Guild Wars 2

I’m just wondering this. There seems to be really no reason to ever put a point into fire as elementalist.

Why? The elementalist has pretty low health and their scalings aren’t exactly so high that you will be one shotting opponents. Unless Scepter dagger and you hit your grasp and tooth and it all crits with the 5x crit thing you have available but that is very rare to see and very hard to pull off in pvp because one guy can just escape signet of earth for example and totally mess it up…

So then you have this high awesome burst with D/D S/D etc… but then you either miss out on fast switching and attunements and a lot of traits that the water line give or some traits in the earth line which are vital to you surviving if you also put in points in water. Because otherwise you simply die to fast and you can sustain yourself better when having both points in earth and water.

For me arcane is a must have to play this class as it was intented. It’s so important that there is little to no reason to not put at least 20 points in this trait line for every specc. The same goes for water. Then you have 30 trait points to give out. They usually go in arcane or water or both, so then you have 10 more points and then earth is the most viable or you can miss out on some water and put in 10 in air if you use the +10stats +2% crit gear and go for a build where you can also deal decent damage with crits.

Fire just feels really weak to me and the power buff feels not noticeable enough compared to the effects the other traits give you.

I don’t think Elementalist is as crappy as I thought it was a month back and I think they got an advantage in most 1v1 situations, but this often is not significant because when they duel another class it will usually last a minute anyway. But I do think that the fire trait is very bad… anyone else feels the same way? Is anyone still even using the fire traits in spvp?

EDIT: I’m not really that interested in PvE because your traits and specc don’t really matter in it you likely faceroll the dungeon with your group anyway ^^
Although for farming I can see why you might take some points in farming but I’m mainly concerned about Spvp as there seems to be no real reason to put any leftover points into fire. Don’t mention glass cannon for spvp though if you think that owns you probably haven’t been playing your elementalist much =). This is because glass cannon relies to much on getting in a combo with S/D and with D/D you need to get close so you will take damage and if there are 2 people damaging you at once you won’t survive because of lack of health + toughness.

To me, 10 points in fire is enough to get a bit of extra damage combined with a bit longer conditions and a little extra oomph on my crits. I don’t design my builds around min/maxing stuff and with the calculations I’ve done, 10 points in fire added more than the alternatives.

But I cannot give you a specific reason other than the fact that I’m an allrounder in both build and playstyle (mostly for WvW purposes) and that I do not wish to go either glass cannon or bunker.

As a staff user in dungeons I have no use for water let alone 20 points.

When it comes to PvE no stat scales better than power.

I do design around min/maxing, at least for PvE, and for direct damage this is the formula for long run damage:

Long Run Damage = Power (1 + crit % * (0.5 + crit damage %))

Plug in two sets of number whichever is higher will do more direct damage over the long term.

The more crit and more crit damage (i.e. Air) you have the more damage you get from each point of power. If you are going to go glass cannon and max damage then imo you should do it right: max crit and max crit damage to get you the most bang for your buck on max power and not spec and gear as if you are going to enter a pvp tournament.

I run 0 10 10 30 20 and switching to 30 10 10 0 20 is a net gain of about 30% damage on average with the same equipment, which seems nice enough on the surface. The problem is that when you lose your primary condition removal, health regen and ~15% more healing you are less than half as survivable.

Without condition removal off long cooldown, you have to use your cantrips to get out of immobilize instakill situations and you get chewed up by big stacks of bleeding and vulnerability that you can’t get rid of. You also have trouble with poison staying on you and kittening what limited healing you had, and other conditions like chill that cut your damage in half, defeating the point of gaining 30% damage in the first place.

I would like to see them put condition removal deep in the fire tree. I mentioned a new grandmaster perk in another thread: Cauterize – 15% chance to remove a condition when you gain might. It’s not as frequent or reliable as water condition removal, but it at least gives the damage oriented ele something other than cleansing fire and ether renewal. It’s also deep enough in the damage tree that bunkers won’t go get it and become more tanky.

Then you have the issue with long cooldowns. A glass ele can do a lot of damage if he burns through all of his weapon skills, but then what? He doesn’t have the survivability to last until they’re back up, so he either has to run or die where the more balanced 30 water build can just heal up and keep doing damage while the damage ele is respawning or hiding in a corner.

It just isn’t worth it IMO.

I run 30/30/0/0/10, full glass, and have no issues. I also stand at 1200 with a staff. Make friends with heavies that shout and like to tank stuff. If you are nice they will give you 25 stacks of might.

Aura on signet use trait, might on cantrips trait, burning on crit trait, dmg vs burning foes trait.

After my previous statement, I got calculating some things and I came to the conclusion that my earlier assumption wasn’t entirely true.

In my build, I used 10 Fire Magic combined with the 30% chance to burn on critical trait. For my build, the dps increase on an auto attack was 13% on average.

However, as it turns out, that’s only when there’s no burning on the target and I spam only Fireball. In practice, some of my attacks do quite a bit more than that, and burning gets applied much more frequently. On the other hand, bountiful power adds 4-6% on average with a potential of 12% or even higher. Plus, it will get me 1k extra health, better condition removal and added healing power.

So I’m making the switch. Even the added condition duration isn’t worth it in my build, so I literally have little reason to use Fire Magic.

the argument isnt about glass cannons and what not.

whats better? 10 fire or 10 air?
or 10 air and 10 fire vs 20 in either one.
id say earth and air have better traits. more defense and more utility and more synergy. synergy being pretty important to the ele.
but what do i know.

I go for 10points to get the chance of Burning on crit, thats it and the rest goes 30 into Air and 30 into Earth for my build

My point is that it depends on your build and what you’re doing. Not every ele is D/D in sPvP. I find staff superior in dungeons for both direct damage and condition builds and my direct damage build uses 30 fire because that is how I do the most damage. 10% damage increase, -20% CD, conjure trait if using fiery greatsword (it has it’s uses) , might trait if not, but the last ten points is mostly for the +100 power. So yes, there are reasons to spec deep into fire.

Classic synergy: Power, crit and crit damage.