Grieving Weaver

Devs originaly stated Weaver was meant to be played with grieving stats. I get that Sword is designed as hybrid weapon, so as Weaver traitline, but somehow I never managed to make it work. Has anyone ever succeeded? Mostly from PvP perspective.Grieving stats offers no survivability. If you trait to survive, you have little benefits from stats and do mediocre damage, if you trait for damage you have even less survivability, and thus even less damage since you're dead.Maybe can a dev show us how to play with grieving amulet?

Grieving stats offer no defensive stats. They're pure glass cannon. Besides the fact that glass cannon weaver doesn't really work in PvP, weaving stats are worse than a pure condi or direct damage setup.Power, Precision and Ferocity multiply each other's effectiveness.So does Condition damage and Expertise.

Grieving stats are basically Berserker stats with Condition damage on top. To achieve this, the other values are lower than with Berserker stats. You're sacrificing stats that multiply each other for a stat that only adds to the others.

I recently tried making a grieving Holo Smith because the condi and power builds are almost identical. Still, specializing in either condi or direct damage gets you more dps than the grieving mix.

It doesn't work. There's too much condition cleanse to have a condition damage build for any elementalist work in PvP because the only constant condition applications are small and risky. The rest are large and are passively cleansed. It might be fine over time in PvE, though.

@OddFinrir.6801 said:It doesn't work. There's too much condition cleanse to have a condition damage build for any elementalist work in PvP because the only constant condition applications are small and risky. The rest are large and are passively cleansed. It might be fine over time in PvE, though.

Grieving doesn't offer duration of condi, its just condi damage, 1 tick, nothing to cleanse after, the harm is done.Weaver was great on PoF relise in grieving, I don't really know what devs did after.

@phs.6089 said:

@OddFinrir.6801 said:It doesn't work. There's too much condition cleanse to have a condition damage build for any elementalist work in PvP because the only constant condition applications are small and risky. The rest are large and are passively cleansed. It might be fine over time in PvE, though.

Firebrand happened with a gazillion cleanses. Every other class also got lots of them to cope with scourge and condi mesmer. :tongue:

For PVP condi weaver lacks cover conditions to be really viable.

I wanted to do a build for it in PvE. It does not work their either..

I don’t pvp but I would suspect that ele, glass and condi don’t go well together (also considering maybe melee and long cast times as well).

There is a (possibly outdated) pve build, but from what I understand it’s practically an offshoot of FA sword weaver. It uses a specific setup to get up to 100% burn duration with little to no expertise (smoldering sigil, flame legion runes, burning precision and weaver’s prowess + food?) but is probably worse than either full power or condi (viper) weaver in optimal situations.

I tried speccing into fire line, but sacrificing water makes you vulnerable to condis, or sacrificing arcane makes you vulnerable to power spikes. It's a shame our survival tools are so Boon dependant, which are very trait dependant. I think I'd be fine if i could burst properly with Sword, but i can't pull it off somehow. Sustained damage is okayish, but i can't manage to exploit the few windows of opportunity i get, while mine seem easily exploitable. I try to bait dodges, evades, resistance and defensive cds, but damage never seem to connect :( while i eat all of them when my defenses are on cd or when i'm interrupted mid ToF. I envy those specs that can pressure me with mere AAs.

@otto.5684 said:I wanted to do a build for it in PvE. It does not work their either..

Works all right on PvE with Fire/air/Weaver.Moving between fire and air you gets tons of dmg and burn stacks.You can get 100% burn duration just with traits/runes/sigils/food, so on a pure burning build you don't need any sinister or viper stats.

Fire/Earth grieving weaver is what you should be running. Geomancy sigil for sure, as a weaver you literally proc it on cooldown. I used to run full grieving sw/d with berserker runes (renegade runes are best tho), with geomancy and force sigils, and would be in the top 3 DPS for boss fights/bounties. I ultimately stopped playing it because it is subpar for farming, and that's all I do in PVE anymore, aside from new maps, where I always bring my grieving weaver. If you have trouble surviving, getting some pieces with Marshal stats can help, or just go with full Celestial trinkets, you still do plenty of dmg if you aren't worried about "playing the meta".

That works fine in pve, although the 3 targets cap is annoying since it's harder to take larger groups of mobs, i'm more concerned about PvP.

@MyPuppy.8970 said:That works fine in pve, although the 3 targets cap is annoying since it's harder to take larger groups of mobs, i'm more concerned about PvP.

In PvP, Ele lacks the mechanical defenses to use fully aggressive stats.Other glass canons have stealth, mobility, invuls, etc.

Ele does not have unblockable attacks or enough mobility to disengage other classes that would focus a glass-canon ele (such as thief, mesmer or burst guard). And sword would not have the dmg to down a pt holder fast enough to avoid being down yourself (surviving scourge pressure on pts).

If you want to run sword, you are better off with something with healing power to improve your sustain and make use of your water attune heals to keep yourself in the fight.If you want to run glass, you are better off with scepter to use the burst from a safe distance and try to kite and move around pts untill they are clear.

I run grieving in PvE. It's a lot of fun.

For casual play I actually run a mix of grieving and marshal, with water and arcane traitlines, to kind of have a build that can do a bit of everything, so that all 4 attunements feel good. Would recommend.

pvp? don't think there's any way to make it work there