Guild Wars 2

For D/D roaming, what do you guys feel is more effective? Also explain why, preferably with some solid math. I’ve been looking long and hard for guides/streamers/tubers from people who know what they are talking about and it’s hard to find. Either the ’pro’s’ don’t seem to be very community focused or maybe it’s because gw2 is still a young game. I’m used to games where math plays a role in stat allocation and where the better players have done the math to produce more or less ‘meta’ builds. For PvE this has certainly been done in this game but not for WvW as far as I’m aware.

I’m looking at healing power and toughness vs vitality vs going berzerker gear and forgoing on defensive stats all together.

The way I see it, elementalist have better scaling for healing than other classes and also have a good amount of heals at their disposal (especially if you play d/d or staff), healing power is therefor a better stat for us than for other classes. Healing power allows you to reset fights better, play out attrition fights better and limit condition pressure. It would also force your opponent into a more aggressive playstyle as they would need multiple CC and use all damage cooldowns to be able to burst you down. Toughness works better with healing power than vitality, essentially making healing power stronger. Armor rating needs to be doubled to reduce damage by 50% however there is also a myriad of ways to add gain protection as an ele. When you take smaller hits healing up the full becomes easier as opposed to high health, making your heals weak and leaving you with little defense against burst damage.

Vitality on the other hand provides better protection against condition damage. Conditions are very prevalent, especially when you play in small groups and engage into 1vX situations. That said, the ele has many ways to build into increased condition removal. However some classes can keep on reapplying strong conditions, eventually leaving ele without conditions. Due to my relatively limited wvw experience I am not entirely sure how prevelant this is. In some situations I wonder why I even brought condition removal to the table whereas in other fights it allowed me to win the fight.

Then there is just going straight up damage. Maybe it is my lack of skill, but I refuse to believe there are really high ranked players/pro’s/<insert arbritary term for good players that run full zerker and still succeed. Granted ele’s have many tools, high vigor uptime, many sources of protection and CC, wouldn’t a good player simply avoid your burst and proceed to instagib you?

A balance has to be found ofcourse and I’ve read numerous claims of at least 30% crit chance to have 50 with good fury uptime. How useful is that crit chance if one has low crit damage? Or low power? Increasing the crit damage and power would require a large sacrifice on vitality/healing power/toughness (whatever one uses for passive mitigation) to a point where I wonder what the use is of having say 500 extra vitality and 300 extra toughness. If doubling ones armor reduces damage by 50% than adding the 300 toughness would only reduce damage by approximately 10%. This also makes the extra 5000 health rather negligble. While for ele it means a 50% increase in HP, reality is a thief instead of one shotting you now needs to do a single extra heartseeker to take you out (not exact math ofcourse). This leads me to believe that the dmg vs defense pans out to be you have to choose either or and cannot really balance the two. Either you go full damage instead of balance because balance takes huge chunks of dps away while not really rewarding you with much more survivability or you go full defense having low damage where trying to find extra ways to increase damage sacrifices defense so much it becomes more or less useless.

I’m leaning more towards defense now because you can at least build for high power as it’s relatively easy to reach 3k attack while maintaining high toughness/healing/vit.

How much toughness/vitality/healing power etc do you guys go for.

For reference: ele has 1836 base armor and would require 3672 armor to gain 50% damage reduction. Getting to 2718 would result into 25% damage reduction and around 3k armor to emulate having permanent protection up.
An ele also needs a 1000 vitality to reach 20k health, something that can only be done by going heavy in water and having vitality as a stat on most gear slots. Finally cleansing wave’s heal is 1302 base and has a 1.0 co-efficient which as far as I know means 1000 healing power makes it a 2.3k heal.

I know this is a huge wall of text but this is primarily aimed at players who like this sort of min-maxing and theorycrafting. I hope to see some solid answers and insights. Preferably backed up by math and based on real high skill level wvw experience.

Great question….and a complicated one with soooo many variables.

Math

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1jau9a/an_explanation_of_basic_gw2_theorycraft/

Because healing power vs toughness vs vitality vs damage is defensive gear these should be what your looking for.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1kigzm/a_comparison_of_defensive_gear_in_build_making/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1o0coa/how_defensive_stats_helps_your_damage_output_fun/

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/60838-math-damage-reduction-toughness-and-vitality/

This has been beat to death since release.

Personal preference tends to win over math but use the math to give you good parameters.

You take the math which is more focused on more controlled environments and try to apply it to WvW the problem is human factor.

EHP is I auto attack you and you auto attack me in a more traditional MMO sense but the dodge button throws a variable into the equation that isn’t present in other MMO’s there is no RNG misses in Guild Wars 2.

It plays with a bit more strategy in player vs player combat since it become strategy of dodge baiting, vigor uptime, block access, invulnerability access, blind access etc. Better put is that you have many ways to avoid getting hit that are under your control.

In almost all of the toughness vs vitality threads for guild wars 2 (and I’ve probably looked at most them with many bookmarks not just from elementalist forums) healing is almost always thrown out. Many things can interrupted expected healing because you can’t spreadsheet what your opponent is going to do and what access he has to the above mentioned damage mitigation options and there is no way of knowing until the fight started and if you have knowledge of his capabilities.

Anyway this thread will probably rehash the same discussions that have gone on for a while about the subject and bring up some of the same math I’ve linked. This question usually does.

In the end my personal ideas on the subject are when it comes to WvW/sPvP don’t look at the math as law but a guide. The math fits more in PvE because the encounter hardly ever changes just your own group comp may. PvP build diversity among all the classes makes it impossible to spreadsheet a always win situation in a build vs build it isn’t possible in guild wars 2 to predict it that way.

Edit

If I remember correctly the straight math is build to 18.6k vitality then from there starting adding toughness and vitality point for point. In straight gear terms its soldier armor zerker trinkets. If you are using EHP as your guide in your elementalist build.

Thanks for that, your google link is inaccessible though, mind rechecking?

Verificus.4320:

Thanks for that, your google link is inaccessible though, mind rechecking?

NP I edited in another paragraph for the straight answer for elementalist and put in the direct link to gw2guru thread on toughness vs vitality.

Also my views on healing power are go all the way or not at all. Don’t spec into healing power if you still want good damage that can kill everything. Sure with 800 healing power you can still kill a thief but what about a bunker guardian?

Thats why I find the gearing so hard. I mostly roam with a group of guildies.. 3-5 ppl max. Aside from that I solo take camps and stuff and play by myself.. Only join the zergs when I need badges/karma etc. I wanna be able to kill both the super defensive character and kill the thief. I definitely don’t wanna hit like a wet noodle. However I also don’t want to constantly be living on the edge where I instantly die because of no defensive stats. I want a balance of sorts.. Enough dps to be able to outdamage said guardian’s cc/regen/heals and enough EHP to be able to survive thief’s burst and kill him. It would be much easier if there was simply a chart that showed all popular damage skills and how they affect different levels of EHP. Then one could simply choose how far to take EHP to be able to survive x amount of burst of y and z classes. I realize that viewing all these things in vacuum is bad and pvp is so variable in pretty much everything that math is no longer exact science however what is the purpose of math at all if not to view it in a vacuum. The DPS calculations for ele speedclearing meta are done in a similar way. What happens to those calculations when x might/fury is not up x amount of the time or if that warrior is not there, the vuln is not there and other players aren’t using zerk. Sometimes using math makes no sense because of the variables but still its needed for a general starting point.

Alot if what you want to know is can vary depending on playstyle. Like what kind of trait setup do you want? A cantrip build a sig build a burning build a crit build? If you specify a little more i could help. Ik u said d/d roamer but what kinda utilities do u use and what traits?? If you want a crit heavy build my rule of thumb is never go velow 40% crit chance. Going full zerkers gives about 39%. But so does full barbs and full knights., the difference is that u grt alot more survivabilit with the ladder of these.

This is for wvw roaming, obviously. No barbarian gear here..

In wvw there is only 1 viable build and that is cantrips.. for one, armor of earth is only source of stability, mistform is just too good for stomping/ressing etc and cleansing fire and lightning flash are both decent skills..

I remember doing some back of the napkin calculations at some point and came up with the statistic the healing is worth more than vitality in a x/y/15+z/30 base build as long as the fight lasts more than 10 seconds. Please don’t take that at face value. But it is true that in long fights healing power is the most important defensive stat for this ele. The problem is those short fights (ie. zerk thief, burst condi necro… and both happen to love applying poison which screws up healing).

1 viable build to roam? U jst start playing? Alot of ppl dont run a cantrip i dont and it soes jst as good. Sorry i thought u wanted help.

Verificus.4320:

This is for wvw roaming, obviously. No barbarian gear here..

In wvw there is only 1 viable build and that is cantrips..

I think this is kind of an over exaggeration. It is mostly D/D builds who take 3 cantrips because their survivability for a melee build is astonishingly bad compared to other melee builds of other classes.

If you look at it closely, almost all melee weapon sets of other classes have either Evades, blocks, or a combination of both on a very tolerable cool down. They either have tons of evades and blocks or they have natural medium~high HP/armor or access to stealth. Now look at Eles, lowest HP and armor in the game. Main hand dagger has 0 access to evades for a whole year (will be given 1 on the march patch). Off hand dagger has one evade on Updraft on a 40 second cool down. Dagger main hand offers no survivability outside of Shocking Aura which is easily contered by stability. This is why people are forced to get defensive cantrips.

As for s/x builds, they usually go for “kill-before-you-get-killed” builds. When I go for Scepter I usually go with 2 arcanes and Lightning Flash. The blinds, although Dust Devil is a bit unreliable, are your bread and butter for survivability. While it is weaker than Evade (because you can only blind very limited number of enemies), it is decent enough for a ranged weapon.

Kyon.9735:

Verificus.4320:

This is for wvw roaming, obviously. No barbarian gear here..

In wvw there is only 1 viable build and that is cantrips..

I think this is kind of an over exaggeration. It is mostly D/D builds who take 3 cantrips because their survivability for a melee build is astonishingly bad compared to other melee builds of other classes.

If you look at it closely, almost all melee weapon sets of other classes have either Evades, blocks, or a combination of both on a very tolerable cool down. They either have tons of evades and blocks or they have natural medium~high HP/armor or access to stealth. Now look at Eles, lowest HP and armor in the game. Main hand dagger has 0 access to evades for a whole year (will be given 1 on the march patch). Off hand dagger has one evade on Updraft on a 40 second cool down. Dagger main hand offers no survivability outside of Shocking Aura which is easily contered by stability. This is why people are forced to get defensive cantrips.

As for s/x builds, they usually go for “kill-before-you-get-killed” builds. When I go for Scepter I usually go with 2 arcanes and Lightning Flash. The blinds, although Dust Devil is a bit unreliable, are your bread and butter for survivability. While it is weaker than Evade (because you can only blind very limited number of enemies), it is decent enough for a ranged weapon.

100% correct. I use s/d wvw roaming and alot of other ppl do too. i also take two arcances but i switch up the last one a lot.

If you are running anything else but d/d (or staff for zergs) you are bad imo. I didn’t just start playing. Granted I probably don’t have as much wvw experience as some people here but I’m a veteran mmo player and have always played in the highest level in all of them as I do here too. The points the other dude made about why cantrips are mandatory hit the nail on the head. Scepter/dagger burst might work vs a bunch of noobs but no good player is ever going to get hit by your tooths and birds. Scepter belongs in PvE. Which is a shame because Scepter does have a few interesting spells like earth 2 and 3 and air 2 and 3.

Whenever me and my friends see a S/d we know he is glass and we focus him down he has no chance. The spec provides zero 1v1 and 1vX potential and staff wins because of range in zergs.

When a good player realizes you are not running armor of earth and just a single stunbreaker he will /laugh and proceed to kill you.

Ofcourse if it works for you on your server and you’re getting many camps and kills than by all means keep using it. This thread however is purely for d/d as it is what I main and would never change unless it gets nerfed to hell. And more specifically it is about determining some math base basic guideline for hp/armor/healing/dmg breakpoints and values in relation to eachother. I will stress again math in a vacuum is not the best way to approach gw2 considering the way combat works in this game as opposed to other mmo’s but it is still good to form this basis to solidify builds more based on actual sound calculations rather than random player experience.

Verificus.4320:

If you are running anything else but d/d (or staff for zergs) you are bad imo. I didn’t just start playing. Granted I probably don’t have as much wvw experience as some people here but I’m a veteran mmo player and have always played in the highest level in all of them as I do here too. The points the other dude made about why cantrips are mandatory hit the nail on the head. Scepter/dagger burst might work vs a bunch of noobs but no good player is ever going to get hit by your tooths and birds. Scepter belongs in PvE. Which is a shame because Scepter does have a few interesting spells like earth 2 and 3 and air 2 and 3.

Whenever me and my friends see a S/d we know he is glass and we focus him down he has no chance. The spec provides zero 1v1 and 1vX potential and staff wins because of range in zergs.

When a good player realizes you are not running armor of earth and just a single stunbreaker he will /laugh and proceed to kill you.

Ofcourse if it works for you on your server and you’re getting many camps and kills than by all means keep using it. This thread however is purely for d/d as it is what I main and would never change unless it gets nerfed to hell. And more specifically it is about determining some math base basic guideline for hp/armor/healing/dmg breakpoints and values in relation to eachother. I will stress again math in a vacuum is not the best way to approach gw2 considering the way combat works in this game as opposed to other mmo’s but it is still good to form this basis to solidify builds more based on actual sound calculations rather than random player experience.

actually u can fight w scepter / dagger in wvw pretty well, and u have to stun /immobalize enemy to land the dragon tooth, immobalize better coz enemy wont expect it:p (arcan surge) , everyone has their preferences

and they cant stunbreak immo*

S/D is horrible for WvW. S/F is acceptable and can help your team greatly. Thieves and necros will spend all day trying to kill you. You blinded me? Okay. You’re blind. You are ranging me? Nope. You’re throwing conditions? Removed. You’re trying to backstab? They are hitting me for 50% of other squishies. You want to interrupt my stomp? Nope. You want to stop me running through you blocking my path? Nope. 2x immunity + stab + cleanse + dodges + reflect + cripple + teleport + knockdown + whatever else.

For D/D I personally do not want more than 2 pieces of celestial gear with 30 water already. I start with 17k-18k hp, use – condi+vit food, and power stone. Then I eventually get guard offense and defense stacks which drives up vit, and the condi damage that the 2 celestial pieces give. After that I stick with crit damage and toughness.

My next project is to swap out my pvt pieces for a mixture to get the right amount of crit damage and chance, without dropping too much power, like the celestial path does. The only hope vs warrior or guardian is that heavy hitter, that negates burst like hundred blades.

It’s food, 30 water, and signet that allow you to out-live the conditions, with arcana dodges thrown in. It’s gear like cav that lets you put out the pressure.

I’m currently using 10 air instead of 10 earth, but it’s riskier. I would not use 10 air in a gvg though. I use bloodlust and energy, but I’m not sure how necessary either of those are. However my damage vs anything skyrockets at 25 stacks, and I can keep the stacks up a long time. I have no swap-to-static (ie. force) dagger after that. There are a lot of interesting sigils that could possibly help me more. Like applying a condition suchas torment, or poison, that could help in taking down a beefy runner. But vs 250 power and extra dodges, I don’t really know how practical they become in the long run.

Overall I’d say get 18k hp, 450 healing power, over 50% crit damage, and over 1800 toughness. The game favors damage over defense. For example, a backstab will always hit way harder than you can stack your armor to compensate for, so you need to focus on keeping up the pressure, and negating as much as you can via movement, healing, and out-going damage. You know the damage is coming. Your auras are there for that. You need to use earthquake and updraft to put out as much damage as you can in order to make the attacker either think twice, or die in a barrage of combos. Magnetic grasp is huge vs melee. Tap once. They use some gap-breaker move, hit it again, and they’re stuck in combat still.

When I swap to s/f in my D/D spec, I change zephyr’s boon to zephyr’s focus. This trait is amazing. Your main damage is a channel. And again with d/f it procs in water and fire from cone of cold, and drake’s breath. It’s also a reason to use churning earth vs nothing, whether you port it onto targets or not. I’m going to try running it more often in D/D to see if I can play without energy on off-hand.

Did you read op? he said roaming.

The links oZiix posted are good. I looked deeply into this over a year ago. My findings are located here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/14hg3g/lets_talk_effective_health_armor_health_condition/

Basically, incoming healing and condition damage taken are important variables, but too complex to calculate. Effective health, which is armor * health, is largely a useless variable in and of itself. If you don’t take into account healing and condition damage, then it’s not very useful. But it’s too complex and ever-changing to take into account these two variables.

What does this mean? It basically means that you need to figure it out for yourself. Everyone has different preferred stats. Some people prefer running 300 healing power, some 600, and some are fine with 0. Some prefer 18k health, some are fine with 14k. Some prefer 2.8k armor, some are fine with 2.2k.

In this case, while knowledge is power, it’s not the answer. It’s just a tool you can leverage while buildcrafting. Buildcraft, test builds out, try different things. See what works best for you.

One of the hardest classes to gear is a DD ele. I’ve spent hours and hours on single builds, tinkering.

Here’s what I’ve come up with, what I prefer:
My 0/20/0/20/30 build: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k;4BJ-V0w47NkY0;9;5J-JT;105;249-17AUN;4V19cV19cm-kaH6;4V0-5WC1FYMZQ_-i-HN1c;57X7X7X7X;9;9;9;9;85-6g

My 0/10/0/30/30 build: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k;4B2-V0y47NkY0;9;59-TT;10;349A17ASN;4TutbU9fgm-kaH6;54-8WCXI2K3U_-7WAN1c;57X7X7X7X;9;9;9;9;85-6q

In regards to actual damage, I’ve created a DPS calculator that you may find useful. You enter in a few stats and it spits out a damage value for crits, non-crits, and your average damage between crits and non-crits. The numbers it spits out aren’t all that useful by themselves, but test multiple builds and you’ll be able to compare numbers. I use this to check the damage % difference between builds and setups a lot. http://jsfiddle.net/GNEFd/3/embedded/result/ (Source code at http://jsfiddle.net/GNEFd/3/)

While I appreciate the complexity, I wish this game was not opaque in regards to builds and stats. I wish GW2 was designed to be “easy to learn, hard to master”, rather than what it seems to me: “randomly choose stats and hope that you find the right combination”.

Figuring out the math behind stats may be an exercise in the theoretical, but I find that infinitely more useful than randomly slapping different gear on and hoping for the best. Believe me, I have tried to do that, since release in fact. A few times, I’ve had some success. Then a patch comes along and I have to reevaluate everything. This is a problem because, frankly, if you want the best gear, you have to spend many hours acquiring it (i.e., ascended gear for WvW). It’s not like I can just cycle through different gear options in WvW on the fly.

Grinding out 40 laurels and 50 globs of ectoplasm per accessory, only to discover that, hey, sorry, those accessory stats are “not quite right”, is disappointing.

I just want a basic guideline to follow for gear that will be “good” with a build that will at least be able to hold its own against other classes…but I don’t really want to have to do intense calculations before buying a new piece of gear. Stats could stand to be simplified a bit, or at least made more obvious.

Good posts all.. nice discussion going..

@Katniss

I don’t really get your stat choices, you say 18khp (this requires more than just 30 water, alot more, this would require vitality on 75% of your pieces or all of your pieces if you go full celestial). 18khp is around 1700-1800 total vitality.. if you add your 1800 toughness to that it means you are running full soldier or full celestial with 30 water and 30 in earth, else there is no other way to achieve such numbers. 450 Healing power can be achieve by slotting clerics jewels + boon duration runes along with your full celestial/soldier gear. Along with the huge amount of crit damage celestial gives to reach your 50%. I wonder then tho, where is your precision? You can’t have more than 10% base crit chance, maybe 15% if you are full celestial. So this gives you like 35% max crit chance with fury. You do realise how incredibly suboptimal this is for damage output? These numbers means your base power is very low and you’d benefit a whole hell of alot more forgoing all that crit damage and low as hell precision for more power. You are essentially critting with a wet noodle.. 50% crit damage on top of kitten damage is still kitten damage.. You’d want at least 2000 power and 30% base crit chance to make the precision and crit damage stats somewhat useful, assuming high fury uptime. If you go for that you cannot possibly have 1800 vit and 1800 toughness.

This is my current gear: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJAoYhMmgbyx5gjDAkHucCLiCPUekzM2A-jEDBYgBkgAg+AM1cQsJqJrMsIasabYaXAqYLq2qDwaORG0a1SBwkwI-w

This site does not let you put infusions into armor. It’s +5 vit in each piece.
I miscalculated my healing power. It is under 400. And I do roam with it/ solo camps with FGS or Fire Elemental. The precision is low, but jumps up from auras. Your response doesn’t make any sense to me. You aren’t looking at ascended gear or different runes than boon duration.

Your power is low.. you run with 1758. Your stats depend on all your gear being full ascended + infusions which is rather unrealistic for anyone who has more than an a few level 80’s. Most people are not running around on full ascended gear on their ele’s. And considering your stats you seem to have wasted a good many laurels/mats/gold to get to these stats. Your boon duration is also low which is kind of the point of fury on d/d without it you have low uptime of fury thus most of the time you are running around with that measly 28% cc, instead you could be running with 2k+ power and have a good deal more base damage. I suppose you could be incredibly skilled as a player to the point that it really doesn’t kittening matter what gear you run but I think it’s a waste of alot of in game currencies to go with your setup. You could reap far more benefits changing the stats around.

Input the 25 bloodlust stacks. I only play ele. I have numerous ascended trinkets. I’ve tried clerics, hated it. Tried pvt, no damage. Recently dumped celestial for cav, and enjoy it so far. I normally use sharpening stones, but I’m trial-running oils before I invest in different crit-related pieces. I have invested all my time, and numerous laurels to try things out. Correct. I’m always testing different things.

@Verificus
Regarding s/x eles, I’m pretty sure you haven’t encountered a good one with the way how you regard them. There is a reason why D/D is not viable at all in high level competitive PvP but scepter is (but still at the bottom of the food chain). Since you want this to be an exclusive D/D discussion, I’m all for it.

I do agree that Katniss’ Power/Attack is really low considering that he doesn’t use Sigil of Battle to make up for it. But then again, it depends on his playstyle. His build is tanky enough to fight prolonged battles but one big disadvantage of playing a prolonged battle using an ele is that your cantrips have very high CD in general. You’ll end up with yourself backed to a wall without any way out from time to time.

Regarding Boon Duration, it’s really depends on the player’s preference. One reason many eles opt for 45% boon duration is that being too dependent on boons can be a big disadvantage especially now that many players would have boon strips. They’d rather maximize their stats than rely on might/boon stacking which can be easily stripped or stolen by your enemy.

And as for Fury uptime, 45% boon duration is more than enough since you are using Zephyr’s boon and Arcane Fury.

@Katniss
I see, well if it works for you.. Me personally I detest RNG and I’d rather play a build that has less RNG burst but steady overall damage. Your build ofcourse can potentially burst down tankier classes much easier.

@Kyon
If you are referring to sPvP with high level pvp than I don’t think it really matters at all what type of ele you run since all of them are pretty much kitten and no good team would ever take an ele in or go to the trouble of making team composition work with a suboptimal class, imo at least. Don’t get me wrong I love ele and I don’t sPvP on ele usually so I couldn’t really care less but they are as you say bottom of the food chain.

I approach builds differently I suppose.. I calculate most of my stats in how it rewards a certain other stat. Like e.g. how much x stat is worth x power to me or if defensive how much x stat is worth x vit/tough for me. In that light I feel boon duration is something you should max to have it be worthwile.

Also sigil of bloodlust/perception is terrible outside of PvE imo. You cannot assume you will never die and never have to refarm stacks. Not to mention the effort it costs. In the time one farms those stacks I’ve already captured a camp. Time is money.