Guild Wars 2

I am a big fan of picking a build or loadout and rolling with it, making the best of it, taking advantages of its strengths and weaknesses.

First I rolled an engineer. Rifle is neat, pistol/shield was useful too. But I started getting these kits. I could understand swapping to a grenade kit once in a while to lay down some heavy AoE, but 90% of the time I just wanted to stay with Rifle. After doing some PvP and seeing what engineer felt like at 80, I was very discouraged. Not with how poorly I did (it was bad, though), but with how clunky everything felt needing to constantly change my 1-5 skills four or five times per fight. I thought for sure .. it must be just engineers that need to deal with this. I bailed on the engineer.

I rolled an elementalist. While I enjoy many aspects, I find myself needing to constantly swap between multiple elements in a fight. I am currently using dagger/dagger and the fire element is the only one that can hold its own without needing to swap between the rest. I feel like I’m headed right down the same path as engineer.

Is the only way to play this game by constantly doing the ‘stance dance’, trading out your main skills for alternate skillsets multiple times per fight? It feels SO messy.

I could understand needing to swap out your skills under certain circumstances. Like the engineer.. got an event with lots of guys? Grenades. The rest of the time? Rifle. With the elementalist .. the only justification I can find is.. hey.. my weapon skills are on cooldown. I can either spam autoattack for 20 seconds or swap to a new element. That seems trashy.

Is it like this for all classes? Am I really forced to play this way?

If this is how you feel, all I can say is don’t ever play Elementalist.

Edit: I want to supplement this by saying.. I don’t expect one weapon/stance to do the job 100% of the time. You need to adapt to your situation. What I’m saying is.. I’m not adapting to the situation here.. I’m adapting to the limitations of a single weapon/stance. I’m combating the CLASS instead of the enemies.

Tradewind.6913:

If this is how you feel, all I can say is don’t ever play Elementalist.

Why not? I understand there’s still balancing to do, fixes to be done for each class. That doesn’t concern me. What I am concerned about is how the class PLAYS, not how it performs. Right now, it plays very messily (although not as bad as the engineer).

Because if you’re looking to play Elementalist properly, at least in it’s current state, you should be cycling your attunements regularly. Far more “stance dancey” than just a weapon swap.

I would say it’s the nature of the game, you’re given an easy weapon swap for a reason. From the start you’re not meant to be sitting there with only one weapon combo the entire tire.

I can say that my Ranger does feel like that. The most natural combo for me is short + long bow, and sure, both have their situational advantages, but most of the time I need to switch simply because everything useful is on cooldown. I don’t play my Ele because it’s much worse for her.

+: The elemental stance changing seems like a gimmick someone came up with to make the profession “unique”.

Hm… well.. that’s going to be the case for all classes then, huh? I guess I picked the two classes with the MOST weapon swaps though. Engineer kits means up to 4 swaps including main weapon, elementalist means 4 elements.. I think everyone else just gets a single weapon swap, right?

Mongo.2490:

I am a big fan of picking a build or loadout and rolling with it, making the best of it, taking advantages of its strengths and weaknesses.

First I rolled an engineer. Rifle is neat, pistol/shield was useful too. But I started getting these kits. I could understand swapping to a grenade kit once in a while to lay down some heavy AoE, but 90% of the time I just wanted to stay with Rifle. After doing some PvP and seeing what engineer felt like at 80, I was very discouraged. Not with how poorly I did (it was bad, though), but with how clunky everything felt needing to constantly change my 1-5 skills four or five times per fight. I thought for sure .. it must be just engineers that need to deal with this. I bailed on the engineer.

I rolled an elementalist. While I enjoy many aspects, I find myself needing to constantly swap between multiple elements in a fight. I am currently using dagger/dagger and the fire element is the only one that can hold its own without needing to swap between the rest. I feel like I’m headed right down the same path as engineer.

Is the only way to play this game by constantly doing the ‘stance dance’, trading out your main skills for alternate skillsets multiple times per fight? It feels SO messy.

I could understand needing to swap out your skills under certain circumstances. Like the engineer.. got an event with lots of guys? Grenades. The rest of the time? Rifle. With the elementalist .. the only justification I can find is.. hey.. my weapon skills are on cooldown. I can either spam autoattack for 20 seconds or swap to a new element. That seems trashy.

Is it like this for all classes? Am I really forced to play this way?

It sounds like you just made some bad choices on which class you want to play. Engineer and Elementalists are the two classes that play in that style. They are also the only two classes that don’t get weapons swap for that very reason. Try any of the other classes and you will find that you don’t have to “stance dance”. The elementalists is the worst/best about it. I love my ele and my engineer alt, and personally love that play style, but I totally understand that it isn’t for everyone.

Also let me just add that there is nothing wrong with the way the ele or eng play. It just isn’t for you. I personally love the playstyles of both classes. Also, the engineer doesn’t have to use the kits that you speak of. I personally don’t care for them. I use turrets and what not for my utilities and never have to change my 1-5 abilities.

I have to say that overall I don’t like how some, or even most, skills aren’t immediately available. Perhaps limiting them to 1-5 was to simplify the control scheme with the combat being so mobile, but the end result isn’t awfully appealing to me.

I’m Bad luck Brian when it comes to GW2 I guess. Unfortunately, I haven’t found much to love in the rest of the classes. Warrior seems like the only other one I might like but.. there’s so many warriors. And apparently they’re an easy class to dominate with .. I’m not really looking for that. My friends are playing guardian and necromancer, so I wanna stay away from those. I don’t like thief’s resource system, ranger’s pets annoy me, and mesmer just seems like a sorry excuse for a class (clunky illusions.. no thanks).

Oh well, I had a good 3 weeks with guild wars.. :-P

Mongo.2490:

I’m Bad luck Brian when it comes to GW2 I guess. Unfortunately, I haven’t found much to love in the rest of the classes. Warrior seems like the only other one I might like but.. there’s so many warriors. And apparently they’re an easy class to dominate with .. I’m not really looking for that. My friends are playing guardian and necromancer, so I wanna stay away from those. I don’t like thief’s resource system, ranger’s pets annoy me, and mesmer just seems like a sorry excuse for a class (clunky illusions.. no thanks).

Oh well, I had a good 3 weeks with guild wars.. :-P

Honestly no offense, but you have a way too narrow-minded and negative look on it. I honestly am finding every class fun so far (only ones I haven’t tried are Warrior and Engineer). They are all fun in their own way. What you shouldn’t do is listen to other people which it seems you are and adopt a more laid back, fun look at the game and it’s classes.

Too many warriors? Who the kitten cares if it’s fun to play. Mesmer clunky? No, far from it, it’s a fairly well designed and fun class. Elementalist and Engineer do require stance dancing and if done in a thoughtful way it’s great, but it’s not that hard to do once you know the skills, don’t listen to random forum goers. Thief and Rangers? Neither of those are big issues if you build and play properly, give the classes a try and try different builds.

Friends playing Guardian and Necro? Who cares, they’re both fun classes and nothing is stopping you from playing them. In GW2 it doesn’t matter if you have 2 of the same class in a group. Whether it’s PvE or PvP, I’ve done all of it with duplicate classes in my group and succeeded.

Basically, have a positive, open minded outlook, give every class a fair chance, and ignore everyone else’s opinions and form your own. This game has a lot to offer.

Mongo.2490:

I am a big fan of picking a build or loadout and rolling with it, making the best of it, taking advantages of its strengths and weaknesses.

First I rolled an engineer. Rifle is neat, pistol/shield was useful too. But I started getting these kits. I could understand swapping to a grenade kit once in a while to lay down some heavy AoE, but 90% of the time I just wanted to stay with Rifle. After doing some PvP and seeing what engineer felt like at 80, I was very discouraged. Not with how poorly I did (it was bad, though), but with how clunky everything felt needing to constantly change my 1-5 skills four or five times per fight. I thought for sure .. it must be just engineers that need to deal with this. I bailed on the engineer.

I rolled an elementalist. While I enjoy many aspects, I find myself needing to constantly swap between multiple elements in a fight. I am currently using dagger/dagger and the fire element is the only one that can hold its own without needing to swap between the rest. I feel like I’m headed right down the same path as engineer.

Is the only way to play this game by constantly doing the ‘stance dance’, trading out your main skills for alternate skillsets multiple times per fight? It feels SO messy.

I could understand needing to swap out your skills under certain circumstances. Like the engineer.. got an event with lots of guys? Grenades. The rest of the time? Rifle. With the elementalist .. the only justification I can find is.. hey.. my weapon skills are on cooldown. I can either spam autoattack for 20 seconds or swap to a new element. That seems trashy.

Is it like this for all classes? Am I really forced to play this way?

I think for most Professions the idea is that by the time you’re at level cap you have 2 or 3 favourite builds that suit your playstyle in several different circumstances that you know to equip for beforehand. e.g. PvE exploring, PvE dungeons, maybe sPvP and WvW. (But you might cut the cake differently.)

In order to get to the stage where you get deeply into 2 or 3 builds that really suit you, you will have to do a lot of experimenting, tweaking, thinking, re-outfitting, tweaking, experimenting again, etc., etc., yes.

But I think most of us would consider that to be what’s known as “fun”.

But of course YMMV.

Elementalists are, as others have said, very heavily dependent on attunement dancing. Engineers are similar, yet not quite as dependent. It’s a style of playing the “mage” class that is different from some other games and which many typical “mage” type players don’t like.

In general, you will need to be switching off something in gameplay. Even a warrior (my main) needs to switch weapons for different ranges or abilities. Elementalist is the most extreme class in this regard (they really went hog wild with it, having 4 attunements and 20 abilities to switch between at any one time), but even on a warrior or a ranger you are switching off between weapons regularly to deal with certain situations.

Again, in general, GW2 is not really designed to be a game that is about rolling with one setup. It’s about using multiple setups and adapting on the fly, switching off to meet the situation. This is an aspect of difficulty scaling in the game as well. It’s much less about theorycrafting/mastering the optimal rotation as it is about understanding all of the possible abilities and picking the right one for the given situation. That creates a learning curve in the game for all classes in order to reach maximum effectiveness — the elementalist just has the steepest curve of the bunch because of the switching between 4 attunements, which is intended to be rather routine and constant for the class to be played effectively.

Yeah.. I didn’t know about weapon switching when I started. When I found out about it, I thought “Oh.. that’s a nice option”. Kind of like Diablo 2. Then I found out it was pretty much required and I needed to re-evaluate everything.

Yeah.. I didn’t know about weapon switching when I started. When I found out about it, I thought “Oh.. that’s a nice option”. Kind of like Diablo 2. Then I found out it was pretty much required and I needed to re-evaluate everything.Elementalist is not for me. I can see that. The question now is .. what is? I can deal with swapping out a weapon. 2 might be too much for me. Maybe I’ll go back to engineer and just run with rifle / grenade kit, who knows. At least those are two very different weapons with very different uses where the time to swap is clear.

Yeah.. I didn’t know about weapon switching when I started. When I found out about it, I thought “Oh.. that’s a nice option”. Kind of like Diablo 2. Then I found out it was pretty much required and I needed to re-evaluate everything.Elementalist is not for me. I can see that. The question now is .. what is? I can deal with swapping out a weapon. 2 might be too much for me. Maybe I’ll go back to engineer and just run with rifle / grenade kit, who knows. At least those are two very different weapons with very different uses where the time to swap is clear.I’m trying to be open minded .. just .. I’m very indecisive when it comes to picking a profession. I am in every game. I find games to be most interesting when a party is comprised of a diverse group of people, which is why I’m avoiding playing the classes my friends play. As far as not enjoying some of the core mechanics of a profession (ranger’s pets, thief’s stealth), that’s just how I am .. it’s a matter of personal preference.

Yeah.. I didn’t know about weapon switching when I started. When I found out about it, I thought “Oh.. that’s a nice option”. Kind of like Diablo 2. Then I found out it was pretty much required and I needed to re-evaluate everything.Elementalist is not for me. I can see that. The question now is .. what is? I can deal with swapping out a weapon. 2 might be too much for me. Maybe I’ll go back to engineer and just run with rifle / grenade kit, who knows. At least those are two very different weapons with very different uses where the time to swap is clear.I’m trying to be open minded .. just .. I’m very indecisive when it comes to picking a profession. I am in every game. I find games to be most interesting when a party is comprised of a diverse group of people, which is why I’m avoiding playing the classes my friends play. As far as not enjoying some of the core mechanics of a profession (ranger’s pets, thief’s stealth), that’s just how I am .. it’s a matter of personal preference.The only class I can say I’m being truly closed minded about is the mesmer. I didn’t like how it felt and I never gave it too much of a shot. And I don’t really want to. I’ll leave it as a last resort.

Yeah.. I didn’t know about weapon switching when I started. When I found out about it, I thought “Oh.. that’s a nice option”. Kind of like Diablo 2. Then I found out it was pretty much required and I needed to re-evaluate everything.Elementalist is not for me. I can see that. The question now is .. what is? I can deal with swapping out a weapon. 2 might be too much for me. Maybe I’ll go back to engineer and just run with rifle / grenade kit, who knows. At least those are two very different weapons with very different uses where the time to swap is clear.I’m trying to be open minded .. just .. I’m very indecisive when it comes to picking a profession. I am in every game. I find games to be most interesting when a party is comprised of a diverse group of people, which is why I’m avoiding playing the classes my friends play. As far as not enjoying some of the core mechanics of a profession (ranger’s pets, thief’s stealth), that’s just how I am .. it’s a matter of personal preference.The only class I can say I’m being truly closed minded about is the mesmer. I didn’t like how it felt and I never gave it too much of a shot. And I don’t really want to. I’ll leave it as a last resort.Edit: Not sure what’s going on here .. when I see the text here, it looks fine.. but as soon as I press to post it, it does some bizarre stuff to my text.. it looks like I started 4 paragraphs the same way and just added onto it every time. Not sure if this is my browser or it’s really posting strangely. If you see it, I’m sorry .. I didn’t do it. If you don’t see it .. it’s limited to my browser and you can ignore this.

Granted I’m not high level in any class, but with my Mesmer I mostly use staff, but have sword/focus to give me access to Temporal Curtain for the run speed boost. It doesn’t hurt that sword/focus is also almost as much fun, and often quite workable, in combat too.

With my Thief I wanted to use pistol/dagger and dagger/pistol, but it won’t let you do that on weapon swap with the same two pieces of equipment

I mentioned it earlier, but I haven’t seen you acknowledge it, so I will say it again. The engineer does not need to use any of the weapon kits that cause it to change out 1-5 skills. Even though I love my elementalists, I prefer not to do all the “stance dancing” with my engineer. There are other options like using the turrets or other utility skills to avoid “stance dancing” all together.

Weapon-swapping/stance-dancing is what makes GW2 combat. It’s a core part of the game and is a primary feature of what makes it unique. It’s what sets it apart from other MMOs. In other MMOs you are given 50+ skills to annoy yourself with key binding. In my opinion this makes GW2 not only more RSI-friendly, but the complexity of keybinding — even for a engineer — isn’t that hard.

I have a level 80 engineer and use 3-4 kits for my builds, and I’m capable of switching them rapidly and using whatever skill for the situation. It’s all about conditioning yourself and muscle memory.

My two points of advice:

1. Make sure your weapon-swap and/or “stance” keys are easy to reach and press. It should be among your easiest keys to reflexively press.

2. Level to 80 through PvE. About the worse thing you can do is roll a new profession and head straight to sPvP. You’ll turn yourself off from a profession no faster. PvP is too fast paced for a total beginner. PvE will slowly condition you into how to play the profession and the slow repetitiveness will familiarize you with stance dancing.

Mongo.2490:

Tradewind.6913:

If this is how you feel, all I can say is don’t ever play Elementalist.

Why not? I understand there’s still balancing to do, fixes to be done for each class. That doesn’t concern me. What I am concerned about is how the class PLAYS, not how it performs. Right now, it plays very messily (although not as bad as the engineer).

Because elementalist uses 4 attuments and almost every skill in it, you constantly switch them to maximize your damage output. You can use only one but it’s wasting potential and benefits from traits.

I replaced 6 7 8 9 0 with Q E R F T

I liked how, with other professions, ` was weapon swap. It felt much more natural to have it there. I would have preferred have my first utility be ` and assign it to a kit. This would be fine for my engineer but .. it would muck it up for the rest of the classes.

Yeah.. I did some PvP at 16 with my engineer. Very discouraging.

Yeah.. I did some PvP at 16 with my engineer. Very discouraging.

Funny story about this:

I played all 3 beta weekends. In the first beta weekend I only played Mesmer, and liked it a lot.

In the 2nd beta weekend I decided I wanted to try every profession at level 80 via The Mists and sPvP. Over the weekend I tried every single profession and attempted to learn them.

I failed for the most part. I understood the core mechanics but I couldn’t get a true grasp on each profession. I’m a gradual learner, and having all the skills available from the get-go made me choose unwise builds and playstyles.

The funny part is, when I got to engineer in beta weekend 2 I couldn’t like it. I hated engineer. It was confusing with all the skills and kits.

In beta weekend 3 I decided I tested enough of The Mists and should try leveling a single profession. I decided to roll ranger, but somehow ended up rolling an engineer. I think I misclicked during the character creation. I spent so long at customizing the appearance of my character I must have forgot I picked engineer and not ranger. Once in the game I of course realized I was an engineer, but I decided to stick with it for some 5 levels. Those first 5 levels were funny, because I kept thinking I was a ranger due to the fact that Engineer at low levels is mostly ranged combat.

I leveled to 30 in beta weekend 3 and absolutely loved engineer. By gradually leveling in PvE I came to realize how awesome the profession was. I rolled engineer when the game went live and hit 80 with it, and still love it since day 1.

And are you constantly switching between 2+ kits?

Gilgamesh.2561:

I failed for the most part. I understood the core mechanics but I couldn’t get a true grasp on each profession. I’m a gradual learner, and having all the skills available from the get-go made me choose unwise builds and playstyles.

I’m with you on that. It takes me a while to really learn all the ins and outs of a class so I prefer to level it up and play my chosen playstyle as I level so I really understand it. Sure I can research a good build online and play it well in the Mists, but I won’t really understand the entire class. Even in WoW when most people would level a character in an efficient “leveling spec”, I still played my healer in heal spec so by the time I hit 80 I knew what I was doing. A lot of people can just switch out of a leveling spec at 80 into something else and learn it fairly quickly but I never enjoyed doing that. I’d rather suck at low levels when everyone else sucks and learn how to play on gradually harder content instead of starting out as a newb on hard content and being forced to learn fast (and inevitably not learning it as thoroughly).

And are you constantly switching between 2+ kits?

I believe that’s the true strength of an engineer. An Elementalist is locked into their attunement for 10 seconds, but an Engineer is not locked into a kit (there is a 1 second GCD on swapping out of the kit however).

Therefore I treat kits no different than if I had 15-20 extra skills readily available at any given time. Kits are also nice because most kit skills are on relatively low CD, meaning if you’re swapping amongst kits and your weapon chances are your CDs are going to be up all the time.

When leveling I used Med Kit, Flamethrower, Elixir Gun and Tool Kit — and rifle.

The survability is amazing. I could tank 3-4 mobs much higher level than me and have no problems with the amount of control available.

This Guru guide influenced my decisions to try kits heavily:
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/52982-get-ready-to-quad-kit-zenhs-dynamic-kit-build/

Before then I was using elixirs and pistol/pistol, which is good in its own right if you want a simpler build.

Wow.. I’ll take a look at that guide. From my perspective, I can’t see why you would possibly need all those abilities available at once. Med kit.. seems most useful for the speed boost you get with 5. The heal packs don’t seem to heal enough, but I suppose if you’re just all out running away and need some health, it would be good.. kinda..

Wow.. I’ll take a look at that guide. From my perspective, I can’t see why you would possibly need all those abilities available at once. Med kit.. seems most useful for the speed boost you get with 5. The heal packs don’t seem to heal enough, but I suppose if you’re just all out running away and need some health, it would be good.. kinda..Flamethrower .. I liked the 2 skill at max range. Did some good damage to a single target. After that I swapped over to rifle to finish em off though.

Wow.. I’ll take a look at that guide. From my perspective, I can’t see why you would possibly need all those abilities available at once. Med kit.. seems most useful for the speed boost you get with 5. The heal packs don’t seem to heal enough, but I suppose if you’re just all out running away and need some health, it would be good.. kinda..Flamethrower .. I liked the 2 skill at max range. Did some good damage to a single target. After that I swapped over to rifle to finish em off though.Elixer gun and toolkit both sound neat, I haven’t been able to play with them.

Wow.. I’ll take a look at that guide. From my perspective, I can’t see why you would possibly need all those abilities available at once. Med kit.. seems most useful for the speed boost you get with 5. The heal packs don’t seem to heal enough, but I suppose if you’re just all out running away and need some health, it would be good.. kinda..Flamethrower .. I liked the 2 skill at max range. Did some good damage to a single target. After that I swapped over to rifle to finish em off though.Elixer gun and toolkit both sound neat, I haven’t been able to play with them.Maybe I should watch some videos of people playing engineer so I can see what exactly people DO in combat.

No idea what the hell is going on with my posting right now. Must have divided by 0 or something.

Having played 300 hours of elementalist I have this to say.
Any build not switching between all 4 attunements throughout fights is doing it wrong.

Here is how a typical fight for me would go, in say a dungeon scenario. (Dual dagger)
Start fight
earth5 → earth4 → earth2
Summon elemental if I think we’ll need it. Use Arcane shield to cover self if it looks like enemies are going to be a pain

Switch to Fire
Fire2, Fire 4, Fire 3 if applicable, Fire 5, maybe a few hits of Fire1

Switch to air
Air 4, Air 5, Air 2 and 3 at the same time

Water
I cycle to water anyway even if not damaged purely because it A. rewards me and my team with a regen affect and B. it allows me to heal anyone who may be hurt.
Water 5 or 2 as needed to heal. → Water 3 and 4 to freeze enemies

Then I evaluate. If the monsters are too dangerous to be fighting in the mid range, IE I have 6k hp left even after the healing then i’ll stick in water for now, chucking out vapor blades and backing off (they have the longest range of the auto attacks by far)

Assuming I can get away with it my first choice of next element is earth so I can use earth 5 and 4 again. The protection aura it gives my team and the knockdown+damage is just great. On a good hit I can be doing ~8k damage overall with a churning.

The rest of the fight for me is pretty much stance dance revolution as im running 30 arcana. Everytime I swap attunements im buffing my party, and every attunement has 1-2 skills worth using in it as soon as you swap.

It’s not the only viable build, but it’s one of the better ones ive used. The only concern to me with elementalist right now is that they
A. have way to little hp (lowest base health besides guardians who get heavy armor, and far better support skills) or
B. the fact is I have to be switching between 4 attunements for the entire duration of fights to feel like im doing well (I did try a 30 fire build once that relied on staying in fire as much as was possible, and it just didnt feel that good to me). Which makes the class much harder to play than pretty much any other. I talk to plenty of warriors who carry a second set with a warhorn purely for swiftness, and never need to tab to it in combat. Ive met many more who have a shield on the second set for the defensive switch, but that’s literally it. Their switching is reactive to taking damage only. Whereas elementalists have to be switching pro-actively constantly.