Guild Wars 2

If they wanted to nerf Ice Bow damage by 50% just remove the second Ice Bow spawn. That was the right change.

You have to spam fire 2 with staff to have any DPS so its hard to build a creative rotation out of that. Its hit fire 2 after every cooldown and the rest is just filler imo. Anything else and your DPS is crap with staff.

What combination of traits and skills will give me the most amount of stability?

The ele prolly had Diamond Skin. According to the wiki the ranger shortbow auto attack does 134 damage, with Soothing Mists, runes and food you can get your per second health regeneration pretty close to 134 per second.

I’ve been dissapointed with my efforts to play healer in PVE. Its only valued in squads of borderline fails and then all you have to do is hit the auto attack in water on staff or use the Frost Bow with the trait which increases charges and thats enough. Everyone wants to be needed but the healer ele is only needed by his loser friends who blame him when they die.

If healing is important to you my gear advice is get celestial gear, which only exists in ascended form and thats expensive and time gate to around a month no matter how much you spend. Other than using celestial gear my recommendation is keep a staff with two healing related sigils in your inventory for when you want to play healer. Thats all you really need. I tried Cleric’s gear and it didn’t help me or my squad. One staff, I use a Monsoon cuz its pretty and has healing stats on it, with 2 healing related sigils on it is enough no matter what your gear. If you want armor that heals as well get Celestial.

Do not underestimate the healing potential of the Frost Bow especially if you take the Fire trait for extra charges. You can use offensive weps like daggers and still heal the squad that way. It works as well as any other gear set up.

Big problem with trying to play healer in GW2 PVE, to really make it work ppl need to stack(cluster up) together to get in range of your healing. Ppl smart enough to do that are pros and don’t need healing. The people who need healing are the ppl who form a drum circle around the boss and range him.

Despite all this I don’t give up on healing. Wear Celestial gear and keep one staff in our inventory with healing stats. Don’t go farther than that in gearing to heal because it won’t help, I know this from experience. Be ready and willing to forego the staff and use Frost Bow for healing its so underrated for this IMO. Just the freeze will save lives forget the healing.

There is really only one thing about playing ele and playing a healer in a traditional MMO that is the same. When ppl die they blame you.

I like scepter for open world questing because it eats up groups of trash mobs with its fire AOEs. Eles are squishy and in this game you often can’t avoid fighting groups at a time in the open world, unlike other games I’ve played.

Also dagger off hand Churning Earth skill with the guaranteed five crits arcane skill can one shot lots of trash mobs.

Other than having enough aoes, and using Earth Elemental to tank hard veterans/elites for you all you really need is speed skills for covering ground.

This should be stickied.

I care so much it hurts.

;/

If ppl flamed you in chat thats WRONG. That should not happen. But EOTM is a zerg train for drops, karma, badges and whatever. Anyone who says otherwise is misleading you.

This happened to me in RL.

Start saving all your silk scraps right now because you will need a mountain of those. Light armor is the most expensive because it needs the most silk scraps.

You need to know what your play style is to know what gear you want. Try different gear using exotic gear to see how it feels. I tried condition gear, pvt gear and zerker before I decided to go for celestial. IMO its whats best for eles but prolly 60% of posters say otherwise. Anyway test builds out first. If you can’t make up your mind get celestial since its the most versatile.

After you decide what gear to get you have to get your crafting skill up high enough to make the parts for it. You can start making the parts for ascended before you hit 500 in your crafting. You need 500 to make the ascended gear though. You need 30 damask bolts and can only make one a day. It costs more to buy them then make them. So start making one a day when you get high enough and you have 30 days to get your crafting up to 500. Get up to 500 by making berzerker exotic gear, it sells well and you get back all the money you put into the materials to make it. You can’t buy Charged Crystals and you need 25 if IIRC and can only make one a day. So since it takes 25 days minimum to make ascended armor you might as well make your own damask bolts and make it 30 days and save 30-60 gold.

So start making your charged crystals once a day right now that is cheap. Then get your crafting up high enough to make damask bolts and get the last way up to 500 making and selling berserker exotic gear.

Its a lot of work which is why you need to be sure about what kind you want first.

Scepter hate is all about the puny auto attacks. The air auto looks good because the numbers on the screen are wrong, look at the combat log to see the real numbers. I tried timing it and scepter autos took twice as long to kill the same kind of mob as dagger auto.

Scepter also has poor healing and CC so its not good at group support in those ways. Only one defensive skill, the toughness skill which is annoying because you have to keep hitting the button.

So whats it good for? BURST AOE AND MIGHT STACKING. If you want to use it in dungeons focus on stacking might for the group and then switching to a conjure. Everyone will say switch to LH but why not the frost bow for healing? FB healing is underrated. If you want to use it in PVP you better focus your traits, utilities and tactics on burst damage because scepter is great at that. After all your cooldowns are blown you will either have won or now you need to run away.

BTW anyone wanting to use the scepter needs to think about using a Fresh Air build. You need those extra lightning strikes from attunement switches to make up for your puny auto attacks. And guess what, those lightning strikes help with burst damage too.

Am I the only one here who doesn’t like the OP’s clerics/knights gear combo?

The only thing I found cleric’s gear useful for was keeping my HP above 90% for running around Orr with Diamond Skin on. The extra healing doesn’t help you or others all that much and doesn’t compliment the added toughness well. With Knights gear you are adding more toughness when with cleric’s what you need is added vitality especially since vit compliments healing so well.

vit and healing power go well together
vit and toughness go well together
vit and traits and skills for Protection buff go well since Protection does what toughness does
toughness and healing power do not go well together

Also cleric’s has healing power as its primary attribute and healing power scales so poorly.

Between vitality and toughness vit is better for eles since we can make up for toughness with protection boon and vit protects against both condis and direct damage and compliments our healing, you don’t benefit from healing that goes past your max HP.

For healing situations I keep a staff with healing and vit and 2 healing related sigil’s on it. Switching to that is all I really need and healing is more about which skills you use and blasting in water fields than you healing power number because it scales so poorly. If I need more healing than that I have a set of exotic PVT armor from karma merchants with runes of dwayna on it.

The main problem with using knights with clerics is your doubling up on toughness when vit and toughness need to be combined for maximum effect. The second problem is it adds Precision when Ferocity prolly helps an ele’s damage more since we get Fury so easily and most eles trait into Air for damage instead of Fire.

maxinion.8396:

MotherKitten.6795:

There are several things I don’t like about your build. Fresh Air is mandatory for scepter builds and useful for builds which put no points into Arcana. You have a dagger build and points in Arcana, no reason to take Fresh Air.

What I dislike the most is taking is taking Shard of Ice when you already have so much vulnerabilty from Weak Spot.

I’ve run similar builds and know from experience that if you take points from air and put then in water to get Healing Ripple you build will be better.

Fresh Air has two main purposes. Increasing dps on Scepter builds and diminishing the negative impact of putting no points into Arcana. It can do other things but those are the main benefits.

Fresh Air is the key trait to PvE D/F builds, so it is absolutely the right trait choice. Please read any of Zelhyn’s or DeKeyz threads in the stickies before you give bad advice. Healing ripple is also close to useless in PvE.

S/D Fresh Air is only applicable to PvP/WvW, which OP didn’t ask about.

Dear Internet Tough Guy,

I checked dekeyz’s guide and saw nothing about fresh air being important to d/f builds. Zelhyn says its important but also says “We have 30 points to spend and we have 3 trait lines to consider (arcana should not exceed the 10 points already invested). Let’s take a look at the most interesting choices.” If your putting max points in Arcana you are not going by Zelhyn’s guide at all so no reason to treat it as canonical. With that many points in Arcana the need for faster attunement swapping through Fresh Air is reduced. Zelhyn’s guide is about maxing DPS and the OP said that is not his goal.

Fresh Air is not only applicable to pvp scepter builds. It is useful for all scepter builds to offset the weak dps of scepter auto attacks.

Healing Ripple is not “close to useless” in any game category. Moving a point from Air to Water would only lose Fresh Air and gain significant healing and would improve the build.

There are several things I don’t like about your build. Fresh Air is mandatory for scepter builds and useful for builds which put no points into Arcana. You have a dagger build and points in Arcana, no reason to take Fresh Air.

What I dislike the most is taking is taking Shard of Ice when you already have so much vulnerabilty from Weak Spot.

I’ve run similar builds and know from experience that if you take points from air and put then in water to get Healing Ripple you build will be better.

Fresh Air has two main purposes. Increasing dps on Scepter builds and diminishing the negative impact of putting no points into Arcana. It can do other things but those are the main benefits.

BIKINI IS SRS BZNS.

Why is double tapping to dodge related to jumping puzzles??

If you want both power and condi damage get celestial gear. Trying to get a build that can do 75% of the maximum of both is impossible. Getting serious condi damage without doing crap power damage is also impossible. Good condi damage requires a complete commitment in build and traits because the returns on condition damage stat is so low. If you build entirely around condi damage you will put up big damage numbers but just adding a little condi damage doesn’t make a difference and replaces stats that could have gone to something else unless your wearing celestial gear.

tldr – return on condition damage stat is looooooow

Turin.1024:

The Queensdale train was literally the worst thing that happened to this game.

Exaggerate much?

It would be good just for looking for a new guild in map chat.

I was gonna try archeage but then it looked like they were catering to the furries.

I don’t find GW2 dungeons fun and rarely do them. The champ train gave me a way to make money for gear without having to do something I don’t enjoy and so I find this a negative change.

If you found the train mindlessly boring then you shouldn’t have done it. I would try to make it interesting by trying to maximize my damage and try to take agro or sometimes I would heal if too many ppl were dying. If I needed to do something around the house I could and come back to the train right away. If you leave the EOTM train for any length of time its gone and you might not be able to get back to it and chasing after it won’t be easy. So you end up holding your pee in to stay with the EOTM train.

I don’t understand why so many ppl hated the champ trains. If you don’t like it don’t do it.

I didn’t even know we had this.

I hope you use this build 4ever.

You need a mix of resistance and hp in every game and the better your healing the more valuable resistance is in comparison to hp and eles have good healing. You are wearing mostly valks gear and then adding 6 points in water on top of that for more hp. You also have 6 points in both arcana and water giving you great healing but healing compliments resistance better than it compliments hp.

I would take 6 points out of either arcana or water and put it in Earth and take either Diamond Skin or the new anti crit trait. This will give you toughness which will compliment your valks gear hp well, I use valks gear and I know this from experience. Diamond Skin is an underrated trait its not perfect but ppl don’t want to give it its due. It will definitely help in short fights and will mess up the opening move of anyone who is trying to start off with a condition of any sort. Ppl hate having their opening move fail.

The anti crit trait will help against thieves since they have that guaranteed crit out of stealth trait. Or mebbe its a skill I forget. Staying in earth in between fights in case a thief jumps you is no hardship. Once the fight starts you can use the earth gap closer and then switch to fire or air for damage.

I am not an expert in this game but I feel the earth line is underrated. You can get damage modifiers worth +20% along with great defense and various other utilities. Every time I’ve tried to go away from Earth I’ve come back to it.

Staying behind the boss is easier than reading tells. Its also less affected by lag. My advice is keep moving in a circle staying on the bosses’ butt at all times, its easier and works.

I keep reading how useful LF is in wvw but outside the trick with churning earth I have trouble seeing what the big deal is. Can someone give specific examples of how you are supposed to use it in wvw?

I like scepter/dagger for early leveling. It has so much burst aoe damage that you can take groups of trash mobs down in seconds. This is important because eles are so squishy. It will also get you used to stacking might and has some defense and good range. Only really short coming of scepter/dagger is low dps in prolonged fights which doesn’t matter for what you do while leveling.

If you turn autotargetting off and don’t select a target and attack a boss against a wall with the #4 fiery great sword skill it sort of glitches and does massive damage, more than any other attack in the game. So ppl want you do to that in dungeons and frost bow is a better aoe than meteor shower so ppl want that for a lot of things.

Anyway eles can have the best healing, dps, and might stacking in the game and ppl want that in dungeons. Ppl will say they want dps more than healing but if the squad wipes they still complain that you didn’t heal enough.

Leveling with ele is easy as long as you let the earth elemental glyph tank the hard stuff for you cuz you can’t tank for crap.

In wvw you have to build for mobility and survivability to roam and pick off random targets or use a glass cannon build and kill ppl from max range with staff with a large group. Or use a boon build and support your zerg. Its actually a lot of choices I don’t see why ppl complain so much.

Player to player trading would be awful, I’m so happy GW2 doesn’t have this. Aside from people tricking stupid ppl there are also young children playing every game and they get scammed a lot. Also there are some ppl with low self esteem who have trouble saying no and worry about making ppl angry. So if someone says they just want to borrow something to see how it looks on their toon they have trouble refusing and they get their stuff stolen. I know some ppl will say anyone like this is a loser and you don’t care about them but I have friends who are like this and get their stuff taken in other games. Adding player to player trading would be the biggest mistake anet could ever make.

GW2 has the best graphics of any game I’ve ever seen. From what I read its due to Daniel Dociu, the guy seems to be gifted.

You need 6 points in either arcana or water for healing and condi cleaning to survive on ele. If you put 6 points in both you don’t need ether renewal for condi clearing but if you don’t your gonna need it. Air is preferred for traiting for damage. Since your using valks gear using points in air to get your precision up is even more important than usual.

You seem to be emphasizing condi damage while wearing valks gear, that doesn’t make sense. Valks gear is good but you need to get your crit rate up to make it shine.

Taking zephyr’s boon and elemental shielding would work better with that weapon set then the adept traits you have taken. You need the fury to make the crit damage from valk’s gear useful and protection on demand is more useful then a passive trait triggering protection on its own. And with d/f you can have massive aura uptime.

Internal Fire only makes sense for staff DPS builds I don’t think anyone else should consider taking it.

Fiery Great Sword is mandatory for dungeon runs on ele. For PVE with dagger/focus I always have frost bow to balance out the build. Has the range and aoe to balance things out and can even heal the squad the way a staff can.

The water trait that gives you 20% more damage to targets with vuln on them is effectively a conjure only trait. Lots of classes would love to have a trait giving you 20% more damage.

I feel stupid asking this but how do you see another player’s AP point total.

I’m over 40. I’ve found that you just naturally gravitate to being with players your own age. Even b4 you voice chat with them or do anything that would give age away you just sort of end up with the other oldies.

BTW as I get older my fine motor skills are getting worse making jumping puzzles harder and harder. I feel like paying a neighborhood 12yo to come over and do them for me.

I don’t see why eles having a little more dps matters. Its not a big difference and its not hard for wars to get into squads and to get that max dps the ele has to go glassy and rely on being in a pro squad.

Eles are versatile and one of the hardest classes to learn and you have to pay attention all the time. It keeps the game from getting boring for some ppl and is torture for others. Wars are incredibly strong in both defense and offense but so many times you can set them to autoattack and go get a coffee. I think how much interaction you need to stay interested in the game is the biggest difference.

Serbianwolf.1652:

Hello there arenanet!

I was thinking, why not make Kodans as future playable race? They are quite cool and they look kitten!

What do you guys think?

I’m trying to figure out what kitten was in the original.

I only remember one veteran I couldn’t solo on my ele and mebbe I’ll go back and try it again it was somewhere in dredgehaunt. One veteran abomination with Frenzy did stop me from finishing a quest for 2 days until I put a sigil of nullification on my dagger to take away his Frenzy.

For what its worth Franklin Quickblade is absurdly hard for the level of player that’s supposed to do him.

But anyway, the key to these hard vets is usually to use an earth elemental to tank him while you focus on maxing damage to kill him b4 the elemental times out. If necessary you can equip both of the glyph utilities and stagger their use to keep an earth elemental up almost constantly. This is really the easiest way to solo hard vets on ele.

It seems strange to me that you don’t have Armor of Earth on your utilities I keep it on my utility bar non stop no matter what it is I’m doing. Since your using d/f once you have traits you will be able to give yourself Protection thru auras but thats in the future.

I would consider trying Scepter, the Rock Barrier skill and the 2 blinds help with defense and the extra range can reduce the damage you take since bosses do extra damage in melee in this game. Just remember to hit Lightning Strike as much as possible or your DPS with scepter will be awful.

For what its worth at level 40 I could solo Champion Wolfmaster(easiest champ imo) with scepter on my ele. Wolfie is polite enough to keep his distance so scepter kept me out of his melee damage range and the blinds really help if you hit them after every cooldown.

Dezert Stormz.7248:

I got so much karma, Yet i cant spend it towards the Obi shards, I don’t like doing a dungeon with random tryhards to get (FotM) my shards, No one is doing temples anymore, i have been keeping a eye on multiple sites that track the temple states…. The Temples are just dead!!

You need to try harder.

Blackjack.5621:

I had to use pirate runes and keep my parrot alive with heals and protection

WTK are you saying those runes are actually useful?

Eles have at least another conjure trait, Piercing Shards. This increases damage by 20% on foes with vulnerability on them. Almost its only purpose is to increase conjure damage on bosses.

To the comment that helm, boots and shoulder got nerfed, the minor items of celestial used to give outsized gains in crit damage so ppl would take that and get defensive gear for pants and coat to try and have the best of defense and offense. That doesn’t work anymore, crit damage is now distrubuted across minor and major gear pieces the same way all the other stats are distrubuted.

Runes are either dirt cheap or super expensive, I don’t know why. Some of the dirt cheap ones are actually pretty good. Rune of Earth gives you good defense and if you take 6 points in Arcana and take Elemental Attunement and Elemental Shielding you can keep Protection on you almost non stop because auras will give you protection and the protection you get lasts so long. You might as well take Earth’s Embrace with this set up for even more protection.

Rune of Rage is cheap and will help attack a lot if you have good crit damage on your gear and trait for easy access to Fury. Rune of Fire is also cheap and gives good offense.

When leveling you will be going through gear fast so no reason to use expensive runes.

For weps the Major version of sigils are always cheap so just get the Major version of the best sigils. Sigil of Bloodlust and Sigil of Force are the safest bets for increasing damage and the Major versions are always cheap.

Remember that sigils which proc on weapon swap will proc on attunement swap for an ele. If you are going for the standard fresh air s/d build you will be switching attunements a lot and might want a Sigil of Battle.

What is spam join?

I’ve never played a game with less crowd control than this one. I know that doesn’t add anything to the debate but I’m throwing it out there anyway.

“Let them speak Chinese.” -Marie Antoniette

GW2 tries to appeal to every type of MMO player and one type wants to always have something to aim for and gets bored if they max out their gear too soon. So they put in Legendary weapons and made getting them a grindfest to give that section of the market what they want. But Legendary weps are no stronger than ascended so no one is being forced into grinding for them.

I personally have no interest in getting a Legendary wep. If you do its prolly because your a person who feels compelled to chase after every goal put in front of you. Which means when you run out of goals to chase you will be bored with the game. So having it take a while to get Legendaries helps to maintain your interest in the game.

I like it much better now. I do feel bad for the role playing ppl tho, because they are usually very nice ppl and I like to see them have fun with what they do even tho I have no interest in it.

I thought this was going to be about boon duration runes being nerfed … but as I read it I realized … its about nothing …

I view condi damage as this games version of magic damage. Its common in MMOs for casters to be better in PVP and worse in PVE and thats true in GW2 as well once you look at condi damage dealers as casters.