Guild Wars 2

Static bonuses usually stack with themselves. Force and Accuracy are specifically noted as not stacking with themselves on the wiki.

Killstacking sigils, such as Bloodlust, will not allow you to get multiple different types of kill stack (you can’t have Bloodlust and Perception). You can use the same sigil in each hand to get an additional stack per kill, but the cakitten till 25. If you happen to have two different killstack sigils in one weapon set, only the mainhand one will get stacks, unless you somehow already had stacks for the offhand (in which case only the offhand gets stacks)

Sigils that proc on weapon swap or crit all share the internal cooldown, but how the time it takes for that to wear off depends on the sigil itself. For example, if you crit with Sigil of Rage, then no on-crit or on-weapon swap sigils can trigger for 45 seconds.

Also, no two crit or weapon swap sigils can activate at the same time. If you have two weapon swap sigil on one weapon set, only the mainhand sigil will activate. If you have two crit sigils, they’ll check for whether they proc in order; if the mainhand sigil procs, both will go on cooldown and the offhand sigil won’t get a roll. This does mean, however, that stacking two of the same crit sigil effectively increases the chances of getting the proc (e.g. two Superior Sigil of Fire have a 1- (0.7 * 0.7) = 51% chance to trigger on crit, instead of 30%.

One drops from a Champion Twisted Nightmare, another drops from an Aetherblade Captain and the last should drop upon event completion of any minion portal.

They won’t drop if the achievement is still locked (need the achieve for clearing 5 invasions first), and they might not start dropping if you don’t talk to Vorpp with the hologram communicator, but it’s a little late for me to test that theory.

Maybe as a trait, “Burst skills are unblockable and unaffected by blind”. Not by default, Signet of Might is already an option if you absolutely need unblockable attacks, and there are a small number of options available for dealing with blind.

This sounds similar to what happened with siege blueprints when those became non-bound.

There was a solution to this: Split the stack. The new stack was spawned into the inventory as the correct item, and then you could merge the old stack onto it and have them all be correct.

…but I doubt many, if any, of the people with this problem have enough of a given skin to have a stack to split.

Asides from anything else, Healing Signet actually ticks per second, and they likely mixed up the description with Adrenal Health, which ticks every 3 seconds.

i.e. it’s 3 times as effective as your math suggests.

It scales to exactly the same heal/second bonus as a tier 3 Healing Surge, and also as Mending.

Healing Surge: 1.5 * healing power, once per 30 seconds
Mending: 1.0 * healing power, once per 20 seconds
Healing Signet: 0.05 * healing power, every second. (30 seconds = 1.5 * healing power; 20 seconds = 1.0 * healing power)

In fact, when you take into account that the cooldown on healing surge/mending doesn’t begin until the cast time finishes, and you’re not always going to cast it exactly on cooldown, Healing Signet benefits the most from Healing Power over time of all warrior heals.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

Dingle.2743:

They already are categorized this way. Each JP has a different quality chest, which rewards a different number of items. The three in Lion’s Arch demonstrate this perfectly: Urmaug’s Secret gives two items, Troll’s End gives three items, and Weyandt’s Revenge gives four items. The average rarity of items in the chests increases as well. If the loot is tied to the chest, then ArenaNet already have a system in place to sort the ascended item rewards based on JP.

are you sure weyandt’s chest has better loot table? O_O

Yes, although currently it’s not particularly significant. The vast majority of drops from it are green or better quality, and the equip drops from Urmaug’s Secret tend towards being blues. Troll’s End I can’t say I run regularly enough to compare to the others (it feels roughly in-between the two), but I can confirm that you’re going to have a better chance at high quality items from Weyandt’s Revenge simply due to having more rolls on the loot table when you complete it.

I used to run Weyandt’s Revenge and Urmaug’s Secret daily, for about a month or so. I’d have been running Troll’s End as well, but camera and collision issues really make it annoying.

Carighan.6758:

While I love the idea, can the JPs be categorized into three groups for this?

1. Easy to reach OR fast to do, like the Ogre one in Lion’s Arch. No such rewards.
2. Average (this includes difficult ones close to cities like the other two in LA): Normal rewards.
3. Difficult to reach and/or annoying to do: Increased rewards. Examples here could be the one in Orr, or the one in Southsun Cove.

They already are categorized this way. Each JP has a different quality chest, which rewards a different number of items. The three in Lion’s Arch demonstrate this perfectly: Urmaug’s Secret gives two items, Troll’s End gives three items, and Weyandt’s Revenge gives four items. The average rarity of items in the chests increases as well. If the loot is tied to the chest, then ArenaNet already have a system in place to sort the ascended item rewards based on JP.

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

Which is sort of the point. 1000 condition damage will cause 92 damage with a bleed while 1000 power will add 600 damage per auto-attack. All you need is 7 bleed stacks on a target to equal that which is easy with sword to surpass. But neither is exclusive to the other.

Bleeds tick once per second, while sword AA is twice per second. So you would need 1200/92 13 stacks to equal the AA. It’s actually more because of the way the last one is only 1/4 second instead of 1/2. You get 3 auto attacks over a 1.25 second period, but only one tick of bleeding. Now over 6 attacks it’s 2.5 seconds and you get two tics of bleeding. At 5 seconds y ou get 12 AA, and 5 tics of bleeding.

So 12*600 = 7200 so for bleeding to equal that you would need (7200/5)/92.4 = 15.6 stacks of bleeding on them from the start to the 5 second mark. Now I’m not including the base damage because both sides get that, nor am I including base power/base condi damage because again both sides get that.

Anyway this isn’t really part of the discussion I guess. I just wanted to clear up where I got my numbers from. Honestly I think I’ve skewed things towards the bleed build. I haven’t included crits, or crit damage, or final thrust etc. That bothers me, but I will leave it to other people to work that out. I know how you guys get on this forum when we start doing math. Not in the mood to deal with death threats because I can add.

Firstly, the cast times are not the entire cast + aftercast. There’s some period of time after a skill finishes before another can begin which makes nearly every skill in the game slower than listed, and it’s not uniform across all skills. You’d need to properly time it to say that the chain takes precisely 1.25 seconds. Secondly, the first and second attacks in the chain proc bleeding, not just one – it applies 2 bleed stacks every 1.5 seconds, roughly, before taking critbleeds into consideration. With 100% duration, 16 seconds in the autochain maintains 21 stacks of bleeding by itself, again before considering critbleeds. That’s a decent amount for not having to do anything else, but optimally the warrior would be using Impale, Riposte and on Longbow Pin Down, Combustive Shot and Fan of Fire whenever possible.

Thirdly, a condition build can initiate with a DPS spike from Flurry + Riposte + Impale that power builds can’t make use of effectively (at 100% bleed duration, 8 stacks for 4 seconds, 4 stacks for 24 seconds, and 5 torment for 18 seconds at 50% duration), and will also be getting benefit from critbleeds. Heck, a Longbow + S/S build could initiate from range with Pin Down + Impale and have 6 bleeds and 5 torment before the power build reaches melee range. Condition warrior can accelerate to a high number of stacks in a relatively brief period of time.

If we go purely by cast times (though we should because aftercast…) then:

1. Pin Down – 0.25 seconds, 6 bleed
2. Impale – 0.5 seconds, 5 torment
3. Flurry – 0.5 seconds, 8 bleed
4. Riposte – 0.5-2.5 seconds, 4 bleed (cast time variable, there’s a half-second slakitten the moment a melee attack is blocked)

Worst case scenario, that’s 18 bleeds and 5 torment in 3.75 seconds before resorting to auto-attacks (best case scenario, 7 or more of the 11 hits crit and proc critbleeds, but that’s, well, unlikely). With the “Critical hits grant triple adrenaline” trait, flurry pretty much pays for itself. Additionally, as far as a condition setup is concerned, it’s no less effective with only 1 bar… the short duration of the bleeds means it’s only good for an initial burst of conditions, though following attacks replace them relatively quickly (if Flurry’s the last part of the initial burst, 5 of the stacks are replaced by auto-attacks before they expire). With sigil of doom and some lucky crits, the condition build is already around 4k DPS within 4 seconds. Not the worst acceleration ever. Certainly not the slow ramp generally associated with condition spec.

Once you include the “+50% bleed duration” trait, the value of each bleed goes way up, from 340 base to 570 base (before considering any other source of condition damage). At that point the base damage of the sword chain is about 200 per hit, and the bleeds are worth 570 per hit – zerker can catch up with that, but when you actually start adding condition damage gear, conditions pull well ahead because their base is 2.5 times zerker.

At this point with no runes, sigils, utilities, only 10 trait points spent, the first two hits of the auto chain deal a total of around 1.4k if the bleeds play out fully. If they crit, they have a further 14.3% chance to cause another 4 bleed ticks, or roughly an extra 400 damage from bleeding, plus the extra 100 direct damage from critting.

Let’s take it further with a closer to full build. At this point each hit applies a 16 second bleed which totals 2k damage, plus 224 direct damage. On crit (60% chance to crit) there’s a 60% chance to bleed the opponent for 10 seconds (roughly 1250 damage) and a 33% chance to bleed the opponent for 6 seconds (750 damage). The damage goes up another 12% or so with Sigil of Corruption maxed out, and up to a total roughly 25% higher with 10 might stacks (for example, FGJ, SoR, maybe a blast finisher inside Longbow’s fire field). At this point a full chain of the autoattack deals roughly 6k damage (for 2 seconds’ worth of attacks) before taking crits into consideration. The full damage is just delayed 16 seconds, but it’s there.

Let’s take it to the logical conclusion.

This build has little difficulty in maintaining the following: 25 bleed stacks; Burning; Poison (7.5 seconds added on weapon swap every 9 seconds, plus 22.5 seconds per minute provided by radiation field to cover the rest of the uptime); 5 torment stacks; 8 might stacks with a spike to 13 from Signet. It has 2546 condition damage with that, and 170 more while the banner is active for 2716. This is entirely self-provided at this point.

With 2716 condition damage:
Bleeds deal 179 damage per tick (x25 = 4475)
Torment deals 134 damage per tick (x5 = 670, or x10 = 1340)
Burning deals 1014 damage per tick
Poison deals 358 damage per tick

For a sum damage from conditions alone of 7187 per second on a moving target; direct damage adds in around another 400 per second. Subtract 670 if the target isn’t moving. This doesn’t take into account might from other players or additional direct damage added by vulnerability, so it can go higher.

The warrior condition build is one of the strongest condition builds out there for PvE. I certainly don’t see a direct damage sword build hitting around the 7k damage per second mark. Condition damage also fares much better when downscaled, as the crit damage stat is heavily reduced when downscaled (other stats are reduced so the damage multiplier from them is roughly the same; crit damage already is a multiplier, but is downscaled anyways, so it has a reduced effect in comparison – flip side, it’s also upscaled for low-level characters in living world content)

Then some necromancer comes along and halves the warrior’s effective DPS by applying their own bleeds and poisons, because of the condition cap; and/or the mob dies before the warrior maxes out all his conditions. Or maybe the warrior’s attacking an object and is only dealing 300 damage per hit. Conditions still have issues.

But warrior’s one of the best professions for them.

This sigil does not currently work for my elementalist; it simply doesn’t activate.

Currently tested with setup:
Dagger/Dagger, traits 0/10/0/30/30. Superior Sigil of Renewal (Minor/Major not tested)

In the following situations:
In combat
Out of combat
On self
On allies

There have been posts suggesting it works with other professions, so I believe the issue lies with Attunement Swapping. It’s possible it extends to engineer kit swap as well.

Edit: other clarification: The sigil on my second dagger is a killstacking one. It has no internal cooldown that would clash with Renewal

KinkyPotato.4219:

Hmmm…when I tested it, it worked on myself but I didn’t test it with wounded allies near me. However, the heal amount is ridiculously low even with healing power. I had ~1.45k healing power and the sigil healed me for a whopping 529 health.

He doesn’t indicate if it’s affected by healing power, but if it is it’d be close to Sigil of Water. That same thread suggests this sigil might not work with attunement swapping, as the original poster, an Ele, can’t get it to work.

Range helps a lot, by not constraining you to a small circle around her so you can still attack while avoiding the tornadoes. Attacking from 900 range really gives a lot of room and you might not need stun breakers at all.

I actually beat her first time in under a minute using a Scepter/Focus condition build (Rabid gear, 20/10/30/0/10 stacking condition duration where possible) but with the current state of the game it’s understandable if you don’t have a condition gear set ready on an ele.

Removing MF from gear stat spreads doesn’t mean it’ll be removed from utility infusions – the same logic that can be argued against MF goes for every infusion slot, and I’m pretty sure ANet’s stance on MF was already “having it on gear was a mistake” even before the release of the utility slot.

So I’m pretty sure that’s not being removed at the least.

We’ve been told there will be compensation on the gear side. Why don’t you wait til ANet ave announced what it’ll be?

Peter Buch.8071:

To make condition elementalists viable I’d like to see a trait (probably master in water), that is comparable to the terror trait for necromancers.

Chills, that you have inflicted, deal now dmg over time (~75% of bleeding dmg).

Only 75% of a bleed for a single non-stacking condition that typically only ever lasts for 3 seconds? It should be at least 75% of a burn.

Elementalists don’t need a unique damaging condition, they just need significant bleed access outside of earth attunement, like a trait that makes ice-themed attacks cause bleeding (Ice Spike, Frozen Burst, Ice Shards, Shatterstone, Ice Globe, Ice Wall). This will enable elementalists to run a condition build that can actually leave earth attunement. Maybe torment could be added to a few earth skills like Magnetic Grasp.

RawVegan.7518:

-snip-

Core problem:

“Charge a bar to use a special skill”: Warrior
“Charge a bar to use a special transformation”: Necromancer

ANet have tried to make each class have a unique defining mechanic. I’m all for giving players some way around Attunement Recharge Rate, but something that doesn’t fit with ANet’s design philosophy probably won’t get implemented. I’ve got my own thoughts on how to achieve that, but those are fairly irrelevant to a thread about new skills.

However, we can touch on your idea here. This is one I’ve been thinking on, though it doesn’t really feel like a supercharged mode.

New elite skill:

Arcana Attunement || 15 sec CD
Attunement
Attune to the arcane, gaining multiple combo finishers and defensive effects

So, a 5th attunement as an elite skill. Like other attunements, the recharge shouldn’t start until the player switches to another attunement. As for effects, we need to look at what the Arcane utilities do. Two are “deal damage and X combo finisher”, one is a defensive effect, and one is an offensive buff. None inflict conditions by default, and none are movement skills. All are instant cast, but that would be pretty ridiculous for an entire weapon set. Due to concerns with this further complicating future weapon sets for ele, let’s assume that for this specific attunement the skills remain the same on all weapons.

Disclaimer: Numbers might not be balanced. Whatever. If it was implemented, ANet would try to balance it.

#1
Arcane Bolt || 1/4 sec cast time
Fire a bolt of arcane energy at your opponent
Damage: Around half of Fireball
Range: 1200
20% projectile finisher

Auto attack. Single target attack with relatively on-par DPS, high fire rate. Gives 1200 range access to D/ and S/

#2
Arcane Maelstrom || 10 sec cooldown
Create a maelstrom of energy at target location, causing damage over time
Damage: Around the same as Glyph of Storms: Fire
Range: 900
Radius: 240
Duration: 5 seconds
Whirl Finisher

Pulsing AoE. Is a whirl finisher constantly while up, but the damage isn’t the highest thing ever. Yes instant cast – but the maelstrom itself should have a wind-up time before it deals damage.

#3
Arcane beam || 3.5 sec cast || 10 sec cooldown
Channel a beam of raw power into your target, causing an explosion if you force enough energy into them.
Damage: Double Arc Lightning, but damage increases based on number of hits, not channel time
Explosion Damage: As Arcane Wave but halved if only stage 2 is reached, and doesn’t occur if damage stays in stage 1
Range: 900
Radius: 240
Combo Finisher: Blast (checks for fields at the beginning and the end of the skill)

Another single target skill with the intent of high damage output. Difficult to mitigate all of the damage, but consecutive dodges would heavily reduce the overall output. Blast finisher only happens if the explosion occurs at the end of the skill.

#4
Arcane Aura || 20 sec cooldown
Aura
Gain a shield that will absorb 50% of the damage you take, up to a certain amount of damage. If the aura is destroyed, your next attack crits.
Shield health: 2000
Duration: 3 seconds

This one’s kind of a mix of Arcane Shield and Arcane Power. As an aura, it might be fairly powerful due to traits. Punishes the opponent for attacking, but doesn’t completely remove the incentive to do so.

#5
Freedom || 30s cooldown
Leap into the air, breaking stun and gaining immunity to crippling effects for 5 seconds
Duration: 5 seconds
Breaks Stun
Combo Finisher: Leap

The idea here is to give the attunement a stun break somewhere; I also needed a leap finisher to complete the set. The character floats in the air for the duration of the skill, perhaps with a new levitate animation or just simply standing a couple feet above ground level – because they’re not relying on their body’s physical capabilities for movement, speed reductions don’t apply. The levitation part may make it look too much like an air skill, but I wanted a way to fit a leap finisher into the skill set somewhere.

tl;dr: 5th attunement as an elite skill, with all combo finisher types represented, a stun break and an aura; same skill set for all weapons

Firstly, the weapons you get as drops are random out of the 19 types available. They also don’t drop as skins, they drop as actual weapons with rare quality, which means you need to transmute them to get the stats you want.

Secondly, the drop rate is low enough that the last time I checked, 24 hours into the event, none of the weapons were below 40g on the TP.

With the current prices, I wouldn’t farm the candidate trials hoping to get the skin I want, but perhaps doing it to get any weapons at all so I can sell them is an option.

Of the new armor, the heavy and medium is decent on both genders.

The light male armor is absolutely nothing like the light female armor, apart from the headpiece. Add in that charr and asura only have one model for armor, and it’s almost always the male one, and this makes me very unhappy.

My female asura elementalist would murder to have the kasmeer style armor. Well, maybe she wouldn’t, but I’d murder so she could look like that. unless ANet change their minds and make an asura model for the kasmeer style armor, that probably isn’t going to happen at all.

The infinite salvage kit… well, as mentioned, mystic salvage kits are basically free right now to a lot of players. If it can’t even match that (and the description makes it sound like just an infinite Crude Salvage Kit), /care

Well, if you activate the signet before entering rampage, rampage doubles your health while active, and lasts as long as it takes for the signet to be off cooldown…

At the very least the downtime of the signet is counterbalanced by the health you just gained being doubled. Healing Surge was always better healing over time to begin with, though. Edit: Except Veritas has done the math, and Healing Signet scales better now.

Stealth on ele would be a defensive mechanic.

Fire is not a defensive trait line or attunement.

If we get it, it should be in earth, same as the underwater smoke field is already.

A set of elemental themed utilities which remove specific conditions from the target in exchange for another effect, for example

Cauterize || 30s cooldown
Inflict burning and remove bleeding from your target. Deal damage for each bleed stack removed.
Burning: 5s
Damage per bleed stack removed: 150 base

Douse || 30s cooldown
Chill and remove burning from your target. Damage enemies and heal allies in an area around the target if burning is removed.
Chill: 3s
Damage: 300
Healing: 300 (0.5 coefficient)

Not sure how air and earth would use it, but keeping with the theme air would remove Chill and earth would inflict some stacks of Bleeding.

I solo’d Orr with 0/10/0/30/30, staff with cleric stats/boon duration runes. May be taking it a little to the extreme to go full bunker in PvE, though it definitely worked. For a couple communes near champs I switched to /f for obsidian flesh.

As a basic hint for the Champion Risen Baron guarding a skill point in Cursed Shore – carefully work your way to the back corner of the area it patrols, take out mobs from there until only the champ is left (can be done without aggroing it) and then go for the commune when his patrol takes him down the stairs. Carrying a focus purely for obsidian flesh in case he comes back before you’re done can help.

Most of the other champs guarding skill points tend to be spawned by events, so there’s a chance it’ll just be open for the taking.

As mentioned, the % damage traits aren’t very useful with low power.

My personal modification to this looks something like this:
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-uo-FF;0RKVP0f4-L-60;9;4EJJ-E1;027-28;22;0T-F4a;1hoHAhJG42ZF

Strength is brought down to 15; this keeps some duration and the “gain endurance when using burst skills” trait. Arms is brought down to 20. Defense is increased to 20 and takes Cleansing Ire and Sure-Footed (but you could also use Dogged March instead of Sure-Footed here).

Sword and Longbow are both very suited to Cleansing Ire – Combustive always uses adrenaline even if you don’t hit anything. Flurry hits 8 times in rapid succession, meaning for the sake of landing a single hit to use adrenaline, it more or less ignores blind.

I also swapped out the longbow’s sigil for Sigil of Doom – this adds poison to the build as an extra damaging condition (dealing damage equal to 2 stacks of bleeding, which you’d be lucky to get from sigil of earth in the 4-5 seconds you should be using longbow for). Doing this may mean you’ll need to consider dumping the sigil of earth on the sword, as the cooldowns interfere with each other, in which case perhaps go for increased cripple duration or sigil of accuracy.

You may also want to consider swapping the rune set to Runes of the Undead – warrior’s base bleed duration is enough to hit the stack cap without it, which means condition duration on runes is only offering some slight assistance to burning and cripple, and the additional damage you could get from rune of the undead may be worth more.

Also, perhaps consider swapping out Throw Bolas – you’ve already got a ranged immobilize on the bow and plenty of cripple on the sword. For Great Justice could be fairly effective, as it adds both condition damage and fury for extra crit rate for extra bleed-on-crit procs.

I want to see mesmer hammer based off the Dimensional Anchor featured in the sylvari story step Shattered Light

That thing was incredibly fun to use if only for a few minutes.

“any stat combo available” almost certainly refers to “stat combos that already exist on gear”

11125860. Your move.

Courtesy of reddit user iogic, member of Desolation Vanguard [DVG], not myself. It’s the highest number I’ve seen so far, but if anybody can get this guy’s warrior to the crow’s nest in Labyrinthine Cliffs, he’ll probably be able to push it even higher.

Just some thoughts on the issues with Healing Signet and a potential rework here. By themselves, Healing Surge and Mending both do what they do with no real issues.

The problem with Healing Signet is that both the passive and the active do the same thing, just at different rates. How to use the signet comes down to whether the player has the Signet Mastery trait.

1) Without signet mastery, it’s optimal to only activate the signet when you’re about to die to buy some more time. Usually if you need this, you’re putting yourself in more danger as your health will decrease even faster once the signet passive is gone. In this situation, the signet becomes nothing more than a last ditch emergency button with very little play to it.
2) With signet mastery, it’s optimal to use the active effect as soon as you’ll get all of the heal (active effect has better heal/second than passive with mastery). After this your health will generally go down faster than before and you’ll likely be able to use the burst heal effectively as soon as it’s off cooldown. In this situation the passive effect is barely used, reducing the signet’s play to “use on cooldown”.

The issue with the effects of both the passive and the active being “Heal” is that it creates a situation where if the passive is buffed too much, all play becomes the first situation described, and if the active is buffed too much, all play becomes the second situation. In addition, if the passive is buffed too much then warriors may have too much access to passive regen effects (passive regen should never hit the point that certain builds cannot ever overcome it, as it’s an effect which requires no player input to use – so if a warrior’s passive regen hits 1k heal/second and a bunker elementalist can only output 900 dps, the warrior’s regen would be too high to be allowed in the game as a free effect)

This combined means that there’s a limit to how much ANet can buff the Healing Signet in raw numbers. Any significant buffs to it will need to be some other additional effect, to either give builds with signet mastery a reason to want to leave the signet passive active, or to give builds without it a reason to want to use the active.

My personal suggestion is to merge the active of the Healing Signet with Mending. The signet becomes “Passive: Heal 200/second, Active: Heal 3275 and cure 2 conditions”. This leaves warriors with an empty healing skill slot, so it’d need something new to fill it.

For that, I’d suggest some sort of skill that’s the reverse of Healing Surge – instead of healing based on adrenaline level and then maxing adrenaline, heal based on adrenaline and empty the bar. This does two things for warriors: Firstly, it gives an alternative method for spending adrenaline. Secondly, it has excellent synergy with Cleansing Ire, which is often noted as being subpar in its current state due to requiring the burst skill to land before adrenaline is spent.

Alternative options for the signet include giving both the active and passive effects a differing bonus each – for example, having the passive effect cure conditions over time like the guardian’s healing slot signet, and having the active grant some sort of offensive boon or break stun.

WvW does not favour Burning Fire – the signet is already a high duration burn, which means it’s likely to be cleansed before the end of the default duration. In such cases the extra burning from Burning Fire will be completely wasted.

Internal Fire for the constant boost while in fire, or Burning Precision, for reapplying short duration burns semi-consistently, would probably be more effective (of those two I’d put my bets on Burning Precision as you’re likely to use every attunement to a degree, and getting an extra 400 or so damage every 6 hits might outweigh the bonus damage while in fire)

If you didn’t know, you can also use 2 major runes of the water/monk to get an extra 10% boon duration that stacks with the superior version. If you want the runes of the Dolyak for the stats, there are better options (even 2 crests of the soldier will provide a higher stat total to both vitality and toughness)

Fish.1657:

Ok, don’t think I’m being clear enough lol.

BEFORE you accept the PA where does it say it’s soulbound?

Afaik, you only know it’s soulbound AFTER you’ve accepted it, or if you look it up online.

How does it matter? You can open up the achievement menu on any character and take any number of copies of the skin for that character. If you accidentally took the skin on a character that can’t use it, you can just destroy that one, because you can create as many of that skin as you want on any character you want.

Unless they give engineers Zenith kit skins somehow, it doesn’t really matter – however, I’m fairly certain all skins will be available at each choice (firstly the “…” in the menu, secondly that they wouldn’t give us the same exact choice at both 1k and 2k)

Similarly to how WvW grants bonuses to player in PvE, some PvE content that can be done to support players in WvW.

If I had the ability to take part in some massive PvE event, and then head to WvW and see that my actions have awakened a dragon which is attacking an enemy keep, that would be interesting. Being able to do something free of human-controlled enemies and see it directly help my allies in WvW.

DanteZero.9736:

Before release and before even the betas, when the devs mentioned the conjured weapons, I always envisioned that the skills would do what the corresponding element couldn’t do. Example: conjure flame would have been about crowd control, or conjure earth causing lots of single target damage.

The point was kind of the reverse, i.e. you could use the features of one attunement while remaining in another by using a conjure themed to that attunement (e.g. you can get the defensive and condition capabilities of earth attunement by using the Earth conjure, regardless of whether you’re in Fire, Air or Water)

That said, it falls somewhat flat. The water conjure is mainly a direct damage weapon with a little CC and some condition damage, the earth conjure has no condition access. The air and fire conjures keep fairly in-theme, but flame axe’s damage is a little too weak to meet up to expectations.

Leo G.4501:

I honestly don’t think Warrior is cut out to be a pure condition profession. You only really have bleed and burning to work with and confusion in PvE isn’t that effective.

I usually have several kinds of builds on my Warriors and when I go condition, I tend to go condition-hybrid. Basically, don’t put your eggs in one basket and build for support/condition or all-around damage. My hybrid build tends to hover around 900-1100 condition damage and 1500 power with 50% crit and 60% chance and around 75% condition duration without my giver’s weapon.

Bleeds still do good damage (like 100/tic) and I can still do good direct damage. If a build who focuses on conditions joins, I can either keep doing what I do and stack bleed, burn and poison (Asura) or just swap to a greatsword, pop a few traits around (I do that already anyway) and good to go. It won’t do as much damage as a zerker but it also has over 2.5k armor with conditions that can last almost 2x as long (more weakness on your hammer/mace, more cripple and again, Radiation Field is a really good PvE skill).

With Fast Hands + Sigil of Doom or Asura Radiation Field, warrior can add poison with decent uptime. Even then, poison isn’t that critical in PvE to begin with (it’s only worth 2 bleed stacks). Not having Torment, even though it’s a unique condition, is pretty negligible due to no profession being able to even maintain just 3 stacks (i.e. it’s not a huge bonus to those professions either). Warrior has a large amount of access to confusion if traited appropriately, but it’s not necessary in many PvE cases.

Warrior has no problem with hitting 100% uptime on burning and 20+ stacks of bleed, which is very potent (and better than necromancer builds typically put out). It also doesn’t need to dedicate runes to condition duration to get there, allowing those slots to be dedicated to either raw damage or utility. As an example build, this one has a bleed duration of 16 seconds per strike on the auto chain, which without interruption loops roughly 10 times. This means that the auto chain would maintain 20 bleed stacks by itself. Swapping to Longbow allows the player to use Pin Down and add 6 high duration stacks which make up for not using the sword auto for 5 seconds; it also grants the warrior access to burning, a fire field + blast finisher, and 5 100% projectile finishers to use in that field (making the burning last much longer if more time is needed using sword). Switching back to sword applies poison. This hasn’t yet taken into account the offhand sword skills, which both easily make up for their cast times with higher bleed stacks than the auto chain can put out in the same time, or the bleed on crit, or the sword F1 skill. This all simply goes to show how easy it is for a warrior to maintain a high amount of bleeds, 100% uptime on burning, provide himself with ~10 stacks of might and still have a high base condition damage stat. It’s potentially one of the best condition builds in the game.

The core problem with condition builds on a warrior isn’t the damage output compared to other condition builds, or the lack of condition types (bleed and burn are the only ones that really matter for damage in PvE) – it’s the damage output compared to the warrior’s own direct damage builds (doubly so when taking things like the stack cap into consideration in a group scenario). It’s not worth running in a group because there are better ways for warrior to deal damage, while other professions (necro especially) can deal more damage over time with condition builds than direct damage.

That said, I still made an asura warrior just today purely for running a condition build (I already have a maxed out norn warrior for zerking everywhere)

Nikkinella.8254:

Just be glad you didn’t waste gold on it thinking it would be good to do a condition spec because of this like I did. Warrior condition build with rife/bow can drop people literally 3 times faster than condition ele. You would think it would be the other way around because on paper our conditions have some insane numbers. Doesn’t work that way in actual combat though.

(tl;dr at the end)

Maybe not in any form of pvp (ele doesn’t have many cover conditions to protect the bleeds from removal) but the numbers -are- amazing for a condi build in PvE.

Consider this build

Numbers:
1850 condition damage (before might or kill stacks) (Bleed: 135/sec, Burn: 787/sec, Poison: 270/sec) (assume the extra 13 can be covered by infusions in a min-maxed setup if Diamond Skin really doesn’t scale with the earth adept minor)
100% sustainable bleed stacks: 24 on a large 5 target AoE (3240 dps total; ramp time is 20 seconds to max bleeds)
~90% sustainable burning on a single target while in earth, or 80% on 5 targets while in fire (attuning to fire sacrifices 3-6 seconds of bleed stacking, generally one Eruption cast, which can be worth more than gaining AoE burning is worth)
28.5 seconds of AoE poison per minute, with a 100% projectile finisher on the autoattack stacking 1.6 seconds more on a single target per shot (assume 2 autoattacks every 6 seconds = 5 projectile finishers = 8 seconds) = 36 seconds on one target total. (Poison damage is negligible in PvE but Radiation Field can easily be fit into the rotation – it’s not a huge loss for non-asura to not have this)

A standard conditionmancer has slightly higher condition damage, but can’t maintain above 12-15 bleed stacks. The elementalist in this case actually has better base numbers due to being able to maintain high stacks (and doesn’t need a utility slot to keep all the bleeds AoE, or a trait slot to inflict burning at all). A bleed-focused warrior is only just faster at stacking bleeds, doesn’t have diamond skin and only hits 3 targets at melee range, or one target (with linear pierce if traited at range) – and the warrior sucks in damage compared to zerker warriors anyways in PvE.

In a single target situation, any other weapon set will be able to reach the bleed cap as well (and faster to boot – around 14 seconds for scepter and 18 for dagger), though mainhand dagger and scepter both have to sacrifice more condition damage for Giver’s stats to be able to maintain the bleed cap. Should be noted that condi eles are exceptionally squishy due to not having room to take water and arcana to 30, and also because leaving earth attunement is basically not viable for the build. (Condi ele really, really wants to have a decent bleed capability in another attunement; a good candidate would be something like a trait to make the ice-themed attacks in water attunement apply significant bleeds

Ironically, Isaiah Cartwright thinks mono-attunement builds shouldn’t be viable but it’s the optimal way to play condi ele in PvE right now, and will be as long as ele can’t get bleeding outside of earth attunement. The core weakness of the condi build is twofold; firstly, leaving earth attunement massively reduces DPM as the stacks drop off and can’t be reapplied for up to 15 seconds depending on build; secondly, that the only damaging condition ele can stack outside of earth is plenty available through traits and utilities, meaning attuning to fire doesn’t really gain burning. Combined, this means that the condi build gains nothing from leaving earth attunement – the minor healing from water skills won’t keep you alive longer than an extra 15 seconds of maintaining bleed stacks will shorten a fight by, the damage of fire and air skills is negligible without power.

tl;dr: Condi ele build is a PvE build. This trait works just fine in PvE (though the damage boost isn’t comparable to, say, the flat +10% damage traits). Mono-earth condi ele is one of the stronger PvE condition builds in the game due to large AoE, high stacking capability and having the highest potential for condition damage in the game thanks to Diamond Skin. The tradeoff for this is being exceptionally squishy.

Zelyhn.8069:

Thanks for the input, but you gave us nominal numbers only, no base heal + coefficient + cooldown. I can’t make up my mind with just this!
Besides I am talking about reactive heal. Because heal per second is nice, but it is less useful for reasons that you can understand

The numbers I posted were at 1500 heal power, which is a little below what my engineer has before getting any life stacks/food buffs. If you’re considering a healing build, you’ll get somewhere around that number.

As you asked, cooldowns/base heals/coefficients:

Each bomb heals for 145+0.1*heal, with varying radius on the AoE (minimum 120, with a trait to increase by 50%, and the largest radius possible is 360). The smallest bomb is the autoattack with no cooldown.
Healing Turret – Cleaning Burst: 15(pick up)/20(detonate) seconds, base heal: 2520, coefficient: 0.5 (placing the turret self heals for the same amount, but doesn’t heal allies)
Elixir Gun – Super Elixir: 20 seconds (16 traited), base heal: 700, coefficient: 0.4 (this skill also drops an AoE healing field that pulse heals 10 times for 204+0.1 * heal)
Superior Rune of the Water: 10 seconds (but really tied to the healing skill, so 15 or 20), base heal 690, coefficient 0.5
Blast Finishers: base heal: 1320, coefficient: 0.2
Cooldowns for blast finishers (Base cooldown/Traited):
Magnetic Shield: 30/24
Big Ol’ Bomb: 30/variable, but caps at 23 (toolbelt recharge rate)
Elixir Gun – Acid Bomb: 15/12
Detonate Healing Turret: 20
Supply Crate: 180 (Supply Crate also spawns 6 (9 if traited) bandages or more if traited, which heal at 1000 base + 0.5 coefficient on pickup
There’s one utility slot free, which I use for Rocket Boots (20/16) personally, but there are several other blast finisher utilities, including Throw Mine(18/14.5), all turret detonations (20, 30, 50 and 50), and Thumper Turret’s activated skill Thump (30) and toolbelt skill Shockwave (45/34.5 with max Tools)

Water fields are available with a 1 second duration on Healing Turret’s F1 skill (25/19.25 with max tools) and about 4 seconds with the turret’s activated skill (15 or 20, depending on pick up or detonate). Most of the blast finisher cooldowns line up perfectly with the water fields’ cooldowns, though I’d recommend only using skills with a high cast speed on the toolbelt skill’s field (Rocket Boots works well). A bomb-heal engi may also drop a bomb when dodging if they have 10 in the power line for increasing bomb AoE, meaning dodges won’t interfere with the passive bomb heals much.

Thrashbarg.9820:

Zelyhn.8069:

To this date I am yet to find a class that can reactively heal better than the elementalist.

A bomb healing engineer with healing turret and elixer gun can get pretty close. I haven’t run the exact numbers but it’s not a build you will see many running anyway. It would work best with a guardian and elementalist as well, for soothing mists and that virtue passive heal. Yay for team games.

I run a bomb heal engi. Some numbers:

At 1500 healing power, bombs heal for around 300 hp per explosion. They’re dropped at a rate of about 1.5 bombs per second, so the heal over time from bombs is about 450/sec.
It’s also very likely that the engi will have regen on the party permanently, from toolbelt skills for the turret and elixir gun, and the turret itself. That regen ticks for about 317 per second.
As one last heal over time effect, the elixir gun has Super Elixir, which drops a light field which heals for 3520 over 10 seconds, plus a burst heal. This can be maintained with about 40% uptime, so 352*0.4 = 140.8 heal per second.

This brings the engi up to a heal over time of 907.8 per second on the party; my engi is also running the backpack regenerator trait and passively healing for 192+ per second, but that’s not shared.

After that, there’s still the burst heals. Super Elixir mentioned earlier heals for 1.3k on impact, healing turret’s overcharge heals for 3270 (both on 20s cooldowns if the turret is detonated). I’m running runes of water, which add 1440 heal in an AoE when using healing skills, once per 10 seconds (effectively once per 20 seconds when detonating turrets). Finally, I have 6 blast finishers slotted and 2 water fields available, and with timing can usually land 4 of those blast finishers per rotation. Each blast finisher heals for 1620. (If the extra healing is unnecessary, bomb kit also packs a smoke field and a fire field for situational stealth or might)

Condition removal on the group is fairly weak. Elixir Gun has fumigate which pulses condition removal but does weak damage, and Super Elixir heals a couple conditions on impact. Healing Turret’s overcharge also removes several conditions.

Unlike a staff elementalist, the majority of engi’s healing comes from skills which also deal damage. A bomb heal engi in particular has his main source of damage as his main source of healing, and the heals which don’t deal damage have a combined cast time of about 2 seconds if they’re necessary to be used at all.

I’m actually finding engi a more efficient group healer than ele. Should be mentioned it has little boon support for the group, though.

With the sky pirates update, the scaling on the passive changed. it’s now (40 at 80, scaled down to your current effetive level) where it used to be (40 at your current level, scaled down to your effective level).

In other words, the stat bonus you get from it is what a level 80 character would have when scaled down pre-patch. The tooltip doesn’t reflect this just yet.

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

I had a signet build on my warrior at lower lvls XD 100% crit chance at lvl 20 was amazing! killed anything and everything in two hits.

Which is why the latest patch made the trait that made that build strong at low levels scale to character level. It isn’t anywhere near as powerful at low levels anymore.

At OP: As a heads up, the signet’s effective value decreases as your character’s effective level increases. The signet’s bonus to precision increases linearly (same amount of precision per level) while the amount of precision required to gain 1% crit rate scales exponentially (i.e. the increase in precision required for additional crit also increases with each level). At level 5 when you can unlock the signet it’s worth about 18.4% crit rate. At level 80, it’s worth about 8.6%. Still a fair amount, just be aware that it gets worse slowly as you play in higher level zones.

A thought: 50% of longbow skills are condition skills, one of which creates a fire field.

The trait “Stronger Bowstrings” makes both arrows from Dual Shot 100% projectile finishers, though this isn’t mentioned on the tooltip. This means that shot through a fire/poison field, each shot adds 2 seconds of burning/poison (before condition duration), making the skill fit in with the weapon’s general theme of condition damage via burning (as it can create its own fire field to combo with)

Of course, the warrior doesn’t personally have access to any other fields in PvP; PvE can get the warrior poison or water fields via racial skills (asura radiation field, human avatar of melandru) or for water fields the healing seed consumable (probably unusable in WvW now), so using Dual Shot this way requires team support in most cases. It is, however, something to keep in mind.

Side note: the bug list for stronger bowstrings says it reduces dual shot’s damage by 10% as well. 2 seconds of burning per shot adds a lot more damage than that if it runs its course, but it’s very rare for a trait to make anything weaker in some way.

Maybe have the conjured weapon become our weapon swap while active, so cast skill → weapon swap becomes available, allowing us to swap between the conjure and our weapon swap for the duration.

Only elementalists, mesmers and (strangely) guardians have traits that increase their own condition damage, and those generally aren’t the most popular condition builds, save for confusion mesmers.

Warriors, however, have the best trait for increasing condition duration (+50% to bleeds), which adds a major boost to total damage when an opponent can’t remove conditions for whatever reason. Warriors also have one of the better bleed-on-crit traits, with a 3 second duration (better than necro/ranger’s 1 second, equal to engi’s 3 second, lesser than mesmer’s 5 second but mesmer’s only procs from illusion crits)

Warriors also don’t need much trait support to hit the bleed cap, or to stack mass bleeding and burning, which leaves those trait slots open for defensive traits, or you can go with rampager’s gear and benefit from the direct damage increasing traits anyways.

Yamsandjams.3267:

Einlanzer.1627:

Dual Shot has to be the weakest autoattack in the game.

No! No one will ever take this away from engg pistol… no one…

Nah, the weakest autoattack is elementalist staff water #1; it has a coefficient of 0.3, no aoe damage and no bleed, and attacks at nearly half the fire rate.

By comparison, engi pistol’s #1 has a coefficient of 0.35, aoe’s and deals a 2 second bleed. (Warrior’s rifle has a roughly 0.45 coefficient, but attacks about 33% slower and doesn’t AoE. The only thing it does better than engi pistol overall is a longer bleed)

Focus is meant to be a defensive weapon. It’s the only weapon without a healing skill in water attunement. So give it one.

Comet, while nice, is not one of the mechanics of water attunement; it’s an air attunement effect (CC) in the wrong attunement. So, imo, that slot should be changed to some form of healing skill, which could be as simple as switching the daze out for a Cleansing Wave effect (AoE heal/condition removal around the point of impact, which the elementalist may not necessarily be in the range of).

Gale needs a lower cooldown, or additional effects (1 or more of: damage, blowout, vuln)

Fire shield needs to last longer or provide some additional effect on top of the fire aura, such as retaliation, so it actually has a chance of discouraging people from attacking.

Questions:

1) Do ANet honestly believe that single attunement builds should be viable? There are a lot of traits to support a given attunement, but the general elementalist consensus is that single attunement builds suffer a lot due to our skill’s cooldowns being balanced around us having 4 skill sets, and sustain being mainly provided via traits that require us to switch to the water attunement (which isn’t viable for damage, and therefore we need 2 other viable attunements at any time)

2) For that matter, most elementalist sustain is currently in the water attunement – this means that we generally need two viable damage attunements besides that, as water is generally weak outside of its support. Any plans to boost the damage output of water?

3) Air attunement is presented as a high damage attunement, as far as the skill description for it states. However, on the staff, it’s pretty weak – a low damage auto-attack, a blind which can almost never be cast in reaction to an enemy attack due to the 1.5 second cast time, and static field which deals about as much damage as the auto attack. Would it be possible to increase the damage of staff air somehow?

4) Generally speaking only water attunement provides us with sustain, leading to most competitive builds incorporating the water traitline. Could other traitlines receive sustain, such as fire getting “heal [some amount] whenever you burn an opponent”?

5) Have ArenaNet considered changing the profession’s unique stat away from Attunement Recharge Rate? A lot of players feel that their playstyle just doesn’t work without a certain amount of points in Arcana, which is limiting choices in the other trait lines. I feel that either Attunement Recharge Rate should be removed, or available via other means (an elite signet that offers it as a passive? Traits that increase the recharge rate of specific attunements as part of their effect?)

6) Other professions often get additional benefits from their cooldown reduction traits for weapon skills. Any possibility elementalists may see something similar?

Azrayl.4936:

Does empowering allies give the power to the warrior though? I selected it a couple of times and it doesn’t give any +power on my character sheet and I don’t see any buff that shows up on surrounding allies. Am I missing something? I’ve been just trying desperate power.

You need to be in combat for the trait to activate.

As for the tradeoffs:

Empower Allies: Doesn’t stack with other party members using it; effective additional damage decreases as power increases (7.5% damage increase at 2000 power; 5% damage increase at 3000 power)

Empowered: Doesn’t increase party member’s damage, relies on boon maintenance, stacks multiplicatively with the extra power from Empower Allies (if Empowered is giving 4% damage it’s increasing the effective power from Empower Allies to 156. Not much, but still)

In general a group should have the first warrior with Empower Allies to buff everyone, but any further warriors should be running Empowered. At 25 might stacks with power food, Empower Allies is only going to give around a 4% damage increase, which is roughly similar to Empowered with 2 boons. As a warrior, it’s likely you’ll have at least 3 boons (might/fury/swiftness), so fully buffed up, Empower Allies is probably weaker than Empowered for solo play. How often you can reach 25 might stacks alone, though, might change that.

As above.

It also won’t sell anything in an invisible bag.

Weakness duration nerf in PvE, where mobs almost never crit. No notable duration nerf to those mobs that use weakness against players.

Eh… not much else I particularly dislike. None of my characters were running builds that were hit hard by nerfs, and I don’t PvP enough to complain about other builds getting buffs.

The patch notes specify 5% damage to bleeding targets. I’d say the tooltip is wrong.

While it’d be neat, one thing Anet have said in the past is that for the sake of PvP, it should be possible to learn the animations of each ability. Making it possible to change them makes this a lot harder (and if the game is to have eSport potential, it’s just as important for spectators to tell what’s going on as well).

This isn’t as important in PvE, but high level play still requires players to be able to adapt to what their team members are doing, and part of that is also knowing skill animations. At the very least combo fields need to remain very recognisable.

To that extent, only legendaries affect our skill animations to any major degree, and those aren’t even available in sPvP. The only real exception is pvp finishers, but all you really need to know that a player is using one is the fact that they’ve stopped moving in front of you.

So for the sake of what I’ve said, this is unlikely to truly happen anywhere outside of PvE, and in PvE, one of the draws of legendary weapons is that they change certain skill animations. I don’t think it’s a bad idea (if restricted to PvE) personally, but I don’t see ANet doing it any time soon.

Currently, there are two active defenses against condition damage:
1) Don’t get hit by condition attacks (dodge/block/blind)
2) Condition removal

Currently, there is one active defense against direct damage:
1) Don’t get hit by attacks (dodge/block/blind)
However, to counter this, there is one passive defense against direct damage
2) Toughness and protection

And naturally, Vitality works against both damage types.

Condition Damage not being reduced by any stats is intentional – it gives classes with poor healing a reason to take vitality over toughness, and it makes up for condition damage being possible to prevent before it’s run its full course. My staff ele might be able to stack 6 bleeds for 24 seconds with eruption, dealing a total of 14.4k damage… but being on the ball with removal means that damage could be reduced to 1 or 2 ticks and not even scrape 2k damage. Maybe this isn’t the best example, but removal can be much more effective against condition damage than toughness is against direct damage.