Guild Wars 2

My question ultimately boils down to the type of damage a D/D utilizes. Fire and Earth both apply conditions, so at first glance, I assume gearing for condition damage is the way to go. But after reading through a couple of forum posts I see more people leaning towards Power/Precision (burst) builds. So are then conditions for a D/D Elementalist complimentary to burst or vice versa?

The reason I ask is that I look at the multiple Burn effects added by fire, and don’t see how they can’t be beneficial to quickly taking down enemies. Using Condition damage gear would boost the effectiveness of those burns, and Earth Attunement (bleeds) would be boosted as well. A theoretical trait build would include options for survivability (Earth/Water+Cantrip utility) as follows: http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mmszz9mMTbvMMhwTMx0xa0okbcRoc .

Let me know your thoughts. Thanks in advance!

My experience is that while condition damage is useful, you get more damage out of power.

What sets it over the edge is that we have good access to fury for increased crit chance, which benefits from having more power.

Much of the D/D condition appliers benefit from power too. Like earth #2 applies a bleed but more of the damage comes from the direct attack. While earth #5 will get more from cond damage than power (unless you’re going all in with lots of precision and crit damage or something), it’s got a strong direct damage component too that benefits from power. Fire #2, while not a strong direct damage attack…does benefit from more power on the breath itself.

So you’ve got these few attacks that benefit a little more from cond damage than power, then a bunch of attacks that don’t use condition damage at all.

The condition damage is not very high and can be cleansed. In a situation like group WvW for an Elementalist, high burst damage is far more important than having DoTs that tick for a bit higher damage since people die very quickly in big WvW fights.

Take a look at Burning Speed and Ring of Fire – both of them may apply Burning, but the majority of your damage comes from landing the spell itself. Then you also have Fire Grab which has no condition damage component at all.

Ring of Earth and Churning Earth? Both of them have a bleed component, but it’s either a fairly weak stack or 8 stacks which can all be cleansed at the same time and the direct damage is already significant.

To truly excel with condition damage you want to be able to apply a large number of conditions to effectively minimize the chance of your Burning / Bleed being cleansed when spells are used for that purpose. Some of the best Engineer builds use this concept too, which makes it harder to cleanse the Confusion stacks they are dishing out.

Condition Damage as a stat is not bad, just as Healing Power is not bad, but there are better options for most situations.

And in PvE you run into the obvious problems that all condition damage suffers from which is the 25 stack cap etc.

….no
the build you made has no synergy.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEEQJArdhMmYbvR3wjEAkCtEUIACjHgICJiCPA;ToAg1Cuoay0koJbTumkNNaYWA

When you go condition build you want to have some time to build up those conditions thus having some range and being able to kite is important that is why I use Scepter/Focus when I do my condition build. The burn on crit allows you to do both burning and bleeding while in earth atunement plus since your signets give you fire aura which gives you fury, swiftness, might (when hit), protection and causes burning I’d say this is the go-to build for survivability+condition damage.
The survivability however is minimal compared to that of a D/D healer set-up but its decent none-the-less

What you do need to watch out for is when you are fighting multiple enemies. 5 veterans is no problem but if there’s a bunch of trash mobs too it’ll take a looooong time and many downs to beat ’m all. Having an off-hand dagger with the AoE knockdown and bleed combined with the aoe fire field would compensate for it.

• I also recently calculated how much damage you would do if you used a cantrip spell-slinger S/D build for might-stacking and when you get 12 bleeds and a burn on your enemy that is 2000 dmg per second. With a power/crit build you should be able to do 2000 dmg per second to but then right from the start without having to wait to proc all those conditions on them.

Also you should know that condition damage is not burst but sustained damage thus this would not work in spvp or tpvp. Lots of people bring condition removal so….

Here is an arcana D/D condition build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEEQJAoYhMmKbkRzgjEAkCtEKIgQxDQUeEzN1A;ToAg1CuowxgjAHLOOck4MIYWA
focus is not the condition damage but the crit that proc conditions and give you perma vigor. Its something I came up with on the fly so haven’t tested it yet.

From my experience I would say you currently ALWAYS want to have 30 points in arcana. It sounds boring but that’s just how good arcana is.

Attunement recharge rage = MUST for all builds.
Boon duration = extremly strong since boons are the only real advantage eles have in PvP.
Traits = also really strong compared to the fire/air/earth traits.

Besides that instead of earth I would focus on air for your damage. The huge earth damage skill (5) pretty much never hits because any good player just runs out of the AoE or dodges it. Like you said fire is good for damage though (skill 2 kinda sucks but 5 makes up for that).

In general elementalist don’t have that much single target burst (which you need in PvP) compared to something like a thief or a mesmer. You also don’t have a really strong defense like stealth or illusions unless you are building tanky. That’s why the D/D bunker build is way more popular than any D/D burst build. Sad but true.

I am not saying D/D burst builds don’t work, they are just not as good as the bunker one or the burst builds other professions have.

Gearing for any extra condition damage in WvW is a waste on an ele.

Burning scales poorly with condition damage, so speccing that on d/d means you’re relying on the bleed stacks in earth. This is very unreliable in a pvp setting, thus the gravitation towards power/precision.

You can splash some condition damage if you like, but I wouldn’t recommend investing too much into it.

Like others have mentioned, condition scales poorly and can get removed.

D/D ele’s most reliable form of damage will come from power above all else. While precision contributes, I think there are great debates on PVT vs. healing power (cleric) vs. precision (knights) and reasonable pros for each.

Power should give you most of the damage you need. D/D ele isn’t meant to do explosive damage anyways. Everything else goes towards your survivability through either vitality, toughness, or healing power while some opt for precision for a bit more damage

Prefer power myself, but you could test out carrion gear with something like 0/0/20/20/30 as your traits. You get your power, you get your boons, you get most of your healing as well as some condi dmg. Not so bad. Never tried it though so pure theory.

Thanks for all the replies. I probably should have mentioned this would be PvE centric, but the point has been made. The conditions compliment the power. Is gearing PVT the most efficient way to increase survivability, or do you guys find taking traits to help out necessary (versus points spent on increasing damage potential)?

P/V/T is really nice if you want to be tanky.

I could easily do fractal runs up to level 28 (without any AR) while not having to worry about dying each time an enemy hits me. Of course agony skills will kill you super fast but that’s not the point. The enemies in “higher” fractal levels hit really hard. If you can survive there you can survive any part of the game.

Besides that boons, dodge, runes and some traits increase your survivability. So there is no reason to worry about that.

Even for PvE I would say 30 points in arcana is really good. Being able to change attunements faster increases both your defense and offense. The increased Boon Duration also helps. The traits you should pick can be used for more damage or more survivability (e.g. Evasive Arcana).

For the rest of your points you can pick whatever you feel like. Fire/air for more damage, earth for a mix between defense and condition damage and water for even more survivability.

I really like having at least 10 points in water for “Cleansing Wave”. It is really good for any part of the game. The extra HP and healing power is also nice.