Guild Wars 2

If I had a gold for everyone I see in WvW who stops attacking the moment a thief goes into stealth…

Tanith.5264:

My theory does not involve Scarlet on any level.

Somewhere, nestled in ArenaNet’s headquarters, is a special counter that ticks over every time someone “touches it”.

And sitting next to the timer watching it count steadily upwards, is a group of devs. Laughing themselves sick.

’How many times is this guy going to touch the pole?

Tell you what guys, let’s kill him the next time he touches it.

…

……

YEAHHHH’

Warrior speaking up. This should have been the system all along. Not losing adrenaline on misses actually confused me the first time I missed a burst skill months/years ago.

Just fix the LBCI exploit while you’re at it though. It’s harder to gain respect when part of the profession is cheese.

I don’t have any issues with the game mode itself. My main issue is how the other players behave in a PvP scenario.

WvW, you don’t get to hear the other side.

PvE, it’s cooperative.

WvW ranks have lost all meaning since EoTM. I meet Gold+ ranked players who can’t even reduce my warrior below 95% HP before getting stomped into the ground, and the occasional bronze that leads to a mutual vengeance-kill.

What you suggest will lead to zergfarmers with little ability beyond using blast finishers, fire fields and autoattacks (being generous here) being thought to be better commanders than those that part time command WvW and part time command PvE.

The only reliable way at present to know if a commander is capable or not is the commander’s name. If you’ve not been in WvW long enough to recognise the competent ones, you’re probably not experienced enough to complain about bad commanding, either.

Thief is most hated in WvW for being ‘OP’. It’s more or less the strongest 1v1 class in a WvW 1v1 roaming context… and herein lies the problem.

People don’t generally cry about a class when it’s a 5v5 fight and one side loses. They don’t know which player was the one that decided the game, or if it was the overall team effort that did. They don’t cry about guardians in a 80 man zerg, they cry about the zerg numbers.

So when people must complain about something, it will be in a 1v1 context. And since that’s where the thief’s abilities are best applied… the result is obvious.

===

Ranger is most hated in PvE because of two problems.

1. The average ranger player is incompetent at being a ranger.
2. The average non-ranger player is incompetent at being a ranger.

Therefore, the overall perception is that the class is underpowered, which is made worse by the generally bad skill level of its players. This is extremely misleading.

Rangers are built, class-mechanic wise, to deal both condition and direct damage simultaneously. They are not built to specialise in one or another. The average player is not capable of thinking in both direct and condition terms at the same time. The most effective damage-based builds must run Rampager or Carrion. And the number of builds that follow this rule in existence is single digit, and they are all not in the current ranger meta.

A properly specced damage ranger has 5000 damage per second before the effects of might, and is played like a thief, without stealth, with a pet. It outdamages all other builds except a particular dps-focused mesmer variety, but does almost the same damage as that at a much higher potential range. The disadvantage is that to achieve this it uses max bleed and poison under ~ 1500 condition damage conditions, so you can have only one of this kind of ranger or a necro in a party. The moment you have two, things start to become far less efficient since only one of them will have their damage properly registered.

The support ranger is also feasible, of which one of the builds is in the current ranger meta. Spirits are used liberally in this, and the ranger’s job in this context is to buff others and keep others alive. However, this build is pointless in the overly easy PvE backdrop, and only really comes into its element in WvW.

If compared to a necro in terms of overall dps against a single target, the ranger is greater. If compared to a necro in terms of overall survivability, the ranger is greater. If compared to a necro in terms of overall dps against very large numbers of targets, the necro is greater.

In summary, the ranger class is hated in PvE because people don’t know how to use it.

===

The most hated in sPvP is the ele, for two reasons again.

1. It’s the hardest class in the game to play by a wide margin. Most of its users suck at it.
2. It’s very badly balanced for sPvP as the class revolves around booning and AoE damage. In an environment where boons can be easily removed or even stolen, this role is invalidated. In an environment where people don’t ever bunch up, AoE is weakened. Builds that do not boon do not play to the class’s niche, and therefore are weak. A non-boon damage based FA elementalist will never match a warrior of equal skill, because the class was not originally designed with that in mind. An AoE elementalist generally never hits enough targets to be worth the party’s while.

Now, OP, do you want to be hated in WvW, PvE or sPvP?

Effective heal = Heal per second * Target Armor * (0.67*Fraction of time poisoned).

Where Armor = Defense + Toughness.

Stacking toughness is more effective than stacking healing power for keeping yourself alive , since heal coefficients barely ever breach 0.1. However, personal toughness has no effect on your heal on other targets – that is dependent on their toughness.

Thus, if looking to heal others, Cleric > Nomad, and even Cleric should be taken only on healbomb engis and symbol/virtue full heal guards. And these builds are only viable in WvW and to a far more questionable extent PvP (as condi builds screw Healing builds over by reducing effective heal by 33%, while their damage completely ignores Armor and hits Vitality directly). Nomad doesn’t heal enough to be viable over Cleric in a zerghealer scenario, and it also does less damage in that scenario. If you’re soloing you’re dead because you cannot do enough damage to take down even the glassiest full zerk ele/thief, and if you’re in a zerg you’re inferior to a full cleric build of the exact same traits. For PvE scenarios, not having PpF/pPF/PvT/CpT/Cpv means your damage output as a Nomad user is low enough that a ranger’s pet will outdamage you.

If you really must heal others, though, an optimal config will probably be a heal/condi ranger with spirit of nature, sic em and full apothecary specced on A/W SB. If you want to take damage for others in a zerg while being an off healer, the better config would probably be a Cleric based guard.

There’s no situation in which full Nomad is ever optimal. This is not to say that people using Nomad will necessarily fail, but those same people on another healvariant build will do better.

It’s funny how the single most effective class against stealth is complaining about stealth. Good joke, OP.

Elementalists summon two weapons at a time, they’re guaranteed one weapon.

Banners are for group use. If soloing, signets always give a better return on investment for buff/time. If only the user could pick it up this would be an issue, as there are a few rare multiple-banner builds for warriors which depend on party members helping to move all 3/4 banners from one fight to the next.

The only problem I have is when someone takes my 2nd lightning hammer in a dungeon, because it results in a reduction of DPS to the party for 15 seconds, which sabotages everyone with a slightly slower completion time. Telling people about it after the first time they do it usually solves the situation, since most people have no idea how a S/F LH build even functions, they can’t really be blamed for doing it.

Calm down.

You. Must. Play. EoTM. Now. For at least an hour. You’ll understand later.

Until then, you cannot understand what I’m talking about.

You see correctly that the commander system at present is like someone running around with a severed carotid artery, but your proposed measure is the equivalent of cutting the entire head off.

One char per world boss still gives the large chest, just not the guaranteed-rare chest. I rotate alts on mark II if ever starved for dragonite.

But I pretty much only use a char for a given purpose too. World boss commanding/Jumping puzzles (to free-port others with), Mesmer. WvW commanding, Guardian. Dungeons/living story/world boss zerging/general pve, Thief. Fractals, Elementalist. Condi Wurming, Ranger/Necro. Some dungeons/farms, Bomb Engi. WvW Roaming/WvW Zerging/Triple Wurm zerging, Warrior.

Wouldn’t use my thief to command WvW or bring my Guardian into a dungeon, it makes no sense.

Gold’s easy enough to earn already without abusing alts to go around timegates. Maybe your problem is that all of your classes have identical specs (I will guess Zerkeverythinglulz) and are shoehorned into the same purpose, which would obviously mean that all except the one best suited to the role would be redundant. If the usual ‘easily survivable damage dealer’ that gets photocopied across the meta, then it would be necessarily a warrior.

Why would you expect otherwise, if they’re all identical in purpose. If you had a toolbox with 8 hammers of varying quality, you’re not going to do anything else but use the best hammer. If you have a hammer, a screwdriver, a power drill, a wire cutter…

Fail because of

1. Movement of players to servers expected to win, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
2. Dropping of Nightmare tower content in halfway when the League was supposed to be entirely unaffected until the season ends.
3. Ridiculous requirements for the League achievements – you’re encouraging people to run circles capping ruins which might do nothing for the world if the world already owns Bloodlust, and run circles around the map killing random sentries for the lulz. Sentry, Ruin and Camp requirements should have been reduced, Tower, Keep, Player kill requirements should have been increased. SMC shouldn’t have been a requirement because certain small worlds simply cannot take SMC, let alone 5 times.

Locking players to worlds for the duration of the League, announcing matchups only at the start of the League after the server-lock, keeping new content the hell out of WvW and setting achievements which would have been earned in the course of normal WvW would have fixed these issues and turned it into a success.

There are only two things I am unhappy about.

1. The inability of NA players to guest to EU, and EU players to guest to NA. As it is, if you have an EU friend, someone must pay for a transfer for you to play together. That’s bad policy.

2. The fact that almost every single world costs 1800 gems to transfer to, even worlds that feel relatively dead. I am ok with this server transfer cost for Tarnished Coast, but transferring to a midactive server like CD should not cost that much.

@John Smith

The problem is not with RNG being random, but with some of the drop rates being too low that the rates are, in a player’s experience, rarely anywhere near their statistical rates. While rarity also gives value, and it is understandable that to have higher value items their overall rates must be low, the current system where the rates are so low that a player cannot ever approach its statistical rate is broken.

The solution is to use a 2-factor drop system. The first factor is always two-digit, anywhere from 10 to 25%, as overly high rates also entirely remove the emotional effect of receiving a drop. This factor awards a ‘scrap’. The second factor is non-RNG based, and gives a 100% chance of combination success of scraps via an NPC vendor. The number of scraps required for combination into the original ‘drop’ item can then be modified to achieve the intended droprate and thus, its intended rarity. The scrap can be left as an account bound item as well to avoid devaluation from increased supply frequency.

Arenanet has already applied this system three times: 10 black lion scraps creates a ticket, 25 keys plus a bandit key creates a key of greater nightmares, and 4 aetherblade key fragments creates one aetherblade chest key.

I see no good reason why it should not be expanded to deal with the problem drops of low frequency: legendary precursors, fractal weapons, tequatl hoards, regurgitated armor boxes, dungeon exotic accessory recipes, arthropoda, and unidentified (amber) insects. The last one was the most mind-boggling – since the system already exists to exchange a token for the required item for the ambrite weapon, it has never made sense to me why the drop rate was not multiplied by 20, and the number of required insects per ambrite core also multiplied by 20. As an added benefit, some of these can be paired to give a choice – fractal runners would be far happier if they got fractal weapon shards which they could combine to get any skin they wanted, as opposed to the current system, where some fractallers hold 14 harpoon guns, but all they wanted was a fractal sword. Using this on precursors would also equalise the cost of all precursors – while all legendaries are still of different value due to different components in the crafting process, the difference in precursor values at the moment makes not only legendaries, but even rares and exotics different in prices between weapon types – which is also one of the reasons people complained about profession based loot.

All complaints about RNG I have seen are because of absurdly low rates that do not allow drops to obey the law of large numbers.

P.S. It would be better if the tokens are treated as currencies. Geodes, bandit crests and whatnot take up an insane amount of inventory space as it is, and it is similarly mind-boggling why they were not coded into the account wallet.

P.P.S. As opposed to a ‘secondary system’ besides the ‘main RNG’ I would rather the ‘main’ system be scrapped entirely and replaced with this for any drop for which the intended drop rate is below 5%.

Ranger and necro perform best in condition damage applications. If looking to do direct damage go for the mesmer. There are people who like to do certain things with just one profession, but if you already have 6 characters I doubt you’re one of them.

Rangers who don’t think about their pets fail.

Necromancers who don’t think about death shroud fail.

The rest, you can probably figure out/already know.

Rather than ask about details, I want answers to overarching issues:

1. Will characters under the current system who have already unlocked traits/skills get to keep them, or is everything zeroed and reassigned based on the number of skill points completed? Otherwise certain builds used by people with low world completion % will completely break the moment the patch hits.

2. When is this happening? The blogpost implies it will phase in BEFORE HoT and HoT will simply tag on an additional specialisation/skill line/weapon etc to this system, but when can we realistically expect this to be?

3. Given that allowing 18 traits instead of the current 14 will throw balance out of whack, will there be a open beta to test trait balance under these new conditions?

4. Will WvW-exclusive players be forced to world-explore in PvE in order to use their desired build in WvW? At the moment they can unlock by paying directly, but if it’s going to be tagged to PvE map exploration…

5. Are these new mystic forge items a currency in the account wallet, a token, or what? What happens to skill point scrolls?

6. Can adept/master traits be selected using the higher tier trait slots?

Do you even have any idea what Edge of the Mists is?

It’s ENTIRELY different from normal World vs World, and the rank gain there is exponentially faster than normal WvW. The map is also entirely different.

EoTM-only farmers have exactly zero idea of what WvW is like in the same way WvW-only players have exactly zero idea what EoTM is like. We don’t use superior siege, we spam cheap rams on one phase, then recycle the same scorpions for 4 different gates.

If you’re thinking ‘what scorpion’, they’re something that don’t exist at all in WvW.

Rank gain is very slow if in an outmanned world when you can’t cap much, and while most competent commanders are at least a bronze rank or one of the highest tiers of non-material ranks, it’s not a blanket truth. Defender commanders are among the best commanders in the entire game, of which those based in severe-outmanned worlds like Eredon Terrace have abilities exceeding that of mid or high tier worlds by a long shot, even though they can’t cap often.

Do you honestly think someone who lolcaps all the structures with a 40 man zerg has even a quarter of the skill of someone who tries to hold the structure against said zerg with only 10 people?

You don’t need to know the ‘best commanders’ for your world, it’s entirely irrelevant. The people who command in WvW when you are in WvW (the only time that matters) are the same day after day (or at the very least, the same day of the week) since it’s based on their time zone, and people don’t randomly decide to wake up at 3am to command a zerg. You only need know the one or two competent commanders for your world (maybe up to 6 for very highly populated worlds), which takes about 10 minutes in WvW to find out.

Your suggestion will, without question, be used by Gold/Diamond rank EoTM farmers to show off, while disorienting people from the Bronze/Silver rank Commander that’s actually leading the zerg.

Wtb permanent portal to SAB in Rata Sum.

You don’t have to update it.

Just leave it there.

‘Dungeon ownership’ in the first place is nonsensical. The instance should persist until the last person leaves the dungeon.

Instances of hosts ragequitting, hosts who have to leave (sure, YOU wouldn’t do that, but SOMEONE might, and they might be the host), hosts who leave party after looting the chest at the end of a dungeon before others take the chest, etc etc etc.

The whole ‘ownership’ mechanic is broken.

The title of this thread. /grammarkitten

Because of Barbed Precision plus Haemophilia, Rabid-speccing a Necromancer results in the highest condition damage spec possible (4780 dps pre-patch… I haven’t bothered to recalculate post-patch). Most of the other bleed-on-crit proc rates for other classes are too low for Rabid to make any sense at all, but Necromancers do benefit from them. Necromancers don’t actually benefit as much from the Vitality on Dire as other classes will because of their large default HP pool plus their class mechanic’s secondary HP pool (of 60% default HP pool). Condition warriors also don’t have as much of a survivability improvement, but crits help them less, so Dire’s still the default for those.

In most other cases, Dire ends up being the best for condition builds in general, since the increase in damage from the Power Carrion gives you is not much – you’d have only 400 damage per second from direct sources on Dire for a necro/ranger/pistol engi/conditioner mesmer; when upping it at most you can get about 600 damage per second. It’s an additional 200 ish, out of a total DPS of ~ 4000+. For that paltry +5% damage, you sacrifice a LOT of toughness.

The only class I know of that can use Carrion properly is Engineers because they can swap from condition to direct damage mode at will by simply swapping between kits. In all other cases, a weapon combination that gives you enough conditions to be viable in that mode also ends up giving you hopeless power multipliers, and vice-versa.

Rampager is generally quite useless, because precision doesn’t do anything significant to damage without ferocity, doesn’t contribute as much to condition damage via oncrit traits as condition damage, and has no defensive stats to pull you out of the fire.

It’s a long, long story to explain it all, but essentially, aside from the Berserker that works as a standard option in most classes (except Necros (no cleave) and Rangers (horrible power multipliers on all weapons)), the other viable stats for the classes are:

Guardian – Sentinel, Knight, Soldier, Cleric
Warrior – Dire, Knight, Soldier
Ranger – Dire
Engineer – Carrion, Dire, Cleric, Settler
Elementalist – Celestial (Berserker not recommended at high level content because repeated death)
Necromancer – Rabid, Dire
Mesmer – Assassin-Berserker mix, Dire
Thief – Dire (venomshare, otherwise Berserker usually works better because of how utterly hopeless the class’s survivability is outside of stealth)

Giver, Rampager, Shaman, Apothecary, Zealot (Healing power without toughness is seriously out of point), Cavalier, Valkyrie (Doesn’t matter how high your crit is if you never crit ESPECIALLY post-Ferocity nerf), Magi (Healing power and precision don’t interact at all and there’s zero damage stats on this thing) stats are all suboptimal. If you wanted a Valkyrie playstyle for instance, you’ll have better results by mixing Berserker and Soldier gear than by using full Valkyrie in both damage and survivability.

Also note that specific combinations of stats and classes are pretty much suboptimal. There are people who enjoy using them, which is fine, but they’ll never be optimal. For instance putting any form of Healing Power on a Thief is ridiculous, stacking Power on rangers is suboptimal (not thief-HP bad, but still nowhere as good as sticking it on any of the other 6 classes aside from necro), stacking Vitality on a Warrior without adding Toughness is pointless because its HP pool is already large but its HP regen is more or less fixed, and stacking Condition Damage on a Guardian is… just… no.

Should probably add a few things.

First, the music modification information is here. Note that just dumping music in the folder won’t work, you must name the playlists as given. I overwrite Guild Wars 2 music with Touhou remixes.

Second, you can access a bank at any crafting station on the map, not just those marked as banks.

Third, you can access a crafting station-bank easily from any location on the world map by going to your world’s Borderlands in World vs World, then running a few seconds east from the portal. This is a non-capturable location, so this always works. However, larger servers may have queue problems. This is, however, perfect for small worlds.

Fourth, you can access the Trading Post easily from any location on the world map by pressing O – you can buy and sell items, but you cannot collect the items or gold you get. If you want to collect them, use ANY world vs world borderland and you’ll be able to access a TP there. This also gives you access to a merchant to buy kits/tools/w/e.

Fifth, if you have quick need of a Mystic Forge, consider checking if your world owns all the keeps in its borderlands. If it does, chances are that you can access the Forge by waypointing to the Garrison waypoint – the Forge is in the Lord’s room; this may not work if the waypoint upgrade is not built. A way that always works is to visit the PvP lobby and use the Forge there, but since the only way out from the PvP lobby is to Lion’s Arch, this may not be an optimal method.

For tips 3 to 5, note that you can flash-exit World vs World by exiting out to character select, and then reentering the game with the same character. This automatically boots you out of World vs World into the same spot where you were before you warped to World vs World. Now you know why I like to use this to bank/TP/mforge so much, it’s essentially a free bank that only takes a few seconds to activate, as opposed to waypointing to a bank, which requires running back to your original location, and which involves waypointing costs. I have a perm merchant I summon at will so it’s not needed for that purpose, but this method is convenient enough that I don’t exactly see the need to buy either a permanent TP or banker NPC, not to mention that since only one is summonable at any time, the one being used the most often is always the merchant.

Sixth, confusion damages you when you trigger any attack. Aside from certain ways of removing conditions without using a ‘skill’ like swapping water attunements on an ele, the other usual way of dealing with a high-stack confusion is simply to not attack at all. But most people play with Auto Attack on skill 1 on. To stop attacking, simply left click on the ground, and you’ll deselect all targets.

Seventh, some environmental weapons do not have Auto Attack by default. You can enable it manually to avoid spamming 1. Some weapons of relevance here are the dredge door blaster in Dredge fractals, and the rocket launchers people use against Jormag.

Eighth, to Interrupt an attack is to use any control effect like Stun, Knockdown, Daze, or whatnot on a target as it channels the attack. This puts the skill on a cooldown. This is of extreme importance in killing guards/supervisors in WvW – at certain health thresholds they will heal; if you interrupt the heal, you can kill them much faster. This allows for easier camp/sentry soloing. It’s also important in many other fights.

Ninth, Defiant is a stack champion and above class mobs have that nullify control effects. The number of stacks a mob has depends on the number of players in the vicinity. Try to reduce the number of defiant stacks to zero, then keep it that way until the mob uses a skill you must interrupt for some reason, so that your interrupt will not be blocked by Defiant.

Tenth, Sink and Float control effects pierce defiant, so underwater enemies of any class can be Interrupted at will.

Eleventh, there is no need to repair your armor when a yellow shield appears (ie, you get killed once). You only need repair after they turn red (ie, you get killed 8 times and above). So don’t repair your armor until it’s either red or you’ve cleared the map to save yourself unnecessary time running back and forth/money waypointing to a repair shield.

Twelfth, you CANNOT wear two of the same ascended accessory/ring. If you want that stat combination repeated, buy one defensive and one offensive infusion version. This has cost countless players laurels for no good reason.

Thirteenth, bags can be unequipped by dragging them out of the slot into the inventory. Because of this, you can buy a single set of 20 slot bags once, and buy cheap 10 slot bags for all other characters. Then when you’re switching your main character for a while, move all the 20 slot bags to another character, so you don’t have to buy multiple copies.

Fourteenth, if you’re the host of a dungeon/fractal and you leave the party or disconnect, your entire party may be kicked from the dungeon/fractal. Don’t start unless you can finish, or people will hate you for good reason.

Finally, basically all non-dagger melee attacks Cleave – that is, they hit up to 3 targets in the front arc of the user within its maximum usage range. This is important for two reasons – firstly, it only hits the front arc, so moving to the back arc before it hits makes the attack deal zero damage. Secondly, knowing it hits multiple targets should change how you think about engaging enemies. Related to this is that all piercing attacks can hit a given number of targets on the way to its target. When using a ranged piercing attack, try to aim for a far target and hit targets in between using the pierce ability, rather than targeting the nearest one first all the time, and you might see up to a tripling of your DPS against groups of foes. The number of players who can’t use Pierce and Cleave effectively is very, very large.

The real issue here is how mouseover on the price would make your numbers go into price, rather than into the quantity field YOU ACTUALLY CLICKED.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Put together a list of underpopulated worlds, such as Kaineng, and not only make transferring to those worlds free for a time, but offer incentives to make players want to switch over. Long-duration boosters mailed to everyone on a low-pop server after the transfer period, big infusions of influence for any guild who moves the bulk of its players over, things that people actually want.

Only way to convince players who otherwise lucked out/paid the price to move already to go and try to address world imbalances. Telling me I’m only charged ten bucks instead of twenty-five if I decide to move to Kaineng is pretty much the worst possible way in the entirety of the Internet to get me to switch to Kaineng.

Best thing I’ve read all day. Now if Anet would read and implement it…

7. She fights Trahearne post-Zhaitan, and they kill each other with a mutual strike.

There are three types of gamers.

1. Casual gamers – they play games to pass the time in a fun way. A lot of this demographic has moved on to mobile gaming because it’s able to take away time in transport and whatnot while computer gaming is somewhat more restrictive in terms of required equipment.

2. Hardcore gamers – there are two variants: those who play a game because they are immersed in the world/community of the game itself, and they live the game as a second life; those who play a game because they want to feel a sense of accomplishment, and since games run on fairly consistent rules, it affords the ability to achieve in a fair environment, while in reality you could throw all your resources into something and never be rewarded when your luck is bad.

3. Professional gamers – they play games to earn money, either through tournaments or through converting ingame resources to real finances.

Professional gamers always go where the money is, and as they have a somewhat higher profile (and occasionally industry sponsorships), games sometimes like to have some of them in play every now and then for marketing exposure. But since their aim is to actually earn money, restrictive costs tends to turn them off from a game. Aside from attempts at ‘e-sports’ (which frankly will likely fail because the complexity of Guild Wars 2 mechanics is way above that of your average esports audience’s ability to grasp without doing prior research), there’s been limited effort in this department.

This thread is started and populated mostly by the achievement-type hardcore gamers. However, traditionally, game companies have relied more on keeping systems generally consistent and fair as the only effort towards this entire community, since the amount of time already invested in the game presents a very high cost to leaving a game. From Marketing’s eyes, it’s not a dollar-efficient effort to retain hardcore gamers.

Casuals seem to be the main target of a lot of these recent updates at the moment. Without time to invest in a game, pay-for-convenience features like gem-gold conversions, buying skins, or gambling RNG are ways to monetize this crowd, but it seems like to avoid turning them off from the rest of the game until they spend more, disproportionate effort has been spent in the initial phases of the game (pre-lvl 80). Once they play enough to become invested as a hardcore player, retention is no longer as much of a concern.

If you want to see things change, the hardcore gamer as a community has to undertake relatively drastic actions, involving cutting the monetization source. It does not necessarily mean you stop playing Guild Wars 2, but it means you stop spending any real world money, if you already do, and limit gold=>gem conversions. Then we engage them in dialogue over certain non-negotiable updates – say, precursor crafting.

Once a promised update has been conceded, spend money or convert gold to gems the moment the patch hits, then if the update frequency stalls, stall the monetization process as well. Once the message is clear that the community will financially support the developers only if they acquiesce to the desires of the community that supports it, it’ll be easier to see updates that you want.

If not prepared to coordinate spending behaviour in response to updates, there will be little or no chance that even developers who are interested in improving things for us will be able to convince the other departments within the company to give them the go-ahead.

I’m serious about the spending phase bit. If you’re expecting them to work for free to create patches for us when only the casuals support them financially, it’s just not going to happen.

Meta isn’t top builds, it’s the builds that achieve highest utility assuming no coordination and limited skill. You don’t want to dump a triple kit engineer build on a new player, and you don’t want condition builds to become too prevalent due to condition capping. Neither will ever appear as a meta build.

Still a good reference for reading.

However, it’s irrelevant to the OP’s question.

Most common WvW classes vary by world but are usually War, Guard, Necro, Ele.

Most common dungeon PvE classes vary by dungeon but are usually War, Guard, Mesmer, Thief.

Most common high fractal classes are Ele, Thief, Guard. Low fractal classes are identical to dungeon breakdown, since the challenge is the same.

Most common world exploration classes are War and Ranger.

Most common sPvP classes are Ranger, Thief and Guardian. If you go into ranked matches you’ll run into some teams previously that ran celestial engi/ele, but they are rare overall, just overrepresented in a few spots. They’ll start vanishing too, since might just got nerfed.

Rarest class in most content is necro, except WvW zergs. Some players also kick necros and rangers on sight from dungeon parties. Some players kick everyone except warriors and guardians as well, if that matters to you. Engineers are normally second rarest, but nobody ever kicks them, at least without kicking all other light/medium classes as well.

These are just usage indices though, and don’t necessarily mean anything about viability.

P.S. @Elegy, some people will only listen to those they perceive as ‘authorities’. They really do need someone they look up to say ‘X is good’ before they think it’s good.

This only applies to the Crystal Desert world, I’m not going to go world guesting for this (because aside from being insanely troublesome there’s also a limit to how many worlds I can guest). Conversely, if you’re from another North American world you can call on my support by guesting Crystal Desert.

Essentially, I’ve found that, perhaps oddly enough, one of the things that is most enjoyable for me is to help others with their stuff. And I’m not really the kind who goes around every map advertising help so…

If you need help with anything, just ask if you see me online. Ingame, mind, I don’t monitor my message inbox on the forum. Send a whisper or something along those lines and let me know what you need. As a mesmer I can do extremely cheapskate things like complete jump quest portions (or entire jump quests) and vistas by portalling to the end. As one of the stronger mesmer soloists around I can also generally help to take down almost any opponent should you need that for a quest – this is probably more relevant for Personal Story quests since in most of the map cases there should already be a few players around you to help even before you ask for it.

Of course, if I don’t respond to the whisper even though I’m online, I could be:

- In World vs World
- In a Fractal
- In a Dungeon
- Already helping someone else
- Otherwise extremely busy such that I’m not available
- Away From Keyboard

In all of those cases I won’t be able to help you out.

And also bear in mind that I can’t help you optimise your build because I haven’t played any other classes yet – and even for other mesmers your style of play may vary enough from mine that I may not be able to give you any useful advice. That is something you will have to learn for yourself.

Otherwise, I’ll see what I can do to help you out – which can range from information on how you can solve the problem yourself to direct assistance. I’m in the process of unlocking the map now so at first there may be initial delays in getting to locations, but after a while I should be able to get to most waypoints in less than a minute.

There may be cases where I can’t help, in which case I will let you know. But you do not lose anything for asking.

Just leaving this as an open invitation to forum users who may be new to the game. This service is free – it’s just something I’m doing because I find I like to do it, and it’ll add a bit more meaning to my endgame experience over only grinding for a Legendary, WvWvW, Fractals or Dungeons (which I also do). Somehow, it feels meaningless to me to only talk about helping NPCs all the time and earning ingame ‘Karma’ for it without also helping real people as well.

My avatar name ingame is Mikazuki Aura.

Can’t they just set a minimum hit? Maybe for normal mobs 1 hit, veteran mobs 3 hits, champion mobs 10 hits, world bosses 10 hits? From a server point of view it’d make a heck load more sense counting hits than summing all the damage values, and it’ll stop the dps race issue.

It gets the hammer out faster, though both have more or less equal might potential before the random ish effect of Fire Shield. The focus version also always works, whereas the dagger version is prone to interrupts.

Focus
-1s Dragon’s Tooth begins channel, Flamewall begins channel.
0s Flamewall procs, Dragon’s Tooth hits (3 might), Phoenix leaves caster.
1/4s Phoenix hits (3 might) Fire Shield activated (? might depending on enemy), dodge starts, attune to earth (3 might from sigil).
1.25s Dodge ends in Earth attunement (3 might), Magnetic wave hits (3 might), Arcane Wave hits (3 might), Begin channeling Lightning Hammer, Proc Invuln.
2.25s Lightning Hammer fully summoned.
5.25s Final Hit of the first Lightning Hammer combo (3 might).

Might Total: 21-25 might (depending on how many enemies hit you) in just over 5 seconds. 2.5+s grace period, exceeding which the Lightning Hammer’s 3rd hit of might will not proc.

Defensive: You are exposed for the initial one second until earth dodge starts. Thereafter, you’re covered by dodge, invuln, then the Blind from lightning hammer.

Dagger
-1s Dragon’s Tooth begins channel.
-1/4s Ring of Fire begins channel.
0s (Assuming perfect timing on your Ring of Fire) Ring of fire procs at the same time Dragon’s tooth hits (3 might). Phoenix leaves caster, dodge starts, attune to earth (3 might from sigil).
1/4s Phoenix hits (3 might).
1s Earth attune dodge hits (3 might), Arcane wave hits (3 might), begin Earthquake channel.
1.75s Earthquake hits (3 might). Begin Churning earth channel.
5s Churning earth hits (3 might).

Might Total: 21 might in five seconds, you have only one second margin of error or the Churning earth will not hit before the Ring of Fire fades. Also, because Earthquake has a 45 second cooldown, your second combo will only proc 18 might. Given Lightning Hammer is only useable every 60 seconds, you will hammer with 21 might half the time and hammer with 18 might half the time.

Defensive: You are exposed for the initial one second, covered by dodge for one second, then exposed for the next 4 seconds channeling interruptible skills, followed by one more interruptible second channelling your lightning hammer, then another 3 seconds until your first blind hits.

As for controlling Fire Wall, remember that it’s always cast at a 90 degree angle relative to the line between you and the cast point. Nowadays I use instacast, rather than the versions that show you where the AoE field is, because I’m familiar enough with how to position the Wall such that the Dragon Tooth never misses, after doing this for a very long time.

If you are hit 4 times at 1 second intervals after Fire Shield is activated, the Focus version is the only way in the game for one character to activate 25 might within 5.5 seconds. It also requires Arcane wave as a utility, together with Evasive Arcana.

In any case I find it strange your Arcana stat is zero if you’re intending to mightstack. Without sufficient boon duration, might stacks only last for 20 seconds by default, before dropping back to zero. This is in addition to the fact that you’re losing out on 3 stacks from Evasive Arcana, which also Cripples in the way Churning Earth does, without the channeling time.

At present, the build I’m running, at 190% BD, makes it last for 38, so I can comfortably run the might stack rotation every 30 seconds (cooldown limited by Arcane Wave) and be guaranteed permanent 25 might. Do that twice, 60 seconds have elapsed, by which the next set of lightning hammer summons is available to keep this going infinitely.

PvE: Night (direct only), Air (crit+power only), Strength (crit only), Earth (condi only), Battle (low crit only), Frailty (low crit only), Corruption (condi only).

Between Air and Fire, Air procs on one target for 1.1 every 3 seconds, for a 0.37/s multiplier per target. Fire procs on up to 5 targets for 0.85 every 5 seconds, for a 0.17/s multiplier per target. If you find yourself attacking single or dual targets more often Air would be more appropriate, if you find yourself attacking three targets or more more often Fire would be more appropriate. Given that the only time in my dungeon experiences I’ve ever fought three champions at once is SEp1’s triple golems, I find Air to be far more advantageous from a PvE perspective (arah p1 doesn’t really count since those champs all have reduced HP and die in two rotations). Outside champs, nothing else has enough HP for it to really matter which sigil you use. Also note that neither Air nor Fire’s sigil attack can crit. I’m not sure if Air’s ever did, or whether it was hearsay that persisted for some time, but both definitely do not crit now.

Night sigil works on the majority of dungeons and minority of fractals. It doesn’t work on Arah, HoTW and CM, of which the first two people don’t generally run often and the third is inadvisable to run without a thief, so for the purposes of most people you could just ignore these three dungeon types. Or if you have more than one character, run these three on your Fractal character. Or, have an alternate weapon with Night on it. Your call.

Force is actually one of the weakest sigils for damage at a pathetic 5%, and its only viable use is against targets immune to crit and either immune to or capped at 25 vuln nonstop – essentially it has some utility against Epic-rank world bosses being zerged by 60 players, otherwise you can consider the sigil as good only to sell to players unfamiliar with other sigils. Strength accounts for 8.5% dps increase assuming you never go above 25 might, air accounts for 7%, fire can be anywhere from 3%-15%, night is always 10% at night, and frailty is 5% AoE damage buff for your whole party (2.5% aoe on champs, 12.5% increase if vuln never goes above 25 on champs). Bloodlust is 6.5% DPS at full stacks, but you must maintain full stacks. Sigil of battle is iffy since how good it is depends on how often you can swap and swapping early to break a rotation reduces dps more than the slightly earlier swap will give, but it’s about 7% ish in general. For high power and high crit go Night/Strength|Night/Air, unless you already have perm 25 might in which case you’ll go double Night/Air. For power stats with low crit go Night/Bloodlust|Night/Battle. If you don’t want to be limited to night dungeons, replace the day set with the next highest damage in rotation – strength, battle, air, fire or frailty in that approximate order. For condition stats with high crit go Strength/Earth|Strength/Corruption, and for low-crit condition builds go Geomancy/Frailty|Geomancy/Corruption unless you can maintain 25 bleeds without the rune, in which case Battle would be your replacement for Geomancy. Your personal damage won’t go up when you take frailty as a condi build, but it will help the direct damagers on your team – and if you’re soloing, you’ll have your own build already.

Rangers have a special mention that power-based rangers should run air+fire on both weapons, because their generic power multipliers are so bad that air and earth get 11% and 6-30% increases to dps instead.

WvW: All the above except Night, plus sigils of Generosity (high-crit only), Purity (low-crit only) and Water (low-crit only).

There’s a ton of worthless sigils. Stacking-to-25-before-single-cast sigils are all bad, more than half of the specific creature ones are worthless given Night supercedes them on the dungeons, anything that increases condition length on any non-intensity stacking condition is fail by default. Though the most useless of all the useless sigils in existence is probably the newest Sigil of Mischief.

Special mention goes out to the Sigil of Speed, which is utterly useless in most contexts except world exploration, in which it suddenly becomes a zero effort way to stack swiftness at a heart to run to the next heart – especially good on guardians and mesmers that don’t already have full runes of Traveler – and by itself increases world completion speed faster than anything else you can possibly slot in a sigil slot.

As a thief I’d still rather they nerf stealth, but buff the rest of the class in survivability.

Having nearly no Stability, few stunbreaks, few condicleanses and pathetic healing isn’t really helping things.

Stealth as a mechanic is OP, but thieves as a class are UP, making them very questionably ‘ok’ in general.

On the other hand, mesmers traiting in stealth…

First and foremost, you should be aware that unlike the original fight, in the Mote Master fight the dragon regenerates health. Berserker’s gear is recommended, but if you don’t have that, Soldier’s isn’t far behind. Condition builds are very unsuitable for the fight as the dragon goes entirely invulnerable within less than 10 seconds – you’ll never have enough time to build up to your max dps point. Bomb/grenade engis are easymode for this particular fight.

Reason for this is that while you cannot crit the dragonhead, you can crit the roots, and you’ll need to clear roots as fast as possible in order to get the dragon attackable before it reaches the next HP phase.

Make sure you have a ranged weapon. Also, as far as possible make sure you have access to Blind. This becomes critical if a vine gets so close you must melee it.

It has 4 HP phases – 100%, 75%, 50% and 25%. You must dps it down to the phase boundary (the multiples of 25) to clear a phase, otherwise the phase repeats until you get to the boundary. Also, you’re only allowed one grace boundary.

In other words:

Phase 1: 100-HP-75: Can DPS to 75.
Phase 2: 100-HP-50: Can DPS to 50.
Phase 3: 75-HP-25: Can DPS to 25.
Phase 4: 50-HP-0: Can DPS to 0.

If the upper boundary is crossed a phase is reset – for instance if in phase 3 you take so long to hit the dragon that it recovers back to 76% HP, you’re reset to phase 2.

At the beginning of phase 3 (first time only) a wolf is spawned. At the beginning of phase 4 (first time only) a thrasher is spawned. This may be somewhat different in parties – I cleared it solo, so someone else will have to fill you in on the spawn characteristics in a party. If soloing, save any summoning elites (hounds of balthazar, thieves’ guild, warband etc) for phase 4 as the thrasher can hit ridiculously hard with its vines-from-ground attack, and there is no AoE circle on the ground to warn you of this.

To make things easier stand at a spot not easily accessible to vine ranged attacks, unlikely to allow a vine to melee range and which is outside the dragon’s AoE patterns. The attached screenshot depicts the spot I used.

A Immobilise debuff will appear on you 3 seconds before you’re stuck in a trap. Dodge to get rid of this debuff. This is pretty much the only thing that can kill you in the fight if you’re not sleeping on the job.

Finally, when the entire ground glows pink then white, a stomp is underway. For the achievement, jump over all of these stomps. On my ping, it requires waiting for 3-3.5 seconds from when the colour first appears before jumping. If you’re located closer to the US server, chances are you may need to wait for 4 seconds. You only need to do this 3-4 times if the other parts are handled well.

Note that you’ll want to range the vines at long range to give yourself max time to react to its attacks – and to stay out of range of the dragon’s AoEs. If you have to fight in melee range, drop a blind field on the vine and burst it down before the blind can wear off. I also had to range the dragonhead since melee didn’t work reliably, but if you can get a melee spot reliably every time, that will be better.

Range the tallest vine first. That’s the only one capable of using ranged attacks. The other two are pushovers if they’re not in melee range.

It is entirely possible to get all three achievements solo in one run. If not prioritise Mote Master, and get the other 2 in a later non-challenge run to make things easier on yourself, if you didn’t unlock them together.

This should make it easier for you to get the achievements, if you’re still stuck.

If the thread helps you bump it so it doesn’t get lost somewhere in page 9.

chronometria.3708:

Lostwingman.5034:

Why does everyone want to go back to the days of dead or nearly dead zones? Go play a single player then.

The problem is that its incredibly hard to form bonds with the megaserver players you meet. Chances are, you`ll never see them again anyhow and the things that once brought you common ground, such as both having chosen to be on a WvW, or RP server are gone.

On a megaserver, you can be surrounded by people and yet still be isolated.

It’s somewhat easier if you actually talk on map chat. Most of the people who have ever run any event chain (Dry Top, World Bosses) for instance know each other now to some level. On the other hand people who don’t talk are treated as NPCs.

As if abusing tags for vanity isn’t enough, adding a title to the mix, ugh.

Necros DO bring party support, though in a narrow field. The class is optimised for not only dealing condition damage but also redirecting conditions from your party to the opposing party. Specific dungeons in which they are very useful are Sorrow’s Embrace path 3 and Crucible of Eternity. Dungeons in which mobs neither use nor are vulnerable to conditions, they fall behind other classes.

Rangers do maximum damage in a condition build with a cat for direct damage, and while their dps is limited by the max stack cap of 25, the utility brought via fire fields, water fields, Spotter and Frost Spirit can outweigh the additional dps of another warrior in a war-heavy party. Rather than being path dependent, rangers’ utility is determined by composition of the other players in a party.

Thieves can stealthrun the best (only other class capable of this to a weaker extent is engis), draw the most aggro, can completely nullify damage, have the second best blasting potential behind elementalists, have the third highest AoE potential and have the single highest burst dps value, but offer no additional party damage buffs beyond vuln stacks unless someone else can provide a fire field. Sustained dps is inferior to a warrior, but very, very few bosses contain enough HP for sustained dps limits to kick in. For standard dungeons I’d consider them one of the greatest classes, though specific classes may be better for specific paths.

The salvage rate of rares > lvl 68 into ectoplasm is approximately 0.9 via mystic salvage kits, there’s been large-number studies done on this already.

The salvage rate of ectoplasm into crystalline dust, numbers are limited, but my own tests with several thousand ectoplasm (not enough sample size frankly, to be more accurate we’d want several hundred thousand to be sure) is approximately 2.0 dusts per ectoplasm.

What both of you seem to ignore is that there is a 10+5(x)% loss in listing and transaction fees whenever you use the TP in any form. If you spend 100 gold on rares, you will always lose 15 gold in fees, even though the crystalline dust you get is almost the same base price as the rares themselves. In order to reduce the losses somewhat you’d want to salvage specific rares that give higher value alternate drops in addition to the ectoplasm itself. Such as anything made from cloth, since silk is relatively expensive – and mforging the runes you get out isn’t optional anymore, it’s a necessity to reduce your losses over very large sizes.

Generally, rares > ectoplasm direct purchasing due to the rune and silk you also get in addition to simply the 0.9 ecto/rare.

Just to clarify since there seems to be quite a bit of confusion on this topic:

Ascended gear is 175% normal stat. Exotic gear is 165% normal stat.

The reason why people state ‘10%’ is because of this arithmetic difference, but this is relative to white equipment. What is more relevant to more people is what the difference between ascended and exotic is. That’s 175/165 = 1.06 = +6% more stats.

Ascended weapons give +6% more base damage and +6% stats from the weapons.
Ascended trinkets give +6% stats from the trinkets.
Ascended armor gives +6% more defense and +6% stats from the armor.

When you have ‘full’ ascended versus ‘full’ exotic (only applicable for certain stat combinations), you have +6% more base damage, +6% more stats and +6% more defense.

Having, say, only an ascended weapon means that you’ll only have +2% more base stats or so, and +6% more base damage. The reason why this is recommended for most builds is because most builds deal direct damage based on power.

The main problem is that the majority of people in balance discussions don’t play the classes they talk about. Experience against a class is very different from experience within a class.

Also, for some strange reason the balance team seems very enamoured with stealth. The thief class as a whole is too weak, but stealth specifically is too strong. You can see the glorious result when a stronger class is also given stealth (PU mesmers), an unholy result which only very specific builds can beat, of which nearly all are other types of mesmers.

Time in stealth needs a nerf. 50-70% uptime is good, the current 100% potential uptime is ridiculous. At the same time, thieves need a significant survivability buff that does not depend on stealth, AND an increase in damage. It would be ok to be less survivable than a warrior should the damage be massively greater to compensate; at the moment the damage numbers aren’t very different, but the warrior has so much greater survivability the whole scale is off-kilter.

To talk about a mesmer vs thief discussion properly you need experience playing both, to talk about thief vs warrior you need to play both, etc. Balancing all 8 classes against each other requires experience in all 8 classes. The current approach to things needs a lot of improvement… decisions by committee don’t work well because not all members of the committee have equal input.

Engi is best dps at superlong ranges or best AoE heal and best tank.
Warrior is best dps at melee ranges, second best burst, best controller.
Guardian is best damage mitigation on group, 2nd best tank, second best AoE heal, second best booner, best condition remover.
Necro is best AoE conditioner, not that good in direct damage as they don’t have Cleave, 2nd best condition remover.
Mesmer is best dps against a single target and best self heal, second best stealther.
Thief is best stealther, best burst, second best dps at melee, second best controller.
Ranger is best single target conditioner, bad in direct damage, third best tank, easiest class.
Elementalist is best AoE, best booner, third best AoE heal, best speed, hardest class. The Fiery Greatsword elite has the honor of being the only weapon that can do 7 digit damage numbers in a minute.

Choose what you are looking for then spec an optimised build for that role. If you still can’t decide, play all of them.

PvE solo and WvW…

Mesmer.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

A nerf would only make boring fights last longer.

Correct…

Bhawb.7408:

There is a single skill that triples the DPS of two players in a group; that isn’t balanced. This isn’t just a matter of making bosses trivial (which it does do), this isn’t a matter of it taking skill (because in many cases it takes absolutely no skill), this is the fact that one skill is completely dominating the entire game mode.

Correct…

oxtred.7658:

Atherakhia.4086:

Question: Is the skill working as intended?
Answer: No.

Question: Are people abusing the mechanic and it having unintended consequences?
Answer: Absolutely. It’s therefore an exploit.

I honestly don’t know why we’re even arguing these facts. They’re facts. ANet tried to fix this in the past for WvW and PvP for these very reasons but Fiery Rush remains. The fact that it trivializes PVE or that PvE would be boring without these exploits is irrelevant.

You seem to be perfectly aware of what is intended or not, are you a dev by any chance?

FGS skills were, and are, used together with Frost Bow skills to great effect at Tequatl and Triple Wurm. If I remember correctly, Anet did not oppose their use when asked by the players who first cleared Tequatl, as they were worried as to whether they’d be considered as exploiting.

So we have:

1. Fiery Rush usage is not an exploit
2. Fiery Rush is overpowered
3. The real problem behind the scenes is the lack of new content

And the fixes:

1. Nerf Fiery Rush
2. Create new content

Fix 1 is incomplete without 2, but leaving 1 as it is isn’t really advisable either. It’s like having a headache and an arm fracture. Curing the headache without caring about the fracture is very misguided, but it doesn’t mean that the headache doesn’t merit treatment, just that the fracture merits it A LOT MORE.

A traited FMW gives 20% quickness uptime for 50% dps boost, or 10% AoE dps boost.
An untraited Discbanner gives 75% banner uptime for 170 precision+ferocity (8% critrate, 11.3% critdmg) ~ 10.5-11% AoE dps boost.

I don’t see the problem. You can perm-quickness all you want, but you pay for that by having lower personal dps x5, and missing out on damage boosts from other classes. Nerf this, and guardians will once again be using nothing but renewed focus.

On-kill effects only trigger on mobs that give experience, as a lazy coding solution of preventing effect stacking from killing ambient whites, and from stacking on killing nonstop-respawn mobs. Therefore all sigils, traits and skills of this type used on zero-experience mobs will not trigger.

As far as I know, this also includes the Vengeance and Illusion of Life effects in many cases.

This answers your ‘how’ question. As for why, that’s Anet’s job to answer.

Actually it’s better to world-explore, and harvest every single resource node you find. Levelling speeds are comparable to train usage if you run fast enough, profit is greater as you don’t eat waypointing costs but take a heck load of resources (the 15-25 iron ores, soft wood logs and carrots are especially worthwhile), and world completion makes doing everything else easier later on as you’ll have all the waypoints you ever need… plus, it is a Legendary requirement anyway, and it puts a nice star next to your character name.

Of course, it takes more skill to solo everything then to follow in a zerg where you basically can’t die, but that also trains you for content later on, while queensdale training to 80 leaves a new player still hopelessly inexperienced.

All of my level 80 characters have >60% world completion, and got to 80 from open world content (and for 4 of them, 500 crafting in 1/2 disciplines) alone. I dungeon exclusively with level 80 characters only to optimise completion speeds, and because drops in the mid level range are worth a lot (linen especially) – so I’d want to stay in normal exploration until 80.

Even after 80 I revisit almost all the maps daily in my 80s to harvest resources from permanent rich nodes, which yields more than 10 gold a day easily.

Encounters that require high might stacks on uncrittable targets will definitely feel the difference, even if this was a silent patch.

I’m looking at you, Tequatl/Triple Wurm phase I.

The Legendary Searing Effigy? Nope, don’t think anyone will notice.

Some builds are flat-out inferior to others (ahem, Cleric P/P thieves), but given that most dungeons can be completed either solo or two-manned, and that it’s hard for even the worst build to be worse than 40% lower relative to the optimal build for that class, even 5 players with the worst builds you can possibly imagine in the worst possible situation have a relative effectiveness of 3.0 players – aka, you can clear the dungeon with one person to spare.

Between comparing the worst-suited weapon combinations of a given profession versus its most suited (say, mace/shield+staff guard versus greatsword/sword+focus) for raw dps, the difference isn’t much greater than 20%.

And between comparing the best-suited builds of the most optimal (thief) and least optimal (necromancer) classes for personal dps in a dungeon, the difference isn’t much greater than 10%.

Being ‘suboptimal’ isn’t the end of the world. A dungeon may take twice as long, but it’ll still be completable. Given how even cleric guards could solo Scarlet’s watchwork boss phase with time to spare, I’d say I’ve only felt compelled to use specific builds twice – one is soloing t3 waves of saboteurs during the Lion’s Arch elections, and the other is killing Liadri the Concealing Dark, neither of which are content you can access at the moment.

Nothing in the game is remotely difficult enough to present a barrier of entry per se. It’s perfectly fine to play whatever you like, in whatever way you like – just be aware that you’re not going to be optimal if it’s mathematically impossible for you to be. If you don’t care about being fully optimal in everything, you can have a great deal of fun anyway. One might say that it’s even more fun, since using suboptimal builds increases any encounter’s relative difficulty, while facerolling dungeons all day long can get to be a bit boring after a while. Couple of people I know started making joke builds in pink/purple light armor charrs after getting sick of speedclearing too much.

For AC specifically, your role is to summon Frost Bows and Fiery Greatswords. Not kidding.

Dungeon eles are strongest with scepter/focus due to its boonstacking potential and utility skills; a Celestial elementalist with Lightning Hammers and Fiery Greatswords routinely outdamages full berserker warriors (thus being the very best class type in the game for gating CoFp1), while also buffing said warriors with might making them stronger than they normally are.

However, focusing on boonstacking and utility skills makes the build much weaker for any form of PvP content, so most people prefer to run the Fresh Air type build for everything.

Water is generally better for survivability than earth. Combining Arcana 30 and water 15 allows you to AoE Regen, AoE Soothing Mist and burst AoE heal on water attune, followed by a second burst AoE heal if you dodge on water.

There are several mechanics that define what classes do best in what specific areas. Most players like to use a build for a class that does all content passably well, but the primary strengths of the elementalist specifically are boonstacking and ranged AoE damage. The former is best done with S/F and is good for dungeons, the latter is best done with staves and is good for WvW. The primary weaknesses of the elementalist are low single target damage, vulnerability to being Immobilised and low damage multipliers on non-Conjured weapon auto attacks.

It’s worth noting that the S/F support ele is one of the only ways in the game to do the CoFp2 solo run before Magg drops fire extinguishers. This can save up to 2 minutes on every CoFp2 run since the ele can initiate the oracyte dialogue, then complete the run before the oracyte dialogue finishes, so that when the rest of the party waypoints to the start, Magg can be instantly teleported to the kaboomium ore without any lag in between.

Specced right, a dungeon ele can outheal, outdamage and outsurvive any other build in the game in PvE. It’s useless for PvP though. Nor can it cc very well… but since anything worth ccing in a dungeon also has Defiant anyway, that gap is a bit irrelevant.