Guild Wars 2

LieutenantGoogle.7326:

And yes its a build with surviability and mobility as its most important aspect, problem is that is has NO counters at all, you can’t stop a ele that is in the middle of your group from escape if he or she had half a brain about what a ele can do.

And he if the group had half brain he didn’t even get the chance to deal any significant amount of damage. Again, what’s the problem with that? That guy specced heavily into being able to pull such stuff, so why shouldn’t he? On the other hand, I’ve seen glass cannon thieves jumping into the middle of a group, bursting one down, and then making it out alive np.

Red Falcon.8257:

In the current broken state there is little you can do vs D/D Ele.
It’s not really just the damage/control which you can negate, you can match their speed with the proper tools, and you can even plow through Protection and shields.
But it’s the fact they can heal massive amounts and self-rally during mist that will simply have them out-last you unless you can too heal up a whole healthbar in seconds or rally on your own.
Just wait until next patch lands, Anet is aware of this hole and will fix it.

heal massive amounts?self rally in mist form?? (wasnt that fixed :S)
Anyway theres an easy fix..Rtl distance covered affected by chill an cripple.You have a set speed thats affected my movement reduction and you just move for a set amount of time.Rtl on crippled ele would be 600 range isntead 1200.
But if we are gonna go that far i except a heavy nerf on thieves escapes..You really cant believe that you can catch a thief in an open area if he is has a functional brain and a not messed up build..
But come on Anet..whats gonna be butchered?Mobility or heals?I would hope we get to keep our mobility or else i reroll to thief..apparently their mobility/escapes is nerf proof

And yeah red falcon you appear to be quite ignorant of the ele class as in total..
I have my thief parked in the mists when i want to find why i failed to counter one in a fight..I advise you to do the same with ele.
(If you dont have enough char slots then blame anet and their evil b2p system :P )

I play both mesmer and d/d ele and here’s what i think:

As a mesmer, i usually have no problems killing a d/d ele (yes, mesmer have probably the best boon removal in the game). They have a decent toughness and some hp but they rely on regen and protection for survivability and their damage isn’t just enough to be a danger if you can keep them in the distance (again, that’s not hard with mes, we have some nice mobility too through blink, sword 3, staff 2). Get rid of regen and protection and it’s almost done.

As a d/d ele (i’m running a classical 0/10/0/30/30 with soldier gear + healing and boon duration runes and jewel) i can easily kill basically every glasscannon class, though i can’t kill bunkers nor brained people who can avoid a ring of fire or escape a churning earth. So how can you defeat a skilled d/d ele without being a shatter mesmer? Well, it depends a lot on what you mean by “defeating”. If you are a bunker guardian, you have no way of killing it. But you’ll probably have more knockbacks than he has (actually we have just air 5 and it’s on a very long cooldown), you’ll throw him out of the point and in spvp he’ll be forced to change point.
People say that d/d ele has too means of escape. Well, if he escapes you have defeated him, right?

My point is: there are different ways of defeating a class. d/d ele focus a lot on his survival but much less on his damage output (which is largely based on easily avoidable aoes imo, if you get hit by a churning earth or a ring of fire, if you take 100% of a dragon breath, if you keep being stunned by air 3 aura..well you’re doing it wrong).
Imo (well, here you’ll all say “ofc you play d/d ele”) there’s no need of a nerf here. We are just facing a different bunker build and most of the people has yet to understand how to counter it. It’s aoe damage and it’s healing skills make the d/d ele a different bunker from a usual guardian, people just need to spend more time 1v1 with a d/d friend that writing here on the forum imo..

And oh, i forgot a thing..(someone just said it earlier but i think it has to be repeated)

If you have played less than..let’s say, 10 hours with a class, you are not ready to go on the forum and cry “OP! OP! Can’t be countered!”
Providing that you learn very quick, 10 hours are the least you need to fully understand a class (and when i say “fully” i mean that you know every single choice you have, every single boon you can get during a fight and so on)

I had no idea on how to counter a mesmer with my thief ad the beginning. I rolled a mesmer (and i loved it so much it became my main char but that’s another story^^) and suddenly all it’s secrets were revealed.
I think i have now 300+ hours of pvp on gw2 and 1/3 of my cake graph is violet, around 1/4 is elementalist and the other is almost equally distributed on other classes.

Believe me, you won’t be able to counter skilled people if you never played their class.

makku.2508:

LieutenantGoogle.7326:

And yes its a build with surviability and mobility as its most important aspect, problem is that is has NO counters at all, you can’t stop a ele that is in the middle of your group from escape if he or she had half a brain about what a ele can do.

And he if the group had half brain he didn’t even get the chance to deal any significant amount of damage. Again, what’s the problem with that? That guy specced heavily into being able to pull such stuff, so why shouldn’t he? On the other hand, I’ve seen glass cannon thieves jumping into the middle of a group, bursting one down, and then making it out alive np.

Its a build that requires 3+ people to even consider killing. And is always a threat to a group of less than 3. It’s not about specing fully into defense and saying “oh I spec fully into defensive like traits, my damage is low” No your damage is still moderate, you can still kill glass cannons even with a full bunker build and if they aren’t glass cannon then they can forget about even trying to kill a D/D ele.

For thieves admittedly stealth is a bit broken especially in WvW, but the conversation is about where D/D eles stand as a whole over all the builds in the game and no matter how you look at it, its way over the top.

We have the healing of a bunker engineer and better control removal than one also mind you, with better crowd control than a hammer warrior, with the escaping capabilities of a thief and the damage of a melee class cladded in knght gear. Even if you browse the sPVP forums you’ll see how much of a problem D/D eles pose due to their shier arsenal of skills, it doesn’t take much effort to keep a point contested against two people in sPvP or WvW.

^d/d cant hold a point against 2 other dps builds..im sorry but you are wrong..
Dont twist the facts or believe the things you hear left and right..D/d is a defencive roamer that can burst respectably and has great group utility .
In eu what was/is still being used a lot is the clerics s/d bunker which is a far better bunker due to the second burst heal in water.
Both the valkyries and the clerics setups completely melt down against 2 of the right classes like rangers/engies/necros/mesm.
Sure you can rtl the heck out of there but then the node is lost.1 ele in a team is actually fine and manageable by most current meta compositions..
In any case if you think it doesnt take any effort to hold against to people in 40+rank pvp then well ..you should start playing more :P

I play a staff ele (carrion/pvt). I had a couple of time defeating d/d ele with the help of another guild mate (usually warrior), all thanks to the opponent being conceited. In my experience, I usually get targeted first and the DD ele seems dead set to down me while tanking the warrior. However, if I can stall the fight while chipping away his health and if the dd ele does not bug off then he will be killed effortlessly.

With staff, I can provide frost armor, healing, condition removing, stability to my ally and maintain invulnerable whenever my healing is on cd. I can also give chill, criple, burning, daze, bleeding, and have an extra dodge and knock-down. I pay attention to maintain good amount of HP/armor while timing my burst skill when his healing is on cd right after draining up all his utility skill first.

D/D eles they must be OP!!!!. I play D/D ele and get torn apart by my friends S/D build (by torn apart I mean it is a close fight, but he wins and can full heal straight after).

It has been said many times, time your immobolizes, they destroy D/D eles. A well timed imob will stop a 1k heal and if he is in water at the time then changes before the dodge then he will have blown all his healing capability for 9-10 seconds except the healing signet.

Poison is also effective. Watch out for the condition removal though, agian learning the animations, knowing what skills he has cast and how long they will be gone for is your best bet.

I’ll suggest heading to Dapheonix’s D/D guide, creating an ele then trying that build out for yourself. Get used to the CDs and learn the rotations that most people do (read my part on unconventional attacks but not many people stray from the usual rotation). This will help you. GW2 PvP in a 1on1 isn’t about playing your character, its about out playing your oppenent and knowing what they are capable of and what they might do next is a great help.

I dont think Ele D/D is overpowert all Bunker speccs are some kind of equal , if Ele is OP all Bunkers are.
And i dont think Bunkers should be nerfed cause if they nerf Bunker GW is going to be a nice oneshot fest with only glass cannons where thiefs and mesmer are the kings of pvp with no counter at all.
All Bunkers have something VERY good:
Ele > Mobility
Guardian > ae denial or very good support
Ranger > very well roundet the DMG is not this easy to counter in compare to Guardian and Ele, he has some kind of Mobility and support as well.

Well thats the Bunker speccs i play and can speak of and i feel like Ranger Bunker Build is mutch Stronger than Ele.
The Swiftness on Pet switch is insane
The Burst with Pet switch+ cds is more like a glass cannon burst
The “Ultimate” skills are mutch stronger than the Ele skills.

And for the Greatsword is one of the best Ranger weapons if you think it suxx you should look at the other weapons.
Axt > trash only good for bad ae and jea for a must have main hand for Warhorn.
Longbow > extrem trash shortbow 1 is stronger than the whole bow most of the time.
Sword 1h > nice but the “selfroot” on 1 is a big downside.
shortbow > one of the best Ranger weapons.
Greatsword > 3 good mobility and leap finisher 4 good defence 5 stun only 2 is bad so overall Greatsword is a really nice second weapon.

My weapon setups are 1h sword +dagger and axt + Horn for sPvP and Greatsword + Shortbow for WvW

Seriously I don’t know why we have all this hate toward D/D eles when S/D eles are much better bunkers. We built this way to try and nullify some of the rediculous burst there was and now that a 1 shot pony combo doesn’t work on us we’re op. There are builds availible that tear D/Ds apart, boon striping, and don’t just say that only certain classes get it, everyone can get the 60% on crit to remove a boon every 10 sec (not ideal but still if you look to other avenus then pure damage you might find something of worth).

Elementalist is the most fun class I’ve played in any game to date. Zipping around the battlefield, a mage tank, an Avatar.

We got a huge damage nerf in the betas, take away my tankiness and give me back my burst and I will be happy. The next day, Glass cannon Eles are op, they can 1 shot me Q.O

It is popular to hate eles currently. It’s a fad.

Roll a necro.

And immobilize is a kitten.

zTales.4392:

So you’re saying that all Elementalists should always have Fiery GS as their elite? Is that how you play the class right?

Apparently that and Cantrips as condition removal. One of those one build min max things I guess.

Shimond.2478:

er, what?

I’m ele.
He’s right. Sometimes my mist form in downed state rallies me without even anyone die closer. It’s a bug.

Lots of knockbacks and immobilizes can help against eles in 1v1. Today I took down a few of them as an engineer in wvw. I was messing around with gadget skills, and overcharge rifle, slick shoes and battering ram completely stopped them from doing any attacks on me, while the double speed and ram head tool belts that cripple made sure they couldn’t run away when they started to get low on hp. I forgot what my 3rd utility was though but the point is, sadly there aren’t enough Gadget engineers around to counter these builds. Let alone engineers at all.

(Mostly cause gadgets are overall horrible and situational)

Yes, CC spam, I second this, problem is that most of the time D/D Eles will outlast us and all the unpredictable tricks we may ever have, I’ve killed two of them in my life, one who was terribly bad, and the other one through a lamer’s trick which was to flee up to a cliff, pull with the magnet, change position, launch him off the cliff.

(I loved the ‘All bunkers have something really good!’ and it stops at Ele and Guardian)

I don’t have to much trouble taking a D/D Ele 1v1 though if they add on a fight i’ll probably die.

However otherwise 1v1 I usually win on my ranger.

However, at any point they could just choose to run and would be able to get away as I don’t have much in the way of catching them.

If I can get them fairly low before popping PI though it usually is enough to kill them before they can escape.

the problem with most people’s “suggested” nerf ideas, is they forget that bunker d/d ele is only 1 BUILD. Nerfs to mist form would affect all elementalists, including staff ele’s, and even a nerf to RTL distance would make a dps d/d ele worthless.

Most of these nerfs would force elementalists who aren’t currently using the bunker d/d to use it, and then there would be a lot more bunker eles.

As for the whole “can’t kill them because they run away”.. in sPvP i was under the impression that we were supposed to be capping points? If they ran away, that allows you to cap the point and win the game for your team!

There are lots of classes that have crazy escape abilities. Thief can turn invisible whenever they want. At least a bunker ele cant instagib you because they need points in toughness to survive. Guardian is also able to just walk away from a fight – and they have just as much healing as elementalists, if not more.

Yes, bunker ele can take on 2 other people at once, and thats a problem – but the nerf would have to only affect bunkers and not any other builds, because ele’s other builds are sub-par or balanced at best.

MagusShade.2358:

even a nerf to RTL distance would make a dps d/d ele worthless.

I don’t exactly agree with that. A nerf to rtl distance would mean dps eles still keep all their damage, with the only difference that it would make it that much harder to escape so easily when things went south.

Because I know that someone would probably point to thieves after I said that, thieves don’t count, they are the evil manifestation of mobility and stealth combined to make uberness, but thats for another thread. Every other class cannot escape so fast, and can be catchable if a person attempts to.

Edit: Actually maybe not even distance, just maybe how fast rtl travel is. You know its that good when a person can’t even keep up with 100% swiftness since the ele gets swiftness too and moves even further with rtl. At best maybe slightly faster than a swiftness buff

They key to stoping a D/D ele is being able to kill them before they realize the fight wont go their way and run away or as someone said earlier stripping there swiftness. I have killed many overconfident eles on my engi and mesmer.

Penguin.5197:

I don’t exactly agree with that. A nerf to rtl distance would mean dps eles still keep all their damage, with the only difference that it would make it that much harder to escape so easily when things went south.

dps eles need escapes because they havent bunkered and dont have toughness. If they cant escape as easily, they get burned into the ground. Harder to escape = no more people rolling dps d/d eles and every1 goes bunker >.<