Guild Wars 2

It’s a usability issue. The blueprints should either be unbound or they should not have the option to drop for someone else to pick up. Personally, I would prefer the former option and let people sell the blueprints or trade them.

If it helps, AoE spells always damage cages. I don’t even try to target them anymore, because I usually play ele staff support build, so I can just lay down lava font and wait a second or two.

Many signature moves already suffer the weakness of 1-hit KOing some while not doing so to others. Because of the wide variation in health pools, it’s somewhat unavoidable because what would make sure to 1-hit down everyone would insta-kill lower HP players.

The first problem that requires addressing is the 10k/14k/18k base health pools.

I want a chance to get vials from salvaging rings.

How easy it is depends on how expensive the vials would be. They could easily be 10+ perfect relics or 1000+ normal relics and still accomplish RNG removal.

I would prefer one (or more) of several things occurred:

Vials be purchasable for relics
Vials be purchasable for the perfect relics
Rings become salvageable, from which vials can be a salvage component

It would be cool if globs/shards could follow the above scheme, too, but since they can ultimately be forged from vials, it’s not necessary.

It costs more points for the extra awesome our fall damage trait has.

Unfortunately, the answer is you can’t. Until they bring back overflow servers or introduce guesting, fractal groups can only be composed of people from your home server.

If you’re an asura, the golems can body-block bolts as well.

It’s a new mechanic added in later levels. I think it starts at 10, though it could be a little later.

The reason to keep the fan going is so that heals are more effective. It’s such a non-issue to keep the fan going if you run the crystals ahead of time and it makes enough of a difference that it’s worth doing, even if you can force your way through without it.

On the whole, I like fractals. However, there is a glaring issue with how fractals work: the level system and RNG for AR gear both conspire to fracture regular groups.

If you have a group of friends that you play with on a regular basis, you are virtually guaranteed to reach a point where the group has to split up at some point because one or more players will have different amounts of AR. Those with better luck are able to progress while those with worse luck cannot, and the group is left with the choice of sticking together and banging their heads against the same levels over and over or splitting up.

Over a long enough timeline, the group will always eventually split up, and with the drop rates being as poor as they are, there’s a good chance that the group will be stuck waiting beyond that point before everyone gets the drops they need.

As an asura elementalist, I refuse to use my water spells to make snow. Why waste an opportunity to experiment with… slightly modified snow?

To provide a little perspective, one of the major selling points of GW2 is that RNG was going to be minimized. ArenaNet wanted to provide fun over grind, and as a one-time purchase rather than a subscription model, there was little business incentive to force a grind.

Much of the RNG people complain about now was added very recently.

If you’re in a pug, you are pretty much universally going to save yourself time going back to lab.

Yes, even if it’s the third fractal.

I had a group running fractals on lvl 19. We got to the third fractal boss, and one of our members DCed. We got the boss down to about 30%, and our party mate who DCed decided to attempt re-joining us. Next thing we know, we’re all being ported back to Lion’s Arch.

So far, I would have to vote mesmer. Feedback is extremely useful is all but the underwater fractal, and portals trivialize the asura and swamp fractals.

I run full berserker gear, but I trait 30 water. It works out just fine in dungeons using staff when I’m focusing on what I’m doing.

I wouldn’t recommend going full glass cannon in both gear and traits, though. That is extremely painful, as the profession just doesn’t support full glass cannon builds.

That, and high HP does not innately lower the effectiveness of heals. When taking flat damage compared to a low HP player, you are not any worse off for heals. It is only when you couple both high HP and percent-HP damage sources (the only one of which is Agony) that healing effectiveness is hurt.

I run a more offensive gear set and build, so I have a sigil of energy in. The extra dodges are particularly useful when running with my poor ring luck in fractals and tend to make up for my lack of defensive stats.

This made for an interesting jade maw run. On a handful of jumps transitioning from area to area, 3+ of my group all missed jumps because our jumps just didn’t work, ending up in a big pile of corpses.

Yes, attunement swapping counts as a weapon swap for the purposes of sigils.

Well, since it will likely be the winter event patch before any possibility of a fix is put into place, it’s probably worth seeing what good we can make of it. My immediate thought is that I should test RTL’s vitality loss and its interaction with agony.

kostbabis.8791:

rtl i would guess strippes you off from your traits..cause i lose exactly 1.5k hp having put 15 points in water.Major nerf..again
I HATE PATCHES

I can confirm this issue. I have mostly zerker gear, so my vitality comes entirely from my 30 points in water.

Normal HP: 14405 (1276 vitality)
RTL HP: 11405 (976 vitality)

Additionally, I have 20 points in air. Air bonuses are stripped, too.

Normal precision: 1871
RTL precision: 1671

Arciel.9650:

Now on the other hand, maps like Ascolinian is an open map, it’s a battlefield that I can navigate to my objective, why is it considered an exploit? Because it’s something you don’t want to do? I’m asking this since last week when I pug a group and we got it, everyone start hubbing the wall immidiately and no-one said anything.

You haven’t seen the real exploit. If you have a mesmer in the group, there’s a path on the right side of the starting area that takes you up to a point where a mesmer can teleport on top of the wall (clipping/teleport exploit), then use the mesmer portal to bring the rest of the group up with him. There is a similar path on the left side. You can bypass the front gate and its guard entirely.

Running up the stairs on the wall on the left side once you get through the gate and skipping the barricade requires careful jumping but nothing more.

KyleQuest.4639:

For skill, how do you evade the legendary imbued shaman? That’s the hardest one in all of Fractals to me.

Stay at his back/sides as much as possible. When he is getting ready to hit you with his agony attack, he’ll turn to face you. If you’re fighting him from range, you also get the visual cue of a purple streak headed towards you – it’s a reasonably slow projectile.

My frustration is just how many harpies there are close together. You can’t fight just one or two – there’s always 4+ which target you all at once. It’s not impossible to jump several times to avoid the ball lightning, only to get hit by yet another one. Or, you can be dodging a barrage of 2-3 balls only to fall off because the 4th harpy snares you just before you jump.

I’d even be fine if the harpies had double the HP and double the damage if it would mean there were half as many.

Out of curiosity, what do you guys propose as an alternative?

I’m sure the immediate reaction is to have agony do a static amount of damage, but the problem with that is it disproportionately harms those with low HP. If you set the damage too high, anyone with a low health pool is virtually guaranteed to die. If you set the damage too low, anyone with a high health pool can mostly ignore the mechanic. This would be less of an issue if there wasn’t such a huge disparity in base health pools, but we have what we have.

If they bumped our base HP to 14k many of the glass cannon builds might become viable.

The rumors and fear spreads like it does because of two major things:
1. the devs rarely say anything on these forums to indicate vision or direction
2. we know the balance team lacks someone who plays elementalist

Those, combined with a large number of nonsensical changes in the last major patch make it easy to question if the devs know what they are doing with the profession. If you are already prone to a bit of paranoia, seeing them nerf some of our already mostly-worthless skills makes it easy to assume they’re just nerfing the class out of spite instead of any real balance concerns.

Addressing one (or both!) issues above would go a long way to quell the chicken little posts.

In the dredge fractal, if you run underneath the platforms to the back wall, there is a spot where players can run through the wall and pull a friendly group of veteran charr from ascalon. If you have a mesmer in the group with you, he/she can use a portal to help you and the veteran group warp back to the main room.

The veterans will follow your group around for the rest of the fractals, unless one of the next fractals is ascalon. In that case, they will stop following when ascalon is completed.

While it is nice we have this website as an interim solution, it only underscores the need for an in-game version.

It depends on what you do. If you take the time to experience a broad swath of the game, there are several extremely frustrating moments you’ll run into that just burn into your brain because ele is the only class which lacks fall damage reduction. I’ll share several of mine:

WvW: it is not uncommon to be in a zerg which decides to jump off a cliff to speed up travel. Jumping with them and being the only person who dies is incredibly demeaning, especially when added to the overall fragility of the class when not playing a full bunker spec. Additionally, if you’re playing a full glass cannon spec, the waterfall entrance to the Emerald/Garnet/Sapphire sanctum jumping puzzles will occasionally kill you.

Mad King event: The mad king fight had a jump at the very end that an ele had to land perfectly to survive. The first time or two I did it, I simply followed the group on the way down to the chest, only to watch my party mates running away nearly unscathed as my blood fertilized the local flora.

Jumping puzzles: Several different jumping puzzles in the game have jumps that will kill an ele or punish them for not having fall damage reduction. Griffinrook Run is a good example – it is a timed jumping puzzle, and eles are forced to take more time to recover health in a few sections of the puzzle that would not be an issue if we had fall damage reduction.

EatThisShoe.5136:

Guardian Bug thread
299 posts.

Engineer bug thread
384 posts

Warrior bug thread
120 posts

Thief bug thread
248 posts

Elementalist bug thread
299 posts

Everyone is buggy, warriors perhaps less so, but still quite buggy. Of course not all bugs are equally bad.

Strictly speaking, the number of posts is not indicative of the quantity of bugs; rather, it indicates the number of people affected by the bugs and care enough to bring complaints to the forums. For all we know, engineers have the fewest bugs and warriors the most.

drkn.3429:

Are you running a glass cannon build or, Six forbid, a magic find gear?
I’m not asking to be rude, but an elementalist can withstand some hits there, it’s certainly not a one-shot one-kill encounter for her, and she’s the profession with lowest hp/armor pools.

That’s only true if the ele heavily invests in earth and/or water for the increased survivability. A base HP ele would be one-shot by bombs, as it leaves you with just under 11k.

That said, the bombs have quite a long time between red ring and detonation, so there isn’t much reason to get hit by one.

In Tribes during the alpha/beta, there was a glitch that prevented friction from applying immediately when you hit the ground. Players discovered this and would hop as they went downhill. Hopping quickly enough prevented friction from applying at all, allowing them to pick up insane speeds, which became known as skiing.

It was never fixed in the first game, and it was deliberately added as a feature to each subsequent Tribes game to maintain the fast-paced play.

Twoflower.7031:

One With Air is my favourite trait…

The problem is that it doesn’t stack with swiftness, and we can get near permanent swiftness already. If we had out of combat weapon swap (or if you can stand to leave your bags open and click away), it would be permanent swiftness, because you can swap */D and staff to juggle switfness buffs and RTL.

Air makes the most sense, and I doubt many would be particularly heart-broken if they replaced our One with Air trait with something useful.

Oranisagu.3706:

maybe they could give us a conjure using up 3 utility skills which gives us tiny wings reducing the fall damage by 1% if we click it really fast.. would be in line with the rest of the class balance..

seriously though, either an air trait with an aoe blind at the end of the fall or one in arcana (hey, we have a grandmaster slot available, since EA is unusable now!) giving different effects for each attunement would be plausible and fit well into the class..

Conjure parachute.

Of course, it would inevitably be nerfed in a later patch to instead conjure an anvil or tire or something.

I must say, I use the frost bow much more than the FGS, if only because the bow is instant-cast while the FSG is a relatively long cast time.

That’s somewhat of a loaded question.

The most useful profession for a group relies at least partially on how aware everyone else in the group is. For example, a staff ele can be a huge boon to the party… provided people actually use blast/projectile finishers when the ele lays down fields. That’s not to say an ele can’t be good in a group without the help, but it is a night and day difference when combos happen.

Meriem.3504:

No no what they need is what Aion had, the shift F12 which turns all players and everything they do invisible to you which cuts down the lag a lot for events and you can see yourself in the times you need to be able too such as these puzzles.

This. The jumping puzzle wasn’t terribly hard – it’s just frustrating as an asura getting blocked-out by giant norn and charr. That was precisely the frustration with Mad King Tower, and it will continue to be a frustration with any jumping puzzle that attracts lots of people.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Yeah, the damage on EA is really, really bad. It’s frankly not worth the Energy just to get the extra damage when you can just autoattack.

Not to mention, it’s pretty stupid as a cloth-wearing class to use precious energy for dodging into enemies just to get a short-duration condition and ~100 damage. The water attunement finisher is the only one that’s worthwhile, and it’s not worth a GM slot.

I fully expected a fix to the fact that you could blast on every dodge irrespective of the 10 second ICD, but removing them entirely eliminates an entire playstyle. It was fun hopping around in my asura during dungeon runs.

Simplicity.7208:

If we’re a staff ele, a toggle greatsword would be a good method of hitting something in our face hard.

Alas, that would only be true if FGS was instant or near-instant cast FGS is good for changing things up a bit, but its cast time is prohibitive in emergency situations.

Also remember to drop target when you bring out the GS. It makes Fiery Rush 100x less suicidal and generally does more damage that way, to boot.

Be careful, though. One of the Halloween patches changed the shelter’s gate orr zergs so they will aggro immediately rather than waiting to reach the base first. Most of them have ranged attacks, so if you run in with any of your AoEs you may be asking for a dirt nap, even if you are far enough out of the way to avoid melee.

Getting bad groups with the WoW LFG tool happened far less often than people like to claim. Sure, you sometimes got people who were completely clueless, but it happened relatively infrequently and it was easy enough to remove the person or find another group.

The “choosing you you take” angle is a bit disingenuous. Forming any PuG leaves you vulnerable to taking a random idiot along. You only truly protect yourself against this when you go with a group composed entirely of people you know.

That said, at this point, I don’t care if we get a LFG tool or something else. I just want something better than we have now.

Oops, I never noticed the ground target part on fiery whirl – I’ll take note of it.

As far as fiery rush goes, if you have a target, you’ll rush at a target and jump up, ending by slashing your target and landing at its feet. Much like RTL, you’ll often (always) suffer a second or two pause before you can move again. If your target is in the middle of a group, you will be downed in short order.

If you do not have a target, fiery rush will go through your “target” and leave your fire trail underneath it, which does smaller, but frequent hits that generally amount to the same or better damage than the jumping slash. Often times, you’ll also do some extra damage as you rush through a target as well. This is vastly preferable, as it gives you a lot of extra ability for kiting. It tends to fit in really well with D/D play style.

Special note: the fire trail damage stacks. If you have something up against a wall and you fiery rush it from close distance, your entire fire trail stacks in one spot and does some crazy damage. It works great for champions or above that are against a wall or against any stationary structures like wvw gates, risen trebuchets, rotmouths, or claw of jormag ice shards. If you have a target, though… you lose a ton of damage, because your fire trail won’t stack next to/under your intended target.

If nothing else, the ice bow gives a D/D build the ability to work at range when you need to. That said, the chill on AC3 is nice and the range AOE on AC4 (with confuse stacks!) can be pretty nice as well.