Guild Wars 2

You asked for a vid.
This is how play. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3ALexKViaQ

Surviving pretty kitten good with my build. (I know it isnt my perspective since I dont record. But Its safe to assume that im always on tag.)

I start playing at 2:30 Since i have a life and cant play every raid

I litterally said with how many we play.. usually around 12-14.

“1 stack of stability for that 2 seconds is enough to get me through a line or a guardian LB5 and has saved me more times than not”

Yea but.. thats so innefficient. You kitten up your rotation and give people stab that might not even need it…
The extra invuln is needed because we are zerg busting. ever fought a 40 man HEAL group with 15 man? Those guys also know what to do and if you are bombing with your melee group you will not survive the bomb for 1 sec without the invuln.

We play on Aurora Glade.

Like I said previously. My build gives lots of burst/support. Why do you need CC when there are 4 gaurds allready pulling and warriors with hammer stuns. What this build brings is the insane amount of burst and the support of aura’s/heals. (Wash the pain away is insanely strong if coordinated correctly.)

I do think your build can work in a less organized group. If you cant rely on anyone for stab/cleanses or heals. And as long as you are not jumping into a 20 man backline from the opposing zerg.

“Your armor choice will not allow you to survive in the front line, your lack of stability will get you killed”

Im really curious why you would think that 1 stack of stab for 2 sec is the almighty thing that will help you… (and simultaniously say that harmonious conduit is bad)

Im not going to argue with you about this or that. But apparently I can trust my driver and my gaurdians for the active defenses. (aside from obsidian flesh and mist form)

To anwser your qeustion about our group.
We play with 2 melee partys, 1 ranged and 1 focus party. Containing of 4 Gaurds/1 DF ele/1 Druid/2 Warriors. our ranged is 2 necros and 1 staff ele. Our focus is 2/3 thiefs and a mesmer.

We try to rely on each other for stability/heals. I have played this build for a long period now. Sure it is squishy and generally very hard to play. It also requires a lot of coordination to execute, but thats how we like to run.
Grabbing a build and play a mindless zero issue build is what every windowlicker can do.

I think you either have your build wrong on http://asphyxia.tv/elementalist/ or you have the wrong text below it. Since you talk about Aura share but you dont have it traited in the build above the text?

“Cleansing Water, every time I apply regeneration – I clear a condition. No internal cooldown, every time I apply an aura, I apply regeneration so then every time I use an aura skill, I clear a condition.”

and

“When I’m critically hit, I gain vigor and frost aura (due to aura share, allies get frost aura as well.)”

You kinda contradict yourself a lot in this link

I dont think you will ever survive in a zerg busting guild with this build though. (frontline ele that is).
The traits/gear/utilities are all over the place.

I think full celestial is not the way to go in a zerg. Since the support/burst ele doesnt need any condi damage. its relies more on direct damage. Try to use zerker trinkets/weapons and cele gear. For that extra umppff.
Now with the extra power from your gear you can remove bloodlust en draining and replace it with Energy and hydro. (energy is a life saver and freaking OP, Hydro is a 2k opening burst. Ill explain the rotation below)
I myself prefer focus much more then warhorn simply because it provides way more utility, is way faster and overal has way better skills then the Warhorn.

Since you have a focus equipped now we can look at the traits.
You should never ever trait Rock solid. Please let the gaurdians in your group give you stab. the 1 stab for 2,5 sec isnt doing kitten. 33% reduction on the 2 best skills in the game (earth #4 and #5) however is amazing.

Powerfull aura is pretty good in this setup since you dont need to cleanse a lot of condis. So I would switch cleansing water. The gaurdians in your group cleanse enough with their skills anyway. If you stick tight to your guild driver you wont have any problems with condis ever. (you even got Earth #4 for a panic button to cleanse 3 condis on a 16! sec CD)

The tempest line is pretty straight forward. I myself go for Harmonius conduit just for the extra damage. But I can see why people would want to go for the extra boons.

The ulities are decent but I would switch aftershock for blink. Blink is a skill you can use both offensively and defensively. Aftershock is clunky and has a huge CD for the little effect it has. (Swirling winds on the bomb will give enough projectile hate anyway. And if you overload earth you give your party reflection as well. That and atleast 1 gaurd in your group has a wall anyway. Or a druid with staff.)

You might even want to change flash freeze for either arcane wave or feel the burn. just because it will make your burst a lot harder since they are instant cast. But I think all 3 of them work fine. (flash freeze gives your party a little more damage reduction)

Now we have ended up with this build.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFEQJAodn0XCVOgtMAeOAcYilNAjYFkCqAu71A7hd4BEAKgA-T1xHABsv/ATKBD4BAAwJAwL9A9o8LR1fCAgAcz2MAeuzduzduz5m38m38m3sUAMpMC-w

It has big burst, survivability and lots of support for your melee train.
Opening rotation is:

Fire shield -> Burnign speed -> Blink (so the burst happends on the bomb) -> Magn. wave -> arcane wave -> Obs. flesh (if you need it) -> ring of earth -> Swirling winds and shocking aura -> Air 1 until air overload on the downed.
(Hydro will proc when switching from fire to earth for an extra 2k damage burst on the bomb)

by this time you will regroup for empower. try to use your heal when you see people from your party low. (since you have 2 panic buttons both obsidian flesh and mist form).

Using reboud 5 sec before a bomb will give the party reflective aura and protection.

This has been a longer rant then I wanted to in the first place. Sorry for the wall of text.

Cheers

This all said, D/F ele can even double blast smoke in the beginning of the fight. You want to start in water for this. use water 3 and 5 and switch to fire when you smoked.

Yea I really like this build. Extremely high skill ceiling, its up there with shatter mesmer.
If we had a Arcane elite this build would be even more fantastic. I might try this build with Arcane brilliance and hope Earth #4 will clear most condis.

One with Air is a freaking life saver. Best pick out of the 3 by far.

I watched for like 5 minutes and saw somebody got saved twice by his passive defenses. Passive defenses is the thing that kills this game mode.

If this game was subscription based I would say No. But since you have HoT allready you can just fire it up and check it out! Elite specs and power creep made range damage far better then it was. Although melee trains are still viable with good coordination.

Did people allready forget about the huge failed middle event of DBL? And that it was removed without filling in something else? making the whole middle obsolete?! ABL allready gave me and my guild better fights then DBL ever did in those 7 months.

That said, I see people talking about how zergs rule in ABL. this is utter BS. ABL actually has less chokes and gives more room to fight. A good guild group has more of a chance versus a zerg in ABL then the DBL wich is full of chokes. How can people not see this?

Trait rock solid on an ele! That 1 stack of stab for 2,5 sec!! Party wide! Insaannee!

SD core engie.
S/F Burst ele
Shatter mesmer
Thief in general.

All the elite specs are easy compared with these builds. HoT kinda made Gw2 even more casual then it allready was with the passice CC procs and everything.

Rev is the death knight of Guild wars. They are overpowered and they will stay that way for a long time to come.

lucadiro.4519:

Do you mean fresh air with arcane or tempest?
Because if you run the old SF fresh ari build its only about timing your burst and blind. Try to apply the more pressure you can. Cast dragon thoot, flamewall and shatterstone on you when they are stealthed. Try to be the First One to attack. And you have to hit them 3 times wit Phoenix if not you dont have enought burst to counter pressure. Run fire sigil and use AoE to spot them (air auto work very nice here since the channel stil track them stealthed). If you are near 50% health cast FGS, the usually autoattacking you while immobilized from panic strike, cast GS 3 and gg.
If you are running tempest I cant help you, I hate it so I don’t play it.

This is how I do it as well. Dont hesitate to use your CD’s when the thief opens up.
Also time your dodges. If he only uses 1 heartseeker in a smoke you know his stealth is only 3 secs. Try to dogde on right before his stealth ends and 9/10 you will dogde his opening.

Is the block from the gaurdian ment to block from every direction? Since it only shows a “wall” in front of him but it blobks from every direction?

Ah this explains why my aura’s didnt last longer yesterday. I thought it was bugged.. But Anet making more runes redundant by shortsighted changes is a more reasonable explanation.

As a hardcore ele player. This is waayyy to OP. We allready got enough sustain.
And of all the things you are changing, you keep our elites the same 0.o?!

A quote from a youtube comment:

“Anet claim they have been working on an overhaul for over a year, yet when Devon left, he wrote of reddit that he has not worked on anything related to WvW since March!
So how can they have been working on an overhaul for a year when the WvW LEAD dev himself says he’s done jack all!?”

This got me thinking as well the other day

Firelysm.8190:

1) As some1 said 2 years to late, we lost over 90% of GvG population thx to BDO, including my guild. We found there what Anet didn’t want to give us even if GvG had more potential then PvP at that phase.

2) Arenas are way to small, clunky cameras, limited area, every true wvw and GVG player knows, that Arena areas are at least 1x to small, they are 1/4 of the OS arena, which is unacceptable..

3) @Pimpi.7843, 15v15 truly was a 2015-2016 format, but 20v20 WAS the real format once GW2 did launch in 2012 and lasted for 3 years because every guild that was not the bottom of the trash bin, had always +10 extra players and even filled email with applications to join.

4) This is desperate option to keep WvW up of what it is left, we would love to participate, but many of guilds that are with us in BDO said the same:
“Backstab the backstabbers, that’s the only way to show them how we feel.”
We are passing until GvG is official WvW game mode challenge choice.

Lot of people from my server went to BDO as well. Im scared its a bit to much grind for my taste. So i havent jumped to hype train yet

I instead went back to Starcraft. HOTs killed that game as well, but legacy of the Void is sooo much better atm

Jski.6180:

D/x ele is dead in wvw other then the full aura support build and staff can pull off a good aura support. Your way better off running staff in wvw at all times.

I dont fully agree with you. Staff is a bit better yes. But D/F has a place in the melee train as well and not only as full auramancer.

D/D and D/wh are not viable imo. they lack the survivabilty very much. If someone says he can survive on a D/D or D/wh then im pretty sure he isnt close to the tag or the bomb and then you are better off running staff indeed.

I got the feeling that introducing elite specs was a very bad call. Its near impossible to balance all the core classes and elite specs. Especially with the amount of time Anet wants to put into balancing. Maybe they should have just added a new weapon for each class and some extra utility skills.

Staff is overal better I guess. Since you have lots of CC and Support trough fields and statics. On top of that u have huge AoE damage. That said, You are sceptible to the enemy focus party and CoR.
Frontline has more direct support (since you dont need to account any blasting of waterfields) and more burst at 1 point. (bombs)

I played both a lot and I must say that I prefer frontline’s playingstyle. A lot more active.
Both builds are viable though, Comes down to what you like to play the most.

It hurts to see the neglect Anet has for such a good post.

Most DH will drop all their traps on 1 place. Double dodge through and you can kill his glassy kitten .
imo, DH is the last class I have problems with.

Since when does score tell anything?

Dahir.4158:

the elementalist version of weapon swap is to switch attunements.

Using Ride the Lightning/Mist form/Vapor form counts as a weapon swap as well.

You can also choose to get some Valkery/magi/Soldier armor I guess.

I can give you a whole page long rant about why Focus is the best weapon in the game and warhorn is the worst. I want to keep things simple though.

You should always go for focus. If you want the rant anyway I can give it via PM or ingame.

http://de.gw2skills.net/editor/?vFEQJAodn0XCVOgtMAeOAcYilNAzdvGYPsDPgAwFkYFkCqAA-T1xHABMpEEgTAQiq/4leAn3fIgHAQPK/CAgAcz2MAeuzduzduz5m38m38m3sUAMpMC-w

here we go.
Ive been having great succes with this build. You support your melee train and you dish out loads of damage.

For questions you can always ask me ingame. Mark.1679

We run melee only in WvW.

Tobad the people who post on the forums are only the minority right? right?
I want them back, yes. Will Anet ever give in? No.
They are to busy kittening up the PvP balance and “scene” in this game.

Power creeeeeeeepppp

Tried the oldschool D/D ele. Fire/Water/Arcane with pally amulet. This build can get 1 shot by every single elite spec. Dont even try to run it.
Only decent build is the D/F Shout bunker. Wich bores me to death.
That is because I refuse to play anything close to a condi spec.

I was always thinking of how Karl thought about this elite while making the tempest elite spec.
“Ok, We have an elite spec called Tempest! Creating raging thunderstorms and devastating whirlwinds! And for its biggest elite skill we will give him… an arcane shout that will give an aura on a 75 sec CD..”

They must have laughed reallly hard during the making of this piece of kitten

Sounds awesome. Ill give it a try in a few hours!

The DS they previewed was seen as a “Buff” by some people. So they gutted it even more.
Now they are happy though, no ele in his right mind will ever use it again.

No… Richard.
WHY ANET! Why didnt you just let him fly.. What did he do wrong!?

Just revert the stab changes only in WvW. Problem solved.
Can I get hired as the WvW dev lead?

NOooooooooooooo….!!!111

That Diamond skin nerf will help necros a lot. like, a lot!

DS got gutted.
That said, I play S/F marauder fresh air. So, Im loving these changes. nothing to complain.

Lol, people ranting about not hitting above 1k with a AA. Meanwhile im here hoping to hit above 100 with scepter AA on Ele…

rotten.9753:

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Since the game was released EVERY SINGLE BALANCE PREVIEW WAS 100% OF THE CHANGES.

That’s how it was usually but in the blog post on Tuesday they said scepter and focus are getting QoL changes. I haven’t heard about any focus changes from Karl so we may assume it doesn’t cover everything.

As if karl always does what he says he will do. The guy doesnt play ele so how has no clue what to buff/nerf. he just throws random crap at the wall and hopes it will stick

I was playing S/F vanilla ele. I did pretty good. Most people dont even know the scepter skills so they dont dodge lightning flash + phoenix combo. Its fun.

Imagine what they could do to WvW with 200k.

What build did you use?
I struggle to much with pressure on a marauder amulet. How did you survive pressure?

They cant be serious.. right?
How can they work for OVER a year at the overhaul and still need so much time after HoT to finish it?! Cant they see WvW gamemode is slipping out of their hands?
My god… I dont understand Anets thoughtprocess at all. Are they really that understaffed?!

Yashuoa.9527:

They have plans to change SCEPTER!

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/profession-balance-goals-for-the-winter-2016-update/

Elementalist
This profession has seen a lot of defensive additions through recent updates and the addition of the tempest. In this iteration, we’ll be fine-tuning the defensive nature of the elementalist a little more and improving its offensive side a bit. To that end, Diamond Skin will see its first change in a long while, moving to condition removal (as is more thematic with the elementalist) rather than condition avoidance. In the effort to improve offense, Air grandmaster traits will be getting usability and damage improvements, while the scepter and focus will be receiving some positive quality-of-life modifications.

INB4 They will add another vunr. stack to shatterstone.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAodn0XCVOgVYCeOAcYilNAzdvGYPsDPgAwFkYFcBqAA-TlBXABj+AAeQJYk7PEiOCAU+xk6PBAQAsclrclrclzNv5Nv5NvZpA6boF-w

This is what I use.
This build does loads of damage, is VERY survivable and supports your group a lot.

Our guild has 1 melee rev in the melee group for near perma resistance. So no need for all the condi clear your build has.
Also, I reallly dont like the Warhorn. Focus has so much more utility and group support.

What I do is the following:

If you want to blast smoke, start in water. Use water 3 and 5 to blast smoke then switch to fire attun.
When leaping into the bomb use Fire 3 + Lightning flash and switch to earth. use earth 4, 2 and if its hot earth 5 as well. Switch to air as fast as possible.
Try to use Air 4 and 3 if neccesary, else you just AA in air. by this time the bomb is prob over and you are regrouping for heals/empower. Stay in air if the group is in good health, else you swap to water and use water 2 and 4. Rinse and repeat.

Air overload on the enemy downed characters is pretty good. try to use it while your group is empowering/regrouping. (While keeping yourself save).

Anyway, thats how i do it. I Like it for now. A bit different than ele backline.

After the visual nerfs for all the aura’s I got a little sad. The new ones arent as shiny and cool as the previous aura’s but as long as its for a greater good i can cope with it. (ESPORTS)
Since I play mostly WvW and with HoT changed my backline ele to a frontline Auramancer, ive noticed something weird.
Since I use radiance runes my heal will give my allies a light aura. To my suprise the light aura visual wasnt nerfed.

My best guess is Anet forgot about it since the META PvP ele doesnt use any light aura’s.
Is this true? did you forgot to change the visual? or wasnt there enough time to change the visual of a light aura?
I think new players can get confused by the fact some aura’s have different visuals then others.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers

I bought a new game today. First time I bought a new game in 2,5 years.

This is what I use.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAodn0XCVOgNYCeOAcYilNAzdvGYPsErgLQFY4BEAugA-TRSDQBM4EAAu9H6hyjNp+TCUCmQlYwRPAAM/JhHAApAYSZE-e

Start in fire.
When bombing use Burning speed -> switch earth -> magnatic wave -> aftershock → Ring of earth.
Do you need Obsidian flesh?-> Go air and use air 111 until air overload. (dont forget to use swirling, after magnetic aura has cleared, on the bombs. it removes a lot of damage.)
use Water when your group needs healing. wateroverload and wash the pain away heals your party a lot.

You can use water 3 and 5 to blast smoke before a fight. Just make sure you switch to fire when you are stealthed.

Only overload when you realllyy can. Dont force yourself to overload everytime because you will die if you do.

All your aura’s heal and give protection. So try to pump out aura’s when bombing. it will give your party some extra sustain.

Nice burst combo! I run some Staff ele as well. Do you have a lot of problems with CoR 1 shotting you? because lately, i have.