Guild Wars 2

What do you guys recommend to be the best dps for staff ele: power, condi or hybrid build?
Fire #1, #2 and #5 = power, while #3 and #4 is condi + more condi from crits and utility skills.
If i go full power build i have no use of Fire #3 and #4 …

I am also confused about Daggers and Scepter: it seems they cover both condi and power builds?
What a strange profession

Full power. 3 is used to optimize rotations and 4 is useful just for the extra dodge. You can use it for its damage, too, and don’t forget the 10% damage modifier against burning targets.

Every weapon of ele can cover power and condi. The elements themself have either a condi or a power affinity.
For staff i would use power because the hard hitting stuff is power based.
You can also use vipers gear which is full glassy gear which is strong for condi and power.

Power all the way..

With a staff, I’d take a Vipers hybrid (1 Sinister earring, 1 Sinister ring) over the pure power build. Use Accuracy & Bursting Sigils with Balthazar runes. You’ll come up short on the power and crit/ferocity calcs, but more than make up for it in condi damage over a Berserk pure power build. You can camp Fire and enjoy your whole rotation, using Signet of Fire whenever it comes off cooldown.

mygamingid.5816:

With a staff, I’d take a Vipers hybrid (1 Sinister earring, 1 Sinister ring) over the pure power build. Use Accuracy & Bursting Sigils with Balthazar runes. You’ll come up short on the power and crit/ferocity calcs, but more than make up for it in condi damage over a Berserk pure power build. You can camp Fire and enjoy your whole rotation, using Signet of Fire whenever it comes off cooldown.

You get too few burns on Staff to be worth sacrificing gear stats, runes, and a sigil for these. Signet of Fire and Overload Fire are your only decent burn applications and they are both on long cooldown. The power build not only will have far superior burst, it will have higher sustained damage too.

Lava Font and Meteor Shower both cause damage over time, so burst isn’t particularly strong on Power Staff Ele. Signet of Fire and Overload Fire are outstanding burns, and Flame Burst is really good. That’s three. With Glyph of Elemental Power, you add five strikes with burns. With Arcane Shield, you pick up another good burn. Both of those also break stun. Toss in Arcane Brilliance as your heal for another burn.

Plus, it’s not like you can’t do power damage. You don’t ignore skills just because they could be more effective with a different build – this is a hybrid, after all. While power will cause roughly 250% of the power-based damage thanks to advantages in precision & ferocity, a hybrid will cause over 500% the condi-based damage.

mygamingid.5816:

Lava Font and Meteor Shower both cause damage over time, so burst isn’t particularly strong on Power Staff Ele. Signet of Fire and Overload Fire are outstanding burns, and Flame Burst is really good. That’s three. With Glyph of Elemental Power, you add five strikes with burns. With Arcane Shield, you pick up another good burn. Both of those also break stun. Toss in Arcane Brilliance as your heal for another burn.

Plus, it’s not like you can’t do power damage. You don’t ignore skills just because they could be more effective with a different build – this is a hybrid, after all. While power will cause roughly 250% of the power-based damage thanks to advantages in precision & ferocity, a hybrid will cause over 500% the condi-based damage.

would you use arcane power in there? potential 20 stacks of burn

Arcane Power’s cooldown is a bit long, but I do like the autocrit. I might swap out GoEP for it, Arcane Blast, or Arcane Wave. Whatever works best for you is what works best

mygamingid.5816:

Arcane Power’s cooldown is a bit long, but I do like the autocrit. I might swap out GoEP for it, Arcane Blast, or Arcane Wave. Whatever works best for you is what works best

ah I don’t even use it for the crit part, full condi ele here and love watching them massive burns stack up fast.

What about soloing open world with Staff? Could a Celestial be optimal in this case?
Oh, and i hope that Staff will still be a thing with the new, more melee oriented, elite spec.

Celestial will probably never be optimal, but it can be fun. Pretty much any spec can handle open world PvE. It’ll have a lot better sustain than power, condi or hybrid builds, so you can be a bit more relaxed in your gameplay. It won’t have anywhere near the offense of the focused power, condi, or hybrid builds, though.

mygamingid.5816:

Lava Font and Meteor Shower both cause damage over time, so burst isn’t particularly strong on Power Staff Ele. Signet of Fire and Overload Fire are outstanding burns, and Flame Burst is really good. That’s three. With Glyph of Elemental Power, you add five strikes with burns. With Arcane Shield, you pick up another good burn. Both of those also break stun. Toss in Arcane Brilliance as your heal for another burn.

Plus, it’s not like you can’t do power damage. You don’t ignore skills just because they could be more effective with a different build – this is a hybrid, after all. While power will cause roughly 250% of the power-based damage thanks to advantages in precision & ferocity, a hybrid will cause over 500% the condi-based damage.

Since we’re counting, here are the major sources of power damage, in order of appearance in the rotation – Overload Air, Glyph of Storms (Air), Lava Font, Meteor Shower, Fireball, Overload Fire, Frost Fan (Icebow), Ice Storm (Icebow), Firestorm (FGS). That’s 9. The burst is fantastic, I assure you. Many of these are over-time effects, but you can stack a lot of them in very short time, and they hit HARD. Also, unlike Signet of Fire, they give you excellent cleave.

If you want to go condi, get Dagger or at least Scepter. Staff is trash for condi.

Definitely agree that dagger is better than staff for condi (and power), but I’m sticking to the OP’s question. I played the Power Staff Ele meta for months and it was fun. I’d still go hybrid now if I wanted to play Staff.

That 250% damage bump for the power component (assuming lots of precision boons) is really nice for the power build, no issues there. Can’t ignore 500% damage on the condi side and the ability to use the whole skillset as a hybrid, though. Ice Bow 3 and Overload Air definitely favor Power. No question there, but I wouldn’t use either on a Hybrid or Condi build. Ice Bow 4 has a lot of condi damage in it, btw.

Condi outperforms Power for Overload Fire and Firestorm (Glyph) if you feel like running Glyph of Storms over one of the Arcane utilities on the hybrid. The burning component of each is just too big. The same is true of GFS. Hybrid and Condi builds can use GFS2 for outstanding damage (15k burns, 5s cooldown) and still make use of GFS4 and GFS5. GFS net damage favors Hybrid pretty significantly.

I wouldn’t ever go pure Condi with Carrion, Dire, or Trailblazers on a Staff Ele. You’re just not going to get enough out of the skillset without paying attention to Power and Precision. You really need to go Power or Hybrid to get the most out of Staff. I stick by Hybrid, but you can have a lot of fun and do well with Power, too.

Let me say this straight: you can play whatever you want in generic PvE and do well. But power staff is meta for a reason, and the reason is it performs better. If you’re not concerned about efficiency/endgame and just want to have fun – then by all means, experiment with all the stat sets you like. However, the question was about best dps on staff ele. As of now, it’s full zerk. Maybe the expansion will change that with the Power/Condi/Prec/Fero stat set. Maybe it won’t. We’ll know after we try it.

Staff hasn’t been meta for a while. Power Staff was meta before Power Dagger/Warhorn, which was replaced by Power Scepter/Warhorn, which was replaced by Condi Dagger/Warhorn. If reviewed now, a Condi Staff build would top the Power Staff build, but it still wouldn’t be good enough to replace Dagger/Warhorn for either.

The only reason the former meta build can be found is because it wasn’t taken down a year ago when Dagger/Warhorn replaced it and that was long before the Condi meta took over.

So is a staff build that bad vs other ranged options or should I be looking to swap to sceptre and offhand.
I assumed metabattle to be upto date still, as a recently returned player looking to find a ranged mage class who actually plays as a ranged class.

I’d recommend Quantify over Metabattle. The Scepter build gives pretty decent range, though not quite as much as the Staff.

Tyvm for the suggestion.
The staff builds there are the ones you mentioned in your prior post, no longer actually meta?

Right, the current meta for Ele is Dagger/Warhorn Condi Fire/Arcane/Tempest. It should still be the meta after the patch. My example above was for a Staff Hybrid build, not meta. I’m not a stickler for the meta, but if you wanted to build to it, I’d look to the benchmarks on the Quantify site.

mygamingid.5816:

Staff hasn’t been meta for a while. Power Staff was meta before Power Dagger/Warhorn, which was replaced by Power Scepter/Warhorn, which was replaced by Condi Dagger/Warhorn. If reviewed now, a Condi Staff build would top the Power Staff build, but it still wouldn’t be good enough to replace Dagger/Warhorn for either.

The only reason the former meta build can be found is because it wasn’t taken down a year ago when Dagger/Warhorn replaced it and that was long before the Condi meta took over.

Power staff could still be considered meta on certain encounters. I preferred to play staff in all W3 and I preferred to play Fresh Air staff on Sloth. On large hitboxes the damage was still competitive enough to call it meta. That’s before yesterday’s changes. Today, I’m not sure ele exists in meta at all.

Is the situation so dire?

-20% Overload Air, -10% Overload Fire is baseline nerf to all Tempest builds. No double hits from Wildfire and less hits from Phoenix, so Scepter/Warhorn is likely ruined completely, as its 3 biggest sources of damage got nerfed hard. Staff might still be viable on large hitboxes, assuming optimal play. qT might conjure something up, but I’m not holding my hopes up.

Optimal isn’t necessary, I’m hoping for viable.

The Overload Air changes hurt FA builds a lot. Overload Fire took a hit to power damage, so condi damage is still viable. Basically, they cemented the Dagger/Warhorn condi meta for Ele. I suspect they’ll roll back the Overload Fire changes eventually.

Should I be giving up on staff and try and be melee?
I feel my hp that gets nuked to death by incidental aoe will be much more of a problem up close.

This is where the meta doesn’t fit with open world PvE. The meta is built for raiding.
It assumes boons from teammates that you may not receive in open world and also assumes that you’ll stay stacked in melee range to continue to receive those boons.

If you’re running around in open world PvE, you won’t receive all those boons from dedicated boonbots and your own boons become more important. You also won’t have any reason to stack. Range is really good for defense in those circumstances, so Scepter and Staff will have non-offensive advantages that may outweigh the offense of other sets.

mygamingid.5816:

This is where the meta doesn’t fit with open world PvE. The meta is built for raiding.
It assumes boons from teammates that you may not receive in open world and also assumes that you’ll stay stacked in melee range to continue to receive those boons.

If you’re running around in open world PvE, you won’t receive all those boons from dedicated boonbots and your own boons become more important. You also won’t have any reason to stack. Range is really good for defense in those circumstances, so Scepter and Staff will have non-offensive advantages that may outweigh the offense of other sets.

In open world you don’t need those boons. Everything is paper and the few enemies that aren’t, they aren’t worth your time either. In case you absolutely want to kill them, you can do so with some kite.

Don’t get me wrong, if you want to spec for your own boons, go for it. But it really doesn’t matter and it really doesn’t make you any more efficient.

mygamingid.5816:

The Overload Air changes hurt FA builds a lot. Overload Fire took a hit to power damage, so condi damage is still viable. Basically, they cemented the Dagger/Warhorn condi meta for Ele. I suspect they’ll roll back the Overload Fire changes eventually.

thought dagger/focus is better for condi? Wh was good for large hitbox since it hit twice, but that got removed