Guild Wars 2

Haven’t really seen one so far on the forums, as most people dismissed the trait initially (myself included), but still i wanted to experiment and try to work out something with it.
At first i went with what seemed most logical to me (6/0/0/4/4) to keep the standart goodies from water and arcana. But that didn’t work out so well for me, so i tried a very different approach to it, and well… it was pretty good.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFEQJAoYhcMqb23wxBf0ACAGpsQ4AQCoIO+G8DKCA-T1iEABCpEThTAwKq+wkyAe2fAKlGQ8AAAwEHiqBsnegCUCSIABjBA-w

Now, looking at the gear i put in, that’s just the stuff that i ran the build with, and it is by no means optimal! So feel free to try it with your own set of items, whatever works for you.
In regards to the runes, i knew i wanted a power rune for this (since this is a pure power build) and vampire runes seem good for 2 reasons:
1. They are very cheap
2. They provide some extra healing which is good since this build doesn’t have the standart healing traits (3 water, 6 arcana).

As can be seen, it has very high power and toughness. For crits, it relies entirely on the new sigil of intelligence (crits are important to apply the blind outside of fire attunement). The only thing that is lacking i’d say is vigor. However i personally didn’t miss it that much, probably due to the high toughness. Oh yeah, and lightning flash
To give you an idea of the damage it can do, with 12 stacks of might i managed to hit 8k churning earth and 7k fire grab on a camp boss in WvW. Probably due to having +30% dmg modifier in that situation.

I wanted to try something different and had a blast with it in the past couple of hours with small scale WvW, so figured i’d share it.

I don’t PvP all that much, so I don’t really understand your build, but I actually DID try to think of an application of Blinding Ashes to PvE. That abruptly stopped when I realized through experimentation that the trait has a 5 second global cooldown – meaning that once you blind something, you can’t blind anything else for 5 seconds.

Indeed, this trait looks promising at first glance, but the cool down makes this a master worthy trait at best. 30 fire is simply too much of a sacrifice for a single blind every 5 seconds.

If you could better control when it was used, maybe, but Ele simply has too many unintentional ways of spamming burning for this to be reliable for big hits you see coming.

I’ve played a bit with the trait yesterday (hotjoin only), it was fine when I encountered a single oponent but, much more likely, this wasn’t the case and the blind often went off to some other opponent, pet, or clone instead of my target.
The idea behind Blinding Ashes is so cool! But, oh well, not like this.

So i thought i noticed a pattern while playing around with this build, so i hopped over to the dummies in heart of the mists.
Turns out, blinding ashes does prioritize your selected target. Meaning if you apply burning to multiple targets simultaneously (most easily noticed with Drake’s Breath), the target that you have selected is gonna be the one getting the blind.

its nice for stomping but other traits better, if it worked out, tht the skill went on cd per person so can blind 3 people at once but cant blind them again for 5 secs be better.

Blinding Ashes does seem like an interesting trait to me, and I’ve been wanting to experiment with the trait, haven’t gotten to yet. And I use Vampire Runes a lot too when I’m experimenting with builds xD I just kinda wish the “turn into the mists” counted as actual Mist Form to receive Cantrip bonuses from traits…

Anyways— A couple suggestions if I may. Since you’re running a signet build, and we’re all about lighting people on fire, I’d swap out Signet of Air for Signet of Fire, for two reasons— One, you’re technically not losing the blind-on-demand of the Signet of Air, and two, you’re only at 8% crit chance, which other than the Sigil’s effect, you’re not going to see crits that often, I assume. And yea, that’s a loss of 25% running… but honestly, it’s not going to give you as much of an advantage in the heat of battle as the Signet of Fire will.
Secondly, I’d trade out Burning Fire for Fire’s Embrace. I am a huge fan of Cantrips, and Cleansing Fire does synergize nicely with this build since it burns, but since we’re running a signet build and fighting at close quarters, getting 3 seconds of Fire Shield every time we use a Signet is a pretty awesome deal, since it gives might and burns our foe when we get hit.
Also, its more of a personal preference, but I would prefer Soothing Wave if you stayed with keeping some points in the water trait, since that would give an extra bit of heals, and its only losing 8 seconds off of Cleansing Fire. If survival is still an issue, you could also drop Elemental Shielding, allowing for a 3 second Protection buff on demand, rather than Earth’s Embrace on the random moment of hitting 50%…. and with two Auras on weapons and three Auras from Signets, that’s 15 seconds of Protection…. Not bad. Maybe even add Signet Mastery… of course, that would put a 10% dip in your damage.
Lastly, while like I said, I’m a fan of the Vamp Runes, and cheap is nice, if you decide to invest further into this build, obviously the Rune of Fire or Rune of Flame Legion would synergize nicely with this build.

Anyways, just a couple of thoughts~ Happy Building~

Scrib.9207:

So i thought i noticed a pattern while playing around with this build, so i hopped over to the dummies in heart of the mists.
Turns out, blinding ashes does prioritize your selected target. Meaning if you apply burning to multiple targets simultaneously (most easily noticed with Drake’s Breath), the target that you have selected is gonna be the one getting the blind.

Good to know. Does not save the trait from the junk pile, though