Guild Wars 2

It really depends on what else you are running. Personally I run carrion because I like the direct damage.

However, with engineers rabid can make some sense. You get less durability out of it, because the engineer needs vitality more than toughness. However, the engineer has some really good procs (4 second burn, 30% for 3 second bleed), and the flamthrower/grenade kit dole out so many hits at once that the procs fire off like mad if you have the precision.

It is really hard to pick a best one, but for WvW I’m running a Terrormancer and it works great. The good thing about the terrormancer is that it does more than just pwn n00bs. The main function of the terrormancer is defense, providing area control and also knocking players off of siege and doing a ton of damage while doing so. When enemies are too smart to run through spectral wall, you can run your zerg through it to get protection.

There’s no set way to make a terrormancer. Personally I’m running a 20/30/20/0/0 version with carrion. Some people run a 0/30/10/0/30 version with rabid, and pretty much every variation in between. But generally there’s a few similarities:

Nearly all use staff (reaper’s mark)
Most use Rare Veggie Pizza or Super Veggie Pizza
All have at least 20 in curses for Terror
They run Spectral Wall as a utility.

Each might gives you 35 power/malice. Do math.

Its called stability.

I couldn’t disagree more. I’ve found scepter/dagger to be completely ineffective in large scale fights. You use Scepter #2 and Dagger #5, and then you’re left with a pea shooter that goes plink plink against one guy in a 15 vs. 15 fight. The most you can do then is use Tainted Shackles or try and follow up with epidemic on one target.

The staff has great AoE, and also has good condition damage when specced correctly, and it does this at 1200 range. Lets compare it to the AoE bleeds of other weapons:

Mark of Blood: 3 bleeds x 8 seconds, 6 (4.8) second recharge, comes to 4 bleed ticks per second on use, and 5 bleed ticks per second with the recharge bonus.

Grasping Dead: 3 × 7 bleeds, 10 second recharge, comes to 2.1 bleed ticks per second on use. Becomes 33% more effective with the right traits.

Enfeebling Blood: 2 × 10 bleeds, 25 (20) second recharge, comes to 1 bleed tick per second on use with the recharge bonus.

So for AoE bleeds Mark of Blood is superior to Enfeebling Blood and Grasping dead combined. I usually open with scepter/dagger, then switch to staff to main that for awhile, and sometimes I’ll switch back to S/D and then use DS while those are recharging. But all in all, I use the staff for WvW. The AoE bleeds are the best, the AoE chill + poison is really easy to apply, it has excellent condition transfering + blast finisher, and it also comes with an AoE fear (and terror rocks in WvW).

So far, I use a 20/30/20/0/0 staff build in WvW. Utilities are Spectral Wall, Spectral Grasp/Well of Suffering/Epidemic, and Locust Signet for movement.

I’m pretty sure that guardians are the weakest range profession. They can’t hit for crap at a distance and they have slow moving projectiles.

I wouldn’t say they’re OP. They can be a tough fight for pretty much every class out there, but they also have an issue with finding roles to fulfill in teams now.

Take bunkering, for instance. Guardians are decent bunkers, but Ele’s and Engi’s are arguably better than that. Guardians can try speccing for damage, but thieves and necromancers do that better. Guardians can spec for support, but Mesmers can fulfill most of the roles that the Guardian would have for support.

So Guardians ATM are a “jack of all trades, master of none” kind of deal right now. They’re pretty good at what thy can do, though.

I think it should be character based, but they should be easier to get.

#1: PVE enemy culling
#2: Condition Cap
#3: RNG nature of events.

I did rough-and-probably-wrong information analysis on what condition damage will require once. I figure that each condition keeps track of several things:

The User
Malice of the User
Duration of the Condition
Stack value of the condition.

And each of those requires a certain amount of bytes to process. stack value of the condition requires 2 bytes, duration of the condition (if calculated on a quarter-second basis) requires 2 bytes, malice of the user requires 4 bytes (if it is possible to ever go above 4096 condition damage, otherwise it requires 3 bytes), and the user identity probably requires 5 bytes or so.

The hard part is that, because of their quarter second system, it goes through this calculation 4 times a second even though the damage only ticks once a second. For 25 stacks, we get

(2 + 2 + 4 + 5) bytes x 4 / second x 25 stacks = 1.3 KB per second.

It doesn’t seem like that much, but this information has to be kept up on every single enemy in the zone. If you have 20 condition users running around a zone, each hitting 5 different enemies with the bleed cap, then this comes to 130 KB per second to process. Repeat this for pretty much every zone and every dungeon, and in the end the servers have to process a lot to maintain conditions.

Personally, what I would recommend is increasing the condition cap, but only doing it on mobs that are champion rank or higher. When wandering around in the overworld, the enemies die too fast to care about the cap. When in dungeons, silver enemies may take longer for condition users to kill, but they also tend to attack in groups, allowing condition users to delegate targets with their conditions, so the cap isn’t a problem there. Where the cap is a problem is when fighting champions: You get 15 or so people there, and then once each of them applies 2 bleeds you hit the cap really quickly. Then condition users can’t contribute much at all.

So, double the cap on Champions and higher. It’ll require twice as much information to process, but also champions are a whole lot rarer than regular enemies, with less than a handful on any map at any time.

What a lot of people aren’t realizing is that the living story approach appeals greatly to a more casual market. Sure, hardcore MMORPGers want some kind of endless gear treadmill to keep them occupied, but that just turns away people who have a life or don’t like that kind of thing.

Another thing I noticed with a lot of MMOs that add new zones is that, once a new zone is added, people just play that zone until they very quickly get bored of all the new gimmicks, then they go right back to grinding where they were previously. Repeat this for any new dungeon, new quest, new boss, or new whatever. I’ve seen it happen dozens of times in PSU, CoH, Runescape, and Adventurequest to go oldschool. The only time this doesn’t happen is when the new content is a better grinding spot than the previous content, in which case the previous content is abandoned.

So even if we kept Aetherblade’s retreat and Molten Facility, by a month people would’ve stopped doing those. Then, because they are story-based group content, no one else can do them because there’s no one else to form a team with. Then we get players complaining about useless content and dead content and abandoned content. “Oh Anet, why don’t you ever add anything useful?” they say while grinding CoF1 over and over again, not aware that they want Anet to make grinding easier and easier by adding places that are better for it than the last.

So, Anet has actually made a decent decision to make a lot of temporary content: people lose interest and don’t care anyway, so there’s no point in keeping it around. There’s already plenty of empty zones with the game akittens current size. Doubling the size of the map will just make twice as many empty zones, so if players want to experience something different they can just go somewhere else. By making temporary content, they make it so players have to log in and play regularly in order to experience the content, and the OCD people will hang around to get all the achievements. This also deals with a very old complaint about MMOs in general: players don’t have an effect on the world. Now we do: we beat the bad guys, and then the bad guys are dead, so there is no one left to fight.

My biggest complaints with the system are the RNG nature of things and that with players constantly chasing new shinies, the non-grinding spots in the game are emptier than they would normally be.

My vote definitely goes for Elementalist, then Engineer, then Mesmer. The reason why is because of the sheer amount of activity require to used the class:

Elementalist: Has to constantly switch between attunements and spam all of their weapon skills in the right order to be effective. They are very hard to build for, too, which is why so many people just copy the 0/0/10/30/30 build that someone came up with so long ago. Their skills are largely AoE and also have delays, which makes doing something like switching to Earth Attunement to reflect projectiles really difficult. Elementalists have the lowest health and armor out of any class, so making mistakes gets elementalists killed quickly.

Engineer: The devs have no clue what to do with this class. Engineers have to constantly switch kits to maintain utility, and their best skills require good prediction. They have overall low damage, and you have to manage their toolbelt skills as well as their main skills. Engineers are also hard to build for, since you have to sacrifice speccing one kit for another many times. Also this class’s top builds get nerfed every patch (R.I.P. 100nades, Elixir S, Elixir R, Static Shield, Zerker Grenades, Tri-stun net turret, etc). You have to be adaptable and can’t run FotM’s with Engis.

Mesmer: The difficulty in this class comes from requiring knowledge about every other class. You have to know how other classes will act and behave, and most of the mesmer’s skills aren’t straightforward.

This gives those classes a high learning curve. You must also consider that each of them seems to get more and more nerfs every patch to their top tier builds (seriously, I’d trade trade stun-breaking shockwave for old style Elixir R, even if you were going give me $1000 just to drop it), so that speaks about how powerful they are as a whole.

I run a mixed turret build myself. 30/0/30/10. Utilities are Grenades, Net Turret, Rocket Turret. The strategy is to use the control effects of the Net Turret and the Rocket Turret along with the Rifle mainhand weapon to lock enemies down (and also apply a constant burn), and then follow up with an unavoidable grenade barrage. It was quite effective.

I say “was”. The current turret bugs and the nerf to the net turret have made the strategy much less effective.

I’ll be bumping this too. I depended heavily on turrets on my sPVP build, and due to the rate of fire changes and the bugs, I can’t accomplish anything now.

I was expected thieves to get quite a few votes on the PVE scale of things, but IMO they really aren’t that bad in PVE.

I have a level 80 thief myself, and have two sets that I use: full carrion and full zerker. The condi thief recently got a buff, thanks to increased pistol bounce, reduced initiative on death blossom, and torment. Seriously, I can maintain 25 stacks in an AoE without +duration food on my thief now, which makes him the fastest and most reliable bleed applier when compared to my necro (who applies long lasting bleeds slowly) and my engineer (who applies bleeds randomly).

The zerker thief is really good against anything that isn’t a champion. I use sword/pistol + shortbow while zerking it, and I can spam a blind field that lets me face-tank nearly every enemy in the game. Then I can just auto attack with the sword to do a ton of damage, and pistol whip to interrupt attacks that might be troublesome. This also has great support for the team, keeping the front line permanently blinded. When that won’t work, I can swap to the shortbow for spammable blast finishers as well as bouncing projectiles that do quite a bit of damage.

The thief also has some good support skills. It is hard to trait for, but Venomous aura + skale venom is incredibly effective at stacking torment. Shadow refuge is great for rezzing downed players and skipping troublesome parts, and is also the only non-necro dark field. Smoke Screen makes for a handy projectile stopping barrier, and though it doesn’t reflect is can also blind enemies continually that are standing inside of it. When taking aggro they can use Dagger Storm to reflect projectiles, and they can easily pull enemies with Scorpion Wire. Any /P thief can spam headshot to remove stacks of defiant, making champions a whole lot easier to control. Thieves also can get some nice support skills in the trickery line. I personally like to combine Thrill of the Crime with Bountiful Theft on my condi thief, so each time I steal it is an AoE Might + Vigor + Fury + Swifthness + whatever boons stole from my target. This is even more awesome now that steal has had it’s recharge reduced.

All in all, I say that a thief has a lot to contribute in PVE. What I do think, however, is that most players who play a thief do not consider this, and instead spend their whole time trying to backstab to get big, beefy numbers.

Stof.9584:

Lordrosicky.5813:

I would rather they just nerfed burning in general than remove it from the necro

Agreed, there is one common issue with all overpowered condition builds: permanent burning. It simply does too much damage and the durations are incredibly long on certain abilities.

I’ve played a condition engineer for awhile, and I have to disagree that burning is overpowered. In fact, there are many handicaps to burning that make it difficult to use. It is also many of these handicaps that make it so I don’t trait Dhuumfire at all.

#1: Burning damage is overidden with other people’s burning damage. So if a condi engineer and a guardian are playing together, when an engineer applies a 10 second burn, the guardain overrides that with their Virtue of Justice passive, and now they have an 11 second burn that does 328 damage per second. It seems like a lot, but that condition engineer hits for 328 damage with each individual grenade they throw, 3 times every 0.75 seconds. It’s really crap when that happens, and because of this it is hard to be a condition engineer in PVE groups and PVP groups that have guardians or elementalists or non-condi rangers or non-condi mesmers.

#2: Burning is the worst scaling condition in condition damage. For bleeds, poison, and confusion you only need around 850 malice to double your damage output for conditions. For burning, you need a whopping 1,312 malice to double it’s output. Torment, if I understand correctly, needs only 290 malice to double its damage. A lot of people equate a burn to so many bleeds, but this changes depending on their condition damage. At 0 malice, a burn is equal to 7.8 bleeds. At 1312 malice, a burn is equal to 6 bleeds. The higher it goes, the less and less burn contributes overall to condition damage.

#3: Burn has a very hard cap on effectiveness because it stacks only in duration. That means that, at any point in time, a burn on a condition build is only doing 700 a tick, and never more than that. Those long duration burns can be cleansed away, causing all of that stacking to mean absolutely nothing. When coming from multiple sources, even if both players use conditions, it will never exceed that amount. 5 condition engineers do the same burning damage as one.

It is because of this that you don’t see many condition Guardians or Elementalists, even though both of those can sustain a permanent burn quite easily.

Mostly I use Super Veggie Pizza. Although I have considered using Loaf of Saffron Bread on my Engineer to get ridiculous damage resistance when stunned.

I"d prefer confusion instead of burn. There’s more play there.

Anyway, as a necro I find the terror buffs to be far more potent than the burn. Heck, in PVE you barely notice the burn when it is on enemies. But when a horde of a dozen enemies are all slamming themselves against a wall, getting hit for nearly 3k damage each time… you notice that.

Whether this is overpowered or not, I’m not sure. The biggest issue I have is that none of my condition builds were changed by this. I have to change my builds to try and get dhuumfire, and I have to change my builds to get better and more fear. What I was running before won’t cut it still.

Now, as for my class specific advice:

Necromancer: Marks can bypass the protection on the golems during the fizz fight. I believe epidemic can as well. Do not hesitate to use DS defensively to go through the lasers, or to use Dark Path to teleport past the lasers. The golems are a bit thick and move in predictable patterns, so it is productive to run around in circles laying marks if they chase you. For Mai Trin, get ready to take a few hits. Spectral Grasp is your go-to utility for this fight, since pulling Mai into the AoEs is a large priority, and chilling her helps out a bunch, too. Bring Signet of Undeath to revive the downed players quickly, and remember to keep your health and LF up, since necromancers lack the active defense needed to avoid the attack. I recommend bringing a staff here as well, since Putrid Mark’s AoE condition transfer can lay a whole lot of hurt on Mai.

Engineer: Do not make the mistake I did, and go tanky. Shield off-hand, tool kit, elixir S, Elixir U, ect, you can use any stat distribution you like, but have defense ready to use. I haven’t tested them extensively, but Elixir S can go right through the lasers with no problem (it is also a stun breaker). For Mai, I’d highly suggest being relegated to a defensive role. With Elixir S + Shield + Tool Kit, an engineer has the ability to face-tank Mai while invulnerable for a lengthy amount of time. The tool kit provides a magnet to pull Mai into the AoEs as well. Something I’d also recommend using is Elixir R, for it’s toolbelt rez. Even though it isn’t immediate, rezzes at range are priceless in this fight.

Thief: The important thing to do is pick your stunbreaker carefully. Shadowstep requires two clicks, Roll for Initiative will throw you into the lasers, infiltrator’s signet teleports you right on top of the golems, and Haste will burn endurance. The good news is, with a shortbow and with the use of steal and other shadow-stepping abilities, the thief can warp through the lasers like they were nothing, so you can engage at any angle. More good news is that caltrops goes right through their protective shield, so I’d recommend this even when not on a condition build. For the Mai fight, you’re going to end up taking a lot of damage. For defense I would recommend using Smoke Screen to block her devastating teleportation attack. For weapons, I’d recommend P/P, and for a very good reason: the thief is really good at pulling Mai into the AoEs. Just use Headshot to clear out all her stacks of defiant, and then scorpion wire to pull Mai into the AoEs. I’d also recommend Shadow Refuge on the downed, and also as a self-defense.

I finished the dungeon with a pug on the first try.

There are parts of the dungeon that annoy me, however that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.. One of the things I like is that enemy attack rate for several enemies was increased. This makes confusion and retaliation more viable; two things that were lacking on content before. Also, I like how a lot of the dungeon is designed based on reason, and not necessarily a “this is a puzzle for players to solve” kind of thing.

For example, Fizz. Now, the golems at the end of the fight are just ridiculous. They are constantly pulling you into lasers to kill you, they cause nasty confusion effects, and they are nigh invulnerable 90% of the time. Now, at first this seems like it is over the top. However, I am reminded of a youtube video I saw comparing Castlevania 1 and 2, and I remembered something that made me appreciate the encounter:

The boss was designed with the purpose of killing players in a way that makes sense to the boss.

Given an evil asura in a room with spinning death beams, of course the golems are going to try to pull people into them. Of course the golems are going to be powered by the same energy that is in the lab. The golems are meant to kill people that enter the lab. It is up to the players to figure out how to defeat such a death trap.

Though I do take an issue with how long their defensive shields are up. Mostly because, due to sheer luck, it punishes groups based on the least competent member of the group. The strategy, of course, is to run with the lasers to minimize buff time. However, some player who will undoubtedly get aggro somehow will stand on the boxes and not move until the wall has nearly killed them. The golems will stay in place while fighting this player, resulting in the golems getting defensive buffs for very long lengths of time, making the event nigh impossible to compete.

The other big gripe I had was that in the Mai Trin fight, her teleportation attack can’t be dodged. My necromancer was bulky enough, and my engineer could block it. But on my thief… oh boy did this hurt. I would dodge roll into the bullet, and every time even though the “invincible” text would pop up I would still lose 75% of my health on my condi thief (note: not glass cannon. I pity those who were) when I wakitten with the attack.

Otherwise the fight was fun. The biggest thing people seemed to miss about the fight is that it required teamwork. Most people just run around like a chicken with their head cut off, but doing that results in nothing happening. You have to pull Mai into the AoEs, and sometimes you have to sit back and face-tank her there for a moment to drop the shield.

Both meet your requirements.

Necromancers are a bit slower in damage, however they are a whole lot easier to play. Engineers can have more damage and more versatility, but are harder to play.

But I say flip a coin if that doesn’t convince you one way or the other.

For a lot of the PVE things I ended up selecting ranger. The reason why is because, for the most part, AoE is king in PVE. As far as rangers go, most of the things I see them do are extremely single target.

For anything in PVP other than zerg vs. zerg, I’ve selected the warrior as the worst. Right now, they’re basically a free kill on any class I play that isn’t a guardian.

Khisanth.2948:

Astralporing.1957:

Ryuujin.8236:

…and let’s not talk about another level 26 run last week where people just kept dying on the bosses and i couldn’t figure why. Turns out 3 of the players had no AR whatsoever, and had tried sneak in hoping nobody’d notice… well kitten, 1 leecher might get under the radar but 3 of you?

That’s… something that i really don’t understand. I mean, why? They don’t get any better drops (since they’re capped at their personal level), and only making it harder on themselves. And their personal level just couldn’t be anywhere close to 26, or they would have at least some AR already. Just getting to 20 guarantees one ring with a chance for more. And a single amulet is also not that hard.

Maybe they are very good at sneaking individually and they managed to do only the odd levels in the 20s? :P

This is something I used to encounter a lot while playing City of Heroes. I used to host various team based and raid based activities, and it would always amaze me how often it is that one team will be utterly incompetent and nonresponsive, and yet a different team of nearly identical makeup would blow through content like it was nothing.

It’s really a numbers thing: for any population, a certain percentage will be slacking. That is, these players will not be putting in a full effort to perform at expectations, to learn the game content, or even learn proper team dynamics. This percentage is relatively low, due to how easy it is to learn something without actively trying to learn something. The chances of getting one of them on your team isn’t very common. Sure, there will be players that underperform, but they aren’t always slacking.

However, by sheer chance sometimes two or more of these players will end up on the same team, and then their performance compounds itself. Imagine the team dynamic kind of like pascals triangle: when you have good players, they play off of each other, making better plays than any individual player could have made. For example, a shortbow thief paired with a staff elementalist will often spam his blast finisher inside of water fields, healing the team, or inside of fire fields to give might to the whole team. By combining their effects, they become something greater than the individual. Do this with 3 more players, and sometimes you can get something truly amazing.

So when three of these slackers show up on the same team by chance, they end up bringing the whole team down a whole lot further than what seems conceivable. They’re not in DPS gear but they’re always face planted, they don’t put down combo fields or use finishers inside of them, they hang back and don’t attack while in combat that scales by player, ect.

I actually had something like this happen to me earlier today. I was trying to do the AR dungeon once with every level 80 toon I had engineer, necromancer, thief). The engineer and the necromancer didn’t have that much trouble at all, and the random pugs they were on blew through content like it was a standard dungeon. But my thief… oh boy. I spent four hours on that dungeon. The first team I was on had low DPS, low suvivability, and didn’t understand how any of the fights were supposed to work. Their natural response to the challenges was to give up and leave. We never even finished that dungeon.

But then I joined another random PUG strewn across different servers, and it was like night and day. Despite the fact that I was running the exact same build on the exact same thief, everything went better. Using the same tactics I died not even half as often, I could put out more damage than previously, and I could support the team better. I also managed to provide a use for P/P on thief finally (hint on the Mai Trin fight: Use Headshot to remove stacks of defiant, and then use scorpion wire to pull Mai directly into the electric AoE. On reduced cooldown, scorpion wire is up every 16 seconds).

What was the big difference? I’m not sure. I imagine it is because my team actively contributed instead of spewing narb everywhere.

I’m 95% certain this is a troll.

Although I am a bit of an evil person, one of my good qualities is that I am VERY helpful to people. Heck, it was my job for 3 years to teach people science and mathematics, and I actually liked that job. I’ve done stuff like this in pretty much every multiplayer game I’ve played, and will continue doing it for years to come.

It is in these very rare instances that I encounter what is arguably the worst type of trolling imaginable outside of something that can actually be construed as direct harassment. There is no name for this type of trolling, as it is incredibly rare, and also it only works when used on one type of person. I used to call these “drowning trolls” because they sit in the middle of the lake screaming for help, and then just pull under whomever comes to help them. However, I am taking a liking to the term “Kevlar”.

Basically it is any troll who feigns an inordinate amount of incompetence and a combative nature on any and all issues with the hopes of lulling helpful people into a never-ending attempt to help that individual. Their form of trolling is not focused on being offensive or obtrusive, but being frustrating. It works best against people who are genuinely helpful, whereas for those who are not helpful they are just somewhat obtrusive. I say this is the worst kind of trolling because when done right, it is the most destructive form of trolling for several reasons:

#1: It excuses the troll to be physically obtrusive on matters while still retaining a position in the party. Where normal loltrolls get kicked immediately when they ruin things, these trolls can convince people that they should stay for long amounts of time. This is until the helpful people run out of patience, and genuinely helpful people have a lot of patience.

#2: It ties up the rest of the team while other players tell them how to do things.

#3: They spread misinformation very rapidly. Their stories of “I did this last time!” and “I read that doesn’t work and we have to do such and such now” and “No, that won’t work because of X” are extremely damaging to other new players, who do not have the experience to know how things work. Because of that, their misinformation will often spread from player to player like a stupidity virus, tying up more and more teams with players who legitimately do not know that they’ve been fed lies.

#4:They make helpful people quit. This is quite horrible, since the charitable players make up the peak of community quality, and their help spreads throughout the community as a communicable act of generosity (an intelligence virus, if you will).

#5: They will join guilds, forums, communities in general, and will persist in their misinformation for as long as possible and on as large a scale as possible.

I theorize that these people are some of the most evil people on the planet. Regular trolling is understandable on a certain level: people need validation of their existence and attention, so they will be obtrusive and offensive to get it. But these trolls, it is just pure hate that drives them to prey on those who are sincerely charitable for absolutely no profit at all. So, whenever I have met one of these rare trolls, they have always been met with a kick + block + I tell everyone I know to also block them.

Spotting them is the hard part. As a general rule, players can be incredibly incompetent without being trolls. Often times they won’t listen to advice due to some personal goal or due to language barriers, and sometimes due to issues like chat lag. But you can usually identify these trolls when they can speak and respond actively, and yet do not listen to advice, do not respect authority, and will tell contradictory anecdotes that are basically impossible. They will make an attempt to disagree with you on things that should be common sense to anyone, even third world children who do not speak English. When they go on offense against advice that has been given without any legitimate reason to do so is a dead giveaway.

I haven’t played a guardian in awhile, but back when I did I used purging flames all of the time. It is alright for an AoE cleanse, requiring people to walk in and out for multiple use. Of course, through the course of combat that tends to happen quite a lot on its own. The burn is also pretty cool, and when hitting in an AoE it does more damage than you’d think. The other awesome thing is that it is a fire field, which causes more burning and stacks might.

I seem to remember a lot of people complaining pre-patch that conditions were useless in PVP because a guardian/ele/engy/thief could just cleanse them away…

The whole thing sounds to me like a case of circumstance and selective perception:

1)Circumstance. 3 classes got a new condition, and a lot of players right now are testing those conditions out. This leads to a lot of players playing condition builds in PVP and WvW. This increase in conditions has lead to an oversaturation of conditions, which make it so builds with light condition removal are hit harder.

2)Selective Perception. With all of the conditions now flying about, both direct and in AoE, the conditions stand out more. Direct damage doesn’t have as clear of an indicator as conditions do, and so players who normally didn’t have issues with conditions are now finding themselves covered with conditions.

All in all, I can’t call conditions overpowered or underpowered at the moment. The fact is, on all of the condition specs I tested, one Null Field renders them helpless against an entire group.

Yeah, the high fury uptime is a pipedream in most circumstances. Its why I personally never bothered with it. On my condi build I use DS for defensive purposes: use enfeebling blood + get retaliation + life transfer to tank while my conditions do their work. Though Dhuum would probably proc in all of that (life transfer hitting 9 times exceeds 90% certainty), it is far form my concern at that moment.

Another thing to note is that the 90% certainty means that there’s a 90% chance it’ll proc by then. It doesn’t mean that it’ll always fire off on the 8th attack. There’s actually a 1/4 chance each attack that’ll work each time off cooldown, so 25% of the time you’ll be burning ‘em on your first attack, and in 3 attacks it’ll proc more often than not (58% chance). The number I pick is reserved for when the RNG cops an attitude and doesn’t cough up the goods; a worst case scenario for most players. But if it is really important, I’d put the maximum crit chance based on proccing dhuumire to be 30%. Then, it happens more often than not with just 2 attacks.

For others, the sigil I personally use is Superior Sigil of Corruption. In WvW and PVE It is surprisingly easy to get 25 stacks, adding a total of 250 condition damage. It’s only about 13 more damage per tick on a bleed, but when my malice maxes out at over 2200, my conditions hit like a truck.

sas.6483:

A few points that might be useful:

1) Barbed precision is terrible. It’s so terrible in fact that vampiric is better. (Vampiric is actually pretty good, but people that can’t do math think it sucks.)
2) At 50% crit and attacking every half second, you’ll get a proc from SoE every 2 + 0.5*(1/(0.6*0.5)) = 3.66 seconds. At 25% crit and attacking every half second, you’ll get it every 2 + 0.5*(1/(0.6*0.5)) = 5.33 seconds. Crit isn’t really as critical as you’d think, given the cooldown.

Somebody knowledgeable can check the math, but it should be about right. Crit just doesn’t seem to be all that important, at least to me, in terms of proc effects. The only good reason I can see to take rabid would be the toughness.

I keep forgetting about that expected value equation. Anyway, it is a handy equation to use, however it comes with a minor caveat: procs with cooldowns have highly variable sample sizes. You attack until the proc hits and then go through the cooldown procedure, and these cooldowns culminate over time to add to the overall proc rate. What happens is that, each attack’s individual chance for triggering a proc is wholly dependent on the previous attack’s chance of triggering a proc, and that is dependent on the previous one, and so on and so fourth.

Lets say something has a 1/3 chance to proc that has a cooldown. Say you have 3 attacks: the expected value for this proc to occur. It seems O.K., but on which attack did it work? Maybe it didn’t work on those 3 attacks, since there is a 28% chance it won’t happen then. Maybe it worked the first time, and then the next few attacks don’t have any chance at all of causing the proc to activate.

With attacks that don’t have a cooldown, you can assume an infinite sample size and non-mutually exclusive events. Then the expected value matches actual performance.

To elaborate on that strange logarithm I’ve been using, it is basically a form of tree diagram:

does it proc?
| \
| \
| \
| \
no yes (0.6 × 0.25)
(0.85)
| \
| \
| \
| \
No yes (0.15)
(0.85)
| \
| \
| \
| \
No yes (0.15)
(0.85)

and so on. At the end, each branch has a certain chance of happening. At first it is a 15% chance. Then it is a 0.85 × 0.15 chance, then it is a 0.85^2 × 0.15 chance, and then so on until eventually it hits and things reset. The total chance that any attack would’ve activated the proc at any point is the summation of all of the odds added together.

But doing this is tedious and annoying, and there’s no clear goal to find. Awhile ago, mathematicians came up with a way to get these probabilities, and it is a complication operation that involves combinations. However, there is a simpler way to do it:

The chance of any proc happening is 1 – the chance of it not happening.

And the chance of it not happening is really easy to find. You just take all the routes where the proc doesn’t happen (0.85), and keep multiplying them until the number is small enough that you can confidently say that it would’ve happened by then. So if I wanted to find out where there would be a greater than 50% chance of the proc having already occurred, then I would have 0.85^5 = 0.44, and 1 – 0.44 = 0.56, or a 56% chance of occurring.

But that is really mess and it looks like pulling numbers out of thin air. So you make an equation for it:

1 – (1 – proc rate x crit chance) ^ Number of hits = desired percentage.

And to solve for the number of hits, you have to take the log of everything:

Number of hits x Log (1 – proc rate x crit chance) = log (1 – desired percentage)

Since I use 90% as my desired percentage, and the log of 0.1 = -1, I often abbreviate this to get the following:

Number of hits = -1 / log (1 – proc rate x crit chance)

And this makes for a nice shorthand to solve for those procs on cooldown. What the end result of this means is, essentially, there is a 90% chance that the proc activates and enters into a cooldown in this period, and because of this the proc has a 90% chance that inside of X number of attacks lies it’s actual frequency. This number is arbitrary, since you can make a case for basically any number above 50%. I pick 90% due to my statistical background, and that people will all agree that 9/10 times is a really good chance that something happened.

Tl;dr: Procs with cooldowns muddy everything up, especially procs that stack in intensity instead of duration.

So, going with 1225, burning does 634 damage per tick. At 100% condition duration, this is 8 ticks in total, for a rand total of 5,072 damage on proc. So, going back to that formula again, you’ll have

5,072 / (-1 / log ( 1 – crit chance) +15)

Now, currently, with a 20% crit chance (40% under fury. Remember, you have furious demise), this comes to

5,072 / (-1 / log (0.8) + 15)
= 5072 / (10 + 15) = 203

So against single targets, dhuumfire is adding about 203 damage per attack. That is quite a lot, actually. If I am to assume that you maintain 50% fury uptime due to furious demise + boon duration from death magic, then you can say you have a 30% chance to crit, and this comes to 231 additional damage per attack.

Now comes the hard part. Logarithms aren’t linear, so I can’t just do a 1 for 1 comparison with power. Assuming the stats I assumed above, this build would get 1,861 power.. The hard part is, this will require calculus; something I am out of practice on. But, looking at a formula for damage modified for my own personal use:

Damage = K * power * (1 +crit chance) x crit dmg + 5072 / (ln0.1 / ln (1 – crit chance) + 15

dDamage/dPower = K * (1 + crit chance) x (0.5 + crit dmg)
dDamage/dCrit Chance= K * power * (0.5 + Crit dmg) /2100 + 5072/15 * ln (10) / (2100 * (ln(1- crit chance ) – ln10 )^2 * (1 – crit chance))

Note: d/dCrit Chance = 1/2100
Note: due to how the equation is solved, crit dmg means only additional %, and not the total critical hit damage mod.

Reference: http://www.derivative-calculator.net/#expr=ln%281-x%2F2100%29%2Fln%280.1%281-x%2F2100%29%29&showsteps=1

I had to get a little assistance on this one, since the derivative of that last part overflowed my whiteboard. I had to jury rig the calculator to work, and even then it the solution was horribly displayed. The whole numerator reduces to ln10. I kept many of the variables in place since thy represent things (like 5072 = burn damage x burn duration, 15 = attacks in 10 seconds on average, ect). One variable, K, represents the product of weapon strength x skill coefficient / Enemy Armor.

When the second equation is larger than the first equation is when Dhuumfire is better than the alternative. Again, this is ultimately a question of choosing power or precision. Now, I’m going to assume that the enemy has 2000 armor, and the attack used will be staff auto attack (0.67 coefficient), and the staff has an average attack rating of 1048 (exotic). This will come to damage being equal to 0.349 x Power, which is then modified further by other things 0.349, BTW, is equal to 0.66666 × 1048 (average exotic staff strength) / 2000 armor. Solving for power, you get

0.349 × 0.5 x Power / 2100 + 5072/15 * Pile of Logarithmic crap > 0.349 × 0.5 x (1 + crit chance)

=

Power > 2100 (1 + crit chance) – 5072 × 2/ (15 × 0.349) * ln (10) / ((ln(0.1- 0.1crit chance ))^2 * (1 – crit chance))

And unfortunately, it can’t get much simpler than that. It is also impossible to understand just by looking at it. But alas, unless I have made a mistake somewhere, your answer lies in there. You can also cut up the values however you want, like changing the damage of Dhuumfire or changing the attack rate of the necromancer. I’ve already spent more time than I expected on this challenge, and solving for precision after all this seems too daunting a task to tackle for free this late at night.

If you want my personal advice, I wouldn’t go for a crit rate higher than 25%. Using that, dhuumifre will trigger every 23 attacks, but this adds a nice threshold for dhuumire: when on off cooldown, it’ll trigger once every 8 attacks (90% certainty). Heck, arguably what you could do is pop DS to get fury, and with fury and just 200 points of precision, you can get 33% crit rate, and that comes to just 6 attacks.

So yeah, regardless of your build you are probably fine.

Pendragon.8735:

Currently I am not using earth sigils, for a 30/20 burn/terror build, I’m finding a mix of carrion and rabid fitting. I want just enough precision to crit that burn pretty quick when its up, but not too much that it is eating into Powers natural advantage over Precision. (Maybe BRA could tell me the exact ideal cut-off, ).

Challenge accepted.

Awhile ago, a few others helped me come up with a golden ratio formula where power eats into precision and vice versa. It’s already been linked once in the thread, but I’ll post it up again since my failures bear repeating:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Finding-the-Diminishing-Returns-in-Stats/first

The conclusion basically is this:

Power > Prec – 832 + 2100/ (0.5 + Critdmg)

Now, for this build I am assuming that you have achieved 100% condition duration through means alternate means than Master of Terror (x2 Lyssa, x4 mad king, at least one giver weapon), to capitalize on staff abilities. I can be very wrong here, but regardless I will continue. Assuming no additional crit damage, you’d need 4,284 power before precision becomes more valuable. Since there is no way Grenth’s domain that this can be achieved, precision will always eat into your DPS without high crit damage.

This is where things get a bit hard. To gain precision from power means I’ll have to compare the power lost to the extra damage done by dhuumfire. This requires a lot of specifics that I don’t have, so I’ll have to do some assuming again. If these assumptions are wrong, then hopefully my math will help others do the calculation under different circumstances.

Dhuumfire’s damage can be summed up as the following

burn damage / how many attacks between activation

where the attacks before activating follow this rule (assuming 90% probability of occurring)

-1 / log (1 – crit chance) + attack rate x 10

I’m going to simplify things a bit here, for the sake of my own sanity. I’m going to assume that, in this terror build, you are not concerned with dhuumfire when fighting against multiple enemies, but rather when fighting against a single target. Know that any gains from dhuumfire are mitigated in a situation where you can launch 100 attacks in 5 seconds. Now, doing this and assuming roughly 1.5 attacks per second, this comes to 15 attacks in down time. So, I’m going to have to divide doomfire by this to get the following formula for the overall effectiveness of doomfire:

Burn damage x burn duration/ ((-1 / log (1 – crit chance)) + 15)

(328 + 0.25 Malic) x (4 x condition duration increase) / ((-1 / log (1 – ((prec – 832)/21))) + 15)

This will all be on the exam :p

So, with a starting precision of 353 from lyssa runes and traits + one giver weapon (the staff), you have a starting crit chance of 20%. Assuming full carrion and the above runes (- the weapon), you’ll get 1094 condition damage with pizza. Assuming Master Tuning Crystal in full carrion + 200 toughness from staff traits, this will come to 1614 vit, 1116 toughness, and a total boon from the tuning crystal of 131 condition damage, bringing the total condition damage to 1225. I’m also going to assume you are running sigil of paralysis for more terror ticks (it goes past 100%, doesn’t it?), and so 1225 will be the final condition damage used. If you are using corruption, then the final condition damage is 1475.

Kravick.4906:

You forgot to factor in healing in regards to rabid vs carrion. At no point have I disputed that carrion does more damage than rabid. Its the survivability that I’m debating.

I didn’t forget to factor it in. I chose not to factor it in for two reasons.

#1: Healing is unreliable. It can be interrupted and burst beyond, meaning that there is no guarantee that you’ll get a heal off.

#2: Necromancers get a form of healing that scales with power in Life Force generation.

Because of this, factoring healing is at best a preference and not a necessity. If you want more nits to pick, I also didn’t factor in condition damage done to the player, and this was because of the chaotic nature of condition cleanses, both based on build and on player skill. The whole thing is just too unreliable, so for analysis I fell back on what was reliable: the stats you bring to the fight. Those don’t change.

sas.6483:

Really nice analysis by BRA. I’d argue that the Sigil of Earth is over valued by a factor of two or so because of the cooldown, but it’s all good.

Just out of curiosity, what exactly were the gear sets you were considering? Straight carrion / rabid weapons (with sigil of earth), armor and jewelry without assuming any runes / gems?

Sigil of Earth probably is overvalued. I used 90% activation probability with 3 attacks/second as a baseline, but really that is all arbitrary. You can use 50% activation probability while assuming 2 attacks per second, or maybe something completely different.

I suppose the big thing about sigil of earth is that it is incredibly negligent of AoEs. In scepter/dagger it isn’t so bad, since you’ll stagger grasping dead and enfeebling blood far enough that it can proc on each. But on my WvW staff build, I’ll commonly throw out 3 marks and well of suffering in the span of 2 seconds, then following that up with life transfer + weakening shroud for the next 3 seconds If all of those hit 5 people each time (well does 35 hits, marks do 15 hits, life transfer does 45 hits, weakening shroud hits 5 more), then it comes to 100 attacks in which the Sigil only has 3 chances to proc in.

Anyway, the stat arrangement I used was basically weapon stats + armor stats + trinkets + backpack. No runes or sigils (other than sigil of earth), no additional traits beyond 300 in curses and minor traits and not factoring in boons from utilities or bonuses from food. All bonuses were assumed at the exotic level. Basically, a this was done with a condition build skeleton.

I didn’t want to go any further, because then the subject becomes more about my builds than condition builds in general. Thankfully it was enough to make the “1.22 bleeds vs. single, 0.42 bleeds in AoE” shortcut, assuming that no additional precision is added to either build. From there you can play with the condition duration, the condition damage, the power added from other traits and might, and all of that stuff. But if you change the precision, you have to calculate the proc rates again.

And that isn’t even going near the fact that a carrion build and a rabid build wouldn’t be cookie cutter copies of each other.

It might be hard to tell. While in DS, attacks drain your life force instead of your HP. So, if spectral armor’s effect is active, you’ll be losing life force per hit unless each hit they do is less than 3% of your life force bar.

Not factoring degen.

Depends. In WvW I generally space them. However, if I am attempting to make the final kill against a target, I stack all of the fears to get maximum damage.

I’m actually starting to level the mesmer myself. Of course, I’m leveling and making it as a condition mesmer first and foremost, so a lot of the nerfs to the mesmer aren’t really nerfs to me.

Frankly I always thought that celerity being an adept trait was overpowered. Just 5 points to increase the recharge of half the weapon skills and a ton of utilities by 20%, and this recharge stacks with other recharge reductions to a full 40% reduction. No other class gets near that level of universal reduction, let alone for just 5 trait points.

In dungeons it has been a buff for me, definitely. Currently I’m running a 10/30/0/30/0 build in PVE, but thanks to coated bullets and juggernaut I can change my build around. Originally there was always a junk trait I had to take in the middle between the + recharge and coated bullets/Juggernaut, but now there’s no junk trait.

Oh, the possibilities are endless right now. I could go with 10 more points in explosives to get more might from enhance performance, or for when I run the bomb kit I can use explosive powder/short fuse. I can put it into Tools to gt kit refinement or maybe even static recharge for when I op for other things than elixirs. Maybe even the gadget recharge rate, so I can leap around like a freak on rocket boots.

I’m probably going to go 20/20/30 though. I like me some might.

It probably won’t get nerfed. Why? It’s quite simple: That isn’t overpowered. It is awesome.

There’s a difference. A small one, but there is a difference.

The necromancer has had something like this for awhile. It’s a pretty sweet trait in the right spots.

If the plan is to permanently upkeep conditions on a target, then it isn’t being done right. In general I like to assume that the target in sPVP will have at least 3 conditions on them, whatever they may be, so you can put it down as a 6% increase (roughly) in sPVP.

The real strength of this trait comes in PVE. When fighting temple bosses or dragon champions, they’ll have a permanent upkeep of bleed, poison, vulnerability, burn, and weakness (may have changed), so this is a flat 10% increase with spikes from blind, confusion, torment, cripple, chill, and immobilize for a total of 22% or so. Against champions this is quite a big damage buff, and it stacks with rifle mod and target the maimed.

This trait is best used on power builds conjunction with condition builds. Even power builds will apply conditions (vulnerability, blind, weakness, immobilize, burning, cripple, chill), so there is that benefit. But if you have a buddy condi mesmer who’kittenting them with everything they’ve got, then you’re good to o.

BTW sorry about the final conclusion taking forever to get. When I start these explorations, I have no idea how they’re going to turn out. I often don’t see the shortcut until I’ve gone the long way.

Now comes the hard part: putting it against an enemy. This is difficult for direct damage, which is affected by the armor value of the opponent. For now, however, I will assume the opponent has 2000 armor, and thus all tooltip damage is increased by 30% (or 2600/2000). I will also assume that in this build spec, with 1003 condition damage from equipment and 300 more from stats, that bleeds do 108 damage per tick. To get these damages, I just apply the numbers above to the tool tip. I’ll only show the calculation for the first move. Looking at each of the necromancer’s attacks for scepter/dagger we get the following:

Blood Curse (carrion):
118 × 1.3 × 2.03 = 311 direct damage.
5 + 0.62 bleeds = 607 condition damage
Total damage: 918

Blood Curse (Rabid):
118 × 1.3 × 1.33 =204 direct damage
5 + 1.84 bleeds = 739 condition damage
Total damage: 946

Rending Curse: Same Values

Putrid Curse (carrion): 443 direct damage, 67 bleed damage, 856 Poison, 1366 total
(Rabid) 290 direct damage, 199 bleed damage, 856 poison, 1345 total

#Grasping Dead:
(Carrion): 620 direct damage, 2335 bleed damage, 2955 total
(Rabid): 240 direct damage, 2467 bleed damage, 2707 total

Feast of Corruption (assuming 3 conditions)
(Carrion): 1214 direct damage, 67 bleed damage, 1281 total
(Rabid): 795 direct damage, 199 bleed damage, 994 total

#Deathly Swarm (per bounce)
(Carrion): 549 direct, 67 bled, 616 total
(Rabid): 360 direct, 199 bleed, 559 total

#Enfeebling Blood:
(Carrion): 443 direct, 2227 bleed, 2670 total
(Rabid): 290 direct, 2359 bleed, 2649 total

While doing this, I’ve noticed an interesting shorthand emerges. Rabid does about 1.22 seconds more bleed damage for every attack. This makes things really simple to do with changing builds: Increasing bleed duration to 100% will mean that rabid gets 2.44 seconds per attack.

1. Except for all AoEs this is incorrect. With AoEs hitting up to 5 targets, the sigil of earth only triggers a 5 second bleed on one of them. Because of this, the contribution of the sigil of earth is only 1/5th of what it normally is. So for AoEs, you can get this additional amount of bleeds from procs:

Carrion: 0.22 seconds of bleed
Rabid: 0.64 seconds of bleed

Which comes to a 0.42 seconds of bleed difference between the two. Note that this is also technically incorrect, since AoEs are capable of launching more than 20 attacks in 2 seconds. As I mentioned before: Muddies the prospect. But lets ignore the mud for now.

All in all, this ends up with a very simple formula to find out whether carrion or rabid is superior (assuming 300 in curses):

For single target attacks, rabid will do (1.22 x condition duration x bleed damage) additional damage from procs. For AoEs, rabid will do (0.42 x condition duration x bleed damage). If this damage is less than the difference between carrion and rabid’s direct damage, then carrion is superior. If this is more than the difference between carrion and rabid’s direct damage, then rabid is superior.

So suffice to say, for AoEs and every weapon other than the scepter/dagger, carrion will be superior in damage. The exception to this being Life Transfer, which hits for only 72 tooltip damage 9 times, getting multiple procs from barbed precision. The only other “condition” weapon that necromancer’s have is the staff, and all of the staff attacks are AoEs.

So whatever you pick depends on what you’ll be doing. If you main something other than scepter/dagger, if you are in PVE with many enemies or in WvW with many enemies or in an sPVP match that has many enemies, go with carrion. You’ll get more damage out of it. If you are fighting 1 vs 1 or away from the group in tPVP, go with rabid. If you are hybriding equipment, go with carrion.

Also something I’d recommend is to use a carrion staff, but rabid scepter/dagger. Or if hybriding, something like zerker or soldier for the direct damage equipment.

Also note: different builds will change the outcomes of the calculations. However, as long as 300 in curses is maintained and no other equipment is hybridized with anything else, then the shorthand (1.22 for single, 0.42 for AoE) can be maintained.

So then we look on offense. The condition damage from both sets are the same, so then we can look direct damage and then procs. For now, the only traits I will assume are 300 precision/condition damage from the curses tier (this is, after all, a condition build).

Power damage ratio increase (carrion): 1.76
Crit rate (carrion): 18%
Crit Damage (carrion): 1.5
Scaled damagae ratio: 1.76 x (1.5 × 0.18 + 0.82) = 1.76 × 1.09 = 1.92

Power ratio (rabid): 1
Crit Rate (rapid): 51%
Crit Damage (rabid): 1.5
Scaled Damage ratio: 1 x (1.5 × 0.51 + 0.49) = 1 × 1.255 = 1.26

So with carrion, you’ll do 92% more direct damage than with nothing, and with rabid you’ll do 26% more direct damage. this means that carrion does about 52% more direct damage than carrion. Retaliation with carrion does 319 damage per tick, whereas rabid does 267 damage per tick, so carrion does 19% more damage with retaliation.

Given this is a x/30/x/x/x build there’s a couple of things you can add in regarding direct damage. The first is target the weak, which gives 2% more damage for each condition on an enemy. This is difficult to work with, since those conditions changed, but for now I will assume 3 conditions: Poison, Bleeding, and any combination of cripple, chill, and weakness. This is a 6% increase in direct damage, pushing the direct damage ratios up to 1.33 for Rabid and 2.03 for carrion.

Another trait worth mentioning is Furious Demise, which gives fury for 5 seconds when entering DS. This can be used to achieve a 50% fury uptime easily, however this comes with a caveat that no condition build will tap DS just to get fury. DS is used mostly for defense in condition builds, and it is very likely that a necromancer will be in DS using all of their utilities for 5 seconds, using up the entire duration of the fury in that span. If someone wishes, they could factor in 50% fury uptime (average of 10% increase in crit rate), but for now I will just say that carrion benefits more from fury.

And now with procs. There are two procs that are worth mentioning: Superior Sigil of Earth, and Barbed precision. Now, Barbed precision gives a 66% chance to cause 1 stack of bleeding for 1 second, no known cooldown. Sigil of Superior Earth has a 60% chance to cause a 5 second bleed, but a 2 second cooldown. With these numbers, we can come up with an “expected bleed output” from these two. It is quite simple to do with barbed precision:

Barbed precision: 0.66 x crit rate x 1 second bleed

For carrion this comes to 0.12 bleed ticks per attack, and for rabid this comes to 0.34 bleed ticks per attack.

However the sigil has a problem with the internal cooldown, and both involve the attack rate being highly variable in fights. This can muddy the numbers greatly, so I will have to get back to this later. For now, I will assume that with the scepter/dagger combo there are roughly 3 attacks per 2 second with the auto attack, and afterward it’ll take so many attacks to activate the proc again. Now, the chance of the proc occurring is the same as barbed precision:

= 0.6 x crit chance

So for carrion it is a 10.8% chance, and for Rabid it is a 31% chance of happening. Now, the chances that the proc will have occurred over 90% of the time for each of these is, for carrion, 20 attacks, and for Rabid, 7 attacks. Because both of those are substantially longer than 2 seconds, I’m going to take a shortcut and just assume it works by a similar function as Barbed Precision (against a single target):

0.6 x crit rate x 5 seconds of bleed

So for carrion this adds 0.5 bleed ticks per attack, and for rabid this adds 1.5 bleed ticks per attack. This can be increased with condition duration, but for now I’m going to assume there is no additional condition duration. This comes to a total of 0.62 bleeds per attack for carrion, and 1.84 bleeds per attack for rabid.

Now that I have free time, I’ll contribute to the debate at hand.

The effective HP of any player is essentially how much health they have multiplied by how much armor mitigates damage. It’s the whole “I have 10k HP, but take half health, so it is the same as someone having 20k HP”. Now, there exists something called the Golden Ratio, which is the amount of HP you need vs. the amount of armor you have in order to get the maximum amount of survivability with a limited amount of stat points. This seems complicated, but it is effectively 8th grade algebra. Let me put it into a perspective that might be more easily recognized:

What is the maximum volume of a rectangle who’s perimeter must add up to 100?

It’s the same problem, but in a videogame: You have two stats that multiply each other (area), and a limited number of points to invest in either of them (perimeter). The answer to the above problem is a square: height is equal to width. That is, when armor is equal to health (health X 10, of course, due to 1 point of vitality giving 10 health).

The whole debate on survivability with rabid vs. carrion is interesting, but even more interesting is that necromancers are the exception to the rules. They are the exception due to the following:

#1: Necromancers already have the golden ratio (armor x 10 = health), with 18,372 HP and 1,836 armor. 1 point of toughness and you’re set.

#2: Necromancers have a form of healing that scales with vitality: Life force generation. The Life Force pool scales with health, and the skills that generate life force do it as a percentage.

Because of this, the debate on survivability with carrion vs. rabid is moot for necromancers: they both provide about the same amount of survivability. You can get into specifics, like how well our condition transfers cure conditions, or how healing can be interrupted and thus isn’t reliable, these aren’t mathematical factors. They are skill and situational factors. You can “what if I’m fighting 2 condi rangrs and a daze mesmer” all day if you want.

The idea that conditions are useless in PVE is an oft repeated and incorrect myth. Necromancers cause conditions in an AoE, which lets them do a lot of damage over time to a lot of enemies. There are only a few circumstances where conditions become an issue:

A)Against environmental objects
B)Against large overworld bosses
C)When having more than 2 condition dedicated builds while running in dungeons.

Otherwise, enjoy a fountain of numbers spewing from your targets.

If you want to go with that, why not just run givers weapons with nightmare runes and 30 in spite, and then with pizza you’ll get 100% in everything.

I might have to resolve this debate later, right now I"m running short on time. But here are my rune recommendations:

For pure rabid condition specs, go with Undead. You’ll get higher bleed ticks, but will have to get condition duration from other sources.

For condition duration, I recommend 3x krait + 3x afflicted. This gives you 30% more bleed duration while also giving a substantial amount of condition damage. While 2x krait + 2x afflicted + 2x centaur does give you 45% bleed duration, it also gives substantially less condition damage. The necromancer isn’t wanting for condition duration, so I’ve found the 30% to be more than adequate for my builds.

For terror builds, I’d recommend Runes of the Necromancer. The runes give condition damage + vitality, while also giving 20% fear duration. The runes of the nightmare give a 10% duration to all conditions and a 5% chance to cause fear when hit, so they are also worthy of mention. It depends on the build used, and how easily they get fear.

For my staff build in WvW, I’m going to experiment with a 30/20/20/0/0 to see how well Dhuumfire works. I’ll still be able to sustain 100% condition duration, but currently my WvW condition build only has, like, a 24% chance to crit with any attack, so the burning isn’t going to be super-reliable.

For PVE conditions, I’m debating whether to take Dhuumfire at all. It’ll definitely be a 30/30/x/x/x build as it usually is, but with the fact that everyone and their grandmother has access to burning, I’m don’t think it will contribute to PVE effectiveness of necros at all.

There’s use for accelerant packed turrets outside of turret builds. It can make the healing turret a stun, as well as be useful for Static Discharge builds that would use the rifle turret and also the thumper turret now that it breaks stuns. This doesn’t need much functionality out of the turrets themselves, so it is possible to use those turrets without a single point into inventions.

Many turret builds will also forgo accelerent packed turrets, instead focusing on sustaining turrets instead of destroying them. With that in mind, the only necessities for any turret build are the 30 points into inventions for armor plating and rifled turrets. I myself see deployable turrets as excess that isn’t a necessity for where I use turrets. It might be hard to think of it this way, but you don’t need to take every turret trait when using turrets. The traits all do different things, and having them all is far from necessary or even productive.

Now, armor plating is quite an effective trait for increasing the survivability of turrets, but I do agree that the regen is nigh useless in PVP, so that trait can be skipped for something else. In PVE, however, these can have quite the overpowered function, letting engineers camp events without actually having to stay there. It was due to this that the turrets of the engineer were set to a 5 minute time limit. So it is arguable that the turret regen is quite strong, given that a new game function had to be put in just to counteract abuse of the trait. The devs probably aren’t sure if they want to give that functionality to all turrets, given the potential for abuse it can cause.

Whether to trait for offense or defense is up to player choice at the minute. Right now, the inventions line several options for defense: Stablizied Armor, Protective Shield, Cloaking Device, and technically Power Shoes. They’re all so useful it is hard to pick just one. Right now Stabilized Armor makes for a somewhat decent defensive trait, since it works when stunned, which is a point that turret engineers were previously weak on. Combine that with 10 points for protection fueled injection and you can shrug off hard controls like they were nothing.

It should also be mentioned that there is no cookie cutter build for turrets. As far as I can tell, the wrong way to use a turret build is to go with 3 turrets for utilities, since that leads to overspecialization and also denies much of the utility that the rest of the engineer skills can bring. The turrets themselves constantly do damage, so traiting for turrets is traiting for damage itself. From this, you can opt for a kit or a stun breaker or some other missing utility, considering that damage and control can be taken care of.

There is something to also look at while looking at stuns: stabilized armor now provides a 20% reduction while KDed or stunned.

This is good. The reason why this is good is because engineers already have a really awesome trait for when they are KDed or stunned: Protection fueled injection. We get protection when we are stunned, pretty much every time we are stunned.

So, we get a 20% reduction to damage, and on top of that we get a boon that gives a further 33% reduction in damage, resulting in an overall 47% reduction in damage while stunned, meaning we take 53% damage while disabled. If we go further and add on Saffron Bread to the mix, we end up taking only 40% of the damage we would normally take when stunned.

While running my turret build in sPVP, I would often debate whether or not I should take a stun breaker in my last slot. Now, I don’t need to anymore. Protection Fueled Injection saved me times innumerable, and now it is 20% stronger.

I think the reasoning for nerfing so many stun breakers is because right now, we’re outdoing guardians in pretty much everything they do. We already have a ton of blocking and evading abilities, we have a ton of hard + soft control, plenty of movement skills, and so much support and utility it is nigh endless. Do we really need a lot of stun breakers or stability?

BTW this is assuming that the stun break function to the elixir gun was unintended. If it wasn’t… then kitten .

I’ve seen the use of Elixir X as a underwater skill, and the tornado can be nice as an above ground skill. But the mortar… yeah that thing is unusable.

I’m not sure what you are asking. Anyway…

I’ve tried using P/P and and P/S on my PVP turret build, however I’ve found the rifle to be much more effective for several reasons:

#1: The auto attack has higher single-target damage with pretty much any build you make. When lining up shots to pierce it does quite a bit of damage. In fact, the rifle’s auto attack is one of the strongest ranged auto attacks in the game. Also, I’ve seen the pistol without coated bullets suffer from body-blocking issues.

#2: The net shot is better as a single target immobilize than glue puddle. The glue puddle only works for a moment, and most people just roll out of it before anything meaningful can be done. Net shot lasts longer and also is on a shorter recharge, which lets it sustain better control pressure against any single target.

#3: Blunderbuss is a high damaging PBAoE cone skill. The best advantage to it is that blunderbuss is also nearly instantaneous with a really short activation time and aftercast, letting it combo seamlessly with any other skill being used. I guess the closest comparison is the Flamethrower off-hand on the pistol, which is a really nice skill as well, but it also misses for strange reasons, and the majority of the damage done is through burning, so it can be redundant if permanent burn is already achieved somehow.

#4: Overcharged shot has saved me from numerous occasions. The ability to cure soft controls is the best use, but the skill is an excellent control and distance creator. Even though it has a self knockback (except with stability, which then it pwns), that is advantageous when functioning as a distance creator, since it will put a stop to bursts and ambushes. The control on opponents is longer, and this is useful for turret builds, which lay down damage without the engineer’s direct involvement.

#5: Jump shot is a leap finisher that is also a movement skill as well as a fairly high AoE damaging skill. The utilities are endless, from closing gaps to creating them, to just doing a lot of damage while in someone’s face.

So it has a lot of high damaging skills on fairly short cooldowns with a lot of utility, and it isn’t dependent on conditions for all its damage. Another thing is that the functionality of P/P can be achieved with kits, most notably the bomb kit. The bomb kit causes AoE burning, AoE confusion, glue puddles, and also can cause AoE blinds. The only thing lacking is the poison, which can be done using the grenade kit if one really desires it. The functionality of rifle, that is, the two movement skills + light control cleanse + high single target control pressure, can’t be readily achieved with any kits. The most you can do is use the elixir gun with acid bomb as a distance creator, rocket boots as an AoE + distance closer, and the net turret for immobilizes, but this is a lot okittenward kits just to mimic the rifle’s functionality.

In PVE I tend to use the rifle against a few strong enemies, but the pistol against hordes of weak enemies. I also use the rifle where conditions won’t matter (environmental objects and dragon champions), and I need to attack at maximum range.