Guild Wars 2

I’m looking for advice for a solo/small group roaming ele build.

My initial thought was to go full Celestial, since pretty much every stat is useful to an ele. Plus I’ve seen a few posts that suggest using it (for that reason). But I ran some numbers through a spreadsheet, and found that celestial does even less direct damage than Soldier’s (!) due to crazy low power, and with even less toughness/vita.
(celestial) http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJAoIGAAAIjRKDA-T1BEABS8AAsb/BtU+1neAAOBACqEET1fIDQ+EA-w
(soldier) http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJAoIGAAAIjRKDA-T1BEABS8AAUU9H72fwJlfAcCA4SJob6BIDQ+EA-w

Based on my understanding that soldier’s does practically no damage to begin with (correct me if I’m wrong about that), that seemed unacceptable to me. So with the goal being to be able to hit not completely like a wet noodle, I fiddled around for a few hours, and came up with the following setup:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJAoIGQEIIntUNKoc7YKA-TFCEwAwU/x++DcVCyU5hkHAgWlYAOBAu1DQGg8JA-w

Does this seem more/less viable than a pure soldier or celestial build? I have basically 0 hours of pvp/wvw on my ele, so I don’t know if I’m missing something about the playstyle/mechanics. I based my target HP/armor roughly on what works for my mesmer (also, prioritizing toughness over vita due to healing abilities), and filled in the rest with zerk pieces to up the damage.

I too find that knights gear works better on my ele. I do run soldier daggers though just like your build. Seems good overall, although may I ask why you chose celestial accessories?

Been doing wvw on ele for a while and condi’s are a pain to deal with. If you are set on celestial or soldiers here is a mix build of those stats I play with sometimes .
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJAoYhMM6cW4wyBfEBPACxfxG1RUgyVT+E-TFSGABA8AAmSJ4jqUEo6KJcCAiS5Hd6BQZ/BSBwkyI-w

Ether Renewel and -condi duration food/runes make life much easier but that is just for my play style. Sine your somewhat new to ele I would also suggest knights armor for a lot of your stat selection then move to more dps or whatever u like.

Quakeman: So my overall thought process for this was that I wanted to be able to out-heal most of the damage thrown my way. This mean high toughness and/or high healing power. Ordinarily I would say screw healing and put those stats in toughness, as Knight’s + soldiers would probably give better damage + survive than Celestial. But toughness only affects physical damage, and I figured with condis everywhere, healing might be worthwhile investing a bit into.

On the other hand, healing scales so poorly that I couldn’t justify putting anything into it via cleric/zealot. E.g. putting 200 stats into healing would mean going from 1900 ish power to 1700 ish for barely any increase in healing other than regen (which seems to scale slightly better than others). Or worse, losing 200 out of toughness…

So the only way I could justify putting any stats into healing was to have Celestial gear, which has slightly higher total stats. Then I ran into the issues with low DPS etc, so I basically started with a full set of Celestial and swapped out pieces with knight/soldier/zerk until I hit the minimum EDmg, hp and toughness figures I wanted. The 2 pieces are what was left when I was done… and admittedly, they contribute only ~80 healing between them so it’s not like they make a real difference there anyway.

So shrug I guess I don’t really need cele, just started out as a cool idea then slowly got chipped away to nothing.

Liquid: Thanks for posting your cele build. Based on my spreadsheets, it looks like we hit about the same toughness; yours trades 8% EDmg for 14% more hp and ~200 healing, with toughness about equal. Aside from total stats, I see a few functional differences:
1) 2 points from water moved to air – lose condi cleanse on cantrips, lose dmg/boon, gain fury/swiftness on aura
2) Hoelbrak runes instead of Traveler for -20 condi
3) -40 condi food
*4) +300 condi dmg

Pretty interesting comparison, basically -60% condi vs. extra condi cleanse; fury vs. dmg/boon; swiftness vs. traveler… stat wise I think yours comes out ahead, especially if you consider condi damage. With extra fury uptime it might actually close the gap EDmg wise too. I may have to try this out…

edit: So the healing power according to the build calc comes out to 5-6% more healing on attunement switch, 10% on cleansing wave, 3.6% on ER. But due to boon duration, actually 2.5% less on regen. Interesting…