Guild Wars 2

It’s bugged. Doesn’t work for ‘+X% damage while in <attunement>’ traits, don’t think it works for the earth 5 trait, seems to work for the water 5 trait, never noticed if it worked for fire/air traits.

Ah, I didn’t noticed that you needed to have 1 sliver already, in order to make more (well that seems kinda dumb), so I guess until you get 1 sliver you can’t create more slivers.

You buy Arcane Converters from the glory vendors for 1k glory.

Chris.7653:

Anyone have an idea on how to get some slivers?

Didn’t you answer that in your previous post?

Turn 50 Orbs into 22 Crystals and use an extra 3 from your stash to make 11 slivers.

And that’s not really an excessive amount of Orbs, considering how junky most of the gear they make looks. I’ve easily destroyed twice that many since I capped out on 250 in my bank (but then I do salvage absolutely everything I get from a chest, since it’s not like I can’t just craft whatever armour I want for whatever class I want using those materials).

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Arcs-Super-Awesome-Super-Build

If you wanted it more defensive just switch the listed jewellry to something with toughness/vit, and if that’s still not defensive enough for you, replace the listed runes with either divinity for a balanced approach, or something else that’s super defensive I guess.

The build survival mainly comes from well-timed use of cooldowns though, and if you get jumped by more people than you can handle there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to outrun them unless it’s a huge zerg, or they keep chain immobilizing you or something.

It’s going to be pretty hard for people to give you any advice when you have neither specified whether you play aggressively/supporty/balanced/whatever, nor given people any information on what you’re using it for. PvE? WvW Zergs? WvW skirmish roaming with a small group? WvW solo roaming?

If you want damage, think about Strength or Pack or maybe even Ogre.
If you want balanced, think about Divinity or the 2/2/2 Water/Monk/<2set that extends your boon duration of choice>.
If you want more defensive, look into sets that will give you +healing or +vit or +toughness or defensive oriented procs when you reach a certain health threshhold or that will provide defensive boons when you take damage.

It’s pretty easy to narrow down rune choices and give people a list of stuff that you’re considering, but haven’t made your mind up on, so that they can advise you of the pro’s/con’s of each one, along with any alternatives that might fit your needs better.

Until you do that, you’ll probably not get much in the way of educated responses, because nobody has any idea right now of your preferred playstyle.

Except tPvP is a mess and by the time it’s balanced there will be few people left playing it. Given the amount of competitive core features that are missing, the whole thing feels mostly like an afterthought.

And they shouldn’t give a rats kitten about WvW/PvE.

PvE is easy, and if you’re good enough your build doesn’t really matter that much. WvW is a zergfest where the amount of players present in one place is more important than their individual skill, class, or gear level.

If they want the game to be an e-sport (not likely at this point, IMO, but anyway) they should be balancing for pvp. That’s what the game was advertised as. A PvP game, just like it’s predecessor.

FOR CLARITY RE: MISTFORM

It works in the mists (proper 60s cd when traited).
It doesn’t work in PvE (cd remains at 75s when traited)

Pick up cantrip cd reduction in water instead of condition remove when attuning since you give yourself regen when you attune anyway, which removes a condition via cleansing water trait, so same effect – no need for trait redundancy.

Maybe think about bolt to the heart instead of air cd reduction, though that’s personal preference – cd reduction doesn’t really improve our damage that much, but each to their own, it’s not like bolt to the heart is super duper awesome anyway (just slightly better against high toughness targets).

But yeah, it’s pretty solid. Is basically the build I’ve been using for the last 6 weeks or more for pvp/pve/wvw. Use your runes and amulet choices to give the the defensive/offensive lean that you want, depending on playstyle.

With swiftness applied, we went the same speed – even when I was in Air attunement, with Sigil of Air passive on, and 5 trait points in Air. I use to be faster than the mesmer with swiftness on both of us. Looks like that 33% movement speed cap is now strictly enforced, or something?

You were never faster. Movement speed bonuses dont stack with eachother and never have, so when you had swiftness up before you moved 33% faster regardless of any other movement speed bonuses. It doesn’t add them all up and go, ‘oh, you’re total is 68%, so have fun moving at the speed of light!’.

It was fairly common knowledge that most of the traited movespeed increasing buffs were pretty pointless as a result of our ability to maintain almost perma swiftness.

Yeah, I’m not saying that the tooltips aren’t a mess and need to be fixed to give an accurate impression of what’s supposed to happen.

With the lack of dev communication, tooltips are all we have to go on to determine a skills intended effect, and 98% of our tooltips are correct, so apply Occams razor.

Humposaurus.5764:

D/D:
0/15/10/25/20

Figure out the traits yourself (aura’s!)

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Arcs-Super-Awesome-Super-Build

And I don’t really know why you’d stop at 25Water when you can go all the way to 30 and get condition removal when you proc regen, which is actually more condition removal than you have with 25 and ‘clear a condition when attuning to water’ (since you get regen when attuning to water, so it’s doing the same thing as the 10point trait).

I think if you look at the tooltip, it’s not.

It’s listed as a leap finisher in the various wiki’s because it was operating as a leap finisher up until the patch, but that’s not to say it was intended.

To be fair, it’s not even listed as being a Leap Finisher, so it might be reasonable to assume it was unintended, which is a shame if that’s the case, but shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s fixed.

It just needs to work as the tooltip describes. If it actually cast a proper Churning Earth, instead of the pathetic mini-shockwave, that alone would almost qualify it for being stupidly good again.

If the tooltip is to be believed, CE is the only dodge that should ever have procced a finisher.

I think it’s a shame that when they were ‘fixing’ it, they didn’t fix it all the way, and instead left it half finished, and almost universally garbage, but it definitely comes as absolutely no surprise that it lost the finishers it was never supposed to have in the first place.

A large number of people already have left, and aren’t likely to look back.

My old tourney team dwindled from having 5 people online pretty regularly to 4, to 3, to 2, and now to only me being the only relatively active player over a 2 week period. It’s also been over a week since I set foot in the mists except to get free travel back to LA, since I figured I could keep bashing my head against the dumb tpvp metagame with what few pug groups I could find that weren’t terrible, or I could get some moneys worth out of the game and finish up some of the PvE content I’d skipped so I could see if there was any fun to be had roaming WvW solo (a bit, but heh – finding a balanced, challenging fight is pretty hard).

I’d be willing to bet that the window for gaining critical mass has closed, and while there will certainly be a core fanbase playing for some time to come, the game is unlikely to achieve the esport status the developers hoped for.

It annoys me that people consistently find the dumbest stuff to complain about, without thinking the implications of what they’re saying through.

So Evasive Arcana is now completely useless (no arguments from me there). In the grand scheme of things, it can go sit alongside our other dozens of useless traits/utilities/elites, and that’s a shame, but if anything, it’s not like the Ele community is any stranger to having it a bit harder than other classes.

Most of the people still playing it are doing so because the effort:reward ratios actually aren’t really that far off balance (overall). If they simply fixed all the stuff that was broken and not working properly, we’d be in good shape. If they balanced all the stuff that wasn’t used because it’s inferior to alternative options, we’d be in really good shape.

Evasive Arcana was (and still is) bugged. Knowingly or not, people designed builds around a bugged skill, and then a bunch of other people bandwagoned on and started using them, which is fine, except for this notion that because a bunch of people were abusing a bug it should never be fixed, and they should just throw us this bone because we’re weak in other area’s.

So it’s kinda frustrating to see the double standard when it comes to detrimental bugs vs beneficial bugs.

I can’t believe you guys are crying about them fixing something that was never intended.

So you want them to only fix the Ele bugs that are detrimental to play, and just gloss over the ones that provide convenient benefit?

How anyone could think that getting blast finishers wasn’t a blatant bug is beyond me. All it takes is 10 seconds of cross-refencing the skills you’re supposed to get according to the tooltip with whether or not they’re blast finishers, and if you’d done that, you’d see that the only one is churning earth, which, had it worked as it should have, would have given you one blast every 10 seconds, at max.

Instead you got a blast every time you dodged into a field, with no internal cooldown, and irrespective of what attunement you were in, and you thought that was just going to slide by?

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it would have been awesome if they’d actually fixed the whole trait so that it worked as described, rather than half-baking it like this, but you can’t seriously believe that Evasive Arcana was going to remain in the state it was in, when it was clearly completely unintended.

And then you have the nerve to complain about it?

DiogoSilva.7089:

And now Mist Form gets a cooldown reduction when traited, finally.

Sorry to say, it’s still bugged.

Otaur, you know Guardias have the same base hitpoints as Elementalists?

Yep. Lowest in the game. Their tankyess comes from gear/traits/stat allocation/weapon choices. The same place ours comes from.

The thing with relying on cantrips for your condition removal, especially against necro’s, is that it forces you to burn a couple of them when they corrupt boons, and I don’t think burning cantrips in addition to water switching is the best use of cooldowns when dealing with that kind of situation, since it pretty much bones your condition removal for anything that comes after the corrupt boons that you just cleared off. Ether Renewal basically makes you immune to conditions. It’s actually borderline broken, and only balanced by the fact it’s channelled. Caltrops Thief? Yeah, I’m just gonna go ahead and channel off the damage your doing while you death blossom over my head, and clear the conditions as you apply them, so things aren’t gonna go so well when you run out of inititative and have a couple of bleed stacks up and I’m still at 85% health with most of my meaty cooldowns available. I actually can’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t use it in PvP, unless they were using some weird signet/quickglyphs/written in stone build to take advnatage of the double passive effect on SoR, or really really couldn’t live without the utility from GoEH.

It’s not just a hotjoin/pubstomping build. While the team I played with gave up on the game shortly before Paid Tourneys came out, we did do quite a bit of free tourneys before then, and it was more than capable of holding it’s own. Sure, there were times where their entire team was at graveyard and focussed me down, but that happens everyone occasionally. I’m not trying to paint a golden picture of the build and how it’s invulnerable to all but the most skilled players or overwhelming numbers, but in the cases where you have time to react when being focussed you just get out and come back when your opponents are distracted with someone else. They can either waste valuable time and manpower chasing for the kill, or put that damage to use on a target in the immediate vicinity. I get out, some cooldowns come back up, I go back in when the safety net is there to get me out again if they switch back.

On the ‘not very friendly to new players’ aspect of your post, I don’t disagree.

I’ve long maintained that the best way to actually learn how to play something (if you’re serious about it) is to first learn how to survive, and then it’ll be really easy to learn how to do damage with it once you’ve got to grips with not dying.

It’s not some easymode faceroll to victory build, but it’s rewarding if played well, and punishing if played badly. If people play it badly and can’t hack constant death, then they either need to improve, or pick up a build that gives them some extra crutches, but that’s not a fault of the build; it’s a fault of the players.

I don’t disagree with what you’re saying at all, and this build certainly dances along that razors edge of survivability, but it’s pretty amazing just how far that survivability can stretch if you manage to do it right.

I honestly normally find Ether Renewal to be good enough to keep me in the fight vs Necro’s. Don’t really have much of a problem with them. 1v1 I normally last long enough to wear them down. It may be a little more sketchy compared to a more defensive amulet, and I’m not denying that the build has a very glasslike lean, but I personally prefer the flying by the seat of your pants approach. Makes things more interesting, and contrary to what a lot of people would have other people believe, it’s not a guaranteed recipe for a trip to the respawn timer. I rarely die in 8v8 (not like that really matters), and when I go down in tourneys I can mostly point to faults in my play, moreso than any inherent problem with the build.

I guess you could say that about any build, and there’s certainly a lot of homogeny to Ele builds at the minute (I mean, it’s really not that far off standard – some gear tweaks and some utility tweaks, and maybe 10 traits points assigned somewhere they aren’t normally), but it’s worth checking out if people are interested in a more aggressive playstyle, assuming they’re willing to play a bit riskier for the payoff.

It’s not really a build designed for Paid Tourneys (which is somethign I have no problem admitting). Paid tourneys with good team mates certainly allow a lot more team oriented builds and setups, but this is more aimed at a more generalised, self-sufficient playstyle (free tourneys/8v8/etc), where you maybe can’t rely on your team mates to cover for your weaknesses like you could in a proper super hardcore group. Like probably the vast vast majority of people play. Lets face it, Paid tourneys are hardly a beacon of activity right now, and with the metagame the way it was pre-patch, I honestly had zero desire to participate, because I knew what every competing team would consist of, and it’s boring as hell to play with, and against.

I think you’d be surprised just how far base toughness can stretch when you factor protection/regen/vigor, and our mobility into things. It relies on you playing it pretty balls out to put them on the defensive at the start of the engagement, so the support of your team mates to either keep the momentum rolling, or simply to provide some target saturation is somewhat important.

If you’re able to break line of sight and manage cooldowns well, you can hold off people for a while, though it’s obviously dependant on their skill and builds, but the build itself is well rounded enough to cover for most eventualities. It’s not anything close to bunker durability, but you can generally run around and play the avoidance dance to the point where you make it very difficult to draw a bead on you, so they move on to another, perceived easier target. Dealing with Rtl/Updrafts/Burning Speed/Magnetic Grasp/Lightning Flash can be very disorienting sometimes, but it probably also helps that I’m a tiny little Asura dude yoda’ing around the screen.

Mistform is your ‘oh bugger’ button. Get jumped by something that’ll probably kill you before cooldowns come back? Mistform.

Need to flag a guardian/ranger/warrior/engy/necro and armour of earth is down? Mistform.

The cooldown seems long, but if you’re playing the build right, there actually aren’t very many times when you really need it. Only a small portion of my deaths have been a result of mistform being down when I needed it up.

Anyway, I’ll see about putting some video’s up at some point, but basically the best way to learn it is going to be to put yourself in a borderline survivable situation and try and play your way out of it. In time you’ll get a more intuitive grip of what you can and can’t deal with, and how far that base toughness really goes if you use it to it’s maximum potential.

Some people are gonna be all ‘wtf why you use Bolt to the Heart omg what!’, and the reasoning is as follows. I’m aware that it’s actually not that great (we don’t really need to do 20% more damage to people below 25% because our burst skills hit hard enough to kill them below 25% anyway), but the singular reason it’s in the build is because it helps when dealing with toughness heavy builds. It’s not like it’s terrible against a bunch of stuff, but it really only equates to about 5% more damage over the course of a fight, and that’s not really too impressive. So yeah, pretty much to lend a little extra pressure on tanky builds when they drop down to that level of HP. It’s about the only place to put 10pts that doesn’t cost me more damage than it gains. If Lingering Elements actually worked, I’d put 10 points into 10% more damage in fire, but it doesn’t, so I can’t.

WvW stuff
Playstyle isn’t really much different, and apparently 99% of the people who play WvW are terrible or undergeared, so it works pretty well if you know what you’re doing. I’ve won a number of 1v2’s, 1v3’s, and had long marathon treks trailing multiple enemy realm dudes around huge area’s of the WvW zones because they’re kind enough to proc my swiftness off the Pack runes when they arrow me. That said, I mostly play solo and just look for small parties that have been cut off from their zergs. It’s probably going to be much less effective if you’re one of the 50man drone squad PvE’ing doors down, so for that, stick with your staff (or whatever you guys use – I guess it doesn’t really matter).

PvE -
Easy.
If your gear is decent enough, and you’re a decent enough player, your build really doesn’t matter that much for PvE. That’s why mine isn’t really perfectly optimized for it (I can’t be bothered switching traits every time I want to run around the borderlands). If I was going pure PvE I’d drop 10 points out of Air and put them into Fire, for the +10% damage in Fire trait, and move Bolt to the Heart down to the 10pt Air trait (because it’s kitten for bosses and stuff)

Anyway, Might stacking in PvE is easy.
Ring of Fire, Phoenix (3), Arcane Wave (3), Swap to Earth (3), Earthquake (3), Churning Earth (3) (if you’re not in range to actually hit anything with it, just immediately cancel). That’s 15 stacks right there, just from your own blast finishing. That moves up to 18stacks 10 seconds after you swapped to earth, and shortly after that some of your fire skills will be back off cd, so you can alternate between your finishers in earth/fire to maintain stacks and build a couple more for a short period. You should be able to mainting about 15-18 stacks fairly consistently, and sometimes if the rotation goes just perfect, or you’re playing with people who know how to take advantage of them, you’ll manage to get spiked up to 24-25. All pretty simple stuff. Damage is pretty kitten solid. I’m sure you could push it higher, but you’re easily pulling your weight with that setup, so (from my pvp focussed perspective) it’s pretty cool the way it is.

I bust the staff out for lupicus and the tree bosses in TA because it makes life easier. Pretty simple to just drop the aoe’s and some fireballs, and since they’re mostly fairly long fights, your own damage doesn’t have to be super maxed. Lupicus assumes you’re doing Arah with people who aren’t failures – you’re not going to be able to carry a group, but it’s pretty easy to lob fireballs at the big wolf zombie thing and concentrate on dodging the arbitrarily dangerous ground bits.

I’m sure there’s more I could add, but this’ll do for now. It’s taken me like, an hour and a half or more to write the kitten thing.

Ok.

So.

Lets talk sPvP. You’ll have a little over 17k HP. A little under 3k attack unbuffed. 44% crit chance, and base toughness.

Wait, did he just say base toughness?

Yes. I did. Be a man.

Here’s what one-shot me with no chance to react pre-patch.
Begin list -
Backstab Thief, if executed perfectly.
End list -

Here’s what will one shot me with no chance to react post-patch.
Begin list -
End list -

Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t quite a few builds that will force you to go super turtle mode and break line of sight in order to try and survive and give yourself a little breathing room, but you’re not dead, and not being dead is a pretty good thing given the speed at which we can regain HP even in combat. There are still things that will tool you if you get caught at the wrong time with the wrong cooldowns down, but everyone has to deal with that, so man up and don’t cry about it.

All those dodges you were wasting on Evasive Arcana? Here’s a thought. Use them to avoid damage. Don’t know what damage to use them against? Get better at seeing the important animations and your surroundings.

Get better at breaking line of sight and rotating cooldowns.

Use your heal any time it is required, whether that be for condition removal or because you actually need a heal. Worst case, you need a heal and it’s merely compensating for the incoming damage and no more, but that’s cool, cause when it’s done you can switch into water if it was on cooldown and pop cleansing water/cone of cold. Either way, it’s buying you valuable seconds of life for bigger heals to come off cooldown, or survival utilities, or positioning cooldowns that will allow you to put the pressure on them and force them to turtle. Always be looking for an opening to turn the tables (you won’t always get one, but you can’t just go into super turtle mode forever, it’s a stalling tactic while you’re waiting for cooldowns). Worst comes to worst, buy time for RtL and gtfo, if you absolutely can’t turn it around. Duck and dive, dodge and weave, twist and turn, move. Don’t just stand there like a dumbstruck idiot and eat damage to the face.

If you’re waiting for burst cooldowns to come up, line of sight while you do so. there’s no point in eating damage from someone while you plink away at them for 2k lightning whip hits or something. Use the time to pop a heal, or waste one of their cooldowns, or whatever. Just don’t eat damage to the face all the time. It’s stupid.

Anyway. Damage.

In a perfect world, your opening combo will look like this.
Start in Air.
Rtl -> Updraft (procs swiftness) -> Shocking Aura (swiftness/fury)
Switch to Fire (gain might)
Burning Speed -> Drakes Breath (1-2 ticks, you’re only putting it on for the fire grabe burst) -> Fire Grab -> Ring of Fire.
Switch to Earth (protection) (You’re still on top of them, right?)
Earthquake (might)-> (optional Ring of Earth) -> Churning Earth (might)
A splitsecond after you start casting Churning earth,
Switch to Water (regen, clears a condition)
Armour of Earth (protection, stability, regen, vigor, clears a condition)
Pop Frost Aura if you think it’ll help.
A half second before Churning Earth cast finishes, Lightning Flash onto targets face if they moved out of range (clears a condition, more regen and vigor).
Twat them for a reasonably large number when churning earth goes off.

Go try it against the test dummies in the mists. Knock the heavy golem towards the medium golem with updraft and combo from there. Practice until you can kill every one of those golems simultaneously inside the above combo (light golem normally has about 40% hp remaining and the CE bleeds take care of the rest).

Obviously that’s ideal, but that’s a lot of damage spread over 5-6 seconds, and giving them very little time to react, with multiple built in redundancies. Of the boons you give yourself, you’re rocking 6-7 when churning earth goes off. 14% more damage. You have at least 10 stacks of might, depending on what point in the fight you’re at (if you pull off the combo mid way through an engagement you could probably have a few more stacks), 20% more crit chance, 5% more damage permanently from Runes (because there are no points in combat where you won’t have Might up), and a whole bunch of other beneficial effects cycling through. Either way, that’s about as close to hitting like a truck as we come with D/D. It certainly doesn’t rival thief burst, and it’s harder to execute due to the length and the small window within which it needs to be performed, but it hits very very hard. You’ll force a reasonable amount of your opponents just to immediately go super turtle to survive. A good portion of them you’ll just kill outright (lol, thieves), and the usual super tanky suspects won’t bat an eyelid, but you’re dealing with that no matter what build you play as ele, so little point complaining.

Since it was requested in the massive gripefest that is the patchnotes thread, here goes.

I will state in advance that it is not completely off the wall, but I run the same build in sPvP/PvE/WvW, merely switching a little gear and runes around between the 3. I have been using this build for about the last 6-7 weeks, and it’s been tweaked in sPvP to pretty close to perfection (though I think I might change the runes now that they’ve fixed the runes of the pack – undecided right now, requires testing) for it’s intended purpose.

So first up, the build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJAoYhEmgbzR5gjDAkHn4CLCFPYRRxM5A;ToAg0CnoyxkjIHbOuck5MEZWA

(copy/paste the link into your browser – apparently the forum doesn’t like semi-colons in links)

As you can see, pretty standard stuff for the most part. Pretty normal looking Cantrip/Aura focussed build with a heavy lean towards aggression and burst, at the cost of a little survivability.

Context Dependant changes:

sPvP -
Played as listed.

WvW –
Runes of the Pack.
Knights Jewellry with Ruby Gems.
Full berserker Armour.
1 Berserker dagger (Sigil of Force)
1 Valkyrie dagger. (Sigil of Battle)

PvE –
As WvW, except;
1 Valkyrie Dagger with Sigil of Battle.
1 Valkyrie Scepter with Sigil of Bloodlust (might change this at some point, but it does the job for now).
Lupicus Fight (or anything else that requires staff range, I guess the tree bosses in TA as well)- Valkyrie Staff with Sigil of Force.
Swap Lightning Flash for Arcane Wave, and Ether Renewal for GoEH.

You guys don’t seem to realise that there’s a good chance all the bunker builds will eventually be tweaked downwards. That the Ele bunker got nerfed first is irrelevant and shortsighted. They have no place in the game. Period.

Survival oriented builds designed to buy time, sure. Almost immortal builds that require extreme dedication of manpower to drop in a timely fashion, no.

Sure, it would have been great to have all that happen in one patch, and I’m not arguing that the patch is kinda pathetic, given the state of the game right now, but you’re acting like you’ve been singled out above all else to receive the only bunker nerf that will ever happen in the entire history and future of the game.

It’s reasonable to assume that, if the developers are competant (the jury is still out on that one as far as I’m concerned) broken things will be fixed, and yet here we are, crying about how some broken stuff was fixed, like it’s some kind of massive surprise. The only surprise is that it took this long and that it wasn’t uniformly spread across all the offending classes, which I’ll not argue feels like a bit of a slight, but I would hope that what we’re seeing now is the beginning of them bringing a lot of classes into line as far as capabilities goes, in order to evaluate on a roughly even playing field, and then, if necessary, buff appropriately. If you’re too short-sighted to see the vague outline of a medium/long term goal for achieving overall balance, then I honestly don’t know what to say.

Aether McLoud.1975:

It’s not that bunkers got nerfed Arc. ELE bunkers got GUTTED. Guardian and engineer bunkers got BUFFED.

I’d like you to direct me to the exact lines in the patch notes that buff guardians.

I haven’t looked at the Engy notes, so I’m not going to comment on that.

fixit.7189:

Arc, you are stated u don’t use staff much and pretty much into D/D and S/D which both only got minor nerfs so of course you are fine with these changes. We get it, you did not like staff bunkers and don’t mind them getting massive nerfs since it does not effect you one bit other being able to smoke staff users way easier now.

Staff bunkers needed to be toned down.

Anyone who disputes that fact has not done enough tPvP to know that a well played one is essentially immortal, excepting stupidly overwhelming odds (which aren’t feasible in a 5v5 setting).

I’m not saying that bunker guardians or bunker engies are less stupid, but bunkers in general are bad for the game, and were too survivable. I’m also not saying that you shouldn’t be able to be tanky if you want to be, but ‘tanky’ should give you the ability to hold off 2 guys for 15-25seconds or so until your backup arrives, not forever. It unbalances the distribution of manpower, and marginalizes the metagame into bunker or burst, since if you take the middle ground balanced build, you lose to both extremes. Both bunkers and burst needed to be toned back in order for the balanced builds to stand a competitive chance.

People are complaining about their bunkers being nerfed and forgetting that other classes got damage nerfs, which means you don’t need to be super immortal any more, and if it were capable to do so (which it may still be on certain classes – I’m not claiming a totally comprehensive knowledge of the game here, but I do know Ele) then the games new metagame would be immensely bunker centric, since the burst isn’t as powerful as it was before, leading to nothing coming even close to keeping them in check.

@zomby – I’ll create a new thread for my build. It’s not anything completely off the wall, and it’s more about how you play it, than being a ‘one build to rule them all’ type dealy.

zombyturtle.5980:

@ Arc its not even the fact skills got nerfed. Everyone agrees that EA was overpowered its that we got nothing in return. No buffs at all (except to useless conjures)

This is a BIG problem and shows Anet has no idea about ele mechanics or just doesn’t care.

I don’t disagree at all with that sentiment.

We didn’t really get anything apart from a couple of quality of life changes, some tooltip fixes, a few nerfs (of varying degrees of severity), and a bunch of other tacked on pointless stuff that won’t really change much either way.

But then, most classes are in a similar position with this patch. I didn’t look much at the Engy/Ranger sections of the notes, but there are few buffs to be seen across the board.

On the whole it’s a lot of fixing and updating tooltips, with some nerfs thrown around, and the odd minor buff here and there.

It’s not like they buffed every class in the game and nerfed us. Every class got tweaked downward a little, and we didn’t even come close to being hit the hardest (seriously – go look at the thief changes. There’s gonna be a huge bunch of easymoders re-rolling tomorrow).

A lot of people here are overreacting and hunting for pitchforks instead of actually thinking things through.

Also bunker guardians got BUFFED even.

They did?

Block bug fixed – Nerf.
Svanir Runes fixed – Nerf.
SoJ duration reduced 2s – Nerf.
Selfless daring healing co-efficient reduced by 50% – Nerf.

They got 2 buffs. Of which one might be actually beneficial to a bunker role.

Drop the hyperbole.

I wonder if half of you guys even play the game.

There was more than one viable Ele build if you put some thought into things as opposed to just copying whatever you’ve been told is good by people who are barely qualified to be any kind of authority on the matter.

While I don’t agree with quite a few of the changes, and at least 50% of them are completely useless as far as changing functionality (hint: those conjure changes will not see them more widely used in any way), it’s not the end of the kittening world.

Note that commentary from here out leans more heavily towards the pvp related effects.

Ether Renewal actually got slightly nerfed, since the reduced channel time now means less ticks of condition removal, and the condition removal was why it was the best pvp heal. In many ways the reduction in channel time is better from a straight healing point of view (it’s certainly the best heal per second we have now), but it looks like we lost around 3 (maybe 4?) ticks of condition removal, which isn’t so great. This assumes the number of condition clearing ticks was reduced proportionate to the amount of time chopped off the channel. If that’s not the case and we’re getting the same amount of ticks as before then it’s a collossal buff.

Evasive Arcana was broken in every regard. If the original tooltip is representative of the intended function, the only blast finisher it should ever have had was on an earth dodge. Stop crying because they fixed your ability to dodge for free finishers at every opportunity. Now, with that said, they should have fixed the rest of it while they were at it, because it of course has zero value now (though I’ve long been of the opinion that for aggressive/somewhat glassy builds, it was a waste of trait points anyway, because dodging for 3 stacks of might is wasting your endurance when you need it to mitigate damage, and slowing down your burst, giving them valuable time to react). In any case, unless you were playing a bunker build, you can live without it, just like I have been for the past 6-8 weeks. Despite what some people would have you think, it’s not necessary. Stop being sheep.

RtL/Magnetic Grasp sounds promising, but I’m pretty sure they claimed to have improved magnetic grasp last patch, and while it was better, it was still screwing up. I’ll hold judgement on it until I see how reliable it now is. If it is close to completely reliable now, that’s going to make a big difference.

All the tooltip fixes are a bit ‘meh’. Doesn’t seem like something that couldn’t have been done weeks ago, instead of leaving it until now and padding the patch notes with it, but whatever.

Dragons Tooth change is a bit sucky and seems counter intuitive (so I cast it on a group of allies who are in a field so they can get the buff while I’m standing outside cheering them on?).

Conjure changes are a waste of time – The problem is the core mechanic of the skill, and it won’t be solved by tweaking cooldowns and adding passive buffs when you have them equipped. At the end of the day they’re not competitive enough options compared to our Cantrips, and, in some cases, signets/various arcane skills.

Tornado was terrible before, and now it’s even more terrible. Not much more to be said, or even much to be disappointed about since nobody with any sense used it before anyway.

A bunch of other random ‘meh’ stuff that i have no real opinion on.

In short:

D/D is about the same as it was before.
S/D is a little bit nerfed due to Dragons Tooth, but fared pretty well overall.
Non-bunker Staff builds don’t seem to have been hugely affected.
Bunker Staff builds got gutted, as well they should have, because bunkers are kittening stupid, and if you can’t survive burst, that’s your problem, not the games. The only time a Thief ever bursted me down before I had time to react was if he landed a perfect backstab combo on me, and by perfect, I mean splitsecond perfect. use your utilities for survival and stop wasting them on dumb skills.

My own builds are completely unaffected (sadly – I’d have liked to drop a few points here and there so I could pack more ‘oomph’, but my damage feels reasonably solid compared to my survivability), and that’s D/D for pvp (spvp/wvw – running the same build in both), and S/D for pve (occasionally dipping into Staff for fights like lupicus where the range helps).

Don’t forget that thieves have taken a huge hit to their damage, so while we didn’t receive many direct buffs, we’re not doing too badly as a result of the indirect changes.

The sky isn’t falling.

Since when is landing a churning earth on someone trolling?

Except that it doesn’t work for the ‘+x% damage while in Y Attunement’ traits.

Might from Sigil of battle/Fire swaps
Vigor from Renewing Stamina/Cantrips
Regen from Cantrips/Water swaps
Fury from Aura’s/Attunement swaps
Swiftness from Aura’s/Air swaps

Throw in Protection from Armor of Earth/Earth swaps and Stability from Armour of Earth (though I’m not sure if Stability applies to Bountiful Power at the minute) and you’re easily rolling 5 boons almost permanently.

The thing that most people forget is that with Bountiful Power (25pt water), you easily make up the loss of the 200odd power you lose from not putting points in fire simply by having 10%+ perma damage boost in combat due to boon uptime, which more than makes up for it, in addition to lending you a huge amount of survivability.

TerryLong.9561:

<snipped rotation info>

I haven’t watched the vids, but that’s a bad rotation.

Doesn’t take advantage of updraft putting you the perfect distance away for burning speed, and doesn’t take advantage of the 6 might stacks you can gain from earth quake/churning into a ring of fire.

Try the following:
RtL -> Updraft -> Shocking Aura
Fire Attunement -> Burning Speed -> Drakes Breath (as many ticks as you feel like – I normally only let it tick once) -> Fire Grab -> Ring of Fire
Earth Attunement – > Earthquake -> Ring of Earth (optional) -> Churning Earth
while Churning Earth is castingArmour of Earth -> switch to Water attunement -> Frost Aura, and, finally, if necessary, just before CE finishes casting, Lightning Flash onto them to remove any blinds and add a little extra direct damage.

Benefits -
Shocking Aura procs any boons your traits give you before the fire combo – maximised damage.
Burning Speed/Drakes/FireGrab puts you pretty much on top of them, meaning you’re instantly placed for Ring of Earth and forcing them to dodge out of churning earth if they want to avoid it.
Ring of Fire generates 6 stacks of might for you when churning earth lands – maximised damage.
Armour of Earth prevents interrupted CE casts, and generates a few more boons to bump the damage up.

That rotation basically gives you every boon we have access to, streamlines the combo chain as far as timeframe goes (you’re not spending valuable seconds chasing people around in an ideal engagement), and has a number of redundancy options built in to cover for people getting out of range, people trying to attack you while you’re channeling, etc etc.

It’s just better.

It’s also a perfectly ideal situation, but that’s the combo to strive for IMO, rather than this backwards and forwards updraft into run towards them into weird fire chain into them having almost full mobility while you’re transitioning into the earth combo.

edit: Just looked at the build and I see you’re not using Zephyrs Boon (in a D/D build? :o), or Bountiful Power, so I guess that renders some of my advice moot, since you’re losing out on at least 14% more damage/20% crit chance.

A (tournament focussed) PvP build that’s dedicated to surviving as long as possible against multiple opponents in order to hold them up until backup arrives. This is important (in the current metagame) because point control in pvp is what wins matches, so having a dude on a point who won’t die ensures that you retain control for as long as possible.

They mostly have next to no offensive power.

A bunch of people play them for other reasons, but they mostly came about from the 5v5 tournament scene and a need to avoid getting practially instagibbed by high burst classes before your support could come and help out.

Plague.5329:

“- “Some” balance changes.”

Oh, lord. I get the impression a lot of people are going to be very mad at this supposedly “big PvP patch.” As I feared, it’s shaping up to be nothing more than bug fixes, with no attempt whatsoever to fix any of the major problems with some of the classes right now.

Bug Fixes are actually a pretty big part of what’s required at the minute. Pick any class and think about how much better it would be if all the currently broken and bugged skills/traits worked as they are supposed to work. At least as far as my Ele is concerned, I can think of a handful of potential bug fixes that would immediately make me re-evaluate my build to improve the efficiency, and quite a few more that would be huge quality of life changes (lol, how about a RtL that actually works consistently).

Making big balance changes while leaving massive bugs still in the game would be a terrible idea, and is only asking for those balance changes to be reverted or further tweaked once the bugs are squashed.

While I’m not in any way denying that a lot of things outside of the ‘bug’ spectrum need work, it’s important that the foundations of the balance are correct and stable. Obviously everyone would prefer bug fixes and balance changes, but these guys have limited time/manpower, and need to prioritise, and while I disagree with prioritising custom arena’s, I’m in complete support of them making the traits/skills work as they’re supposed to before going on a huge number-changing mission.

Adwila.1392:

I can assure you there’s teams in that ladder that don’t even deserve the top 20, they simply have more QPs because they play more, or because since all good teams tend to sync in the same tournament bracket, even if a so called “good team” loses against them, they’ll just queue up for another Paid Tournament where it’ll be free of any good teams and proceed to wreck all the random teams and thus earn QPs.

That’s exactly what he was saying.

Just because playerX has more QP than playerY doesn’t automatically make playerX a better player. Therefore the system is mostly just showing who has played more, rather than who is better.

Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or one hundred duck-sized horses?

Some kind of personal ELO is definitely required, but I don’t feel that enough will solve the problem, and here’s why.

What happens in other games where you have a personal ELO/MMR and queue solo? Well, you start at the average starting level, and if you’re good enough to carry your team mates then over time you’ll eventually rise to the point where you are paired with, and play against, similarly skilled players. The key point is that, at least at the start, you are carrying your team mates. Most other games allow this to be possible because skilled players can normally dispatch multiple bad players with relative ease (unless they get zerged by a silly amount of numbers obviously), but that’s not really possible in GW2, and the fault lies in the current incarnation of the downed system.

Without wanting to drive too far off-topic, the current downed system unfairly punishes players who are capable of winning engagements against the numerical odds. So I’m pretty good at the game, and 2 people jump me, but that’s cool because I’m pretty baller and dispatch one of them after a somewhat drawn out back and forth with good use of LOS/cd’s/positioning/etc/etc. So cool, one of these guys is on the floor. At this point, in almost every other game, you’re 1v1 against an opponent who was relying on his numerical advantage to beat you, and behold, your skill prevails and you emerge victorious, your slain foes lying broken at your feet.

But not this game. In this game, you down one guy, and then you’re in a position where you can’t afford to not stomp him, but you simultaneously can’t afford to stomp him. If you stop holding off his team mate and try and stomp him, you’re going to eat a big pile of damage (outside of a few specialist cooldowns) from the team mate who’s now free to use you as a target golem. There’s a good chance this will be enough damage to down you in most cases. But if you just ignore the downed player, he’s either going to be slamming 1k damage rocks at you for the rest of the fight, supplementing his team mates damage, or he’s going to be vanishing off into a corner (for those lucky enough to have movement while downed) to heal himself up in between pissing you off. In almost all circumstances, winning a 1v2 in this game is practically impossible, regardless of the skill of your opponents.

And, to return to my original point, this is why a personal ELO/MMR system in this game isn’t going to work (in it’s current incarnation). I can’t hop into a pug free tourney group and carry my team to victory based on the fact I’m a super god boss dude, because while I could 1v2/1v3 mediocre players in any other game (yes, that’s me, and that’s probably the best pvp game I’ve played since GW1), it’s just not possible here, and without providing players the means for their individual skill to shine through, the game ultimately comes down to numbers and distribution of manpower, making a personal ELO/MMR pointless.

And, as a byproduct of being unable to create a personal ELO/MMR system, the only alternative is some kind of team-based ELO/MMR, which is fine for guys who are teamteamteamteamgogogo, but basically screws the vast majority of semi-casual/semi-competitive guys who want some kind of personal achievement/rating since they’ll be pugging a large majority of their playtime.

A personal rating is much better for matching similarly rated players together in order for them to progress their individual skills without the reliance on needing 4 specific other dudes around all the time to make some progress (as you alluded to in your first post, with the ‘standing around in the mists doing nothing syndrome’, which it seems a great many people are dealing with right now).

Apologies for the long post – Congrats if you made it to the end :p

duszy.4612:

But on the other hand – solo thief killing 2-3 or more ppl is ok?

Arguing that something broken should remain broken to counter the other broken crap in the game is not a good argument.

Bunkers are way too survivable right now, just like some of the burst is too much or too easy. The balance needs to be reigned in at both ends of the extremes.

Ether Renewal, Cantrips providing Regen which provides condition clear, Cleansing Wave (skill), optionally Cleansing Wave (trait). Keeping conditions off as en Ele is stupidly easy, even as a dps build.

People complain about thieves because their damage is almost entirely frontloaded (exception: Deathblossom/Bleed oriented builds and other oddball stuff). While a Thief might do the same dps over 30 seconds as an Ele, most of that damage comes in huge spikes with periods of downtime (back to stealth) as opposed to constant high pressure while rotating defensive cooldowns/dodges/heals.

Since the vast majority of people playing the game are pretty casual, their window to deal with a thief is much smaller than their window to deal with some kind of sustained dps class. More time to react means more opportunities for your opponent to mess up or more opportunities for you to outplay them by shutting down part of their damage combo. Throw in the fact that most classes are vulnerable while doing damage simply by virtue of having a limited number of dodges and damage mitigation cooldowns, giving people the impression they at least have a fighting chance.

So that’s why people complain about Thieves. Tiny window to react to immense frontloaded damage combined with no ability to really respond effectively should you manage to survive it (if you don’t know what signs to look for and/or aren’t well-versed in thief mechanics). A couple of builds from other classes can achieve similar results from a frontloaded damage point of view, but are almost always left significantly more vulnerable in return, should the burst fail, because they don’t have the luxury of lolinvisible!

Not having personal condition removal is a disadvantage, precisely because you leave yourself open to get tooled by heavy condition oriented builds.

If you’re a decent player, you build to kill guys at your skill level, not below. You can steamroll people below your skill/gear level no matter what build you run, but if you have a bad build and run into a guy who knows as much about what he’s doing as you do about what you’re doing then it comes down to the prep that’s gone into the build, so if the build is bad you’re going to lose the fight (unless your opponent makes some huge mistakes, obviously).

I’m not saying condition damage is bad, or that there aren’t ways to make it work – I’m saying that ‘well, there a bunch of nubs running around in WvW with terrible gear and builds, so condition damage is great!’ isn’t a glowing recommendation of it’s advantages. Likewise, if I said ‘there are a bunch of nubs running around in WvW with terrible gear and builds, so auto-attacking them to death is a masterful strategy!’ I’d be completely wrong, and providing an incomplete picture of reality.

If you’re better than them, bad players will die no matter what you do. Don’t build to kill bad players.

In WvW, most people do not carry more than 1 or 2 condition removals at a time, and generally do not actually remove conditions when they need too. In addition, most people in WvW don’t have that much PvP experience, and don’t run full exotics.

I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to say here. If the people you are fighting are either bad, or outgeared, then it really doesn’t matter whether you use the most efficient means to kill them, or the 2nd most efficient, or the 3rd most efficient.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Fixing-Conjure-Fiery-Greatsword

Jericho.4521:

Ideally for me, it would be bug fixes ASAP, “balance” changes slow and steady just like they are doing. I think going easy on the nerf bat is the best approach and I applaud them for this.

It’d be great to see a rush on major bugs that are holding some classes way back along with that however.

This.

It boggles my mind that we’re seeing balance changes made while every class has at least dozens of skill/trait bugs present. Making sure everything works as it’s supposed to should be top priority, and then you can see where the balance lies.

As it is, we’re seeing a bunch of number tweaks being put in place with no idea how the affected skills will perform once broken traits are fixed, which is just asking for everything to end up balanced twice over. Seems pretty inefficient and short-sighted.

Yes.

Message Body length must at least be 15.

Evassive Arcana is just so good that it makes every other option seem dumb.

Not necessary at all. If the actual abilities listed on the tooltip were what actually fired, I’d go back to it in a heartbeat, but until then, spending 10 extra points in arcana just to waste my endurace for 6 extra stacks of might that you can get elsewhere can be a waste, depending on how much power/condition damage you run before buffs, and what the rest of the build looks like.

Aside from that, DPS Ele’s can work, but bunker/support Ele’s are still going to be more useful with the metagame in it’s current state.

It’s completely unfun to play against bunkers, you’re no threat and simply do nothing except waste my time

Fixed.

And yes, bunkers are silly no matter what class is bunkering at the minute. I can’t really blame people for using them, given the objective holding focus of the game, and the fact that you have to be better than the average thief to not get blown up by his burst, but that doesn’t make the situation any less ridiculous.

And no, not everyone complaining about poor damage is playing a bunker. I’d say it’s probably pretty reasonable to assume that a lot of people have said ‘flux this, if I can’t do any damage anyway, I might as well just build for pure survivability, and at least then there’ll be a good reason for my damage being terrible’. It’s not a mentality I personally subscribe to, but what you need to remember is that 90% of people playing any given game at any given time are probably not very good, so the path of least resistance is what gets chosen (hence the collossal amount of thief/war/mes in hotjoin 8v8).