Guild Wars 2

So continuing to play with scepter I will give my thoughts on each skill.

Fire:

Flamestrike: Servicable but feels underwhelming. A slightly faster channel (1s) or a slightly longer base duration might make this feel a little better.

Dragon’s Tooth: This is a great skill for stationary targets. Hit’s hard in a small AOE and causes burning too. However the delay on it is a bit too great for more than easy PVE targets. It badly needs about a full second delay reduction even if it means a slight damage nerf. I hesitate to suggest ground targetting since this has it’s own “flavor”.

Pheonix: An overall fantastic skill that suffers the same problems as Dragon’s Tooth, but with a far longer recharge. Thie Phoenix needs to travel about 50% faster.

Ice:

Ice Shard: There is absolutely no reason to use this. It needs more damage, vulnerability, chill, or bleeding. Give it SOMETHING, because currently it’s just terrible. Maybe make it a 20% projectile finisher. That could help a bit considering it’s 3 projectiles each cast.

Shatterstone: Terrible skill. Decent damage, long vulnerability, terrible delay. This either needs a full second off of it’s delay or it needs to gain chill.

Water Trident: Underwhelming skill. It gives a small boost to healing and some mediocre damage. It needs more. Make it remove a condition or add regeneration IMO. That would make it a solid skill again.

Air:

Arc Lightning: I feel this is roughly where it should be on DPS after the multi-target update, but it just doesn’t feel fluid and good. The nerf to crit-based effects hit Arc-Lightning heavily and it really feels the internal timers. I’d say it could use a slightly faster channel to feel more fluid. 3 seconds instead of 3 1/2 would be a nice start. That’s not a big DPS increase but it’ll make it feel alot more satisfying.

Lightning Strike: Overall good skill. I like it and have no suggestions for it.

Blinding Flash: A decent skill being a blind on a low CD, but it feels like it could use a little more oomph. Give it a small radius, like 120 or 180.

Earth:

Stone Shards: A great skill overall my only complain is that it feels ssssooooo SLOW. I think this would feel better if you reduced the channel to 1 sec (down from 1 1/2) and reduced the damage and bleed damage by 33% to compensate. Also it needs like a 20% projectile speed increase.

Rock Barrier: Good skill in concept, bad skill in practice. The duration is too short and the DPS from Hurl is not good enough to warrant using except to preload a fight. To make this a more usable skill it needs to be instant or at the very least 1/2 second instead of a full second. Either that or double the duration to 60 seconds.

Dust Devil: Serviceable line blind. It’s decent but it could really use a slightly larger radius that it hits in. Also, where the heck is the whirl finisher on this? This is a whirl finisher if I ever saw one.

Overall Scepter isn’t bad, but it’s not quite up to par. Still I’d like to see it improved.

Edit: Added projectile finisher suggestion to Ice Shards,

It requires more skill to be great with the scepter at pvp specially against good players. Those skills you are saying that are not so good (like ice shard for example which can give vul btw) are actually really great assets in the hands of skillful players with the scepter.

Ice shard doesn’t give vulnerability unless you have 25 air minor trait or 25 arcana minor trait.

As for Hurl, it’s a 100% 5 combo finishers, sometime it finds its usage justified.

haviz.1340:

Ice shard doesn’t give vulnerability unless you have 25 air minor trait or 25 arcana minor trait.

As for Hurl, it’s a 100% 5 combo finishers, sometime it finds its usage justified.

That’s why I said it can be useful for starting a battle. However mid battle the DPS loss from casting hurl mitigates whatever gains you achieve. Furthermore once activated they cannot be stopped, thus leaving you vulnerable to have your own flaming rocks reflected back into you.

Additionally most fields outside of the Asura racial are extremely short lived. by the time you cast say flame wall or ring of fire, switch attunements, and cast rock barrier you’ve exhausted half the fields life cycle. This means to gain the finishers you must start in earth, THEN cast rock barrier, THEN switch out, THEN lay down the field when you are in fire (within 30 seconds!!), THEN switch back and hurl.

Very cumbersome for a marginal gain.

There was a video of a scepter user not too far back that used Hurl in combination with switching to Air to create a massive instant spike. Combined with the combo finishers bit, it gave me a new insight into the skill.

ThiBash.5634:

There was a video of a scepter user not too far back that used Hurl in combination with switching to Air to create a massive instant spike. Combined with the combo finishers bit, it gave me a new insight into the skill.

I can see that if you did what I just posted and combod it with double lightning strike (one from the passive), and Arcane Blast. But that is a rather niche situation and as an Air Scepter ele let me assure you that 95% of that damage was not hurl. Also both Arcane Blast and Hurl are rather easy to see coming on a 1 on 1 and should be dodged, avoided, blocked, or reflected by good players. Specifically since the combo field + rock armor practically screams “I’m going to use hurl within 5 seconds!!”.

Kind of like when someone used Ride the Lightning at me there is a 90% chance he is going to try and use updraft if he enters melee range.

True, it’s a niche but at the same time, could be used in a non-burst build to finish off a player. The main thing I wanted to emphasize is that there’s more to the skill than you’d think at first glance. For me at least, that’s the case.

You can of course make use of other’s combo fields too. The thing is that if used correctly, the skill can do quite a bit more than just provie a bit of toughness.

Ralathar.7236:

Additionally most fields outside of the Asura racial are extremely short lived. by the time you cast say flame wall or ring of fire, switch attunements, and cast rock barrier you’ve exhausted half the fields life cycle. This means to gain the finishers you must start in earth, THEN cast rock barrier, THEN switch out, THEN lay down the field when you are in fire (within 30 seconds!!), THEN switch back and hurl.

Very cumbersome for a marginal gain.

You should have rock barrier at the start of the battle.

Tried it several times and some of the skills are decent, espcially the air skills, but overall it just feels like I’m giving up to much from dagger.

Ralathar.7236:

ThiBash.5634:

There was a video of a scepter user not too far back that used Hurl in combination with switching to Air to create a massive instant spike. Combined with the combo finishers bit, it gave me a new insight into the skill.

I can see that if you did what I just posted and combod it with double lightning strike (one from the passive), and Arcane Blast. But that is a rather niche situation and as an Air Scepter ele let me assure you that 95% of that damage was not hurl. Also both Arcane Blast and Hurl are rather easy to see coming on a 1 on 1 and should be dodged, avoided, blocked, or reflected by good players. Specifically since the combo field + rock armor practically screams “I’m going to use hurl within 5 seconds!!”.

Kind of like when someone used Ride the Lightning at me there is a 90% chance he is going to try and use updraft if he enters melee range.

You should have rock armor up all the time, so anyone dodging every time they see a combo field may evade some of your hurls, but they will be drained of endurance, so just hold back another second before bursting in air+arcane. Adapt. Don’t be that guy who always opens with RTL>updraft.

For a clinical 1v1, I generally start in earth and just get rock barrier up, maybe throw a dust devil to bait a dodge. Into fire for a DT which generally forces a dodge or at least a position change, then when I see what direction they head, throw my phoenix there (lead a bit), basically feeling them out and trying to force dodges before using RoF or flame grab. The idea is to hang out in fire if possible, applying burns and forcing heal/dodge uses, then catch them on the back foot with a RoF-hurl-(channel rock barrier and immediately swap to air)-attunement/lightningstrikes-RtL-arcane burst which can be completed in the space of a couple seconds. Those sort of fights are pretty rare though, so there’s usually even more fields around to combo hurl off anytime.

nothing.7941:

Tried it several times and some of the skills are decent, espcially the air skills, but overall it just feels like I’m giving up to much from dagger.

I started on S/D before D/D was the “fotm”, so maybe I’m more used to it’s flow or something, but I find it as generally useful as mainhand dagger.

Mainhand dagger is great against backstab thieves, which were a lot more popular a few months ago than they are now (in tier 2 WvW anyway), but the current flavor of necros, mesmers and even engineers (probably rangers soon too, once more people figure out how powerful some of their builds are) are pretty much a hard counter to D/D.

Some of those builds can facetank a D/D elementalist (bunker build anyway) but don’t fare nearly as well against S/D or even S/F.