Guild Wars 2

It’s also easy enough to get dungeon equipment, so what’s the karma dump for people who aren’t interested in farming the gold for a legendary?

From what I understand, it’s a 2 hour cycle, but does anyone know what times it is. For example, is 6pm-8pm night, then 8pm-10pm day, every day?

Same here. Tried on two characters (one who warped in, the other who logged out there).

Well, being a “greatsword warrior” is a bad idea. Greatsword/dual axes is far more damage than just sitting in greatsword. My dual axes actually put out more damage than my greatsword does, by the greatsword is awesome for building might. In saying that, go crit damage/heightened senses. Between that and 100% fury, you’ll be constantly critting (especially if you grab Furious out of arms) and putting out more damage overall.

Are you doing it with 4 axe/gsword warriors and a support guardian? I feel like the “time to kill” for every mob uses this set up as the standard, and nothing else comes close to that damage.

I’ve successfully pugged it only once. Basically held one mob each of the group that spawns in front of each torch, since as long as one stays up the group won’t respawn. We would take them down to one hit, then type “r”. Someone would count down from 3, and on go we deliver the last hit and light the torch. Took 3-4 tries (some people didn’t keep their mob 1-hit from death, etc) but eventually got it.

Warrior. Grab your 40 precision for every unused signet with your first 10 points and enjoy 100%+ crit until level 50~. Picking up signet of rage and for great justice at 30 lets you have nearly 100% swiftness uptime (100% with warhorn) and 100% fury (+20% crit chance) uptime. No regular mobs will survive for more than a few seconds, and survivability doesn’t matter when you practically insta-gib groups. Eat a cheap “restores hp on crit” food and you’re pretty much immortal with perma swiftness and the fastest consistent kill-time in the game with an AOE weapon (gsword).

Thief can do well too, but warriors just more powerful for basic leveling.

My dps gsword/axes spec is pretty much always full adrenaline (1-2 attacks fills it up). By taking the 15 point strength trait, you get back half your adrenaline for each burst skill, giving me 2 free dodges every 9 seconds, along with the damage from axes/fury from sword (let’s you sub out FGJ for a strength banner). And thanks to how quickly it refills, I’m very rarely not getting the crit/damage bonus from having full adrenaline. Best of both worlds.

The best way to go about this is 100b>WA>switch to axes as the animation finishes and use the axe burst skill to get back into range, axe rotation>switch to gsword and repeat.

For the record, SBI was consistently ahead of HOD over the weekend until early Monday morning during the week-long match ups.

Rune of the Scholar is the best DPS rune.

165 power, 8% crit damage and 10% overall damage. It’s very easy to hit 50% base crit, and with a proper dps set up you’ll have 100% fury uptime, Banner of Discipline (for another 3% crit/10% crit damage), and hp leech food (for another 3% crit) as well as taking Heightened Focus for 9% crit, since you should always have full adrenaline.

Basically, you won’t need precision off runes and +damage is the best stat for a full dps build where you already have tons of power/precision. The caveat is that you have to keep your hp above 90%, but if you don’t think that’s possible than going Ruby Orbs is best.

It’s fine for stuff you can’t melee. It’s not fine if you can melee something.

The ele skills used to revive from defeated, but they just changed it to downed only. Battle Standard won’t change.

My warrior is 15/30/0/10/15 with a greatsword/axe/axe. I use FGJ, Shake it off, banner of discipline and Signet of rage. I’m wearing all Berserker gear with Soldier runes and a mix of jewelry (Emerald, Ruby, Beryl) with a berserk back piece. My GS and one axe have +crit chance sigils and one axe has the endurance regen on weapon swap sigil.

With Furious out of the Arms tree, my Adrenaline refills almost instantly and between the 15 in Strength and the weapon sigil, I’m never out of endurance when I need to dodge.

Most importantly, I use Omnomberry Pies for the precision and the 66% chance to steal life. It gives back about 300~ health a proc, and my crit chance is nearly 100% thanks to the 100% fury uptime and precision from the food and banner. Whirlwind hits 15 times, and if the Pies proc about 9 times, you get about 2700 health returned per enemy. Note that, for whatever reason, health leech food doesn’t have an ICD and can trigger multiple times a second.

Running like this, you can buff the party, remove conditions, have great survivability and put out 90% of the damage of a full dps-specced warrior without being in any fear of going down.

There really seems to be a trend where the people praising ele’s are also not playing any other profession. In PvE, ele is the weakest class by quite a margin. My warrior is significantly stronger and more durable than my ele, and running a dungeon with an ele is almost always slower than without, even if they are non-80’s.

As someone pointed out, the main gripe people have is that an ele can be pretty mediocre if played really well, but bring that same level of micro to any other class and you get a superior result. Of course an sPvP group can do fine with an ele, but they’d do better if that player was a competent war/ranger/necro/mesmer/engi.

I have an Ele and a War at 80, and both are geared for dps (but the warrior has soldier runes). My Warrior has about 21000 health and my ele has around 11000. My ele crits are lucky to hit for over 3k, while 100b is a consistent 21000, the 3 skill with a gs hits for about 8k, eviscerate about 9k, etc. Even considering that some of the warrior skills “take longer” to fire, they still do significantly more damage in the time-frame than my ele does.

Add to this the fact that my warrior can banner (I keep Discipline up all the time), can remove 3 conditions from the party with shouts, can provide fury/might, is practically immortal on a multi-enemy fight with hp leech food and dual axes, and can put out rifle damage in a pinch that will equal my ele on everything but large, stationary targets.

I know warriors are pretty broken in general (a 4 warrior/ 1 guardian dungeon run is truly ridiculous) but having my ele provide less utility, less damage, and have considerably less survivability doesn’t make any sense.

I honestly don’t understand 5 signet warriors. Banner of Discipline gives 90 precision to your whole party with nearly 100% uptime and 10% crit damage. FGJ and Signet of Rage will give you tons of might on top of 100% fury uptime. This give your more crit and more damage than 5 signets, and still leaves open your healing slot and one utility slot for SIO/EP etc.

And if you’re in a fight where you don’t need to use a ranged weapon, 20 points in discipline lets you use 100b, then switch to dual axes and burst/whirling axe/dual strike/cyclone axe/100b/burst etc. Putting a sigil of blood of one axe with Omnomberry pies is like having a second heal when you go through your axe aoes. It’s more dps, more survivability and more utility than 5 signet GS and requires very little work.

Leveled an Ele to 80, full exotics, thought it was pretty strong. Just finished gearing up my warrior and the difference is night and day. Even running an instance twice in a row with the same group, the run with my warrior was always quicker and smoother. A five warrior party won’t get much done, but they are a necessity if you want a smooth run.

My ele is still way more viable in WvW, though.

This is a really stupid change.

I was wondering if anyone has multiple characters on an account to see if DR’s are account-wide or character specific? Would make farming a specific dungeon easier for someone with 2 80’s if they could alternate…

I like using Elemental Surge out of the Arcana tree. Arcana Power makes the effect trigger on your next five regular attacks. That gives us about 8 blinds in Air alone (obviously some will be redundant thanks to Arcana Power not getting the benefit of them all). Also, having the quicker swap time to keep switching into Water for the free cleanse is pretty nice too.

Even if the thief had 3 orbs and the OP was a level 2 in WvW, there’s no excuse for having a class have a single ability that requires no set up do almost double a classes natural HP pool. None.

Leveling my Ele, I ~always~ had issues with story missions where the mobs were just so strong and I would constantly have to graveyard rush enemies and take a death for every one I killed. My warrior is only in his 50’s, but the quality of life difference is amazing. I can just face tank and spam Hundred Blades and have no issue. It’s really quite dramatic.

With good level 80 year and magic find/power food, staff is optimal because:

A) All of the CD’s are low, so you never have any considerable downtime (like you do with Flame Grasp, Churning Earth, etc).

B) With good gear you’ll kill regular 80 mobs in CS very, very quickly.

C) Between Magnetic Aura, two slows, a snare, a KB, an AoE stun and blind and an extra dodge, you have more than enough survival skills in any attunement if you get a few extra mobs on you. Melee’s should never be a problem and you can burst ranged mobs way faster than they can kill you.

I’m not sure about dungeons, but there’s really no disadvantage to roaming with a staff outside of our professions general weakness in PvE.

You might want to try a Sigil of Battle (I think it’s the one that gives 3 might stacks on swap). You can consistently have 6 might stacks up just from casual swapping and occasionally have 9. Might give you more overall condi damage then an extra stack of bleed.

Well first off, “on damage”, “on kill” and “on swap” sigils all share an ICD, so if you’re using more than one that’s your issue.

Secondly, I had the same issue with the sigil. More specifically, I would swap and I would get the buff icon letting me know that my next attack would poison, but then it never would. I tried on a necro and it worked as advertised (switched weapon, attacked, poisoned every time). I’d posted about it at the time, and someone said they got it worked when they switched back into the attune that triggered it a second time, but that pretty much makes it useless.

As an aside, it seems like all “on swap” weapons have an ICD about equal to what it takes other classes to swap weapons, so swapping through all 4 attunements in 4 seconds will only get one proc of a “might on weapon swap” sigil. If you wait about 7~ seconds between swapping, though, you’ll get it every time.

Decided to test it and my exotic berserker’s gear left me with a higher armor rating than rare level 65 Knight’s gear. So it seems as if the increase in armor of exotics even while downleveled is more beneficial than using high quality lower level armor (that’s still higher level than the dungeon) with defensive stats.

Right, but my question is if I’m wearing lvl 55 exotics, will I have the same stats after I’m downleveled to the dungeons level that I’d have if I was wearing lvl 80 exotics?

I currently have a level 80 ele, and it’s a glass-cannon build focused on WvW. I’m really interested in getting the TA armor set, as I want to turn my character into a disney villain. My issue is that my exotic lvl 80 berserker’s gear doesn’t seem to be a good choice. I was wondering if I would be able to make myself a set of exotic level 50 gear (which would be SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper) focused around defensive stats to make running the dungeon a little easier.

The main question is: am I better served wearing my lvl 80 gear in a dungeon or should I use the highest quality gear possible for the level I get downleveled to? Thanks!

Just to start off, I already have a geared 80 ele so I’m already familar with basic mechanics/etc.

In my late 20’s on my warrior and I’m just pveing with a greatsword/signet build since everything melts so quick. However, for dungeons/etc, I’m assuming this won’t work as well. I’m guessing I should keep more support-ish support skills and keep a mace/shield weapon set for body blocking and the such, but what about damage? Is greatsword king or am I better off going axe/axe? Thanks!

http://i.imgur.com/fR4hg.jpg

I think the real problem is that someone using the same level of micro required for an ele will do much better on a thief/warrior.

So you’re running a tank build in WvW against mostly sub-80 melee classes who you kite around in circles? A mesmer/necro would chew you up and most decently melee classes would have the common sense to not stand in/not interrupt churning earth (no one even tried dodging it).

Besides, my staff ele can three shot most people in WvW thanks to the gear difference and green arrows can barley do damage. That’s also not to mention that running a bunker build in WvW is pretty useless on its face.

You know ET’s just gonna take it all back in a few hours, right?

We have twice as many skills as a Thief, but it doesn’t matter when Heartseeker can do significantly more damage than anything we have…

In PvE, we are very, very weak. Running through Orr to get to an event shouldn’t become a desperate struggle if you get pulled by a Plaugebearer.

In sPvP, we are very weak. The amount of work it takes to be succesful with an ele would allow you to have a much more meaningful impact with any other prof. I can do decently on my ele in sPvP, then switch to my Mes and top the charts putting in less work.

In WvW however, we are really, really strong. If we get caught with our pants down by a Thief, we’re pretty much dead and it’s impossible to beat a well-played Mes with their elite up. In a group, however, we can really make a difference. With a crit/power/pres build you can blow up groups of enemies REALLY quick if they don’t notice you. Getting on a cliff above an enemy group and doing your AoE rotation usually results in 5-6 downed enemies in a few seconds. The big problem is that while we can down players in a best case scenario, it leaves our tank dry, our attunes on CD and the enemies can rally before we can do anything. Of course, it also bears mentioning that my ele is extremly geared and there’s still a ton of <80’s in WvW who get hit by 6-7k+ a tick off Meteor Shower.

The problem is going to be improving our PvE and sPvP ability (where it sorely lacks) without pushing us to the point where we are killing enemy parties in WvW.

I’m not sure why we don’t have this ability in the first place. Our d/d s/d is outperformed by a thief, guardian or warrior and our ranged is outperformed by a mes or a necro, so why can these profs weapon swap to fill a different role on the fly while we would have to break combat and manually switch weapons? Just because we have access to more skills doesn’t mean we outshine the other profs in doing anything.

Lemasive.5136:

Yeah, just ran solo in WnW got 35 kills before a zerg got me. Fits my playstyle.

By dotting and chasing the lowbies who panicked and ran because they thought they were looking at a natural 80 thief? :P

It’s pretty clear to mostly everyone whose touched the class that while Elementalists are not broken, we have to have good gear and good skill management to even hold a candle to the effectiveness of the other professions. For whatever reason, Anet saw it fit to make Elementalist a masochist only prof, and that on its face is fine. What bugs me is not really getting a noticeable advantage over the other profs who can phone it in when I’m managing four skillbars.

So why not just go all in and give us another four skillbars to manage? We won’t be able to burst like a thief, tank like a guardian, support like a mesmer or cond/tank like a necro, but we can competently fill the role of any of these prof’s without making them redundant or being over-powered ourselves. We’d be the games go-to jack of all trades prof that is more and more effective based on player awareness and ability while not displacing any other class.

@Drake yes, that’s how you would assume it works. But to quickly test it, go to the Mists and put 15 points in Arcana and 5 in Earth. When you switch out of Earth, you keep the little icon on the bottom of the screen but you immediately lose your extra toughness.

And what’s weird is that if you do the same thing in water, your regen refreshes for those last five seconds. And considering how hard it is to test the other skills, I think we’d be better off getting a “it’s all fixed” message.

Lingering Elements: Attunement bonuses linger for 5 seconds.

The boon you get from Elemental Attunement doesn’t change in duration with this skill. I assumed it meant the 5 point bonus in each tree, but taking the trait and switching in/out of Earth sees you lose your Toughness bonus as soon as you swap. Considering how useful Blast Staff is for WvW and how we need points in Arcana if you want to swap effectively, having a broken trait doesn’t make our already difficult lives any easier.

People usually bemoan when a game’s pvp gives a buff to a losing team that’s outmanned/outgunned. GW2 is the first MMO I’ve seen where the team that’s zerging gets a pretty significant boost (orbs) and the team that’s being zerged gets nothing.

I’ve also noticed that meteor shower seems to have a set number of hits it can deliver. I’ll consistently drop it on huge zergs and visually see it score a ton of hits, but after the first meteor or two end up hitting 6-7 targets, the hits stop registering. My combat log frequently shows only 6-7 hits off the skill when there were at least 30-40 players in the aoe for the duration. I know it’s rng, but you’d expect more hits then that. I’d say meteor shower is fine.