Guild Wars 2

For the original question: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition_Damage

So one tick of chill is worth 5-6 ticks of poison.

If you’re a condi Reaper using gs, staff, or focus, it’s the best grandmaster. Otherwise, go for one of the other two.

Lynnie.7213:

Zahmahkibo.6375:

I like the concept. Why not take Lingering Curse over Weakening Shroud? It’s a straight 50% damage increase for your scepter conditions, way more than the 10*2 ticks of bleed you’re getting every 20-25 seconds.

I tested it and was subpar in damage compared to this “final” build. The lingering curse condition damage boost doesn’t work in Reaper shroud like it used to work in Death Shroud. :/

Huh, how are you testing? It’s true that Lingering Curse doesn’t work in Reaper’s Shroud, but from some quick napkin math it’s still a much bigger DPS gain.

Using the rotation in the video, you use shroud, scepter 2, and scepter 3 twice each, and the scepter AA chain one. So Weakening Shroud adds 40 ticks of bleed and 1.0 * Power worth of hits, while LC adds 46 ticks of bleed, 28 ticks of torment, 6 ticks of poison, and +150 condition damage to all your S/F and utility skills.

I can see how WS would be better for clearing trash thanks to the AoE weakness and faster stacking, but on any boss fight of reasonable duration it looks like LC is gonna surpass it.

I like the concept. Why not take Lingering Curse over Weakening Shroud? It’s a straight 50% damage increase for your scepter conditions, way more than the 10*2 ticks of bleed you’re getting every 20-25 seconds.

Asmodal.6489:

So calculation done.

[…]

It looks like you’re just using the tooltips in Heart of the Mists to make those calculations, which isn’t a very reliable indicator for actual PvE. We should be able to agree that a condition damage Guardian build isn’t viable in group content, where your burns will get delayed and diluted by fellow Guardians, Engis, Eles, VoJ on teammates, etc. So all we’re addressing here is solo PvE. I ran some numbers of my own, using this spreadsheet created by another player.

Many of the assumptions you make aren’t reasonable, such as using Sigil of Force. In solo content you’ll be better off with a Sigil of Bloodlust. I’ll leave those in place, though, and just use http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/ to calculate the stats for a full set of Berserker’s or Carrion exotics (and Divinity runes, to stay consistent).

Approximate raw stats:
Berserker’s: 5030 Effective Power, 360 Condition Damage
Carrion: 2850 Effective Power, 1360 Condition Damage

I’m not going to get into the complexities of rotations here, but only look at the damage of the GS autoattack with 100% uptime on burning (and 3 stacks of bleeding for the Carrion build):

Berserker’s: 2278 direct dps + 418 condition dps = 2696 total dps
Carrion: 1267 direct dps + 998 condition dps = 2235 total dps

The Carrion build does only 83% of the DPS of the Berserker’s build, and that’s only with autoattacks. Adding in other skills will tilt the balance even further toward the Berserker’s build. The Berserker’s will also have better burst, which is particularly noticeable in solo PvE due to the frequent downtime between fights, and better ranged damage, since it doesn’t rely on Sigil of the Geomancer or AoE burns as much.

The Berserker’s build will also scale much better than the Carrion build. Power, precision, and critical damage all multiply the effectiveness of one another, while condition damage only scales with duration (and we’ve already assumed 100% uptime). Might, Fury, Retaliation, and Vulnerability will all add more damage to the Berserker’s build than to the Carrion one, as will consumables and Ascended gear.

If you just prefer the feel of condition damage builds, you won’t be entirely useless if you’re playing alone. The weaker your gear the less noticeable the difference will be. Make no mistake, though: if you care about optimizing your effectiveness, Carrion is not the way to go.

Slagburst.5304:

But opening up on a boss for example, focus #4 12 stacks in 2 seconds, axe #2. auto attk your looking at 16-20 stacks by yourself with not even having to use any utilitles, and while axe #2 is on CD you can use a utility then quickly go back to focus #4 then repeat keeping at least 16-20 stacks yourself….

That’s great, but using a focus doesn’t require you to use an axe. You could run a dagger/focus or dagger/scepter, keep up some vulnerability and do more damage yourself.

Rennoko.5731:

Interesting, so even though minion damage is static, the explosion does scale with power. Thats pretty cool. Makes them a must have on a power build for burst… Too bad I can’t just force them to stand beside me at all times so I could have that damage as PBAOE.

The minion detonation ability doesn’t scale with power. The base damage is pretty good at level 80, and it can crit, but your stats have no effect on the tooltip.

Bas.7406:

Just because you have access to vulnerability doesn’t mean you can stack it. ONly two classes have a weapon that inherently stacks vulnerability quickly. The ele with water dagger (less damage better aoe crappy targeting) and the Necro axe. The others cannot come close to stacking it as fast or they have to be in melee or trait specifically for that.

It’s true that only the Ele dagger and Necro axe have ranged 1-slot skills that apply vulnerability, but that’s not an advantage. It requires a lot of upkeep to maintain the stacks, time that could be spent on otherwise stronger abilities. Classes with vulnerability on their other weapon skills, which generally have longer cooldowns but apply more stacks at once, can maintain the debuffs while actually doing decent individual damage.

If you’re using a rotation of Ghastly Claws, Rending Claws x7 (which is less damage but more vulnerability than x6) you’ll wobble between 7 and 12 stacks, averaging around 10. That’s nothing special.

• An Ele with a scepter can maintain 16-20 stacks in an aoe on multiple targets by using Shatterstone on cooldown, which only requires about half of their active time in water attunement. If the Ele wants to use other attunements, they can spend only half their time in water and still average around 10 stacks.
• A Ranger with a longbow can average around 7 stacks using Hunter’s Shot, while doing more damage, both single target and aoe, from longer range.

The above comparisons are under optimal conditions for the necro. The more time the necro spends in Death Shroud, using utilities, avoiding damage, etc. the less vulnerability they can maintain, until they’re adding no more than, say, a rifle Warrior with Brutal Shot.

Maybe the axe is fine in sPvP, that’s not my area. In PvE, though, it should be clear that the damage is sub-par, and the vulnerability stacking isn’t enough to compensate.

Bas.7406:

@wizabi – What other class stacks vulnerability while dealing high damage with that ability. The only class I can think of that does that is Engineer, and they have to trait full on for grenades to get that capability. We have that ability with zero traits.

Plenty of classes can stack vulnerability. If you think the axe is doing “high damage,” you’re not looking at it objectively.

Consider a standard single-target damage rotation on the axe: Ghastly Claws, Rending Claws (x6), repeat around every 10.5 seconds. Counting all hits, Rending Claws has a damage coefficient of 0.7, and Ghastly Claws (with the new patch) has a damage coefficient of around 2.9. So for the whole rotation, you’re getting a 7.1 multiplier every 10.5 seconds. Let’s be generous and assume you’re maintaining 12 stacks of vulnerability, to bring it up to 7.95, or about 0.76 per second.

Now compare that to an Elementalist doing nothing but spamming Vapor Blade, which has the same range as Rending Claws and can stack vulnerability faster. 1 second rotation, 0.66 damage coefficient, with the same vulnerability bonus: 0.74 per second. The axe’s optimal single-target damage rotation barely does more damage than an Ele does doing nothing but spamming Dagger Water 1. And Vapor Blade pierces, so consider two or more targets, and the axe gets left in the dust. If you’re thinking that Water Eles are not known as damage powerhouses, you would be correct.

Vulnerability is valuable in groups, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not an excuse for terrible solo damage. I want the axe to be good, but it’s not gonna get there if people are pretending it doesn’t need more buffs.

The axe is still our weakest weapon by a large margin.

It’s obviously worthless in a condition build, Staff and Scepter being the mainhands choice, but that would be fine if it did good direction damage. But even in Power builds, its damage is disappointing.

• Unless you have full Berserker’s gear and barely any condition damage (that means no Blood is Power), Rending Claws (Axe 1) does less DPS than the scepter’s autoattack chain.
• Necrotic Grasp (Staff 1) does more DPS than Ghastly Claws (Axe 2,) if you can hit two or more targets.
• As someone else mentioned, Rending Claws does less DPS than Vapor Blade (Ele Dagger Water 1), even though Vapor Blade has the same range, pierces, and can stack more vulnerability.

I have a hard time thinking of any reasonable situation in which you’d want to use the axe, even after the buffs. Even in a dedicated Power build, the staff has better LF generation, and both the staff and the scepter have better utility, range, and AoE. If you’re playing a Power build, fighting an boss that’s anti-melee, immune to conditions, and has no adds, then the axe might be your first choice. Everywhere else, it’s in desperate need of further buffs.

Right, but if you’re keeping burning up permanently with higher condition damage, any burning from allied guardians, elementalists, rangers, whatever, is never going to tick at all.

Condition Damage is never going to be useless on a Guardian, but I’m not sure it’s ever going to be great either.

Burning has a 0.25 ratio of Condition Damage/damage per second. Bleeding has a 0.05 ratio. So, CDmg is as good on Guardians as it would be on a class that could never apply more than 5 stacks of Bleeding.

We do have tons of sources of burning, and can keep it up indefinitely on multiple targets in the right builds. Plus we can apply bleeding through runes and racials. I feel like Power is still going to be better in most situations, however. It’s not subject to condition removal in PvP, it allows for more upfront damage in solo play, and you don’t have to worry about overwriting or being overwritten by other players’ conditions in dungeons. Plus most of our skills have at least a 0.25/sec ratio for Power anyway.

Skill point prices aren’t supposed to reflect the power of the skill. Each (racial) elite is approximately as good as every other one, at least in theory. There does seem to be some logic to the ordering, with the skills that are simpler and/or more useful for solo play costing less. Essentially, however, ANet just determined that unlocking every skill should cost everyone around 180 skill points. Every class has a 30-point racial elite, so one form had to bite the bullet for the Norn.

Having one extra 10-point elite instead of a 3-point heal or 6-point utility doesn’t make a huge difference overall. Humans and Sylvari pay 175 points for their full range of skills, I believe, while Charr and Asura pay 178, and Norn pay 182. If Snow Leopard Form cost only 10 points, Norn would have a 13-16 point advantage, instead of a 4-7 point deficit.

It doesn’t bother me that the racials are pretty weak. I do wish they were more interesting, however. The elites and Prayer to Lyssa are fine, but Prayer to Dwayna and Prayer to Kormir are just incredibly dull skills that aren’t fun to use. Compare those to the heal and utilities of other races. Summons, positional skills, party buffs, Charr and Asura even get combo abilities.

The point of racial skills doesn’t seem to be power, but flavor. What these abilities say is that norn are the wilderness race, asura are the technology race, sylvari are the plant race, charr are the military race, and humans are the Ned Flanders race.

Gods and plain vanilla.

Here’s a synopsis, as best as I can remember, for anyone not planning on choosing it themselves. Otherwise, it’s a relatively light-hearted series of quests, with mostly investigative tasks interspersed with brief fights. There’s no fighting through big caves or defending through waves of enemies.

It makes sense that it doesn’t, if “set on fire” implies the burning condition. It would be a cute interaction if the trait did work with Zealot’s Flame, however, and not super powerful. It’s only, what, 3 seconds out of every 15 at most. So, average of 4% persistent crit while using a Torch, less if you use the chain active.

Maybe a little over-budget for a first-tier ability, but I’d be happy if they cut it down to 15% bonus crit and re-added this interaction.