Guild Wars 2

For ages now, everyone always says use D/D, use D/D its best. I just don’t see it. I feel like S/D is the best combo for offensive? you get range, mobility, good burst. I just don’t understand the argument that d/d is better.

If its mathematical, please post some math, otherwise? Change My View?

Because auto attack sucks.

That can’t be the only reason? I would imagine the other skills more than make up for it.

fire 5 earth 4 cant stack as much might.

I prefer S/D because of the increased dynamism, but I admit that it’s objectively worse than D/D. It really is the autoattack that kill the Scepter. They’re just so darn weak that they bring the whole weapon down.

Faelun.7563:

For ages now, everyone always says use D/D, use D/D its best. I just don’t see it. I feel like S/D is the best combo for offensive? you get range, mobility, good burst. I just don’t understand the argument that d/d is better.

If its mathematical, please post some math, otherwise? Change My View?

You prefer SD even though it’s not better how am I meant to change your mind exactly? Auto attack on Daggers is MUCH faster and DD you’re right on top of your combo fields as are your enemies / mobs which means burns.

DD > SD but if you had said SF I’d consider that one. but only because there must be a reason to need to be ranged. You should try staff of you hate DD.

Scepter was made for spike damage, but when they nerfed the air line and buffed the spike damage on every other class it became the worse elementalist weapon because damage was literally the only good thing it had.

I don’t think the people in charge of the elementalist at Anet know how to play the class, as we have seen when demonstrating Tempest when Karl got down to 1hp while fighting Svanir (for a ridiculous amount of time)… Something most elementalists relatively experience can beat without losing much HP and much faster.

In my opinion what they needed to do was significantly increase the speed of Dragon tooth, base damage of all Scepter skills by at least 20% and add a trait that increase the range of scepter to 1200 when wielding a Warhorn. Then Scepter could serve it’s purpose of being a dmg weapon.

Dagger should do more condition damage, it needs specially a bleeding buff on Churning earth.

Warhorn needs a complete redesign, it just kittening sucks.

Staff is mostly ok but it could have some of the cast-time reduced, it feels really laggy. Static field should go down immediately, lava font should tick immediatly and gust should be more reliable.

Lightning whip > all of scepter

Because scepter has only 2 good skills. Fire 2 and Fire 3. Dagger on the other hand doesn’t have a single bad skill.

Plus like the others said, ALL our autoattack suck besides staff fire 1 and dagger air 1.

Xillllix.3485:

I don’t think the people in charge of the elementalist at Anet know how to play the class, as we have seen when demonstrating Tempest when Karl got down to 1hp while fighting Svanir (for a ridiculous amount of time)… Something most elementalists relatively experience can beat without losing much HP and much faster.

And that was only because he had a dev-cheat on that made it impossible to go below 1 HP. Karl actually would have died against Svanir. That’s the best proof of how little the devs actually know about our class.

Pity really.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Because scepter has only 2 good skills. Fire 2 and Fire 3. Dagger on the other hand doesn’t have a single bad skill.

That’s an exaggeration.

On the Scepter, Fire 2 and 3 are clearly pretty good (at least in PvE), but Water 3 is also quite useful, particularly in group scenarios. I’ve saved a lot of people in Mai Trin fights with that skill. Air 2 and 3 are both pretty neat skills as well; not game-changing, but the lack of cast time gives them a baseline level of usefulness. Earth 3 is a little harder to hit but it can still be quite useful if you line it up correctly. Earth 2 is honestly a really good skill, giving you +400 Toughness for up to 30 seconds at a time and a decent amount of damage when you reactivate it, but what really puts it over the top is that each rock counts as a separate projectile finisher, which is nothing to turn your nose up at.

The only truly terrible skill on the Scepter is Water 2. I wouldn’t say no to buffs on a few of the others, but if all ANet did were to buff the Scepter’s autoattacks so you weren’t totally useless between rotations, it would suddenly be able to compete with the mainhand dagger really well.

You’re not wrong that all the Dagger’s skills are good, though. Well, other than Earth 1. I can think of situations in which someone might want to use the other three autoattacks, but not so much Impale.

Blaine Tog.8304:

You’re not wrong that all the Dagger’s skills are good, though. Well, other than Earth 1. I can think of situations in which someone might want to use the other three autoattacks, but not so much Impale.

Pretty much agree with you Blaine, but Earth 1 DOES have 2 uses:

1. Damage while holding LOS
2. Attacking an enemy that is on a different level than you (situationally useful on Forest mid, for instance).

Because…Fire D/D …3, 4, 5…target dead. If still alive, switch to Air and 5, 4, 2 and auto until dead. I do still keep a scepter in my bags but almost never use it.

Is there a reason or a thought behind making scepter aa lower? Im just trying to understand why people dont use scepter. It would be a nice middle ground as dagger does force u in quite close range.

Scpeter Autoatacks are usually weak. With dagger lightnign whip compensates as a strong auto attack. And on staff you have fireball. On scepter when you wait for something (e.g. overloads) you have to use a weak autoattack.

Fire and air just don´t do enough damage for their long channel.
Water is soso but you usually don´t use it.
Earth has extreamly low dirct damage. Its only useful in condition builds (which are considered weak on ele)

Air auto needs more direct punch, fire and earth a bit condition buffing.

Fire 2 dragon tooth has a long casting time, for a skill thats only nice but rarely hiting mobile oponents.
And water 2 Shatterstone has the same problem never hiting.

DT should have lower castign time and shtterstone much more radius.
Then both would be better AE denial skills.

Here’s my wish list for Scepter autoattacks:

Fire: Reduced cast time to 1 second, or even 3/4 if possible. 1.25 seconds is just awkward, plus it’s single-target, plus the damage is pretty poor either way. Alternatively, make it an AoE attack (maybe like 120 units in radius) originating from the target.

Water: Every 9th hit delivers a 1-second Chill to the target. This needs to do something other than just damage because it competes directly with Air in that regard, and each of the four autoattacks needs to do something slightly different so it isn’t just a math problem to decide which to use.

Air: Add an AoE damage proc if you complete the channel. Tune as appropriate to make the damage competitive.

Earth: I’m not convinced we should be encouraging Ele bleed builds. Bleeds are a noob trap for us since Burning is basically just a better version of Bleed and we have really good access to Burning. If we want to facilitate specing for Bleeds, though, then the duration on the bleeds from Stone Shards needs to go up dramatically. I’m talking increasing the base duration to 9 or even 12 seconds. We could try making the mechanics more complicated (like striking with all three shards increases the duration of existing bleeds by a static amount, or applies a debuff that converts to additional bleeds upon some trigger) but increasing the duration would allow a build focusing on bleeds to stack up quite a lot if you really focused your assault.

Wolfric.9380:

DT should have lower castign time and shtterstone much more radius.
Then both would be better AE denial skills.

Shatterstone needs to pulse one-second Chills as it grows and deal a teensy bit more damage. Then opponents wouldn’t just be able to lazily shuffle out of range, and they would actually be motivated to. I’d be ok with the cooldown going up a bit to compensate.

DT is fine as-is. It’s a tremendous amount of damage for its cooldown and has a nifty ranged Blast finisher to boot. I can’t imagine it’s easy to land in PvP, but if Shatterstone had a bit of Chill then we’d have the tools we need to land it if we outplay our opponents.

Faelun.7563:

For ages now, everyone always says use D/D . . .

If its mathematical, please post some math, otherwise? Change My View?

Ok lets do the maths:

Direct damage.

1) In scepter you have 2 damage auto attacks: the water (wich is completely useless as your water element is a defensive attunement) and the air auto attack.

Air auto attack in scepter:
- no amulet, i take the damage base from Build editor.
—> 96 + 192 + 384 = 672 every 3,50 sec.

2) In dagger, you can use water, fire and air auto attacks ( water is useless because is your defensive element).

Air auto attack in dagger main hand:
- no amulet, i have taked the damage base from Build editor.
—> 448 every 0.50 sec.

Fire auto attack in dagger main hand:
- no amulet, i take damage base from Build editor.
—> 3*133 (one per projectile) = 399 every 0.50 sec.

==> Conclusion: you have a damage of 192/sec in scepter. You have a 896/sec or 798/sec in dagger.

==> dagger main hand > scepter on direct damage.

I am not taking count of the conditions damage because we all know how powerfull the dagger main hand is (ring of fire, dragons breath, fire dash,… ) compare to the scepter. So, if we take the codition damages in the equation, the results will be something like:

Dagger >>> Scepter.

The reason is actually really simple ( condition damages pass through the toughness )

To balance the scepter annet should try to put some powerfull autto attacks on it. But i think that Arena net prefers the conctact mage ^^

Blaine Tog.8304:

DT is fine as-is. It’s a tremendous amount of damage for its cooldown and has a nifty ranged Blast finisher to boot. I can’t imagine it’s easy to land in PvP, but if Shatterstone had a bit of Chill then we’d have the tools we need to land it if we outplay our opponents.

What to me seems most unfair is that Dragonhunter has True Shot. Lower CD, equal damage, pierces. Only thing it doesn’t have is a blast finisher. Yes, you can dodge True Shot, but to avoid Dragons Tooth you don’t even need to dodge. Just simply walk away from its aoe. Even with 6s CD on True Shot, Dragons Tooth would still be worse.

Tomiyou.3790:

Blaine Tog.8304:

DT is fine as-is. It’s a tremendous amount of damage for its cooldown and has a nifty ranged Blast finisher to boot. I can’t imagine it’s easy to land in PvP, but if Shatterstone had a bit of Chill then we’d have the tools we need to land it if we outplay our opponents.

What to me seems most unfair is that Dragonhunter has True Shot. Lower CD, equal damage, pierces. Only thing it doesn’t have is a blast finisher. Yes, you can dodge True Shot, but to avoid Dragons Tooth you don’t even need to dodge. Just simply walk away from its aoe. Even with 6s CD on True Shot, Dragons Tooth would still be worse.

Different professions, different weapons, different roles. I’m not going to defend the Dragonhunter (it’s new and very well might be overpowered), but there’s nothing to be gained by directly comparing two skills that have so many differences.

So, is the effectiveness in a build/weapon measured in Auto attack capabilities?

Or are we analyzing only raw damage on the two weapons? … I ask this because rarely use auto attacks when trying to deal real damage.. and there’s more than damage on auto attacks that comes into my mind when picking a weapon… for example… scepter lets me stack might faster and has more range, dagger attacks faster so triggers more on hit/critical effects over time.

kuritsutian.2987:

So, is the effectiveness in a build/weapon measured in Auto attack capabilities?

It depends on the weapon. The problem with the Scepter is that its rotations aren’t perfectly smooth, so you end up needing to mix in a few autoattacks here and there. You lose way too much pressure in the process, though.

Blaine Tog.8304:

kuritsutian.2987:

So, is the effectiveness in a build/weapon measured in Auto attack capabilities?

It depends on the weapon. The problem with the Scepter is that its rotations aren’t perfectly smooth, so you end up needing to mix in a few autoattacks here and there. You lose way too much pressure in the process, though.

This is especially obvious if you compare scepter to dagger. Not only does scepter have a few dead (useless skills), but others are more situational (like blinds). Also, some are instant. When you use scepter you simply MUST use auto-attacks quite often, especially if the fight isn’t ended by the time you drop all your burst.

With dagger, not only is every skill useful, but you also have some long, very useful channels in fire 2 and water 2 that fill in some of the time during a rotation without needing to auto-attack often.

In open-world PvE (non HoT especially), scepter can be great for quickly killing any pesky enemies that attack. In PvP and WvW, eles are forced to tank up and play the sustain game, and dagger is just 1000x better for that role.

I’ve always loved running S/D on my ele, still do, but yes, the auto attack barely makes a dent in anything:(
Though I also play in melee range usually, so being on my fields is no issue.
Water 2 is pretty solid for vuln stacking, though the delay on it makes it hard to hit with, similar to DT.
Water 3, pretty good dmg, and great heal, probably my 2nd favorite out of all the water skills.
I love air 2/3, can be cast instantly during a channel similar to a shout.

Pre HoT I fought against many D/D’s with S/D, was probably a 60/40 win rate for me, though we were all cele lol, and more or less depended on avoiding the right combos n hitting with yours.

Air 1 is soooo bad. worst auto in the game. I don’t get why it’s allowed to be so useless. All the damage is backloaded. gotta channel it for the full 3-4 seconds to do any damage, and then even if you do, it still does less dps (0.48) than water 1 (0.54), which is also weak as heck.

Meanwhile lightning whip is rocking 1.2+ dps and isn’t backloaded or any such nonsense. scepter air 2 is a nice skill, but it would need half the cooldown (and be traited, for a less than 2 second cooldown) to make up the difference.

Dragon’s Tooth is good (but only against things that don’t dodge) and and Pheonix is actually a good skill in general, but so is Burning Speed (burning speed is one of the best skills in the game imo).

Blaine Tog.8304:

You’re not wrong that all the Dagger’s skills are good, though. Well, other than Earth 1. I can think of situations in which someone might want to use the other three autoattacks, but not so much Impale.

Impale is actually useful if you’re running condition. It’s the best thing to use when fire 3/4/5 is on cooldown. switch to earth while channeling drake’s breath, then use earth 1 and 2 until fire is off cooldown. slightly better dps than sitting in fire and waiting for drake’s breath to come off cooldown again. Assuming the target will live long enough for the long duration bleeds to tick. And against a single target. Also better against condition removal, since two conditions have to be removed instead of 1.

Impale sucks. Has like one use. Still, all Sceptre auto-attacks suck, but at least it has [SHATTERSTONE]!

GLOR.2489:

Faelun.7563:

For ages now, everyone always says use D/D . . .

If its mathematical, please post some math, otherwise? Change My View?

Ok lets do the maths:

Direct damage.

1) In scepter you have 2 damage auto attacks: the water (wich is completely useless as your water element is a defensive attunement) and the air auto attack.

Air auto attack in scepter:
- no amulet, i take the damage base from Build editor.
—> 96 + 192 + 384 = 672 every 3,50 sec.

2) In dagger, you can use water, fire and air auto attacks ( water is useless because is your defensive element).

Air auto attack in dagger main hand:
- no amulet, i have taked the damage base from Build editor.
—> 448 every 0.50 sec.

Fire auto attack in dagger main hand:
- no amulet, i take damage base from Build editor.
—> 3*133 (one per projectile) = 399 every 0.50 sec.

==> Conclusion: you have a damage of 192/sec in scepter. You have a 896/sec or 798/sec in dagger.

==> dagger main hand > scepter on direct damage.

I am not taking count of the conditions damage because we all know how powerfull the dagger main hand is (ring of fire, dragons breath, fire dash,… ) compare to the scepter. So, if we take the codition damages in the equation, the results will be something like:

Dagger >>> Scepter.

The reason is actually really simple ( condition damages pass through the toughness )

To balance the scepter annet should try to put some powerfull autto attacks on it. But i think that Arena net prefers the conctact mage ^^

This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks.

GLOR.2489:

Faelun.7563:

For ages now, everyone always says use D/D . . .

If its mathematical, please post some math, otherwise? Change My View?

Ok lets do the maths:

Direct damage.

1) In scepter you have 2 damage auto attacks: the water (wich is completely useless as your water element is a defensive attunement) and the air auto attack.

Air auto attack in scepter:
- no amulet, i take the damage base from Build editor.
—> 96 + 192 + 384 = 672 every 3,50 sec.

2) In dagger, you can use water, fire and air auto attacks ( water is useless because is your defensive element).

Air auto attack in dagger main hand:
- no amulet, i have taked the damage base from Build editor.
—> 448 every 0.50 sec.

Fire auto attack in dagger main hand:
- no amulet, i take damage base from Build editor.
—> 3*133 (one per projectile) = 399 every 0.50 sec.

==> Conclusion: you have a damage of 192/sec in scepter. You have a 896/sec or 798/sec in dagger.

==> dagger main hand > scepter on direct damage.

I am not taking count of the conditions damage because we all know how powerfull the dagger main hand is (ring of fire, dragons breath, fire dash,… ) compare to the scepter. So, if we take the codition damages in the equation, the results will be something like:

Dagger >>> Scepter.

The reason is actually really simple ( condition damages pass through the toughness )

To balance the scepter annet should try to put some powerfull autto attacks on it. But i think that Arena net prefers the conctact mage ^^

This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks. So I guess my follow up to this is, why is S/F considered an acceptable kit compared to D/F?

Because you migth like range. …
Mainhand dagger with full rotation done offers more good skills and damage. If you fight at close range, and most fights are, dagger is better.

I tried to find how to use scepter best, and came to a condi based build, but basically half of the skills are not useful. The only good thing is i can use earth autoatack which does OK preasure in my build and that alone is huge, beause i can wait for CD´s in earth(with more defence) without wasting to much by autoattacking. Then it comes down to phoenix being good ….

Faelun.7563:

This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks. So I guess my follow up to this is, why is S/F considered an acceptable kit compared to D/F?

In regards to PvP in all comes down to what you want to achieve. S/F has enough burst dmg to make a rather correct marauder fresh air instakill build. With S/F you want to avoid teamfights and focus on quickly bringing down a single lone opponent (mainly bunkers) to capture a point. The focus gives you a LOT of raw survivability in form of damage blockers (air 4, earth 5).

D/F cele tempest is just overall superior and more versatile. It’s more oriented around teamfight and / or keeping a point. Overloads are less risky to cast due to your higher bulkiness, and the sustain is just amazing.

Playing D/F instead of D/D is giving up mobility for 1 more aura, 9 seconds of projectile reflect / destruction, 3 seconds of invul and a targeted knockdown. It just fits me better actually. But that’s just me.

Indeed, its a lot of personal thing. I am a WvW player and just started to try PvP.
I use the same build, because i like it and can play it. But i had to change the rune to soldiers due to lack of equipement customisation, but soldiers is good.
Had been successful till now with it. Of course its a mess with all the random groups, but i jumped in yesterday for one match and contributed much to the victory capturing and keeping a point for long winning the first two attempts to get me off in 1:1(reaper + ele) loosing the third when the ele came back with a scrapper :-).

Faelun.7563:

This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks. So I guess my follow up to this is, why is S/F considered an acceptable kit compared to D/F?

Firstly, thank you. ^^

Now i will answer to your new question.

The scepter still an acceptable weappon for ele because we dont have any other choice in main hand to play something in range with a possibility to win 1v1.

Because if we take staff, you are in range but it is something almost impossible to kill someone else in 1v1 with the staff in a “open-space” context. So staff is more played like in other context ( PVP points defended context). Then, in a capping points context you can kill someone because you are figthing in a limited area. However, staff is usually a weappon for support, healing and cc. Moreover, you need a team to play staff in usefull way.

To conclude, I would say that if you are playing scepter is because you are a “mage-elemental” range fan: just like me.

Wolfric.9380:

Because you migth like range. …
Mainhand dagger with full rotation done offers more good skills and damage. If you fight at close range, and most fights are, dagger is better.

If you like ranged damage, you use staff, you know, our actual ranged weapon that actually has good skills too.

I found scepter to be ok vs single target/dueling, but falls short overall. I really hope they would considering upping its usefulness, idk if buffing its AA alone is enough.

reikken.4961:

Air 1 is soooo bad. worst auto in the game. I don’t get why it’s allowed to be so useless. All the damage is backloaded. gotta channel it for the full 3-4 seconds to do any damage, and then even if you do, it still does less dps (0.48) than water 1 (0.54), which is also weak as heck.

Want to hear something even worse? Necro scepter 1 has 0.50 per second. That’s a pure condi weapon with a stronger power auto than scepter air 1.