Guild Wars 2

As the new patch rolls out, I think this is going to be one of the more common trait combinations, that takes two Adept Major traits from Earth and Water, along with an Earth Minor Trait, and helps create a lot of damage reduction.

A review:

• Soothing Ice: Gain regeneration and Frost Aura when you are struck by a critical hit. (Unknown CD and duration – if someone does know, that’d be great!)
• Elemental Shielding: Gain protection when applying an aura to yourself or an ally. (3 seconds, no ICD)
• Geomancer’s Defense: You take 20% less damage from foes within 600 units.

Of these:

• Protection reduces damage by 33%
• Frost Aura reduces damage by 10%
• Geomancer’s Defense reduces damage by 20%

That’s a potential of 63% damage reduction!

soothing ice is 10s ICD but they will reduce the duration of the frost aura (to around 1s i guess).

1 second seems really low – is that just speculation or do you have a source?

on stream it was 4s but they said they will reduce it.

Damage modifiers are multiplicative so that’s a 52% damage reduction (108.33% effective HP increase).

You can also add stone heart to that to make one of the strongest counter burst tricks in the game by reducing your foes damage to 48% of standard non-crit down from potentially 165% of standard non-crit with fire and air procs. That means they’re doing only 29% of their potential dps even without factoring in lost sigil procs.

Stop, Drop, and Roll is going to overtake Soothing Ice in PvP.

This is actually something I planned on doing with the Tempest spec, which I expect is going to have sword. From what I’m hoping, sword will be completely melee as opposed to dagger’s 300-600 ranges.

Depending on how the Tempest spec looks, having all that damage reduction would be excellent for glassy or tanky builds. The skills will really determine which way I want to go

Coldtart.4785:

Damage modifiers are multiplicative so that’s a 52% damage reduction (108.33% effective HP increase).

You can also add stone heart to that to make one of the strongest counter burst tricks in the game by reducing your foes damage to 48% of standard non-crit down from potentially 165% of standard non-crit with fire and air procs. That means they’re doing only 29% of their potential dps even without factoring in lost sigil procs.

Did they change this?
Last time i tested (when frost aura got 10% reduction) it was just straight up 43%reduction

ele wvw commanders, here we go! staff or maybe even Sw/F could be insane tankyness (depending on the sword skills ofc)