So let’s start with the easy one: Precision.
A massive amount of mesmer condition pressure and sustain is obtained through crits. Your dueling 15 point minor trait causes all of your illusions to bleed on crit. That’s massive. Since illusions take your precision, having high precision is a must for good bleed pressure.
A slightly less direct reason is the interaction with the 5 point minor in dueling, 5 seconds of vigor on crit. Vigor = 100% faster endurance regeneration = twice as many dodges = twice as many dodge clones, which leads to more damage and more damage avoidance.
Next up is toughness.
Toughness actually has a direct benefit too. Your 25 point minor in chaos adds 5% of your toughness to your condition damage. That’s at least 100 more condition damage right there.
Now, both vitality and toughness are defensive stats, but they defend against different things.
- Power damage will eat right through vitality with no toughness, but conditions take much longer with more health, so vitality is condition defense
- Conditions don’t care about toughness, but power damage does. You get strong reductions in power damage with more toughness, so toughness is power damage defense.
In the blackwater build, you have strong condition defense already due to your traited torch, and so more condition defense is a lower priority. Additionally, mesmers already have medium base hp, so you’ve got a good amount of hp. When I run the build, I generally have 20k hp, which is fine, and so every bit of toughness you can get does much more for you.
Additionally, toughness indirectly increases the strength of your heals, while vitality decreases it. The same strength heal heals for a lower % of your hp with a lot of vit, making it indirectly weaker.
Lastly, we can talk about power.
This one really is quite obvious for anyone that’s ever played mesmer, but less obvious for a necromancer, which is why I’m thinking your friend is a necro. Mesmer condition skills don’t use power, generally. Your entire build is designed to do high condition damage, and not power. You have a couple skills that scale well on power, but the thing is that power does not matter at all without crit power. Pure power damage sucks, in order to do any appreciable damage, you absolutely have to have crit power.
Therefor, taking carrion gear would be lowering your condition damage because of vit instead of toughness, vastly decreasing your endurance regeneration, vastly decreasing your bleed pressure, making your heals less effective, and reducing your power damage defense, while providing you with a tiny bit of power.
