Erenias.6947

Maxing out your crit chance is extremely important on power builds. You want to make sure that every hit is a crit so you can make use of your high crit multiplier. As you noted, weaver and catalyst will get to 100% crit chance in full zerker gear. With tempest it's more complicated. Full zerker gets you to around 51% crit chance. Air gives another 5. Fury is 25. So now you sit at 81%. The remaining 19% can probably be covered by signet of fire and runes. As for Condi builds. Ele doesn't care about crit chance on Condi builds. It's a bit of extra damage, but it's better to just focus on maxing out your condis.

Rev weapon skills are relatively cheap on the energy cost, as a result they're in the same-ish power level as other classes weapon skills. It's the utility skills where energy costs can be quite high, and that's because rev utility skills are really good. Take a quick look at Jalis for instance. Pulsing AoE stab (10 sec cd), 20% dmg reduction + healing (upkeep), 50% strike damage reduction (0 sec cd, 5 sec duration). If you want to make these skills cost less energy you would have to decrease their power or increase their CD.

If you want to play a healer you should use a healing rune. Rune of the Monk and Rune of Water are the best choices, depending on how much boon duration you need. You should also use a Sigil of Transference. If you feel intimidated by the low HP you should use Minstrel stats instead, but be ready to tank in raids in this case. Alternatively get enough harrier gear to reach minimum boon duration (40% ish) and fill in the rest with magi gear (healpower, vitality, precision)

I have some time thoughts on this as well. For me the biggest issue with conjures is availability. In a scenario where you have to move around it's unlikely that you'll get to pick up your second conjure. To that end I have a proposal. Give the conjures a 30 second CD and 2 charges. They will no longer drop a weapon on the ground. If you cast the conjure again while you're already using it, it will now drop one for allies to use. FGS would receive the same functionality but have a higher CD. 60 or 90 seconds. I'd also update the conjured weapons trait in the fire traitline. It would now give an extra ammo to the conjured weapon for a total of 3. It would also increase the stat bonuses the ele gets from the conjures by 50 or 100%. I think this would make conjures a lot better to use. And if you use the trait there would be a reason to keep the conjure rather than dropping it immediately. Fire axe also definitely needs some sort of buff. Give it better tracking and access to unblockables and it might become useable.

Revenant support in PvE would be those builds indeed. Alacren is getting buffed in the upcoming patch, so it'll only need about 40% boon duration instead of 80%. Heal quickness herald is a viable option. It's got good healing when running ventari, but it's got good sustained healing even just from staff skills and regen, so one could take jalis for stab.

I'd recommend revenant. It's solid in PvE with strong support and dps builds through Herald and Renegade. It also has a lot of valuable utility like ventari bubble, stone road, amazing cc. In PvP Vindicator is a strong force now, but Herald is still dangerous in group fights, and Renegade shortbow can meme on the unprepared. In WvW the hammer Herald is a staple. Good ranged spike damage and powerful group support through facets and stone road. Not sure about revenant roaming in WvW.

Don't add burning to MS. That'll only give a reason to further Nerf the damage in a subsequent patch. This skill need a buff to it's power dmg. Maybe mak it do 20% more damage initially, change the damage dropoff from 10% to 5% and increase minimum damage from 10% to 30%. Now we have a proper zerg melter in WvW and a decent PvE dps skill.

I did some golem practice a few patches ago. Swapped the viper gear to cele just to see how much dps I'd lose. At the time I got 33k on viper, while I got 27k on cele. That's about a 20% dps loss, which isn't that bad when you consider that you have become an unstoppable tank.

I'd be doing some pretty big changes to a few traits. First one would be elemental epitome. It would now grant stacks of elemental empowerment when doing combos. Leap and blast combos would give 2 stacks, while projectile and whirl combos would give 1 stack per projectile, up to a max of 3 per skill. Comboing would also grant energy depending on the combo used. Maybe 5 energy for leap and blast and 1 energy for projectiles? This trait wouldn't grant auras anymore though, as that would be moved to the next trait. The second trait is look at is staunch auras. It allows for some insane stab spam, so the stab would be removed. Instead it now grants an aura when performing a combo, and the aura you get depends on your attunement. I feel like this might be too weak for a GM trait so maybe lower the ICD or add a secondary effect. The third trait I'd look at is spectacular spheres. Firstly invert the boons on the air sphere so it gives fury by default and quickness when traited, this makes it like the pve version and it makes more sense that the powerful quickness boon is locked behind a trait. The stab that was lost from staunch auras will be added back to the earth sphere through spectacular spheres. The resistance would be replaced with 2 stacks of stab for 5 seconds. This allows for AOE stab so it might be even stronger than before though. Then there are some skill functionality I'd change. F5 skills would donno damage anymore and be pure fields for combo. This would make the cata more susceptible to blind and aegis again. Maybe add a new mechanic to the F5: when executing a combo in a sphere the field gives a damaging pulse. I'd also like to change elemental celerity. Instead of % based recharge, it would recharge skills by a flat amount, say 20 seconds. That would still let most weapon skills get fully recharged, but the stronger defensive skills on focus would not get fully recharged.

You've mentioned it in your post, but I'm a fan of adding more sources of alacricy to tempest. When there first were rumours of alacricy on tempest I saw four ways to add it. On overload On aura On shout On warhorn They chose to add it in my least preferred way, which was on the overload. I think adding another source of alacricy to tempest is the right way to go. I'd say the simplest implementation would be to add some alacricy to the shout trait, as it's currently useless. I also wouldn't be opposed to the 4 skill on warhorn (every attunement) giving alacricy, as those skills all have a support aspect to them. Alacricy on aura would of course be the best, but I think it might be too easy to maintain alacricy, so they'll have to need it hard.

It's because catalyst is still in beta. The energy system is basically the same as warrior's adrenaline, but without all the trait and skill interactions to make it work. The UI for catalyst is shameful. It's impossible to see if you have 19 or 20 energy, same for 29 or 30 energy, so you might only have two spheres when it looks like you have three. They've just left the energy system alone, probably cuz they don't want to spend resources on it. Hopefully they'll fix it or just remove it.

As of right now, alacren is the only support that requires a stupidly high boon duration (BD) to upkeep a single boon. 78% BD is the minimum requirement for permanent alacricy on Renegade, while other providers get away with 40% or even less. Getting such a high BD is a big gear investment, requiring either diviners or ritualist/celestial + BD runes. I want to see this change and lower the required BD for alacricy upkeep on Renegade. To do this i want to rework three things. The first one is orders from above. Remove the alacricy from the base version, and replace it with resistance, 2 sec per pulse for a total of 8 seconds. This goes in line with the condi defence of its related trait: Righteous Rebel. Righteous Rebel would also be reworked, now providing alacricy, 2,5 sec per pulse for a total of 10, and it wouldn't increase the number of pulses anymore. It would still retain its condi damage reduction. The third thing I would rework is the trait: Bold Reversal. As of now it's kind of a useless trait, as it lacks in power and competes with two other strong traits. I would completely rework this to provide 2 seconds of alacricy when swapping legends. When combined with the reworked Righteous Rebel would let Renegade upkeep permanent alacricy with 30-40% BD, and it would have DPS tradeoffs due to competing traits.

I'm thinking that they should add alac on shouts. The current shout trait is useless anyways. Give 3 sec of alac from shouts and reduce alac on overload to 6 sec to compensate. Not it's a lot more flexible and actually playable. Overloads pulsing alac instead of being endloaded would also be nice.

I've played quickbreaker a bit in raids. It's quite nice as the rotation allows for banner placement whenever they're off CD. I did some runs on the golem afterwards. I'm not at all competent at golem rotations mind you, so on a quickbreaker i got to about 21k, no infusions. For comparison, I got 25k with the meta condi quickzerker build, which can reach 32k according to [SC]. If someone actually competent were to bench the quickbreaker, they'd probably hit 27-28k, which unfortunately is below the other quickness providers. Though, the golem rotation doesn't allow for full counter, so there is a possibility for the quickbreaker to work better in an actual encounter than on the golem.

I've been working on an elite spec concept like this for a while. It's even called Specialist lol. Maybe I'll actually post it.

Seems like you've met a fully glass elementalist stacking all the dmg buffs, while not having any defensive buffs or boons yourself. I ran the builds through the build editor and the total dmg of "molten end" and the dragonhunter's "procession of blades", should be similar. The berserker's "arc divider" also has similar dmg potential. The only difference here is that "molten end" is a single hit, so in that sense it can be considered stronger as it can 1-shot, but that also means it'll be easily blocked. I don't see what the problem here is. It's a melee skill on the glassiest build and it has similar dmg potential to other classes skills in the same category.

Yeah, support heal cats just doesn't have enough energy gain. The 3rd adept trait is supposed to address this, but only getting 2 energy per attunement swap is nearly useless. That means 5 attunement swaps to get 1 sphere, and 15 swaps to get full energy. Assuming an average attunement swapping time of 3 seconds, that's 45 seconds of attunement swapping to get full energy. This trait needs to give at least 4 energy, preferably 5.

I don't see the problem with reflects. If ppl use reflects just wait till they're gone, it's basic strategy. Also, projectiles can only be reflected twice, so you can just toss up your own reflect and they'll become unreflectable.

I usually play heal tempest in my raid static. I see heal tempest as superior to druid, as it is capable of high output 10man healing. and being able to output boons for 10 man like the druid. The only drawback is that to play heal temp well you will need to be a tryhard, while with druid you can literally sleep and ppl still won't notice you are garbage.If you're in a raid group that is "metawhoring" and you don't enjoy that, find another group. I am aware that it can be difficult to find new groups as the raid community is constantly shrinking but unless you want to put in a good effort to change the mind of your raid leader, then finding a different group is my only advice.I believe the main issue ppl have with the heal temp is that the druid has since the very beginning been dominating the healing support meta. Second to that is that they don't understand the heal temp and its capabilities. Also, any argument trying to push heal temp into a meta group will be shut down by: "Druid can do it better."A drawback to the heal temp is the lack of spirits of course. (Just putting this here to appease the metawhores.)So as a wrapup, heal temp is amazing and don't let anyone tell you that it's not viable. It's got its own positives and some limitations that makes it different from druid. If your current surroundings are hostile to the heal temp, then you need to change your surroundings either through hard work by yourself, or simply moving to somewhere else.PS: Druid can't outheal 1-shots (Rebound)