Guild Wars 2

I agree it’d be nice to see some more of the map opened up, maybe some new dungeons, etc. but there is already literally hundreds if not thousands of hours of things to do, a lot more than many games out there, and many people to play and interact with.
If you are getting bored I suggest maybe you are playing too much, or expecting it to fill a void in your life. I’m not saying that is the case, but I get that impression a lot of the time from posters that say they are bored with the game. Why not play something else? Or spend some time away from the screen? You can’t expect a game to fulfill your life. When you get bored, turn it off.

It is overuse of the word “awesome” that grates on me..

Zoso.8279:

IF and that is a VERY BIG IF this is truly it is very disheartening. True it is their game but we bought it so that in turn makes it ours also (even if its just a little bit)……

You don’t even own it a little bit. You only buy the licence to use the software.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Otaur.9268:

If I could find an MMORPG without requiring it to act like a FULL TIME Job to get anywhere …

Ironically, this is more likely to happen if substantial numbers of MMO customers stop demanding that MMO’s fill their every free moment.

^This.

Unfortunately we now live in a world where we expect other people to make our entertainment for us. If you spend all of your free time expecting to be entertained by something or someone else, of course it will become tedious after a while.

You’re doing it wrong… Ele is hard to play, you have to be very quick and understand exactly what you’re doing. To survive I rely on dodging, lightning flash and our multiple heals via our main heal and evasive arcana healing. I use a lot of might stacking, and whatever I can to regain vigor / energy. Also to make it work I use a mouse where I can access all skills so my left hand can concentrate on movement. You have to become very fluent and understand your build.

I agree we are at a bit of a disadvantage with our stats and have to work harder to get results, but it is very rewarding and so much more fun than some of the other classes.

Ele for me – tried other professions but I always come back to my main, seems way more fun, but each to their own of course!

WvW: I currently mix Soldiers and Knights armor, with ascended Celestial trinkets. Sometimes I swap out some trinkets/armor for Cavalier and Berserker if I’m feeling saucy. At the moment I run only Strength runes. Usually 0/10/10/20/30, sometimes 0/10/0/30/30. Food, usually Sharpening Stones and Plate of Truffle streak, and very occasionally Lemongrass Poultry Soup if conditions are annoying me.

PvE: Mostly Berserker armor these days, and tend to swap trinkets between Berserker/Cavalier/Celestial depending on what I’m doing or mood. Same traits as WvW at the moment (can’t be bothered to keep resetting them as I switch between WvW and PvE; it would be nice to have trait presets or even entire build presets). Food, usually Sharpening Stones and Plate of Truffle Steak.

Traits for both are usually Zephyr’s Boon, Armor of Earth, Soothing Wave, Cleansing Wave, Cleansing Water/Powerful Aura, Blashing Staff/Renewing Stamina, Elemental Attunement, Evasive Arcana.

All pretty standard. Again I vary it a little depending on what I’m doing. I usually play with D/D or Staff.

You may notice I switch things round a bit. I don’t think there is one build for everything. I tend to switch things until I have a comfortable ballpark figure for what I’m doing (i.e. do I need to trade a bit of toughness for power, etc.). I used to analyze numbers but I got tired of that and found it didn’t make much difference; its all so situational. As long as you have a good idea how ele works, you can probably make some good choices for each situation (for example I doubt I’d use quite the same build for WvW solo/small group roaming as I would if I was running with a large zerg).

I currently mix soldiers and knights armor, with ascended celestial trinkets. Sometimes I swap out some trinkets/armor for cavalier and berserker if I’m feeling saucy.

Just to echo everyone else: ele is a whole lot of fun especially d/d ele, but it does take time to learn properly. I also find it works best with a many-button mouse for skills so your left hand can concentrate on moving, dodging and attunement switching. I think everyone tends to come up with there own “formula” for this though, which is good. As long as you can move constantly while doing everything else..

I would much prefer better AI. I can’t remember where it was, but on one of the world bosses, everyone would just DPS from the side while it stood there breathing fire out in front. I’m glad I wasn’t showing the game to anyone at that point, it looked a bit silly.

Edit: I think it was the Shadow Behemoth.

One thing that sometimes bugs me about Vigil Keep, the “temporary LA”, is it is not a level 80 area. This makes it a bit more difficult to experiment with your build there.

I know you can hover your mouse over an attribute and get the level 80 value, but it isn’t ideal when trying to get an overall view of your stats. True I can just go off to a level 80 area like The Grove so it is not a big issue; I just thought I little toggle switch above your attributes might be nice and pretty easy to add.

Nice vid, thanks for that. I’ve gone for a build based on Stone Heart which I’ll be trying this evening in WvW. It does mean my investment in water is nil as I wanted to keep Evasive Arcana and Zephyr’s Boon, but I’ve tried to make up for that a bit with some healing power from elsewhere.

I’ve ended up with a little less power, but basically (without food):
Power 1,862
Toughness 1,645 (2,565)
Health 1,453 (16,175)
Precision 1,313 (23%)
Ferocity 468 (181%)
Condition Damage 449
Healing Power 239

Traits: 0/2/6/0/6
Air I
Earth VI, IX, XIII
Arcana II, VIII, XI

Runes: Strength

I’ll see how it goes.. I may need some condi reduction food with the lack of cleansing.

I always found the idea of scheduled world bosses odd.

“We will be stealing your car at 11pm this evening, be sure to have the police standing by”.

Not perfect, but definitely an improvement, even for d/d ele. I’m having much more fun than I was at least. Conditions are still annoying especially for my build, but I haven’t tried tweaking much yet. You still have to be very fast though; if you take the pressure off you’re dead, but I like the fast game play.

I’ve been having a lot of fun in PvP since the patch, I seem to be doing a fair bit better and that’s on D/D. Not tried in WvW yet though as need to rethink my build due to rune changes / etc.

Hi,
When I first got the update I could use the chat system. Suddenly now when I type and hit return, the text is not sent.. tried relogging, restart, etc. and nothing.. :-(

I bet they are twitchy about pressing the go button and doing lots of last minute checks. I’ve always found it a little scary on my software projects when an update affects many sites, and each site is critical. I would find gamers more scary than clients judging by this forum ;-)

To me balance is when two equally skilled players with a well configured character of two different classes both have a roughly equal chance of beating each other. It’ll never be perfect, but it should be close enough that if those 2 such players fight 1v1, it is difficult to be sure who is going to win.

At the moment it does not seem to come down to player skill alone, though that is just my subjective opinion from my experience playing over a year. I think it was more balanced when I started than now.

I can understand how it is hard to balance, but it seems very unbalanced at the moment, though maybe that’s because I play a D/D ele in PvP :-) Thieves annoy me the most for the sheer amount of damage they deal for the least amount of effort (I have played a thief for a short time to get an idea of this, and it felt like easy mode). You can tell something is wrong when you are having a good fight with someone that has lasted say 30 seconds or even a minute or 5, and then a thief just turns up and downs you (or your opponent) in about 2 seconds. It sort of spoils it and it feels so wrong.

I know there’s already a lot of crying about thieves so apologies for adding to it, and before anyone says L2P: I know there are some counters such as stun, but I don’t think this shifts the balance back to anywhere near even.

I won’t even go into conditions.. ;-)

Also the different health pools seem unbalanced. I’m not sure what the “cons” are of heavier armor. The pros are a bigger health / toughness pool… And warriors sure don’t seem to suffer with maneuverability, at least not to the extent that it shifts the balance back.

Oh well – looking forward to seeing what the patch does for balance!

JakHammer.7094:

Over 3K hours on main acct., about 400 on 2nd. 13K Achieves. Did all the usual stuff – No Precursor. Felt the curse. I did see a pretty good increase in Rare and Exotic drops as MF on main crossed 150%.

During the final Scarlett event I bought 30 bucks in gems on each account. Forged the Legend and dropped Scarlett’s Kiss on main account and dropped The Chosen on the 2nd account in less than 2 weeks. Gems On -> Cruse Off? I sure hope not.

I’ve spent a fair bit on gems over the last year or so of playing, and can tell you this conspiracy theory is unfounded.

I don’t really like the term “toon” either, I prefer “character”. For some reason calling your character a “toon” seems like you are less invested in them, though I have no basis for that – it’s just how it feels to me. Also shortening everything just annoys me, but I’m a grumpy old git

1) I purchased 2 ascended rings of the same type (both defensive) not realising I could not equip them both at once. Fortunately ANet swapped it for me!

2) I purchased 15 of the wrong type of transmutation stone from the gem store…! With the feature patch though this won’t be a problem.

I think you’d be avoiding a lot of fights if there was a risk of losing the ascended armor that you’d spent 100’s of gold on, and losing that legendary you spend months working to get, or even just an expensive weapon.

No I think in the current system that really would not work, unless I’ve misunderstood you.

Just the one.

Going a step further, I’d like an easy way to switch weapons AND traits for different situations; maybe even gear too. When switching from dagger to staff, I might want to switch the renewing stamina trait to blasting staff, for instance.
It’s a real pain coming up to a wall in WvW that I’d like to nuke with meteor shower, and having to switch to staff and change my trait(s). That may sound lazy I suppose..

I find stacking extremely boring. I remember taking a break from the game (or at least dungeons), coming back and suddenly finding the dungeon tactics had changed to this boring stand still and mash buttons style. I find it boring for the same reason I play D/D ele still.. I love to move and dodge.
Fortunately there are still players who want to do it old style and play for fun, rather than speed.
I guess we are all different so if the game allows both play styles, maybe that is best.

I would love to see open world dueling implemented. If you don’t want to take part, all you have to do is not take part..

It’d be great if you could slap someone round the face with a glove first..

;-)

I do find stacking in dungeons utterly boring. A lot of people just want to get through dungeons as fast as possible for the loot rather than play their way through the dungeons. Recently I went with a group through AC and purposely avoided stacking, and fought every mob we found, and actually moved around while fighting(!) We all found it more fun. It wasn’t about the loot, it was about playing.

However, since getting certain gear such as ascended requires huge amounts of gold, I can see why it ends up going that way.

I’ve been waiting a year for more parts of the map to become explorable; there’s huge areas where you just cannot go yet that’d I’d like to explore.

Zerging.. I have a love/hate relationship with that. It’s fun being with a group, but half the time you can’t really see what is going on and it eventually becomes a mess of AoE effects. Small zergs are fine, but when big blobs hit each-other in WvW it just seems to become a mess. I’m not sure how that could be “fixed” though, it is the nature of a lot of people fighting each other. I suppose the only way would be to make it more realistic in that, you can’t just run through each other, and AoE can also hurt your allies.

It’s the same with some of the world bosses. I think the scaling on some of them is a bit over the top. How can a worm survive that many people battering it with magic/swords/arrows/fire/frost/etc?

I don’t mind the living story so much. Without anything changing it can begin to feel a bit like groundhog day… My only problem with it is it seems to be at the expense of other parts of the game.

Balance is another issue.. And it certainly feels a bit grindy lately if you want to venture into ascended armor land.

But on the positive side, I still love the combat mechanics (playing an ele at least), it feels fluid and responsive, more so than any other MMO I’ve played. I like the graphics, and it keeps me coming back for the moment. PvP is still fun (even though ele is a bit weak and I think condition spamming is far too easy and skill-less). WvW is fun when there aren’t blobs (huge zergs) everywhere.

Thanks! Forgot it was so minor. I went with cavalier in the end.

I’m trying to choose the stats to apply to my Light of Dwayna back piece. Since the thing has been so expensive to craft I don’t want to make a mistake! I know ultimately only I can make the decision, but I’m just after some thoughts in case there is anything I’m not taking into consideration.

I play a lot of WvW (solo and team); if it was just PvE I would probably choose Zerker.

My current build is PVT armor (though I’m thinking of swapping out a few pieces for Knights and/or Celestial), I use full Melandru runes (though again, might swap some of these out to go a little less defensive), and I currently run 0/0/20/20/30 including using Geomancer’s Freedom. Food is lemongrass poultry soup and I use Superior Sharpening Stones. As you can tell, I really hate conditions.

My trinkets are currently (Ascended): Zerker Amulet, 2 * Cavalier rings, and 2 * Zerker/Valkyrie accessories.

I can get replacement trinkets fairly easily and armor for varying the builds (until I go ascended of course), but the ascended back piece is the one item that I don’t particularly want to swap out later on due to the cost, and obviously I’d like to get use out of it by wearing it as much as I can!

I’m currently thinking either:
Cavalier, Knights, or Celestial, or at a pinch, Zerker, or PVT.

Cavalier is my current favourite, after all an ele always needs lots of toughness, power and critical damage.

I guess with being able to vary the rest of the build it perhaps doesn’t really matter that much, but before I go ahead I wanted to get some thoughts from others in case there was anything I hadn’t thought of.

Thanks!

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I play D/D most of the time.

Peetee.9406:

It’s impossible to balance this game or any other MMO for that matter. It’s why MMO PvP will never be a successful e-sport. There’s too many variables.

I’ll give you a PvE example because it’s easier to understand but you can apply it to PvP as well…..

Berserker gear = 1700ish DPS
Soldier gear = 1400ish DPS and 500 DPS mitigation

If a fight does not require mitigation, Berserker gear will always be better.
If a fight does require mitigation, Soldier gear will always be better.

There will never be a scenario in which these two sets are equal. They will NEVER be balanced. One of them will always situationally be better than the other.

You have two choices in this game:

1) Run the best build and win
2) Don’t run the best build and lose

It’s that simple. Cheese or be cheesed.

All things being equal beyond the character yes, but what about the millions of variables that make up a human being? The player themselves? I suppose there is an optimal rotation (i.e. how you use your skills) but you don’t know how your opponent is going to counter those skills. It isn’t all about highest DPS.

Also, choosing the variables in our character is perhaps part of our variables and our play style.

Having said that, if the meta really is that much stronger that it always dictates the outcome regardless of the player, then the game is broken.

I am talking from an ele’s perspective here.

imsoenthused.1634:

Well, it’s basically a problem with core mechanics. In PvE pure DPS wins out, because a skilled character can mitigate enough damage and heal enough even when not specialized for it that using anything else is just needlessly prolonging a fight, and the AI is stupid and predictable enough that CC is really just a waste of time you could be putting out damage. Combine that with classes with higher base armor being able to do as much or more damage than casters, and you end up with the pure zerker warrior meta in PVE, with possibly a guardian or two thrown in if you want. Now you take that to PVP, and damage isn’t as reliable, so building for health and toughness becomes more reliable, since building for it doesn’t nerf your damage enough, and you can do enough damage while outlasting berserkers to kill them. The the counter arises of condition bursts, which are way too slow for PvE, where non condition damage can be relied on, but great for PvP because the damage is reliable while pure non condition damage isn’t. It also has the benefit of being pretty effective at killing everything regardless of build. So we get this new meta where the class that can stack the most conditions on the enemy while shedding/surviving the most conditions on themselves wins out in the long run. So basically we’ve got this situation where in PvE all classes can do DPS and should push for as much DPS as possible and recieve pretty much no benefit for choosing a class with low base health or armor. In PvP, building for conditions means more reliable damage than any other build so you’ll kill glass cannons fast, and classes built for survivability a little slower, but your only real fights are going to be with classes that remove conditions from themselves faster or put conditions on you faster.

So it’s not a “cheese build”, it’s just a matter of being able to look at how combat in this game is actually done. Sure there’s room for human error. The meta kind of assumes that everyone is mitigating damage reliably and often, ie that all players have a certain minimum skill level. A great player using a berserker build against a player that doesn’t dodge and evade is going to do so much damage so fast that condi being more reliable or them having more health isn’t going to save them. A good bunker build, with intelligent healing/mitigation may very well just straight up out last a condi burst while grinding them down slowly with their less reliable more sporadic damage. In PvE, berserker may be faster, but not if you can’t read boss tells and don’t step out of red circles. If you’re down all the time it won’t matter what your theoretical max DPS is.

TL,DR Don’t hate the player, hate the game. Using what works better than anything else isn’t cheesy. It’s just smart. When people say they don’t like your cheesy build, what they really mean is they wish there were a better build balance and more options, which I think we all can agree with.

I’ve never heard the problem described so well, thanks – I agree with all of that.

Imbalance stifles variety, and is what creates these “best builds”. If everything was a lot more balanced, we would have more variety. Think about it. If 1 build beats them all, then sooner or later most people will end up with it or some minor variant of it.

That’d be fun. My ele would be in her element.

I too do not play just to get through dungeons as fast as possible. It just bores me, especially the whole standing there stacking thing. I’ll do it if the group wants to, but its nothing like as much fun as running around using your skills and dodging.

Each to their own, that’s why its called a game and not a job.

Anyway – I like this build, I’ve always been a fan of boon builds. I used to run the build that used the water and monk runs, but lately I’ve gone more for condition mitigation (for WvW). Ever since I discovered the traveler runes though, I’ve thought about making a 75% boon duration build like you have.

I am worried about conditions though in WvW, especially from Warriors / Necros. Get stunned in a zerg fight and you’re probably dead.

Enjoyed the YouTube video too, nice job.

I did the same thing a few days ago after the 10th december patch left me upset. I tried a ranger and an engineer. Completely new to both professions, and using default runes, I can’t believe how much tougher they felt in PvP.
Now, I had no idea what I was doing and I did obviously screw up a lot, but I could see how much easier it would be given a bit of effort.
It really is a strange state of affairs. I hope ANet can see this and have some kind of plan to help eles out.
I love the general mechanics of attunements and such like so I would not want that to change, but we are just a bit feeble compared to other classes. They seem to have much easier access to things that the ele has to have big cooldowns for, or go deep into trait lines for.
ArenaNet.. please help us.

The main thing that annoyed me about him was, almost every time we went into a dangerous situation he’d say “this won’t end well”. That’s not what you want to hear when you’re all keyed up to kick bottom!

Ele is the most fun, but as I’ve said in another thread I’m finding it hard to ride out these bad times. I don’t want to abandon the ele I’ve had since day 1, but since this last patch upset me so much (I thought they’d finally sorted it out) – I am seriously considering it. I don’t want to “jump to the strongest class”, just a class where I stand a chance given my fairly good play skill.
I invested a lot in playing ele, not just time but also purchasing a mouse that would allow me to play far more effectively (many many buttons).
But no matter how fast and efficient I am at playing ele now, the “spam-1/2” classes can still just stand there and kill me, while I attune/dodge/move about like a crazed idiot and trying to cure my conditions while my health literally melts away.

Mesmer.. that’s another possibility. Daft as it sounds after a year with my ele I feel bad abandoning her for another character, but there’s only so long you can stick it out. I’ll perhaps try playing with some more builds first, but even after playing ranger for a bit in PvP to try it out with just the default build I instantly felt so much more survivable.

I just don’t get it. Warrior has heavy armor and therefore higher base stats. Ele has light armor, therefore lower base stats. They are the “pros”. Surely the “cons” should be heavy armor: slower, less agility and light armor: more squishy. Well, they got 1 of the “cons” in…

It is very frustrating. I love playing ele, and I’ve played the same character for over a year now and I think I’ve got pretty good at is. I bought a many-button mouse especially to play ele properly. I had high hopes for this patch, but now I’m seriously thinking of switching to another high-skill character (spam-1/2 characters bore me). The only one that comes to mind is Engineer.
I do like the idea of ranger, but I think I may get bored of that fairly quick.

D/D ele here.

So far I’m not finding it very effective in PvP.

If I fight 1 on 1 and am very careful about taking damage then I can down a condi class, but as soon as you dip below 90% you are dead very quickly. This makes you feel very uncertain when you fight as the change can be very sudden; one moment you are at 90% and its seemingly taken a lot of fighting to get there, and the next moment you’re dead.

It feels like you’ve got 10% of your health basically to kill someone, so if you run around with 20K health, you better kill them without being hit for 2K… The more I think about it, the more useless it seems.

This was against an engineer in my guild. He could beat me everytime pre-patch, but when he switched to his ele (used to be his main) I could beat him almost everytime even though his build was more tanky. Post patch, I can down his engi if I make absolutely no mistakes, have zero cool-downs, and down him quickly before he gets a 2k hit in. After that the condis get me pretty quick.

Fighting in a group, forget it, it doesn’t take much to get below 90% health.

Having said that, this is day 1 and I’ve had limited time with it. Maybe there will be a way to make it work. I’m still playing with builds, but I felt more effective when I went back to my standard build.

I was really looking forward to this patch, but so far it has left me a little cold. First impression at least.

PvE went a little better though. I did a couple of dungeons and enjoyed the condi immunity, but I really missed evasive arcana. Not had time to try WvW yet.

I do feel a slight disparity in the balance at the moment.

I’m a fairly skilled D/D ele as I’ve been playing that configuration for nearly a year now. I have a multi-button mouse as that is the only realistic way to play ele (IMHO), and my keys are remapped to the point that I can do everything as easily as possible without impeding movement.

So there I was, I think I was fighting a warrior; I was moving a lot, evading a lot, switching attunements to build might and access all my skills and combos, remembering what was on cooldown, repositioning with lightening flash, etc. My opponent was perhaps moving a little, no dodging as such.. I made one little mistake, they disabled me with a stun I think and waved their sword a few times, each blow giving huge damage, and before I knew it I was dead.

So all of that effort, my strafing, dodging, combos, etc. were beaten by a stun and then a single skill spam, all while they stood nearly motionless.

It left me feeling a little.. aggravated. I won’t switch class though; besides the slight peeves I love playing ele and as long as I don’t make too many mistakes I more often than not can win fights, and can solo camps fairly easily.. but it is certainly not easy and spamming 1 or 2 skills will not do it.

The class with one of the highest learning curves deserves a little more, IMHO.

Just a slight gripe. I still love the game.

I think FirstBlood made the point I was going to make. Generally things either cost you time or money. When it costs you time, it comes down to how much you value your time. The good thing is you can enjoy spending the time; it’s called playing a game.

The game-play/combat especially as an Elementalist (Sylvari); I’ve never felt so in control of a character (though there was a steep learning curve involving the use a many-button mouse to play Ele properly, but very rewarding in the end).

The scenery/world; exploring it and getting lost in it. It is a nice escape. I quite like that it is fairly solitary some of the time, and then you just stumble across people or a group of people. I would love to see some new areas available to explore..

The occasional bit of farming.

Dungeon runs especially with people from your own guild.

WvWvW and PvP are great fun, if a little frustrating at times.

This is one of only 2 or 3 games I play, and although there are some things that frustrate me, I still love it. It is certainly the only game that has me logging on almost daily.

I’ve never been a big fan of crafting though, it feels a little cumbersome. I’d perhaps get used to it if I did it more.

Crawford.4135:

I live in Colorado, nothing in this game will be more beautiful than that.

YOU PEOPLE NEED TO GO OUTSIDE MORE!

Unfortunately not everyone lives in a beautiful place. I live in an ugly polluted city where the older characterful buildings built by craftsmen are slowly being replaced with cheap ugly buildings. I sometimes think that’s why I’m so attracted to these games, and generally fantasy based games/films where things are still beautiful and elegant.

Oops, I’ve become a cynic!

Great post Bill, I’m so pleased to see this! I was hoping the focus would shift a little to performance at some point because there are definitely issues that let the game-play down a bit here and there, mostly down to skill lag and FPS (on a NVidia GTX 670).

Besides these issues, I find the GW2 game-play some of the best I’ve ever come across, I’ve never felt so in control of a character (d/d ele in my case).

There is a graphical issue I often come across, and that is the character being half embedded in a rock or something else that is meant to be solid, such as standing on a wall in WvW to find my character’s feet are part of that wall, though that’s just a minor gripe. It just makes it feel a little unfinished..

I’m also finding a lot of “sound lag” when I first go into Lions Arch. I usually use RTL for instance to go straight to the trading post, and burning speed and lightening flash. The skills work almost immediately, but I’ll get all the sound FX bunched up together a good few seconds later (after that initial lag it is fine).

As a professional developer myself it would be great to have posts of a more technical nature such as shown in the link2 Moka.9641 provided, but I suppose it is understandable if you don’t want to go that far.

Anyway thanks again for the update!

I’ve not closely read the rest of the posts, but my advice would be to get into a guild and do the dungeons with fellow guild members. I can understand that it might frustrate some groups if they are looking to do speed runs through a dungeon, but they should not insult you, but that seems to be the way of the world these days I’m afraid.

I play ele (d/d) because I find it the most fun by far. Sure they’ve nerfed the hell out of it, but I’ve learned to dodge like crazy and enjoy finding ways to get round the problems (carefully considered traits, armor, runes, utility, etc). I have no problems in dungeons and do okay in WvW; I can take camps pretty easily by myself, and win or draw most 1v1 fights.

If you want to just click click and barely move or dodge, then you may have to choose one of the.. dare I say it.. easier classes.

It is nobody’s job to convince you; play the class you enjoy. You are capable of making your own decisions aren’t you? Don’t get in the habit of searching the web for every decision you have to make.

Hi,
Is tonight the last chance to beat Liadri? I hear the even is ending… Will I get another chance later? I have a work deadline so not much time to play and she’s the only one I’ve not beaten yet :-(

I agree; I really loved the Halloween event, for me that was the best out of the lot and a complete blast. Okay I’ve whined a bit about the April patch recently, I was fuming about it at first… but it’s amazing to think you are getting all this for free really. I’m looking forward to the next Halloween event.

It boggles the mind. So many people seem to think ele is over powered and take much pleasure in the fact we got nerfed hard in the last patch. They just don’t realise how much we have to move about and dodge because we are quiet squigy. This eventually becomes a skill and we get good at evading attacks and running away, so then we appear tough and therefore hard to kill…

Anyway – I made the mistake of using staff all the way up to level 80, and controlling my character completely via the keyboard. I then started running dungeons and realised just how terribly bad I was, so after watching some ele’s on youtube, I first switched to using the mouse for turning, rather than using the keyboard. I don’t know if you are doing this yet? If not, try running forward and holding down the right mouse button while moving the mouse. This also turns the A and D keys into strafe left and right. It can take a while to get used to, but you’ll be so much more mobile if you do, and ele needs that. I practised by doing jumping puzzles and running along fences.

I now play dagger dagger as it is (or was) the most fun, and I like melee, but staff seems the easiest to get started with because you can do ranged attacks and can worry less about movement.

Learn to circle strafe your enemies, and learn about combos, and boons such as might and protection..

And as the others said, try a more defensive build.. don’t just put everything into fire.

Or it could just be that you are attempting to do group events..

Hope that helps!

The nerf to mist form I find very harsh. Elementalists are a fairly squigy build; we have to move constantly and dodge. Moving constantly means its harder to cast skills, which incidentally includes having to swap attunements all the time to play well, and harder to stay looking at your opponent and keeping line of sight.

To help, I ended up buying a multi-button mouse. If I battle with anyone I’m constantly moving, dodging, setting up combos, remembering cooldown times so I know if I can do a combo. Most fingers on both hands working almost all the time.

1 mistake during all of this often meant a dead ele, though mist form was there if we screwed up. It was also a counter measure to the theifs ridiculously powerful stealth attack.

All classes have pros and cons. I admit I’ve not playing other classes much, but I’ve come to these conclusions from playing a lot of PvP and duelling:

• Mesmer are confusing to fight, and can disable you for a long time by turning you into a Moa. Definitely did not need a buff.

• Theif have stealth and ridiculously high DPS just from spamming 1 and 2. Definitely did not need a buff.

• Warriors are tough and hit hard, though I find a lot of players rely on this too much and don’t move around much. Needed a small buff though.

• Good rangers hit very hard from a distance and have their pets. Perhaps needed a small buff.

• A good engineer has a ton of condition they can apply. I’ve never tried playing one but have heard they are quiet difficult in a similar way to Ele.

So what advantage exactly does an Ele have now? The classes I felt were quiet balanced before; maybe a small change was needed yes, but not this. Ele needs an advantage too!

An Ele will have to move around even more like crazy now and run away at the first sign of losing health, because it sure goes down quickly.

This is just my initial reaction, and its the first time I’ve been upset enough to feel compelled to write in this forum.

I love playing Ele and really do not feel enticed by another class, and I spent a very long time learning ele, researching combos, saving for and buying my daggers (I play D/D most of the time as it is (was) the most fun), so I’m not sure what is left for me now. I did try playing a Mesmer some time back and instantly noticed how much more powerful they were, but they just didn’t do it for me.

And those that think Ele should of been nerfed to this extent; try playing one for a while in PvP against some good players and see how you get on.

Maybe after a while I’ll feel different, and as the above post said, try and adapt. I just can’t see what advantage Ele at the moment.