SuperNova

Explosive barrel bandits. The way they plop their bomb, light its fuse, and walk away with a whistle and a skip if you're downed is... just cartoonishly evil.

Some methods of applying paste are better than others, but it shouldn't make that much difference as long as the paste layer isn't too thick. (Which would be thicker than a credit card for reference.)
Btw, doesn't the stock cooler already come with a layer of (usually grey) paste already in place? Two layers would be too much.
(The stock cooler that came with my i5-3570K has paste pre-applied.)

I have been playing Mesmer most of the time, up to Rank 20, and have gotten somewhat bored and wanted to try something else.  Knowing that Elementalist has a pretty high skill cap, and that I enjoy the complexity, I made one and gave this build a try.  I liked it a lot.  I was fumbling all over the place at first, of course, but after a couple hours when I memorized the skills and got attunement swapping down, this build worked very well.  

I actually had a couple people comment that I was giving them a lot of trouble.  I understand why people like the flashiness of dagger in the offhand, but the focus is definitely the way to go.  It was apparent to me that I really needed the defense that it offers.  E4 was awesome to stick it to the ranged classes.  After playing Elementalist for a while, I can really sympathize for those who want a base health increase.  I think they are really in need of one.  

Good job on coming up with this fun build.

For $189, I think its worth paying an extra ~$10 to get something modern and elegant like a Radeon HD 7850. Its just about as fast as that GTX 480, while consuming a fraction of the power and thus generating a fraction of the heat and noise. That also tends to translate into better overclocking performance.

The GTX 480 was a beast in its day, but its a brute-force design that shocked everyone with its obscene power usage. Plus, its two generations old now and pretty easy to outperform with mid-range hardware.

But as riva noted, its kinda time for a new machine in this case. It probably wouldn't always be CPU-limited, but it certainly would be when it actually mattered.

lellyville, on 17 September 2012 - 03:31 AM, said:

There's a lot more that goes into loading times than just your storage performance. In addition to your SSD, CPU performance, memory bandwidth and internet speeds all affect it. And in fact, your SSD is probably the least likely to be the limiting factor.

Edit: I don't pay a huge amount of attention to my load times (using my Crucial M4) because they frankly aren't long enough to bother me. But yeah, 8-10 seconds sounds about right.

SuperNova, on 15 September 2012 - 02:13 PM, said:

Sound advice because I just recently upgraded my PC CPU/Mobo from an AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE/MSI 880GM-E41 to an Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor/MSI Z77A-G45. I still have my trusty MSI R6850 Cyclone. My FPS has improved across the board. I run the game maxed except I have shadows at Medium and Rendering at Native.

Meet this sexy beast in the Gandarran karma armor.



(Well, 2-3 parts of it)

CyberAssassin, on 09 September 2012 - 11:37 PM, said:

I bolded the important part.

That alone means it's simply better use of developer time to nerf something, it also prevents power creep. Anets philosophy was marketing BS. There was no way that was going to actually make it to the game.

Funny, Sylvari voice acting bothers me the most. The fake british-esque accent the actors put on makes my toes curl.

Maybe you're just insecure as * OP.

I've been rocking this build and it seems to do alot of good in tournaments. Granted I'm pretty new to Elementalists and so I don't know why staff is considered the best for that form of pvp. Maybe just aoes on the point ?  Anyways I play as an almost exclusive support by keeping targets blind/knocked down/ and remove ranged dps from the equation while putting SoF on whatever target is called. Dragon tooth and phoenix does respectable damage to people standing on points.

That being said, I've lost to very few 1v1's  also with this build. In a fresh start duel I'd take this build over alot of other dueling builds in the game. Sadly you don't duel in tournaments, you often get attacked 1v2 or 1v1 and then a heart seeker thief leaps out while your spells are on cooldown. In those situations, even being caught wrong footed this build has performed very well. I give it a +1

Good day. Epic time lurker here.

TL DR at the end of post.

I've only recently (duh) found out that attunement swaps are supposed to trigger Weapon Swap Sigils.

Right now they seem to not be working properly (some are not triggered at all, others have conflicting cooldowns).

I want to make here a reference post (if there's none yet; I didn't find it) about weapon swap Sigils - which of them have conflicting cooldowns, which do not work at all, and which are OK.

The other thing that I'm not sure how to test is whether the weapon swap cooldown conflicts with critical proc cooldown (Superior Sigil of Purity and Superior Sigil of Nullification being the most interesting ones).

I am doing the testing with a set of daggers on dummies in Mists.

The testing is done with a dagger in MH and no weapon in OH.

I tracked timings via cooldown timers on attunements, so they're pretty accurate (+-0.5 seconds at worst).

So here's the list:

Sigil of Intelligence - Does not work.

Sigil of Superior Battle - Works. There is a cooldown, something close to 10 seconds.

Sigil of Superior Doom - Does not work.

Sigil of Superior Energy  - Works. Cooldown is indeed 9 seconds.

Sigil of Superior Geomancy - Works. Applies 3 stacks of Bleeding. Cooldown is slightly more than 9 seconds, more like 10.

Sigil of Superior Hydromancy  - Works. Cooldown is 9 seconds, as the tooltip states.

Sigil of Superior Leeching - Does not work.


MH+OH testing. As a rule of thumb, it does not depend which one is MH or OH.

Sigil of Superior Battle overrides Sigil of Superior Hydromancy
Sigil of Superior Battle overrides Sigil of Superior Geomancy
Sigil of Superior Battle overrides Sigil of Superior Energy

Sigil of Superior Hydromancy overrides Sigil of Superior Geomancy
Sigil of Superior Hydromancy overrides Sigil of Superior Energy

Sigil of Superior Geomancy overrides Sigil of Superior Energy

Testing of crit-proc sigils.

Tested Sigil of Superior Geomancy with Sigil of Superior Strength. Used high critrate build (67%) with multiattacking autoattacks for consistency. Of course, I avoided all alien sources of Might.
Sigil of Superior Strength has no internal cooldown whatsoever (Turns out it actually has, further tests showed about 0.2s cd). It can proc for several crits in a row (as long as the hidden 0.2s cd is ready). I've had up to 6 stacks of Might during testing. Sigil of Superior Geomancy also procs well, even right after Sigil of Superior Strength proc.

HOWEVER, Sigil of Superior Strength DOES NOT proc while Sigil of Superior Geomancy is on cooldown. This is 100% confirmed, I tested it repeatedly many times. It takes exactly 9 seconds after Sigil of Superior Geomancy proc for Sigil of Superior Strength proc to be available again.

Tested Sigil of Superior Geomancy with Superior Sigil of Air. Their cooldowns are SHARED. Thus, Sigil of Superior Geomancy did not proc right after Superior Sigil of Air proc and vice versa.

Most of Sigils "Do something on next hit after weapon swap" work 1 time after you actually equip your weapon from inventory. They dont proc off Attunement Swap, so pretty much useless.

Heavily tested Sigil[s] of Superior Earth with 90% critchance build for consistency:
It has hidden inner cooldown, something close to 0.2 seconds. It never ever procced twice from single cast while spamming Scepter Earth 1. It did reliably proc two times during Scepter Air 1 channel (at the start and at the end).
I suspect all "Proc on crit" Sigils work similarly. Thus, due to inner cooldown it is a bad idea to equip two on-crit proc Sigils at the same time. They will conflict with each other, even if tooltip says they have no cooldown (they still have it hidden 0.2s).

Also noticed a weird bug - Sigil[s] of Superior Earth never ever procced while being slotted into Scepter. It worked fine if slotted into dagger (both mainhand and offhand).
Therefore I recommend slotting all these randomly proccing Sigils into Daggers (or Foci/Staves if you prefer). Or test it to be sure.



TLDR CONCLUSION:

Sigils with cooldowns share cooldowns (i.e. Sigil of Superior Geomancy and Superior Sigil of Air).
Sigils with procs but without cooldowns (i.e. Sigil of Superior Strength) effectively have 0 seconds cooldown timer. So they do not proc if they are paired with cooldown-based proc Sigil and the latter's "Sigil cooldown" is still ticking.
Sigils that "proc" but have no cooldown listed (i.e. Sigil[s] of Superior Earth ) have hidden internal cooldown of ~0.2 seconds. So it is suboptimal to equip any two of those as well.

Thus, it is suboptimal to use cooldown-based proc Sigil - whether it is a crit-proc or swap-proc - with any other proc Sigil.

Oh my God, endless discussion about intelligence.

This is so simple. If you are able to kill someone in 3 seconds with spamming 2-3 buttons that will kill the fun for every other builds. When everyone becomes "so intelligent" and everyone start using this 2-3 buttons "most intelligent" build that will kill the whole game.

I approve. While I try to bind my abilities using similar logic on all the different classes I play, using the very same binds for everything simply isn't optimal, cause every class has their utilities, mobility skills etc. on different slots of the actionbar, also some professions require the use of all four F keys, but some others don't, so I'd be wasting easily accessible good keybinds by using my elementalist binding on a necro for example.

This just makes Anet seem soft, should of stuck by to their guns instead of bending over for the exploiters.

I am guessing only reason they are doing it is because game just came out, and people who got banned just stopped payment on their cards. If this was month from now they would stay banned. Money > Ethics.