(I don’t have much WvW experience. just sPvP)
Is the mobility really that big of an issue? it still has two gap closers, and has two anti-projectiles and a full on invuln, and two pseudo gap closers (ranged CC), before utilities, which can add a lot of mobility
I don’t see anything noteworthy about this build. It’s a typical defensive DD build.
You talk about conditions, but you have very little to boost them. just a few points of condition damage. Your burning does roughly 25% more damage than a similar build that doesn’t invest into condition damage.
burn duration and general condition duration modifiers are added (I tested), so I would assume damage modifiers are added as well. have not tested myself, however
0/x/x/30/30 is a very defensive play style
since you said you don’t want a bunker healer type, I’d suggest starting with 30 in air and taking fresh air for dagger or scepter, or 30 in fire and persisting flames for staff. That’s the baseline for offensive builds
25 stacks might wont do any good if your skills ae bad. And skill 1 doesnt do much dmg.
lava axe is good as far as ranged dps on moving targets goes
but if your targets are stationary or can easily be made to be stationary, you’re much better off using staff for your ranged dps
or if you can afford to be melee, lightning hammer
my favorite class to fight is thief
ranger gives me the most difficulty
and guardians are always boring to fight
mesmers are the most annoying, but they make up for it by being satisfying to kill
in order prob
thief
warrior
necro
ranger
ele
mesmer
engineer
guardian
a few questions: why weren’t you using staff, lightning hammer, or frost bow? and why do you have 20 points in arcana?
also, you took an elite you never used on ele, and took an elite you used constantly on warrior
the fire elemental, the one that does the most damage, can almost but can’t quite kill a heavy golem on its own during its full duration. unless it gets your AoE might/fury. either way, it’s kinda sad
ice elemental can lay down a 5 sec chill field (2-3 times) and heal (twice) for 6570. can also knock back if your opponent doesn’t move for whatever reason. also the chill is affected by your condition duration, so it’s pretty decent
Lightning whip one of the best auto-attack in the game? Are you kidding me? The damage you get out of lightning whip doesn’t compare at all with the damage of a warrior’s axe or greatsword.
uh yeah it does. greatsword auto attack sucks
axe auto does more damage (1.39 vs 1.22), but has way less range, so they’re pretty even. lightning whip’s damage is much easier to actually apply. dat range:
not a single word about balance.
If you’re not going to talk about balance, at least put in a few words saying that balance discussion is coming later or whatever, instead of just blowing everyone off like that.
So, I’m noob at warrior, and went into the mists today to try to construct a build that would let me do as much damage as possible (practical damage, not theoretical maximum damage, like a build with no stun breaks that only works on afk targets), but everything I tried felt pretty underwhelming. Damage traits seem to be pretty spread out, so it’s not very clear what’s best. Help me out here. I don’t mind if I die a bunch, as long as I’ll be killing people in the process.
Too bad most of them are limited to specific attunements that are mutually exclusive to one another. The only ones that aren’t are further limited by other factors. As I keep pointing out … all the hoops that need to be jumped through to get to any sort of reward for the base line risk is insane.
10% damage while in air – fresh air trait lets this be on almost all the time
10% damage within 600 range – obv on all the time when using a short range weapon
10% damage to burning targets – can have pretty good uptime, especially if you combine with the burn on crit trait
20% damage to targets below 33% health – this one is pretty obv
none of these are mutually exclusive in any way, nor do you have to do anything special to get them. and I run all of them on my glass D/x builds
plus precision and crit damage are in the same trait line, and contain two of these damage traits (along with fresh air), as well as the minor trait that does ranged instant damage every time you swap to air (which is very frequently with fresh air). and this same trait line also inflicts vulnerability on crit, which is basically another %damage increase, except it has to ramp up
seriously. see my first post in this topic. I wasn’t kidding
So now we have the ever so popular 20/30/10/0/10 build?
So, if the target is burning, below 33% health, I am in Air, and am practically in melee range … I get to do better than average damage with the least amount of survivability in the game. But if none of those are valid I still get to keep the lowest amount of survivability in the game for just average damage.
I don’t see how that risk/reward works out compared to how its applied to other classes is all.
dear god no
this is the 30/30/10/0/0 build
There are no valid complaints about elementalist damage. You can complain all you want about having to jump through hoops to stay alive—that’s a perfectly valid point—but doing extreme amounts of damage is incredibly simple for this class.
There are always conditions on doing damage. Am I in range to hit my opponent with this axe? Do I have enough adrenaline to use eviscerate? But sometimes these conditions are trivial. Am I within 600 range? Are you kidding me? My attack has 300 range. Am I attuned to air? Of course I am. It’s practically never on cooldown and I can even swap mid cast.
Too bad most of them are limited to specific attunements that are mutually exclusive to one another. The only ones that aren’t are further limited by other factors. As I keep pointing out … all the hoops that need to be jumped through to get to any sort of reward for the base line risk is insane.
10% damage while in air – fresh air trait lets this be on almost all the time
10% damage within 600 range – obv on all the time when using a short range weapon
10% damage to burning targets – can have pretty good uptime, especially if you combine with the burn on crit trait
20% damage to targets below 33% health – this one is pretty obv
none of these are mutually exclusive in any way, nor do you have to do anything special to get them. and I run all of them on my glass D/x builds
plus precision and crit damage are in the same trait line, and contain two of these damage traits (along with fresh air), as well as the minor trait that does ranged instant damage every time you swap to air (which is very frequently with fresh air). and this same trait line also inflicts vulnerability on crit, which is basically another %damage increase, except it has to ramp up
seriously. see my first post in this topic. I wasn’t kidding
burning speed is actually pretty decent in combat mobility. the difference distance covered vs walking during the channel time is notable with that in-combat speed loss.
burning retreat though, is best skill ever. also conjures have good mobility on them, especially the elite. They are our utility skills, but they’re still there
anyway, I agree. ele could definitely stand to have better mobility
I actually do use it on my serious (offensive) builds in any PvP setting so that people can’t stomp me. and also it lets me auto-win any close duels. if we both go down at close to the same time, I win
I’ve even downed and rallied off people on my own, since sigil of fire gets boosted too. bursting someone for 4k with my skill 1 downed attack is hilarious
defensive skills on a single weapon set:
ranged daze
ranged knockdown
wide AoE projectile block
instant cast triple cleanse + projectile reflect
instant cast 5 sec invuln that still lets you move and attack
armor buff that bumps you up to almost heavy armor
instant cast blind
semi AoE blind
(AoE) heal
cleanse + vigor
and again, that’s just one weapon set. And there’s also a ranged chill, if you count that.
We haven’t even begun to start on traits and utilities. I’ll let you do those yourself.
if you want easy mode, something more akin to warrior play, try a fresh air D/x build. And don’t take the “above 90% health” damage stuff. Continually spam lighting whip, swap to a random attunement. Any useful skills off cooldown here? yes? use them. no? swap back to air. repeat every 5 seconds
anyway I do tons of damage. tons. I’ve had people on the enemy team feel the need to comment about how much damage I was doing. You just have to build offensively.
scholar runes? 10 in water?
no, your build sucks. you aren’t going to be above 90%
Here’s the actual best build:
30/20/10/0/10 staff, zerkers, ogre runes
I did something similar in hotjoin before the patch though
30/20/0/0/20 (final shielding, not elemental attunement) staff, zerkers, arcane shield, arcane wave. when some poor noob glass thief jumped on me I would literally explode between the arcane shield(s) exploding, arcane wave, lava font, and the downed lava font, so even if I got downed, they would be downed too and die an instant later. It was pretty hilarious
I don’t get how I’m supposed to use this weapon at all. It’s literally impossible to hit anyone with dragon’s tooth, and none of the auto attacks do damage (water’s has the highest dps!). seems like the only things that do damage are lighting flash, point blank phoenix, and a preloaded hurl
Also, @ topic title
I made a spreadsheet thing and calculated the effectiveness of soldier’s vs celestial for the PvP amulets, and soldier’s was better both at raw defense and at doing damage. like actual damage values. none of this “total stats” nonsense
Forget “total stat points,” which factors in useless/almost useless stuff like condi-dmg. What you want is a mix of knights/cavaliers. Why? So you can hit the toughness threshold, above which a burst thief won’t kill you the moment you see him.
As an ele, you’ve got enough condi-removal that the toughness-threshold is what matters in the first 10 secs of a fight, not how much health you have, so spec into toughness rather than vitality.
vit is far and away the best stat for not dying to burst, so why would you get toughness?
how about instead a mix of valkyrie’s and zerker’s, with like one piece of knight’s. or assassin’s
D/F is also fun melee action
the only thing I really miss when using focus off hand instead of dagger is ride the lightning. well, at least for PvP. In PvE you can actually hit things with Churning Earth, so I miss that one too. Anyway with all the damage mitigation skills on focus it makes me feel pretty boss. especially the earth ones. Go invulnerable while pumping out the damage, in the middle of everything. lets me feel like an unstoppable tank even though I’m made of glass.
figured I’d throw that out there in case that’s your cup of tea
