Guild Wars 2

Completely agree. I always end up getting some rotten chest I don’t want and then reactivate the one I want. Just lemme set it on the one I want until I change my mind!

Jekkt.6045:

Muchacho.2390:

Nova Stiker.8396:

Really? Just run Reaper. The entire elite spec hard counters Elementalists. I just love a perma slow on my weapon swapping and it’s even more crippling as you have to wait to overcharge.

Can we please have it so Elementalists is not the ONLY class were our weapon swapping can be slowed?

So yeah, kitten Reapers.

Unless its a d/d ele. Phantaram streamed some 1v1 tempest against reaper (i think the reaper was nos). The duels came down to the fact if phantaram could keep up the 90% health tresholds for diamant skin (so i guess the chill argument is plausable) but then at the end he switched to d/d ele and simply outsustained the reaper. It took him a while but he won. And it didnt seem even close.

guess what, phantaram has more experience on d/d ele than nos on reaper lol.

The reaper build nos runs only has 5 buttons different than his regular build and that’s the deathshroud abilities. Simply put reaper does less pressure than regular cele signet necro so it can’t kill a dd ele.

I literally just came to the forums to post about this haha. Stow weapon doesn’t work with things like conjured weapons or when you are in the air. Escape is the better cancel ability button but it is also not key-bindable and a lot of people aren’t comfortable hitting it. Escape can also bring up the menu mid combat which is very annoying.

Creating a cancel ability key bind in the control options would be AMAZING.

I’ve not had issues with thieves and mesmers since I started using this build about a month ago. I use vamp runes/air sigil with the arcane shield trait now since air sigil got buffed.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-o3d;2B2-Y0-5sMkY0;9;413G;0057147146;4Ow0;3H7W3H7W3a0S

Use this build and practice your heart out! You’ll get there.

Xillllix.3485:

Yeah it sucks when the only improvement made to a skill in 3 years still leave the skill completely useless.

Shatterstone has been buffed like 5 or 6 times through out the years. It’s the most gradually buffed skill in the game probably. Still a pretty bad skill.

Drake’s Breath doesn’t need a nerf. Water isn’t mandatory and neither will arcane be when tempest comes out.

Fresh air Scepter is as close to what you are looking for as ele can get.

Haha Tarcis you crack me up man. Great video. Axe is key! I feel it’s mostly stronger than hammer especially against dd eles.

“And let’s give him a smile face.”

Thanks to anyone who has kind words The Abjured and I really appreciate it.

Special shoutout to nearlight and infantrydiv. I really like your guys analytical posts and not just for this post you do them other times too. Though I did like the ones in this thread especially.

As most of you saw we were super hyped after we beat TCG. We scrimmed them quite a few times lately and almost never won more than we lost. Especially about 2 days before we left I think we actually went something like 0-8 in one scrim against them which wasn’t encouraging to say the least. There were some close ones but 0 wins during a scrim session is still 0 wins.

Be it the difference in lag from always scrimming on EU servers and then going to LAN, or TCGs lack of lan experience causing nerves or something, or us just playing especially well, or a combination of this and more things, we were able to come out with that win.

And I really have to thank TCG because our scrims against them helped us a ton and taught us a new way to rotate which everyone in this thread and others is noticing via toker fanboy/girling which I’ll join that club anyday. Anyways, in the past we always leave our dps middle and me and nos handle outers nodes. During WTS we started putting a tank middle/whatever node is being fought on and immediately give toker the freedom to rotate anywhere. Heck we’d often just put 1 tanky person on node to stall/die/suicide (hello plague form that thing is awesome) and the rest of us would immediately rotate away. Which was a beautiful thing to do against Tages ridiculously strong bunker guard which we would avoid fighting at all costs. We learned if Tage is in a fight we’d lose that fight 100% so we’d just let someone die/troll the node and everyone else rotate out immediately. Essentially delay tactics which TCG taught us is extremely valuable and we sort of mirrored it. Anyways, I do not think this new way of rotating is the end all be all. There are reasons we rotated the way we did before it’s just that we needed to adapt to how EU plays. Although I will say it works especially well with a necro. Necro has no mobility so if a fight looks sour we can just call for nos to die on node and the rest of us rotate and be useful. Nos can rez and +1 or fight a 1v1 at home, both of which is something Necro is extremely proficient at.

Anyways I sort of went on a tangent here. Back to the main story line. So I actually heard ROM say this before the tournament and I thought the exact same thing I just didn’t discuss it with him/others until after the tournament but TCG, ORNG, and us had a sort of rock paper scissor thing going on. TCG beats us, We beat ORNG, and ORNG beats TCG. This was all based on comp vs comp knowledge and scrims vs TCG. Which ORNG heard about our scrims against TCG somehow so that’s why they had the same suspicions we did about the rock paper scissor thing cause they knew we weren’t doing so hot against TCG.

So after we beat TCG this is why we were so darn hyped. We had just beaten the rock to our scissor and had paper to fight in the grand finals. Albeit a very skilled paper that we had just lost a BO3 too. We were playing so well and we had gotten the rotating down to a T against TCG so my suspicions were we were going to ride this hype train into wins against ORNG which I had originally thought we should be beating. I just needed to confirm my suspicions. After our first win in the Grand Finals of the first Bo3 on forest those suspicions were confirmed. At this point I think we would have originally been completely exhausted knowing we had to do two whole Bo3s but the hype just kept us alive for 3 more games to take the finals. Me and Nos are typically extremely calm dudes and we both lost our voices. The hype was real.

It was really awesome meeting so many of you peeps out there in real life at the convention so thanks for that.
Shouts outs to all the competitors in WTS. We all hung out like friends and had good times before and after the tournament.

Last but not least I’d like to give a huge thank you to Grouch. That man has done more for the pvp community than we will ever know. ROM and Denshee toasted to grouch at the dinner after the tournament thanking him and it was awesome.

Grouch also wanted me to tell you all that he loves it when you whisper him about when you will get your gems. So keep that up

Trevor Boyer.6524:

Cleric’s is power/tough/heal
Knight’s is power/prec/tough
Crusader’s is power/tough/heal/feroc

By adding prec rather than feroc, Crusader will result in power/prec/tough/heal, pretty much a super Cleric’s or a super Knight’s, however you want to view it. I can’t say I completely disagree with you but I can’t say I agree with it either. The main purpose of Crusader that I have found is specifically in conjunction with INT sigils on builds that have very little to no precision at all. If feroc was removed and prec added to Crusader, I believe most builds that actually use Crusader, would lose most of their DPS burst actually.

Air and fire with precision would likely result in about the same burst as intel with ferocity. And most certainly far more damage overall. There’s no two ways about it precision is a far more valuable stat when you have to choose between the two.

Previously I always thought valkyries amulet needed precision instead of ferocity. That was when you could still gain precision from traits.

Crusaders aka the new valkyries amulet of old still has the same stats but now the ferocity is even worse because we have no way of gaining precision in an efficient manner. We are left with 4% crit chance and left thinking where we will gain some crit chance to utilize this ferocity on our amulet.

Currently maybe the best classes to utilize the ferocity on are something like a meditations guardian (you can take the 300 vitality trait to make up for the fact crusaders has no vitality) and power necro.

Medi guard can take pack runes and the fury on meditations giving them about 30% crit chance when they have the fury. They can also utilize intelligence on hammer but that often overlaps with fury from a meditation. The fury up time really isn’t high enough but it’s still one of the best specs to utilize it on.

Necro can take death perception (I think its called) giving them 50% crit chance in death shroud.

Provided these are the 2 specs, I think, that can utilize/synergize with the crusaders amulet the best, they would still be much better with precision instead of ferocity on the amulet. Now think of all the other possible specs that would utilize this amulet but simply cannot because they can’t get any kind of precision to take advantage of the ferocity that is on the amulet.

I look at it like this. Crusaders is the power version of celestial amulet in that it aims to make a tanky dpser hybrid and there are a lot of specs being left in the dark because they see celestial amulet but say “I can’t utilize that condition damage my weapons are for power damage”. You come upon crusaders and think “This is perfect and it’s clear the developers want me to use this but it has ferocity on it and I can’t utilize that cause I have 4% crit chance.”

Toss Elixir X makes your opponent a tornado. Same duration

Drink Elixir X either makes you rampage or moa. Same duration, but of course we can cancel it just like any other self transform.

Believe it or not both toss and drink get stronger with this change.

1. Nothing lingers except for 5 point minors. Stone heart will not linger. 10% damage buffs from attunements do not linger. If they mentioned this will change then I stand corrected.

2. Arcane precision is plenty strong if you go a fresh air build. Perhaps its not the greatest in a cele build but that’s fine. Maybe up the proc rate to 15% on crit at most.

3. I don’t like that Attunement and Evasive are choices between eachother. They are both really cool group utility that take a lot of skill to optimize and removing one from our kit just makes it a whole lot less fun. I have a lot to say about this issue but I’ll keep it short here.

I think elemental attunement should be base line. After making it base line balance from there. Both Evasive Arcana and elemental attunement are really fun and skillful abilities. Why take one away?

Besides that. Let’s take a look at the big picture for a second.

Removing conditions upon gaining regeneration: Dropping evasive arcana or elemental attunement with this trait drops condi removal from 2 every ~9 seconds to 1 every ~9 seconds(everytime you swap to water you gain regen + Evasive arcana for 2 condi removal). That’s a pretty big nerf to condi removal. On top of this we can assume the new “Soothing Ice”, which is the old regen proc trait with frost aura tide to it, will not be a 10 second icd anymore. That’s even less condi removal with the predicted icd being around 25-30 seconds (imo). The only way we’d get regen without healing rain would be from cantrips at this point, which is completely selfish condi removal.

Condi removal is extremely important for survivability these days even against non condi classes. Poison, weakness, chill… they will all be elementalists death without the amount of condi removal we currently have.

On top of all this Elemental Attunement and Evasive Arcana are both group utility traits. People are already not taking Elementalists for team fights because there are much better group/team fight classes out there. Taking one of them away just greater pigeon-holes ele into a selfish 1v1 category.

I think overall making Elemental Attunement baseline and balancing from that point is a much healthier direction to take elementalist.

Is it viable? Sure. I don’t think its quite as optimal as some other berserkers though. It’s close.

Remaking heart of the mists into an awesome sort of “playground” so to speak would be enough for me!

I tested in about 5 minutes of my free time. Less than than most of you probably took typing the things you typed.

86.5% crit chance channeling Air #1 on scepter (elementalist)

1st 1 minute trial with fire sigil (5 second cooldown)
procced 11 times

2nd 1 minute trial with fire sigil
Procced 11 times

1st 1 minute trial with air sigil (listed 3 second cooldown)
procced 11 times

2nd 1 minute trial with air sigil
procced 11 times

Oh no. I’ve provided proof when the burden was not mine. Did I commit some kind of treasonous act?

Narkodx.1472:

This has been a problem since day one

Channeled abilities will cancel if they immobilize you during the cast as well

Any time I get immobilized I have to cast the same ability 20 times before it goes off

Yeah this is what I feel like. It’s very frustrating to deal with.

So for the longest time I just thought I was getting immobilized in the air and my abilities weren’t working because of that. (known bug for a long time)

What I’ve come to realize, and I haven’t tested this actually it’s just something that I’ve deduced while playing a lot lately, is that the ability to queue up 1 ability after another stops working when you are immobilized.

Here’s an example to show exactly what I’m saying.

Not Immobilized

Cast Ability #1
Cast Ability #2 mid way through Ability #1’s cast
Ability #1’s full animation/aftercast completes and Ability #2 goes off.

Immobilized

Cast Ability #1
Cast Ability #2 mid way through Ability #1’s cast
Ability #1’s full animation/aftercast completes and nothing happens.

If this isn’t what is happening then it’s something else wonky about immobilize because there are times I press abilities while immobilized, and not in the air, and they just refuse to cast.

I’ll try to actually test this at some point today.

This is definitely a good idea.

This stuff has been happening to me in clock tower since even before the camera changes. I’ve always had this problem.

Huge congrats to oRNG. First 3 games were some really fun games despite them being so frustrating when losing by so few points. We had lost moral as a team by the 4th unfortunately.

Tage 100% deserved the MVP too. He’s not the greatest english speaker but he was super awesome the little he did speak to me. And of course likely the best guardian GW2 has seen.

Anyways, congrats again oRNG!

Lately I’ve been streaming only weekdays and taking off saturday and sundays. I’ve never really had a set schedule but I might make this my schedule.

I wouldn’t be surprised it things don’t change too much now until the expansion.

Here’s why. All the balancing they would do for now would likely not be valuable come the expansion.

Let’s say they come out with a balance patch in the next 2-3 months to shake some things up. Who’s to say those changes are even good come the expansion? With specializations and a new game mode coming through, certain balance changes now might not even be the correct call come time of the expansion.

Keep in mind viable and optimal are always two different things. Many things are viable, only a few things are actually optimal. I personally don’t think power necros are optimal.

With that said though: Single people have changed the opinion of many about the viability of certain classes/builds. Maybe the community just lacks that one power necro that’s willing to make it happen. OP necro and Crysis in my opinion pretty much have made it work at a viable level they just need the team and general skills that conquest requires to get there and be successful.

The best advice I can give to most ele’s like yourself diva is to use your water attunement as efficiently as possible.

To do this just make sure every time you switch to it to heal you use all the healing you need to get to full life (or as close to it as you can) and then immediately switch out of it to another attunement. Don’t forget about that water evasive arcana! You switch out of it immediately so you have another opportunity to switch back to it later. If you are under heavy pressure and happen to get stuck in water attunement because your other attunements are all on cooldown you did something wrong along the way. Make sure to have another attunement available so you can switch out of water and prioritize it the most.

I haven’t read most of this thread so I don’t know if others have suggested this. Ignoring the monsters on forest and concentrating on the nodes is the right move a large majority of the time. At a high level most teams most often only go for monsters if the game is very close like 450-450 so then whoever gets the monsters wins. Sometimes, however, if you just recently got kills and you are sitting on 2 nodes and don’t have the confidence to push far, killing your monster can be a nice and safe prize while you wait for the enemy team to rez and do their next push. Most teams prefer to push far though. It’s maybe the riskier move but much more rewarding provided your team can make the move correctly.

Hope this helps, have fun.

Thanks for the shoutouts man. It’s a really fun build. I miss it!

I think you are talking about the human on the right side during 1:14. While I see the sword I’m having a hard time making out a dagger. I see something but I’m pretty sure it’s just a part of the armor.

From other angles it really looks like it is sword only and there is no offhand. If that’s the case it could very well be a mesmer.

I’m letting you all know I’ll be there and I already have this won. Might as well give me 1st place prize already.

Edit: Practiced my song a bit and my voice is dying. Looks like I need to preserve my voice for tonight. No more practice!

I haven’t read a lot of this thread but I thought I’d just come by and mention my experience with this bug.

It’s been happening to me since GW2’s release but it actually does nothing. It just shows a flinch animation and maybe a damage number on your screen but you don’t actually take damage or enter combat.

So overall no big deal, just some weird animation you may run into every so often.

The article has a lot of great points but here is what I think.

I think mesmer historically has only limited the meta by being so strong you should take 1 on each comp. They did not however limit other people from playing other builds by countering them.

Thief on the other hand has kept so many builds out of GW2’s competitive history it’s crazy. They counter a lot of builds that could have been and could still be taken but because thieves exist we’ll never see that kind of diversity. I will say that now more than ever though thieves are less limiting.

I don’t think people switched to celestial because of these classes though. Celestial is just really strong so people play it. Celestial classes still gets insta bursted by thief mesmer pretty easily.

That’s sad to here that things went down that way. Thanks for the links to the vods though. This will be interesting to see.

Chorazin.4107:

You can’t take soothing wave, soothing disruption and cleansing water without losing cantrip mastery. So there is a tradeoff, you either live with those really long cantrip CD’s and pick up the extra condi removal or lose out on that removal for reasonable cantrip cooldown timers.

Would you take soothing disruption without cantrip mastery?

Yes.

To a few of you in here, all I gotta say is read the whole OP next time and you won’t make a pointless post. Overall good discussion though.

emikochan.8504:

You can’t make changes that will screw up other builds.

Yeah I see what you mean. The vigor trait change will certainly nerf all other ele builds by quite a bit. Not many of the other ele builds are in a very good spot though and need some rather big changes in my opinion. So maybe a nerf to the vigor would be fine as long as other builds receive some other buffs. I’m with ya though!

Here are some suggestions for shaving DD ele into a more balanced state.

Drake’s Breath – a 2 second burn per tic instead of a 3 second burn

Elemental Shielding – 2 second protection instead of a 3 second protection

Soothing Disruption – 4-5 second regen/vigor instead of 6 second regen/vigor

Renewing Stamina – 6 second duration with a 10 second ICD instead of 5 second duration with a 5 second ICD EDIT: This change strongly nerfs all other ele builds which are all subpar or very bad as is.

Lightning Whip – Make the second hit stronger than the first hit. This is the simplest way to nerf stow weapon lightning whip without altering some major game mechanics that exist across almost all abilities. Alternatively the Signet of Restoration proc could occur on the 2nd hit. That would make this ability one of a kind compared to other skills in how it procs Signet of Restoration though.

Soothing Wave – 5 second regen with a 15 second ICD instead of a 3s regen with a 10 ICD. This lowers the amount of condition removal elementalist will have when combined with Cleansing water which in my opinion is slightly too high at the moment. I didn’t do the math but this hardly changes regen up time. The main thing is the slight nerf to condition removal over all which will be healthier.

These next 2 changes are sweeping changes to all classes that use these two mechanics. I personally don’t see Anet moving in this direction based on the past few balance patches but I’ll suggest them anyways because there is at the very least a vocal portion of the community that wants these changed.

Might – change it to 25 condition damage per stack instead of 35. Or do some other kind of minor nerf to might stacking such as nerfing the might duration on runes like Hoelbrak and Strength.

Celestial amulet – Take away 25-45 stats off of it. Anything much larger than these numbers in my opinion is too much and would bury the cele amulet into obscurity like it once was.

I’m not suggesting to do all of these nerfs. These are simply options that are good ways to nerf DD ele in my opinion.

I personally like doing some of the shaves before the might and celestial suggestions and seeing where that lands the DD ele from there, possibly including some nerf to might. It’s most important that we keep the feedback in this thread constructive though so the devs have something to work off of. Thanks friends!

Don’t say it doesn’t matter, matter anymore

Agreed. I’ve had friends try to play the game with me a few times and it doesn’t take long to realize that there wasn’t anything we could play together besides hotjoins which was not fun. They quit pretty fast. Unranked queue solves that problem.

Chicago Jack.5647:

Phantaram.1265:

One of these days the internet will get my name right.

Okay Phanta-ranta-ranta-ranta-ranta-ranta-ranta-ranta-ranta-ram.

See! I even spell out that one part for them over and over.

One of these days the internet will get my name right.

Nova it sounds like you have an easy way to make 80 bucks a week. Hop to it. We need more good teams on NA.

Them not knowing anything may be the point. If it gets highly promoted and gets a higher amount of viewers than normal, those new viewers will have someone to relate to. Seeing popular esport shoutcasters will give newer viewers the sense that GW2 is really trying to go for it.

These are definitely good ideas if/when they do a huge patch/revamp of a lot of stuff. As of now only changing these things would affect balance quite a lot, even though it would open up trait diversity.

Amstel Steel.2058:

Phantaram.1265:

A more soft example, like you said tage, is mesmer. It can do enough damage on auto attacks to make you want to dodge, but you really want to save dodges for the big stuff like #2 gs and shatters. Most classes are soft examples like mesmer.

Unless I’m mistaken, the mesmer greatsword auto aftercast can be bypassed in which case 1 stow weapon 1 stow weapon air 1 stow weapon 1 stow weapon fire > 11air11fire.

Is there a point you’re trying to make? Or did you just quote me and then make a random statement.

Liewec.2896:

i tend to find myself using strength and force sigils (combines with strength runes) more than air/fire recently,
the damage increase is massive, 10% just from force and the strength 6 piece bonus then even more from the power bonus you maintain (usually atleast 175).

Air is way more damage than force by a long shot on any berserker amulet build.

The problem isn’t just RNG. A few classes are built around doing enough/all of their damage at a constant rate. This means using dodges in a rotation, rather than to dodge meaningful abilities, is the better way to play against these things because there isn’t anything meaningful to dodge. Dodging at any point against said opponents is just as valuable as dodging at any other point.

The perfect examples of this are builds like S/D thief and Power Necro. Both of them are just spamming a few abilities at a constant rate, and the stuff that is meaningful to dodge aren’t able to be reacted to (#3 ds fear, steal, etc). So against these classes you just use your dodges/cooldowns at a constant rate.

Most classes and specs are sort of like this but S/D thief and Power necros are the epitome of this. A more soft example, like you said tage, is mesmer. It can do enough damage on auto attacks to make you want to dodge, but you really want to save dodges for the big stuff like #2 gs and shatters. Most classes are soft examples like mesmer.

Other classes like condi Necro and hambow Warrior operate a little differently. Sure necro has a pretty strong auto attack in scepter but it’s not huge. Necro and Warrior operate by having very strong abilities on low cooldowns. Warrior has hammer CC/pindown and especially earthshaker on very low cooldowns and they all warrant dodging, thing is you’ll run out of dodges and eventually cooldowns. So against warrior you are essentially put on a timer where eventually he is going to put a big cc combo on you and you won’t have anything to stop it. Condi Necro is similar with very powerful abilities on low cooldowns where eventually you will run out of cooldowns/dodges and be dead.

So in the end with how much a lot of classes can dodge I don’t think its that big of a deal and having to deal with different classes specs differently and knowing how to use your dodges/cooldowns against them specifically is sort of interesting.

Like you said in the end of your post though Tage, the RNG factor of it is what makes it frustrating. Dodge one auto attack -> next one procs sigils on you -> don’t dodge the next few auto attacks because you know sigils won’t proc -> dodge another auto attack after 3s or so > next auto attack procs sigils on you. That sucks and makes dodging auto attacks have very little meaning specifically against classes with RNG attached to their auto attack.

An interesting temporary fix could be to make sigils not proc on auto attack :O dunno just throwing things out there off the top of my head.

This bug really sucks and gets me killed quite a lot. I would love a fix to this.

Maybe even a slight rework to immobilize allowing characters to at least rotate in position.

All abilities operate like this. Changing only dodge abilities to work like this would be odd. Maybe adding some abilities on each class/weaponset with the ability to cancel after cast would be interesting. Although these kind of mechanics are not something easily understood by a large percentage of the player base.

Anastasis.7258:

Ostricheggs.3742:

Lupanic.6502:

Ostricheggs.3742:

style.6173:

Elxdark.9702:

Lupanic.6502:

Lupanic.6502:

who played for Abjured ? Noscoc and caed did not, right?

Does someone know ?

If I’m correct :

-Toker
-Oeggs
-Wakkey
-Phanta
-Chaith

Is this abjured or good fights? Can’t really tell. Not sure the point of qualifiers if people just rebuild their team.

Regardless, there needs to a replay of the NA event. Right now, the tournament is a disgrace. Not what ANET wanted for their first WTS event.

The point isn’t to rebuild the team and we had no intentions to do so. We found great replacements for nos and caed in both toker and chaith. Nos and Caed had to bow out for school reasons (the date is literally their finals week). Props to them, as well as backpack for helping us get chaith and toker up to snuff to still stay on top.

you played necro in this setup?

For a while I did, but it was mainly to play against comps that hard countered my condi engi with stuns and condis.

Also, to everyone not excited about this tourney and point to the previous ones, I feel pretty bad for you.

The horrendous balancing over the last year + prevented anyone from even caring about the game. Now we have 2 top teams with their rosters filled with stellar players. This is something that has never happened before, especially in a decent meta.

Pax was a joke to begin with after the disaster of dhuumfire. Get with the times ladies, we’re goin esports.

Your engi is finally overpower in this meta doesn’t mean the meta is decent.

The current meta isn’t decent but unhealthy by spamming passive damages without any efforts. (Conditions)

Still have a lot balancing to do in this game, so I said it’s not decent at all.

Rabid engi is honestly underpowered.

Wow! Thanks for the kind words guys. Always awesome to hear.

The funnier comparison is 100b to Rangers longbow Rapid Fire. Rapid Fire does comparable, if not more damage, while being mobile and 1500 range.