If you’re not doing all of that, you’re not playing elementalist to its potential.
All you did was rattle off a list of things any Elementalist can bring. It is not helpful nor informative.
… I mean honestly short of Water Fields I could bring everything you mentioned with a D/D Brawler style Elementalist.
a D/D brawler should bring all of those things (except maybe AoE condition removal) or he’s not playing the class to its fullest. All eles should have those abilities, to lesser or greater degrees.
Maybe you seem to think “playing an Elementalist” and “playing a Support Elementalist” are the same thing. I contend they aren’t and that there are in fact numerous builds that can all function in a support role and potentially other roles.
If you’re playing a staff ele, you’re playing a support ele. Even in full glass cannon mode, you are a support spec that needs to be surrounded by a team to succeed.
You can read posts like this and many others that there are a variety of builds for when people think support. Some think you can go Berserker gear and just put points into 0/10/0/30/30 and that’s enough support. Others go to the other extreme and equip Cleric/Shaman healing gear and really crank out the heals. We’re all presenting options, it’s up to the person seeking advice to determine what they want.
a S/D ele would be better if you want to spec for healing and condi damage. You heal for more, on lower cooldowns, and have more options to reliably stack condition damage on targets. Staff is a very poor condition weapon and if you spec it that way, you’re doing it wrong. Also, in a large fight 100 people can use direct damage on a target to 100% effect. 100 people can never apply more than 25 stacks of bleeding and will never get more than 1 tick of burning per second.
Healing other people with staff requires them to cooperate and stand in your fields for several seconds. That’s not realistic (and probably suicidal) in the fluid battles that WvW involves. If you’re relying on people blasting your water fields for healing, your own healing power means nothing because the blasts use their healing power.
The truth has been and always will be without a measured way to track performance (be it DPS performance or healing performance) there’s really no way to say one way is better than another. There’s no way to disprove that say two ticks of my Eruption bleed with my Condition gear is any more or less than say one tick of Lava font they get hit with. We can all theorize and assume based on anecdotal evidence (IE: “I saw it do more dmg!”) but without being able to measure it there’s no way to say for sure.
You really can say for sure. Staff does not have any way to reliably spam conditions. You have eruption, which can keep up a whole 6 stacks of bleeding and flame burst which can apply 5s base burning each time you switch to fire. That is really low damage output, and if the enemy has any condi removal, you do no damage. Staff is a power weapon that has some bonus condition damage.
This is going to take forever to reply to all of these, couldn’t you have all kept your points shorter?
Xiv: You obviously haven’t had an original thought about the Elementalist and just repeat the same nonsense that’s been going on forever in the GvG WvW scene. PVT gear and blahblahblah. Try to have an original thought or at the very least don’t try to poop on the rainbows of the people who are trying to have an original thought. There are multiple and viable ways to skin a cat (or in this case play a support Ele).
Strang: As I mentioned just above, there’s many ways you can go about doing a support role and more importantly many different shades of grey on what you want to accomplish. Personally I’ve rocked a 0/20/0/30/20 style Elementalist in Berserker gear and supported the group in a similar manner as people mention AND usually was one of the last to die in group engagements. I’ve also played the various shades of grey from there ranging from PVT gear to Knight gear to even this more extreme Support role with Vit-Tough/Heal/Condi gear. My backpacks are pretty full haha…The simple truth is the way you guys are talking you’re talking from a GvG level. Most GvG groups will tell you what they want you to gear up for and spec as because they have an entire setup that works for them. I’ve seen some guilds go more defensive (my route) and others more offensive.
Even then as you mention (and it’s always been my experience, that video was just the first one I could find) typically the disengagement isn’t that far and is usually much closer these days (usually right outside the initial engagement area). That makes people better able to benefit from a +Healing stat due to the huge number of heals we can do for our allies in the ball while they are fighting (therefore increasing the time they can stay in there). I mean Evasive Arcana alone in Water is a 2500 heal with that much +Healing.
You certainly may not want every Elementalist rocking this route, but it’s not nearly as useless or pointless as some of you are trying to imply AND and it’s actually used to great success by others as we’ve seen and heard in other threads (and other slight variations such as going Clerics instead for a more Power focus instead of Conditions).
Caffynated: Field management is a huge part of the Elementalist game play and with experience isn’t hard at all. It’s pretty easy to catch people both friendly and enemy in your fields for a few ticks and the truth is there’s only two water fields you need to catch allies in. There’s plenty of other sources such as Attunement Swap as well as Evasive Arcana both which are huge 2500+ heals not to mention passive Soothing Mist and Regen that you’re pumping out. With play experience it’s not as bad as you mention.
And yay for personal attacks!
Listen Kodiak, on one is saying that healing power is useless on elementalists. Quite the opposite. The only issue is, that for staff, to really get the most out of the healing power, you must stand still. That is a death sentence in WvW when facing coordinated or skilled groups. Your extra heals on the ticks from your water field are no good when the other group will just AOE bomb the area in which the water field is, or even pull you out of it.
The staff IS support. No matter how you gear, the staff is a support weapon. It is area denial/control with water fields attached. However support != healing. Support means doing whatever your class can do to help. With the staff’s case it is control and combo fields.
You are not a healer. You contribute support by controlling the battle field. Your water fields will be used to blast in them and move on. You will most often drop the field in front of your group, while they are running and as the group passes through it will blast and run on through without stopping for a second. You might get what, one tick of the heal? Then what was the whole point of stacking so much healing power, for that one dodge roll + attunement swap? More often that not, the blast healing will not come from you, but from others and then it doesn’t matter what your healing power is, as it wont affect the blast heal.
If you want for small man to run a tanky/heal build I would suggest a S/D over staff and get a ranger to join you for the water field. Why S/D? Because of Trident and Cleansing wave. With S/D you can AOE (small one yes) burst heal for much more with the swap to water/trident/cleansing wave/dodge roll combo than you would with staff AND you can reliably stack singular conditions longer than you could with staff.
Staff generally is NOT good for the small man group (3-10) since you (generally) don’t pack the blast finishers to make the best use of the water fields and NO ONE will stand in your water field long enough for it to make any difference. This can vary depending on the group composition sure but generally the small man (3-5) would benefit more from the insane 2.5k heals from the above mentioned combo (per ability) than they would a water field and blast in it.
Staff conditions are generally poor. Why? Because you can’t stack a condition to any huge number and quickly re-apply it if it is wiped die to the nature of attunement swap and cooldowns on the abilities themselves. When you launch an eruption, and swap to fire for a lava font to get the AOE might, by the time you can swap back to earth those 6 stacks of bleeding are more than likely gone. Not only that, you would be missing key timings to swap to earth for the AOE protection to try to survive bursts since you are trying to spam Eruption. It is better on Scepter as you will be longer in the attunements (like earth or fire, though mostly you will be in air, until other abilities will come off cooldown)
The strength of the staff is the control it gives, the static field and the AOE chill and Meteor Shower (not for the damage only, but mainly because people just don’t want to headfirst into it). The reason the “Immortal Staff Ele” was immortal was not because the water field was so OP, it was because of Evasive Arcana giving 4 blast finishers. It was only OP really in sPVP because the water fields would cover the whole point and the ele would just dodge roll around and laugh. That made it OP for sPVP because the point would never be uncontested for that team and you could never kill that ele because of all the blast finishers we had from EA. Not because the healing ticks of the water field itself (though it did help). That was OP because the ele didn’t need to move off the point that was covered by the field whereas in WvW you will generally not be in your water field because you have to move around a lot more. That is why the second that the EA blast finishers where removed, the Immortal Staff ele disappeared and the rise of the Immortal Cleric S/D ele did. As the S/D ele can burst heal for 10k out of 14k every 40 seconds, and burst heal for 5k every 10 seconds.
Healing power is only really pointless for staff since the healing comes in ticks, and is not really felt due to all the conditions and damage that a good group will throw at you. Burst healing is better than regen healing in WvW because the damage normally will come in waves. What makes ele healing so strong is thakittens burst healing topped with a regen (or 2) leading to a TON of healing. However in staff, you only really have access to regen style healing with the water fields applying their heals in ticks until someone blasts it, and then all your healing power is null since the blast will be based upon their healing power.
continued in next post…
(edited by Raif.9507)
Continued from previous…
You as a staff ele will have access to 3 blasts (Earth EA, Eruption and Arcane Wave) which while good, you probably wont be close enough to use 2 of them to where you dropped your water field as you should be dropping it on the melee who are protecting your kitten . And if we are talking a small group like 5 people, don’t run staff you are more of a liability than a help as S/D or D/D would help a hell of a lot more since you can’t use the best defense that a staff ele would have, range, since you wouldn’t want to be so kitten far from your group mates.
And yes, if your group isn’t stacking might/vulnerability on targets that you call out together, then your group is worthless. I was talking under the assumption that that was understood. You have consumables, you have might stacking and vulnerability all available in your group and should be doing it all the time. So yes, my ice spike will hit 6k on my target because I worked with my group to make it happen. It’s called team effort, ya know, since we are talking about a team build here and all.
I never advocated using berserkers. Especially not in WvW unless you LIKE running back from spawn constantly. Good groups will more often than not target what they see as the squishy/dangerous member of the opposing group and go for them first and focus them down. Staff elementalists are prime targets in WvW and a good group will kill you fast. Neither am I saying go all PVT as you certainly are missing a lot of what the class can do then.
I always will advocate going for a mix of gear, maybe even some celestial gear too. Get a good amount of health that you feel comfortable controlling with the multitude of heals at your disposal (I always aimed for 16-16.5K) and a good amount of toughness to the point where you feel you are survivable enough and the rest go offensive gear. Maybe throw in some clerics to buff your healing a bit more. But unless you are going D/D or S/D roaming, I wouldn’t suggest going full clerics. You might never die, but you won’t accomplish anything either. Look even at Dapheonix, he started all clerics, and gradually weaned off it to go knights so he can kill stuff. The cleric bunker is a crutch, it’s easy to play and very forgiving as there is so much self sustain that it is hard to kill/kill others. In group play though it isn’t bad, but staff doesn’t make the best use of it.
I wish staff got a buff to make it much better though as far as conditions/healing. The tick healing just doesn’t cut it unless the field is being blasted by someone and in small groups the burst healing other weapon sets give are just all around better and the control that they give are more suited for small man play than the staff.
This turned out quite a bit longer than I intended…. Sorry :p I just love theory crafting and the elementalist is my passion
(edited by Raif.9507)
you are hit with a wall of text and die
my 5cents for those who will read everything.
WvW perspective here (pve and pvp not considered when doing this build)
Staff Ele – Survival, CC and Damage
Equipment is very important; it determines what traits and utilities to take.
Power/toughness – I try to keep these around the same
Precison/Vitality – I try to keep these around the same
Critical damage/Critical chance – I try to keep within 5% of each other
Armor – Soldier/Knight and Superior Rune of Melandru
Trinkets – Soldier/Knight upgrades mixture of Beryl and Ruby
Weapon – Beserker of Accuracy
Food – Bowl of Lemongrass Poultry Soup (-40% Condition duration)/Bowl of Poultry and Leek Soup (-36% – less but a lot cheaper)
Oil – Quality/Master Maintenance Oil – precision equal % of toughness and vitality
What does above equipment provide me:
Condition duration -61 to 65%
Stun duration -25%
Unfortunately still in rare trinkets; my gear is exotic:
Power/toughness = 1800ish
Precision/Vitality = 1400ish
Health = 17k
Armor = 2750ish
Crit dmg/Crit chance = 39%/34%
Race = Asura
Smaller the better for me. Allows me to hide within other larger teammates at various times.
Build
0/10/30/10/20
Air: Bolt to the Heart
Earth*: Earths Embrace, Geomancers Freedom, Rock Solid
Water: Vital Striking
Arcane: Elemental Attunement, Blasting Staff
*25 earth – Enduring Damage = 10% more damage when endurance full
Geomancers Freedom = Crippled, Chilled, Immoblized now -94% to 98% duration (just a blip that appears and disappears)
Staff are range thus should have full health and endurance a large % of time:
+20% damage from Vital Striking and Enduring damage
+40% if opponet has health <33% – Down folks here; killing off down folks very vital in WvW
Utilities (need to be flexible here):
Ether Renewal (heal plus condition removal – those that still hanging on)
Open*: See below
Pain Inverter (Asura Racial ) retaliation and confusion 6secs 30 CD
Armor of Earth
Tornado /Greatsword
*Open (Here depends on whats happening)
Arcane Wave (need another combo finish blast outside of Earth)
Signet of Air (perm swiftness)
Mistform – get through enemies to get into keep
Lightning flash – multiple uses
!!!!!! Summary !!!!!!
CC: is used to separate our enemy allowing easier fighting:
Our best is Frozen Ground
Static field is ignored by stability.
Unsteady Ground
Shock wave
Survival:
Conditions are reduced by 60%
Toughness provides 36% less damage
Pain Inverter, Earth Embrace, armor of earth, Magnetic Aura provide extra protection
Swithing to Earth Attunement; Protection and Stability to self and allies
Damage:
+20% health/endurance full
+20% opponent health <33%
Downed
Ice Spike ‘Water skill 2’ learn to use it.. Great damage, 4secCD, large radius, since down 40% extra damage.
(edited by Jarek.2430)
I stand by my words, healing power is really sucky stat for staff ele.
With full healing power gear, you will get less than 4k extra to amount of burst heal you can do, and less than 290 hps from passive healing. And this requires you to be in the melee blob, puts 2 of your attunements on cd denying access to water, makes you spend both your dodges, requires an utility slot, forces your target to stay still to get all of the healing, has compromised your defensive stats and destroyed your damage output.
I stand by my words, healing power is really sucky stat for staff ele.
With full healing power gear, you will get less than 4k extra to amount of burst heal you can do, and less than 290 hps from passive healing. And this requires you to be in the melee blob, puts 2 of your attunements on cd denying access to water, makes you spend both your dodges, requires an utility slot, forces your target to stay still to get all of the healing, has compromised your defensive stats and destroyed your damage output.
Rest assured when I rock my +healing gear and yet continue to be wildly successful (along with many others) in WvW that really I will be crying inside thinking about how poorly I should be doing :..(
After some tests i will stick with PTV + Divinity Runes + Zerk Jewels.
hi, interesting topic as I have learned quite a bit about eles. However, the support build I run (if you can call it that) is full cleric gear and 20/0/0/20/30 in traits. Also I use a staff. My utilities are: arcane wave, arcane blast, and signet of air. Tornado elite usually. This is my own build that I do enjoy very much. I can also switch to s/d and swap bigger staff AoE for faster endurance recovery with scepter. Other then that, it has served me very well in both survivability and support of the group. that is unless the trait changes murder me. Well anyways,I have fun with it.
I’m not there yet on this build as I don’t have the rings and I have a soldier’s amulet from before, but this is the goal.
An alternative would be to use 2 runes of water instead of a full set of altruism runes, for 15% extra boon duration, but it does come at the cost of you not having a real good means of getting yourself fury and being stuck at 21% to crit, as well as losing 65 healing power. Personally, I like the ability to get myself fury at about a 25% uptime.
Also the second water major trait is something I swap depending on what I need. I may swap it to the fall damage trait, or the cantrip cooldown reduction trait, or even at times, the water skill cooldown reduction trait.
Things I like about this build is it has high flat damage from power, with fury has great crit damage, has the ability to stack good amounts of might through setting up an eruption, swapping to fire attunement in combat, lava font, letting eruption go off and blast finishing it with arcane wave and then healing for 13 stacks of might, 9 of which are spread to those around you as well as fury. Great condition removal, and still manages to have some survivability with 2 stun breakers that are also escapes, and the escapes from fiery greatsword, along with moderate health and toughness.
I only run staff, and I took a generalist approach. I use Knights armor and Divinity Runes (was using Emerald orbs until I could afford each rune). Backpiece is Cavalier, and amulet/rings Ascended Celestial with Precise and Vital WvW infusions. Accessory I use Exotic Berserkers, and will not go to ascended due to cost and being a broke WvW player (and need to gear up 3 other 80 alts too).
Here is the link to current setup:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/elementalist/?1.3|6.1g.h2|0.0.0.0.0.0|1n.71j.1n.71j.1n.71j.1n.71j.1n.71j.1n.71j|211.d14.211.d14.311.d17.1g.67.1g.67.1i.64|0.a1.0.u56c.u58b|2e.7|0.1v.1r.1u.28|e
At 80, my first exotic gear was the Balthazar armor. I used that till deciding on Knights. I’m also in process of working up a exotic karma set of PVT gear (mix and match between the temples and then Invader legs), and then will follow that up with a full Berserker set at some point.
This is the build I use for serious WvW guild support + dps:
It is a support/dps build, not solely support. It is highly survivable (the kind of toughness even a guardian would envy), can pump out huge damage (especially with 25 charges on the bloodlust sigil + might), and still brings a ton of support (water/fire/ice/lightning fields, cleansing wave on dodge, cleansing water, etc).
If you don’t care about dps and want to be 100 percent support, don’t use this versatility build. But you mentioned zerkers, so I thought you might be interested in a hybrid.
Almost exactly the build I use for WvW. I use a mix of Knight’s, Soldier’s and Berserker’s. I tuned the balance to my playstyle, starting with Knight/Soldier and then slowly bringing Berserker into the mix until I found what works for me.
For staff gear, especially if you are new to elementalist, I’d recommend soldier’s gear to start. Then begin working in damage gear as you get comfortable. A mix of valkyrie’s and cavalier’s is good if you can put at least 20 points in air for some precision and have some source of fury. I tend to avoid berzerker’s in WvW except for adding rubies to trinkets (that’s the absolute best point for point trade for crit damage, so start there). Berzerker’s armor/weapon/trinkets cost around 150hp or 15 armor rating per point of crit compared to valkyrie/cavalier, trinket upgrades are 3x as effective point for point.
With the addition of a stunbreaker to signet of air, I’m going to revisit my signet-aurashare build for large scale WvW.
20-0-10-30-10 with full Altruism runes+ether renewal and 3 signets. Gives 100% protection uptime with a decent amount of other boons. The only problem I ran into with this build before was the lack of stunbreaker. A signet can be swapped for arcane wave for an extra blast finisher for frozen ground (frost aura is pimp).
A stability sharing (rock solid) build might be interesting as well, gonna try something like 0-0-20-20-30 (I know, so revolutionary right? way to go making those fire/air build viable with new traits!).
Personally I’ve been running 30 air for a long time, so I’m actually pretty stoked about the air line changes. For offensive small scale I currently run full knight’s with rubies in every slot and 0-30-0-20-20, so they may have actually buffed my favorite build for once (well, and nerfed too, since I’ll only have 2 stunbreakers now instead of 3, but that’s ok, I also play a 4-kit engineer, so kinda used to not having any stunbreakers). So on the bright side, get ready to self-stun and eat 12k churning earths, muahahahaha!
(edited by Thrashbarg.9820)
I stand by my words, healing power is really sucky stat for staff ele.
With full healing power gear, you will get less than 4k extra to amount of burst heal you can do, and less than 290 hps from passive healing. And this requires you to be in the melee blob, puts 2 of your attunements on cd denying access to water, makes you spend both your dodges, requires an utility slot, forces your target to stay still to get all of the healing, has compromised your defensive stats and destroyed your damage output.
You must never run with the zerg or assault towers. Or fight in prolonged, massive battles. Or fight near arrow carts.
…
Actually, what DO you do?
You must never run with the zerg or assault towers. Or fight in prolonged, massive battles. Or fight near arrow carts.
…
Actually, what DO you do?
Haha, right?
I stand by my words, healing power is really sucky stat for staff ele.
With full healing power gear, you will get less than 4k extra to amount of burst heal you can do, and less than 290 hps from passive healing. And this requires you to be in the melee blob, puts 2 of your attunements on cd denying access to water, makes you spend both your dodges, requires an utility slot, forces your target to stay still to get all of the healing, has compromised your defensive stats and destroyed your damage output.
You must never run with the zerg or assault towers. Or fight in prolonged, massive battles. Or fight near arrow carts.
…
Actually, what DO you do?
You are absolutely right. I tend to never run with zergs, i fight against them.
Rest assured that my guild (15-30 man raid) gets a metric butt ton of prolonged fights heavily outnumbered, under heavy arrowcart fire, against other good guilds, out in the field and inside keeps/towers or any combination of those. That´s what we thrive for, and more often than not we come out victorius.
Not that i think you´ll believe me so i´ll just post few links when i have time, so you can see.
I stand by my words, healing power is really sucky stat for staff ele.
With full healing power gear, you will get less than 4k extra to amount of burst heal you can do, and less than 290 hps from passive healing. And this requires you to be in the melee blob, puts 2 of your attunements on cd denying access to water, makes you spend both your dodges, requires an utility slot, forces your target to stay still to get all of the healing, has compromised your defensive stats and destroyed your damage output.
You must never run with the zerg or assault towers. Or fight in prolonged, massive battles. Or fight near arrow carts.
…
Actually, what DO you do?
And you must not realize that no one is getting the extra heals from your water fields… because no one is standing still in them unless they want to die as an arrow cart/zerg will out damage your heal over time and not give anyone a good cushion of health to get out of the way.
The argument isn’t that HP isn’t good for the elementalist, just that it isn’t optimal for the staff due to its regen-like heals that require you to stay in a certain spot instead of burst healing.
Burst healing > regen healing.
Play how you want, but it is sub-optimal to use HP on a staff as no one will really get the full effect of it in WvW unless you have people dancing in your field, which happens less often than one would like. Can you play that way? Sure. Many do. Is it the best for group comp? No.
You are better off running with a guardian who has a hammer with full HP gear and just have him/her blast your water field and support him/her with control/aoe damage as your own HP makes no difference when someone else blasts your field.
And before your comment on “You must not do x,y,z” I do play on a t1 server, I do it all with my guild, so find some other way to refute my claim. Preferably with a video. Or numbers. You know… actual facts about the gameplay mechanics or how WvW is actually being played.
Then you should know that it is much better to stay in water during a siege, putting 5 and 3 down on the rams, and then spamming 1 to heal people. This, along with your regen, is much more helpful than any damage you can do.
Then you should know that it is much better to stay in water during a siege, putting 5 and 3 down on the rams, and then spamming 1 to heal people. This, along with your regen, is much more helpful than any damage you can do.
Sigh….so you base your build on healing people on rams? Sounds to me it should be us asking what exactly do you do… (btw, you´ll get about a 150 hps more to those ram users than someone with 0 hp if you have 1500+hp yourself)
Also, you´re letting people freely nuke from walls if you don´t suppress them at all.
oh, and here´s the link, this is what we do
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEUDo60Jq4A
Then you should know that it is much better to stay in water during a siege, putting 5 and 3 down on the rams, and then spamming 1 to heal people. This, along with your regen, is much more helpful than any damage you can do.
You know what, I’ll give that to you. I can say that in the tier that I play, this almost never happens (this could be a T1 meta thing). We almost never use rams on a gate unless we’re trying to ninja something and when spotted just leave or its the end of the week and were just flipping things for fun.
Even with a full zerg more often than not we don’t really use rams. It’s more catapult from range/trebuchet and so that is almost never needed. Again, thats in T1, I don’t know how it is in a lower tier.
Even still, that seems still useless. You still can’t out heal even 1 arrow cart which any good defensive opponent would have. And it seems a waste to build for something as specific as that and have all that HP be useless almost all the other times.
If you were to say S/D then hell yes. Build for clerics, AOE burst heal for 10k. Staff is just lackluster for HP in comparison because (and only due to this) it’s a regen heal giving no real cushion to a person. Even if you were to drop those water fields on someone on a ram, you should have others blasting it to heal them. The blast is whats keeping them alive more so than your regen ticks.
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