Guild Wars 2

Hugs.1856:

So if I got it right, in the end we’ll have:

- custom arenas with obs mode that will be used for both unranked games and 3rd party tournaments.

- 2-team tournaments for both solo and team ranked games.

- 8-team tournament for daily/weekly/monthly/yearly first party tournaments.

Is that correct?

That’s what I got from the SotG, yes.

Hugs.1856:

Also, I don’s see why the shoutcaster feature is incompatible with obs mode in tPvP. Why can you not have both at the same time? :p

Heh, not sure about that one

@ Hugs, they talked about all your concerns…

Obviously custom arenas will be the place to set up scrims, that’s how every competitive online game works, you can make your own games with your own settings.

Obs mode is in hot join so you can see what other players are running, how they play, and how their spec works. Hot joins will eventually be replaced by custom arenas.

8-team tournaments will not be left in their current form. They mentioned making them only available on weekends, or doing weekly or monthly 8-team tournaments.

There won’t be an obs mode in tPvP at first because they are working on a shoutcasting system. Basically, accounts tagged as shoutcasters will be able to reserve the single obs slot for a given match or series of matches so they can stream and cast the game.

“What will the PvP landscape be like eventually?” is too broad of a question IMO.

I guess you guys missed/ignored the part where they said they would be increasing the casting times on ele heals.

Other stuff:
-Leaderboards might be turned on before the patch hits, depending on how long testing takes.
-Ele is pigeonholed and they want to give them a reason to use other builds.
-Buffs to underused builds/utilities, like warrior banners and engi turrets. Like significant buffs. As in doubling the stats on banners.
-Custom arenas to replace hot joins. After seeing what game options are popular, more game modes.
-Thiefs get the Revealed debuff every time they come out of stealth, no more perma-CnD. Also looking to add mobility to all weapon sets to reduce reliance on shortbow. Backstab damage is fine, Mug is not. Will likely get more boon removal or +dmg vs boons.
-Buffs to ranger greatsword and longbow.

Lots of other good stuff in there, you should give it a watch if you have time.

Kardiamond.6952:

Am I the only one that had a heart attack when they said they were buffing Mesmer GS because they suffer from AoE damage when fighting class like Minion Master Necro?

Seriously?

You buff mesmer because you think they have a hard time killing a Minion freaking master Necromancer?

Was that a joke that I didn’t catch?

You certainly didn’t catch something. They said that they were going to make the beam attack more reliable in big fights by letting them hit targets along the way instead of getting blocked. They also said that they would be toning down shatters to compensate. I think it’s a good change. A shatter mesmer either does 16k damage or 0 damage to you depending on if you know what to look for. If they make shatter worse and other things better, that helps build diversity.

Lay off of Karl. Grouch specifically asked him to summarize the first couple classes, so then Karl assumed that’s what he wanted for all the classes, and Grouch nor the other interviewers ever asked him to stop doing that. It’s not Karl’s fault, it’s the interviewers’.

So he’s not a good public speaker. So what? If there wasn’t someone from the balance team there I’m sure people would complain even more. So he forgot whether or not a certain skill has a blast finisher. So what? There are hundreds of skills and effects in the game, he can be forgiven for forgetting one. So it makes him appear less capable at his job. So what? He’s a human being and human beings all make mistakes, he doesn’t deserve to be judged for that.

“They said ele healing is fine, lol” – no, they said that the amount that eles heal is fine and that they want to increase the casting times of those abilities. They want an ele getting his heal off to be a big deal, but they admitted that right now it is perhaps too easy to do so.

“same build diversity as necros? Necros have no build diversity, lol” – wrong. There’s the standard condition build, then you have 30/30/10/0/0, you have the condition build with Terror mixed in, there’s a 30/20/0/0/20 ele-killer build which is super fun with 4.2k life blast crits and incredible dagger spam damage and boon removal, you have the minion bunker-buster or bunker build, heck take a look at the two builds in my sig. The point is that the tree is diverse enough to support a wide variety of builds, AND there is room for “tweaking” builds to suit personal preference. Whereas there’s only one mesmer shatter build, for example.

“leaderboards will probably release six months from now” – oh my lord, they said specifically that leaderboards are in testing. Meaning that all of the programming work is done unless the testers find a bug that needs to be fixed. They also said that leaderboards will be here soon, maybe even before the patch! How in the hell do you interpret that as “6 months”?

EDIT: sorry for the venom in this post. The forums have been frustrating me lately, there was a thread where someone dared to say that they were actually having fun with sPvP and everyone on here tore him a new butthole. I guess I’m frustrated over how this forum behaves, but it is the internet, so I should probably get over it…

Kamata.5762:

Daendur.2357:

I hope they recoded their game to remove culling AND skill lag.
A game where only zergers can play (ikittenerg you press random buttons and cast random skills, so timing isn’t necessary) is a kitten.
And again, about “nameplates only” I mean LOL !! srsly?!?! It doesn’t matter who you attack as long as you attack something…

btw: thieves will continue to crush you, little noobs.

Not everyone will be a nameplate lol. You WILL load the avatars that you can load, just like now, and the rest of the avatars that shouldve been affected by culling will show up only as nameplates. At least, that is what I understand from what they said.

“Nameplates only – We don’t render the model at all and instead only show the nameplate for that character.”

Not quite. You will be able to control three different things: what kind of models to use (if any), how many “high resolution” models you will see IF you elected to see them, and the total number of models the game will render before doing only faceplates.

So for example, if you choose “High resolution models”, set Character Quality to 50, and Character Limit to 70, then 50 players near you will use the high-quality models, 20 will use the cheapo fallback models (for a total of 70 character models on screen), and the rest will be nameplates.

Woot, thanks Evan! I’ve noticed this too and it’s pretty annoying/funny.

I’ve noticed this too. The stacking only applies to duration and was done to stop large groups of people in WvW from getting up to a few minutes of retaliation. It shouldn’t have affected the damage at all.

Yea, the life siphon procs on every instance of direct damage you do. Locust Swarm, marks triggering, whatever. If you put down a damaging well like Corruption or Suffering you will get two siphons per enemy per pulse – one for Vampiric and one for Vampiric Rituals. If you are using Vampiric Precision and the well pulse crits you get three.

Alright so I gave the build a proper go. And I like it. The problem I see is that it has no way to remove conditions. There were several times during my testing when I would go down very quickly to condition mesmers or engineers that I couldn’t get the drop on, they were smart about dodging dagger 3 and staying out of wells. It may be worth changing out the heal for Consume Conditions and/or using some Sigils of Purity.

Which brings me to the sigil choice. On-crit and on-weapon-swap sigil all share the same global cooldown. So with the sigils as listed in the build link, if one swaps to the Axe/Warhorn set he would only get one of the sigils to proc (when I tested it, only Hydromancy proc’d each time). If he gets a Sigil of Blood proc and then switches to Axe/Warhorn he would get neither benefit unless he waited out the 5s cooldown.

I would also recommend swapping the offhands. So instead of d/f + a/w it would be d/w + a/f. This gives the build a melee set and a ranged set, and the warhorn goes better with dagger because of Locust Swarm.

Here’s the version of the build I used: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;04-8cFK0IFJ0D4gJVJ0;9;4T9-T-09B4;317B;1XBW7I;1sV2DsV2D5Bj
You will notice I sort of contradict myself by taking Air and Leeching sigils, but I rarely found myself switching weapons, and it’s easy to tell when the Sigil of Air procs so I was able to tell when I could switch to get Leeching to proc. Whereas with a sigil like Blood it’s pretty much impossible to tell when it goes off.

Overall, nice build. I like how it compensates for the squishyness of the Berserker’s amulet while still retaining a good chunk of the damage.

Bhawb.7408:

Actually, you can get 100% retaliation uptime using a different build; one that I made and have been using recently. That aside, looks like a solid build.

Something like 10/0/30/0/30? If so, sounds like fun and thanks!

Do you find that you are able to get a good number of life blasts off? My experience in sPvP is that I only get a few casts off at best, so I don’t often taken Reaper’s Might. I think Chill of Death would work much better.

In any event, I bookmarked this so I can try it out tomorrow and will try to remember to post more feedback.

If you’ve wanted to play as a life-stealing damage soaker, and have wondered how to put the “attrition” back in “necromancer”, then I think you’re going to like this.

Build link (copy and paste it into your address bar): http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;0437c;1IkI0D4-KkJ0;9;49-TT-4;336717B;1XRV76;1IBl3IBl36ge
Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVqfh119CII

Advantages of the build: As much Retaliation uptime as you can get, very high attack (over 3.2k before bloodlust stacks), very high defense (2.7k) and health (just under 28k), good team support with wells, and an incredibly high threshold of punishment. You will be the last one to go down in any teamfight, guaranteed.

In the video, I occasionally get lucky with the vuln stacks and manage to pump out 3700+ damage on the Axe 2 channel. With no crits. Or crit damage. With the soldier amulet. IN SPVP.

Yea…I’m liking this build a lot.

One last bump from me. I updated the build link again with the sigil set I’m currently using. I’m pretty confident I can call it the final version, personal preference tweaks notwithstanding. Thanks for the support guys, have fun out there!

So for anyone who cares, I tried out a 10/0/30/30/0 point-holding build with wells, taking the three downed-state-enhancing traits. It worked out good, but in the end I felt like the downed traits were kind of a waste. I really didn’t spend that much time downed and the times I was downed I didn’t notice them helping too much.

So my verdict is to only use those traits as filler or if they benefit some other aspect of your build, too.

Talentless.5708:

lettucemode.3789:

Necromancers can actually trait to get the best downed state. You have the +50% damage (which everyone does), but you also have Bloodthirst which will improve your siphoning and Dark Armor which will give you an extra 400 toughness. You are as hard to damage down as a guardian who used his #3 skill if not more. Of course if someone stomps you they bypass all that but that is true of any class. If you are down on a point and the other team is unable to stomp because of team support, you will last a long time.

And to my knowledge you can cancel the cast of #1 by pressing Escape, just like with other spells.

building around downed abilities… sounds like an SOR player

I kid, I kid.

Haha, nice one! I just spit up some of my water all over my keyboard

One could probably work the traits into a bunker, point-holding build with wells. I want to try this now.

Necromancers can actually trait to get the best downed state. You have the +50% damage (which everyone does), but you also have Bloodthirst which will improve your siphoning and Dark Armor which will give you an extra 400 toughness. You are as hard to damage down as a guardian who used his #3 skill if not more. Of course if someone stomps you they bypass all that but that is true of any class. If you are down on a point and the other team is unable to stomp because of team support, you will last a long time.

And to my knowledge you can cancel the cast of #1 by pressing Escape, just like with other spells.

How long did it take all/each of those modes to be implemented in GW1 from release?

Lazarou.3745:

1. Why aren’t you listening when people tell you they want other game types, cause its been asked before and even though spvp is dying you keep blinding going on the same path.

Sorry to post off-topic, but I don’t understand this complaint. Every single game in the world has one game mode that they rank and balance for, and that tournaments use. There are some exceptions, for example Bloodline Champions has 2v2 and 3v3 ladders and tournies, and some Warcraft 3 tournament formats had a 2v2 match in them. But even then it’s still the same game mode, just with different numbers of players.

Games that have one ranked competitive game mode: WoW, Brood War, SC2, Warcraft 3, all the Tribes games, all fighting games ever, DotA and HoN and LoL (they don’t even change the map), the Halos, the Counter-Strikes, the Call of Dutys… the list goes on and on.

So what is the problem with GW2 PvP only having one ranked competitive game mode?

Haven’t met or talked to Xeph before but it sounds like you are a good, positive force in this community. Thanks for everything you’ve done!

This patch isn’t make-or-break for me. I like the game and the features it’s missing don’t inhibit gameplay so I will continue to play, simple as that.

You know, this same thing happened with the HoN competitive community. See, competitive communities of well-established games like SC2 or DotA or WoW are shaped like a pyramid. When the game first comes out, you have a very large base of players who are not that good. Over time the skill level increases for some and they form the next level of the pyramid. Eventually you have a few excellent players at the top who are supported by the other layers of players below.

When HoN first came out it was not like this. You had lots of players who were already pro from DotA coming in, so the pyramid structure was messed up. There were a couple of players at the top but there was no support beneath them, so they stayed at the top for a very long time, pretty much untouchable. This made the competitive scene very unforgiving and it was extremely difficult for new players or new teams to get noticed and win games. After some time DotA 2 came out and the frustrations of the top players in the competitive scene came to a head and they kind of left en masse. Everyone on the forums predicted the death of HoN, so let it be written, so let it be done.

But look at HoN now. Their simultaneous active players is higher than before and the competitive scene is thriving. There are lots of teams that all have a fair shot at beating each other. This is because the pyramid structure has taken effect. Now that there is a proper base of players, teams can properly improve and fluctuate in rankings and new blood will come into the scene and it’s exciting.

So back to GW2 – I think the same thing is happening and will play out over the rest of this year. We’ve got lots of players from WoW or whatever other MMO-type arena games are out there comprising the top part of the pyramid with no base of player support. There have been a few bumps in the road and so some have left. However, this is not the end for GW2 PvP and things will improve. There are a few positive forces in the community who will someday see the fruits of their labors. It’s just going to take some time.

Heya Bas, I’d love to do another PvE/Dungeon event. Hit me up if you see me on.

I haven’t tried this build in PvE yet. I’m most of the way toward a full set of Rabid gear, but I stopped working toward it once I found this build in sPvP. Now I’m taking a look at what I already have and figuring out a way to mix it with Carrion stuff. Probably by this weekend I’ll have a set put together.

1) Are they actively working on improving Raid or have they basically abandoned it for the time being? Two new maps have come out while Raid sits unchanged in hot joins.

2) What are the current plans to develop the tournament system? Randomized maps, change 3-round to be once per week/month, etc.?

3) What is the priority of making a more thorough tutorial?

Skyro.3108:

War Mourner.5168:

I was under the impression the x2 force sigils won’t stack.

Last time I tested they did not stack.

I did some tests with various amounts of force sigils and it looked to me like they did stack. That could have just been the occasional crit messing things up though. I will test some more.

Skyro.3108:

Also lettuce I think you are doing your build a great injustice by not using sigils of earth. It does a lot more damage than force even if force sigils did stack.

Point taken…5% extra damage on an Axe 2 channel is like 150-200 extra damage, which is just two bleed ticks.

I tried the Melandru and Necromancer runes and I liked them a lot. I like Melandru less because they provide defenses only, whereas Necromancer runes provide both defense and offense to the build.

I also tried dagger offhand instead of focus and liked that a lot, too. I opted for two Sigils of Force just to get my Axe damage higher. I think a Force/Earth on Axe/Dagger and then Corruption on Staff would work really nice too.

Updated the OP again and have decided to name this build the Facemelter after WoW’s shadow priests. It’s the term that came to mind after I watched two different elementalists attempt to burst me tonight, then stagger around under the weight of the conditions, fears, and Axe to the face, unable to do much. Feels good mang

All of the dailies reset at 0:00 GMT too…

I don’t think this is a bug. It seems like changes are being made to make DS into a proper transformation so we can see our boons and conditions and such, and you can’t weapon swap in any other transformation in the game IIRC. It’s lame that we lose this ability but I think it’s good for overall consistency.

I noticed that my damage wasn’t increased on Focus 5, and was wondering if something was up. So I can confirm that bug, thanks for bringing it up.

Khronos.7283:

i wasnt feard cause i was never close to him

You don’t have to be close for a necro to fear you -.- they can do it from 1200 range with staff, 900 range from DS.

Maybe he was berserker with 30 in spite and traited for staff. You can get 4k crits on Putrid Mark that way.

Next time this happens, check the combat log.

Best way for a necromancer to burst from long range is a Terror build (Terror is a necromancer trait that makes Fear tick for damage). With a Rabid or Carrion amulet they can get ticks over 1200 and with staff they can chain into a 4-second fear. If you get loaded up with bleeds and don’t have a stun break you will drop very fast.

Was he in melee range or long range? Were you feared?

Arvid.3829:

Mackster.9726:

… but I have noticed that exiting DS seems to trigger weapon swap sigils, which I hadn’t noticed occurring before.

If anyone else can confirm that, I’d actually call this change a buff to be honest

I can confirm, it was happening to me in sPvP yesterday.

I would say that necro has the most subtle synergies in its trait lines. It takes time and trial and error to find good builds. Here’s two builds for you that actually have quite good synergy:

Spectral crit build (this is a WvW build)
Traits: 10/20/10/0/30 – Spiteful Spirit, Weakening Shroud, Spectral Attunement, Shrouded Removal, Spectral Mastery, whatever, and Near to Death.

So you can see there is some synergy in the traits already. DS is on a 5-second cooldown, and every time you enter it you get 3s retailiation, 5s fury, and remove a
condition, plus you might proc Enfeebling Blood too. So you can just toggle and dagger spam forever and crit like a madman.

Now let’s look at the stats we get from the trait lines. Most importantly, 200 precision and 30% critical damage. This is great! That is a good boost to offense and focuses us toward a power/crit build. But we’ve also increased our survivability with Shrouded Removal, the 100 toughness and 10% boon duration from that line, bonus life force, and investing in the spectral skills.

With Spectral Attunement and Spectral Mastery, you can get 14s of protection from Spectral Wall, and it’s on a 32s cooldown. Thief beating on you? Drop it and stay near it. Spectral Walk is good for juking and gives you life force, Spectral Grasp is great at snatching people out of a zerg and gives you life force, and you get Spectral Armor for free because of traits. Also all these skills give you 5% life force on use because of Spectral Attunement. Often when I am getting hit in WvW and lose all my life force, I will cast all three of my utilities, and my life force bar is full again by the time the 5s cooldown is up. Plus with a full life force bar you get bonus power from the SR 25 minor.

So you can see this build uses the defensive nature of the spectral skills and DS to stay alive while also gaining a great boost to direct damage from passive bonuses. If that’s not synergy I don’t know what is.

Terror hybrid build (this is an sPvP build)
Here’s the link: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/A-hybrid-Terror-build-for-sPvP-updated/

This is a mix between power and conditions that also squeezes in the Terror trait and 100% bonus fear duration (at least once they fix the Nightmare runes, apparently they’re not giving any condition duration atm). Check out the videos, the build works very very well.

Synergies: You don’t have much power because of either Rampager’s or Carrion amulet, but you offset this by taking Axe Training, which increases its damage by 20% (and a nice CD reduction). However, taking this boost to damage also increases your condition duration! So now your bleeds will do more damage overall and your fears will tick for damage twice. Additionally, the 20 in SR for Master of Terror gives you critical damage! So now your direct damage is even better and you aren’t even using a power amulet.

So again, the synergies are subtle and harder to find than other professions, but they are there. Both of the builds are also usable in any area of the game, so you won’t have to constantly switch things up. Give them a try and you will see how it all comes together.

Oh that sucks. At least the build still works without it. Hopefully they fix it soon…

Xynn.2748:

Also, given the Spinal Shivers update, I’d think about replacing Spite VII with Spite X.

I missed this somehow. Not sure if it’s worth the loss of mark damage. Might work better with the Rampager trinket rather than Carrion cause the marks will be critting a fair amount so they will still do good damage even with the 10% loss. Will be testing this tonight.

Heya mate, give my build a try: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/A-hybrid-Terror-build-for-sPvP-updated/first#post1545382

It’s a hybrid (power and conditions) build that mixes in Terror for excellent overall damage and good CC. Works well in dueling and in teamfights.

If you use a Terror build and get your fears over 1.5 seconds, it’s pretty easy to fear people off bridges. I usually switch out one of my utilities for Spectral Grasp, and always carry Corrupt Boon. I think necros have good potential as runner-stoppers.

Alright, so I gave Carrion amulet a try. And I like it. Direct damage is noticeably lower. With Rampagers I was able to get 3k+ on the Axe 2 channel consistently, with Carrion it is pretty difficult. Also the marks, a/f skills, and death shroud stuff rarely crits. The direct damage is still decent because of the extra power on Carrion, but going from around 50% crit chance to 9% crit chance definitely lowers it. However, with Carrion you have about 3k more health, about 20 more damage per bleed tick, and fears will tick for over 1200 with a few stacks on the sigil. So…it evens out? Kind of? At this point I’m not too sure which is better.

I added a video of a match I played with the Carrion amulet, some good fights in there. Maybe sometime this week it will finish processing (edit: done!). Also I updated the build link in the OP, changing Fear of Death to Path of Midnight and changing around the sigils a bit. I changed out Epidemic for BiP, which makes it more a dueling build, but added a note in the OP that in tournaments taking other utilities would work better.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Rennoko.5731:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Not to be rude, but is there ANY evidence that all bleeds tick simultaneously? You can’t compare it to Poison, Burning, or Fear because those can only ever tick once per second anyway, no matter how large of a stack there is.

Bleeds are all tracked seprately on their durations and intensity, so it makes no sense that they would all do their damage at the same time. On top of that, graphically we have evidence against that as a bleed stack has numbers flying off constantly, not bursts of numbers once per second.

I have never seen Barbed Precision tick twice unless you have 100% bleed duration (though it is difficult to tell as it is rarely your only bleed).

Get hit by an ele using churning earth, and it stacks 8 bleeds on you immediately. Watch your HP, do you see it update every .125 seconds or just once? Every indication is the damage is done in 1 second chunks, and is evidenced by the fact you can be at 10 HP, and survive a full second with 25 bleeds on you.

Since Churning Earth puts all 8 bleeds on you at once, they would all be ticking at the same time anyway. It would be better to compare two eles, using churning earth about a 1/2 second apart as that would provide two large amounts of damage (easy to see) that should be ticking at slightly different times.

They all tick at the same time, you can tell just by watching your target’s health bar instead of the numbers flying off their model.

They’re probably making DS more like other transformations. AFAIK you can’t switch weapons while in Lich Form, either, for example.

The fourth Nightmare rune set bonus gives 16%, not 6% as stated in the tooltip. 4% + 16% = 20% from runes.

Ooo, you’re right! I saw Carrion but thought you meant Rabid for some reason. Hmm…well, I haven’t tried it, but IIRC carrion doesn’t have any crit chance on it, so it would still weaken that aspect of the build – way less direct damage and less Barbed Precision procs. I will experiment with it just to be sure.

Damage ticks work like so. If there are no conditions on the target, the first condition placed starts a timer that ticks once per second. Every tick, all of the DoT conditions on the target will tick for damage. So, say you have +50% bleed duration:

1) You apply a bleed: timer starts.
2) .7 seconds later, you apply a Barbed Precision bleed, which will last 1.5 seconds.
3) .3 seconds later, the timer from step 1 ticks, and both bleeds do damage.
4) 1 second later, the timer from step 1 ticks again. However, both bleeds will still tick because the 1.5 second bleed has not expired yet!
5) .2 seconds later, the barbed precision bleed expires.

If you improve your condition duration you are basically increasing the chances that you will get extra damage ticks on your barbed precision and terror ticks. If you have 100% bonus fear duration you should get both ticks every time.

(EDIT: THIS PARAGRAPH IS WRONG) Carrion amulet would sort of cripple the build since it doesn’t give any power. If you are using the carrion amulet you may as well just use scepter instead of Axe imo. You’d probably still have decent damage it just wouldn’t be optimal.

The geomancy sigil works great, I swapped hydromancy for it based on Khalifa’s suggestion. I’m planning on updating the post with that soonish.

Best thing you can do is just wait. I was in the same situation as you a few months ago. But servers move up and down in the rankings, guilds change servers, and real life stuff happens that affects the number of players in WvW. If you wait, eventually your server will be all the different colors and you’ll be able to get everything.

I’m flashing back to when matchmaking was first implemented in HoN…or any game for that matter…

Dunno if it will happen. The question would be if they are tracking the things that you can get world exp for.

Your kills are tracked, so awarding exp for those is doable, unless you can get bonus world exp by killing things that haven’t been killed in a while the same way you get bonus normal exp. Best compromise would be to give a small amount per kill.

EDIT: forgot about the event tracking

Events is a bit easier since they know how many yaks you have killed, how many towers taken, etc and those always give the same amount of exp.

I’ve been using corrupt boon in my new sPvP build. Over the course of several hours of play, I only noticed it missing when the opponent dodged, blinded me, or blocked it with something like the Engineer shield ability. Seems to be working just fine.

I can’t access the build link here at work, but I think your build sounds pretty solid. You’ve put a lot of thought into it so you should have good results.

I’ve found that the Axe Training trait (if your other weapon set is Axe mainhand, that is) is a godsend for hybrid builds. It is a great buff to your direct damage and the extra condition duration from the spite line helps your conditions too. You also get Spiteful Marks in that line! You should do some tests between that and your current build to see which one does more damage. Off the top of my head I’m not sure whether the constant fury and extra crit damage would outpace 20% bonus damage and reduced cooldown.

Bull Zooker.1672:

has anyone tried a full rampager axe focus and staff fear build? ive been theory crafting and you could get 140% fear duration, maybe a 3rd tick on fear? im not sure about that though.
ur condition damage wouldn’t be optimal (about 1200) but you would have a form of burst through axe and fear.
would be something along the lines of 30/10/10/0/20.
I think this would fit my play style. does this appeal to anyone else? or is this a ‘good in theory’ build?

I will copy and paste my answer from my hybrid Terror build thread just to make sure you and others see it.

Extra condition duration is capped at 100%. So using the 40% condition duration food wouldn’t extend your fears any longer. However, it would still affect your bleeds, vulnerability, cripples, etc, so I’d say it’s probably still worth using. Heck, if you were okay with 1.9s fears instead of 2s fears (still very likely to get 2 damage ticks) you could just swap out the Master of Terror trait for something else.

Bull Zooker.1672:

I was planning on making a 30/10/10/0/20 build myself. (cant see ur link as im on my phone) axe/focus and staff. was interested in trying this in ramgager armor and possibly rabbid trinkets for toughness. I may go full rampager though.
I will check your video later and will try this myself too in hot join.
do you think this would work in WvW too? with 40% condition duration food. 140% fear duration.

That’s the build, good job

Extra condition duration is capped at 100%. So using the 40% condition duration food wouldn’t extend your fears any longer. However, it would still affect your bleeds, vulnerability, cripples, etc, so I’d say it’s probably still worth using. Heck, if you were okay with 1.9s fears instead of 2s fears (still very likely to get 2 damage ticks) you could just swap out the Master of Terror trait for something else.

The video’s finally done processing. And thanks for the tips, Khalifa!