Guild Wars 2

I was testing the staff build last night in light of the patch, but I fell asleep at my desk after casting Lava Font for the 4th time.

Zelyhn.8069:

snip

LH only looks good when you skew your numbers to make it look good, which is exactly what you’ve been doing.

1) You insist on using Slaying/Night sigils rather than Force/Accuracy, which obviously favors 1H weapons far more.
2) At the same time, you don’t factor in Spotter or Frost Spirit. Frost Spirit favors all DD equally but Spotter favors builds with lower precision.
3) You are assuming ridiculous things like 9 boons on LH. That includes having stability, protection and aegis up at all times, which is pretty much impossible. Even if you drop those three boons out you still have to stack might, fury, regen, swiftness, retaliation, and vigor 100%. Good luck with that.
4) You are only looking at LH during its uptime. Your 0/20/25/25/0 build gets 30 swings on hammer which is less than 50% uptime. Even a more realistic build like 25/10/25/10/0 with Conjurer is only getting about 75% uptime and that comes at the cost of about 10% less DPS.

You’re free to make whatever assumptions you want but let’s start qualifying statements like “LH deals way more than staff” with disclaimers like “when you have slaying/night sigils and you only have to do one 30-second or less fight every minute and you don’t have a ranger”. I’ll do the same whenever I talk about staff being good. Deal?

Also, my spreadsheet is accurate, I’m not the one getting 18k on LH without Spotter/Frost Spirit.

Extra tick on Lava Font from Persisting Flames and Meteor Shower changes makes Staff camping far too appealing, especially being way more PuG-safe than LH now.

No sane speedclearer would ever assume spotter or fights longer than 30 seconds in speedruns. I’m fine with all assumptions Zelyhn does, except from slaying+night. I’d rather use Slaying+Force.

If you are going to destroy my position then you should do it thoroughly:
Say that if you dodge in LH you loose 10% damage
Say that bosses are much larger than humans so meteor shower deals more damage
Say that staff is better because you can afford to dodge: the rotation allows for a gap of 0.6s without dps every 4.6 seconds.
You know just push it, don’t leave me any hopes for a come back!

In all seriousness staff has been buffed quite a bit with the last patch. It is still hard to know by how much because there is some uncertainty about the consistency of lava font casts, but it can become quite viable for those who like to play with fire

And if you get hit by a lupine blast staffs dps drops to about 3k.

Achieving maximum self dps isn’t the thought behind taking an ele. Achieving maximum self dps while buffing the party as eficcient as possible is.

Thinking of that, a 30/0/0/0/0 S/F+LH ele is far superior to any staff one.

Lava Axe is pretty legit for might stacking now actually. Lava Font > Conjure Axe > Explosive Axe > auto-attack for a bit > Ring of Fire > Explosive Axe > drop it and go back to staff. Lava Font is on CD so you don’t really lose that much DPS. If you do it right you drop Lava Font maybe 2 seconds later and the damage from Explosive Lava Axe evens that out anyway. If you’re really tight on might on you can also switch to Earth, wait out another Lava Axe and blast in Burning Retreat, then drop the axe and use Eruption for an extra two blasts.

Dub.1273:

No sane speedclearer would ever assume spotter or fights longer than 30 seconds in speedruns. I’m fine with all assumptions Zelyhn does, except from slaying+night. I’d rather use Slaying+Force.

Are there more daytime instances than night? Off the top of my head I can think of AC, TA, SE, COF, COE, Snowblind, Jade Maw, Swamp, Grawl and Underground fractals as night, so that’s 20 “paths”.

Then there’s Arah, CM, HOTW, Cliffside and Ascalon which is 12 paths.

Have I missed any?

Dub mostly does arah so thats probably why he says force + slaying. And the other 80 dungeons are Hotw and coe. CoE is easy and noone does hotw. So i guess arah is the standard lvl 80 dungeon that would make most sense to base things off.