Guild Wars 2

Personally I feel your pain. IMO you can increase your skill a lot at playing, hoping that some changes will come and you’ll be a bit more powerful. As you mentioned, there’s just no way to get anything close to real damage (comparatively speaking), while still having a decent chance of staying alive. The gap closes more as you get full Ascended gear, but I personally feel we should be more viable in lesser gear without spending 100s of gold just to find out how effective we can be at the top. Ele is my most expensive character because I end up changing runes and builds so much hoping to find something a little better.

Your build is good as mentioned, it’s similar to the one I often run as D/D. Just change things around slightly to compare other builds, but overall it’s the base of what I find most effective in WvW.

If it’s a 1v1, GoE will help you a lot, but otherwise I feel FGS is a better all-around WvW elite (you can always swap out if you go into a 1v1 that’s in a secluded place where you don’t expect to be interrupted). FGS helps you with escape if a group is chasing, and it can lay down some damage against groups and thieves (I find it can really surprise many thieves and down them even after stealth if you don’t just stand still where they vanished), especially if they have someone else to focus on or have turned their targets right after you mist form or armor of earth up.

I would also advise you break your combo down a bit more, don’t just try to go through the whole thing in a fight, a lot can happen and you should adapt on the fly. Don’t feel like you have to be combo’ing the entire fight, you need to lay down a burst string, get someone to use their heal while you keep constant pressure on them. Eventually with enough time you can wear them down, but you will never have the burst to take someone out before they can react so they’ll have a chance to use pretty much everything they have against you. The more you can anticipate what a class will do and counter it, the better you should do in fights.

This bug, general skill lag and just general low hp (thief fodder) is what keeps me off my ele in WvW. I also feel like my damage is very low compared to other classes I play, but that could just be because I die so easily with hybrid gear.

I guess a staff ele probably is the intended build for WvW, so IDK if it will be that big of a priority to change.

elementalist: teleport and mistform

any class: when building siege in wvw and interrupted

Viking Jorun.5413:

Saturn.6591:

Viking Jorun.5413:

In all seriousness, I think or settled on a build (pay no attention to the boon duration…..)
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJAoYhEmgbyx5wjDAkHuADLiCYUekDN2A-jUDBYMChUDIUIAUBgZPFRjtMMaVXBp8Ks6FY6SK1qTByfAwpgRrWEAzYA-w

Not sure if trolling…

It’s decently viable in WvW. No worse than any other D/D setup, unless you’re fighting a corrupt boon necro or boon steal thief. I use it more for team roaming, rather than solo roaming though.

30 into arcane without elemental attunement?…

SoLeciTO.3490:

If you all want to be objective you must provide numbers or examples to the table.

These are examples of how OP can be any class . . . the people here complaining about thieves has no objective points . . they are just angry because they still do not how to deal with thieves.

Warrio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiXhgsfoL6c

Mesmer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54UCCEinT5o

Engi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zy5cANG4Hk

Guardian:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw6bMD5z6bM

Necro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfGdT896JZ8

Ranger:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCBjuXKbqQM

Also here is a link of a thread talking of wich profession is the most hard to play against.

Is funny how Sanduskel and Burnfall are basically the only ones again attacking the profession.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Strongest-1-vs-1-class

I invite you to use the time you expend here in the forums learning the mechanics and improve your game play instead.

Sorry for my bad english i try my best.

Sad but true, Ele doesn’t make the OP cut.

I admit my thief in greens and yellows hits pretty hard and can get away easier than most other classes. But other than that, what can a thief do? Zerg battles suck with me trying to pick off someone on the sidelines and usually getting AOE stunlock zerged. Or near zero damage and only some utility with short-bow. OK fine we aren’t supposed to zerg battle maybe, so roaming/scouting is all that’s left.

If you take away thief damage I think that’s OK, but you have to give them more stealth back (and balance other class’s damage as well). Every patch has nerfed stealth duration, but I feel like it’s not helping to solve the problems of the class.

Thief/assassin/rogue are one of my favorite classes, but in this game there is something about their mechanics that annoy me and leave me switching back to other classes after a couple hours in WvW or sPvP.

Leuca.5732:

Optimal S/D spiking doesn’t even involve DT. It’s a combination of Earthquake+Air Burst/Arcane skills. When executed properly it’s extremely fast and if you are caught it’s hard to get out of, but there are also really obvious tells if you already know what the ele is running. The build is essentially a one-trick pony; it’s almost useless if the spike fails because it sacrifices pretty much all of your possible defensive measures to accomplish its damage.

The funny part is that the Air section of that burst is what 2 skills? Light strike and RTL… But yes, I realized OP was getting hit with this combo of mostly arcane skills that insta-gibbed him. Running a build like that wasn’t much fun for me, but to each his own I guess. Builds like this make me think they are the reason ANET created the downed state, because getting the stomp isn’t trivial with a full glass build that has no survivability skills.

dreztina.4820:

Columbo.5924:

There was already a lot of talk going on in the sPvP forums about the burst capabilities of an ele. The general consensus is that this burst is very cheesy (speak: not a good gameplay mechanic).

I really agree with that. I don’t want to call S/D eles overpowered because it’s not that they are stomping all over everything, but their mechanics really are stupid. The entire pvp system in this game is based around tells and reactions, and S/D has neither. There is no counter play to S/D damage. You do your best to read your opponent and guess what they’re going to do, but still the damage is all instant and avoiding it is more luck than anything else. I’m torn between wanting S/D wanting to get a severe overhaul, and not wanting to give Anet the chance to kitten up one of the few things eles have going for them.

IDK, I felt like S/D required RTL->Updraft->Dragon’s Tooth for effective burst. Without that lightning burst alone, or even with arcane isn’t that great. DT is the easiest thing to dodge (big red flag that says get away now) so without Updraft your pretty much without damage that will land.

In small fights it’s just too devastating to miss DT and other spells that you really need to land to be able to get someone down these days. Having gone back to D/D I don’t miss S/D much. But I still don’t feel like any of the weapon sets are effective anymore. I wish every skill on the bar was good at something, and that each attunement for a given weapon set actually worked well together (imagine if Scepter did condition damage across all attunements for example)

how are elementalists not viable?

Let’s first agree what being viable is. Is it being able to do something no other class can do? Or is it being able to achieve a result that helps yourself or your team win a fight that would be otherwise more difficult with you playing another class in that situation? I think of it as the latter, so…

The answer is because ANET reduced us to not being viable in MANY situations. That isn’t to say we aren’t viable in some situations, but generally very few that people enjoy playing.

How many people in any MMO sign up to heal-bot or be perma-support? The answer is a fraction of those that want to do damage. Although we are supposed to be a hybrid, we’ve been stuck into a narrow area where we are considered viable and even that is becoming more and more in jeopardy as patches go on.

Hybrid should mean the class can play however you want to spec, but IMO I hope it doesn’t mean that we aren’t good at anything, which is the current state of the class if you ask me.

A lot of other classes can do as much or more burst than we can, but because ours can be relatively instant, it looks to be worse than it actually is. If you survived that burst with 10% life you would be able to recover and beat the elementalist that insta-gibbed you. That’s why it’s not a viable spec and why the person running it has to target up-levels or those running zerker gear. Not exactly what I call viable even though it can get kills.

Your build and advice isn’t bad, but I feel the title should read Talyn’s Guide to a DD Elementalist.

Really overpowered and elementalist shouldn’t be in the same place unless this post is more than 6 months old. It’s true at release we had a lot, and because of the high skill cap of our class not everyone could achieve it easily. It’s just sad to see that produced such a nerf to oblivion that we now have to play amazingly just to achieve mediocre results. At least it’s still somewhat fun for me at the moment, but it is often disappointing.

If any class could use aegis to prevent the first backstab, I think it’s the ele. Being 2 shotted with over 3k armor is always frustrating.

start here: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=gw2+elementalist&sm=3

then add whatever else you want to the end of the search, such as wvw, d/d, staff, spvp…etc

Columbo.5924:

gw2buildcraft is a bit overconfident when calculating its values. For example if you take a thief and pick the “7% more chance to crit from behind or side” trait, it will ignore that there is a condition attached to that trait and simply add those 7% to your regular crit chance. You should be careful when taking those values for granted – it always makes a best case calculation.

Back to topic: I am fully in the boon duration boat. Take the protection boon for instance. Keeping that boon up reduces the damage taken by 33%. Given the diminishing returns of toughness/armor this can easily be the equivalent of 2000 or more toughness. The same could be said about fury as well. If i remember correctly you need 21 points in precision to increase your critical chance by 1%. So having the fury boon is like 420 extra precision. Or take the might boon: with 16 stacks (which is a more or less realistic value even if you opponent pushes you) thats 560 power and condition damage. And there is swiftness, regeneration or vigor on top of that.

Keeping all those boons up is in my opinion the best choice for your rune slots and is also one of the reasons I never run without 30 arcana (aside from the fact that it contains the key traits for a boon duration build – without it there would be no boons in the first place…).

I agree with this as well. For me it’s pretty important because I can afford cheap boon duration runes and food, but I don’t yet have ascended armor and weapons, only a couple trinkets. If everything I had was ascended, it might be different, but it’s hard to for me to decide right now if the Ele is even worth pumping my resources into since I don’t have enough for more than 1 character and probably won’t for quite a long time.

Gear always skews things so much, which is why I’m glad this game still has sPVP, at least I know there it’s not my gear that’s allowing someone to roll me.

Stand The Wall.6987:

I dont play ele a lot, but I know how hard it is.
Its one of the few classes I dont mind getting rolled by. Imo eles dont need a buff every other class needs a higher skill ceiling.
Its not your class its theirs.
Blah blah.

Thats because you know that they played flawlessly and you probably made several mistakes depending on the class.

Personally I think those who QQ about diamond skin haven’t played it. It’s useful for the first 5s of a duel and that’s about it.

I would love the skill to be reworked since as a GM trait it’s nowhere near worth it and kitten many people mentioned, a hard counter doesn’t make anyone happy, even if the 90% was lowered it would still be a cheesy build to troll with at best, at worst it would make 30 earth a required build to become viable.

Tom.8029:

This may be a bit selfish and unreasonable, but I’ve had this idea lately that they should allow the Elementalist to have more trait points than the other classes. Maybe like 5 or 10 more. I always feel like my build is incomplete in some way. For example i have this really good vulnerability build and it literally needs 5 more trait points to be perfect. I feel like a lot of the build for the Elementalist are like this. For most builds, you would need like 5 or 10 trait points to get that last this in the trait line that would just be the icing on the cake. I figured I’d just throw this out there. haha.

But I’m not sure if I think it would even the playing field or if I’m just being biased towards the Elementalist.

I think this just shows how much reworking elementalist trees need to make other lines actually viable.

Prysin.8542:

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Because it doesnt affect the ONE thing they care about – The Gemstore.

it does indirectly.

Hackers create agony, frustration and anger. These things make one much less motivated to play. If you are less motivated to play, you are less motivated to pay, especially since paying gives you no real advantage (as it should be, don’t get any funny ideas).

However at this point, the amount of hackers are too low to cause any form of problems outside of WvW and possibly PvP.
Since kill-stealing is much less likely to work here in GW2, hackers will not invade the PvE side as often as WvW or PvP.

At some point Arena Net will have to deal with these people, as they are indirectly causing loss of profit, but also because often, hacks can cost money. This money is often sponsoring groups or individuals that deliberately make hacks for games. Thus they are directly trying to harm the economy of a company. They do it, not for the lulz, but because they can and because they are almost never going to be stopped. However, deliberately aiming to hurt a licensed company outside of direct market competition can be considered a crime in many countries.

In the end, Arena Net must decide to take a stance against unfair and despicable play. In the end, allowing hackers are not much different then permitting people to physically bully a person in real life, except you shift the event into a virtual world.

Perhaps, Arena Net just need to learn to plant their feet in the right place.

+1

I stopped putting in money to the gemstore because it seems like ANET is unwilling to fix many things about the game. If they are unwilling I feel I can vote with my money at my unsatisfaction.

If they fix a few things and really crack down on illegitimate tactics and hacks and publish some of the latest number of accounts they’ve banned because of exploiting…it would turn around my confidence in the game.

Right now I still only play because I’ve already bought the game and sPVP is still a bit fun, but I’d happily support a company that had the right attitude even more and purchase more things from the Gemstore if they turn it around.

I agree with most that has been said. This is my first post, but I’m a long-time ele player since launch. I really like mechanics, but in general we just don’t have the damage without amazing gear which limits it to WvW and no casual players. Even then when you compare our zerker damage to a thief, it comes up pretty lackluster. My thief in yellows has more damage and more ability to get out of a fight than an ele.

I know we were supposed to be a hybrid class, but I do think every class needs something special. If it’s not damage or survivability…what is it?

I’m really not sure what exact changes would help our class, funny that someone mentioned nerfing every other class, but that sounds safer than buffing classes. My general thoughts are as follows:

1. Make our clas(s) less cooldown dependant. Right now we “blow our load” and then revert to our crappy auto-attacks which are not good enough. I think this could be done by increasing the cooldown to swap attunements (and a global cooldown so you can’t switch through every attunement so fast), BUT with this must come every skill on the bar being good. This would make each attunement a tactical decision of switching, rather than having to rotate through 3 attunements just to do some decent damage. Fire for AOE pressure, lightning for burst single target, water for healing/snaring, earth for control/conditions. It should be simple…you could argue this would take some of the fun out of ele, but I’d rather have a more consistent class in each attunement than one that has to use the 1-2 actually good abilities from every attunement in about 5s to be effective.
2. Regardless of #1, give us and all classes a way to see cooldowns for weapons/attunements/toolbelts that aren’t active.
3. Make other trees effective. How to do this? Make each tree synergize with a weapon set of choice. Right now the good skills are all over the map, but for the most part our low survivability and low damage means the only way we can be decent at both is to crank damage into our gear. This forces us with the latest patch to go 30/30 water/arcane on pretty much any build to stay alive. Even still we need to mix in some toughness and vitality (or at least I do as a casual player) to have any chance. I’ve been trying every build, but this is the only one that is now even half way decent. Diamond skin looked nice, but ultimately just a troll or dueling spec.

Please give us something ANET. If you commit to doing something about our class, actually do something and don’t just throw us promises. Why don’t we have a test server or realm similar to the mists where we can port our main characters to try out the latest patch before it goes live? It seems like this would be trivial to implement and is a great practice to get feedback from the community. I’m sure all of us ele’s would love to be on there testing experimental builds and giving feedback.