Guild Wars 2

“You are going to play revenant and you are going to like it, because we say so!”
-Arenanet balance team

Same issue, all of the 3 tabs suffer from the same bug.

Are it´s hands on fire?
-if yes, prepare to dodge, obvious tells and big damage coming.

Did it just splash water around?
-if yes, good, heals are all gone, burst it´s sorry kitten down.

Did it survive?
-if yes, rince and repeat, it´s cantrips are running out sooner or later.

This is getting seriously funny. Each and everytime they want to “promote more varied gameplay”, “make alternate playstyles better”, “reduce the need to specialise into water/cantrip/arcane” or “give other builds more power”, they end up gutting all the tools those other builds have.
“ummm, guys, we have 2 traits offensive builds use for survival, and 3 traits that only the builds we want to nerf use…how about we nerf the 2 former ones?”

Nowadays whenever they mention anything along those lines i can´t help but giggle

Full celestias doesn´t have enough power is the problem. Larger the group you play in is, the more you need power/toughness and less relevant other stats become: Healing from team surpasses vitality and your own sustain, conditions get cleaned so efficiently they lose most of the damage potential.
To break it down further

In large groups you need
-power/toughness, you want to max these, power is the best damage source and toughness the best tool for survival in prolonged combat (which is every bigger engagement) Power is king though, so as much power as you can get while still being able to survive and contribute (if you keep escaping and kiting to survive, you aren´t doing damage)
-vitality only enough to survive the burst untill waterfields and team heals kick in
-healing power scales bad and most of the sustain comes from team anyhow, you do need a bit as ele for when you get focused or separated from team.
-precision/ferocity aren´t a focus. You´ll do better focusing on power because breakpoints where precision or ferocity gives more damage than power are so high, that after the baseline vit/toughness you can´t hit them (also berserker pieces, which you want to use as your power sources, give these anyhow)
-condition damage isn´t relevant, too much aoe condi clear around.

While roaming you can treat is as 1v1 wih time limit, you need to max killing potential while staying alive, so most of the defensive stats from celestial goes to waste, and you´d much rather have higher offensive stats. Long fights will get you killed because there is always more enemies coming, just a matter of time.

Basicly, like people have said, 150-250 points worth of celestial is a sweet spot where you get basic survival efficiently from celestial, and the the damage potential from the rest of the equipment.

Jski.6180:

Ele getting the biggest buff in the game out of all of the classes from the new trait system the 10 sec swap being a base line effect. It opens up every build that you could images…

I´m not sure if you´ve realized how powerful EA is. The sustain and utility it brings is what made people specc into aracane, and people will keep doing it for the same reasons. To even get the same effective hp out of passive reduction like earth -20% trait you´d need to take generously estimating 7,5k damage every 15 seconds, never to mention other perks like perma vigor, might stacking from blasts, blinds etc.
Attunement cooldown is nice change, but it´s not the only thing that drove people into arcane line, not by a long shot. And same goes for water 15 trait, the insane effective hp can´t be replaced with anything.

Coldtart.4785:

Damage modifiers are multiplicative so that’s a 52% damage reduction (108.33% effective HP increase).

You can also add stone heart to that to make one of the strongest counter burst tricks in the game by reducing your foes damage to 48% of standard non-crit down from potentially 165% of standard non-crit with fire and air procs. That means they’re doing only 29% of their potential dps even without factoring in lost sigil procs.

Did they change this?
Last time i tested (when frost aura got 10% reduction) it was just straight up 43%reduction

More likely it´s the skill type for ether renewal, torando and such. They did say all skills will have a type in future.

There´s glyphs, conjuration (conjure weapons), cantrips and signets there too, and they´re not specialisations for sure since those skilltypes have been confirmed to be integrated in other specializations (water traits for cantrip bonuses etc.)
Furthermore, skillpoint are gone so hero points will likely be what you use to get skills, and thus they are on the same page where you spend thsoe points.

Correct answer is you mix it up.

About 2,5k armor, 15k+ hp and you should be set, max out damage after that, if it feels squishy slap some more armor on it and maybe a bit more hp untill you´ve learned to play bit safer.

Never mind the armor costs, when you find proper stats you still need 1-4 copies of the sets for different runes, some of which costs 6×8g for the set.

Guardian tomes can be chained(rarely is there just a single guardian), they are ground target with large aoe, are .75 cast time without any real aftercast, offer protection egen and blinds too and to top it off the healing per second with very little investment is better than what ele can do with full investment including the new trait). What´s more, they aren´t locked into the role, if there´s no healing needed, they can reserve their cooldowns and do their other jobs efficiently, while ele specced into healing power is essentialy guy who lacks everyhting else all through the fights.

Autotattacks are beyond useless in real situation. You lose too much (your other skills are crying because you neglect them), gain too little(healing is really mediocre, and scales horribly) and they aren´t even reliable in hitting allies.

Scepter #3 has 1.0 coefficient, each point of healing power is point of extra healing. Geyser has combined coefficient of .75 if all 3 ticks hit which they rarely do, most likely it´s goint to be .5 or at worst .25…..that´s 25-75% of your main stat completely wasted.

You´ll still want elemental attunement in that build, the high uptime buffed up regen is going to heal nearly as much as water swaps or EA during longer periods.

S/D gives more direct healing than staff, mostly because scaling on staff skills and blasts is atrocious, and also, those staff skills are ridiculously complicated to get full potential out of.
Staff water #1 is useless anywhere but in rare pve cases, the range is too low, the healing too low and to top it off the coefficient for healing power in that one is horrendous. It also leaves you sitting in water stopping you from using most of your actualy useful skills (mass cc <3). Elementalist spamming water #1 is something beyond useless, he´s a complete liability to any group.
Staff water #3 is bit better, the coefficient is still bad and to gain benefit targets need to stay in radius, which is in most cases a death sentence. But hey, atleast people can blast the field.
Compare that to scepters water trident, instant effect with large radius, good enough range and full benefit from healign power. Cleansing water same thing except that it´s pbaoe, which shouldn´t be a probelm as you need to be in that range anyway for water swaps to have effect.

You will want EA in any healing build, dodges in water give more healing than any of the weapon skills.
You will want elemental attunement for high uptime regen. That regen does wonders over time, huge amount of healing potential from that given enough time.

So in short, atleast 30 in arcane for EA(regen) and EA(healing), get s/d for simple to execute heals that gain full benefit from healing power.

The thing is though, that most groups will want those waterfields for the blasts, which btw benefit absolutely nothing from all that investment into healing power as bulk of them will be from your team, and thus most of the actual healing is not done by you (and even if it was, the scaling on blasts is still horrendous, so you will not get big benefits from all that healing power).

Oh, and realise that after investing everyhting into healing power (literaly everything, life stacks, food, gear, runes…everything), you can heal just about as much as tome using guardian with 0 investment.

I´d dare to guess there´s going to be an actual boon duration focused rune set available, the monk one has the outgoing heals as it´s 6 piece bonus, not really boon related so i think it´s infact not the boon duration focused set.

I´d expect there to be 20-30% boonduration set available if skeptical, or 30-40% if optimistic.

To tank up more:

-Swap some soldiers parts for parts with toughness as main attribute, i like cavaliers a lot myself. Toughness is the king in wvw, where you can rely on healing to come from team, and thus points in vitality are near useless after you have enough to survive the spikes.
-Get rid of that useless dagger trait and use renewing stamina instead, kitten near perma vigor with that one. Also you should regularly have near 2 minutes of swiftness up if the guardians you run with know what they´re doing, and thus the trait does absolutely nothig for you.
-Consider swapping sigil of battle for sigil of energy, it gives the same effect as perma vigor would, so in essence with vigor and sigil of energy you can dodge 4 times in a time where you could dodge twice without em.
-Drop the crappy signet and equip lightning flash, best way to tank damage is not to be in the damage in first place. Despite this one note being a stunbreak anymore, it´s more than enough to get you to safety.
-Realise you can never ever ever take tha same amount of punishment as heavy classes, so stop trying to and start zipping in and out of the train with the mobility skills you have.

For anyone who thinks this will be even passable in wvw:

If you go staff most of your healing skills have low coefficients for healing power and most healing comes from your team blasting the fields.

If you go s/d (has most direct healing out of all sets), you can do respectable 1.5 to 1.7k healing per second if you have full healing power (abokittenely maxed, life stacks and all).
The thing is that a guardian who just slotted tome of courage outheals you with 0 additional investment.

If it´s just a +% to healingpower, it´s trash.
If it´s +% to outgoing heals, it´s still kittening bad.

If it´s +% to healingpower to allies, it´s trash.
If it´s +% to outgoing heals, it might have some use.

Maskah.1486:

I saw 7k pop up from 1 meteor shower drop when I did this combo last night. Granted this combo only works in very large fights and for clearing camps. It can only be done once every 150 seconds and your mobility really sucks! It is also funny how people will try to stay away from you when you tornado in a fire field.

2-6k are normal hits on decent enemy from tankier eles.
4-8k are normal hits on decent enemy from glassier eles.
10k above it´s usualy uplevelled player.
20k above it´s uplevelled player and your´re stacked on might.

The effect as far as i remember is basicly one tick of damage more, and a little bit longer field to blast.

if you´re downing people with ms you´re talking about figthing zergs, right?

Anyway, aurashare with some fairly tanky stats, or glassier sideline ganker can both work.

0/10/0/30/30
0/0/20/20/30
0/0/20/30/20
Are all nice options, stability on earth attunement is real life saver and amazing tool for stomping.
Elemental attunement is must have for team and self buffs.

ThiBash.5634:

Tsume.3490:

You forgot to mention default lifepool and armor type.

Armor is a relatively minor component, but yes, for a good discussion those factors need to be included as well.

I´d hardly call 291 (314 if ascended) free stat points while having same defense a minor component.
Healthpool advantage equals over 750 points of vitality btw.

ThiBash.5634:

Do you understand my point?

Yes i understand that that SoR will propably never have decent standalone healing, but at the same time you´ll have to see how huge the healing signet really is for one single skill.

And also you´ll need to understand that the same thing applies to almost every aspect of ele:
It´s not really good, but hey, you can invest into it to make it be on par with others. And there comes in the problem, you can´t trait/invest for everything. So youll have to trait and spend points to make some aspects be average, and then rest will be lackluster.

Just informing you that real cooldown with “on attunement” type of effects is 11.25s. 10s attunement cooldown when you leave it, but you can´t leave it before the 1.25s cooldown from when you swap into it has gone, so 11.25 in total minimum.

It´s impossible gain absolute maximum healing per second from cleansing wave and water swaps both because swapping to water on cooldown means that there´s extra 3.75s where your cleansing wave is off cd but you´re out of water.

Giving signet proc rate of once a second is rather generous like i earlier pointed.

And finaly, all the above describes ele playing his character perfectly, not getting chilled/interrupted, and stopping to do the healing when it´s off cd despite what situation calls for.
Meanwhile warrior can sit there spamming autotattack and receive almost equal healing.

ThiBash.5634:

Strang.8170:

1 trait, 30 points locked, weapon choice locked, runes locked, food locked.
Without boonduration it´s about 80% uptime on regen/swiftness

If you re-read my post you can see that with just a staff and Elemental Attunement, you get perma swiftness and regeneration. The usefulness of the might stack is debatable and yes, you only have 50% protection uptime with said build.

If you make a full build, adding boon duration and the fire field’s fury, things just get better.

With staff and ea it´s still just 80% regen about 90% swiftness. Ofcourse like i said it´s a powerful build with rest of it there too, but it´s hardly just 1 trait that makes the build, you need to sacrifice a lot more for the effects.
Just the fact that everyone bascily can do it because the points/traits/gear needed are optimal anyway doesn´t mean it´s a free choice, there´s a lot of commitments needed to get the build, which will become obvious if we ever get build choices that compete with the ones mentioned.

Well, i once counted the average skill usage in actual combat for fairly spammy d/d (for myself that is), got somewhere around 0.7-0.8 casts per second.

Why is there regen and such included? those are additional investments into traits/weapon choices, both of which warriors can do too to boost the healing.

ThiBash.5634:

Pretty much, though I find it useful in jumping puzzles occasionally.

Propably because that´s basicly the only palce where you notice it.

On a class with such a good access to swiftness it´s basicly non-existent trait.

ThiBash.5634:

So the bottom line is: eles can provide near permanent uptime of 4 boons through just 1 trait.

1 trait, 30 points locked, weapon choice locked, runes locked, food locked.
Without boonduration it´s about 80% uptime on regen/swiftness, it´s till just 1.24 stacks of might despite it sounding cool that there´s one permanent stack.

I´m not denying that eles can be good boonbots, but it´s far more investment than just one trait.

ThiBash.5634:

knowing that we have VERY little access to Stability.

We have Armor of Earth, a trait for another Armor of Earth, and a trait that gives us stability everytime we swap to earth attunement. That’s hardly ‘very little acces’.

It´s bit of an odd kind of stability being small bursts of it (very hard to work with sometimes), but hardly matters since eles are one of the classes that need the stability least.
One of the better uses i´ve found for this is lengthening stabilities teammates provide.

ThiBash.5634:

Why? Can guardians provide near permanent uptime of 4 boons through just 1 trait?

Neither can ele.
Just because every build propably should have it, doesn´t mean it´s free.

The trait alone needs 20 points investment, and the uptime from only that is 49.2% for regen, protection and swiftness, 123.1% for might meaning 1.23 stacks of might on average.
Maximum you can get (without the completely unviable stats like givers armor) is 86.7% which requires 30 trait points, all rune slots and food to pull off.
Any additional duration on any of those boons(except might) teamwide requires atleast either weapon choice or another 40 trait points and 2 major traits to be used

Well to be honest you can just facetank regular mobs in normal zones.

If you want straighforward ranged nuker, try well necro.

Nikkinella.8254:

Strang- He did only what was necessary to cc the enemy, heal the team and not die. End results are all that matter.

He didn´t really though.
To be honest, it would´ve been exactly the same results even if our clicking healer wasn´t there. Most of the time he kept autoattacking in water while team was full health or when there was nobody to receive the healing, questionable cc placement while not even using everything he has, slow skill chains (i mean come on, 1s stun should be plenty to land next bit of cc on the target), slow reaction to attacks, almost no utilisation of damage eles can pump out, seriously inefficient kiting, complete disregard for some of the best skills he has…
…and signet of air!? attunement swap properly and you´ll have near perma swiftness with staff and elemental attunement alone (which he clearly is using already).

He did indeed survive when few people “focused” him…by running around not doing even what little he previously did for his team… Go look up something from good wvw guilds eles Scnd, RG, VII, Sin etc. they can survive full guild train running over them while still supporting their own team

Wyrden.4713:

the moment meteor gets red circle, any half deent zerg can avoid meteors.

thats the issue, in gvg elementalists will be not neccessary at all(staff eles)

Please do mention a good gvg guild that won´t run any staff eles at all, i´d love to hear who thinks waterfields aren´t needed.

Hello mister squishy, meet the gank squad of most decent guilds and say bye bye to your hitpoints.

It really is hilarious though what ms+tornado can do

….So much potential wasted….

Care to explain what exactly in that video shows that your “healer” isn´t just gimbing the group by starving it of all the cc and damage staff ele is capable of? Or what is so good about almost dying multiple times despite all the defensive cooldowns being there and trying to click water fields that nobody then blasts?

It´s also rather atypical show of…skill?…to gank people coming out of spawn in eb, you do know most of those people have no idea of what they´re doing?

x/x/x/30/30 classic build shold work, swap some traits when you switch between zerging and roaming. Start tanky and swap armor parts for more deeps the less you die.

And also, if you ever find a decent guild, and you totaly should if you´re interested in the best wvw can offer, you can start to specialise your build ofr whatever is needed.

Aurashare/boon suport d/d, ganking d/d, staff support, staff semi dps…pretty much anyhting that does things and doesn´t die to a sneeze.

Going glass in a gvg is a bad idea. If your opponent is any good, they will find you and kill you, no matter how hard you try to hide behind your friends.

magic fly.2041:

Also curious to see what melee professions will do with a staff and scepter.

It will probably be a long time coming.

Ever heard of a quarterstaff or a baton?

i mostly have problems with game teleporting me back after the lf…so furstrating…

Well, that would explain why i feel like 55 monk without protective spirit when i´m testing some builds.

Graendall.4765:

Oho.Indeed.Maybe i will just wait for the patch.How many D/D auramancers/buffers would you reckon a raid with 30 people should have?1 or 2?

On a separate note we fought you yesterday in WvW.[ObV] guild,you guys have gotten even better from when you left Piken

Number of dagger eles depends completely on raid composition, usualy when i play daggers i just cover up holes left in groups due to lack/abundance of other classes. Some of our d/d run more of a sideline ganking role, which is whole another topic.

And thank you
Sadly i wasn´t playing yesterday, but it´s nice to hear that we´re making progress.

Malcastus.6240:

Strang.8170:

Do note the exact wording:
“While attuned to water, your spells deal more damage to vulnerable foes”

Shouldn’t it work with Lingering Elements?

Nope,
enjoy the joke that is lingering elements, only the 5 point minors linger, nothing else does.

KrazyFlyinChicken.5936:

…

And this would be the borderline viable use in burst builds to get the damage delivered i mentioned earlier.

Boon duration will propably be slighlty nerfed(propably still stays viable), will have to see how it gets affected, but so might the -condi duration too. If you want to be safe wait untill the balance patch.

If you want to run the supportish boon bot build, there´s basicly few options.

Stability+protection 0/0/20/30/20 (*)
fury+protection 0/10/10/30/20
Fury+EA 0/10/0/30/30 ()
protection+EA 0/0/10/30/30
stability+EA 0/0/20/20/30 (*)

*marked builds are what i consider the best options out of those, EA builds have a lot more sustain compared to those without, but lack bit of boon uptime of the non-EA builds, however they do have heals/blinds/blasts from EA.

Good thing about all of those is, that you can run them with the same gear, so you can swap simply by retraiting and do anything your group needs.

Staff, zerker, Glyph of storms (in earth), and you´re done.

Aura build without powerful auras?
And what´s with the staff trait?

Also, you don´t want to lose elemental attunement in team scenario, ever! So 20 arcana minimum.

Melandru runes are imho bit meh, you don´t really need that much condi reduction with ele, i prefer boon duration.

Lemme guess…if this goes live the actual skill facts state something like:
30s icd on passive, 120s cooldown on active.

Without the usual absurd cooldowns though, this could mean the ele bursts are sligthly more reliable, and support can swap attunements with little more freedom.

Do note the exact wording:
“While attuned to water, your spells deal more damage to vulnerable foes”

You might want to wait untill the rune/sigil overhaul they´re doing goes live. Nobody can tell how much sets will change, so safest bet is to wait a moment before wasting money on potentialy soon to be trash runes.

I tried to get this work in a cc focused wvw build, but it was just simply lackluster. In pvp builds too it´s usualy bad decision to pick this over EA even if you run some arcanes in your build.
So apart from the one borderline legitimate use in a burst builds where you can root the target before the burst, has anyone figured out a way to make this trait work?

Personaly i find that the base duration of condis is just way too low for grandmaster trait that has such a specific trigger.
If every enemy you hit would increase the base duration by something like 20-40% though…i could see it working. Keeps the pvp version pretty much where it is, as targets are scarce, but significantly boosts pve/wvw versions without splitting the trait.

Replacing the useless burn in fire with something like say weakness, and maybe also switching the air to somehing else…just personal wishes here.

silvermember.8941:

That would be a nice trade off, then you remember Arenanet is brilliant when it comes to balancing and they will probably do the same great job they did with the elementalist in Guild wars 1.

Ah, the famous stomp to the ground and leave there to rot for few years.
When the buffs then finaly come any people still remaining sure as hell will appreciate them

Fasyx.9347:

As I already mentioned above, GO AND PLAY SOME WvW and come back. There are guilds like Good Old Days(GD) or Red Guard(RG) which destroy zergs two times there size. Numbers dont matters, classes do!(usually every top guild will run warriors, guardians and elementalists + a few necros and mesmers).

It´s usualy more like necros and few eles and mesmers.
And usualy the eles don´t run all that glassy, it´s necros that deal bulk fo the damage along with the melee train.

Flissy.4093:

ErazorZ.5209:

Ele do little to no reall damage in staff

Obvious troll is obvious. Ele Staff is currently highest DPS in the game.

yea…if the enemy is gracious enough not to walk away from it.