Guild Wars 2

torgar.4015:

https://www.reddit.com/duplicates/4ft01q/qt_dps_benchmarkstests_for_all_classes/

DH DPS is one of the best.
Plus DH has a ton of sustain…
DH/Guard is in a great place ATM outside of PvP

I remember guardian DPS getting nerfed after like… s1. And then the true shot thing happened after s2. Is guardian pve dps still relevant? I feel like regardless of benchmark, daredevil and elementalist are the only relevant power DPS specs at the moment, with reaper / maybe engineer or warrior for condition. Again, I could be blowing smoke out my butt, so if someone could clarify that’d be awesome

Toughness isn’t an issue imo. It doesn’t scale that well, and you can usually forgo it since a lot of the damage in PvP is passive these days (conditions) in exchange for vitality and healing power. If you really want to attack sustain, start with the traits and utilities (this is especially the case with tempest: all of their sustain comes from protection, healing power, and regeneration/cleanse traits.) Warrior has ridiculous healing resistance access. Idk where engineer sustain comes from but I’m pretty sure they spec marauder

How did you log on to your account to post this?

I would be okay with it if the track gave you “proofs of heroics” like WvW, but hero points right now are specifically linked to locations in PvE so Anet can keep track of how many hero points are acquirable, and I’d like to keep it that way

Ashandar.2570:

I expect LS3 will contain 25 min story, 12 glider skins, 4 BL weapon sets and 6 outfits, and possibly, very possibly, a gem store sale on instant repair canisters, in incremental releases over 9 months.

You’re new here so I won’t troll, but I think the accepted S3 standard is eng/war/ele -> the rest -> guardian

Wolfric.9380:

What i woudl like ist a -20% shout CD on tempestios aria.
An if suport is nerft that powerful aura is the target nothing else.
Fix the OL / swap bug for arcane.
And a bit arcane/fire love would be welcome.

Is powerful aura even good anymore? Ive been running Gale Song and Cleansing waters and I think that’s on metabattle. For real though i want arcane buffs

I’d like the idea of buffing reaper’s 1 v 1 or mobility capabilities somehow, and then nerfing their CC bombs. cause at the moment, reapers fill up teams and just tick everyone off on the opposing team with CC and make the match not fun for the opposing team, and then often make their own team lose cause they have no mobility and are picked off easily.

warriors just need straight nerfs… way overbuffed

Legendary weapon-gate parked the hype train at the station permanently. But here’s a nice kernel of leaked hype I’m looking forward to… An expected PvE / PvP split balance

Ryou.2398:

lucadiro.4519:

Ryou.2398:

reikken.4961:

Ele used to be more difficult to play before HoT, but tempest makes it pretty easy.

In any case, pve staff dps ele is very simple. You only need to press 3 buttons. Lava font-> meteor shower. wait 4 seconds. lava font->overload. wait 4 seconds. lava font on cooldown until meteor shower is off cooldown. repeat. Congratulations, you have the game’s top dps.

If you want to get extra fancy, add ice bow, and for the lava fonts with no channel in between, press autoattack to cancel the lava font’s aftercast delay.

Now, support ele isn’t nearly as simple. Ele in any vs player context is not simple at all.

There are multiple metabuilds for pve though thats only one of the dps builds.

The other dps build for pve is fresh air that I think It’s easier to play since has more susistain than fire staff.
Thats because swap to fire give you an aura (aka heal) and you have another from Dagger 3. So It’s way more easier to save your scholar rune’s buff than playing staff without breack your dps rotation.

The only other metabuild is the raid healer, that maybe require you a little more effort since is like to play fresh air but require you to use your heals when allies need it.
Maybe this could be a bit more complex.

The only build that is hard to play, mostly because require stationary enemies to be effective, is condi burning temepest. But to be honest, how much people run this build lol

There are tons of raid builds on metabattle.com check again man.

No, there isn’t. The little black dot means “meta”. The three metabuilds for ele are FA, staff fire, and healer. The others (mostly condi) are experimental or terribly rated

The groundhog day of balance is upon us. Karl has put off dealing with bunker ele for the last two seasons, probably because who knows what else to do with us. A dev post in the pvp forum hinted at a split PvE / PvP balance this patch, which would help, but I’m banking on them taking a sludge hammer to ele this round and giving us more scepter / offhand dagger boosts or something to “compensate”

If that happens, 6 more weeks of not playing ele

Pifil.5193:

Alex Shatter.7956:

Reading through this post and am depressed at the people who spend hundreds of dollars on tools for multiple characters and think it’s an alright deal…

Depressed that people like to support their MMOs? Ultimately that’s why I buy gems, the tools are a useful sink for those gems. I’ve still spent less on GW2 in the past 4 years than I have on MMO subscriptions in the past.

Regardless, that’s the deal that was offered. Anyone who bought these tools should have known that.

or, for that money, you could buy 3-4 copies of HoT, the entire game, and give them out to friends to play with. it just baffles me: 3-4 copies of the entire game, and all of its content, for the same price as the minor logging convenience item on multiple characters

i love ele to death but it is pretty easy in all game modes. Perhaps that will change if/when they nerf its healing and sustain in the next patch

CJTheKilla.1054:

I’m actually quite confused anet. I’m currently #1 on Legendary Leaderboard for NA and there’s like no point. There is absolutely no point in being #1 because you guys don’t even give us a reward. It basically makes us look like no lifes who play your game by being #1. I have 403 games won with 40 losses. It’s real discouraging to continue pvp’ing and to be honest, playing your game, when there’s no gain from it. What am I supposed to do? Have bragging rights? Oh yeah because everyone knows that division = skill. A person not known in the pvp scene can climb the leaderboards just by putting on the MMR favored team when they have absolutely no player skill. Your pvp is absolutely boring with nothing new/fun being implemented to it. If I’m supposed to no life my way up your league and not receive any sort of gain from doing so, what is the point in even continuing to play pvp. And while I’m at this league stuff, how about these queue times huh? Its real satisfying to keep doing ranked, and even unranked, when you have to sit through 30m to 2hr queues just for a match that lasts for 5m and is usually a 500-0. I have yet to have one fun match this season, because they’re always blowouts. Top tier players fighting people who barely understand their classes role on a team. I’ve went on a car trip to Kroger, stopped for gas and Wendy’s and came back only to still be in a queue. Something is wrong here anet… I mean a suitable reward for being #1 might be a free legendary/precursor, 5k gems, something of that nature. Quite frankly no one cares too much about titles and would only cause even more rage from people who spend a lot of time waiting in queues, sitting in hotm more than they are actually ever in a match.

She’s so lucky… she’s a star… but she cry cry cries in her loonely heaaart

(not trolling- just the image that came up in my head)

HoT map hero points give you 10 each. If you have the masteries it will take you two days. Tyria world completion also gives you a pretty sizeable chunk. If you don’t like PvE…. Sorry fam

Conditions or any amount of sustain will rip thief open or at least cause them to kite off point and become useless

I want medium and light armor that looks more like heavy armor- simple and battle ready. Also some masculine looking, practical female armor would be appreciated. I’m not a fan of the trench coats, dresses, butt capes, and flamboyant glowy back items

Illustrious is about as close as my elementalist can get to looking practical, well protected, simple and ready to kick some butt

The infinite harvesting tools in the gem store have always seemed like a bad deal to me, even for 1 character. A copper-o-matic is 800 gems, which is a flat $10, for something I use every 30 seconds. The harvesting tools are 1000 gems, so a $20 minimum each, and I use them much less frequently.

In addition, unlike the copper-o-matic, which I use regularly in all game modes, the harvesting tools only get used when I’m about to burst farm an area. Since I have to prepare for the burst anyway (usually by switching characters to my speedy thief, using speed boosts, et cetera), going to the kodan merchant in LA to pick up some spare harvesting tools for like 20 silver really isnt that inconvenient.

I addition, you really need all 3 on one character for it to be convenient at all, since if you have 1 or 2, you will make the same number of trips to a merchant to refill on tools.

I don’t know if there is a “hardest”, but here are my least favorites:

CENTRAL TYRIA:

1. Frostgorge Sound. The dredge one with the power suit is cumbersome after you get over the nifty references to the soviet union. The kodan quotes and teachings read like Jaden Smith’s twitter feed and to complete those hearts, you have to find every last bear. In addition, they quiz you on their nonsense, hand-wavy religion so you actually have to read through the bad writing

2. Diessa Plateau and Iron Marches because it is the Nebraska of Tyria. Miles and miles of nothing interesting

3. Dredgehaunt cliffs is kind of an eyesore compared to the other beautiful shiverpeaks maps… Like comparing freshly fallen snow on evergreen trees to the grey sludge snow in parking lots. Idk so many people disapprove of Lornar’s Pass, it’s gorgeous and gliding makes it a breeze.

HEART OF THORNS:

All of them, because of the mastery system. Verdant Brink is probably the easiest, but I don’t think Tangled Depths is that much harder than Auric Basin or Dragonstand

Tere.4759:

two problems with your argument:

a) sexuality is a spectrum. There are no “homos” and “heteros”. regardless of how you identify, no one is 100% gay or straight. we are blobs in the universe with chemicals wizzing around our heads, and a lot of so-called “straight” people have homosexual experiences at some point in their life, and “gays” often have moments of heterosexualtiy. Penguins, horses, insects, and cows also have varying degrees of sexuality among populations. the gay-straight divide is fuzzier than you like to make it, and such is nature.

---

I absolutely disagree with this. I am completely not attracted to women nor am I at all interested in having relations with them. I have never had a homosexual relationship though I can’t say I haven’t twisted the hetero expectation. So no, there are 100% straight people who haven’t had homosexual experiences. I love men, all of them. Women, I’m not attracted to them at all.

And before you say it’s a religious thing or a psychological thing, my niece is gay and I love her to pieces. I am not religious at all. In fact, I write erotic novels, so I’m in no way a prude. As I said, I love men even when they’re jerks (lol, and many are.)

I didn’t say everyone was bisexual lol. You can be 99.999999% straight at the moment, and for your whole life, but you exist as a human along the same spectrum I do. Nature has few disecrete phenomena

+1 to OP, +1 to Anet

Swap the passive and active. Passive: signet of hydromancy. Active: remove damaging conditions

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

It’s just a variation of the “appeal to authority” logical fallacy known as “appeal to accomplishment.”

People aren’t content to say, “I don’t like [this]” — instead, there’s a human need to justify that dislike in terms of some sort of “ideal game” or logical argument. However, “preferences” aren’t logical and mileage varies. So we end up with threads arguing about the terms used by the OP, instead of whatever it is that is bothering the poster.

In this case, what I read is:

• OP hasn’t played in a while
• OP doesn’t have as much fun as they used to
• OP attributes this to some sort of irrational focus by ANet on balancing for no good reason.

I’d thus be more sympathetic if the OP dropped this thread and started a new one that said something like, “I’m not having as much fun as I used to —- here are the things I found enjoyable that aren’t available any longer. Does anyone thing the game will have more of it down the road?”

slam bam thank you man

imbalance is only fun for the professions / WvW team that is constantly winning. they should; however, stop catering only to hard core players. I think the idea is that hardcore players get bored faster (since the are constantly at the end of the rope), but I wouldn’t mind simple things like ascended gear and AR being more accessible so that casuals can start doing more end game content. i’m beating a dead horse, but I also wouldn’t mind simple stat selection in WvW or PvE (ascended gear) as well

I would be surprised if it was anything but the desert

hello forums- meet Nymphasia, my elementalist main

Easily the best hairstyle in the game 10/10 recommend (OP uses it too, in pink)

No

/15 characters

WWWWWWWW.6742:

Class homogenization

I am all for new Elite Specs (even more if they ever get balanced) adding a different flavor to a class, but I really don’t want to see things like Warriors cloaking, Necromancers making portals, and Rangers with Alacrity.

“I don’t want to see more mesmers”

jk but i agree

Substance E.4852:

Forcing people to buy gems to get BLT weapons now?

I’d rather blindly buy games during the Steam Summer Sale I’ll never play than gamble for gem store trash…

this one said it best

If you want to roleplay and still pump out decent damage, run Ice Bow (which uses ice attacks in all attunements), Glyph of (lesser) Elementald to summon ice minions, and flash freeze is pretty good too. Scepter/focus is probably the most viable ice-offensive weapon combo. You can also switch to earth and use obsidian flesh / magnetic surge and just pretend it’s ice, since there is no animation.

It’s hard to play at the moment because of the drought of content, and how HoT actually intensified the grind. My 2016 wish list:

1. New elite specs
2. New fractal stages and living story
3. Easier accessibility of ascended gear (so I can play more than 3 professions in PvE) (I only do fractals and raids)
4. PvP style stat selection for WvW

Anything that doesnt necessitate me getting a new full set of ascended gear to play correctly

insanemaniac.2456:

lol ele has a much easier rotation than any decent power engi…

easier and deals more damage

I main elementalist but I had a bunch of ascended chests lying around so I was like “hey, I’m gonna try something new”. Engineer is pretty cool so I made one with Yassith (viper) gear, and the condition damage is really high.

I’ve found that power engineer is much more fun. But is it worth spending 70g to mystic toilet all my gear? Coming off my elementalist, the damage is pretty forgettable. Power engineer offers more “support” because of its easier rotation and more flexible trait/skill lineup, but I think power elementalist out-supports power engineer too.

So is there any reason to invest in power engineer if it is pretty much outclassed? I think guardian and thief also beat it in terms of power.

I also feel like because of scrapper’s utility in pvp, it is more nerf-able

be careful what you wish for

Same here. Optimistically, it seems pretty likely to be in a future expansion. So many possibilities… the “Nightmare”, perhaps? I’m not a good theory crafter. More on your point though, other professions have difficulties solo-ing in PvE as well. My elementalist, for example, wears full Zojja gear, and it can be frustrating trying to solo content with 12k hp and no armor investment. My Yassith condition engineer can just be plain boring. It’s always greener on the other side

I just made an engineer after playing zerker elementalist for about 4 months. I chose condition engineer because it was something my elementalist couldn’t outshine it in, since I’m pretty sure power ele takes a big dump on power engineer.

If there are things like burnzerker, thief, and tempest running around, what advantages does power engineer bring to the table? Being a recent addition to the community, I was surprised there was a debate. I had always assumed engineers and necromancers huddled together as the condition champions.

What if ascended weapons / armor / trinkets could have their stats changed at will like legendaries, except with like a 2 day time gate? (so if you invested the hundreds of gold in ascended gear, you could change up the stats every two days to keep things interesting)

My engineer wears yassith, my elementalist wears zojja, and my mesmer wears saphir, and it’s pretty pricey to change it up, so i rarely do. I’m also a casual WvW player which makes the gear thing a drag. Sometimes I feel like playing healing tempest for a while in WvW, and then a few days later I might want to switch back to Zerker for fractals, without spending that much gold to transform my equipment, or waste the inventory space to have multiple sets.

Idk, hardcore players with lots of legendaries might not approve, because it devalues the equipment tier, but I don’t think it would hurt the community to let us try out different WvW and PvE builds every few days to keep the gameplay fresh. As compensation legendary weapons could have modifiable sigils at will as well (and of course, changing stats would not be time gated)

I know guardian is supposed to be the only non-meta class this season, but man is my elementalist having problems with them. When I’m trying to stay on point and support, their CC pins me down and I die 5 seconds later from their teammates. When I’m 1 v 1 guardians, my reflects come in handy to get them down to about 50% hp, but then they start glowing blue and block every attack for the next 10 seconds and in that time they can usually CC and knock me out. Any advice?

Serious.7083:

Substance E.4852:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Malediktus.9250:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Malediktus.9250:

The easiest way to get rich in GW2 is to never spend any gold. After playing 10k hours you will easily have 100k raw gold on your hands that way.
With trading those 100k gold could easily be 500k gold.

And have 30 accounts feeding you about 1500 gold/28 days (or about 19k gold a year) for logging in.

I excluded options like convertig gems to gold or extra accounts since that obviously skews the results. I think it costs less than 10k USD to buy 100k gold with gems to gold option at the moment which is a pocket change for plenty of people. If you have disposable income and value your time trading gems for gold is obviously the best way to get gold. Farming gold yourself means you value your time at only like 1 USD per hour.

Having a easy income of 1500 gold or so a month also means it’s easy to say things like, “don’t spend gold and you’ll be rich.” Easy to say but not really useful to tell people to not spend gold in a cosmetics based game.

I think it costs less than 10k USD to buy 100k gold with gems to gold option at the moment which is a pocket change for plenty of people

I’m not surprised at all that you think 10k USD is pocket change.

I feel bad for anyone who can just kitten away $10k and can’t think of anything better to do with it than buy currency in some online game.

Some bankers, sports personalities, entertainers and businessmen will pay $10,000 plus on a ‘good night out’. ‘Investing’ that sort of money in a game would be relatively cheap for them.

People with that kind of money play better video games

Zok.4956:

Grand Avatar of Destruction.2537:

but the more offensive eles will melt like butter in the middle of a volcanic vent.

Have you ever seen butter melting in the middle of a volcanic vent?

He’s an elementalist so probably

Thank you for your service. Very valuable topic and I hope it gets more views. Is it naive of me to suggest voice to keyboard software? It would make playing in TS a bit more challenging but it might fill in some gaps with some specialized mouse suggestions above

unfortunately, it’s because they can’t do anything else

ImTasty.2163:

Kayberz.5346:

Donari.5237:

In an AMA they said that elite specs are things that come with expansions. I was sad. No new ones ’til the next expack.

Thats false, they said the exact OPPOSITE. They said elite specs are something that doesnt necessarily require an expansion to be released, and that we could see them come along with living story releases

Actually, your statement is outdated. At first, it was stated that elite specs were not expansion only stuff but, I believe in the AMA, it was stated that they are now expansion only content.

Edit: found the link
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/48zlyd/im_mike_obrien_here_with_gw2_dev_team_ama/d0nxtgx?context=10000

Not to sound pessimistic, but what kind of lifespan does Anet think this game has? It took them 3-4 years to release the first xpac, and the player base isn’t exactly picking up speed. If they plan on releasing new specs every expansion, then I doubt we’ll ever make it to 3 per class

Can we get some more elite specs? The model of:

“9 core profession interfaces that serve as the basis models for the elite specializations”

seems pretty okay if we had a bunch of elite specs to choose from. It’s brilliant, actually. but since we only have 1 elite spec per profession, it kind of falls flat. Anet is probably taking detailed notes on how these elite specs are doing, but can they really collect relevant data from just 1 elite spec? My gut tells me we’ll have to wait until the next expansion to see more elite specs, but I hope the next expansion brings at least 2 per profession, so we can really see the benefits of having them as a game feature (in terms of creating build diversity, etc.)

Jhoul.6923:

Alex Shatter.7956:

All I’m saying is, if i were to update any elementalist skills, it would be

1. Tornado
2. Signet of Water
3. Arcane Shield
4. Arcane Power
5. Conjure Earth Shield

These 5 are categorically useless and outdated

Why don’t you create a Suggest post for each? Something that I have seen is that even if the devs don’t reply they do read this and rather than throwing down a skill that would help the class we could just write ideas on how to make all of them better.

Edit: This way we can all brainstorm together

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Another-skill-suggestion-post/first#post6151360

Imho the most useless elementalist core skills are

1. Tornado
2. Signet of Water
3. Arcane Power
4. Arcane Shield
5. Conjure Earth Shield

Quick fix ideas:

1. Tornado- ground target instead of transform. Or, if that’s too OP in conquest, make it a summon-able, kill-able NPC that moves around and does tornado things. I would love either of these for WvW so much.
2. Signet of Water- switch the active and passive effects. So, on active, removes damaging conditions. Passive, works as a Signet of Hydromancy.
3. Arcane Power- The 5 attacks are unblockable and un-evadable as well. For freaking perma-evade-block thief, guard and revenant
4. Arcane Shield- Definitely a CD reduction
5. Conjure Earth Shield- Gives classic Diamond Skin (no conditions >90% health) to bearer

All I’m saying is, if i were to update any elementalist skills, it would be

1. Tornado
2. Signet of Water
3. Arcane Shield
4. Arcane Power
5. Conjure Earth Shield

These 5 are categorically useless and outdated

Is the vigor sharing all that necessary? I’d like to see water globe and lightning orb also be ground targeted + stationary

Alekt.5803:

Alex Shatter.7956:

Topher.5631:

Tempest:

-Reduce the healing from applying auras

-Reduce healing from water overload

-Reduce damage from air overload

-Increase recharge on “Rebound!”, “Feel the burn!” and “Flash Freeze!”

-Increase damage on all weapon skills

As an ele main I agree with most of this. But the reason why overload air is so strong is not because of its damage, but because of its burst (1/4 sec), radius (largest of overloads), and it hits 5 people. Meaningful nerfs would target those as well / instead

Well, Air Overload hits 3 targets maximum. I don’t see where Tempest would be without Air Overload.

OH lol i goofed. I thought it hit 5 for some reason. Yeah tbh i hope they dont nerf overload air or reflects. Those are the only things allowing me to wear a maurader’s ammy in pvp :c