Guild Wars 2

Which build worked better for you in tPvP?

Did you find anything new after the last balance patch?

Marcos.3690:

Did you find anything new after the last balance patch?

nope. wrong forum btw

My observations:

• D/D Aurashare builds with the new Tempest Defense lack the very precious Rock Solid trait to make Ether Renewal work.
• It’s hard to take advantage of Tempest Defense’s damage bonus without arcane skills.
• Sacrificing Tempest Defense or Powerful Auras for Rock Solid is usually not worth it – you’re much better off playing with a 20-30 arcana Rock Solid build.

• 5-cantrip builds with 20 fire investment and spell slinger for might stacking are decent for survival (in fact, can be very good versus conditions), but burning fire seems to unreliably trigger after-cooldown, and the protection boon is unreliable and scarce.
• A s/d build can go with 30 in fire for plenty of might stacking and fury, but they won’t hit anyone reliably without any investment into their instant air burst.
• It’s also a very egoist build.

• Diamond Skin feels underwhelming to me.

• D/D builds generally get melted by untargetted AoE, and are not fast enough to fight back a thief neither. D/D’s defenses are unreliable (auras require them to get hit, one of their heal skills only heals over-time, lightning touch is easy to miss) and it’s also very easy for a thief to evade dagger ele’s skills while stealing their boons. Rock Solid is not enough to protect against warriors over-time.

• Our weak auto-attacks get countered by warrior’s healing signet.

• Yet our burst builds are pretty underwhelming due to the lack of survival and the tanky meta.

My build, 0/20/0/20/30 which worked well for me before the patch with s/d was nerfed pretty decently. Both water traits that i used both were adept traits before the patch and now they are master. I mean the reduced cooldown in water skills and condition removal on water attunement. Now i have to either give up my condition removal or sustain (lower cd on water healing spells).

This might sound minor, but it made a huge difference and now my build either lacks condition removal that it had before or i lose out on conditional removal and healing (dagger water 5 is a heal and condi removal)

I tried to use new builds without water traits, but i found we just have waaay too low of hp. On my mesmer i can run condi rabid amulet and have close to 17k hp….on my ele using a similar setup i barely have 12k. With so little base hp, we absolutely MUST go 30 in arcane for evasive arcana dodge roll heal. Without it, any ele will drop like a fly. Water is also needed because of how abysmally low the ele base hp is.

Overall this patch was garbage for eles and they should have left us alone. we cannot afford to go 30 in earth because then our survivability suffers way too much. Without higher hp from water, 30 arcane is needed just to survive (evasive arcana). So a major investment in arcane or water needed for all eles, and even more so with our sad sad nerfs to water and arcane traits

There’s plenty of Ele builds that “work”, in the sense that they’re the best we have. In any case you’ll need to play your selected build for at least ~300 hours and break all your fingers in order to stand a chance against average players of other classes.

S/D fresh air: 0/30/0/10/30 or 0/30/0/20/20
D/D damage: 0/20/0/20/30
D/D rock solid: 0/0/20/20/30
Staff balanced: 20/10/0/20/20
Staff zerker: 30/20/0/10/10
For Diamond Skin builds it’s up to you, for me it’s just way too situational and tends to result in very awkward builds.

Good luck.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJArYhImObyx5gjDIjCdg4RF4AcY5ROMD2AA-ToAg0CnICSFkLITQygsBNKYGC

Been playing with this for about 3/4 months now, only thing that has changed was I used to run 10 water for the extra condition removal, but since they nerfed that and finally fixed stone with lingering elements I’m running 10 in earth.

piffdaddy.8014:

My build, 0/20/0/20/30 which worked well for me before the patch with s/d was nerfed pretty decently. Both water traits that i used both were adept traits before the patch and now they are master. I mean the reduced cooldown in water skills and condition removal on water attunement. Now i have to either give up my condition removal or sustain (lower cd on water healing spells).

This might sound minor, but it made a huge difference and now my build either lacks condition removal that it had before or i lose out on conditional removal and healing (dagger water 5 is a heal and condi removal)

I tried to use new builds without water traits, but i found we just have waaay too low of hp. On my mesmer i can run condi rabid amulet and have close to 17k hp….on my ele using a similar setup i barely have 12k. With so little base hp, we absolutely MUST go 30 in arcane for evasive arcana dodge roll heal. Without it, any ele will drop like a fly. Water is also needed because of how abysmally low the ele base hp is.

Overall this patch was garbage for eles and they should have left us alone. we cannot afford to go 30 in earth because then our survivability suffers way too much. Without higher hp from water, 30 arcane is needed just to survive (evasive arcana). So a major investment in arcane or water needed for all eles, and even more so with our sad sad nerfs to water and arcane traits

Yeah the trait changes really kittened everything up

go S/F 20-30-20 with ether renewal, double arcane and lightning flash.

Trait choice is obvious.

Leave arcana forever. Be a true glass cannon destroying everything.

Lightning flash is used solely for mobility purpose.

basically the only thing eles lack right now is mobility, the prof can be useful but struggles too much against meta choices.

It seems as if no one at anet truly plays the ele class in pvp. This patch proves it; what kind of person who plays elementalist would want to put 30 whole trait points into a useless trait line like earth? Earth gives no +hp which is what eles need. And even worse, it will be another 3 months at least before we hear about possible changes they may be considering. They are going to want the meta to “settle” (aka everyone continues to boycott the elementalist class) before they consider some changes.

They will probably give us a new 30 point trait in fire and nerf evasive arcana for “build diversity” while we still have under 12k hp with no water traits….haha. I mean…we were already the least represented class in high level pvp last patch and we received mostly nerfs this patch….I can’t think of one buff that the class got. And you can’t count reducing the cooldown of attunement you just left as a buff…it should have been baseline since beta, and we got MAJOR nerfs just to get this useless “buff”.

They had an opportunity to give the eles a nice new useful heal, look at what mesmers got. They get a nice, useful passive heal with a very nice and fun to use active. Meanwhile, our passive heal signet is garbage and overnerfed compared to the mesmer and warrior signets. The ele passive heal signet is not even viable; you will drop so quickly if you use it it’s not even funny. It’s not even that passive like the others that heal every second….you have to cast a spell for the healing to work. It is extremely weak for any weapon other than dagger and for dagger it is still weak. Not to mention d/d is not viable.

The new elementalist heal is also crap…the cooldown is way too long and the healing is not enough for the 25 second cooldown. You have to get in the middle of the teamfight and hit 5 targets to even get on par with the other active eles heals. You may say, well traits affect arcane skills (the new heal)….too bad we can’t afford to take reduced cd on arcane traits because you moved elemental attunement up a tier so now we have to put 20 in arcane.

I’d argue that last patch we had MORE build diversity, and now we have LESS. Reason being as last patch there were a few burst builds with just 10 points in arcane, for the elemental attunement. That has of course been nerfed, so less build diversity when the patch was supposed to encourage build diversity. All this patch did for eles was make them reroll/stop playing ele because anet has no idea how they want the class to work.

Elemental attunement should have a weaker version baseline for all eles built into attunement spells. As in, the effects should only work on the ele and not be aoe buffs to allys. The effects can even be shaved a bit…take 1 or 2 seconds off the protection for the baseline version. The 20 point trait can make the effects last longer, and be aoe so it will still be a very useful trait but not a necessity. This, 1k or 2k more base hp, and ride the lightning cooldown reduced to 25 seconds and eles will be viable once again.

piffdaddy.8014:

The new elementalist heal is also crap…the cooldown is way too long and the healing is not enough for the 25 second cooldown. You have to get in the middle of the teamfight and hit 5 targets to even get on par with the other active eles heals. You may say, well traits affect arcane skills (the new heal)….too bad we can’t afford to take reduced cd on arcane traits because you moved elemental attunement up a tier so now we have to put 20 in arcane.

It’s very much a PvE heal, ideal for for dungeons and world events. Another blast finisher to maintain might-stacking and hitting 5+ targets is fairly easy.

In PvP we all know what happens when an Ele finds themselves in the center of a heated fight :P

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJAoYhMmmbxxzgjDAkHuYCLjCdUekzM2A-ToAA0CnIyRljLHTOycs5MIYKC

dont facetank the enemys dps, move, move, move and dodge proper….than you should be fine…..even if you need to bring up much more effort than some other classes