I leveled with scepter/dagger, I suspect you’ll find that easier. 10 points in earth for armor of earth trait. 10 points in fire and grab the +10% damage trait. That should get you started on the right footing. Glyph of storms, glyph of lesser elementals and mistform for utilities. And learn to ride the lightning out of trouble safely when you get in over your head.
I think the class is a mess with a major design pass needed on our abilities and traits to do more than put a band aid on all its many problems. The class is clearly designed to be able to put out significant damage, which explains the slow animations, easy to avoid damage and long cool downs, none of which works very well once they nerfed our damage into the ground. Of course, with only two designers working on class balance, I’m not expecting them to get around to fixing any of it any time soon.
Yeah sure… Let’s just accidentally insert these lines of code here that make the ability act as a leap finisher. Then when they get used to it and design builds around it we can take it out and tell them it was never intended!
I’m partial to staying on land.
Not really in my opinion. Not any more. Sad state of affairs.
Your premise is flawed OP. We don’t know what the devs think about our class because they won’t actually communicate with us. All we have to go on is what they actually do in the patches. Other than a few d/d improvements, it’s been nerf after nerf after nerf. The class is a mess in my opinion and they have no idea where they are going with it. The two guys actually working on this may get around to addressing the situation in a few years, but I’ll be long gone long before then. My patience has run out for this ongoing mismanaged fiasco.
Best bet is to aoe the illusions down quickly. Otherwise your only option is to get good at spotting the real mesmer while dodging the incoming shatters. Not easy to do against a good mesmer I’ll agree.
I’m sure in the next update they’ll just change the DT tooltip to remove any reference to a blast finisher and claim it was never intended.
Yes, arcane power is still bugged. You’ll get maybe 2 crits out of it per use.
The traits are pretty good. My only critique is that Aeromancer’s alacrity might not be necessary, you could consider doing something else like bolt to the heart, or quick glyphs or inscription if you like using glyphs. Or consider putting those 10 points somewhere else entirely as a possibility.
Also, signet of restoration is terrible, you’d do better with either of the other two heals. The signet is only worth considering if you take the writ in stone earth grandmaster trait.
All jokes aside, we are still useful to take down the treb……..
Not really, according to the patch notes that was “fixed” too.
It seems pretty clear that the QA process is either broken or just completely non-existent. Pushing changes live without basic testing is pretty inexcusable in my opinion. Of course, with their management team assigning resources for only 2 designers for crucial class balancing tasks, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised if they’ve made QA an even lower priority. The lion’s share of the resources are clearly going to the new content teams.
The issue is that it’s not as if we have a lot of great options for spending those 10 points. I’m debating whether or not to keep it in my build myself.
It seems pretty useless on my staff now to me, but I can still see it as useful on D/D for the cripple/blind/heal effects since you’ll be in melee range and can actually get some use out of them, unlike staff. Since I regularly switch back and forth between staff and D/D depending on my range requirements I haven’t decided what to do yet.
I’m having a hard time not feeling discouraged with the class given the broken abilities, lack of good damage options, and generally underwhelming class balance. However, even with all its problems, for me this class still has the most fun, engaging and dynamic play style in the game.
For itemizing, my opinion is power/vit/toughness is the way to go for everything except maybe some really specialized builds. I wish we had more viable options frankly.
I find it amusing you think their giant two person balancing team has time to look at any stats before making all their inspired changes. Guess I’m feeling rather cynical at the moment.
Better watch out for that Ele’s burst.
To be fair, its not as if we really knew ALL the blast finishers were unintended. It could have been a feature with just poor tooltip documentation.
I know for myself I thought the bugged part was how you could get a second blast without having to swap attunements. I expected that to get fixed, or at worse a 10 second cooldown on the finishers regardless of attunement.
It’s not as if the dev’s ever drop by to tell us these things, or their vision and plans for the class generally. All we’ve gotten out of them for months is “We are watching Ele bunker builds”
I’d say for that build Ether Renewal. Unless maybe you are trying to use Inscription with GoEH for the buffs, but even then the condition removal on Ether Renewal will probably be more important, at least in pvp.
I think it’s a bad move to give abilities spvp only effects, except perhaps in some extremely limited cases. It’s just going to make an (even more) giant imbalanced mess for them to sort through down the road.
Please do explain to me what all these viable specs are for my Ele. Clearly I must just be doing something wrong by wanting to survive for more than two hits.
So presumably one of those two guys (and I agree it’s ridiculous that there are only two of them) is responsible for Ele’s. Is it really so much to ask for him to pop by and talk with us? Maybe once a week or so would be a good start?
Nice find TheGuy. This smells like a bug to me, they’ll probably reduce the 10 seconds for shocking aura down to 5 like all the others in an upcoming patch.
Ah, I understand now, you’re talking about the trait effect. Yes, that is rather odd that it’s different with each aura. Is the fury boon behaving the same way, or just swiftness? Have you tried testing with the fire and earth auras? Maybe that would help figure out the pattern.
The boon duration increase on your runes has been nerfed, it’s in the patch notes.
My suggestion is to delete all 5 conjure spells and give us new abilities that might actually be useful.
Guardian hammer is really the only fast, reliable, short cool down blast finisher in the game of which I am aware.
Fun the way the devs intended? I assume you mean roll a warrior, right?
/seconded. I feel like the black sheep class of the game, right at the bottom of the devs’ to-do list —- unless of course another class complains that we can actually do one or two things well. Then the nerfs come, fast and brutal.
I’m having a rather hard time getting enough motivation to even log in and play right now.
Water / Arcane is one of the most popular builds right now. It’s our standard bunker build and very viable (although it may be about to get nerfed in today’s patch).
Why choose just one when you can stack boon duration and have all of our primary boons up semi-permanently?
Scepter can hit hard but it is much easier for enemies to avoid their big hits. You can literally walk out of a dragon tooth attack with time to spare. The other problem with scepter is the lack of great mobility tools. D/D’s attacks on the other hand are much harder to avoid and you get ride the lightening for quick hit and run tactics.
Your issue was not that it was a bunker build, your issue is that it was a condition removal build. Since they spent 30 trait points in water and probably a utility slot (cleansing flame) specializing in condition removal to counter condition builds like yours, it hardly seems unfair. Anyone with a power build could have burst that ele down easy. Pro-tip: get some stuns or other CC.
Just add it to the long long list of underwhelming features of this class.
My guess is because a lot of the player base hasn’t been bothering to do the dungeons much (I’m one of those people). So they want to encourage people to take the time to discover this content.
I have a mix of exotic crafted knights and valkyrie gear currently which is working pretty well. I have decent power/precision/crit damage for my offense and a mix of tougness/vitality for defense. I do want to try a full invaders set though as Drkn suggests and am working on farming tokens for invaders’ gear, but that wasn’t an option I could achieve quickly when I first hit 80.
Mine is very similar, I run 0/20/0/20/30 and a mix of knight’s and valkyrie gear. Another nice thing about the build too is its easy to just swap a couple traits without a respec when you need to switch to a staff for a long range fight.
I think the prices are way to high for T3. I’d actually really like to have the set for looks, but there’s no way I’m paying that amount for it. I’d be happy if they either brought to gold prices down to a more reasonable level, or switched them to being expensive karma items so I would have something to spend all my useless karma on.
It’s not as if there are a lot of attractive options to spend all that karma on any way…
Solution: re-roll to an Elementalist. You will be constantly cycling through your 20 weapon abilities in combo with your 5 utilities.
Splitting skills can lead to some bad dynamics around not being competitive if you don’t gear up for the pvp skills, or vice versa.
If I for example have worked hard to get a full exotics set doing dungeon runs and then decide I want to go do WvW, should I really be penalized for that and have to grind tokens to gear up for it all over again? Similarly, if the WvW fanatic in full invaders gear decides he wants to go do a dungeon run with his guild, should he really have to go buy or farm a pve set of gear if he doesn’t want to?
They already have the mechanics around sPvP to make it easier to balance itemization issues in tourneys and what not, surely that is sufficient? WvW is such a zerg fest any way that gear disparities really don’t matter that much in that context.
What classes have you tried? My Elementalist can be an extremely fast paced, fun and effective support character.
In you typical Ele support build you are using heals, laying down combo fields for your group mates, buffing your party, clearing their conditions, and applying crowd control, lots of conditions and some damage to the enemy.
You won’t like it if you want to just focus on healing (which is impossible due to the cool downs), but if you change your mindset to being a supporter rather than a healer you have some really powerful support tools with this class, including some great heals.
It heals you for less than it heals your allies. It definitely does heal you though.
Yes, you can go full glass cannon if you want. Yes, you’ll hit harder that way. And yes, you’ll die if anyone sneezes in your direction.
My advice is to try out different itemization and trait builds for free in sPvP to decide what you like before you invest all your gold. Alternatively, buy a rare (yellow) set on the cheap to make sure you like the build in WvWvW before you upgrade it to exotics.
Also keep in mind that you’ll probably want your set to be versatile enough to get you through some dungeon runs (at least until you can afford two sets). Full glass cannon will make it harder for you to not die a lot on your average dungeon run.
I agree, a lot of the 4 and 5 slot weapon skills and many of the utilities seem to have overly long cool downs relative to the norms for other professions.
Good job. Vote for sticky.
In the case of the mist, it’s because you already had those conditions on you before you transformed. In the case of the tornado… well, it just sucks.
Yes, on swap works, but the next attack on swap ones, like leech and intelligence, are bugged, so stick with things like battle or hydromancy.