For D/D roaming, what do you guys feel is more effective? Also explain why, preferably with some solid math. I’ve been looking long and hard for guides/streamers/tubers from people who know what they are talking about and it’s hard to find. Either the ’pro’s’ don’t seem to be very community focused or maybe it’s because gw2 is still a young game. I’m used to games where math plays a role in stat allocation and where the better players have done the math to produce more or less ‘meta’ builds. For PvE this has certainly been done in this game but not for WvW as far as I’m aware.
I’m looking at healing power and toughness vs vitality vs going berzerker gear and forgoing on defensive stats all together.
The way I see it, elementalist have better scaling for healing than other classes and also have a good amount of heals at their disposal (especially if you play d/d or staff), healing power is therefor a better stat for us than for other classes. Healing power allows you to reset fights better, play out attrition fights better and limit condition pressure. It would also force your opponent into a more aggressive playstyle as they would need multiple CC and use all damage cooldowns to be able to burst you down. Toughness works better with healing power than vitality, essentially making healing power stronger. Armor rating needs to be doubled to reduce damage by 50% however there is also a myriad of ways to add gain protection as an ele. When you take smaller hits healing up the full becomes easier as opposed to high health, making your heals weak and leaving you with little defense against burst damage.
Vitality on the other hand provides better protection against condition damage. Conditions are very prevalent, especially when you play in small groups and engage into 1vX situations. That said, the ele has many ways to build into increased condition removal. However some classes can keep on reapplying strong conditions, eventually leaving ele without conditions. Due to my relatively limited wvw experience I am not entirely sure how prevelant this is. In some situations I wonder why I even brought condition removal to the table whereas in other fights it allowed me to win the fight.
Then there is just going straight up damage. Maybe it is my lack of skill, but I refuse to believe there are really high ranked players/pro’s/<insert arbritary term for good players that run full zerker and still succeed. Granted ele’s have many tools, high vigor uptime, many sources of protection and CC, wouldn’t a good player simply avoid your burst and proceed to instagib you?
A balance has to be found ofcourse and I’ve read numerous claims of at least 30% crit chance to have 50 with good fury uptime. How useful is that crit chance if one has low crit damage? Or low power? Increasing the crit damage and power would require a large sacrifice on vitality/healing power/toughness (whatever one uses for passive mitigation) to a point where I wonder what the use is of having say 500 extra vitality and 300 extra toughness. If doubling ones armor reduces damage by 50% than adding the 300 toughness would only reduce damage by approximately 10%. This also makes the extra 5000 health rather negligble. While for ele it means a 50% increase in HP, reality is a thief instead of one shotting you now needs to do a single extra heartseeker to take you out (not exact math ofcourse). This leads me to believe that the dmg vs defense pans out to be you have to choose either or and cannot really balance the two. Either you go full damage instead of balance because balance takes huge chunks of dps away while not really rewarding you with much more survivability or you go full defense having low damage where trying to find extra ways to increase damage sacrifices defense so much it becomes more or less useless.
I’m leaning more towards defense now because you can at least build for high power as it’s relatively easy to reach 3k attack while maintaining high toughness/healing/vit.
How much toughness/vitality/healing power etc do you guys go for.
For reference: ele has 1836 base armor and would require 3672 armor to gain 50% damage reduction. Getting to 2718 would result into 25% damage reduction and around 3k armor to emulate having permanent protection up.
An ele also needs a 1000 vitality to reach 20k health, something that can only be done by going heavy in water and having vitality as a stat on most gear slots. Finally cleansing wave’s heal is 1302 base and has a 1.0 co-efficient which as far as I know means 1000 healing power makes it a 2.3k heal.
I know this is a huge wall of text but this is primarily aimed at players who like this sort of min-maxing and theorycrafting. I hope to see some solid answers and insights. Preferably backed up by math and based on real high skill level wvw experience.
, your google link is inaccessible though, mind rechecking?