Guild Wars 2

swiftpaw.6397:

When I do COE, it’s 3 war/1 mes/1 guard or 4 war/1 guard or 5 war. How does LH ele go? considering replacing 1 war with LH ele as it (supposedly?) has higher single target dps? I specced my ele out for it but was missing a few things, the food and scholar runes (was running full ruby because I’m cheap) , and sigil also missing. Think I need to follow the build up to the minute detail to compete.

Make sure you’re in water attunement, because that’s like 20% damage you’re missing if you’re not.

And it really does some insane damage honestly, especially through Fiery Greatsword on the Subject Alpha fights. A good end-of-path alpha fight should take 20-30 seconds. A slow kill is usually kitten -ish.

As for the LH: once everyone is stacked in might and the foes have their vulnerability, you should be hitting 6k-6k-10k at a minimum, while 8k-8k-12k is what you’re aiming for, sometimes you get like 10k-10k-16k, but those are a lot rarer.

@Nik, I’ve seen the videos on the forums as well, and the first thing that came to my mind was that those Alpha fights were incredibly slow… If you have a good ele and a good warrior, that fight should not take more than 25seconds, with the possibility of 20s or less.

But yeah, it’s a very small difference, and we mainly do it because the build is kinda fun, and having 4 professions that run the path give people more options to swap after runs to not get DR.

Bright.9160:

swiftpaw.6397:

When I do COE, it’s 3 war/1 mes/1 guard or 4 war/1 guard or 5 war. How does LH ele go? considering replacing 1 war with LH ele as it (supposedly?) has higher single target dps? I specced my ele out for it but was missing a few things, the food and scholar runes (was running full ruby because I’m cheap) , and sigil also missing. Think I need to follow the build up to the minute detail to compete.

Make sure you’re in water attunement, because that’s like 20% damage you’re missing if you’re not.

And it really does some insane damage honestly, especially through Fiery Greatsword on the Subject Alpha fights. A good end-of-path alpha fight should take 20-30 seconds. A slow kill is usually kitten -ish.

As for the LH: once everyone is stacked in might and the foes have their vulnerability, you should be hitting 6k-6k-10k at a minimum, while 8k-8k-12k is what you’re aiming for, sometimes you get like 10k-10k-16k, but those are a lot rarer.

Yeh been keeping the water attune going. I think half the problem is I’ve only tested it so far in pugs and they dont provide the might/fury uptimes required to get the most out of it. I think I can maintain the LH uptime the whole time, it’s 50 charges between 2 hammers traited which should be enough time for CD to be up, are saying Firey GS does more dmg on alpha than LH? or are you using up charges on LH that fast? :o

swiftpaw.6397:

are saying Firey GS does more dmg on alpha than LH? or are you using up charges on LH that fast? :o

Fiery Greatsword has the potential to do 100k+ burst on a 10s cooldown. With a 25-45k whirl on an 5s cooldown, and a 12-15k autoattack. The only bad part about the autoattack is that it roots you and you have to hit esc in the middle of it if you don’t want to die due to Alpha.

Bright.9160:

swiftpaw.6397:

are saying Firey GS does more dmg on alpha than LH? or are you using up charges on LH that fast? :o

Fiery Greatsword has the potential to do 100k+ burst on a 10s cooldown. With a 25-45k whirl on an 5s cooldown, and a 12-15k autoattack. The only bad part about the autoattack is that it roots you and you have to hit esc in the middle of it if you don’t want to die due to Alpha.

Oh kitten I didn’t think of the whirl -.- yeh that kitten would be great there seeing as he’s in a corner.

Well, like I said, it brings some flavor to the runs, and gives an extra profession to roll to when people want to grind CoE all night.

I don’t mind running 3 wars instead, I know the change in time is so minute it doesn’t really matter. You can do 10min p1 and 12-13min p2 and 3 with both setups, so it’s the same to me.

I just like the Fiery Greatsword, using Fiery Rush and shouting “PRRRRSSSSHHHHHHH” on TS while looking at 40-50 2.5-2.8k hits flying across my screen.

Ninja edit: the 20s or less time is possible if the people on their Fiery GS time their Fiery Rushes so that they kill all of tkittenences every time they arrive. That way Alpha won’t heal and you’ll just burn straight through his HP. It’s hard, and you’ll have to alternate your Fiery Rushes to time them when he gets tkittenences, because it’s more than once per 10s, but it’s definitely possible. Just hard.

It’s actually 70 hits.
In situations where fiery gs is usable, ele’s out-dps everything and everyone by just using #4 every 10 seconds.
I do phase 1 lupicus solo in ~1:30 with my ele once i got him to the wall. Sad thing about is that i would only need 30 seconds with my warrior (fgs) due to superior self-buffing.
My ele rush ticks for~700 damage, my warrior for ~1-6k, bit unfair.

I always thought it was 50… 70 makes it even more OP than I thought it was.

Seeing how I hit 2.5-2.8 on my crits usually, sometimes even going over 3k, that’s over 150k burst…

Nikaido.3457:

Bright.9160:

Ninja edit: the 20s or less time is possible if the people on their Fiery GS time their Fiery Rushes so that they kill all of tkittenences every time they arrive. That way Alpha won’t heal and you’ll just burn straight through his HP. It’s hard, and you’ll have to alternate your Fiery Rushes to time them when he gets tkittenences, because it’s more than once per 10s, but it’s definitely possible. Just hard.

Whirlwind from greatsword on war whenever tkittenence spawns also helps a lot.

Yeah, but he’ll usually still eat some of them, whereas I’ve seen well-timed Fiery Rushes kill all of his essences without him healing a single bit of health. WW will kill like 5 of them, but you won’t hit the other ones, whereas Fiery Rush kills them so fast that it basically ignores the AoE cap…

Dub.1273:

It’s actually 70 hits.
In situations where fiery gs is usable, ele’s out-dps everything and everyone by just using #4 every 10 seconds.
I do phase 1 lupicus solo in ~1:30 with my ele once i got him to the wall. Sad thing about is that i would only need 30 seconds with my warrior (fgs) due to superior self-buffing.
My ele rush ticks for~700 damage, my warrior for ~1-6k, bit unfair.

I don’t think my phase 1 solo in 1:20 is too far behind

I already did 1:05, sadly lupicus insisted on using attacks every few seconds in phase 3 so it worked out as 6:40. That whole fight becomes so luck-based when going for a good time.

Edit: You were refering to the ele time, i see. Can’t spam fiery rush there without going into the danger of dying.

Latinkuro.9420:

And, please for the love of God don’t pretend like it’s the parties fault or the game’s fault.
and don’t act as if they are obligated to take you even if you do not fit their needs and all you will do is drag them down with you.

+1000

I just like the idea that the OP equates efficiency to zerker gear. Like we haven’t seen some ham fisted zerkers out there.

shimmerless.4560:

Warriors are not the strongest class by far for applying Vuln and while it’s certainly nice to have (particularly since you can’t always rely on a team comp when PUGing) it’s not the be-all end-all. I can put out an instant 25 Vuln on my Mes every half minute and keep it at around ~15 just on my own while waiting for the main cooldown.

I am perfectly aware that a mes, necro and engi can stack vulnerability even better than a warrior, but a warrior is so good because it brings all 3 of those things, and can keep them up for most fights while at the same time dealing massive damage. Especially since most fights usually don’t make the 1 minute mark with a good team.

shimmerless.4560:

Warriors are not the strongest class by far for applying Vuln and while it’s certainly nice to have (particularly since you can’t always rely on a team comp when PUGing) it’s not the be-all end-all. I can put out an instant 25 Vuln on my Mes every half minute and keep it at around ~15 just on my own while waiting for the main cooldown.

While those other classes are maximizing their application of vulnerability they’re doing less than half of a good warrior’s DPS. And at the same time, the warrior is achieving, what, 50 or 60 percent of the vulnerability while maximizing damage.

Folks still don’t understand, warriors are about the total package. Personal DPS, group damage buffs, and vulnerability application. Other classes can do some lackluster combination of those things. Warriors can maximize one category and do the other two comparably as well as anyone else.

Here’s the thing. No one likes being kicked from a party. Period. So when you kick someone, no matter how you try to sugar coat of justify it, they aren’t going to like it and they will see you as an elitist jerk.
How you act outside this speed run doesn’t matter, right now you’ve kicked someone who got their hopes up of finding a group.
Elitism and looking for maximum efficiency go hand in hand, because if you want maximum efficiency, you want the best party you can get; and the line where you cross into elitism is when you disallow others into the run because they don’t meet your view of “efficient”.
In any case, farming CoF shouldn’t be a thing. It just gives players who do it more gold, which in turn decreases the value of gold, driving up the prices in the TP, so players will need more gold and run more CoF runs, in one big vicious cycle that: 1) doesn’t satisfy the CoF farmer because they continually rising cost, and 2) Renders the TP inaccessible to the common players. In short, gold farming causes inflation.

shimmerless.4560:

I would like to second someone’s statements about the difference between Zerk’s and PVT (or anything else really). I was doing CoF P2 last night on my War, I was a bit late to entering so the group had already pulled some silver mobs into the wall and they were doing their thing.

However, the difference between how fast the mobs were being taken down when I was helping and how it would slow to a crawl when I was just watching the other four players was unreal, and I had to take a step back at first because I didn’t quite believe it. Without a real combat tracker we can’t really know, but I can say fairly confidently that I was contributing as much damage as the other four on my team combined, if not substantially more.

I know a lot of players don’t want to hear this, but all of my experience tells me that equipment choices and flat damage traits make an enormous difference in this game’s PvE. When I mean “enormous” I mean that someone in PVT is functionally not playing the same class as someone in full Zerk’s. I don’t really blame players because this isn’t intuitive at all until you see just how it plays out in practice.

Well we can try to rough it out.

On my zerker you’re looking at 100% crit rate, 121% crit dmg. With no might stacks you literally do base damage * 2.71 on every single hit. Let’s say we’re doing 100b->whirl->axe rotation->100b->whirl etc. which would be 12 greatsword hits every 10 seconds (fast hands) giving 12 might stacks which last 5 seconds per rotation or on average 6 constant might stacks. FGJ is another 3 might stacks so 9 and SoR lasts through most fights, another 5 giving us 14 might stacks at 100% uptime during the fight.

Let’s say the green banner is the only one in play because I’m pugging, so without the red one down base attack stat is a little over 4k @ 14 might stacks but due to crits you’re effectively at something around 11k.

Some pure PTV warrior is standing next to me, just to allow some wiggle room for where their traits might be placed, let’s say has 18% crit chance and 20% crit dmg (these start at 4% and 0% in PTV without traits but 12% and 15% with the same banner I’m using buffing them). Their multiplier would end up being base attack*1.126. As they wouldn’t generate as many might stacks but would still have the same amount of base power (as both armor sets are primary power) they would have a base attack likely somewhere around 3650 (7 might stacks). The end result of their base attack and the contribution from their crits would be 4110.

They would also probably be using a better survival weapon (instead of a dps rotation), be lacking the % modifiers I get from traits, etc. So yeah, 1 person can actually do the dps of 3 or even more.

shimmerless.4560:

War is strong because it’s simple to play

I honestly love that argument. Whenever someone brings it up you can be sure he has no clue about whats going on.

shimmerless.4560:

Dub.1273:

shimmerless.4560:

War is strong because it’s simple to play

I honestly love that argument. Whenever someone brings it up you can be sure he has no clue about whats going on.

Fantastic contribution friend!

Yours wasn’t much better. Just because you spammed out more words doesn’t make it more of a valid input. His statement, while simple got the point out pretty bluntly.

For me, what makes warriors excel above other classes is their utility. They excel in offensive utility, which is much more desirable than defensive utility. Whenever run efficiency is concerned, the more defensive utility you have, the less efficient your party composition is (generally). Offensive utility helps the entire team, it buffs everyone, and it contributes to a faster run. Defensive utility is more often than not a crutch, so whenever you see a ‘record’ or pretty fast time achieved for something, it will involve minimal defensive (support) utility and maximum offensive utility and DPS output.

There are obviously going to be exceptions, but as a rule if you’re aiming to go fast you should stack offensive and sacrifice defensive utility. Warriors fit that role perfectly. As for skill to play, I’d imagine 90% of warriors don’t even use a rotation, or they call their rotation using GS #1 and every x seconds using GS #2.

shimmerless.4560:

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

shimmerless.4560:

Dub.1273:

shimmerless.4560:

War is strong because it’s simple to play

I honestly love that argument. Whenever someone brings it up you can be sure he has no clue about whats going on.

Fantastic contribution friend!

Yours wasn’t much better. Just because you spammed out more words doesn’t make it more of a valid input. His statement, while simple got the point out pretty bluntly.

For me, what makes warriors excel above other classes is their utility. They excel in offensive utility, which is much more desirable than defensive utility. Whenever run efficiency is concerned, the more defensive utility you have, the less efficient your party composition is (generally). Offensive utility helps the entire team, it buffs everyone, and it contributes to a faster run. Defensive utility is more often than not a crutch, so whenever you see a ‘record’ or pretty fast time achieved for something, it will involve minimal defensive (support) utility and maximum offensive utility and DPS output.

There are obviously going to be exceptions, but as a rule if you’re aiming to go fast you should stack offensive and sacrifice defensive utility. Warriors fit that role perfectly. As for skill to play, I’d imagine 90% of warriors don’t even use a rotation, or they call their rotation using GS #1 and every x seconds using GS #2.

The fact that many players don’t think about skill order or the abilities they’re using has little to no relation to class difficulty. If anything, hundreds of players performing passably (if not exceptionally) with poor skill orders or a heavy reliance on subpar autos is precisely evidence that Warrior is pretty forgiving, even at low levels of play. Never mind that there have been multiple people in this very thread saying the exact same, that niche builds may offer comparable Warrior damage but they’re not worth the effort when you get more or less the same results on a less-demanding class.

Sod on me for figuring a message board was a place for adult discussion though, obviously it’s better used as a platform to pointlessly insult complete strangers. Enjoy one another’s company m’loves.

Because being any other dps build and just pressing the buttons in the right order is harder than pressing warriors buttons in the right order?

shimmerless.4560:

Sod on me for figuring a message board was a place for adult discussion though, obviously it’s better used as a platform to pointlessly insult complete strangers. Enjoy one another’s company m’loves.

No one is going to take you seriously if you just leave a discussion with passive aggression towards others, just because they don’t agree with you. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but if your opinion is stupid, it’s stupid.

shimmerless.4560:

As an aside, the whole notion of “offensive utility” is close to meaningless. Is burning mobs down fast defensive in the sense it’s preventing less incoming attacks from hitting your team, or offensive just because it’s damage? What about a pull that allows for otherwise difficult to impossible cleave damage? Where would a reflect or a group Aegis fit into this? There’s just no reason to dress up things like damage output in fancy words. Anywhere you put that line is completely arbitrary.

Were someone to say that Warriors provide the best reliable and accessible damage output for group play, that would be agreeable and backed by a wealth of evidence. To go any further is to stretch too far on unknown grounds. We have no real in-depth combat tracker and only a murky approximation of the game’s limits based on some shared experiences.

So banners and boons aren’t utility? We just drop banners because the banner does damage? When you use FGJ or OMM those are just attacks? Ok thanks for clearing that up for everybody.

haviz.1340:

zoran.4826:

Staff auto attack heal 450 per swing works thru hammer auto attack plus the 100 ish from soothing mist to group xtra 200 to self from signet. It may not sound like much but it can make or break some fights like fire fractal where warriors self healing often isn’t enough. In the 30+

I just tested this nonsense in-game and the results say it’s a nonsense and doesn’t work. You can’t heal with staff when you have hammer equipped, sorry. Plus, even if it had healed, it’s 395. I won’t comment part about fractals because I’d be probably infracted or yet again banned.

Yes I kinda feel dumb the heal on hammer swing isn’t there anymore. I know it use to be at some point and I guess I never noticed when they changed or fixed it. My ele is just a cof alt, but still I usually don’t speak about things unless I have first hand knowledge and proof. Thank you for correcting me

Honestly the efficiency of the Zerkwarr group is actually what’s fabled. Whenever I party with them usually the runs last longer because they die several times. This is roughly 8/10 times.

wait, are you saying staff autoattack heal goes over to when you use hammer?

does that mean dagger autottack will also apply vunerability on mobs when using hammer?

Bright.9160:

I agree that a mesmer probably makes CoF p1 go faster, but it’s practically useless in Fractals 48 for example… I’d rather bring an Ele or an extra warrior there…..

Yeah its not that in fotm 48 ele is useless (unless you have 2 dps warriors) and a mesmer that can keep up 80% uptime reflect is gold….
Add to that illusions TW and stuff…
But more than everything almost double the dps of an ele.

You possibly played with a shatter mesmer that is not the proper build for pve.

My main is an ele, was the only character i had since release.
a month ago i rolled a mesmer…i regretted all the time wasted on my ele.

I got to fotm49 first with my ele…….but nowaday i use it only as a reroll for daily fotm chest if i have time for 2 runs.

Obviously i don t use a conjured weapon ele that is an excuse for players that cannot accept the class is “adamantly uneffective” (cit. by dev) in pve.

shimmerless.4560:

Player Character.9467:

shimmerless.4560:

As an aside, the whole notion of “offensive utility” is close to meaningless. Is burning mobs down fast defensive in the sense it’s preventing less incoming attacks from hitting your team, or offensive just because it’s damage? What about a pull that allows for otherwise difficult to impossible cleave damage? Where would a reflect or a group Aegis fit into this? There’s just no reason to dress up things like damage output in fancy words. Anywhere you put that line is completely arbitrary.

Were someone to say that Warriors provide the best reliable and accessible damage output for group play, that would be agreeable and backed by a wealth of evidence. To go any further is to stretch too far on unknown grounds. We have no real in-depth combat tracker and only a murky approximation of the game’s limits based on some shared experiences.

So banners and boons aren’t utility? We just drop banners because the banner does damage? When you use FGJ or OMM those are just attacks?

This is exactly my point, why try to group different skills into one nebulous umbrella? Just call banners and buffs what they are. The word “utility” on its own doesn’t really mean anything.

u·til·i·ty
Noun
The state of being useful, profit-able, or beneficial.

Because it IS utility. I’m not sure how you define the word if you don’t think that there is ‘offensive utility’. Aegis and reflects, as I mentioned in the defining of defensive utility, are generally a crutch. At this point you’re just scrambling for semantic arguments in an attempt to prove something, I’m not too sure what.

You can make the argument of burning things down fast enough that it becomes defensive, but if anything that just supports my point. If you had just gone into the engagement with a composition heavily comprised of defensive utility, you never had good offense to start with. There is no conversion of utility there, you quite literally are only playing defensive which is not efficient in the least. You needed to have more offensive utility, and less defensive utility. This results in more efficiency as your progression through content is faster.

The exaggeration between offensive/defensive utility becomes most meaningful when people try to justify the use of their profession by saying “oh, but my ele provides a lot of utility!”. Sure, it does. But it’s not OFFENSIVE, it’s purely defensive. It focuses on red barring players, not helping players kill mobs faster. I’m sure you’re going to take some pointless semantic arguments out of that as well, but the idea is there.

People have been saying this kitten for months, that the game revolves around killing enemies faster than they can kill you. Warriors excel at helping the party, and themselves kill things faster. Eles are good at making just themselves kill things faster, pretty similar to thieves in that regard.

People have been saying this kitten for months, that the game revolves around killing enemies faster than they can kill you.

This^. Offensive utility exists. It’s why a LH ele can only reach his maximum efficiency in a group who provide the fury and might to him.

warriors have also the best ressing skill in game
if that is not an utility….

Conjured ele is simply unviable in any situation that is not of trivial difficulty.
As said many time if you need to interact with stuff, you lose conjured, if you are downed you lose conjured, and you are stuck with 5 offensive skills with no surviving mechanics.

What is that mesmerbuild that deals double ele damage (and still maintains 100% reflection uptime)? Because that would generally be warriors damage with mesmer utility.

LordByron.8369:

Yeah its not that in fotm 48 ele is useless (unless you have 2 dps warriors) and a mesmer that can keep up 80% uptime reflect is gold….
Add to that illusions TW and stuff…
But more than everything almost double the dps of an ele.

It’s not that an AoE perma blind on a very short cooldown coupled with a very versatile skillbar where you can swap between melee, ranged or something in between whenever the fight asks for it isn’t gold either.

Not to mention, double the DPS of an ele? Wut? How do you play your ele?

And no, I don’t play with shatter mesmer builds on FotM. I probably should have worded my point otherwise, and shouldn’t have said a mesmer is ‘useless’, but I still prefer a warrior or an ele over a mesmer in a 48.

By the way, your 80% reflect uptime is really cute, but if you’re standard running 2 guardians like us, you have 100% reflect/absorb uptime anyway, so the mesmer would just be overkill. And TW is pretty useless in high level fractals, because bosses are such dumb health sponges that a TW will only burn through like 25% of their healthbars… The difference in kill time becomes pretty minimal there…

phantasm builds that you can find in mesmer section:
can deal something like 10-12.000 per phantasm attack chain with iwarden

6-7000 per iduelist

And you can add mesmer Attacks with reduced CD.

The best part is phantasms doesn t die so easy as you could think.

Between iwarden, feedback, temporal curtain and the reduced CD on all of them from traits your reflect uptime is awesome.

Its obviously something that works best in fotm because it needs time to set phantasm and stuff.

Yet nothing comparable to thieves or warriors….

What is this 4 war 1 mes nonsense? 2 thief 2 war 1 mes, fastest time I’ve ever had is with that combo.

‘Utility’ is more of a general catchall term for something made up of many parts having a collection of support and control options. Not a word you use to inexplicably shy away from using the words ‘support’ and ‘control’ when it comes to identifying particular parts within.

Like; Mesmer Focus has good utility, ‘Into the Void’ is a good control skill and ‘Temporal curtain’ is a good support skill. Not; Mesmer Focus has good utility, ‘Into the Void’ is a utility skill, and ‘Temporal curtain’ is a utility skill.