Guild Wars 2

I did some more testing with a full power/precision/crit set and the 30 fire/30 air spec; exact same item levels as my condition damage set, exotic staff and otherwise all-greens. Here are my findings, in case anyone is interested.

I got about 2100 power, 50% crit chance and 90% crit damage (+50% base) from the set. In testing, base damage from Fireball and one tick of Lava Font was about 1000, while crits were around 2400, so average damage was 1700 (including Pyromancer’s Puissance stacking). (Oh and, btw, meteor shower was also hitting for the same damage – 1000 base, 2500 crit.)

18 × 1700 = 30.600 over 10 seconds (10 x Fireball + 2 x Lava Font)

On the other hand, the drop in condition damage was massive with this set/spec; Eruption went from 9.5k, to something like 3.5k. Flame Burst also dropped somewhere around 2k. So not counting Meteor Shower, or Shockwave (both with long cooldowns), that’s about 32-33k, mostly single target (imo) because of the small impact radius. And you’ll be permanently tied to staff/fire, because all other weapons/elements are like 60%-80% condition damage.

I figured out how game shows DoT damage; one number per stack per second. So Eruption is doing, with my condition set/spec:

951 + (20s x 6 stacks x 105) = 13.551 (little less than my earlier estimate, yes I know)

Two of those and maybe 4-5k from Stoning adds up to about the same as fire, but AoE area is much larger. Then again, at higher gear levels fire will scale better (3 stats vs. 1).

Needless to say, my survivability dropped like a rock. But it wasn’t just about stats; I noticed in a large event that the mobs were sticking to me like glue. They obviously did not like the crits. With DoTs, they hardly even notice me since damage is applied slowly.

This concludes my theorycrafting session for now; my next project is to level a ranger and compare their damage output to ours, since people say our dps is low.

> KOTOKO:
> so 3 rocks and I already out dps your entire eruption

It seems rare to hit the same target even twice per meteor storm, and the impact radius is fairly small. Also, since you still have that 24 second CD, I doubt this spell affects your overall dps all that much.

> Lava Font does 3k crits and ticks very quick, fireball does about 3.5k crits.

What about base damage? What are your crit chance / crit damage? You won’t crit every time. Still, with numbers like that, fire begins to look much better… it would be nice to know how you got such numbers.

> I think you are under geared or something if your
> meteor shower’s rocks are only doing 1k per rock.

It is from tooltip; but then again, so is my Eruption damage. In game, I see a constant stream of 105’s flowing from the mob’s head, perhaps as often as 3-4 per second (with one Eruption cast, that is); that would also mean much, much higher damage than what the tooltip actually says. How many fireballs do you need to kill a level 80 mob in Orr?

Like I said, I wear all-green gear, except for exotic staff. Considering how much damage I can do with this gear, I wonder what I could do with gear like yours.

I guess here you also have an answer to your own, original question: people might be using other weapon sets because at their gear level they out-perform staff/fire – like staff/earth clearly does at my gear level. I would imagine full exotic set is not common yet.

> in a group, any other class who also has bleeds is
> directly losing out on dps due to stacks already
> been at max (25)

That might be a valid argument; I don’t actually know how many classes stack bleeds, whether they stack them on single target or AoE, how much of their dps comes from bleeds, and how easily they can reach 25 stacks. Some classes might also use fire, but I suppose it’s less common than bleed.

> Morthis:
> I’m kinda confused why people are comparing earth and
> fire by themselves, as if they stand alone and can’t
> be combined.

I’m sure we all swap from time to time, as needed – but if one spec does a lot more dps than another, the cooldown for switching elements can also become a dps loss if you don’t have enough heavy-hitters in other elements (air, water… ouch).

> KOTOKO:
> Staff earth can’t even get up to 25 stacks of bleed

6 stacks per cast, 4.75 second cooldown, 5 second extended duration from traits and runes… I can hit 24 quite easily, and shockwave can add the missing one. Doesn’t make much difference anyway since damage should be calculated as “total damage per cast”; hitting maximum stacks just limits your dps.

> I also fail to see how eruption can out dps Fireball
> + Lava Font + burning + Meteor Shower whenever its
> up, earth is just bleeding…

My eruption does 15k damage; I can cast two of them in 10 seconds. In Orr, I only need to cast one, it’s enough to kill a level 80 mob without auto-attack. Takes a while, but that’s one spell, one cast. And I have base attack and Shockwave.

Your Meteor Shower has a 24 second cooldown and it hits like kitten; like 1000 damage per rock. I once used it on a mob and mob didn’t even agro cause none of the rocks hit. In WvW I don’t even move out of it because I know it doesn’t hurt.

Fireball has base damage of around 600-800; with generous precision and crit damage, I accept 10k over 10 seconds. Lava Font you can use twice in 10 seconds, maybe 3-4k each cast. Both spells have a hideously small 120 radius; mobs need to be stacked on top of each other for you to hit more than 1-2 at a time; while eruption has 240, or 300 (traited) radius.

> TannerMS:
> Maxing fire grants you 300 Power, you might want to retrait next time you’re trying out Fire.

I’m specced 30/5/30/5/0, so I am fully aware of that, and I also had this spec while testing a power / precision / crit damage item set today with staff/fire. I was not impressed. That said, apart from an exotic staff, all my gear is green so there might be scaling involved; however, difference between green and exotic gear is only about 20%, which does not seem like anywhere near enough to change the numbers in fire’s favor, especially considering it has no room for defence.

> pandaqueen:
> traiting 30 into fire enables you to get Pyromancer Puissance

I would like to see some numbers on how much dps this trait adds; so far it seems extremely low (considering I have it).

As for surviving in dungeons, I also have vitality in every piece of gear I have; an advantage which a crit build can’t have btw since they have to stack 3 dps stats instead of just one. Unfortunately the game does not have a set with just vitality / toughness / condition damage, so I’m forced to go with power / vitality / condition damage. Yes it annoys me.

The way I see it, fire should be doing nearly twice as much dps as earth for this reason alone: you can’t stack defence stats if you use a crit build, without seeing a massive drop in your dps. Earth loses maybe 5-10% overall dps for going full defence, depending on the weapon you use.

Oh, forgot to mention: sure you could go power / crit chance / crit damage to get more out of fire/staff like the OP suggests (which I still think provides way lower DPS than staff/earth, btw), but in most dungeons you would also need to survive in order to do damage. With a condition build, all you need is condition damage; you don’t even need power, since it only affects direct damage (as far as I understand it; please correct me if I’m wrong on this one).

Sadly there is no vitality / toughness / condition damage set in the game it seems, so I’m using power / vitality / condition damage, with runes that boost bleed duration (which seems to be broken btw, you only get one extra tick for every 15 “percentages” of bleed duration on Eruption, and even less on other bleeds). Oh well, I get 300 toughness from the earth trait line and vitality seems to give more survivability anyway. People say eles are squishy, but at least in my dungeon runs I’m usually the one who survives longest.

Could somebody please explain to me why so many people seem to think that staff/fire is the way to go? Almost every ele I meet in dungeons uses that, eventhough staff/earth can sustain more than twice its DPS just by spamming Eruption. That’s more than 10k AoE per cast on a 4.75 second cooldown (traited). On top of that, staff/fire is only 1/3 condition damage, which is by far the lowest percentage among the weapon combinations I calculated (staff, D/D, S/D). If you want to go fire and actually get something out of your condition damage stat, use either D/D or S/D…

Really, do the math guys; Meteor Shower looks fancy but does very little damage on a really long cooldown; Fireball and Lava Font are both really low damage on a really small area. Burning retreat is not even worth mentioning. Flame Burst is the only staff/fire spell that does decent damage, and that’s less than half of what a single Eruption does, on an 8 second cooldown.

Disclaimer: this only applies to dungeons; I couldn’t care less about PvP, and mobs don’t remove conditions or move out of Eruption.