Guild Wars 2

I’d love it if the different auto attack chains could be combined such that attunement swaps mid-chain doesn’t restart it entirely. Could introduce some interesting play by finishing a chain in another attunement from the one you started in.

Air overload nerf sucks and that the damage on fresh air builds are so low now.
Other than that I like that hitbox scaling was removed from phoenix and wildfire which brought back staff as the best choice for eles on large hitboxes.
Condi ele is still pretty strong although /F are always taken over /Wh now.

The only part I would complain about is the reasoning. Elementalists are not the “best-in-slot for DPS, support and survivability”. If their reasoning was to normalise how skills scaled with hitbox sizes I think many would’ve been behind it.
It’s also partly annoying that condi daredevil and DPS warriors seemingly got a buff, which brought them more out of line than tempests were previously. But that’s hardly a complaint towards the elementalist changes, more towards the oversight of parts of the PvE meta that needed balance changes as well.

Cooldown reduction traits and alacrity work multiplicatively though, so we would get a reduction of 36% rather than 40%. It might be too strong, but how could they balance those traits out without gutting core/tempest?

Also side note, next week (11-13th) we will only test the first map and raptor mount. The elite specialisation tests can be done in PvP and WvW the weekend after that.

The attunement ICD is not 1 second, but there is a global CD of 4 seconds.

Also, One With Air doesn’t stack in intensity. Yes you can get 3 seconds of superspeed each time you attune to air, but even with instantly double attuning to air you’ll never reach above the 3 seconds.
Twist of Fate is a 1.5s on demand super speed but in terms of maintaining the buff it can only do 3.75% by itself. We can reuse the skill every 5 seconds if we have a charge like you said, but a charge takes 40 seconds to recharge. The strength of it is stunbreak, removal of 3 conditions with Unravel Hexes and on demand escapes – not as a maintained source of superspeed.
Same goes with Unravel Hexes. Incredibly interesting trait for condition removal, but as a super speed source it’ll be unreliable (triggers when you get cripple/chill/immobilise) with a cooldown of 15s.

In short, you can’t maintain super speed unless you; always crit, can hit things consistently, have alacrity/weave self to lower attunement recharge and fresh air. Any other scenario than that we won’t have permanent super speed – albeit still a pretty high one (attuning air – X element back and forth would give ~50% upkeep)

This seems to be a worry for many people I’ve talked to so far, but remember we’re all judging the Weaver mechanics from the limited picture of what we’ve seen so far. We don’t know exactly how it’ll turn out, or even if it will be a problem.

To leave a suggested solution to your problem though, there seems to be at least two ways to circumvent the mentioned problem and access offhand skills of any attunement reactively:

1, Use fresh air and go into target attunement —> crit --> go into air
2, Use the utility “Unravel” (max 2 charges, one charge takes 25s to recharge) to forego the weaver attunement mechanic for 5 seconds and fully attune to the elements.

I wrote this in another thread, but fresh air allows instantaneous access to offhand skills of any attunement as long as you can attain a crit.
Imagine fire-air —> swap to water --> water-fire —> crit --> swap to air —> air-water. This can all be done in a fraction of a second assuming the crit was achieved.

So with the Weaver we can now have two attunements at once, one for skills 1-2 and one for 4-5, #3 being mixed.

What happens with the glyphs that are affected by attunement, and the traits that give bonuses or condition applications based on your current attunement? The way I see it there’s two possibilities: both, or just the 1-2 “main” attunement.

If it is both, we could do some interesting tricks with fresh air to gain water-dps-traits for “free”. Say we start in fire-air —> (swap to water) --> water-fire —> crit to recharge the 3s cd on air --> (swap to air) —> air-water. One hit we’d be in fire-air, the next air-water.

This means fresh air offers a way to instantaneously access offhand skills of any attunement assuming crits are attainable, which could resolve some worries I’ve read about Water attunement and healing.

I think you guys are correct in that for each swap the attunements get shifted. We could basically see it as different types of X on a construction line. You’ll always have one attunement coming in and one coming out, even if it’s the same attunement in a row.

Let’s say we start in Fire-Air and do following swaps:
Fire —> Air --> Fire —> Water --> Air.
The construciton line idea would then produce following states:
Fire(1)-Air(1) —> Fire(2)-Fire(1) --> Air(2)-Fire(2) —> Fire(3)-Air(2) --> Water(1)-Fire(3) —> Air(3)-Water(1)

Sounds correct.

I also partly worry about the global cooldown potentially locking access to some skills in a greater way than before. I like your suggestion to solve access to a water field.

I thought of another Weaver mechanic as well that I might as well ask here. Say you’re in Fire-Air and thus have 1-2 fire skills, 3 mixed and 4-5 air skills.
As shown on WP’s post-show, if you now go into fire you “double attune” and have 1-5 fire skills. If you head into water or earth, the air attunement is stripped and you are Water-Fire or Earth-Fire. However, what happens if you attune to air? Do you become Air-Fire or Air-Air?

Hey,

I finally have a guild slot open, so here goes:

- Name: Particlar
- Role: Tester/PvE teacher
- Game mode(s): PvE
- Realm: Desolation
- Other info: I occasionally stream, mostly raid content. Weaver hype!

Hey,

This is something I’ve spent some time looking at and it’s pretty important if you want to squeeze the maximum amount of DPS out of a D/ build (condi or power).
I’ve explained it to some extent on reddit before and I made a short video showcasing it on a medium hitbox.

Basically ever since the FGS “Fiery Rush” nerf a few years ago, fire trails cannot stack closely together. This fixed the admittedly broken fiery rush skill, but also affected burning speed as well as burning retreat (Flame axe version as well but w/e). The fix was that multiple trails that spawn too close to each other will be voided, making it impossible to stack a large number of them on the same spot.

This means that we want to stack the Burning speed trails as closely as possible under the hitbox without putting the trails all on each other. There’s a sweet spot dependant on the travel distance and the size of the hitbox, but I’ve had more success getting a feeling for how to do it right rather than giving it exact numbers I can’t relate to in a real fight.
From what I’ve tested a medium hitbox can only get 2 trails under, and a large hitbox can get all 4 if used correctly. This is pretty difficult on the large golem, but much easier on a stationary Slothasor/Samarog (in which case you pretty much want to travel as far as possible, starting outside the hitbox circle).

Here is the best rotation I’ve found on D/W tempest after the patch, both with all buffs and with realistic buffs without alacrity.

• All buffs: 35.3k
• Realistic buffs: 27k

Seems to come off a bit above guard, but below thief. At least in realistic fights.
That’s not to say that a main guard will definitely perform better on his guardian than he would by swapping to his off-class tempest.
Big hitboxes we’re still top DPS.

As a side note, when looking at engineer/scrapper DPS. Don’t forget your trait Modified Ammunition that gives an unrealistic damage modifier by having all conditions on the golem.

I have the natural keybinds of F1-F4. Only F5 that I find really clumsy but luckily ele’s don’t have to consider that.

I’d love to see a change of Phoenix, from 20 seconds cd to 15 seconds. Long live fresh air scepter!

Right clicking the weapon and choosing the second option “equip in offhand” is the way to do it. There’s no other way to do it afaik.
Keep practicing with the swaps, I would focus on the same rotation without comet for now to get more used to the weapon swaps.
After HoT and the warhorn we got access to another blast in earth with Sand Squall, so many people favour using that blast over comet. This since comet is a rather slow hitting blast and quite cumbersome to use.

If you’re refering to the qT benchmark videos I can tell you the arcane traitline is not used. You can confirm this by looking that the Glyph of Storms cooldown is 48 seconds rather than 60 seconds. This means the player in the video had the trait “Inscription”, something that would not be possible without the air traitline. Thus Fire/Air/Tempest was used.

I think everyone agrees that doing DPS tests with bountiful power while you have every single boon is more than unrealistic.

For reference, you can see my PoV with similar results here.

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.

For numbers on S/W I’ve gotten 34-35k while D/W is 37-38k.
The biggest cripple of this is phoenix cooldown. If the cooldown ever lowers a tiny amount to fit in together with the OLA fresh air rotation we’ll have a variant competetive with D/W. It’s also really difficult to play well when both you (due to seaweed) and the enemy are moving.

I’d say D/W is always better damage.
Only in a setting with zero movement, permanent alacrity and a Slothasor’s sized hitbox staff pulls ahead slightly. Slightly as in ~3%, in a scenario that will never be reality.

Go staff if you need the utility of ranged dps or if you’re figthing the Ice Elemental in the Snowblind Fractal. Otherwise always D/W.
That means even for Bloomhunger or Molten Duo or similar. All of those bosses have a much smaller hitbox than Sloth’s making D/W roughly 8% better than staff.

Decided to do some DPS number checking with different rotations. Remember these numbers are gotten through spreadsheet assumptions with every buff (scholar, GotL, alacrity etc) as permanent. The numbers will not be what you will see in a real scenario, the variance between the different rotations though should be close to the same.

• Normal camp fire staff – 32614
• Fresh Air Staff (reikken rotation) – 30508
• LH Fresh Air Staff (rotation in video above) – 31360

I was using 53 strikes from a Gorseval and Sabetha kill. Seems raid bosses generally stick with that amount of armor (2200 afaik) so it felt most accurate for estimations.

MadRabbit.3179:

In a group setting, where multiple people are acquiring the Static Charge buff, I would probably buy it’s higher DPS, just because of how fast you can reapply it.

Static Charge has the same coefficient of Sigil of Air which has an estimated DPS of 709 (taken average of ~50 strikes). The Static Charge is applied to 5 players and with a decent fresh air rotation the overload air, and hence Static Charge, will happen every 10-12 seconds.

Assuming the optimal scenario of 10 seconds, 709*3*5/10 = 1063 groupwide bonus DPS or 212 as personal bonus DPS. Safe to say it’s not much but it’s something

Made this rotation some weeks ago. It should have gotten buffed together with the +250 extra ferocity from Fresh Air. I’d argue it’s slightly behind normal staff rotation with the added inconvenience of LH left behind in cases where the fight is mobile.

I have a feeling Frowny is discussing from a WvW perspective without making that clear. Lightning rod is definitely worse than Bolt to the Heart in a PvE scenario.

To answer your question, attunement swap doesn’t cancel the ongoing cast. This means you can start any channel and change attunements without fear of interrupting your skills.

From what I’ve tried out, swapping to Air is never worth it unless you have an icebow to cast while waiting for Overload Air. In which case it’s marginally better.

Regarding the Accuracy sigil, there was a discussion about the same thing in the dungeon forums about a month ago. I’ll copy paste my reply there for reference.

Okay, so I went in to compare sigil of accuracy over sigil of air for staff ele in the most optimal set ups for both with and without Spotter.

In terms of EP, I got following (I disregarded damage multipliers as they will work as linear coefficients which won’t change the comparison):

Without Spotter:

• Accuracy: 13994
• Air: 13460

With Spotter:

• Accuracy: 14163
• Air: 13988

So going accuracy over air we get an increase of 3.97% EP without spotter or 1.25% with. Air sigil seem to have an annoyingly large variance of hitting 1.5-3k. After taking the average of ~50 strikes I got 2126, making it a 709 single target DPS increase. I’d love to take a bigger sample to make this estimation more accurate.

Assuming the damage on a single target is all that matters, then we can calculate the required DPS we need in order for accuracy > air.

• X > 709/0.0397
• X > 709/0.0125

where X is the required DPS and the two cases for spotter and without spotter.
Now the result, remember that the estimation here is with a final DPS number after an entire fight and not a number gotten after dummy practice.

• Without spotter: 17859
• With spotter: 56720

Now make your conclusion! I don’t think there’s a clear winner in the case of no-spotter but Air wins by miles in cases with.

It absolutely does. Went in to both pvp and pve to double check, all damaging overloads gains a 10% buff from the trait.

You guys heard of the mythical F squad?

Yes, definitely.

Okay, so I went in to compare sigil of accuracy over sigil of air for staff ele in the most optimal set ups for both with and without Spotter.

In terms of EP, I got following (I disregarded damage multipliers as they will work as linear coefficients which won’t change the comparison):

Without Spotter:

• Accuracy: 13994
• Air: 13460

With Spotter:

• Accuracy: 14163
• Air: 13988

So going accuracy over air we get an increase of 3.97% EP without spotter or 1.25% with. Air sigil seem to have an annoyingly large variance of hitting 1.5-3k. After taking the average of ~50 strikes I got 2126, making it a 709 single target DPS increase. I’d love to take a bigger sample to make this estimation more accurate.

Assuming the damage on a single target is all that matters, then we can calculate the required DPS we need in order for accuracy > air.

• X > 709/0.0397
• X > 709/0.0125

where X is the required DPS and the two cases for spotter and without spotter.
Now the result, remember that the estimation here is with a final DPS number after an entire fight and not a number gotten after dummy practice.

• Without spotter: 17859
• With spotter: 56720

Now make your conclusion! I don’t think there’s a clear winner in the case of no-spotter but Air clearly wins in cases with.

Updated recruitment post, open the floodgates!

You’re definitely right that 100% burn duration is required, however when comparing the two different build you can’t just look at the condition damage.

Your build gain 329 extra condition damage cause of suboptimal traits when looking at highest achievable DPS (arcane is better than earth, pyromancer’s training better than power overwhelming).

With the correct viper build the comparison then turns into:

Viper with Berserker runes:

• 2264 power
• 1597 condition power
• 80.19% condi duration (100% burn)
• 5% direct damage multiplier

Sinister with Balth runes:

• 2055 power
• 1856 condition power
• 34.76% condition duration (100% burn)

End result with Viper on LHS and Sinister on RHS:

209 power + 5% direct damage + 5 bleeds from sigil of earth vs. 259 condition power.

gobermueller.6203:

Even with full Vipers you don’t reach 100% burn duration (assuming no Balthazar runes). Is this still worth it then? And if so how big is the difference to using Balthazar runes?

This is what I would make from your post: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAodn0XCFNgNNAmNA8RgFBAzt1GbztBBgCwBoYTGGSDA-TxhAQBsRJYA3fAiq/AgHAw1U+BQ9AT4EAQKAIWWB-e

About right?

I’m very much interested in your opinion.

Almost! I believe vipers amulet is available from HoT story achievements and backpiece for magnetide shards which will give us 98.2% burn duration. If you’re super lucky we can choose viper rings/earrings from raid drops as well to cap the duration.

Viper on everything (apart from helmet), berserker runes, sigil of earth/malice would be optimal but sadly the earrings/rings are out of practical reach, so for now I wouldn’t be surprised if balth runes are the best.

I’d say 35% is a really inflated number when assuming permanent buffs. From what I’ve tested it’s closer to 22-25%, still crazy high and slightly a head of warrior buffs if we disregard might.
An optimally set up ele should benefit 1.97% in terms of EP from Spotter.

This is not meant as a counter argument to der(p)y, just wanted to clarify statements about buffs.

I’d say condition eles are in a good spot in raids but their other direct damage builds overshadow the condition versions.

There’s been some development since I made that video. I’d recommend full viper, berserker runes, sigil of smoldering/earth for a bit better result.

It’s actually pretty interesting it procs the Fresh Air trait but doesn’t mess with the Overload recharge.

After some testing with different rotations I can’t get it to reach D/W levels. It seems to me /D is about 10% worse than /W. Surprisingly, this makes D/D a tiny amount stronger than staff.

Monday 8 am server time, so in a bit more than 20 hours from now

Sunshine.5014:

It’s 10% damage buff that lasts 5s. You can’t get the Overload damage there, so it’s actually not that big of a buff.

Since you’ll gain the ferocity buff when you re-enter air, it sounds to me that the buff will be live just when the majority of the damage drops.

1, Use Overload Air
2, Swap to Fire -> Use Wildfire -> Swap to Air during Burning Speed channel
3, Ferocity buff is live benefiting the Burning Speed blast as well as the OLA lingering field.

Have a look at this for power/precision/ferocity breakpoints. Simply find the cell that corresponds with your crit damage and power in a chosen scenario to find the optimal crit chance.
With revenants, ferocious winds and LH we are able to go beyond 244% but since no meta build uses LH it shouldn’t be an issue.

Assassin staff or assassin earrings have the exact same stat (1 power vs 1 precision on dual wields), so if only berserker earrings are available to you you can choose assassin’s weapon.

Note though that the precision balance will vary a bit depending on what build you go. Fresh air builds will have an additional 190 precision from Aeromancer’s Training, take spotter into the consideration and it’s very easy to overcap. In simple terms, this is what I usually go for. For infusions I have power.

Staff:

• Berserker with assassin earrings, maintenance oil and truffle steak = 98.4% crit chance

• With spotter: Berserker with assassin earrings, maintenance oil and Bowl of Curry Butternut Squash Soup= 99.8% crit chance

Fresh Air:

• Berserker with assassin earrings, Sharpening stones and seaweed sallad = 99.37% crit chance
• With Spotter: Berserker with berserk earrings, Sharpening stones and seaweed sallad = 100.7% crit chance

And yes, the difference you’d see from those few assassin pieces are in the 0.1% margin.

It’s aftercast.

On most skills there is an ‘aftercast’, a delay before you can do another action. If you cast a skill and directly jump off the edge, you won’t be able to deploy your glider until the aftercast time has passed.

NikeEU.7690:

Adding about 1.5k dps is less impressive than adding unnecessary extra Might stacks? I think people are over-buffing in general, I think if you have a group with a Chronomancer using SOI and golden fried dumplings there is a pretty good chance you have plenty of Might without adding silly things like Sigil of strength.

Using golden fried dumblings over seaweed sallad is a much bigger dps loss than sigil of strength over sigil of air though.

The way I interpreted previous commentor was how revenant would fare on providing might alone without any PS warriors. In which case I think sigil of strength is a viable option since there will be times where might will be below 25 even with FoN and SOI from the mesmer.

Because toxic gives the exact same precision as the usual maintenance oil plus 10% condition duration for your burning from your fire fields.

Small increase, but an increase none the less.

Here you go: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJBIhdSfJ0fJW2A40AwhJWEAsgAQB4AIcJvA1Q3W7sN3C-TxRBABA8AAua/R5xDnAAKV/BP9AkpEzMlgBAOA+tvBw5nf+5nfe/+7v/+7vlCYgdVA-e

Go for left side first, have one guy camp in the tunnel close to the right side.
2 hammer runners, as therunner comes close to the right side have the camper aggro to give the him safe passage.

Take it slow, don’t overpull and be sure not to stack too much agony on each other.

Thanks!

To answer your question Iris on the stream the other day, I ran some tests comparing sigil of air and critting with sigil of hydromancy. From a maths perspective we need 330% critical damage in order to reach the breakpoint where they are equal, which sadly is unreachable.

I found out another thing I hadn’t realised before. It’s still not more than a theory so don’t take it as gospel, but it seems that sigil of air takes the weapons strength from the weapon that was used with the skill that procced the sigil. Say D/W AA procs the sigil it will take the weapon strength from the dagger.

Ted The Warrior.8674:

The new meter can be pretty unreliable. I’ve gotten over 60k dps on sabetha on condi war.
This was just one of the screenshots I have from sabetha. http://puu.sh/maXLG/91338b712c.png

Check the video description, I double checked this to be sure of this debate.
The numbers are quite accurate, through manual computation excluding damage dealt to Seekers I got to 31.5k DPS on VG. (pastebin of numbers here; http://pastebin.com/Tkp5qK3L)

Burnzerker is not the only build that can get above 30k dps on VG https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEdIfhuEe7o

Hey,

I’ve been very curious about what DPS the D/W Fresh Air build actually puts out in raids in optimal settings so I decided to record a good run of it.

This is by no means perfect play but should showcase realistic numbers, I used the jynX dps meter with recommended settings as well as compared it to manually computed DPS.

• Manually entered numbers can be found here and it resulted in 31.5k DPS.
• jynX showed a DPS of 31.9k after excluding the damage dealt to the Seekers.

This shows that there is an error but it seems pretty minimal. Or maybe I managed to stare myself blind and made a mistake

Anyhow, this was way more DPS than I suspected it to be.

I failed to mention it in the video, but using ascended quality head and legs will give you 74 expertise, which is 1 expertise away from 100%. I’d go this route instead of a viper weapon. Potentioally you can go with vipers amulet for close to the same result.

Regarding keeping up the DPS in a real fight, yes it is rather difficult. I’d say this is the most fragile spec the ele has (or maybe I’m just not used to it) for great damage. I can’t think of any concrete tips other than the usual avoidance, try to stand behind the target etc.

DPS like the shown bloomhunger can be kept up on Sabetha, though that is basically the same case. I think you’ll lose a lot of damage using this build in an encounter you’re not used to compared to using a staff build, but that’ll diminish as you become more knowledgable.

Hey, thanks for linking Prism

If you have any further questions Sanquinn, feel free to ask here!

Tempest is better, not mainly due to traits but because of Fire Overload.