Both are very important classes in WvW. Warriors focus more on condition removal and CC while Guardians focus on providing beneficial boons to the group and dealing damage (basically, this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0fxuoJGdGs ).
Speaking from a WvW perspective, ideally this trait gives (for each application of Retreat or Virtue of Courage):
300 damage * 5 (Retreat/VoC apply Aegis to 5 allies) = 1500 damage applied to 5 targets (7500 total). This is around the same as three Staff autoattacks, assuming this damage can crit.
I don’t think it’s that bad, but I feel like I can’t really justify spending the points on it compared to the other options.
Use the new healing skill Arcane Brilliance when it is released. If you don’t care about team support at all (you should) you may switch the runes for something else. If you can’t afford Celestial armor, a mix of Cleric’s and Sentinel’s/Soldier’s armor is a decent alternative.
Assuming that Defiant Stance heals you for as much damage as you would have taken if it wasn’t active, using Frenzy will likely increase the amount healed by 25%.
Balanced Stance and Dolyak Signet are the only Warrior skills that provide on-demand stability, people tend to favor Balanced Stance due to its shorter CD and swiftness buff. Dolyak Signet is useful if you traited Signet Mastery and don’t intend to use the stability as much (i.e. only for securing stomps). You always want to bring one of these two skills in PvP.
The common setup is Knight armor with defensive runes (i.e. Melandru/Soldier), Knight weapons and Berserker trinkets. This leaves you at ~20k health, 3k armor, 40% crit and 75% crit damage with the cookie cutter hammer train spec.
casting time and dodges i don t blindly use defensive skill usually…
autoattack is bad, and rolling interrupts everything on staff
Dagger is faster but have most rooted or mobility skills that could get you in the wrong place if commander turns.
If you’re pushing through a choke or a zerg and you are doing anything but dodging you are very likely going to die. Let the heavy armor classes do their thing in that situation while you position yourself.
A lot of Warriors use a combination of traits, buff food and runes to achieve close to -100% duration on chilled, cripple and immobilize effects. You can directly counteract this by using effects that increase condition duration.
ok the part from the distance is clear i figured it already…
When you have to push instead
Considering you want to do something more than running… wich skill do you use?
If you have to push, you don’t press anything. You double dodge through until you’re in a safe position.
Other than that, the only ability you can’t use while running is Meteor Shower so I’m not sure what the problem is.
As other people have pointed out, support your zerg from range while they’re pushing through. In big WvW fights you will generally not get targeted a lot if you’re standing by yourself. Even if you do get attacked, using your defensive abilities will usually quickly make them lose interest while you reposition.
In some situations you can’t avoid pushing with your zerg (i.e. when going through a gate). In these situations just be ready to use Mist Form/Armor of Earth and double dodge through the choke/enemy zerg.
I feel like high survivability builds are essentially a crutch. If you just go full berserker straight away you will improve at the game much more easily due to how punishing it is to make mistakes.
Damage increase per boon was nerfed across the board for all professions which I feel was justified considering how easy it is to keep up 5+ boons in group play.
Toughness matters much more than total health because i.e. 5000 extra hp only increases the hp threshold for Diamond Skin by 500. Having higher Toughness makes your heals more effective in comparison.
Chill doesn’t affect Thief weapon skills at all since they have no cooldown. It’s still useful because it slows movement speed by a lot. Relying on chill to not die against any class is also a very, very bad idea.
With this mechanic, Hammer warriors would be able to choose which type of damage they would like to do. Thus, be a master of damage or master of cc, but not both.
That would be true if you only had one weapon set, but you have two. Also this wouldn’t really increase build diversity IMO since what you’re suggesting is essentially already covered by weapon choices (i.e. axe for big damage vs. mace for strong cc).
Water Blast isn’t bad, it’s just more of a situational healing spell than an attack spell.
Fireball is good due to its ranged cleave (huge aoe for an autoattack with Blasting Staff).
In comparison, Chain Lightning and Stoning feel like they lack direction. Staff already has one aoe autoattack making Chain Lightning kind of superfluous and Stoning doesn’t provide bleeding despite that being one of the defining themes of the Earth trait line.
Either way, even if these autoattacks were buffed you still wouldn’t be able to fight anyone 1on1 with the Staff.
It’s true, I never use Lightning Surge except to tag Dolyaks (it’s the only Staff attack that hits instantly after it finishes casting). I rarely even bother attempting to cast Gust because it just misses unless you’re right next to your opponent.
I don’t really see how you could make the weapon viable in gametypes other than large-scale WvW and PvE considering it’s meant to be a weapon that mostly deals with combo fields and large aoe attacks which are naturally easy to get around.
I think the only time leg specialist is worth taking is when combining it the arms trait opportunist. 1 sec immo. is negligible for single target
1 sec Immob is enough to set up a full Earthshaker combo and guarantees the Flurry followup if you’re using the Sword.
You are not likely to earthshaker then flurry since both use adrenaline and if you don’t have your adrenaline maxed for flurry, it isn’t worth using.
That 1 secone immobolize is also only on 1 person because leg specialist has a 5 second cooldown. Hardly enough to waste a earthshaker on unless it is just a 1v1.
I worded that poorly, it was meant as an additional example.
I use it in dungeons, and not in WvW. It’s pretty bad in WvW, but with high AoE builds it can be pretty awesome. Infinite burning on as many enemies as you can find. I use this guy or some variation thereof (I swap things out constantly). Between two symbols, in crowded PvE encounters you can put out an incredible volume of burning. The AoE on it is not insignificant, it has the same range as Purging Flames, 240.
It works well with any weapon that can consistently hit lots of targets many times in as short a time frame as possible. Greatsword and any weapon with a symbol are good.
The problem I see in dungeons is that it does absolutely nothing against bosses or smaller pulls.
Tried it a bit in WvW last week. Simply put: it’s terrible and only does anything at all in ideal situations. There are plenty of ways to more effectively apply Burning without giving up a lot of rune slots and trait points.
Eviscerate is very easy to dodge if you aren’t disabled and axe mainhand doesn’t have good mobility/CC like other weapons making it easier to kite. Kill Shot has a very long cast time and a very obvious animation so either interrupt it, run out of line of sight or cast Blinding Flash on him (Scepter 3).
I suggest clerics personally. Outstanding healing is the only way you’ll last in a fight.
Healing scales the poorest out of any stat. I would not run clerics personally, though I do get a healing boost from some celestial pieces (mixed with Knight). Most of an eles’ defense comes via traits anyway, and specifically protection and stability.
Not really true if you’re using a spec with lots of different sources of healing, especially not for Elementalist. Heal on attunement swap, Cleansing Wave, Water Trident etc. all have 1.0 scaling.
I and a lot of players like and consider fun, but which we would appreciate not punishing us for playing correctly, for example, trying to remove a condition causing the condition to kill us.
You realize this applies to every single other class? If you’re too low on health to cleanse confusion you just need to live with the fact that you now have to wait for it to end before being able to heal up. Also if you find yourself in this situation you clearly were not playing correctly beforehand one way or another.
Add lowest hp/thoughness base on top of this, and wonder why people blame elems to have the most QQ subforum while even those who blame us admit at some point smthing wrong with us..
If you compare the different class forums you’ll see that each of them is just as whiny as the next one.
Renewing Stamina almost gives you 100% Vigor uptime assuming decent crit chance and you can’t get more than 100% additional endurance regeneration, therefore just stick with that trait.
wvw staff ele is in a good place this is true as long as you stay with the herd. My main issue is that the devs have been using comparisons like mine to justify shuffling our traits around. I’m just wondering how they can then justify a stronger trait being in a lower tier for a different class.
I play both warrior an ele in most aspects of the game and I can’t help but notice the warrior seems to be in a better position. For a mere 15 points they get access to Dogged March, Adrenal Health, and Healing Signet. This gives them very good passive healing I might even go as far as say its better than ele’s active healing because they can keep the pressure on. Now why does a class with the highest hp/armor warrant healing as good or better than the ele? While still having 55 trait points to spend how they please. To be able to keep up I’m forced to take Healing Ripple, Elemental Attunement, and Evasive Arcana taking up 45 of my 70 trait points.
Consider that all of those elementalist heals work in AoE while the warrior regen only affects themselves. Of course that doesn’t matter in a dueling setting, but if you run with even a small group it makes a big difference.
Morelia would you be so kind as to point out those things that only eles can do? I’m having trouble thinking of any.
Allow me to use the Staff Elementalist in large WvW groups as an example:
strongest AoE damage in the game (especially lava font, meteor shower)
access to the most water combo fields (healing rain is one of the most powerful combo fields in the game)
two of the strongest AoE CC spells in the game (static field, unsteady ground)
Any raid that doesn’t bring Elementalists is at a severe disadvantage because of these points. I don’t have much experience with sPvP so I can’t really talk about that. It’s also not like I’m saying that Elementalist doesn’t have some issues, my whole point was just that you shouldn’t compare classes directly and base your complaints around that. What you should be asking for is to improve the class in the areas you think it is lacking in.
Is there anything only your class can do?
Are there things it does better than any other class?
How does it compare to other classes for a specific role?
You generally run into problems with class usage if they don’t have any qualities that make them stand out over other classes or are simply outclassed at different roles.
Then how should different classes be compared for balance purposes?
Count the number of Elementalists in tournaments?
Count the number of times Elementalists is request in LFG by dungeon groups?
Count the number of Elementalists in wvw?
Count the number of Elementalists playing in sPvP?
Count the number of newly created Elementalists each month?
Count the number of Elementalists that finish high-end living story such as The Queen’s Gauntlet?
Doing so, the conclusion would be obvious. Consistently Buff every aspect of Elementalists until the point where Elementalists popularity reaches the average class, and then nerf every aspect of every other class until they too reach average popularty.
Thats the only way to no directly compare different classes traits and skills.
The point is that if you’re going to compare classes directly you might as well go “warriors have more base armor and health than elementalist regardless of builds, therefore they are clearly the better class in every possible respect”, which obviously isn’t true at all.
Elementalists may have issues in sPvP, but another class having a slightly better version of a similar trait is not likely to be the reason for that.
Nice advice, thanks guys. Ill try to find some handy scepter dagger builds. Is Zoose good to look at, he seems mainly focused on Spvp but he seems to be a leader in the ele community.
How exactly are you staying above 90% hp in WvW? From my exeperience, even if I’m at a safe position in a fight and not being attacked my health will go below 90% just from random retaliation boons on the enemy players.
Staying above 90% doesn’t mean you never drop below it. It means that when you do, you heal back up immediately so that you’re above 90% health for most of the fight.
The problem with that is that you’re below 90% while dealing your damage, it’s useless to heal back up to 100% in between if you don’t get the damage bonus while you’re actually trying to attack.
Of course if you’re roaming there won’t be nearly as much retaliation but don’t expect to benefit from these traits in bigger groups much.
Note that you’re throwing 30 points in Earth already.
Free stability, as well as immune to fear because your health is already 90% and above when you cast your ether renewal.
That’s irrelevant as you’re still spending 3.5 seconds healing yourself while your opponent can unload on you whatever he wants. Most people already pick the signet because not wasting time is crucial in sPvP.
Also keep in mind that all that condition cleanse will be far less effective against power builds.
My only concern with diamond skin is that when pair with Ether Renewal, it can be too powerful against classes that rely on condition as their main source of damage.
Ether Renewal is already a very powerful healing skill that remove a total of 8 conditions every 15 seconds. When pair with diamond skin, it not only cleanse all the remaining condition on the ele, it also constantly heal ele so it can maintain above 90% hp when channeling, so a total of 4 seconds immunity to condition every 15 seconds.
This would be very unfair in 1 on 1 situation to necro and engineer who rely almost entirely on condition damage as their main source of damage.
Ether Renewal’s extreme cast time easily balances out its strong condition control imo.
This is coming from an ele with over 3k hours played almost all in WvW and sPvP. I’ve played a build centered around staying above 90% health for vital striking and scholar runes for much of that time, and it’s not some impossible task that people make it out to be.
How exactly are you staying above 90% hp in WvW? From my exeperience, even if I’m at a safe position in a fight and not being attacked my health will go below 90% just from random retaliation boons on the enemy players.
