Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone ,
First i’d like to apologize for my english mistakes , I’m french but I post here because french topics are quite desert.

So with the extension HOT and the new “hard pve content” I was wondering if celestial stats would be worth it in PVE ( magumaa , future raids …)

The question is : is the survival benefit to me and my allies granted by celestial worth compared to the DPS loss (I actually play D/F zerker ele).

Let me explain :
The idea would be to have a “swiss army knife” build with aura sharing and heal on auras (playing any other weapon set than staff that I truly dislike, with fire, water and tempest traits ). The point of celestial stats would be to be a little bit more tanky (I dont know how efficient is celestial gear on this point ? ), get better heals and regens for me and allies (though I think healing power doesnt affect our traits/skills a lot ? ) and get some condi damages to still hit enemies while i’m busy with helping allies/ placing myself right (which could happen really often if the game content gets really hard ) .

Thx for answers , have a nice day

I haven’t had a chance to play around in the HoT zones yet and tempest feels a bit weird to me but i’ve been doing pve in full ascended celestial gear for most of the year. I think most people don’t take into account that while you do lose out on some direct damage you do gain a bit of condition damage.

Since i was a bit curious if it will work i tried a tempest build with water 132/ air 121/ tempest 333 (or 323 but i kept getting tossed around allot so went with stability). I went to the first way point of verdant brink and aggroed 2 veteran stoneheads at once since they looked to be the biggest guys around and it’s the only part of HoT i have unlocked. You can survive just fine but killing stuff takes a while mostly because of the waiting time before you actually manage to get an overload going, maybe someone with more experience than me can take a look, but so far if you want to play an unkillable ele, full ascended celestial in pve is the way to go.

Personally i’ll keep using daggers, focus and occasionally a scepter with a fire-air-arcana or water build as this seems to be much better at reacting to enemy mobs. It’s gotten me past lots of level 50 mai trin fights before HoT and will probably get me past some other nasties that the expansion brings. So far tempest is a bit of a let down to me, not because of the overload mechanic but due to having to camp out an attunement, it makes my fav profession feel sluggish and boring rather than the a classic ele build that feels like an out of control element smashing god, even with defensive gear.

Looking forward to read what the more experienced players around here think about full celestial tempest.

I’ve run Celestial (just Exotic) since before “Celestial” was a thing (back when you just had to mix and match sets) and I really enjoy it. It’s very versatile, allowing you to fill a number of rolls at any given time, deal with just about any challenge you come up against, and use whatever weapons you want.

I use exotic celestial armor and ascended celestial trinkets including celestial Mawdrey. For runes use what ever suits your play style, there is too many good ones to list. I’ve literally never had a problem with any of the content and it works very well for me.

Thx for answers guys
I was also wondering about the efficiency of celestial compared to zerk for instance , do you think the damages in celestial are good enough ? do you consider the loss of damage without zerk is balanced by the utility of your better heals/regen and the fact that you almost never get down (at least a lot more less than in zerk ) ?
I agree that as @shadow said , condi damages in celestial are quite good and make up for the flat dps loss , but still it’s true that you lose DPS at the end. ( but still i’m convinced that while i’ll be focusing on something else than DPS , which will happen because of the content of HOT which seems harder, condi damages will do a lot compared to direct damages and so it can be great )

I’m talking about efficiency because the most important point to me in my playstyle is to feel (and be^^) useful for my group

exotic celestial & Zerker Trinket with runes of strenght staff /cantrip build, works very well in the new content.
i also tried slotting tempest and it worked fine too although i had some healing issues.

Redsky.7096:

Thx for answers guys
I was also wondering about the efficiency of celestial compared to zerk for instance , do you think the damages in celestial are good enough ? do you consider the loss of damage without zerk is balanced by the utility of your better heals/regen and the fact that you almost never get down (at least a lot more less than in zerk ) ?
I agree that as @shadow said , condi damages in celestial are quite good and make up for the flat dps loss , but still it’s true that you lose DPS at the end. ( but still i’m convinced that while i’ll be focusing on something else than DPS , which will happen because of the content of HOT which seems harder, condi damages will do a lot compared to direct damages and so it can be great )

I’m talking about efficiency because the most important point to me in my playstyle is to feel (and be^^) useful for my group

Honestly I’m not too sure about the effectivesness of celestial in PvE. I’ve started experimenting with Cavalier armor to see if increased toughness helps in the HoT maps. With my setup I have around 650 toughness which is about the same as celestial gives. I have a bit higher ferocity, precision and power. Just slightly lower than full zerk. What I find is that once you have 25 might, 25 vuln and fury up you don’t really notice the damage loss. When playing solo I can take on more monsters and take less damage from them so it allows me to make a few more mistakes. On the other hand, in big zergy group fights like Dragon’s Stand or Auric Basin meta events I tend to die just as fast to everything. Like those orange fissures. 650 extra toughness might mean that instead of dying instantly, I die a second later. In any event, they only way to deal with those attacks is dodging. Toughness is irrelevant there. Now ofcourse Celestial also gives you more healing, vitality and condition damage. Allowing you do deal some decent burns, have more base HP against condi’s and % based attacks and you have better regen and burst heal (only slightly). I still don’t think it makes a good enough difference for it to be worth running full celestial. Then again, in those zerg type events its more important that you follow the mechanics properly (like killing preservers in DS) than what gear you wear. And if 15 people are trying to kill an octovine it doesn’t really make a difference if someone isn’t full zerk. Especially if you do the event correctly. What it all comes down to I think: what will raids require? If raids need mostly full Zerker/Sinister parties to be able to deal enough damage to avoid enrage timers, then I’d say you’re forced to use zerk on an ele. If you mostly play fractals, than you also need zerk. Keep in mind that switching stats on your armor and weapons on celestial is quite a daunting task because each time you switch from celestial to something else you have to wait another 30 days before you can play celestial again.

All right ,
well I didnt know for the 30 days , good to know
And for the raids, i’ve seen the first one in the beta , of course the boss had a huge pool of HP , but still the enrage timer wasnt the main problem since everyone seems to die long before it , that’s why I was wondering about getting more “multitask” and get more survivability . Also the raid strat forced people to be in constant movement ( often far from the boss himself ) that’s why I thought gettting a bit of condi damages could be usefull .
As for fractals, i’m not pro at all in it , to be honnest I’ve done very few fractals , and was wondering , why do you say we need full zerk ? It appears to me that if the fractals are difficult , a little bit of survivability and support through better healing would help ? am I wrong ?
anyway thx for answers

Redsky.7096:

All right ,
well I didnt know for the 30 days , good to know
And for the raids, i’ve seen the first one in the beta , of course the boss had a huge pool of HP , but still the enrage timer wasnt the main problem since everyone seems to die long before it , that’s why I was wondering about getting more “multitask” and get more survivability . *Also the raid strat forced people to be in constant movement ( often far from the boss himself ) that’s why I thought gettting a bit of condi damages could be usefull . *
As for fractals, i’m not pro at all in it , to be honnest I’ve done very few fractals , and was wondering , why do you say we need full zerk ? It appears to me that if the fractals are difficult , a little bit of survivability and support through better healing would help ? am I wrong ?
anyway thx for answers

Condi damage doesn’t have any inherent advantages over direct damage when it comes to being “away from the boss”.
In most games there IS a benefit in DoT mechanics, but that’s because the DoTs there have above average DPET (damage per execution time). Those DoT classes have a few skills that do lots of damage, and then the rest is filler spells. If you can connect your high-value skills every once in a while, and only lose out on some fillers you are not losing out on as much damage as direct damage classes that have a more balance damage-spread.
All of that doesn’t really apply in GW2 – at least last I played. So keep that in mind.

It’s an amazing stat spec to run, you’re basically invoking god mode.
Source: 1500 hours of Cele ele in end-game pve