Guild Wars 2

I hv just made a set of cele gear. but I am thinking that is it really worthy for ele(WVW). As I compare to PTV, the power of cele gear is really low but the healing amount and condition damage increase just a little bit(since staff ele just have 2 condition damage skill). Should I change it to cele + PPF (or use Rune of scholar instead of Divinity)? It seems better for ele.

Here is my thought:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQFAWnMIShDW5AeOAfEIgAwInEKCHxQBARlgivhvAA-T1BEABls/QTK/6THBAXIgHegAYq+zWKBBA-w
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQFAWnMIShDW5AeOAfEIgAwInEKCHxQBARlgivhvAA-T1BEABMt/gBKBbS5Xf6IA4CB8wDEAT1fAA-w

Better is subjective. Eles literally do everything at once, so they can make full use of celestial gear. However, it may not be optimal for what you’re trying to achieve. On my ele, I’m mixing celestial with zerker and zealot because I want to have a bit more healing power and defense, but not fully commit to it.

Having run Cele Ele and loving it before, I absolutely would say that cele ele is worth it many times over and over. Sure it may not put out the highest dps numbers or the highest healing amounts or the highest conditions, but it makes it so you’re able to do everything all at once, you can heal, condition, have a little armor, a bit more health, have a decent crit chance and crit damage. It becomes a trait game at that point, need a bit more power? Swap to 6 fire and 6 air. Need a bit more tankyness? Swap to 6 water and 6 earth or whatever fits your playstyle.

Running Cele Ele gives you the most choices of what you can do and what you can make at least somewhat effective. Cele Ele is mostly used by me when I run wvw or solo around in pve.

On cele ele I usually run 6 fire, 6 water, 2 arcane and a staff so that I can have a bit more damage and a bit more vit/healing as to be a bit more useful in those departments.

There is some truth here.

The best eles use 2/3 celestial and the rest 1/3 is up to the individual playstyle (This is why i love legendary daggers , swap stats for different setups)

I speak for the classic dnd only.

Buy/Save up for Strength runes, use sigil of battle+sigil of strength
Run the good ‘ol 02066 or 00266
Or even better, check out Chem’s Stream and Build:
Stream: http://www.twitch.tv/chemsorly
Build: http://intothemists.com/guides/guide.php?id=107

Before I left I used celestial for WvW. I mostly ran D/D in the melee train, though, and had enough survivability to not be a rally bot.

I also use it for solo PvE mostly out of laziness.

Celestial does everything sort of well, but I’d recommend you look really closely at what you want to do before investing. In my experience the healing power/survivability stats aren’t worth the tradeoff in spike potential, as you’re still able to pump out respectable healing without stats, and your survivability shouldn’t be tied to stats. IMO its overrated for most roles.

I never was a fan of Celestial stats, and I probably never will be. Even for Eles, who are probably the only ones who potentially could make some use of it, other stat-combinations are much better imo. Being a jack of ALL (literally: ALL) trades stat-wise never works out well. I’d always prefer more toughness over a bit of healing power, and more power over a bit of condition damage.

I’d like to use the celestial ascended rings just because I like the names. And the whole concept (and even the name “celestial”) sounds kinda tempting. But in fact (in this case, in fact = what I and afaik also some other people are convinced of), celestial stats are just bad. Even for Eles. It may sound nice, but as soon as you start looking at the numbers, you’ll be disappointed.

I wouldn’t see myself using it for anything but D/D. I had tried more focused stats and for me personally, and what I wanted to do, I liked celestial.

It’s not ever something I would use in dungeons or with another weapon set, though. Open PvE only if I’m too lazy to swap.

Celestial scales better than Knight or Soldier DPS-wise and offers comparable survivability. Of the four possible “defensive DPS” sets:

Zealot is highest DPS but gives the smallest boost to survivability overall.
Celestial is second-best DPS (since it scales best with buffs) and very high overall defense.
Knight is highest sustain (best damage reduction, which equates to more healing effectiveness) but lowest effective health pool.
Soldiers is highest health pool but worst overall DPS and worst sustain.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Celestial scales better than Knight or Soldier DPS-wise and offers comparable survivability. Of the four possible “defensive DPS” sets:

Zealot is highest DPS but gives the smallest boost to survivability overall.
Celestial is second-best DPS (since it scales best with buffs) and very high overall defense.
Knight is highest sustain (best damage reduction, which equates to more healing effectiveness) but lowest effective health pool.
Soldiers is highest health pool but worst overall DPS and worst sustain.

What you’re forgetting here is a mix of zerkers/soldiers/knights/maybesomeother. I’d always rate that higher dps-wise than celestial, and at least equal in survivability.

Personally, I run two sets of gear for my Ele.

Full Celestial with Traveler Runes for general PvE and WvW.
Full Berserker with Strength Runes for Dungeons/Fractals.

Weapons are full Zerk, if I ever get a Legendary, gravy.

The only time you need max damage/efficiency is in dungeons and Fractals, as the stuff here one shots you. In general PvE, nothing is really a threat, and WvW you want to be more versatile anyway, especially if solo roaming or havoc. There, Celestial damage is fine, and Celestial makes trait re-speccing less painful overall, as going from a 6/6/2/0/0 build to a 0/0/2/6/6 build isn’t as great a change compared to running a specialized set. Plus having the move speed bonus means not having to run SoA, or optimizing rotations for swiftness, which is a nice bonus.

Why would you want to REDUCE your damage for open world? That’ll just make things take exponentially longer to kill. If anything the damage reduction is less noticeable in dungeons since you have teammates to leech off of, solo you take that DPS hit 100%.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Why would you want to REDUCE your damage for open world? That’ll just make things take exponentially longer to kill. If anything the damage reduction is less noticeable in dungeons since you have teammates to leech off of, solo you take that DPS hit 100%.

Its not about reducing damage. Its about survivability and versatility, as well as not having to cultivate eight different sets of ascended armor, trinkets and weapons.

Dungeons and Fractals are usually at least somewhat coordinated, and any hit to DPS efficiency is noticeable and may get you kicked. For example, running Fractals with someone who doesn’t have sufficient AR is VERY noticeable, and if you dungeon enough with the same people having less than balls to the wall DPS gear is noticeable as well. Plus, high end Fractals your defense is irrelevant, being hit means you die, so full out DPS gear combined with active defenses (skills) and dodging is the optimal route.

As for open world, Celestial gear gives you the option of running efficient (although not fully optimized) builds that can accomplish a variety of tasks, from laying down staff water fields in WvW to D/D champ train farming with 100s of players, where your DPS “hit” is far less noticeable than in a 5 man dungeon. Open World PvE/WvW is about tagging, so Celestial is fine, whereas dungeons and Fractals you have to kill before being killed.

You’re also the only person attacking trash so a 50% hit in DPS in a direct doubling of kill time, as opposed to in a dungeon where it’s only a 10% increaste.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

You’re also the only person attacking trash so a 50% hit in DPS in a direct doubling of kill time, as opposed to in a dungeon where it’s only a 10% increaste.

So you’re saying its ok to drag down a team that depends on you not being a weak link, but not ok to take a bit of a hit vs. trash mobs while retaining more flexibility across game modes?

Sorry, but I like my reasoning better.

Leeching off your team is objectively the best thing you can be doing in a dungeon format, in terms of effort expended versus reward gained.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Leeching off your team is objectively the best thing you can be doing in a dungeon format, in terms of effort expended versus reward gained.

Well you just lost any credibility.

Using leeching (i.e. not playing) as the baseline for determining the worth of gear is about the dumbest thing I’ve heard all week. If you’re fine with leeching, then you don’t need ANY gear, and the question becomes moot.

Your argument ignores the extra time required for a 4 man team to accomplish what a 5 man team could, as well as the possibility of dungeon failure and the reduced rewards. Which equates to a waste of time, all because you weren’t geared properly.

Tell me again how leeching is awesome?

Kaleban.9834:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Leeching off your team is objectively the best thing you can be doing in a dungeon format, in terms of effort expended versus reward gained.

Well you just lost any credibility.

Using leeching (i.e. not playing) as the baseline for determining the worth of gear is about the dumbest thing I’ve heard all week. If you’re fine with leeching, then you don’t need ANY gear, and the question becomes moot.

Your argument ignores the extra time required for a 4 man team to accomplish what a 5 man team could, as well as the possibility of dungeon failure and the reduced rewards. Which equates to a waste of time, all because you weren’t geared properly.

Tell me again how leeching is awesome?

Let’s say you’re a zerk. You deal high DPS (above the average for the group) and dodge perfectly. You’re amazing. Your party is also all zerks and you’re at 100% DPS potential. It takes 10 minutes to do X dungeon and you get 1.5 gold for it, which is 15 silver per minute spent at 100% effort expended.

Now let’s say you go full tank spec. Full TVH, regen traits, etc. and just AFK auto-attack mobs while watching a movie on your other monitor. If you were the primary DPS carry before and contributed a third of the DPS, now your team is at 66% efficiency and takes 15 minutes to complete the dungeon. You’re getting 10 silver per minute, which is less than before, BUT you’re barely even playing in this case so you’re literally actually only playing something like 10% of the time. That means you’ve actually only been playing for a minute and a half and got 1.5 gold for it which is ONE FULL GOLD per minute played, if you can get it to the point where all you do is look over at the screen for a few seconds between each fight to autorun to the next boss and trigger AFK auto-attack on him.

I think it’s obvious which is objectively the better choice for you in the individual case. Of course the calculus is slightly more complicated in practice (setting up to “look like” a zerker so you don’t get kicked, etc.) but the basic principle is still the same.

Mix celestial with some knights/ptv/zerk/zealots for WvW. I’ve done the math on this and you get higher effective offense and defense by mixing a good amount of celestial into a balanced build. With a high amount of celestial gear (50%+) you want to emphasize power and toughness for the non-celestial gear.

Full celestial isn’t as good as a mix because the low power means precision and ferocity also counts for less per point which actually means lower final offense/defense (even if the individual stats add up to more). This is for WvW.

For PvE I guess full zerks is always better since damage is predictable…

Zephyrus.9680:

For PvE I guess full zerks is always better since damage is predictable…

I find myself happy to have my celestial armor when fighting the mordrem alone at Prosperity.

Usually I do as other said : glass canon armor for dungeons and celestial for everything else. I do not bind my level of satisfaction with the size of the numbers I see on my screen.

At high level fractal, you usually bring scale venom thus making your defensives stats relevant again (since you are getting 2 shot with tanky gear instead of one-shot with glass canon gear).

Besides, celestial ascended is cheaper now with all these quartz cristals in the market.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

if you can get it to the point where all you do is look over at the screen for a few seconds between each fight to autorun to the next boss and trigger AFK auto-attack on him.

Try that on Mai Trinn and let me know how long it takes for you to get kicked. Of course, any competent group is going to kick your worthless self to the curb way before then, but even IF you made it that far its likely you’re going to cause a full wipe, repeatedly, because you’re not contributing.

AFK leeching is the dumbest metric for gear comparison I have yet heard. As others have said, a mix of Celestial is generally the optimal gear setup (here and other forums, Reddit, etc.) and while going FULL Celestial is not the optimal setup all the time, it does offer the most flexibility in build diversity and stat usage.

Though, I don’t even know why I’m arguing the point with someone who is convinced the optimal way to play a game is to leech.

Zephyrus.9680:

Mix celestial with some knights/ptv/zerk/zealots for WvW. I’ve done the math on this and you get higher effective offense and defense by mixing a good amount of celestial into a balanced build. With a high amount of celestial gear (50%+) you want to emphasize power and toughness for the non-celestial gear.

Full celestial isn’t as good as a mix because the low power means precision and ferocity also counts for less per point which actually means lower final offense/defense (even if the individual stats add up to more). This is for WvW.

For PvE I guess full zerks is always better since damage is predictable…

Yeah I think my chest (?) is knights. Maybe pants, too. I know it’s ridiculous but I’d
honestly have to look again. I arrange my gear in sets in my inventory so it’s been a long time since I looked at what I settled on, lol.

Kaleban.9834:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

if you can get it to the point where all you do is look over at the screen for a few seconds between each fight to autorun to the next boss and trigger AFK auto-attack on him.

Try that on Mai Trinn and let me know how long it takes for you to get kicked. Of course, any competent group is going to kick your worthless self to the curb way before then, but even IF you made it that far its likely you’re going to cause a full wipe, repeatedly, because you’re not contributing.

AFK leeching is the dumbest metric for gear comparison I have yet heard. As others have said, a mix of Celestial is generally the optimal gear setup (here and other forums, Reddit, etc.) and while going FULL Celestial is not the optimal setup all the time, it does offer the most flexibility in build diversity and stat usage.

Though, I don’t even know why I’m arguing the point with someone who is convinced the optimal way to play a game is to leech.

Fractals isn’t a good AFK leech dungeon simply because it’s hard to get enough defense to go full AFK mode. Most other dungeons it’s easy to pretend to be a zerk and just afk in defense spec gear. Just grab a cleric warrior with Phalanx/EA and drop banners and quietly auto-attack with axe and most people probably won’t even notice you’re not doing anything.