Guild Wars 2

Even with all the nerfs, is D/D still our most effective PvP spec? We basically play the same as we were before, but all of our fights are just more drawn out (and we are more likely to lose than before)? Or is Anet signaling to us that we should be abandoning D/D and they never intended for it to be viable?

That’s a bit of an overreaction. We’re talking about a spec that was stacked in teams even at the highest tiers more often than hambow was, and can do everything fairly well. A nerf was definitely needed, I’m not even sure if it was enough.

D/ was actually buffed DPS wise.

The nerf is that the rotation is less forgiving now. The timing is a lot more tight for field blasting if you want to maintain steady DPS. Or it feels that way.

On it’s own though, Lightning Whip’s overall speed increase is a decent DPS gain of about… ~+5-10%? Somewhere in that general area?

If they didn’t add that 10% base decrease, the speed gain on the new LW would end up doing almost ~+20% the damage it used to do.

But yeah, the ‘nerf’ is a tighter rotation and the fact that LW can’t abuse SoR anymore. The later was intended, the former just might be that I’m not used to the new tempo.

Going to need to play around with it more, see if I can get my groove going steady again.
_

TL;DR
Ele’s whip stuff with lightning faster for a small DPS boost, LW SoR abuse is dead.

You need to generate more active might than before (blasting field) because passive might (sigil of battle) is nerfed by 1. Also, even might stacking now is less efficient because you loose 5 power/condi dmg for every might stack you have compared to before.

D/D is still the best spec we have.

If you want to try-hard, you can play S/F, but its still not really viable at top-tiers.

Not really any other truly viable specs.

It will still be fine. The newer eles will notice the difference the most.

It hasnt been touched really. seen a d/d dual and was easily maintaining 18 stacks.

was never drawn to the cele meta and imo it’s as viable as before atleast in wvw. for me there’s no other class/build that im as attached to as dd ele esp with all the pewpew going on in wvw.

Fat Disgrace.4275:

It hasnt been touched really. seen a d/d dual and was easily maintaining 18 stacks.

18 might stacks aren’t the same anymore either. 18 might stacks after this patch is roughly equivalent to 15 stacks of might pre-patch. Remember the 35-30?

The Game Slayer.7632:

Fat Disgrace.4275:

It hasnt been touched really. seen a d/d dual and was easily maintaining 18 stacks.

18 might stacks aren’t the same anymore either. 18 might stacks after this patch is roughly equivalent to 15 stacks of might pre-patch. Remember the 35-30?

absolutely! but i was more aiming at the 33% nerf from sigal f battle.