an enemy toward you when you are dead?!

I thought that… until i discovered that its actually a small knockdown so acts as an interrupt as well. It also serves the major purpose of pulling someone in so you can knock em on their kitten with the downed #3 (especially in a team fight if its someone wailing on one of your buddies but in that case you only want to use it if #3 is available). I’ve actually held off for a while using 2 → 3 → 2

sorrow.2364:

About Necromancers, people are not building a team around them, they are building a team around one of their skill which is Epidemic.
Throw Epidemic away of the bar and none wants you.

Necro’s are also awesome when going against condition based teams and if they ever fix plague signet will be godly if the metagame actually shifts heavily to condition teams in anyway.
Sure there are plenty of classes that can remove conditions from themselves/teammates… but apart from mesmers arcane thievery on themselves only necromancers are the only ones that can take all of the allied conditions and transfer them to the enemy with deathly swarm, putrid mark and plague signet
They can then spread all those conditions with epidemic!
Oh and then there is corrupt boon. Mesmers are again the only ones that come close to its functionality with null field but thats 6 of one half a dozen of the other (one cleanses all boons in an AoE one changes all single target boons into conditions). Of course it is also bugged to high hell and doesnt work half the time

Most people don’t have many problems with necros specifically from a PvE perspective once you learn the few tricks. The issues are with condition damage in general and it just happens to hit the necros hardest.
Bleed cap limit
Poor scaling of condition damage (your bleeds get a whole 5% of your condition damage)
Inability to do anything against objects kitten graveling burrows)
General poor group synergy from conditions. The only buff/debuff that affects condition damage is might. No benefit from fury, quickness, vulnerability, traits/nourishment that increase damage by a % have little to no use to a conditionmancer.

The only real issue i have with my necro directly can be seen here
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApbbAUHZTALUdFpCZ3B4azZGZkpBMk0wRFBmNVdMN1E&output=html
We have the least (and worst) combo generators/finishers of any class….

Or just change the AI to the same as the ranger pets. Their pets attack the target the ranger is currently on. Necro pets from what i have seen attack defensively (ie prioritize attack what damages the necro)

Now all i need to do is a) live long enough against quickness/haste/frenzy to complete this rotation and b) have been in the match a while as with this condition build the only life force generation you have is staff auto attack (which never hits) and people dying until they actually fix scepter 3 to properly gain life force.

Love using this setup in PvE especially when you then throw in epidemic cause all of those bleeds were AoE but in PvP it doesnt really help all that much cause if your that close to utilise weakening shroud and mark of evasion your probably going to die before you can complete the rotation

I think what I find the saddest is that there are so few of us there obviously hasn’t been 2 necros in the same group to find this out before now…

No class does more damage with their conditions than others outside of traits as the damage conditions do are a set formula across all classes.
Bleeds are 2.5 + 1/2 your level + 5% of your condition damage stacks intensity
Burning is 4.1 + level + 25% of condition damage stacks duration
Poison is level + 10% of condition damage stacks duration
Confusion is 25 + level + 7.5% condition damage per ability stacks intensity

So you can see from that confusion is the highest damaging ability assuming you can stack it and the enemy is attacking. This gives mesmers and engys a good leg up as the only 2 classes that can reliably apply it.
Burning is the biggest scaling and base damage condition but it doesnt stack in intensity only in length. Engies, guardians and eles (i think) are the big ones here.
Poison has the lowest burst damage but the second highest scaling. Rangers, thieves and necros are the big users here.

Then you have bleeds. These are the big thing normally associated with conditions and the tricky one because while everyone does the same damage per bleed the duration and the stack rate are different per class and should be the grounds for comparison.

Rangers can stack bleeds faster on a single target than anyone else with a shortbow but they are short duration with no ways of increasing the duration outside of passive trait line bonuses. Their shortbow auto attack also does a lot more damage than the bleed causing auto attacks of other classes (warrior sword, necro scepter, engie pistol), can be traited to pierce and they also proc bleeds on crit while have a large uptime on fury as well as the ability to get large stacks of might to boost it.

Engineers can bleed with piercing attacks when specced as well as apply many conditions in AoE with kits and have access to many sources of fury (for proccing bleeds and burns on crits) and might through elixirs. Offhand pistol can also place heavy burns, mainhand pistol confuses grenades and bombs can vulnerability. Condition engies are difficult to look at as their is so many different combinations of different conditions they can apply.

Mesmers have fantastic condition builds with liberal amounts of confusion and the fact that all of their condition attacks are not only random conditions but also random boons (chaos armor, chaos storm, winds of chaos) this means they can end up with sizeable might stacks to boost condition damage. They also tend to use the phantasmal duelist who can stack a bleed on crit with a 8 hitting attack that has perma fury.

Unsure on theif/warrior/guardian condition builds other than the heavy focus on burns from the guardians.

Then we have the necros. No access to might and fury outside of traiting for death shroud (which then stops us applying new conditions) however we have the ability to apply the highest amount of AoE bleeds and the longest duration single target bleeds (that can then be spread to other targets via epidemic) but the longest time to get these bleeds up. We also have the most abilities to control enemy conditions in the game. Dagger 4 transfers, plague signet transfers (and would be awesome if it actually took them off allies like its supposed to), staff 4 transfers, consume conditions is one of the lowest cooldown condition removals.

TL:DR all classes do the same damage per condition stack so you have to look at how rapidly stacks are applied, the different types of conditions applied, AoE vs non AoE, the duration of bleeds etc to determine the higher damage.

Personal opinion is that while necros do the highest total condition damage out of other classes with their huge duration bleeds (your able to get scepter auto attack to 12-13s… blood is power can bleed for almost a minute) other classes are more bursty with their conditions with faster stacking short duration bleeds, short duration burns and poisons, and the almighty confusion as well as we have no reliable access to might or fury on our own to increase our condition damage or our bleed on crit application. We also scale the worst with increases to power as our scepter attacks do the least direct damage per hit.

Pretty much what Thellena said. Every class is viable in dungeon runs. Not every player is. Especially this early in the game.
In that 3 warrior/1engi/1thief run you said was exceptionally hard were all of those warriors and the thief focused on DPS and basically glass cannons?
People need to realise that almost every utility skill you can purchase has a use somewhere and you should be willing to swap to them when they are called for despite the lack in ‘lol dps’ when in a group situation. You want abilities that blind/weaken you want cripple/chill even in melee. You want the ability that may benefit you less but also gives that benefit to your group. You want the abilities that may appear weaker but can feed off of allies fields or provide fields for them.
Taking my own necro for example, I’d never touch wells while out and about soloing as the cooldown is prohibitively long. In a hard group though wells + ground target trait can save lives making everyone effectively condition immune for 10s, or blinding entire packs for 10s . Plague signet is relatively lackluster soloing… is godly in groups. Taking plague as my elite and spamming the blinding attack with the chilling darkness trait, its not much damage but its an entire pack blinded and chilled for 20s….

This early in the game with the ‘WoW’ generation of gamers its going to take more than the 2 weeks the games been out for people to get out of the loldps mode and into the different structure that GW2 promotes

I know… used to get a nice mix of stuff. Only low level but opened the 10 that were in my inventory and ended up with 45 sticks of butter…