Guild Wars 2

What kind of play are you aiming for? Solo roaming? Small group? 15 man? Zerg?

Your D/D build is okay for roaming but way too much condition gear. PTV + Knight’s armor + Cavalier accessories.

With a very high Fury uptime your crit chance is > 50% anyway, making the +critdmg from Cavalier’s more useful.

oZii.2864:

I disagree you don’t want to use any auto attacks for any of the attunements except Air that is the one auto attack with D/D that you should be using it is the best auto attack an ele has it does almost as much damage as thief dagger auto attack but has 300 range on it.

Perhaps you misread. The Dagger Air auto-attack is really good, but you’re not going to spam it over other abilities. It’s a “last resort” in that you’re going to cycle your major CD’s in other attunements before you rely on it too heavily.

Kaleban.9834:

Almost any build for any area (bar high level fractals and using Focus) you’re going to be relying on Fire and/or Earth for damage, cycling into Air only when all your other skills are on CD. That’s my problem with traits like Fresh Air, its a crutch for poor design.

This really is the crux. The “good” stuff in Air (RtL, Updraft, Static) has such long cooldowns that you really don’t want to be swapping back to Air just to end up using auto attacks.

When playing D/D, the auto attacks are a “last resort” between your other elements, so you can keep some pressure up while you wait for things to come off cooldown.

Fresh Air sounds like a good idea until you realise it genuinely doesn’t give you anything useful over a non Fresh Air build. I typically max out at 20 in Air (Zephyr/Bolt or Alacrity/Bolt) and then, as everyone else does, dump the rest into Water & Arcane.

I believe that the attunement reduction should be reduced by default, that Evasive Arcana should be an Adept trait (10 Arcane) and Fire & Air fixed to make them more attractive.

Depends on what you’re doing: following a zerg, running in a 15-20 man, or small group/roaming.

Aim for around 2600 armor though. Rest very much depends on spec.

Sari.1247:

What’s your new guild called Karps?

Splash Attack [WET]

ykyk.2740:

Because “ANET” doesn’t make people transfer. People make people transfer, and at the rate things are going these people are in for a very uninteresting time in WvW.

It’s alright, those League Finishers are totally going to be worth the 600 PPT PvD.

Totally.

Wraistlin.6072:

IceBlink.4317:

Has the new stats for superior rune of the traveler been interesting enough for usage in anyone’s elementalist build?

Just to remind people so they don’t need to look it up:
(1): +10 to All Stats; +2% Critical Damage
(2): +15% Boon Duration
(3): +10 to All Stats; +2% Critical Damage
(4): +10% Condition Duration
(5): +10 to All Stats; +2% Critical Damage
(6): +25% Movement Speed

Taking just two is tempting, haha.

Like you said; I’ve seen many take 2 of these, with 2 water, and 2 monk (think it’s monk) for the +15% boon duration for all of their second tiers. I haven’t tested it myself but that would be 45% boon duration increase if they stack.

They do stack

Looks good to me. I’d maybe run Divinity or Traveler runes for the extra crit damage since you are already pretty tanky.

What are your overall stats?

2600 armor and 20 in Water is pretty solid for D/D, but it’d be nice to know your other stats to give some context.

I have “large-ish” hands, but not incredibly so. I re-bind 5 to Q as it makes sticking to WASD a bit easier.

Apple aluminium keyboard, so not anything special in terms of key spacing.

I use:

Shift + R/C/V/B for attunements
1/2/3/4/Q for spells
R, T, shift + T for utils
shift + Q for my elite

PS: There are tons of builds for both on http://intothemists.com/guides/ and on this forum. Use Google instead of the forum search and set the date as June 1st to get recent (post-patch) builds.

S/D can be pretty good for small scale/roaming, given that it’s similar in numbers to sPvP. The downside is that DT and Phoenix aren’t as great without a node to drop on. Blind spam and Fresh Air burst are still effective, however.

D/D is pretty popular for roaming. Run the usual Cantrips and/or Arcane utils for added burst.

You really have to play your fights well to succeed as either build though: Ele’s are unforgiving and have a fairly high skill cap.

We don’t need another layer of mechanics. It will just act as another weight to balance against—you need to make sure that a “full bar” Ele isn’t OP, which is likely to result in an empty bar Ele being dramatically underpowered.

(if a full bar doesn’t bestow a noticeable difference over an empty one, why have it?)

Azunai.5974:

elithrar.7143:

If “idea posts” are the tens (hundreds, if you include other class forums) of DOA ideas that Daecollo posts on a monthly basis, then I don’t want them.

Otherwise, there are certainly some solid idea posts (e.g. the Focus thread on the first page).

G-give the rifle thread a read if you havn’t yet.

I’ve read it, and believe it to be orthogonal to what the class needs. Our existing mechanics and weapons are mostly fine. We need some sensible fixes; we don’t need to spread ourselves thin with a weapon that doesn’t fit the class thematically (I’d rather MH sword in that case).

If “idea posts” are the tens (hundreds, if you include other class forums) of DOA ideas that Daecollo posts on a monthly basis, then I don’t want them.

Otherwise, there are certainly some solid idea posts (e.g. the Focus thread on the first page).

You can play whatever you want in a zerg. But if you want to be useful, Staff (0/0/10/30/30) with ’zerker trinkets and PVT/Knight armor will be the best fit.

Drop Static on the flanks to stun them; Earth 2 & 5 for the snares; and water fields so melee can blast them for heals.

I am well aware of how useful healing power can be. But your linked build has 10 points in Water, not 30.

A D/D needs to survive with strong burst and constant pressure. Sacrificing that is likely to end up with the other class out-sustaining you.

There is a magntitude more work in offering a OpenGL renderer than a native OS X support. It is precisely why a native Mac client doesn’t exist: forking their engine is a mammoth undertaking.

A wrapper around an OpenGL application and a native launcher is comparatively easy.

Full Celestial is a massive waste for PvP. Your power & crit damage are well below where they should be and all that +healing & +cond is useless in a D/D build.

Run Valk amulet + ’zerker jewel.

This is one of the most well thought out threads on any class forums. The OP understands that balancing isn’t just “obvious” buffs (which often have not-so-obvious ramifications) such as cool down decreases, but also about providing utility with respect to other weapons. Resolving weaknesses without just making abilities more spammable.

Hoping for some good fights tonight from JQ & FA. Apparently I knocked off a bit too early last night.

That sounds like fun to balance. How do you massively improve a “specialized” attunement without making the [supposedly more skilled], 4 attunement Ele underpowered?

How do you balance 2 attunements being viable, without overpowering 4?

It’s not possible without having linked cool downs between attunements, and then why have 4?

Not all classes are as equally easy to play.

Schwartzy.9573:

1) Map loading takes an ungodly amount of time and even when the area appears my character is invisible and immobile for another 3 minutes or so. There have been times when I am attacked and can’t move to defend myself.

Tried a repair on the install? (check the stickies and the Wiki)

2) Watching Activity Monitor on my dock I see that my inactive RAM slowly swallows up my free RAM as the game goes on and eventually I have to stop playing because it gets so slow. I have used the “purge” command in Terminal but now this is causing other issues on my computer.

Has anyone else dealt with similar problems or heard of any solutions that helped them?

Thanks!

Mid-2010 13" MacBook Pro, 4 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB

You have a very underpowered GPU. There’s only so much that can be done here.

Note that “inactive” RAM isn’t a problem—it’s simply RAM reserved by processes that the OS might take back if it needs to. You should never need to run purge—that’s not solving your problem and it’s just a placebo.

Either get more RAM, upgrade your machine (add an SSD; buy a new machine, etc) or tweak your settings downward.

Not surprising (in a good way). Tiny userbase, expensive (time + resources) development & deployment costs.

Are the drivers installed? Do you have desktop zoom running? Tried relauching the game? Rebooting after the driver install?

saithira.9037:

If ANet had a department over here idd gladly quit my current position and join ANet to help them make an OSX client, if they would have me.

And for the DirectX stuff, I know, OpenGL is hardly a big problem with windows, just check out blizzards games

Blizzard targets both Direct X and OpenGL with their game engines. Which is no small feat at all, as they can be remarkably different (and hair pulling) at times.

Many people in this thread severely underestimate the work required to build a native client, test it and then keep it in sync with upstream changes in the Windows client. This includes every hotfix and patch as well, without impacting their current turnaround times. None of that is free, and given the tiny Mac user-base—likely < 1%—hardly a sensible way to spend time, money and add complexity to development workflow.

Relaunch the client. It’s a rare-ish bug with the embedded browser (Awesomium).

Cries Of Sorrow.5864:

or go back to the warrior forums where you posted overpowered suggestions.

This.

Daecollo posts crazy suggestions in nearly every class forum (+ the sPvP forums) on a daily basis.

These posts are neither constructive nor useful to the devs.

This thread genuinely confuses me.

Stack Power, throw in some Precision & Toughness where needed. Run D/D or S/D and profit. I recently brought an Ele up to 80 and had zero issues killing 2-3 equal level mobs and/or a vet + adds.

You can’t expect to run Staff and kill things fast, just like a Warrior can’t go Mace + Shield and expect the same.

It’s extremely rare (if at all?) that a group won’t take an good Ele for dungeon content. Only the top fractal groups or speed runs will care, and they won’t look for members on GW2LFG or in map chat.

Use a good PvE spec, wear the right gear (‘zerker) and play well. Ele’s are strong in PvE and complement a group of Warriors/Guardians/Mesmers well.

http://gw2crafts.net is your friend.

Spec staff, roll with the karma train and drop combo fields and AoE to tag up enemy players.

WvW levelling, regardless of class [and forum!] isn’t super efficient, unless you’re steam-rolling other servers and not protecting your assets in any way, since you’ll eventually run out of towers to roll over.

There’s only so much a level 32 (uplevelled included) can do in WvW against players in full exotics with a full set of trait points. I’d just have some fun and treat it as a “break” from PvE.

PS: You could always craft your way to ~65-70 and then level the rest of the way in WvW with boosters.

It’d be more similar to Engineer TK #5 — “Magnet”. 1200 range pull (but a bit buggy).

Note that some will argue that the leap is a nice escape mechanism.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Lets-see-your-engineers

OzDragon.5482:

Just to me it makes no sense that a grenade has the same range as the long bow or the rifle. In my opinion the range should be no more than the pistol which is 900. Now I understand it would be a nerf but its not that big of a nerf.

Also this is just my mind not being able to wrap around the fact that I can throw a 3 pound metal ball or two at the same time further than I can shoot a pistol.(and yes I understand it’s a game)

It’d be a big WvW nerf (when fighting attackers on walls or below walls).

It’s “dumb”, but let’s not just suggest nerfs for the sake of it.

MonMalthias.4763:

So I would say that it is not Backpack Regenerator that is OP, rather, Adrenal health is – after the condition management changes for warrior .

Nail on the head. I’m glad there are people who “get” the faulty logic in comparing traits between classes.

That being said, I have never and will never take Backpack Regenerator in any build. I believe Teldo used it at one point in his condi-burst far point assault build – and you’ll still see some engineers running it because they copy-pasted his innovation – but it is far inferior to something like Protection Injection where the additional mitigation you have while disabled is far stronger than any passive health regeneration.

I wouldn’t mind a rework of the trait though. Passive regeneration – even on a specific trigger of requiring a kit to be equipped – is boring and it takes up a Major slot to boot. Perhaps a trait replacement that introduces Stability on a specific trigger may be in order.

I got caught on this when I swapped to Engineer at first—needing a reliable build before figuring out “what works” for myself after some warm-up time. I now run Protection Injection on nearly any build with 20 in Alchemy (and that’s most of my builds).

I definitely agree on the need for a better “on demand” or at least “guaranteed” Stability boon.

Whilst I’m in this thread, I’d very much like a change to Speedy Kits. Mashing kit swap keys to keep it up isn’t “fun” in any way. Might as well just make it a 10s swiftness to make it less of a pain to maintain the buff without making it too powerful/hands-off in combat.

surama.5167:

Im [CA] member, one of the top WvW guilds of Blackgate, and my main is engineer. I read the many whinnig and im sad. Engi is one of the most OP classes.
I cant share my full build, but can give few tips:
Use flamethrower/mines. Mines removes boons, then burn all enemy to ash.
You have 73% damage reduction when disabled if you well traited and combines with food.
Use Elixir X.
I have 3400 attack, 30% crit chance, 34% crit damage, 3200 armor and 25 000 HP.
So, this underpowered?
Good luck to to create for your own build

Good build advice, but at the same time one has to assume that your FT recommendation is for small-group (< 20) fights rather than ZvZ. Flamethrower suffers the same problem as grenades vs. Retal, except you have to get even closer to use FT.

For ZvZ I usually run GK/BK and either Boots or EG. I skirt around the edges with grenades, elixir gun spam and then dropping water fields on our > 15 – 20 man group (we don’t run with bigger groups than that).

I eat a lot of damage from grenades—ignoring barrage—and whilst it won’t kill me in one hit, if you add that + other incoming AoE damage + some direct damage, you’re taking a lot of “extra” unavoidable damage that you have to heal off.

If grenades simply returned one target’s Ret damage rather than targets (plural) ret damage, it’d be much better (or if it was just hard capped to a % of outgoing damage).

PS: I’m sure we could all submit ideas for fixing Ret. I really don’t care about the specifics, as long as it’s better than now.

Heeb.3178:

All this skill lag… is this how T1 is? How do you even play like this

111111111111111111111111

NevirSayDie.6235:

True enough. I was thinking of the last several patches, with dogged march, healing signet becoming incredibly powerful, banner buff, signet buff, berserker stance, etc. But yes, the healing signet was perhaps the biggest one.

I liked the way they balanced the Warrior. Lots of minor tweaks across a few patches to test stuff. That stuff was real “quality of life” stuff—Dogged March being a favorite.

The issue is that bandwagon players who jump on the FotM see it all as having come in “one hit” and assume that ArenaNet was heavy handed.

MonMalthias.4763:

@NevirSayDie:
I’d argue that Warrior is actually almost balanced, just a little OP.
The main culprit is in Sigil of Paralysation rounding up stuns by a full second (!!!) which turns Earthshaker, Skull Crack, Shield Bash, Pommel Bash etc. into a full CC train that is nigh impossible to break out of without long (6+ seconds) upkeep of Stability.

As a Warrior (our group needs more heavies than Engineers, unfortunately) in WvW, I totally agree. I was running a roaming mace/shield + sword/mace stun build w/ Sigil of Para and Berserker Stance, and I could run into a fight with ton of adrenaline and just lock someone down hard thanks to Sigil.

Sure, lots of morons run zero stun-breaks and expect to have no problems, but against this build it gets a bit much: if you get into melee range you’re going to eat one of the 3-4 stuns (mace f1, mace 3, mace 5, shield 4) and chances are your stunbreaker will only save you from one.

NevirSayDie.6235:

You’re behind the times. Warriors received some hefty PvP buffs and are now at the top of the food chain there, probably one of the best two professions.

To be fair, Warriors received sustain buffs (healing skills, mostly) and it was then that the majority of players figured out that Warriors were now useful and jumped on to the Mace/Shield stun build train. Nothing in that build itself was “buffed” — the stun trait and Sigil of Para existed prior to the buff.

Finding medium armor that isn’t skimpy is hard work. Defaulted to the Orr temple coat.

Rabid.

Vitality (Carrion) isn’t as useful to us as we have plenty of heals. It’s mitigation we need.

I would like more utility with gadgets across the board. Rocket Boots is pretty good as-is (I really wish it was still a stun break, though), but Slick Shoes would be nice on a 30s/30s (utility/toolbelt) cool down.

Nice work. Ruins are great for the line-of-sight.

Will probably see you around given I’m on BG

Chaba.5410:

Learn to combo too.

This x 1000.

AzernakO.9627:

I suggest NOT picking a tall race if you can like how the other races look. Tall races have camera troubles when trying to do certain jumping puzzles. My Charr took like 2 hours to do Troll’s End when my Human took like 10 minutes.

It sorta sucks, but it’s not a huge dealbreaker. For PvP it doesn’t matter so much, besides the small Asura advantage due to smaller (harder to read) animations and dodges.

magikfox.9658:

Woah, Super Adventure Box, you get some, guuurl!

FTFY!

PS: I’m from BG.

Quoting a single change to Spirit Rangers without noting the rest of the changes is disingenuous.

All spirits can now be launched, knocked down, and knocked back.
Storm Spirit, Frost Spirit, Sun Spirit, Stone Spirit, and Spirit of Nature will now begin their recharge when the spirit dies instead of when the spirit is summoned.
Storm Spirit, Frost Spirit, Sun Spirit, and Stone Spirit: Recharge has been reduced from 60 seconds to 25 seconds.
Spirit of Nature: Recharge has been reduced from 240 seconds to 180 seconds.
Solar Flare: Fixed a bug so this skill no longer applies a duplicate infinite duration blind.