Guild Wars 2

Hello all, I am a long time solo and small group roamer. Currently I am running a s/f condi ele. This build has been pretty successful for roaming, but I’d like to see if the ele community has any suggestions for changes and improvements.

My current build

Pros:
- Very high armor
- Reasonable amount of condi clears / condi reduction
- Offstat condi damage is made up for from condi dmg from toughness trait/food
- High healing, both self healing and group

Cons:
- Despite having 4k armor with momentum stacks, I still have trouble with hard hitting physical damage specs that know what they are doing, particularly d/p thieves and dagger necros
- I recently switched from 20 in fire to 20 in arcana, which decreased most of my burns by a second. I don’t have as much pressure with the arcana, though I have more survivability
- One stunbreak I don’t usually use as a stunbreak
- Low max health (will be less of a problem when I get guard stacks from my other ele ^.^)
- If I don’t have FGS up, I can’t run away from zergs
- In order to control both people in a 1v2, I need to sacrifice a significant amount of damage from glyph of ele power to use it for chill or cripple

Any suggestions would be welcome. Thank you in advance ^_^

I am always on the lookout for tweaks to a good condi build. I will take a closer look later but why do you have Obsidian Focus? I don’t see any channeling skills.

Could very well be my inexperience with the class. Is this a theory craft build? A couple of questions.

Why Arcane Power? There is zero crit damage in the build and only 938 power. How much damage could that add?

There is only one heal in Water with S/F. Over the top Toughness but less than average HPs. Condi damage doesn’t look that powerful with no + to duration. Not sure how you kill anything with that.

Forzani.2584:

Could very well be my inexperience with the class. Is this a theory craft build? A couple of questions.

Why Arcane Power? There is zero crit damage in the build and only 938 power. How much damage could that add?

There is only one heal in Water with S/F. Over the top Toughness but less than average HPs. Condi damage doesn’t look that powerful with no + to duration. Not sure how you kill anything with that.

So I don’t know if we somehow ended up looking at different builds, but the version I’m looking at doesn’t have arcane power in it.

I also don’t like using that build website because it has a history of remaining in an outdated state for a long time, and there always seem to be inaccuracies in the tooltips. It also assumes weird things that can give some misrepresentation of the stats. For instance, in this case, the build featured always has the +290 toughness from obsidian focus applied, even though this is a situational bonus and not inherent in the build. You don’t even necessarily have to have any channeling skills on your weapons in order for the stat sheet to apply that bonus.

I made a version that should be mostly the same on the good webiste (put a sigil of momentum in for the sigil of restoration so you could add the momentum stacks): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vEEQJArdhMMKiW0wvBf0ACRBMYCjHZwH0hFF6wMA-zwBBogCh03gUIBJ9sIaslRFRjVPjIqWfELAACwMLzgMnZG6QH6QH6QboDdoDdoDtIA+1A-e

In any case, the condition damage is still fairly decent at 1500, but the build is still designed to be more of a tank than it is to be more of a condition based killer.

One could rearrange the runes and consumable choices to spec more into offense with conditions, but I’m not 100% sure what I would tweak as far as the utilities go. Perhaps swap out the earth shield for the ice bow… it would be nice to fit the sigil of fire in there somewhere, so that could even be used to just replace the conjured weapon entirely.

As for channeling skills, I think all of the scepter auto attacks count as channeling skills (although maybe not the fire one). This makes it useful for this build since he will be using the earth attunement auto attack very frequently to stack bleeds, and thus gaining extra defense during that time.

I’m not sure that the extra toughness provided by obsidian focus contributes to condition damage bonuses based off toughness (i.e. the tuning crystal), although I haven’t tested that. It’s still allows the build to reach very high armor values, regardless.

If you’re looking to balance out the vitality a bit more for some additional health, I think mixing in some shaman’s gear might work out alright.

The only other things I can think of are making it into some kind of experimental signet build that uses runes of resistance, or working in runes of the antitoxin.

Have you ever tried this with scepter/dagger? The focus has some nice stuff on it, especially in earth attunement, but you could make some decent use out of frost aura and cleansing wave, and you could use ride the lightning as an escape tool if you really needed to.

EDIT: Have you tried fiery war axe? You get a 7s duration burn on a 15 second cooldown that is also a leap finisher, meaning extra fire shields, heals, or whatever else you can muster. It also gives you might for extra damage as well as a blast finisher. Last but not least, you also get a retreat skill that can help with some of your mid-combat mobility concerns.

Yamsandjams.3267:

Thanks for the recommendation on a build editor that is more accurate.

As you said, I mostly use earth auto attack which proc’s the obsidian focus trait. Ether renewal also counts as channeling. I don’t think extra buffs like obsidian focus or rock barrier contribute to the converted condi damage.

I haven’t used ice bow or lava axe for this build, not sure how they would work out. Ice bow 4 would definitely do some damage, but I’m not sure if the rest of the weapon is worth it. Do you know if the healing effect from ice bow auto is a large enough area to make it worth while? With staff water auto, I had the trouble of not being the in the splash radius of the heal.

I like the defensive nature of focus. Swirling winds is invaluable for group fights and obsidian flesh is good for ressing a buddy in a pinch. That said, I really wish there were something comparable to cleansing wave or RTL on focus. Since mobility is more of an issue for solo fights, I might try s/d for solo roaming and stick to s/f for small group. Time to light up the ole incinerator and get to testing :3

Switching to dagger offhand means I could use a different sigil, as restoration is not worth it for solo roaming. There was some talk about weapon swap sigils having independent cooldowns at some point, is that still in the works? If so, then sigil of geomancy might be a good option for the dagger.

Thanks for your suggestions ^^

Oh, another question I had, though not specific to ele. How do the + and – stun durations work from sigil of paralyzation, melandru runes, and the -stun duration food? Does it round down or up to the nearest second when doing reductions? I know there was a change to the way sigil of paralyzation worked so it did not always round up, but does this apply to reductions as well? I ask because most stuns last only a second or two, so it may be more worthwhile for me to use the damage reduction when stunned food rather than stun reduction if the stun reduction is having minimal effects due to rounding.

Kyskythyn.6471:

Ether renewal also counts as channeling.

Oh I didn’t even think of that one, that’s a nice bit of synergy there.

Kyskythyn.6471:

Do you know if the healing effect from ice bow auto is a large enough area to make it worth while? With staff water auto, I had the trouble of not being the in the splash radius of the heal.

The healing effect on the ice bow auto has a 240 raidus, whereas the water staff auto is 180. So the effect is a bit bigger. Not only that, but it’s also about 15-20% more powerful too. I was kind of thinking ice bow because the CC on the #5 cannot be countered with a stun breaker if it lands, and the #4 ice storm thing can apply a lot of bleeds in an AoE as well as high direct damage.

Kyskythyn.6471:

There was some talk about weapon swap sigils having independent cooldowns at some point, is that still in the works? If so, then sigil of geomancy might be a good option for the dagger.

That is still in the works, but it won’t be for at least a few more months I think.

Kyskythyn.6471:

Oh, another question I had, though not specific to ele. How do the + and – stun durations work from sigil of paralyzation, melandru runes, and the -stun duration food? Does it round down or up to the nearest second when doing reductions? I know there was a change to the way sigil of paralyzation worked so it did not always round up, but does this apply to reductions as well? I ask because most stuns last only a second or two, so it may be more worthwhile for me to use the damage reduction when stunned food rather than stun reduction if the stun reduction is having minimal effects due to rounding.

As far as I know, it shouldn’t really do any rounding anymore. If it does still do rounding, it’s probably in 0.25 second increments. So if someone hits you with a 2 second stun and you have -25% stun duration reduction, you would be stunned for 1.5 seconds. The tooltips in the game can only ever display things in 0.25 second increments, and I don’t know if that means that it rounds to 0.25 second durations, or if it only displays the durations as those even though the actual durations of a stun or something can be in between (i.e. 1/3 second, 5/6 second, &c.).

I didn’t realize earth auto attack proc’s the obsidian focus trait. that is good information to know. ether Renewal is also a good point.

I am keeping an open mind but I just don’t know if Focus works better than dagger. Especially in WvW cruising around. Some fights are small man, some solo and some are zerg surfing. Focus seems to lack a little damage and mobility compared to Dagger.

i need to keep playing around with it.

I’ve been in a situation before where I miss dagger when I equip focus, and I miss focus when I equip dagger… they need a combined form, like a dagus.

Yamsandjams.3267:

I’ve been in a situation before where I miss dagger when I equip focus, and I miss focus when I equip dagger… they need a combined form, like a dagus.

lol i like it