Elementist - Wind is Direct Damage?

Hello. I am new to guild wars so forgive me if I sound stupid, but I'm trying my best not to.

I have a Elementalist/Mesmer 12, and prior to making him I looked at your descriptions of each tree and what they did. Now apparently wind is supposed to be direct damage, but looking on the skills page, compare Flare to Lightning Strike:

Flare
Description
Flare flies towards target foe, striking for 16-40 fire damage if it hits.
Energy Cost
5
Casting Time
1 seconds
Recharge Time
0 seconds
Skill Type
Spell
Linked Attribute
Fire Magic

and

Lightning Strike
Description
Strike target foe for 5-41 lightning damage. This spell has 25% armor penetration.
Energy Cost
5
Casting Time
1 seconds
Recharge Time
5 seconds
Skill Type
Spell
Linked Attribute
Air Magic


Now even assuming you could spam LS like Flare, the only real difference is the armor penetration. And because this is not a straight up increase in damage it ends up being much less than 25% increase in damage. I'm not sure how much a level 20 [insert class] has in reduction, but it seems that wind is ONLY good at taking out Warriors. It has blinding flash which is great, and the penetrating armor, but you need to use 3 skills slots as detailed here to get the same spammable effect as flare.

Not only that, but speccing fire allows you access to all of the powerful AoEs which are very useful.

So my question is:

Is the 25% armor penetration a big enough increase to justify 2 spell slots and decreased efficency over flare? I was hoping wind would give me a lot more damage overall, so I could focus in on say, the monk: using my mesmer skills to lock him down and then nuke him quick with Wind. It doesn't seem like Wind offers a very high nuke potentional against non Warrior/Rangers.

Air has the effect of knockdown which you didn't mention. Whirlwind attacks all surrouding enemies and knocks them down...so you can escape...or cast an AoE like inferno while theyre down. Gale knocks down enemies for longer, making it a very good monk killer spell for those monks that like to run in circles. True, fire does more damage i think, but air has its perks. Lightning Orb and Chain Lightning also offer the highest damages for eles (besides Obsidian Flame...which i havent used yet...but seems very crazy).

The Elementalist class as a whole doesn't deliver very good single-target DPS. It's specialty is AoE spells.

Nothing really compares to Flare in terms of raw DPS. Lightning Orb has roughly half the DPS potential of Flare. Stone Daggers is essentially identical to Flare. Not counting the 25% armour penetration, lightning strike's DPS is about 1/3 that of Flare, perhaps half if used on a high armour target. But lightning strike is a little bit more energy efficient (providing 8.4 dmg per energy used compared to flare's 8 dmg per energy).

So anyways, Flare has the highest single target DPS and is pretty energy efficient, in terms of single target application. But that's not the true use of an elementalists. Its only when you use AoE spells to mush whole groups of enemies at once that the ele really shines. If you want to assasinate specific targets, you're better off just playing a warrior.

You're completely missing the point of elementalists focused on single targets. You're not aiming for high sustained DPS. You want huge bursts, which is what air magic provides. Consider lightning surge + lightning orb. Mmm mmm fun.

Level 16 Flare is a 48 damage projectile that'll often miss a moving target.

Level 16 Lightning Strike is an automatic 70 damage to casters, and it does proportionally better against Warriors.

Nothing really compares to how inefficient, slow, and otherwise terrible Flare is. If you really want to spam something, cast Conjure on your wand and make normal attacks. It does roughly 25% less damage, but costs 95% less.

Peace,
-CxE

Uhh, if lightning strike does 70 dmg to a given caster target, flare would do about 53, which come to think about it isn't all that much damage after all.

But anyways, yea, ele DD nukes do crap single target DPS. You might as well play a warrior for that sorta thing.

Actually, look at this

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/content...nics-id674.php

25% armor penetration is huge. Almost always at least 25% less damage blocked for the unfortunate that is getting his or her armor penetrated.

That article was very enlightening for me. People seem not to realize that 25% armor penetration hits those without much armor hard too. In fact, a warrior with 100 armor will only get 27.1% of his armor taken away. A monk with 60 armor will get twice that (54.2%). The thing is, you do so much less damage in general against a warrior, the armor penetration looks good.

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