Guild Wars 2

Yes I edited my post with an idea

Oh and also, once they fix lingering elements I’d like to see this trait grant the attunement bonuses to conjure’s spells and its wielder for a duration. But now that’s wishful thinking!

Wishful thinking, wishful thinking everywhere .. Get real, guys!

The core mechanic of elemetalists is indeed to swap attunements. It is very well done, but tricky. In fact if you look at it generally, in terms of damage:
-fire: direct damage + condition
-air: direct damage
-earth: conditions
So whether you go for condition damage or direct damage, somehow you have two attunements that are optimal for you. Attunements have a base recharge time of 15s. So, theoretically, the recharge time of your optimal damaging state is 15/2=7.5 seconds, which is lower than the other classes recharge times. The issue is that when we are not in those optimal attunements then we are quite suboptimal, that’s why many elementalists prefer to be tanky and faceroll attunements with arcana.
What I mean is that we do not need a weapon swap. We do not need conjures to be similar to engineer’s kits either. This would be extremely redundant.
However I am not saying there are no issues with conjures.
You just need to be realistic and keep in mind the core concepts of the game.
Their wish is to give us group utilities, that’s why the conjures drop a second weapon, it’s not necessarily just for us. There are utilities, so think of them as such.

A realistic idea:
When you have a conjure utility slotted, you will drop the conjured weapon at your feet (with less charges and time) when you swap out of the corresponding attunement.
This would solve the problem of their clunkyness, keep the group aspect of it, and act in in a similar way as fresh air if you see what I mean. Actually I love my idea.

Awesome!!
Thanks a lot, and good luck for upcoming tournaments

@oZii
Thank you!

Analysis of your build:
D/D
0/10/0/30/30
Full knights armor and weapons
Divinity runes
Trinkets ascended all stat trinkets w/ 2 healing infusions 3 power infusion
Backpiece: Ascended Cavalier
Food: superior sharpening stones and +45 to all stats and +5 crit damage

Stats from gear, traits, and food:
————Power: 889
———-Precision: 673
———-Critical Damage: 61
—-Condition: 321
———Vitality: 621
————-Toughness: 871
———Healing Power: 629
—-Boon Duration: 30%

Unbuffed:
Direct Damage: 2.81
Condition: 1.31 (index to base, assuming equal use of burn and bleed)
I am not completely confident about my condition calculations
With perma fury and 10 might on average:
Direct Damage: 3.87
Condition: 1.65

Max EHP: 2.32
EHP/s: 14%
Cleasing/s: 0.74 (measure of the number of conditions you are able to cleanse per second on average, not completely confident)

Note that these numbers are particularly high compared to the numbers currently displayed in my original posts because I included runes, food, and infusions here

With your healing spells from D/D:
EHP/s: 15.6%
Cleansing/s: 0.76

With Aquamancer’s alacrity (if you use your spells perfectly on cd, optimistic):
EHP/s: 16% (+ 2.3%)
Cleansing/s: 0.77 (+ 1%)
So I would say Aquamanacer’s alacrity is not that useful in term of just healing and cleansing for your build (but again I am not completely confident).

I hope this is useful
(it probably isn’t just yet, but once I finish my calculations on popular builds you can benchmark yours)

@Fuzzion
Are you asking me to analyse your build? If yes please give me all the necessary info like oZii did.
I do not take proactive defence into account.
Signet of restoration is tricky because it requires to estimate the average number of casts per seconds (I usually use 0.75 to 0.95 depending on the weapon and traits, arbitrary so far).
The water elemental elite is too random for me too reliably compute any metrics, but if you are interested I can try to come up with something.

@Swimsasa Stoon
Are you asking me to analyse your build? If yes please give me all the necessary info like oZii did.

@Demon
Thanks for your interest!
I believe conditions are not that bad on staff! There are quite a number of builds about it and people seem to say it has a decent output (I never worked on it so I cannot confirm).

@ARM
The question, as always, is “how much?”.
And as you can see from my analysis of Daphoenix’s builds, more healing power does not necessarily mean that you will sustain direct damage more easily.

__

I should probably include the stats from traits in my stats summary/diagrams.
19/07/13 Edit: now including them.
Sharpening stones are a headache to work with

So it should be considered a bug? I remember reading in the patchnotes that it should act as I stated above.

I don’t see how weapon swap is related haha!

If I am not mistaken again, RTL goes on a 20s cd when hitting a dodging target.

If I am not mistaken, when in RLT you can very well be pushed back or stunned.

- reserved for future use -
- end -

Let me know what build and what gear you use and I will tell you your survivability!

I will add talks about conditions in the near future.

These matters are very new to me, and there has been little work on this in the past, so I am not completely confident about everything. If you find mistakes or if you have any remarks I would be pleased to hear you!

_

Currently working on:
-how to measure defence against conditions without making the model too complex (I like to give no more than 3 values to reflect survivability)

- work in progress -

Analysis of current popular builds

Builds taken from Daphoenix’s guide.

Max EHP expressed as an index of base Max EHP, EHP/s expressed a percentage of base max EHP healed per second, Damage increase (from stats only) expressed as an index of base.
No runes, no sigils, no buffs.

Previous gear
Knight armor, knight weapons, and ascended celestial trinkets (cavalier back)
Stats from gear:
———Power: 603
———Precision: 568
——Crit damage: 34
—Condition: 216
—Vitality: 216
————Toughness: 766
—Healing power: 216

Direct damage: 2.50

-0/30/0/10/30
Max EHP = 1.83
EHP/s = 9.5%

-0/30/10/0/30
Max EHP = 1.77
EHP/s = 8.2%

-0/30/0/20/20
Max EHP = 1.96
EHP/s = 9.6%

New gear
Celestial armor, celestial weapons, ascended celestial trinkets but cavalier rings (cavalier back)
Stats from gear:
——-Power: 521
——Precision: 350
———-Crit damage: 67
——Condition: 350
——Vitality: 350
———Toughness: 612
——Healing power: 350

Condition damage: + 10.7% on average, depending on whether you use more burn (closer to 8.8%) or more bleed (closer to 12.6%)

Direct damage: 2.33 (- 9.4 %)

-0/30/0/10/30
Max EHP = 1.89 (+ 3.3%)
EHP/s = 9.4% (- 1%)

-0/30/10/0/30
Max EHP = 1.84 (+ 5.6%)
EHP/s = 8.2% (no change)

-0/30/0/20/20
Max EHP = 2.01 (+ 2.5%)
EHP/s = 9.5% (- 1%)

After I include runes, sigils and buffs the results may change.

- reserved for future use -

Direct Damage

In order to analyse the direct damage potential of a build, I compute a direct damage index. To produce this index I compare the raw damage from the end build (with in action self buffs) to the raw damage from the base stats. Raw damage is never used in game, it is simply a measure of your damage before weapon strength, skill coefficient and target armor.
Raw damage = power * (1 + precision / 21 /100 * critical damage / 100)

So the Direct Damage Index is:
DDI = raw damage of the build / base raw damage

This shows your overall damage potential, independent of your targets’ armor, weapon damage and skills used. It is only useful for comparison. It is not a damage per second calculation.

Damage from Conditions

Evaluating the condition damage potential of a build is a completely different process. This is because condition damage can take two forms for elementalists: bleeding and burning. In addition, these conditions have a fixed base damage (dependent on your level), so the increase in average damage from more condition damage is not linear (as opposed to direct damage and power).
The Condition Damage Index is computed by dividing the damage per second from the end build (with buffs) of each condition by their respective base damage per second.
For convenience, I am currently computing this index under the assumption that burning and bleeding are used equally. This gives at most a 14% error margin on the index: if you use more bleed then your index will be higher and if you use more burn your index will be lower, by at most 14% in extreme cases. In regard of the simplicity this assumption provides, I believe this error margin is acceptable.

CDI =
1 + (condition damage * (0.05 / base bleed damage + 0.25 / base burn damage) / 2)

To provide a perfectly accurate Condition Damage Index I would have to know the average amount of bleed stacks and the average uptime of burn a build is able to achieve.

Example of analysis

let’s take two popular builds since the 9th of July: 0/30/0/10/30 and 0/30/0/20/20

For this analysis we are going to completely ignore the choice of weapons. This is relevant because you may use each build with any weapon. Also each weapon is balanced and has very few differences in term of healing and passive defence (not proactive defence). Remember that a weapon is a response to a situation while a build is a response to a playstyle. I am also ingnoring the gear, since both build are often used with a gear that provides only toughness in term of survivability, toughness is a common factor in both aspects of direct damage survivability and can therefore be factored out for the comparison of these builds.

1. 0/30/0/10/30

-Smoothing mist
-Elemental attunement
-Lingering elements
-Evasive arcana
-Ether Renewal

100 healing power, 100 vitality
30% boon duration, attunement recharge time: 9.4

Survivability in terms of base survivability:
-Max EHP = 1.09 . base max EHP
-EHP/s = 6.06% of base max EHP per second

(The way I measure this survivability is not important, they are just numbers, what matters is the comparison between the two builds)

2. 0/30/0/20/20

-Smoothing mist
-Healing ripple
-Elemental attunement
-Lingering elements
-Ether Renewal

200 healing power, 200 vitality
20% boon duration, attunement recharge time: 10.7

Survivability in terms of base survivability:
-Max EHP = 1.19 . base max EHP
-EHP/s = 6.17% of base max EHP per second

3. Comparison

The second build provides
1.19 / 1.09 = 9.2% more max EHP
6.17 / 6.06 = 1.8% more EHP/s
than the first build.

Conclusion
The second build 0/30/0/20/20 provides more short term survivability for the same long-term sustainability.
Does this makes it a better build? In terms of passive defence, yes. But this is just one aspect of a build.
Once you know this you can make more educated choices regarding the other aspects of the builds, like less condition cleansing, lower attunement recharge rate and less blast finishers for example; but I will leave this to your appreciation with the guidance of the theory crafters who advocate the use of these builds.

To get the actual values of survivability of these two builds simply multiply the values given here by the ratio of armor of the stats with the gear to the stats without the gear (ratio = 1.58 for full knight gear)

Hello fellow elementalists!

Disclaimer: I am expanding my analysis to damage and buffs. This is work in progress and I am editing this thread continuously

I have been working on theory crafting and modelling healing. It is a much more complex task to analyse healing than damage because it requires to take into account specifically what spells we are using. What I call passive defence is the survivability granted by the combined passive actions of your vitality and toughness (Effective Health Points). I am focusing my analysis on direct damage survivability from stats for the moment.

What is survivability

Once all your proactive defence has failed and that you are going to take a hit, I distinguish two aspects in survivability:
-Short term threat: you are subject to high damage in a short period of time, you may not have the time to heal in the period, so you are in danger of being “one-shot”.
-Long term sustainability: you are receiving damage over a long period of time during which you can unfold your full healing potential; while your health may often be not full, your life is not in imminent danger.

In practise, you may never clearly distinguish these two aspects. This is because a lot of the combat output occurs in bursts. It is also very rare to be one-shot, you almost always have time to throw a heal. But the idea remains the same: if you get hit very hard your health will be low and you will change your gameplay until you can heal up, or you will have to “burn a cooldown”; in any case you get diminished to some extent.

How are stats affecting your survivability

The three stats that increase your chances to stay alive are vitality, toughness and healing power.
-Short term: only your passive defence matters. To survive in the short term you must have a high enough number of Effective Health Points (EHP), given by the product of your health and your armor. The stats involved are vitality, toughness and defence from your armor type (wich is just toughness with a different name).
-Long term: the level of your health matters less, instead it is your ability to heal and sustain yourself that is prominent. If your are continuously getting damaged and healing it, then the stats involved are your armor (toughness) and your healing power.

In practise the two aspects are linked.
You get damaged and then heal up. If you do not have enough healing potential to heal yourself sufficiently until the next time that you get damaged then you are not sustaining yourself and your life is under threat. If you heal yourself too easily and spend most of your time at full hp while your maximum effective hp is low then you are sustaining yourself but your life is more likely to be in danger.
Therefore you must get the right combination of stats that help you to best respond to the situations to which you are exposed.

As elementalists we build our survivability on the following base:
-Armor (toughness): 916 base + 920 from armor = 1836 base total
-Vitality: 916 base + 164.5 from class = 1080.5 base total (or 10805 hp)
-Healing power: there is a base healing specific to each spell, and in addition they benefit from a coefficient of your healing power (0 total base) [ skill data ]. This is why it is complex to model healing: in order to determine how much base heal and coefficient of healing power you can put out you must first determine what spells and traits you are going to use.

Analysing

So far, I find that the clearest way to analyse direct damage survivability is to compute maximum effective health points (short term response), and effective health points healed per second (long term response).

Max EHP = vitality . 10 . armor
EHP/s = (base heals + coefficients . healing power) . armor / offtimes

How you value each of these aspects is up to your judgement. There are no reliable metrics for it.
For example you may be fighting Giganticus Lupicus so you are not sustaining much long-term damage but rather you want to avoid being one-shot from missing a dodge on his projectiles, so your max EHP is more important; or you could be tanking the flame legion mobs in Citadel of Flame path one to keep the gate open, so your EHP healed per second becomes more important.

Notice how you base vitality is much lower than your base armor. This means that to increase your max EHP is it easier to focus on vitality.

I have been asked to be a bit more constructive and less mean in order to express my views of this build and gameplay. I understand that while I believe it is obvious that this build/gameplay is not a good example to follow, I should take some time to explain to the community why it is so.

Everything that follows is my opinion and should only be considered as such. Although many people will share it. I am expressing this opinion because I want to help the elementalist community to progress and so I must ward them off the not-so-good ideas that can be found on this thread.
First I will analyse the gameplay showed on the videos.
Note that I am analysing the gameplay, not the player. I am sure Kodiak is a very likable person, but I have some critic to make regarding his gameplay.
Some mistakes that I can spot:
-using scepter and not maintaining a permanent rock barrier
-Not using the air attunement apart from for RTL (Updraft could save his teammates, blind could provide some support, Lightning strike is a good damaging spell worthy os using since the player has invested in power)
-Using heals while out of combat: redundant since you regenerate automatically
-Attacking structures with spell that deal damage primarily with conditions (Flamestrike)
-Not using the fourth spell of the fiery greatsword while meleeing structures (it stacks the ticks on the target, therefore making it the most damaging spell in the game)
-Stacking conditions on targets that have already the maximum stacks possible, therefore providing no damage
-Running into enemies aoe (getting knocked down and stunned a lot from them)
-attacking mostly downed players: this is contributing very little to the group
I would like to point out to anyone watching this video that apparently the damage output of this build is quite suboptimal: as you can see for yourself the player is only able to throw out a few hundred damage per second, which is commonly considered as inefficient. Also the player is not making a good use of his signet utilities while he could spam them without loosing their passive effects due to his traits. Finally I would like to point out that the player is level one in PvP and therefore he may lack the required experience to properly understand what works and what does not.

As for the traits, this is an attempt to make use of conditions as an Elementalist. One of the major flaws I can find in it is that you either damage your targets with burn or with bleed, almost never with both. Therefore the fire traits are useless when you are in earth and the earth traits are useless when you are in fire, or in any other attunement. Notice that the OP has linked his gear set up for you to consider. He advocates using a sigil that chills on weapon swap and a sigil to increas chill duration. Keep in mind that with such build you will not be able to swap attunements that often and that you only have one source of chill. I would kindly advise to anyone interested in dealing damage with conditions to look at any other build approved by the renowned theorycrafters of this community for guidance and ignore this one.
With all due respect and no offence intended.

Edit: I forgot to say that this build provides very little group-wise, not only because its damage is low but also because the utilities are self oriented (or that the player is not using them – like signet of air). Also notice that apparently the player is not using dust devil. In effect, since the player seem to be unable to land most of his skills, he would do more damage if he auto-attacked in water or air.

Drakkon.4782:

Zelyhn.8069:

my belief is that this build is not efficient and that the videos posted by the author clearly illustrate that fact.

Perhaps not, but I think that the most important question is being overlooked in this race to out theorycraft one another: Is it fun to play? One can lose repeatedly at the game in any aspect and still have fun, and if the build it fun to play, then it’s a good build. If it is also efficient or successful, those are added bonuses, but if it isn’t fun, why bother doing it?

Fun is a subjective matter. Build efficiency however, is objective. A lot of people on these forums are trying to help the elementalist community progress, they are putting a lot of effort into that, so it is only normal that poor builds are criticized and judged accordingly.

I am not questioning moderation but maybe if you reconsidered your definition of “rude” then this discussion could actually go forward. Forward as in getting to a full stop from the first post since in all objectivity my belief (and this is my opinion, which is shared by a large number) is that this build is not efficient and that the videos posted by the author clearly illustrate that fact. I hope I have been respectful enough in this post. No offence intended. Respect all. Peace and love.

Updated.
-Added weapon damage comparison. Notice the conclusions in staff’s fire rotation.
-Added traits spells

Unless I get a response on cast times I will start counting their values using frame counting. Any help on this topic is highly appreciated!

Exactly.
This table is accurate but you need to pay attention to the ratio of critical damage to precision in order to read it correctly.

If you compare how often critical damage is better than precision in the table as it is you get a about 12%, which is in line with the idea that critical damage is less potent than precision as a general rule.
But this is only true for a 1:21 ratio (1% critical damage compared to 1% critical chance). In fact, the ratio of stats is always better than this. The wiki states an average ratio of critical damage to precision of about 1:11 (in fact it is even lower than this, around 1:9). So to read the table correctly you need to compare the increment in precision with double that increment in critical damage. The result of such comparison is that in around 50% of the cases critical damage is better than precision. If you take away the points that are covered by a basic berzerker gear this percentage goes up to 60.
Therefore no general rule can be made from this table.

I made a very simple spreadsheet that helps to compute the marginal benefits from each stats. It is easy to do, and quite useful although it does not provide as much insight as Abraxax’s data does. But everybody ignored it

Nikkinella.8254:

Zelyhn.8069:

They don’t keep nerfing PvE ele … we have never been stronger since release in PvE!

Spoken as someone who wasn’t around for beta when ele was actually good. Trust me, we’ve gotten weaker and weaker with each patch.

I agree that we are seriously weak … I am quite tired of having to try much harder than the other classes only to achieve half of what they can do! But still, last patch buffed us a lot.

They don’t keep nerfing PvE ele … we have never been stronger since release in PvE!

Aether McLoud.1975:

Kodiak.3281:

Aether McLoud.1975:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Commonly abbreviated as L2discuss.

Haven’t you realized that sometimes who is saying something is more important than what they are saying?

The message is always more important than the messenger.

Except when it’s Kodiak, in which case both are not imporant :p

Any build that focuses on one utility spell is a bad build.

iriyabran.6218:

This way you would get what it’s lacking – some party support

Wait…

Zelyhn – EU
Playing only elementalist
Applying as a teacher
I do not count my hours
Friendly to anyone who is familiar with basic maths!

My end goal is to help the elementalist community progress, so whether this initiative works or not I want to be part of it.

Great! Thanks Puandro
I have a few questions then:
-what was your method to find the cast time of spells?
-did you include all aftercasts in your cast time listed in the sheet?
Thanks!

I can’t believe it, but I am going to agree with Kodiak on this!
They should try their best not to split skills. What they should do instead is produce PvE content that require PvP-style of play. Aetherbalde Retreat was a nice move in this direction.

Not too bad.
Some decent moves in the first part of the video, but 3 huge mistakes in the second part :p

@TimeBomb
These are not algorithms, these are formulas
Develop and reduce your effective power formula and you will get ours.

@Abraxax

For the crit chance, the wiki is correct: it is precision – 822 and it gives 4.47% crit chance. Since the game takes only integers into account it is displayed and used as 4%, but as soon as you reach 927 precision it becomes 5%. This is a minor difference indeed, and we are not going to use the rounding up in our calculations anyway (the maximum deviation from not rounding up is 0.79%).

I do not understand why you would compute EHP in relation to light armor. Why dividing by the base defense? When you take a hit the damage is first divided by your armor then subtracted to your HP, or equivalently: divided by armor then divided by HP to give the percentage of health lost, so the correlation is linear and the base defense is not involved at any point. But maybe I am forgetting something?
This is important because if you want to compute the absolute marginal benefits from extra vitality or toughness you need this calculation to be correct.

Apart from this, and if I am not mistaken, you did everything right! Good job again

One thing that could be interesting would be to show what pieces of zerker you need to change to PVT as a function of effective health usefulness coefficient to be optimal.

I have some preliminary thoughts on healing and survivability, I will write about this soon, but I definitely not master this subject at the moment.

I agree, that’s why i use this “coefficient of effective health usefulness” to determine the value of my EHP. This coefficient is arbitrary and is meant to reflect the practical use of my passive defence.
It could be objective: I would just have to fraps my gameplay and see the proportion of time that my HP is not full.

Josh Mitchell.1596:

I should have meant giving regeneration through the combo field, my mistake. Will update that bit to clarify. Regardless, the trait tooltip needs to be updated.

I was responding to this talk about cleansing waters.

This is not an I quit thread.

I am bored like I have never been before!

This is not because of the content, nonono, I am even actually starting to enjoy the content.

I am bored because of the players! If you run dungeon with low-skilled players I can get mad at their averageism, but that’s understandable.
If I run with highly skilled players, I get bored because all they do is find the most efficient way to run through the dungeon, to finish it as fast as possible but not in the way the developers intended it.
In some cases it makes sense, if you want to go for a speedkill (DS guild downed Lupi in 26s), but in most other cases it is just killing the fun!
For example I get bored when:
-meleeing subject alpha against a wall so that he does not touch you
-LoS-ing & out-ranging mobs and bosses
-staying on a safe spot, nullifying the pressure from the encounter’s mechanic
You get the idea, I hope.
There are very little rewards in this game, so why play the easy way that brings nothing at the end and nothing on the way?
What is the point of this? It makes the game less fun!
What I find most rewarding in this game is being able to master the encounters the way they are meant to be played.
It’s great to be efficient and optimized, but it should not mean avoiding all the difficulty.
Is there really no one looking for a challenge?

Is there still a good guild alive for dungeons anywhere in the world??

DS is incredibly efficient, very skilled players (Lupi down in 26s right Dub?), but I just cannot bear LoSing every single boss there is!
Is there really no one looking for challenge? It seems people just use strats that are not exploits in themselves but that are definitely not the way developers intended us to go about the dungeons.
Namely:
-If you are using the fact that Alpha does not hit you with his spells when backed against a wall at melee range then you are avoiding the challenge.
-If you LoS kholler (AC mid boss) then you are avoiding the challenge
-If you use safe spots anywhere then you are also avoiding the challenge
Well you get the idea. It’s all only because warriors have an insane dps with their high passive defence.
Luckily ANet is releasing content that requires a more creative play than just rotating GS + Axe and dodging once in a while.
But until the meta game evolves I am just bored!
Is there really no one here looking for a proper challenge??

We know that the aftercast of the spell has been reduced by 0.75s, but do we know what it is now?
If the wiki is correct and the spell applies 4 stacks of vulerability for 15s then with its 2s cd we can assume that the spell stacks up to max stacks of vulnerability ? I never noticed that.

Edit: the cd does not start before the activation of the spell, so in fact the average amount of stack this spell can give is: 4 . 15 / 4 = 15 which is quite strong anyway!

I am not sure I agree with your conclusion that ruby orbs are the best option.
I find that they provide about the same bonus as runes of strength when you have low might stacks (6-7) but the runes’ effectiveness is increased and outshines ruby orbs as soon as you pass that mark.

(I am talking about a set-up with 0/30/x/x/x zerker with 50% fury uptime, I put 0 in fire for pessimistic reasons, more points in fire will only confirm my conclusions, and replacing some zerker→PVT also goes my way)

As far as I know regeneration from combo fields is generated from the finisher, not the field, so it is the finisher who is granting himself the regen.

Who uses shatterstone anyway? :p

Outstanding work!
I am glad to see that there are more and more people in the elementalist community that are interested in theory crafting

A few remarks:

Why not include ascended gear?

For effective power, did you just multiply actual power by crit chance and crit damage modifiers? I tend to call this raw damage = power . ( 1 + (precision – 822) / 21 / 100 . crit damage / 100 )
(Base crit damage being 50)
And effective health = vitality . 10 . total defence ?
Did you take into account the base class vitality of 164.5 (Which is not disclosed in the stats panel)?
Total defence being base toughness (916) plus additional toughness from gear plus defence from gear (920 for light armor)

I would not say that precision is more important than critical damage. To an extent you are right, but there is no direct link in the allocation of stats between the two, so the ratio may vary and it makes comparison more likely to be inaccurate. Also their effectiveness is interdependent.

I agree with your zerker-PVT conclusion. Although you would have to consider the idea that effective health is not being used at all times (your health is not always threatened, because of pro-active defence, dodges, etc) so I tend to use a coefficient of effective health usefulness, usually around 0.5 in PvE, and I use this to min-max my gear. With that in mind I still find that changing the zerker pieces that have a bad crit damage ratio to PVT is a positive move.

Your fourth plot is daring!
I also have a hard time modelling healing and linking it to the rest of the models.

Thanks a lot! I would be more than glad to discuss all this with you.

Kodiak, you are looking for a forum fight, I will not fall for this. I am willing to help, but you are not willing to be helped.

I am just going to explain why the extra 10% boon duration runes are sub-optimal when you have 30 arcane and two sets of 15% boon duration runes (70% boon duration).

Elemental attunements give 5s of regen and 5s of protection (and swiftness). So with these 10% boon duration runes you get an extra 0.5 seconds for each.
The 60% boon duration already make these boons last 8 seconds, so if you add 0.5 seconds you do not even have an extra tick of regen.

As calculated above the additional might is quite small. And if you are going for more might from boons it is more optimal to go for superior runes of strength (20% might duration).

I’m out.

Right, so I am getting trolled. There is no other explanation.
But sure baby, let’s go further!

I mentioned a 15s might stack on arcane boons, not sigil of battle. You got that wrong, just admit it.

With 30 arcane or with 20 arcane you will get pretty much all the stacks from sigil of battle because you can swap 4 times during the recharge time of your attunements. This gives a very small error margin, around 10%. As opposed to what you say, you will not miss the buff entirely, but you will have less stacks on average so somehow you have a point! Congrats! But it’s negligible.

Now an other proof that you have no idea of what you are talking about, and that you understand nothing at maths!
About raw damage

This is a huge problem and it dramatically skews all your results. While mathematically it works out, it will ultimately show results that are vastly higher than they actually are. Two Ruby Orbs don’t increase DPS by 3%, they increase it by a fraction of that % once you actually plug in real numbers into those other parts you’ve taken away because as the numbers scale up the damage numbers scale relatively downward.

Which part of “divide new raw damage by base raw damage” did you not get??
You could take any damage!! Even plug in coefficients, or the age of you favorite pet, it does not matter because you are going to divide it by the same thing after!
All that matters when you want to know the increased damage from additional power is its proportion to your total base power.
So you did not read my hint did you?

I only have what you give me to work with. The little work you did show reflects what I have listed that you took the boon duration, divided it by the cool down which gave you an “average” number of stacks which you then multiplied by the boon bonus (in this case Might, so Power) and compared those two power ratings.

Yes, and that’s the same thing as what I have been talking about in my last three posts. It’s still correct, and quoting it again and again won’t make it wrong.

So now that I have explained to you for the fourth time why my calculations are correct, the results still hold: 10% boon duration runes are suboptimal. They are suboptimal compared to ruby orbs, but I compared them to that just because you mentioned it. The real thing is when you compare two major runes of monk with two superior runes of force. It’s not hard to compute: it’s twice the benefit in power!

Can’t wait to see your reply.

READ: this is what you need to learn to do before attempting MATHS.

Superior Sigil of battle: Gain 3 stacks of Might (20 seconds) when you swap to this weapon while in combat.
Ok? So 9.6 on average (9 with the occasional 12) with 60% boon duration. Or 9 on average with your 50% boon duration.

I’m glad you go the wiki formula right, but I told you to calculate raw damage: damage before coefficient, weapon damage & target’s armor: raw damage= power x (1+(precision-822)/21/100 x bonus crit damage /100)
Yeah arguably it’s not on the wiki
Hint: if you are just going to check the effectiveness of might, all you need to do is divide your total power with the might stacks by your normal total power without the might stacks

You got my calculations about might stack completely wrong.
What I do is: average might stacks without boon duration (duration x number of stacks on proc / proc cooldown), multiplied by boon duration coefficient (1.5 with your build) = average stacks with boon duration, multiplied by 35 = average bonus power from might with boon duration.
You can move multiplications and divisions around, it’s ok, it’s maths well done.

So you want a grand feast? give me a build for PvE and I’ll tell you how to improve it. Or you could just click on my signature like I told you many times.

This conversation is getting tiring.

flyingfox.6150:

I too have been thinking of taking every single point out of Attunement tree, well maybe except elemental attunement (that one that gives boon when you switch) that one is boss.

I’m so tired of every single build out there is pigeon holed to that trait line. That is not how a class is supposed to play after more a year of release as a triple A title.

I couldn’t agree more!
Take a look at my signature for a PvE Build.
_

@Kodiak

I am going to say it again and for the last time: small difference (less than one percent) may seem meaningless, but it is the the accumulation of those that make a good build (many small differences make a big difference…). So every single one of them is worth discussing.

My calculation for might stacks are accurate (with some rounding up). If you think otherwise then please show me where I did a mistake.
Your calculations are far from correct. This is because you limited yourself to full stacks, while it is more accurate to use average number of stacks like I did, and this is why you got a lower number.

Let me explain:

So lets take your example of Sigil of Battle. This is reusable every 10 seconds. That’s 3 stacks of Might every 10 seconds. With 60% boon duration that’s 24. With 50% that’s 22.5 duration. This means in either scenario we can keep up 6 stacks of Might (210 Power) assuming you switch perfectly every 12 or 11 seconds. Fire Attunement is the same thing each time you swap into Fire Attunement with similar up time.
(As a side note, technically if you did everything perfectly the additional time would lead to additional Might up time which means more effective Power but since no one is that robotically perfect we will skip it. I’m merely noting it to be complete)

The emphasis is mine

So you talk about maintaining 6 stacks if you swap every 12 or 11 seconds. Not only is this vague, but also the attunement swap cd is 9.375 with 30 in arcane so the difference is big. Since water is a huge source of heal, most people will swap to it as soon as it is available so you can be sure that the 10s ICD of the sigil will proc on that mark. So if you swap on ICD proc then you get at least 6 stacks, but often more because the previous stacks have not yet run out if you have bonus duration. That’s when your note shows your biggest failure: you choose to ignore these occasional extra stacks. My calculation multiply the stacks by their duration bonus because this is what gives the accurate number of stacks on average: 6×1.6=9.6 for a 60% duration bonus. What this number means is that most of the time you will not have 6 stacks like you predicted, but closer to 9 (with occasional 12). The key words are “on average”.

The percentages of increase I stated are not random. Go on the wiki and look at the direct damage formula, calculate raw damage without the buff/item you want to evaluate, then calculate raw damage with that buff/item, divide, get percentages.

Untill the patchnote is out it’s not actual so I stick to what I have tested
And even after the patch … sometimes they lie.

Edit: And I said " unless it was patched" !

Sorry didn’t see the 9th of July patch notes!

Unless it has been patched since the 25th of June, this trait does not do what the tooltip says (too good to be true).

The increase in damage has been tested to be 5%.

Why I am replying to this …

What you need to understand is that making a better build means making a lot of these 0.X% > 0.Y%. An optimized build is just an aggregation of these small improvements. So yes I am discussing them, and rightfully so. And if you play good only to the point where people stop calling you out then you are not a good player, or a player at all. Also, that kind of “looking good” remark is off-topic: the OP is asking for an efficient build, what good is it going to do to him if he only “looks good” while leveling up? I am astonished by your attitude.

I can prove all my statements. I have done so, but then you just criticise my numbers because you do not understand where they come from. Maybe if you only looked at the damage formula on the wiki you would have a clue. Do you expect me to copy paste that formula here or you can find it yourself? If you are not going to do your share of the work then at least show some respect.

Hm interesting
But spell queuing is made so that it counters the effects of lag.
Well then if this 1.2s difference comes from the aftercast then it must be either a mistake in the fireball or meteor aftercasts, since the patch notes clearly states the cast and aftercast time of lava font (but we never know with patch notes). Obviously 1.2s cannot come from the meteor aftercast only.

Can you try with an other rotation? (I am at work now muhaha)

Edit: since there are 17 fireballs in the rotation (prime number), I have the feeling that the delay comes from lava font and meteor :/
For example the meteor aftercast could be 0.6 and lava font’s aftercast kept its 0.36 value.

@Sabull
For the fire staff rotation where do you get that 31s total time from? Empirical tests? All I can come up with is the 29.8

There is no base damage. Edit: Crit does not matter for this calculation: it is a percentage increase in damage, which is unrelated to the amounts of hits (admittedly you may stack more vulnerability if you have air 25 with scepter: 57% more hits per second) . Scepter’s increasing damage is accounted for in my calculation. So my maths is correct

The percentage of attacks you can afford to miss in order for dagger to provide at least as much dps as scepter is: 1-0.72/1.22=41% (realistic)
So if you spend 59% of your time hitting your target you are dealing as much damage. This is achievable due to the amount of gap closers that dagger has, but using those can lock you out of the air attunement
With perfect electric discharge procs with fresh air(5s ICD intended, 0.7 coefficient = 0.14 c/s): 1-(0.72+0.14)/(1.22+0.14)=37% (pessimistic)
With fresh air, you need to spend 63% of your time hitting your target with dagger for the damage to be equivalent. So this is quite higher, but the air attunement uptime of the dagger is substantially increased with fresh air, so your gap closer (burning fire, magnetic grasp) do not lock you out of your air attunement for too long. With this set up you can spend 3 seconds outside of the air attunement for every 5 seconds in the air attunement (3/(5+3)=37.5%) in order to deal equivalent damage (note: this is ignoring the damage you can do in these 3 seconds, pessimistic).
There will be no clear winner! Anet actually does a nice job at balancing skills, so in the end it all comes down to the situation, and how you are able to respond to it.
Scpeter’s damage is almost ensured (non projectile ranged) and dagger is subject to enemy melee defence (retaliation, auras etc), you get the idea.
As a general rule I would say scepter’s damage is safer, but if you can take advantage of the right opportunities then dagger will be stronger.

I love to be contradicted
So let’s see:
Dagger’s auto-attack, Lightning Whip: coefficient=0.7 hits=2 totalcast=1.15 so coefficient/s=1.22
Scepter’s rotation:, Arc lightning: coefficient=1.89 (total) totalcast=3.95 so coefficient/s=0.48, add Lightning strike: coefficient=1.2 cooldown=5 so coefficient/s=0.24, total scepter’s rotation: coefficient/s=0.48+0.24=0.72
Comparison: 1.22/0.72=1.69, so I was wrong … dagger does 69% more damage.
If you factor in the Lightning discharge proc that goes down to 58% more damage.
So basically you can miss on third of your hits in dagger and still have more damage.