Guild Wars 2

I like warhorn for the Fire 5 when I rotate it with fresh air Overloads. By using the fire line it gives a 10 second fire field on a 20 sec cd that does very good damage, combine that with superior healing in water with 2 heals and a mobile water field that you can blast at least twice with a dagger main hand its quite nice. The on demand magnetic aura and prot are quite nice in earth as well.

Tomiyou.3790:

Humblekain.5418:

blubberblasen.3901:

do not use tempest LoL
play classic dd ele
armor of earth -> walk in -> teleport out -> kill him -> gg

This is one way to get murdered vs a competent DH; classic dd is still very vulnerable to the amazing longbow damage.

Also, Tempest is totally fine for 1v1 against DH.

Tempest won’t solve problems d/d has against DH, it’s all about the weapon skills, if anything, Tempest is even WORSE against DH since you are stuck casting 4s overloads, which against any decent DH means instant death. Aftershock has too long of a CD to reflect stuff.

Tempest is a teamfighter that should be avoiding 1v1s and should try to be a secondary point holder and support and whatnot. Leave the 1v1s to the scrapers or the condi reapers or the DHs or even the daredevils.

Honestly offhand dagger seems pretty useless in pvp right now with the insane amount of burst flying around. Focus offers just so much more survivability. And even warhorn has a lowish cooldown magnetic aura which helps a LOT, plus 2 good heals in water.

1. Gear for power, it’s by far your pest stat while leveling. Precision naturally complements power and the more precision you have the more valued ferocity will be. Have as much toughness/vitality as makes you comfortable while leveling.

2. Staff is probably the best weapon for glass cannons because of range and AOE. It’s also the go-to weapon for group content. Daggers are great and especially fun too, though of course you need to be in melee, which is very managable though with experience. Focus is good if you need the survivability though usually in pve dagger would be preferred especially while leveling. Scepter is our weakest weapon though it works well for leveling with it’s big burst abilities with low cooldown on fire 2 and 3. You can also consider the conjured weapons to help out your chosen weapon’s weakness in pve.
Staff fire autoattack is amazing, as is dagger air autoattacks. All other autoattacks are weaker than those (dagger fire is good too though and air staff can work too).

3. You can only do each hero challange once. Though you get enough points with leveling to 80 without any challanges to unlock all your skills and traits. Hero challanges only help you get them earlier and bunk points for the elite spec.
You’ll probably want to unlock glyphs in pve for the damage and utility, maybe cantrips if you feel you need the survivability. Unlocking signet of air is also great for movement speed.
Traitwise I’d go fire or air first, air is nice for the movement speed again, and with dagger. Fire is great with all weapons. Earth is mostly defense as is water. Arcane can work too as your first line though air and fire probably offer more immediate benefits.

Staff is good for PvE levling. Stick to it for now. Fire for shure is best. when you learn elementalist you will realize changing elements in a fight is helpful.
Gear: You don´t need to buy gear for levling. Take what you find. Power + Precision is what helps most. You buy a full exotic set at level 80. Stats depend on what you like after playing ele for a while.
Doing hero challenges is good. Unless you like map exploration jsut get hero points. also Exploring helps in levling.
Also use food. Its extra XP and not expensive. Cheap food. For fire staff somethign with power but its realy more for the XP so take what you get/find.

Take salvage kits and collect materials for later. Crafting will get you a few levels too. A cook is helpfol here. the food you create hepls you levling :-).

For training order:

I recomend fire + Signets .
then air + Glyphs: glyphs of storms + elementals help a lot in PvE especially solo.

I think you would get more going into water line then going into arcain well if your trying to support a group. Your def is to low to go into major melee groups in wvw too try to aim for 3k.

The traits says; “Gain swiftness when overloading an attunement. 8 seconds”

It seems to only be the tooltip that has changed because the duration is still 5 seconds like on previous beta weekends.

So here’s the bug. Overloading grants 5 seconds of swiftness instead of 8 seconds as shown on the tooltip.

I run the FA build with D/Wh. I think WH is quite good unlike most other people. Earth is awesome with reflects and blinds, water has a great water field and also regen, fire has a very long duration fire field and extra might stacks + sharing fury aswell. Only thing that is a bit meh = air. But when you’re in air you are either auto-attacking or using OLA. Now that we have acces to party wide magnetic aura with Aftershock I don’t really see the added value of Swirling Winds anymore, water and fire are quite abysmal too on a focus and earth is about the same. Although I prefer blinds over an invulnerable that doesn’t really do much for your party. Dagger offhand is still great but I don’t think it has a place in PvE when you have WH and Focus. For gear, I was using full Zerk at first but later switched to a more defensive set-up.

I do completely oppose all this ‘soldier gear’ crap I see everyone blabbering about. I’m pretty sure the way I’ve set up my gear is alot better. I run with cavalier’s armor and scrapper runes, knight’s weapons and zerk trinkets. I run an aura set-up with Air/Earth/Tempest. Giving me high uptime on Vigor/Fury/Might/Protection/Regen/Swiftness. I went with extra boon duration from Fried Golden Dumplings (which stack extra might in combat along with sigil of strength to keep your might stacks high) and Bountiful Maintenance Oil, for extra precision and more boon duration. 50% total. Which is more than Fire/Air/Arcane builds had using strength runes. Mandatory for this build is either Sigil of Accuracy or Fire signet. If you don’t need the 3rd utility skill than obviously signet is better as it will allow you to run with Sigil of Force.

This build can easily be adapted into a more support type build by switching air to water and being a bunker/healer role or you can switch out earth for fire in standard old content like fractals for more damage multipliers and easier to maintain fury in groups(permantent fury in this build requires good timing of shocking aura, sand squall, your sand squal proc from trait, whichever shouts you have slotted and possibly rebound. E.g. a good way is to, after might stacking, start with shocking aura > glyph of storms > OLA > switch earth and use sand squall as fury is about to drop off and get 7,5 seconds again + the extended duration squall gives. Then usually Shocking Aura is back up. If it’s not you might want to use the 1 aura you slot. E.g. if you were using Arcane Wave before I’d say Aftershock is better now as it does more than just damage and blast finisher. But Feel the Burn is also good. Alternatively you can time rebound to coincide with the rest by using it 5 seconds before your boons are gonna fall off.

My stats with his build are, unbuffed (off the top of my head, as I’m not in game right now):
~2400 power
~55% Crit chance
~205% Crit Damage
~2900 Armor
50% Boon Duration
17% extra baseline damage reduction
100% fury/regen/swiftness/might/vigor uptime
~85% protection uptime with which you take another 40% less damage.
Added side-bonus: On conditions when health is above 90%. Very useful for running around the jungle.

I suppose at the end of the day, a Zerker build can achieve better results provided you are able to stay alive. And this build could very well do that too with Zerker gear. I chose this build as it feel it is a very minimal DPS loss. It allows me to have 25 might, 25 vuln and 100% fury in a solo situation with very minimal effort and able to upkeep during combat. Something my staff build couldn’t do. So I hardly notice a damage difference. In fact, I’d say OLA spam is much better at dealing with all those highly mobile creatures than Lava Font is. I’m also very positive I deal both more damage and have more survivability than Zerk/Soldier builds. I mean who needs vitality anyway when it’s so easy to cleanse conditions in PvE situations. It’s not like you’re going to get hit with 30 burn stacks. It isn’t PvP/WvW. Vitality also makes regen less strong and makes it harder to keep bonuses like Scholar/Water/Diamond skin active. I think it’s a bad stat for PvE. Toughness isn’t great either unless you stack alot of it, which I’ve done. Switching to earth puts me over 3k armor and at that level of toughness your really start to notice. Smokescales hardly put a dent in me and instead of getting oneshot by pocket raptors they now need to hit me as a group 3 or 4 times. By that time they’re all dead already. This build also made it alot easier to solo groups of vets and do hero points with champs by myself. If I never die I can keep doing high sustained DPS and they drop like flies. When the raids come I’ll see how I’ll change this. It all depends on what role ele’s will have in raids, if they are even brought at all (something i’m not sure of). But for now, for high level Fractals and Jungle roaming I use this build and it works great. For everything else I still have my trusty zerk staff build.

Only regrettable thing about this build and tempest in general is that Warhorn (while being better than focus imo) needs some major fine tuning. Air skills are awful and Fire skills are good but just not impressive. They could use a bit more oomph. Another annoying thing is that while I think charge up time for Fire and Air Overload is totally fair and appropriate (especially considering Fresh Air spam), I feel it kinda defeats the purpose of Water and Earth overload. No one is going to stay in those attunements for 6 seconds to use those skills. It’s just bad. They are both great overloads but are never used because Air is default for D/x and Fire for Staff. I don’t see why we can’t just split it up. Why do all overloads need charge ups, for Lore/consistency? That’s just bull. Balance should come first. I’d say nerf Fire’s OL damage and make it focus more on Burns and Might stacking and remove the charge up . Keep OLA the same and simply remove Water and Earth Overload’s charge up and leave the skills as is. For both staff and d/x builds this means they are simply two skills on a 20 second cooldown, but that can now be used on demand. For Fire this means a DPS loss for staff but give something to staff it never had before and that is the ability to keep 25 might up solo. Right now OLF is better than Fireball. So make it about equal then. For Fresh air builds nothing changes as they still have to wait 6 seconds (which I feel is fair since it’s really really powerful). All specs gain access to good Water ad Earth Overloads. I imagine this will not change anything in PvP either as you still have to choose between ingivorating torrents and stab on overload. I don’t play sPvP as much as most so I wouldn’t know how OP it would be to give stab to overloads baseline along with this new change but hey, I’m just looking at it from a PvE perspective.

Right now, we all know that the staff is in a decent place, but does ened some improvements, mainly skill 3. I myself never use this skill because all the others are much better and I have dash.
The improvements I would like to propose are this
1. Remove the evade from skill 3 and add it to Weakening charge. Weakening charge having the evade instead would make a lot more sense, especially since it is quite a slow skill.
2. Speed up the animation of Weakening charge and decrease its aftercast
3. Thieves do not have access to stuns apart from pistol whip. A staff seems like the perfect place to give us this. Remove staff 3 and exchange it with a charge stun of 600 range.
“Charge forward with your staff and deliver a crushing blow to sun your foe”
This gives us a chance to land vaults and weakening charge.
4. I actually really like skill 4, it fires fast, does decent damage and blinds. I have seen some suggestions for a smoke field but for once I disagree with this as this weaponset does not need stealth, and it would just detract from its main use.
I saw a suggestion for a “Smoke cloud” which seems like a great idea.
“Create a cloud of smoke for the caster to hide within, evading and becoming immune to incoming conditions”.
Duration: 1.5s
Radius. Radius: 240
This allows us to deal with conditions and gives us a decent way to mitigate damage with the blind.
So these are my proposed changes. I think this would put staff in a very viable place and might begin to be the start of the much needed buff
Thank you

Fix ideas:
1) make next attack a guaranteed crit on successful evade,
2) restore 1 initiative on successful evade.
3) buff damage by 100%.

Meanwhile, don’t forget body shot, which exceeds all limits when it comes to uselessness.

Hes dead, lets go get the next one please!

Do a big final send off to Traeherne(even you dont like him, hes the pact marshal, that alone should be enough) And then we go slay another of these big beasties!

I have to agree with “I See no Tommorow” and “Verifucis”

The plot seemed extremely forced at the end, and I was not at all satisfied with the final confrontation.

Zhaitan’s death was spread over a massive personal story… we had to cut his resources and literally starve him to death. With Mordremoth, the dragon leads us straight to the one plot device that allows us to stab an avatar of his brain. boo.

… is limited to 3 options?
I just finished Bo and there’s only Celestial, marauder and minstrel’s.
Worked pretty hard for this, I’d like if I could actually select the stats I want :/ Can we please give these weapons all the stat combinations so we can chose something useful for such a weapon.

(The scavenger hunt itself was great though)

lol I just went through that today. That’s one warning you can ignore. You’re equipment will remain account bound

To all you Zerker “Elite” players whom I have despised, I now understand your pain… and I’m so sorry that I ever doubted you…

Quick Story

I’m relatively new to FOTM, for a long time I had not considered myself good enough to play FOTM, so I just avoided it and did Karma trains and such mob content. ( I tried early on but a bad pug group and a 4 hour run convinced me that FOTM was not for me)

About 2 months ago I got back into GW2 in prep for HOT and leveled from 12-47 FOTM, and learned to enjoy the tactics, reflects, speed clear, dodging and most importantly, Zerker. Generally I don’t mind if people run off builds, I run full zerk guard (because reasons) but Im happy to play with just about anyone. Until yesterday…

For my last frac of the day yesterday I hopped into a 40 (molten boss) for what the LFG advertised was a “Speed Clear” Awesome. If you are not in the know, a decent zerker group can take down this fractal in about 6 minutes total. We start off at the champ and it takes a LONG time to go down, like a LONG time. I was experimenting with DH traps though so I just figured my own dps was low (it wasnt)

Then we fight the fiery pair and again, it takes a long time. I’m used to Bruiser dropping in about 20 seconds, it took us 4 minutes. Finally i speak up in chat and simply say “our dps is a bit light guys”

The Staff Guard & the Ranger both respond “I’m healing”

Facepalm

And then the monster appeared. I’m normally good natured, but its just SO FREAKING STUPID TO RUN HEALING ON MOLTEN ALLIANCE, ESPECIALLY ON 40 WHERE THE INSTABILITY IS DODGES CAUSE YOU TO FUMBLE YOUR BOONS ANYWAY… AND THE ONLY REASON YOU HAVE TO HEAL IS BECAUSE THE KITTEN BOSS IS STILL ALIVE AND SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ALIVE IF YOU HAD ACTUALLY DONE DAMAGE….

Which I guess makes me one of you now?

- Cheers

I always found the claims that Trahearne was some kind of “Kormir 2.0” immature and largely unfounded. During the Zaithan story, his character suffered from a couple of badly written lines, and sub-par voice acting. The biggest problem might have been the fact that a lot of other characters tell us about “that one time back then when he totally saved my kitten ”, etc., but we don’t get to see the rather bookish Trahearne do such things while we are with him.

The important thing – at least to me – however is that he does threat us (= the player character) with respect, he gives us plenty of credit for the things we do for the pact (while Trahearne is stuck doing strategy stuff – do players really envy him for doing all that organizing stuff instead of being out in the field?), he seeks our council, lets us hear his thoughts, and in general treats us like a friend!

Compare that to, for example, Caithe, who betrayed us, stole from us, and does even take a second and try to explain her motives to us – after all the things we did for her during the Zaithan story, like rescuing her from Faolin, reuniting her “worst soap opera cast in tyrian history”-type of guild, and taking down an Elder Dragon! I’d rather having Trahearne at my side than her any day.

I can’t say was surprised to see Trahearne die at the end of HoT ( I predicted Trahearne, Zoija, and Eir dying. 2/3 I guess…). The moment you see him in that vine pod, you know he’s not coming back out. But I do wish they would have given Trahearne a little bit more agency – he opens the “portal” to the mordrem dream for us, allowing us to strike at Mordremoth’s weak spot; decent enough storytelling. Now imagine after we defeated Mordremoth Trahearne would have told us, he couldn’t be separated from the vines anymore BECAUSE he did that dream portal thing. That would have turned his actions from a were plot device into an actual willing sacrifice, and, in my opinion, a stronger (and more worthy) death.

What I really dislike is how there is no epilogue whatsoever – and no, those few lines your comrades say to you after you are put back into the map don’t count, and the cinematic, while pretty, is a classical sequel hook, not an epilogue. I would have expected a ceremony to commemorate all the pact soldiers that died fighting the mordrem, including the pact marshal. He earned that much during the Zaithan story alone. And I would have also like to see a more personal epilogue between the player character and the companions, checking in with Taimi, Logan/Zoija, etc. And bringing back Caladbolg to the Grove. When I saw that item after the mission I was sure I would be going to bring it “home” to honor my dead friend. Turns out it’s just a souvenir from when you finally we allowed to shank that stupid salad who always stole the spotlight from you. It’s very disappointing.

Funny thing is that he never took credit, he always gave it to you. Always was saying we would have come nowhere without you.

So ArenaNet listened to all the whiners who needed to be commanders and gods and whatever, and killed Trehearne… awesome. You made it clap clap … clap

Classes changed so much? What!! Gw2 classes feel the same just slightly balanced with some specializations added to it, I like it more this way. Play WoW now that’s an mmo that changes classes completely with paladin being an example from wotlk to current paladin.

So the last few days I’ve thrown on a mentor tag and spammed map chat for up to 20 minutes to get 2 to 3 other people to join me for these Champion hero points. It’s not fun and should be changed to match the first maps changes.

I see other players that have already done it running past as the rewards are terrible and don’t encourage anyone to complete them again after getting their points.

My favorite is getting yelled at for not helping with META events and people saying HPs should be disabled during them. Well if the HPs didn’t take 4+ people and 20 minutes to gather a group i’m sure people would be more willing to do them at a more convenient time.

I’m sure i’ll get lots of blah blah MMORPG, blah blah Elitism. I have full elite specs trained on 3 characters and running the rest of my alts through is getting worse and worse as the majority of players have what they wanted trained.

It’s kind of dim to complain about the “spoiler” that you have a battle with Mordremoth.

Anyway, yeah this is really frustrating. The little cyclones that are supposed to throw you into the air don’t seem to work for me most of the time, which is kind of a problem since he knocks you out of the air within a few seconds so you need to get back up there.

Also had an issue where a reality rift showed up behind Braham IN THE AIR – that was game over. It wasn’t just a visual bug either; standing next to Braham to try to activate it didn’t work.

Buggy, frustrating fight that takes forever just to get into it (the two illusion battles beforehand) and breaks your armor should you fail.

Hero: Hey, glad I could finally get you alone.
Rytlock: What is it, cub?
Hero: I was wondering when you were going to give me back that crown.
Rytlock: What crown?
Hero: The crown. Of King Doric.
Rytlock: What?
Hero: You know. Bust some ghosts. Save Ascalon?
Rytlock: No idea what you’re talking about.
Hero: You said you’d put it right in my hands when you were done!
Rytlock: Wasn’t me. You must have given it to someone else.
Hero: Look, you walking carpet, that was a relic of MY people. Like the Claw of the Khan-Uhr!
Rytlock: Excuse me, I’m needed somewhere else. Logan! I thought I smelled cowardice and failure!

The thing that bugged me was Trahearne right at the end. It just felt like a sop to all the Trahearne haters who had asked for exactly that sort of thing.

The interaction with Caithe felt awkwardly handled.

Taimi was way too mobile out of her golem. This was a little bit of a disappointment too. I thought that the charr she was speaking to back in the Silverwastes was going to become the archetype for the Scrapper, and leaving her at Rata Novus with a group of Scrappers to help her defend herself would have been more comfortable.

In retrospect the disaspointment regarding the Nightmare Court angle is more of a product of overhype than bad story telling. Had nobody mentioned the Nightmare Court beforehand I would have been quite pleased with that aspect.

The way Eir died seemed to ignore the fact that Eir is at least as important to us as Braham is. The effect on Braham pushed the right emotional buttons, at least when Taimi noticed he’d shaved his hair. They should had Belinda die at that point in a similar way, and it would have worked well.

The encounters were pretty good, the last one would have been extremely satisfying if it weren’t so buggy, but there was too little story to make it feel is big as it should have. Four or so scenes concentrating more on exposition than on battle would have worked wonders.

Having said all that, I still think the story eas OK, it’s just that I only give it a six, when I was hoping for an eight or a nine.

I just hate how blatantly obvious Eir’s death was way back in LS2. When Braham and Eir began to patch things up that was a major red flag that Eir was going to die tragically before they could “go hunting together”. Then when the Dragonhunter was revealed it was again blatantly obvious that Eir was going to die so that Braham could take her longbow and become the first Dragonhunter. Then when Eir’s final cutscene started, all suspense was lost because it was a foregone conclusion that she wasn’t going to make it.

I can’t believe they “fridged” Eir just so Braham could get some emotional development. It also sucks that this is how they choose to kill off one of the most beloved characters. No chance for any Zojja/Eir resolution or for any Eir centred revenge against Kralkatorrik. I just bet they’ll bring her back Obi-kittenenobi style to give Braham some tips on defeating Jormag or something, when it should have been her leading the assault against that Dragon.

And where exactly is Garm?

So now we have many Human, Sylvari, Charr, even Asura major NPCs… and the Norn just have Braham. Seriously Braham? They had a brilliant Norn NPC in Eir who combined the best of Jora and Sif, yet they just wasted her.

It’s also incredibly disappointing that the Nightmare Court were rather minor players. If there was ever a time for them to do something big it was against Mordremoth. There could have been a really interesting dynamic with Faolain and the Nightmare Court, versus Malyck (the harbinger) and the Mordrem versus the heroes and the Pale Tree’s Sylvari, not to mention the rogue Caithe. There’s probably Sylvari fatigue but now is the only time to actually delve into this lore.

It’s just a shame that there are obvious NPCs with a target on their back while a select few are held in such regard that they are untouchable. Rytlock and Braham seem to be indestructible, yet Eir is dispensable? She’s far superior to Braham and an equal to Rytlock.

Sad to see Trahearne go but at least he got the hero’s death that Eir never got. Knifing someone in the back after being stabbed in the side isn’t fitting to even Caithe and she’s a thief.

I was also disappointed with Eir’s death and agree it was pointless. Also insulting to her. No battle to the death as befits a norn. Just a constipated look and standing around for the most telegraphed attack in history.

As that rescue was happening, I thought Faolain (let’s just call her F) would team up with DE. It would be the uneasy-alliance trope, but that could be interesting.
But then she stabs Eir. Okay, that could work. I though Eir would die and F would tell the rest of the team she died bravely saving F’s life. Then F would join the team and work to undermine it from within. That could have been interesting.
But wait, Eir kills F. Okay, so it’s the I’m-taking-you-with-me trope. Fine. At least Eir will go out in a blaze of glory!
……oh……