Searing Flames/Invoke.

Which would be better for heros to run, they both can dish out some massive damage.

I also heard that almost all mobs in game have + armor to fire.

Prefer Invokers who can be easily turned into B-surge for areas with heavy psych dmg.

If you bring pair of SF eles, consider bringing para with They're on fire or mes with Fragility or derv with Reap Impurities, but remember Destroyers are immune to burging and high resistant to fire, so SF is useless against them, which makes you to completely rebuild your team for most EotN an some other areas.

Searing Flames is horrible; at least Invoke works.

Quote: Originally Posted by Schmitty211

Which would be better for heros to run, they both can dish out some massive damage. Umm actually no, which is why Anet will be fixing up eles

Air Magic at least has some utility against HM armor rating: when in doubt, reach for a mesmer

Quote: Originally Posted by Schmitty211

Past around 80ish armor your elemental spell in general start weakening noticeably, and 100+ makes them quite underpowered. Against the near-60 armor crowd SF reigns supreme. At about 80ish base armor you want cracked armor and/or armor penetration on your spells (so either another mesmer to spread conditions or switching to air). Once you get to 100 AL enemies you really want to have both cracked armor and AP spells, or to switch over to armor ignoring spells.

Generally this translates into SF making everything around lvl 20ish explode on sight, Invoke putting out the best damage against enemies around lvl 24-26, with lvl 28+ enemies causing significant damage drop off unless you take special measures to bypass their armor.

Of course, these are only rules of thumb based on the AL = 3 * lvl + prof bonus rule of thumb. Some monsters have an extra -20 or +20 to certain elements on top of that (destroyers being the biggest example, with their +20 vs fire), and others ignore it entirely and have haxx0rz 160 armor against everything (RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO these guys). That said, its possible to beat nearly anything even with SF, you just do it quite a bit slower.

On a side note, Air has the ability to inflict weakness/blindness, which can massively nerf the damage enemy physicals can output. I don't really count cracked armor for much since its single target while your nukes are AoE, though it combines very nicely with mesmer condition spreaders. Fire OTOH doesn't really have any support at all.

Also of note is that an upcoming update will apparently change all of this. Its expected that enemy armor will get a general nerf, though exactly what and how much isn't known.

In general air builds are better for Hm and very decent in NM too. You don't want to use any other element in HM and as people have said you can swap elites round for utlity(b-surge, thunderclap even) just makes it ace.


Kunder could you source this update note? I'm interested.

Searing Flames does have an important upside (that it shares with discord). SF builds can rely entirely on SF for damage, meaning that you dont have to use up more space on your bar for more spells to inflict damage with (like you would with invoke). Therefore, you can devote more space on your bar for monk, necromancer, and rit support skills. Its really a very similar concept to discord - the only difference being that a devoted SF team will require BiP to assist with e-management (so that you don't have to devote the SF's entire bars to e-management).

Quote: Originally Posted by Xsiriss In general air builds are better for Hm and very decent in NM too. You don't want to use any other element in HM and as people have said you can swap elites round for utlity(b-surge, thunderclap even) just makes it ace.


Kunder could you source this update note? I'm interested. http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/l...t10491686.html

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lanier Searing Flames does have an important upside (that it shares with discord). SF builds can rely entirely on SF for damage, meaning that you dont have to use up more space on your bar for more spells to inflict damage with (like you would with invoke). Therefore, you can devote more space on your bar for monk, necromancer, and rit support skills. Its really a very similar concept to discord - the only difference being that a devoted SF team will require BiP to assist with e-management (so that you don't have to devote the SF's entire bars to e-management). Problem is that if you run BiP you are then pretty much dedicating an entire character to e-management, since blood is almost entirely useless unless you are running Orders for a physical group (which SF is not).

And it still wouldn't be able to fuel several SF heroes that didn't have a bar with three energy management skills. And of course your team wouldn't do anything.

Quote: Originally Posted by Kunder Problem is that if you run BiP you are then pretty much dedicating an entire character to e-management, since blood is almost entirely useless unless you are running Orders for a physical group (which SF is not). not really, BiP only requires 8 blood to be useful, so it is easily put on a minion master or curser or anything really. You do have to devote a character's elite to e-management, but not an entire character.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xenomortis And it still wouldn't be able to fuel several SF heroes that didn't have a bar with three energy management skills. And of course your team wouldn't do anything. err, have you ever run this before? All you need is glowing gaze and fire attunement. BiP is sufficient for the rest of your 3-4 ele's e-management needs. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that SF is good. I'm just saying that when comparing it to Invoke, you have to take into consideration what the rest of your bar would look like. A SF ele is easily able to run SF, fire attunement, glowing gaze, and then fill up the rest of their bar with skills from the curses or channeling or smite or prot or w/e attribute lines. Once again, im not saying this makes SF good - I'm just saying that it must be considered when comparing SF to Invoke.

If/when the monster armor nerf comes through, SF + cracked armor would be quite potent. Until then, Invoke is clearly more powerful except against huge mobs where SF will routinely hit many more targets.

In NM I think SF is still better under most of the situation.

Ran SF ele hero in WoC NM for http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/What_Waits_in_Shadow; http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Gangs_of_Kaineng; http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Free_Birds ... when you pack the mobs in a tight area, Invoke has no shot and you can't pack Meteor on Invoke bars. I was mad that there was "Watch Yourself!"/ "Stand Your Ground!" though. On my necro I didn't notice it at all because of MoP spikes, but on my monk I noticed it took longer to kill things.

The mobs in NM are ~60-70 armor. Searing Flames doesn't need BiP: run Glowing Gaze with Aura of Restoration and Glyph of Lesser Energy. It's a crapload of stuff (GG+AoR+GoLE+attunement=half your bar) just to get the damage, so it's not as flexible as Invoke.

In HM, however, I just don't use eles...IMO when you have Keystone there's no reason to because Keystone has recharges that are way less and for 0 energy. Invoke is a bit overrated because at 15 air, you only get 90 base damage vs 3 targets: this means against a typical target with 70 armor that gets reduced to 52 you get 1.1487x damage which is 104 ; against 80 armor you do 90; against 60 armor you get 1.2968x which is 130. This is on 6 cooldown which is a half cycle of Keystone Signet use. 57+47=104 (provided you get unnatural signet to trigger) or 57+57=114 (signet of clumsiness) so unless you are fighting 60armor targets 1 cast of Keystone will be more damage ; there's no target limit either and you have other AoE from any signet casts rather than just 2 skills for damage (Lightning Orb is the only other air skill you can use for damage). I typically run Panic or some other hex in HM, so Unnatural Signet is stupidly easy to trigger.

Quote: Originally Posted by LifeInfusion

In HM, however, I just don't use eles...IMO when you have Keystone there's no reason to because Keystone has recharges that are way less and for 0 energy. Aren't KeystoneS, UnnaturalS, and SoClumsiness all adjacent range? One of the big selling points for Searing/Invoke/E-Surge is the big range. Unless you're doing EFGJack-style tank-n-spank-with-heroes stuff, the difference between adjacent and bigger stuff makes direct DPS comparisons questionable.

If you're looking for it, Esurge range is quite huge tbh. And KS isn't that good on heroes too.

Invoke vs. SF is pretty much:
-in Nm or areas where you can easily hit more than 3-4 mobs, SF.
-in Hm and where mobs aren't that big, Invoke.

Invoke is considerably more powerful than Searing Flames, except against really large mobs (>6 monsters is a good benchmark) and against mobs weak to Fire (Snowmen).

Would you bring an earth ele in harder areas with wards, sandstorm, glowstone when having weakness in your builds? I and my hero have enfeebling blood so I figured it might be good to take advantage of the synergy with that skill.

Nothing to do with Searing Flames / Invoke Lightning, but answer to that question is "no". As with all wards, you are better off splitting up than clumping together in a ward: it is less dangerous to have Savannah Heat hit 2 unprotected heroes than it hit all 7 heroes in a ward. Also Elementalists have decent energy management already, so Glowstone's synergy with Enfeebling Blood is minimal. Have Enfeebling Blood in your teambuild if you want, but unless for specific purposes (you are playing a melee character and are confident in your ability to ball stuff up, for example) don't bring the Earth Ele.

just a quick question... when were hm armor vs fire raised? was it always high?

because before i tried sabs necros, i ran fire elems and did all of the eotn with them. me 3 fire elems and henchies. not as good or as fast as sabs and later builds, but it worked even against destroyers. war with grasping earth n kds or my ranger main with evas to aggro and some hexs to slow em/keep em in fire. definitely not ideal, but unless things have changed, still doable with the right pulls and flagging. the same basis for most all of pve non elite areas. i also rojed them using similar methods.