Guild Wars 2

There is no ICD on stacking sigils

deSade.9437:

Shouldn’t it be skip 10.000 élites.
Or kick 10.000 pugs.

No because they want to destroy our image, kill our credibility, so they have to make a mockery out of our ways.
Like the siths we will be casted into exile far away with nothing to furnish our existence but the bitter memory of our past glory. Like the siths we will wait patiently, for revenge and remorse fuel our veins with relentless anger. And like the siths we shall return stronger than ever, when they least expect us.

Mesket.5728:

well.. my Sherlock instinct (¡?) tells me there will be something added regarding elite killing to give an incentive to actually fight them instead of skipping (perhaps something achievement wise). Then reality hits me like a train and I’m back to reality,… its ANet, looking back and forward again, if anything new is added it will be in the “kill 10K for a bubble gum and a pat on the back” line.

New achievement:
Slay 10.000 Elites
Reward title: Elitist
Reward mini-pet: a mini Wethospu in his original armor dye.

And then the eliticide will be complete.

We are the minority, we must fight to survive!

Mesket.5728:

I better call all my friends that quit the game and tell them it is fixed now!

I came on gw2 with all of my wow guild (50+ players), they have all left one by one and I am the last man standing.
I used to taunt people in LA by saying “wow>gw2” in map chat, I would normally get tons of replies but not anymore.
Sometimes my friends come on my ts and ask me how the game is going. Last november I told them “guys it’s getting better look they added new interesting content!” that was last november. My friends all play c*a*py games but they refuse to come back on gw2 even though it is free.

“Guys now silvers are called elites!”

Thanks!
For rtl, that “aftercast” listed here actually includes the time needed to travel the complete distance. Keys and I will take a look at this in order to make it more accurate.
Yes there can be mistakes, please do not hesitate to point them out. Also any feedback on this thread is highly appreciated

Big patch.

LordByron.8369:

haviz.1340:

One more thing, when you range your lovely fractal bosses they use less attacks then in melee (imbued shaman, archdiviner, dredge suit, ice elemental, mossman, ashyn, kitten golems, jellyfish). So much fun.

LordByron.8369:

Just require a mix of both ranged and melee combat.

If you are lazy just use fractal boss approach that are way more balanced than dungeon ones.

Stop judging people, stop feeling the best in the world.
You can learn something even from the worst player in the game.
So you can stop fighting on the forum to have fun…..

The instant you start making personal arguments is the instant your credibility flies away far far away above the cloud never to return …
The only thing there is to learn from the worse players is how to cope with bad designs.

Ranging anything is boooooring.

Player Character.9467:

Zelyhn.8069:

Player Character.9467:

I think my favorite is when they compare classes/weapon selections and list none of the setups :P

What do you mean?

When you or guang are like
guardian – XXXXX dps
warrior – XXXXX dps
mesmer – XXxXX dps
engi – XXXXX dps
ele – XXXXX dps

and attach 0 calculations, builds, etc

Hm you know, as for me I think I have published a calculator and all my builds
As for guang, well …

Well there is D/F, D/F, D/F, D/F, D/F, D/F, also D/F, D/F, and one must not forget D/F as well as D/F.
I could also mention D/F but I don’t want to sound like I’m biased or anything.

Clumsy.6257:

adding skill requirements is overrated, just add dredge

Obviously this game intends to reward people for their ability to mindlessly farm (dig) some repetitive “content”, so yes I think dredges are appropriate.

haviz.1340:

How to make dungeons more fun? Move some temple bosses and other open world bosses to dungeons.

You just made forums more fun!

Molch.2078:

Zelyhn.8069:

DiogoSilva.7089:

haviz.1340:

Staff is still bad as ever in pve.

A staff ele can out-dps HB warriors by simply spamming two buttons, and can do so by staying at range while providing infinite fire fields.

It’s one of the best pve builds in this game since the buffs to blasting staff and persisting flames in the last patch.

This post is the perfect example of people miss-interpreting the spreadsheets.
Well I can’t blame you too much, considering the amount of wrong information being published in some guides like on guru for example …

DPS is about numbers. About math. a>b. If the sheed say that your number is smaller than guangs, I dont see how you could miss-interpret this. Care to explain?

Staff is ok in pve.

Well to start off, Guang’s maths is like religion.
Then trust me he is not the first to say that staff deals damage, and he is definitely not the first to notice how the patch buffed that damage.
Also to out-dps warriors staff eles need more than just lava font and fireball: they need meteor shower. That’s why I say you misinterpreted the maths.
Furthermore they need to be within 600 range, or actually within 360 range to benefit from might combos, so at the same range as a dagger wielder.
Staff provides fewer of the necessary conditions to get max buffs than other weapon sets.
Staff has very little hard control and its use comes at a high cost.
Staff requires the targets to be immobile.
So no, staff is not the best pve build around. Actually it is thought to be one of the worst.

Player Character.9467:

I think my favorite is when they compare classes/weapon selections and list none of the setups :P

What do you mean?

LordByron.8369:

Being stuck in one single range

Staff range: 0-1200
Scepter range: 0-900
Dagger range: 0-600
Weapon sets requiring to be in melee range (150): 0

Bloody hell it’s so unfair we have no weapons to get stuck into melee range! Nuff ! Berf !

DiogoSilva.7089:

haviz.1340:

Staff is still bad as ever in pve.

A staff ele can out-dps HB warriors by simply spamming two buttons, and can do so by staying at range while providing infinite fire fields.

It’s one of the best pve builds in this game since the buffs to blasting staff and persisting flames in the last patch.

This post is the perfect example of people miss-interpreting the spreadsheets.
Well I can’t blame you too much, considering the amount of wrong information being published in some guides like on guru for example …

haviz.1340:

Zelyhn.8069:

You left LOD?

I sincerely welcome all good players in the best open world guild in EU.

I’m a jumping puzzle elitist, can I join?

Oceanic [Insert Guild Here]

You left LOD?

If you do precisely the rotation that you described then that portion is precisely half of your time.
Stoning has a coefficient of 0.5, an animation time of 1.35s, and is single target.
Its damage per second is equal to one third of that of lightninh whip.
I really hope that your team mates know how to make the most out of the might stacks you give them!

So you spend half of your time auto attacking in earth.

This debate again?
I think if you really want 0 cd on attunements you should post there.

I agree with MaXi: staff’s air attacks are very weak.
This means that fresh air is not a good option for staff.
This, in turn, implies that staff is bad for PvE.

I noticed two questions in your post but I understood none of them !
Could you rephrase this please?

What do you mean by dynamic?

What you describe with this diagram is what he have done separately for every single element in our spreadsheets.
We have every formula, we have tested the relationship between formulas, so unless there is a mystical force in-game, or we are missing information, then there is no way our results will be incorrect.
Now you may say that we could be missing information, but honestly theorycrafting for this game is really straightforward: there are only 2 or 3 formulas involved … so I think we got it right
But if you insist, then let’s do a “half” test: let’s design a simple rotation, a build with PvP gear, and try this in the mysts on the unbreakable golem.

On the topic of sigil of battle.

Many elementalists take this sigil because its synergy with 30 points in arcana is very strong. The sigil has 9 internal cooldown and it gives 3 stacks of might for 20s on proc. With 30 points in arcana the cooldown of attunements is 10s. This means that a full arcana elem can stack might up to 6 on average (before boon duration) just by swapping on cooldown. This is a very strong buff to damage: 6 * 35 = 210 power.

When you run my current build (30/30/0/0/10), and aim to achieve the optimal rotation, the swapping pattern is quite different from that of a full arcana elem. In fact we will swap 8 times in 30 seconds, but the spread of the swaps is such that you can only stack might to 4 on average (before boon duration). This is a buff of 140 power. This is good, it results in an increase to our damage of 5-3% (depending on buffs). But can we find something better?

The optimal rotation yields a high number of hits per second (2.2 on average). Let’s take a look at an interesting sigil: frailty. My calculations tell me that with such sigil we can inflict more than 3 stacks of vulnerability on average on targets.

This means 3% more damage for the group. I find this to be much more valuable than 3-5% self increased damage. Therefore sigil of frailty is an interesting choice to replace sigil of battle with my current build.

haviz.1340:

Where is the appreciation of my work?

You told me to take vigor on crit because I was failing to dodge the shaman’s arrows in volcano fractal. Now I still fail to dodge the arrows but I don’t have excuses anymore. Much appreciated

Update:

Scepter, dagger (MH and OH) and focus are now fully listed. This completes the main weapon sets. Only conjures, trident, trait spells, downed state and tornado are left. For this reason I have removed “work in progress” from the thread title. Obviously the information is not complete yet, but it is getting really close to this point.

If you notice mistakes or of you have remarks on anything please don’t hesitate to post here!

Renewed thanks to DEKeys

@ spoj
Yes I would like to make a tl-dr, but on what? I am not advising just one build. I will add quick and easy info about the build I currently run, but then again I tend to change it frequently

@ Jalabi
Celestial gear is ok, it is a very decent way to get started with this game.
I would advise you to use D/F for PvE, it is by far my favourite weapon set.
As for the builds you should start with something like this:
0/30/0/20/20 (fresh air, air training, vital striking, cleansing wave, elemental attunement, renewing stamina)
Once you get comfortable with this try to get rid of 10 points in arcana and put them in water and try aura sharing (with zephyr’s boon in air).
This is a good way to get started with a D/F elem.
In the future you may want progressively switch to berzerker gear.
Don’t hesitate to ask for advice along the way

@ DEKeys
Thanks to your awesome data-mining I can make a proper rotation calculator now I am very grateful for your contributions!
I will finish to update this thread soon, and I will be as specific as detailed as possible.

Thanks to the outstanding work of DEKeys I am able to start working on a rotation calculator for the elementalist.
I have done a few tries at making such tool and it is incredibly useful.
However I am concerned about thing: how complex should I make this calculator?
The more complex I make it the more accurate it is, but the less easy to use it becomes.
Can people let me know what they expect from a rotation calculator? This would give me an idea of what to aim for.

Making sure animation durations are right is the tricky part.
For the elem we have DEKeys working on specific skill’s animations and Sabull working on full rotations, the end result is a very accurate picture.
I don’t know what could go wrong in practice … if the situation assumptions of the spreadsheets are correct and match that of reality then combat should develop as predicted.
This is unless the force truly intervenes in-game of course

Lavadiel.6231:

Zelyhn.8069:

It’s funny Tyler Chapman made this thread to tell us to post bug reports in the bug sub-forum but people do exactly the opposite here and talk about bugs in the very thread asking them no to do this. I am amazed, but not surprised.

when you get older you will be not even amazed…
http://youtu.be/z9pD_UK6vGU

Hahahaha! Thank you for this

It’s also the patch that buffed the glyphs , allowed for faster and better use of conjures, and it is the patch that buffed staff’s fire damage to the sky.

However it is not the patch fixing lingering elements despite this trait being bugged since release and having an enormous fun/diversity/cool potential.

cheshirefox.7026:

ok it’s been a week and all i can say is
what “elementalist” patch ?

It’s the patch that buffed the persisting flame duration of burning speed trail’s fire field to 6 seconds instead of 5. This enables a D/F elem to swap to air between the fire field application and its blasting in earth or water. In turn this allows us to proc fury, proc electric discharge, better proc sigil of batlle, and bypass attunement swapping cooldown via fresh air. Therefore this patch gave me a considerable boost in damage.

LordByron.8369:

Balance professions for pve rather than only on PvP

Or the opposite: stop splitting PvE and PvP skills, keep PvP balance but rework dunduns to require PvP mechanics.

Lingering elements?

STRanger.5120:

Gorni.1764:

No, the calculation on wiki is wrong. Just stopped it myself to make sure I calculated it correctly.
It doesn’t lower the CD but increases the recharge-rate.
10P -> 16/1,2
20P -> 16/1,4
30P -> 16/1,6

arcana gets worse the more points you spend in it

No, your calculation is wrong m8
It’s recharge rate increase, not recharge cooldown decrease. You’re not the first one who interpreted this wrong.

Basically, it increases the amount of how many times you can switch to the same attunement in a period of time, let’s say per minute.

To my knowledge, Gorni is right.

Dude you don’t know how to ground-target the surface?

But living story?
But achievements?
I do not compute

I think lingering elements does not even work with arcane precision muhahahahahahahaahahahaha

(never tested though)

Thread updated, game on!

Nice job !

It seems all perfectly legit to me, congratulations

It’s funny Tyler Chapman made this thread to tell us to post bug reports in the bug sub-forum but people do exactly the opposite here and talk about bugs in the very thread asking them no to do this. I am amazed, but not surprised.

Maybe if the devs had a thread showing us the bugs that they are aware of it would prevent a lot of double bug referencing in the bug sub-forum. Maybe if this thread was in the elementalist sub-forum then there would be no double referencing with the bug sub-forum. And maybe if this thread was maintained by players then it would be much more responsive than the devs are now so it would work better.

Oh wait I just described how things were before the devs got rid of the bug-report thread that was maintained here, how strange !!

Alilinke.7690:

Sorry, meant burst. The insane burst coupled with lightning hammer results in insane DPS.

Ok I can more easily agree with this

Alilinke.7690:

S/D is weak if you do silly things like, casting phoenix on or in front your target, not using your instant cast skills while channelling, not combo-ing etc. If you know how to use scepter, the DPS is insane.

Please define insane

Yes I have a bad opinion of staff.

I am not going to express my opinion of Guanglai’s guide because I am clearly biased

Nice! Please keep giving me feedback, I highly appreciate this.

I like to explain my though processes to great lengths
Yes there will be more numbers, many more. I like to have a good structure before adding the details. I am going to use the discussions I have had in this thread to make the OP complete.

Whethospu wants your head, what I want is your powers

Edit: I have done a large part of the rewriting of the thread, but there is so much I want to say! It’s hard to keep track

Focus has projectile absorption for the group, projectile reflection for yourself, and invulnerability.

FGJ op