What’s more? 100 power or 100 condi dmg?

As the title says, I’m aiming at some serious min/maxing for my hybrid mesmer build.A few pointers, I’m running a mix of viper trailblazer with the exact proportions being tweaked out constantly but sitting at a reasonable 27-2800 armor. I rely a lot on Might stacks to get both power and condi damage to satisfactory levels.

My question is lb for lb what is better?

Edit: Oh yea before someone asks the million $ question, I am talking about WvW.

Depends on other stuff. I'll do a quick calculation to demonstrate.

1000 power going to 1100 power = 10% more damage.2000 power going to 2100 power = 5% more damage.

Edit: I'll do you one better even.

1000 CD going to 1100 CD = 5.4% more burning damage.1000 CD going to 1100 CD = 7.3% more bleeding damage.

Being on the receiving end of condition damage, and especially since it bypasses toughness, I'll say condition damage. But please take my opinion with a grain of salt. I barely played the class, yet I do recognize how much more powerful condition damage is on me and mobs. :)

@Pyroatheist.9031

If I take normalized values for both and ignore precision/ferocity as I have those pretty low to make a significant impact. Say 1500 base for both.

@Arlette.9684 said:@"Pyroatheist.9031"

If I take normalized values for both and ignore precision/ferocity as I have those pretty low to make a significant impact. Say 1500 base for both.

You can't just say "oh take normalized values" and expect an answer that means something. That's literally what I just tried to explain. I'll explain it in prose this time though.

Your question is simple: does 100 power or 100 condition damage add more strength to your build? The answer is far from simple. The varying amounts of power in a build will affect the marginal gain from adding more. Ditto for condition damage, but now you get the additional complication that is varying ratios between different conditions. On top of all of that, an additional consideration is the relative use in your build and playstyle that the two see. Do you rely more heavily on power or condition damage? Does your build apply more sustained conditions or is it more bursty?

All of these factors add into answering the question of whether 100 power or 100 condition damage is better. You might say "but Pyro, accounting for all of that seems impossible! How can I ever get a real answer to my question?" Unfortunately, you're absolutely correct. Accounting for all of those factors is effectively impossible. Attempting to do a perfect stat-based build optimization for a hybrid build is completely pointless because ultimately it's not something that can be answered by math in a meaningful way.

Could I make absurd simplifications and eventually reduce the question to a solvable problem? Sure. But in the same way that you won't see a physicist bowling a perfect game because they simplified the bowling lane into a frictionless plane in a vacuum, you're not going to get an effective build because you simplified the problem down to a point where it's meaningless.

@Pyroatheist.9031 said:

@Arlette.9684 said:@Pyroatheist.9031

If I take normalized values for both and ignore precision/ferocity as I have those pretty low to make a significant impact. Say 1500 base for both.

Made my day, I swear :lol:

And thank you.

You don't need any toughness as a mesmer. ;)

Let me do some of the simplifications Pyro has mentioned.

If we're talking about raw stats, here's the deal.

1000 power to 1100 power has more impact than 1500 power to 1600 power.And 1000 condition damage to 1100 cd has more impact than 1500 to 1600.

But that stuff is kind of irrelevant here, because this is overly-simplified. We have to add more factors.

Let's say you have 1500 power and 1500 condition damage. Adding 100 power or condition damage would depend which damage you'd want to focus on. Since you want to know which will be "better", there are more factors coming in: "Which damage type you inflict more than the other?"

And let's say you have 1500 power and 1400 condition damage. The factors that I just mentioned are still relevant here. And we still gotta add that some certain percentiles have more benefit from Condition damage than the others. For example burning has 0.155 multiplier from Condition damage while Poison and Bleeding has 0.06 multipliers. That means you have to consider which types of conditions you inflict too.

The list goes on and on.

Just pick power. Power is always better ?