First of all, if you haven’t given D/F a serious chance, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. I remember when the game first released I thought D/D was where it was at. It was flashier, you flipped all over the place and—having not played any other professions—the damage felt great. Now that the game and my playing has matured, I’ve found a lot of satisfaction with the D/F combo.
I tried S/F at first, but they don’t seem to compliment each other as nicely. The only place I S/F is on the air / harpy / raving asura fractal. I like the air4 and earth5 when gunning down harpies on the platforms. That or if I know a really mean melee boss is coming, or I need to kite him like end of new TA.
I’m currently running either a 0/10/0/30/30 or a 0/10/10/30/20…trading Evasive Arcana (blasphemy, I know) for Earth V (protection on auras). D/F makes for a great aura build and I use Air (fury swiftness) and Water (powerful auras) to make for a fun front-row support fighter. I run zerkers w/ a mix of monk/water/traveler rune set for max boon. Not sure if this is entirely optimal, but it’s what I have for now. I might trade some boon duration for a full set of traveler’s.
This is where it gets fun. Here’s my rotation:
Start in air and prior to combat, hit 3 (shocking aura). I and the rest of my melee people are now swift, furious, and have protection if I’m not using arcana. I switch to fire and use 3 burning leap into the fray, while hitting 5, fire aura. Traited properly, I’ve just given my melee people a fire aura, more swift, more fury, and more protection. As I’m flipping in I drop firewall (focus 4), switch to earth and do 3 for the immob and 3 again for the leap, causing another fire aura, more swift,prot,fury. Then hit the 4 for a blast combo, switch to water for comet (more blast), and…well, blah blah.
My team gets: about 9 stacks of might, fury in abundance, swiftness, and protection. I then use lava axe (anticipating the next patch improvement). and hit 4/5 for another fire leap and more of the above. I drop it and move on, though after patch we’ll see what else I do (at least 2 for another blast).
You provide a lot of support for your team with snares in the form of two chills, an aoe cripple, protection, fury, swiftness, some stuns (shocking aura) and disrupt (comet), you do decent damage, and you still get to flip around like a ninja. Not bad. You also can give a huge break to projectiles.
My observations though: earth 3 can be clunky especially right after an equally clunky fire 4. Cast times and animations need to be dramatically streamlined. I see no reason why firewall can’t hit instantly like the other ring of fire spells (both dagger and lava axe). Comet is another clunky cast animation, time, delay, etc. Speed it up too. If you’re going to play D/F, and go for the auras, get used to the slightly slower speed of your chain. It took awhile for me to get used to, especially after D/D.
Couple this with GoEP and zerker gear in AIR to provide weakness and you’re : weakening and slowing your enemy, while speeding up and putting protection on your friends, providing quick stuns, damaging, healing, destroying projectiles (air 4 is so powerful), and you can go invuln in pinch (team can’t seem to take 30 stacks of shield of gear head in TA? Not your problem now…), and rez while invuln if you need to.
I do mostly PvE and this works great. Be Johnny on the Spot w/ your dodges though. full zerk, well we know that tale (especially front line). I don’t find it to be a huge problem, especially with some of the survivability /F offers. I see a lot of promise with this in PvP as well, but only if you can get yourself to stay with a group. No use in supporting if it’s just yourself.
TL;DR: D/F is fun and worth a shot, especially if you’re into auras. Some animations need to be streamlined and executed more quickly. Give D/F a try if you’re getting sick of spending all your time in fire on your staff.
Also, any suggestions for a rune set on any of this? Ok w/ the boon duration?