Guild Wars 2

Dabrixmgp.4758:

Monztor.9207:

Dabrixmgp.4758:

Might try a Fire ele out.

In my opinion, if you’re going to try ele, don’t waste your other attunements either. Elementalists give up a second weapon set for their 4 elements that they can use If you only use fire, you’ll end up using only 1/4th of your skills

Yea but im looking for faceroll easy here.

You aren’t going to get ‘easy’ with elementalist, especially if you attempt to do it with a single attunement. If you don’t get used to attunement swapping, you really aren’t going to maximize your damage, utility, or survivability.

Xriah.5743:

Nesetalis.5293:

I guess none of you ever played another on launch MMO? All things told, guildwars 2 launch has been relatively smooth… The serious bugs that did crop up were fixed rather quickly. Compare this to say WoW’s launch, and oh my god the bugs.

I’ve seen most of the bugs i’ve run across fixed within a week or two. The others there are workarounds that work temporarily, and a few that are probably head scratchers.

Neither of you have likely worked on bug fixing code.. it isn’t like patching a wall or sanding out a ding on your car. :\ some bugs can be so illusive as to hide for years on end, cropping up only in weird situations 7.5 days after daylight savings, but only if the day is tuesday. :P
The thing I would like them to do though, is put a lot more information in to the patch notes. Documentation is everything!

Actually, yes I have done debugging. In fact, that’s part of my current job.

I understand bugs can be ELusive (mass effect fan?) and that they can take time to fix. However, some bugs are more complex than others. And some of these bugs just have no excuse.

The cantrip cooldown trait for the ele for instance. This trait decreases the cooldown time for 3 out of the 4 skills it’s supposed to. It works fine for the other 3 skills. Changing a number isn’t terribly complex. And even if the skill has a unikittenfect that is complicating matters, they’ve had three months to fix it now! Are they so understaffed that someone can’t spare a half a day to sort through the problem and straighten this out?

To add insult to injury, they said they fixed it in the patch notes and they didn’t. That’s just sloppy. I know before I patch any piece of software I support, I go through and test the fixes listed in the patch notes to make sure they actually work.

This ^

I also work in computer science as a programmer and well… I usually test my bugfixes quite thoroughly before I say they’re fixed. I personally have an issue that they are worrying so much about pushing out content that it seems to be taking precedence over so many bugs, but my absolute biggest gripe are the “Guys! We fixed X” and…. they didn’t actually fix it at all. That is ludicrous.

Being a relatively non-rich player, I would like to suggest alternate methods of upgrading keeps, camps, and towers in wvw. I have loads of extra karma due to there being few places to spend it (especially if you don’t necessarily care for the karma gear, which you can’t get on my server anyway due to the events never being completed).

The suggestion:
Separate tabs for upgrades: Gold, Karma, or Badges.

Not everyone has 2 gold to blow on an upgrade, and those of us who can simply afford to upgrade camps often don’t because we don’t feel that the 35 silver required is justified, typically because camps are so ridiculously easy to take (see: zerg issue).

As a side note, my server in particular has been having issues in many areas and 1 would be that very very few of the already few people we have are willing to shell out for upgrades so it kind-of limits our possibility of playing smart to beat the odds. (HoD).

Personally I need all my cash so that I can upgrade my equipment more and if I upgrade more stuff I will never be able to save enough cash. I should be able to blow my excess karma and/or badges to help out.

One final thing – I did consider that some people may think this trivializes the upgrades. In my opinion, wvw should be based as much on team skill and tactics (yak escorting, etc) and less on how much cash we have. For instance, we do just fine with limited siege versus our opponents (this week) who throw that stuff down like candy.

P.S. Sorry if this has been suggested before, didn’t really have time to search in-depth.

Mikitten058:

Azariah.8420:

brandon.6735:

Can we remove the ability for these two to not go through the portals when they use there skill Mist form/

God he doesn’t want the ability itself removed, just the moving through tower portals when using it. Stop arguing like he asked to have the entire ability removed.

I agree it’s kinda annoying that they can get through portals with their skills, but mine doesn’t work(even though if i use a teleport onto the portal when alive i get ported through) this seems inconsistent and that is what annoys me.

But at the same time I’m not really fussed when they do, warriors can be spiked before they can vengeance, and ele’s need something useful in downed

Then I am sure All Ele’s would be saying “Anet, we are waiting to buy a better HP base so we can actually make it into towers like everyone else”

Believe me, If there are attackers and you are spotted, you are less likely to ever make it in as an elementalist then any other class.

On the contrary… I think elementalist is the easiest class to make it into a tower on, aside from thief b/c shadow refuge… heres why….

Swap skills to lightning flash, vapor form, and armor of earth… cast AE…. run till its out, teleport.. hit mist… you’re in. I’ve never been stopped before.

On the flip side; There really is no reason to nerf either of these… as stated, every class has unique abilites…

Warriors still die/take armor damage

As for ele…. as someone up there said, you can (and I do… all the time) be CCed (immob) while in mist form. I think this might only be carry-over. I’m not 100% sure if you can be CCed after in mist, but in order to live we have to hit mist immediately and if we are rooted prior to downed, we die.

rhonyn.6810:

Kneemin.4235:

rhonyn.6810:

Kneemin.4235:

Fix culling and it’ll just make it a bit harder for really good thieves to stay in stealth, but it will use up all their focus just to do that… let alone kill you as it does now, but a smidge more-so.

It’s unlikely that culling will ever be fixed in the WvW environment…..class/game mechanics should be designed with that in mind.

Where is your evidence for this? Are you a programmer? (I am) Did you not see the post by devs that they are working on it? On the contrary, its quite likely that it be fixed at some point. Whether that be done in the near future or not, they shouldn’t waste a bunch of dev-time rebalancing thieves because a few people can’t adapt to the rendering (which really isn’t that big an issue anyway…. even in large fights its maybe 1.5 seconds where you can target, but not see the enemy). I actually feel bad for thieves when it gets fixed… since I already mop the floor with the majority of them on my elementalist as is.

My point is a basic premise: design classes and game mechanics with game engine limitations in mind….not some future build that may or may not ever coming into being and may or may not even actually fix the problem. You say its not worth their time…you’re entitled to your opinion as am I. (and the culling issue is bigger then just “thieves”…its just the topic of this thread)

Anet would never say they can’t fix the culling issue. It will be “being worked on” indefinitely or until fixed. They’ve stated its challenging, and they are hoping to “improve” it in the future (no timelines given). Meh, at some point…. months? year? when? you have to call it and hopefully design the game around what they have imo.

Clearly the fact that you’ve stressed you play Ele several times now, brings some additional weight to your arguments that I am failing to see …but I defer to you…as you are a programmer.

The point here is that if you don’t understand even a little bit how these kinds of bugs work and are “fixed” then you really have no room to overhead an “obvious” fix that should be implemented. It would take a lot of time and money to come up with a fix that would effectively ruin the idea behind the thief class. In the meantime it would also take away time from fixing the actual problem. It is a huge taboo in design to cover up a problem with a hacky fix.

As for the “engine’s shortcomings” – this statement isn’t even accurate, so it doesn’t really lend to your argument either. There isn’t necessarily a shortcoming on the side of the engine, but rather the implementation. Anet has a vision to reach a wide playerbase (as a casual F2P system should). In implementing culling, it cuts down heavily on the client-server communications and thereby, the lag. Simply increasing the culling limits would fix the problem for people like me who run semi-high end machines with no bad side effects, BUT there are a majority of people out there who run this game on machines like my old laptop that would see a drastic decrease in performance. The reason this ‘fix’ can/will take a little while to complete is to ensure that does not happen when they do finally fix it.

Culling aside; I’ve noticed that a good chunk of the complaints here boil down to:

I think I’m awesome and I like to roam by myself as a class, X in a huge world vs world battlefield and I expect to be able to catch thieves whenever they try to run or play stealth combat with me. It isn’t fair that they can just stealth and run away or stealth and heal up. I want to be able to roam around by myself and beat thieves.

I hate to break it to you guys but thieves are an infiltration class, their highest strength is 1v1 combat. The fact that decent players can render most thieves useless in a 1v1 is bad enough. I’m sorry but you can’t have all your cake and eat it too. Thieves sacrifice a LOT to be so mobile and stealthly. They can go to and from hotspots very quickly and offer a lot on the battlefield but aside from the occasional scorp wire, they are merely supply carrying mules in siege warfare, wherease most other classes, that often do worse in 1v1 combat (against specialists, like thieves) offer a lot more to more situations than thieves do.

tl;dl This is not world vs world: duel mode. Also not every class should “have the tools necessary to deal with it”, even though they do just not in every build.

First; calling people lazy or slackish is a statement, similar to calling someone ignorant. Its a state of being, if you slack you fall behind. Calling someone a “scrub” is derogatory. Linguistics, my friend.

Back to the topic. First, do you really think that Anet was just goign to leave exotics at the top and never add new gear to aspire towards? If you did, then that is just naive.

I can imagine how they stressed that it would not be a gear treadmill game and I can even appreciate the fact that the new gear is just a tad too treadmill-like in that it takes a great deal of stuff to make (50 globs, seriously?) but this game is far from gear treadmill with far less gearing options than other games. In-fact I think the way they designed the gear (3 stats, pick your poisons) is absolutely horrendous as it allows for very little strategic flavor to one’s choice of armor.

I really don’t think you were ‘misled’, but rather you expected a far more radical version of what is already in play, which again is readily available for you in sPvP as seems to be their intention.

rhonyn.6810:

Kneemin.4235:

Fix culling and it’ll just make it a bit harder for really good thieves to stay in stealth, but it will use up all their focus just to do that… let alone kill you as it does now, but a smidge more-so.

It’s unlikely that culling will ever be fixed in the WvW environment…..class/game mechanics should be designed with that in mind.

Where is your evidence for this? Are you a programmer? (I am) Did you not see the post by devs that they are working on it? On the contrary, its quite likely that it be fixed at some point. Whether that be done in the near future or not, they shouldn’t waste a bunch of dev-time rebalancing thieves because a few people can’t adapt to the rendering (which really isn’t that big an issue anyway…. even in large fights its maybe 1.5 seconds where you can target, but not see the enemy). I actually feel bad for thieves when it gets fixed… since I already mop the floor with the majority of them on my elementalist as is.

I hadn’t seen your recent post morgar so this is an edit:

You very explicitly said that CnD spam was unfair. I gave ways around it. SERIOUSLY, If a thief is stealth “half the fight” its your fault. Without hitting you, he can’t stop spamming a stealth combo which involves pistol/SB and leaves him vulnerable every time he fires it off. There is no sure-fire safe way to perma stealth and if you think there is .. do what we’ve all said. go play a thief for 30 levels and figure it out

Also, if he keeps “running away and coming back” then you clearly are alone, which isn’t the intention of wvw anyway. If your in a group, he will take fire ANY time he gets close enough to attack and then run away.

Sylosi.6503:

Kneemin.4235:

I think its good that you can upgrade your gear to a level better than newer players and slackers. If you want to be casual then you can accept being slightly out of date sometimes or you can go play sPvP that is built around that ideal.

The only casuals are the scrubz who want a gear advantage, real PvPers want to PvP not Gear vs Gear.

Thsi was one of the attractions of this game knowing that upon reaching level cap, everyone would very easily be able to get the top tier (statwise) of gear and be on a level playing field when it comes to gear.

On the contrary; First the namecalling is not necessary.
Secondly; I don’t know what games you’ve played but typically “casuals” and “gear ‘scrubz’” are not in the same category. Even in this case, it takes considerably more time (or if you are really lame, cash to buy gems to buy required items) to get the better gear. Part of being better is not always “skill”. Sorry to burst your bubble but scavenging around to find t he best gear for yourself is a skillful venture and you can and should be rewarded for your time.

Just to cover myself here. I am not a WoW player and their system may suck, I could care less as that game was/is horrible anyway.

This is also not to say that there is a current issue. ANet has been absolutely horrible about implementing updates… in this case adding the ascended gear to PvE but providing no way for WvW-only players like myself a way to obtain them. (yes, I advocate the gear but I don’t pve, big surprise!). They really need to step up the game and start adding changes in a more correct way, instead of being like "Well, we are going to add them to wvw but we just didn’t get around to it yet.

That aside, sPvP was made for the “skill” based combat where everyone is ‘equal’ in terms of gear. WvW is NOT the same and is a PvPvE style of play. There can and will be differences to the ‘skill-based’ pvp that is sPvP and tPvP.

rhonyn.6810:

Yashino.5713:

Kneemin.4235:

I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the ‘dodge’ button? Or perhaps the ‘blind’, ‘immobilize’, ‘cripple’, or ‘chill’ effects? How about ‘blowback’? Surely you have a couple of these available to you? Seriously, do you not know anything about how thief works? If they are stealthing for “1/2 the fight” then you’re clearly doing something wrong and if your not, that means they burnt a LOT of their trait points and select-skills on stealthing, which means they will probably not be able to kill you.

Holes; Your argument has a lot of them.

exactly my thought…
people just don’t learn the mechanics of the game~
im sure ALL classes have something to counter, stun, slow, stealth, DODGE…
oh sorry, i think im wasting my time since 90% of them just stand there waiting to be stabbed in the back.

by this logic….nothing would be OP, or need adjustment. I don’t even need stealth…give me a skill that can hit for 50k!….you’ve got dodge right?…so its all good

I don’t care about spike, I do think that some thief builds are too easy to play to mediocre efficacy though relative to other classes (risk/reward is off), and rendering in WvW is an admitted issue – at some point that game engine deficiency needs to stop being an excuse for current challenges in class/game mechanics and become the reason for implementing change (read: CHANGE not NERF class into oblivion).

There is quite a big difference between CCing your opponent to increase the time it takes him to get off a CnD than there is dodging effectively every single time your opponent swings a “super overpowered move doing 50k damage”.

If you dodge effectively even ONE time on a CnD they get NOTHING for it, including the +2 initiative they get from going into stealth (due to not going into stealth because it missed). They also lose the 6 init they spent activating it.

You built up a reallllly obvious strawman argument to combat my point about the fact that if you don’t stand there like a deer in headlights while he spams CnD on you then its a heck of a lot harder for the thief to stay in stealth.

Lets not forget that most of you keep crying that its only “us thieves” who are advocating that stealth is fine. Please recall that I main an elementalist, NOT a thief. They aren’t broken.

Fix culling and it’ll just make it a bit harder for really good thieves to stay in stealth, but it will use up all their focus just to do that… let alone kill you as it does now, but a smidge more-so.

I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the ‘dodge’ button? Or perhaps the ‘blind’, ‘immobilize’, ‘cripple’, or ‘chill’ effects? How about ‘blowback’? Surely you have a couple of these available to you? Seriously, do you not know anything about how thief works? If they are stealthing for “1/2 the fight” then you’re clearly doing something wrong and if your not, that means they burnt a LOT of their trait points and select-skills on stealthing, which means they will probably not be able to kill you.

Holes; Your argument has a lot of them.

I hate to break it to you guys, but each class has its own area of expertise, and in some cases various areas depending on weapon-set (i.e. d/d ele combat vs siege ele with staff).

World vs world is NOT a 1v1 arena, just in-case you didn’t know. There is nothing ‘unfair’ about a class being good at not dying in a 1v1 fight. If you and group of people can’t kill a stealthed thief then well…. l2p.

My main is an elementalist and since I made my alt thief, guess how often I die to thieves? Also, since I’ve made my thief and understood how stealth works, I almost never have thieves successfully run away. I find that a grand portion (the not amazingly good ones) of thieves typically don’t run away until they are literally about to lose the fight. I will toy with them and as soon as they get around half health I fire off all my burst along with 2 immobilize; Then simply litter the spot where they were and… bam = dead thief.

Its not hard people, seriously. If YOU dont’ have to tools to catch them, then your build simply isn’t built to fight a stealth-based thief, just like my elementalist can’t fight against guardians well b/c they have a lot of defenses and I don’t run full bunker or full cannon.

Mogar.9216:

Funny thing you have no idea who I am what I play and I don’t think you even read my post. All I read from you is that OP must be a bad player who plays glass cannon . I don’t play glass cannon, I’m not qqing about dying to thief. All I’m saying is that it is not fun to fight someone whom you can’t target for 1/2 of the fight. It’s a design flaw that should be addressed.

Thats the thing, it isn’t a design flaw. This is how a thief is intended to be played. They are not supposed to stand there and trade blows with you. Once the rendering problem is fixed, you’ll find the “half the fight” thing trickles down to a more acceptable rate. Also, if you’re letting the thief stay stealthed then… well that’s your fault. Its not like they have an ability called “stealth” with a 3 second cooldown. They can either stock up on high-CD moves like refuge (easy as heck to counter), or spam you with C/D which again, is your fault. Its pretty simple to time your dodges so that they miss on C/D sometimes which, guess what, uses up a large chunk of init and = no stealth.

Seriously, if you HAVE to rely on targets for a “fun” fight then you simply need to get over that. Part of the tactics of fighting human players is dealing with their abilities.

There are plenty of ways to counter thief stealth and if you choose not to spec to defeat them then you will lose and/or they will mess with you and get away.

It will be hard to pull off something effective, but I think that a signets water/earth build might do well with that.

It also depends a bit on whether she will be in wvw (I presume not, as the ‘less complicated’ thing tends to lead toward a less competitive playstyle). If thats the case, then a support role with a staff might ideal.

Something like 30/20/20 Earth/water/arcane might do her justice. It’s a fairly obvious build, run signets with Written in stone (30 earth), signet heal instead of the glyph and use the earth skills for damage and water for healing. It might be wise to swap to fire now and again for a quick damage boost but I imagine it would be safe to stay earth/water most of the time.

Regardless of how its done, in the current setup, it will be pretty difficult to find a highly effective build without stance dancing.

Good luck!

Something along these lines has my upvote. Honestly, some of the normal mobs in the new zone have more HP than the veteran mobs in WvW. There really needs to be more automated (or at least more difficult) defense so that response time is increased a little bit. It pains me that you can blow so much cash on upgrades, especially in camps, only to lose them in a matter of seconds to a zerg blow-through or lose a fully upgraded keep to a few players who beat their heads on the doors for a few minutes.

I’m going to refer to the wonderful “I used to QQ until I rolled a thief” post above.

I used to have some issues with thieves… I now have a lvl 56 thief and well…. I rarely lose to other thieves anymore, unless I"m playing my own thief and they outplay and outgear me due to my being a much lower level.

ANYONE will be hard as hell to beat if they are really good, thieves are no exception. You can’t complain that “90% of thieves suck and you can deal with them”…. so, you’re saying you should be able to beat everyone, but since 10% of them are good and beat you, they need nerfed? I hate to play this card but it sounds like a L2P issue.

The only thing that needs ‘changed’ at all is that the rendering issues need fixed.

I don’t see what the big issue is over some gear improvements? Rather than complaining that you don’t want any kind of difference in commitment level, why not petition them to add a wvw-based way to get the better gear? (I personally like the idea that you can move a little ways ahead in wvw, since its partially PvE based as well unlike sPvP).

Since WvW is a dedication/time based system unlike sPvP that is an arcade style pick your “character” and go fight, I think its good that you can upgrade your gear to a level better than newer players and slackers. If you want to be casual then you can accept being slightly out of date sometimes or you can go play sPvP that is built around that ideal.

Also, please stop referring to these as “wow” changes. Just in-case none of you knew, Warcraft didn’t ‘invent’ ANY of these concepts.

UberLander.8326:

Just to clarify we switched to EB 3 or 4 times last night. Would push red off the map and move back to HOD. Your server defended garrison for what seemed like all day. Now don’t you think starting off your post with how well you held us back would have been more positive?

I for one didn’t mind yesterday. It’s clear then that if you don’t bring the fight too us we will bring it too you.

Just a random question what are the names of your major guilds.

Über.

I don’t know what you read from my post, but I don’t think you understood what I was talking about. First of all, i was talking in terms of one map. I don’t care where the HoD BL zerg zoned to and from and how often. I’m also not trying to push up morale either, so the “you should have started by saying how much you owned us” thing is irrelevant. The point made was that, in a given map. BOTH of the other servers did more attacking of us, than of eachother. In the EB map, when there was a lot of red. If you weren’t there, I don’t care. Those “30+ people” I mentioned weren’t the ones over in the BL, I’m talking about the 30+ people that were, instead of helping to beat back red, were busy camping us at our spawn while red owned the map. In the BL, I was speaking in terms entirely of the BL in which DH was wandering around capping stuff, but never was it YOUR stuff they were capping, it was always our stuff… on the complete other side of the map. THAT is why it is suspicious.

As for your question about guilds. I honestly don’t know; We don’t have much of an organized force right now and thats not even the point and its completely irrelevant to my complaint. Whether we have strong guilds or not isn’t relevant to the fact that you were both (DH/FA) spending a suspiciously large portion of your attention at our objectives when there were much bigger threats from each-other to be worrying about.

I’d run with the signet if you use written in stone – not a bad build IMO. If you don’t use it, the signet is junk IMO.

Hey!

I mained a wizard (nagafen) and conjuror (Mistmoore) for years in EQ2. Glad to see some other EQ vets Anyway – to your questions.

I think, for leveling that you would be best off using a staff (personal preference, requires less dodging around and killing multiple mobs at the same time). Dual Daggers is also a pretty effective pve weapon-set due to its high damage output. Though I would use the lower levels to learn the 10 billion weapon skills you have, just so you have them for future playing around. In short:

1. Yes; Once you get more traits, you will find yourself a lot more hardy. Play well with the earth (in my opinion, some hate earth) and water traits for survivability.

2. I don’t dungeon grind much, but when I’m wandering around in zones I do see (more often than a lot of other classes) that elementalists are specifically searched for groups. We do offer a metric-crap-load of combo fields, especially with staff. We also have more AE healing than anyone else and a load of CC (again, staff).

3. Yes. Unfortunately, a lot of elementalists run dagger/dagger in wvw which is pretty useless. They might kill effectively but we already have a ton of thieves, warriors, rangers, etc doing killing. Elementalists truly shine with their myriad of AE spells that have 1200 range and the blasting staff trait, which enlarges your AE circles for all staff skills. This ability is absolutely unmatched in terms of siege warfare. I wish we had more on HoD that ran staff, especially now that I"m not playing my ele while I level my alts in wvw >.<

If you have any other questions feel free to post… we have quite a few annoying people in this forum who whine, but there are a lot of helpful folks to who will help you figure stuff out.

You can also feel free to friend list me in-game and chat me up when I’m on.

Good luck!

It’s a little pointless now that the match is half over but I’d like express my extreme disappointment in both DH and FA for various reasons.

We’ll go with DH first;

I notice a lot of the time when FA has mostly the full map controlled, DH likes to roll into our (HoD) borderlands and, big surprise, start taking camps and attacking towers. The ones by their own border? Dear no, despite FA having a huge advantage, not only do they come to our BL to cause trouble, they will constantly hit the camps all the way across the map near the HoD citadel and begin attacking dawns and woods towers randomly. I can think of quite a few situations where FA probably would have been routed from the majority of the map, if instead they did the logical thing and started taking the things by their own border instead of screwing around and attacking HoD’s pittance of an established land.

As for FA – I mostly noticed that a lot of the time when DH gets their game on (especially in EB) and starts taking stuff, we will also be there trying to take the towers and camps near our border, yet despite DH taking close to half the entire map, FA will continue to flood our border with literally 30+ people, while they let DH just plow down the rest of the map… seems kind of suspicious and very counter-productive: prevent 1 server from getting 1-2 towers at the cost of half the map.

I don’t hold the idea that FA and DH are working together necessarily, but the seeming amount disregard they have for each-other when they go well out of their way to keep HoD under wraps, at the same time seems pretty ridiculous and definitely not productive in terms of a good match.

P.S. Please keep the “well obviously HoD sucks” and “QQ more nub” comments to yourself. Regardless of how bad 1 team is, logic says that you will spend more energy fighting the hard fights than the “weak” guys – which has not been the case as outlined above. This also isn’t to admit that HoD isn’t capable, because we are.

Nautika.5376:

To me the risk vs reward is nice, but the time vs reward sucks. My Warrior can kill 6+ mobs in a fraction of the time my Ele can and not even break a sweat. It is really kind of sad…

You’re obviously doing it wrong. I can drop way more mobs than any of my other toons on my elementalist.

PvE-wise, I’d say they are definitely worth it. There is a steep learning curve, but once you master it, as said above, you can easily become a very versatile machine.

They are a little lackluster in PvP at the moment because our damage is very low in most builds and unless you’re running D/D it is insanely easy to dodge most of our attacks (without using the dodge button). You can still be effective but its more situational (great in group fights and in siege/defense situations).

Hopefully most of the problems we do have will be resolved in the ‘big patch’ coming tomorrow.

You know the main thing I find disturbing?

The all-in-all answer to this and other survivability questions is nearly always:

Well, you obviously don’t run D/D with water/arcane.
Great so then your saying the only way to survive is by running a SINGLE build on a SINGLE weapon set…. and we can’t swap, so we can’t just keep D/D around to help us survive.

We simply need to be more flexible. While our traits are balanced b/c D/D is strong, they make it so running another build is almost entirely non-viable because those weapons dont’ have enough to survive on. Make us more hardy and you would make D/D OP. Perhaps the answer is to nerf D/D a little bit and buff our base survivability and/or the other weapon-sets so we can run something else in PvP.

That aside, if your REALLY good, you can do decently with any weapon set but a really good enemy will almost always beat you. Ever try to kill a warrior with a rifle whose auto attack hits harder than our heals can heal for and faster than any of our attacks go off (again, for more damage as well and more accurately since our projectiles are so kittening slow)? Its fun… really.

I personally find that the only really viable weaponsets are staff (when not alone, its amazing) and D/D; Even then, with a relatively small number of build options since we need arcane to get anywhere with any build.

I have played D/D ele a little bit but I personally feel that for support your better going with a staff ele. They have a metric crap load of combo fields and versatility. They are also useful in tower fights where a D/D ele will not be anywhere near as useful.

Regardless of which way you go, I would include an elementalist.

For the other 4, I don’t really know. I suppose a mesmer would be nice to have. I think including a ranger would be a good idea as well. When you have extra pets and things running around it can easily give yourself more battlefield control and illusory numbers advantages. I’ve only played mesmer, ranger, ele, and theif so I don’t have enough personal input to figure in the other classes.

P.S. I always keep a set of daggers on my ele for situations where it is more useful like a 1v1.

EDIT: + necro

Hello all. This is a semi-rant and also in-part a comparison.

First of all, I will start by saying I am an EQ and EQ2 veteran who still plays those, which I consider to be the best made MMOs to date. With that out of the way I have noticed, if nothing else, 1 thing they have done (especially with EQ2) worlds better than any other MMO I’ve dipped my paws in: The UI.

In every game… Rift, Aion, Wow (admittedly for 30 minutes, I’ve played it), this, and others…. the UI is very simple… and very defined with very little customization out of the box. I am not a fan of dealing with mod programs to change my UI scene but all of the above-mentioned games don’t allow you to do barely anything regarding the client.

I suggest the people at Anet, as well as other companies have a look at what you can do out of the box with the EQ2 UI and take note. You can control nearly everything with the extensive options available to you and they were almost entirely available at launch.

/rant_off

P.S. I suppose I’ll also add in the chat controls that EQ2 also employs…. also vastly better than the rest of the games I mentioned, including GW2.

Despite that this seems to be a troll thread…

My main is an elementalist, and a theif has to be pretty good to actually kill me. If I see damage, my immediate reaction is to dodge roll and prepare to kick someones kitten

I also have a theif and hes only lvl 21, yet I am able to own people in wvw… if they suck. Every half decent player I try to attack trounces me horribly due to my lower level.

P.S. You CAN hit thieves in stealth. You may not see numbers but you still damage them and I bet you that if you manage to whack them for a few thousand damage, they aren’t going to stick around to try killing you.

P.P.S. Thieves with highly evasive specs via stealth are usually really squishy.

In pvp I tend to die pretty fast when targetted, but with my elementalist (main, lvl 80) I can easily pull 5 or more mobs and down them all pretty fast.

I use a signets staff build. I don’t recall exactly but its 30 earth, first major slot is armor of earth at 50%, last slot is written in stone. I run fire/earth/healing signets and in pve I run the air signet (instant cast AE blind that you can fire during a spellcast). I have 30 more in Arcane with the on-attunment boon spell as well as evasive arcana (dodge into your field spells for nice bonuses). Lastly I have 10 points in water and I took the vulnerability on signet-cast major trait slot (3 stacks iirc per cast). If your having trouble surviving, you can drop one of the signets (fire IMO) for arcane blast. Switch to water and drop your small heal on yourself and use arcane blast in it for nice damage and a decent bonus heal.

With a staff, I would be very careful about which way you dodge as you can easily cause mobs to move out of your AEs, which is bad.

If you can manage, start in earth with eruption, then switch to fire during the cast and immediately drop lava font on top of it (slightly closer to you to allow for more damage time). This combo will almost entirely obliterate most mobs outright. If you manage to pull too many mobs immediately start casting meteor shower on yourself (then use the air signet to blind them all about mid-cast). Immediately post-cast drop another lava font right at your feet… if the mobs outlast you then I really dont’ know what to say.

One other small tip, assuming mobs near you aren’t at full HP, the AEs you drop usually will rally you… always be ready to immediately lava-font once you rally, as you typically won’t have much time to do anything else…its instant and does a ton of damage.

You should NEVER have trouble with mobs in PvE.

Feel free to mail me in-game if you’re still having trouble with your build/etc.

If you seriously think that mist form is that powerful, you, my friend, are insane.

First – The ONLY large uses:

Defending a keep and if you have a group to hide behind for rez- makes it kinda hard to fully die BUT:
We have very little raw defense – toughness, HP, armor so we die really fast anyway, even downed.
If you CC spam during the kill, we can’t move (roots don’t dissipate as i’ve been rooted in place during mist form more than a few times.
You also incur 2 (yes 2) downed penalty, one for the first down and one for the second which makes you die super fast the next time, in which case you cannot mist form again because you just DIE as soon as it ends due to having 3 downed penalty.

Thirdly – its 100% absolutely USELESS in an open field if you dont’ have a large number of people to hide behind. I, as an elementalist, LOVE downing my own class in the field… easiest kill in the game.

As for this…:

“You can also travel to the nearest mob, to kill him and rally! So many utility on the same spell.”

LOL – Yeah, because I can own that mob with ele downed skills before the player whacks me with a stake….. right.

I won’t say our downed skill is lame – its definitely improved, but it is far from versatile or being the best.

To the person who said that nobody would walk into an AE field to rez (i.e. more net kills) then there is no issue with down state anyway, because that guy is dead and not rezzed. I never said I have a crapload of people running in to rez, but when one does, I root him and blast away with AE litter.. most times it kills them both.

Removing downed state would make it way easier for zergs, not harder.

@Niim – That is already how downed works. I dont’ know about you, but as an elementalist, I get downed ALL the time. If you’re downed while your downed debuff is red, you die.

I agree that warriors have some fairly broken abilities and that downed attacks can be strong (not mine, lol!), but I still think that the benefits of carpeting AEs on downed enemies in defense is a great boon to getting extra kills more-so than the one or two times that rally or powerful downed 3s cause an issue (sure isn’t mine – a cripple!!! hahaha).

Clearly, you don’t know how to use the downed state to your advantage. I guarantee that, when outnumbered vastly, you would easily lose a tower/keep you’re defending. On any given night I notice people going up/down on walls WAY more than the attackers… the difference is that our guys get back up and the ones who go down outside usually die.

I use the downed state as a sort of ‘magnet’ to suck people into a storm of AE which usually not only kills the downed player (from the safety of range), it usually manages to down one of the people attempting a rez.

AE litter is the absolute best way to deal with downed players as it minimizes risk (not standing there trying to steak him) and deals good damage to any who try to help.

I know it’s been said above a few times, but can you seriously think you’ll be successful and have a great time after just 2 days at this ridiculously complicated class?

I play staff and I know for certain I have heavily influenced some fights just because I destroy wall siege like its my job.

There is nothing more devastating in the game than a well-placed meteor storm with arcane staff AE enhancer trait (on walls).

I’ve also dabbled in D/D so I could survive firefights better but I found it to be less universal and less helpful so I went back to signet/staff build.

I play a staff elementalist and I’m always on the front lines trying to vie for people to push back (i.e. endangering myself a lot). I almost always come out ahead from wvw. I also buy and place seige all the time (always carry at least 5-10 BP of various types).

I really don’t know how you don’t come out ahead more often. Kill yaks, take camps, do little stuff in between big seiges without dying and the event money will more than pay for repairs.

FYI I play on HoD and we have been vastly outnumbered for weeks now and I still manage to get more than a few kills per death.

There are also tons of good suggestions above. Its not that hard to come out at least even.

I have reasons to believe that culling might not be the problem. Indeed I’ve had this happen a couple of times, but I’ve only ever noticed it when there were only a couple of people in view, sometimes only 1. I’ve also been in quite a few large-scale fights (with no lag) and yet most of the disappearing acts I see are fairly legitimate, but I’ve also noticed a few there. Perhaps there are just rendering issues? Perhaps people are blipping their internet which causes some kind of problem with Anet?

In EQ2, when pvp was new. I know people would throttle their internet to cause blip-lag which could cause long-range ‘porting’ (not actual but to another player it looks like you just blip forward a ton, or disappear entirely for a few seconds).

As to why it supposedly was affecting OP, I’m not sure, as they seem relatively unaware it happened so I suppose net throttling isn’t the issue, at least, in that case.

First. I’d like to point out the silly comparisons to WoW. All you people who are blabbing about how this game isn’t wow and how its not supposed to become a WoW clone; I don’t know what black box in the corner you all lived in the past 20 years but WoW is far from the forefront in MMO mechanics and design. That craptastic game has nothing to do with where gear progression came from. It also is literally a copy of a bunch of different (and IMO better) games.

Anyway; This is also NOT guild wars one. Every game series, especially MMOs, changes with each iteration. I see absolutely no problem with giving people something stat-wise to strive for. There’s no reason I should be able to completely beat the entirety of the game content playing casually after a month. That should not have happened… yet it has. I have 1 80, 2 alts, 3 400 crafters, and a full set of exotic gear (after having scrapped quite a few pieces simply to change stats until I found what I wanted). Literally the only thing I don’t have is the legendary and a few dyes. This hardly seems like a way to keep players in the game.

They don’t have to go and make them so stupidly powerful that people get excluded from groups for not having them, but it would be nice to say “hey, you worked your butt off for this, here’s a small increase.”

I’m also starting to wonder if half of you who came in here bashing about how this game isn’t WoW even have a clue about how gear progression works. It definitely isn’t some thing where you are 10X more powerful than other people just because of gear… That is almost never the case as casual players can get stuff which is nearly ‘exotic’ in quality putting them not THAT far behind the hard-core people. Its really a small advantage given to those who work for it. Skill still plays a large role, and as always (and same with guild wars) the LARGEST advantage in pve AND pvp is always class, because balance usually isn’t that great.

I would like to see our bugs fixed… other than that:

Better signets. Some of them just flat out suck. Also they should all be like the wind signet and not have a cast time so you can use them mid-cast.

Reduce a lot of our spell cast times and increase projectile velocity. It is insanely easy to dodge most of our projectiles…. without even using dodge. They also do WAY less damage than rifle/bow attacks which fire 2-3 shots per our 1 shot….

A little more base HP to offset our craptastic raw defense.

An elite skill that doesn’t suck (a signet would be awesome.. I love my signets build, I just wish they were a little better).

I know this game is supposed to be ‘different’ but I feel like the armor creation was extremely lazy. Other than appearance, there is practically zero reason to run any dungeons as you can get all of the different armor sets via karma merchants or just crafting. There is no difference between ‘hard to get’ exotics and craftables. Same with blues, greens, and rares. Due to this, I’m finding the end game extremely boring. I want to go pvp, but with server Xfers I’ve been unable to wv3 for about 5 weeks now. I would LOVE to spend this time farming for some really cool armor (with awesome, unikittenfects or stats!), or trying to bring down some big-bad dood at the endgame with awesome loots to get, but there is honestly none of that around.

Whats wrong with having some unique weapons and armor rather than all this cookie cutter stuff that you can get anywhere with enough luck? Booooring.
Adjective Slot of Stat-Style >.>

I’m only running a core i5 2550k with 16 gigs of DDR3 RAM and I can be in wvw with 50+ people on screen going nuts and I don’t see a single frame drop. Side note: I don’t overclock anything either.

The suspicious thing is that my laptop runs some old, but decent, hardware, dual core etc yet it has a lot of trouble even in low-end situations. The range of “can run without lag” is very strange with this game. Most games, if you lower the settings a ton, you usually see a huge spike in performance yet my laptop lags like no other in wv3 even with low settings and few people around. I haven’t run many tests on it, but I’m willing to put my money on the 4gb ram vs 16gb ram that are causing such disparity between my older laptop and this new machine.

@MilitiaMasterV – Due to my setup. I’m certain your new machine will run without any blips since it could eat mine for breakfast.

This… omg this.

Also, there should be a box for all the stuff that came out with the event IMO too. I don’t suppose ectoplasm could also get a slot? I keep stacks of all the tiers of doubloons, shards, etc as I get them since I’m leveling most of the crafting professions and have lots of alts so they take up a lot of space… Don’t worry, I will still have plenty of crap that warrant me buying extra banks space (see: armor sets).

Since you’re ‘defeated’ and can’t move around and need ‘revived’ (Suggesting that you’re not conscious), why not just fade-to-black on death so that only your open windows will display, like the map.

Hey all,

I’ve been bouncing around specs trying to find one that suits my play best and I recently ended up with an arcane/earth perma-signet build (staff). I happen to have picked up Arcane Precision (25 points in arcane auto-buff)…. I just spent a few minutes testing some more stuff and I killed… probably 10+ mobs with approx 50% crit chance and it did not proc… not even one time.

Can anyone verify this even works at all? If not it needs put in the bug section, if it does work it needs a serious overhaul in trigger chance considering its a 25 kittening point ability and I was able to kill 10 mobs+ mobs spamming only auto attack without a single proc.

I also noticed that Arcane Power is broken (3 triggers?) but that’s already in the bug section.

I’ve been soloing with a fire/air staff build (was intrigued by fire, making it secondary when I have cash). Air based builds with the staff seem to do pretty well with solo pve. Chain lightning hits really** hard when there are 2 mobs and really the CC with the push-back and stun field is great. Fire is a nice additive for the extra power too, I just plan to make it my secondary instead of primary as I was trying to do when I first started.