Guild Wars 2

I’m sure you’ve all seen the Elem complaint threads. Now, for groups, when i have someone that can distract an enemy and keep them in place, yeah my ground targeted AoE effects are useful. for the majority, however, i don’t even bother tossing them out, as i’m constantly moving, kiting, and strafing, with the enemies following me. take Staff/Water, for example. 4 GTAoE’s….but i have to swap to it constantly to heal up. which requires i stop moving so my heal restores some of my health. which lets the enemy beat my face in. yeah. so helpful. they really need to rethink these GTAoE skills.

I use my AoE skills while moving all the time, plant it where you stood and back up and let them walk into the AoE.

Not exactly difficult.

Depending on the encounter you are right, I typically just try to stack them all on top of each other at my location and hope it kills the enemy before me, yet it is great during world events or in decent groups.

I feel like you should be able (for some of them) to target the enemy and the effect follows them, say like meteor shower. I switched to double daggers, less grape so more damage

Ground targeted AoE skills have a specific functionality that is not always evident in solo play. Because these skills cover an area of the ground, you need to think of them as skills that change your terrain.

Consequently, they’re best used in situations where several enemies/allies occupy the same space. They’re not intended to benefit or harm a specific target so much as they take advantage of crowded areas.

Switching to Geyser while kiting isn’t really the most efficient or useful way to heal yourself. Geyser is more useful healing up a closely knit group of your allies. Similarly, skills like Ice Spike and Meteor Shower punish enemies for staying in radius. They create lose-lose situations for the enemy: Either you stay put in a GTAOE radius and take damage, or you’re forced to stop what you’re doing and move.

Finally, bear in mind that many Ground Targeted AoE skills create Combo Fields. While you can certainly capitalize on Combo Fields in solo play, the benefit is more obvious in group play when a half-dozen allies trigger combos in your field.

I normally use dragon fang 1st (Takes a while to drop) and then use the phoenix, set down a fire ring (So they walk through it) and then use a strong fire blast from my hands attack.

That normally kills them quickly but sometimes I use my attunement storm so I can create fire storms if I have more than 1 enemy attacking.

I loled

Clearly you do not understand the elemental class or the basics of this game in general

I played fire staff elementalist and i actually used the GTAOE #2 quite a bit. You can dodge sideways or backwards, but dont forget you can also dodge forward through a mob. If you lay down a Lava Font in front of you a second before the mob steps into its aoe boundary then you can dodge forward once it is cast and this keeps the mob in the aoe. If you cast a Lava Font and just roll backwards or sideways this minimizes the time the mob spends in the aoe. If you roll forward you can dodge their attack, and keep them in your aoe a little longer.

You can also use Burning Retreat offensively instead of defensively. If an enemy is coming right at you lay down a Lava Font in front of you, then turn your back to the enemy and hit “Burning Retreat”. You now have the enemy sitting in two of your fire spells, a GTAOE and a spell that is normally used to retreat. When i start a fight i usually do it from max range, and hit them with fireball > flame burst > fireball repeat until they are close.

Its really amazing the total lack of innovation some people have.

So your saying because you cant seem to make use the GTAoE spells in any real way that benefits you in solo play you want the whole system refurbished?

Perhaps you should go ahead and rethink how your doing things. All the posters in this thread have given you food for thought. GTAOE is a tried and true method that has been used to deadly effect in virtually every game there is. I think you need to go into WvWvW and go defend a keep or two and come back and tell the class how useless your GTAOE wasn’t in that setting!

Lol what? Its very useless in WvW. The only thing those are good for, are killing idiots. Anyone with half a brain knows how to dodge.

“Oh what is that big red circle on the ground? Oh it’s raining fire? I think I should stand in it.”

Either way man, you should just reroll if you are having trouble with Ele. Every other class requires less skill, and higher rewards. Kinda lose lose for us. I still play it because its fun, sometimes. But overall Ele lacks in pretty much everything atm.