Guild Wars 2

this happens when a good player, mayby been roaming all his life in some high quality tier, joins the lowest tier of wvwvw. It feels like berserker is PVT, you can tank so much and smack about double the numbers than before. You are like a god in there, a wolf thrown in middle of lambs.

what i enjoyed doing during leveling was a blind rotation. Pistol 3 + bomb 3 + grenade 3. You dont take much damage at all when you rotate those with shield CCs and all the snares.

kit swap jumpshot trick for rifle builds. Start inside any kit, press weapon swap and one millisecond after spam #5 with ground target into distance past the max range. This will let you do jump shot without any ground target constraint giving you much longer range that you normally can achieve.

I can’t think of anything, ANYTHING, as fun as doing the jump shot trick from cliffs for 2k range death from above jumps on enemies.

Elixir for HGH and cleansing formula builds.
Healing turret if without elixir things, but running with a raid and/or using shield, like healing type raid build with elixir gun and bombs.
Med kit for SD builds (many points in tools and fury used for the bursts).

3 builds that I most commonly use, and all use different heal.

Trap -gadget suggestion that I’ve had like since the launch:
A Scanning Device:
On Use: Scans area of radius ~whole keep or half of keep~ and shows a red dot for each alive enemy on the map for few seconds, stealthed too. Check SC2 scan, similar animation on the map. One time use or long recharge time 15min+.
Built: on spot like a siege weapon from little bit of supply, and mayby some crafting materials? to make it abit special, or mayby EB mercenaries could sell extra item for these.
Why: I do not think hiding mesmers and abusing texture bugs to hide is the best feature of the game. Not all tiers have this problem but would help against it.

I’m not gonna go into too much detail here, just gonna say:
1. You don’t trait for underwater combat
2. Arcane wave and blast extra good underwater because they do good damage. While normal skills do significantly less.
3. You shouldn’t be confused by the water combat, ele plays very much the same underwater as staff ele on ground. Atleast when playing 30 arcane.
Keep blowing #2s on each attunument while rotating them around just like you would in staff. Use everything in water. CCs comes naturally when rotating around constantly. Best place to land in you rotation – final destination – is air spam #1.

Just do your usual kitten like you were on ground, and you should quickly notice, aaahhh this feels more natural and better.

Lingering elements is supposed to work for the 5 point minors in each mastery.
fiery shield thingy on fire, 10% speed air, soothing mist water, toughness earth.

However last time I checked, it didn’t work for the earth and air is hard to notice so not sure about that.

It does not affect those 10% dmg in fire, 20% more against vulnerable and so on . . .
Nor boons from elemental attunument or swap fury, common misconceptions too.

1. HGH: refers to a elixir focused setup with 30 in alchemy and HGH +Cleaning Formula 409 traits. And there are multiple ways to spend rest of the 40 points and different gear setups. Might and boon duration runes can be used to great success with these.
-You can do condition damage and crit proc (rabid&carrion mix) focused Nade HGH with 30/10/0/30/0.
-Flamethrower HGH with -/30/-/30/-, might runes rock here. More direct damage geared here.

2. 100nades WAS a Kit Refinement (tools trait) ONE SHOT spec. You basicly used Rifle immobilize, ran inside your opponent and swapped to grenade kit (old kit refinement barrage proc) + threw toolbelt Barrage at the same time. One shotted anyone using similar berserker gear like the engineer.
Doesn’t exist anymore in it’s old form, but you can still use similar build decently, just lacks the 100nades part.

3. I’m not exactly sure about the last one. But my take on something like that would be healing setup with 20/-/30/-/-, bombkit, healing turret, pistol and elixir gun. For healing and tanking frontline wvwvw for example.
spvp mass controlling objectives you could add a second turret and turret knockback trait IX. How ever I don’t feel like the healing focus would be as strong for spvp, rather PVT, drop the gun and add elixir. Would be my GUESS.

As WHAT IF IF IF point. I’m strongly of the believe that zerging culture would have never evolved if there was set raid sizes with private commanders(like raid frames or similar advantage), of say 20-30. I know squad is 30 people but it makes no advantage joining it, actually has a disadvantage of not seeing movement of other raid commanders. Resulting in less focus on guilds.

Without this purely phycological soft restriction there was no guide to stop anywhere. I remember starting game with 10-15 man, we felt very impactful and actually a driving force in what ever zone we were in.
During the first couple months I saw alot of single nation guilds growing bigger and bigger – I started on SFR and there was OSC and FD gained numbers by the day (not pointing any blame here! just telling my story). They really didn’t have a good reason to stop at any number due to being same nation among members. Something like 40-50 of them often. And I had a few week break/quit as the lag started to be to much of a participant in the fights.

Around cristmast I had couple of good weeks in the mid tiers but then we got against Elona Reach national server. This was the time of the stacked 50+ moving with only portals. Simple way for national servers to organise everyone, because the identity was in the server and nation, not in a guild say. And the same story continued in t1 against vizuna. Not trying to blame here! Just a natural direction for national communities to take because there was little guidance from Anet to focus on guilds and working with set raid sizes.

do, not, touch, COMBO FIELDS.

Thats the organised little bit of something you do in this game. Attack, gather, spread, gather. Coordinate, rotate.
Combos are something that anet needs to encourage.

I would add some new special effects that can only be gained from some more difficult combos. Like take Frost auras 10% mitigation without all the chills, but twice longer. Or mayby something cooler, like 5% chance to proc life steal buff for 10seconds. With some difficult combo. Just question how they could implement more combos.

I heard you like combos, so I put combos in yo combos!

You should test just trowing nades on a dummie how many stacks of might do you get from the sigil of strength alone. Not sure if you can get even half as many as from Battle, single target.

I stand corrected! I swear crit proc and swap sigils used to have different cds.
Good to know, I have some possible changes to do!

Let’s do a quick reasonable test to get idea:
nadeing in spvp with 35% crit chance I got about 3 stacks of bleed from the sigil. So lets say I’m using rabid, some elixirs flying about, 8stacks of might, that will give me about 1550 condition damage → 3*120 = 360DPS from earth.

And lets say I use Battle, swapping frequent enough, for another reasonable 8 stacks of might average from battle. 1830 condition damage. Thats 12% boost to my bleed tick, 10% for my burn, 12% poison … 350 more power is abots 17.5% direct damage boost on my setup, where I’m pulling these numbers from.

So let’s just average abit and say Battle gives around 15% boost to DPS compared to no sigils. And earth anywhere between 240-480 DPS.

If my base DPS is around 2500 they are about equal. Well that sounds reasonable, burning 715+ bleeding 10×120 + 3×200 nades every sec. No huge difference either way prolly, but I’ll prolly choose Battle actually. Will suit more specs and one might concider the safer option!

also with rifle jump shot I often fly towards my target enemy instead of the ground I target. Prolly related to bug that sometimes you fall second time when you jump/fall long distance. Also often not getting any stacks for kill stacking weapons :s.

So there is some new ones.

Sigil of earth should be the first choise of the crit proc sigils. So I assumed you would use no proc sigils if no earth.
What you do with corruption is, you have 3 weapons. You stack 25 corruption with Earth+Corruption. And then swap corruption off for Battle+Earth. You keep the 25 stacks.

I cannot say flamethrower is a condition weapon. It’s direct damage, buffed by burning. You are kinda forcing it to be something else. (if you wanna force it, atleast use sigil of earth)

I think there is way better ways, like using offhand pistol, flame turret or rocket boots to get perma burning. Than force setupping every rune and weapon to boost the duration of minimal burns.

When people talk about WvWvW they should distinguish between roaming and raiding. (and don’t say anything about 80 blob, it doesn’t matter how u play there but that’s not what people ask help for and noone needs to comment about it)

Roaming and raiding have a mile difference. Engi is one of the if not the top character as a solo player in wvw – for soloing camps, 1vX, occasional raid harrash with big nade range, doors.

Atm conditions are engineers strenght so roaming builds are(/were – confusion nerf – more data required to see wazzup with those specs) HGH P/P nades and 14 confusion toolkit/bomb P/P among other P/P variations. Direct dmg builds much less effective for roaming in general – unless you concider 1v1-1v2 succesful.

But how to spec for organised – or less organised guild/raid fighting. Where there is massive amount of condition removal – depends so much of the tier quality. It is not so simple for engis to incorporate their condition builds.

Anyway, I run the most OP spec in the game (atleast prepatch) P/P HGH nades for both solo roaming 1vX and occasional raid follow. That works great in the raid in my tier as our server are always the kite team.
FOR WHICH THE GEAR SETUP IS full Rabid (half half carrion&rabid if you have problem finding rabid jewellery for example), sigil of earth. 3x Might % rune sets or rune set of your choise. Rare veggie pizza. 20 stacks of solo bleeds each ticking upto 150 – nuff said.

But the instant you drop sigil of earth, you swap to carrion.

all classes can solo abomination np. There is no special mechanic that would prevent it. Rampager bleed nades should be pretty fast at doing it aswell, abit less dodgeing than many others might have to.

uu I like the Eruption idea, sort of charges the spell. There are not many skills that you charge in gw2, suprisingly! Was expecting many more pre launch actually.

Let’s say the total delay is 3 seconds atm, if you leave it on its own it’s 6 stacks of bleed. 2 sec is 4 stacks and 1 sec is 2 stacks. Always blast.

I don’t think Lava font radius should be bigger, because then it would be harder to aim (snipe) it to hit certain parts of zergs (target limit). Which is quite important.
It should just do the first tick right away.

Instead of Unstable Ground, usable while stunned, a 1-2 second tornado transform instant SWOOOSH. Smaller knockback and applies 2 second cripple too.

Ryn.6459:

I don’t fully understand how to proper use this table.
…

So my question is, here http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/ where you have “effective power”, is that the number that I have to take in account for maximizing my damage?

Yes. Just use the table and compare effective power numbers. That number should be average DIRECT damage formula stripped off from variables you can’t change (target armor, weapon damage, skill modifiers). Aka the formula that was linked somewhere here.

The maxima obviously lies in full berserker, but you can use it to think about how to properly mix defence, like PVT versus Knight. Things get more complex with conditions. You can think about the relative gains and losses, “gained 6% more damage and 4% defence with using valkyrie+pvt mix instead of knight because i have 100% fury” FICTIONAL EXAMPLE.

Remember to add buffs like might and fury if you have em! Makes big difference in the balance.

Longer waterfield, party healing – not just you. Can’t believe people crying about this, it’s a great boost for supportive playstyle. There are 2 other heals for just you. Try playing around with 20/0/30/20/0, pistol shield, healing turret – elixir gun – throw mine – bomb kit. Healing gear.
Thats 5 blasts you can play around with, stealthing, mighting, aoe healing ur buddies. kittenen hard to properly and consitently chaining blasts on different fields.

Throw mine → toolbelt regen → detonate + shield blast for a quickie on the fly.
big ol bomb → trow mine → heal turret + overcharge → detonate both + bombblast for a longer one.
And list goes on.

If you go DD ele in many times you can escape battles that your buddy won’t. You will find yourself leaving him to die, to let yourself catch up on health and restart the fight better on your own terms. When chargeing in to big zerg fights as duo your warrior buddy will have much more passive sustain if running a zerg friendly spec, shouts, hammer+warhorn. While you are blinking and dotting around. Loosing the bro connection.

If you go staff ele, small scale duoing is quite out of question and larger fights you won’t have the bro connection with ranged + a melee.

So if you wanna be the bro Norns bashing faces, definetly guardian + warrior. Then you both are in the same boat of similar mobility skills, both complement each other well with full swiftness together, not alone. Similar type melee assist, lot of retaliation with hammer + lightfields similar type sustain. Fear inducing double hammers diving into zergs.

Papaj.9035:

Swiftwynd.1685:

Finally got around to editing a video of a fight that’s a “decent” display of the damage potential of the build. Although not perfectly optimized with 25 might stacks, 25 vulnerability, and full list of boons, this is quite a good display of an easy boss beat down.

VIDEO LINK

I immediately discounted this as evidence of “super leet Ele deeps” when I saw 2 Warriors, a Guardian, and a Mesmer. Not to mention that boss has nothing for HP to begin with. Multiple Glass GS Warriors with a Time Warp and a Lyssa Mesmer makes anything look good.

Well I don’t think you are supposed to watch the boss health. Instead the damage done. It’s a short video but fights are short with a maximum dps group which this topic is about.

I summed the damage from first cast to last hit. And I got 154693 damage in 18 seconds which gives 8594 +- 478 DPS ~ 8500 +- 500. This is with partly quickness ofc.
I think simple way to give perspective for it is to think 25 stacks of bleeds with maximum possible condition damage (2600 quite exact) is 4313 DPS. Guess that 4300 could be concidered as a bench mark for great dps.

Some of the tooltips on burning skills can be confusing. Ones that reapply the burning multiple times show the total damage for full reapplies. This is indicated by a number ontop of the burn icon. So tooltip shows full damage, with a timer of just one apply – confuses quite a few people. Especially when they pick up a Fiery Greatsword, “holy kitten #2 does 12k burning damage in 3seconds!”.

Burning duration, condition duration work the same. They are added from the base duration, “additive”.
For example with your spec you should get 6*(1+0.1+0.2+0.15+0.15+0.4)=12seconds of burning alone, with 12 seconds of cooldown.
So you have WAY too much burning, you’ll be stacking it up to 1 minute, which is useless.

You should drop 2 of the utilities for something else. I would say drop the turret and get toolkit instead.
Personally I would drop flamethrower and get any of the survival Elixirs, you are speccing alot into pistol anyway so spamming in flamethrower is not so optimal. Or bombkit if you feel extra manly.

Think of burning as the extra bonus that can do great damage in the background, and turn your eyes into Confusion. Magnet→ pry bar → pistol 5→ bomb 3&5 → pistol 3 and watch those 4k+ confusion ticks fly. After you cry yourself to sleep for what monster you have become.

Can’t recommend too much. Unless you want to be really limiting yourself I would say.

For good condition setup you could ask yourself “do i have”
1. Multiple different conditions to hinder condition removal
- Like for example engineer pistol pistol and toolbar 10s Burn + 2-4confusion&blind + 5confusion + poison+ cripple&immobilize + spam bleed. All applied in under 10seconds.
or
2. Can I quickly apply massive amounts of bleeds or confusion on demand. (burn is a sort of bonus, as it cannot increase in DPS – especially when alot of guardians in wvwvw already doing burns, so someone is loosing ticks if not you)
- Like staff&scepterdagger necro 20+ bleed stacks solo, engineer 14+ stacks of confusion (4k+ ticks), mesmer multiple sources of aoe confusion

To both I would say answer is no. On (1.) ele can push out decent number of decent conditions, but we cannot do it fast and triggering all of em would destroy our follow up, as only earth attunument can do reasonable condition damage.
And on (2.), ele can push full 25 stacks of bleed solo with simply spamming eruption with all out bleed and condition duration. Insane damage and nothing to laugh about.
But doing it requires alot of time – not on demand, hitting the eruptions not always reliable and doing nothing but what earth offers you. And the instant you have to leave earth your damage really cuts down.

I can imagine it being super fun few times defending behind a keep door. As you don’t get owned by retaliation (like you would with fire) and you can freely do insane amounts of damage without needing to pop in water or air for CC or heal.

Also in solo play the bunkery D/D ele with 25%-50% condition gear can work good too, making sure burn is always ticking, churning hits and bleed spam instead of lightning whip. Wouldn’t go all out condition.

Try making necro, hit the mists, 0/30/20/20/0 staff+scepter&dagger+all wells. Just spam through all ur skills to get a example. And then you realise: ok so this is what actual condition class/spec feels like. Ele really doesn’t feel near the same :P.

great vid!

One note: You should cast your arcane power at the last moment for the churning. Atm you are triggering it early during channel and the Cripple ticks trigger it. So you loose the guaranteed crit.

well, I’m not sure if there is too much to learn more on the skills, how the calculations work and stats. I’ll add em to the end so you can skip all these tests if you wish – inside a spoiler in case it’s a case of “I enjoy the process of trying to figure kitten out”, like it prolly was for many people who know how it works :P… There is replies every so often saying the damage formula and skill coefficients are not known, but they been known quite some time, soon after launch.

What I’d be intrested would be actual DPS compares between full rotations of different weapon sets and different classes. And mayby actual weightings for comparing healing power with tough&vit, depending on spec ofc.
I think that is a much worth while time sink. FOR SCIENCE!

What has stopped me from doing this is I don’t have a stopwatch to actually check the real cast times and delays. (the tooltips are just the cast, no animation delays, so they are quite useless)

Hey I don’t know the conjure co-efficients! Lightning hammer would be nice to know actually. Same with many utilities. Heals too if want to think about healing power statweight.

Anyway, people should only dive into these if they enjoy just the process of finding things out.

Oh didn’t realise you were talking about WvWvW well then absolutely not only fire lols :S….

….

But i like the Idea of starting in another element and going up to fire.
Perhaps you can only land 1 of the other AoEs, before you realise, this isnt working.
You still have Fire access.

Definetly. You want to set up for that burst dps to really get people melted in PvP.
Simple lava font and fireball doesn’t kill anything, but 3 spells hitting together can really pack the punch.
Let’s say you want to do set up a good burst combo on the rammers of keep door.
The standard combo is the following:
1. Eruption (earth 2) → Switch Water last moment of cast (fury maximised)
2. Ice Spike (water 2) → fire
3. Lava font
Those 3 will hit very close to each other.

And if meteor storm is available and good situation you can add it there, + tornado for added damage ( >+50%).
With 30 arcane specs you loose little dps while getting massive amount of sustainability and utility, while making your dps much more bursty with the more frequent combos.

What I would concider as the standard attunument dps rotation with 30 arcane is:
1. Earth 2 → Water 2 → Fire 231spameti spam until Earth and Water ready.
2. Earth 2 → Water 2 → Air 21spam until Earth and Water ready.
repeat.

Then ofc in real situation, depending on what is necessary you add skills between the CORE DPS ROTATION. For example:
1. Earth 2 and 3 → Water 2 and 4 → Fire spameti spam untill E&W ready
2. Earth 2 → Water 3 (blast) and 2 → Air 5 and spameti spam untill E&W ready

Point is currently the arcane based specs will make you so much more versatile in many cases, especially for Wvwvwv. With loosing very little for gaining very much.
This is obviously problematic, having very little possible specs.

This comes with experience of 100k+ STAFF world versus world kills.

What are these stories of 50% less damage with other attunuments :P… I didn’t take it seriously but you seem to pop it everywhere so I guess you actually think that is the case.

OP seems to be under the impression that he is alone thinking staff could use help in some areas of the game. And everyone is out to get him. I’d say big reason for negative comments he gets is because he spams and creates multiple topics with same provocative ill-informed stories of what elementalist should in his roleplay opinion be like (wow mage, dagger combat mage doesn’t fit my roleplaying idea!!!!) and how he does not seem to have too much experience in attunument rotations, aka how to deal good damage while providing control, boons and healing.

Not just how to deal damage, and then switch to control or heal, and have no idea how to deal damage in this odd situation. This is also why you don’t teach new elementalists “just stay in fire while u lvl, ull be fine.” or talk about the elements as totally seperated, fire damage, water heal, … . You combine them, combos, rotate – will make you more diverse and able elementalist, who is comfortable in every situation.

Aight back to the top, lets see which one of the 5 topics he has created is this.
Maximum staff dps, hmm k.

It’s correct if you use a spec that is not built for attunument rotation and want to provide dmg and dmg only. You stay in fire. I didn’t think that was much of a secret.

Unfortunately that is not a spec that most people would run in a staff frienly environment – wvwvw, and perhaps harder fractal content when you might need to kite and control packs of mobs. In these cases you are not there just for the lava font, or just for the static field or just for the healing rain. You want to integrate these to deal good damage while proving this control, boons and healing/condition removal. And burst combos!

Out of intrest I did some testing between da glass 30/30/0/10/0 only fire and “da bunker” 0/10/0/30/30 attune rotation. I had just around 20% loss of dps for all those (EA, water traits, staff area, need i say more?) boons, utility and healing I had available for me, without the dmg on/off switch with only fire.
Should do this with “pen and paper” for proper numbers but, there is no controversy anyway, so not required.

Anyway, I’ll just repeat so there is no confusion for the slowest kittens. Yeah damage only situation, with glass no arcane spec, use dat fire. It’s no controversy.
But frankly I hope that the content Anet provides stays/gets/is dynamic enough and complicated enough that you want to bring more than just damage.

Don’t use autotargeting. And just spam press ground with mouse to untarget. Or use Esc, which can pop up menu to screw up everything tho.

Ye it is slightly confusing, like clearly you move and are very active with the camera, so it’s not matter of bad player and prolly had great success with D/D. Just the rotation is very much off, result of not being used to the weapon set and not knowing how to deal damage properly with it.

I would prolly rock that greatsword more, try to get that into the normal play. When having hard time to push real punch with just one dagger.
You gotto get that fire attunument rocking much more often. To keep burning rolling and work for air stun into burning speed for example. Many fights you played like this was the last thing you would do, while this should prolly be the first thing to do for damage.

Sadly not many or at all projectile enemies in the vid, so your weapon set couldn’t shine too much.

fire shield won’t give you buffs when you are not being hit. So in pve it’s often not that reliable.

1. There are no absolute diminishing returns or artificial caps in GW2 like in many other games (aka no such thing as “Aight I’m capped at 45% crit chance and now I push all my stats to power!” or “After 13k armor it starts diminishingly return defence per stat point! So after that focus everything on health!”.
These are always the magical cutting spots on stat priorities in other games.
The limiter in GW2 is only what sets are available, and for direct damage the highest dpschoise is obvious, full berserker and nothing less.

And when you take condition skills into the rotation you require alot more assumptions to correctly model the situation, the target, rotation, situation…

So as the optimum can vary so much in different situations and rotations, and you often need defencive stats. People just tend to use these couple of methods to move in the more efficient direction if they like to think about these things.
Ofc there are exceptions to these general rules, like condition stacking with sigils and special traits through crits (great on engineer!). Or necros naturally high health = tough >>> vit. For example.
- Use stat efficient crit damage pieces. Watch how much stats you loose per crit damage . Ruby jewellery (5/ and 7/%) are the most stat efficient way of gaining it. Shoulders, Boots, Gloves (12/%) from the armor. Think ascended trinkets have efficient crit damage pieces but haven’t checked.
- Mix of stats gives higher results, mix of [power&perc&critdmg], mix of tough&vit. Not just all out on one. And power is nearly always the best direct damage stat. This results straight from the damage calculation formula.
Tool http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/engineer/ can help greatly thinking about these. (Make sure to add fury and might from buffs!!)
- When you want full out damage, in most cases go direct damage. And as we mentioned before → full berserker. Because of the condition caps, meaning you can rarely reach the same dps as a full direct damage can if you go condition.

2. You can get both 100%. Crit damage is easier to get up there, or atleast more common. For the 100% crit you’ll need fury and quite near all the foods and buffs for it you can.
Pistol #1 not something you want to build around :P, but the optimum I’d guess gonna be full rampager for pistol 1, just because it’s DD part is minimal.

But anyway you don’t wanna take too theoretical approach for this game as the combat can be so situational and no simple stat cutoff points exist. Unless you wanna write a program to model the rotations urself :P.

why did this old post get bumbed back up :S.

It’s clearly a non-issue. The point of the unlocking skills is not the process, but what it gives you – gradual pace of learning each feature of a skill. Point is to slowly gain new skills to get accustomed to each before gaining a new one. And having higher total number of skills, doesn’t mean the learning process needs to be any faster.

Goal is not to have newcomer standing still and hovering tooltips for what the skills do, as he is unlocking them too fast.

For more optimized setup with the same heavy punch approach. Swap around berserker rings for PVT, and PVT shoulders, gloves&boots for berserkers.
And as this is not EA spec with mass ally condition removals and more of a glassy dps, I think you are playing this very much ranged style (not always allies around you), I’m not sure if boon duration is the way to go.
Rather go for Ruby orbs. Or if you find yourself sticking to that fire more than usual, 60% might duration, you’ll have to see that yourself based on your playstyle, you need some base might for % to be worth it.

I didn’t quite catch why are you doing this? As a goof? You lost a bet and now you have to level 1-80 elementalist only using fire attunument?
However if you are leveling the elementalist to actually play it as a main, you do not want to waste precious learning time (leveling) by noobing around and not learning the other 75% of the class. Starting the journey with goal: only fire, will only bring you harm.

I could understand if you were asking for if you could be effective doing this from pure DPS perspective, like a dungeon situation.

You aswered yourself correctly on the third comment of this topic. So I hope you keep to that, just the later comments got me confused.

Also note that the link you gave is outdated, from the early times of gw2. Don’t follow that as a good templelate :P…

Think there is strong argument for running 25 air instead of fire. For better self sustainability for 20% bonus (vulnerability, around 3 stacks self mayby? haven’t checked) and more stats as condition duration doesn’t help.
Even in worst case solo loss is small, and party will always win out.

You are wasting all those traits, runes and sigils for burning duration. While you could simply use P/P and blowtorch. For solo purpose you do not need to stack long burns, and for group purposes it doesn’t matter cos there are other people applying burning, and prolly with higher condition damage (meaning your won’t even tick).

I always have trouble loading that tool, but I can probably guess what the build is like. You’ll do alot more dmg on flamethrower with, lets say 3 elixir setup and 3x 20% might duration runes and might on crit sigil or battle (both will be too much). You stack 25 might on yourself and actually pump out much more direct damage and condition damage aswell, even without the extra burning ticks you might get – solo – against a champion (long kill).

If you want to go full crit on engineer it’s to abuse multiple condition/(might/fire) proc items/traits and fast ticking attacks (flamethrower, grenades).
Like a setup with Sigil of Earth, 5+ firearms, Shrapnel and Incendiary Powder. Mass condition nade spec.
Key here is the condition damage and high crit chance, both rampager and rabid items provides that. And as most of the damage is done with grenade kit. The weapon set is chosen for it’s utility: rifle to land combos (pvp), pistol shield for more safe control (pve), for example.

For direct damage you don’t go precision as mainstat.

Lingering elements works for
Water 5 points Soothing Mist, Fire 5 points Flame Barrier, Earth 5 bugged, Air 5 very hard to see.

Them working for the 10% bonuses would result in quite OPness :P. Would give rise to hybrid builds tho!

hmm, some of those changes quite odd.

I’d say Dust Devil should a knockback, a mini tornado. It would push straight out same way as now, just on top of blind do a mini knockback. Scepter having no CC atm so … Also would help on wvw usefulness.

Shatter stone chills for 1 second or 3s with actual cooldown on the skill. Helping scepter focus in relative mobility, with a small disengage/kite tool and hitting dem fires.

Ground targetted Dragons Tooth would feel very powerful atm, but if it was ground targetted all the time it would feel normal. So I guess it could be justified.
It would prolly indirectly buff fire mastery, I could see heavy fire specs with Scepter happening, 20% less CDs + 10% dmg.

I’ve used quite near same build – mass bleed nade engi in spvp quite alot. Basicly a condition version of hundred nades, (I wouldnt take static discharge when you go condition stat as main!)

On your theorycraft tho, you are kinda going for the direct damage insta kill and condition at the same time, which I think is false approach. As the first one is not gonna happen with condition gear. But instead target will die to the upto 20+ bleeds you can stack solo. It’s quite insane.

There was one problem tho, I cannot recall exactly what trait, but something interfered with the procs. As in same internal cooldown. I noticed building upto 16 bleeds on target dummies, but just around 12 with some trait on. So you should keep eye on that if that is the case.
It was either 50% swiftness or 50% vurn proc crit that interfered with some bleed procs.

it’s the same effect that elementalists get with Evasive Arcana. With earth dodge elementalist triggers confusion 3 or 4 times. Definetly not intented…

It’s funny how you can instantly destroy eles with confusion. 3x 4k confusions when they dodge x).

by swapping around items and food for more stat effective counterparts (not touching the ascended) you can get 10% direct dmg boost with no loss of direct dmg defence. You should always add the 100% fury uptime and 10 (or more) stacks of might (with battle) at the buffs tab, it makes a difference between the items.

Change precision into power -> berserker weapons, all other knight pieces into soldiers with rubys. And plate of tryffel stake.
Slightly slightly more effective version is with soldier weapons and berserker shoulders, gloves, boots. But I wanted example that had the gain in just one variable, dmg. While the latter has u gaining in both.

How ever anet balanced the stats quite well, there is no imba secrets and abusable peaks. You gain somewhere, you usually loose somewhere else.

I run a Scepter&Dagger glasscannon which works amazing. Really great fun and most of all what I love Conjure fiery greatsword works amazing with glass setup.

You want to play weasel style, take your engagements well. Join in 2v2s and burst them down. 1v2s only if they are right enemys for you, like double melee and you got greatsword ready – pull of from unwinnable 1v2s. Just pull back if you go low health for few secs, use your heal + water heals, and always use your range well and pulling back → back for burst.

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mzsMz9Mz0mxlbmMxMbofx0faooasoV08kir7khs7070c7kNb70V7ofD8ofY
15/30/0/15/10
Fire: VI
Air: VI, X, IX
Water: VI
Arcana: V

S/D
Sigil of Fire
Sigil of Bloodlust → Battle
Superior Runes of the Scholar (be weasel and have 90%+ hp, 10%*10% extra dmg)

Slot Skills:
Ether Renewal
Arcane Blast
Mist Form
Lightning Flash

Berserker Amulet&Jewel

Don’t go hero mode open with all out fire combo (unless it’s gonna land). Go in with Air, and time the #2 + blast to the end of channel. Use Air attunument swap for burst.
Updraft → ring of fire → Phoenix → Flame grab. Use dragons tooth on objective fights and downed people.

Most of all, use greatsword. There is so many times when you can do #3 and #4 against the wall in pvp. Doing 10k+ #3 whirls (evades all attacks while doing this!) and same with the #4 (untarget!). Just blitz through objective with these and everything melts. Use against downed people too, and hard 1v1s/1v2s (especially against melee). People don’t know how to handle it, cos they see the sword so rarely (and never doing any dmg).

old conditions don’t break stealth. Just all new offencive skills and any direct damage done, old or new.

it depends on how you want to define the “optimal rotation”. I would say optimal is which results in the highest dps output. Mayby in few tiers, theoretical optimal for pure dps without outside interference, practical optimal that thinks about blasts and combo fields. And situational optimal with CC ‘n kitten, which for DD ele is basicly “blow all ur skills”. That’s why I’d keep it as clean as possible, guess the mid tier.

Standard aurashare + EA rotation, with might stacking for group.
Air 3, → swap to fire
Fire 3, 2, 5, 4 → swap to earth + dodgeblast + arcane wave in fire field
Earth 4 (only because of fireblast, never for dps), 2, (add churning 5 if alot of health left and have someone else adds a firefield)
Water 2 and 4 (if single target cut 2 midcast)
Air 1 spam (your best autoattack with direct dmg gear, against single target with other sources of burning it’s actually better just spam this than drakes breath, or cone of cold for that matter, they are the same skill from direct part).
REPEAT, you want 15 seconds to pass after burning speed to go back fire.

well played mon

indeed, stealth breaks if you deal damage.. I take that as a positive, I don’t want thiefs nuking me while invisible.

You can do quite nice stealth tricks in a small scale situation.

Magnet pulls target to you, if target has stability pulls you to the target, if both have stability you Magnet skill breaks for 120 seconds.
Cloacking Device either turns you invisible, or massive + stability when immobilized. Or swiftness.
When you gain swiftness, you gain 5 seconds of vigor, or 5 seconds of swiftness. This can only trigger once every 5 seconds.

(my PoV is group/raid oriented and focusing on the strenghts of the elementalist)

Very standard core for any ele build, staff especially is 20+ in Arcane tree. Strenght of staff Ele is in the group play – maximise your area boons, healing and condition removal!

V: Elemental Attunument – will lead you to the right ele playstyle of frequent attunument swapping. Giving you and your allies boons. And making you naturally use the full skill arsenal available.

VIII: Blasting Staff – Helps you aim the staff ground targets much easier, and in many cases hit more targets.

I would add to the standard core 20+in Water.
15 points: Healing Ripple minor trait – Area healing.
V: Cleansing Wave – Area condition removal.

This leaves you free with 30 points.
Still the full standard is heavily group oriented buff&condition removal master, same as D&D build. With 30 water – XI: Cleansing Water & 30 Arcane – XI: Evasive Arcana.

But for your purposes, mayby more solo oriented, you can go 30 Fire, or 15 fire/15 air. Or 30 Earth. Anything you please with the last 30 points.
For sake of concretizesing lets say 15/15/0/20/20!
However I want to reiterate that with Staff you want to find yourself in big group situations to fully take advantage of your boons, combos . . .
That’s why I concider the core for staff to be so group oriented.

Core utilities: Mist Form – saves you fromevery trouble!
Arcane Wave – learn to use your combos!