Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone.

I’ve been trying to set up a new build for my ele, something all-around for dungeon and for some WvW too.

Until now I’ve been running a soldier/carrion build with 30/0/10/0/30

Recently I’ve been trying for few hours to make a new build, the best I came up with is this:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEQQJArYhEmOblR2gjDAhHEwwBiCWUeETO2A-j0yAorASQAJRAZvioxW6CbBMIl3opewUlJV7KI7NUWBA-w

My goal is to set up an Ele that isn’t completely zerk, but could keep up with the damage.
I realized that if I wanted to min-max an ele, condition damage is pretty much pointless, because you need to stack up a lot of it to notice a relevant increase of dmg.
One of the reasons I picked an S/D ele is because of the ability to stack might in a relatively easy/fast way (2 blast finishers with fire, 2 with earth, 1 from trait and utility=6×3=18 might stacks).
Boon duration runes are necessary for fury (from 2 to 3 on att swap), vigor (trait+fire3) and swift (air5).
Now however my doubt is: will I be able to stack up 25 stacks of might without too much effort like before? Or will I need still Pyromancer’s Puissance?
Any other suggestion about traits/stats/utilities?

0/10/10/20/30

Ill edit this post tomorrow with build. Now ill sleep

Scepter is not a dungeon weapon. It has the worst sustained damage out of the weapons (because its autoattacks suck and only air hits multiple targets). It has bigger numbers that might seem misleading. But when that Dragon Tooth that hits for 7-8k crits actually takes 2 seconds to deliver the damage on a stationary target, it’s pretty miserable — in 2 seconds autoattack crits from other classes already outdamage that, and for around one second longer 100 blades does nearly double the damage.

For WvW, you will use scepter strictly for roaming. It is not a team fight weapon as it has no aoe outside DT and air auto, with the odd Phoenix in between.

The build for scepter is 0/20/0/20/30. Arcane missile at least as one of your utilities, with one of the cantrips. The final utility is optional, either earth signet or arcane wave or a second cantrip.

Zenith.7301:

Scepter is not a dungeon weapon. It has the worst sustained damage out of the weapons (because its autoattacks suck and only air hits multiple targets). It has bigger numbers that might seem misleading. But when that Dragon Tooth that hits for 7-8k crits actually takes 2 seconds to deliver the damage on a stationary target, it’s pretty miserable — in 2 seconds autoattack crits from other classes already outdamage that, and for around one second longer 100 blades does nearly double the damage.

For WvW, you will use scepter strictly for roaming. It is not a team fight weapon as it has no aoe outside DT and air auto, with the odd Phoenix in between.

The build for scepter is 0/20/0/20/30. Arcane missile at least as one of your utilities, with one of the cantrips. The final utility is optional, either earth signet or arcane wave or a second cantrip.

Not too sure about that, main hand Dagger’s autoattacks definitely outdamage Scepter but that’s not the point, because Scepter doesn’t rely on instant-cast skills and is more about sinergy with the off-hand dagger and scepter’s 2nd and 3rd skills are more likely userful than mh dagger which makes them spammable and not forcing you to use the autoattacks that as you are right to say, suck (except Air’s, that actually hits pretty hard, not strong enough to spam it but very nice to use between the swaps)
Fire: DR+aoe combo finisher with vigor
Water: aoe+heal
Air: instant damage+blind
Earth: armor+blindness in line
on the other hand D/D has slow channeling (fire&water 2), and the rest is mostly about CC and positioning (which obviosly make him an excellent roamer), but the main damage ARE autoattacks alone (if not the off-hand dagger kiting itself).

And Dragon’s Tooth, dispite being actually the strongest scepter skill, Phoenix, Shatterstone and Lightning Strike all do considerable damage. Not to mention that easy might-stacking that allows higher dps, not only power-based but condition-based too which is a better sinergy with off-hand Dagger burn and bleeding (RoF and CE). 2 seconds of DR ain’t cast time :\ , it lands after 2 seconds allowing you to use -other- skills before it lands.
Dispite being mostly on-ground target scepter skills have a very short cast time.
As for 100b, only Mesmer and Thief can pull something close to that and all melee weapons deal more damage than ranged weapons.

I even gave a few tries in the mist recording times to kill a heavy golem with zerk stats and no traits.
Without the Off-Hand Dagger, Mh dagger can outclass scepter at killing heavy golems with auto attacks (with fire/air auto attacks only..) easily by 5+ seconds, but with off-hand dagger the killing time is just the same, since Mh dagger has only (fire)autoattacks as strong reliable damage and adding an off-hand dagger to it makes no difference. (Staff instead is around 3-5 seconds slower than Mh Dagger)
Not to mention that with scepter you can actually run around while d/d has to hug the enemy. I know that golems ain’t players and still scepter isn’t better than D/D for roaming or than Staff at sieging but that does show that Scepter is actually reliable in dungeons.

I don’t pretend to know better than you, I’m just showing my reasons for using scepter over dagger, at least in PvE context.

I use s/d in PvE almost exclusively. Comboing is insanely easy and the cast times are very fast compared to staff. And I believe that swapping attunements synergizes best with s/d. Once of my favorite mobos is to start churning earth, swap to air and cast 32 and #3 which are instant, and then swap to water for the heal, all before the channel finishes so there really isn’t any wasted time, which is not the ase for d/d. There are many other good rotations that I never felt I had with d/d. Not to mention that the water heal skill on scepter > heal skill on dagger mh.

Scepter lacks any real sustained damage. It’s a poor choice for dungeons if you can melee instead.

Daggers have far superior sustained damage and you are still able to stack a ton of might using just Earth’s blast finishers and Arcane Wave.