The Goderators have ruined this forum for me.
Has anybody geared around Diamond Skin?
From what I understand this would not work very well for a number of reasons, but I haven’t tried it out. Feel free to give it a shot though since who knows.
The reasons I can see against it is that sustain for ele is not good enough to keep 90% at such a close range to heavy direct damage classes. Even if you stay fairly mobile your base hp will be low, and various classes pick up increased damage when a certain hp % is reached. So you would be making it a bit easier for them to reach this damage increase. Even with high toughness you have to take into account that ele is in a place right now where you’re going to be focused first. Mostly due to the fact that ele is seen as easy kills at the moment.
After that I think there have been enough survivability theory craft posts about overall survivability, and generally stacking just toughness or just vitality is less effective from my understanding. I believe the suggested route is to hit around 2500 armor and 17k or more hp. There are a lot of theorycraft posts on reddit about this. I believe they are for the most part still current.
Has anyone geared around the goal of keeping their HP at +90% as much as possible to maximize the value of Diamond Skin? Maximizing healing and toughness at the expense of vitality would seem to do the trick and I’m wondering if anyone has tried this and what were the results.
Yes, but I’m pretty sure they have stopped because it isn’t particularly fun OR masochistic, and anyone who plays ele for a different reason than one of those two is obviously insane.
Although a condi build (which is obviously not the best), it is an inevitable death (if they don’t run of course) for almost any other class that isn’t a zerker thief or of the sort.
The build uses perma protection/vigor/regeneration as it’s main way of staying above 90%. You can pretty much have any version of dire/settler/apothecary. When I was running this sort of build (mine was slightly different, a bit more defensive), I had about 20k health, 1800 toughness (protection helps here), and about 800 healing power. I still had enough condition damage to cause 800 damage burn ticks and I could reach 2k bleed ticks if I was able to get a churning earth off. As a human, I actually use Reaper of Grenth just so I could get additional conditions to cover my burns and bleeds (this is the main problem an elementalist has).
It is possible to forgo the boon duration runes (especially with the upcoming patch reducing their 2 set bonus effectiveness) and go with perplexity runes in order to cover your conditions better.
This is what I use when I decide to go Cond on my ele.
Its not bad.
It completely destroys PU cond mesmers, full cond necros and engis.
Its efficient against condi thiefs and warriors and balanced engies…
The gear gives you 3 conditions that help a LOT. Poison+torment+confusion…
Confusion on interrupt is great since you have so many (shock aura, updraft, earthquake), just dont spam them (8sec ICD).
the GEP is a great tool to use right before the fight. Use in the right att and it can keep opponents perma weak, constant chill, burn or cripple (the effect is set on activation, and it doesnt change the cond after that)
you are still very mobile and efficient in zergs.
I swap mistform for air signet for more speed sometimes and strengh of stone for more speed. and get the ER instead of the signet for healing…
I’m a staff ele, since the DS update I’ve been running this.
I’ve got high healing and toughness and (very) low vit, as OP says, with 4 ways to blast in my staff’s water fields and reasonable regen uptime.
I love my Glyphs, and have been (successfully) staying away from ER+cantrips, though I find Tornado to be more reliably useful than the elite Glyph.
Glyph of Elemental Power: chucks out a few conditions without any need to think about it, and a reasonably short cooldown on a stunbreak - much better than cantrips, at any rate. Usually use it in Air, but sometimes will go for Earth to maintain cripple, or Water for a bit of chill.
Glyph of Storms: usually used in Earth, as the Sandstorm plays hell with warriors’ attacks and can shut down a minion necro so their pets don’t immediately damage through the 90% barrier and let the necro melt me with condi. With the GoEP, its Lightning Storm can dish out decent damage and condi over an area.
Before the new heal came out I planned to run this with Glyph of Elemental Harmony, but I prefer the blast finisher on Brilliance for a bit more AoE utility - and with the number of clones/pets/spirits/minions/rock dogs running around everywhere, it’s a very powerful heal if fighting in a point.
(edited by cheese.4739)