Guild Wars 2

Let’s face it: no one actually encounters scripted agony and tell themselves “wow that’s cool I am so glad they implemented this!”

It’s bad.

Ok time to talk about 30/30

Here is what I have come up with:

Traits
Fire: ember’s might, burning precision, persisting flames.
Air: air training and fresh air as usual, and what you like for adept (bolt to the heart is a safe choice).
Earth: stone splinters.

Optimal spell rotation:
There are two phases: earth and water.
1) earth:
-swap to fire, cast burning speed
-swap to earth, cast ring of earth and magnetic wave to blast your fire field
-swap to air and use lightning whip until fire is back up
2) water: same, except you use frozen blast and comet in water instead of being in earth.

With this rotation, if you manage to blast your fire fields you will produce 20s of fury every 30s. All you need to cap fury for your group is to use an other blast finisher. Arcane wave is the obvious choice.
Burning precision will enable you to maintain a very high uptime of burning on your targets (80% on average) and if your burning speed trail hits you will maintain more than perma burning.
The chance of failing fresh air procs virtually null.

It could be good to have assassin gear instead of zerker. This is because a high crit rate enables us to produce more burning and more vulnerability, while our damage is not compromised. I need to work more on this before I can confirm.

Thoughts:
pros
- very high damage, comparable to warriors.
- share perma fury
- requires high attention only for a short amount of time (fire combo)

cons:
- difficult to achieve: the fire combo chain is hard to pull off, and it may fail due to overlapping fields or moving target.
- burning speed’s trail does not always go all the way to the blast location, so making sure it hits is not easy.
- blast combos have a small radius so fury sharing may fail
- no access to vigor or any elemental attunement boons
- no extra heal or support
- sigil of battle may proc oddly due to our swapping pattern
- since we are using magnetic wave in our rotation and since we do not have cleansing wave (water trait), our condition removal is weak. In addition, we have a low health pool, so conditions will hurt us even more. Basically, three seconds of burning is all it would take to bring us down to below 90% hp (=damage loss). This is an important concern to me.

Conclusion:
Very desirable in an optimized group. High risk, high rewards
Things to consider: for trait variations we are locked into 30/30, this gives us 10 points to play with. Earth is the obvious choice for damage, but we could also use them in arcane (will talk about this variation later).

Discussion
Let’s talk about this. It is easier to be more complete in our evaluation of the build if we discuss it. We could play around with runes and sigils. I would like to hear what you have to say about this!

Shadowfax.7562:

Guys it works correctly! Only after this patch I’ve totally understand this trait!

You can see a small icon that is blinking under your boons icons when you switch the attunements! And yes it is 5 seconds! This means that we get +10% bonuses from one attunement being in another!

Nope

Razor.6392:

Zelyhn.8069:

Axelifus.3269:

Agony is only subject to agony resistance alone.

And Anet’s will to make us farm instead of rewarding us for our skills.

Such skill putting 30 into earth~

I bet you my ascended dagger that it won’t work.

If you do precisely the rotation that you described then that portion is precisely half of your time.
Stoning has a coefficient of 0.5, an animation time of 1.35s, and is single target.
Its damage per second is equal to one third of that of lightninh whip.
I really hope that your team mates know how to make the most out of the might stacks you give them!

I would like to express my utmost gratitude at your renewed efforts to make this game a bug-free experience.

Many thanks and may the force be with you.

I doubt you deal more damage than my D/F zerker scholar 30/30/10/0/0 though

Wanna hear a funny story? The title is Lingering Elements.
Don’t laugh yet, wait, it’s worth reading.

The story takes place a few month before the last “big” balance patch.

Since the release of the game the developers had been messing around with the Lingering Elements trait, nerfing it, breaking it, fixing it, rebreaking it … it simply never work as described, it never worked as the devs admitted it to work, it was just broken and close to useless. Yet, this trait is placed in what used to be a compulsory trait line. In that line is also located Arcane Precision, an other broken trait. Both are minor traits, so no way to pick something less broken and more useful instead.

For many months we reported these issues to the developers and nothing happened. They kept claiming to have “fixed” Lingering Elements, repeatedly, but this was not true. This is why the elementalist community decided that enough was enough. We started a thread in which we intensively called for Anet’s attention. The thread has been heavily moderated and we all got many infraction points in this struggle. But this was a just cause.

Many many times I made suggestions to improve this trait. I believe my most sensible suggestion was to make the mechanic of Lingering Elements natural to the class: all attunement bonuses would linger for a brief time after swapping out. When I mean all bonuses I really mean all, not just the adept minors like it is now. Then I suggested that the Lingering Elements trait could simply extend the lingering duration. So this would mean that all build would be able to use attunement specific bonuses like Piercing shards in other attunements, to some extent. I felt this would be a good suggestion because it would allow us to play with the elements. It would feel right for an ele.

Finally the devs cared for us a little bit. The 10/12 patch arrived. In the patch discussion thread we started an interesting conversation with Jon Peters about lingering elements. You can find the beginning of the discussion here. Needless to say I was not the only one utterly shocked by the way this conversation went. Let me give you a little abstract of what we learned from the devs in that occasion:
- They had never read any of our very numerous suggestion and discussion threads on the topic.
- They couldn’t even do basic maths: we have 70 trait points to allocate, which means we can not reach a 50% damage bonus from attunement specific damage modifiers. Never! At best we can do 40%, if the target has vulnerability.
- They said that the stacking of damage modifiers would be overpowered. However this is exactly what we do in PvE. Is the ele overpowered in PvE? Well that’s a good question, but the point is that the devs have no clue about what is going on in PvE.
- They failed to understand that stacking damage modifiers by swapping attunements comes at a huge cost: to stack three attuements’ modifiers you need to swap twice, the swapping cooldown is 1.65s, so that’s 3.3s wasted on just swapping, which allows you to use the stacked modifiers for 5 – 3.3 = 1.7 seconds at best !!! And this would work only every 13s (attunement cooldown). So we could do this famous “massive damage in a single attack” that manifesto promised us, at the expense of a bad spec, 2 attunement cooldown, with obvious telegraph (swapping) and long cooldown.

“Overpowered” they said.

Edit: they also admitted that our adept minor traits need work. Still waiting.
Edit2: for extra fun, look at the tooltip for lingering elements in-game
Oh and since I am delivering personal messages, I might as well add: Jon we told you that Ember’s might (+25% burn duration) would not be used. Maybe it is time you start listening to the people who actually play the class. With all due respect.

also it is telegraphed as much as a marvel movie trailers tells you that the good guy wins in the end.

Also after the dodge you can proceed to rip that ele apart with the sheer power of your auto attacks: it’s not like he can do anything for the next 16 seconds.

30% boost is nothing.

Talk about QA failure.

It’s also the patch that buffed the glyphs , allowed for faster and better use of conjures, and it is the patch that buffed staff’s fire damage to the sky.

However it is not the patch fixing lingering elements despite this trait being bugged since release and having an enormous fun/diversity/cool potential.

Thank you Anet for making the ele class and making it interesting

That’s also what I am afraid of!

I didn’t like the D/D bunker either, but I liked that mobility !

Also you have to take into account the rather large list of things they change without telling us about it on the patchnotes, which makes us reason based on inaccurate information.

Kodiak.3281:

Big Tower.5423:

Thank you guys for the input, i think il go full healer/utlity for both pve and wvwvw (yes i know dps is meta… but im not a speedrun guy :P i wanna save the pugs xD

Don’t even worry about it man.

You could go in and do dungeons in white gear level 80 with zero stats or even any traits spent and provided you’re skilled enough to not flop over dead you can pretty much pull anything off and no one will ever say a word.

No one is going to call you out on your DPS or how you play because the truth is no one in game has any way to prove factually that one person is doing more DPS than another. They can calculate it all theoretically about what you should be doing to theoretically get the maximum DPS but since no one can actually check if you’re doing maximum DPS or even no DPS it doesn’t matter.

Sounds like you want to do support, go that route and if any one gives you any guff (not that I’ve ever had anyone question anything I’m doing in dungeons over the course of 100’s of PUG dungeons) just tell them to mind their business.

Congratulations! You just won the 2013 award for worse advice of the year!

The existence of this item summoning a Mini Developer is blatantly a bug.

Did you really expect a game named Guild Wars would have anything to make guilds compete with each other in a way? hahha you naive!

But wait for first expansion, BUY it, then you can probably rent a guild hall with time token (gems!) to play GvG, probably.

Awesome!!
Thanks a lot, and good luck for upcoming tournaments

I don’t mean to be the one defending the devs in a thread that is clearly voicing our concerns, but this game is very complex, it is the most complex game I have played in my life in fact and I still believe that they are doing a job that I can qualify as good.

This thread is not the place to state how broken or not broken the elem is. These subjects have been debated more than enough in the past months and it has become clear that we need some attention.

This thread is a call for their attention. We have been asking for it many, many times. Now is the time to give us some answers.

I am sure they have read all our thoughtful posts. I am sure they are also thinking about changes, just like us.

What would make us happy is a few paragraphs from the devs telling us about it. How they view the class, how they feel about it, what are their lines of thought.

We need to know that something is being done.

The devs will reply to this thread if we make enough noise, so make them come!

Sure, I may lack reading comprehension Kodiak …
But the one thing you are definitely not saying is that people should care about their team mates in groups and try their best to achieve what they aim to do in order to have fun together and enjoy the game.

As for your vision of the community, you are wrong. There are many people who come on these forums and they simply don’t post anything, they just read.

I am pretty sure these people value the pieces of advice that tell them how to achieve more in-game, rather than those who tell them to faceroll their builds and gameplay.

The fact that some people could finish most content without thinking about what they do is irrelevant. People do not come on this forum asking for this, they come here in order to learn how to perform better. Maybe you should learn how to respect them.

I would like to get into a scientific analysis of our skills compared to that of other classes. For this evaluation to be meaningful we would have to include all factors affecting a skill.

Let’s take an example:
Elem’s lightning whip versus warrior’s axe chop chain.

• coefficient per second: 1.22 LW vs 1.36 Chop
• range: 300 LW vs 170 Chop
• commitment: must not interrupt chop’s chain to deal its damage versus uncommitted LW

So the question for these skills is as follow: are the extended range and commitment freedom enough to justify the loss in damage?

It is almost impossible to answer this question without further data. This is why I am asking for your help: I would like the community to do comparisons similar to what I have just showed you in order to establish the “price” of range in terms of damage, for example.

I am actually planning to use regression analysis in order to accurately determine the “price” of all factors in terms of damage

Please help me settle this debate scientifically!

Guides , calculators, advice, actually we are scumbag altruists!!

I should make a “Let’s yell” about this issue. I like my style.

More and more I am experiencing this habit that the community has to despise people who claim to be skilled for this game.

Try it: go to LA, and say that you are a good player.
(Note: I am not saying I do it. This sentence is for rhetorical purposes)

People will instantly tell you that you lack humility, that you are an elitist, that you are despicable etc; for no reason.

People do not want to see or be aware of the fact that some players can be more skilled than them (no boasting, just statement of skill). The community seem to believe that they would be better off without such players.
It appears as if the community would like to stay bad and play only with bad people.

It is also the same on the forums.

I believe this is not benefiting the game in itself because it promotes stale and boring gameplay additions rather than diverse and challenging content.

As a comparison: when you play football as an amateur you play it for fun and you dream of being as skilled as the players of international level. In GW2 the ’amateurs" have no such dreams, worse: they do not want to face the fact that being better is possible.

With all due respect, why the discrimination?

lLobo.7960:

dont complain about tooltip information pls, or they will nerf the skill to fit the info instead of changing the info…

Ever heard of lingering elements?

Again, do we have any data on what has been changed, if a change there was at all?

Elementalists: I’m alive !! … wait no, not anymore.

We cannot play the way we want

It’s not mobility that hurts us most in PvP, it’s the condition meta.
Mobility was the fun factor

Hello all, the title pretty much says it all, but let me elaborate:

-No tangible rewards (I play for fun, yes, but I find that rewards are additional fun)

-Too easy for the most part, lack of challenging content (apart from the encounters that require you to stay extremely focused and keep up reaction time at minimum for an extended period, at which point the difficulty only comes from the fact that you may loose focus for a split second …)

-Difficult parts are mainly difficult because they are incomprehensible/unreadable (I pay a lot of attention to animations etc.. but nothing is ever clear. Unless you acquire very extensive knowledge about the encounters you will find them messy)

-Inconsistent designs

-HP sponges everywhere, dull boss mechanics. (Unshakable is the dullest thing ever)

-Fun mechanics that are present in open-world PvE are yet to be found in dungeons (karka mechanics!)

-The one dungeon which I found fun and almost flawless (apart from some fractals) was temporary content

-No replayable value of story mode (add them to fractals!)

So at the moment I am compelled to running dungeons in a group of 3 in order to find challenge (yes you can do CoF with a group of 3). While this brings some fun to my gameplay experience, it accentuates the fact that mobs are hp sponges a lot!

Please give me fun.

Wethospu.6437:

Anet invented GW2 though. Or at least I hope so.

But is the Anet developing GW2 now the same as the Anet that invented GW2 then?

Snowblind
-new camera (completely unnecessary)
-mobs in the run-by part are more numerous or more packed

Yes I am being emotional and I apologize for this. This is all because I play mostly PvE and I can see quite clearly the state of the ele at the moment: it is not really bright. We have some builds that are incredibly boring, bypassing our class mechanics, and other builds that are interesting but they hardly deliver.

I have trust in your ability to balance classes. I can understand how difficult this is.
My mood only comes from the fact that I love this class. I am fascinated by its potential. Therefore I can easily commit crimes of passion

You really need to look at our most lacking traits:
- all alacrity traits – please give me the metrics: is anyone really using those?
- arcane precision
- Vigorous Scepter/Blasting Staff/Windborne Dagger should be combined as one, and include something for focus. Then you can introduce two new traits
- sunspot makes no sense since all fire attunement spells are at range on all weapons. It needs a bit more range or something like: your next attack inflicts additional fire damage
- conjurer is boring and it does not promote the use of our class mechanics (conjures need more attention, much more, despite your last awesome patch – no sarcasm)
- one with fire, flame barrier …
-zephyr’s speed
-zephyr’s focus, obsidian focus – we have like two channeling spells per weapon …
- arcane energy – metrics again please: has anyone ever slotted this trait for more than 2 minutes since release?

As for lingering elements I can understand your concerns about making this trait as awesome as we describe in this thread. But you should really consider this kind of changes: they make sense, they are fun, and they bring diversity.

Finally, I sincerely thank the Anet team for being so open and responsive. What you are dong as a company is ground-breaking. I highly respect you for this.

I have a strong feeling I am the one being trolled here

Don’t rely on the patch notes .. they don’t even list half of the changes they do in there!

And people, he is asking about your opinion, so if you have one give him instead of saying that “it depends on the player” :o

(this kind of sentences are just as uselss as saying “this is just your opinion” in a debate zomg)

Meta?

You put “guard” and “hard to play” in the same sentence, your argument is invalid.

Hello developers yesterday I tried my awesome and favourite 0/30/25/0/15 spec and I appeared than lingering elements was doing nothing.

How is it possible that a trait has no effect ?

Thank you for replying somehow.

So much for “collaborative development” …

It’s obvious how awesome this new “Fresh air” trait is.
Now I would love to see something similar for fire!
Maybe Fire Attunement is recharged if you inflict 4 seconds of burning while out of this attunement? (ICD shared with fresh air?)
With lingering elements this would give you a perma fire attunement, which could make the flame barrier traits useful, etc…
Discuss!

Fror.2163:

if, and I mean “if”, I read Guang correctly.

There is no correct way to read Guang.

dante.2864:

This trait is pretty strong in fresh air builds.
Anyone tried superspeed with greatsword elite 3 skill, swear to god that mobility seems like 2500 range and will escape anyting chasing u.

After you spend 1.5 seconds immobile casting GS

Honestly I am not an expert on WvW.
I do occasionally play it, but I doubt my experience is of any interest to the community:
-I play staff + LH full zerker scholar 10/30/0/20/10
-I am a complete chicken! A nuclear-loaded chicken but a chicken nontheless.

All I do is destroy zergs
my favourite moves:
-abuse terrain to make meteor shower bug and transform into tornado (like on a bridge for example)
-wind gust in a zerg
-static cage, conjure LH, jump, static cage from hammer, bash, jump, laugh at perma stunned zerg, then die.

When roaming I just hope that my Asura ears will help me blend in with the wild rabbits so people ignore me.

It is supposed to work in combat only

Oh it wasn’t about the OP

Overall the Elem is simply over-balanced for:

pros:
-versatility and adaptability

cons:
-lowest armor and lowest health
-weak skills (arguably)
-constraining class mechanic

The widespread opinion of the community is that these cons are too many and that they offset the pros too much.

Edit: However it is one of the most entertaining classes to play

I found a new bug with Lingering elements:
When you switch from air to water you are supposed to be able to cast air spells in the water attunement for 5 seconds but I can only cast water spells for this duration. It looks like there is something wrong …

Total bugs with this trait so far: five.

Actually an interesting benchmark would be something of the sort:

At the end of the dungeon some stats are produced:
-total damage dealt by the group
-total downs in the group
-total rezzes in the group
-total seconds of weakness applied
-total attacks blinded
-etc (many statistics representing all outputs inputs possible)

And then each player would get a personal debriefing telling them what percent of these totals they have produced.

You could even have a group average for each statistics so you can benchmark your group against the average group.

This way everyone knows what they have done personally, the group as a whole knows what they have done as a whole, and players afraid of performance checks won’t be threatened with public exposure.

Hello all and OP, I did not read all posts replies because I expect most of them will just blame you for using the word elitist and talking about progression, and all this non-constructive stuff I am familiar with on this forum . You know, people are afraid of performance :)

Anyway I would like to stress how useful of an idea this would be in order to know how well you can be performning at a personnal level. However, it would be extremely complicated to put in place (too many factors to include! and some would be subjective..). Also, once you know other classes it is very easy to know if they are doing their job (not the numbers but the boons, the cc ..) or not. Finally, content is too easy! Any team of 3 with brains can pretty much fly through everything untill fract 30 …
My advice: use the social side of the game. Only play with friends, with people you know, who have the same philosophy and will to perform as you. Be an elitist and play with elitists.

Oh, and expect people to despise you for wanting to perform…

Many people are going to hate me but I can’t wait until they design all movement-attack skills like FGS rush or whirlwind attack to hit foes only once per use.

I am tired of banging mobs against the walls. I want real fights.

Then we will see all those “meta” ele and warriors fail so hard not knowing what to do