Guild Wars 2

Dub.1273:

But larger staff AoE’s?!?

I prefer the focus trait.

Is ele focus the only weapon that doesn’t have any traits? While at the same time ele has those two traits. I guess “extra” and “more” is what differentiate those two original traits.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

Either way, it’s a mistake to say something isn’t a DPS build just because it isn’t totally optimized for only DPS.

That’s what a DPS build is, optimised for damage. I look at a 30/30/0/10/0 Ele and see a support Ele, sacrificing damage modifiers for Vuln and Fury stacking. Whilst it is offensive support it isn’t built for raw damage.
So when I see a boon spamming, non conjure wielding build, “DPS” isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. That’s not at all saying it doesn’t have it strengths, but it just isn’t damage.
It is just a lame disagreement in terminology and I’m not even fully sure why I care so much, I suppose I don’t want to see PuGs roaming around claiming to have “mad d33pz” then seeing Dagger auto attacks and a flurry of boons.

I think I’ll just stop because we seem to be judging builds on their bad PuG carrying abilities, and it is a sad day if that is what this forum has been reduced to.

Edit: And more specifically that this thread was about Ele speedclears. Yes, yes I did have to scroll back up to the top to remember that.

Zelyhn.8069:

Yeah but this increased damage is only applicable to the OH skills
Not LH or FGS

Ya it doesn’t apply to LH and FGS, but it does apply to main-hand skills.

Weapon damage gets averaged. e.g. if you were using a lvl 80 dagger and a lvl 1 dagger in the offhand, your Lightning Whips get kittened down to be worse than D/no-OH. i.e. 5% weapon strength bonus is strongk.

It doesn’t really affect eles much since LH is baws but this is why rangers should sword/axe or sword/dagger to auto for more if they don’t have to /warhorn.

I doubt that

Zelyhn.8069:

I doubt that

Hmmm that’s weird when did they change that?

I doubt it ever was like that at any point

Dolan.3071:

I think I’ll just stop because we seem to be judging builds on their bad PuG carrying abilities, and it is a sad day if that is what this forum has been reduced to.

You’re just playing with semantics and getting upset over someone putting 10 points somewhere that you disagree wiith. It’s like when you tell Necro players that Necros are bad in dungeons, and they scramble for any excuse they can think of to make some kind of counter argument, because they just refuse to accept this negative thing being said about their build/class. You’re doing the same thing. People are saying your favourite ele build requires you to get carried, and are unhappy with that connotation.

A DPS build doesn’t have to have zero spec for utility. The main idea behind the build has to be to out-put high damage per second, but it doesn’t have to exclude other options (I’m looking at you, Wardens Feedback).

99% of power necro’s use deathly perception and use lifeblast for dps. When you tell them that its worse they either outright disagree and get upset. Or they try to argue that the piercing makes it better than dagger because of multiple targets. We all know most of dungeons is killing trash obviously so they must be right…. They also dont like going into curses on power builds, because it has condition damage, thanks to a certain theory crafters “build rules”. Cant take stats that we dont use!

spoj.9672:

They also dont like going into curses on power builds because it has condition damage thanks to a certain theory crafters “build rules”. Cant take stats that we dont use!

Better respec my warrior since strength, arms and discipline have undesirable stat combinations.

Idd i made that arguement before and they all went full on hate on me.

My comment on getting carried wasn’t meant to be personal at all, I just envy people who can regularly party with decent teammates. I’m not really a regular here so I don’t know which idioms trigger rage, sorry.

Ele traits are pretty bad overall but once you dump 60 in fire and air all you can really choose from is +10% from melee in earth, +20% from water if you go full conjures, or a largely personal boon collection from arcane.

Interestingly:

25/10/25/10/0 LH gives me 10741 DPS with all buffs. That’s the highest damage combo I’ve been able to put together.

30/15/25/0/0 Fire Staff gives me 10482 DPS with all buffs. That’s the best I can get with staff.

Since you only get 78% uptime on two Hammers if you attack constantly, and you’re stuck with D/D the rest of the time, that means the staff is actually BETTER as a DPS weapon than the hammer. In fact, if you drop the second sigil on the LH (which is what is giving it the edge over staff), the staff is actually better in terms of raw DPS.

So I guess the moral of the story is that you should be using Staff most of the time, and only summoning LH for the blast finishers, rather than trying to use LH as an actual DPS weapon.

Staff if far from LH’s 13k+ dps. Check my Zalculator.

Zelyhn.8069:

Staff if far from LH’s 13k+ dps. Check my Zalculator.

Give me a better staff spec then.

EDIT: Nice stealth edit.

EDIT 2: Oh wait, I forgot to add Fury into the above numbers. They should be 12329 on LH versus 12085. Which makes more sense in light of the guardian’s and warrior’s respective numbers, but doesn’t really change the proportion of damage between LH and staff.

I’d like to see that spreadsheet telling staff’s dps is better than lh’s.

Edit: Or coming close to.

Some of guangs theoretical builds strike me as very odd. I feel like important things like rotation are overlooked or incorrectly calculated on some of them. Makes no sense to me with his warrior suggestion if empower allies gets moved (20/30/0/20/0).

Me? Editing? I would never do that!

I plugged in staff coefficient modified for weapon damage (1.50) in my calculator and I got a sweet 12k, so actually it’s nothing to laugh about (especially when you know that I calculated this coefficient for a human-size target)

And I retract what I didn’t edit: your staff spec is the best for a speed kill.

What’s cool about the 78% uptime assumption is that very few bosses live long enough to go through 2 Lightning Hammer’s worth of hits from a whole party. In practice, Lightning Hammer has a 99% uptime.

I believe the best staff rotation is Autoattack + Lava Font. Burning can’t be taking into account because even just one guardian will overwrite your burning all the time.
Did you take actual cast times, probably hapening interrupts and aftercasts into account?
Also, LH has ~90% uptime in most fights and the little downtime is used to stack might to increase parties dps output even more.

Yeah I think this is the problem we have when comparing numbers. Guang does completely theoretical calcs. But we all know that ingame the dps is better due to the length of fights. Its like his calc for my necro build, the wells contribute a lot more than his calcs suggest because fights dont last too long most of the time.

Meteor shower is worth casting as well

Guang you must have omitted something because I did the LH calculation many times and for the 46s/min you can use it the dps is definitely above 14k. I believe Dub also had this number.

I’m checking it now. 358 + 358 + 586 = 1302 over 2.82 seconds = 462 DPS.

Compare that to staff auto at 314 per 1.33s for 236 DPS plus Lava Font being 296 × 5 every 5.6 seconds (with all the relevant traits). Lava Font is worth is 1480 damage in .83 second cast, so subtract the concurrent auto damage (261) and you get 1219 damage per Lava Font, per 5.6s = 218 DPS. 218 + 296 = 514 DPS on staff, which means the base damage is actually higher. Burning Retreat is only good when walled and Meteor Shower is pretty random and usually not worth using, so I didn’t include those. It’d be higher if it was a big target that could be walled.

Staff gets a trait % boost of about 56% all together. LH gets 79%. 514 × 1.56 = 802 versus 462 × 1.79 = 827. So there isn’t a huge difference between those two at all. Power and precision aren’t different enough between the two builds to make a huge difference.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

People are saying your favourite ele build requires you to get carried, and are unhappy with that connotation.

Pretty much. I’d like to just throw in a snappy “L2P” comment to those that can’t LH in PuGs, but the truth is these players are more than likely better than myself which confounds me even further.

A DPS build doesn’t have to have zero spec for utility. The main idea behind the build has to be to out-put high damage per second, but it doesn’t have to exclude other options (I’m looking at you, Wardens Feedback).

I get your point, but it’s like if I took the 30/25/0/0/15 Warrior Build (what I would take in PuG’s) and changed it to 20/25/10/0/15 because I feel safer with a Shield. It is incorrect to claim this to be a “DPS build” because I have sacrificed so much to nab a bit of survivability, as long as there is a build that gives you higher damage, it isn’t worthy of the title.

But I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time anyway, Staff Ele is where it’s at

And Guang you get like 95% Hammer uptime if you’re constantly wailing on the target? So add in any dodging/healing and you’re almost at a full circle. In PuGs you’d use any downtime to stack might/fury, do you even Conjurer?

Dolan.3071:

do you even Conjurer?

We don’t make eles so we can use hammers to kill stuff, just like we don’t make rangers just so we can kill things with swords.

Just tested it. LH with Conjurer runs out in 47 seconds, which is pretty much exactly as projected.

Moreover, given that the damage lead is only a few perfect, any downtime at all will put the hammer behind the staff in overall DPS.

Lets list all the common boss fights that typical groups with good dps will take more than 47 seconds to beat…

1. Lupi
2. Butcher
3. Aldus Stormbringer

I’m stuggling to think of more.

Any Boss in Open World with a 15+ player scaling.

Gaung you are doing your calculation wrong … you need to take hammer’s attributes, modifiers as well as staff’s rotation into account. If you can find my old spreadsheet (not the new calcualtor) on the elem forum then you will see what I am talking about. Otherwise I will have more time on Sunday evening to show you the maths that allow to say that LH can do 14k+ dps.

I am sorry to interrupt the thread like this, but can someone explain to me why there is a man called ‘solo’ who is not in [SOLO]?

Solo.9027:

I mainly run 10 in arcana instead of water for arcane cooldowns and free fury because I dont really do group content much anymore. People who can regularly run conjures and focus just seem lucky to be carried imo, must be nice though.

Cause he’s the legendary Hans Olo.

Hey Guang, take a look at this: this is the rotation that Sabull and I have found to be most optimal for staff on a human-sized target. The size of the target is important because it affects the probability of the meteor hitting the target.

The first rotation is for staff with no reduction in cd, the second is with reduction in cd but no persisting flames (simply add 5 * 0.8 = 4 to total coefficients to include it)

Note that meteor shower is definitely worth casting on a human sized target, so it is even more on a larger boss.

This sheet is not formatted, sorry, but I think you can easily understand that the left column is the time elapsed, the center column is the cast time of the spell and the right column is the coefficient of the spell (total).

The total time of the fully traited rotation has been empirically observed to be 31s. This is different from that 29.8 it theoretically should be.

The results for cd + persisting flame is a 1.36 coefficient per second. Which is 1.50 if you compensate for weapon strength (to compare with LH).

With this, I calculate a 12k+ dps with my new calcualtor (which is quite reliable) and you seem to find the same.

_

On the other hand the best LH build has a build damage modifier of 2.06 and a crit modifier of 2.87 for the duration it is active (I say 46s and not 47 because it is better to not use the last few charges after the last full chain and pick up the second hammer instead), so its damage can reach much higher as you can see in my new calculator (link in my sig).

Edit: written on a mobile device, sorry for the possible inconvenience.

This is why I dont take guangs numbers as gospel. He talks purely theoretical. Doesnt take into account the length of average encounters because thats quite hard to do in fairness. But some classes are capable of doing a lot more damage than let on if the fight is very brief.

Erm…. how do you get 12k dps with staff? I don’t use staff a lot but 12k doesn’t make sense.

With full buffs

Uptime or not, the fact is that LH gets, at most, 5-6% more than staff while it is up, and that’s including the extra sigil and of course the stats you get from actually holding the hammer. At least, those are the numbers I’m getting. Rotation should be a non-issue since there really is none (staff = Lava Font > auto > Lava Font > repeat, LH = auto xN). I’m also not sure if LHs get your regular weapon set’s stats or if they have their own weapon damage, because if it’s the latter the staff will get an extra 6% damage bonus from being Ascended and that pretty much wipes out the difference. Once I throw in that Ascended weapon damage for staff it goes up to 12818 DPS.

If you want to show me the build you’re using on LH, I can see if I can get any higher numbers than what I’m currently getting. The only way I could see you going over 14k is if your offhand sigil was Slaying/Night or full Bloodlust stacks for the extra 10%, as opposed to the 4% or so you’d get from Accuracy. I also use Ruby Orbs as a default rather than Scholar (mostly cause too lazy to change it for mesmers) so that’ll make a 5% difference or so. The biggest advantage to LH is that it benefits more from Time Warp, but that also makes it burn out faster. The overall DPS isn’t that much better really.

Oh, and you can use up your LH and immediately pick up the second and keep swinging, so breaking the chain isn’t an issue there.

Zelyhn.8069:

With full buffs

what skill do you use? 12k damage in 1 attack, right?

Zelyhn.8069:

I say 46s and not 47 because it is better to not use the last few charges after the last full chain and pick up the second hammer instead

If you pick up the second hammer fast enough you won’t interrupt your attack chain. Also using Lightning Storm on massive targets like the Nightmare Tree is well worth the cast time, but not really a constant enough of a factor to include in tests.
And of course constant Blast Finishers, so assuming an organised party you’re looking at a lot of Might uptime as opposed to Staff, but again not a constant factor.

Bismuth.3165:

Zelyhn.8069:

With full buffs

what skill do you use? 12k damage in 1 attack, right?

Lava Font hits 5 times approximately every 5 seconds on top of your auto-attack so you should be hitting 6-7k per hit on average to be able to 12k. Which isn’t unreasonable at all considering a totally unbuffed staff hit (no might, vuln, or any other buffs) usually crits for about 3-4k.

Also, I’ve been doing a bit of extra testing and I think my staff numbers are actually on the low end. Lava Font casts ridiculously fast; I can barely even see the animation. It’s pretty much as close to instant-cast as you’ll get without actually being instant cast. I was assuming .83s per cast (since that’s the standard cast time for most “fast” skills) but I think it’s even faster in this case. Based on my tests it’s actually closer to like .3 seconds, which would push your overall DPS up to almost 14k. 13843 to be exact.

Seriously, Lava Font is like an instant cast HB. Smite but even faster cast and without the size limitations.

But that means you need to be traited 30 in fire, 20% skill recharge, 10% more damage when attuned to fire and fire fields last 30% longer.

yeah he took that into account, he used whatever optimal builds for each case

Sanderinoa.8065:

I am sorry to interrupt the thread like this, but can someone explain to me why there is a man called ‘solo’ who is not in [SOLO]?

If I wasn’t me i’d want to be in me too.

Thanks for telling me about the LH trick, I didn’t know that.

The optimal LH build is: 0/25/25/20/0
It does around 14k dps (quite more when arcane lightning and bolt to the heart are active)

Guang there is definitely an issue with the way you are doing your calculations because your numbers actually are on the low side and yet you find figures that are too high for staff and too low for LH.
- Lava font has an animation time of 0.4
-Meteor shower is worth casting
-You have to use bloodlust sigil and force, not accuracy (no specifics like night)
-You have to use scholar runes, not ruby orbs

With all this I find 12k for the staff, and yes this includes a 5% difference for weapon tier.

Maybe if you can show me how you do your calculations I can see where we differ. As for me I have showed you the rotation that I use to calculate staff’s dps.

Hmm so it’s ‘okay’ to use my BiFrost again? Was on a massive staff ele rave last year and then LH happened.

Why not both?

I haven’t run the numbers yet, but it seems to me that a duo of two elems with persisting flames staff and hammer would not only cap the group in fury, might, but also deal incredible dps.

That’s why we’ve been running duo eles in fractals in the first place!

haviz.1340:

That’s why we’ve been running duo eles in fractals in the first place!

I don’t remember any of Lorek, you or me doing anything like this ^^

I have calculated a first figure for the dps of a staff + LH rotation:
build: 30/20/10/10/0 staying in fire (cd reduction in for fire, no conjurer)
rotation: lava font,meteor shower, fireball, lava font, conjure LH, swing 5 times (until charges run out), lava font, 4-5 fireballs.
dps: around 13k
Fire field uptime: 50%

I played Staff ele yesterday in CoE to put some practice to this theorycraft. I would upload the videos but none of the runs were especially clean due to kitten + disconnects. However, the staff build is definitely viable, but godkitten I thought LH ele was boring.

Also, when you are determining the LH build, are you assuming that the Guardian will be giving perma burning? If you can assume burning, do that make the Fire traits more appealing?