Guild Wars 2

Fresh Air for the Attunement Swapper

Fresh Air has great potential for certain burst builds, with several nice examples around. What I would like to comment on is how Fresh Air can speed up continuous cycling. In a nutshell, your fastest, indefinitely repeatable four-attunement cycle used to take something like 12 seconds, now it is closer to 10 seconds.

I have not seen this discussed in such detail, certainly not after the patch, but my apologies if I overlooked something (please comment below). In any case, some of the details I find quite amusing, and perhaps not everyone is fully aware of them.

The 6/25/13 patch gave elementalists Air XII, Fresh Air: “Critical strikes will now recharge Air Attunement. This effect can only occur once every 5 seconds.” For all of us who swap attunements a lot, this is really neat: whenever you crit, Air attunement is available again right away, although air skills maintain their cooldown. At the time of writing, the 5s cooldown does not seem to be imposed (let’s see whether we get to keep this feature …).

How much does Fresh Air help when you swap attunements as often as possible? Think long boss fight, and you would like to maximize the boons from Arcane V. You trait Arcane30 so that the attunement recharge time is 9s, cooldown after swap is 1s. I will ignore small delays because of reaction time, lag, latency, etc.

1. Without Fresh Air, pre 6/25 patch:

This is what most of us are used to. 9s attunement recharge time means that your shortest four-attunement cycle is 12s.

For example:
3s in Fire, 3s in Water, 3s in Air, 3s in Earth, then repeat 3s in Fire, …

The basic fact is that after leaving say Fire, you have to spent 9s in other attunements. You could also do
9s F, 9s E, 9s F, 9s E, …: 18s cycle for 2 attunements
4.50s F, 4.50s A, 4.50s W, 4.50s F, …: 13.5s cycle for 3 attunements
Note that in each case 9s pass before you get to go back to Fire.

But who says you have to spend equal time in each attunement? Obviously, I can do better by mixing things up, can’t I? Well, no, I don’t think you can.

Here are two examples that do not work:

1F 1W 1A 7E, 1F 1W 1A 7E(x), …
We try to swap as quickly as we can right away, until we have to wait 7s in Earth so that Fire is available again.

First of all, we do get seven attunements in 13s (FWAEFWA), which is much better than four attunements in 12s. However, we want cycles that just keep going (not bursts where you stop/get stuck). Second, the final 7E is not possible, since Earth is not available yet after 3s in FWA!

The second example is what happens when we swap as quickly as possible without making a mistake with the final Earth:

1W 1A 7E, 1F 1W 7A, 1E 1F 7W, 1A 1E 7F, repeat

Now there are 9s between any two identical attunements. However, this is no faster than the four times 3s cycle, since you still get 1 attunement in 3s on average. Just count it, 12 attunements in 36s, or note that we are doing three attunements in 9s compared to four attunements in 12s.

These are just examples, but if you think a little harder about it, you can convince yourself that you cannot do better. The reason we usually don’t even have to think about it at all is that many cycles give the same optimal or near optimal result. We looked at the sequence 117117117…, but 126126126… works as well. The sum of three
consecutive numbers is always 9, which is all that is required.

Therefore, if you “swap as quickly as your skill rotations allow”, many of these will give you a 12s cycle for four attunements, or something that comes close. You may waste a second here and there waiting for an important skill to come off cooldown, but maxing Arcane V is rarely the only thing you want to do.

2. With Fresh Air, post 6/25 patch:
Or: finally getting to the point :-)

Fresh Air allows us to shorten the four-attunement cycle from 12s to 10s.

One of the examples that didn’t work before now becomes an option:

1F 1W 1E 7A, 1F 1W 1E 7A, …: 10s cycle

Without Fresh Air, we could not get back to Air after only 3s in FWE, but with Fresh Air we can!

Again, there are variations, or irregular cycles where you swap to Air whenever possible to do some air bursts. Always assuming that you do get the critical hits to proc Fresh Air, but you can help with arcane utilities.

The bottom line is that in playtesting you can get to 10s or so rather easily, compared to the 12s without Fresh Air, plus a little extra for unavoidable short delays.

Just one example why this is neat. If you actually do cycle in 10s, then you can get permanent Protection from Arcane V with +100% duration gear (30% from Arcane30, food for 20%, 4 runes for 30% boon duration, and 2 runes for 20% protection duration).

3. Why I care but probably almost noone else:

You know Lightning Hammer builds, right? One of the versions I like is a “LH Swapper” build. Traits something like 20/0/0/20/30. The key observation is that you do not loose the hammer while attunement swapping. So while swinging away with your hammer, you can cycle through your attunements for boons from Arcane V. When you wonder how quickly you can do that, you find out about the 12s four-attunement cycle. But what about Fresh Air? The answer is rather ironic: you don’t have enough trait points to get both Air30 and Arcane30 since Fire20 is basically a must-have for the extra conjured weapon charges. If you insist on Fresh Air with something like 20/30/0/0/20, then your attunement recharge is at 11s instead of 9s for a 14.7s cycle. With Fresh Air your cycle becomes 12s. Well, this is where we started. Still, this now allows higher damage builds with Air30 without loosing boons, but loosing Evasive Arcana.

I thought att recharge was at 16 sec base and global cd at 2..cant check now though
But still your point is absolutely true..
People are like “fresh air is crap/good only for s/d builds” while the reality is that it speeds up ALL attunements..Basically during normal gameplay even with 30 in arcana very fast swaps on 2-3 attunements make you stuck in one of the other 1-2 for a very long time.With fresh air you can always switch back to air and completely avoid that downtime.
Basically if you play it right 30 in arcana is definately worse than lets say 20 in arcana and 30 in air for more than 1 type of boon upkeeping.Actually its better/equal even if you care about keeping up only prot for example since air recharge is not affected by global attunement cooldown so you skip the extra second you have to wait after you switch to earth assuming you crit immediatly (use an arcane)
Not to mention that you can do swaps purely for boons now even if you know there are no good skills out of cooldown in earth for example,without losing dps or utility. Its a really great trait imho

But nice to see someone calculatin att rotation.I did the math back in the days and ended up too that you cant do better than 12-13 sec and that for max boon uptime on all boons you need to stay 3 sec at each,while if you swap as fast as you can in the long run you stil end up with same boon uptime with just small bursts of more boon uptime followd by longer downtimes as each elemnt takes turn at being the one you stuck while waiting for others.Then again fire boon is 1 might and air swiftness so you can increase the uptime of prot /regen by droping the uptime of those boons

Yeah the more I play fresh air the less I miss EA :p (for pve – still use the condition reduction food though, missing the EA cleanse is painful :p)

@kostbabis:
Good question! What exactly are the current attunement recharge rates?

The wiki says 15s and 1s: “When one is activated, the previous attunement recharges for 15 seconds, while other attunements which are ready to use will recharge for 1 second.”

And about the effect of the Arcane trait:
“Attunement Recharge Rate … effectively reduces recharge time of attunements by 1 second for every 5 points invested into Arcana. "

But when I tested this with 0 Arcane, I do get numbers very close to what you suggest, 16s and 2s. Someone probably can give us the exact status, perhaps this changed in one of the patches and the wiki is out of date?

For Arcane30, with an increase of recharge rate by 60%, the current cooldowns
would then be closer to 10s and 1.25s (not 9s and 1s which I used originally). This is nice: I thought I was simply slow or lagged so that I could never quite
get the 9s I expected. I will look into this more carefully and update the original post.

Still, just as you say, in practice one can get something like a 13s cycle, even without Fresh Air. Thanks for the confirmation. Which is nice for the boons – if we don’t have other things to do :-)