Guild Wars 2

what kind of ascended staff should I make? I guess we are depended on for heals most of all (although the cooldown on aoe heals seems way too long to me, commanders always ask for water fields.)

My current gear is full apothecary. As far as I can tell my healing attributes affect outgoing heals as well as self-heal, so I focus on toughness and healing power in my gear.

Anet advises eles boosts to all stats stuff, like celestial/Wupwup. I figure I am way too squishy for a mixed batch of weakened attributes to matter much in WvW.

What do commanders here want staff eles gear to be?

thx.

Celestial for an allround build (which is always good since you use every single stat), Sentinel’s for a tank build (you have low HP but high Protection uptime => Vitality > Toughness) or Berserker’s for the damage (which is never a bad thing).

I currently use Berserker’s since I can stay in the back and have a strong zerg protecting me. Cleric’s can work too although I don’t think Healing Power is that good in zerg fights.

Blackhat, the one thing commanders want and everybody tells me they really need is waterfield heals. I have not carefully tested how much increased attibutes in healing increase heals in waterfields, but the wiki notes seem to imply outgoing heals are improved by increased healing power.

I am traited for seige so combo healing/toughness/condition damage seems to make sense, but would like input. (full ac, cannon, treb, cata)

You’re there for the fields you provide, CC and damage. The amount healed by combos is based on the healing power of the person doing the blasting, not the person who dropped the field.

Wear zerker if you’re a skilled player who isn’t worthless rally bait. Play a necro if you’re bad.

so timing and calling the fields in voice comm is essential. I will not wear zerker on my WvW character. I will not play necro, ever. Dead things stink, sorry.

Also not convinced outgoing heals are not affected by healing attribute.

Caffynated.5713 pretty much explained it.^^

I would suggest Celestial then. It’s works really well and you can use it for every build. Sentinel’s can work too although I’m not a huge fan.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo

“When applicable, the stats of the character that activated the finisher are used to calculate the combo effects. This is most relevant to combos that inflict damaging conditions, as well as the healing effects of water fields.”

I hope this helps.

What I am looking for is some evidence that outgoing heals are improved by the caster’s healing attribute. Pain in the butt to test that myself. I was hoping someone else had.

You know, blah blah, this character, that one, measure the numbers, ack, blah

Cool, thanks, Blackhat. Our commanders really emphasize voice comm. I will pay a lot more attention to that so we make the best use of the blasts, and blast my own waterfields if needed.

Berserker or celestial. Celestial stats are good but full celestial is not. So zerker is better in much more cases. I wouldn’t recommend any other stat.

Staff is an extremely long range, high CC, and defensive skill set so “tank” staff ele makes no sense unless you’re new.

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

I am traited for seige so combo healing/toughness/condition damage seems to make sense, but would like input. (full ac, cannon, treb, cata)

No offense but that’s doing it wrong. Heavies should be on the siege if it’s taking damage.

Zerker for Staff Ele in WvW? Not sure about that. Contrary to everything I’ve heard.

Celestial is the way to go. But its expensive. So if you can’t afford it, get something that approximates celestial.

Blackhat.4016:

Caffynated.5713 pretty much explained it.^^

I would suggest Celestial then. It’s works really well and you can use it for every build. Sentinel’s can work too although I’m not a huge fan.

I am an ele, for frak sake. Zerkers? You ever played an ele?

Berserker’s only works if you position well and have a strong front line. Otherwise you will die. Really fast.^^

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

Blackhat.4016:

Caffynated.5713 pretty much explained it.^^

I would suggest Celestial then. It’s works really well and you can use it for every build. Sentinel’s can work too although I’m not a huge fan.

I am an ele, for frak sake. Zerkers? You ever played an ele?

Yes, since BWEs and currently in Gold League (EU). I even wrote a few guides about eles back then (2 are in my signature although they’re now outdated).

If Berserker’s doesn’t work for you feel free to use different stats.

Seems stupid for an ele to use Zerkers. Really stupid glass cannon, no place for that in WvW.

I got a cannon, and it is in a tower I took good care of building to T3. Also got about 6 superior ac and a couple of trebs. Dont need no zerker glass stuff. I need to heal my zerg when I run with them.

Just wondering if I should Ebonmane’s staff, is all.

It is pretty expensive.

Thanks, Blackhat, some of that may work for us.

You probably know, there are multiple factors. Our big deals are coverage, since not so many of us play WvW, and coordination, since those who play are kindof new to WvW. We have some passion tho, so look out.

Zephyrus.9680:

Berserker or celestial. Celestial stats are good but full celestial is not. So zerker is better in much more cases. I wouldn’t recommend any other stat.

Staff is an extremely long range, high CC, and defensive skill set so “tank” staff ele makes no sense unless you’re new.

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

I am traited for seige so combo healing/toughness/condition damage seems to make sense, but would like input. (full ac, cannon, treb, cata)

No offense but that’s doing it wrong. Heavies should be on the siege if it’s taking damage.

Sorry but heavies usually have no clue about that kind of patience. It takes a lot of time and gold to build siege. Try it. Especially if you are on my server. Please.

if you are TC, tick siege. If not, let it time out. Thanks.

1)The amount of healing your water fields will give is dependent on the healing power of the person that blasts it.

2)Condition damage stats? Really? Please change asap. Get some celestial/knights/zerker/soldier/whatever pieces. Mix and match them until you get the optimal stats.

3)You can’t go wrong with either a zerker or celestial staff.

why? you know, the talking outa yer kitten stuff, need to check

Zerkers just seems really stupid for a squishy support build. Need explaination for why that would work.

Like, you get killed just a few seconds slower, yay! You wasted other stats so you lived another 2 seconds. Wheee!

I play zerker and the key is positioning often times with the right position you don’t get hit by the zerg and i mean they completely ignore you.. and that’s punishing for them cause they’ll be walking under meteors that hit 5-6k per meteor..
although I do not recommend going zerker because of it’s squishiness if you don’t know how to position yourself don’t go zerker just don’t.

1 thing if you go zerker you don’t follow the tag during battle you go to the sidelines or the back to avoid the zerg clashing

Info in the wiki indicates healing attributes apply to out going heals as well as self heals. Is that true or not?

Good deal, Grim.

That aint me. I am all about support, defensive siege and healing.
I have other eles for that other stuff. But WvW, I am support, siege, healing.

the nice thing about Zerk ele is that you are the seige itself
you are a walking arrow cart with a measly 11k hp

good deal. We need those too.

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

Zerkers just seems really stupid for a squishy support build. Need explaination for why that would work.

Like, you get killed just a few seconds slower, yay! You wasted other stats so you lived another 2 seconds. Wheee!

It works if your coordinated group outmans the groups you face. If you are facing another coordinated group but are outmanned, you will fold like a tissue.

A more balanced tactic is to wear a mix of valk, soldiers, knights with some zerker weapons/trinkets. Get to over 16k hp, push to 1600 toughness, 30% crit unbuffed, etc. Once there, analyze your fights. If you are surviving easily, and not going down before your melee train, start adding another piece of zerker gear. Do this until you feel you aren’t surviving well enough, and back it off a bit.

PS: Clerics gear is almost useless for a staff ele in WvW. You don’t have more survivability than you do with soldiers, contrary to what people may think, and, as what has been said enough on this thread, blasting water fields offer the biggest heals but they are dependent on the healing power of the person blasting the field.

Celestial is equally not that good for staff since, again… the healing power/condi dmg doesn’t really help you and your attack is woefully low.

Condition dmg is bad because staff has a total of 2 condition skills, earth 2 and fire 3. And earth 2 is super easy to avoid. I’ve actually tried hybrid condition/celestial build on staff, only because I used it on s/d. It wasn’t worth it for staff.

Good eles can use full zerker or close and dish out massive damage while still being the last ones standing because ele utilities and range allows for such strong positioning.

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

Zephyrus.9680:

Berserker or celestial. Celestial stats are good but full celestial is not. So zerker is better in much more cases. I wouldn’t recommend any other stat.

Staff is an extremely long range, high CC, and defensive skill set so “tank” staff ele makes no sense unless you’re new.

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

I am traited for seige so combo healing/toughness/condition damage seems to make sense, but would like input. (full ac, cannon, treb, cata)

No offense but that’s doing it wrong. Heavies should be on the siege if it’s taking damage.

Sorry but heavies usually have no clue about that kind of patience. It takes a lot of time and gold to build siege. Try it. Especially if you are on my server. Please.

Touche. I think.

Zephyrus.9680:

Condition dmg is bad because staff has a total of 2 condition skills, earth 2 and fire 3. And earth 2 is super easy to avoid. I’ve actually tried hybrid condition/celestial build on staff, only because I used it on s/d. It wasn’t worth it for staff.

Good eles can use full zerker or close and dish out massive damage while still being the last ones standing because ele utilities and range allows for such strong positioning.

Amen. while I still think Ele is underpowered because of our extremely low hp and low armor and our damage is sub par even with full zerker, I do agree Ele has the Strongest and Weakest AoE’s in the game..

Weakest in the sense it’s very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very easy to dodge.. Lava Font? 1 dodge.. Meteor? 2 Dodge.. (sometimes you don’t even need to dodge) Eruption? you can literally just walk out of it..

but hey if they decide to chill in a lava font that’s 15k worth of damage.. if they decide to try and use an umbrella to cover meteors that’s alot of damage XD

A few things:

*Don’t go 100% full zerker, even with guard stacks any decent thief or other bursty periphery roamer will instakill you. Just taking a bit of retal damage will put you below the one-shot threshold.

*Having that said you should go for some zerker pieces. Personally i use zerk/valk trinkets (1 cava), ascended celestial staff (1 crit), celestial helm/body/legs (1 crit), swapping rest between soldier and zerker.

*Stay away from anything based off healing-power or condi-damage, It’s really not worth it. The same goes for full soldier/sentinel builds.

The stats you pick is up to the play style you want.
If you want to follow CMD tight and can drop water field when he wants = All Soldier (your healing power is not matter much since all heals are from blast finisher which scale on the healing power of the one who blast)

If you want to stay outside the zerg ball and do damage you can use combination of Soldier Armor+Berserker Trinkets.

If you want all around good survivability ok damge you can use combination of Knight Armor+Celestial Trinkets.

PS. I always use PVT Staff and try to max my power because power is good vs siege (no cri dmg to siege) and when you are on arrow cart power scale to you arrow cart damage too. So I use full soldier when I’m in organized guild group and Soldier+berserker when I play as a pug.

Celestial is the only way to go for ele right now.
Ele is the only class that benefits from every stat he has because of those 4 attunements.

People seems to forget that there are other ways to heal in addition to blasts.

with this build you can heal 20k+ HP every ~40 seconds, you alone :
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQFAWhEmKbzR3QlDAkHvYCLjChUeEzM2A-j0xAoNAqBQWsIas1tioxqawUqER1ukioVLFAyKjA-w

I tend to run with 2 staffs, when I reach the bloodlust cap I switch to a cleric staff with sigil of renewal to maximise the heals.

A combo I use sometimes when the group/zerg need heals: water attunement swap(3710hp) + regen from trait (2280 hp)—> dodge ( 3170 hp ) —> geyser+blast (5296 hp) —> Healing rain + whirl + earth attunement + dodge blast ( if all is timed right its near 10k hp ) = 24K+ hp if you do it right.

On top of that the whirl finisher+ cleansing wave + cleansing water will remove a lot of condition from your alies.

Your main role in a zerg as a Staff Ele is CC and providing Fire/Water fields. Secondary role is AoE DPS.

- Since your condition stacking ability is crap -> Condition no-no.

- Your only decent heal = Water 3 = Crap radius and mostly uses for blasting. PLUS your healing power-affected healing only heals 5 people who stands in it per tick. It is negligible compared to 10 people blasting it. -> Healing no-no.

So your objective is to survive as long as possible, to cast as many water fields/static fields/ice fields as possible, and your secondary purpose is DPS.

If you’re bad, go full PVT = Maximum survivability to fulfil your primary role.

If you’re good and can stay alive amongst the blobs, go Zerker to fulfil your secondary role.

IMHO, going Celestial puts you somewhere in the middle of the scale between survivability and DPS. Because so much more damage can be dealt by you via Skill-1-spam, Fire 2, Fire 5, Earth 2, Earth 5, Water 2. And if you rotate properly you get almost full Fury uptime, which really affects your output DPS.

Personally I recommend the usual staff ele support build, but with zerker armor and trinkets. Going full damage traits just doesn’t seem to work for WvW. For myself, I carry find Celestial to work when I want to quick-switch to D/D because you experience the healing power effect when you’re healing yourself or in small scale fights.

EDIT: Unless you’re going to run around spamming water 1 for the entire fight, you’ll find that your healing power will be lost when you’re out of water attunement (Well, most of the time).

I run with 60 % Celestial, 15 % Knight’s and 25 % Zerker’s. I use buffs (foods, bloodlust) to increase my power. Runes are traveler, since it is all about positioning and that 25 % increase helps a lot.

And I like it.

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

Seems stupid for an ele to use Zerkers. Really stupid glass cannon, no place for that in WvW.

My armour for staff ele is mostly berserkers. If I wasn’t so fidgety when my armour drops below 2200, I would be wearing a full berserker set.

It’s fine to be glass, provided you know what you’re doing. I’ve lived through hammer trains, aoe and when my internet decides to be terrible, with lag. If you have good combat sense, it’s fine to wear berserker as positioning and awareness become your means of survival.

The only time I would not recommend a full berserker set is if you are not confident enough with your skill (or if you find yourself getting 1-2 punched by the enemy hammer train on a regular basis).

I would get some celestial pieces but I’m cheap and lazy. Whoops.

The reason full celestial is bad for Ele is because it lacks power. I actually tried this as well and it was almost impossible to die, but, damage was way too low. With low power, precision and crit damage have little value because they are reliant on the power stat. That means you have lots of total stats but half them (your damage) aren’t optimized to be useful. That’s also why I don’t like knights set unless you really need the toughness over power. But mixed with some primary power gear, celestial pieces have have excellent synergy and give a good boost to survivability.

I would always prefer celestial over valk and knights on ele. Just, mixed with a power main stat set.

I found in general, in smaller groups you need more survivability and larger zergs you can do pretty much a dps zerker with mist form and teleport (because even a disorganized zerg will kill anyone out of position, you just need positioning to survive). Solo roaming can do whatever works though zerker build will have trouble 1v2 and 1v3.

urak.4863:

Your main role in a zerg as a Staff Ele is CC and providing Fire/Water fields. Secondary role is AoE DPS.

No static field?? Also, given that fields are mostly unaffected by caster’s stats, that doesn’t matter for build. IMO for ele, the support vs dps option is whether you go anywhere from 15-45% boon duration runes or full dps runes/ruby orbs. And that depends on build as well since Arcana builds and some others like earth (AoE stability) traits will see high returns on boon duration.

im using 100% Zerker from Armor to accessories and Staff running with 12k hp 47% crit chance 91% Crit dmg – goes up to 111% during combat and 4,000 attack with food and 25 bloodlust stacks and im doing fine in WvW

When I clicked on this thread, I did not expect to see so many recommend zerker gear. I’llhave yto try it out some time. As a somewhat newbie to wvw, I chose a mix of soldier and knight gear, with a zerker staff (though I have the bifrost so I can change whenever I want to). My primary focus is staying alive to provide fields and killing siege, so a more defensive set made sense to me.

What is the cookie cutter staff ele build?

Grim Jr.8946:

im using 100% Zerker from Armor to accessories and Staff running with 12k hp 47% crit chance 91% Crit dmg – goes up to 111% during combat and 4,000 attack with food and 25 bloodlust stacks and im doing fine in WvW

Classic rally bot build, don’t you get killed by thiefs/ranger in 2 attacks ? some thiefs can even oneshot you… meteor shower at the wrong time will melt you by retalation.

And how can you assault a keep ? you’ll die before crossing the first gate imho.

sminkiottone.6972:

Grim Jr.8946:

im using 100% Zerker from Armor to accessories and Staff running with 12k hp 47% crit chance 91% Crit dmg – goes up to 111% during combat and 4,000 attack with food and 25 bloodlust stacks and im doing fine in WvW

Classic rally bot build, don’t you get killed by thiefs/ranger in 2 attacks ? some thiefs can even oneshot you… meteor shower at the wrong time will melt you by retalation.

And how can you assault a keep ? you’ll die before crossing the first gate imho.

ofcourse not. you don’t stay infront and I never Meteor shower at the wrong time or the wrong place. Thieves aren’t a problem they go down before I do considering they have almost the same hp as me.

funny thing is for Ele Zerker is actually the least common build

sminkiottone.6972:

Grim Jr.8946:

im using 100% Zerker from Armor to accessories and Staff running with 12k hp 47% crit chance 91% Crit dmg – goes up to 111% during combat and 4,000 attack with food and 25 bloodlust stacks and im doing fine in WvW

Classic rally bot build, don’t you get killed by thiefs/ranger in 2 attacks ? some thiefs can even oneshot you… meteor shower at the wrong time will melt you by retalation.

And how can you assault a keep ? you’ll die before crossing the first gate imho.

ofcourse im lying if I say i don’t go down.. it’s hard not to. I mainly only use staff when I go with zergs and use Scepter and Dagger during roaming I even have a video in youtube showing off scepter and dagger burst while roaming

I’m a PVT Ele that plays as a support (lots of CC skills, heals, damage in enemy’s restack) with zergs. I came back to GW2 a couple days agor and I want to try something new too

Anyway, here is a video of some battles of this week (JQ/BG/SoS):
http://youtu.be/P54tEQu_3zM

mozzato.6157:

I’m a PVT Ele that plays as a support (lots of CC skills, heals, damage in enemy’s restack) with zergs. I came back to GW2 a couple days agor and I want to try something new too

Anyway, here is a video of some battles of this week (JQ/BG/SoS):
http://youtu.be/P54tEQu_3zM

wow I thought I was the only one who uses Tornado XD Good video but the bgm is kinda boring XD

I really miss wizards obviously gw2 has no wizards and ele is the next best thing AoE and all… I miss casting a really long spell and people would either run away or try to stop me and if they couldn’t they’d either be heavily damaged or dead XD sadly ele is supposed to be “Jack of all trades” which imo is horrible

Thanks so much for all the suggestions, everyone. Good stuff.

Zephryus, I’m thinking eles don’t do that much damage in the zerg anyway. I’m seem to be out there throwing heals and boons, and basically leeching WxP so I can build up my siege traits. I’m not actually killing much except by pitching in a little in emergencies. Is a zerker build going to change that or just make me squisher and more of an agro foo?

I’m thinking my best damage is done with acs and trebs. That’s where I see the multiple four digit damage numbers.

Zephyrus, also, someone said here that condition damage stats translate to siege damage. Do you know if that is true?