Guild Wars 2

This seems to work pretty well in the class cannon category.

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Morkai.7645:

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

The one problem here is that Elementalist has the same flaw as every other class: predictability. RtL to someone, everyone should know Updraft is comming next. The one flaw in GW2 is that while you have an assortment of builds and armor/weapon combinations, classes only get a handful of skills per weapon. It’s not like other games where your build is largely dependent on feat points and there are mutliple builds. Here, if you see a theif rolling dagger/dagger, we know what 5 abilities he has. Playing as an elementalist, almost all your better attacks are telegraphed through animations. While not many are long (Churning Earth at 3.25 is the worst), any veteran PvPer of any game will always be watching for animations. This is compounded by the fact many abilites have a great synergy (like RtL/Updraft) and after a while, smart players will notice the standard attack rotation of any class.

I’m not saying your advice is bad, it’s well thought out and tested. But against tourney players or seasoned PvPers, unless your team is there to CC and clear your way to DPS, the same rotation will only work so many times. The only real secret to playing a D/D glass cannon, is staying unpredictable and always be aware of positioning and the flow of battle. Not getting into and wasting time on 1v1 in minis unless you have to also helps

Elementalist is only predictable if you play it that way. You don’t HAVE to RTL+Updraft. You can do other things. RTL + Ring of Earth applies bleed and cripple early in the fight, where it’ll actually help the most. Earthquake + Drake’s Breath gets Burning on early as well, and will probably put you ahead of the endurance curve as they dodge your Earthquake only to still get hit with Drake’s Breath. Also, the earlier in a fight you can get lots of scary conditions up the earlier they’ll blow their removal skills (or you learn they’re a bunker/cleanse build and just leave). There’s load of ways you can tie abilities together, and with twice as many skills we have many more opportunities to be unpredictable.