Guild Wars 2

Here are two screenshots showing two spreadsheets that I made for classes with traits that are convoluted. It turned out that I only needed it for the Mesmer in the beginning. Now, it is useful for the Elementalist. I think the category listing of traits might be helpful to others. Trait numbers are color coded for convenience. Duplicates exist if a trait is substantially part of more than one category.

The spec is what I run at the moment. It is my first time back into Arcana after vowing not to return until Lingering Attunements was fixed and the attunement delay timer was returned to the shorter time (basically, reverse the nerf). I do not plan on staying with this spec for the same reason, but I wanted to gauge Arcana after the last patch.

Use the ss if they help you. Comment on anything you want. Let me know if there is a trade-off in my spec that is undesirable, and tell me why.

I expect someone will point out that the attribute modifiers and the constant traits at 5, 15, 25 are missing without the trait lines shown, so here are those.

This comparison list shows the attributes values for any light armor class. Upgrades for weapons and armor are not factored. These values reflect exotic items.

10 earth vs 20 water
passive damage reduction from 100 toughness nets you some amoutn of DR, i really doubt it goes above 10% in which case to get same amount of effective hp out of it as you´d get from extra 100 vitality from water you´d need to take 10 000 damage, if it´s 5% you´ll need to take 20 000 to get the same out of it.

Earths embrace vs water 15 pointer.
Earths embrace has 90s cd, during which you could get propably about 5 water swaps. 1,5k hp each. To get the same effective hp out of it you´d have to take 23k damage during the next 6 seconds of it´s activation to get same amount of effective hp out of the trait.

Basicly it´s whole lot more effective hp and free major trait vs 6s stability that activates at random time in combat with 90s cd and small amount of condition damage

Final shielding vs elemental attunement.
Final shielding will block 3 hits at random point in combat with 90s cd. Elemental attunement gives you about 30-50% uptime protection for whole engagment. I dare say elemental attunement will give more effective hp than final shielding. On top of that it gives you regen, might and swiftness freeing you not to have to take the 25% dagger speed boost. That way you can trait vigor on crits (easily near perma uptime with just the fury from attunements, and therefore strictly better than endurance regen while channeling) Freeing the air trait to take either damage traits or zephyrs boon for added swiftness and fury.

Strang.8170:

10 earth vs 20 water
passive damage reduction from 100 toughness nets you some amoutn of DR, i really doubt it goes above 10% in which case to get same amount of effective hp out of it as you´d get from extra 100 vitality from water you´d need to take 10 000 damage, if it´s 5% you´ll need to take 20 000 to get the same out of it.

Earths embrace vs water 15 pointer.
Earths embrace has 90s cd, during which you could get propably about 5 water swaps. 1,5k hp each. To get the same effective hp out of it you´d have to take 23k damage during the next 6 seconds of it´s activation to get same amount of effective hp out of the trait.

Basicly it´s whole lot more effective hp and free major trait vs 6s stability that activates at random time in combat with 90s cd and small amount of condition damage

Final shielding vs elemental attunement.
Final shielding will block 3 hits at random point in combat with 90s cd. Elemental attunement gives you about 30-50% uptime protection for whole engagment. I dare say elemental attunement will give more effective hp than final shielding. On top of that it gives you regen, might and swiftness freeing you not to have to take the 25% dagger speed boost. That way you can trait vigor on crits (easily near perma uptime with just the fury from attunements, and therefore strictly better than endurance regen while channeling) Freeing the air trait to take either damage traits or zephyrs boon for added swiftness and fury.

If you where to take a 10 point earth trait for defense wouldn’t elemental shield be even better? I always preferred it over earths embrace anyway.

Strang.8170,
The chance to heal a character is why DR is more valuable than HP. Given an option to add more DR or HP, assuming equal effectiveness, DR is preferred. This is a topic that could run a lengthy thread of its own, but I think we both understand it. The +180 Armor from Earth line 100 is a bet that a fight will go past base Health. Hopefully I can a play skilled enough to make healing useful. Also, Earth’s Embrace does not trigger Armor of Earth’s cooldown, and, unverified by me, the wiki claims it also triggers Spell Slinger and Soothing Disruption.

oZii.2864,
Repeated passing of the 50% Health threshold should repeatedly invoke the buffs.

My last argument in favor of my build is that (time on target) > (water attunement(locked 2s) every 9s)

If you where to build a support style d/d ele with healing power what would you pick up as far as gear, runes and traits. I’m all set on my dps setup but starting to work on a d/d tanky healing setup.

Right now it is basically 0/10/0/30/30 with full clerics armor but I run runes of guardian to get toughness main stat and a bit more healing power. I run another toughness rune in place of the 6 piece. Trinkets are all clerics, weapons are soldiers. back piece is soldiers.

ImProVocateur.5189:

Earths embrace has it´s own icd of 90s.

To get the same amount of damage reduced from earths embrace, as you´d get from heals if you took water 15, you´d need to take that 23k damage during it´s 6s duration everytime it activates and this is assuming it´s active every 90s (if not it falls even further behind) That means that if you have somewhat standard 16k health, you need to take 23k damage when you´re at 8k hp. during that 6 seconds you can scrounge up heal skill, water dodge and water 5 skill, amounting to about 8k hp, so you still need to get 7k healing from other sources during that 6 seconds to get same amount of defense out of it while coming out with a sliver of health left after having blown all the healing available to you.
If you want to claim that extra 100 toughness makes up for that during the downtime, you get 5% dr increase from that if you have abosulutely no other sources of toughness. So to make up for that you need to take 140 000 damage during the next 83 seconds. about 1,7k damage a second for 83 seconds if you will, when you´re at brink of death already.

So, as you can see there´s no feasible situation where 10 in earth will provide more defense than 20 in water. Not only that but 10 in earth is really far behind water 20, so in essence, you will lower your defense a LOT, to get 6s of uncontrollable stability, where as you could be getting a kitten ton more defense, and another major trait slot.

This is a situation where, if it wasn´t for that stability, water 20 would be strictly better. As it´s now, one could argue that 6s of stability you have no control over is a non-factor, although not technicaly true, that´s how it prettymuch is.

Feel free to point out a situation where 10 in earth does bring more defense incase i´m wrong, you can include any of the cantrip traits if you want too.

<edit> And on the time on target > attuning to water argument…water attunement should be part of your rotation anyway (for cooldown reasons, utility and damage from skills, etc), so it´s not like you do anything outside normal even with 20 in water, the attuning 5 times during 90 seconds does not require you to keep water attunment on cd, if you did that you could attune to water 8 times every 90s.

oZii.2864,
I understand the multi-purpose of your question. The worst thing we can do is act like a [WARNING: Loaded word ahead. Use caution.] “support” role is the right mindset for devs to have. I would rather we think of every player action as a support action. Someone needs to kill the enemy. That is damage support. GW2 was made to differentiate classes based upon their damage support. Every class is supposed to be able to provide non-damage group support in role relevant ways. The Ele does that mostly with combo fields, yet there is little in the way of traits to enhance that with all attunements. To think of support in any other way is counter productive, so you must accept my decline to imagine otherwise. I would be interested to see your idea, though.

Strang.8170,
Woe the Ele for the many disempowering mechanics plagued upon it. I hope you are wrong about the icd for Earth’s Embrace . I have been practicing with this build (obviously not using the disabled Arcana 20 trait) in sPvP, and have had more success than expected with d/f. I will try to pay more attention to when that buff works or not.

Your numbers are all over the place when discussing Earth/Water trade-offs. We all know that every skill and trait is not available at all times, but nerfs to the Ele are done as if any skill or trait is always active. Your own claim to the benefit of Water asserts the same illogic. I have one trait to bind at Water 10, or two traits to bind at Water 20. I most certainly do not have Cleanse, +20% damage, +10% damage, Regen & Vigor proc, and inflict Vulnerability. I have one choice among those options. Ten more points in Water gives one more option. You are stretching the truth quite a bit to make your point. May I suggest one or more .jpeg that proves your argument. I would definitely like to see how you figure 23k and 140k as compensable damage to excuse toughness speccing.

Indeed the nubmers are bit off, jsut threw them on top of my head, appologises, but the difference is so clear i didn´t feel teh need for precision.

I´m not sure what you mean about traits, so let me just clarfiy what i mean.

I´m claiming that 20 in earth with any trait choice for 20point major, is better than 10 points in earth with earths embrace for survivability.

To prove this, i´ll compare the healing you´d get vs damage you´d reduce. The difference is that with healing you first lose health, but gain portion of it back where as with DR you take less damage in first place. If the amount of damage reduced is equal to health gained, you will end up with same amount of hp left.

From that follows that to get the same effect ouf of damage reduction as you´de get from healing, the amount of damage reduced needs to be the same as healing gained during a certain amount of time.

Every 90s you will have 6s of 33% increase in DR, so 33% of incoming damage needs to match the healing you could get during that 90s periods in order for them to be equaly effective.

Incoming damage is x, you will reduce 0.33x, 0.77x is the damage you will take.

For DR to be as effective as healing, 0.33x needs to be the amount of healing you could get during 90s. Total cd on water attunement is 11.25s with 30 in arcana, 90s/11.25s=8 so 8 times is maximum number of times you can swap to water. In order to not require keeping water attunement on cd we will estimate you can attune to water atleast 5 times with any kind of rotation. Cleansing wave heals for 1302+healing power(at the very least 200 with 20 in water), 5 procs of cleansing wave means 5 times healing from one cast, in total 5 times 1502 = 7510 health. So 0.33x=7510, x=22 758 (as you can see i forgot to continue from here last time)
0.77x is the damage you take with protection, which is 17 523.

That tells us we would need to take 17 523 during that 6s of protection, when we were already below 50% hp to procc the trait. If we assume we had that fairly common 16k health, and we can use heal skill, water dodge, and water 5 skill on dagger (if you use focus the situation becomes even worse as you´re blocked out of this skill) we can with 100 healing power (from 100 in water) heal for 5120 + 1402 + 1402 = 7924
so we are at 16 000 divided by 2 health to procc the trait, that is 8000hp, we can heal 7924, so we have effectively 15924 HP, and we need to take 17 523 damage to be as effective as the other choice. That´s 1599 damage we need to somehow negate.

Well let´s say we come out with 1 health, that means water 20 choice has done 1600 points of health better. But the earth choice did have one other thing going for it, the 100 toughness you get from it. That 100 toughness provides extra 5.17% DR if you have not other source of toughness so in order for that amount of DR to be as effective as extra healing you would´ve gained from water 20 compared to earths embrace, that 0.0517x needs to be 1600 health, x=30 948, and again damage really taken is 0.9483x=29 347, so during the 90 second period you will have to take 29 347 damage for DR to be as effective as the healing on top of the damage you need to take during the 6s period after the erath embrace procc. So you start from 1hp, all heals on cd, and have to soak over 29k damage during the next 83s. not to mention that you´d have to regain atleast 8k hp to survive the next procc of earths embrace.

So in an ideal situation where you keep surviving with a sliver of health, and the earths embrace activates every 90s, you barely get the same amout of survivability as you´d get from 20 in water and casualy doing skill rotations.
Now keep in mind
-Every second that earth embrace isn´t active or on cd, it´s doing absolutely nothing and falls further behind in terms of survivability offered.
-Any additional toughness decreses the % of DR you gain from the extra 100 from earth, further reducing the survivability you get out of it.
-Any damage you don´t take during the combat lessens the amount of damage reduced by 10 in earth, and thus decreases it´s effect compared to healing gained from 20 in water.

Someone may notice that there´s still mistakes in my numbers, but i just can´t be kitten d to do this again, this works as an estimate well enough anyway.