Guild Wars 2

Hey all, I was just wondering if anyone had any good condi builds/rotations for PvE raids?

Senario.2038:

It only works in a solo group and you have to give up damage and healing. The dmg from overload is alright but the fact you have to be so close will honestly be a huge detriment as you will get destroyed by high damage mobs.

Being in melee for four seconds does not in any way mean you will get destroyed by high damage mobs. If that was true then the old meta Scepter LH build would never have existed, and the current D/F FA build would not exist. Having the lowest armor/health rating does not mean eles can’t go into melee, it just means they need to be careful about it.

And honestly, when you get into the harder content (which is the only place where min/maxing DPS really matters), mobs hit so hard that ALL classes need to be careful about being in melee. But just because you have to be careful about it doesn’t mean that it will “be a huge detriment as you will get destroyed by high damage mobs”. That’s just silly. If you’ve ever run a high level fractal with competent players you will see that they are almost all running melee builds, regardless of their class.

Senario I’m not sure what your fascination is with melee and death, but it is heavily misplaced. All you need to do is know your class, know the encounter, and have halfway-decent timing, and you will never have issues in melee regardless of your class or build.

inbe4 “Ahmagawd you elitist prick, stop picking on me! Not everyone is a super champ at playing their class!”
- Being a halfway decent player, which is all that’s required to be in melee, is very different from being a pro. And just to be clear, I’m not saying anything about your personal skill level. I’m just saying your philosophy on melee DPS is highly flawed and inaccurate.

tl;dr
Staff tempest is indeed the highest DPS power ele build, and is recommended for anyone looking to min/max their build. It is easy to play, provides great damage support for PUG runs, and provides better DPS than base ele in both PUG and coordinated runs. The only ele build that beats it is condi staff tempest, but that build requires perfect execution where any interruption will cause significant DPS loss, so in most situations it’s impractical to use.

Edit for Senario
Since I’m sure you’re going to come back with some argument against me, I’ll break it down even more for you. Coincidentally, if any eles are having issues staying alive in melee, this may be helpful.

Good to know information:
- Every boss has a tell before its big hitting abilities.
- Big hitting abilities have a cooldown.
- Most big hitting abilities are not omnidirectional.
- Aegis negates big hitting abilities.

How to stay alive in melee with STAFF:
Staff only needs to enter melee to use OLF. This means you will have four seconds in which you may be hit by the boss’s melee attacks.
- In order to not die like a nub, watch the boss’s tells. Wait to go into melee until you see the boss use a big hit.
- If you don’t want to wait (because waiting generally results in a DPS loss) then get to an area of the boss where you won’t be hit (usually the back or the side).
- If you are running with a guardian (which is meta), then make use of the ample aegis they give you to avoid being hit in melee.

How to stay alive in melee with DAGGER:
Because D/F builds are quite strong and provide excellent group support, it is worth mentioning some tips to use with them.
- First and foremost, dagger eles almost never need to fully enter melee range. The range on your autoattack, Lightning Whip, is 300. That’s over 50% farther than most melee attacks, including the attacks of most bosses. Learn to stand at max melee range and most bosses will never be able to hit you.
- You have plenty of defensive abilities at your disposal.
- Starting in Air, you have Shocking Aura which will heal you as well as stop any mob that doesn’t have a breakbar (i.e. trash).
You also have Gale which is essentially a 2s stun, or decimates breakbars.
Swirling Winds doesn’t apply to melee attacks, but it is still extremely valuable when you are attacking a ranged mob.
- Moving on to Fire, you have Fire Shield which will heal you.
You also have Burning Speed which is an evade.
- In Water you have plenty of chill from Frozen Burst and Freezing Gust.
You also have Comet which is an AoE daze.
- Finally in Earth you have Ring of Earth which blocks missiles for 2s.
You also have immobilize from Magnetic Grasp which lets you attack from your maximum melee range (which as I mentioned, is outside the range of most melee mobs).
You also have a reflect and cripple from Magnetic Wave.
And finally you have one of the most powerful defensive abilities in the game: 4s of complete invuln from Obsidian Flesh.
- From utilities/elites you also have Glyph of Storms in Earth, which provides pulsing AoE blind.
You also have Earth elemental which is an excellent tank.
You also have Lightning Flash which can get you out of tricky situations.
You also have Eye of the Storm which breaks stun and grants a large amount of superspeed.
- Using all of these abilities to their fullest, along with staying at max melee range, will keep you completely safe in just about any melee situation.

Unless a fight is specifically designed to require standing at range, an ele who is familiar with their skills will actually have an easier time in melee than most other classes.

I figured you would come back with that argument, which is why I specifically stated twice that you don’t need to be a pro to survive in melee. You don’t need to “play 100% perfectly to get any sort of benefit out of your class” as you so ridiculously put it. You just need to know what you’re doing.

There is a difference between being an inexperienced player, being a good player, and being a great player. An inexperienced player will not know when to use defensive abilities, will not know when to step out of the boss’s range while using an ability with greater range in order to not lose DPS, will not know when to use their heal effectively, will not know which attacks should be dodged and which are okay to be facetanked, etc. etc. A good player will know some of these, but not others. A great player will know all of these.

An inexperienced player who does not know the above will die, regardless of their class or build. A good player, depending on specifically how good they are, will be able to survive in melee with mild to no difficulty.

Do you honestly think that inexperienced players should be able to do challenging content with ease? Or do you think that the game should require a modicum of skill in order to succeed?

And yes, I do help players who are actually interested in learning instead of just using the excuse “Well I died because my build is too squishy”, but thank you for assuming from a single post that I am a horrible person. A little quick on the draw there don’t you think?

Regardless, this is getting off topic. I’m not going to start a flame war with some random person I’ve never met before. If you want to keep crying because someone you’ve never met before disagreed with your point of view, then by all means go ahead. I’m done wasting my time.

The OP’s topic is about Tempest DPS, and the answer is that, in PvE at least, Tempest is both a DPS increase and a survivability increase.

Being melee does not put you at unreasonable amounts of risk, that is a common propaganda message of bad players. Almost every fight in the game can be done completely safely while in melee, and you don’t even need to be a super pro player to do it.

Also, as illustrated above, Tempest has better survivability than Water, which makes it more ideal to use than the classic Fire/Air/Water build.

Also, the real benefit from tempest is not the might stacking, it’s the increased DPS (with better group support being a secondary bonus).

Being squishy in PvE is completely irrelevant because good (just good, don’t even have to be great) take almost no damage to begin with.

Overloads don’t get interrupted in PvE unless you are dumb enough to start channeling them right before a boss does a disable (which are all telegraphed and extremely predictable).

Fire is most definitely not useless for D/F, it provides excellent DPS (the top D/F build is Air/Fire/x, where x is Water/Arcane/Tempest).

Tempest also has better survivability than Water, making Air/Fire/Tempest a more defensive option than the old Air/Fire/Water build (which was itself our most defensive DPS build). Let’s see why:

The classical D/F build with Air/Fire/Water (found at either metabattle, DEKeyz’s guide, or Dulfy’s guide) takes Piercing Shards, Aquamancer’s Training, and Powerful Auras from the Water traitline. None of these give you any additional survivability. In fact the only survivability from Water is Healing Ripple, which provides a heal when you attune to Water, which only happens once every ~30s when you are doing the D/F rotation.

Now you might say “Take Soothing Ice, Cleansing Wave, and Cleansing Water/Soothing Power!” but let’s be honest, those are pretty awful for PvE. Not only do they result in a huge DPS loss, they have very little survivability. Soothing Ice has an ICD of 20s, meaning it will generally only proc once during a solo fight and maybe two-three times against a fractal boss. Cleansing Wave and Cleansing Water are decent, but unnecessary for survivability seeing as we have plenty of condi removal without them. Soothing Power is near useless because a properly played D/F ele spends so little time in Water.

Meanwhile Tempest has a plethora of surviability traits. In the adept tier Gale Song gives you an AoE stunbreak/Superspeed proc, Latent Stamina gives you vigor and a small endurance regen if you are in a group, and Unstable Conduit causes your Overload Air to proc Shocking Aura, which not only stuns mobs but also has nice synergy with the grandmaster trait Elemental Bastion. This grandmaster trait causes all of your auras to heal yourself and allies. Without using shouts, D/F Tempest sustains an average of 1 aura every ~5s. These auras are:
- Fire Aura from attuning to Fire (every ~16s)
- Fire Aura from Magnetic Leap in a fire field (every ~28s)
- Shcoking Aura from Shocking Aura ability (every ~25s)
- Shocking Aura from Overload Air (every ~16s)

This does not include the Frost Aura you would gain upon dropping below 75% health (Elemental Bastion), the Shocking Aura you get when you are disabled (Tempest Defense), or the auras you have access to with shouts. Without healing power, each aura heals for 778, which gives you an average of 156 HPS just from doing your standard DPS rotation. Conversely, the healing from Healing Ripple provides 43 HPS.

Tempest also provides Hardy Conduit, which not only gives you protection while you are overloading, but also increases the effectiveness of all protection buffs by 20%.

For DPS builds (which is what this topic was created for), the Water traitline provides significantly less survivability than Tempest. Anyone who used to run the D/F Fresh Air build prior to HoT will actually have an easier time staying alive by using Tempest.

And for DPS builds, don’t drop Fire for Earth. For crying out loud, Fire provides so much more DPS.

Hey all! I’m looking for some feedback on my PvE tempest build. This is primarily for fractals, and will be adapted to raids depending on what they need.

Build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAodn0XCdOgNNAOYC0RgFBAzt1ObztBBgCwBQYDcBqhA-ThRBABXt/o8DP9EPcCBA4BBQp6PmpEkUA6JMC-e

Heal:
I’m not sure how Wash the Pain Away stacks up to Arcane Brilliance, but it seems to heal for more and also heals allies. The loss of a blast finisher sucks, but is somewhat made up for by bringing Aftershock as a utility (also allows me to keep my heal off CD for when it’s needed instead of using it for DPS).

Utilities:
I use Lightning Flash because I’m addicted to the mobility of it, even though I really should be using Arcane Wave, Signet of Fire, or something else for more DPS.
Also I’m not sure if Aftershock is ideal here, but it’s a blast finisher, does comparable damage to Arcane Wave (depending on crits), and gives allies magnetic aura for reflects and small AoE heals (not to mention the cripple/immob to help out a bit for break bars).

Elite:
Pretty self explanatory, Rebound doesn’t directly add any DPS and heals for so little that it seems extremely niche in PvE.

Rotation:
I tried to stick to DEKeyz’s base ele D/F build as much as possible, so I generally do:

(Block 1)
>Air
– Lightning Whip until OLA
– OLA
>Fire
– Flamewall
– Burning Speed
>Water
– Comet
– Frozen Burst
(Block 2)
>Air
– Lightning Whip until OLA
– OLA
>Fire
– Flamewall
– Burning Speed
>Earth
– Magnetic Wave
– Aftershock!
Repeat from Block 1

Also using Glyph of Storms off CD in Air and Glyph of Elementals off CD in Fire.

So I’m looking for constructive criticism on this build. What should I replace Lightning Flash with? Should I replace Aftershock with something? How does the rotation look? Any other thoughts?

Gotta love when people compare individual abilities across classes without taking anything else into consideration…

When will people learn that comparing skills in a vacuum is useless?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Phoenix-not-blasting-Wildfire-fixed

Zoltreez.6435:

in what world a rainbow Giant crystal shield fits the black and red spiked martial revenant armor set ?

in itself it looks good but absolutly trash with the rev set.

In what world do you not have access to armor dyes?

Also, seeing as all of the Glint skills are blue/purple in color, the blue/purple (not rainbow, just blue/purple) glowy shield absolutely does fit the revenant theme.

Base revenant colors are black, white, and red. But beyond that, each legend has its own color theme, and the herald shield matches the herald legend perfectly. And, coincidentally, you need to have herald slotted to use the shield. Funny how that works out.

Dagger/Dagger in PvE is viable, but is one of the worst PvE builds available to us. It has less sustained damage than Staff and Dagger/Focus, less burst than Scepter, and less survivability than Dagger/Focus.

If you just want a weapon set to run around in open world with, D/D will work, especially because it has high mobility thanks to RtL. However, for fighting anything stronger than a vet, or for group content, you will be better served by running Staff or D/F.

Again, D/D is definitely viable, but in PvE it is outclassed by Staff and D/F in both damage and survivability.

But to answer your question, zerker gear is still the top DPS gear for ele. Staff and D/F both have enough defensive abilities to keep you alive even with your squishy armor/health, so there is no need to gear for more survivability. That being said, if you find yourself dying a lot then you can switch to Marauder’s gear (Power/Precision/Vitality/Ferocity) for a boost to health with minimal losses to DPS. If that is still not enough survivability then feel free to swap out some zerker gear for Knight’s gear. Just remember that this will drop your DPS quite a bit, and is not necessary if you learn to use the ele’s active mitigation abilities properly.

Shiki.7148:

Slot Golem. Press charge. Profit.

This.

Golem charge does insane damage to break bars, and it’s CD isn’t all that long.

Plus we have two pulsing blind fields in addition to everything else that was mentioned.

Reaper has great bar breaking capabilities.

Dude, stop complaining and start playing. Yesterday I fully unlocked Tempest and today I’m solidly workin my way through Reaper. Yeah, took less than a day to fully unlock the elite spec, and that was almost completely solo with very little help from others.

Remember each HoT hero challenge gives a whopping 10 points. Get your glider, bouncing mushrooms, and updraft masteries, then advertise in map chat or get some friends together and bang out those hero challenges. It goes incredibly fast.

Um…what are you talking about? They definitely still have flame effects…

Fay.2357:

The time delay is between the stun and the damage. You’ve got about 1 second to react once the stun hits, and that’s enough for many people.

This.

Gotta remember, getting stunned is a huge red flag to players. Even if they don’t see you coming, getting stunned will immediately send them into defensive mode, starting with a stunbreak and followed closely by a dodge, invuln, stealth, counter-stun, etc.

Stunning your enemy removes all element of surprise, so getting your burst damage off ASAP is extremely important. Those fractions of a second can and will mean the difference between a successful burst or a counterplay that leaves you vulnerable.

Valento.9852:

Lol what? I was simply suggesting, calm the kitten down. Geez…

You know what they say about suggestions.

Not sure if you’re being serious or sarcastic, but in case you are serious:

Why? It only lasts for the first 9 levels, has no impact on competitive gameplay, has barely any impact on personal gameplay, and is not an exploit.

The only reason new players don’t get all of the attunements immediately is because ANet didn’t want them to feel overwhelmed by all of the different abilities. Being able to access attunements a few levels early doesn’t give players any real advantage, it just removes part of the tutorial phase from the game. Plus if you switch out of the locked attunement then you have to travel back to the PvP zone to use it again.

Considering the fact that ANet freely hands out level-up tomes every week, as well as consumables that immediately boost a toon to level 30, I see no reason for them to fix this bug.

If you honestly think ANet should waste time fixing this bug instead of working on actual problems with the game then you need to get your priorities in order.

Hey everyone! I’m sure this has already been reported by others, but I just figured I’d throw it out there for anybody creating a new ele.

If you travel to the Heart of the Mists (PvP zone) and swap to an attunement you have not yet unlocked, you will remain in that attunement when you return to the PvE zones. Not really a big deal, but it helps speed up the first few levels by being able to sit in Air attunement with D/x ele and killing enemies much faster than Fire or Water (Air auto attack is stronger than Fire/Water/Earth and cleaves much better than the others as well).

Might want to take a look here as well:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Rabid-or-Sinister-ascended-armor/first#post5589630

AlpatheWhite is getting some very interesting numbers for condi Chrono.

I was doing a bit of napkin math, and it seems to me that, ignoring the potential for allies to blast the turret’s water field, Med Kit puts out significantly more HPS than Healing Turret does. Here are the results of my quick and dirty math (I ignored regen from both because regen is very easy for most classes to apply so you will likely never have JUST your regen on your allies):

Med Kit (no Health Insurance trait):
Med Blaster (no boons): 99 healing, 3 hits, 1.25s cast time = 238 HPCT & 238 HPS
Throw Bandages (no regen): 505 healing, 0.5s cast time, 5s CD = 1010 HPCT & 202 HPS
Throw Stimulant: 505 healing, 0.75s cast time, 10s CD = 673 HPCT & 67.33 HPS
Throw Accelerant: 505 healing, 0.5s cast time, 15s CD = 1010 HPCT & 67.33 HPS
Throw Antidote: 505 healing, 0.5s cast time, 20s CD = 1010 HPCT & 50.5 HPS

Healing Turret:
Cleansing Burst: 2520 healing, 15s CD = 2520 HPCT & 168 HPS

So even without Health Insurance, Med Blaster alone puts out more HPS than Healing Turret. Healing Turret definitely has more burst healing, but is the loss of overall HPS worth the burst?

Also, while the “Throw” abilities from Med Kit are all single target and thus not super useful in a 10 man group, the Med Blaster has a 5 target limit in a 600 range cone, compared to the Healing Turret’s 5 targets in a 480 radius circle. So Med Blaster not only does higher HPS even when players have no boons on them, but also allows you better control over who gets your healing (you can aim the cone) and more range on your heals.

Also, even though Cleansing Burst has a higher Healing Power coefficient (0.5 compared to Med Blaster’s 0.033), with Cleric’s gear (1200 Healing Power), Cleansing Burst only rose to 208 HPS while Med Blaster (no boons) rose to 334 HPS.

Of course there is the glaringly huge downside of Med Kit: You lose almost all ability to deal damage while you are healing people. That is why I am looking at this strictly from a raid healing point of view.

tl;dr
So I have three questions:
1) Is my math here generally correct, or did I miss something huge?
2) I highly doubt Med Kit plus whatever healing/support utilities we take will be able to match Druid healing, but if a Druid is not available, could a Med Kit engi take their place?
3) For raid healing purposes, am I correct in asserting that Med Kit beats Healing Turret?