Guild Wars 2

I personally like it the way it is currently over the gazillion fireballs I’ve chucked and especially love the bouncing rainbow chain lightning. It makes Gust and Shock-wave pretty much identical to the auto-attacks and thus impossible to dodge.

Ele can be stronger in WvW since there’s no balance in WvW. The higher stats from gear makes the differences in health and armor relatively lower and allows the ele to be more on equal footing and the versatility starts to shine, especially with the celestial set. In sPvP Evasive Arcana’s Water Attunement heal is also halved and you don’t have crap like PvE consumable and WvW Vitality stacks from killing guards. It makes me feel nauseous that GvG is now used to refer to 20v20 zergfests instead of the grandeur of actual GvGs in Gw1.

Alot of Gw1 players would still be playing it if they didn’t slap in Dervish overhaul and made the Ele completely OP unnecessarily even though they didn’t need it before stopping the Gw1 balances. The irony.

In sPvP, if you try to bunker with clerics/shamans/pvt your sustain is too poor to survive against anything 1v1 for a prolonged period of time, lack of stability means you get flung off the point. Having to get off point and out of range to Ether Renewal lest it gets interrupted is also not an option since you lose the cap point.

Berserker’s amulet lets you have small chance at killing other people but it’s very high risk low reward compared to thieves who can get around much quicker and can actually burst people down without dying in the process.

The middle ground, the Celestial Amulet in sPvP means you are just bland, don’t do enough damage to assist in kills and you’re just deadweight since you don’t exactly fulfil a role.

If there’s no wall, I don’t take lightning flash. Instead I keep my inventory full and open a champ loot bag to self-snare mid Firey Rush. Obviously advanced mechanics.

If fiery rush gets a trail nerf, reflect should get a nerf too e.g. Feedback/WoR shatters after reflecting 5 shots.

Tbh Fire Salsa Lava Tomb Ele downed tanking + Rune of Mercy revivers is as close as you can get to tank/heal/dps trinity.

Harrahou.4518:

zencow.3651:

Wayfarer staff guardian, 0/0/30/20/20 selfish meditations and symbol healing with the only exotic pieces being the 5 Traveler/1 Noble runes and Sigil of Luck.

wth was anet thinking when they added wayfarers? Glad it’s gone now.

5 traveler…it was 5 pirate one noble! Sadly I farmed a full noble set of runes on my guardian b4 i got into dungeons…

Power/Might Duration too useful. Vitality is better for leeching tanking.

Wayfarer staff guardian, 0/0/30/20/20 selfish meditations and symbol healing with the only exotic pieces being the 5 Traveler/1 Noble runes and Sigil of Luck.

wth was anet thinking when they added wayfarers? Glad it’s gone now.

I believe it’s a shift in designer’s visions that failed to be implemented properly. It’s obvious that they intended Eles to be high damage, bursty with low health judging from the old Attunement descriptions. Instead though, we have other designers who want them to be super versatile with a mix of condition damage, sustain and direct damage.

Thus, health is kept low and our sustain has been nerfed according to the first design vision but damage potential is also kept low due to the second design vision.

The conflicting design visions has led the ele to become the broken ragdoll as they are today and it will continue to be so until the designers. It seems they are firm on the second design vision now and have updated the Ele page at guildwars2.com according and according to how Isaiah Cartwright condones the use of celestial gear.
http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/c/2491717

It will take a very long while until Ele becomes balanced again.

Glenstorm.4059:

Haha, love this. I’ve been running a similar build in hotjoin because trying to play Staff normally became too frustrating.

For extra lulz I sometimes bring Earth Shield for the AoE pull. If I’m fast enough I can pull a bunch of people to me, daze the most dangerous one in front of me, drop shield, switch to Air, Static Field->fire->Lava Font->Water->Frozen Ground->Ice Spike. Then I die and my Lava Tomb procs.

It’s like….50-50 effective lol. But when it does work it’s hilarious. I even had a thief QQ at me: “wtf why do you do so much damage AFTER I down you?”

Yeah I stopped trying to be serious with S/D and just being out-sustained and out-damaged by some random rifle using warrior and went full kitten with LH.

TGSlasher.1458:

Ptolomy.6984:

We need something that does more damage the lower our hp is. Then we can go with a bang. That would be so awesome for kamikaze. Like a supernova explosion or something

Fire Grandmaster: Out with a Bang: “While in fire you do 10, 20, 30, 40, 50% more damage when below 50, 40, 30, 20, 10% hp respectively and you gain quickness when below 33% hp. If you go down within 5 seconds of reaching 50% hp you explode forfeiting your rally causing damage equal to your downed health in a range equal to Fire Storm.”

Hmm I should try 4x Balthazar Runes and 2xDivinity Runes to get some quickness.

Jabberwock.9014:

This really speaks volumes for the current state of elementalist. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

To beat broken builds, you have to use broken builds :P
After pondering the traits I decided to try out LH with Lava Tomb against people’s protests.
I’ve had more success in beating necroes and stun-warriors with Lightning Hammer than trying to fancy Fresh Air burst my way through their tankiness and Death Shroud or Healing Signet. Too bad LH isn’t always up.

Believe it or not, even Lava Tomb had been nerfed.
It used to have no cool-down and Vapor Form once functioned differently with the downed state so you could beat anyone 1vX as long as they are downed.

I only made mine last week with fundings from Deadeye Dunwell but I wish it not to be purple too since I wasted a weapon token for a Zodiac Dagger to match it and everything…

After endlessly dying to the opponent’s team-mates after bursting people down with S/D and thus have my handiwork undone so simply, I have resorted to trying more haphazard builds. And I think I have found the best one by far, using what is, imo the most effective Ele trait by far.

Lava Tomb.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQFAWhImIblRAxjFAkCpEKEwoQHCFWARRBO7A-TkAg0CnIwRhjDHDOScs4MsA

For use in:
sPvP hotjoin with a friend or two.

How to use:
This build involves going full berserkers and laying down your strongest Aoes, Static Field, Meteor Shower and Lava Font, then going full YOLO into the fray with Lightning Hammer/FGS in Water Attunement and mashing 1, Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave. Final Shielding will also provide an extra oomph when it explodes. If you get downed? No worries, the +damage steroid traits combined with Lava Tomb will pump your damage high enough so that the produced Lava Font will tick for 2k-5k per second and your super fast casting downed number 1 skill will hit much higher than when you are alive at 2k-4k each, ensuring either a guaranteed rally or deter your opponents enough so your friends can revive you. If the ambitious Mesmer/Engineer attempts to distortion/S-shrink stomp you, congrats! Simply Vapor form away and after your teammate picks you up you can hug onto them and kill them the next time you’re down.

What not to do:
- Using this in soloQ or tPvP unless you are willing to risk ranks.
- Trying to play normally and being afraid of being hit – you do not want to get downed away from people, in fact you should WANT to get downed but oddly enough you probably won’t most of the time unless you violate the following:
- Running in by yourself without others to assist you.
- Vapor forming too early/too late. Try to delay so by the end of vapor form, 10 seconds have passed so you can generate another Lava Font at the end of Vapor form but don’t try too hard.
- Not being downed in Water Attune will drastically decrease your downed state damage output.

Variants:
- S/D or D/D will give you an extra sigil slot. Blasting staff still recommended to make your Lava Tombs big enough to melt people’s faces.

It’s really fun in a crazy way. Everyone should try it when doing your PvP dailies

Daishi.6027:

Knowing them they’ll make something completely unreasonable. Think of the 100 jorbreakers.

Or trying to craft Mjolnir :P

Erebus.7568:

-.-
the truth is if its a good thief then you simply CAN’T win… its just not possible no matter which build or how pro you are you will never win against a good theif

At the end of the day it’s pretty much this but you can replace thief with any other class. How successful you are at ele is 80% how well your opponent plays and 20% how well you play.

blessing nosferatu.3784:

Yea eles will be useless with ascended.
Meanwhile in dungeons “why my fiery rush hitted for just 140k?”

See but it should hit for 154k with ascended weapon. But no, it will only stay 140k

Erebus.7568:

the ele is broken and up and need to be fixed.

Yeah but you see that whine in every other thread. I wanted my whine to be original ;D

cheshirefox.7026:

why are you playing from birds eye view that you can’t see through the rain cloud ._.

When going up or down hill, it’s impossible to be immune from the effects unless you play from landscape view, wherein you can’t aim your aoes either.

My ele is also a charr so I am forced to play with a very specific angle. But that’s more of a WTB race change contract issue.

Antiriad.7160:

Does anyone actually know which professions the Arenanet people play mostly?

Isaiah Cartwright cares for Warriors and Guardians.

Anet’s pretty much clueless about their own game though. Even right in the times of Gw1 PvP glory days where the game was considered the most balanced, right off the bat most of the recommended builds were terrible:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Hamstorm
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Premade_build

Necromancers were notorious for becoming super strong, then super-nerfed throughout the history of GWs, some examples are Lingering Curse, Weakened Knees and the Blood Magic updates toward the end of the game’s PvP life.

In my opinion, even with less skills to work with, Gw2 is pretty much headed toward the same downward spiral of imbalancing despite what the Dev’s intentions are. Necro’s pretty seeing the same it is in Gw2 as it is in Gw1. Death Shroud was strong initially then nerfed, Wells were buffed then nerfed, people cry for a about a year, then they buff them in too many factors: more Fear, Burn, Torment, Marks and the DS+Spectral Armor to be overpowered as they are now.

Mirsa.1628:

Reroll.

Haha, but if you decide to stick it out, take a look at daphoenix’s D/D ele guide on the forums. 30 in arcana is a must, but you can play around with putting points in water, earth, and air. You’ll need to gear with defensive stats because the ele is naturally squishy.

Or you can try the S/D Fresh Air.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvsb2hmvyEw

To it’s animation. Probably cause staff sucks and I never use it but it’s been a year and only now do I realise how obstrusive it is.

After using it, it clouds your field of vision and makes your already hard to land staff aoes even harder to land and pretty much gives the enemy zerg/the mobs a free stealth.

woops meant to be in Ele forums

To it’s animation. Probably cause staff sucks and I never use it but it’s been a year and only now do I realise how obstrusive it is.

After using it, it clouds your field of vision and makes your already hard to land staff aoes even harder to land and pretty much gives the enemy zerg/the mobs a free stealth.

I would’ve preferred rain clouds. Downscaled, mini Healing Rains even.

Or how about when a trash mob dies, it drops an orb (they could use the model of the orb from Sanctum sprint) that temporarily applies a massive magic find boost to your party that gets renewed and stacks up higher as collect more orbs? And bosses provide a bigger orb depending on how fast they are killed. That would be pretty fun.

Silvers should transform into Champions when you deal damage to them at a high enough rate after it’s been aggroed.

Nikkinella.8254:

Reroll as a warrior would also be an acceptable answer. It so ridiculously OP right now its not even funny. I was with 2 of my guild members today on my warrior. we got jumped by 5 thieves, I pretty much dropped all 5 of them at once with one combustive shot. Over 900 damage burn ticks on them. And as quickly as I regain adrenaline on my build I can do it pretty often and just drop it on myself and stand in the flames. They try to run in and stab me and they die. And the damage just jacks up even further when all 3 of us stand in the flames and spam blast finishers. I saw a few 1300 ticks at one point.

Combustive Shot and Arc Arrow are what ele skills should be like… They do more damage than Ring of Fire + Dragon’s Tooth, at a much longer range, bigger radius and MUCH EASIER TO LAND >.>

Jatacid.3725:

By that logic wouldn’t it be better to go 0/30/0/10/30?
If vitality is pointless and dodge rolling to clear effects can be done by evasive arcana.

FrownyClown.8402:

i go 20 into water for the heal on water attunment and the remove condition on switching to water.

I prefer 0/30/0/10/30 in WvW since water 15 and water V traits are condensed into one in Evasive Arcana, which also allows you to have an extra blind from dodging.

In WvW, healing from Healing Ripple vs Cleasing Wave dodge is exactly the same (Cleasing Wave dodge only halved in PvP). The extra 10 Arcane gives you extra boon duration so the extra regen gained easily replaces loss of 100 Healing Power and also lets you heal more often since you can switch to water more often.

Arcane 25 also allows you to randomly weaken the target which is argueably also better than the health gain from the extra 100 Vitality.

You can pretty much instant-kill a full zerker thief if you use food, if he’s not as squishy you still should come out on top and if you try hard enough the fights will end with you Phoenix/RoFing in his Refuge or Arc Lightning through stealth and then happily seeing a downed thief when the stealth ends.

Most people run really ridiculously tanky stuff these days though, so even though you shouldn’t die to Rune of Perplexity as an S/D ele since Arc Lightning is resilient to confusion being a channeled skill and Lightning Strike/Blinding Flash being uninterruptable, you won’t be able to finish off these tanky targets. Tanky/scum guardians are your bane with retaliation and necroes are hard to approach since RtL is nerfed so you can’t just disengage/re-engage as you want to to bait out Spectral Armor or when the condies become too much and you need a rest.

Mesmers already have purple legendaries to use play with: Bolt and Quip
Thematically, they also get Minstrel.

And now they get sceptre too…

Antiriad.7160:

Oh right. But what is the difference if you consider not only have weapons, but a full set of items of Ascended vs Exotic.

The above was assuming you had BiS everywhere except the weapon slot. For a full exotic vs ascended comparison see below:

The if disregarding traits and assuming full PVT armor the, damage difference at a minimum is 8.2%. The difference would be less for non-power major stat sets like Clerics but tanky/scum warriors and guardians don’t do any damage anyway so I’d rather disregard them.

In the ideal and extreme case scenario of 25 might stacks/25 blood stacks, butternut squash soup food, superior sharpening stone, full zerker, scholar runes, 25/30/0/0/15 thief with Sigil of Impact backstabbing a 1900 armor target, the maximum damage you can deal is the fabled 19.2k with in full exotics. In full ascended gear, including the assumed 5% improved ascended weapon, the backstab would deal 21.5k. So maximal damage output difference is 11.82%.

So the answer is anywhere between 8.2% – 11.82% depending on your build, which is not all that bad.

Nikaido.3457:

zencow.3651:

People who complain about TA UP are also people who complain about having to have a guardian/mes to reflect for them.

You won’t convince them so easy.

No, there are a ton of people who had guards in the group who still complain how hard it is, and range him despite having a guard with new exploity techique such as max ranging with rangers to not aggro anything.

http://youtu.be/S3xKagfVz7E
http://youtu.be/PekHuA9cDJk
http://youtu.be/9WeRmFSVTlI

Here’s a 4men with only one guard and zero mes. I’m pretty sure it could be done as five (why does the 5 turn into “kitten”..) men with no guard if the 5th was a class like ele/thief etc with some blind and reflect of their own.
Also, no actual burst dps to speak of beside the poor lone war. No lightning hammer, no fiery greatsword, not really trying much to maximize might etc.

The only way I’d see a group fail this boss in a 5 people party that coordinate a little is to have 5 necro/5war or a mix of both.

Hell, in the videos I linked both the ele and guard wasted the reflect because you should only start casting them when he does his first shake.

This boss doesn’t need a nerf. The only thing it needs is for the fight to restart after a fail. That’s a reasonable demand.

I never had a group made from friendlist that failed this though.

Well ya, baddies are baddies. They’d rather have the easy way out than L2P under the assumption that it’s not their fault and that the content is ‘unfair’ and give the ‘play how I want’ arguement and refuse to change their skills.

It’s sad that dungeons, which were intended for hardcore players, is now getting nerfed to be easier so casuals could complete them… it’s like there’s no place left for hardcore players in this game.

Under the assumption that ascended weapons are only 5% stronger than exo as per the leak, under the same test backstab testing conditions, only a 6.4% difference in damage would be observed.

Antiriad.7160:

emikochan.8504:

I doubt everyone will have ascended weapons so easily, and they aren’t going to dwarf exotics in effectiveness.

They are. A LOT so. As someone calculated in a posting in Game Discussion, the 5% increase on each stat/damage of Ascended weapons will ultimately result in a 15% difference in total power (not the stat) between two characters (Asc vs Exo).

That was me, and that was a comparison between exotic and rare though and that’s an 11% difference.

With the same back-stab test, with ascended weapon being only 5% stronger than exotic, the according to damage calculations (as I can’t test ascended weapons in-game) shows the difference will only be around 6.2% assuming 100% crit chance.

But of course that difference can go higher when factoring in external sources of power like like utility signets, food and bloodlust that can come in to play. If I add in Assasin’s Signet the difference becomes around 6.4%.

The more power you have or lack, the larger the difference in damage output from weapon grades will get. A common misconception people make is that they might offset their stats difference by upping their power. Someone might think that when they can ‘outplay’ someone with an ascended weapon my stacking might and use consumables, but when the opponent stacks might and uses consumables they can be much stronger due to weapon strength’s amplification effect, though it’s much confortably smaller between ascended and exo than between rare and exo as I hope to have demonstrated.

Emanuel.9781:

Just did a TAFU run with a few random guildies earlier, no optimized builds and lots of lag.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHvqk4UsF_U

People who complain about TA UP are also people who complain about having to have a guardian/mes to reflect for them.

You won’t convince them so easy.

Dramen Maidria.1034:

Much as I would hate using WoW as a reference, trash mobs in dungeons could have a minuscule chance to drop an item that could start some sort of chain to craft unique exotics, or even better the beginning of the scavenger hunt for precursors we were told was being kicked around over 6 months ago. Naturally some sort of heavy DR would need to be implemented that only reset upon completing the path to prevent just running in and out. You could even do this as a chance for the new T7 mats.

How will they implement that DR though?

To everyone as soon as they enter the dungeon? What if you leave want to leave a pug because you find out you’re in with some ‘Full cleric guardians’ or ‘Support eles’?
It would also make getting kicked from dungeons more painful.

Castaliea.3156:

Why would they adjust kit damage?
Ascended gear stats don’t really make a difference and are just for people who need to grind gear to stay attracted to a game rather then enjoying the content. The whole game can be done in exotics and so therefore, obviously, kits don’t need to be increased.
Sheesh. Such selfish engineers! Wanting free legendary stats!

But engies and eles who DO have legendaries and use kits and conjures don’t get to show off the skin either, so it’s only fair!

Excalibur.9748:

Stop the gear treadmill or make it possible to gain all ascended gear with only playing in WvW.

Or better, make ascended weapons only obtainable from WvW :P

WvWers had to put up with fractals the first time round so it’s only fair, right?

Oh, but that AMA claims there won’t be anything after ascended, only improved infusions. Or am I just reading that in a wrong way?

Infusions do very little to change your performance so I’m fine with that if the extra stats trickle in by 1 point a year.

Some of the horizontal progression they’ve implemented recently are pretty game breaking though: see Runes of Perplexity complaints.

Wethospu.6437:

I don’t see why you would do an in-game test. Damage ranges make it bit unreliable. You can easily calculate the effect with just the damage ranges (or damage formula if you want to include stats).

3 Reasons:
- I hate maths even though I’m azn =w=
- I prefer to see numbers in-game for myself
- People seem to prefer seeing numbers in screenshots than when you type them out

Kelnis.1829:

The difference between exotic weapons and ascended weapons should be 5%. Attached is a screenshot from when they accidentally updated legendary weapons several months ago.

The likely returns from such an upgrade will be tangible, not excessive to the degree you are predicting. The upgrade to ascended from exotic isn’t as large as that from rare to exotic, at least for weapons.

Thanks for that, that looks alot less game changing.

(Suddenly washed over by a feeling of disappointment though, I didn’t know a little, nasty part in me was looking forward to Meteor Shower fools for mega damage right off the bat on Tuesday…)

TooBz.3065:

What a game designer should do is try to address the root cause of the problem and not adjust the game based on collective intelligence (not a fan).

But they can’t. There are 400+ workers at Anet and each designer has their own vision.
There is alot of ‘inertia’ when pushing things forward hence the changes that aren’t hotfixes take forever to happen e.g. super hard nerf Subject 7, then they had to recollect themselves and reconsider how they would and change Gauntlet in a more meaningful way. Equally once something starts moving it hard to/can’t be stopped.

haviz.1340:

I can see here one strange notion. Usually, people that don’t want to skip are those that use more tanky gear (correct me if I’m wrong). The thing is, it takes considerably longer to kill mobs for those people that for those running optimized builds. It’s also safer for them to skip mobs.

In other words, people that don’t want to skip could actually profit from skipping the most. But it’s no fun I guess.

Maybe they like to RP tank and healers? :P

It’s true though, I don’t mind killing trash if everyone is zerky and not diey.
The dredged words that always makes me shudder: “I’m a support ele!”

TooBz.3065:

Yaki.9563:

zencow.3651:

Weapon Strength has a major effect on damage alone. Trinkets weren’t half as bad since they only carried stats.

The difference between just changing a rare dagger to an exotic dagger: negligible stat difference but 15-20% damage output difference.

More info here (my informative posts never get commented on and thus ignored):
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Stat-effects-of-Weapons-vs-Trinkets/first#post2732230

They haven’t posted Ascended weapons yet so it’s unconfirmed whether that is the case. It’s also one item slot and the problem would be with Ascended weapons specifically, not with the rest of the gear. 11% stat increase is a lot less than you think it is.

Because they are multiplicative, a 11% power increase and an 11% weapon strength increase results in at least a 23% damage increase.

If you also increase precision by 11% you get a 32% damage increase.

For example:
Weapon Damage 1000
Power 2146
Precision 1876
Crit Change .405
Crit Damage 90%
Against 1900 armor
Give 1770.5 expected damage.

Weapon Power of 1110
Power 2382
Precision 2082
Crit Change 48.5%
Crit Damage 90%
against armor 1900
Gives an expected damage of 2336

which is 30% more.

Now I don’t think those will be the numbers, but the effect can be bigger than you think.

I was only aiming to demonstrate the effects of Weapon Strength difference to show how big of a deal Ascended Weapon is compared to the effects of Ascended Trinkets to the naysayers.

Your ‘new stats’ is also incorrect, I think you are wrongly multiplying the base stats AND the weapon up by 11%, remember base stats at lvl 80 is 916 so your ‘ascended’ power should be 2281 if you are using that example etc.

TooBz.3065:

Thanks for putting this together, my theorycrafting indicated the difference would be much smaller, 5% instead of 20%.
The Exotic dagger had the damage of : 923-981
The Rare dagger had the damage of: 818-869

Which is about 6% better. But the numbers you show are about 16% better in terms of damage.

Any idea why that happened?

Because Weapon Strength is MULTIPLIED with power in damage calculation, that is then further multiplied by Crit Damage and traits. This is why elite dungeoneers stack as many +% damage traits as they can since they so reach ridiculously large numbers.

The equation is:
Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

From: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage

But it’s better to test it out in game, any rare/exo swap would produce the same results though the numbers may be more volatile if you can’t get 100% crit.

Yaki.9563:

They haven’t posted Ascended weapons yet so it’s unconfirmed whether that is the case. It’s also one item slot and the problem would be with Ascended weapons specifically, not with the rest of the gear. 11% stat increase is a lot less than you think it is.

Please see take the time to read my full post for more info:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/ANet-loves-difficulty-spikes/first#post2592962

Weapon Strength has a major effect on damage alone. Trinkets weren’t half as bad since they only carried stats.

The difference between just changing a rare dagger to an exotic dagger: negligible stat difference but 15-20% damage output difference.

More info here (my informative posts never get commented on and thus ignored):
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Stat-effects-of-Weapons-vs-Trinkets/first#post2732230

Morrigan.2809:

As a player I am starting to feel a bit like a guinea pig

That is exactly what they are doing. They are constantly surveying how to best maximise revenue.

Unlike in Gw1 where the developers had a clear vision of who they wanted to target and were content with their own niche, Gw2 is much more ambitious and has a larger amount developers trying please as much people as it can to get money. Nothing really wrong with that but yes it does hurt the game from a game design perspectives.

Their direction with the zerg events and easy gold heavily targets the majority of the population. Targetting the casual audience is what they teach in games design these days since it’s the most profitable.

A Dev post that’s on a related note:

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

That creature was put there specifically to be avoided. It’s on a long patrol path around the temple, and easy to avoid. In a similar fashion, if you stop to fight a patrolling knight, you’re likely to have another one wander in during the fight, then another, etc. Not every story step is “Destroy every enemy on the map”.

From https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/ANet-loves-difficulty-spikes/first#post2592962

My take on things: How many runs of a path can you repeat before you get bored of it and quit the game/join the skippers? Theres a reason why no-one ever posts for it in LFG anymore. If you want to run a dungeon without skipping of course you’re gonna have time finding people to do it especially now that everyone’s done the dungeons paths before. You may likely get people who’ve never done the dungeons before who will likely GFTO once they have their dungeon master and aren’t worth making friends with since they’d just be off on their merry way to zerg events after they’re done with the path. You especially won’t find empathy here in the recesses of the dungeon forums.

Evans.6347:

zencow.3651:

Unlike the OP, Meteorlogicus’ blue was the only reason why I STOPPED being a TA armor charr.

If it turns purple I will be forced to don the wedding dress again so my outfit matches both legendaries. And I’d have to stop using a Zodiac Dagger and get Peacemaker/Nightmare.

Before and After Meteorlogicus entered his life:

It’s like watching an extreme make-over show.

For the first 3 days of getting BiFrost and that outfit, I felt very nauseous from all the rainbow.

Made a similar post in a thread that got too toxic, I’ll repost it here so everyone doesn’t miss out.

Unlike trinkets, weapons have a significant effect on damage since they carry Weapon Strength. Trinkets purely held stats and thus it upgrading from them from rare to exo to ascended made little impact on your damage output.

I have done an experiment with illustrate this effect. The traits are the standard 25/30/0/0/15 Backstab thief, but taking Hidden Killer instead of Executioner’s to obtain a consistency in damage and 100% crit chance. Due to the raise of cost in weapons, I was only able to afford one rare dagger. However, two rare daggers vs two exotic daggers should also produce the same difference in damage as Weapon Strength is averaged when using two weapons. Feel free to conduct similar experiments yourselves by comparing your damage output when changing between an rare and an exotic weapon.

As you can see from the first picture, the Stat difference when changing between the daggers and nothing else seems negligible between a Rare and an Exotic dagger. However, the effects on damage are very noticeable despite the stat difference being so small. As you can see from the second picture, the damage done using the exotic dagger outputs slightly more than 15% damage compared to the rare dagger.

From the ascended stats leak when legendaries had been upgraded prematurely then quickly reverted, we can infer that the difference in Weapon Strength will be roughly the same 10% increase as it is between rare and exotic and thus we can expect the same increase in damage.

However, as condition damage is based solely on level and stats, this change in Weapon Strength will not be very noticable with condition builds. Engineers will also fall behind professions while using kits since Bundles still use their own Weapon Strength value and only stats and sigils carry over.

PS: No rams were fatally wounded in this experiment, I let him/her reset

NB: Ascended stats won’t be as overpowered as I thought,
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Stat-effects-of-Weapons-vs-Trinkets/first#post2733380
Under the same backstab testing conditions, a 5% boost in ascended weapons should only mean a 6.4% increase in damage under the same testing conditions.

Demonstration of how Weapon Strength causes a massive difference in damage across weapon grades even though the stats show negligible difference.

So even with ascended weapons, LH still only do 4k-4k-6k while everyone else apart from engineers and condition necroes will get an extra +15% damage boost from higher Weapon Strength.

Baladir.2736:

LH is simply not all it is cracked up to be. To use in a rotation, fine, but other skills have better burst. And the mob can’t be anything but paper because if he starts hitting you, there is one defensive skill with an 18 second cooldown.

No doubt someone is going to quote me a co-efficient from a character with stats no one runs with because they are absurd. How about linking me to a video with perfectly controlled circumstances and a elementalist with no agro?

You need to LH in PvE. It’s pretty godmode.

Your have abit of a cooldown so your damage in between S/D spikes is pretty weak. D/D fresh air has better sustain damage since you can lightning whip spam between your bursty skills from other attunements but lacks blast finish.

Defense-wise if anything you have MORE defense in LH than any other weapon due to the AoE blind on every third auto-hit vs the high cooldowns. It also provides the sustained damage that the eles lack.

I’m currently running sub-optimal 25/25/0/20/0 full zerkers and LH does 4k-4k-6k crits without might stacks. Damage-wise this is equivalent to a typical zerker warrior being able to spam Hundred Blades constantly and with 25% increased attack speed but the end of which HB also counts as a blast finisher and blinds. 25/0/20/25/0 supposedly on average has higher damage and is slightly ‘tankier’ but requires you to have team-mates who applies burn, vulnerability and bleed for your +damage% steroids to stay up (i.e. Guard and Warrior) + I like seeing the red numbers more often.

Try it. LH with these stats are completely safe in dungeons like CoE where trash mobs are few and Alpha is easy, FGS or not. SE of course hurts especially if you don’t have team-mates to reflect.

emikochan.8504:

I doubt everyone will have ascended weapons so easily, and they aren’t going to dwarf exotics in effectiveness.

I have BiFrost and Meteorlogicus so I will have ascended grade weapons as soon as the patch comes out. Pity though I won’t benefiting from them much since optimal damage calls for LH…