Guild Wars 2

After a bit of a spinoff discussion in Zelyhn’s PvE D/F guide, I decided to do some Veteran Risen Giant killtime comparisons in Cursed Shore to have some sort of data that people may use to make better informed decisions.

With a warrior providing OMM and banners: http://youtu.be/N_hIDPYrsvI
Without the warrior: http://youtu.be/-rLK9kFofBQ

I tested Scepter+Hammer, Dagger/Focus, and Staff. Builds are listed in video descriptions and are all relatively high DPS builds appropriate for the weapon.

Weapon Set: Time with Warrior / Time without Warrior
Dagger/Focus: 14.4 seconds / 16.2 seconds
Scepter+Hammer: 15.1 seconds / 21.9 seconds
Staff: 11 seconds / 17 seconds

I mainly used gear that I had on hand, though for the scepter-hammer trial without a warrior I had to use a Sigil of Frailty to maintain vuln. For the trials with a warrior, I got stacks and ate food that would give me the theoretically highest EP for that weapon set and used a potion of undead slaying. For the trials without the warrior, I stacked and ate food to boost precision and used Skale Venom as I initially thought it would give me sufficient vuln for the hammer build (but it didn’t) and I didn’t want to redo trials that I had recorded previously. I swapped from S/D (in the first hammer trial) to S/F (in the second hammer trial) to have better burning uptime on the target. While in the warrior video I used heals I would normally run, I swapped to the signet heal to help keep my health up for the second set of trials.

Kill times are recorded from the start of the cast of the first skill that hits the giant to the experience gain popup. I performed multiple trials from each weapon set but included the fastest trial of each weapon set in the video. Slower trials lagged by usually 1 – 2 auto attacks and possibly an additional dodge and were made slower either by losing too much health to maintain Vital Striking and scholar’s rune damage multipliers or by needing to dodge too much.

While I have formulated a few of my own conclusions from this experiment, I would like to hear others’ thoughts and reactions. Here are some questions to get those brains working:

• Are the killtimes what you expected?
• Why do you think the scepter-hammer killtimes were the highest in each trial?
• Why did the staff and scepter-hammer killtimes change so much between the videos, while dagger/focus only increased by about 2 seconds?
• Does this mean dagger/focus > staff > hammer in all PvE? Why or why not?

Unless you intend to solo everything, a solo dps test is pointless. Hammer provides spammed blast finishers, staff provides fire fields but isn’t great at blasting it by itself. The 2 together actually make some really nice fury/might uptimes if traited for it.

Lol I got comparable (actually slightly faster) times with S/D compared to the S/F build you used, without using food.

I’m quite surprised at how fast the D/F build killed the Giant, but it is 30/30/10/0/0, which cannot get glassier. Maybe I’ll repeat the test with S/D and the same spec, see how it goes.

Solo dps tests are actually quite valuable. It is not ground breaking but meaningful.

D/F works This is hardly a surprise to me because I do the maths. I think Keys can even shave off some time for this kill by tweaking the rotation a bit.

Jeydra.4386:

Lol I got comparable (actually slightly faster) times with S/D compared to the S/F build you used, without using food.

You’re absolutely right, S/D’s burst damage shaves off a few seconds. I got 18.73 seconds with a rotation of Fire 2 4 3 5 Earth 4 5 Air 2 3 Water (finish Earth 5) LH AA using the same setup as S/F (except with oh dagger, of course). I could upload it if anyone is interested in seeing the rotation. I’m not sure if waiting to get an extra Dtooth off would be a DPS gain or loss, but it’s something to look into. And Zel already pointed out an improvement to my D/F rotation. It’s actually been a great experiment in refining my own rotations with some extra eyes to go over everything!

The solo DPS tests are good indications of what a particular build brings to a party, but yes, it does miss part of the picture.

I would test it on a dungeon boss just to see how sustained DPS is compared to burst.
If you can t kill your target before your skills go on CD, then your time to kill becomes way longer.

Also maybe a mobile small target would be better….otherwise i suspect adding an icebow 4 would even get better results when it comes to burst….

Maybe is easier if you go to the mist and kill n* times the indestructible golem on there.

*I’ve been told that has 80K life points, so you can “kill it” 5 times to have a target with 400K.

In the mists we do not have access to the same stat pool.

But you can calculate the differences afterwards. Am I wrong? Kind of new on this.

We can calculate everything and we already do (check the zalculator). The point of actual dps test is that they are actual. Also we need crit chance to be consistently high, especially for fresh air and staff. We also need food, and other buffs.

Ups, just checked your guides and posts. I’m not in this league, yet.
Sorry for my post.

FGS Killtime: 3 seconds.
Aswell as the rotation matter’s too much to deliver accurate data. S/D could mostlikely burst one down within ~6 seconds.

With optimal rotation I hit 18s with S/D, no food, no Warrior. There was one anomalous run in which I hit 14s. I used the same 30/30/10/0/0 build that you used with D/F. As I’ve said before my Elementalist is lacking ascended weapons, ascended backpiece (only have masterwork) and Power infusions. Everything else was full zerk. Times were recorded using the FGS cooldown as a timer, so should be much more accurate than using the stopwatch.

I heavily dislike that 30/30/10/0/0 build since it’s ridiculously glassy. There was even one time when I got downed fighting that Veteran Risen Giant. The problem’s only going to be worse with D/F, which has no good immediate heal (unlike Staff #3 and #5, Scepter #3, Dagger #5 and the quintessential Healing Ripple). Why did you pick this particular build for D/F?