Guild Wars 2

I am considering getting back to my old favourite build: 0/30/0/30/10 with fury share.
This is because the damage from boons can mostly offset the lost damage from not have 5% on burning foes and loosing 100 power; then the added fury duration and sharing makes the build more valuable.

- forced into zephyr’s boon, so no more quick glyphs or bolt to the heart (damage loss or flexibility loss)
- loss of 10% condition duration
- if we do not take fury into account, it takes 8 boons to offset the loss of 5% damage and 100 power (in a realistic situation), which is very hard to maintain. With 4 boons we can loose only 4.3% damage comparatively.
- pessimistically estimated shared fury uptime: 25%
- full fury boosts a zerker group damage by a least 15% (25% * 15% = 3.75% boost on each party member affected)

In the end it is a damage gain groupwise and a health gain, at the cost of little condition duration and flexibility.

Just go in there with full PVT and do as the others do.

As the wise Kodiak once said: " If I could wave my arms around excitedly with spell effects in hand while running around avoiding AOE’s no one would be any the wiser that I’m doing no damage."
And trust me that guy knows what he is talking about.

haviz.1340:

FGS is going to get nerfed with or without HC whines but I don’t see how not using it would promote better gameplay since most speedrunners would just stack warriors with enough reflections cause it’s the most foolproof and still very effective. I don’t see how rolling your face on a keyboard against los-ed mobs/bosses is entertaining for people to watch. It’s definitely not for me.

And lastly, how does fgs make good players bad? It deals way less damage than reflections which almost no one has problems with.

Spot on. Entertainement is the keyword here.

Start making records for lvl 70+ fractals guys, there are so few exploits in those, and they require skill, which is entertaining

Technically you can solo CoF 1

It’s role-play or it’s bad play, I’m the committee.

Guardians use mace?

In arcane. If we consider just the might buffs you can provide from Elemental Attunement then you are giving your group a constant damage boost that is worth more than water 25 and earth 25 in most cases. Then you also get other buffs so it becomes even more valuable You also gain access to vigor on crit if ever your would need it.

Broadicea.8294:

Understandable, but then it would be nice to have as accurate a comparison as possible using actual hard metrics rather than a simple “better than” or “worse than” comparator, since I might be ok trading 5% personal DPS out for the convenience of condi removal on demand, or something of that nature. The calculator should do that, but if the calculator says 5% difference it would be nice to verify that in game as well. 100 seconds to kill something versus 95 seconds to kill it (on average of course) would prove out the theoretical approach.

You must never have worked professionally with software or electronics before. Or met a QA person.

Guys I’m not trying to rag on anyone doing “theory crafting”, and this isn’t rocket science. If you come up with a hypothesis, it doesn’t matter how sound it is on the blackboard, what matters is the field test. NASA doesn’t go from the blackboard to the launchpad without testing in between. Pharma doesn’t get a product on the shelves until the clinical trials have been reviewed. Toyota doesn’t just calculate G forces caused during a crash, they test that sucker. That’s all I’m asking about.

Actually that’s exactly what the calculator does

If you put in the right characteristic of this “something” then it will tell you exactly your average dps on it and you can deduct your time to kill it from that.

In fact theorycrafting is even more precise than rocketscience because we “reverse engineer” what the devs have given us. So we are sure that there are a finite number of laws, a design, and we can master it all.

As for the testing, trust me I have done the necessary field work. I tested the formulas in PvP with stable weapons and I am absolutely confident about what I have put in the calculator.

Exactly

And as for the independent verification, I tested the behaviour of every factor that my calcualtor takes into account. So, using your speedometer analogy, if every component of the device has been approved then the final object must be working correctly. Well, provided I put the pieces in the right place! That’s why I am asking for feedback.

You do need at least 5 in arcana in order to have access to fury on attunement swap. With this you can maintain a very high uptime of fury, which is a strong dps boost. If you are interested I suggested you take a look at my guide (link in my signature).

You can easily adjust the armor of targets in the calculator

As for your test Broadicea, if you put the correct input in the calculator then it will give your correct average dps.

True, but you wouldn’t want clerics instead.

I would surely like to do this, what exactly would you like me to show evidence for?
-The way stats are built and their effects
-The damage calculation formula

I am a full zerker scholar and I was killing the adds on the Tequatl encounter. I guess there’s room for everybody

Yes all formulas used in the calculator have been tested and approved.

(apart from the behaviour of vulnerability stacks, the common belief is that it is additive)

Actually there are plenty more bugs…

But the mods have decided to move the thread listing them to the bug forum

So there is not an elem in Tyria who is going to go there and read about them.

In the end it is more work for the devs since they will have many more threads about bugs, and not necessarily well maintained/referenced. At the same time the elem community has very little access to this. It’s a loose-loose situation

Yes I am angry because when they decided to make this move I posted right away to tell them to mirror the bug thread onto the bug forum instead of simply moving it.

And that post I made was even upvoted a lot by the community.

Edit: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Profession-bugs/first

I will add the Mesmer data to this calculator and then we can settle this debate

Well if it was just this….

It’s pretty funny: if you make an ele with 10/0/30/0/30 for example, then your lingering elements will make only your flame barrier last for 5s after you swap out of fire, awesome isn’t it??

The truth is that Lingering Element has to be fixed, but not just for earth. It should apply to all attunement bonuses, without exception.

But I doubt ANet is going to work on the arcane trait line, unless elementalists become completely absent from PvP, seldom used in WvW and with no arcane in PvE.

Oh wait

You even have enough time to throw a comet as well

Edit: and soon, lava axe 2 ! Yay!

That would give you a 2.5% increase in damage.

The fact is that Fresh Air would boost your damage much more: you can use LW pretty much all the time (highest c/s dagger spells), you can swap often for Electric discharge procs and a high uptime of fury. This way you can save your energy sigil and get a sigil of force instead (assuming you already have a sigil of battle) for 5% more damage. That’s a full win.

Why not taking fresh air?
The 10% dmg you get from 25 in earth will go away quickly when you dodge.
Using Fresh air is much more than a 10% damage boost.

But Elementalists are supposed to be bad!
Well, according to HC’s logic, since they only have warriors.

Excelsior comrades!

I have just finished the alpha version of my new calculator (the Zalculator). This calculator enables you to plug in your build, your rotation, and see what kind of damage it does. Easy and simple!

So far I have made only an alpha version.This is an ambitious project in its early stage. It is limited to a number of classes and builds, but the framework is in place for future expansions to other classes.

I would like to get feedback on this calculator, any kind of feedback, so I can know what to work on first. If you are interested, could you please download it and try it?

Download
Designed for excel 2007+

Features
Current:
-Build calculator (Elem, warrior, guardian, and more coming soon)
-Combat stats
-Dps calculator (direct damage)
Upcoming:
-Rotation calculator (already present but not yet functional)

Note
Until the rotation calculator is finished you need to manually plug in your rotation coefficients and adjust the other numbers in orange. Take a look at the rotation tab.

If you have any questions or remarks, please let me know! I look forward to making this tool complete, and I can only do so with your help.

haviz.1340:

PvE is brainlessly easy. No one cares about that because getting gold medal is all the counts.

But … I care about PvE ! :s

I think most of you are being too extreme in your evaluation of the elementalist.
Most of your comments apply to PvP or WvW but make little sense for PvE.

I am only going to reply on the weapon swap comment:
We do not need weapon swaps.
1) We already have conjures
2) Lots of our skills have different effective ranges depending on our attunements
3) That would give us just way too many skills and one more mechanic to manage

Also, we have a mix of AoE and single target on every single weapon.

As for the potency of your skills, it is important to look at all the skill factors when evaluating them. Many times our skills do a bit less damage than comparable skills from other professions, but this is often compensated by having “out of the box” factors such as extra range (LW, draggon’s claw, vapor blade), location advantage (impale), non-projectile ranged (flamestrike, lightning arc), etc. This is why the devs advise us to use celestial gear: if we want to make the most out of all our skills then we are going to use all stats.

While this seems right on paper, I understand that in PvP and WvW the class can be lacking due to the meta.

The devs said the ele would be fine once they tone down the condition meta a little. I say we wait until they do this before we start screaming too loud.

Edit: remember that while they do not have a dungeon dev team, they do have a skill team! (JSharp just gave that away )

Hate for zerker ? That reminds me of an old thread …

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/The-hate-for-talent/first

:)

Update:

Added a version compatible for Excel 2003

Wow that’s bold Wethospu, and I am totally in favor

And in this vid replace “honey Badger” by rT.

Also I think any ele with more than 10 in arcane

Yes I am looking at you Haviz

In Puandro’s spreadsheet I found a “conjure weapon damage” of 925. But then his spreadsheet is unfortunately not always accurate, so it could be that conjures always had a 969 weapon strength. I just remember that around the dragon bash patch it was said that conjures started dealing more damage.

Sounds like Phantasm are a huge mess!

Hey thanks for trying!

I did not make sure it works with Office, indeed. Maybe you can try to turn devmode on (put 1 instead of 0 at the top of the sheet), this will display the cells that are affected by the function buttons, and you can then modify them manually (the number in the cell is equal to the row of your choice in the dropdown menus, so scholar runes are 1, ruby orbs are 2 etc). Also make sure the calculation option of your software is set to automatic.

Not all of the wiki is accurate or up to date.

There is a formula for the damage of utilities, but I don’t know it. All I know is that they scale on the level of the character.
So instead of putting " coefficient * weapon damage / target armor" in the formula, you just take the lvl 80 damage as stated on the wiki, divided by 916 (base lvl 80 power) and multiplied by default target armor (2600) to get the damage component you need.
To calculate final damage you just multiply that component by all modifiers, by your power, and divide it by your target’s armor.

Edited to mention armor.

Edit2:
so for glyph of storms
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Glyph_of_Storms
lvl 80 damage is 122
Therefore with my 2200 power I would deal: 122 / 916 * 2200 = 293 (on a 2600 armor target)

I don’t have to take your word for it amigo, I have a super powerful calculator and I can check all this in a matter of seconds

My issue with staff: no source of fury, unless you swap but then no source of damage.
The best full rotation I can find for staff (fresh air) has a c/s of 1,18 (modified for weapon strength), which is low, but provides fury and a number of offensive conditions.

Until they fix lingering elements I don’t see how people would want to switch attunements in staff that much.

I think utilities scale with the level of the player

Dub.1273:

Of course Conjures were buffed from 969 by 5% but that was unintentional and was patched right away.

Hm that’s not exactly what I understood: if I am not mistaken they were buffed quite some time ago, around the dragon bash patch. Then the 03/09 patch had a bug and they just fixed the bug.
I have not tested any of this however, so I could very well be wrong.

Huh.. nope! Weapon strength is being used!
Check the formula on the wiki.
skills have no base damage

As for the weapon strength of phantasms, isn’t 969 the exact same as that of elem conjures? If I remember correctly conjures were buffed from 925 to 969 to match ascended stuff.

Well no, definitely not, that would be way too extreme.

A few things you would have to do however:
-kill any foe that has aggroed you
-complete all events

Excelsior comrades!

I have just finished the alpha version of my new calculator. This calculator enables you to plug in your build, your rotation, and see what kind of damage it does. Easy and simple! But is it just an alpha.

I would like to get feedback on this calculator, any kind of feedback, so I can know what to work on first. If you are interested, could you please download it and try it?

Download link

Works best on Excel 2007. Function issues with Open Office’s Calc

Alternative download

Compatible with Excel 2003

Features
Current:
-Build calculator
-Out of combat and In combat stats
-Dps calculator (direct damage)
To come:
-Rotation calculator

Note
The calculator is in its very first version. It is very far from complete. So far I have only made the framework for future improvements, and I have only included the necessary information to calculate direct damage dps from the most common builds. There are four tabs: Build 1 is a realistic calculation for my Fresh Air dagger build, Build 2 is the highest dps an elem can achieve (LH), Root is the raw data used for all calculations an Rotation is just an example of how I calculate my coefficient per second figures. You need to plug in your coefficient per second figure in the build tabs to calculate your dps (in a future update I will make a rotation calculator to do this for you). You also need to take a look at the number in orange.

If you have any questions or remarks, please let me know! I look forward to making this tool complete, and I can only do so with your help.

I find a lot of truth in what Nikaido is saying.

@Topic: my opinion is that a proper record would have to be done with role play in mind, at least to a certain extent. I know this word can hurt some sensibilities but what I mean is that a record should look beautiful. The team would have to make the community feel like they are a group of heroes, not afraid of any challenge. The team would face encounters and overcome them in the way the community is most afraid of, but still use the cleverest tactics in order to cut time.
Technically speaking it is hard to state how exactly this can be achieved. But as a guideline the question that the runners would have to keep in mind is “are we making a story worth telling?” if yes then it is a beautiful run for me.

It’s high time we dispel the confusion about staff: it deals very good damage.
Let’s look at three scenarios:
-normal staff rotation: spam lava font and meteor shower on cooldown, fill in with fireballs
-rotation with cd reduction
-rotation with cd reduction and persisting flames

The coefficient per second figures I have calculated are as follows (single target, human size):
-normal: 1.17
-cd: 1.23
-cd & PF: 1.36

As a matter of comparison, the lightning hammer also deals 1.36 c/s

However the staff has much more weapon damage: about 10% more, so if we take weapon damage into account the modified coefficients should be as follows:

-normal: 1.29
-cd: 1.36
-cd & PF: 1.50

So yes technically staff can do more damage than the lightning hammer if you land all your skills.

However, this calculation is done before the effect of traits and hammer attributes. In fact LH is stonger because you can combo traits to gain a huge damage boost.

Still, the staff deals high damage. The problem is that you have to remain in fire for this and if ever you have to swap out then you will deal very low damage for 15s.

oZii ! It’s been a while! How’s your ascension going?

I have a strong belief that they intentionally made the condi side of the meta a bit too strong just so that people would give it a go. Now they talk about shaving it a little. You know what that sounds like to me? Inference in a market economy to reach equilibrium.

Don’t we all need the same thing Haviz? Don’t we?

LordByron.8369:

Zelyhn.8069:

Hm, so warriors do not provide anti-projectile but the elem is the worse support anyway just because guardians can provide a bit more reflects?

On a side note: mesmer’s feedback and swirling winds both have 6s duration, but swirling winds has 30s cd while feedback has 40s. That does not sound like 200% more to me.

You mean

Feedback
IwardenS <==== best reflect
curtain
Healing skill
Blurred frenzy if traited
Distortion

a mesmer can have 100% reflect uptime for Whole party while dishing huge dps (PvE)

An ele can get near 80% ABSORB counting invul skills, giving up almost all his damage.

Indeed I forgot about the Pwarden. This is rarely seen though, because it is really akward to use (if I am not mistaken).

But you forgot about not including traits

Lavadiel.6231:

Zelyhn.8069:

Lavadiel, Elems do have the best achievable dps. But not on their own: they need a speedkill set-up for this.

proof it on movie (ofc without FGS rush bug) that ele can output 80k dmg in a 100b timeframe, ofc if you want to timewarp the ele also timewarp the warriors 100b.

That’s burst. I am talking about dps, so a 15s+ time frame is more reasonable.

Lavadiel, Elems do have the best achievable dps. But not on their own: they need a speedkill set-up for this.

I agree, but if we consider traits then we are including both augmenting and limiting factors. These factors affect not only the reflection potential of the class we are evaluating, but also many other aspects of its output (damage potential, debuffs, etc). So if we include traits then bringing factors that are significant for other kinds of outputs into the equation. We would have to compare the potential of both classes in these other outputs to avoid bias, but that would mean considering too much information for us to handle, so we cannot do that reliably. This is why I say this is biasing the evaluation.

Therefore my point stands: if we exclude traits, the elementalist has one of the best anti-projectile potential of the game.

Also, to respond to

silvermember.8941:

2. Your high dps depends entirely on cheap encounters, the moment the encounters evolve past that stand in place and dps, the so called damage falls apart. you have no range dps that can rival the warriors.

The realistic fresh air rotation I am advocating in my build has an average effective range of 300 and deals around 10k5 dps under full buffs. I think this kind of number is considered decent by the community.

Yes but you have to compare what is comparable: skills to skills.
If you take traits into account then the comparison is biased.

Hm, so warriors do not provide anti-projectile but the elem is the worse support anyway just because guardians can provide a bit more reflects?

On a side note: mesmer’s feedback and swirling winds both have 6s duration, but swirling winds has 30s cd while feedback has 40s. That does not sound like 200% more to me.