Guild Wars 2

Are you serious? You want to encourage people to take dagger/scepter over staff and yet proceed to buff the strongest autoattack of the strongest weapon by 17%?

While only giving scepter a miserly 33% increase to the water attunement auto and marginally reducing fire auto cast time?

And leaving dagger water and earth attunements the same?

A 7% buff to Churning Earth? Are you joking?

Churning Earth needs to function like Dragon Tooth. Drop and forget.

Holy kitten.. I didn’t actually read that.

Fireball damage was one of the last thing I expected.

I would have expected instant first tick of Lava Font, Cooldown reduction of lightning surge, damage increase on Ice Spike and/or Eruption, damage increase on shockwave. But no, fireball.

Alekt.5803:

Fireball damage was one of the last thing I expected.

I would have expected instant first tick of Lava Font, Cooldown reduction of lightning surge, damage increase on Ice Spike and/or Eruption, damage increase on shockwave. But no, fireball.

At least it’s an actual fireball again

yep very surprising but understandable. This is a huge buff for newer players and PvE but only a slight one in competaiv PvP.

Zenith.7301:

Are you serious? You want to encourage people to take dagger/scepter over staff and yet proceed to buff the strongest autoattack of the strongest weapon by 17%?

While only giving scepter a miserly 33% increase to the water attunement auto and marginally reducing fire auto cast time?

And leaving dagger water and earth attunements the same?

A 7% buff to Churning Earth? Are you joking?

Churning Earth needs to function like Dragon Tooth. Drop and forget.

idk if you noticed, but what they did was just a undo to all the Elementalist nerfs to dagger, scepter, and staff fire 1.

In the past dagger was the meta and by undoing the most of the past nerfs and leaving the staff strong I believe you will see more type of weapons being used.

I actually want dagger to be more meta for pve dps. Staff to me is a support weapon. But they were on par before patch, now there is more reason to use staff.

I wonder how much the fireball dps increase will contribute to the overall dps though. 17% alone on AA is really huge.

Jhoul.6923:

Zenith.7301:

Are you serious? You want to encourage people to take dagger/scepter over staff and yet proceed to buff the strongest autoattack of the strongest weapon by 17%?

While only giving scepter a miserly 33% increase to the water attunement auto and marginally reducing fire auto cast time?

And leaving dagger water and earth attunements the same?

A 7% buff to Churning Earth? Are you joking?

Churning Earth needs to function like Dragon Tooth. Drop and forget.

idk if you noticed, but what they did was just a undo to all the Elementalist nerfs to dagger, scepter, and staff fire 1.

In the past dagger was the meta and by undoing the most of the past nerfs and leaving the staff strong I believe you will see more type of weapons being used.

where is the unnerf to ride the lightning then.

It’s really weird they buffed Fireball when Fire is the strongest attunement for Staff by far and the #1 skills on the other 3 have always needed buffs much worse.

Why in the world have we STILL not seen a buff for Lightning Surge?

Zenith.7301:

Fireball

strongest autoattack of the strongest weapon

wut

reikken.4961:

Zenith.7301:

Fireball

strongest autoattack of the strongest weapon

wut

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, man. It doesn’t even come close to dagger lightning AAs. Even after the buff to fireball, it still has a higher coefficient, hits twice and swings .05 seconds faster.

On the rest, I don’t know what to say. I’ve been running my Daredevil mostly on the damage golems. I will do my elementalist later this week. I want to see what the different DPS numbers clock in on with the weapons before I have an opinion.

He means that on the strongest weapon eles have, Fireball is the strongest auto-attack. Not that it is the strongest auto-attack we have.

Axialbloom.8109:

He means that on the strongest weapon eles have, Fireball is the strongest auto-attack. Not that it is the strongest auto-attack we have.

Depends on which game mode. Staff was completely eclipsed in SPvP lately, and we have no confirmation about if it’s going to be any different.

Jekkt.6045:

Jhoul.6923:

Zenith.7301:

Are you serious? You want to encourage people to take dagger/scepter over staff and yet proceed to buff the strongest autoattack of the strongest weapon by 17%?

While only giving scepter a miserly 33% increase to the water attunement auto and marginally reducing fire auto cast time?

And leaving dagger water and earth attunements the same?

A 7% buff to Churning Earth? Are you joking?

Churning Earth needs to function like Dragon Tooth. Drop and forget.

idk if you noticed, but what they did was just a undo to all the Elementalist nerfs to dagger, scepter, and staff fire 1.

In the past dagger was the meta and by undoing the most of the past nerfs and leaving the staff strong I believe you will see more type of weapons being used.

where is the unnerf to ride the lightning then.

You mean the one that does not allow ele to cast ride the lightning in mid air? does that count as a nerf when no other character can cast abilities in mid air?

Anyhow, I tried it and I like it more than what we had before.

I actually agree with Zenith for once

Axialbloom.8109:

He means that on the strongest weapon eles have, Fireball is the strongest auto-attack. Not that it is the strongest auto-attack we have.

I see

Well, the only place staff might be the best is wvw ZvZ

Jhoul.6923:

Jekkt.6045:

Jhoul.6923:

Zenith.7301:

Are you serious? You want to encourage people to take dagger/scepter over staff and yet proceed to buff the strongest autoattack of the strongest weapon by 17%?

While only giving scepter a miserly 33% increase to the water attunement auto and marginally reducing fire auto cast time?

And leaving dagger water and earth attunements the same?

A 7% buff to Churning Earth? Are you joking?

Churning Earth needs to function like Dragon Tooth. Drop and forget.

idk if you noticed, but what they did was just a undo to all the Elementalist nerfs to dagger, scepter, and staff fire 1.

In the past dagger was the meta and by undoing the most of the past nerfs and leaving the staff strong I believe you will see more type of weapons being used.

where is the unnerf to ride the lightning then.

You mean the one that does not allow ele to cast ride the lightning in mid air? does that count as a nerf when no other character can cast abilities in mid air?

Anyhow, I tried it and I like it more than what we had before.

no, im talking about the nerfs when they reduced the range from 1500 to 1200 and doubled the cooldown.

reikken.4961:

Axialbloom.8109:

He means that on the strongest weapon eles have, Fireball is the strongest auto-attack. Not that it is the strongest auto-attack we have.

I see

Well, the only place staff might be the best is wvw ZvZ

Not really. In PvE raids staff is neck to neck with D/WH, with this buff it’ll pull ahead.

You don’t compare fire staff or lightning whip, because fire staff has lava font and meteor shower that increase DPS in that same attunement next to fireball autoattack DPS, while air dagger has nothing but autoattacks.

We disregard overloads because both cases use their overloads.

They buffed the autoattack that needed the least buffing. I mean, staff air autoattack was already worse than fireball, so air attunement wasn’t even used on a single target, and they buffed FIREBALL?

Anet pls.

Zenith.7301:

In PvE raids staff is neck to neck with D/WH, with this buff it’ll pull ahead.

Nah, I tested in the new test room, and d/w is better dps than staff even on large targets, even with the buff to fireball (though only very slightly). And of course way better dps to smaller targets.

the range is great for some fights though (gorseval)

Zenith.7301:

We disregard overloads because both cases use their overloads.

nope
air overload is much stronger than fire overload AND is used much more frequently

Staff is much better than D/Wh fresh air on large targets.
D/Wh better on small and moving.

I noticed something when testing the staff rotation against a golem. Fireball is very low in the rotation priority and rarely gets cast. The 17% buff doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference in the overall dps of that build. I wonder if it was put in to alleviate fire’s relative weakness against small and/or moving targets. If that was the case, then they really should have buffed Chain Lightning instead.

By the way, Fireball + Lava Font already had a higher combined coefficient than Lightning Whip. However, even as D/Wh, AA still only accounts for a small part of our total dps.

Which is really annoying, they have not the slightest clue about balancing autoattacks for attunements so we don’t just sit in one attunement because the rest of the autoattacks suck, and they don’t even bother to balance autoattacks across weapons let alone across classes.

I’ve been doing lots of DPS tests on the ele lately.. What I’ve gotten are no ‘one time wonders’ but averaged results over consecutive runs:

• All buffs medium golem D/W: 37.7k
• All buffs large golem D/W: 42.2k
• All buffs medium golem staff: 36.5k
• All buffs large golem staff: 46.8k

Is staff or D/W best? Tested with qTs ‘realistic buffs’ setting:

• Medium: D/W: 28.2k – Staff: 26.5k
• Large: D/W: 33.1k – Staff: 33.6k

Now, staff scales better with alacrity and in these settings I have 0. D/W scales better with targets movement, which is also impossible to test well in the training arena.
I know, you can use the moving golem. However, that will just show D/W as superior, raid bosses don’t move quite that much.