Guild Wars 2

I think the posts who disagree with this are basically saying, “I WANT ranged to do 75% less damage in group situations than melee”.

Ranged being significantly worse, fine, but the current situation is making about 50% of the weapons in the game completely non-viable when they could be decent.

I’m not trying to suggest something that will have any effect on min/max groups.

This is a change that would make casual players who choose the weapon they want for fun not be a complete failure for their teams. All the Rifle Warriors, LB rangers, etc.

Dolan.3071:

Don’t be such a girl, you want the boons get in there and earn them, get in there and melee you coward.

I melee on all 5 of my classes. =)

That is sorta the problem. A lot of the games potential PVE variety is thrown away because of boons.

Moreover, it just feels off to me— lots of people prefer ranged, and I kinda prefer not to be stacked with 4 other people in melee range.

In sPvP and WvW, the way boons work makes PERFECT sense and to me, feels like a very fair balance of risk/reward.

In PVE, it just feels like some builds/weapons are punished.

I’ve just been inviting an offline friend to my group, it lets me call target with the invite prompt open.

But yeah, definitely.

Linguistically Inept.6583:

Hamartia.3421:

The group is 3 Warriors, 1 ele, 1 Longbow ranger.

thares the problem; why cant the ranger switch to the superior melee option? thats like having a guard who only uses scepter; its stupid

- your pet will be getting buffs anyway (unless you’re using a ranged pet as well? in which case… you’re playing really really wrong)
- you could rapid fire and walk into buff range when you see the ele pop ring of fire

I think I addressed that in the original post.

But to re-iterate: this suggestion wouldn’t make longbow as good as melee. It would still do much less damage… as would Guardian scepter.

It would just make them somewhat more viable, which is Anet’s stated goal.

Of course there are things one can do to mitigate the situation so that you are getting some of the boons, but it will never be as good and this game has really been moving towards a, what I believe to be unintended meta where everything is basically stacking with no ranged.

This is going to sound like a big change, but I really think that if Anet changed this, it would be hard to imagine it being any other way.

In order to increase the viability of diverse builds for every single class in the game, and to de-emphasize the requirement that we play only melee and close ranged builds…

Anet should remove boon range in Dungeons only. All 5 party members will receive all boons as if they are in melee range. Alternatively, they could just make the range HUGE for dungeon content.

New boon appears on your characters in a dungeon: Harmonized. Allies receive boons regardless of range.

Why?

I’ll use Rangers as an example. (Although this applies to some degree to Staff Eles, Greatsword Mesmers, Scepter Guardians, LB/rifle warriors, etc) Anet buffed Longbow last patch, so I assume they want players to be using it.

Let’s assume rangers and GS/axe+mace warriors do identical damage. That is obviously not the case.

The group is 3 Warriors, 1 ele, 1 Longbow ranger.

The ranger is pewpewing away.

The warriors are using FGJ. The Elementalist is using Scepter/dagger and stacking might.

And the Ranger is getting none of those buffs because they are standing at 1000+ range, as the game requires them to in order to do maximum damage.

Assuming 2500 power, the ranger is losing out on 35% damage from Might, and 10-20% damage from fury.

A Longbow that does identical damage to Warriors actually does 45-55% less damage in a group situation.

As long as boons remain location-based, ranged weapons like the Longbow can never be viable, and all players are forced to remain in melee range.

Some players are going to say: Ranged is easier, it should be less damage. Well, it already is, by a ton. Ranger sword does 26% more damage than Longbow, everything else being equal.

Boons would just make more ranged weapons and more builds viable; it wouldn’t necessarily make them equal.

Suggestions Forum Thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Revamp-Boon-Range-for-DUNGEONS/first#post2318135

Reddit Thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1hc19f/suggestion_revamp_boon_range_for_dungeon_content/

This is going to sound like a big change, but I really think that if Anet changed this, it would be hard to imagine it being any other way.

In order to increase the viability of diverse builds for every single class in the game, and to de-emphasize the requirement that classes play melee and close ranged builds…

Anet should remove boon range in Dungeons only. All 5 party members will receive all boons as if they are in melee range. Alternatively, they could just make the range huge for dungeon content.

Why?

I’ll use Rangers as an example. Anet buffed Longbow last patch, so I assume they want players to be using it.

Let’s assume rangers and GS/axe+mace warriors do identical damage. That is obviously not the case.

The group is 3 Warriors, 1 ele, 1 Longbow ranger.

The ranger is pewpewing away.

The warriors are using FGJ. The Elementalist is using Scepter/dagger and stacking might.

And the Ranger is getting none of those buffs.

Assuming 2500 power, the ranger is losing out on 35% damage from Might, and 10-20% damage from fury.

A Longbow that does identical damage to Warriors actually does 45-55% less damage.

As long as boons remain location-based, ranged weapons like the Longbow can never be viable, and all players are forced to remain in melee range.

Some players are going to say: Ranged is easier, it should be less damage. Well, it already is, by a ton. Ranger sword does 26% more damage than Longbow, everything else being equal.

Boons would just make more ranged weapons and more builds viable; it wouldn’t necessarily make them equal.

Dungeons Forum Thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Revamp-Boon-Range-for-DUNGEONS/first#post2318138

Reddit Thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1hc19f/suggestion_revamp_boon_range_for_dungeon_content/

XcmGT.3847:

So I have been trying this build out with the hammer and I have to be honest it feels clunky. Might stacks are an issue without boon duration/might duration, my stacks drop fairly fast by the time I finish the first hammer. In addition, I prefer to be at range instead of right up on the mob especially since we are light armor. I really enjoyed fresh air because of the mobility it gave as well as the damage while kiting. This also enabled you to DPS if you had to swap to heal and needed to wait for fire to get back from CD…

You have 20 seconds on the might stacks and 25 seconds if your full down the arcane line (this is all w/o boon duration runes). Even if might gets refreshed while you have the hammer it won’t be near 15-25 stacks since the duration of the boon is independent from reapplications of it.

If anyone has the math I would like to see how long the might stacks would be with full boon duration as opposed to scholar runes.

You’re absolutely right on all counts. I updated the other versions of this thread to point out that I lost some might-stacking— this version gets less attention so I haven’t updated it yet.

With full boon duration runes, it appears I was able to MOSTLY maintain 25 might stacks throughout lightning hammer rotations. On swapping to Scholar runes I found it much harder to maintain might.

So basically, compared to older versions of this build, this build is better with better groups where other people are doing their job and bringing some might.

The old version with 30 arcane, 2x might duration runes, evasive arcana/elemental attunement… that can solo maintain 25 might very easily. But as soon as you get into a more organized group, you’re throwing away a TON of potential damage that Lightning Hammer brings. Fully buffed, it does maybe 75% more damage than S/D.

Most groups that run Lightning Hammer bring a Guardian to lay down Purging Flames, which allows the LH to stack 6 more might per use.

Jabberwock.9014:

If your teammates don’t stack full vulnerability I would rather do 30/30/0/10/0. For grandmaster air trait take air training and use lightning hammer in air attunement. You get vulnerability stacking, +10% damage in air, +10% crit damage (almost as good as +10% damage with high crit) and 100 precision for even better crit rate. You’ll be doing more damage when not using lightning hammer and almost the same damage when you are.

Hm, taking a moment to think about it… I’d have to look at the math, but I think you’re right, if only because the points in water do nothing when outside of water attunement. Thanks for the suggestion!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Hamartia-s-S-D-Might-Fury-DPS-June-25th/first#post2309790

Update there in case anyone stumbles upon this older thread.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Hamartia-s-S-D-Might-Fury-DPS-June-25th/first#post2309790

Other Scepter Notes:

-Rock Barrier provides 250 Toughness. Using it as a damaging move provides 5 projectile finishers—great for extra burning, regen, or condition removal in a light field.

-Frost Aura, Lightning Strike, and Blinding Flash can be cast off the GCD while another move is channeling. This also applies to Arcane Wave, Shield, Blast, and Power.

-Phoenix provides vigor and condition removal.

On Elementals:

A much more viable choice after recent buffs.

Fire Elemental does the best damage, and great AoE. However, it only has 9300 health.

Air elemental has 14,500 health, deals less damage, and does no AoE, but it attacks from range and provides swiftness—the better choice for heavy AoE fights where Fire elemental will get downed. The damage difference between air and Fire is not that huge in single-target situations, and it will stay alive far more often.

Ice and Earth both have 21300 health and attack in melee. Earth Elemental does less damage than Fire and Ice, but is very hard to kill and provides a small amount of AoE Protection. Great choice if party starts wiping and your heavies start going down and you need a quick tank.

Ice Elemental does meh damage, but chills enemies and, on a 25 second cooldown, can cast cleansing wave for a 6570 heal.

On Condition Damage

This build provides:

1.) 100% burning uptime on pretty much an unlimited amount of targets.

2.) 33% uptime on 8 bleeds from Churning Earth, AOE. (1 more bleed for 20 seconds added if you use evasive Arcana.)

Using the balanced gearing option and self-buffed 25 might:

The fire damage is worth 631 damage per second, and the Churning Earth is worth 91×8, to 728, for the time its up. That averages out to 212 bleed damage per second— higher on fights with lower uptime on boss that allows your Churning Earth time to reset.

That means an average of 873 damage per second is occurring from conditions with this build. Sadly, I’m not sure investing in Celestial accessories or Divinity Runes is worth it simply because condition damage doesn’t scale very well with the condition damage stat (although fire damage scales pretty well). However, more testing is necessary— this build benefits more from Celestial than any that I know of. I’m interested in trying full zerker, celestial trinkets, divinity runes for an efficient survivability option or full zerker + divinity runes.

100 condition damage adds +25 damage per second to burning, and +5 damage per second to each bleed, so +13 damage per second to bleeds per 100 condition damage with this build (8 × 5 divided by 3).

100 condition damage will net you +38 damage per second. So, when considering Celestial trinkets or runes, count the DPS effect of the condition damage accordingly to see if its worth it for you.

Thanks for Reading/Critique away please!

GW2Guru Thread:

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/83561-hamartias-sd-elementalist-build-dps-might-stacking/

Reddit Thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1h96vf/hamartias_sd_elementalist_build_june_25th_update/

Rotation Without Lightning Hammer:

Rotation video with 30 Arcane, no hammer (update pending):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qdmUz_WE7g&feature=youtu.be

Maybe you hate Lightning Hammer. That is all right with me!

This version does a bit less damage, but allows you to pick up your choice of Arcane traits and opens up one of your utilities for Arcane Shield.

The gist of this is to pop all of your combo finishers inside of Ring of Fire (fire 4) to stack AOE might and some additional burning.

Swap to Fire and before reaching target, use 2, Dragon’s Tooth. Use 4 to throw down your fire field under Dragon’s Tooth and at your target. Use Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave. Use Fire 3 inside of your fire field. Use Fire 5 from melee range, use Fire 2 again.

Swap to Earth. Use 4. (Use Arcane Shield if its your utility choice) Begin cast 5, swap to air, 3, 2. Churning Earth finishes casting. Stay in air until you can use RTL.

Swap to water, spam 1 for a few seconds, back to fire.

Mostly stay in Fire until your Earth cooldowns are available and then repeat. Use Arcane Blast and Wave on Cooldown unless you need them available to stack more might, in which case wait until you can pop them in a fire field.

If you are able to run with Arcane Power, you want to pop it before Fire Grab (Fire 5) so that it crits Fire Grab, Fire 2, Earth 4, Earth 5, Air 2.

During “downtime”— when all but your fire moves are on cool down, feel free to use Earth 2, and water heals and evasive arcana for a minimal DPS loss. Whenever a long cast is going, swap to air for 3 and 2, which are off the GCD.

Possible Tweaks, no Lightning Hammer

30/25/0/15/0

Adds 8 stacks of vulnerability and heals when swapping to water. If group isn’t at 25 vulnerability, this is best non-LH damage.

30/20/0/0/20

Sacrifices 10% damage in order to grab a second arcane trait. Once you add Elemental Attunement, you can consider adding boon duration runes instead of scholar runes.

30/0/0/10/30

Maximum support with Evasive Arcana, Elemental Attunement with Perma vigor, and shorter attunement cooldowns.

Alternative Gearing Options

Standard is nearly full berserker; PVT in 3 slots to make it easier to spend a lot of time in close range and get off your churning Earths. Perhaps a better player than me could pull off full zerker. Theoretically, chest or legs with knight armor, rest zerker might be an even better balance than PVT in 3 slots. I like some vitality on Eles due to powerful heals and to reduce chance of taking aggro.

Balanced Gearing Options

Zerker hands, feet, shoulders, weapons. PVT helm, legs, chest. Celestial trinkets.
I’ve tried this one out personally and it feels infinitely survivable with great damage.
Why Celestial? Scepter benefits from the condition damage, time spent in melee range will make your 3, 5, and dodge heals a bit more in demand.

Obviously lower damage than going pure Zerker, but this feels like a balance that I am happy with in casual play.

Leveling Build

This also happens to be the most fun and powerful leveling build I’ve tried across several classes. You can change the order you grab the talents to suit your own needs. I usually just ran with 3 signet to be lazier—air for movement speed, earth for toughness, fire for critical chance. Swap in the level 80 utilities for fun, practice, or when they start to feel effective. Arcane Blast/Wave and Signet of Air is probably a healthy balance. This follows the same rotation as the level 80 build.

Level 10—Start investing in points to get 10 Arcane.

Level 20—10 Arcane for Elemental Attunement—the burst of protection before casting churning Earth helps a lot along with the CD reduction on attunement swap.

Level 30—10 fire for 10% damage in fire and the Power stats.

Level 40—20 Fire for Cooldown Reduction, 10 Arcane.

Level 50—10 Water.

Level 60—30 Fire for Persisting Flames, 10 Arcane, 10 Water.

Level 70—30 Fire, 20 Arcane, 10 Water.

Level 80—30 fire, 30 Arcane, 10 Water.

Hamartia’s S/D Elementalist Build, June 25th update

June 25th buffed this build by an insane amount.

In the interest of streamlining things, I am only going to recommend the two most optimal versions of this build. The most recent patch has opened up a TON of options which I will discuss further down in the post.

Build website is not updated to show that Arcane Lightning grants 10% critical damage, now stacks with banner of discipline.

Credit to JNeko for pointing out to me the synergy between this build and Lightning Hammer. Thanks!

With Lightning Hammer, best damage: 30/20/0/20/0

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEEQJArYlw1iMWZQABOyAARBKpEecADFIUYBEA-jAyAYLhQCCIZJIJPl1sngYxtIas6aMlLRUNA-e

Without Lightning Hammer: 30/20/0/10/10

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEEQJArYlw1iMWZwzAOCBApAKhHEwQBCFWARpQMA-jAyAYLhQCCIZJIJPl1sngYxtIas6aMlLRUN

What This Build Brings:

25 stacks of might, roughly 35% damage boost to party.

100% fury uptime, 10-20% DPS boost to party.

Great damage, great AoE.

Lightning hammer.

Rotation With Lightning Hammer:

Take a deep breath.

The gist of this is to pop all of your combo finishers inside of Ring of Fire (fire 4) to stack AOE might and some additional burning.

Start in fire, use 2, Dragon’s Tooth. Use 4 to throw down your fire field under Dragon’s Tooth and at your target. Use Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave. Use Fire 3 inside of your fire field. Use Fire 5 from melee range, use Fire 2 again.

Swap to Earth. Use 4. Begin cast 5, swap to air, 3, 2. When Churning Earth finishes casting, use RTL, and then use air 2 again. Stay in air until fire cool down resets.

Back to fire. 2, 4, 3 (should be at 25 might)—

Create Lightning Hammer, swap to water. Spam Lightning Hammer 1, 3rd attack in chain is a blast finisher that stacks some additional might/fury. Always stay in water attunement when using lightning hammer for 20% additional damage.

Then basically repeat this loop as best as you can, depending on how your cool downs line up. The ideal scenario is this: you have used Scepter to buff your group with 25 might and 100% fury uptime—and then you’re using the Lightning Hammer as much as possible for maximum damage.

I think S/D or lightning hammer is the obvious choice for PVE.

Staff for WvW.

This is a very sensible suggestion.

Solo.9027:

I noticed you’re using arcane power along with the arcane attacks, if you place the last 10 points into arcane to get good uptime on it you can probably get away with just using valkyre and cavalier armor/trinkets. Along with 30 in air and maybe some berserker weapons you should be criting pretty regularly with 100+% crit damage and still have ~16k hp and ~1400 toughness with rock barrier.

I’m currently using the 30/30/0/0/10 full glass but am planning to try this next:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEUQJArYhEmibkR3gjEA0DoMUkBAiHW4AAVBA-jkyA4rASUAICgpviox2HKiGriBTfuoalLgRHwdwoVHFQEB-w

(the blank traits are fresh air and rock solid)

This looks awful to be quite honest with you. It throws away the best parts of S/D right now, which is 30 Fire for might and fury stacking, and gains nothing of value.

Ashanor.5319:

This is a pretty standard DPS Longbow Ranger build. I use something similar, minus the spirits. Only time I use the spirits is if I want to troll people from the roof in Khylo. Generally I find either increased range or Signet of the Beastmaster works best. When I troll in Khylo I knock people off when they try to come up.

Didn’t someone say there is a bug as of the patch that decreased damage with LB though?

Agreed that this is a pretty common/obvious build.

I just couldn’t find it posted anywhere (not saying that means it isn’t, just that it was hard to find), so I wanted to share it. I know that when I first hit 80 in an MMO I mostly just google builds and hopefully someone explains what buttons to hit and such. =)

Considering it comes up on google if you type “Ranger DPS build” or “Ranger Longbow build” i feel my work is done. =)

That’s also why I tried to explain options that involve abandoning the spirits, so that newer players can find this and start to learn how to make their own builds.

Baladir.2736:

XcmGT.3847:

I really like this build, however, you can get destroyed in dungeons if you miss a dodge or stay in too long. I preferred your other version you posted prior to this one, I had more options to heal with evasive arcana…I’m going to add in full PVT gear with Beserk Acc. to see if it off sets the issues I mentioned prior.

/signed. I changed my build and went into the new dungeon last night and really missed my healing. I don’t think anyone can evade those aoes from the cannons on the second boss for long no matter how well they dodge or how lucky they are.

I think this kind of build is more of a PvP kind of thing.

Nope this is intended for PVE. Just gotta stack more survival if you’re having issues.

My ele is currently zerker, PVT head, legs, celestial trinkets and survival feels great (although my gear is non-optimal for anything).

Prior to June 25th patch, Arcane Blast was NOT a blast finisher. It was only a projectile finisher.

It appears the patch made it a blast finisher by accident, and they have since fixed it.

XcmGT.3847:

Rhialto.8423:

Does the lack of boon duration from Arcane have a noticeable difference? I see you’re running scholar runes in your build.

I noticed it somewhat, however, in many groups I have been in a lot of people are using blast finishers in my fire fields so I get 25 stacks in no time. I do notice that I hit a lot harder running scholar than water, monk, and fire. The key for me is to find the right ratio of PVT and Beserk for high end PVE/survivability.

This.

I never aimed to create a build that hits 25 stacks of might solo, as thats overkill. Every group I’ve ever run with has at least 3-4 stacks of might, so I really only wanted to bring around 18-20 stacks of might. 25 might just kinda happened =) That being said, in practice, with people running around, being able to constantly apply might over 25 stacks DOES help your group actually maintain 25 stacks in practice.

I don’t think 30/30/0/0/10 can actually hit 25 might solo without boon duration. Without boon duration apart from Arcane, I previously needed the earth dodge roll to maintain 25 stacks of might.

I wouldn’t be surprised if 30/30/0/0/10 with scholar runes can only really maintain about 18 stacks of might in practice. However, I think this is a reasonable amount where any half decent group can make up the rest of the difference.

In a group where, for some reason, NO one else is providing might, the other build with boon duration will be a better choice.

I was tempted to try 2 runes of fire for 20% might duration, and then 4x ruby orbs/divinity runes, but I’m pretty sure scholar is solidly the best use.

The 20% might duration will help a lot more with 30/30 than it did with the old build, so this might be a smart, cheaper choice.

How to Play

When you reach the location you will spend most of the fight (minimum possible distance away to reach 1000+ range), spawn your Spirit(s). it is important to pick a good spot so they benefit from your healing spring.

Use Sword/Warhorn off-set to provide 15s fury/might/swiftness to your party every 35 seconds. Use Warhorn 4 as you’re running away before swapping to LB.

With Longbow, always use 3 as your first priority unless the target is sitting at 25 stacks of vulnerability. Longbow 5 is your highest damager in AOE situations or if you know the target will stand in it for its full duration.

Only use longbow 4 as a Projectile Finisher unless you take aggro and need survival. It is a major annoyance to melee damagers.

Longbow 2 is your best damager if not at max range, and in some gear, appears to be best damager overall due to the faster cast speed. If not at max range, use LB 3 on cooldown as it beats LB 1. If you aren’t sure if you’re at max range, use the priority of 5, 3, 2, 1. If you are sure you are at max range, use 3 (if need vuln), 1.

Longbow 1, at max range, will hit pretty hard and do a majority of your damage.

When you notice the group around the boss taking lots of damage, run in and give them a healing spring to keep them up, especially since it will provide a lot of heals via whirling, blast, and projectile finishers. Remember that you can use any of your projectile finishers to give yourself tons of regen while standing in the water field.

Swap to Spirit of Nature elite when your group needs it. The +100% health, and you staying near it with healing spring will actually make it a VERY powerful healer.

Please note all of your projectile finishers you have available to grant yourself a huge amount of extra healing when they are used in healing spring.

When you find yourself in need of stamina, swap to Axe for sigil of energy useage.

Remember that with Piercing, ALL of your moves are AOE with proper positioning.

Pets:

Are they going to have trouble staying alive? Spider/devourer because they are ranged.

Are they not? Cats for boss, Drakes for AoE. Specifically I mean Jaguar for max damage (crits when stealthed), and Jungle Stalkers for 5 stacks of might to party for 11 seconds every 30 seconds.

Does your melee group need help and someone to do some of the tanking? Bears. This helps in groups without many heavies.

Reef Drake feels sturdy and does nice AoE. If you really have trouble with pet survival, brown bear and reef drake make a nice combination.

Gear:

Full zerker and scholar runes helps a lot with damage. Optionally swap legs, helm, legs, chest to PVT or Knights for extra survival, in that order, swapping as few pieces as possible.

Ranger moves have poor scaling, so Sigil of Fire benefits them a bit more than other classes.

You can bring an alternate Longbow with Bloodlust to get 25 stacks, then switch to the one with Fire Sigil.

Tweaks:

I think this is optimal, or I wouldn’t be recommending it. However, if you hate spirits, you can add 5 points to marksmanship to give pets the ability to heal on critical hits, and then put 10 in beastmastery to boost their healing power. This allows for much tankier Jaguars.

You can alterantatively gain like 100 power by swapping Vigorous Spirits for vitality—> power, if you dont need the 100% bonus health to keep them alive. In general, only the 30/25 part is important.

I hate Spirits!!

You can move around everything other than 30/25 and swap your utilities out. They are not essential to this build, although I do believe they are the best use of the talent points and utility slots.

So are Rangers still underpowered?

I quite like this build. I don’t feel that in the average PUG, this build is anything but a very nice boost and great use of a party spot. 42% uptime on fury is huge. Vulnerability and spirits are very nice, and healing spring is insane on stacking fights. In a min/max Guard/War/Mesmer group? You aren’t going to be bringing much of value, sadly, that they don’t bring already. This is a balance issue on Anet’s end.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/83536-ranger-longbowspirits-dps-build/

What the June 25th patch has wrought:

Significant buffs to this build. Longbow damage is significantly buffed and spirits are now significantly better for exactly the same trait point investments. Frost Spirit is now worth 7.5% damage to party rather than 3.5%.

Hey all,

I’m posting this because I noticed there are way too few guides to help Rangers out. I think that this build is pretty much the best rangers are capable of, and I’m happy with the results.

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQJAzXjEVR2dVWVsWCg1j9CsvuAOjDZ0VoUA-jwxAYrATWAoPwJvioxWcLiGruGT5SEVDA-e

How is the damage?

High. Not Warrior high, but high. 5% more longbow damage, 10% damage when above 90% health, 10% damage when endurance is full, 10% damage when flanking… these add up. And at max range, you can maintain all of these boosts very easily.

LB 1 can hit for 3.5k, about on par with warriors 1 move. When you can keep cats alive, that’s a pet hitting for 800 and critting for like 1.5k.

Sword 1 move hits for 26% more damage than LB 1 move. So when you can melee, melee.

If you are uncomfortable meleeing altogether, swap to axe for a hefty DPS loss.

Utility provides by this build:

Frost spirit, always. For a traited 7.5% increase to damage for party. Before people cry, with the recent 60% health buff, and if you keep them near you and use healing spring to keep them up, Spirits will almost never die until they are off cooldown.

Stone spirit when needed (No Guardian), for decent protection uptime for party.

If your group does not have either 2 Guardians, or 1 elementalist, add Sun Spirit to give your group burning damage. Especially consider using sun spirit if you have a heavy condition damager. A condition necro or condition thief will suddenly gain access to burning, boosted by their own condition damage and condition duration. This can massively buff the condition damagers in your group.

10 stacks of vulnerability on target from LB3, the equivalent of Warrior’s “On My Mark” but on a shorter cooldown. 10% damage to target. Very few pugs hit 25 stacks of vulnerability on boss’s, so this is a huge boost.

5 stacks of might for 11 seconds every thirty seconds, using Jungle Stalker.

Healing Spring, one of the best heals in the game. Be sure to drop it near boss or wherever allies need health. Plenty of Regen via using combos inside of healing spring.

15s of fury/might/swiftness every 35 seconds from Warhorn 5. 42% uptime.

XcmGT.3847:

Just curious on whether you changed up the rotation? I found myself in air a lot more using the instacasts because of fresh air procs. I also was playing around with Arcane Lightning and I really enjoyed it, since I’m running two arcane skills to begin with.

I definitely think Arcane Lightning is the right choice for this build and will update future threads accordingly!

And yeah, I haven’t had much time to play, but I’ve been starting in air, unloading all my air moves, go to fire, pop all my combo finishers, swap to air 2,3, swap to Earth, 4, 5, back to air, 3,2, water, 4, back to air if I can for 3,2, then back to fire.

Basically, just sneak air into every chance you can since swapping to air does solid damage, and air 2 does very solid damage.

XcmGT.3847:

I really like this build, however, you can get destroyed in dungeons if you miss a dodge or stay in too long. I preferred your other version you posted prior to this one, I had more options to heal with evasive arcana…I’m going to add in full PVT gear with Beserk Acc. to see if it off sets the issues I mentioned prior.

To be honest, the Arcane version felt more fun to me as well, and I need to do more testing before I’m confident this one is significantly better.

Sadly, I think in most groups the 8 stacks of vulnerability this build provides ensures that it will be better, since almost every group I run with on my Ele is short of 25 stacks of vulnerability—- 8% damage to group with no room for error is pretty nice.

I will probably be swapping the air trait to the one that provides 10% crit damage on arcane use, and not focus on spending much time in air.

I will miss all the things Arcane was able to provide. =(

Zenith.7301:

Or, you can stop being bad and play Lightning Hammer in PvE, which does far, far, far, far more damage than any ele mainhand weapons.

Scepter does horrible sustained damage. Don’t be fooled by the dragontooth/phoenix numbers.

Warrior/Guardians can stack might just fine and give group fury.

My Elementalist is my PUG class. Otherwise, I have a kittening zerker warrior and Guardian for min/maxed groups.

In the average PUG, providing 35% DPS through 25 stacks of might, and10-20% DPS through 100 fury uptime is more valuable than sitting there and spamming 1 as a glass cannon.

DJSkittles.7196:

Im sorry, but I dont understand how your getting the 100% Fury up time without Zephyrs Boon or Fresh Air. Please enlighten me so I too can create a new build.

Every blast finisher you do inside a fire field with persisting flames gives 10 seconds of fury AOE. You have 8 blast finishers, so 80 seconds of fury right off.

Smooth Marc.8743:

S/D is the worst weapon choice you can make for pve.

The biggest problem with scepter is the auto attacks in every attunment are inferior to dagger and staff auto attacks.

For example with my current gear trait set up which is full berserker gear with scholar runes and using 30/10/0/20/10.

as dagger/x

Dragon claw is 6191dps
Vapor blade is 3850 dps
Lightning whip is 6699 dps
Implae is 3381 dps

vs scepter

flame strike is 1833 dps
ice shards is 3132
arc lightning is 2633 dps
stone shards is 2244 dps

vs staff

fire ball 3676 dps
water blast 1418 dps
chain lightning 2960 dps
stoning 2121 dps

Dagger mainhands worst auto attack is better than scepters best auto attack.As staff you’re better off sitting in fire and spamming fire ball > lava font only leaving every 20-30 seconds so you can stack fury.

This leads me to my next problem with using scepter in pve.

Only phoenix and dragons tooth do meaningful damage.The rest of the damage spells in other attunments all do worse damage than auto attacks.As s/d you’re casting two hard hitting skills, and then not doing meaningful damage for the next 16 seconds.

You’re better off playing dagger/focus or staff and stacking might to 9.

You do not press 1 when using Scepter. I even have autocast disabled so I never waste a second using one of the crappy auto attacks.

Hope you didn’t sit there and waste your time coming up with this.

Saitam.9340:

I agree with both of the above posters—but my real question is along the lines of analyzing the usefulness of celestial gear vs. berserkers, for taking down high-health targets and in WvW. Celestial only slightly decreases the power/prec/crit damage, while upping the condition damage and other defensive stats considerably. With the increased durations and the new grandmaster zeal trait adding power to condition damage, I feel like a more versatile build might be justified. In terms of 1v1 damage, the combination of power and constantly-reapplied burning damage and vulnerability might be more effective than direct damage.

Circle of Logic

+126 Power
+85 Precision
+9% Critical Damage

Syzergy:

+54 Power
+54 Precision
+54 Toughness
+54 Vitality
+7% Critical Damage
+54 Healing Power
+54 Condition Damage
+4% Magic Find

Winds.3087:

Is this fury… party-wide?

Same range as might, so 300 if im not mistaken.

Already been playing around with S/D via my build located here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1fuwpk/hamartias_sd_elementalist_dps_mightstacking_build/

Patch today significantly buffed that build by providing 100% fury uptime in an AOE area around blast finishers.

But this is a quick attempt to make something work with fresh air. Arcane didn’t provide anything TOO necessary previously.

So 300 precision and 30% crit damage is very much appreciated. Will have to see if I end up preferring 10% damage in air over 20% CD reduction— I’d like to get more RTLs for some AOE damage in air and mobility.

30/30/0/0/10

Grounded = fresh air
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEEQJArYlw1iMWZQzAOyAQ4BBMUg4hFNERpQOA-jAyAYLhQCCIZBI5psm9EELuFRjVXjpcJiqBA-e

If for some reason you don’t feel you need vigor, swap to 10 water for 10% more damage over 90% health.

I will probably end up swapping the air CD reduction for the 10% crit damage on arcane skill, since this build should provide 100% uptime on that which is a more than 5% damage increase across all attunemnts, assuming 50%+ crit chance.

Perks:
25 stacks of might, like the old S/D build.

100% fury uptime.

Some vulnerability stacking, not sure how much it will add up to fully buffed in a group, but it seems like around 8 stacks.

Refer here for rotation:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1fuwpk/hamartias_sd_elementalist_dps_mightstacking_build/

Rune of the Scholar or Ruby Orbs.

I personally always rune with Sigil of Fire.

It hits for 1.5 to 2k every ten seconds.

However, you dont have 100% uptime on bosses in most PVE content, which gives the cooldown time to reset.

It is not necessarily optimal, but I feel that in most situations it is a bigger asset (after bloodlust).

Bloodlust is worth about 10% damage fully stacked if you’re in mostly zerker gear, so I’m personally thinking about swapping back to straight 5% damage because the payout doesn’t seem worth how often it is not providing ANY significant boost.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/83561-hamartias-sd-elementalist-build-dps-might-stacking/

Posting mostly to see if anyone can debate the fact that S/d is now the obvious choice for Elementalist PVE.

Before this patch, this build did the most damage, but gave up on providing fury to group— it now provides 100% fury uptime in addition to might.

25 stacks of might and 100% fury uptime make Elementalist pretty much the strongest PUG class.

Assuming mostly zerker stats, 2500 power, 25 might is worth about 35% damage and fury is worth 10-20% damage.

Min maxed warrior/mesmer/guard groups already have 100% fury and 25 stacks of might— but any other group will benefit from these huge boosts.

Going to be investigating a 30/30 version later on.

Lightning hammer will outdps this build as an individual, assuming someone else is bringing the fury and might.

Good Eles run full zerker in PVE.

Worse Eles add some PVT or Knights for survivability

Terrible Eles stack healing power or go full PVT/Knights.

I will not be replying to people who go BUT ELE HAS GREAT HEALING SCALING because it doesn’t change anything. PVE is about damage.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Hamartia-s-S-D-Elementalist-DPS-Leveling/first#post2251981

Goes from providing zero percent fury uptime to party to providing 100% fury uptime to party.

So huge utility buff to my (obviously) favorite PVE DPS build.

Very happy to hear this is working for people, and thanks for the kind words!

The next patch is going to be awesome for this build.

If the leaked patch notes are correct, this build will now provide 100% fury uptime, making it, in my opinion, an obvious choice over standard d/d builds.

A 30/30 variant is also possible, given that Arcane is not actually THAT necessary for this build to work… I would certainly love the extra precision and crit damage.

30/30/0/0/10 to grab the vigor trait. Swapping between fire and Air when air procs.

Because sPvP. D/d is best for sPvP.

In PVE, staff and S/D are both great for their roles.

Fror.2163:

Well, to that I answer that my definition of better is “fun”. Doing 20 times the same thing? No way. I prefer to have a necro, a ranger and a thief in my party than any combination of warriors, guardians and mesmers, because it’s more fun. Simply going from the start of the dungeon to the end without having a different experience everytime is just plain boring.

I’m playing fractals for the fun and the challenge. If you want to remove the challenge by decreasing the skills needed, fine for you, but that’s not what I want. It’s not “better” in my view. So yes, the group you describe is indeed probably more time-efficient. But “better”?

To completely sort it out, in gaming “better” is a completely subjective word. So keep subjectivity out of the way and use accurate words. “Time-efficient” is the one you’re looking for here.

Hamartia.3421:

25 fury

By the way, fury doesn’t stack intensity, so writing “25 fury” doesn’t mean anything.

Okay, yeah. Obviously that was the BS answer you were going to give. Guess what? Most people measure fun by speed, ease, and level of success. That makes warrior-based groups more fun for most people— but most people don’t have access to the 3/8 classes that can get into min/maxed groups.

Since fun is completely, 100% subjective though, I didn’t think it was worth bringing up.

Can you admit that by the measures I provided, a warrior based team is superior?

25 fury was a mistake. I meant 100% fury uptime.

This is derailing the thread, however. This is meant to be about Fractals of the Mist. 100s of posts on PVE balance.

If this is a “Story Dungeon” like Canach’s Lair was a “Story dungeon”, someone from Anet had better say it before it comes out.

That was seriously the most disappointed I have been by this game, and I do not want to feel that again. I really, really want new PVE content and its not right to tease me by calling a one-off instance a dungeon.

Fror.2163:

Hamartia.3421:

Broadicea.8294:

Ratty.5176:

Running with a perfect team does not take skill. It just takes knowing when to do X. Running with a imperfect team of strangers takes far more.

But what makes a “perfect team” is everyone being skilled :psyduck:

Incorrect.

One necro, a thief, an elementalist, a ranger, and an engineer run Fractal of the Mist level 48.

They are running their highest DPS/best utility builds. Each player plays perfectly.

Another group runs 1 Guard, 3 war, 1 mesmer. The warriors are all half-assing it and not bothering to weaponswap to axe/mace to stack vulnerability. The mesmer is in PVT gear because they are bad. The Guardian doesn’t bother to hit Aegis when it would help most.

Which group does better? You have to be high out of your mind to think its the first group.

Define better. When you’ll have defined it, maybe I’ll answer, but your vision of better isn’t mine.

Perks of warrior focused groups: 3 war/1 guard/mesmer, or 2 guard/2 war/mesmer:

Speed. It is faster, and more gold per hour. Without a single downside.

Easiness. It takes significantly LESS skill to run a 2 war/2 guard/mesmer group than to run a mishmosh PUG group.

Access to all damage boons: 25 might, 25 fury, 100% fury uptime.

Agreed. This makes sense for items that are actually special, like the gemstore Doll.

But for Fractal rings that have an identical option with a different name?

Broadicea.8294:

Ratty.5176:

Running with a perfect team does not take skill. It just takes knowing when to do X. Running with a imperfect team of strangers takes far more.

But what makes a “perfect team” is everyone being skilled :psyduck:

Incorrect.

One necro, a thief, an elementalist, a ranger, and an engineer run Fractal of the Mist level 48.

They are running their highest DPS/best utility builds. Each player plays perfectly.

Another group runs 1 Guard, 3 war, 1 mesmer. The warriors are all half-assing it and not bothering to weaponswap to axe/mace to stack vulnerability. The mesmer is in PVT gear because they are bad. The Guardian doesn’t bother to hit Aegis when it would help most.

Which group does better? You have to be high out of your mind to think its the first group.

If the achievement asked me to do something interesting that took twice as long, I wouldn’t be complaining.

I’m happy to invest tons of time in Guild Wars 2 as long as it is fun. But it is ceasing to be fun.

It’s a good idea to buff them all to at least 1%.

I would also add that I think Anet should consider changing boon duration to have more positive effects.

For example, boon duration also increases the duration of Auras and “self-boons” like Elementalists Rock Barrier. Perhaps only by 50% of boon duration rather than 100%.

Addendum:

Maximum of 3 slots hidden.

This will allow people to be creative, without silly people running around naked in an attempt to obscure what class they play in WvW, etc.

Bright.9160:

Melfice.5091:

Warriors need a nerf and berserker gear also needs a big nerf

People don’t take me on their parties because my build and gear sucks. Please nerf their build and gear so mine doesn’t look so trash.

A lot of the people saying Warrior need a nerf are people who have a warrior.

I have a fully geared Zerker warrior. Whenever I want to play one of my other classes in a damage role, I know I am hindering my group by doing so.

This joke needs to end.

Warriors bring fury, might and vulnerability, the three most important boons for PVE.

They do far and away the highest damage, both single-target and AoE.

They synergize so well with themselves that you don’t need any other class to maximize damage. Every other MMO that has a “pure” DPS class like Warrior gives them disadvantages like low survival, or makes them lack essential buffs that must be provided by other classes.

They have the highest base survivability of any class, making it trivially easy to run full zerker.

Necro, Engie, Ranger need buffs— but all of the other classes are mostly balanced with one another. Except for Warrior, which is a significant PVE outlier that needs to be fixed.

This is not just Cof p1. This is Fractals and speed runs of every dungeon in the game.

If you don’t have a zerk warrior/Guardian/Mesmer, you have no idea how powerful Warrior-based groups can be. It feels like a chore to run any other group because it takes so much longer to kill bosses.

“Just make the fights more interesting/100 blades isn’t great in movement fights”

Whatever more difficult content Anet comes out with will still be optimal to run with Xboon class, Yreflect class, and 3 warriors. 3 warriors bring 25 might, 25 vulnerability, ad 100% fury uptime. They don’t need any other class to provide any boons.

DPS Thieves, Rangers, Elementalists, Engineers, Necromancers need to be capable of taking a party spot without hindering their group compared to if they had just rolled warrior.

Bright.9160:

tigirius.9014:

Buffing all other classes to be up on the warrior’s OP status would mean that every class would be able to run all 5 man content solo. That’s exactly how bad it is. Denying it won’t change it.

Although what you’re saying is true: buffing all other classes would make it possible for them to run the soloable content solo (because fyi, no all paths can be solo’ed, CoF p1, Arah p1, CoE p3 etc), it still doesn’t validate your request for nerfing warrior and buffing the rest so they surpass warrior.

You fail to see the bigger picture. The warrior was designed to be the class that could do the most damage in melee range. They are a damage class that has terrible utilities outside of Fury and Might. It just happens to be the case Fury and Might are the most wanted boons in PvE.

The problem with warriors does not lie with the class. It lies with the lack of depth and mechanics in the PvE.

This is such bullcrap that I am so sick of hearing.

Warriors bring fury, might, and vulnerability. They bring the best and most important boons in the game.

They also have the best base survivabiliy and the highest damage.

No one ever said warriors were designed to be the highest damagers— Anet’s pages say they were designed to be highly durable.

Warrior damage and boons are too high. They need a PVE nerf.

Does thief single target beat warrior?

Thanks Haviz