Guild Wars 2

Rather what I meant was (at least for NA) whether we use the old double elim brackets or the new single elim brackets both scenarios have a very high probability of the same teams making it to the top 4. Granted, I understand and recognize the possibility that one of the “top 4” teams have a higher chance of losing with the single elimination as there will be no second chances.

All it takes is two of the top 4 teams (top 4 through double elim) being paired up against each other in the single elim tournament for one of the top 4 to not go to the deserving team. There’s a, what, 3 in 7 chance that that happens with random seedings?

I concur with the others – seeding aside, single elimination is a very bad, unfair idea.

Let’s run a scenario. Let’s say we have a PvP tournament, much like this one, where there will only be two winning teams. The tournament is double elimination. However many teams show up, let’s say 8 teams, and they all duke it out. In the end, Team A and Team B win the tournament -they are the two top teams.

Now, back it up a bit. Let’s say the first match of the tournament pitted Team A against Team B. Team A won, perhaps by a small margin. Team A beat every other match they were in. Team B, now in the loser’s bracket, worked there way back up – showing that they were the second best team, by beating every team in their way as well.

In the end, there is no doubt that Team A and Team B are the two best teams of the tournament.

If it was single elimination? Team B would have lost against Team A, and despite being more skilled and more deserving of the second place spot, they would not get it. Some team not as worthy as Team B would get it, all because of the initial seeding and the silly single elimination rule.

When you choose single elimination, your seeding decides who gets to move on almost as much as the teams themselves. Let’s say Team Faded and Apex Prime are in this tournament. Let’s say that they both have the capability to beat every other team in the tournament, they are both deserving of the #1 and #2 spots in the tournament. But no. Single elimination. Your seeding just happens to pair them up. You decided that one of them will absolutely, definitely not move on from the tournament. All because it wasn’t double elimination.

Please don’t make the tournament single elimination. We’re just getting into our first Pro League, don’t start it like this. Thank you.

Kuhrer has an absolutely excellent site filled with a lot of useful information and video guides to help new and old PvP players alike get better. His site is http://qqmore.net

SlayerSixx.5763:

Diamond skin’s tool tip says it makes the elementalist immune to conditions while in earth. I’m assuming this works the same way resistance does in such a way that it leaves the elementalist immune even if you hit him with conditions before he goes into earth.

Now, here’s the deal. Elementalists generally revolve around attunement swapping. If he’s camping earth to keep the condis off, then his offensive pressure has just taken a big hit.

Also, 3 guys couldn’t auto attack him, a class with the lowest HP pool in the game, past 90%? Like I know some players run rabid and have very little power, but really?

You’re mixing up a couple traits. Stone Heart ensures you can not be critically hit while in the Earth attunement. Diamond Skin, on the other hand, works in all attunements, though only while you are above 90% health.

In 1v1s, this trait can be a bit overpowered against certain condi-only specs. This game is not balanced around 1v1s. In any sort of scenario where the ele is fighting more than one player, if the ele is being focused and you two can not get his health below 90%, something is wrong with you, not the ele.

The mesmer has to effectively be in melee range for the blind to hit, as it’s a point blank AoE around the mesmer. Mesmers are squishy. Mesmers in melee range constantly can die. Fast. If you are being hit with the blind mid-evade, that’s another problem; sounds like a bug.

Blinding Dissipation actually blinds around the mesmer instantly once they activate their shatter ability. The illusions don’t apply it to you. Because shatters are instant cast, you would have to predict the shatter and dodge to have a chance at avoiding the blind, a la dodging thief’s steal.

Darn, can’t edit my post to fix the couple typos hah.

Anyhow, smiley.1438 mentioned in another thread that MediaWiki, the wiki powering the GW2 wiki, has its own query ability, so you shouldn’t have to traverse the wiki in any fancy way. You can get back more useful, raw data with it. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Query

You can implement this yourself, if you want to get into something a bit nitty and gritty.

You need a few things:
- A database of item names
- A way to convert an item name to an item code
- A way to convert an item code to an item ID

If I were to go about this, I would likely use the official GW2 wiki as a source of item names. It also pairs most items with their item code, so that works out.

First, you need to be able to crawl a wiki page for its item code (the chat code, e.g. ). You can do this by traversing the DOM. There are many DOM traversal libraries, and potentially even some wiki traversing libraries. Take advantage of them.

Second, please remember to cache. Indefinitely. You only need to find the item code once, because we can use that to get to the item ID. Then you’ll have a permanent local link from item name to item ID.

I’d suggest using your local API to lookup the item ID from the item name. If it doesn’t exist, query the specific item code from the GW2 wiki and convert that to the ID. (And cache it so it’ll exist in the future.)

Now, how do we get the item ID from the item code? Luckily, this is pretty well documented in the Chat link format wiki page

I’ll brief over the basics. Take a look at this chat code for Zojja’s Claymore:
[&AgGqtgAA]

Strip the square brackets and the ampersand, and we have…
AgGqtgAA

Look familiar? That’s base64, a common type of encryption. By converting this base64 to hex, we get the following:
0201AAB60000

Let’s make this easier to read.
02 01 AA B6 00 00

Now, each of these areas means something specific. That’s all detailed in the aforementioned Chat link format wiki page. But let’s not get into all those details.

This format changes depending on the item type and what the chat code is for (i.e. something other than an item), but for most items, it appears that the format here is quite consistent.

Let’s get the item ID. First, we need to do is strip the first couple bytes.
AA B6 00 00

Now, reverse it.
00 00 B6 AA

Remove the spaces…
0000B6AA

Alright, now we have little endian hex. If we convert that to a decimal, we get…
46762

Ta-da. The item ID! Don’t believe me? “See for yourself.”:
https://api.guildwars2.com/v2/items/46762

Happy developing!

It happens to me too. Only when an enemy guardian hits me with Whirling Wrath. They hit me with whirling wrath, we continue fighting, they lose, they die. I walk off, am halfway across the map, when I, while being OOC, get hit by whirling wrath of said guardian. It puts me in combat, I can hear the whirling wrath, see the damage floaters, see my health get lower, and see it in my combat log. The guardian also sees it in his combat log.

The new match making is a joke, and I’m considering taking a break until this is fixed up.

Pre-patch, my team was decent. The enemy team was decent. Good players all around. They could fight, they could usually rotate decently. They’d even communicate. You even got to know some of them.

Pre-patch, leaderboards sucked. They were based on some level of MMR+decay. But at least many of the people near the top of the leaderboards you knew were, at the very least, decent players. I could take a couple week break from the game, drop in the leaderboards, win a few solo Qs, and get top 150-100 easily.

Now? I’ve solo Q’d maybe half a dozen times. Legitimately 80% of my matches have been me on a team with people that lost fights constantly. I can win 1v1s, 1v2s, and be the last one standing in group fights. But it tends to not help more often than not. I Not to mention I’m lucky if they have any grasp on the concept of rotations.

And the leaderboards now? I thought they meant next to nothing before. But now it’s nothing more than a blatant, skillless grind-fest. Hilarious, sad, worrisome, and frustrating.

Like a lot of people I’ve seen complain recently, I feel like I’m being matched up with people far under my skill level; newbies to PvP, perhaps. You want to know what makes it worse? These 80% of the matches I’m talking about here. Every. Single. Time. We go up against a premade. Some random team I’ve barely heard of usually, but still a 5-man premade.

What is going on? Do I just need to keep playing until some level of MMR matches up with some new variable in the equation? Are matches destined to be this bad forever? Why?

This isn’t fun anymore. WvW roaming has been dead for a long time, and all that I’ve been left with, with my minimal time, is the occasional solo Q and very occasional team Q. But this? Ugh.

Stack might.
Lightning whip.
Chill them when they leave water.
Lightning whip.
Don’t lag.
Dodge their fire rotations.
Lightning whip.
Don’t lag.
Land your fire rotations.
Lightning whip.

Win.

oZii.2864:

TimeBomb.3427:

My main problem with all this is that your allies should not rely on nor die because you didn’t have +35% healing.

Don’t look at it maxed out like chaos’s example. Think about it as far as versatility you could decide to go damage but still have high healing as if you specced some clerics.

Hmm. Alright. But I still perceive this trait as being less than useful. Let me tell you why.

My first argument is that my allies shouldn’t need me healing an extra 25%. That one’s been refuted by claims that it’s simply nice to have, a nice buffer if you will, the extra heals. Fair enough.

In regards to pushing a non-cleric build to near-cleric levels of healing. Ok, I can understand the usefulness there. Let’s do the math.
Let’s assume we’re using valks or celestial. Averaging the two out, let’s say we have 400 healing power from the amulet.. We also have 30 water, so 700 healing power. With clerics, we have about 1200 healing power. 500ish more than our other choices.

Cleansing Wave scales very nicely with healing power – 1HP = +1 Health healed.
It has a base heal of 1302. Add our 700ish healing power from 30 water + cele/valk amulet, and we’re at about 2000 health healed from cleansing Wave. Nice!

Cleric’s Amulet gives us 500 more healing power, so now Cleansing Wave is healing for 2500!

But let’s go back to the valk/cele cleansing wave. 2000 heal. The trait just stacks the 25% on top of that, right? So 2500. Bam, we’re now cele/valk/whatnot with the equivalent healing of a clerics ele. Neato. Of course, we don’t get the extra heals ourself like we would with clerics, but we all already understand that.

Now. Let’s take a step back and look at an alternative to this wonderful new trait. Aquatic Benevolence may be interesting, but let’s not forget about Cleansing Water. Any regen we apply to our allies also clears their conditions.

Assuming we have 6 points in Arcana, every 10 seconds, we grant regen to ourselves and our allies. AoE condi clear. Scepter can now grant regen in a 180 radius, on a 20s CD. Staff, of course, can do it in a 360 radius every 45 seconds.

I would argue that you would be more useful to your allies if you had the condi clear. Condis are more likely to be noticably hazardous to you and your teammates than a few thousand damage (going on the notion that you heal that much more).

In GW2, the goal isn’t just to keep others alive. It’s not even just to keep yourself alive. It’s to kill the enemy. From my point of view, if you’re doing more damage and curing more condis, then you’re a larger asset to the team than if you were just healing a bit more than usual.

That being said, I’m interested in hearing more peoples’ opinions on this new concept of support ele, with Aquatic Benevolence. Why do you think it’s more viable, why do you think you are more of an asset to a team, with it, than without?

Play whatever you want. As long as you’re a Charr ele, you’re invincibleeeee.

Gaile said a long time ago that 1 button press = 1 button press. You can use a keyboard’s extra keys, i.e. macro keys, that’s fine. Bind G1 to the number 1, that’s fine. But bind G1 to a macro that does number 1 then number 2, and it’s bannable.

My main problem with all this is that your allies should not rely on nor die because you didn’t have +35% healing.

DeathPanel.8362:

May need to hold back on buying strength runes. They may be nerfed in the near future.

Quite true. Though, look at the track record of AN… just see perplexity runes……

Very solid stats, seemingly solid build. Good job oZii. I’d suggest using ether renewal and, in place of soothing disruption, cleansing wave, to offset your noticeable lack of condi clear. Nicely done.

The rubber banding is a very frustrating bug. Even worse, sometimes burning speed or lightning flash don’t trigger when I very obviously use both (I see both the icons flash as if they were used). The former bug has happened less since I turned off instacast and went back to normal ground target casting (argh!), but it still does happen. Very frustrating, but what can you do?

My perspective – As an elementalist, my choices are berserker, soldiers, or valkyrie. Right now, valkyrie is moderately useable with berserker’s or barbarian’s jewel. With valkyrie’s jewel and 30 points in our vit trait line – water – we have less than 14000 health. If you’re an ele with under 15k health in spvp, you may as well consider yourself little more than dead weight. Getting rid of jewels is going to make valkyrie’s amulet less of a viable option, to the point where I may not even consider it. That’s not something I’m happy about.

Won’t Fresh Air be innately better than Lightning Rod? We get roughly 2x more lightning strikes from the 15 air trait, which is likely more than the damage lightning rod will do. And we also get the lower attunement cooldown. Lightning Rod has a few seconds of weakness, sure, which equates to an average of 25% dmg reduction, but this is already mitigated by the fact that the weakness will start counting down while the enemy is stunned. A big fat meh.

Elemental Contingency would already have a hard time competing with Evasive Arcana (largely due to how great the heal+condi removal is that EA offers) if Elemental Contingency was a per-attunement CD, as EA is. With a global CD rather than per-attunement, only a fool will use it over EA.

Blinding Ashes ICD not being per-target makes it very near useless.

Overall, some potentially cool traits that are likely going to be somewhat useless due to poor design. At least they can be buffed to potentially make them worth using. Too bad buffs only happen every few months at best :/.

FrownyClown.8402:

If all your gear had crit damage on it you will lose about 30% crit damage in total. RIP

My math shows that this build, wherein most of the gear has crit dmg: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vEAQJAoIGAIPAAAWEFeo8AAAsB-zgBBYjBMRtIasVNFRjVbDT5CQFbR1kCQPlRA-e

Loses 50% crit dmg post-patch. See my previous post in this thread for the maths.

Hm? Let’s do the math again. Mind you, effective power, which, to me, is a number based off of power, crit rate, and crit dmg, is inherently specific to the build, as it relies on power, crit rate, and crit dmg as a whole, and it feeds off all three of these numbers.

Let’s assume we are using this build: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vEAQJAoIGAIPAAAWEFeo8AAAsB-zgBBYjBMRtIasVNFRjVbDT5CQFbR1kCQPlRA-e
This isn’t a build that I would specifically use, but it’s similar to what I’ve seen from people that like using a lot of celestial. (Note: Not using crit dmg food since I don’t want to guess what’s going to happen to it.)

We’re using this DPS calculator I’ve built a while ago to calculate. It uses a simple algorithm – based off of the damage algorithm, taken from the wiki, that finds the average damage based on power, crit rate, and crit dmg. http://jsfiddle.net/GNEFd/3/embedded/result/

So now we plug the build stats into the calculator, and we get an average of 3248.1 with fury and 2702.1 without fury. Again, this is a number based off of average damage, taking into account crits and non crits.

Now we’re convert crit dmg on everything to ferocity, then back to crit dmg.. We’re also we’re going to add 6% to celestial gear stats, and round all stats appropriately, so 45.4 stat points is 45 and kitten stat points is 46.

So our daggers go from 42 → 45.
Head piece from 21 → 22.
Chest from 47 → 50.
Legs from 31 → 33.
Boots, gloves, shoulders from 16 → 17.

Let’s assume divinity runes are treated like celestial gear.
So divinity go from 10 → 11.

So our power and precision go up by 21 stats.

Zerker amulet from 9% crit dmg → 85 ferocity.
Rings from 8% crit dmg → 68 ferocity.
Earrings from 7% crit dmg → 60 ferocity.
Back piece from 5% crit dmg → 35 ferocity.

15 ferocity = 1% crit dmg. We always floor crit dmg, just like crit rate. So 20.9% crit dmg is 20% crit dmg. (Do we know if this is accurate or not?)

We have, between weps, runes, armor, and trinkets, 688 ferocity. 688/15 = 45.86. So 45% crit dmg. Instead of 95%. Our power is 1883+21=1904 and precision is 1462+21=1483. So our crit rate is (1483-822)/21 = 31.4, rounded down, 31% crit rate – instead of 30%.

Plug these numbers into our calculator. 2826.4 with fury and 2464.7 without fury.

tl;dr
In closing, this build pre-patch is 14.9% stronger than the post-patch build with fury, and without fury, the pre-patch build is 9.6% stronger than the post-patch build.

Over the last few days, potentially more, I’ve been noticing ability lag. Abilities take roughly 2/10ths of a second or more to activate, sometimes. Sometimes they don’t activate at all! I see the icon press animation occur, but nothing happens. This used to be a very rare occurrence, primarily when using multiple abilities at once, but it’s been happening a lot more lately, and with pretty much any ability.

Tracing route to 64.25.38.138 over a maximum of 30 hops

Starting at comcast, the first dozen or so hops are a healthy 10-70ms; leading me from the west coast to Level3’s dallas server. Here’s the results from then on out:

13 74 ms 67 ms 66 ms ae-3-3.ebr3.Dallas1.Level3.net [4.69.132.78]
14 69 ms 67 ms 68 ms ae-73-73.csw2.Dallas1.Level3.net [4.69.151.145]
15 * 67 ms * ae-2-70.edge2.Dallas1.Level3.net [4.69.145.75]
16 59 ms 62 ms 56 ms 4.59.197.34
17 69 ms 67 ms 68 ms 64.25.32.9
18 56 ms 54 ms 55 ms 64.25.32.26
19 59 ms 65 ms 63 ms 64.25.32.82
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.

Keep this thread in mind when making assumptions.

The links oZiix posted are good. I looked deeply into this over a year ago. My findings are located here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/14hg3g/lets_talk_effective_health_armor_health_condition/

Basically, incoming healing and condition damage taken are important variables, but too complex to calculate. Effective health, which is armor * health, is largely a useless variable in and of itself. If you don’t take into account healing and condition damage, then it’s not very useful. But it’s too complex and ever-changing to take into account these two variables.

What does this mean? It basically means that you need to figure it out for yourself. Everyone has different preferred stats. Some people prefer running 300 healing power, some 600, and some are fine with 0. Some prefer 18k health, some are fine with 14k. Some prefer 2.8k armor, some are fine with 2.2k.

In this case, while knowledge is power, it’s not the answer. It’s just a tool you can leverage while buildcrafting. Buildcraft, test builds out, try different things. See what works best for you.

One of the hardest classes to gear is a DD ele. I’ve spent hours and hours on single builds, tinkering.

Here’s what I’ve come up with, what I prefer:
My 0/20/0/20/30 build: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k;4BJ-V0w47NkY0;9;5J-JT;105;249-17AUN;4V19cV19cm-kaH6;4V0-5WC1FYMZQ_-i-HN1c;57X7X7X7X;9;9;9;9;85-6g

My 0/10/0/30/30 build: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k;4B2-V0y47NkY0;9;59-TT;10;349A17ASN;4TutbU9fgm-kaH6;54-8WCXI2K3U_-7WAN1c;57X7X7X7X;9;9;9;9;85-6q

In regards to actual damage, I’ve created a DPS calculator that you may find useful. You enter in a few stats and it spits out a damage value for crits, non-crits, and your average damage between crits and non-crits. The numbers it spits out aren’t all that useful by themselves, but test multiple builds and you’ll be able to compare numbers. I use this to check the damage % difference between builds and setups a lot. http://jsfiddle.net/GNEFd/3/embedded/result/ (Source code at http://jsfiddle.net/GNEFd/3/)

This bug still happens. I tried going back to fast cast for a while, but this bug breaks my lightning flash + burning speed combo roughly 25% of the time for no reason, so again, I’ll have to go back to normal cast. Anyone else notice anything like this?

oZii.2864:

He mention Signet of Resortation I wonder if they boosted the sustain on it? Or perhaps as I think this would be awesome if they allowed every 6 slot heal to receive healing boosts if you use it in water. Leave the glyph the same as it does that already but allow ether, sor, and arcane brlliance to heal more if used in water. I think it fits and doesn’t sound particularly OP to me.

I think he’s just talking about the fact that they unnerfed it in spvp. It’s the same as it is in wvw now. So I assume.

Just incased anyone missed these responses from Powerr (Tyler Chapman), in this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Ele-in-Dev-live-stream-scrimages

Tyler Chapman.1832:

Ele should technically be in a much better spot come the feature build.

Pretty anxious not gunna lie..

Tyler Chapman.1832:

By technically I mean that we are giving some nice changes to ele but there is so much going into that patch that trying to gauge the meta or what will be strong/too stronk/weak/too weak is just not possible right now.

I’ll say that internally staff Ele has turned out to be strong, scary strong against condi meta. The glass cannon specs seem to be unchanged but the tankier dps specs have seen substantial improvements. Enough? Arguable. At least ele will now bring the cleanse support it has needed. Will the Signet of Resto change be enough to make it super strong? Arguable, but it’s definitely a viable option now. Do you want to lose the cleanse from ether renewal? Probably not.. but dagger specs see a nice sustain boost from using RS. Additionally, our changes has brought a new role to ele and it’s one hell of a role! I’m sure plenty of people will have tons of fun messing around with what they can do on ele now.

Regardless, it’s just really hard to say where ele will stand on the tier chart in PvP with double on swap sigils coming in alone. This might over scale certain specs into godliness while bringing other classes up to par at the same time. We will have to see the implications of what a bunch of stacked up hydromancy, energy, battle, and geomancy sigils do to the tides of battles. Every single class has such drastic improvements to sustain through this that it makes glass cannon specs stand up stronger against foes, at the same time it allows full tank builds to bring out more damage while supporting their group. There is a lot more might flying around. With warrior 5 second weapon swaps, they can utilize 4 different on swap sigils as compared to what most classes can do with 2.

It’s just difficult to gauge at this point with so much happening. I really wish we could speak about what else is changing, but hopefully time flies quickly and we can deliver the news asap. Ele will however, be in a better place than it was I assure you.

pmnt.4067:

The fastest AA hit once in a second. There’s no compiled list of skill aftercasts (or none that I’m aware of) but the wiki states the attack frequency of all auto attacks (and whole AA chains) in the articles.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dragon%27s_Claw
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vapor_Blade
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lightning_Whip
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Impale_%28elementalist_skill%29

This is not exactly true. Very little known fact: The second hit of lightning whip appears to happen at the end of the cast, arguably at the after cast. Either way, you can cancel lightning whip right at the end, and it only hits once rather than twice – BUT it hits a lot faster. Even though you’re cancelling, because it’s at the end of the cast, signet of restoration STILL TICKS. From my experiences, this allows you to tick signet of resto faster than once per second. Of course, this is a far from easy and moderately taxing manuver. But it’s quite optimal.

The PVT recommendation is a rough statement that’s made with the intent of encouraging you to play tanky initially, and as you feel more comfortable with the class, become more and more glassy.

You don’t need 21k health. Even a new ele should be quite comfortable with 17-18k health. Aim for that. I personally am comfortable with 15-16k health. You want more crit rate, and if at all possible, more crit damage. I’d recommend you aim for at least 28-30% crit rate.

If you purely want to maximize damage, I created a simple calculator that lets you figure out what’s best. It uses the algorithm on the GW2 wiki page for damage as a base line. http://jsfiddle.net/GNEFd/3/embedded/result/

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I like to aim for maximum effective HP myself. Your effective HP is the total HP you have multiplied by your total armor rating. It is maximized when HP and armor are roughly equal.

So, for maximizing effective HP on an elementalist, you’ll need to have about 18.3k HP before it is more profitable to invest in toughness than in vitality. So in general, vitality will give you a bigger bang for your immediate buck.

You’re not taking into account healing or condition damage taken. These two variables, notably healing, heavily complicate the effective health algorithm. Simply armor*health is largely a useless number in and of itself.

Toughness is an interesting stat. To use it most effectively, there are some things that you should know.

- Damage taken = Damage dealt / Armor. This means that armor is the divisor. In other words, the more armor you have, the less effective adding more armor is. You can read more about damage and algorithms here.

- You can generally improve your sustainability by adding more armor and healing power. The general goal is to heal more % of your health while taking less % of your health.

- Condition damage bypasses armor.

- The above points taken into consideration, it’s important to note that heavy burst damage still hurts no matter what. A zerker thief can backstab for 16k against another zerker thief. A zerker thief can still backstab for 7k against someone with 3.4k armor.

- The tooltips show damage dealt against 2.6k armor. (For lack of a better wording) This number, while largely arbitrary, is thought to be a good number to aim for.

- In sPvP, Valk amulet used to be very popular for D/D elementalists. As time went on, more and more people switched to Soldier’s amulet. While valk offers better overall sustain, because it has less vit (and more healing power), it is more susceptible to being bursted down, and because soldiers has more vit, it can handle a barrage of conditions better.

Personally, if I’m aiming for hybrid stats, I don’t bother going higher than 2.6-2.7k armor. Some people are comfortable at 2.4k armor. My current wvw build, with food, has 2066 power, 2596 armor, 86% crit dmg, 15145 health, 36% crit rate, 30% boon duration, 100 cond dmg, and 300 healing power.

LelouchViBritannia.3607:

Oh for fracks sake. They said in the stream that every single sigil and rune had a balance pass. Which – get this – means that they actually know that doubling sigils is power creep and will probably make all of them a bit worse. Just like they said that on crit sigils will probably be 100% chance but then do way less damage.

I imagine stuff like energy only giving 25 energy, battle maybe giving only 2 might, etc.

This is actually a really good point. While this seems like it could be a massive power creep at first glance, they are going over everything – and with this change in mind. Expect nerfs to a lot of sigils with CDs – presumably enough so to make sure the current always-on sigils aren’t completely useless.

When using lightning flash with burning speed, lightning flash simply does not activate around 1/3rd the time when I have Fast Cast Ground Targeting enabled. I press the ability successfully, I see the green circle on the ground, and I let go of the lightning flash ability key in the middle of burning speed. Lightning flash does not trigger, does not go on CD, and I do not get teleported. This only happens around 1/3rd of the time; the other times, it triggers successfully, as expected.

This happens at other occasions too, but most often when I’m trying to combo it with burning speed. It’s quite frustrating. This appears to be a bug with the fast cast ground targeting. I’ve gone back to normal ground targeting until it’s fixed.

Mmm, I’m not 100% sure yet. I’m waiting for the build calcs to update. I know intothemists is planning to update w/ this patch. Sliiiightly off topic, I’d really like to see some main-vit ascended stat pieces that have good secondary stats.

oZii.2864:

TimeBomb.3427:

Heya. Our builds are really similar indeed; nice job with all the minmaxing. I don’t actually run this build, and I minmax’d it in about 20 minutes. I chose celestial where I chose it because the stats I get from those celestial pieces are much larger than what I would receive by using any non-celestial piece. The weapons especially give you a massive amount of stats. It’s quite crazy. I don’t sacrifice much stats on the celestial armor pieces I chose, and gain a lot more. Yes, crit damage was also a thought. If I were to personally consider using this, I would likely spend a bit more time in the build calc, minmaxing the stats as I see fit.

The toughness infusions were effectively an afterthought – I personally prefer to have as close to 2.6k armor as possible when running DD ele. The build I linked will, with fury and without might or bloodlust, do, on average, 1.6% more damage than the one you linked. Yours has ever slightly higher toughness, healing power, and condition damage, though.

Happy minmaxing hehe.

Heya TB <3 yea I prefer about 2.6 myself. I remember when I was fascinated with 2.7k armor glad I am out of that phase rofl like no deeps at all. I think I will replace just 1 celestial accessory for either a zerk/valk or cav one not sure yet.

I will wait on going ascended armor I think the defense rating is higher by about 5% I believe but I was a late adopter on my last ascended dagger.

Ascended armor will be nice; I’m hoping it’ll be easier to get from WvW soon. Right now, it’s harder to minmax for vit moreso than toughness from my experiences, so the extra armor will be nice, but extra vit would be even nicer.

…Here’s a video of a DD ele running the trait, fighting a full condi necro:
http://www.twitch.tv/lhob9944/b/486397926

oZii.2864:

TimeBomb.3427:

Full celestial lacks too much power. I recently minmax’d the average 10 30 30 DD build as such http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k;4BJ-V0y47NkY0;9;59-TT;10;349A54AUN;4V19cV19cm-kaed;4V0-u5A1v5K3w537WLN1i;5cYDucYDu;9;9;9;9;85-6Y

I have similar set up to this now that I am back to all divinity runes. My question is why celestial on the pieces you have it on? The gain or loss is least there in the pieces you picked so wouldn’t it be better to put the pieces helm, chest, legs for celestial? Its like picking a armor slot that gives you critical damage.

You grabbed celestial my guess because you wanted the critical damage but you would get better damage if you just changed those pieces to zerker. The infusions are toughness but 1 knights minor armor piece would have given you the same amount as all those infusions. I am personally a fan of Vitality infusions on the defensive side because you get more out of it than you would 5 toughness the damage reduction is so small for 30 toughness that I think vitality is a better return.

Our builds are really similar if you put them both in build craft and compare the effective power. This is with celestial accessories still mucking up my dps till I replace them. Your build pulls ahead slightly when you add 10 stacks of might and consider 100% fury up time.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/elementalist/?1.0|8.5n.h2.8.5c.0.d13.0.d14|0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0|1j.71j.1n.71j.1j.71j.1n.71j.1j.71j.1n.71j|2t.d1d.2v.d14.3v.d17.211.d1d.311.d19.2v.d13|0.a0.0.u150.u56b|2e.1|1n.1u.1v.1s.28|e

Unless I did something wrong though your build actually has 82 critical damage in buildcraft. On into the mists it says 74.

Heya. Our builds are really similar indeed; nice job with all the minmaxing. I don’t actually run this build, and I minmax’d it in about 20 minutes. I chose celestial where I chose it because the stats I get from those celestial pieces are much larger than what I would receive by using any non-celestial piece. The weapons especially give you a massive amount of stats. It’s quite crazy. I don’t sacrifice much stats on the celestial armor pieces I chose, and gain a lot more. Yes, crit damage was also a thought. If I were to personally consider using this, I would likely spend a bit more time in the build calc, minmaxing the stats as I see fit.

The toughness infusions were effectively an afterthought – I personally prefer to have as close to 2.6k armor as possible when running DD ele. The build I linked will, with fury and without might or bloodlust, do, on average, 1.6% more damage than the one you linked. Yours has ever slightly higher toughness, healing power, and condition damage, though.

Happy minmaxing hehe.

Full celestial lacks too much power. I recently minmax’d the average 10 30 30 DD build as such http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k;4BJ-V0y47NkY0;9;59-TT;10;349A54AUN;4V19cV19cm-kaed;4V0-u5A1v5K3w537WLN1i;5cYDucYDu;9;9;9;9;85-6Y

It can stack 5 times max now, post-patch it’ll be 3 times max.

It’s against the rules and bannable to macro like that. As Gaile has said before, one button press = one button press. Macro Button A performing the role of the A key is fine. But Macro Button A performing the role of A + B is against the rules, and bannable.

I’ve attached an image of the new heal tooltip.

My opinion: Meh. 1/2s cast time is more appropriate. The radius should be at least 300-360, not 240. It appears to heal about as good as ether renewal when it hits two people, and a bit worse than glyph when we hit one person. It’s very crappy if you don’t hit anyone.

The base damage is meh, though it always crits. Still, meh.

Sure, it works with arcane traits, but we’re almost always better off with other traits than the arcane ones. I don’t think I’ll be using this heal as D/D. I think it is most interesting for staff though, with the ability to blast water fields.

I’m a bit excited about the arcane wave change, though as a D/D ele, I hope it doesn’t make fighting much… clumsier. I usually just go near my enemy and use it, and that’s it. Now I have to worry about where my mouse is. At least I can use it from range. It’s good for scepter and staff, but I’m personally a bit worried. We’ll see how it plays.

DevonCarver.5370:

AcFiBu.9624:

So when the ranks become account bound. Say my total rank is 400. does that mean I have 400 points to put into each character, or does it mean I have 400 points to split between all my characters.

It means that you have 400 points for each character and can spend them however you want on each.

Wait wait wait. This still leaves me slightly confused.

I was under the impression that if I have 400 points, and spend 50 on character A, I could only spend 350 for character B. Then I have none to spend for character C.

Are you saying that if I have 400 points account-wide, I can spend 400 for character A, 400 for character B, 400 for character C, and I can create a new character D, and spend 400 points on them? (Yes for 400 points per character; No for 400 points spread between all characters)

Thank you for the clarification.

Nice. Power and crit dmg are a bit low for my liking. I modified my build to use your traits and have similar stats, but more power and crit dmg. http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k;4BJ-V0w47NkY0;9;59-TT;10;348A45AUN;4V19cV19cm-kaH7;54-5WC1FYMZQ_-i-HN1c;57X7X7X7X;9;9;9;9;7VS-6k Cheers!

Remember that damage received = damage dealt / armor. Armor is the divisor. Thus the more armor you have, the less effective adding more armor is.
To put it another way, 250 armor mitigates much more damage if you add it to 2k armor than if you add it to 3k armor.

The 250 armor is likely not as good as 250 power for most people. Anyone tanky would be better off with damage. Anyone glassy could potentially go with it, but the extra 250 power would be hard to pass up.

It may be interesting with zergs, specifically organized zergs. You kill enemies by having multiple people attack a single spot. They all may do low damage by themselves, but together, they instakill people. Thus damage is less important and survival moreso, so the 250 toughness would be nice, especially for the non-heavy classes.

Thanks Grouch. My guild got in already and I was on the list, but I have gotten no emails/notifications about this testing. Any idea what’s going on? Are you guys not allowing all the guilds that you already accepted and got roster lists from in yet? Cheers!

I have also had this, and I know many, many people that have it too. It’s generally accepted as part of the game at this point. It used to happen a ton, and though it has been happening less over roughly the past few months, it still happens and is loud and a bit annoying.

2000 power before might/bloodlust
25-30% critical w/o fury
2600 armor
16k health
70%+ crit dmg

Can’t wait to start buildcrafting come the next balance patch. But for now, this works.

In regards to Cleansing Wave, I would also be fine if were only a solo cleanse, if it were to remain adept.

It’s been said time and time again, but I’ll continue being redundant here: Going deep into Arcana and Water is now more necessary than before. The trait changes in the other lines are nice, but I feel like, combined with these Arcana and Water changes, a lot of people are still going to opt to keep 20-30 points into Arcana and Water.

oZii.2864:

TimeBomb.3427:

Again, it would still be a very poor decision NOT to choose elemental attunement. It gives you 50-60%+ protection uptime. With one trait. This is +50% armor. (Not to mention the other three boons, which are nice as well.) Elementalists, having the lowest health and armor pools, need all that they can get, and this protection uptime is (literally) a HUGE boon. Thus there’s still a 20 point reliance on Arcana for all builds that want to be able to be not squishy. Something should really be done here to lower the reliance on this trait.

If protection is the argument there is still Elemental Shielding, Glyph of elemental harmony, Earths Embrace, Inscription, Armor of Earth. Still Rune options to get protection or spec boon duration and just go 10 points in for renewing stamina. You only get 1 extra second of protection anyway just going 20 points into Arcana. Protection is important but if it really was that important like you are saying people would always take elemental shielding also but if people have 10 in earth they usually take earths embrace or stone splinters. Or they just go 20 in Air.

Elemental attunement just makes sense if you have 10-30 points in arcana because it augments something you are going to be doing anyway with swapping attunements. If I was forced to choose between renewing stamina and elemental attunement Renewing stamina would always win. I am not forced to choose so I can take both.

Armor of Earth (which doesn’t deserve a 90s CD) is 6.6% protection uptime. For D/D, Elemental Shielding offers potentially ~19.5% protection uptime. Glyph of Elemental Harmony is a 12% protection uptime if it’s used whenever it’s off CD and only when you are in earth, which is almost never the case; not to mention the other two heals are better against anything that isn’t burst damage. The fact of the matter is that Elemental Attunement is vastly superior for protection uptime (@50-60%+). The alternatives to Elemental Attunement are not as good; not to mention EA offers more than just protection. It’s insanely good, and it’s just plain silly to not take it in most builds.

Again, it would still be a very poor decision NOT to choose elemental attunement. It gives you 50-60%+ protection uptime. With one trait. This is +50% armor. (Not to mention the other three boons, which are nice as well.) Elementalists, having the lowest health and armor pools, need all that they can get, and this protection uptime is (literally) a HUGE boon. Thus there’s still a 20 point reliance on Arcana for all builds that want to be able to be not squishy. Something should really be done here to lower the reliance on this trait.