Guild Wars 2

Excelsior comrades!

Last updated on 02/12/13

I would like to gather in this thread all the data available about our skills that is not available in the tooltips ingame. My intent is to make the efficiency of each skill known to the community, so that elementalists can make better decisions based on this data. This information is useful for anyone, whether you are a beginner or an advanced theory crafter. It is a contribution thread: I will edit the original posts as the data is updated, feel free to contribute!

For each skill, I would like to disclose the following characteristics:
-Cast time
-After cast off-time (animation)
-Damage/Heal coefficient of power
-Base heal
-Cooldown (included for convenience, although disclosed in tooltips)
-Effects

Some notes will then be added to provide quality information about the skills.

I am aware that a substantial amount of this data is available on the Wiki. However there is much more available on the web. This thread will concentrate this data and make it as available as possible for all elementalists.

Format:
Spell: coefficient (base + coefficient for heals) | cast aftercast | cooldown {effect}
[notes]

Disclaimer: Work in Progress!
I am gathering the data for the skills. I can find most of the coefficients and base damage easily, but I need data on casts and aftercasts. If you are willing to test, please contribute!

Special thanks to DEKeyzToChaos.7381 and other contributors.

@Dingle
Thanks for taking the time to get all the data, I appreciate this!
You are right, it seems that the engi is able to put out quite some heals.
It is less reactive though, and has a bit more limitations (such as having to combo and locking you into some utilities and traits way more than the elem scepter heal).
I’d say it is quite viable as a healer, I have never seen it in practice though but you seem to know what you are talking about!

@Shockwave
“The game is designed so that healing isn’t a role.”
It’s not entirely true. The game is designed so that you cannot dedicate yourself to healing exclusively. However it could be efficient to dedicate one of your three stats to this role. This would make you one third of a healer
Also have you not noticed? ANet is producing new content that promotes a very different gameplay from what they gave us with the release version. I have a strong feeling that PvP-like gameplay will be the norm in PvE in the future.

About LH:
The reason I say that you are locked out of attunement swaps (and fury) is because it is more optimal to stay in water with the 20% increased damage to vulnerable targets. Even if you take 15 arcane (lingering elements, bugged) you will not benefit from this bonus in other attunements. It is a soft-lock, I admit, but a lock nonetheless.
I made some calculations, with 0/30/0/10/30 if you swap attunements constantly to proc perma fury, lightning discharge and stay in water as long as possible (6s) to benefit from the 20%, your LH does 7% more damage than my build’s lightning whip.
This is because you loose the damage from fire, you loose the bonus damage from air, you loose the water bonus on 90% hp and the 1% per boon (~5). However you have a bit more might, which I did not include in my calculation.

About going into arcane rather than water for survivability, you have a point: if you disregard my set-up (I play with a guardian) then arcane gives you more survivability on average in the long run, it’s true.
However I go into water not really just for survivability. Water gives me damage as well, and not just a bit! Water also increases my passive defence (more hp) which solves one of my biggest worries: getting one-shot.
One move that you could do is take 5 points from water (get rid of bountiful power) and put them in arcane to get the boons. In fact it is a matter of play style. It could be quite valid to go for more arcane, depending on your group.
Like I said, never copy a build, experiment and find what is best for you. I like that you ask me this kind of questions, thanks!

Don’t level up with LH .. you are going to have a bad time!

Thanks for the input, but you gave us nominal numbers only, no base heal + coefficient + cooldown. I can’t make up my mind with just this!
Besides I am talking about reactive heal. Because heal per second is nice, but it is less useful for reasons that you can understand :)

I would like to agree but you need to consider this:
Air is the best attunement of direct damage because its auto-attack has the highest power coefficient per second (1.22). So ideally you want to always deal damage in air. Fire auto-attack is a bit less optimal (coeff/s=1.13) and is close-melee single target, so it is a decent back-up for air, but definitely not as good.
Now if you roll between the four attunements and stay in each for four seconds, then you have a cycle of 4 seconds of optimal damage, 4s of not-that-optimal damage, then 4s of bad damage followed by an other 4s of useless animations. Also now that you use all your attunements wihtout planning for them (a cycle!) then it may happen that you get in danger just after getting out of water. It’s very likely, since you will use water regardless of the situation. At this point you have to wait 12 seconds before getting back there. Of course with my build that would be a good 15s, but it is less likely to happen since I don’t include water in a cycle, I plan for it (more or less, since I use it for reactive defence). But that’s just water! There are also plenty of active defence spells that could be locked out for you for several seconds when you need them. Yes it requires some planning and I won’t say that I am so skilled that I can plan for everything, but I find that it is something I can get used to. Try it

With my build you rarely spend more than 1 or 2 seconds per attunement apart from air, so the damage is optimal and you can still use all of the utility.

The staff trait is overrated.

Attunement recharge is pointless with this build: 15 extra points in arcane reduce the attunement recharge to ~12s, a 3 second improvement out of 15, that is a 20% increase to my heals from swapping to water (about 1k4) . . . compared to 15% damage and 1k hp?

Vigor is quite nice, but even in Arah I find I am able to sustain myself without it. It is a matter of practice and group set-up. Arcane boons are very nice though, at the moment I do not need them because I am running with a guardian, but this could change!

Hi there!
I am quite interested by your guild.
Lupicus is one of my favourite bosses (along with volcano fractal’s shaman), I play PvE mainly and I am motivated by all paths in all dungeons, I like the challenge!

What you may be concerned about , is the fact that I play an elementalist as a main. However I am convinced that after a brief talk I can provide some decent arguments on the speed-run potency of this class.

Anyway I am just looking for high-end players and I am prepared to chance my playstyle if necessary.

I look forward to getting in touch with you!

Hi,

I am looking for a PvE guild that promotes high skill level. I am not a farmer, not a hardcore, more of a retired high level gamer: I want to play when I can play, but with a high skill level.

I play since pre-release on my elementalist main
I have a strong experience in WoW
I am very interested in theory crafting
I look for group optimisation and group progress more than anything

I currently play on a French server. I was leading a high level PvE guild there, but after a conflict with my co-leader (who started whining excessively about the game) I have decided that I am tired of this community.

I now look for an English speaking guild who share my ambitions.
Thanks!

Updated every section and added a paragraph about Lightning Hammer.

So we are comparing living story with expansions ?
Well well well, for starters I think the content of an expansion is available for more than just one silly month.

Urukami.4796:

well depends on what weapons you want to use

No, noooo!
Always be ready to use any weapon set.

It only depends on what he wants to play: PvE, WvW, PvP ?

Actually earth shield fits quite a nice role, but it could be made more potent without increasing its damage (increased pull aoe, etc).

On topic, I would like to stress the potency of the new improved Weakness. This condition is quite strong: on average it provides a 25% damage reduction (on average, because, it is unreliable and you are still exposed to spikes). With dagger a2 and glyph of elemental power you can maintain it up to close to full uptime in aoe. Consider this!
But this is double-edged: weakness is now quite important to dispell, especially since you cannot spike down most mobs.

Yeah I agree, a blast would be a bit too much.
How about it gave aegis in a 180 aoe instead? That would fit quite well with the theme of earth and it would break the guardian’s monopoly of the boon!

Updated after testing stone splinters (tooltip bugged), it was too good to be true!

Actually what I am most likely to do is swap the 10 points in earth to water in order to reach 25. This is because it seems that the bonus from stone splinters is just 5% and not 10%, and vitality is preferable anyway.

Sun Spot: fire 15
Inflict damage at your location when you attune to fire.

Earthen Blast: eart 15
Damage foes and cripple them for 3 seconds when attuning to earth.

I am not making a suggestion here but I would like the opinion of the community:
If the numbers were balanced around, would you like to see the effects of these skills do the following instead:
-Sun spot => create a small fire combo field (lava font?)
-Earthen blast => blast combo finisher

I think people would play around with these minor traits much more then.

Of on the most interesting ues of this I can think of is a LH build with 30 in fire (persisting flame): use LH, swap to fire for combo field, auto-attack for blast combos (might + fury from persisting flames), swap out and enjoy a long duration of fury.

And I don’t think I have to explain how to use an extra blast finisher :)

Any thoughts?

If you want to heal, you can, but please for the love of god don’t go for staff !!!
Staff’s heal is very situational: water auto-attack is nice but limited, and the rest is just combo fields (which means that your teammates have to have healing power for them to be optimal) that have long cooldowns and combo limits.

The real heal in elem is with the scepter, and in this weapon you can invest points in healing power and become a true reactive healer, let me explain:
The following spells have a base heal of at least 1300 and a coefficient of healing power of one, which means that the entirety of your healing power will be added to the base heal of the spell:
-water trident (20s cd, 16s with trait)
-cleansing wave (25/20s cd)
Go for 30 in arcane and get:
-EA (10s cd)
-Attunement swap to water (~10s cd)

How to use them? if you see someone low on hp, dodge towards them and swap to water just before the end of the dodge (proc EA + attunement swap), then cast either water trident or cleansing wave, swap to an other element during the cast, rinse (wait 10s), repeat.

The numbers?
Every 10s: 3x (1300 + 1x healing power) = 4000 + 3x healing power, at least.
Also you will have soothing mist rolling in.

To this date I am yet to find a class that can reactively heal better than the elementalist.

Lightning hammer is very good at what it does, I don’t deny this. But like I said a build should not be made according to one utility skill because that is just limiting. A build should be able to adapt however, so you could very well be right: if you plan on using LH then go for at least 20 in water and grab that +20% damage on vulnerable target.
However bear in mind that LH is good mostly because of this trait, otherwise its coefficient per second is 1.42 VS 1.22 for lightning whip, and at 2000 power the damage difference is only 16% (plus the 8% from the stats). Factor in the 20% from water and you get something really strong, but you have to be in close melee range (150 instead of 300) and you cannot use most of your active defence reactively without a substantial loss in damage. Also you loose the fury (uptime of at least 70%) and lightning strike procs (coeff/s=0.14), as well as the heal and cleanse from water . . .
So yes, it’s very strong, but limited to CoF-like encounters in my opinion.

Anyway you may have a point: 10 in fire gives a damage increase of 10% (including the 5%) and some condition duration; getting 25 in water can give me more than this (10% above 90% hp, bountyful power ~5%) as well as 1k more hp, not bad! I will have to test whether I stay above 90% hp more than half of the time, but at the moment I prefer to go for consistency.

Arcane recharge rate is almost pointless with this build.

Edit: Although I find it not essential, I will make a paragraph on LH.

That’s right. But the class is designed to play around this. When you are D/D you have a lot of gap closers (3), more than any other class (afaik).
We are indeed “stuck” into one mode, but they gave us the tools to work around this: adapt. In D/D we actually have several ranges: very short for fire, medium for earth, far-melee for air and half ranged for water. This can give us an edge: we can strike in melee but out of reach from the other melee classes. Do you see them complaining about not having extended melee ranges?
If a warrior decides to be a melee beast and takes two melee weapons then he has the same problem, if not worse. If he takes one ranged weapon then he is less efficient in melee. We have more of a drastic choice, but we can play around more as well.

I did not say that I don’t use LH
It is quite easy to use it with a build very close to this one, but in my set-up I just don’t. I cannot afford to lock myself in just doing melee blinds + damage. Actually saving your teammates from harm (with anti-projectile for example) allows them to continuously deal damage and therefore the total damage of the group is increased. So what I mean is that going LH is usually suboptimal (not in some situations) because you can do about 70% of that damage without it, and enable your teammates to do 10% more each at the same time (for a total of 110% compared to LH). You see my point? It’s about group optimisation.

Reaching 20 in water does not give you much (water V – cleanse on attunement- is attainable at 10). Arcane boons are nice and handy, but in term of usefulness they mostly provide regen and protection, which is already given to me by my guardian mate. So it is more efficient to go for damage (100 power, +5% damage on burning foe).

• 8. How to use this guide

I am very often posting in this thread to give updates on how to achieve more with the elementalist. I can not go into great details in the first posts of this guide due to character limitations, so I highly advise you to follow the ongoing discussions. Also feel free to ask me anything or contribute in any way: by working together we can all get better

• 9. DPS Calculator

You can find my DPS calculator (the Zalculator) at the following link:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B88y8fHnpBfZRnJRdVNqVC1MYXc&usp=sharing
(Requires Excel 2007 or later)

This tool is in its alpha stage. It is functional but not yet complete. I will provide a guide for its use as soon as possible.

• 10. Conclusion

Adapt. Only the fittest will survive!
Make choices, and think ahead. Ultimately what makes you a good player is using the right skill at the right moment, it’s not your traits, not your gear, not your runes and sigils. So I am just giving you guidelines here, and I will be glad to discuss anything with anyone!

Time to level up the elementalist community!

Sincere thanks to Haviz.1340 for his enriching guidance.

• 11. Annex

Elementalist skill data

• 7. Mechanics

You have to train until you know exactly what you are doing with your spells, until you feel the cooldowns under your skin, until you become the elementalist
The combat mechanics of a fresh air build are very interesting. Be prepared to execute numerous actions per minutes. Coffee is advised, Italian of course.

Use of fresh air
The beauty of this trait is that it does not only recharge your attunement cooldown but also its swapping cooldown. Normally when you swap to an attunement you cannot swap to an other for 1.625 seconds (base recharge time, reduced by arcana). Fresh air bypasses this.
In combat you will spend most of your time in the air attunement. Every time the fresh air internal cooldown is going to be up (every 5 seconds) you can swap to an other attunement for its specific purpose and swap back to air almost instantly due to our high crit chance (berzerker gear and fury). This allows you to be able to use all your skills, benefit from strong buffs, and deal good damage at the same time.

Optimal rotations
There is no such thing. Optimal rotations are just a mental experiment of what skills to chain in order to do the highest consistent damage possible. In game, you will almost never have the opportunity to unfold these rotations because you will have to dodge, react to the unexpected, and adapt. However they are a good measure of what to aim to do in order to get close to maximum damage output. Optimal rotations are guidelines.

• Normal rotation: start in air, swap to fire, burning speed, drake’s breath (if target isn’t perma-burning already), swap to air during cast, lightning whip 4 times, swap to earth, ring of earth, swap to air during cast, lightning whip 4 times, swap to water, cone of cold, swap to air during cast, lightning whip 4 times, repeat.

• Optimized rotation with persisting flames. If your build allows for it, you can use the combined effect of the fire field from burning speed’s trail and the blasts finishers from comet and magnetic wave to give might and fury for your group. This leads us to a two-phased cycle: start in air, swap to fire, cast burning speed, swap to air during cast, lightning whip 4 times, swap to earth, cast ring of earth and magnetic wave (blast), swap to air and cast lightning whip (7 times) until fire is back up. The second phase of the cycle is the same except you swap to water instead of earth and blast your fire field with comet.

Remember to maximize the effect of your traits: electric discharge, arcane fury, sunspot, etc. It is interesting to notice that our rotations generate many hits per second (often more than 2) which is most beneficial for traits like weak spot or burning precision.

• 6. Final builds

We have 30 points to spend and we have 3 trait lines to consider (arcana should not exceed the 10 points already invested). Let’s take a look at the most interesting choices.

Fire

• Attributes: Power is always desirable; Condition Duration fits our varied condition output.
• Burning Precision allows you to maintain a strong burning uptime on your targets. Good synergy with our rotation, condition duration from fire, and other desirable fire traits.
• Pyromancer’s Alacrity brings the cooldown of Burning speed on par with the cooldown of our fire attunement. This spell is the most important in our rotations so being able to use it more frequently is very strong.
• Persisting flames increases again the potency of Burning Speed and allows us to execute might combos more easily.
• Minors: Sunspot is hard to land since we are not in melee but in mid range; Burning Rage is a strong damage modifiers that fits our play-style very well.

Air

• Attributes: Precision and critical damage together boost our direct damage enormously. The higher our critical hit chance the more consistent our Fresh Air rotations will be.
• Quick Glyphs increases our battlefield control significantly. Very useful.
• Bolt to the Heart is estimated as a 5% boost to damage. This is a good damaging option.
• Air Training boosts the damage in our most used attunement. A must take.
• Fresh Air is the core of our builds, you should know this by now
• Minors: Electric Discharge synergises well with fresh air. This is a good damage boost. Weak Spot allows us to generate a decent amount of vulnerability stacks.

Earth

• Attributes: Toughness will not save you. Controlling the battlefield with our conditions, and our defensive abilities, are what make us survive. Condition damage is negligible since we are dealing direct damage almost exclusively.
• Stone Splinters is a strong damage modifier that is virtually unconditional: we stand at mid range (around 300 range) so this will always be active.

Water

• Attributes: Vitality is a passive stats that boost our survivability significantly. Healing power is appreciated but not essential.
• Vital Striking is a strong damage boost. However it is easy to loose it due to our low health pool. This is also why Water attributes and minor traits are desirable.
• Cleansing Wave is a good support trait. Don’t use it selfishly.
• Minors: Soothing Mist helps with maintaining your group above 90% HP (to keep Runes of the Scholar and Vital Striking activated ). Healing Ripple is a good group heal. Bountiful Power is a desirable damage boost but if you are going to maximise your damage you should probably invest trait points in more offensive trait lines.

This leads us to two kinds of builds.

Normal build

Comfortable: 0/30/10/20/10 (cleansing wave, vital striking, stone splinters)
Damaging variant: 10/30/10/10/10 (burning precision, stone splinters, vital striking)

Optimized build
(with Persisting Flames, providing Fury for the group and dealing strong damage)

Current build: Advised: 30/30/0/0/10 (burning precision, pyromancer’s alacrity)
Damaging variant: 30/30/10/0/0 (burning precision, pyromancer’s alacrity, stone splinters)

• 5 Gear and Utilities

Direct damage! We are going to try an maximize precision, power and critical damage.
Full berserker is a very safe choice but in order to maximize your damage output it may be best to mix the stats combinations of your gear.

For this analysis I am assuming the following speedrun situation:
- Ascended gear
- Signet of Fire (180 precision)
- Permanent Fury (20% critical chance)
- 25 Might stacks (875 power)
- Strength and Discipline Banners from Warriors (170 power, 170 precision, 15% critical damage)
- 25 Stacks of Bloodlust (250 power)
- Curry Butternut Squash Soup (100 precision & 10 critical damage)

The basis of our build is 30 in air (300 precision, 30% critical damage), therefore the only variable that can affect our stat optimization is Fire (power). The other trait lines offer modifier bonuses that affect our dps independently of stat points. Depending on how many points you put in Fire it will be best to swap a number of armor pieces from berserker to assassin. There are four possible scenarios: 0, 10, 20, or 30 points in Fire.

For these four scenarios it appears optimal to swap your entire armor (head, shoulders, chest, gloves, legs, shoes) to assassin. This results in a shift of -94 Power and +94 Precision from full berserker gear. Our critical chance is therefore brought to 100%. In regards to Fresh Air, this gives the highest consistency in our rotations.

Therefore our gear is best as:
- Armor: assassin
- Weapons: berserker
- Trinkets: berserker

Note however that such mix is only slightly better than a full berserker set. In addition, going full berserker may be a more efficient choice for less optimal situations (out of speedruns)

If you want some survivability you should change some pieces to PVT.
Always keep trinkets in zerker: they have the highest amount of stats for direct damage, but you can play around a bit with armor and weapons. If you are going to switch zerker->PVT you should change pieces in this order of priority: legs/head, chest, weapons, rest. This is because of their suboptimal ratios of stats.
However remember that passive survivability from stats (Toughtness, Vitality) is inferior to active defensive skills. This is why it is more optimal keep a fully offensive gear while achieving survivability via control and active defense.

Runes and sigils

Sigils: +5% direct damage and sigil of battle (might on swap), combined together they provide the highest increase to direct damage possible. When facing hardship I would use a sigil of energy instead of sigil of battle.

Runes: Divinity runes are quite good, but never the best. Yes you make use of all the stats they provide, but the problem is that if you try to use them all then you are using skills that are not necessary and you are not doing a good job. Know what is your job and take the right runes for this.
Consider the following runes:
- Ruby orb: simple and straightforward choice.
- Runes of Strength: if you can maintain a good number of might stacks (9 on average, with the duration bonus) then this set provides more damage than ruby orbs.
- Rune of the Scholar: simply the best choice in terms of increased damage, but risky.

Utilities

To be written soon

Interesting choices:

• Signet of Fire
• Ice Bow to cast Ice Storm, Deep Freeze, and sometimes Frost Fan.
• Glyph of Storms
• Lightning Hammer
• Glyph of Elemental Power
• Arcane Shield
• Arcane Wave

• 4. Basis of the builds

The common ground between the builds I will talk about is my will to manage my resources as efficiently as possible. The elementalists can do many things, he is the jack of all trades, but if you try to do them all at the same time you will certainly fail to be efficient. It is hard to manage having so many possibilities.

You want to have as much synergy as possible between your traits, and you want to avoid wasting resources you invested in. So here is my problematic:
How can I deal strong constant damage, while retaining access to my bursting abilities, to my control skills, to my support output and while maximising the effects of my traits?

The answer is fresh air.
This trait allows us to spend most of our time in the air attunement and to swap out to other attunements on demand. Basically, without this trait you would have to spend 13 seconds waiting for air to be off cooldown after swapping to earth to cleanse you conditions with magnetic wave for example. This would result in a big drop in your damage, because our strongest attack without cooldown is in the air attunement (lightning whip). People are often tempted to invest heavily in arcana in order to solve this problem. The issue is that arcana gives you only boon duration while air gives you precision and critical damage. If you can achieve 19 stacks of might on average then the 30% boon duration from arcana will raise it to 25, this is a boost of about 200 power. For the same amount of points air gives you 300 precision and 30 critical damage which are worth much more. In addition, the master and grand-master minor traits of the arcana trait line are very weak in comparison to that of the air trait line. The 30 points in air are well invested.

Having such an easy access to the air attunement is beneficial not only for its optimal auto-attack, but also to maximize the advantages provided by attunement specific damage boosts (air training). For example you can start a drake’s breath and swap to air as soon as you start casting in order for your spell to benefit from air bonuses.

This synergy is also increased by procs on attunement swaps. When you swap to air you will deal additional single-target damage due to electric discharge . Furthermore, you can take 5 points in arcana in order to achieve arcane fury on attunement swap. Fresh air has a cooldown of 5 seconds, so you will do 2 attunement swaps in 5 seconds, so you will generate more than 4 seconds of fury every 5 seconds for yourself. This is very strong.

The next obvious move is to invest 5 more points in arcana to get access to the adept major trait. This enables you to have vigor on crit. This is a necessary choice for survivability.

The base for our builds is therefore x/30/x/x/10. These 40 points are efficient and they solve our problematic. We will see how we can construct ends builds with our 30 remaining points in the following chapters.

• 2. How to be a good player

Until you have seen the best players at work it is hard to know what you can achieve in this game and how to improve your performance. What makes you a good player is not your build or gear, that is just paper. Instead it is your mindset.
You have to be aware of a few concepts and try to work best on each one of them.

Output.
This is what you provide in a fight. You can breakdown your output into a few categories such as damage, control, defense and support. What ever your build or your play-style you have to do as much as you can in each of these aspects. Remember that the “holy trinity” is in you. Therefore before each encounter you have to think about how to make your presence matter as much as possible by choosing your action carefully. Be conscious of everything your character can do!

Resource management
There is no such thing as mana in this game, but there are many resources you have to manage. The most important is time. The elementalist is a class that can do a lot, but not all of our potential output is appropriate for every situation. If you spend time casting spells with little relevance to the fight then you are wasting your time. You do not want to waste such a valuable resource as time. Similarly you have to consider your endurance, your cooldowns and every skill fact of your abilities. For example using magnetic wave is nice to cleanse your conditions, but if you can blast a field for a beneficial effect and damage your enemies at the same time then you are using your resources efficiently. Similarly if you have AoE support such as elemental attunement then make sure you buff as many allies as possible.
Adaptability is a capital to consider. You may have noticed that you can change you major trait choices when out of combat. Use this to your advantage: run builds that allow for changes of play-style. You have to be prepared to face many different types of encounters and they may not always go as planned. Be conscious of how flexible is your output.

Team play
GW2 is a group game! Remember that you have to pull your own weight but care about your team mates at the same time. Group coordination is the key to excellence.

• 3. Weapon choices

You should learn to master all weapon sets and conjures, changing them according to the situation.

One important concept to understand for every encounters is that melee is generally much more rewarding than range, if you can survive. This is because of many factors. Consider might combos from fire fields : they have an effect radius of 360. This means that if you stand further than 360 units away from your target for some time you will loose on the might stacks that your team can generate. Whether you are at range or in melee you will have to learn how to dodge. So you should try to stay as close to your team mates as possible in order to benefit from their support, and that is in melee range.

The main-hand dagger is our weapon of choice. Its attacks deal high damage at point blank, and due to their above-average melee range it is easy to land hits. You can deal very good and constant damage with this weapon. It is fast paced, it is dynamic and it is fun to play

The obvious off-hand choice is the focus. This weapon gives you incredible utility and support, which is much more valuable than the occasional burst an off-hand dagger can provide. This is a team-play weapon. I can not imagine playing PvE without a focus.

Therefore we are going to be mainly in a Dagger/Focus set up. I will not expand further on how to use each weapon. I advise you to learn by yourself and to read Neko’s guide for further help.

That’s called choices!
Make a build for what you do, and do that :) If you get in a situation where your build is wrong then either you shouldn’t be there, or your build is too specific.

Divinity runes are not that bad, but they are still bad.
Just do the maths!

Vayne.8563:

Zelyhn.8069:

Fractals did not satisfy anyone apart from grinders.
But there was already quite a lot available to grinders, they were not the problem!

Rewards would be nice, and they do not have to be gear (I dislike gear treadmill as much as anybody):
-cosmetics
-titles
-guild stuff
-housing stuff
-spells and abilities
you get the idea

The core concept of the game if that anyone can do anything, no gating (hello fractals), but what we would like is a way to progress and differentiate ourselves from the rest.
-Grinders have fractals and legendaries to grind for
-Casuals have living story stuff
-Skilled players have … what … arah solo? :/
And guess what are the most rewarding things to do: CoF brainless runs and brainless world bosses!
Do the designers really want to promote brainless play? I am baffled

Edit to mention that I am actually a fanboy: I love the core mechanics and design of the game. Actually I love the idea so much that I want to improve it, I won’t let it down, I won’t let it be wasted by people who do not understand gaming!

I’m not so sure I agree about the Fractal part. I love Fractals, and I’m no grinder. To me, Fractals are the best dungeon in the game…but I’ll never grind them. I’m up to level 20 finally after all this time.

I agree they are great! Finally some mechanics that are not as boring as in the other dungeons (bar a few). But their rewards? That’s what’s wrong!

Fractals did not satisfy anyone apart from grinders.
But there was already quite a lot available to grinders, they were not the problem!

Rewards would be nice, and they do not have to be gear (I dislike gear treadmill as much as anybody):
-cosmetics
-titles
-guild stuff
-housing stuff
-spells and abilities
you get the idea

The core concept of the game if that anyone can do anything, no gating (hello fractals), but what we would like is a way to progress and differentiate ourselves from the rest.
-Grinders have fractals and legendaries to grind for
-Casuals have living story stuff
-Skilled players have … what … arah solo? :/
And guess what are the most rewarding things to do: CoF brainless runs and brainless world bosses!
Do the designers really want to promote brainless play? I am baffled

Edit to mention that I am actually a fanboy: I love the core mechanics and design of the game. Actually I love the idea so much that I want to improve it, I won’t let it down, I won’t let it be wasted by people who do not understand gaming!

Anyone saying divinity anything is good has made no calculations.
There is always a better choice than divinity gear, unless you plan on fulfilling all roles so poorly that you are useless!

It has a ’5’s’ cd.
Move from air, crit, get back to air, now if you leave crits won’t recharge it for the next 5 seconds

You fool, don’t do CoF runs!

Thank you OP for this very well put together post!
You stated in very clear terms most of the important issues I am also worried about.
And more than anything you are right about the fact that people who could understand you have moved on …
My original guild left, my new guild was built on its ruins, but my co-leader and best friend in-game got so tired of the weak content and bad long term decisions that he started whining about the game, mindlessly. On the contrary I defend the game because I strongly believe in its core mechanics. In fact, I am only still playing because I want to improve my skills even further (there is so much room for this!) and be ready for actual content, when it comes. But not everybody can see for themselves how the core design of the game is so great … now my friend and I are in conflict because he got so upset by the game that he cannot come online without a strong lurking frustration. I can control this feeling for myself, but for how long?
Now the community is astonishingly locked in its blindness. It’s getting too late!
I don’t know if I will be prepared to pay for an extension at this point …

Edit: I forgot to mention that of course casuals will buy the expansion “Hey look more fun content over there!” but in the end the game will not shine. It will not be remembered. I don’t know if this is a concern to developpers, maybe it does not matter, maybe they will make money regardless and sell millions of gw3 copies anyway … but somehow I am convinced that the people who designed gw1 in the first place had higher values and a more long-term view. Where are these people??

Shufflepants.9785:

What was wrong with the mechanics from the bouncy shrooms in SAB. Those always bounced you high enough and were completely predictable. Are we SUPPOSED to be dying randomly through no fault of our own? Or do we just need to be standing pixel perfect in the right place for them to work correctly?

This.
I did the JP just fine until the launch pads.
I did not take two in a row, I had no momentum, no movement in air, but three times in a row the launch pads would just not throw me far enough. When this happens to you several time and you die, you just can’t resist: poor quality design, rushed, full of bugs

Edit: almost one year anniversary, still no way to dispel the stupid speed boosts applied to you by brainless players.

Yep, as always it is buggy, more than you know, because they can’t make things that work properly.
Yes you will die trying to do it, and then you will die again until they bugfix it, at which point something else will be broken, etc etc

I have done a few calculations..
Well it’s just a matter of looking at coefficients:
I play an elementalist, with no traits the coefficient of my best weapon skill is:
Lightning whip: 1.4 (1.15 sec cast) = 1.22 p/s (power per second)
to reach such coefficient with bleeding you need: 1.22/0.05=24 stacks of bleeding, which is unattainable without a dedicated spec & build

Then factor in the precision and crit damage:
From zerker gear alone (no traits), the damage augmentation is 1.47, so the direct damage coefficient of lightning whip becomes: 1.47×1.22=1.79 p/s which is the equivalent of 12 additional bleed stacks, unattainable.

But direct damage is reduced by armor and augmented by weapon damage (x985/amor), while bleed damage is unaffected!!
How big is this?
for a 2400 armor target, lightning whip direct damage coefficient becomes: 1.79×985/2400=0.73
And this is just 15 stacks of bleeding!

So as an elem, with no traits, if I can maintain 15 stacks of bleeding on my target (a few +duration runes) I deal as much damage as a full zerker hitting a medium armored target.

Note that these calculations are based on builds with no traits and disregards base damage (unaffected by power/condition damage).

GoPE is now instant, I think they gave the spell an interesting twist (get inscription in air for instant boon, etc)

Water was too strong! It gave almost more damage than fire …
But take a quick look at earth VI :)

Lightning flash is interesting as well now because people will start to use it for offensive purposes, as opposed to the brainless pattern of spamming defensive cantrips like most elems did before!

If you play PvE then surely you will love Fresh Air, this is the best trait I have ever seen!

So what I mean is: take a step back, look at the bigger picture, you probably need to adapt but we have received quite a buff :)

If you use the right skills and traits, I have calculated 1000 power to be as efficient as 1000 condition damage on a 2600 armor target.
But if you factor in the precision and the critical damage, that synergise so well with power, you get at least twice the direct damage.
And then comes the stacks limitations.

No, cast times are rounded in the tooltips.

Since ANet fails at providing meaningful tooltips, does anyone know where I can find for each skill:
-coefficient
-cast time
-after cast

I am particularly interested in this data for elementalist spells.
Some of this information is in the recent patch notes, some is available on the wiki, but it is very very incomplete.

Please feed the theorycrafters !!!

I am baffled at the inaccuracy of tooltips everywhere in the game. Very often they are vague at best, incomplete and inconstant.

I would like to see an option to have less text based but more detailed tooltips.
The information I am looking for in a detailed tooltip is the following:
-base damage
-coefficients
-cast time (including animation time, after cast)
-internal and hidden cooldowns (and shared cooldowns)
-tracking (target or direction)
-speed of projectiles

Don’t you find it annoying to have to go every time on the wiki to learn about your skills?

There is an other change in Ele’s traits that isn’t mentioned, but it’s so good that I won’t say what – avoid the nerfbat!

I do not think there has been a single patch note in which many of the changes weren’t missing.

It is getting very annoying to notice changes in game that are not documented in the patch notes!

I do not expect ANet to disclose the changes they make to RNG stuff (loot, salvage, mystic forge, gathering, openable bags, chests…) because they like to play with this without us knowing about it so we cannot make rational expectation decisions about it; but all the other changes should and must be listed. Countless times I see changes to stats distribution on items, traits, skills, tooltips (what?), instances, mobs, zones, runes, prices .. well the whole game, that are not mentioned.

Note that I am not complaining about the content, or the omnipresence of RNG, or non-disclosure of information, or script bugs, or lags, or the absence of many essential and simple tools, or the priority of the fixes, just accurate patch notes!

How hard is it to write down on paper what you change as you change it?

Then just make it so that this type of attacks can affect enemies only once per use (twice maybe)

1 gold/run

I just hope a party of braindead warriors can’t fly through it like they do CoF1 !

On paper this dungeon seem quite appealing!