Guild Wars 2

nearlight.3064:

Serenadin.3470:

I roll with both specs in exactly the scenario you describe: solo queue unranked.

Cele Staff is great support, but you have to have a team that coordinates well enough to take advantage of it. While you have some escape tools (cantrips, Fire 4, Air 3 and 5, Water 4, etc), you really need team members that can help peel so that you can cast your stand-and-deliver spells like Fire 5 and Water 5. Courtyard is great for this, since you’re fighting in a group, and you’re almost guaranteed to have a 5v5, so your support abilities will shine.

D/D is much more flexible, which is better when you’re grouped with randoms and have no idea what you’ll have to work with on your team. It’s a little frustrating on Skyhammer, since in addition to tracking everything that you need to do as an ele, you need to pay special attention to your positioning so that you don’t Fire 3 down kitten or off a cliff.

So what I do: I join up as my D/D, and if we’re doing courtyard or skyhammer or there’s another D/D, swap out to staff (I have two 80 eles, but the specs are so similar you can easily change them out in 30 seconds).

Yeah thats true. I just tried a game with staff and my teammates were circlejerking at the far point for most of the time, but we just barely won because I was able to tank mid long enough against 3 opponents. I’ll try D/D next, but I like staff a lot so far! What runes do you suggest for staff? metabattle says pirate which seems weird to me, and then doom/energy

The other point of view is “Whatever you’re having the most fun with”, and save the min/maxing for ranked. If you’re having fun with staff, no reason to force yourself to play a spec that you don’t like.

I’ve never had a problem with rune of the Privateer, as the power bonus helps a lot. Rune of Hoelbrak gives the same bonuses without the parrot if that annoys you, but given the amount of cleansing that you have, I feel that the capstone on Rune of the Privateer is better.

You can also experiment with swapping out the celestial amulet for zerker. It works well until people figure out that you’re a complete glass cannon and react appropriately.

I roll with both specs in exactly the scenario you describe: solo queue unranked.

Cele Staff is great support, but you have to have a team that coordinates well enough to take advantage of it. While you have some escape tools (cantrips, Fire 4, Air 3 and 5, Water 4, etc), you really need team members that can help peel so that you can cast your stand-and-deliver spells like Fire 5 and Water 5. Courtyard is great for this, since you’re fighting in a group, and you’re almost guaranteed to have a 5v5, so your support abilities will shine.

D/D is much more flexible, which is better when you’re grouped with randoms and have no idea what you’ll have to work with on your team. It’s a little frustrating on Skyhammer, since in addition to tracking everything that you need to do as an ele, you need to pay special attention to your positioning so that you don’t Fire 3 down kitten or off a cliff.

So what I do: I join up as my D/D, and if we’re doing courtyard or skyhammer or there’s another D/D, swap out to staff (I have two 80 eles, but the specs are so similar you can easily change them out in 30 seconds).

Altaholic here. My first 80 was a Guardian. My second was a warrior, my third was a Norn elementalist, and my fourth was an Asura elementalist.

I don’t touch my guardian. It was trying to recapture my favorite character from WoW, a retribution paladin, and it never really clicked. The class mechanics are easy to get a good grip on, and then you’re focusing all of your energy on trying to keep four suicidal maniacs alive. Every wipe is your fault, whether they tell you or not. Some people love having that support role, but for me it was less than satisfying.

Elementalist is a lot more engaging, and you’re spending the time on improving your own game, which for me was a lot more fun.

Honestly, just play both to level 20 and see what you like better. Just a word of warning: Until you get your full kit, elementalist is much harder to play at lower levels.

As for race: I swapped from Norn to Asura because:

1. Norn was annoying to do jumping puzzles with.
2. My other characters (Guardian, warrior, ranger) were also Norn, and I wanted something different to stare at.
3. I felt like I had a big fat bullseye on my when I waded into PvP.
4. I had 120 tomes and a bunch of gold, so ‘switching’ was almost completely free.

That said, it’s a matter of what you like to play most. However, if you’re trying to min/max based on race, then elementalist is definitely the class for you.

The problem suddenly isn’t reproducing. I downloaded a ‘clean’ .dat file from another computer which was about 3GB less and loaded it. Now when I try to use the bigger dat file that was causing the problems, the game loads just fine.

My machine:

Windows 8.1 64-bit
AMD Radeon HD 7900 series graphics card

Problem:

1) Launch GW2.exe
2) See initial downloading screen

Expected:

See login screen of launcher

Actual:

Launcher window disappears.

Things that I’ve tried:

• modified command line to log directly in (Gw2setup.exe -autologin -nopatchui -email stephen.m.peters@gmail.com -password hunter2)
  * -StreamingClient
  * Launching in Win7 compatibility mode
  * Deleting Data folder
  * Redownloading client
  * Renaming GW2Setup.exe to GW2.exe (both with original and newly downloaded exe)

I don’t have an error message, since all the process does is hang. I attached windbg and dumped out the thread stacks in case that’s useful, but I don’t have symbols for GW2.exe, so they’re somewhat limited. It looks like it’s waiting for some sort of IO to complete

Thanks

Welcome to the Elementalist family!

http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Elementalist_-_Staff_Conjure

That should get you started.

My first 80 was a Guardian, and my second is an Elementalist.

I got the Guardian to 80 first, since it was much easier to learn, and provided a good tool to learn the GW2 mechanics and how they differed from WoW. However, around level 40 it got boring as heck, and I started an Elementalist which, from what I learned, promised more interaction. It was frustrating compared to the Guardian, and I joked for a while that I kept it around so that I could remind myself as to why I didn’t play an Elementalist.

However, over a couple of evenings of “reminding myself why I didn’t play an elementalist”, things just started to click. While I won’t claim to be good at PvP, I became markedly less bad, even occasionally winning 1v1s. It’s much more rewarding for me mentally to pull off the Air 345 Fire 345 Earth 42 Water 45 Air 11111 combo than it is for me to run in circles trying to get my GS hits to land.

My advice: Have multiple toons. I also played a Warrior and Ranger to the high 60s/70s. This game is very alt-friendly, and it doens’t hurt much to try out a new class every now and then.

Final advice: Make them look different. We all know that Norn is the best race for everything, especially elementalist, but it gets boring staring at the same backside through 4 characters.

Narghile.4170:

Couldnt find better charr enginer look. Any advices for improvement or new look ideas?

I’m considering rerolling to a Norn Engineer just for this reason. That said, have you considered a top hat and monocle?