Bunker eles can remove a lot of conditions.
Staff Eles:
Water 5 (healing rain) continuously provides regen, see the trait related in the list below.
Traits:
- Most important one: regen removes 1 full stack of conditions when applied by self
- Cantrips grant regen (most take 2 cantrips, some take auto armour of earth)
- Switching to water removes a condition and grants regen
- Dodge roll in water is a blast finisher and cleansing wave (removes condition and heals)
- And their glyph heal in water grants 1 x regen (2 x regen if they are wearing dwayna gear).
Look for the water attunement swap (big burst of water coming out of them), shortly after will be a water field. You will have to immobilize them after the change to water and before they can dodge into this field as they will likely get a chunk of their health back and remove your conditions. Apply pressure with your other conditions if you have any, chill and bleed maybe some immobilize and possibly weakness. I would hold off on poison and weakness till you know they need to heal, then I would try to apply a quick bleed to try to shield your weakness, and weakness to try to shield your poison. The conditions will work against his geyser heal, but healing rain will remove all of your conditions quite quickly, so when that is up, don’t blow your cds, it will be on quite a long cd when used (bout 30-40sec from memory).
Not 100% sure which order conditions are removed, you may want to do some testing or research here but you don’t want the poison removed and you don’t want the weakness removed if he is going to dodge (double recharge on endurance, reduces the amount he can dodge combo field (for heal or might)). Repeat this strat till he is low, then go for imob to backstab to finisher move.
There are some other things you could do, such as chill but I believe your class lacks chill, also hitting him hard at the start will force his reaction into healing, putting the healing rain on cd. Geyser will still be available to him but the field size is much smaller and rolling into it is harder, an immobilize when you see that up will stop a good deal of healing. He may also keep his rain for a “rainy day” (see what I did their) as it removes a lot of conditions, so starting with short cd conditions (a fair few different ones if possible) would also help to put HR on cd.
Once Geyser and HR are on cd and he switches attunement (noted by a blast looking effect that isn’t blue in colour) he will have only his heal skill left (and the cantrips, watch for mist form) and you can proceed to kick his but for 9 seconds (6 if he uses mist form and as long as you can interrupt the heal). Note: he will also probably have a lot of regen on him, 5 sec of double regen (water effect last 5 sec on attune switch) and most likely protection and vigor as well as 2 dodges up his sleeve.
Thanks man, this is some really useful stuff. I’ve never played as an ele so this is all new information to me.
You might want to evaluate whether having an entire utility slot permanently sitting there doing nothing but giving you speed slower than his perma-swiftness is a utility slot well spent. You’re already running swiftness-on-dodge and you seem to be using a lot of range and the occasional immobilize, are you really getting the most out of SoS or is it habit?
You also spent a good amount of time using shortbow without really trying to stack poison up on him. Poison is a good counter to his constant heals.
Stealth is really nice when there’s a chance the opponent might lose focus on you. You didn’t take any heal-on-stealth though, so all it really means in this duel is that he gets a few seconds to stack up boons (really easy for combo field spamming elementalists) while you’re not doing anything productive.
Overall, he is just keeping the momentum for most of the fight, always putting on more boons while occasionally putting conditions on you while you try to position for that perfect opportunity that never comes. You aren’t tanky enough to survive his AEs long enough to put him down in melee and not enough of a threat at a range to harm him with his heals up.
SoS is an addiction of mine, and I figured it can be handy to get out of an ele’s AE’s quicker, especially when my endurance is depleted. I also like it to stay on top of the ele when I go into melee.
Poison, yeah, I should’ve threw more fields down…I would imagine the ele just curing it off and getting out of the field ASAP though.
Okay. I’ve been playing a thief for well over a month in PvP now, and i’ve won a majority of my encounters.
I’ve started to run into more and more bunker eles recently, and I really have tried hard to take them down but I just can’t if they are decent.
Please note that I do not run full glass cannon build either..
TL;DR: How do you counter this?
Due to me publishing a video of me “not giving enough effort” and “playing terribly” and “noob thief”, I decided to contact the ele today and ask for a reduel. I put a lot more effort into this duel and survived quite longer, yes. I also changed my spec into a more appropriate one for dueling. I found this duel very entertaining.
Now I’m not trying to prove bunker eles are too strong. But seriously, this ele still came out with 100% HP when I died.
You didn’t build for duels. You didn’t really use skills (except for the 1). You ran in every AoE attack. And all of this is suddenly proof that eles are overpowered? Do you want to see how an ele fares vs. a thief when he just uses the auto-attacks?
What..? Can you read..seriously. I made this thread to question why eles are considered weak by their players. I never said they were OP…
So nobody has any feedback on this? ^.^
But sure, if you would like to see my playing my usual build and me giving everything I have, I will gladly still show you that a bunker ele is extremely hard to take down if even possible. It’s definitely possible, but it requires an abormal higher skill level than a bunker would need to pull this off imo.
Just watched again. Not only did you never once dancing dagger him to cripple him while he was kiting you, but you didn’t even weapon swap to shortbow to evade, cluster bomb, nor infiltrator arrow out of AE’s when chilled or immobilized.
You can’t honestly think that you deserve to win that duel when all you did was your opener, then spam 1 when the ele went through 4 attunements and used over 15 abilities along with managing his endurance very well.
Shortbow was not even my alternate weapon set at the time lol. I’ve been messing around with sword/pistol which was my alternate set.
Haha, you guys need to calm down. This thread is not about how I played during this duel.
After all, everyone is talking about terribad thieves mashing buttons and killing everyone in 2 seconds. Another purpose of this video is to show that’s not the case vs. decent players.
You dueled a bunker ele as a glass cannon spec and died.
If you were actually playing Conquest mode the way it was meant to be played, you’d realize bunker eles do no damage and you’d just leave if you were in any threat of dying, then come back later or spec appropriately to deal with them if they became a problem.
Instead you blew your shadowstep to go into a chill field, blew shadowstep return to go BACK into said chill, then stood in lava font and died.
So, because you died to a bunker ele, you think that the elementalist class is fine ? They have horrible problems, and it’s mostly because of your class – thief. They are forced into low-damage bunker specs with at least two defensive cantrip stun-break utilities because glass cannon thieves currently possess the burst to insta-kill them before they can even fight back.
You can counter bunker eles by spec’ing appropriately and using different runes/amulet and getting more toughness. This is the same advice you lifetime thieves give to other people when they complain about getting smoked by thieves in a CnD/Steal/Backstab opener.
Once again, if you’re going to post a duel, first spec your thief for duels. The ele spec’ed for the duel and took the water pet elite just for that reason. I doubt you’ve changed your spec in a month, because it’s worked fine as a panacea for smoking everyone when used with a modicum of effort.
tl;dr: You ask where all these complaints come from – the answer is that thief opener burst instagibs reinforce and mandate the bunker meta because all other builds get one-shotted.
Build diversity is stagnated by CnD/Steal/Backstab.
…..First of all, this duel was actually me TRYING different builds for running around in sPvP. This build is not even specced into glass cannon full power/crit. I met this ele randomly in a deserted sPvP match and we decided to duke it out a couple times.
….Second of all, I run into one ele and suddenly I think eles are fine? No. I’ve played against loads of bunker eles, I’m just pointing out that everyone seems to think eles are the worst class in the game.
….Third of all, No. I shadow step offensively against this ele, landed a C&D, shadow stepped back out of the chill after a failed backstab attempt.
Your video is blocked by youtube but given the topic title I’m pretty sure I’ve seen plenty of the same type of video before.
Sorry it’s only available in United States, Canada, UK, France, and Mexico. (few other smaller countries too.)
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Okay, moderator, please lock this thread as it has become non-constructive. I have posted a thread in thief forums on what I feel like is more important.
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Duckzor also supports Daish’s idea of Commander being account-bound. Duckzor does not really see why it isn’t in the first place.
Hi guys, finally getting around to post my video here on official forums. I run full berserker armour, 1 berserker amulet, and 2 beryl earrings and rings.
Build is in the video description.
Please leave feedback :-) thx.
@Ursan. Please don’t even mention that. It cost 200g+ to make.
Why do people complain that these items are hard to get? They are supposed to exclude the majority of people thats what makes them rare…
If everyone could get the item i dont think everyone would want it. People work hard to achieve something unique, you can’t expect ArenaNet to spoon feed you everything.
So basically you want to exclude 99.85% of the population?
The craftable weapons cost 200g+. Nobody is going to drop that much money for it.
I thought halloween was supposed to be fun?
Nobody wants to grind a couple months straight to get a halloween item from an event 2 months ago.
And for the guy who said “All you gotta do is grind for a week to get these skins, get over it”.
Lol what… please tell me how to make 200g in a week. Maybe possible if you literally grind 24/7 with magic find boosters always on.
The weapon skins should be attainable from simply doing halloween activities.
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Thief is pretty easy to play, hard to master.
I’m glad so I don’t have to wait to see what happens.
We want something special to symbolize we participated in these events.
Black lion chest skins you say? Sorry, most are ugly anyways.
No, don’t say devil horns. Useless town item.
I want the spider bow. Some want the moon shield. Some want the crossing staff.
We don’t want to grind 3 months just to be able to get it. These craftable weapons should be obtainable by PARTICIPATING IN THE HALLOWEEN EVENTS for a REASONABLE amount of time (Aka 4-8 days or so).
We don’t want to go farm curshed shore for 3 months just to get an item from the halloween event that was ages ago!
You can craft them permanently. However, they cost 200g+ to make. Ridiculous grind.
Everyone does. It requires almost as much effort as a legendary though.
Are you kidding me ANET? What the kitten is this?
Good job on the festival….you’ve ruined it for everyone.
Hmm…gift of moon is probably the last ingredient for the craftable weapons maybe (?)
you can get them from candy corn merchants in LA. they last 4 hours.
Theyre also craftable but we dont know the recipe yet.
It’s a discovery recipe. We gotta find them out.
I opened 2 and got a chainsaw greatsword.
Lol. They went the right way about doing it. Thieves are perfectly balanced now. Maybe you guys will start using it on your chain of skills (CND —> Steal --> backstab —> 2 more attacks with 15%)
I don’t see how it’s that big of a nerf.
If anything I’m more disappointed in the removal of evade in whirling axe.
Personally I’m not holding my breath for them to revert this. Was there even any documentation about this so called animation bug? I don’t recall seeing one. I still believe this was an excuse to nerf the shortbow.
I’m already starting to look at another profession (aka class) to change to. If I can’t find one I like then I’ll move on to another game.
ANet’s lack of fixing real Ranger bugs while fixing many many other bugs from every other class for every patch only backs this up even more.
This is my case basically.
Animation bug? Sad excuse to nerf. There was no animation bug.
I love ranger but the class is just really lacking now. Looking at thief to change to. Don’t know if I’ll like it and if I don’t I’ll probably just quit the game entirely for a while.
I just want to put this to all those people talking about ranger weapon damage being far below that of other professions:
Your pet makes up more than the difference, other professions do not have a constant additional damage from their f1 skill, the lower damage from weapons is to compensate for this, and rightly so.
On topic:
I have noticed much more of a decrease from Sb than I was expecting considering the difference is in milliseconds
Maybe if pets actually moved and attacked? Pets are useless. They miss 70% of the time and cannot even hit a moving target. Therefore making utility skills useless.
I would not suggest rolling to a ranger. It’s likely it is the worst class in the game now after the nerf.
i’ll be taking a break from my ranger from any form of pvp.
rolling a thief.
Running greatsword post-patch in place of shortbow. Too bad greatsword is trash too just like longbow, axe, and now shortbow. So basically all our weapons are trash now.
Running thief soon.
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Honestly, this isn’t as big a deal as people are making it out to be. Using SB/LB in my build I’m nearly 1v2ing people and HAVE 1v2’d them today. It IS a noticeable change, I agree, however it isn’t as bad as you all are letting on.
Maybe I’m just in the zone tonight, but I’ve had no issues with it. It could also be that I just now started using LB in my build and wasn’t playing like a total nub like I usually do, but still. If I can beat people fairly easily with it I don’t understand why people are griping.
Besides, the SB did kinda need a small nerf and that’s what it got.. a SMALL nerf. I would be more concerned with how it’s working with quickness. That being said, maybe THAT was the intended angle all along; Quickness is still pretty OP.
Congrats on killing bad players bro.
“Wow they changed literally like nothing.
•Crossfire: Increased casting time by 40 milliseconds.
Quit crying, those of us who want to play longbow are forced into shortbow or another class, and its still fine, literally you cant tell a difference. If you say you can then Im calling BS.”
Maybe if you actually played ranger and used shortbow you would know that it’s definitely not 40ms.
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I’ve also asked my friends and I. There was definitely NO animation bug. This is ridiculous.
There’s no way that JUST quickness was nerfed. The auto attack is very NOTICABLY slower and way less damage overall.
And yes krojack, there was definitely no glitches. Probably just a sad excuse to nerf shortbow.
“What sucks is that we have been nerfed so hard previously that we are narrowed into a single good weapon and set of utilities, now we don’t even have that. So what do we do? Roll a different character?”
Yes, I suggest rolling to thief.
I didn’t realize that anyone complained about the Ranger.
Yep, it was nerfed very very hard. Attack speed is about 33% less.
Waiting for an official response from ANET on this one before I continue to reroll thief, warrior, or engineer.
Go with the thief. I switched to thief from the necromancer and it is very satisfying. It also has a lot more versatility and complexity than people give it credit for. Pistol Whip spammers are severely hampering their potential.
Ah yeah, I was leaning towards thief out of those.
I’d rather have quickness skills be removed than shortbow attack speed be nerfed. I didn’t rely on quickness before and now it’s almost necessary to even win a 1v1.
Yep, it was nerfed very very hard. Attack speed is about 33% less.
Waiting for an official response from ANET on this one before I continue to reroll thief, warrior, or engineer.
I’ve spent so much time and money and effort into my ranger. I’ll wait till they give an official response till I reroll to thief or engineer.
Yep. This class is ruined now.
Looks like I’ll be rerolling thief or engineer soon. Sigh. All work wasted getting to 80 and gearing up.
Well, at least it’s better than nothing.
Also added this to main post:
Ranger
-Crossfire: Increased casting time by 40 milliseconds. This was done to fix some glitches in the animation that caused problems with this skill.
Short-bow was actually speed nerfed by about 33%.
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Mhmm. you’re right. it’s A LOT slower. Guess I won’t be pvping for a week until they fix this.
Actually yeah…My shortbow feels a lot slower. Maybe it’s just in my head though.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Update-Notes-October-7th-2012
Mesmers
-Signet of Domination can no longer be cast on targets behind the mesmer.
-Added a much faster breakout for mesmer underwater mantras.
-Phantasmal Warlock: Increased recharge to 20 seconds.
-Chaos Armor: Decreased recharge to 35 seconds.
-Chaos Storm: Increased recharge to 35 seconds.
-Phantasmal Duelist: Increased recharge to 20 seconds.
-Phantasmal Swordsman: Increased recharge to 18 seconds.
Thieves
-Pistol Whip: Reduced damage by 15%.
Ranger
-Crossfire: Increased casting time by 40 milliseconds. This was done to fix some glitches in the animation that caused problems with this skill.
Short-bow was actually speed nerfed by about 33% or so…. Not sure if this is a bug or what.
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Looks the majority likes armor 1. =P
And Ari Kagura, it’s human T3 cultural armour.
For PvE and WvW? Ranger.