Guild Wars 2

You would need comet for that, but yes theoretically speaking it is possible.

you forgot 3 times Electric discharge | 0 | 0.7

I forgot two.
And also Drake’s breath has a 0.5 coefficient per second (so 2 in total), but it is still worth using because the burn it provides is a dps increase.
Edited accordingly.

what is Burning speed misses? Is it a huge dps loss?

Also looking at rotation, what is the purpose of switching to water?
It seems staying in LW will do more dps while waiting for fire

Yes, missing burning speed is a substantial dps loss (around 8%).

LW does more dps than water spells, yes, but switching to water allows you to proc fury and electric discharge. If you simply add the damage of electric discharge to your water spell you see that it does more damage than LW.

I look at Lava Axe and it seems that having range of 900 it has even better coeff than LW…

In case of using scepter to stack 30 second of fury and 12 might to all team you can switch to Lava Axe and staying in water spam it 25 times under +20% from water vulnerability trait.
This is simmilar to LH build but it’s much safer cause it has 900 range.
Also it has a fire field that you can use to add more might with Arcane Wave

Lava axe has a coefficient of 0.77
LW has a coefficient of 0.7 but hits twice, so 1.4

Zelyhn.8069:

Lava axe has a coefficient of 0.77
LW has a coefficient of 0.7 but hits twice, so 1.4

Ah, yes forgot about 2 times…

Just in case 30/30/0/0/0 is really appealing to me… But I can’t understand does it worth it compared to 0/30/10/20/10

I would not consider playing 30/30 yet, it simply has too many limitations.

0/30/10/20/10 is my all time favourite because its damage is good, its utility access is good, and I can’t bring myself to play without the support it provides.
Even in 70+ fractals, the heal and cleanse on water attunement is so valuable that I am prepared to loose 10% damage for it.
Our health and toughness are so low that one hit pretty much kills us. However I find it so stupid to die to simple conditions like burning or to deal less damage due to weakness! If you manage to heal and cleanse your allies everytime you swap to water then your are doing a very good job (also it helps to benefit from runes of the scholar and vital striking the most).

But water heal is nothing when you get 90% damage of your life…
Condition removal is:
1) 3 conditions chanaled heal spell
2) 3 conditions Cleansing Fire
3) 3 conditions Magnetic Wave

We have about 12k hp with my build, so swapping to water heals your for about 10% of your life (and that of your allies).
If you have runes of the scholar and vital striking then a large part (15% if the modifiers are additive like I believe) of your damage is conditional on your hp. Also, other members of your group are likely running runes of the scholar.

As for condition cleansing, we don’t use cleansing fire, and magnetic wave has a long cooldown. Ether renewal is awesome, but it leaves 15 long seconds between it uses during which you will be vulnerable. This is why we often need a second source of cleansing, just in case you get hit by an important condition in the meantime. The combo of the two is something I really like.

Compare all this to the 10% damage you could get from additional points in fire… If you do challenging content it is a no-brainer.

Good explanation, agreed
20% crit to all teammates is only 10% more damage on boss? Did you calculate it?

No fury is roughly a 15% boost to damage if you didn’t have fury before (assuming full zerker gear, full air traits, etc)
But I am not talking about persisting flames here.
When I talk about 10% damage from points in fire I mean the ouput of 100 additional power and 5% damage to burning foes.

It was really funny last day I played low level fractals with this great build

Everybody in a group said me not to be in melee! But in spite of being in melee I was the last to be down Glyph of elemental power really helps to control boss movement speed. The only boss I used staff for was Ascalon.

Zelyhn.8069:

No fury is roughly a 15% boost to damage if you didn’t have fury before (assuming full zerker gear, full air traits, etc)
But I am not talking about persisting flames here.
When I talk about 10% damage from points in fire I mean the ouput of 100 additional power and 5% damage to burning foes.

But I’m talking about persisting flames.
30/30/0/0/10 is really interesting to me. But I do not have an experience to evaluate it especially for a high level content. Maybe in some time you can try it to describe an experience in more detail…

Also I have a question about Arc Lightning spell. I know that it has a very low coefficient… But when I use it, I see crit numbers like 2500-2800 for the last 2 hits! How can it be?

Yes, I am interested in evaluating 30/30, I will tell you how I find it very soon.

I am very glad you enjoy D/F fresh air. More and more people are trying it, especially after the LH bugfix, and I strongly believe that they are right to do so.
Good luck climbing up the fractal levels!

Arc lightning’s damage is displayed in cumulative numbers. The number that appears on the last tick is the total damage that you have done during this cast.

I was just thinking about something:
10 in earth gives us a conditional 10% damage
10 in fire gives us about 10% as well (100 power and 5% damage), the increase is only slightly less beneficial after 7 might stacks (at 25 stacks of might the difference is -0.8%) but virtually unconditional and it gives us a little condition duration as well.

So I think I am going to swap to 10/30/0/20/10

Edit: if I factor in the 10% increased condition duration then this is actually a dps increase due to burn.
Also this gives us the flexibility to take 10% bonus damage in fire. I am going to edit the guide accordingly.

What’s about toughness?

Also 5% to burned foes may be not constant, it seems we can’t maintain burning for 12 seconds

Loosing 100 toughness is a reduction of about 5.2% of our EHP.
This is not a very significant change to our passive survivability.

With 10% more condition duration we stack burning to at least 13s, and more if we consider burning speed. On our own it is not enough to maintain perma burn, but we are not alone. I think we can safely assume that the group can provide the 26% of burn uptime that we miss to benefit fully from our bonus damage on burning foes.

I think this is a better conditional deal than the earth trait. This is because we bet less of our damage on it, and the conditions are about as easy to meet.

This is not really a big improvement anyway, but I think that because of the flexibility this change provides it is quite desirable.

Updated the Build section of the thread for clarity on the thought process involved.

I am considering getting back to my old favourite build: 0/30/0/30/10 with fury share.
This is because the damage from boons can mostly offset the lost damage from not have 5% on burning foes and loosing 100 power; then the added fury duration and sharing makes the build more valuable.

- forced into zephyr’s boon, so no more quick glyphs or bolt to the heart (damage loss or flexibility loss)
- loss of 10% condition duration
- if we do not take fury into account, it takes 8 boons to offset the loss of 5% damage and 100 power (in a realistic situation), which is very hard to maintain. With 4 boons we can loose only 4.3% damage comparatively.
- pessimistically estimated shared fury uptime: 25%
- full fury boosts a zerker group damage by a least 15% (25% * 15% = 3.75% boost on each party member affected)

In the end it is a damage gain groupwise and a health gain, at the cost of little condition duration and flexibility.

but then we loose 10% in air stance or 20% to 33% health…

You would choose to discard bolt to the heart (20% dmg on <33%hp targets) indeed. But the additional fury uptime and the buff from boons likely result in a self damage increase in the end, as well as a substantial damage boost group-wise anyway.

Magnetic Leap

Does it apply aura to your teammates? If yes isn’kitten good choice to include it in a rotation?

Nope unfortunately it does not

@Zelyhn do you have a WvW experience? If yes could you please share it in a new thread? This would be very interesting.

Honestly I am not an expert on WvW.
I do occasionally play it, but I doubt my experience is of any interest to the community:
-I play staff + LH full zerker scholar 10/30/0/20/10
-I am a complete chicken! A nuclear-loaded chicken but a chicken nontheless.

All I do is destroy zergs
my favourite moves:
-abuse terrain to make meteor shower bug and transform into tornado (like on a bridge for example)
-wind gust in a zerg
-static cage, conjure LH, jump, static cage from hammer, bash, jump, laugh at perma stunned zerg, then die.

When roaming I just hope that my Asura ears will help me blend in with the wild rabbits so people ignore me.

Have you ever considered the new assassin’s prefix gear? Is having enough crit damage and crit chance ever able to offset the loss of power for an overall increase in average dps? With assassin’s gear, it would seem that it’s possible to optimize the ratio of power|precision|crit damage for the maximum average dps.

Basically, is 10% crit chance worth giving up 200 power when you have, say, 100% crit damage, a 40% damage modifier, fury, and might?

I have been working on evaluating the Assassin gear actually. My first estimates are that it is actually quite interesting!
Especially with a fresh air build, since you need high crit chance.
The Assassin gear enable us to reach close to 100% crit chance when you have full air + fury + signet of fire + discipline banner, which means the rotation will not fail.
Apart from that, the increased damage from assassin gear can go from 3% to 12% depending on your buffs.

These are preliminary results. I want to make sure of this before I make a real post about it

Scrap that. I did a calculation mistake.

In fact what you need to know is that if you don’t have over 100% crit chance with assassin’s gear then there is no dps difference with berzerker in a full buff situation (might, fury, signet, food, upgrades, banners etc)

In other situations, the difference is small and distributed depending on your buffs.
I still consider this an interesting set because it would allow me to reach 100% crit chance with my build.

Ladies and gentlemen I am working on 30/30/10/0/0 spec and it is godly. I will give details soon on the build and rotation

Can’t Wait )

It’s a pity that you can’t do the same great job also for wvw specs(

Just trying to predict your thoughts for 30/30/10/0/0
So funny to play with it theoretically, waiting to compare

When the build will be ready? can’t wait to test!

Oh the build is 30/30/10/0/0
With:
- ember’s might, burning precision, persisting flames
- the usual air traits
- stone splinters
Gear is Assassin until you have 99% crit with signet of fire and fury and other buffs but not banner, put the rest in zerker (the idea is to swap signet of fire for other stuff when you have the banner buff)
Utilities: arcane wave is required if you are the only fury provider for the group

I haven’t posted about this yet because I want to make sure about a few more things, like the optimal rotation and how high the damage output is, I’ll let you know soon!

I’m not crunching numbers tonight

Edit: sorry for making you wait! I just want to be thorough and make a detailed post.

I conted that if we use 3 x +15% boon duration than we can maintain constant fury on a group

Is it worth switching shcollar?

Yes definitely
Scholar runes are a huge damage boost and you can maintain perma fury on the group with 3 blast finishers: magnetic wave, comet and arcane wave. It’s tricky, it’s risky, but the prize …!

But if we use +15% boon 15% fury 20% fury we’ll only need 2 blast finishers.

we’ll loose:
1) 10% damage health > 90% but we gain 10% from fire traits
2) we loose 90+50+25 = 165 power but we gain +300 power from fire
3) we loose 4% crit damage

so i see that we do not loose any damage compared to your standard build but even get some more and share fury constantly with only 2 blast finishers!

So i tested it in 20 level fractals and it works great!

Constant fury to all party! And a ton of damage from this build even with boon duration runes

Hey Shadowfax,

Glad you enjoy it! I have lots of thoughts to share about the build, but I am on a trip with little internet access at the moment so I will reply to you only on Monday.

Have fun!

Ok time to talk about 30/30

Here is what I have come up with:

Traits
Fire: ember’s might, burning precision, persisting flames.
Air: air training and fresh air as usual, and what you like for adept (bolt to the heart is a safe choice).
Earth: stone splinters.

Optimal spell rotation:
There are two phases: earth and water.
1) earth:
-swap to fire, cast burning speed
-swap to earth, cast ring of earth and magnetic wave to blast your fire field
-swap to air and use lightning whip until fire is back up
2) water: same, except you use frozen blast and comet in water instead of being in earth.

With this rotation, if you manage to blast your fire fields you will produce 20s of fury every 30s. All you need to cap fury for your group is to use an other blast finisher. Arcane wave is the obvious choice.
Burning precision will enable you to maintain a very high uptime of burning on your targets (80% on average) and if your burning speed trail hits you will maintain more than perma burning.
The chance of failing fresh air procs virtually null.

It could be good to have assassin gear instead of zerker. This is because a high crit rate enables us to produce more burning and more vulnerability, while our damage is not compromised. I need to work more on this before I can confirm.

Thoughts:
pros
- very high damage, comparable to warriors.
- share perma fury
- requires high attention only for a short amount of time (fire combo)

cons:
- difficult to achieve: the fire combo chain is hard to pull off, and it may fail due to overlapping fields or moving target.
- burning speed’s trail does not always go all the way to the blast location, so making sure it hits is not easy.
- blast combos have a small radius so fury sharing may fail
- no access to vigor or any elemental attunement boons
- no extra heal or support
- sigil of battle may proc oddly due to our swapping pattern
- since we are using magnetic wave in our rotation and since we do not have cleansing wave (water trait), our condition removal is weak. In addition, we have a low health pool, so conditions will hurt us even more. Basically, three seconds of burning is all it would take to bring us down to below 90% hp (=damage loss). This is an important concern to me.

Conclusion:
Very desirable in an optimized group. High risk, high rewards
Things to consider: for trait variations we are locked into 30/30, this gives us 10 points to play with. Earth is the obvious choice for damage, but we could also use them in arcane (will talk about this variation later).

Discussion
Let’s talk about this. It is easier to be more complete in our evaluation of the build if we discuss it. We could play around with runes and sigils. I would like to hear what you have to say about this!

So we do not include Drake’s Breath and Cone of Cold in a rotation?
They make DPS lost? Do we loose DPS from not swaping every 12 seconds for lightning strike?

Also for runes I had a great game with +30% boon runes and +20% fury runes having +5 seconds to your shared fury!

It helps a lot and also you have your might stacks last longer. Yes I know that scholar runes give a huge DPS boost but it seems that +50% fury duration and +30% might duration to all group give at leas the same damage boost.
You wait for earth and water phase 15 seconds each. So with these runes you get 15 seconds of fury not 10.

In the optimal rotation you wouldn’t need Drake’s breath or cone of cold, indeed. This is because we already cap burning and because their direct damage isn’t desirable on small groups. However these spells are very strong anyway, mainly on larger groups, due to having no target limitations (while LW can hit 3 target at most).

However it may be interesting to include drake’s breath in the rotation, not for damage but for ease of execution purposes: instead of swapping to fire in melee (sunspot) and hoping that our pre-casted LW will give us enough time to get into the right distance with the target before using burning speed, we could swap to fire in melee and cast drake’s breath for just enough time to get to 400 range (around 2s) before interrupting it with burning speed. The extended range is quite desirable since we are betting a large part of our output on the burning speed execution. This would result in a small damage loss, but could help land sunspot, so depending on how accurate you are it can be a good move to consider.

As for fury capping, boon duration does the trick, I agree. But simply slotting arcane wave as an utility also solves this problem. I think a utility slot is "cheaper’ than discarding scholar runes for this purpose. Also since comet may fail to hit the target on the fire field, arcane wave can ensure you to gain fury anyway, while boon duration would be useless (if you miss a blast with boon duration your fury output is cut by half, while if you have arcane wave you only loose one third of the fury uptime).

After quite a bit of practice I find it very difficult to land sunspot and burning speed as it must be for the rotation to work

(which is a loss of 2.3% of our damage)

Yes it is. But inspite of this, this build is great for two things!
1) Staff damage on trash and some hard evade bosses
2) Constant fury to all team and 12 – 18 stacks of might (with boon duration runes). And this in without scepter! So our dps with LW is consistent.

I use Arcane wave + boon runes so sometimes i can buff myself for 20-22 might during the fight 20+ fractals.

The rotation produces 3 * 3 = 9 stacks of might for 20s every 30s, so that is 6 stacks on average with no duration bonus.
How would you get as high as 20 with duration bonus?
(Mind that you must ignore sigil of battle since it is a self buff only)

Sure my mistake, 20 for myself…

I also thinking about switching 10 earth trait to 10 arcane trait to get elemental attunement and +10 boon duration… -10% to damege but +1 might every 12 seconds but i don’t think it can give more dps

Also to mention it is really hard to land ice commet! Only some bosses allow to do it…