Guild Wars 2

3 D/D Ele videos in the same week? HYPE!

Got the clips for this video over the course of a few days, could’ve gotten some better footage if I’d waited but I edited this all together pretty quickly because I was excited about being able to play d/d again.. and it actually feeling like a viable option.

It genuinely feels like it holds it’s own again, and it still isn’t amazing but it makes a nice change to playing S/F all the time (because I still really don’t want to play tempest).

Enjoy!

WOOT! HYPEEEEEE!

D/D roaming not quite viable if you play in North America between 6pm – 2am Pac time. If you play in the morning you can roll the euro casual and pve players in North America. Hey even back 6-7 months ago I can 1v 3 or 1v4 people maybe down 1 or 2 but can’t flag. Most of the nice and spectacular Euro wvw ele d/d roaming vids not viable. If you cross me ele to ele you’d be fighting me for hours lol. Let alone fight 1v5. In reality if two powerful ele’s cross path the fight would last forever with current builds. I’m atleast happy there are still many poorly geared players to kill on euro servers.

DD ele is a dream now it’s nothing compared to what it was pre hot release massive nerfs. Back in the day I can fight off two tempest and dps them to death in spvp rank when pre fire trait and arcane nerfs. Yes it was like be the DH now but way more skillful and way more damage. People would cheer for the D/D eles in wvw and in spvp, we were respected …. but enough of those old memories. Yeah retro d.d ele needs buff since HOT made every prof a superior ele with more damage, heals, conditions and movement skills to escape. Most profs have tough, healing and condtion remove traits in one line. For an ele now that stuff is all spread out and it’s not even great or skillful to play with. You can even make it great with expensive gears, just minimize the flaws. :P

A lot of these people aren’t poorly geared players tho, i don’t know if the meta is different in NA now, but last time I played on NA it was no different to how it is here. your making it sound like people Build a lot tankier over there nowadays tho. I doubt that’s the case, but Most people run Maurder/zerker mix setups here, also yes if two ele’s with this build did cross each other, the fight would not end, that does not mean is unviable, I feel like it has a rather comfortable spot in this current meta between the decent sustain and damage, although the cds one some skills really could do with a change..This build is still more viable then people seem to believe despite that tho. It’s by no means meta, but it is viable.

I played a D/D ele back after beta and it made me fall in love with the game. After all the changes, I gave up and quit. Are they a legit class/build again?

Oh, and if I wanted to roll one, what armor would you suggest until I can afford the celestial ascended or just celestial in general?

SeranusGaming.7362:

I played a D/D ele back after beta and it made me fall in love with the game. After all the changes, I gave up and quit. Are they a legit class/build again?

Oh, and if I wanted to roll one, what armor would you suggest until I can afford the celestial ascended or just celestial in general?

I’d suggest getting some money first, or get the ascended from PvP now that you can. Celestial, marauder and crusader are pretty much irreplaceable for a d/d ele.
Though if you really wanna try it out first, I recommend (based on all current d/d ele roaming vids): around 2.1k power, ~2570 armor, ~350 healing power, ~30% crit chance, ~190% crit dmg and 16k HP.
Or something like this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAoIA-T1CEABsoqiWKHgf/haUJYLlgPcCAaRNAP0DwkSObUhAgHAApAycZE-w – if you have more celestial trinkets, be sure to equip them. Just aim for these stats roughly.
(you will get much, much better stats with ascended and cele + other 4 stat gear)

SeranusGaming.7362:

I played a D/D ele back after beta and it made me fall in love with the game. After all the changes, I gave up and quit. Are they a legit class/build again?

Oh, and if I wanted to roll one, what armour would you suggest until I can afford the celestial ascended or just celestial in general?

d/d is a legitimate build again, for me it always was, it just required some gear changing, when hot rolled around i dropped all healing power completely and stacked armour and vitality for awhile because recovering from the insane ranged damage that was around was nigh impossible, so weakening the hit all together was more beneficial to survival, as other classes have gotten nerfed over time we have slowly been able to fade back into our old multi stat spreads, and currently the build i posted (which I see you have looked at) is the absolute best setup i could find after countless hours trying different setups, the gnashblade food and durability runes allow us to stack -43% damage nearly permanently and -53% with frost aura, if you run it with tempest which is also an option you can stack -50% damage pernermantly, ontop of the 2.6k armour we have this gives us the tankiness we need to survive the current meta, and free’s up
Some stats to be able to take more a more offensive gear setup to be able to down the tankier opponents.

if you absolutely can not get any ascended at all, and want to hop right in, this is a decent cheap alternative you would be able to get straight off the trading post, don’t expect to be able to pull off anything amazing, and your be missing a lot of survival compared to the other build, but it is passable, and it will help you get a feel for d/d again and how its play-style fits into the current state of the game.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAoIGIAsaNkELDRBIAEEpswRIKA-TlSDQBD4BAkO9ApSJIAM/ND1fkwJAIhKDOiSMko0wf7PQKAZFaB-

note this is just an alternative for the time being, and i wouldn’t recommend it as a main build, as the other one is leaps and bounds ahead of it, sadly the best of the best gear is what d/d ele needs to fully compete now days.

@Noble.2670

Thanks for the detailed guide and the link. I’m going to try this out later tonight. I sadly still remember all my D/D tricks and hotkeys I set up. It was always fun even in PvE with the bow and the FGS.

Again, thanks for the help!

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAoIWOBMiJQAYBUEFHgfA3xaa9tC-TlyHABDpMBgTAw/KpeXVFBeAAfrHQIlChv/wcKB1TtiAAIA3sNDghO0hO0hO0u5Nv5Nv5NLFQm7sA-w

A little build I’ve been using with the spare parts that I have that’s why things seem mixed/matched a little weird. But basically at the heart of it it is a marauder ele. I’m actually preferring over the half-celestial variant. I think ele makes such huge use of marauder pieces based on the fact we need every stat in the book that we can get.

It packs a pretty big punch while still being tanky and still heals itself very well. I’ve consistently hit 4K burning speeds on semi-tanky targets, probably more towards 5K on squishy targets. And maybe 6K fire grabs on semi-tanky targets as well.

I’ve played ele exclusively for the past 2-3 months testing out different builds and what. The main problem I found with many ele builds is that it simply doesn’t deal enough sustained damage or have enough spike damage to really put pressure on people. Especially hard hitting melees like Warriors, DH, Daredevils, Scrappers, Heralds, etc.

But you would eventually die because the opponent would be just a more damaging, sustain version of you. Unless you roam with people who can fill the DPS void for you it just became pretty frustrating that you didn’t have that extra damage to really have people running or have them downed themselves trying to res an ally.

It’s difficult because Ele starts out with the least amount of stats out of everybody. You still need to have that toughness/vitality to be able to hang in there. It’s super important, but as a roamer, damage is also super important too because in outnumbered fights you are going to eventually die if you can’t put the pressure.

This is a tempest variant of pretty much what the OP posted. IMO I still prefer the tempest variant over vanilla because of the auras, AoE cleaving DPS, boons. However the fire variant is definitely better at spiking single targets down, to each their own I guess.

If I were to run vanilla I would probably run either Fire/Water/Arcane or Earth/Water/Arcane. Wasn’t a huge fan of Air/Water/Arcane TBH, the ability to deal with condis IMO was lacking.

To me though the best roaming set up for tempest is Water/Arcane/Tempest. Earth/Water/Tempest was really, really meh for me. Earth just seemed only slightly better in some situations and infinitely worse in others, depending on the traits you picked. I never realized how great Evasive Arcana was until I removed it. The Fire/Earth variants are nice DPS boosts + CC + blast finisher while the Water is a clutch heal/condi clear.

The main difference I noticed with Arcane was my ability to heal. When attuning to water I gain a 1.5k heal, another 1.5K heal + condi clear on dagger, another 1.5K heal + condi clear with Evasive Arcana + Leeching sigil which is another 1K heal. So literally a 5500 heal every time I attune to water. Not to mention the shorter CD on attunement swap is so clutch and so good for combos. Boon duration is good too and I can actually keep might stacks for extra damage. I think another major thing too is Fury. With earth you have no access to Fury at all which severely cuts your DPS and your main damage spikes (burning speed+lightning flash combo) just falls extremely flat. So IMO Arcana is better than Earth. Earth’s traits look good on paper but depending on what traits you pick they are only marginally more effective in certain situations and represent a huge DPS loss over Arcana.

And Durability runes hands down for D/D I found to be the best. 4.5 seconds of protection every 20 seconds, a regen which amounts to 1 condi clear every 20 seconds The resistance is just icing on the cake. Not to mention Boon Duration is amazing and flat out the amount of stats it gives you just makes it unrivaled.

As for foods, I found the gnashblade to be great, but I think a decent, viable alternative are also the omnomberry pies, they add a nice bit of DPS and healing to your build. So if you can’t afford it it isn’t a big deal.

Or if you are an Ele on a budget something like this could work.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAoIWOBM3xaa9tSMBCALgio4A8DA-TlyDABApU7HlEqoHAiTAwLq/0qSwdUGAg5v43fQiHAApAMXkF-w

Let me know your thoughts OP

@killahmayne: I really like the build in fact, when HoT had just released, I ran something really similar to the stats and gear you have. The marauder and durability armour then zerk and cav trinkets, I think what I got was pretty similar to yours but yours looks a bit better. Having said that though I played it pre-elemental bastion nerf so the healing was a bit better and I could get away with running next to no healing power. Maybe you can still get away with running no healing power on d/d tempest but if I ran it now I’d still probably go for the 300~ points of celestial. I stole this build straight from Elem’s Tempest video but you can see you can achieve pretty similar stats and have the added healing power with cele, and of course if you add the oil you’re using they’re almost exactly the same: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAoYhcMowhVOwzB8RscCYuf1z6blYCEAWAFlgB4HA-TVCEABYq6yWKBZSpV/qR4ueAtUmA/+DA8AAe4EAQGgitA-w

I think the one thing I’d change about the build (excluding cele cos that’s just preference and it’s a pain to get) is swapping Harmonius Conduit for Invigorating Torrents, because a lot of the time people do just run out of overloads, I mean the added damage is great but the extra cleanse you can get from running IT with Cleansing Water is much more useful in my opinion. I mean you’re already pretty tanky with the food, Hardy Conduit and the dura runes so why not run tonnes of cleanse and make yourself an unkillable machine?

Apart from that one thing though the build is really good, what you wrote kind of inspired me to give Tempest another shot.. maybe :p

ConnorHD.3842:

@killahmayne: I really like the build in fact, when HoT had just released, I ran something really similar to the stats and gear you have. The marauder and durability armour then zerk and cav trinkets, I think what I got was pretty similar to yours but yours looks a bit better. Having said that though I played it pre-elemental bastion nerf so the healing was a bit better and I could get away with running next to no healing power. Maybe you can still get away with running no healing power on d/d tempest but if I ran it now I’d still probably go for the 300~ points of celestial. I stole this build straight from Elem’s Tempest video but you can see you can achieve pretty similar stats and have the added healing power with cele, and of course if you add the oil you’re using they’re almost exactly the same: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAoYhcMowhVOwzB8RscCYuf1z6blYCEAWAFlgB4HA-TVCEABYq6yWKBZSpV/qR4ueAtUmA/+DA8AAe4EAQGgitA-w

I think the one thing I’d change about the build (excluding cele cos that’s just preference and it’s a pain to get) is swapping Harmonius Conduit for Invigorating Torrents, because a lot of the time people do just run out of overloads, I mean the added damage is great but the extra cleanse you can get from running IT with Cleansing Water is much more useful in my opinion. I mean you’re already pretty tanky with the food, Hardy Conduit and the dura runes so why not run tonnes of cleanse and make yourself an unkillable machine?

Apart from that one thing though the build is really good, what you wrote kind of inspired me to give Tempest another shot.. maybe :p

I will post a video soon when I get time during the holidays + get better footage. But I definitely think you should give tempest another shot again. It does boast better support if you roam with friends and better AoE cleave DPS at the same time though the spike potential of Fire is hard to ignore and overlook. I’ve actually tried your fire variant a little bit, not so much to form an overall opinion but I did like the extra damage I was doing, it caught some guys who were running Warriors/DH’s by surprise thinking they were good at half health :p. But I did miss the auras, the overloads not so much in 1v1 but in bigger fights it served me pretty well.

For those who actually like tempest I’ve been screwing around with this build for a while: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAoYncMAVOgFOAeOAcYilNAzdv+XPsErgMwIY4BEAKgA-TBCBQBA4BAAhTAQGV6JJlgCa/htoMQf6BUo6PBAQAuZbGAH9oH9oH9o1m38m38mlCQ0dWA-e
It has decent sustain and damage while having the ability to negate up 60% damage with food and frost armour. Admittedly, the food and oil is a pain to get but it still works fine with generic ferocity nourishment. Let me know what you guys think.

A d/d build i been finding a lot of luck with is this….
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAoYncMAVYidOAGOAcYiFCALoAEACiup2WbtlILcEiCA-TVCEQBOUZgWUiJFlGA4EA0P1fewDAwd6Bi3+DbUJYAAEAH9oH9oH9oVnpzkCIzhWA-w

If the conditon meta was not as big i would drop the tempest line for arcain and give up on the aura giving reg to counter condtions.
The crit are a bit rng it needs fury but with out losing fire line and arcain line dose a good job of that but its too hard to get by with the 2 condtions removale that it gives you vs the 6 that tempest gives you.