Guild Wars 2

Then they are probably right.
What I am asking for is at least a sticky on this page here that redirects (or best: mirrors) the game bug thread.
This is very important. I just remember the day when I opened this forum and I read about all the bugs (many more at that time). It felt very good to have all the information easily handed out to me, and it was very useful! From the bug thread I learned a lot of mechanics and tricks at that time. I would have never ventured on the game bug forum though, so in order to help all elementalists, especially the new ones, a game bug thread must be stickied here.

Ok now I have some time to write about my view of the famous persisting flame LH build.
As I see it there are three builds: 30/0/0/20/20, 30/20/0/20/0, and 30/0/0/10/30

I do not have my spreadsheet available right now so I am just going to talk about the builds without specific calculations. I will update this post with the accurate numbers later if required.

The common ideas of the three builds are the following:
-using the two LH conjured as the main source of damage while staying in the water attunement
-buffing allies with blast finishers on fire fields for fury and might

My general critique is the following:
-buffing allies with fury is nice, but perma buffing is an overkill (no need to use that many resources for this since most classes can have access to fury, persisting flame is very good though)
-relying on using the two LH and staying in water for your damage is far too cluncky.
It is a very simple remark indeed, but let me explain.
Once you conjure the hammer you deal good damage. If you have to drop the hammer then your damage becomes terribly low (scepter) until you pick the second one. It does not seem like much of a problem like this, but when the encounters are challenging (some dungeons, high level fractals) this becomes a huge issue. It has been argued that it is possible to plan to drop the LH every 30 seconds, use utilities and skills from weapon sets and then pick the second LH. I do not disagree with this, but it locks you into cycles of 30s. So basically you have to plan to use all your utility at once every 30s. In my opinion this is terrible. I say this because in challenging PvE you will need to use the focus in air, water and earth. The chance that you will need to be invulnerable, self block projectiles, aoe block projectiles, knock down, and daze all at the same time every 30s is null. At best you can manage a rotation for swirling wind, but that is still very limiting. If at any point, after you pick the LH, you have to use any of the other utilities, or mist form, or pick up an item, then the synergy collapses instantly.
The build relies a lot on the ability to generate blast finishers every 30s in order to give might and fury. This means that every 30 you will have to switch out of water, so this attunement that is required to deal your damage will be locked for some time. In this time you do the persisting flame combos, which are very good (you need only 3 blast every 30s, it is very easy on scepter and takes little time), then you pick up the hammer again. The consequence of this is that for at least 8 (to 13) seconds (depending on arcana) you will not benefit from the modifiers from water. This is crucial! Think of it: for a good third of your time you will not have the 20% increased damage that the build is supposed to give you.
So in short: far too cluncky, limiting, vulnerable to change (not reactive at all) and inconstant.

Now to the builds, in order of viability from lowest to highest in my opinion:

1) 30/0/0/10/30
All you gain is some utility from arcane, 300 power, and 20% more damage. This is very little and as I see it the only advantage of this build is the persisting flame combo (support), the damage itself is low.

2) 30/0/0/20/20
At least here you have decent damage in water attunement. Under the right conditions you get a modifier of 50%, which is good (my build gives 30), but no points in air so in the end you deal less (air gives 300 preci and 30 crit, which is far more beneficial than 300 power, especially under might stacks).

3) 30/20/0/20/0
Awesome damage, likely quite better than my build, but no generation of vulnerability. This is the only LH build that I consider viable, in non-challenging PvE (like speed runs). It is the most cluncky of all LH builds, so in high level PvE it becomes rapidly obsolete.

I would like to add that LH builds have very little ability to generate weakness and protection, which are essential (my build easily keeps 40% uptime on team protection, and near permanent aoe weakness).
And finally, LH is just so much more usefull if used situationally: with an ally wielding the second one, spamming blinds and blasts, and then getting back to constant and fluid damage.

However I agree that persisting flames can be very good.

I hope this explanation is useful to understand why I am quite against using the LH as a main source of dps. I am open to any critiques, and I may be wrong so feel free to let me know if you disagree.

(Written from a mobile device, my apologies for the possible mistakes)

Neko is not referencing my build in his guide so I suggest you take a look at my sig!

Kodiak has one point: if you are scared of destroyable objects then conditions are not for you
But if you are not, then I believe our discussion has given birth to an interesting condition build that I would like to try myself!
I am only concerned about its viability compared to other condition classes, but my intuition tells me it could pass the test.

Necros are not consudered garbage in PvE. A good necro deals good damage.

Conditions are very useful in PvE. In fact you can easily do more damage than most direct damage builds, just not as simply. If, like this build, you do not max out the stacks, then you team will not “eat” your stacks.

The point of arcana in the build is not only the utility at little damage cost (5% damage in exchange for 20% more boon duration, vigor, attunement cd reduction, EA or elemental surge, it is a no brainer) but also for the ability to use the essential focus skills with little down time on your bleed spam. You will need to use the focus in air and water, so refucing the earth and fire cooldown is a good way to increase your damage. In fact the 200 power from more points in fire is close to useless: the direct damage output of the build is extremely low and 200 power would not make it much better anyway.

D/D gives mainly fury, the build does not need this.
Boons like might are extremely worth it no matter the condition duration.

Edit: I forgot to mention that conditions damage dealers have a hard time in low level pug groups, like Kodiak is suggesting from his experience, but in higher levels we almost always take one good condition guy. Again, I have not tried this build myself, but I am really tempted. I am definitely not the best elem around tho, so we would have to wait until guys like Haviz try this to be really sire it is worth it

The amount of QQ here is too kitten low!!
No seriously we all love the class, that’s why we are so vocal about it

This is a response to the new addition of a sticky message from the mods. This message is telling us to report profession bugs in the forum bug section. I think this is not a good idea:

- it is very easy to just check our profession forum and see the bugs that we have reported. We have a thread for this that is very active and well maintained, once stickied it would be a click away.

- new elementalists can have a better access to this thread. They can learn a lot this way, and they do not create topics that are unnecessary.

- almost no player check the game bug forum. The community would be much less responsive

Wouldn’t it be easier just to sticky the thread we have here and then mirror it on the game bug forum?

Yes but you just take burning precision in fire so that you still maintain perma burn, then in arcana you can take what ever you want (V-VI-XI is always strong, but you can also do a nice elemental surge build, think and adapt to the relevant situations). You should use the focus in PvE by the way.
Loosing 20% conditions duration is a 5% to 7% dps loss (depending on boons and corruption stacks), which is nothing compared to the incredible utility you gain from using arcana (for example you can use swirling wind from the focus reactively at little cost). This is because with the chance to apply bleed on crits you will still maintain around 21 bleed stacks on scepter (19.5 on staff and 18 on dagger MH). With more condition duration the stack cap gets in the way of your proc on crits, so you don’t benefit from it fully. I have never tried this myself but in theory this build looks quite good In fact condition duration food is so OP in PvE that I am considering using it for my direct damage build …!

Edit: I forgot to say that you should use signet of fire actively, don’t take the fire axe. And try GoEP!!

We do use conditions in PvE, but indeed it is usually limited to one big condition damage dealer. Try high level dredge without conditions ^^
@ OP sorry I meant 180% bleed duration, so a 80% increase. Yes 20% condition duration is likely better than 180 condition damage, but I have not calculated it myself, I will let you know more about this in the future

Yes, final damage is calculated as:
Dmg = raw damage * weapon damage * skill coefficient / target armor * modifiers
As you can see it is all linear, so calculating raw damage changes is the most simple and relevant way to evaluate stats
I define raw damage as:
Power * ( 1 + crit chance * crit damage )
Note that crit chance is (precision – 822) / 21 / 100
Crit damage has a base of 50%

I would be very glad to share my spreadsheet of course! I have improved it quite a bit now by the way. At the time not many people appeared to be interested. I will reupload it as soon as I am back from my trips, in two days

No you can completely leave out the coefficient, it is completely irrelevant to calculate raw damage changes.

We talked about a PvE condi build in a previous thread, it is very efficient indeed! I am yet to try this myself, but it seems to me that the more optimal route is to go 10/0/30/0/30 with givers weapons, so you have perma burn, 180% burn duration and the less cost to swapping out of earth. This build is working because condition duration food is completely OP.

We havehad this talk in an other thread before. It is simply poitnless to make this kinds of conclusions guys. First the stats points allocations of power preci and crit are not equal and evenly distributed on the pieces of equipment, then no simple ordination of efficiency can be made since the effeciency breakpoints of each on of these stats are dependent on the two other stats and finally you have to take mights stacks and fury buffs into account. It is just way easier to take the raw damage formula (without including skill coefficients, weapon damages, and target armor) and derivate it for each stat, factor in your current stats and then you know what to increase. You can do this on Excel in 5 seconds

All our alacrity traits are complete rubbish.

@ Shockwave
Actually with this build you usually use at most one or two skills before switching back to air, in fact you spend at best a little more than a few seconds out of this attunement.
The focus is compulsory in high level PvE, and the dagger is simply the best option for damage while maintaining my utility. The fury stacking LH build is the only other build that seems optimal to me, indeed, but not for high level PvE because it is way too clunky (it is good for speedruns mainly). I will explain in a following message why this LH build is hardly used in high level PvE.
If you look at the damage output of my build, in fact it deals a lot (for an elementalist) ! The weapon set allows you to stack a lot of might (more than off-hand dagger) and the combat style is very fluid. Once I post videos you can see this for yourself

@ Kevin
I use full zerker ascended gear, ruby orbs (I would use runes of strength if they were not bugged), sigils of force and battle. Most of the time I use glyph of elemental power, glyph of storms, LH (expect your teammates to pick up the second hammer) or signet of fire.
Videos will come soon!

@ Kahzi
Yes scepter deals very little damage and it is very limited in aoe, I almost never use it. When I have to be at range I usually use the staff, but that is rare. You don’t need combat logs to check this, just look at the coefficients of the spells: Skill data

It seemed to me 80% of the talks here are about WvW, 15% on PvP and 5% on PvE. The PvE discussion usually ending in “anything works” since people don’t play fractals past level 26. In high level PvE things can get quite complex, not as much as in PvP of course but it is worth talking about.

In PvE anything more than 10 points in arcana is a waste of points.

Actually it seems to me that staff deals decent damage in its fire rotation, and more damage than scepter in its FA rotation. When I say “decent” I mean for elementalists…

I would not play anything but ele, and in high-level PvE I find it quite fine, difficult, but fine
People are mostly whinning about WvW (read mobility) here.

Hello all, thank you for your interest in this thread. I am on a trip, with little access to the web, so I will reply as soon as I can, and videos will be posted when I return :)

@codingCaptor
This is an impressive condition build!
If I have calculated things right, you should actually be able to max out bleed stacks (stone shards have a cast time of 1.9 so it is a bit more than you thought), but I would like your empirical confirmation on this. Note that in practice you would actually not see the theoretical average of 25.6 bleed stacks that your build is supposed to put out, and the empirical average should be lower (due to probability distributions and caps).
For my calculations I assumed you maintain on average 23 bleed stacks (you loose a bit of time casting signet of fire).
I found that your average dps from conditions would be as follow:
3246.5 dps from bleeds
818.3 dps from burn
condition total: 4065 dps
add the direct damage from your attacks (signet of fire ignored for simplicity, irrelevant) on a 2400 armored target.
141 dps
grand total:
4206 dps
with max corruption:
5858 dps
Which is bloody high.

As for the fire traits, the first thing you should do is take the chance to apply burn on crits. This is because you will then be able to cast signet of fire less often, so you will save time to cast bleeds. It is a minor improvement, but it makes sense and I am going to explain why.
If you swap out of earth you are useless for 12.5s, which is a huge dps loss.
My advice to you would be to consider the following move:
Take those 20 last points in fire and put them in arcana, take the trait to apply burn on crits in the fire trait line (burning precision).
This will reduce your direct damage by an insignificant amount, and your condition duration will be 180% instead of 200% (stack bleed to 21)
Burning precision will enable you to still maintain perma burn (14.4s of burn from signet, plus 3.6s of burn every 16s from burning precision while spamming your auto-attack), but your bleed damage will be reduced.
You will then deal 3932 dps (5561 with max corruption stacks)
So your new damage is 93.5% (94.9% with corruption) of your previous damage, which is still bloody high.
Now you have the possibility to swap out of earth at much less cost.
In arcane you can take defensive and supportive traits.
It seems to me that this would be a good compromise: a bit less damage for augmented survivability and group utility. This gain is explained by the fact that this move makes you get rid of the unused fire traits. This way your build becomes more efficient: your output is increased.
(edit: there is also the additional advantage that you will not cover all bleed stacks, so people in your group will not “eat” your stacks)

Note that your build is also perfectly viable for staff (eruption base stacks bleeds to 10), so you would deal most of this bloody high damage in aoe, not just single target.

End build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEUQJArdhEmYbtx0wjDIhCCw4BIoBdY5xMkD2AA-jAyAINAsWCpFAUFwcYR0YrmFRjVdjpjJiqFCYxaA-e

Condition duration food is imba

They would still share ICDs as far as I know.

Yes of course, but then you are comparing the use of six skills (water field + 5 blasts) versus the use of one skill. Each of these blasts only affects 5 people, just like any of our direct heals.

Very nice! This is like the bunker ele support condition build I have been talking about for a while. I am very glad someone has had the will to try something like this.
I believe this build is working because when you are a bunker you deal low damage, and conditions require less resources to deal equivalent damage compared to direct attacks, which enables you to focus more on healing and toughness.
What you are truly surprising me with is the idea of being able to apply confusion like this, I think this is quite clever and I thank you for being innovative!
Can you post some videos?
One remark: aren’t those sigils sharing ICDs?
How about more apothecary gear?

Actually it seems to me that conditions have one thing working in their favor: it takes less resources to do equivalent damage with conditions compared to direct damage.
Unless they introduce a mechanic similar to that of fresh air for earth, I can hardly see how focusing mainly on conditions can be a good thing in PvE. However I believe that conditions are actually nice if you do not focus too much on them (spend few resources on them): for example the bunker ele is doing a large part of its damage with conditions, and even with the direct damage build I am using in PvE I find that including conditions applying skills (such as drake’s breath and ring of earth) in my fresh air rotation is a good damage boost.

Additional questions:
-Is the trait Lingering Elements working as intended? Are they happy with the way it works and they way it is being used?
-Are they happy with the weapon-specific traits? Why no traits for the focus?
-Are they happy with the alacrity traits?
-Do they plan on introducing more traits with mechanics similar to that of Fresh Air?
-Are they happy with the Arcane Precision trait?

I think you are being too drastic. Even in fotm 70+ I find that a bit of support healing is beneficial to the group, especially when it comes at no dps cost (my build include 20 in water). One of the reasons for this is that people will get downed, maybe one-shot, but they will also rally and at this point they will need heals. Of course I am not saying that being focused on healing is any good.

I don’t understand why the target limitations are a problem. As far as I know there are only very few skills that are not limited, so this is not a comparative disadvantage to heals.

Minor bug: When reviving a player, if you swap attunements you will stand up in ready combat motion but still channel the revive. Animation bug.

This is neat and well rounded discussion gentlemen. I think we are being quite objective and constructive, I hope Anet can hear us.

I would just like to add that this overall problem you are talking about leads to a frustrating feeling of having to do a lot of effort just to do anything close to a decent output. I am totally in favor of the “high risk high reward” philosophy, but apart from in PvE I fail to see how we are rewarded for having to do so much.

The self-heals of bunker eles have not changed at all in PvE and WvW.
Only the damage, cleansing and mobility have been reduced a bit. The support bunker ele is still as strong as ever!

cheshirefox.7026:

elementalist lacks synergy
synergy noun 1. the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements, contributions, etc.; synergism.

this is not only an issue with our attunements, but also our traits
one aspect of elementalist fails to compliment another and our traits are simply too bland or they hype ‘something’
elementalist then becomes a one trick pony in a marathon of race horses
then they decide to take our trick away

Exactly this.
Only very few traits have synergy, the others are just useless. That’s why I advocate a natural lingering element mechanic.

In dungeons you need to use a focus off-hand, so you can provide projectile deflection for your group. For survivability you will have to use glyph of storms and lightning hammer so you can apply lots of blinds. If your group takes abilities that are as supporting as these then you will have no trouble surviving until fractal 79

Edit: unless you are fighting dredges, in which case your best move is to get down on your knees and pray to all the gods you never believed in.

As for the traits, you need 10 in arcane, so you can either buff you and your allies or use vigor for timely dodges.

Elementalists rock in PvE

Yes with a minor in condition you should apply near perma burn and a bit of bleed. This gives you about as much dps as someone with a major in power only (traits ignored). It is true that some classes can easily fill the condition stacks, but when they are most optimal they will usually stack it up to 20, leaving you some room for a bit of damage. So it requires some group coordination, but it enables to heal while contributing a little to the damage output of the group. I am not saying that this is an optimal choice, but if he is going to do healing this is the best response I can think of. If he went for direct damage instead of condition like I advise, it would cost him more resources, so less healing.

I think you are almost exactly right BlackBeard.
In my opinion the problem is more that we have very very weak attunement specific traits compared to the other classes (and also lingering elements is bugged). This is crucial.
With the way our attunements are designed it is ok to have 15s cooldowns and some ways to reduce it. But many traits are designed to work only in a specific attunement, which is ridiculous.

A solution that comes to my mind: lingering elements should be debugged to work with everything, and made natural to the class, for a shorter duration. So elements would linger for maybe 2-3 seconds as a class mechanic. The arcane 15 could then buff this duration.
Alacrity traits should work with lingering elements (“when this attunement is active your skills cooldowns are reduced by 20%”)

You can do this easily:
Try the support bunker build: 0/0/10/30/30 with apothecary or cleric gear in PvE and shaman or cleric gear in PvP.
This will give you a strong focus on healing, while letting you do a little it of damage.

You should read these two threads:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Queen-s-Gauntlet/first#post2597928
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Guide-Mastering-the-D-D-ele-7-15-13/page/18#post2585275

Well the very famous bunker support build can easily fulfill this role: 0/0/10/30/30. I suggest you try apothecary gear, I have not tried it myself but in theory this would be a good response to what you intend to do.

@ Aaedhros Encalius

Thanks for asking! I think there is one utility skill missing from your build.
One major issue I see with your build is that you chose two sigils that proc on weapon swap. The mechanics are such that only one of them can occur when you swap attunements, if I am not mistaken this would be the main-hand sigil.
I have done my analysis of your build assuming you would proc sigil of battle.
I assumed a cast per second amount of 0.80 (for Signet of Restoration), an average of 8 might stacks, and perma fury. The factors taken into account for the analysis are the stats from gear, traits, buffs and food. Non-stat trait choices and sigils are ignored.

Analysis of your build:
Direct Damage = 4’.55
Condition Damage = 1.27
Direct Mitigation = 1.14
Max Health = 1.27
Sustainability = 6.6%

A few comments:
-You seem to want to do direct damage with some defense, so you go for zerker armor and some defensive trinkets. I think you should do the opposite. The critical damage bonus ratio of the trinkets is better than that of the armor and weapons, so if you want to have zerker pieces it is better to focus on the trinkets first (for the same amounts of power and precision you will have more critical damage). You can then tweak your armor with the defense pieces that you want.
-You decided not to take elemental attunement (arcane trait). This is quite detrimental to your survivability (no access to regen or protection) and to your damage (you could get at least 2 mights stack on average).
-You probably have little cleansing (condition removal) with you build, isn’t this a problem for you?

I hope this was helpful, let me know if you have any questions!

I am not an expert on scepter but I think you could save that + 10% damage in fire: just make sure you swap out of air into fire while the auto-attack is still channeling so that it crits while in fire, then cast your bursts and swap back to air before they land so that they benefit from the + 10% damage of that attunement. You could for example use the burn on crit chance instead, or more likely the + 5% damage to burning foes.
The issue you may have is that phoenix has a quite long cd, even with cd reduction you likely have to wait a few seconds before it is available (16s reduced skill cd VS 12.5s attunement cd), which means that either you waste time waiting for it, or you swap to fire less often or you use phoenix every other fire swaps. This is less of an issue for dagger since burning speed has 15s cd.
Also there is a good chance that the augmented condition duration from the fire trait line is not being used since you likely apply little burn/bleeds.
It simply seems to me that you could do without the fire trait line. You could just choose to cast phoenix once every two fire swaps, and invest those 10-20 points somewhere else, like earth (+ 10% damage under 600 range compensates for the loss of 200 power, stability) and water (healing ripple helps to stay above 90% hp, cleansing on swap). But I can imagine that in scepter you likely don’t need this defense.
Let me know what you think!

The last time they released an armor with boon duration you remember how much it had?

@ Kahzi
You are right that FA benefits dagger and scepter way more than staff. But my build does not limit the use of the staff, actually I mention many times that I leave room for adaptability that allows you to best respond to any given situation. If you are going to use the staff you can just choose a different trait choice than FA. As for me I still keep it even with staff because I like to spam lightning surge on cd and lightning discharge procs. Like I said, the staff is rarely used for its damage in PvE. If you plan on using it for its damage then it is best to take the + 10% damage in fire attunement from the fire trait line.
By the way you can still deal a decent amount of damage in staff with FA: fire, flame burst (if required), lava font , switch to air instantly, wait, switch to water, ice spike, switch to air instantly, wait, switch to earth, eruption and switch back to air instantly. The idea is that all these other attunement spells will deal their damage while you will be in air, therefore benefiting from + 10% damage and fury without changing the build.

@ Fade
Spot on!
I found that in dagger I did not need more arcana past 10 points for three reasons: no additional damage or support apart from vigor, which I do not require; bugged lingering elements; and no need for lower cooldown on fire (with daggers I can stack near perma burn with a drake’s breath every 12.5 seconds so less cd would not increase my burn damage, and burning speed has 15s cd). But more arcana could be a valid choice: it is more defensive and I can understand why people would want more defense. Still, going 30 in arcane just for a bit more defense and EA is a waste of points in my opinion (in PvE).

Can you tell me which fire traits you are using with your build?

Hi!
Yes sigil of battle works
The conjures can be quite useful in PvE except the axe.
The frost bow has a good aoe capability (skill 4)
The shield is rarely used but is strong for some specific actions: packing mobs, tanking.
The lightning hammer is very strong for damage dealing and provides blast finishers as well as blinds.

The issue with using conjures exclusively is that it often locks you out of your weapon skills, so it can be limiting.

As I see it, it is best to use the conjures only in the specific situations where they shine.

Look at Neko’s thread stickied at the top of this forum, everything is explain in this comprehensive guide.

Invulnerability never made us immune to previously applied conditions, this is not a nerf.
If what BlackBeard says is true however, we can start whining!

Water trident is a good weapon skill heal: it is about half more efficient than cone of cold and twice as efficient as cleansing wave (d.w5) in terms of healing.
It is very far from the potency of the staff heals, but it is more convenient to use.

The difference in c/s of CE and LW is 0.22
Over 3.25 seconds that is 3.25 * 0.22 = 0.72 c/s
let’s assume an in-combat power of 2300, crit modifier of 2 and targets with 2400 armor, the difference in damage of the two spells over the longest cast time is about 0.72 * weapon damage * 2300 / 2400 * 2 = 1314 damage. So yes, if we include conditions (2700 base damage) CE is likely doing more damage.

Again, LW > churning earth in direct damage:
LW damage at 916 power on 2600 armored target is about 235 per hit, two hits, 1.15s cast = 235 * 2 / 1.15 = 408 dps
CE damage under the same conditions is 1090, 3.25s cast (plus some aftercast, ignored) = 1090 / 3.25 = 335 dps
Lightning hammer does even more damage.

Churning earth has a c/s of 1 compared to 1.22 for LW.
I am pretty sure that even if you factor in the bleeds the damage will be lower.

Kodiak in the post where you talk about your condimentalist build you clearly state that it is designed for small skirmishes and single target attacks; so basically: duels.
You provided us with videos. Videos are a great way to demonstrate the potency of a build that is non-mainstream (for mainstream build we need maths). Then I demonstrated that your performance in those videos is largely under average.
Maybe if you were able to provide a proof of the efficiency of your build, by either defeating skilled players in duels or by showing us meaningful videos, we would reconsider our positions.

Until then what I see is the following:
-This is not a condition build, it is a hybrid damage build. The issue with being hybrid is that when you intend to do two things (direct and condition damage) there is a good chance that you will be bad at both. In your build your damage may actually not be bad (yet to be seen on video) but your sustain and supporting abilities are so few that it is obvious you will not be able to put out this damage. Nearlight confirmed this.
-The resources implied are not being efficiently used. When you are in fire you do no longer benefit from the cd reduction in earth and the bleed duration increase. When you are in earth you no longer benefit from the fire damage increase, the cd reduction and the pyromancer puissance. So half of the time half of these traits are wasted.
-Again, alacrity does not increase your condition damage output in most cases. This is because the vast majority of your conditions in scepter are applied by the Auto-attack.

Please try to understand that here we are not trying to compare builds. But we are trying to guide the less experienced elementalist away from bad builds. Many non-conventional builds are not the best choices, but that is not the question. If people want to play non-conventional build it is perfectly fine, but we will always make sure that they are non-conventionally optimal (like maybe for example TGSlaher’s build). Your build, Kodiak, is non-conventional and non-optimal.

You put a lot of effort in defending it. You are probably taking this too personally. Or maybe you just don’t know what it is to be efficient in this game?
Now stop fleeing: if you are confident about your build then go duel, even if you loose, or give us meaningful videos. Until then our position will remain the same: your build is a bad build.

I am going to be completely honest with you Kodiak.
No one here is expressing anything against your person.
We are saying that the build your are promoting is bad, for obvious reasons.
(The word “bad” may sound offensive, this is definitely not my intent, I am trying to be constructive here, so you may read “weak” instead)
I am going to explain to you the reasons why this is a bad build, but before you need to understand that we are not saying so to bring you down or to discredit you.
The only reason why the renown theorycrafters have not expressed their opinion on your build is because they believe it is not worth their time and that it is obviously wrong. Anyone can see this. But some people are starting to have some faith in your build and this is detrimental to the elementalist community.

Critique of your build:
The strongest argument I have against your build is that your damage output ill be very low while your sustainability is almost non-existent.
-You use direct damage increase traits specific to attunements, but in earth and fire only about one third (at most!) of your damage will be direct
-Pyromancer puissance becomes useless as soon as you swap out of fire, and since you have no arcana this will be for a good 15s.
-Alacrity spells can be interesting but they do not increase your condition damage in most cases
So in fact your build is twofold: it is a level 40 fire build and a level 40 earth build, with very little interactions between the two.
The key idea of any condition damage build is to be able to apply burn and bleed at the same time while covering them with other conditions, your build fails to do this.

I have nothing against you so please do not take this personally. I am just as disappointed as you that we have only few viable builds to work with! But it is not because you produce a build that is not mainstream that it will necessarily be a good build.

If I remember correctly Innocent Ouarrior published a condition build some time ago and it seemed decent to me, if I can find it I will post it here.

Sincerely, with no offense intended and with the interest of the community in mind.