Celestial Runes in 2018

I have been playing my elementalist for the festival, hybrid damage, support, celestial with zerk weapons. All around decent build, good sustain, ok damage, ok heals, festival tagging farmer. I’ve always been fond of celestial stats as a solid middle ground choice. I’m wondering what you guys think of celestial in the 2018 game. Best professions and builds for that set.

It has its uses in wvw for certain classes and builds, but only there. It's not functional in any end game content, be it fractals, raids, or spvp. Open world everything works.

There's recently been a discussion about Celestial stats on the Elementalist forum that might interest you - although the conclusion seemed to be that they aren't useful for much...

I main a full Celestial Firebrand with Balthazar Runes and Sigil of Smoldering + traits for 85% Burning duration. Good damage and pretty much immortal in open world PvE/story.

I have 3 more Celestial characters, kit Engi, Ele and Warrior but Firebrand is by far the best for Cele stats (in my opinion) because it only uses one condi: Burning (except for Axe which has some Bleeding) so it can use the Runes and Sigil I mentioned for extra Burning duration. Guardian also has high base power damage on weapons so it makes use of Precision/Ferocity. And of course FB has tons of heals so your Healing Power stat is not wasted either. Use Celestial only if your stats are not wasted!!!

My Ele and Engi can't generate enough Burning stacks to use this build at its full potential and getting condi duration as a Cele build is quite limited (runes, food, sigil) UNLESS you want a mix of Cele-Viper OR you only use the skills that cause Burning but that's boring. Cele Engi/Ele are decent but damage-wise FB will always be ahead thanks to the crazy burns/Justice passive.

Another good profession for a full Cele build is Berserker with Longbow/Sword+Torch, it can use Balthazar Runes and Sigil of Smoldering just like the Firebrand. It has more bleeds (Sword, LB) but overall high power dmg for Precision/Ferocity. I also like to use the trait that makes my shouts heal to make use of the Healing Power but then again, I find Warrior boring in general so I don't play it much. ;o

tl;dr: Celestial is better if your profession uses one condi type so you can boost that condi's duration with runes/sigils. Make sure the Cele stats are not wasted.

(edit: typo)

The overarching problem is the game has been steadily pushing towards over-specialization, and begun balancing everything around it. Whats wrong though, is the balancing efforts have been trying to drag down the peak performance while, simultaneously widening the performance gap with lower base line performance and demanding more stat investment to be minimum viable.

Cele's viability revolves around the strength of a baseline and the scaling coefficient, to reach a minimum performance threshold in multiple areas. Where more narrow stats, like zerks, try to play off scaling coefficients to high peak performance, and make up the deficiency through other means (such as build, team comp, or strategy). Thats why Cele has always worked best on classes with hybrid concepts, as they fundamentally tap multiple areas to make ready use of that wide spread of stats. Even when the peak performance is lower then a specialist, they make up for it by holding up multiple roles on the fly, and are less susceptible to single points of failure.

For PvE, this hasn't been useful in a long time, as damage output was always the better option, and the scale of outgoing damage has power crept massively since the time before HOT. For a long time in PvP and WvW, Cele was a strong option to add defensive stats and healing power to a power based build without completely giving up damage. The damage potential was a lot lower, but for most builds, still high enough that glass builds couldn't just ignore it. Not all classes could take advantage of this, but Ele, Guard and Engineer could thrive due to how well that moderate stat investment could fill in gaps in the defensive traits. Condi builds (if they were ran at all) would generally go Dire, and ignore the power damage component entirely.

As of right now, I can only think of 2 builds that still get good mileage out of Cele stats.... Hybrid FireBrand (OW/WvW), and Power Scourge (wvw). And of those 2, only Power Scourge scales well in the meta its part of. If Cele Ele hadn't been dismantled at their trait level, that would still would had been a good option for it. Even Support Tempests are not able to keep up with the current WvW Meta, nor mid-line Auramancer builds..... the Firebrand/Scourge dynamic is just at too high a magnitude for them to properly survive, much less compete. Roaming Ele maybe.... but with the prevalence of Mirage, I don't know if it still fits in.

I've only tried it on Revenant, which I used a lvl 80 booster for and got celestial runes automatically. It made for adequate performance, but it's not something I'd choose. Basically I'd say it's good for someone planning to play casually.

The relative uselessness of Celestial is the biggest red arrow pointing to a major balance issue that, ridiculously at this point, has never been properly addressed. If the game was balanced, Celestial would be the best stat spread for many generalized solo builds and would be in pretty high demand across many professions. But, it isn't. Not by a long shot.

Specifically, there's a major problem emerging from how wasted Toughness, Healing Power, and to a lesser extent Vitality are in general usage, and it's gotten worse rather than better due to offensive power creep. Because of that, even though the total stat point is higher, you lose too much offense and don't gain enough from healing or defense to compensate. This is why Viper is pretty meta (mixing power and condition offense) while Celestial is not.

It's not so much an issue with Celestial in and of itself, but rather an issue mostly with the balance of Toughness and Healing Power as attributes. Toughness just sucks due to the prevalence of conditions and the way combat design is skewed too heavily toward avoidance of high damage rather than mitigation of minor damage, and HP only scales well if you are a dedicated group healer (in which case you wouldn't want Celestial). For personal healing, it's undertuned and totally pointless.

In a nutshell, using Celestial you won't notice any significant difference in your TTL with moderate bonuses to Toughness and HP, whereas you'll notice a significant loss in your TTK from not having more offense on your gear.

If Toughness and Healing Power in particular scaled better in an independent way it would probably be a lot more competitive. They really need to revisit the mechanics behind the attributes.

@Biff.5312 said:I've only tried it on Revenant, which I used a lvl 80 booster for and got celestial runes automatically. It made for adequate performance, but it's not something I'd choose. Basically I'd say it's good for someone planning to play casually.

I would consider it a liability considering how much more effective investment in damage is then defensive stats. Most classes have fairly strong baseline self healing, and defensive trait lines are extremely powerful. But the damage thresholds needed to stay ahead of enemy DPS threat levels is somewhat high; and their damage output is designed around beating tanks in a race of attrition. Damage generally scales faster then defenses, given the former is allocated more traits and compounds on multiple stats, while latter's scaling is much more linear with far fewer multiplicative options.

For open world and PvP, the goal with investment is defensive stats is to help ensure you survive bursts of damage if you fail active defenses, and then recover (usually via healing) between bursts. Beyond that, the return on investment diminishes heavily, unless your build is designed to reset between each combat exchange. To achieve that for most classes, you'd have to give up a lot of damage, and rely heavily on self sustain or bunker tactics, and hope someone else comes along and kills them for you. Damage output inherently has the advantage, and neutralizing a threat revolves heavily around whose damage level is more threatening to the other's defense level. Killing an opponent is always the best option, because it removes their threat level in its entirety.... where as a lock down situation would require the attacker to actively maintain that control, and runs the risk of exhausting skills.

The thing with PvE is that most enemies are usually more damage skewed ..... often having stats that are stronger in Offense then they do Defense. Of the few that do have an emphasis on defense, still do enough damage to be a threat if they land a solid hit. Average HP pool is 20-30k, though there is a notable variance based on mob types. Toughness values vary as well. But because most have slow attack rates, this gives players a large window of opportunity to unload damage into them before the next round of attacks start. Thus killing them fast reduces the number of attacks you need to mitigate/avoid, and rapidly reduces the aggravate threat level of a group.

Players on the other had are a lot less consistent in their attack patterns, and usually take longer to kill. Defense stats gain value here, because the overall threshold of lethal damage is significantly lower (the trade off is less serve), and incoming burst/pressure damage potential is a LOT higher. Outgoing damage volume is secondary to reliably connecting that damage, and your effective threat level just has to be higher then your opponents to have the overall advantage. But like I said earlier, damage scales a lot faster then defenses in most cases, and you can lose a lot of threat by having too low damage despite having very high defense. All together, this means a moderate amount of defense is highly valuable, and often worth trading a little damage potential to gain. But if your build doesn't scale well in either of these categories, your performance is going to be too low to be viable at either strategy.

In a nutshell, using Celestial you won't notice any significant difference in your TTL with moderate bonuses to Toughness and HP

As a person who mains Cele but has tried glass cannon builds, I disagree. The difference is actually huge. However, it all depends on what the player is capable of. If someone has quick reaction times and can handle glass cannon builds without getting downed all the time, then yay for them! But I must admit that my reaction times are kind of slow, I'm bad at timing blocks and dodges, so I'm a lot more effective in my Celestial gear because it gives me more time to react during fights. Definsive stats being useless is probably the biggest lie in the game. They are useless for some but not for everyone.

@Mea.5491 said:

In a nutshell, using Celestial you won't notice any significant difference in your TTL with moderate bonuses to Toughness and HP

I don't know. I'm not immensely skilled at the game, but I have always noticed my attrition is better the more offense I stack because of how much faster things die, reducing the amount of time I'm taking damage and leaving more room for error. In contrast, when I use defensive stats, I still die pretty quick when I'm screwing up, but there's a lot more time for me to screw up due to how much longer things live - especially considering the limitations on endurance and dodging.

So, I don't really buy this argument. It's possible there's merit for some builds, but it's not an across-the-board thing to nearly the degree it should be. Toughness and Healing Power in particular are very, very situational stats that are largely undertuned, and therefore the extra points completely go to waste and undermine the usefulness of Celestial gear.

@Einlanzer.1627 said:In contrast, when I use defensive stats, I still die pretty quick when I'm screwing up

See, I don't! I do not die as Cele Firebrand at all (note that I only play open world PvE and story missions, I don't know about fractals and raids but I don't see the point of using Cele there anyway). Exactly why I said it depends on the player. Everyone's different and if something works perfectly for someone it might not work for the next person.

@Mea.5491 said:

In a nutshell, using Celestial you won't notice any significant difference in your TTL with moderate bonuses to Toughness and HP

Most of the time you're better off with some offensive setup with some defensiveness, like Valkarie or Marauders. Even Commanders has use in some builds.

I just play casually from time to time so I want to get a celestial set since I won't be doing any of that endgame stuff. If endgame here is anything like other games then there it would make more sense to specialize, the harder the content is. But that's not my thing in GW2, so I'll stick to getting my celestial stuff together. I actually managed to get my armor crafting to 500, which I didn't I was going to be able to but hey. So I can start thinking about getting an ascended set, but I've seen that in materials it's probably about 60 gold per piece so I better save some money first.

Now I have noticed it's not that easy to get a bow with celestial stats. (I play a dragon hunter) I was looking for an exotic one but there weren't any on the TP and I haven't found one except in WvW which I'm not really wanting to do. Getting the dragon hunter bow from collections is definitely out of my reach but maybe more crafting to do though I find it tedious and expensive to get to 500.

Oh well, I'll get there somehow I'm sure.

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

I don't know. I'm not immensely skilled at the game, but I have always noticed my attrition is better the more offense I stack because of how much faster things die, reducing the amount of time I'm taking damage and leaving more room for error. In contrast, when I use defensive stats, I still die pretty quick when I'm screwing up, but there's a lot more time for me to screw up due to how much longer things live - especially considering the limitations on endurance and dodging.

So, I don't really buy this argument. It's possible there's merit for some builds, but it's not an across-the-board thing to nearly the degree it should be. Toughness and Healing Power in particular are very, very situational stats that are largely undertuned, and therefore the extra points completely go to waste and undermine the usefulness of Celestial gear.

It may also depend on class. Some take better advantage of attributes like vitality and toughness. For instance, I play a guardian with an emphasis on those traits. I kill VERY slowly, but I can comfortably handle multiple mobs with zero fear of being downed. So it's not faster, but it is easier. That might not work out so well giving the same bonuses to a theif or elementalist.

@Biff.5312 said:

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

I don't know. I'm not immensely skilled at the game, but I have always noticed my attrition is better the more offense I stack because of how much faster things die, reducing the amount of time I'm taking damage and leaving more room for error. In contrast, when I use defensive stats, I still die pretty quick when I'm screwing up, but there's a lot more time for me to screw up due to how much longer things live - especially considering the limitations on endurance and dodging.

So, I don't really buy this argument. It's possible there's merit for some builds, but it's not an across-the-board thing to nearly the degree it should be. Toughness and Healing Power in particular are very, very situational stats that are largely undertuned, and therefore the extra points completely go to waste and undermine the usefulness of Celestial gear.

Yeah I play my guardian mostly and this makes sense to me. I think the guardian can be a bit of a jack of all trades in that sense and that's why for just casual PvE it's something that appeals to me.

It's just a long process because to craft the celestial armour set it takes at least a month. I have to make the insignia and you need five of those combined quartz crystals and you can only make one per day. So that's 6x5=30 days. Not to excited about that since the other insignia have no such limitation. I thought it was expensive enough already but that's the thing with GW2. It's always just one more extra thing at least when you want something specific it seems and generally that one thing really makes it very annoying. Well hopefully I'll last a month and my patience holds that long.