Guild Wars 2

Greetings,
I’ve been a solo elementalist for a looong time, and I enjoy doing spvp and wvw.
But when I’m teamed up in a group, it seems boring. In group you don’t really need all your tricks for winning a fight, just do as much damage as possible. As we don’t really have a lot of damaging skills, I mostly rotate my attunements doing basicly number 2 constantly (little more with fire).
But I guess that’s with all classes, probably even worse with thief.

Group fights are a bit less interesting than other fights. I generally stay in water a lot, tagging enemies and spamming heals since I can’t keep up with the chaos, but hope that my healing is helpful. Sometimes I’ll dip into fire for a while, since Ring of fire is d/d’s only field maker. Generally, fire’s damage is overkill; the other players drop the enemy before I have a chance to cycle through it all.

So my main focus when fighting in groups is to watch not the enemies, but my allies, and make sure everyone stays alive as much as possible.

huh…..I get a total rush in group battles myself. The ’mentalist is such a versatile class….I feel like I am in control of the battle. I have all the tools I need to control the flow of the fight….I have CC, heals, mad single target damage, AoE, brief invincibility if I pull too much aggro (or fast escape if that fails)…
It reminds me a bit of the Nano-Technician from old-school Anarchy Online. Perfect class for a control freak

I just had my first really good set of group battles last night; my first dungeon. At first, it was enough for me just to point myself in the right direction, let alone hit the right buttons once I had done so. But over time, my situational awareness got better, and my control scheme improved. I stopped moving with the mouse and attacking with my fingers, and started moving with my fingers and attacking with my mouse, and it made a load of difference!

In fights against multiple targets, I’d generally stay in water, cycling through fire and earth briefly (grabbing armor of earth before cycling back to water) if there was a lull and I just wanted to make the fight end faster. I found that staying in a healing mode kept us all alive longer when enemies could come from any direction.

But the bosses were fun. Often, one of my teammates would have aggro, so I could stop focusing on dodging and just stand there, unloading my best combo (water breath and ice armor, ice field and water heal, switch to fire, fire breath, number 5 (that quick damage dump), ring of fire, followed by one of the earth finishers to grab a bonus, dump all the rest of my earth damage, dump all my air damage, back to water and repeat). When the boss finally would get the idea he’d generally take me down with two or three shots while I frantically attempted to find my movement controls, but by then the damage had been done, and someone else would either pick me back up, or manage to grab aggro so I could recover from my downed state on my own.

I really enjoy playing Elementalist.

@ tarvok Just be aware that using conditions on bosses grants them a boon. So, the Earthquake finisher has a condition Knockdown. Shocking Aura has the condition Stun. Updraft has the condition Blowout.

There’s some mechanic that allows another player to take them off by applying a condition? I’ve never quite gotton the hang of it because the effects icons move so fast that I can’t keep the tooltips up lol, but I have definately heard players say they will take a boon off.

@Burrid Lol. I have found that to be true of other mmos too. In Pve, excluding dungeons, the mobs go down so fast with good grouped players you don’t have time to do much. There is post somewhere in these forums where a player suggested not to take a scepter into Pve because in the two seconds it takes to cast Dragon Tooth the mobs will already be dead lol. So true. If you go d/d you have some nice insta-damage skills in all the attunements and can still cast a Cleansing Wave for a heal if need be and a Ring of Fire for a combo field for the group from time to time. Everyone else in the group is also thinking there are too many players for those squishy mobs, excecpt the warriors lol, but that’s their ego thinking they are doing all the dps anyway.

from what i gather all ‘boss’ mobs have a boon called defiant and nshakable, cant remember which is which, but one of them will have a stack number, and the other wont. the one with the stack number means that the mob is immune to all hard CC (knockback, stun, fear and some others cant remember ) until that stack number is gone (by using those CCs)

so for example mob has 3 stacks of defiant (i think thats the stacking one)

i hit mob with a stun, it fails with ‘immune’ message

mob now has 2 stacks left

someone hits boss with a knockback, again it fails due to the boon with the message ‘immune’

mob has 1 stack left

a 3rd person hits the mob with another stun, and again the boss is ‘immune’

boss has 0 stacks left

someone hits the mob with a knockback and the boss is knocked back, and due to the other boon returns to 3 stacks of the first boon and the process starts over again

So I’m not really hurting anything by hitting them with conditions, just resetting them to their normal setting.

Are you a staffer? Don’t forget to toss in some support, use those rolls, the 4k heals and aoe might is a nice bonus after. But you’ll still be standing most of the time :p (til a monster comes after you anyway)

Well elementalist are squishy. When it is a mob against an ele it will certainly be more interesting then a mob against a team of 5 or such. So yah, it is more boring when there are people there to draw that 3 hit fire off you and revive you if you mess up. I mostly play in dungeons with a staff. I like it, but sometimes I get lazy and just go with fire and nuking because I can. Actually, even in solo I usually just do that… I really only bring my A game to the big bosses where it is worth my time to chill them.