Guild Wars 2

Rejoice. I have figured out the secret. After two months of theory crafting and trying every possible sigil, rune, trait, skill, amulets, and weapons set I could think of, I figured out the problem to the lackluster burst DPS our class suffers from. I have a build that brings back the cannon in glass cannon.

A little about me. I am currently spvp rank 25. I’ve attached a screen shot of my scores in the past week or so to prove that playing an elementalist properly can and does work! It just takes a bit of patience, practice, and knowledge of your enemies. My screen shot sucks so BLUF, I have top score in every frame. Some with the most kills.

Now on to the secret

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJAoYhImkblRygjEAkCoEKQg4xDW4QRxM5A;TsAg0Cno4ywlgLLXOukcNE5wxsAA

The problem is stacking power, precision, or condition doesn’t work.

Stacking power and precision = junk. You will blow cooldowns and never generate enough burst to take down an enemy fast enough before they heal back up.

Stacking Condition = junk. Most classes have multiple condition removals at their disposal. We stack on hardcore burn and bleed just to have an enemy remove it.

Hybrid = kitten. Not enough damage, health, toughness, or condition. To spread out. Results in lackluster performance leading to frustration.

Bunker = Works. But gets boring. Little damage output.

Power+Precision+%damage = Glass cannon

However, stacking raw %damage with precision and power will burst down most classes to a quarter health and instantly chain kill thieves and non-bunker elementalists.

I took 20 points in arcana because it gives about a 10sec attunement swap and with Zephyr Boon I can keep fury and swiftness up.

My build is 10/30/0/10/20

10% damage fire (in fire)
10% damage air (in air) + 20% below 25% health
5-10% damage above 90% health (water)(haven’t quite determined the amount on this trait)
10% damage above 90% health (scholar runes)
5% damage sigil of superior force
+3 might sigil of superior battle
+arcane wave + arcane blast
+Beserker Amulet/Jewel

This build brings back the cannon in glass cannon. I can instantly chain kill all thieves and elementalists (non-bunker), most engineers, most rangers, some warriors, few necros, few guardians, and few mesmers. However, if I don’t instantly chain kill a class, most classes will drop a third of their health. Bunker guardians and bunker elementalists I can drop to half health. keep in mind this is in 1vs1 situations. In group play its sick the damage I do.

How do you implement this build without getting killed with only 15k hp!?

1. Simple! kill them before they kill you! But use common sense! Patiently wait as your teammates engage the zerg first. Then pick out a thief, elementalist, ranger, engineer, warrior, mesmer, necro, guardian to kill (in that order).
a. thief or elementalist, Ride the lighting in. Use updraft, switch to fire, use burning speed, ring of fire, cast arcane wave+blast which will trigger 2 combos. If thief isn’t dead use fire grab. After grab, thief = dead.
b. ranger, engineer, warrior, repeat same as above except after ride the lightning, hit them with lightning whip, until their health drops to about 70% then updraft and repeat adding drakes breath if necessary.
c. mesmers, necro, guardians, repeat same as above except after ride the lightning, hit them with lightning whip, until their health drops to about 50% then updraft and repeat adding drakes breath.
Once you have instantly chain killed someone, ride the lightning out of the zerg, heal up, rinse and repeat.
If you get stuck in zerg, switch to water or cast shocking aura or mist, to give yourself breathing room to get out.
If you haven’t killed someone after blowing your fire load. Switch to earth or back to air if its up and they should be near death anyways.

2. The secret to fighting warriors and guardians is to stay out of range. Lightning whip has a range of 300. Learn the range because you can hit them, they can’t hit you. Kite until you get their health to about 50% and then unload the above. Fighting necros and mesmers can be tricky. Hit them with lightning whip and then burst them down before they kill you…Its a toss up based on their build.

3. Pay attention to the skills your enemy uses. Dodge a lot. take advantage of renewing stamina. With a crit chance of 49% it will usually always be up.

4. Learn when to run away. Fight another day.

5. When killing someone in downed state, to avoid stomp, start kill and then mist form. You will avoid stomp and get the kill.

Elementalist is not an easy class to play. Steep learning curve, but once you got it you will love it. I do believe their still needs to be better balance. It is true that we work twice as hard as other classes, with the steepest learning curve, just to stay on par. A little increase to our base HP wouldn’t hurt. Definitely our downed state needs to be fixed. Ride the lightning bug needs to be fixed.

-Manannan

reserved reserved reserved

Nice.

I’ve been working on a power, crit, critdmg% build also. My stats are a bit scattered stats wise but it does the job at this stage.

Great we found 1 way to play elementalist effectively!

…wait…do we just settle for 1 play style? Then again, we could go support.

…but… I’ve been hearing they’ll be nerfing healing numbers.

I would take 10 from fire and put that into water. The minor in 15 is jus to great to not take, and cleansing wave trait is nice too

I mean I use scepter dagger. But when I switch into water+3&5? That’s a 4.5k heal right there. It’s awesome sauce.

So the secret to playing a glass cannon ele is to stack glass cannon stats and traits.

I am enlightened

IF they start nerfing the healing an Elementalist can do, I will seriously think about leaving this game. I love playing Support and right now Support is broken in Guild Wars 2.

Sure, Arenanet spoke about breaking up the Trinity of MMORPGs (DPS, Tanker, Healer) but they didnt! They extremely weakened support to make it near non-existent, amplified DPS to the point anywhere they go, they reign supreme these days, and tanking for its purposes and benefits still remain with all the stuff Guardians can do.

..This is the very first MMORPG I’ve played where playing ANY KIND of DEFENSIVE SUPPORT is almost broken (I love Water Healing Elementalist) while Ground-Control has become how “Support” is done by using one DPS to support another.

Glass Cannon builds are nice and they work as Ele is a class that you really have to go for all in one strong area or break yourself.

From the looks of things, the damage you’re doing is in no way making up for the collossal amount of survivability you’re losing.

Practically no condition removal. One stunbreak on a 75s cooldown. No stability. No protection outside of an earth swap.

To be honest, it looks a lot more like a build that relies on getting your team mates to distract the enemy so you can play the opportunist and sweep in to grab the kill. If the burst fails you have only mistform to get back out, which limits you to either engaging once every 75s, or risking yourself for kills when it’s on cooldown.

Anything that shuts down your movement is going to make a real mess of you real fast, likewise if you get jumped by a high burst class. A bunker will probably kill you before you kill him (not that we have much chance at killing bunkers played well anyway, but the modus operandi is to tie them up and force a team mate to come and assist so they can get points from the objective they’re standing on again).

This has all been pretty general criticism though, which I guess doesn’t help much. Here are the exact problems.

Bolt to the Heart – +20% more damage under 25% is the same as +5% damage for the entirety of the fight. A reasonable portion of the time (in my experience anyway) we’re finishing with Fire Grabs or Churning Earths. They don’t benefit from that trait because they already hit like trucks if they hit. Having CE do 8k damage instead of 7k damage when your opponent is under 25% is pointless, because that’s much more HP than most people actually have when they’re under 25%. You want CE/Firegrab to hit hard, but they need to do it all the time, because they’re our main sources of single-hit burst.

Scholar Runes are only good between 100-90% health. Once you drop below that (which you will) you lose 10% damage, and the last thing you want is for your damage to get worse as you drop HP. Same problem with Vital Striking (which is 10%, by the way). So once you drop to 89% HP you lose 20% of your bonus damage. It wouldn’t be as big a problem if you were playing staff, because you have the range to stand-off, but as d/d? Most fights I’m sitting at around 50-70% HP constantly. I’m rarely above 90% for more than the initial few seconds of a fight, so I can’t imagine losing that much bonus damage guaranteed for anything beyond that initial burst. Seems like a bit of a waste.

Sigil of Superior Force isn’t terrible from a ‘damage right now’ point of view, but compared to something like Minor Accuracy, it falls short. 5% more damage on crits isn’t as good as 12% more crits (with max accuracy stacks) most of the time.

The main problem is that you’re a glass cannon, except you’re insanely glass, and the cannon part doesn’t, in any respect, make up for how glassy you are. If your opening combo doesn’t work you’re boned. If you get caught by a thief without mistform you’re boned. If someone is paying attention to you when you initiate, rather than being distracted by a team mate, things aren’t going to go well (assuming they know what they’re doing). It might work in 8v8 where it’s a zergy mess, but you’d get totally tooled in Tourneys.

I am as enlightened as Angel.

power and precision = junk.

Power+Precision+%damage = Glass cannon

I thought anyone stacking power and precision would be stacking % damage as well. Maybe that’s just me.

Your build is bad and you should feel bad. Try playing that in a tournament and weep. You’ll get owned left and right. 900 toughness lol.

I run with 900 toughness and have few problems.

People need to lose this idea that if they want to be survivable they need to sacrifice everything for millions of toughness. Yeah, sure, you can do that, but you’re either saccing HP to do so (resulting in your effective HP being around the same) or you’re saccing damage to do so (in which case you might as well go full bunker).

Pretty much every highlevel team has a glasscannon thief. With 900 toughness they’ll instakill you without being seen with their combo.

Morkai.7645:

Stacking Condition = junk. Most classes have multiple condition removals at their disposal. We stack on hardcore burn and bleed just to have an enemy remove it.

Stopped taking you seriously right there.

Isn’t the entire point of condition builds (besides cutting through high-toughness bunker builds) to apply pressure to an opponent and get them to blow all their survival cooldowns? That way your bursty buddy can zip in and gank him down from 60% to zero, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

I will just leave this here. Had very good success with it and even the nasty thieves with heartseeker have ran away from me in sPvP. I change Ultis depending on map.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJAoYhMmmbwx4QlEAkHn4CLhCKIU8gFlCzA;ToAA1Cno8ykjIHbXOvkdNQYKC

Pretty much every highlevel team has a glasscannon thief. With 900 toughness they’ll instakill you without being seen with their combo.

Out of all the tourney and 8v8 games I’ve played, I have only twice been insta-gibbed by a thief before I was able to react. Both times were by the same thief. That’s not to say there haven’t been times where thieves have come alarmingly close to downing me in a very short period of time, and it’s also ignoring the times where I died simply because I didn’t have the cooldowns up that i needed. Most thieves who open on me force me to turtle a bit until I stabilise, at which point I can turn the tables and kill them if they haven’t already left me alone because they realised they messed up their combo and their window is gone.

Sacrificing the damage I do to be more survivable against one type of build by one class is not worth it. Especially so when it requires them get a series of good crits and to execute their combo perfectly to merely be in with a very good chance of taking me down.

I disagree with this glass cannon build. Here’s why.
1. A glass cannon ele can still be done “better” by other classes. Even if ele is your favorite flavor of the month, it starts to lose it’s luster if you compare the burst with other classes.

2. This build really only works 1v1. If, for any reason, someone happens to poke you—or comes right after killing someone—you’re mostly screwed. You don’t have the time to wait for CD’s to come back to rinse and repeat a cycle. Ele works best when you have time to play on the fly without any set “rotation”. The big burst skills just have long cooldowns that make chain fighting very difficult.

3. Defending in sPvP. Even skilled players make mistakes. Making a mistake with this build may mean you didn’t defend a point and you died before any support happens. Surviving, even if you kill slowly, is the difference between saving/winning a circle. Sure, you make instantly kill your enemies, but what if you fumble what you needed to do, or worse, my reason 2 comes into play and you don’t have the CD’s. You can’t sit there and survive for support, you fall over.

Link says bad link.

@ Katniss: copy paste the link

@ OP: there’s not really a whole lot of survivability in that build. none really. anyone worth their salt in PvP will dodge your obvious attacks (which are all of them) and turn around and destroy you.

I run a somewhat similar D/D build that does considerable dmg but has far more survivability for when one or more people show up to help their friend. The idea is focus on the boons you get from the auras and attunement swapping:

First, I take those 10 points out of fire (%dmg increase specific to attunement is a no-no IMO for stance dancing) and toss them into Earth V for the protection when applying auras. Then take 15 pts out of air and throw it into water for the cleansing wave and the minor trait that gives +2% dmg increase for each boon. Then swap your Scholar runes for Rune of Fire (grants fire aura when health reaches 90%) or go more defensive with Earth runes (magnetic aura at 20% health).

When you’re stance dancing in a fight there’s virtually 100% uptime on Fury, Swiftness, Protection, Regen, and Might. With GM minor trait in Water that’s virtually a static +10% dmg no matter the attunement, and you’ll also be able to take a punch.

Isn’t the entire point of condition builds (besides cutting through high-toughness bunker builds) to apply pressure to an opponent and get them to blow all their survival cooldowns?

Have you seen how many conditions a ele can remove without even poping a defensive cd (unless you count healing rain as a defensive cd).

Ill put this here:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQFAWhImkbwxygjDAkHn4CLjChUeMzO2A;TYAqbM3Iuxej7G5NA

If Healing rain lasted its full duration that’s 9 conditions removed.
Then the regen from your free armour of earth.
5% chance to gain regen from dwayna.
Then using cd’s: there’s the 2 you remove from using your heal whilst in water (2x regen thanks to dwayna).
Then the 2 other cantrips when you need to use them and if you can’t source regen then you have geyser + dodging twice + arcane blast to heal you up to full.

I can tell you from experience that condition damage ele against that is impossible.

That build is designed to counter conditions. So, yes…a condition build is terrible against a cleansing build. That’s why it’s a counter.

You could make a control/toughness build to counter the OP’s glass cannon the same way. That was sort of my point. Even the best build plays like trash if you play it against its counter. The real fun is guessing your opponent’s build before you engage.

Well to be fair the OP said it was a glass cannon and that’s exactly what it is. I suppose the main problem is that anybody who knows our class will be able to survive it. There is nothing unpredictable about the way it bursts, and elementalists (in my experience) sort of rely upon the fact that they can choose a number of different actions according to most circumstances. They are difficult to predict. This build narrows the options to just a brief set of actions that all wait on a big cd. Afterward, you have to somehow get away from the fight, and pretty much any other class can decide to say “nuh-uh” and pin you to the floor.

As others have stated, there are other classes that are much better at this, such as thief kittenz. I’ve been dropped by a thief so fast I don’t even think he was having fun.

It looks like a really fun build for some spvp pug lulz and maybe some WvWvW banditry. After embarrassing a thief or warrior, however, they will come looking for you next time, and they will win.

Morkai.7645:

I can instantly chain kill all thieves and elementalists (non-bunker), most engineers, most rangers, some warriors, few necros, few guardians, and few mesmers.

How do you implement this build without getting killed with only 15k hp!?

1. Patiently wait as your teammates engage the zerg first. Then pick out a thief, elementalist, ranger, engineer, warrior, mesmer, necro, guardian to kill (in that order).

Once you have instantly chain killed someone, ride the lightning out of the zerg, heal up, rinse and repeat.

2. The secret to fighting warriors and guardians is to stay out of range.

3. Dodge a lot.

4. Learn when to run away. Fight another day.

5. When killing someone in downed state, to avoid stomp, start kill and then mist form. You will avoid stomp and get the kill.

A little increase to our base HP wouldn’t hurt. Definitely our downed state needs to be fixed.

So, starting from the top: So your glass cannon kills other glass cannons who are too stupid to use stun breakers/dodge roll, this is 5 month old news.

So basically, you acquire the playstyle of your standard glass cannon Thief, except with less escape capability, less annoying mechanics to deal with (stealth in this game is by leaps and bounds more OP than in any other MMO), and at best 1/2 the damage as the same Thief.

Any decent player will instantly swap to a ranged weapon and start ye olde kite.

Dodging is nothing new, except you can simply strafe out of most Elementalist abilities without suffering because the front-loaded damage on most of them is terrible or non-existant; whereas strafing out of a 100 Blades is a good way to take about 5k more damage than you needed to.

I see a recurring theme here…..very similar to a Thief, only they’re better at it….much better.

Nifty trick, used it many a times myself, but as a glass cannon build it’s pretty dumb to blow your single defensive ability on a 75 second cooldown just to guarantee a kill.

I’d sell my soul for even a 3k increase to my base HP. And our downed state is indeed awful. No body is going to take more than 5 seconds to run to your corpse, thus ensuring you never get to use Mist Form because by the time they finish their execution, you still have a 3-4 seconds cooldown on it.

I appreciate all the feedback.

This is a glass cannon build. For all those that complain about lack of survivability, Learn to strafe and dodge, kill your opponent before they kill you, and use mist. You are the burst for your team. I’ve never had any success with a condition build. Most people just remove your conditions over and over before it does any serious damage. Power and precision isn’t enough damage to make an impact. It needs to be coupled with %damage.

Everyone complains there is no glass cannon build. This does exactly what it says. I can’t tell you how many times my teammates are struggling to kill a bunker guardian down to half health when I swoop in and instant chain kill it.

I get it. No survivability, no toughness, to squishy, will get owned in pvp, blah,blah,blah. It’s a build that either works for you or doesn’t. Take it or leave it. But it does what it says. Stop complaining that there isn’t a glass cannon build. When I provide one that works people complain it’s to squishy. my screen shot doesn’t lie.

Gotta love this community.

Arc.9374:

From the looks of things, the damage you’re doing is in no way making up for the collossal amount of survivability you’re losing.

Practically no condition removal. One stunbreak on a 75s cooldown. No stability. No protection outside of an earth swap.

To be honest, it looks a lot more like a build that relies on getting your team mates to distract the enemy so you can play the opportunist and sweep in to grab the kill. If the burst fails you have only mistform to get back out, which limits you to either engaging once every 75s, or risking yourself for kills when it’s on cooldown.

Anything that shuts down your movement is going to make a real mess of you real fast, likewise if you get jumped by a high burst class. A bunker will probably kill you before you kill him (not that we have much chance at killing bunkers played well anyway, but the modus operandi is to tie them up and force a team mate to come and assist so they can get points from the objective they’re standing on again).

This has all been pretty general criticism though, which I guess doesn’t help much. Here are the exact problems.

Bolt to the Heart – +20% more damage under 25% is the same as +5% damage for the entirety of the fight. A reasonable portion of the time (in my experience anyway) we’re finishing with Fire Grabs or Churning Earths. They don’t benefit from that trait because they already hit like trucks if they hit. Having CE do 8k damage instead of 7k damage when your opponent is under 25% is pointless, because that’s much more HP than most people actually have when they’re under 25%. You want CE/Firegrab to hit hard, but they need to do it all the time, because they’re our main sources of single-hit burst.

Scholar Runes are only good between 100-90% health. Once you drop below that (which you will) you lose 10% damage, and the last thing you want is for your damage to get worse as you drop HP. Same problem with Vital Striking (which is 10%, by the way). So once you drop to 89% HP you lose 20% of your bonus damage. It wouldn’t be as big a problem if you were playing staff, because you have the range to stand-off, but as d/d? Most fights I’m sitting at around 50-70% HP constantly. I’m rarely above 90% for more than the initial few seconds of a fight, so I can’t imagine losing that much bonus damage guaranteed for anything beyond that initial burst. Seems like a bit of a waste.

Sigil of Superior Force isn’t terrible from a ‘damage right now’ point of view, but compared to something like Minor Accuracy, it falls short. 5% more damage on crits isn’t as good as 12% more crits (with max accuracy stacks) most of the time.

The main problem is that you’re a glass cannon, except you’re insanely glass, and the cannon part doesn’t, in any respect, make up for how glassy you are. If your opening combo doesn’t work you’re boned. If you get caught by a thief without mistform you’re boned. If someone is paying attention to you when you initiate, rather than being distracted by a team mate, things aren’t going to go well (assuming they know what they’re doing). It might work in 8v8 where it’s a zergy mess, but you’d get totally tooled in Tourneys.

Thanks for the feedback.

I agree the scolar rune was a concern for me regarding the 90% health. However the point of the build is to get the first attack and unload. You cannot make any errors with this build or you are boned. I never admitted to this build being easy mod. However, if done properly this build is fun and deadly.

I’ve played bunker and honestly I get bored. The damage output is lackluster and the combat drags out. Just trying to provide an anti bunker alternative. It is extremely glass and maybe the damage output doesn’t equal the squishy factor, but unless we get a damage boost this is the best that can be offered.

Papaj.9035:

Morkai.7645:

I can instantly chain kill all thieves and elementalists (non-bunker), most engineers, most rangers, some warriors, few necros, few guardians, and few mesmers.

How do you implement this build without getting killed with only 15k hp!?

1. Patiently wait as your teammates engage the zerg first. Then pick out a thief, elementalist, ranger, engineer, warrior, mesmer, necro, guardian to kill (in that order).

Once you have instantly chain killed someone, ride the lightning out of the zerg, heal up, rinse and repeat.

2. The secret to fighting warriors and guardians is to stay out of range.

3. Dodge a lot.

4. Learn when to run away. Fight another day.

5. When killing someone in downed state, to avoid stomp, start kill and then mist form. You will avoid stomp and get the kill.

A little increase to our base HP wouldn’t hurt. Definitely our downed state needs to be fixed.

So, starting from the top: So your glass cannon kills other glass cannons who are too stupid to use stun breakers/dodge roll, this is 5 month old news.

So basically, you acquire the playstyle of your standard glass cannon Thief, except with less escape capability, less annoying mechanics to deal with (stealth in this game is by leaps and bounds more OP than in any other MMO), and at best 1/2 the damage as the same Thief.

Any decent player will instantly swap to a ranged weapon and start ye olde kite.

Dodging is nothing new, except you can simply strafe out of most Elementalist abilities without suffering because the front-loaded damage on most of them is terrible or non-existant; whereas strafing out of a 100 Blades is a good way to take about 5k more damage than you needed to.

I see a recurring theme here…..very similar to a Thief, only they’re better at it….much better.

Nifty trick, used it many a times myself, but as a glass cannon build it’s pretty dumb to blow your single defensive ability on a 75 second cooldown just to guarantee a kill.

I’d sell my soul for even a 3k increase to my base HP. And our downed state is indeed awful. No body is going to take more than 5 seconds to run to your corpse, thus ensuring you never get to use Mist Form because by the time they finish their execution, you still have a 3-4 seconds cooldown on it.

Agreed this is played like a thief. Except I can burs aoe damage and have shorter cool downs on my burst combo. When classes switch to range my ride the Lightning is usually off cool down or I’ve already cast updraft blow out, and run over them with burning speed. There’s ways to adjust.

I don’t agree with everything in the OP about build, but the fact that people think they need more than 2 CC breaks and 20k+ hit points to be effective in PvP shows the quality of players.

If you work with your team, or even with just another person you should never be in a situation where need this amount of overkill defense unless every player on the other team decides to FF you only. PvP is about working in groups. I run about 1500 toughness and only have about 16.5k in PvP and made it to PvP 20 without getting kitten Playing an elementalist is all about positioning and movement, if you expect to run into a group and burst DPS your not going to do anything but die. You have to pre plan your atunements and swaps for each situation without burning cooldowns before they are needed. People need to just tighten up their game and stop thinking you can take on 3v1. This is not the kind of game that favors that kind of playstyle.

The problem is that you are still a subpar glass cannon. You are efficient in a very niche setting against people who have absolutely no balance in their build.

i laughed when i read the op’s post. we fall over like bowling pins i said.. i have been home all day trying out all kinds of differnet builds to no avail. so i decided lets try his build before I go to bed…. umm.. wow. I actually HAVE killed people accidentally with just blazing speed ring of fire X2 arcane. I bursted down a guardian and I saw from his corpse (WTF WAS THAT)
made me feel good.’

Im going to shoot a REALLY quick video a post

ok this is a REALLY quick clip, Ive only been playing it for 30 minutes or so but this is what the numbers look like with the setup. I wanted to get the clip of where i 14k bursted on a poor unsuspecting Asura.
http://youtu.be/SKqQxYCzx0o

but i spent too much time on the ground. this is very glass cannon, not sure if it would work at range since range abilities dont hit for as much, but KILL THEM BEFORE THEY KILL YOU, is pretty doable

TY for the vid. Yeah, wow, that was better damage than I expected. Still extremely glassy, but it actually seems like it would be worth it for those interested in min/max dps. I understand that those players weren’t necessarily pro, but watching that hp just melt under the burst was pretty sweet.

Will be uploading videos as well stand by

Did a quick fraps. Not pretty but you get the idea of the capable damage. Overshot the ranger on clip 2 haha but made up for it. Engineer was asleep. Burst down the warrior pretty good and did massive damage against the ele in zerg. This build is not an easy build to master. But once you get the hang of it, its fun as hell. Will post better videos tomorrow. THis was a quick put together.

http://youtu.be/jfBmHXSFVDs

Hmmm i didnt even think to add flame grab on the end, honestly whats been killing people for me is the fire 1, ive had all 3 barbs hit a thief and all crit for 900, but then again in my clip i think you can see lightning whip hit for 2k and if you are close enough it will hit the person twice….

but I been playing this a bit more, I will co sign, you can blow other squishies away but be warned, the era of the caltrop thief is upon us, and i have died waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many times in the past 4 hours to caltrops left by people i never saw / this build is THAT squishy

Well, the build itself isn’t news. The only problem is condition removal. You want Mist Form and the two arcane spells for the damage, so there isn’t much room for it. An alternative is Cleansing Wave in 10 water and Ether Renewal, if you want to get away. I would also invest in 20% reduced CD on air skills, rather than the 10% damage therein, as the combo that will dish out most damage is fire. Having the RTL ready to gain distance to an enemy is worth it.

Btw, I would use 20% reduced CD on arcane skills as well, as they are very important. Runes of Divinity also is very important, as you want as much critical damage as you can get. It’s about taking down your enemy before they can take you down.

condition removal? i think thats called respawn
like i said before, i died a LOT. my KDR stayed POSITIVE… BARELY positive. something like 7 kills for 5 deaths which is pretty much a zerglings mentality and not fun at all.
but I died to aoe dots and the such. caltrops are just too abundant now to even think about condition removal for it and this build dosent have enough healing to get rid of it.

Ether renewal would be good but you dont have enough survivability to wait for the whole channel, I tried the signet of heal every time u cast… but that didnt return enough life either. the point of the build it seems to work BEST when you get the extra % damage from being at full life. so using the heal+regen from the glyph seems to be the best bet.
i am not sure if you saw it in my clip but i spent a LOT of time running away from the combat circle.
I felt like i was back in daoc on my savage. I sat outside of every combat waiting… waiting… waiting, and then once everyone blew the initial TADAAA skills I picked a target, ran in and blew them up then tried to blow up a 2nd person and as soon as I was at 70% life I mistform and ran away!

seriously though… dont try to make this build more survivable, it WONT work.

bad link plz repost link i would like to check out ur build

Berserker gear is what all glass cannon builds for all professions use though.

power + cond- damag = kitten?

Sorry but no.

Next PvP video I’ll upload on my youtube channel will be this build I made I can archieve: 2100 power, 1100 cond. dmg., 1900 toughness, 1000 healing power.

I just lack precision and vitality.

BishopX.6453:

ok this is a REALLY quick clip, Ive only been playing it for 30 minutes or so but this is what the numbers look like with the setup. I wanted to get the clip of where i 14k bursted on a poor unsuspecting Asura.
http://youtu.be/SKqQxYCzx0o

but i spent too much time on the ground. this is very glass cannon, not sure if it would work at range since range abilities dont hit for as much, but KILL THEM BEFORE THEY KILL YOU, is pretty doable

That’s one of the worst gameplay videos I’ve ever seen. You click your skills?

Lazarast.6571:

power + cond- damag = kitten?

Sorry but no.

Next PvP video I’ll upload on my youtube channel will be this build I made I can archieve: 2100 power, 1100 cond. dmg., 1900 toughness, 1000 healing power.

I just lack precision and vitality.

You cannot have those stats at the same time.

Anybody promoting these builds should just re-roll Thief and stop clouding this classes’ forums with garbage. A Thief is superior to you in every way; he doesn’t rely on a gimmick knockdown combo to do it (because any decent player, in WvW or sPvP will have stunbreakers/stability skills to pop), he has much higher burst and much better escape than you, and the best part is he can do it all while he’s still rendering out of stealth on your screen.

Get over it, the Elementalist is a subpar profession in every aspect and style of play except group support. There isn’t a single spec out there for any profession that can put out the condition removal and AoE healing a Splish Splash Ele can.

I just wish our AoEs were actually punishing damage/condition wise for the amount of time they take to cast/hit their area of effect. I mean for christ’s sake, the Grenade Kit auto attack stacks better conditions and does is way faster than a plethora of perfectly executed and simultaneous cast Elementalist spells could ever achieve.

Arc.9374:

From the looks of things, the damage you’re doing is in no way making up for the collossal amount of survivability you’re losing.

This was my immediate reaction to the build as well. You gain nowhere near enough damage to make up for the loss of defense an auramentalist would have. Glass cannon is overrated, if you have all the damage in the world, but no control over the battle, you’ll lose, because you’ll have no way to apply that damage before you’re dead.

You’re an elementalist, you have tons of ways to stack boons and combos. Use that to your advantage and you’ll do great. Ignore that and you’ll be subpar.

Aether McLoud.1975:

BishopX.6453:

ok this is a REALLY quick clip, Ive only been playing it for 30 minutes or so but this is what the numbers look like with the setup. I wanted to get the clip of where i 14k bursted on a poor unsuspecting Asura.
http://youtu.be/SKqQxYCzx0o

but i spent too much time on the ground. this is very glass cannon, not sure if it would work at range since range abilities dont hit for as much, but KILL THEM BEFORE THEY KILL YOU, is pretty doable

That’s one of the worst gameplay videos I’ve ever seen. You click your skills?

I use a mixture of clicking and keys. The problem arises when you don’t have the mouse coordination, or are relying completely on it.

Another alternative to armor runes would be the runes of air. I haven’t tried this build yet but my current build is very similar and the 20% chance of lightning proc happens a lot, and its pretty much a free 3,000 to 6,000 damage surprisingly. I’ve had thieves hit me from stealth and lose a good portion of their health with no effort from me 8D

Thanks Morkai, excellent build.

One of my biggest fears was thieves, but as you said, a pure offense mindset sure puts them in their place. One did whisper me right after saying “Wow, so much burst” after he got instantly gutted after his attempted opening by the combo you mentioned.

I know this may be a little too fast on the fingers and reflexes for those stubborn of mind, in that case, teams need bunkers too, but don’t go insulting this very well thought out and viable build.

I used to run a similar build in sPvP, and I had a ton of fun doing it. It was actually 30/30/0/0/10, so even less survivable from a trait perspective. The difference, though, was ether renewal, which made up for the lack of condition removal. The object of the build was to deliver the burst to a group of people — not just one guy — and then hightail it out of there to recover.

Mist form helped you recover from your initial push on a point, because that’s when you’d be most likely to get hit by something debilitating. Ether renewal, being on a much lower cooldown, was there for later bursts. Bear in mind that several of your major burst skills are on a 12-15 second cooldown.

Sticking to this sort of formula, victory came pretty easily. Thieves can burst a single target more handily than you can, but their area burst is much lower. If you can sacrifice a sense of individualism for the sake of team play, it won’t matter to you as much that you don’t shine 1v1 as a total glass cannon. Stick to your role, and do it well.

Here’s a potentially more damaging and survivable spec:

http://tinyurl.com/c4txod3

The extra survivability comes strictly from the addition of Ether Renewal for condition removal. Personally, I like cooldown-reduction over certain % damage bonuses, but I’m just sticking to the theme of your build.

And this actually describes the problem of other glass cannon classes besides thief

A thief can dish out higher dmg in short time and has better survival. With this build you are dead before you can say a word if you get targeted by suprise without much defence options. The defence options are for certain glass cannon builds very limited, thats why you see a lot more thieves because they can do it better.

You mention aswell condition dmg, another point to give some more thoughts about in comparison to other glass cannon builds.

A lot of people in this post recommend condition builds. However, I don’t get it? Everytime I play condition, every class has multiple condition removers. Its painful watching my massive condition damage get removed over and over at the snap of a finger. Its also too slow paced. Thats why I say its kitten because with a massive burst build, any good twitch player, can kick major kitten. I constantly get first place in the games I play due to instant kills. I’d rather put my eggs in a burst build, knowing that the only counter is invulnerability skill. Little can be done to negate the massive pain I put on people.