What armor/runes/weapon stats would be the best to gain some much needed toughness without sacrificing too much DPS?
the crusader stat spread has the best durability*damage, especially if you’re already packing a bunch of marauders
Synergeticist Sammi
teacher in pve
play all modes except wvw. would like to learn non-zerg wvw though
Dragonbrand
for what? solo pve? wvw?
in any case staff is kinda bad at condition damage. only two and a half skills do condition damage. vs 6 on other weapon sets
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damage certainly does matter. else people would be running magi’s.
and I do average damage (around 20%) each match with mender’s
same build as mender’s
just don’t take any on-crit stuff
there would need to be something else to offset this bonus
else average mmr would just slowly go up
truffle steak is worse than spicy butternut squash, which is in turn still worse than seaweed salad
that said, I’m a casual and spamming left right the entire fight is too annoying, so I don’t use seaweed salad
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I do that with mender’s
usually have around 50% of team’s healing
Magi’s heals for a little more (about 6%) and has more health (20% more) to make you a bit harder to burst down, but in return, you do a LOT less damage (mender’s does about 80% more). Precision with no damage stats is just so useless. I’d use it if that precision were replaced with quite literally any other stat.
which now has me wanting to see stat spread with healing, vitality, and concentration or expertise. No damage, all support. And no toughness to make you invincible which would be OP
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for an option purely in game that you can grind all day any time, gathering is 15-20g/h iirc
swiping your credit card
I like playing support in every game.
I just wish this game had damage absorbtion shields
it took me to my last post instead of the new ones, so I couldn’t not notice
and while I like the idea of giving staff more condi power, fireball is already really strong. I’d add it somewhere else
I use sage if I want more killing power, and menders if I want more support. That’s really all there is to it.
That 560 precision is not that significant backed up by no ferocity unless you need crit procs. It offers about 13% more raw power damage.
evade frames? but what if my condi thief is p/d?
Every team don’t need an ele, every team need a support class. The ele is the only actually forced to play as a support but also a ranger, a support buffer revenant, a support mesmer or a support guardian can be good.
Support is a really good thing for every team and grant good things for everyone.
Oh look, someone who actually knows how this game works
or basically any game, really
However, if there was a stat combination whereby I can replace the condi and healing power stat for something else, that would be great too.
if you cut out condition damage, you’re left with about the same total stats as the 4-stat gear. Then to convert healing power into something else, it’s just a matter of mixing them.
…except that marauder is the only one that doesn’t have either condition damage, healing power, or concentration
Does unranked queue apply any kind of matchmaking? It doesn’t seem like it does.
anecdote: yesterday I queued up for unranked with a party of fairly casual players for a few rounds of pvp. 2nd match in we get utterly crushed, barely even able to get any points at all. Then next round we get matched against the same team. with similar results. Half my party logs off for the day.
Whatever your matchmaking is or isn’t doing, please adjust it to prevent things like that from happening (large skill gaps and facing the same people repeatedly). Good experiences in unranked are important too. Even moreso now that you can’t do ranked with a full party.
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also, stab on overload is a trait option, so be careful to watch for that. It’s only 1 stack and non-refreshing, so easy to get around
alternative to gitting gud: play ele
you’re probably at or near diminishing returns for adding Toughness.
How do you think toughness works?
omho combat logging to file should be a thing. Takes development burden off of Anet and allows us to customize parsers as necessary.
yes please
it’s very good design.
ensures you always have something to work towards without massive powercreeping
healing power is great if you’re using water or arcane (it’s about as good as toughness if you’re running both), but you aren’t running either, so skip it.
water is fine. earth could use some minor tweaks. but air is the only one that fails. it needs a lot more damage
look up anthology of heroes
the other person is talking about
gale song
wash the pain away
rebound
water skills
all of which you can have in a max dps buildthief can skelk venom and pop signet of agility though
Going into Water severely cripples your DPS, and the less ‘Wash the Pain Away’ you need to pop the higher your DPS stays.
Thief literally takes a second to channel Basi venom which gives a sum total of 7.5 seconds of stun to the melee if it hits all allied targets. That’s a bit under the full Warrior Wombo-Combo in CC in one skill.
Your other points are valid, but I believe you might be rating Elementalist just a touch too high on the support, because if they are supporting that much, they aren’t DPSing.
depends on when you swap into water
if you’re staff and water swap while meteor shower has most of its cooldown and right after dropping a lava font, you lose very little dps
if you’re dagger and swap shortly after air overload, you also lose very little dps
there are also times when you would rather momentarily trade all of your dps for some utility.
but again I’m not arguing that ele has better utility, since thief has some underused utility as well
When you are running the normal DPS ele setup, going for the full damage rotation, elementalist carries with it less utility than thief who always carries Basi Venom in their kit. I specifically didn’t mention any of the alterations to utilities and kits for the DPS Elementalist because that goes into boss specific DPS territory. If we are talking strictly a Tempest running without the supportive utilities and traits, such as on VG, that’s where Thief will have an edge in support in that fight.
the other person is talking about
gale song
wash the pain away
rebound
water skills
all of which you can have in a max dps build
thief can skelk venom and pop signet of agility though
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That gear looks like it will meet your needs. Plenty of damage, and a solid chunk of defense. No changes needed.
Since you already have ascended, I would recommend eventually rolling some of it over to Marauder, which is a little more efficient at getting damage+defense than Berserker+Soldier. Also ascended trinkets are relatively easy to come by if you have laurels or do guild missions or fractals. But these are minor optimization tweaks.
just use it every 3 cycles
ele’s raid dps doesn’t need a buff
you took the remove immob trait
need moar shocking auras
Earth shield 3 can hit multiple times.
What, how?
warhorn: god tier PvE. Good AoEs with strong effects, for damage, defense, and support. But the skills are slow, delayed, so it’s not as great against players, who can avoid them.
focus: amazing personal defense and solid single target cc, but offers little else
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tbh staying alive as a glass tempest in a raid (discounting things out of your control—major errors from teammates) is easier than staying alive in HoT solo pve where the attacks are harder to predict and all directed at you
running around open pve with a big group though is, of course, very easy
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while it does sound ridiculous at first glance, it’s actually more reasonable than you’re giving it credit. 180 units is not much distance. And flamestrike is slow. Even if it is spammable, think about it. How are you going to decap anything with this? Decap knockbacks work because they also CC you. This ele is spending a full 1-1.5 seconds doing nothing but moving you back half the distance you can move in that time. It has more in common with a 1.5 second cripple than any kind of decap. It doesn’t interrupt casts or anything. You’re still completely free to attack while the ele is barely doing anything to you.
that said, it’s still a bad suggestion because it’s weird and way out of theme, and it doesn’t really accomplish anything. (I guess you could use it to help land dragon’s tooth, but that’s literally the only thing)
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Tempest improves on everything: damage, defense, support. There are only two scenarios in which you can do better without tempest.
1: You don’t have time to overload.
But even here, if you have time to start an overload before you’re in range and drop the overload down once you’re in range, tempest is going to still have better damage. So this scenario is even more specific than advertised.
2: You stay at range the entire time, and defense and support are of little value.
Tempest’s damage advantage is in the overloads, which are all close range. If you are never in range to overload, tempest has no damage advantage. But it still offers a ton of defense and healing and general support, so that would have to be of no value as well.
So my conclusion is a fire/air/(water or arcane) staff build that tries to never get close to anything
oh, yeah, for sure
I was thinking more something like this, though:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAoYhMMoohNOwsB8RMIAITwdFr3tTHBKcA-TxhAABzqEMG9Aws/AAPAAgU/5BzfPp8TQAKC-e
ie extreme burning damage
main advantages of ele’s condi build is that it’s nothing but high intensity burning— meaning that it kills almost as fast as power builds, and you don’t need any stats but condition damage and burning duration to max it out, so you can afford to have a big chunk of health
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dagger+dagger carrion fire/earth/arcane, signet of fire, glyph of elemental power, balthazar or flame legion runes
don’t see why the next elite spec can’t have a bunch of active defense
I’m curious about what’s the image of the elementalist in GW2 for you.
For me, the elementalist is merely a master at using fire/water/earth and air magic. It’s a pretty reactive profession that dance between attunment.
Nothing in the game can lead us to think that the elementalist are conservative and old school to the point of avoiding technology.
It’s not about avoiding technology. It’s about the way they conjure the elements. They don’t actually use their weapons as weapons, and they’re very active and physical with their spell casting. Pulling a trigger to cast a spell isn’t how an elementalist would do things.
Do we have any word on when a new elite spec is coming around?
and while elemental bullets is a thing I’ve seen in other games, any kind of gunslinging style really doesn’t gel at all with the image of elementalist in this game.
last time I checked (and it has been a long time), it was either you go viper’s or you go magi’s. The damage contribution from zealot’s over magi’s is relatively pathetic compared to damage your dps is dishing out, so you may as well just make yourself immortal with the extra health and improve your ability to keep everyone else in top shape.
yeah I like that it makes the rotation more interesting instead of a snooze fest.
pre-Tempest fresh air arcane d/f
nah, using half marauder is better than full zerker for raids 90+% of the time. The #1 cause of failing dps checks is someone going down.
It’s not remotely a minimal DPS loss, it’s substantial.
using half marauder is less than 5% dps loss
for a 30% health gain
and swapping warhorn to focus is a much bigger dps loss
Sustain really is the main problem with this game’s PvP. Everyone being able to self heal for huge amounts means you need to have huge amounts of damage for anyone to die.
why in gods name somebody would play with magi. u have zero dmg and nearly squishy as menders. mender is way to go otherwise ur just usless. pls stop confusing new players magi is pure trash. if u cant play mender change class rly
Magi has more healing and vitality, why would damage matter for a healer build? Get more familiar with roles pls.
because one of the best ways to mitigate damage is to put pressure on your opponent so that they can’t focus entirely on doing damage to you. Magi’s does no damage at all and barely has any more healing, so you take a lot more damage.
DD is ambiguous, so the three character abbreviations are preferred
marauder + good positioning