Guild Wars 2

I’m using a berserker lightning hammer build. The damage is stupidly good and the build functions well enough in dungeons. Except it doesn’t everywhere else, particularly wvw or pvp.

You have the lightning hammer which is the only weapon that does some damage. And it’s damage is tied to its auto, which requires you to sit in water attunement and have a target with vulnerability and burning on them.

This conjure is easily kited — it has one leap, and a stun field with a cast time. It has no root or cripple. So practically, this is a dead weapon in pvp right from the beginning — you have paper thin defense but no way to reliably deliver your high damage.

When an ele gets a conjure up, he pretty much gives all of his survival skills up. If you use a conjure like the ice bow to gain control, you do no damage since the frost bow auto is worthless, as is the rapid fire. It’s only worth it for the barrage and freeze.

The ele conjure weapons need to be made more selfsufficient, or builds supporting these conjures need to have way better traits to compensate for giving up your matrix of skills.

As it is, you only use a single conjure (lightning hammer) to turret DPS against pve AI, and that’s it. The fiery greatsword is also use in wvw for mobility.

Ele damage in general if you’re not playing a boon-reliant water/arcana bunker/hybrid build is pretty kitten terrible, so our build options are very limited, and our survivability is too tied to cantrips and boon abuse. If you don’t have boon duration runes or traits designed to grant boons, your base survival is terrible.

I’m actually wondering what ele builds are going to do when they implement boon punishment — it’s going to bring into the forefront the flaws of the class that were masked by the overall strengths of boons and builds designed to abuse them.

lupercaleb.6041:

conjured weapons typically have a situational use. i figure an elementalist to be thinking ahead to set up using a conjured weapon’s skills and then drop it

like dropping some area of effect spells and using the earth shield’s pull to draw your foes in and turn invulnerable while they hammer on you and sit in your damage

or perhaps in reverse, the lightning hammer’s blowout is a good opportunity to lay down some lava font dragon tooth hurt

There simply isn’t reason to take Conjures over Cantrips or even Arcane utilities – you lose too much defense and/or offense while using them, and they’re incredibly awkward to boot. (60/180 second recharge times when you’re going to drop them shortly after conjuring them, the Lightning Hammer isn’t really able to stay on a moving target, etc.)

Also, the Lightning Hammer’s blowout doesn’t last enough to follow up with something like Dragon’s Tooth. You’d need to use its Static Field, but even then you may as well take Signet of Earth for the shorter cooldown and greater range.

Yup, and the thing is you have to specialize for a build with the trait in fire and the multipliers from water trait and fire to make conjure lightning hammer work, which means when you’re not using the conjure you’re actually handicapped, since obviously you will never use normal water attunement skills (terrible damage) and by switching attunements you lose the 20% damage against vulnerable targets, and without the lightning hammer ele sustained is pretty bad by comparison.

You can get easily 10k crits with 25 stacks of might on conjure hammer auto — not even lightning whip will come close to that auto’s output.

goep in earth gives cripple on some spellcasts (and chill in water), maybe that’d help :p

Zenith.7301:

I’m using a berserker lightning hammer build.

I found your problem, and I didn’t even have to read past the first sentence to find it.

If you’re profession has both the lowest armor and the lowest health pool in the game and you’re going to make a build around conjuring melee weapons, wouldn’t you be better served investing in some knight’s or soldier’s gear?

To the larger point, not all skill-types are useful in all situations. Turrets, for example, make for poor choices for roaming engineers.

darkace.8925:

Zenith.7301:

I’m using a berserker lightning hammer build.

I found your problem, and I didn’t even have to read past the first sentence to find it.

If you’re profession has both the lowest armor and the lowest health pool in the game and you’re going to make a build around conjuring melee weapons, wouldn’t you be better served investing in some knight’s or soldier’s gear?

To the larger point, not all skill-types are useful in all situations. Turrets, for example, make for poor choices for roaming engineers.

How’s that different from a thief spamming black powder?