Elementalist Discussion

[Allyrion]

Has it been mentioned if the Powerful Auras (allies gain aura effects) trait works with the passive from the signet of restoration(heal per cast), labelled as an aura)?

[Soul Hermit]

Just started an Elementalist, and I love it! At first I wasn't sure if I should stance dance, but when I did I never found myself waiting for anything, although I do have a couple of questions:
1) How do I deal with squishiness? I do dodge and I do try to be active in combat, but some of the spells (for scepter/dagger atleast) requires some time to cast and cant cast them while dodging attacks at close range. Any tips?
2) Is Air/Fire attunements synergies well? Or should I just switch between all 4? And what attunements synergies well? cause so far I really like Air

[Meledelion]

1. Distance/dodging/water attunement (to heal back up/remove conditionds) and earth 2 to shield yourself before going in to the danger zone
2. Air/fire is the best dps combo you can get if you're going raw damage. Fire is basically the "buff" attunement, it works for both condition based specs (earth) as raw damage specs (air). If you go a couple of posts back I sort of lined out a basic "rotation"

[Soul Hermit]

What's the best weapon for distance? besides staff, because it seems more like an AoE weapon for me
Edit: Just noticed scepter is the only distance weapon besides staff
So Air is raw damage? because the scepter air seems sub-par to me(atleast the 1) compared to fire

[Meledelion]

you're underestimating cast speed of the air scepter

[Durzlla]

So, just did some instances with my engi and I can cobfirm that tornados man handeling 100% ignores defiance, I kept just about every boss I got tornado on pinned to a wall for the entire duration of the tornado (20s) giving my entire group a large amount of time to just stand still and unload.

So unless engi tornado is just flat out stronger than the ele one (face it, it's not) then tornado is EXTREMELY powerful in PvE an you naysayers can blow it out your ass.

[sacrypheyes]

given most bosses are pretty much no brainers atm, i hardly see how this experiment of yours demonstrate any sort of OPness of tornado.
even if it may help on bosses (well 20s every 3mn of a boss fight that is), it's just plain useless for 90% of the rest of the dungeon where tossing out minions everywhere is the best way to piss off those who are trying to land their aoes to clear packs faster.

good thing you like it but i can't seriously think of it as anything but some trolling gadget in its current state. (granted, they couldn't leave it to what it was in beta either with its huge damage too)

[Durzlla]

given most bosses are pretty much no brainers atm, i hardly see how this experiment of yours demonstrate any sort of OPness of tornado.
even if it may help on bosses (well 20s every 3mn of a boss fight that is), it's just plain useless for 90% of the rest of the dungeon where tossing out minions everywhere is the best way to piss off those who are trying to land their aoes to clear packs faster.

good thing you like it but i can't seriously think of it as anything but some trolling gadget in its current state. (granted, they couldn't leave it to what it was in beta either with its huge damage too)

Lightning tornado (hitting 1 while in tornado form) shoots chain lightning out, and maybe if you were smart about your tornado use IE throw all the mobs into a wall (what I normally do) instead of just all over your group wouldn't be so mad. And I didn't say OP, I said powerful, there's a difference.

PS: I'm not saying tornado does tons of damage, it can do decent-good aoe damage and can shut down a ton of mobs if you use it right.

[Meledelion]

The "issue" of tornado is the same as the weapons, you simply sacrifice too much for it. Sure knocking shit into a wall 24/7 is "handy" but why not just knock'm back once and then stack where they are?

Personally I find whirl finishers to be very weak in comparison to blast finishers so that's probably also a reason why I dislike tornade...

[Durzlla]

The "issue" of tornado is the same as the weapons, you simply sacrifice too much for it. Sure knocking shit into a wall 24/7 is "handy" but why not just knock'm back once and then stack where they are?

Personally I find whirl finishers to be very weak in comparison to blast finishers so that's probably also a reason why I dislike tornade...

Ah, yeah I personally think you gain a lot of things from both whirls and the weapons, the whirl finishers really strong because they're better the longer their duration (tornado has the longest) because they throw more bolts, and as long as you have a target you're guaranteed to throw a bolt at that target, the other bolt gets thrown out randomly though...

[Meledelion]

On reddit someone posted this video regarding condition elementalists.
He's synergising his talents pretty well with his utilities however I don't think he realises how weak/useless the signets really are and just bringing them for 9stacks of vulnerability isn't all that great either nor is the fire aura since you basically don't want to be hit anyway and you don't need more burning, fury is nice but can be gained from speccing into arcana.

Also his gear choice is a bit weird he says carrion is probably better due to the d3 (when d/d) doing quite a lot of dmg even when you're full condition based. While this is true the problem is that a) you're not using d/d and b) no other runes scale as good as undead.

Then he breaks down the trait and why he went 20/10/30/10/0 instead of going further in arcana. Sure you lose precision from speccing out of air and dropping signets but you can make up for those by grabbing some rampager gear instead (or atleast jewels/weapons/...)
Then he says "arcane doesn't give anything beneficial to conditions" which is wrong on so many ways. I can keep up 16stacks of might solo and 25% boon duration surely helps for this and it helps my team as well.
A tad later he continues with saying that there's no source of burning when you camp in earth which is wrong. You take burning precision so you'll get burns from that.
As he says later the shorter duration on aura swapping helps a ton for keeping burning+bleeding up and it would also help for his sigil choice (I thought weaponswap and on crit sigils shared CD's)


In comparison in my full ramp(exotic) gear I have 1299 condition dmg while he has 1455
I have 5% less condition duration and the same amount of condition damage but I have 47% base crit.

Here's a post where I sort of give some options

[Valeron]

Ah wooden potatoes video, it's pretty good. I still don't think I would go for a dedicated condition build. If I get some extra money around to buy some gear for it, I might try it out.

[Lane]

In what situations is a condition build considered optimal? I'm trying to decide if this is something I would ever want to do (as someone who predominantly participates in DEs and doesn't have much to do with dungeons or PvP).

[Meledelion]

Condition builds are optimal when there's a limited amount of players using them (preferably only you) and bosses tend to go in "defense mode". With defense mode I mean that they for instance get lots of protection or some sort of immunity (at this point you can safely get off churning earth for instance).

When the opposite happens (dredge fractal) raw damage is better but it's important to note that the defense mode is far more common.

For DE's (and thus tagging) raw damage always wins since doing 1k dmg with that is one skill while 1k dmg from bleeds = something between 1-8seconds (depends on your bleed dmg).

[Lane]

So, before I went to do Orr map completion I put together my version of a survivability build (not that it turned out I needed it). It's 30 in Water, 30 in Earth, and 10 in Arcane. It's surprisingly not that bad. o_O Some fights take forever (at least it makes veterans feel epic :P), but it takes a lot for me to feel I'm in any trouble. It's also nice to have that OP ability, earth dagger #5, available on such a short cooldown too.

I have to say, though, that I'm disappointed in the healing ability. I guess GW2 just doesn't ever want you to be able to heal for very much? I mean, 30 points in Water + healing power gear and the best I can do is a 2k (about 10% HP) heal every 40 seconds in an extremely short radius (water dagger #5).

Anyway, I still can't help wondering if this is really a gimp build. Usually I go full out glass cannon and offense > defense, so maybe with something else I would be killing stuff fast enough that survivability wouldn't matter (as much). I know that for DEs it is absolutely terrible. I kid you not, I got 0 contribution helping to defend the Penitent Camp. No credit at all.

[Durzlla]

So, before I went to do Orr map completion I put together my version of a survivability build (not that it turned out I needed it). It's 30 in Water, 30 in Earth, and 10 in Arcane. It's surprisingly not that bad. o_O Some fights take forever (at least it makes veterans feel epic :P), but it takes a lot for me to feel I'm in any trouble. It's also nice to have that OP ability, earth dagger #5, available on such a short cooldown too.

I have to say, though, that I'm disappointed in the healing ability. I guess GW2 just doesn't ever want you to be able to heal for very much? I mean, 30 points in Water + healing power gear and the best I can do is a 2k (about 10% HP) heal every 40 seconds in an extremely short radius (water dagger #5).

Anyway, I still can't help wondering if this is really a gimp build. Usually I go full out glass cannon and offense > defense, so maybe with something else I would be killing stuff fast enough that survivability wouldn't matter (as much). I know that for DEs it is absolutely terrible. I kid you not, I got 0 contribution helping to defend the Penitent Camp. No credit at all.

Huh, idk how you got no credit I was using a 30 water 30 earth 10 fire build for a long while and I was not having the healing issues or the lack of contribution issues you are... Then again, I use a staff or scepter/focus because I find dagger boring and not Mage like, so I have big ole AoEs tagging everything in the area.

The real question is, what traits are you taking in the trees? Because I feel I likely took more offensive traits, like the +20% or something ridiculous like that while in water attunement, and the +X dmg on bleeding foes etc.

[Meledelion]

For healing you have to look at the weapons again d/d has very lackluster healing while staff has awesome healing.
Also most healing comes from regen and not from active healing as you'd expect.

[Durzlla]

For healing you have to look at the weapons again d/d has very lackluster healing while staff has awesome healing.
Also most healing comes from regen and not from active healing as you'd expect.

Well this is true 99% of the time, but if you can get some burst combos goin in water fields while decked out in healin gear you'll be healing up to ~4k (that may be the leap) per heal, which certainly isn't something to scoff at, but keep in mind you have only so many blasts and water combos, an you have to give up way to much to be an effective "healer".

[Lane]

Huh, idk how you got no credit I was using a 30 water 30 earth 10 fire build for a long while and I was not having the healing issues or the lack of contribution issues you are... Then again, I use a staff or scepter/focus because I find dagger boring and not Mage like, so I have big ole AoEs tagging everything in the area.

The real question is, what traits are you taking in the trees? Because I feel I likely took more offensive traits, like the +20% or something ridiculous like that while in water attunement, and the +X dmg on bleeding foes etc.

Except for 'reduced cooldown by 20%' on earth and water spells everything is some sort of survivability trait, like shields at certain HP % or cantrips.

I can only assume I wasn't doing enough DPS to tag anything. I was using scepter/dagger and tried every AoE in every attunement. I even wailed on one of the veterans for a while thinking for sure that would count, but I didn't even get credit for that kill either.

I don't know what's going on with events. It seems like doing any kind of damage doesn't count anymore, you have to have competitive damage to people around you (reminds me of the way the contribution meter used to work in Rift). Elementalist isn't the only class I've had this problem with either. I have the most success on my ranger (my only semi-decently geared character), but (using Shelter in Cursed Shores as an example) I'm still lucky to get one lootable corpse per wave. Champions as well, if there are a lot of well geared 80s holding nothing back it's virtually impossible for me to get gold contribution even if I'm there from start to finish doing constant DPS.

[Meledelion]

I'm going to speculate so don't take this as confirmed at all.
If aoe heals work the same way as aoe dps you can only "hit" 5people at a time.
We know that 1hit != 1tag but let's just go with this basic idea for a second and exclude the actual amount of dps/hps requirement that comes after having "tagged" something.
This would mean that if you're running a "heal" build on a:
* d/d ele will tag 0.5625tag/sec.
* d/f ele will tag 0.5/sec
* s/d ele will tag 0.375/sec
* s/f ele will tag 0.25/sec
* stf ele will tag 15.5/sec

You can do the same thing for dealing damage but as you probably guessed you'll get a lot more tags by dealing damage.