Guild Wars 2

Merlin,

You are awesome. Thanks for your input, you’ve given me a lot to try out. I’m glad that at least a couple of those I have already, so I’m evidently on the right track, but so many more I hadn’t thought of.

Much appreciated!

Hi all,

I’m doing sPvP a fair bit, and Guardians are basically the bane of my existance.

Aside from the fact seemingly half of every team is made up of them, they seem to have absolutely absurd combinations of tank and gank, being rather difficult to damage in the first place and then instahealing to at or near full. (While still being able to dish out quite a lot of pain.)

I’m running a scepter/dagger condition build with staff secondary, and a flesh golem as backup DPS. Corrupt Boon has been one of my best friends but is a temporary respite as they seem to pop boons like crazy.

Is the answer to just not be a condition necro*, or indeed not to be a necro at all?
Can anyone give me some pointers on techniques that work for them?

Thanks!

*I do consider this a last resort. I don’t want to have to learn a whole new playstyle when I finally got otherwise good results from this one, if I can avoid it.

Oh look, another fine example:
http://i.imgur.com/a1R0gQu.png

Keksmuffin.1450:

I don’t even…. you think there are way too many people playing mesmer and guard and they are brainless op stuff?

Yes. I 100% do. Laughably broken dev favorites who have no downsides and immunity to non-token nerfs.

Keksmuffin.1450:

Can’t remember who, when and where but somebody brought up the idea that if you would have the same class more than once in your team that they would not be allowed to share more than 30/40 points in the same traitlines. Way better than just banning having more than one of a class IMO.

Love it. Much better idea than mine.

Keksmuffin.1450:

I haven’t seen any team with more than two of one class since 10th december.

You lucky kitten. Every game I’ve played lately has been a Guardian/Mesmerfest and it’s boring as hell.

The day Arenanet nerfs Guardians or Mesmers in any significant way is the day the four horsemen galop across the sky. In lieu of that, why not have sPvP games that encourage class diversity?

Hi there.

Is anyone else sick of seeing this in every game?
http://i.imgur.com/HTMxu3Y.png?1?8744

You can replace the Mesmers with Guardians, or in fact replace the warrior and necro with Guardians, and you’d still have a pretty realistic summary of most sPvP matches.

Can we please have game settings that limit the number of X class per match? Or better: enforce that rule across all games. Ok, so mesmers and guardians would cry, but really who cares about them? They’re only playing those classes to be on easymode.

Let’s have a little diversity in PvP – enforce class limits so that it’s not an endless horde of purple and blue spamfests.

Edit: Inb4 “omg ur just jelly of our 1337ness and ur kitten” etc. etc.

Thought not. Pity. Ah well, thanks. I know just how hard laptops are to upgrade >_> time to pass on the bad news.

Hi, sorry if I’m posting this in the wrong place.

A friend of mine would like to give GW2 a go, but not sure her laptop is up to it.
Specs as follows:

Windows 7 64 bit
Dual core 1.6Ghz processor
4GB RAM
Intel Onboard graphics, approx. memory 1.7GB
DirectX 11

Sorry if I missed anything there. The RAM seems fine but honestly it’s the fact the processor is a bit underpowered and the lack of dedicated graphics card that worries me.
Thanks in advance.

Simple enough: a toggle on sPvP which shows only games that allow X number of any class in any one game.

Because really, is anyone else sick of games that are just 3 mesmers, 2 guardians and a warrior or ranger?

It’d make things a whole lot more tactical as well, forcing everyone to play to their strengths rather than relying on half their team being made of unkillable bunkers or clone spammers. It’s not even really about balance, it’s about making things less boring, should people choose it.

Ok so plenty of twelve year olds who rolled a mesmer to just own in sPvP will whine, but who cares about them? They can just stick with the regular games. The mesmer/guardian players who are actually good will thrive in class-limited sPvP just as they do in the regular games.

“CC and conditions. Immobilize and poison especially – quite deadly to us. Also, right when we start using our water attunement heals, chill us. It’s a lot more helpful if you have a reliable way to consistently reapply it, as our condition removal is quite good.”

Advice appreciated, but you just massively contradicted yourself. “Use conditions” and “Our condition removal is quite good” (massive understatement, by the way).

“Most D/D eles all use a very similar, pretty predictable rotation (or numerous rotations). Learn them, learn when to dodge, and destroy them.”

I think you mean learn to dodge, and watch as they run off and regen to full to attack again.

“They are heal tankers, you go backstab burst thief and end it before the battle even starts. If you miss your burst you lose because you can’t out run them, if you are a sustained dps you lose because thats the exact build they counter, if you are a bunker you can “beat” an ele but you have nothing to secure the kill before they run.”

Translation: You need to oneshot them with some absurdly one-dimensional class/build, or they just won’t die.

“you can build a d/d bunker ele with insane defense that pretty much cannot be killed 1 v. 1”

This is an argument for a nerf by itself.

“For some reason, you acknowledge that a thief needs to sacrifice a hell of a lot of offensive power to be like this, but you seem unaware that elementalists do as well.”

Elementalists sacrifice nowhere near as much offence to be utterly unkillable.

“You learn to play”

And the twelve year old who likes being overpowered shows his face. Disregarded as idiocy.

The overriding point here is: the pinacle of skill for an elementalist is “unkillable”, wheras the pinacle of skill for other classes is “temporarily inconvenience the elementalist”. This is a problem that needs addressing.

So, the D/D Elementalist.
They have average offence, insane defence and unparralleled mobility.

How exactly is this balanced? Where is the drawback in all this?

An elementalist at a given skill level is unkillable. They can withdraw from any fight short of a zerg V 1 scenario at will. Notice how I said “kill” not “beat” in the title: beating one is not the same as killing them. Beating them they just run off, regenerate in seconds, recharge their skills and come back for another go. They don’t die unless they make a serious mistake.

You certainly can disrupt the spell rotation – at which point they can run off and come back for another go at leisure. No other class besides a specialised thief has this luxury, and said thief build sacrifices a hell of a lot of offensive power to do it.

So can someone explain to me, picking whatever class you like, how do you reliably kill a D/D elementalist without them making a monumental kittenup?

Ok, so generally the necro form is a pretty miserable place, and a fair bit of that admittedly is justified. However, I happen to find this class a hell of a lot of fun and know there are plenty who feel the same, so let’s share some experiences and any useful info we’ve picked up along the way.

So, me. Fell in love with this class in the beta weekend, rolled one immediately and despite having a few other 80s I’ve always considered my necro my main. Started doing mainly WvW, with mixed results, but lately my focus has been on sPvP and a bit of PvE with my guild.

PVE
I love necro for this. With traits, staff and wells are both incredibly powerful support tools, and I’ve got a lot of use out of plague form. As you can imagine, mass blinding and chilling of hostile mobs for 20 seconds (25 throwing in a well of darkness) can take a hell of a lot of pressure off the rest of the group.

I won’t be winning any awards for damage, but there are other necros out there who can and do that role and excel in it. Hopefully one of them will comment here on necro as a DPS class, but I play support so can’t really say much.

WvW
This is where I probably have the least experience, but: for big group fights, you’re kitten good at throwing around a lot of AoE conditions and support abilities. For general roaming, a 25% move speed signet and spectral walk make it pretty mobile and it’s a very capable fighter. I run a heavy scepter condition build for this and have fought down a surprising range of enemies, though frankly I’m still not great at it. Again, hopefully a more WvW-oriented necro will chip in here.

sPvP
Necro has become my favorite class for this, frankly. I still don’t claim to be anywhere near the top skillwise, but I’ve got consistently good results which have only got better as I got more experience.

I’ve heard good things about deathshroud-heavy builds in sPvP, but I run a heavily bunkered build with a staff primary weapon, two wells and corrupt boon. I originally tried this build as a joke, just to see how hard to kill I could make myself, but found it worked so well I started using it seriously. This was after I’d tried a sPvP equivilent to my usual condition build and failed miserably.

I’d just like to stop here to mention corrupt boon is, from what I’ve found, one of the best and downright hilarious moves we have. You’ll know why when you use it on a heavily buffed up guardian or elementalist.

You’ll also hear a lot of people say that wells are useless in PvP because you can just dodge out of them. In my experience: that’s actually not the case. If you time them well, and use the right one for the right situation, they’re fight-winners. Not to mention that if you’re supporting another person or two, there are often so many effects flying around that the enemy doesn’t even notice that they’ve just had a chilling WoD dropped on them

Anyway: I’ve found it fairly capable 1v1 as well surprisingly enough. Just yesterday I was dueling a bunker dagger elementalist. I couldn’t do enough DPS to bring them down, but they couldn’t kill me either.

Hell, I’ve even tried running round as a minion master in sPvP and while it wasn’t the greatest thing in the world it actually turned out to be surprisingly effective. Especially when my flesh golem stopped eating popcorn and actually hit stuff.

So yeah, if you think you’re doing badly, or just want to try a different style, just go nuts with your traits/gear, step in to structured and see what happens. Worked for me.

Again, I make absolutely no claims to being great at PvP or any kind of authority on the subject, but I’ve found this class perfectly capable and very enjoyable, and anyone who feels the same is welcome to offer up their own advice for new players or those just looking for help/ideas.

Simple rule of GW2: good thieves don’t die.

Chain stealth + good DPS + solid defences and yes, you can get all that in one build. No other class besides possibly mesmer can achieve this, and they don’t even come close in mobility.

Backstab thieves get whined about the most, but they really are pretty one-dimensional. Chain stealth thieves with someone who isn’t brain dead at the keyboard are the real problem, and those need the everloving kitten nerfed out of them because no class should be as utterly without drawbacks as that.

Basically: Thief stealth lasts 3-4 seconds.
Then add a load more time because the game has a rendering bug, meaning they don’t appear until sometime after their stealth ends.
Then add a load more still, because they can chain stealth abilities and defence without sacrificing DPS.

Thief is OP as kitten, and good thieves don’t die to anything short of a massive blob of people.

If it’s a 1v1 fight, they’ll either kill you or just reset the fight until they can kill you, or just run away and there’s kitten all you can do about it. If it’s a group battle, pray your friends focus the same target because a good thief is literally impossible to kill without 1-hitting them or a large, coordinated gang.

Well in that case, a few tips on wells that I’ve learned from experience:
1. Put 20 points in Curses. I know this isn’t the usual bunker route but there are two traits in this tree you REALLY need.
1.1. Pitch Black – this makes your Well of Darkness, an already very powerful spell, chill on top of the blindness. If your enemy has used up their dodges, it can render them virtually helpless. Bonus point: a lot of people who don’t know how necro works don’t realise how much trouble they’re in when a chilling WoD lands on them.
1.2. Focused Rituals – well skills going from point blank range to 900? Absolute must.

2. Learn to time them. See an enemy who just repeatedly dodged? Drop a chilling WoD on them. Dodges are your worst enemy as a wellmancer, but you can use this to your advantage. Got a thief/warrior beating on you? Drop a well or two right on yourself and watch them flail about helplessly.

3. So you can only equip 3 utility wells – what to go for? Well of Darkness is compulsary, frankly. It’s too good to ignore, for both solo and gang support. Then there’s Well of Corruption, which is another one that is practically too powerful not to use.
After that it’s a matter of picking what’s more important to you:
3.1. Support/survivability – Take Well of Power. Turning conditions on you and your allies into buffs is incredibly valuable and significantly increases your survivability.
3.1 DPS – The huge utility and survivability of this build comes at a price, namely damage. Well of Suffering is a great supplement to your marks (staff should be your primary weapon, frankly) for damage.

Hope this helps, and good luck to you!
Hope you’re not on my world because I’d absolutely hate to run into someone else with a build like mine. Annoying as hell.

Locust signet/flesh golem are both handy to have yeah. I personally prefer a third well and I like plague too much to go with the golem but IMO there’s a lot of leeway for tweaks and changes to that kind of build depending on how you play.

On another amusing note: the first thing I did when I brought my necro into sPvP thinking “kitten it, I’ll die horribly anyway” was bunker minion master. That turned out to be passable as well, though for actual performance I prefer wells. Still, when the AI gets fixed, that build has the potential to be really good I think.

Well I play a bunker necro in sPvP, but nothing really resembling your build (which looks more like an axe/deathshroud power build I’ve seen floating round the forums a lot.)

So while my build isn’t much like yours, I’ll at least share my general experiences playing full bunker. I actually tried this build as a joke, just to see how stupidly hard to kill I could make myself and pretty much just kitten, Then I found it working disturbingly well.

I run mainly wells with a staff primary weapon (and yes, they actually do work in PVP with decent timing and a bit of luck) and a dagger/warhorn as my secondary weapon.

As a group support class/style, it’s absolutely outstanding. Ripping boons off enemies, conditions off allies, regeneration/chills/fears/blinds all over the place, it’s a tremendous force multiplier. (Good use of plague can massively swing the odds of a fight in your teams’ favour as well.)

In 1v1s, I rely mainly on just wearing them down slowly. My burst damage is pretty much nonexistant, but you’d be surprised how little that’s mattered. Guardians and the occasional ele or thief (the bunker condition ones, I think, which stealth every 5 seconds or so) are realistically not killable but they utterly failed to kill me either.
Other than encounters like that which relied more heavily on being able to burst, I win a fairly high percentage of 1v1 fights.

Necro has all the right ingredients for a very strong defensive setup, make use of them and you’ll get surprisingly good results. Sorry I can’t offer much advice on your build, because frankly I have no real experience playing something so deathshroud heavy, but just so you know bunker necro builds can and do work hilariously well with a bit of practice and playing to your strengths.

Best of luck in sPvP you’re playing a heavily underrated class.

JonPeters.5630:

3 notes

1) it seems to be failing because of a rounding error which we are working on fixing right now.
2) we are buffing it next patch on top of fixing it.
3) carry on.

Thank you!
It is really nice to know that this stuff is at least being worked on and that concerns have been taken onboard.

Well, on the face of it this patch is basically a huge slap in the face and seriously calls into question whether Arenanet devs play their own kitten game.

The Spectral Grasp change is nice, and the +axe damage is a step in the right direction, but overall pretty meh with none of the serious, fundamental issues even addressed.

I have to give some credit to the balancing team given they do all this with a pitifully small workforce, but I have to say my faith in Arenanet is in freefall right now. They seem vastly out of touch with their playerbase to an extent even the WoW devs never achieved, and I think I speak for more than myself when I say it’ll be a cold day in hell when they see any more money out of me until they get their act together.

If they had done AI it probably would have been the only necro change and then everyone would have complained that we only got 1 fix.

Well it has to be said, a fix to minion AI is really more like 6 fixes in one, and a big overall fix to an entire playstyle. I was deeply disappointed in the lack of an AI fix personally.

Hey, sorry going to be a bit of a mess of questions in this thread but try and bear with me.
I’m currently level 58, and planning out gear and traits for WvWvW PVP at level 80. I really want to avoid going glass cannon, because being twoshotted is not something I find enjoyable, but what worries me a bit more is the people saying Elementalist basically needs to go bunker or go home.

Bunker just seems like the other end of the spectrum from glass cannon, but not really much more enjoyable because I can’t imagine I’d get decent DPS out of that.

So with that in mind, I wanted to go with a more all-round setup and I could use some opinions on it.
For gear, I was thinking I’d go with quite a lot of valkyrie and knight gear for passable vitality and toughness, but with power and crit thrown in. Pretty sad damage compared to the berserkers undoubtedly but should be more resilient (in theory.)

The big question here is: will this approach just make me terrible at everything rather than a decent all rounder? Does this class have to go either berserker or bunker to work well?

As for traits, earth is one I really want to max out because frankly it just seems awesome, but I’d like to get some points in fire and/or air but I don’t see many builds doing this. Are they just bad trees? Or is Arcana just mandatory?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

So in WvW, high toughness > high HP?
Right now I’m running round with somewhere in the area of 28K hitpoints, but virtually no toughness on my gear/spec. I just don’t know how well X amount of toughness equates to damage reductions.

I would also like some input on this.
I run a scepter bleed build, 30 points in curses. I’ve always put a lot of points in blood, but my gear has virtually no toughness on it and (it might be my imagination but:) I still seem to go down more easily than I’d like in WvW.
Is it worth taking points out of blood and putting them into death? Thinking of going:
0/30/30/10/0

Alternatively: would it be a significantly better idea to go with ArmageddonAsh’s approach of putting the points into extra death shroud instead?

The trouble is I don’t really know how much toughness does, or what a “good” amount is. Will the 200-300 from extra traits give me a significant benefit? Stupid question I know but I’ll have to find out how this works sooner or later if I’m going to stop being living up to my name.