Guild Wars 2

Which gear, or karma vendor is best for pve damage ele?

It’s honestly up to you; this game doesn’t restrict one class to Power, one class to Percision, etc. If you want to do more damage, get power or percision – if you need more survivability, get toughness or vitality.

Thank you for your help, much appreciated.

I use Carrion gear for Condition damage, it has power and vitality on it also.

As for the best gear, there is some Karma gear in Orr. I think it costs about 250 000 Karma. Or some WvW gear, which is about 1000 tokens.

I am not sure how good these are, but for other classes they are sort after.

It depends on what type of damage you do. Critical? Condition? or any of the other types of gear. Craft some gear and try out a build.
Also it helps if you know what type of combat, PvE? Dungeons? WvW?

I been using a Staff-Fire build, I been told, precision, condition, then power for stat’s, but the karma gear in orr that cost’s 42,000, doesn’t have the stat’s

I just buy exotic armor on the trading post and call it a day. I personally look for anything with ‘Carrion’ in it then rune it up how it suits me. I haven’t been much of a fan on the karma vendor armor itemization. I like to be able to live through something hitting me more than once.

I’m also all about Carrion. Gives me exactly what i need – power, condition damage and vitality. focusing on vitality seems to work better for me than toughness but i’ve seen others say the opposite?

Echonight.7126:

I been using a Staff-Fire build, I been told, precision, condition, then power for stat’s, but the karma gear in orr that cost’s 42,000, doesn’t have the stat’s

Condition damage for a FIRE…STAFF…elementalist? I would get a second opinion on that.

Second opinion: No no no and no.

Fire and staff = power/precision.

rozcinana.7249:

I’m also all about Carrion. Gives me exactly what i need – power, condition damage and vitality. focusing on vitality seems to work better for me than toughness but i’ve seen others say the opposite?

Depends on your enemy and the damage you take.

Toughness is going to do squat against conditions (burning, bleeding,poison).
A little more vitality won’t make that much of a difference if you cant reduce some insane burst (admittedly, it can be negated by dodge, but you run out of that eventually for a short period of time)

So yeah…have both.

Keep in mind that power/precision does nothing to improve your dots, while condition damage doesn’t improve any of your direct damage. It makes it tough to balance all 3 stats effectively due to this lack of synergy.

Personally I’d say go either power/precision or power/conditions depending on which weapon you are using and which attunements you favour. And round it off with either vitality or toughness as your third stat for survivability.

Going vitality & toughness + either power or conditions is also viable for a tankier, lower damage build. You need to trait to really support your damage type (e.g. dots) as you will be relying on it exclusively.

Korath.7402:

Keep in mind that power/precision does nothing to improve your dots, while condition damage doesn’t improve any of your direct damage. It makes it tough to balance all 3 stats effectively due to this lack of synergy.

And a FIRE elementalist build with STAFF has exactly 1 dot which can be used whenever off CD, 2 if you count the terrible occasionaly/rarely used “4” and a 30% burn from a crit.

So condition damage would ultimately be useful on one ability for a fire staff ele “3”. “4” is terrible and the damage (burn) from the fire trait benefits more from power than from condition (+power/precision = more damage on crit initially and 30% off of the higher damage, so you improve 2 sources of damage with condition you only improve the 30% dot which we be lower than your power/precision dot as well as condition dmg scaling less than power)

So for a staff fire ele, 100% go for power/precision and some vitality/toughness for survivability. Condition damage for you in particular will have little bonus.

I agree power/precision is the way to go on staff. There’s a pretty good argument though for going power/condition on something like S/D though. I did say choose depending on your weapon choice and favourite attunements.

Being a level (like 120 by now) ele, and doing nearly all the dungeons, I can attest that if you are rolling staff, you don’t apply a lot of conditions typically, and Power/Precision is the route to go. BUT and I stress BUT…being able to get crazy #s with those critical hits is useless, if you are dead. For every second your dead thats another 1000-1500 damage per second your NOT doing….so at least in your gear, you can go with power/precision/crit
and for your jewlery, go with Berel Jewels, which are Power/Vitality/Crit Damage.

I would only suggest rolling condition damage gear, if you are going scepter/dagger or dagger/dagger as that setup rolls quite a bit more conditions.

And as a note, rolling full condition damage, my bleeds and burns were doing 70ish damage instead of 50. Times that by the 6 ish #’s that showed, and thats 120 a second since the bleeds were a few times a second, so maybe 300 more damage a second? Less then what I did in damage with staff, by not applying conditions and just using say, my aa in fire, and my secondary lava flow below the guy, and rolling my traits so that my air/fire do more damage and recharge faster.

i’m mostly using staff fire and i’m making myself knight set accessories and valkyrie set armor with berserk staff… i think that is a nice mix of everything… and i usually have 20 points in water for a little bit more HP… crit is about 35% which is enough for me…

Power/Prec/Crit Damage.

You will find condition damage is very lackluster, and boosting it takes a lot of focus and the reward is blah.

Also you will find that the damage with a Staff is…well low.

So if you try anything but a near-glass build you will find your DPS to range from garbage to sigh.

You can get away with a 80-90% offense 20-10% defense build and use your skill to make up for the rest, along with defensive abilities like Mist forum and such.

But as it stands Staff is the lowest DPS, Scepter/Dagger is ok if the enemy stands still, and Dagger/Dagger is not too bad even if they move.

Of course you have the lowest HP/Armor/Survivability in the game…so yeah.

But going fire/staff I assume you want DPS and thus have focused information on that.

You might be one of the…its cool if I do 1/4th the damage as long as I occasionally make the enemy walk slower, and I dont know, give half the party crap regen, and heal 1-2 people, maybe for 5-10% of their life bar, a couple times a minute…type of guy.

In which case ignore everything I said.

Mytheos.7205:

…

Of course you have the lowest HP/Armor/Survivability in the game…so yeah.
…

You might be one of the…its cool if I do 1/4th the damage as long as I occasionally make the enemy walk slower, and I dont know, give half the party crap regen, and heal 1-2 people, maybe for 5-10% of their life bar, a couple times a minute…type of guy.

In which case ignore everything I said.

Hah…bitter elementalist much? We are in need of some tweaks…being glass paintball guns vs glass cannons…

Regardless:

I run about 60/40 Berserker/Valkyrie. (Power/Precision/Crit, and Power/Vitality/Crit). With traits I run:
20/30/0/20/10. This gives me a really nice balance of survivability and damage.

If you throw on the signet of air, you get an extra I believe 10% crit chance which is nice, and when the battle is nigh over you can do a decent burn with it as well. I think we definitely are lackluster for most pve but I do think we do fairly well, in the dungeon category with other classes. Definitely don’t shine by any long shot, but we aren’t worthless either. I did a dungeon run last night, with 4 ele’s and a warrior. It was the fastest I had EVER seen the dungeon go, and we dropped the end boss substantially faster.

Why is carrion so popular? In dungeons and pvp, bleed builds are great, but for general pve, they’re stupid and not worth the effort. Power vitality and condition damage is such poor synergy for stat combos. I think way too many eles overestimate how much power they’re really getting when they put so much effort into speccing power.

And condition damage is ONLY good if you’re stacking conditions (read: bleed). I don’t understand why so many eles tend to forget this.

Aries.5182:

Why is carrion so popular? In dungeons and pvp, bleed builds are great, but for general pve, they’re stupid and not worth the effort. Power vitality and condition damage is such poor synergy for stat combos. I think way too many eles overestimate how much power they’re really getting when they put so much effort into speccing power.

And condition damage is ONLY good if you’re stacking conditions (read: bleed). I don’t understand why so many eles tend to forget this.

They don’t get carrion because they love bleed specs but because in order to survive a sneeze you must be earth spec => bleed specs.

Same result, opposite reasons.

Why do people think that condition damage (and hence Carrion gear) is so bad for staff users?

As a staff user, your only real sources of major damage are lava font, flame burst, meteor shower, eruption, and shockwave. All of these do most of their damage as condition damage except for lava font and meteor shower, and the latter is something that’s only useful in special situations. While it’s true that D/D has many more ways to apply conditions, this is only because the staff has so few ways to do damage in general.

I think Carrion gear is pretty solid for staff users as you deal a pretty even mix of both direct damage and condition damage. This is doubly true if you use Evasive Arcana as your attacks in both Fire and Earth attunement do condition damage. The only way I can see you wanting precision instead of condition damage is if you’re a lousy player and you just sit in fire all day casting lava font and autoattacking.

Not to mention that even a “staff user” will occasionally want to swap to D/D or some other weapon set in special situations. If your gear is purely power/precision/toughness, you’re going to need to invest in and carry around a second set of gear to be able to use anything other than a staff properly. With Carrion gear, you’ve got something that works with any weapon combination and against any sort of opponent (as the large amount of vitality keeps you safe from both direct damage and conditions).

Am I missing something?

lambda.5324:

Why do people think that condition damage (and hence Carrion gear) is so bad for staff users?

As a staff user, your only real sources of major damage are lava font, flame burst, meteor shower, eruption, and shockwave. All of these do most of their damage as condition damage except for lava font and meteor shower, and the latter is something that’s only useful in special situations. While it’s true that D/D has many more ways to apply conditions, this is only because the staff has so few ways to do damage in general.

I think Carrion gear is pretty solid for staff users as you deal a pretty even mix of both direct damage and condition damage. This is doubly true if you use Evasive Arcana as your attacks in both Fire and Earth attunement do condition damage. The only way I can see you wanting precision instead of condition damage is if you’re a lousy player and you just sit in fire all day casting lava font and autoattacking.

Not to mention that even a “staff user” will occasionally want to swap to D/D or some other weapon set in special situations. If your gear is purely power/precision/toughness, you’re going to need to invest in and carry around a second set of gear to be able to use anything other than a staff properly. With Carrion gear, you’ve got something that works with any weapon combination and against any sort of opponent (as the large amount of vitality keeps you safe from both direct damage and conditions).

Am I missing something?

Nope, that was exactly my reasoning as well.

Critical hits only deal impressive amounts of damage whilst in fire attunement. People saying they’re “fire staff elementalists” are missing the point, and a great deal of their overall damage.

Because I only use the staff in groups, and dual-wield the various combinations of 1-hand weapons in solo PvE, I needed stats that would work with all of them. And no matter what weapon you use, you’re always going to have burning and bleeding.