Guild Wars 2

Introduction

Let us look at some ballpark numbers for Tempest DPS. After the various balance patches, I wanted to get a rough idea of how the different skills perform. Real in-game damage is complicated, so we won’t worry about 10% or 20% inaccuracies in the calculation below.

TL,DR:

• Tempest gets a modest boost in damage of roughly 10% when using overloads.
• Condition builds can in principle approach the damage of direct damage builds.

Let us assume: PvE. Exotic gear. Permanent Fury and 25 stacks of Might. For direct damage builds, a factor 1.5 from traits and other boni. For condition builds, maximal condition duration for a factor 2.0. For simplicity and since there are too many options, no other increases of stats from runes, food, skills, etc. We will focus on average sustained damage, as opposed to burst damage. Under some further reasonable assumptions that may not relate at all to what you see in the game™, we obtain the following numbers for damage per second.

Direct damage builds

Berserker Staff Fire/Air/Tempest

6100 Fire rotation
1600 OLF
7400 Fire rotation with OLF

• If we run Tempest, then Overload Fire (OLF) boosts our damage by 20%.
• Choosing Tempest over Water or Arcana looses 5% to 10% damage depending on specs. Overall Tempest gives us a modest damage boost of roughly 10%.
• The numbers don’t add up trivially because casting OLF takes away time from other skills.

Berserker Fire/Air/Tempest with OLF

7400 Staff Fire rotation
4900 Dagger/Focus Fire rotation
4800 Scepter/Focus Fire rotation

• Other main-hand options do significantly less DPS for a basic Fire rotation. The main reason is that Lava Font (which we assume to be traited for recharge and duration) is very strong at 3700/s. Of course, there are other reasons and situations where D/F or C/F may be preferred.
• Warhorn off-hand contributes less than Focus, mainly because the cooldowns are rather high, so we do not consider it here. May still make sense for its utility.

Berserker Fire/Air/Tempest with Fresh Air and OLA

6700 Staff Air-Fire rotation
6200 Dagger/x Air-Fire rotation

• Overload Air (OLA) becomes strong with Fresh Air because we can cast it roughly every 10 seconds. Channel OLA, swap to Fire, cast a quick fire skill for damage, swap back to Air after the first critical hit. Or wait for OLF to come up, which gives similar damage, but fewer boons and is a little harder to land.
• Overloads scale with weapon strength, so OLA on staff is 10% stronger than on scepter or dagger.
• Updated 11/10/2015. Lowered numbers for OLA builds by setting damage modifier to 1.4 instead of 1.5. We loose Bolt to the Heart and the bonus from sitting in Fire, but we gain some damage from Harmonious Conduit and Weak Spot with frequent OLA hits.

Condition damage builds

Now that conditions stack well, there no longer is a killer argument against condition builds in groups. The question is what sort of damage we can obtain. We focus on burn damage here.

Sinister Fire/Tempest

4900 Dagger/Focus Fire
1800 OLF
900 Signet of Fire
7100 Dagger/Focus with OLF and Signet of Fire

• Tempest with OLF gives a damage boost of 25%. Signet of Fire is very strong against single targets.
• We assume that all the ticks from fire fields that do burning actually hit. Damage from burn on crit is not included.

Sinister Fire/Tempest with OLF and SoF

7100 Dagger/Focus Fire rotation
7300 Scepter/Focus Fire rotation
7000 Staff Fire rotation
6200 Staff Earth rotation (bleeds instead of burning)

• The different weapon sets give similar results, but almost 40% of the
  damage comes from OLF and SoF.

Dire Fire/Tempest with OLF and SoF

6300 Dagger/Focus Fire rotation
6400 Scepter/Focus Fire rotation
5400 Staff Fire rotation

• One reason to use a condition build is that we can get Dire gear for a big increase in tankiness for a rather small loss in damage. For D/F, Dire gives 90% of the damage of Sinister while your effective health in Dire is at 260% compared to 100% for Sinister.
• Soldier gear can play a similar role for direct damage builds, but compared to Berserker you loose significantly more damage. Both comparisons become less favorable when not assuming full might and fury, but Dire or other condition gear is still worth considering.

Comparison of direct damage and condition damage

The ballpark numbers above say that a standard Berserker/Fire build gets about 7000/s, and that a standard Sinister/Fire build also gets about 7000/s.

• In practice, condition damage works far more slowly than direct damage. For up-front burst direct damage is easily two, three times more effective than condition damage. It used to be bleeds (very slow) compared to fast direct damage. Now it is burns (faster than bleeds) compared to direct damage that includes sources that tick over time (somewhat slower). As a very rough ballpark number, you may easily loose 50% of the longterm condition damage quoted above if the fights are too short for your slowly ticking burns/bleeds to make a difference.
• However, I think condition builds for Ele cannot be ruled out simply because the base damage is bad. Condition damage can be comparable to Berserker. And damage falls-off more slowly when making a transition from Sinister to Dire than for Berserker to Soldier.
• The direct damage is calculated for target armor of 2600, which is the tooltip/wiki default. However, does someone know what the average target armor is in PvE? The game seems balanced in the sense that for light armor of, say, 2000, direct damage is favored by 30%, and decreases against foes with higher armor, which favors condition damage. Some new content is designed to favor condition damage by large factors (Mordrem).

Big factors

Don’t take these numbers too seriously. There are several big factors that are much more relevant than a 10% or 20% difference in such estimates. Just a reminder:

• Your skills have to hit. If you rely on Lava Font, Overload Fire or Flamewall, you only get full damage for mostly stationary targets.
• Factor 1 to 5 depending on how many targets are involved.
• Do you have fury and 25 might all the time? 25 vulnerability? Breakbar control? Alacrity etc?
• Burst can be much more important than sustained damage, which is all we considered here.
• Ranged, melee, and in between. It is a little strange that Staff is in many situations the best ranged weapon and the best melee weapon. Long-range can be much better than trying to go close-range with overloads.
• Damage under pressure. If you have to dodge (say out of OLF), or move, or be rezzed, different skills are better at keeping your damage high.

Damage calculation

Most of the needed information can be found on the GW2 wiki.

Direct damage per second for various skills can be computed from the skill-fact damage given on the wiki, which is the tooltip damage at power 1000 without any other modifiers and assumes target armor 2600. Multiply the wiki number by (effective power/1000) and divide by the total casting time plus cooldown. The catch is that there is cast time and some after cast time, which people had to measure carefully. For cast times I use the nice table by DEKeyz (partially outdated) mentioned in DEKeyz’ excellent guide.

Average direct damage is proportional to effective power, which includes the average damage from critical hits. For example, exotic Berserker equipment with full might and fury gives power 3039 and effective power 5271.

Example: For effective power 5271, we compute for Staff/Fireball that dps = 343 * 5.271 / 1.4s = 1291/s.

To compute total damage, we should add up the dps from each skill in an optimized skill rotation. Instead, I used a quick and not too dirty estimate, the skill spammer. Assume that we cast all non-auto skills as often as we can and else we do the auto attack. We compute the total dps by adding up the different non-auto dps numbers, plus the dps from the auto-attack for the time that we are not busy casting the other skills.

Conclusions

These numbers are only rough estimates. They are no substitute for careful meta build crafting, but I think looking at ballpark numbers can point out interesting things to look into further. What I take away from all this is (for PvE):

• The classic staff meta can be improved by perhaps 10% with Overload Fire.
• Overload Air is an interesting alternative, but personally I have not yet tested enough builds in different content.
• Condition builds do seem to be viable as well. This holds up in game play, although I do miss the high damage against structures. From other posts, it would seem that condi Eles are outdamaged by Engis, and it would be nice to have actual numbers.
• Heart of Thorns adds a lot of variety (and I love it!), but with regard to DPS the Elementalist lost more than was gained if you figure in the cut to Frost Bow 4. Once you get over that, I think Elementalist is still a fun class to play, with lots of utility and many damage options.

All comments welcome.
Have fun.

I run the FA build with D/Wh. I think WH is quite good unlike most other people. Earth is awesome with reflects and blinds, water has a great water field and also regen, fire has a very long duration fire field and extra might stacks + sharing fury aswell. Only thing that is a bit meh = air. But when you’re in air you are either auto-attacking or using OLA. Now that we have acces to party wide magnetic aura with Aftershock I don’t really see the added value of Swirling Winds anymore, water and fire are quite abysmal too on a focus and earth is about the same. Although I prefer blinds over an invulnerable that doesn’t really do much for your party. Dagger offhand is still great but I don’t think it has a place in PvE when you have WH and Focus. For gear, I was using full Zerk at first but later switched to a more defensive set-up.

I do completely oppose all this ‘soldier gear’ crap I see everyone blabbering about. I’m pretty sure the way I’ve set up my gear is alot better. I run with cavalier’s armor and scrapper runes, knight’s weapons and zerk trinkets. I run an aura set-up with Air/Earth/Tempest. Giving me high uptime on Vigor/Fury/Might/Protection/Regen/Swiftness. I went with extra boon duration from Fried Golden Dumplings (which stack extra might in combat along with sigil of strength to keep your might stacks high) and Bountiful Maintenance Oil, for extra precision and more boon duration. 50% total. Which is more than Fire/Air/Arcane builds had using strength runes. Mandatory for this build is either Sigil of Accuracy or Fire signet. If you don’t need the 3rd utility skill than obviously signet is better as it will allow you to run with Sigil of Force.

This build can easily be adapted into a more support type build by switching air to water and being a bunker/healer role or you can switch out earth for fire in standard old content like fractals for more damage multipliers and easier to maintain fury in groups(permantent fury in this build requires good timing of shocking aura, sand squall, your sand squal proc from trait, whichever shouts you have slotted and possibly rebound. E.g. a good way is to, after might stacking, start with shocking aura > glyph of storms > OLA > switch earth and use sand squall as fury is about to drop off and get 7,5 seconds again + the extended duration squall gives. Then usually Shocking Aura is back up. If it’s not you might want to use the 1 aura you slot. E.g. if you were using Arcane Wave before I’d say Aftershock is better now as it does more than just damage and blast finisher. But Feel the Burn is also good. Alternatively you can time rebound to coincide with the rest by using it 5 seconds before your boons are gonna fall off.

My stats with his build are, unbuffed (off the top of my head, as I’m not in game right now):
~2400 power
~55% Crit chance
~205% Crit Damage
~2900 Armor
50% Boon Duration
17% extra baseline damage reduction
100% fury/regen/swiftness/might/vigor uptime
~85% protection uptime with which you take another 40% less damage.
Added side-bonus: On conditions when health is above 90%. Very useful for running around the jungle.

I suppose at the end of the day, a Zerker build can achieve better results provided you are able to stay alive. And this build could very well do that too with Zerker gear. I chose this build as it feel it is a very minimal DPS loss. It allows me to have 25 might, 25 vuln and 100% fury in a solo situation with very minimal effort and able to upkeep during combat. Something my staff build couldn’t do. So I hardly notice a damage difference. In fact, I’d say OLA spam is much better at dealing with all those highly mobile creatures than Lava Font is. I’m also very positive I deal both more damage and have more survivability than Zerk/Soldier builds. I mean who needs vitality anyway when it’s so easy to cleanse conditions in PvE situations. It’s not like you’re going to get hit with 30 burn stacks. It isn’t PvP/WvW. Vitality also makes regen less strong and makes it harder to keep bonuses like Scholar/Water/Diamond skin active. I think it’s a bad stat for PvE. Toughness isn’t great either unless you stack alot of it, which I’ve done. Switching to earth puts me over 3k armor and at that level of toughness your really start to notice. Smokescales hardly put a dent in me and instead of getting oneshot by pocket raptors they now need to hit me as a group 3 or 4 times. By that time they’re all dead already. This build also made it alot easier to solo groups of vets and do hero points with champs by myself. If I never die I can keep doing high sustained DPS and they drop like flies. When the raids come I’ll see how I’ll change this. It all depends on what role ele’s will have in raids, if they are even brought at all (something i’m not sure of). But for now, for high level Fractals and Jungle roaming I use this build and it works great. For everything else I still have my trusty zerk staff build.

Only regrettable thing about this build and tempest in general is that Warhorn (while being better than focus imo) needs some major fine tuning. Air skills are awful and Fire skills are good but just not impressive. They could use a bit more oomph. Another annoying thing is that while I think charge up time for Fire and Air Overload is totally fair and appropriate (especially considering Fresh Air spam), I feel it kinda defeats the purpose of Water and Earth overload. No one is going to stay in those attunements for 6 seconds to use those skills. It’s just bad. They are both great overloads but are never used because Air is default for D/x and Fire for Staff. I don’t see why we can’t just split it up. Why do all overloads need charge ups, for Lore/consistency? That’s just bull. Balance should come first. I’d say nerf Fire’s OL damage and make it focus more on Burns and Might stacking and remove the charge up . Keep OLA the same and simply remove Water and Earth Overload’s charge up and leave the skills as is. For both staff and d/x builds this means they are simply two skills on a 20 second cooldown, but that can now be used on demand. For Fire this means a DPS loss for staff but give something to staff it never had before and that is the ability to keep 25 might up solo. Right now OLF is better than Fireball. So make it about equal then. For Fresh air builds nothing changes as they still have to wait 6 seconds (which I feel is fair since it’s really really powerful). All specs gain access to good Water ad Earth Overloads. I imagine this will not change anything in PvP either as you still have to choose between ingivorating torrents and stab on overload. I don’t play sPvP as much as most so I wouldn’t know how OP it would be to give stab to overloads baseline along with this new change but hey, I’m just looking at it from a PvE perspective.

Very nice numbers. Have you considered Arcana/Air/Tempest Fresh Air build? I think it might be able to achieve comparable results to Fire/Air/Tempest staff build.

Arcane is very nice indeed and if I could pick 4 trait lines I would go with Arcane. The problem is, Earth provides two important things for my build. One is condition immunity above 90% HP. Outside of OLW the build has no way to cleanse conditions. Running Arcane would make me very vulnerable to it and since i’m all toughness no vitality i’d pretty much be less powerful but not more tanky against condition enemies. Second, Earth has protection on aura. The whole reason for carrying Boon Duration is to get higher uptime on Protection as it’s one of the more important boons. Now you still get protection when switchin to Earth when you take Arcane and protection on Overloading, but you also loose the 10% damage reduction from Earth GM minor. Finally, since I’m taking Earth 3 on Master, I also get reduced durations on Chill/Cripple/Immobilize, which is very nice for disengaging. Arcane provides me with Vigor on crit, but I already have permanent Vigor. It gives Fury on attunement swap, but I already have permanent Fury. It gives 10% extra boon duration, which is definitely nice and 15% attunement recharge rate. Which is irrelevant because of Fresh Air. It gives me boons when struck, but that is going to be Fury most of the time because I will be in air 99% of the time and again, already have enough Fury. Ofcourse Elemental Attunement is really great and being able to get Protection by quickly going in and out of Earth, and Regen in Water is convenient, but redundant. In case of Protection it would actually be a step back because I have less uptime with EA than with Elemental Shielding. Finally, 8-10% damage multiplier from bountiful power, while good, is not worth IMO losing Diamond Skin, 10% dmg reduce and Protection on aura’s for.

Question was mostly directed towards OP.

Verificus.4320:

I run the FA build with D/Wh. I think WH is quite good unlike most other people. Earth is awesome with reflects and blinds, water has a great water field and also regen, fire has a very long duration fire field and extra might stacks + sharing fury aswell. Only thing that is a bit meh = air. But when you’re in air you are either auto-attacking or using OLA. Now that we have acces to party wide magnetic aura with Aftershock I don’t really see the added value of Swirling Winds anymore, water and fire are quite abysmal too on a focus and earth is about the same. Although I prefer blinds over an invulnerable that doesn’t really do much for your party. Dagger offhand is still great but I don’t think it has a place in PvE when you have WH and Focus. For gear, I was using full Zerk at first but later switched to a more defensive set-up.

I do completely oppose all this ‘soldier gear’ crap I see everyone blabbering about. I’m pretty sure the way I’ve set up my gear is alot better. I run with cavalier’s armor and scrapper runes, knight’s weapons and zerk trinkets. I run an aura set-up with Air/Earth/Tempest. Giving me high uptime on Vigor/Fury/Might/Protection/Regen/Swiftness. I went with extra boon duration from Fried Golden Dumplings (which stack extra might in combat along with sigil of strength to keep your might stacks high) and Bountiful Maintenance Oil, for extra precision and more boon duration. 50% total. Which is more than Fire/Air/Arcane builds had using strength runes. Mandatory for this build is either Sigil of Accuracy or Fire signet. If you don’t need the 3rd utility skill than obviously signet is better as it will allow you to run with Sigil of Force.

This build can easily be adapted into a more support type build by switching air to water and being a bunker/healer role or you can switch out earth for fire in standard old content like fractals for more damage multipliers and easier to maintain fury in groups(permantent fury in this build requires good timing of shocking aura, sand squall, your sand squal proc from trait, whichever shouts you have slotted and possibly rebound. E.g. a good way is to, after might stacking, start with shocking aura > glyph of storms > OLA > switch earth and use sand squall as fury is about to drop off and get 7,5 seconds again + the extended duration squall gives. Then usually Shocking Aura is back up. If it’s not you might want to use the 1 aura you slot. E.g. if you were using Arcane Wave before I’d say Aftershock is better now as it does more than just damage and blast finisher. But Feel the Burn is also good. Alternatively you can time rebound to coincide with the rest by using it 5 seconds before your boons are gonna fall off.

My stats with his build are, unbuffed (off the top of my head, as I’m not in game right now):
~2400 power
~55% Crit chance
~205% Crit Damage
~2900 Armor
50% Boon Duration
17% extra baseline damage reduction
100% fury/regen/swiftness/might/vigor uptime
~85% protection uptime with which you take another 40% less damage.
Added side-bonus: On conditions when health is above 90%. Very useful for running around the jungle.

I suppose at the end of the day, a Zerker build can achieve better results provided you are able to stay alive. And this build could very well do that too with Zerker gear. I chose this build as it feel it is a very minimal DPS loss. It allows me to have 25 might, 25 vuln and 100% fury in a solo situation with very minimal effort and able to upkeep during combat. Something my staff build couldn’t do. So I hardly notice a damage difference. In fact, I’d say OLA spam is much better at dealing with all those highly mobile creatures than Lava Font is. I’m also very positive I deal both more damage and have more survivability than Zerk/Soldier builds. I mean who needs vitality anyway when it’s so easy to cleanse conditions in PvE situations. It’s not like you’re going to get hit with 30 burn stacks. It isn’t PvP/WvW. Vitality also makes regen less strong and makes it harder to keep bonuses like Scholar/Water/Diamond skin active. I think it’s a bad stat for PvE. Toughness isn’t great either unless you stack alot of it, which I’ve done. Switching to earth puts me over 3k armor and at that level of toughness your really start to notice. Smokescales hardly put a dent in me and instead of getting oneshot by pocket raptors they now need to hit me as a group 3 or 4 times. By that time they’re all dead already. This build also made it alot easier to solo groups of vets and do hero points with champs by myself. If I never die I can keep doing high sustained DPS and they drop like flies. When the raids come I’ll see how I’ll change this. It all depends on what role ele’s will have in raids, if they are even brought at all (something i’m not sure of). But for now, for high level Fractals and Jungle roaming I use this build and it works great. For everything else I still have my trusty zerk staff build.

Only regrettable thing about this build and tempest in general is that Warhorn (while being better than focus imo) needs some major fine tuning. Air skills are awful and Fire skills are good but just not impressive. They could use a bit more oomph. Another annoying thing is that while I think charge up time for Fire and Air Overload is totally fair and appropriate (especially considering Fresh Air spam), I feel it kinda defeats the purpose of Water and Earth overload. No one is going to stay in those attunements for 6 seconds to use those skills. It’s just bad. They are both great overloads but are never used because Air is default for D/x and Fire for Staff. I don’t see why we can’t just split it up. Why do all overloads need charge ups, for Lore/consistency? That’s just bull. Balance should come first. I’d say nerf Fire’s OL damage and make it focus more on Burns and Might stacking and remove the charge up . Keep OLA the same and simply remove Water and Earth Overload’s charge up and leave the skills as is. For both staff and d/x builds this means they are simply two skills on a 20 second cooldown, but that can now be used on demand. For Fire this means a DPS loss for staff but give something to staff it never had before and that is the ability to keep 25 might up solo. Right now OLF is better than Fireball. So make it about equal then. For Fresh air builds nothing changes as they still have to wait 6 seconds (which I feel is fair since it’s really really powerful). All specs gain access to good Water ad Earth Overloads. I imagine this will not change anything in PvP either as you still have to choose between ingivorating torrents and stab on overload. I don’t play sPvP as much as most so I wouldn’t know how OP it would be to give stab to overloads baseline along with this new change but hey, I’m just looking at it from a PvE perspective.

Can I get a link to your build?

@Verificus
You may be right, I should give Warhorn a closer look! About equipment, I would agree that it can really help to mix in different gear depending on the situation. There are some clever ideas in your build.

Iohanna.4863:

Very nice numbers. Have you considered Arcana/Air/Tempest Fresh Air build? I think it might be able to achieve comparable results to Fire/Air/Tempest staff build.

Good point! Usually Fire is the strongest damage option since with Fire/x/x we can get about 25% extra damage: 10% Burning Rage, and sitting in Fire about 5% from Empowering Flame and 10% from Pyromancer’s Training. But when doing the fast Fresh Air rotation, we are not in Fire for most of the rotation, so we don’t get the 15% from sitting in Fire anyway.

As you suggest, Arcana/Air/Tempest will give comparable damage to Fire/Air/Tempest when spending most time in Air. If we assume burning on the target, but also 5 boons, then the 10% damage from Bountiful Power replaces the 10% from Burning Rage. So I would agree, Arcana/Air/Tempest will give comparable results. Arcana also helps with personal fury uptime.

Actually, I may have been a little optimistic when evaluating the Fresh Air build, since I basically assume that the 15% damage loss from not sitting in Fire is balanced by the
high vulnerability from Weak Spot given all those hits from OLA.

maybe I am missing it, but what runes/sigils are these builds running? I’m assuming the berserker builds are running scholar? And the Condi builds are running Balthazars with Smoldering for 100% burn duration?

How the builds are done precisely I left open because there are just too many options, but for meta building you would of course want to be specific. The idea is that it is straightforward to get the overall modifiers, and to look at the relative strengths of skills rather than maximizing everything.

For 1.5 direct damage, we get 25% from Fire specs and 10% from Bolt to the Heart on average. Sigil of Force and Scholar runes can give the rest. For 2.0 burn duration, I use Burning Precision, Balthazar runes, Sigil of Smoldering, and food. A couple of weeks ago the maximal condition duration on food was reduced from 40% to 20%, and the Sigil replaces that.

Verificus.4320:

I run the FA build with D/Wh. I think WH is quite good unlike most other people. Earth is awesome with reflects and blinds, water has a great water field and also regen, fire has a very long duration fire field and extra might stacks + sharing fury aswell. Only thing that is a bit meh = air. But when you’re in air you are either auto-attacking or using OLA. Now that we have acces to party wide magnetic aura with Aftershock I don’t really see the added value of Swirling Winds anymore, water and fire are quite abysmal too on a focus and earth is about the same. Although I prefer blinds over an invulnerable that doesn’t really do much for your party. Dagger offhand is still great but I don’t think it has a place in PvE when you have WH and Focus. For gear, I was using full Zerk at first but later switched to a more defensive set-up.

I do completely oppose all this ‘soldier gear’ crap I see everyone blabbering about. I’m pretty sure the way I’ve set up my gear is alot better. I run with cavalier’s armor and scrapper runes, knight’s weapons and zerk trinkets. I run an aura set-up with Air/Earth/Tempest. Giving me high uptime on Vigor/Fury/Might/Protection/Regen/Swiftness. I went with extra boon duration from Fried Golden Dumplings (which stack extra might in combat along with sigil of strength to keep your might stacks high) and Bountiful Maintenance Oil, for extra precision and more boon duration. 50% total. Which is more than Fire/Air/Arcane builds had using strength runes. Mandatory for this build is either Sigil of Accuracy or Fire signet. If you don’t need the 3rd utility skill than obviously signet is better as it will allow you to run with Sigil of Force.

This build can easily be adapted into a more support type build by switching air to water and being a bunker/healer role or you can switch out earth for fire in standard old content like fractals for more damage multipliers and easier to maintain fury in groups(permantent fury in this build requires good timing of shocking aura, sand squall, your sand squal proc from trait, whichever shouts you have slotted and possibly rebound. E.g. a good way is to, after might stacking, start with shocking aura > glyph of storms > OLA > switch earth and use sand squall as fury is about to drop off and get 7,5 seconds again + the extended duration squall gives. Then usually Shocking Aura is back up. If it’s not you might want to use the 1 aura you slot. E.g. if you were using Arcane Wave before I’d say Aftershock is better now as it does more than just damage and blast finisher. But Feel the Burn is also good. Alternatively you can time rebound to coincide with the rest by using it 5 seconds before your boons are gonna fall off.

My stats with his build are, unbuffed (off the top of my head, as I’m not in game right now):
~2400 power
~55% Crit chance
~205% Crit Damage
~2900 Armor
50% Boon Duration
17% extra baseline damage reduction
100% fury/regen/swiftness/might/vigor uptime
~85% protection uptime with which you take another 40% less damage.
Added side-bonus: On conditions when health is above 90%. Very useful for running around the jungle.

I suppose at the end of the day, a Zerker build can achieve better results provided you are able to stay alive. And this build could very well do that too with Zerker gear. I chose this build as it feel it is a very minimal DPS loss. It allows me to have 25 might, 25 vuln and 100% fury in a solo situation with very minimal effort and able to upkeep during combat. Something my staff build couldn’t do. So I hardly notice a damage difference. In fact, I’d say OLA spam is much better at dealing with all those highly mobile creatures than Lava Font is. I’m also very positive I deal both more damage and have more survivability than Zerk/Soldier builds. I mean who needs vitality anyway when it’s so easy to cleanse conditions in PvE situations. It’s not like you’re going to get hit with 30 burn stacks. It isn’t PvP/WvW. Vitality also makes regen less strong and makes it harder to keep bonuses like Scholar/Water/Diamond skin active. I think it’s a bad stat for PvE. Toughness isn’t great either unless you stack alot of it, which I’ve done. Switching to earth puts me over 3k armor and at that level of toughness your really start to notice. Smokescales hardly put a dent in me and instead of getting oneshot by pocket raptors they now need to hit me as a group 3 or 4 times. By that time they’re all dead already. This build also made it alot easier to solo groups of vets and do hero points with champs by myself. If I never die I can keep doing high sustained DPS and they drop like flies. When the raids come I’ll see how I’ll change this. It all depends on what role ele’s will have in raids, if they are even brought at all (something i’m not sure of). But for now, for high level Fractals and Jungle roaming I use this build and it works great. For everything else I still have my trusty zerk staff build.

Only regrettable thing about this build and tempest in general is that Warhorn (while being better than focus imo) needs some major fine tuning. Air skills are awful and Fire skills are good but just not impressive. They could use a bit more oomph. Another annoying thing is that while I think charge up time for Fire and Air Overload is totally fair and appropriate (especially considering Fresh Air spam), I feel it kinda defeats the purpose of Water and Earth overload. No one is going to stay in those attunements for 6 seconds to use those skills. It’s just bad. They are both great overloads but are never used because Air is default for D/x and Fire for Staff. I don’t see why we can’t just split it up. Why do all overloads need charge ups, for Lore/consistency? That’s just bull. Balance should come first. I’d say nerf Fire’s OL damage and make it focus more on Burns and Might stacking and remove the charge up . Keep OLA the same and simply remove Water and Earth Overload’s charge up and leave the skills as is. For both staff and d/x builds this means they are simply two skills on a 20 second cooldown, but that can now be used on demand. For Fire this means a DPS loss for staff but give something to staff it never had before and that is the ability to keep 25 might up solo. Right now OLF is better than Fireball. So make it about equal then. For Fresh air builds nothing changes as they still have to wait 6 seconds (which I feel is fair since it’s really really powerful). All specs gain access to good Water ad Earth Overloads. I imagine this will not change anything in PvP either as you still have to choose between ingivorating torrents and stab on overload. I don’t play sPvP as much as most so I wouldn’t know how OP it would be to give stab to overloads baseline along with this new change but hey, I’m just looking at it from a PvE perspective.

Your gearing and build works great. I tried a variant with what I had (soldier’s armor, zerk weapon and trinkets) and, it wasn’t as tanky, nor did it hit as hard. I got cav gear but kept one of my weapons zerk (other is knights), scrapper runes, and I use the bowl of Nopalito Saute as food (pretty cheap for 20% boon duration). Has been working great in open world pve and fractals in the 40’s… haven’t tried higher yet, but I have no doubt it will be fine.

is the dos better than regular staff ele?

Shouldn’t those be dps builds?

Verificus.4320:

I run the FA build with D/Wh. I think WH is quite good unlike most other people. Earth is awesome with reflects and blinds, water has a great water field and also regen, fire has a very long duration fire field and extra might stacks + sharing fury aswell. Only thing that is a bit meh = air. But when you’re in air you are either auto-attacking or using OLA. Now that we have acces to party wide magnetic aura with Aftershock I don’t really see the added value of Swirling Winds anymore, water and fire are quite abysmal too on a focus and earth is about the same. Although I prefer blinds over an invulnerable that doesn’t really do much for your party. Dagger offhand is still great but I don’t think it has a place in PvE when you have WH and Focus. For gear, I was using full Zerk at first but later switched to a more defensive set-up.

I do completely oppose all this ‘soldier gear’ crap I see everyone blabbering about. I’m pretty sure the way I’ve set up my gear is alot better. I run with cavalier’s armor and scrapper runes, knight’s weapons and zerk trinkets. I run an aura set-up with Air/Earth/Tempest. Giving me high uptime on Vigor/Fury/Might/Protection/Regen/Swiftness. I went with extra boon duration from Fried Golden Dumplings (which stack extra might in combat along with sigil of strength to keep your might stacks high) and Bountiful Maintenance Oil, for extra precision and more boon duration. 50% total. Which is more than Fire/Air/Arcane builds had using strength runes. Mandatory for this build is either Sigil of Accuracy or Fire signet. If you don’t need the 3rd utility skill than obviously signet is better as it will allow you to run with Sigil of Force.

This build can easily be adapted into a more support type build by switching air to water and being a bunker/healer role or you can switch out earth for fire in standard old content like fractals for more damage multipliers and easier to maintain fury in groups(permantent fury in this build requires good timing of shocking aura, sand squall, your sand squal proc from trait, whichever shouts you have slotted and possibly rebound. E.g. a good way is to, after might stacking, start with shocking aura > glyph of storms > OLA > switch earth and use sand squall as fury is about to drop off and get 7,5 seconds again + the extended duration squall gives. Then usually Shocking Aura is back up. If it’s not you might want to use the 1 aura you slot. E.g. if you were using Arcane Wave before I’d say Aftershock is better now as it does more than just damage and blast finisher. But Feel the Burn is also good. Alternatively you can time rebound to coincide with the rest by using it 5 seconds before your boons are gonna fall off.

My stats with his build are, unbuffed (off the top of my head, as I’m not in game right now):
~2400 power
~55% Crit chance
~205% Crit Damage
~2900 Armor
50% Boon Duration
17% extra baseline damage reduction
100% fury/regen/swiftness/might/vigor uptime
~85% protection uptime with which you take another 40% less damage.
Added side-bonus: On conditions when health is above 90%. Very useful for running around the jungle.

I suppose at the end of the day, a Zerker build can achieve better results provided you are able to stay alive. And this build could very well do that too with Zerker gear. I chose this build as it feel it is a very minimal DPS loss. It allows me to have 25 might, 25 vuln and 100% fury in a solo situation with very minimal effort and able to upkeep during combat. Something my staff build couldn’t do. So I hardly notice a damage difference. In fact, I’d say OLA spam is much better at dealing with all those highly mobile creatures than Lava Font is. I’m also very positive I deal both more damage and have more survivability than Zerk/Soldier builds. I mean who needs vitality anyway when it’s so easy to cleanse conditions in PvE situations. It’s not like you’re going to get hit with 30 burn stacks. It isn’t PvP/WvW. Vitality also makes regen less strong and makes it harder to keep bonuses like Scholar/Water/Diamond skin active. I think it’s a bad stat for PvE. Toughness isn’t great either unless you stack alot of it, which I’ve done. Switching to earth puts me over 3k armor and at that level of toughness your really start to notice. Smokescales hardly put a dent in me and instead of getting oneshot by pocket raptors they now need to hit me as a group 3 or 4 times. By that time they’re all dead already. This build also made it alot easier to solo groups of vets and do hero points with champs by myself. If I never die I can keep doing high sustained DPS and they drop like flies. When the raids come I’ll see how I’ll change this. It all depends on what role ele’s will have in raids, if they are even brought at all (something i’m not sure of). But for now, for high level Fractals and Jungle roaming I use this build and it works great. For everything else I still have my trusty zerk staff build.

Only regrettable thing about this build and tempest in general is that Warhorn (while being better than focus imo) needs some major fine tuning. Air skills are awful and Fire skills are good but just not impressive. They could use a bit more oomph. Another annoying thing is that while I think charge up time for Fire and Air Overload is totally fair and appropriate (especially considering Fresh Air spam), I feel it kinda defeats the purpose of Water and Earth overload. No one is going to stay in those attunements for 6 seconds to use those skills. It’s just bad. They are both great overloads but are never used because Air is default for D/x and Fire for Staff. I don’t see why we can’t just split it up. Why do all overloads need charge ups, for Lore/consistency? That’s just bull. Balance should come first. I’d say nerf Fire’s OL damage and make it focus more on Burns and Might stacking and remove the charge up . Keep OLA the same and simply remove Water and Earth Overload’s charge up and leave the skills as is. For both staff and d/x builds this means they are simply two skills on a 20 second cooldown, but that can now be used on demand. For Fire this means a DPS loss for staff but give something to staff it never had before and that is the ability to keep 25 might up solo. Right now OLF is better than Fireball. So make it about equal then. For Fresh air builds nothing changes as they still have to wait 6 seconds (which I feel is fair since it’s really really powerful). All specs gain access to good Water ad Earth Overloads. I imagine this will not change anything in PvP either as you still have to choose between ingivorating torrents and stab on overload. I don’t play sPvP as much as most so I wouldn’t know how OP it would be to give stab to overloads baseline along with this new change but hey, I’m just looking at it from a PvE perspective.

I read your post carefully. Your idea much interested me becasuse i have little problem in HoT as full berserker staff.

Currently I bought exotic (knight/cleric) gear and try tests.

Here is a link to my build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFEQJBIhdSfJ0gJ2fJY2AwhJWaAM3Lbn9zOsCaBhQhCQA4DC-TRCBQBGR5Xf0Ccw9HkgSwPp+DAOhAtQHRCM/FgHEgoA8K-e

Could You apply the patch.

That is a very interesting build there, Slautar. Question, do you think that going Cavalier on gear and Berzerker on trinkets is better than the opposite (Berzerker on gear and Cavalier on trinkets)?

Have you guys tried the new Commander or Marauder gear? Why can’t ANet create a gear with Power, Precision, Toughness and Ferocity?