Potaters!
(edited by Arc.9374)
Arcs Super Awesome Super Build
Ok.
So.
Lets talk sPvP. You’ll have a little over 17k HP. A little under 3k attack unbuffed. 44% crit chance, and base toughness.
Wait, did he just say base toughness?
Yes. I did. Be a man.
Here’s what one-shot me with no chance to react pre-patch.
Begin list -
Backstab Thief, if executed perfectly.
End list -
Here’s what will one shot me with no chance to react post-patch.
Begin list -
End list -
Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t quite a few builds that will force you to go super turtle mode and break line of sight in order to try and survive and give yourself a little breathing room, but you’re not dead, and not being dead is a pretty good thing given the speed at which we can regain HP even in combat. There are still things that will tool you if you get caught at the wrong time with the wrong cooldowns down, but everyone has to deal with that, so man up and don’t cry about it.
All those dodges you were wasting on Evasive Arcana? Here’s a thought. Use them to avoid damage. Don’t know what damage to use them against? Get better at seeing the important animations and your surroundings.
Get better at breaking line of sight and rotating cooldowns.
Use your heal any time it is required, whether that be for condition removal or because you actually need a heal. Worst case, you need a heal and it’s merely compensating for the incoming damage and no more, but that’s cool, cause when it’s done you can switch into water if it was on cooldown and pop cleansing water/cone of cold. Either way, it’s buying you valuable seconds of life for bigger heals to come off cooldown, or survival utilities, or positioning cooldowns that will allow you to put the pressure on them and force them to turtle. Always be looking for an opening to turn the tables (you won’t always get one, but you can’t just go into super turtle mode forever, it’s a stalling tactic while you’re waiting for cooldowns). Worst comes to worst, buy time for RtL and gtfo, if you absolutely can’t turn it around. Duck and dive, dodge and weave, twist and turn, move. Don’t just stand there like a dumbstruck idiot and eat damage to the face.
If you’re waiting for burst cooldowns to come up, line of sight while you do so. there’s no point in eating damage from someone while you plink away at them for 2k lightning whip hits or something. Use the time to pop a heal, or waste one of their cooldowns, or whatever. Just don’t eat damage to the face all the time. It’s stupid.
Anyway. Damage.
In a perfect world, your opening combo will look like this.
Start in Air.
Rtl -> Updraft (procs swiftness) -> Shocking Aura (swiftness/fury)
Switch to Fire (gain might)
Burning Speed -> Drakes Breath (1-2 ticks, you’re only putting it on for the fire grabe burst) -> Fire Grab -> Ring of Fire.
Switch to Earth (protection) (You’re still on top of them, right?)
Earthquake (might)-> (optional Ring of Earth) -> Churning Earth (might)
A splitsecond after you start casting Churning earth,
Switch to Water (regen, clears a condition)
Armour of Earth (protection, stability, regen, vigor, clears a condition)
Pop Frost Aura if you think it’ll help.
A half second before Churning Earth cast finishes, Lightning Flash onto targets face if they moved out of range (clears a condition, more regen and vigor).
Twat them for a reasonably large number when churning earth goes off.
Go try it against the test dummies in the mists. Knock the heavy golem towards the medium golem with updraft and combo from there. Practice until you can kill every one of those golems simultaneously inside the above combo (light golem normally has about 40% hp remaining and the CE bleeds take care of the rest).
Obviously that’s ideal, but that’s a lot of damage spread over 5-6 seconds, and giving them very little time to react, with multiple built in redundancies. Of the boons you give yourself, you’re rocking 6-7 when churning earth goes off. 14% more damage. You have at least 10 stacks of might, depending on what point in the fight you’re at (if you pull off the combo mid way through an engagement you could probably have a few more stacks), 20% more crit chance, 5% more damage permanently from Runes (because there are no points in combat where you won’t have Might up), and a whole bunch of other beneficial effects cycling through. Either way, that’s about as close to hitting like a truck as we come with D/D. It certainly doesn’t rival thief burst, and it’s harder to execute due to the length and the small window within which it needs to be performed, but it hits very very hard. You’ll force a reasonable amount of your opponents just to immediately go super turtle to survive. A good portion of them you’ll just kill outright (lol, thieves), and the usual super tanky suspects won’t bat an eyelid, but you’re dealing with that no matter what build you play as ele, so little point complaining.
Potaters!
Mistform is your ‘oh bugger’ button. Get jumped by something that’ll probably kill you before cooldowns come back? Mistform.
Need to flag a guardian/ranger/warrior/engy/necro and armour of earth is down? Mistform.
The cooldown seems long, but if you’re playing the build right, there actually aren’t very many times when you really need it. Only a small portion of my deaths have been a result of mistform being down when I needed it up.
Anyway, I’ll see about putting some video’s up at some point, but basically the best way to learn it is going to be to put yourself in a borderline survivable situation and try and play your way out of it. In time you’ll get a more intuitive grip of what you can and can’t deal with, and how far that base toughness really goes if you use it to it’s maximum potential.
Some people are gonna be all ‘wtf why you use Bolt to the Heart omg what!’, and the reasoning is as follows. I’m aware that it’s actually not that great (we don’t really need to do 20% more damage to people below 25% because our burst skills hit hard enough to kill them below 25% anyway), but the singular reason it’s in the build is because it helps when dealing with toughness heavy builds. It’s not like it’s terrible against a bunch of stuff, but it really only equates to about 5% more damage over the course of a fight, and that’s not really too impressive. So yeah, pretty much to lend a little extra pressure on tanky builds when they drop down to that level of HP. It’s about the only place to put 10pts that doesn’t cost me more damage than it gains. If Lingering Elements actually worked, I’d put 10 points into 10% more damage in fire, but it doesn’t, so I can’t.
WvW stuff
Playstyle isn’t really much different, and apparently 99% of the people who play WvW are terrible or undergeared, so it works pretty well if you know what you’re doing. I’ve won a number of 1v2’s, 1v3’s, and had long marathon treks trailing multiple enemy realm dudes around huge area’s of the WvW zones because they’re kind enough to proc my swiftness off the Pack runes when they arrow me. That said, I mostly play solo and just look for small parties that have been cut off from their zergs. It’s probably going to be much less effective if you’re one of the 50man drone squad PvE’ing doors down, so for that, stick with your staff (or whatever you guys use – I guess it doesn’t really matter).
PvE -
Easy.
If your gear is decent enough, and you’re a decent enough player, your build really doesn’t matter that much for PvE. That’s why mine isn’t really perfectly optimized for it (I can’t be bothered switching traits every time I want to run around the borderlands). If I was going pure PvE I’d drop 10 points out of Air and put them into Fire, for the +10% damage in Fire trait, and move Bolt to the Heart down to the 10pt Air trait (because it’s kitten for bosses and stuff)
Anyway, Might stacking in PvE is easy.
Ring of Fire, Phoenix (3), Arcane Wave (3), Swap to Earth (3), Earthquake (3), Churning Earth (3) (if you’re not in range to actually hit anything with it, just immediately cancel). That’s 15 stacks right there, just from your own blast finishing. That moves up to 18stacks 10 seconds after you swapped to earth, and shortly after that some of your fire skills will be back off cd, so you can alternate between your finishers in earth/fire to maintain stacks and build a couple more for a short period. You should be able to mainting about 15-18 stacks fairly consistently, and sometimes if the rotation goes just perfect, or you’re playing with people who know how to take advantage of them, you’ll manage to get spiked up to 24-25. All pretty simple stuff. Damage is pretty kitten solid. I’m sure you could push it higher, but you’re easily pulling your weight with that setup, so (from my pvp focussed perspective) it’s pretty cool the way it is.
I bust the staff out for lupicus and the tree bosses in TA because it makes life easier. Pretty simple to just drop the aoe’s and some fireballs, and since they’re mostly fairly long fights, your own damage doesn’t have to be super maxed. Lupicus assumes you’re doing Arah with people who aren’t failures – you’re not going to be able to carry a group, but it’s pretty easy to lob fireballs at the big wolf zombie thing and concentrate on dodging the arbitrarily dangerous ground bits.
I’m sure there’s more I could add, but this’ll do for now. It’s taken me like, an hour and a half or more to write the kitten thing.
Potaters!
1v1’s don’t make tpvp, not saying I’m an expert by any stretch of the imagination but pretty sure if you are in a fight with more than 1-2 people if they focus you, you are more of a hinderance to your team than a benefit seeing as how fast you could potentially drop due to the lack of base toughness and healing power. (ignoring the fact that ele’s are light armor and have the lowest base hp)
This is just my opinion, If you can excel with it then props to you and congrats but I just can’t imagine this being viable in paid tourneys.
Elementalist – Isle of Janthir
(edited by Scyndek.5273)
This is nice but I play a Staff Ele.
It’s not really a build designed for Paid Tourneys (which is somethign I have no problem admitting). Paid tourneys with good team mates certainly allow a lot more team oriented builds and setups, but this is more aimed at a more generalised, self-sufficient playstyle (free tourneys/8v8/etc), where you maybe can’t rely on your team mates to cover for your weaknesses like you could in a proper super hardcore group. Like probably the vast vast majority of people play. Lets face it, Paid tourneys are hardly a beacon of activity right now, and with the metagame the way it was pre-patch, I honestly had zero desire to participate, because I knew what every competing team would consist of, and it’s boring as hell to play with, and against.
I think you’d be surprised just how far base toughness can stretch when you factor protection/regen/vigor, and our mobility into things. It relies on you playing it pretty balls out to put them on the defensive at the start of the engagement, so the support of your team mates to either keep the momentum rolling, or simply to provide some target saturation is somewhat important.
If you’re able to break line of sight and manage cooldowns well, you can hold off people for a while, though it’s obviously dependant on their skill and builds, but the build itself is well rounded enough to cover for most eventualities. It’s not anything close to bunker durability, but you can generally run around and play the avoidance dance to the point where you make it very difficult to draw a bead on you, so they move on to another, perceived easier target. Dealing with Rtl/Updrafts/Burning Speed/Magnetic Grasp/Lightning Flash can be very disorienting sometimes, but it probably also helps that I’m a tiny little Asura dude yoda’ing around the screen.
Potaters!
(edited by Arc.9374)
Berserker amu/gem, strength runes
Has 0 sustain in a team fight, dmg output would be great if you were alive to do it.
Any thief that’s even half aware of their surroundings will never get hit by your opener. Simple shortbow 3 at the end of your RtL means you wasted 2 cooldowns, disengaged from melee range and are now crippled.
Never seen anyone make berserker amu/gem work in tournaments. If someone has video footage of it working vs decent people, do please post. I just never seen it happen.
To be honest if you want to make this build tournament viable, just switch to a valks amulet, all you miss out on is the precision and vitality, but in exchange you get a TON of survival ability. I have tried MANY times to get berserkers amulet to work for me but it completely kills any chance for long sustained fights. Sure you can play like a burst glass cannon, run in with your combo and then run away with RTL or blink when you get focused, but then you have to ditch the point, losing you the game.
I also noticed that between the Berserkers and valks amulet, 1v1s against my necro buddy change drastically. Sure you can say that this game is not balanced for 1v1, but the amount of sustain I lose when using the zerkers amulet is too huge to ignore, even when using 30 water 30 arcane and 3 cantrips.
I could make it work, but it is not the playstyle I prefer on elementalist.
I honestly normally find Ether Renewal to be good enough to keep me in the fight vs Necro’s. Don’t really have much of a problem with them. 1v1 I normally last long enough to wear them down. It may be a little more sketchy compared to a more defensive amulet, and I’m not denying that the build has a very glasslike lean, but I personally prefer the flying by the seat of your pants approach. Makes things more interesting, and contrary to what a lot of people would have other people believe, it’s not a guaranteed recipe for a trip to the respawn timer. I rarely die in 8v8 (not like that really matters), and when I go down in tourneys I can mostly point to faults in my play, moreso than any inherent problem with the build.
I guess you could say that about any build, and there’s certainly a lot of homogeny to Ele builds at the minute (I mean, it’s really not that far off standard – some gear tweaks and some utility tweaks, and maybe 10 traits points assigned somewhere they aren’t normally), but it’s worth checking out if people are interested in a more aggressive playstyle, assuming they’re willing to play a bit riskier for the payoff.
Potaters!
I don’t suppose your hiding any staff builds too are you? XD
I honestly normally find Ether Renewal to be good enough to keep me in the fight vs Necro’s. Don’t really have much of a problem with them. 1v1 I normally last long enough to wear them down. It may be a little more sketchy compared to a more defensive amulet, and I’m not denying that the build has a very glasslike lean, but I personally prefer the flying by the seat of your pants approach. Makes things more interesting, and contrary to what a lot of people would have other people believe, it’s not a guaranteed recipe for a trip to the respawn timer. I rarely die in 8v8 (not like that really matters), and when I go down in tourneys I can mostly point to faults in my play, moreso than any inherent problem with the build.
I guess you could say that about any build, and there’s certainly a lot of homogeny to Ele builds at the minute (I mean, it’s really not that far off standard – some gear tweaks and some utility tweaks, and maybe 10 traits points assigned somewhere they aren’t normally), but it’s worth checking out if people are interested in a more aggressive playstyle, assuming they’re willing to play a bit riskier for the payoff.
Well using Ether Renewal is pretty much an auto win against condition Necros, unless they are smart enough to fear you so it breaks the channel, but since you can use it with mist form or armour of earth they cannot stop it anymore and it just becomes stupid. I never really liked the idea of ether renewal, but now that they buffed it, It might be worth taking, though not really if you have 30 in water and a cantrip build, which gives you enough cleanses as it is.
Sure you can wreck people in hotjoins with this build, and with the addition of 5v5 hot joins it is probably even more viable there, but valks will let you heal to full multiple times in a single fight even if the enemy is keeping up pressure.
We could fight 1v1 and “prove” that one choice is better, but that really will not prove anything since skill difference would have to be considered.
Also, the only reason I decided to make this post is I think it is a bad idea to recommend such squishy build to other eles. It would greatly increase the thief QQ if if they are “nerfed” now.
The thing with relying on cantrips for your condition removal, especially against necro’s, is that it forces you to burn a couple of them when they corrupt boons, and I don’t think burning cantrips in addition to water switching is the best use of cooldowns when dealing with that kind of situation, since it pretty much bones your condition removal for anything that comes after the corrupt boons that you just cleared off. Ether Renewal basically makes you immune to conditions. It’s actually borderline broken, and only balanced by the fact it’s channelled. Caltrops Thief? Yeah, I’m just gonna go ahead and channel off the damage your doing while you death blossom over my head, and clear the conditions as you apply them, so things aren’t gonna go so well when you run out of inititative and have a couple of bleed stacks up and I’m still at 85% health with most of my meaty cooldowns available. I actually can’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t use it in PvP, unless they were using some weird signet/quickglyphs/written in stone build to take advnatage of the double passive effect on SoR, or really really couldn’t live without the utility from GoEH.
It’s not just a hotjoin/pubstomping build. While the team I played with gave up on the game shortly before Paid Tourneys came out, we did do quite a bit of free tourneys before then, and it was more than capable of holding it’s own. Sure, there were times where their entire team was at graveyard and focussed me down, but that happens everyone occasionally. I’m not trying to paint a golden picture of the build and how it’s invulnerable to all but the most skilled players or overwhelming numbers, but in the cases where you have time to react when being focussed you just get out and come back when your opponents are distracted with someone else. They can either waste valuable time and manpower chasing for the kill, or put that damage to use on a target in the immediate vicinity. I get out, some cooldowns come back up, I go back in when the safety net is there to get me out again if they switch back.
On the ‘not very friendly to new players’ aspect of your post, I don’t disagree.
I’ve long maintained that the best way to actually learn how to play something (if you’re serious about it) is to first learn how to survive, and then it’ll be really easy to learn how to do damage with it once you’ve got to grips with not dying.
It’s not some easymode faceroll to victory build, but it’s rewarding if played well, and punishing if played badly. If people play it badly and can’t hack constant death, then they either need to improve, or pick up a build that gives them some extra crutches, but that’s not a fault of the build; it’s a fault of the players.
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying at all, and this build certainly dances along that razors edge of survivability, but it’s pretty amazing just how far that survivability can stretch if you manage to do it right.
Potaters!