Long time lurker here, and I recently started playing an Elementalist and browsing this section of the forums. I am definitely enjoying Elementlist more than warrior (mostly because it requires a pulse to play ), but one thing is proving extremely difficult, I can’t dodge worth kitten. Is there any way to improve this other than l2p? Any advice would help a lot.
Thanks in advance
EDIT: I apologize if my question was not very clear/specific, English is a second language to me and i always have a debate whether I should post anything because of this or not.
If your running evasive arcane your going to want to learn how to combo. For example if ur d/d, start in fire, throw down ring of fire and seitch to earth. While jn earth dodge roll in to the ring of fire and it will blast the field giving you might. Also if ur talking about dodging for mitigation the best way to practice would be to roll a s/d thief die to the fact that alot of their mitigation relies on dodging :p also since you came from war you know the skill hints… Hammer burst, axe burst, dtuff like that. dodge the vital stuff not just autos.
Learn your skills till they’re instinct. Then do some 1v1s and learn/watch the key skills that you need to dodge. Most people don’t know how to dodge well so that’s not really unusual.
Try to play so that you never dodge at random except as a reflex dodge (or evasive arcana of course).
For EA, whenever you find yourself dodging naturally, switch to whatever attunement you’ll need mid-dodge for the effect. Usually this will only be water.
Staying behind the boss is easier than reading tells. Its also less affected by lag. My advice is keep moving in a circle staying on the bosses’ butt at all times, its easier and works.
First order of business is learning to watch your opponent carefully. You could try practicing on an NPC. Just run around kiting them and press the dodge button the moment you see them do a wind-up animation (raise their sword over their head, etc). Learn their walk/run cycle animation and learn to notice when they switch from that animation to anything else. Average human reaction speed is 0.22 seconds. If you learn the common behavior patterns, you can predict what a PvE mob or even a player is about to do as much as 3+ seconds before they do it. Plenty of time, technically.
Best way to learn to dodge is the leveling process, if you do not abuse dungeon xp!
Basically each mob has a type. Each type has specific animations and similar skills. So when you encounter easy mobs as you level, focus on dodging. You will rapidly get the hang of it. Then when you get to real PvE encounters you will be prepared for all types of mobs.
For pvp purposes id say try playing a bit without evasive arcana. I think at least for me the added variable of having to dodge to get the effects on top of having to actually dodge to avoid an imoprtant attack was hard to process at same time.
In the end you just dodge randomly for evasive arcana and dont have endurance available for attacks that would do x3 times the damage you healed with water dodge.
Dodging effectively is like the highest skill cap goal of this game imo. Its not something that ll come fast or easy and you need a lot of knowledge of the other classes to do it.
And its not like you can bypass this slow process. If you already put down all important skills of your enemy and get a solid idea of what you have to dodge you still need to build it up in your memory so that you can do it without second thought..which means you need to play the fight mulitple times
I use both M4 and M5 mouse buttons for dodging (left buttons on the side) and I have a Logitech M510 wireless mouse. Hope that helps you out when deciding on keybinds for dodging.
I also dodge on a mouse sidebutton! I think doubletap only works well in games with unlimited dodges and no jumping puzzles. :P
Something I find really difficult is to dodge some open world pve bosses, just because there is so much spell effects engulfing the enemy you can’t even see some of their tells behind all of it. Otherwise i think only experience in facing the enemy whether pve or pvp can help you to make dodging calls.
Why is double tapping to dodge related to jumping puzzles??
Because if you are moving forward carefully and press W two or three times in a row (to move bit by bit), you might end up dodging instead… which often leads to falling down.
Aside from that, not using double-tapping also lets you dodge more fluently while moving, as you don’t have to release the movement-key to double-tap, which might save your life every now and then (due to the dodge happening faster).
I use the mousewheel for dodging (clicking it, not scrolling).
Try the Veteran Oakhearts. They have two or three anymations that you have to look out for and attack slow as dolyak. Plus their tells are HUGE.
The important part about learning to dodge is memorizing when the hit occurs in relation to what is going on animation-wise. The animation ‘impact’ is not always 100% in line with the timing of the spell. So you just have to learn it on a mob-by-mob basis imo.
//edith: yeah, definitely uncheck double-tap and bind a dodge key. I use E
A side mouse button. When you double tap to dodge in s/tPvP and WvW you many times guess when a big attack is coming when you have a mouse button ready you can dodge on demand when you see the actual attack coming like an eviscerate or burning speed. I used double tap for a long time probably up until december of last year for some reason when I made my engineer I was able to drop the habit. I still played decently with double tap dodges but you notice a big difference when you finally break the habit.
I’ve been using shift+s to dodge for over a year. A and D are strafe left and right.
If you aren’t getting enough vigor to dodge, you can get more from water and arcane skills, and energy sigil.
The big one attacks every 9’ish seconds so bring some extra immunities (i used staff fire #4). There is a ‘hiding spot’ where the respawning trash wurm don’t aggro and you can concentrate on the boss – unless you get hit by the big wurm even once, which by the way takes off ~80% of your HP. Plus the attack’s impact is quite a bit later than the animation suggests, so there’s that xD
[bragging warning :P]
I was level 30 or 31 at the time with average power/prec gear, so the fight was long enough for trash mobs to respawn. (I was actually hit by the big one when it was around 5% HP and another wurm aggro’ed. Luckily their attacks where somewhat syncronized so I could dodge both in one roll.)
), but one thing is proving extremely difficult, I can’t dodge worth kitten. Is there any way to improve this other than l2p? Any advice would help a lot.