Guild Wars 2

DeoDose.4237:

I think this is one of the best condi builds for dungeons too (50% breakbar dmg + poisson bursts instead of slowly stacking up)

problem with venomshare outside of raids is it has no AoE damage. venomshare is all single target

Reduce venom cooldown or make the venoms worth the long cooldown, but then limit venomous aura to 3 targets

yeah day/night is game-wide
just /wiki day and night
has the timer there
or you can /wiki event timer and look at verdant brink

Druid brings a lot of damage buffs. It can buff the party’s dps by as much as 17%.

Tempest is better at healing, however, and you rarely see a failed dps check that doesn’t involve people going down.

I like JPs, so I am intrigued.

I love me some polearms

indeed, my greatest weapon-related gripe is that spears are not available as land weapons

still my favorite build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJBIhdSfJU0A24A4fJwHBWEAsgAQB4A42ajt5WiuQSoKA-TxhAABA8AA6U9HoPBANqEMR9Aws/QZK/IEgi1A-e
woks just as well in exotics

wildfire under mobs, burning speed through them, and press all the buttons, and they die. taking too much damage? swap to water for a quick heal, then to earth, use sand squall for protection and reflect, and dust storm for AoE blinds and some bleed damage. overload earth for more protection and bleeds before swapping back through water to fire

optionally save your utility skills for the stun break and/or condition clear, but this usually isn’t needed and you can pop them for damage

Greatsword is mostly just for going fast.

btw, water 4->5->3->earth 4 = massive heal combo

If you want more defense, swap fire trait line for earth and take elemental shielding for tons of free protection

oh, dang, I can’t swap traits that fast
do you use some kind of build swapper addon for that?

Marthkus.4615:

reikken.4961:

People who think you can’t deviate from the meta full zerker builds without nuking your damage into oblivion clearly haven’t taken the time to actually try to craft a build.
[…]

Use the DPS golem and check for yourself how well the homecrafted builds actually compete.

Then compare with other numbers reported. For most classes, you’ll want around 20K dps in group situations.

Though a couple pieces of marauders is not a huge lost, but it’s minute defense gain too.

For any smallish amount, the %health gain is about 5-6x the % dps lost, for ele/thief/guard. like 30 % more health for 5 % less dps. I find that’s a very good trade. running around with 15k health instead of 11,645.

and yes, I can pull 20-25k on the actual bosses, and 30k with realistic buffs in the vacuum of the dps cave. and break 40k with full buffs

People who think you can’t deviate from the meta full zerker builds without nuking your damage into oblivion clearly haven’t taken the time to actually try to craft a build. I don’t even raid in full zerker, as it’s not the best overall build for my classes (ele, thief). 99 times out of 100, an ele is better off with a couple pieces of marauder/valk.

You can gain quite a lot of defense without losing much damage, and there are several ways to go about it.

Marauder gear offers a health boost for a very small loss in damage.
You can complement your berserker/marauder gear with valkyrie’s, knight’s, crusader’s, cavalier’s, etc to gain even more defense, though the damage loss is bigger than the swap from berserker to marauder.

Some traits or skills offer a lot of extra defense. Protection boon, projectile reflects, blocks, invulnerability, condition clears, evades, heals, etc. all contribute a lot to surviving.

Condition builds typically only need 2 stats to do big damage, condition damage and duration, and that can allow you to take health or toughness or the like without a big damage loss.

Also there is food that makes you take less damage. Pop some mussel soup to instantly become way tankier.

also how did you do that? I can only manage 65k dps…that drops off to 46k before I get the kill

bladex.9502:

On ele with some bullkitten air/water/arcane build, am I a skilled player now?

yes

double skilled if you can reproduce it on the small size 4 million hp golem

Orr is indeed a notable step up from most of the rest of central tyria (and the Heart of Maguuma is a step up from Orr)

but yeah, take some defensive traits or skills or gear, and practice until you get the hang of it

gather resource nodes on a mobility daredevil

make the ice spikes drop randomly instead of in a predefined pattern. or make the pattern harder to dodge
also make him hit a lot harder and attack more frequently
and give him a little less health scaling

The ice elementals themselves are fine. Just use reflects.
just did it pretty painlessly a bit ago with me on ele with 4 AoE magnetic auras, and 2 AoE pulsing blinds, and our thief took smokescreen and shadow refuge for good measure

the only problem is the randomized teleport splitting up the group, so if you’re unlucky, someone can die before you regroup

WHOA WHAT
LEAD ATTACKS WORKS ON CONDI? oh man, I didn’t even notice
sounds better than lotus training. death blossom is way stronger than impaling lotus, too

Talking about the bars over people’s heads. The ones that let you see where to throw the heals

you could just post a screenshot of your dps

skritt best, by far

The thing is, this is an MMO. MMOs aren’t very good if you’re alone. I’m not going to ironman mode an MMO by myself. I’d ironman a single player game by myself, sure. But for an MMO, I’d need some fellow ironmen.

Hanza.6872:

Wouldn’t the thief count as one of the 5 people obtaining the venom. Meaning you should add *4 as venomshare multiplier? Since you already have your own venom in the dps calculation?

it’s being added to the no venoms damage

Josh XT.6053:

You’re doing math incorrectly. You don’t add percentages, you multiply.

Protection 1.4 (40%, got that?)
Frost Aura 1.1
Food 1.1
From Trait 1.1
Scrapper rune 1.07

1.4 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.07 = 1.993838, which is 99.38%.

Indeed you do multiply. But these are damage reductions, not damage increases. You don’t take (1+0.4) = 1.4x damage when you have protection. You take (1-0.4) = 0.6x damage.
0.6 * 0.9 * 0.9 * 0.9 * 0.93 = 0.406782 = 59.3% damage reduction
However, frost aura, protection, and food all stack additively:
(1-0.4-0.1-0.1) * 0.9 * 0.93 = 0.3348 = 67.5% damage reduction

I’m not sure if scrapper rune and earth trait stack with each other, because the difference is extremely small, but for that same reason, it also doesn’t matter.

Also where is your source that the trait and scrapper runes don’t stack?

meticulous independent testing

also add permadeath, and I’m in

what about that thing where you do all 3 ac paths at the same time? does that count?

Honor of the Waves (dungeon) has the last third or so underwater
and Orr has a lot underwater

Jekkt.6045:

burning speed is instacast

you can dodge things with it, but it doesn’t have evasion frames until the slide forward hits full speed

would not recommend running full zerker gear for high scale fractals (or really anywhere at all, for ele)

I for my power dps build, I use a mix of berserker’s + marauder + some zerker valk trinkets. You can get an extra 400 vitality (ie 35% more health, for an ele) while still doing 94% dps of full zerker

but for the really high scale fractals I just go condi. On condi you can get a ton of defense and still do a lot of damage. and the high scale stuff has higher armor anyway and has more protection.

but yeah, potions help a lot
can also pop damage reduction food instead of power food

also change up your traits and utility skills to deal with whatever the fractal presents

that’d be nice for sure

try using marauder instead of zerker amulet

idk man, about 40% of the pugs I’ve joined had 1-2 people who didn’t know the fight
and even if you haven’t done it before, you can still read a guide and watch a few videos and know what to do

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Guardian, whose DPS mainly coming from traps,

This is wrong. like extremely wrong

Condi Engi, same thing, once the conditions are set, it continues to do damage.

And this is misguided. Yes, your conditions will keep ticking, but if you don’t keep reapplying them, your dps goes down. The only way you can stop attacking without losing dps is if all of your skills are on cooldown.

besides, the amount of time spent using breaks is so small that it doesn’t impact dps by a notable amount
EXCEPT if you have to swap weapons to do it, locking you out of your dps (like warrior), or if your cc for some reason takes a long time to cast. (like ice bow)

depends on which build you were trying out
but I’m not too sure in any case. I was able to increase my fully buffed dps by 20% (32k->39k) with mostly just snappier skill transitions (need to be much quicker to make the most of quickness and alacrity).

But I don’t know how latency is handled. If you try to use a skill that’s almost off cooldown such that it’s still on cooldown when you press the button but would be off cooldown by the time the use request reached the server, would it let you use it?

well 24k dps is nearly the same as engineer, so that’s pretty good

Also, one reason I would use condi outside of VG or trying to abuse epidemic is as healer. I’m getting more dps out of a build like this than out of a build like this or this.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Condition Ele’s biggest problem is that other than damage it doesn’t do a lot, though. It’s just raw damage, in which case why not use a power Ele which is stronger? The nice niche about condition Necro/Thief/Engi is that they offer a lot of unique utility that helps in myriad ways.

indeed no reason to go condi over power outside of VG, unless you have multiple necros using epidemic

Ven Zehn.6573:

Oh, weird, guess I clicked the wrong thing:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJArYnMIClMgNOAmNA8RgBBAr2khhzQEAClHg5HsDKCA-TxhAABfq+z1K/sUJIM7PA9DAAgTAgg6BIFgiitA-e

nah, not good

Pyromancer’s training is the best trait you have. dunno why you wouldn’t take it.

Arcane power gets you a lot more burning than arcane blast. And besides, glyph of elemental power gets you more burning than arcane power+elemental surge without taking up a grandmaster trait. You might take evasive arcana, but overload fire is better, even if the boss moves out at the end. Plus you lose wash the pain away.
You might take arcane instead of earth, though. not sure which is better.

Dagger off hand might be good.
Scepter is fine against a small moving target, but I still got the same dps with dagger mainhand on the moving golem with its small hitbox, and it’s better against anything else, so you may as well use dagger. UNLESS you are in need of might. Scepter/warhorn stacks more might than a PS warrior, with permafury to boot.

Thaddeus.4891:

You are wrong. Flamewall, Glyph of Storms, Burning Speed, Fiery Eruption and Firestorm are all static attack. I’m not saying that Staff ele isn’t affected a lot by moving target, but condi tempest are affected even more because. Several of those attack have long cooldown are in line and not in circle.

Actually, being in a line is better, if the target moves predictably. You can lay the line across the movement path

Anyway, I did some tests, and very little dps is lost on the moving golem (like 10%), since it moves in a predictable fashion. Most of the raid bosses move predictably as well. The biggest factor is actually the size of the hitbox.

no
but I was just about to put a burning duration sigil on my shaman’s scepter and go test

Dahkeus.8243:

15k DPS from venom share (delta calculation from video) with a 33% reduction = 10k DPS

math is a bit off there
it would be 15k/1.33 = 11.3k

yo, just a heads up
I did a dps test with a much-less-than-optimally-geared condi ele and got 32k dps
so ele is still top dps even if you go condi with it.

edit: This was against the large size golem, though. All ele builds benefit from increased hitbox size.

FogLeg.9354:

Thief… is not a class I would recommend. It has some nice mechanics and can do ton of single target damage but it has problems. For example does not survive against condi very well. Or has really weak ranged damage options. Very little AoE damage.

This is not true at all.
thief has lots of defensive options
has some of the strongest ranged burst dps in the game
and has some AoE options

then why is anyone talking about alacrity?
first chart: full alacrity: no one is even close to thief (barring ele, obv)
second chart: no alacrity: no one is even close to thief (barring ele, obv)
where is the issue?

that’s the second chart

just look at any of the videos for confirmation

skelk venom is now roughly 9000+2.2 heal untraited. I’d most definitely use it when running venomshare. That’s 6450+2.5 heal for allies. and a little extra damage (11k), making it not a dps loss to cast

you can bring 10 people to a raid
obviously you take both thieves and eles to gorseval for ideal results. They have different jobs.

Also, venomshare can apparently do in excess of 30k dps, while providing the best burst bar breaking now available, and sustain support stronger than wash the pain away

I like how death blossom isn’t even worth using

lol wtf at people saying that alacrity puts thieves lower on the dps ranking
not sure if trolling or just didn’t read the post at all

The first chart is with 100% alacrity

How do you like to enjoy your pve?

GW2 is buy to play with unlimited free trial

flash freeze was bugged to full clear conditions on eles with soldier runes

PVE:
1. tempest
2. daredevil
3. reaper

for sheer personal dps and and ability to stay alive while doing it
does not include party support