108 replies to this topic

[keresturec]

In your opinion who is the best class for stacking as much bleeds in the shortest amount of time? I would think thief with leaping death blossom followed by a dual sword warrior. Any of you think other professions are better than those two?

[Morghana]

Oh well..

Elementalist:  

Scepter - Earth 1 skill, Stone shards, 3x bleeds no cd.

Dagger off hand- Earth 5 skill, Churning earth, 5x bleeds 30s cd.

Necromancer:

Staff - 2 skill, Mark of blood, 3x bleeds 10s cd

Scepter - 1 skill, Blood curse, 1x bleed no cd. 2 skill, Grasping earth, 1x bleed 10s cd

Utilities- Blood is power, 2x bleeds 30s cd. Corrupt boon, X (depends on boons stacking) bleeds 25s cd.

Edited by Morghana, 27 May 2012 - 09:48 PM.

[Esorono Osuiger]

I believe necro is one of the best bleeders since there is a whole build dedicated to it. However, I don't feel like going through every profession skills and traits to see if I'm correct or not.

[Killyox]

NEcro, Ele, Ranger

necro has it the easiest since he can bleed msot efficiently, with proper gear/stats can reach ~22 stacks by himself and then hit epidemic

Shortbow ranger can apply bleeds the quickest, i could apply with mine ~24 stacks in ~4 seconds

[Babe]

Axe ranger is a pretty mean bleed stacker, alongside thief, necro, and earth attuned ele. I was surprised at just how easily I could stack bleeds on earth attunement with the scepter. I could consistently keep 11-12 stacks of bleed fairly fast without sacrificing spec flexibility. I could stack 11-12 stacks of bleeds on earth fast, and then switch to air and crit someone for 6k with Lightning Strike followede by a 5k Dragon Tooth+ 3k Phoenix combo.

[Gordianus]

Warrior sword/sword

[Vorsakan]

With no real investment: elementalist.
Churning Earth inflicts the most Bleeding of any skill (by a comfortable margin) while spamming Stone Shards also delivers.

With moderate/high investment: warrior.
Duel swords & rifle pump out a lot of Bleeds (both of-hand attacks offering super stacks), while Deep Cuts makes all their Bleeds much longer and Precise Strikes essentially gives them a free Bleeding weapon mod on all attacks.

With all-out investment: thief.
Thieves have zero special Bleeding investment opportunities, but the simple fact is that if every initiative trait is taken you could just spam Leaping Death Blossom (with multiple attacks & being a dual skill it has optimum traitability) - no other profession can match that Blood output because they have cooldowns on their biggest Bleeds.

Honorable mentions:
Rangers have bags of potential - with feline/shark pets too - but they have to contend with cooldowns and the general difficulty maintaining pets and perfect Splitblades.
Necromancers have a great skill in Mark of Blood and a great trait in Barbed Precision, but that still leaves them a long way behind the warrior's superior Bleed skills and massive extension trait.

[Catenaccio]

Morghana, on 27 May 2012 - 09:31 PM, said:

Oh well..

Elementalist:  Scepter - Earth 1 skill, Stone shards, 3x bleeds no cd. Dagger off hand: Earth 5 skill, Churning earth, 5x bleeds 30s cd.

Morg alredy spotted the winner imho.

But still you need to explain what does "shortest amount of time" mean exactly. Do we have to take into account the single skill application? Does duration matter? Do you mean only spike bleed application or sustained?

Warriors can put 4 long stacks of bleed in only 1 move (riposte, need to block a melee attack) and another 4 (ranged) with trow sword, and then wait for 20+s CD on those abilities, and do nothing better than spam 1 skill on MH sword or rifle to add a single stack of bleed every time.

On the other hand necros have builds devoted to bleeds, they synergize a lot better with those, cover the bleed with several other conditions, spread them from a target to others.

All taken into account and runes+sigils taken apart (everyone have access to them) I'd say necro is the best overall bleeder, since it has a spammable ranged bleed, a 100% bleed on crit trait (others have chance), have a bleeding monster elite (Plague), can spec deeply into conditions forgetting everything else  and watch opponents die slowly while they sit on their high health.

Second is the shortbow ranger: spammable bleeding 1 skill, cripple+bleeding on a 10 seconds CD, charpening stones as utility, chance to bleed on crit trait, skirmishing playstyle, and a pet that can add more bleeds or help keeping distance. Also you can take Axe/Dagger as as second set to get two more bleeds (6 and 18 sec CD). Not so bad

I'd say thief is third since spamming LDB you're going to miss initiative, and thus need to hide into the shadows if you won't get spanked. Then reapper, put another 9/12 stacks of bleed, and again go watching them die. In the shadows. LDB is AoE too, but I don't think you're gonna survive so long in these situations to actually spam LDB, hide, spam again, hide...
I've seen build working better than this, but still...

Fourth is the ele, since is ranged, and it's 1 skill on scepter has multiple bleed stacks. Potentially dagger OH grants additional bleedings on longer CD, and given the ele can put many others  conditions the bleedsa are going to be useful in some way, Too bad I've seen eles being better at dealing spike damage as opposed to attrition.

Fifth is the warrior, has very good bleeds on sword offhand (2x4 stacks of bleed, 1 ranged), but there's no ranged main hand for warrior, and trying to go attrition as a melee (with MH sword, most attaks on 1 chain apply bleed) isn't the best idea ever: you need to work hard to even hit ranged and you yould like to stay away form melee to watch em die. Anyway you have a ranged weapon with a spammable bleed. Too bad its class mechanic (burst skill) is a single hit spike damage, so if you wanna take advantage of the rifle you better go for damage and/or critdamage, bleed is a side effect.
Only good thing is that he has better innate survivability than others to try and go attrition, but I think he's best suited for direct damage.

6th the engineer: spammable bleed on the pistol MH, 1-4 stacks of bleed on rifle depending on the range (too bad you need to stay close to apply 4), chance to bleed on crit, also granade kit and tool kit have bleeds respectively on 6 and 10 seconds CD. He's got some bleeds after all, is an attrition class, but it seems that bleeds are only a side effect since you'll use kits intead of weapons the most, and not the ones I mentioned above ^^

TL;DR necro is best overall bleeder, and best aoe bleeder for sure, ranger best single target bleeder, thief best melee bleeder.

EDIT: I only considered PvP, I sometimes forget that not everyone wanna play PvP only.

Edited by Catenaccio, 27 May 2012 - 10:36 PM.

[Apocalyptic]

Thief is great.

[DeanAdamFry]

Elementalist: Daggers = Impale (1, single target), Ring of Earth(2, 6 second cooldown AoE), Churning Earth (5, 30 second cooldown AoE, stacks 5). Scepter = Stone Shards (1, single target, stacks 3). Staff = Eruption (2, 6 second cooldown AoE, stacks) Shockwave (5, 30 second cooldown cone AoE, stacks and immobilizes).

The difference between the Elementalist and the rest is even if we do not focus on bleeding we overall have the best access to it on any weapon and have traits which dedicate to bleeding alone in Earth.

In terms of specialization it's the following:

1. Necromancer
2. Ranger
3. Elementalist
4. Thief
5. Warrior
6. Engineer
7. Mesmer (Very random)
8. Guardian (Guardians can't bleed foes)

[GuanglaiKangyi]

Thief is kind of a hard one to evaluate.  He only has a few skills that actually inflict bleed (LDB, Vital Shot, and Cluster Bomb) and with the exception of Vital Shot, those are all pretty initiative-heavy skills.  Because of initiative you can spam them, but that means you're blowing literally all your offensive power on stacking a condition that is easily removed.  On the other hand, since crit more easily than any other class and attack quite fast in general (both general attack speed and access to multi-hit skills, i.e. Unload), using the right sigils and traits they can repeatedly apply bleed and cover with other stuff.  For example, they can spec to get bleed, cripple, and vulnerability on basically every shot with a pistol using traits and Earth sigils.  IMO being able to repeatedly stack conditions at low cost is more important than stacking a lot of them on a long CD.

Mesmers should also be noted since with a staff and the right traits, they can rapidly apply bleed to multiple foes, which is better for zergs and PvE (don't forget that clones cast Winds of Chaos too).  To be fair, it's only a 33% chance, but with four of you potentially hitting the same target multiple times it'll add up pretty fast.  Moreover, if you count the chance to apply burn (which is equal to 8 stacks of bleed, or 1 stack of bleed for 8 seconds) that's a lot of ticks of damage over time.  And just like with thief, the fact that there are multiple conditions being constantly being applied makes it less likely that the opponent will be able to remove the stack of bleeding.

[Tevesh]

Necro is one of the best. Probably the. Most classes have enough skills to apply/maintain a lot of bleeds, but necro also gets a lot of synergies going off it.

They have a three hit scepter chain that applies 2x bleed and 1x poison roughly in two seconds. They have a trait for bleeds on crit. They have traits for longer bleeds and longer conditions from scepter (where the majority of their bleeds comes from). Together they put necro at what, 50 or 60% bonus bleed duration? They also get a trait that boosts their damage per condition on the enemy, and I believe every bleed stack is considered separately.

All of their bleeding application skills are either no cooldown or low cooldown (~8 sec I believe on scepter 2?). Sure some classes like rangers or thieves can frontload some bleeding stacks, but if they need to switch targets or the target uses a condition removal they are screwed. Against a necro that's not really useful. You'll be back to 10 stacks or above in some 3 or 5 seconds. Better than nothing, but does not break their strategy much unlike thieves or rangers who use major cooldowns to apply several bleeding stacks at once.

In addition, necros get several skills that either transfer conditions from them to enemies or transform boons to conditions, both of which contribute to the whole condition damage build. Especially considering several of their skills apply bleeding on themselves as well, so there is always something to transfer.

[blakdoxa]

Damn, Warrior was grossly overlooked...

Two minor talents in Arms...a major which increase duration by 50%...

Auto attack on the sword and both attacks on the off-hand sword.

Weapon skills...
Sever Artery sword #1
Impale sword #4
Riposte sword #5

Traits...
Precise Strikes
Deep Cuts

All of these just with bleeds. I'm even leaving out Attack of Opportunity cause that's just extra damage.

With a decent critical hit rate and Sigil of Earth, you can stack (double or triple stack) bleeds in a short amount of time with either Flurry or taking a Sword/Axe set for Whirling Attack.

Sad thing is that no one will take a bleeding warrior seriously.

[DeanAdamFry]

blakdoxa, on 28 May 2012 - 01:49 AM, said:

Damn, Warrior was grossly overlooked...

Two minor talents in Arms...a major which increase duration by 50%...

Auto attack on the sword and both attacks on the off-hand sword.

Weapon skills...
Sever Artery sword #1
Impale sword #4
Riposte sword #5

Traits...
Precise Strikes
Deep Cuts

All of these just with bleeds. I'm even leaving out Attack of Opportunity cause that's just extra damage.

With a decent critical hit rate and Sigil of Earth, you can stack (double or triple stack) bleeds in a short amount of time with either Flurry or taking a Sword/Axe set for Whirling Attack.

Sad thing is that no one will take a bleeding warrior seriously.

It wasn't overlooked at all but compared to the Elementalist, Necromancer and Ranger, Warriors simply cannot outbleed these professions and if you want to compare bleed traits then take a look at the Elementalist, Necromancer and Ranger traits.

[Drokk]

As shown in a video above, Thief is the best. Followed by Necro. Beyond that is a little hazy. People saying elementalist...lol? Listen, if you're sitting in a single attunement, spamming the 1 ability to stack bleeds you're a terrible elementalist and you're going to fail miserably. Whereas a thief spamming LDB to stack 18 bleeds in 3 seconds is kind of how the class functions and dominates (for the time being) simply by doing that.

[blakdoxa]

DeanAdamFry, on 28 May 2012 - 03:45 AM, said:

It wasn't overlooked at all but compared to the Elementalist, Necromancer and Ranger, Warriors simply cannot outbleed these professions and if you want to compare bleed traits then take a look at the Elementalist, Necromancer and Ranger traits.

Guess it's just another show of how ranged is significantly better than melee. :|

Why's engineer not in here?

Drokk, on 28 May 2012 - 03:59 AM, said:

As shown in a video above, Thief is the best. Followed by Necro. Beyond that is a little hazy. People saying elementalist...lol? Listen, if you're sitting in a single attunement, spamming the 1 ability to stack bleeds you're a terrible elementalist and you're going to fail miserably. Whereas a thief spamming LDB to stack 18 bleeds in 3 seconds is kind of how the class functions and dominates (for the time being) simply by doing that.

Whoa. That requires both sigils of earth and a pretty ridiculous critical hit rate there. You'd also have to invest in venoms to cover your bleeds or that's getting removed asap.
Thief kinda gives up a lot to pull that one trick there...

EDIT: error 500 in writing

Edited by blakdoxa, 28 May 2012 - 04:15 AM.

[GuanglaiKangyi]

Drokk, on 28 May 2012 - 03:59 AM, said:

As shown in a video above, Thief is the best. Followed by Necro. Beyond that is a little hazy. People saying elementalist...lol? Listen, if you're sitting in a single attunement, spamming the 1 ability to stack bleeds you're a terrible elementalist and you're going to fail miserably. Whereas a thief spamming LDB to stack 18 bleeds in 3 seconds is kind of how the class functions and dominates (for the time being) simply by doing that.

18 bleeds then they hit their condition removal and you've got nothing.  It's just gimmick damage.  It doesn't mean the thief bleeds well.

[DeanAdamFry]

Drokk, on 28 May 2012 - 03:59 AM, said:

As shown in a video above, Thief is the best. Followed by Necro. Beyond that is a little hazy. People saying elementalist...lol? Listen, if you're sitting in a single attunement, spamming the 1 ability to stack bleeds you're a terrible elementalist and you're going to fail miserably. Whereas a thief spamming LDB to stack 18 bleeds in 3 seconds is kind of how the class functions and dominates (for the time being) simply by doing that.

Sure while I dodge away, remove the conditions and you have wasted pretty much most of your initiative while the Elementalist's skills have no cooldown and are spammable so it doesn't matter if you remove them since I can easily put them back.

Saying that the Necromancer is below Thief is laughable.

blakdoxa, on 28 May 2012 - 04:06 AM, said:

Guess it's just another show of how ranged is significantly better than ranged. :|

Why's engineer not in here?

Engineer is 6th on the list below Warrior who is 5th.

[Drokk]

GuanglaiKangyi, on 28 May 2012 - 04:09 AM, said:

18 bleeds then they hit their condition removal and you've got nothing.  It's just gimmick damage.  It doesn't mean the thief bleeds well.

And that's true of any spec made for bleeds. This thread isn't about fallback positions if that playstyle fails. It's about who's the best at bleeds, and it's Thief.

[keresturec]

Guang you'd be surprised how many people don't realize they have bleeds on them in quick battles(thief literally takes 4-5 seconds to apply 20 stacks of bleed). Thief makes no sacrifice for his bleeding build. It actually works quiet well since the build allows them to have 18 to 20k health with extremely fast initiative recovery. If someone does take off the bleeds, thief can stealth and trait for faster initiative recovery while in stealth. When he pops back up he is full of initiative.

[DeanAdamFry]

Drokk, on 28 May 2012 - 04:33 AM, said:

And that's true of any spec made for bleeds. This thread isn't about fallback positions if that playstyle fails. It's about who's the best at bleeds, and it's Thief.

Your not taking into account the cost of your skills and the range of them, your only looking at the stacks.

The difference between your stacks of bleeds and the Elementalist, Necormancer and Ranger's bleeds is that ours have no cost, are spammable and ranged between 900 - 1200 while your's requires you to be up close and costs valuable initiative.

keresturec, on 28 May 2012 - 04:33 AM, said:

Guang you'd be surprised how many people don't realize they have bleeds on them in quick battles(thief literally takes 4-5 seconds to apply 20 stacks of bleed). Thief makes no sacrifice for his bleeding build. It actually works quiet well since the build allows them to have 18 to 20k health with extremely fast initiative recovery. If someone does take off the bleeds, thief can stealth and trait for faster initiative recovery while in stealth. When he pops back up he is full of initiative.

If you want to get technical like that then I can just say I'll immobilize you with my shockwave (which adds bleed as well by the way) and then continue to apply bleeds on you at 1200 range using eruption.

Thief's make a huge sacrifice with initiative, just because LDB does not have a cooldown it doesn't mean it has not got a limit.

[aguliondew]

Everyone is going by how much bleed damage a condition spec do and not how much survivablity gained with that spec? I know that when I tried to do a bleed spec with a ranger he did not have the same survivability as my elementalist. Also, the ranger's bleed stacks were very random. It either spike a ton of bleed or very few. So how about comparing just the defensive aspects of doing a condition build with each profession.

Edited by aguliondew, 28 May 2012 - 04:50 AM.

[Morghana]

I have seen a warrior (sword/shield), and a thief (dual pistol) stacking bleeds.. I had like 18 stacks in no time, however I was with my guardian and then I poped: Contemplation of Purity (60s) Remove all conditions from yourself and turn them into boons... peeew that was close!!  

[blakdoxa]

aguliondew, on 28 May 2012 - 04:49 AM, said:

Everyone is going by how much bleed damage a condition spec do and not how much survivablity gained with that spec? I know that when I tried to do a bleed spec with a ranger he did not have the same survivability as my elementalist. Also, the ranger's bleed stacks were very random. It either spike a ton of bleed or very few. So how about comparing just the defensive aspects of doing a condition build with each profession.

Well all of these builds rely on two things: sigil of earth and high critical hit rate.
Primarily built for stacking the highest amount of bleeds in the shortest time. Lots of relying on random factors as well as other things. So it's not without it's drawbacks.

[aguliondew]

blakdoxa, on 28 May 2012 - 04:54 AM, said:

Well all of these builds rely on two things: sigil of earth and high critical hit rate.
Primarily built for stacking the highest amount of bleeds in the shortest time. Lots of relying on random factors as well as other things. So it's not without it's drawbacks.

Well the elementalist has enough skills that apply bleed on hit so it does not have to rely on the sigil of earth for a bleed spec. The ranger was the other profession I tried and without the sigil of earth I did not have a steady amount of conditions. The short bow is the only one I could spam for bleed, but only when you are not in front of your opponent.

[BaconSoda]

I played the Ranger and Elementalist in PvE and found the Ranger to be better at applying bleeding, but the Elementalist was capable of getting a 9 bleed stack with Stone Shards pretty easily. With that, you can use a Focus and Earth makes a pretty wicked tanking and support build where stacking bleeds is pretty much your only offense and if you're not focusing on offense, you've got 4 skills to support your friends.

The Ranger, though, was pretty wicked with a Greatsword. A lot of people went over the Shortbow above, but with the Greatsword, you have Maul which applies 4 bleeds in one hit. With that, you can use a Snow Lynx with Rending Pounce and Maul, which is six bleeds in five quick hits, a Lashtail Devourer with Sting, which is five bleeds in five hits, or Arctodus with Rending Maul, which is two bleeds in one hit, depending on what you're trying to do with your pet. I preferred the Snow Lynx because I found that with Speed Training, the Snow Lynx was an absolute bleeding machine, and I could manage its position and health on the field very easily. That kind of build was able to consistently stack on six to ten bleeds in quick succession on the enemy and then my Lynx friend maintained them.

Talking about survivability, the Greatsword is pretty wicked in that regard, too. Between Power Stab, Counterattack and Hilt Bash, you have a lot of control over what the enemy is doing. In this kind of thing, your pet is going to be doing most of the work while you're just bashing and evading the guy. That's why I'd rather talk about the four bleed stack with a twenty second cooldown on the Greatsword rather than the five bleed stack with a six second cooldown on the Axe. The case in the former is that your pet is doing the bleeding while you're surviving, so it's more of a Snow Lynx build, while you can always reverse the roles and use the Axe so you're supplying the bleeding and your pet is surviving, at which point an Arctodus is going to suit you better. The Lashtail is always good to fall back on.

After that, you can talk about utility skills and traits. With Zephyr's Speed, Sharpening Stone is suddenly really awesome. Start off with a Lashtail Devourer using Sting and then switch out to the Snow Lynx and use Rending Lunge with Sharpening Stone at double the speed, your enemy has a lot of bleeding on him. Since you're in melee, Spike Trap was really cool, but I found that most of the time the enemy was dead before I got a chance to use Spike Trap. I didn't really get a chance to invest in many traits, either, since it was only PvE stuff, but Zephyr's Speed was seriously the most OP thing I encountered in my entire time playing. I was swapping pets in and out at breakneck pace. Free quickness with that? You'd have to be crazy not to invest in Beast Mastery.

But all that said, most professions have the ability to stack bleeding on their foe. If that's the kind of playstyle you like, then there's options for you regardless of which asthetic you choose.

[T0ken]

Anyone here who is mention churning earth have never used it or are just adding it "theoritically".

it sucks balls and would only be useful in pve aoe situations. assuming you dont have to cancel it when a mob starts running your way( i have no clue how pve aggro works).

[Mammoth]

The answer really depends on your criteria. The way you have phrased the OP, the answer is ranger (up to 19 bleeds in <1s). If you want the quickest/most reliable to get 25 stacks, the answer is thief. If you want sustained bleeding that can deal with having stacks removed, the answer is either warrior, elementalist, or necromancer, depending on animation times of their 1 skills.

Edited by Mammoth, 28 May 2012 - 03:39 PM.

[Apocalyptic]

BaconSoda, on 28 May 2012 - 06:05 AM, said:

-snip-

The greatsword will be the first build nerfed... infact I would wager anything that it takes a significant dmg nerf before launch.  Ranger axe is great IMO for bleeds.

The hands down winner is necro followed by stone spamming ele.  I'd say Ranger and Thief are quite similar.

[Nyth]

Drokk, on 28 May 2012 - 04:33 AM, said:

And that's true of any spec made for bleeds. This thread isn't about fallback positions if that playstyle fails. It's about who's the best at bleeds, and it's Thief.

Best can be interpreted in a lot of different ways.

I think thief is the best at stacking a lot of stacks fast and quite reliable. However the thief suffers from an immense "burn out" after applying the stacks. Initiative low and not much to fall back on.
If someone cleanses your stacks, or if a second opponent shows up; you might be in trouble.
Hence why it's called a bit gimmicky. (And this might very well get nerfed, just like they nerfed how you could stack 10+ bleed with pistols in a single unload)

Other classes, like the necromancer don't have that problem. They don't have to go out of their way and/or use a gimmicky build to get it done. If someone cleanses my bleeds, it's not much of an issue; I can put most of them back on in a few seconds.

So the best bleeder, depends largely on your perspective. To me best bleeder sounds like which profession is the most efficient with a bleed condition damage build. In which case I gravitate more towards the necromancer over thief. Even though the latter can apply a lot of bleeds stacks much faster.