Guild Wars 2

Soothing mist and fury on attunement swap are pretty kitten good adept minors..

As far as bugs go, good to have a thread to dump them! The only one I can think of atm is that when you disable autoattack on lightning whip, updraft for some reason doesn’t instant cast anymore but gets queued behind the lightning whip in progress. Mildly annoying in PvP. If you don’t understand what I mean, disable autoattack and try to updraft in the middle of a lightning whip.

You don’t need conjurer with icebow and fiery greatsword generally. They don’t have many skills that need using so you likely won’t ever reach these last 10 charges.

Soothing disruption is a very underwhelming trait to go up to grandmaster in water for. Add 2 to fire and grab persisting flames and suddenly you’re doing very very respectable damage.

Went on an 11 winstreak in teamqueue with this build just now. Only one or two guildies with me to make use of the bow, no voice comms. Let me tell you, it works. Tempest defense alleviates a metric ton of thief pressure, icebow is an enormous threat in any fight.

Tweaks to the build: take mist form over armor of earth, take earth’s embrace over cantrip mastery. Mist stomps/resses have an enormous tactical value and are hard to trump in team queue.

Notes on the playstyle: KNOW WHAT 1v1 YOU CAN TAKE. This build loses quite a bit of 1v1 potential in sustained duels, and loses a lot of potential in condi duels. When the enemy team has more than 2 heavy condi users, it’s advisable not to run this build. You are a menace in skirmishes and teamfights, play as such.

Use frost fan on the icebow. A very potent, long duration chill with a low cast time.

Pre-cast icebow in any fight early. Get the casts of #4 and #5 off as quickly as possible as they leave you vulnerable. Put the icebow in an easy to reach spot for yourself or your teammates to pick up.

An enormous advantage this build brings to your team as well is the kill potential on guardians! Keep an eye on stab and you can drop guardians like no other ele spec ever could.

Fuzzion.2504:

“The second real strong-suit of this build is an area where classic D/D often falls short. Up-front damage and kill potential. " – OP

Not sure who you are playing with but you need to find a real DnD ele sometime.

By upfront damage I mean damage before you get to stack might. With 1450~ power you do ridiculously low damage. Ele needs time to ramp up in fights and that’s one of its weaknesses.

Kill potential is a problem due to most of your skills not being reliable enough

I was actually wondering about this the other day. I hear so many people talking and complaining about macro’s on burst eles. Are they like ‘a thing’? Does anyone know anyone who uses them? Are they widespread, are they just a raging man’s ramblings?

@ OP: the combos can get really complicated though. Basic ones are no problem for most people but a REALLY condensed instant burst takes a lot of skills in a short time.

Tei.1704:

Gokil.2543:

SonOfKrypton.4357:

I for one am supremely salty that people are rolling FotM Ele now that they’re strong again. I kinda wish we’d stayed how we were pre-patch where only decent players got the results new Ele players are getting now.

And that’s why we can’t have nice things… You have to realize how ridiculous you’re sounding.

I for one am glad elementalist is a viable pick now, and PvP actually has all professions in it again. There will always be something people can complain about.

Ele has pretty much always been viable though. Viable just means that it works reasonably well. Something can be generally considered bad or not meta while still being viable. Now, it’s just stupid easy to have good defense and good offense. Ele went from being good if you didn’t faceroll and played with a little intelligence to just being good. I consider the former to be a much nicer thing than the latter. Every profession and build in the game should at least strive to not be faceroll.
used it on an engi, took out about 40% of his hp then he got up and nearly killed you.

It seriously bothers me how fast people’s conceptions of certain things change. Feel like I need to put this down in hard text, pre-patch elementalist was NOT viable. That’s not a matter of opinion, just an observed fact derived from there not being any elementalists in tournaments, none high on either the sPvP ladder nor the tPvP ladder. What that doesn’t mean is it couldn’t do stuff, what it does mean is it was factually not worth picking ever. Don’t get me wrong, I still played it, did okay, but it was a handicap, and everyone was aware of it.

A few months later and everybody is reminiscing about ‘the old days’ where ele was ‘cool’. As I said, that bothers me quite a bit. For one that sentiment is not very mature at core, but more importantly it’s skewed as all hell.

Elementalist is more in line with other classes now. That means entry level players are not utterly useless with it anymore. It’s not by far the easiest or most effective build for a new player out there though.

“As you can see, the changed version has around 4% less power, but 18% higher crit-damage. Now if I do a critical hit 50% of the time (thanks to nearly perma-fury), that makes for an overall damage-increase of 9%; that’s 5% more dps compared to the first build”

This is where you were wrong the first time around :-) 18 percent higher crit damage on top of a 160 percent base only adds around 5-6 percent damage with 50 percent crit chance. Not 9.

I’m gonna take an educated guess that that wiki edit implies that you have to consume the ‘leeching’ stack you get when swapping (gives a little toolitp) before you can proc the next one. So that you couldn’t stack a bunch of leeching hits on top of each other by not attacking while in combat.

I’m positive sigils like doom and battle will work fine alongside leeching so I wouldn’t pay too much attention to it.

Again, arcane wave is entirely unnecessary on D/D. You’ll die if you give up a defensive utility.

Seriously, there’s no real discussion to be had on what build is better. Do the numbers and the first one comes out on top every time.

SonOfKrypton.4357:

Your incessant kindergarten flaming in chat is something to be ashamed of but your gameplay was fine. I hope that no experienced Eles in here give you too many tips if I’m to be totally honest.

I for one am supremely salty that people are rolling FotM Ele now that they’re strong again. I kinda wish we’d stayed how we were pre-patch where only decent players got the results new Ele players are getting now.

And that’s why we can’t have nice things… You have to realize how ridiculous you’re sounding.

I for one am glad elementalist is a viable pick now, and PvP actually has all professions in it again. There will always be something people can complain about.

Video was quite nice. Like others have said, lacking a bit on some ele-specific areas but good game sense.

Heads up, aura sharing doesn’t actually work on the frost aura from blasting an ice field. The aura is acquired by the combo itself. Even without aura sharing your allies will receive whatever boons you get from auras when you grant them a frost aura with a blast.

That said, both other water GM traits are significantly better on staff imo.

Saturn.6591:

As some might remember, I’ve already asked for opinions about my build in another thread, and I was told that it’s nice but that critical damage might be a bit low (although my power is higher).

Then I’ve also read in a more recent thread, how someone claimed that Soldiers gear makes you hit like a wet noodle. Thus, I’ve just put it into the calculator, and that’s the result.

Original build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFQQJAoYhcMaZ25wwBf0AdAB5xzvRBlzbnB-TlCFwANOgAOOBAsUPIjeiUq4Ub/hmKNIcgAlgKVmB4BAQGg8tA-w

Changed build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFQQJAoYhcMaZ25wwBf0AdAB5xzvRBlzbnB-T1CFwANOgAsU/ppShN6BA8AAcqswxJAIpSMCHIQJYt9HyohgMA5bB-w

As you can see, the changed version has around 4% less power, but 18% higher crit-damage. Now if I do a critical hit 50% of the time (thanks to nearly perma-fury), that makes for an overall damage-increase of 9%; that’s 5% more dps compared to the first build. With Might, the difference will be higher, because additional power gets added to the basic power, but multiplied by crit-damage. On the other hand, the second build has 40 toughness and 1370 HP less. The toughness I don’t really mind (since it’s not much), but the HP…

Now, a while ago I’ve read in the Thief-forums that actually, Soldiers gear is the best choice in terms of a trade-off of defensive stats for dps. And if you look at EHP, this is probably true. Compared to my actual HP, my armor-rating is way too high (or vice versa), thus I should actually have way more HP and/or less toughness. The problem is however, that EHP doesn’t take the awesome healing capability of a D/D Ele into account, which (as far as I know) makes a higher armor rating desirable.

So now my questions: Did I miss something? What do you think about the builds? Which one would you prefer? Or maybe some other input?

Thanks in advance.

First build is definitely better. Ferocity is a very underwhelming stat, and contrary to what others say it should be very low on your list of priorities.

As for general advice, I personally like having some celestial and/or clerics since you can really feel the difference in sustain from another 100-200 healing power. Not that your build is bad by any means though. Pretty much optimal, any adjustment from there would just be preference.

Why the arcane wave though? Arcane shield, mist form and cleansing fire are way better.

hihey.1075:

I think the idea is fine, but the problem is that it looks like you are making a build just to counter S/D thieves.
The “fun” thing is that even if S/D thief is a counter to D/D ele, in the Conquest game a D/D Ele will “always” win against the thief. S/D is great at kiting and peeling, but it takes a while to take down some bunker builds and is not a 1v1 spec for conquest.

Not to mention that if the thief realizes that the Ele is running tempest defense, he should just change his approach to the fight, by either picking another target first in a teamfight, open with a ranged Basilisk Venom (instead than Mug) to let the Ele proc Tempest Defense, or just wait for the Ele to be CC-ed by another player and attack him afterwards.
A good thief will realize quickly what specs an enemy is running, and a D/D ele without 6 points in water is REALLY weak to focus fire, especially if he runs Ice Bow.

Honestly I don’t see this spec becoming meta at all. You COULD gain the upper hand against “bad” thieves, and you could even surprise good thieves the first time they face you. But you would lose so much in terms of self-defense that the tradeoff is not worth it, making this one a “situational” spec rather than a “staple”, meta spec. Not to mention that you would be covering a niche role in your team comp, and random players will never understand this: in order for a build to become “meta”, it needs to be either really easy to play or extremely effective at it. Standard D/D Celestial Ele is both effective AND easy to play. Your build is somewhat effective, but absolutely not “easy” to play.

If you want to counter thieves, you’d better go full zerk fresh air S/F (or S/D) with Arcane Shield and pop your burst on the thief when he closes in.

I’m not sure what you mean by the first part. S/D is in no way, shape or form a guaranteed win for a standard D/D elementalist. You severely overestimate how tanky an elementalist is if his armor of earth gets stolen right away. S/D definitely has a solid 50-70% chance of winning the duel given no interrupts, and it doesnt take all that long since S/D can quite effectively deny an ele’s heals if he’s paying attention by pressuring while the ele’s in water. Moreover, the kill potential of an ele on a good S/D thief is very low, whereas the thief has a decent chance. Finally, S/D’s specialty is 2v1ing you with whatever teammate he has, since his damage and mobility are so high. Having a S/D thief 2v1 you is catastrophic without exception on the current build since you melt very very fast once they get through your armor of earth. 20066 thief is the strongest 1v1 thief spec vs ele bar none. Maybe P/D power but even that is meh.

I understand your opinion in the rest of your post, and respect it. IMO the sacrifice is not that huge, and the potential payoff when hitting a couple icebows is massive, but your points are very valid.

As for full zerk S/F, I’d play it if it were viable believe me I really enjoy it in 1v1 servers but I feel like it’s not made for conquest.
We should duel again sometime btw. I really enjoyed duelling your thief in the OS! IGN is Elemelentalist.

Neat video man! Interesting build as well, you’re pumping out some impressive hybrid damage.

Why the arcane shield though? I’d figure glyph of elemental power would be way better no? CD on shield is insane.

I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with doing the combo ‘too fast’. It’s just a lag-induced problem called rubberbanding. Every profession struggles with it.

I’ve been thinking about this skill as well.

If Anet brings out new elites, which seems like the logical thing to do after new healing skills, arcane echo could be an awesome arcane elite skill.

My idea for its design was completely different though. To have it fit in more with the other arcane skills I figured it would copy the last arcane you cast, with an extra little effect on top perhaps (like leblanc’s ultimate from LoL). It would then go on twice the cooldown of the echoed arcane spell (otherwise you would only copy the long CD spells).

Gameplay-wise this would be so awesome. Be it an epic barrage of arcanes, double shield, double heals. It would make a full arcane build worth going for.

Quakeman.9378:

Mystogan.4157:

Jst by looking at 0/4/0/4/6 your going to need alot of defensive stats seeing gow arcane gives no bonus stats. Id possibly try soldiers trinks zerk armor and knights weapon. You will be lacking in toughness i think. Cant check cus im at work :p

Or if u dont mind losing some dmage you can use knights armor and zerk weapons. Throw your build in gw2builder.com and try out the combinations above

Yeah I’m thinking of a mix of soldier and knight w/ zerker weps or so. Maybe a celestial amy thrown in too
Something like this build I found online:
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJAoYhcMqcW4wzBd0APAC5fv2JKQ5qJfC-T1iFABjs/wJqEskSPrUCCwDAghTAAhqRQlygz0BcoqKopFIAACwNDAiQjbezje0bmMA5bB-w

Excellent build!

I’d add just a little bit of healing power to compliment all that armor and condi cleanse.

Also, I’d advise against that food. Lifesteal food or -condi duration food is better imo.

02066 with 2400-2600 armor, 1600-1900 hp, 2k power, 30-35% crit chance and ~500 healing power is the standard. Different setups to achieve this general spread, all of them work.

SaintSnow.6593:

Tempest defense is a very nice trait and definately something that helps the ele in fights. Now for icebow, this utility is powerful but is as we know it, gimmicky. Against theives it’s useless (especially s/d) with their extensive blinks as well as the mes or any ele with LF. As I main a warrior this can be hurtful but it has a huge tell. Most people should be able to dodge it or like me, even reflect it back and have a field day.

The idea is to either channel icebow 5 from stealth or from a huge range and blinking in at the last second. Ofcourse neither method is completely reliable but it will make the important stuns have at least a solid 70 percent chance of landing.

As for getting it reflected, that’s part of the game You should be able to dodge the returning projectile though if you’re paying attention.

Colt.9051:

Frozen Burst/Earthquake/Magnetic Wave: Water #3 and Earth #4 (For both dagger and focus) respectively for Chaos Aura.

Chaos armor does not count as an aura. :-/

All the other things he said were spot on though. It’s still one of the traits that gives the highest protection uptime of all professions. If combined with elemental attunement and armor of earth you have insane protection uptime.

Seph.5042:

83 views and no replies. Ive been playing basic d/d and loving it so far looking for a build with a bit more burst if possible,maybe something that hits harder in the fire or lightning dps phases. I wouldnt mind being a little squishier either i main thief and mes as i said so im used to dying quickly if i mess up once.

D/D and burst don’t match very well. 0/3/2/3/6 is the most offensive version out of all classic D/D specs and hits quite a lot harder than classic 02066. From there on out it gets a bit shady. 06026 kind of works, as does 40066 but both are not exactly optimal. If you show me your build I could estimate how much you could change your gear to offensive stuff without losing too much viability.

S/F or S/D however is the king of burst. 66002 and 66200 do absurd damage while having really solid 1v1 potential. It will also push your skills to the limit. I recommend S/F with arcane shield, lightning flash and arcane blast or icebow. There are also more conservative versions that go deeper into arcane like 06044 or something (I don’t like these but they’re still effective)

Your 3rd question, the reason I don’t like S/F in WvW is that you die a lot. Not only because it’s a risky playstyle since you’re full zerk, but also due to the fact you have no mobility. Dying is a pain in WvW since you have to run so far. I do enjoy playing S/F glass in the duelling arena though

4th question: play elementalist. I don’t think even the warrior forums will disagree that elementalist is MUCH more engaging than warrior. You’ll notice if you transition now that warrior feels pretty braindead and easymode.

There aren’t really any guide videos about fresh air but you’ll learn to use it soon enough. Just make sure to keep swapping in and out of air for your instant burst from discharge and air 2. It takes a ton of practise to get perfect at though.

D/D is definitely more forgiving and arguably stronger in this PvP meta. I honestly have to advise D/D. S/F is a lot of fun though.

Water grandmaster minor swapped with arcana grandmaster minor. New water grandmaster minor: Auras grant regeneration for obvious synergy with both powerful aura and cleansing water. I really feel we need more aura traits.

New fire grandmaster to replace PP: thermal shock. Having both chill and burning up on the target at the same time has a devastating side effect (similar to terror, deals substantial bonus condition damage). This would make for an interesting flavor to the condition ele while still allowing a good bit of counterplay. Suddenly the rune of the elementalist makes sense Can be changed to either daze or immob the target when both chilled and burning instead of damage(makes sense thematically).

Shockwave.1230:

Icebow was in the meta a bit until ppl learned to play against it.

I don’t see 30 in air being the next meta just to deal with thief. You lose too much from team fights and personal sustain. That healing power lost, the condi removal, and the 2k health is big. You need sustain to build up might stacks to deal heavy damage. Also you don’t have protection on aura.

A thief can literally get around shocking aura by not using basi venom and using infiltrator’s signet instead of steal. Or they can basi venom you, then steal so you’re cc’ed just as long as the aura. Or they can use shadow step after they steal and shadow return to deal with the two stuns from shocking aura.

You just become too squishy, and lose too much team support for a little bit of damage and an aura.

It’s good to see people thinking outside the box, but tempest defense would be best on a one-shot ele for the purposes being described, in my opinion.

Thief builds today entirely revolve around steal though. Maybe they will learn to deal with it in the end (that’s what meta is after all), but remember that they need steal for: fury, vigor, boonrip, damage, healing, daze. Not having any of those will set a thief back severely even if he manages to avoid using steal and basi on you altogether (which i highly doubt).

If you’ve played as a thief against shocking aura, you would know it’s not just something you brush off. You describe a lot of ways for a thief to deal with shocking aura which include using a lot of cooldowns just to keep the break-even (basi and steal? shadowstep and return?). Even if they do that, you’ve won since they had to blow a lot of stuff just to keep the break-even, and you still have a shocking aura up your sleeve.

Note that I added a sigil of leeching to get about half of the sustain healing ripple would provide, while also adding 1k damage every 9s.

If you want to run protection on aura you can. I find it an overrated trait since you don’t need protection as much when your auras are up anyway.

Linnael.1069:

I’ve been running a similar build for a long time for wvw soloroam. I’d suggest a few things, that should patch up most of your weak spots.

Drop Evasive arcana and elemental attunement. I know I know, it seems crazy. But if you take the time to play around without them, they really aren’t necessary. Even if you only take ten out of arcane, you can put it into water. Thats gonna get you a bigger heal on water swap, to balance out the loss of the water dodge, as well as give you instantcast condition removal, which goes a long kitten way towards dealing with condition necros.

Personally I go zerk and take another ten out of arcane for stone shards, but thats not really necessary. It plays similarly, only the fights are(have to be) shorter.

Essentially, I’d heavily recommend pulling ten out of arcane and dropping it into water for healing ripple/cleansing wave. If the icebow thing is not working out due to uncooperative teammates/smart opponents, i’d also slap a signet of air into that slot. It’ll deal with the longer controls and make the stun turnaround even harder for your opponent to deal with, given that blind.

Furthermore, against thieves arcane shield is basically a won fight, and way more effective than armor of earth against boonripping mesmers/thieves. If tempest defense is on cd for their burst, such as the common midfight gank scenario, you can shield to break basilisk, and their blocked backstab will proc the shocking aura you just activated. You’re now free to bomb them with aoe. It works on hambow warriors similarly, given that as soon as they pull out hammer they have nothing to rapidly pop it.

I put quite a bit of thought into whether I’d take healing ripple or evasive arcana and in the end the power of elemental attunement won me over in favor of the arcana line. However I never considered dropping 10 and keeping EA but grabbing healing ripple and cleansing wave. I’ll give it a go, but remember that Evasive arcana is the same heal as healing ripple and also a condi remove. Essentially it won’t change very much I think.

I’ve run arcane shield in PvP quite often, and the cooldown is just too long in my experience. It’s indeed really strong vs thieves but not a guaranteed win since larcenous is unblockable. By the way the backstab thieves are really not the issue in sPvP these days. S/D and S/P trickery thieves are far more abundant and effective. I disagree on it being effective vs mesmers though (albeit still more effective than AoE i’ll give you that).

The zerker’s amulet is also something I considered. It makes a lot of sense to combine this strong opener build with a zerker’s amulet, but you just lose out on sooooo much sustain. Rather than having a comparable build that does certain things better, you get a completely different build that does certain things a LOT better but can’t do a lot of the things classic D/D can at all (e.g.:bunkering home for a while).

Thanks for your insight!

Khenzy.9348:

What pressure do you have midrange as D/D? Drakes breath, Ring of Fire/Earth… and…

I consider even lightning whip midrange. 300 range > 130 range. The entire set is practically made to kite heavies around.

The whole idea of baiting stances only works if it doesnt cost you a cantrip… When it gets to a back and forth, and you start trading blows and cooldowns the elementalist will lose without exception. You’re better off betting on kiting and going slow.

I’m talking about double melee warriors, and I’m fairly certain OP is talking about WvW scenarios. In PvP where having a longbow is the norm, the matchup completely changes. I agree with you in a sPvP scenario, and I’d also advise against running DS in sPvP.

Not sure on how to do it with a condi build, but as a classic D/D the key is to properly sustain and to mid-range the hell out of him. Your range advantage is unbelievably important vs double melee warriors such as A/S hammer or M/S greatsword.

I kinda disagree with khenzy, rushing it seems very detrimental in my experience. They will burn through your stunbreaks in no-time if you don’t take it slow and kite them around.

If they are not running immunity to movement impairing conditions, this becomes an absolute walk in the park. Keep the soft cc up and he might not even manage to touch you.

Come to think of it, you might have quite the advantage if you have some decent + condi duration since you can chill and cripple him regardless of his build.

Khenzy.9348:

^I think you can remove almost anyone from the equation is you land that Icebow 5, but wouldn’t that be regadless of build? :P

Well, mesmer, thief and ele all have blink moves. I’m honestly not sure how many people are aware of how this skill works and know to blink out of it Mesmer has distortion as well, and some eles have mist. Not many engis run elixir s, and even if they do they won’t be able to move.

Warrior can pop endure (worth noting he’ll still take considerable bleeds though). Necro, ranger, guardian and engi are pretty much screwed. (guardian might be able to stun-break and renewed focus).

I’m actually not sure what happens to an ele who lightning flashes out or a mesmer who phase retreats, thief who steals. These are teleports with no stunbreaks so the 5s stun might actually persist wherever they blink to. :o

The tempest defense damage boost makes a big difference if you don’t have much assistance getting the target down while he’s stunned, so the build does actually make quite a bit of difference there. Plus there’s the fact that you have a lot more precision and ferocity from traits

Khenzy.9348:

‘Careful, you may gain effectiveness against S/D thieves but you lose some against conditions (necros, rangers, engineers, even warriors). Unless you know what you are facing beforehand, I’m not entirely sure the tradeoff is worth it.

It just so happens that lockdown counters engi and necro quite hard. You might lose some effectiveness against them overall, but there’s a good chance you can remove them from the equation before a fight even properly starts with icebow 5.

Condi warrior will probably destroy you though, you’re right about that. Overall the build gains a lot of teamfight potential at the loss of advantage in some of the less common 1v1s such as rangers and condi warrior.

If the enemy team has a lot of condition users you’re probably wise to swap to classic 00266(especially if they don’t have a thief), but that doesnt seem to happen as much as it used to. Power necro and power engi are getting quite big as well.

Imma bump this for the sake of all you engineers out there. I got completely and utterly rolled by this build like never before. Literally. Not even the cheesiest condi thieves and PU mesmers beat my D/D ele as reliably as this guy.

This build is incredibly strong. We had our most experienced duelists in the OS and were unanimously amazed by this. The damage + the cc, I’ll just say hackusations were made…

A bit of hyperbole maybe, but hype is good Stop the perplexity triple kits, hop on this hypetrain!

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

I used the icebow combo before too. Tempest defense is awesome. I tend to use D/F though. The Focus off-hand gives 1 stun and 1 knock down ranged and targeted. D/D has it aoe but you need to be close and people tend to recognize it.
Next focus earth 5 in combination with the icebow combo means you cant get killed or hit or interrupted while using icebow. You could also save it up for stomping.

And you know those situations where you have 3 opponents downed and don’t feel like stomping every single one of ’m? Just use ice-bow no. 4 to clean ’m up.

Yeah the added downed control is really nice, although the cooldown is rather lengthy. Icebow 2 damage is ok too, for when you really need to hang back to wait for some cooldowns.

About focus: I really have a love/hate relationship with that thing… I’ll definitely give it a go, but I hate to lose the aoe CC of offhand dagger, not to mention the good fire field and ride the lightning. Overall I think you kind of need the offhand dagger to be considered a threat, and focus is more suited for bunker-play. Thanks for your insight though.

Darox.8069:

I enjoyed reading this!

The only thing that comes to my mind at the moment is that this greatly reduces the support ability of the d/d ele, which I find is its value added in teamfights. This is not crucial, but could imply that your build requires a change in the mindset for the ele: from support to kill maker.

I am a bit lower than you in the ranking but I’ll give this a try and let you know how I find it

Very true. Against a heavy condi team the support ability might benefit a team more than the kill potential of this build. If anything though, this build makes for interesting scenarios. It can seriously throw teams and players off completely and snowball games out of control. It remains to be seen if it can do so reliably enough.

I’m very curious to see if you can make it work! Remember it helps a lot to have a stealth opener on the mid point if you can manage to communicate it.

Let me begin by describing how I currently see the metagame. Feel free to disagree and post your thoughts. Currently dominant builds are:
- Sizer’s 20066 S/D
- Strength/celestial D/D elementalist 02066/00266
- Strength/cele/soldier/valk axebow and hambow off-bunkers
- 3kit balthazar engi
- Standard condimancer
- Oh so classic 01661 bunker guard
Honorable mentions:
- Power necro(lich)
- Pistol whip
- 44006 shatter

Obviously these are not the only builds that are played, but to me they are extremely abundant. (Worth noting I play around rank 100 mmr EU soloq)

Get to the point already

So why tempest defense? The main reason is the trickery meta. It’s no secret that S/D trickery is a hard matchup for D/D. Tempest defense however COMPLETELY turns this matchup around. S/D relies heavily on a strong opener with a mug + a precast larcenous strike. Every time he opens on you with steal however, he hits the shocking aura that pops from the daze, interrupting him before he even gets the chance to finish the pre-cast ability. His offensive is completely nullified, and chances are you get to punish him quite hard since he can hardly touch you with shocking aura up. When it wears out you still have a 20s cooldown shocking aura up your sleeve, and by the time his steal recharges, so will your tempest defense.

On top of that, this build does substantially more damage than a classic setup. If you ask a thief what his worst enemy is, it’s damage. Be it another thief, a sneaky mesmer or whatever. With 200 percent critical damage and 40 crit chance, you pose a very real threat to the S/D thief. Whereas he was previously in control of the engagement and could disengage at will, this build is quite a bit more scary.

The second real strong-suit of this build is an area where classic D/D often falls short. Up-front damage and kill potential. That’s where the icebow comes in. It might seem like a bit of a gimmick, and it probably is, but hear me out. First off, tempest defense damage boost procs off the #5 skill. For those of you who didn’t know, that ability is a 5 second stun that can not be broken by a regular stun-break. Only blink type abilities can get you out of it. The downside is that it’s a very slow projectile with a lengthy wind-up animation. When used in conjunction with lightning flash however, this skill becomes MUCH harder to avoid. Long story short, if you get hit by this and you don’t have a blink or form of invulnerability, you’re probably dead. The skill 4 with 20 % bonus damage from tempest defense will decimate you.

This skill spawns another bow on the ground. If you can get a teammate to pick it up he can chain the stun together into a 10s stun, or stun someone else and use the same combo. Thieves are especially suited for this, since they can steal to their opponent before the 5 skill hits, and do insane damage with the 4 skill since they’re likely on a zerker’s amulet, however a bunker can also make good use of this purely for the stun.

Opening a match with a refuge into a double icebow from you and your thief can truly snowball a match.

I planned to dissertate on the merits of this build against every other meta spec, but I feel the post would get way too long that way. If you read this far, you could probably see its merits versus hammers, fear chains and classic D/D. I would very much like to point out that shocking aura will interrupt pistol-whip and thus completely and utterly shuts down PW thieves. Same goes for blurred frenzy, although S/P mesmer is not as common anymore. The two most important advantages I feel I have touched on enough. Trickery matchup and insane teamfight potential with sheer damage and stunlock. Test the damage out for yourself (don’t forget to swap while barraging for might and fury).

The biggest downsides are probably:
- rather poor condi management(reliant on ER)
- rather reliant on your team to know what to do with the bow(tell them)

Please do let me know what you think

P.S.: The two points in water can be freely spent on many things. Prime candidates are cantrip mastery, piercing shards (massive overkill on icebow damage), armor of earth when below 50% (good for not dying, which might be a problem with only two cantrips), elemental shielding(extra TD proc) and stone splinters. When deciding on where to spend, don’t underestimate soothing mist area support! Also this build can be ran in an aura sharing variant, 06062 in tPvP mainly.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Gokil.2543:

But why does it need to be 1000x better?

D/D can be braindead enough as is. You don’t have to aim anything… For the insane damage fire grab does, it should be hard to hit.

Just curious, how Zerker with the exact right situation do you have to be in for this to do insane damage? Trying to up my build a little to actually make using this worthwhile. What Power and Ferosity would you be aiming for as a minimum for this not to be a totally useless and pointless skill to use?

I upped my Power to 1,500 and it didn’t really do that much i can hit Guards decently with it (2-2.5kish) but players no matter the class just shrug the damage off :/

Insane damage is relative to what other skills we have. Fire grab has a 2.8 damage coefficient which is the second highest on any skill the elementalist has. (Churning has 3.25). For reference, eviscerate has a 3.0 coefficient, so fire grab does almost as much damage as eviscerate.

To answer your question: it only really starts hurting at around 1.8k power + 10 or more might. Ferocity isn’t that important anymore, but 175% is decent enough.

Cenzuo.6328:

Ok so you guys think blast is too much, fine by me that was just an afterthought. The real idea I was driving at was removing the buggy targeting system fire grab currently works on and making it fit the theme of aoe that fire attunement has atm. Hell keep the skill exactly the same but make it PBAoE (same radius/range as old fire grab), all this would do would then make it easier to hit, which I think would make this skill a 1000x better.

But why does it need to be 1000x better?

D/D can be braindead enough as is. You don’t have to aim anything… For the insane damage fire grab does, it should be hard to hit.

I agree it’s fine as it is. D/D ele lacks hard to hit hard hitting abilities. (blew your mind:D)

I’m fairly certain the hit detection problem is not specifically linked to this skill, but rather ping related problems when you’re trying to hit someone who might seem to be right in front of you when in reality they’re slightly behind you or inside your hitbox. With enough experience it’s really not too hard to learn when you can or cant hit it. When roaming with friends on teamspeak it’s easy to notice what I’m talking about, when just running in a straight line there’s quite a bit of inconsistency in trying to share auras for example. When I ask my friend to run alongside me he says he is on his screen, whereas on mine he is a few feet ahead.

Since the feature patch however, I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting the burning scan to work on this skill. It fails to detect the target is burning and does half damage very often. Anyone else?

I wasn’t telling you to go either full power or full condi. I was telling you you need quite a bit more direct damage to be a hybrid. Your direct damage is next to nothing while condi pressure is quite high.

And you can easily make exotic celestial Really not expensive anymore.

First and foremost, pretty much all viable elementalist builds (except glassy oneshot scepter builds) revolve around healing ripple and/or evasive arcana. You have neither. All that defense is practically useless since you have almost no healing.

Especially on a condi build, you need the healing to survive until your opponent drops dead.

If I were you I would give up these 4 points in fire in favor of cleansing wave and elemental attunement. At that point, decide whether you want to go full condi or not. Your direct damage will be very low, so if you’re looking to go hybrid you’re going to need a lot more investment in power and what not. If you’re going full condi pick a condi rune. If not, hoelbrak is fine, but you’ll need to add quite a bit of soldier’s/zerker’s/knight’s to crank up that damage.

By the way, celestial armor isn’t all that expensive. The recipes are dirt cheap on the tp now, so you might want to consider making some of that.

I’m gonna stop here because I’m practically making an entirely different build

nearlight.3064:

Okay, I wanted to be nice, I wanted to be tolerant. If you want to play a condition elementalist build and post wonderful videos about it, fankitteningtastic for you Ash. But please stop pretending to be the king of the condition ele, because you have succeeded in kittening me off by continually saying my advice is bad when you never understood my original post.

Been there, done that. There’s a quote about this situation I’ve seen somewhere…

Luimes.4281:

I begger to differ on the might output. You can keep perma might uptime without running battle sigil. Combined with sigil of battle you will have 6-8 stacks of might stable through fights.

And you might stay above 90% health if there is a 40 man melee train to guard you. But im speaking in terms of more organized guild raids. I think ferocity indeed is nice but I have my doubts on maintaining that DMG modifier

If you’re playing glass ele, you’re either dead or full hp. I know that’s a big hyperbole, and you probably won’t play full glass, but my point is the same. Generally when you’re not full hp, you won’t be doing damage either. DPS ele is all about freecasting and positioning. When you’re not freecasting at full hp minus retaliation damage, you’ll be running away from a thief or repositioning depending on what your and their melee ball is doing, scholar bonus isn’t active, but you’re not doing damage either.

Strength is nice for the 100 percent reliable modifier, but I feel like the added impact damage you get from scholar is more meaningful. That first cast to obliterate a choke will do a lot more damage with scholars. In sustained fights strength will catch up due to superior uptime and extra might stacks from battle, but I value a strong initial punishing over the long-term dps. Fights are often won due to the element of surprise from a staff ele’s opening.

That’s my opinion anyway. Strength runes will also work great of course.

Scholar all the way. You don’t put out enough might to warrant runes of strength. On top of that you’ll be above 90 percent a lot of the time as a dps staff elementalist (channel er to counter retal damage when showering).

The gamebreaker however is that ferocity is fenomenal for boosting your damage when meteornado’ing. You get a huge boost to power and precision in tornado, so both of them hit diminishing returns quite substantially. Ferocity is therefore a very important stat for dps staff, given how important the shower tornado combo is.

I’d say energy or air. Personally using air at the moment, lightning whip melts people like never before.

Leeching is often overlooked. In duels that are very hit-and-run (think S/D thief and mesmer) it provides a very substantial boost to both healing and damage. On crit sigils are often wasted since elementalists typically spend a lot of time disengaging to regenerate, to channel ether renewal or just to run away from a zerg or an outnumbered fight. Your sigil of leeching however doesn’t go to waste, and gives you a strong re-engage. A 975 heal and armor ignoring damage every 9 seconds(goes through endure pain and everything) is very strong.

I really don’t like intelligence on ele. The stacks get burned on random stuff in combat far too often since attunement swap doesnt cancel animations(fire trail for example).

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

Came back to this topic and I see people saying:
– forget about bunker –
- go 0/2/0/6/6
– go hybrid/dps

etc. etc.
I just want to again point out that the elementalist bunker is one of the best bunkers in tpvp. Yesterday I played 5 matches and won nearly every single 1v1 and stalemated nearly every 1v2 and near the end I even did a 1v3 for 5 minutes. Because I kept three of them busy and we had capped the other two points we got back from 470-200 to 500-497. The only reason we lost is because two of the players I was fighting gave up beating me and ran off to different points in the end I beat the third one that decided to stay.
Is this possible with D/D? nope. Plus the Dagger main-hand and the Focus off-hand in fire can still boost your damage alot through might stacking. The no. 4 on focus is one of the longest lasting fire fields and you can probably use every single one of your blast finishers in it during its duration for about 12 stacks of might + an extra flame aura for approximately 5 more stacks of might. Fury you get by atunement swapping.
I have learned that of all the bunkers out there the elementalist does the most damage (mostly due to it being aoe) You can pressure multiple opponents easily and thanks to the focus off-hand and our cantrip utilities we’re able to stay alive for a looooong time.

That’s very cool and all, but this man is just trying to get into PvP and learn the ropes with D/D. This is not the kind of person you would give some revolutionary D/F bunker build. D/D ele is all over the top of the leaderboards so I’d rather give him something solid to begin with.

If you want to advertise your build, make a thread, and advertise it to people who could put it to use. Don’t force it on beginners. D/F is way harder than D/D

A few short tips:

- grab arcane shield and lightning flash. Playing glass S/F without both of these is suicide

- Try to be very mindful of your positioning. Keep your distance and get on top of elevated positions so people can’t just run up to you

- Spec really heavily into damage. The build you describe is fine if you find you have might up at all times. Consider scholar runes to increase your free casting damage massively. 66002 is another option with a lot more duelling potential. I personally prefer it because of the burst condi cleanse from 4 into fire. Air + fire sigils is pretty much a given. Battle is okay but not great (even with strength runes, fights don’t generally last long enough to make good use of this sigil)

- You cannot run from a thief with S/F, but you can blow him up. Thief damage is nothing compared to what you can produce. Try to see the thief coming, and don’t panic if he jumps on you. Pop a cooldown and put as much damage in him as you can.

- I’d advise against ether renewal in most matches. People can easily negate the heal by hitting you once or twice. Both other heals work better in my opinion

- Auto-targeting on.

- Lots of exercise. Glass S/F is harder than D/D

Positioning is the most important one. For example on graveyard, dont stand on the point, but hop around the tombstones. Run in to blow someone up, get back out.

Darox.8069:

I am going to insist that the role of D/D is support. This is very important for the playstyle.

How would you define support? Pretty much what I said no? Find the skirmishes and try to outnumber.

I would advise 02066 over 00266. Has a little more damage. Not a big deal though.

On the topic of the srole you should be playing: you’re mostly a roaming hybrid dps/bunker. I know that sounds silly, but it’s true. You help where you are needed and use your decent mobility to have as much impact around the map as you can.

Don’t play D/D ele as a bunker! You’ll have a bad time, especially with celestial ammy and strength runes. Look for the skirmishes. 2v2s and 2v1s are your specialty. Help your home-point if he needs the help, assault the far point if it’s open. As you have already felt, big mid-fights are not a D/D’s specialty either.

Also, D/D elementalist is perfectly viable, and the only set that’s really played at high level. You don’t need to go D/F, and in fact I’d advise against it since it has a steeper learning curve.

I’m tempted, but I’m not going to get into this argument over your playstyle.

About diamond skin though, I’d much rather have an interesting fight with a condi spec, than just winning because i happen to run DS. I duelled a condi necro in the obsidian sanctum last week. Gold raider, NR, top 100 solo queue and all that jazz. Duelled him over 100 times out of which he won roughly 70 percent. Awesome, very interesting fights overall. Then I slotted diamond skin, went with a triple conjures kittened build with half my trait points unspent and lava-axed the guy to death. Sad.

I’m with fluffkin here. Not dodging in a 9 minute video is straight up absurd. How could you possibly defend that… I’m not going to get in this lengthy argument, but come on. Dodge is the core mechanic of this game’s combat. If you REALLY didn’t need to dodge at all in these fights, it’s no use uploading them either… Might as well upload some golem kills.

I further agree that you spam your skills a LOT. You spam lightning whip for no reason (no damage), pop arcane shied for no reason, use your water heals at max hp, use your cc for no reason by not effectively utilizing the time your enemy is controlled and so on. You autoattacked in earth maybe twice in the entire video, which is your only source of sustained condi damage.

I used to not mind the design of diamond skin so much, but watching this video is starting to sway me. It absolutely destroys what could be a deep combat system in every condi duel. You seriously might as well upload some PvGolem.

JETWING.2759:

Frost Bow: Water > #5 > Lightning flash > #4 > Air
This kill every light armor, 90% of mid armor and most heavi armor. Ignores stun break.

S/D: attune from water to fire > signet earth > #2 > #3 > #5 > Lightning flash > attune to air > #2.
obs: after attune to air, auto attack will start, increasing the amount of dmg.

S/D: attune from water to air > #4 > #5 > attune to fire > #2 > #3 > #4 > attune to earth > #1 > #2 (hurl) > lightning flash.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJArIhMMKZW9wzhAIAh0sRbE3IQhiTPC-T5QBwA02fgcZAAPAAA

Both these bursts are well over 2 seconds, which is not what OP is looking for

BTW piercing shards doesnt work with lingering attunements

That combo will blow fgs trail right out of the water. People exaggerate its damage massively. In the 4 or so total seconds the trail lasts it does unrivalled damage, but you have to be terribly slow to actually die from it, even when ressing someone.

And yes I do believe that would be the highest near-instant burst. If the window were closer to 1 second, the combo would be something like cast dragon’s tooth and phoenix at range, lightning flash for the fire grab (all 3 fire spells will hit near enough simultaneously) and then proceed with the instant air and arcane burst. This loses the 20 percent tempest defense modifier, but has a lot more hard-hitting spells in its rotation. You can test the combo yourself, see if it is up to your standards time wise.

It’s a lot of hits, so assuming they’ll all crit would be a long shot. If you want to make that assumption, I believe 26520 would win yeah.

Do note there’s no bleeding in this setup, so the bleeding modifier won’t work.

I’m 80 percent certain that instant burst would beat anything a thief could produce. Even with a pre-casted cluster bomb within the burst window.

Half a second is a tiny window Can you even CnD backstab in that frame?

Anyways, I’ll roll with it. The max burst attainable in a PvP setting would (probably) be this setup:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJArYhUMaZWywzBdUBKABp+QBjOFnlEVB-TJRBwAX3fYzDAgcZAAnAAA

Now you can get all sorts of silly with weaponswaps to stack up to 25 might, but let’s not mind that.

Rotation is:

- dragon’s tooth, phoenix and churning earth in ring of fire for 9 might, glyph heal or arcane brilliance for another 3.
- pre-cast earthquake and start hurl
- Lightning flash as the first projectile from hurl hits (another 3 might from spell slinger)
- Attune to air, air 2, hydromancy proc, pop both arcanes and ride the lightning in melee range.

The last bulletpoint (the biggest chunk of damage) will benefit from:
-Scholar runes, vital striking, stone splinters, tempest defense, force sigil, 15 might, fury and bolt to the heart for the last few hits.

Obviously this is completely ridiculous and not applicable to pvp at all

Combos are drastically different if the window gets bigger. For example the stuff you could fit in your earthquake is at least double this.