Guild Wars 2

Not dying.
You have 3 stun breaks. If you have a couple of them off cooldown you’re somewhat safe from any variety of thief that isn’t the ‘Mug into instant C&D into Backstab’. The ‘Mug into instant C&D into Backstab’ variety of thieves will, if they’re in any way good, probably kill you 9 times out of 10. You just don’t have the HP to eat 5k/9k/5k hits. Most anything else can be dealt with to various extents assuming you have the cooldowns up when you need them.

Ether renewal is your heavy condition removal. In a 1v1 with a Ranger or Necro? Lol. 4 seconds of condition immunity and mainting the status quo as far as your health pool goes (you’ll probably not have a net gain as far as HP goes, but you won’t lose many either). Best to try and LoS people when you’re healing anyway. Short cd means it’s basically spammable condition remove, and heals for more over 1min than any of the other heal skills. Sure, you lose the ability to deal damage during it, but it’s a sustained pressure damage type of build. You force them to burn cd’s as they come up to not die, and eventually they don’t have a cd when they need it, and down they go.

Mistform.
Is your ‘ohkitten’ button. If you’re getting completely boned, mistform, heal, and put some people between you and the people trying to shove sharp pointy things in your throat. There’s a small period after a burst where there’s not much you can do anyway, so there’s no point eating damage when you could be kiting someone and waiting for cd’s to come back up.
I also Mistform to flag warriors/rangers/engies/guardians/necro’s if it’s up. Can’t be knocked back, feared, or CC’d. Guaranteed kill as long as they don’t have another guardian helping them res. Doesn’t work so well against thieves and mesmers (flag the mes with the skull over his head after his first teleport, after the theif does his first teleport just Dragons Claw him down from point blank range if it’s feasible to do so – that thing hits downed players for about 2.5-3k crits).

Dodge.
Dodge dodge dodge dodge.
You have essentially got permanent vigor. Twice as many dodges as most people. Use them.

Water skills.
Frost Aura combined with Frozen burst on a melee that’s up your backside pretty heavily hampers them. Combined with your swiftness uptime, you have the capability to be twice as fast in that situation. Use it to get out of LoS or clear some distance so that you’re not eating axes to the face. Cone of Cold and Cleansing Wave are decent heal skills. You can clear 3 conditions simply by swapping into Water and popping Frost Armor and Cleansing Wave together. use your heals to top up, rather than waiting until you’re at 25% and going ‘oh… better heal’.

There’s a finesse to the build, and it’s still somewhat glassy (it’s not super duper dps gogogogogo build, since you need sustainability), but you’re not a tank. If you play it well, you’re balancing that razors edge of doing enough damage that your opponents can’t simply ignore you, while being slippery enough that it’s hard for them to get some serious blows in.

If you wanted to sacrifice some dps you could throw in a Soldiers Amulet or something, but I don’t think it’s necessary, and I don’t think the damage trade-off is worth it so that you can die slightly slower to the stuff that will probably still kill you anyway.

Enjoy your 7-9k Churning Earth crits, and remember the immortal words of Bruce Lee.

“Be Like Water.”

Oh wow – message is too long, so I have to doublepost, lol. Sorry for the essay.

Try this:

10 Fire: 10% damage while attuned to Fire trait
10 Air: Zephyrs Boon (fury and swiftness when you get an aura)
30 Water: Cantrips give regen and vigor, Cantrips cd reduced 20%, Remove a condition when granting regen.
20 Arcane: Boon when attuning to an element, Crits grant vigor (33%)

Dual daggers with Sigil of battle in one (3 stacks of might on attunement swap, 9s internal cooldown), Sigil of Minor Accuracy on the other (+12% crit chance at max stacks). Full Berserker Amulet.

Runes of Strength in armour (+20% Might duration, 3% chance to gain might when attacked, +5% damage while under the effects of might, 165 total Power).

Armour of Earth, Lightning Flash and Mistform in utilities, and Glyph of elemental for elite. Ether Renewal for healskill.

If you want to damage test, pick a location that will allow you to updraft knockback the heavy golem into the middle of the pack (so he’ll be beside the medium armour one, basically.

Combo as follows:
RtL, Updraft, Fire Attunement (3stacks might from sigil), Burning speed, drakes breath (1 tick), Fire grab, Ring of Fire, Earth attunement, Earthquake (3stacks might), Churning Earth (3stacks might) while churning earth is casting swap into Water, Frost Aura (Fury and Swiftness), Lightning Flash (Regen and Vigor) on top of the light Golem, Churning Earth goes off.

You’ll kill the medium and heavy golems, and the light golem will be on about 50% HP with bleeds ticking. Sometimes that’s enough to kill it if you get a good crit on Churning Earth.

Now obviously that’s an ideal setup, and won’t always go completely as planned in real pvp. I normally pop armour of earth midway through the CE cast in pvp so that I a) don’t get interrupted and b) have regen and vigor, as well as protection, and maybe even a splitsecond left on stability to give me 6-8% more damage guaranteed (since sometimes you don’t need to lightning flash if people are still on top of you).

Similarly, you won’t always have all the attunements off cd when you need them. Sometimes you end up having to Magnetic Grasp, Ring of Earth, Earthquake, Churning Earth begins (Swap into Water or Air for an aura)(Swap into Fire for 10% more damage), Churning Earth ends. Sometimes you’ll only get an updraft/burning speed/drakes breath/fire grab combo off, etc etc. Whatever, I’ll assume you can figure out the optimum use of situational combo’s yourself.

Rank points are the points you get at the end of every sPvP/tPvP match that improve your rank. If you look at the scoreboard of a match you’re running a glory booster in, you’ll notice that while you may get 250 rank points at the end of the match, you’ll have recieved 375 glory, since the glory booster only applies to the spendable currency, and not the speed at which you earn new ranks (dolyak/tiger/etc etc).

If there’s a cd then nobody respecs, because your opponent can respec to counter yours while you’re waiting on the cd from your first respec to come back up, meaning that for however long that is, you’re losing (assuming equal skill levelled teams).

It’s all needless complexity, simply to pander to people who aren’t prepared to build versatile.

If the game is properly balanced, that shouldn’t be an issue.

If it’s not properly balanced, it will be an issue, and the game will never be an eSport.

Onus is on ANet not to screw it up, in that case,

Then learn the lesson and improve the build for the future. If you’re getting stomped by a team with a better build than yours, it’s probably because (ideal world clause applies here – the game isn’t in that state atm) they put more effort into their preparation.

They shouldn’t be rewarded for putting more effort into their team synergy prematch/the time they spent practicing and working the kinks out?

edit:
Additionally:

will they change their traits throughout the match?

i mean change traits every 2 minutes?

no.

lolwat.

So you’re up against a condition heavy team. You all swap your traits and gear a bit to be more resilient to conditions, but lose some survivability against burst. They figure this out 2 minutes later and swap their gear and traits around to be more bursty and less condition focussed. Crap. Guess you gotta respec again, until they respec to counter your counter again, that is.

It also doesn’t in any way reward people who put thought and effort into their comp and builds prior to the roster being submitted. It moves the ability to counter people away from simply ‘play better’ to ‘change your build a bit so it trumps theirs’.

There’s no skill in counter-comping when you see what you’re up against. There’s skill in understanding the metagame and building robust teambuilds that aren’t reliant on broken classes or abilities.

Anecdotally/Speculatively, I suspect that most of the time, the people in favour of counter-comping are the same people who are trying to play at a level higher than their actual skill level, and who need those kinds of crutches to fill in the gaps in their own capabilities.

Maybe we should let people swap characters entirely during a match. That way when you lose to a class the one you’re playing against is weak vs, you can swap to another one and kill the guy, until he swaps to a different character and kills you, at which point you’ll probably have to swap to a different character to kill him back, but then he’ll swap to a different character and kill you again, and yay, LoginWars2 is such fun!

Gear, weapon and trait setups should, in my opinion, be locked from the time you submit the roster until the time you’re officially out of the entire tournament.

Being able to swap gear/traits, and even classes doesn’t encourage versatile, take-all-comers teambuilds. It merely encourages counter-comping every round. While there’s certainly an argument to be made that proper counter-comping is a skill in itself, I’d argue that it’s much less of a skill than bringing a rounded, balanced teambuild that can deal with all aspects of the metagame simultaneously.

Initiate with burning speed, pop one tick of drakes breath for the burn duration, melt them immediately after with fire grab.

With decent power/crit that’s still pretty respectable damage in a very small window.

Long story short, if you can survive the spike, you have it in the bag. ALWAYS expect a big spike, then they have to run away while there init recharges

So what you’re saying is that if you can survive the spike, they can run away via one of many stealths, until their init recharges, at which point if you can survive the next spike, they can run away via one of their stealths, until their init recharges, at which point if you can survive the wait… That’s not in the bag at all!

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StanceSystem

That big list of precedents there is why it’s frequently referred to as attunement/stance-dancing.

Maybe the ‘scientist’ in you should do some research before making assumptions as to the reasoning or origin behind terminology.

You don’t need to trait for Fire Shield.

Magnetic Grasp is a leap finisher, so just use it through a fire field and voila! Fire Shield on a 12s cooldown.

Aura’s are skills.

Frost Aura in dagger offhand.
Shocking Aura in dagger mainhand.
Magnetic Aura in staff.
Fire Shield (an aura) in focus.

It’s also possible to proc them off some rune sets.

Still isn’t working.

While we can put out a lot of damage at times, stating that you’re ‘instagibbing’ when you have to land a 6-10part combo is misleading.

If it takes you 4-5 seconds (or more if you’re getting the biggest part of your damage from Churning Earth) to pull off a full combo and drop someone from 100% to 0 that’s not even remotely ‘insta’ anything.

People don’t seem to realise that Toughness isn’t the default holy grail of build optimisation. Sure, it will probably help certain builds or certain styles, but the difference between base toughess and 2k toughness is about 30% damage mitigation (except conditions, which will eat through you just the same). That’s all nice and awesome until you realise that most of the time, to stack toughness that high, you’re either sacrificing HP to do so (resulting in the same effective survivability as someone with base toughness and more HP), or you’re sacrificing damage to do so (hence why it’s more viable for certain builds than others).

Base toughness is perfectly acceptable for an aggressive damage oriented build as long as you have a reasonable HP pool. I have few problems with my 17k health/900 Toughness apart from occasionally getting blown up by thieves when I’m out of cooldowns, or not paying attention, and it’s a problem I could easily solve by removing my Zerker amulet and putting something else in it’s place if I was really that concerned about it.

They work in any attunement.

The precedent is that attunement specific traits already state that they only work in one attunement.

But if I had to pick one, I’d pick the trait. As Ele’s, we have a lot to think about when fighting. Having an ace this powerful up your sleeve that requires no attention on your part is a valueable asset. While the 90 sec cooldown does sound quite harsh, I find in practice it throws your average 100b user so far off their game that you don’t need it twice in one fight.

Until that time you got randomly stunned or CC’d by something 30 seconds ago and it’s on cooldown for when you actually need it to stop the damage that’s going to kill you.

The problem with proc-based defence is that you have no control at all over when it’s up or down. Sometimes it’ll proc in your favour and save your bacon, but most of the time it’ll proc off some random event and you’ll be SOL when you need it.

This may sound harsh, but if you can’t use active defence to save yourself then you need to improve your play until you can. Passive defence isn’t terrible as a second or third layer in case you’re out of cooldowns or whatever, but just banking on having your 90s cd available for that time you need it, out of all the times you’ll get CC’d a bit and not need it, is immensely foolish.

Good builds have redundancy options.

Just had it happen twice within 30 mins.

Once on Niflhel, then again on FoeFire.

Pretty much makes the whole thing a waste of time.

sPvP is not tPvP.

You guys know the ‘s’ stands for ‘structured’ right? Both tourneys and hotjoin are sPvP.

Stunbreak -> Dodge.
Lightning Aura.
Blind them.
Knockback (Updraft/Gust) or Knockdown.
Obsidian Flesh.
Arcane Shield.
Lightning Flash (Also a stunbreak).

If you’re stunned without a stunbreak you’re basically boned. Carry more than one :p

You have no condition removal, no way to acquire more than 2 seconds of Fury, no way to stack swiftness short of an Air switch into Glyph heal, and you only have 600 range to kite with.

That’s going to be a bit of a problem :p

And yeah, it’s total glass. Anything with more than 600 range is going to make a mess of you real fast, and anything with heavy condition application will do the same. Your low Water traiting leaves you down some HP and healing power (healing power admittedly not that significant), so the only way to make up for that is to sacrifice damage runes for survivability runes.

I think you’re overestimating the benefit of Fire traits (especially since many of them are conditional on burning being applied, which can be cleansed) and underestimating the value of crit chance/perma vigor uptime.

Give it a shot by all means, but from the information you’ve given about the concept, I think it’ll certainly come up short compared to a more standard Aura build where damage is concerned, and absolutely come up short where survivability is concerned.

If you have 1-2 friends with you it’s not a 1v3. If they’re already trying to kill something else it’s not a 1v3.

If they’ve slotted movespeed utilities, blown cooldowns or otherwise altered their build in order to reach the zerg faster then it’s a 1v3 with the odds heavily stacked in your favour, since you’re ambushing them in a sub-optimal setting with them at a disadvantage before the fight even begins.

On top of that, which I forgot to mention in my initial response, you have the benefit of vastly increased Power or Precision or Crit damage stats via PvE gear compared to an sPvP environment.

So I can believe you might be able to rofl through that combo unharmed and get kills, but that’s not how actual pvp works in a balanced environment, since you don’t get to stack the situation to your advantage in that way, and good players don’t just eat an 11-part combo without dodging, healing, stunbreaking, or otherwise making a mess of your carefully laid plans.

If it’s working for you, it’s because you’re playing against people who have no clue what they’re doing, or who are outmatched before the combat is even initiated.

Shukran.4851:

remember wolfe that thief has only 1 “burst” skill in every composition of weapons so fixing game around your idea need a rework of all skills of thief….

Not every class even has a ‘burst’ skill. Nevermind a (somewhat) spammable one.

For quite a few classes, it’s possible to play badly and still achieve results.

This contrasts starkly with other classes, where bad play results in almost instant death.

The issue this would partly address would be the very low skill floor.

I have no strong opinion on the change suggested, but I do believe all classes should have similar skill-floors and skill-caps. There’s no reason to reward people who just mash 3 buttons to victory, while others are busting their balls using their full skillset just to survive.

It’s just poor design.

I’m talking WvW

Congrats on being able to 1v3 people who are undergeared/levelbuffed and/or who might not even be able to see you on their screen due to culling.

You could run any build you felt like in WvW and find reasonable success with it. It’s a numbers game, and the class you play has very little bearing on the outcome of engagements that involve more than 15 people on each side.

It works, but it’s bad in comparison to Minor Accuracy which gives you 14% more crit chance at max stacks, which is only 5 kills in pvp.

Getting the most out of Churning Earth - More PvP oriented.

Assuming you’re running enough points in Water to reach Bountiful Power (2% damage per boon) once you start the churning earth cast, swap into water and pop Frost Aura (Swiftness and Fury (and Might if you have a Sigil of Battle). Now anyone who hits you is getting snared in the radius while you channel. Additionally, you can either pop Armour of Earth if you think you’ll be interrupted, or instead start the cast out of range and Lightning Flash in at the end, both of which grant Regen and Vigor (if you’re running a heavy cantrip build).

Enjoy your 10% extra damage from having 5 boons up, and your 20% extra crit chance on our hardest hitting ability (possibly combined with a reasonably big hit off Lightning Flash if you used it to reposition).

With Bolt to the Heart factored in, I’ve had 1.4k Flash crits directly followed by up to 7.2k CE crits on densely packed people before. You’ll pretty much gib anything that’s unfortunate enough to be in the radius, or at the very least vaporise a huge chunk of hitpoints.

Cosmic Teapot.9162:

If possible I’d like to see a variation of this build that does more damage without sacrificing so much survivability as to make it worthless versus other glass cannons.

Drop 10 points out of Arcane, put them into Air and get Bolt to the Heart. Also swap Final Shielding for Renewing Stamina.Swap Amulet for full Berzerkers. Swap that crappy sigil of superior accuracy for minor accuracy (+14% crit at max stacks, needs only 10 stacks (2 kills) to pretty much equal the superior version). Run Runes of the Fire instead of your mix/match versions for the free Fire Aura every 90s and free Might stacks when you get hit. (the boons don’t need to last forever, they just need to be up in combat).

Drop Cleansing Fire for Mist Form (more for flagging/ressing/ohshizzle moments). Swap Signet of Resto for Ether Renewal, which takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s basically 4 seconds of condition immunity if you do the full channel, and makes up for the loss of Cleansing Fire, plus the shorter cooldown results in more healing over time than the other options.

More crit and crit damage, much more base power, 25% more damage to people below 25% health (lol 7.2k churning earth finishers), at the cost of about 5k health and a bit lower boon duration (which the fire runes partially compensate for, and your killing speed partially compensates for).

To be fair, there’s probably not that much between the 2. I haven’t tested your multi-rune setup in place of my Fire runes, but I can survive most things reasonably well with 17k hp and proper cd management.

edit: Oh, and use the Glyph of Elementals instead of Tornado, because while a big bunch of stability is nice, it’s not worth the elite slot cost IMO. At least the elemental is going to supplement your damage and/or distract fire.

Pretty underwhelming stuff really.

But hey, at least we know about most of the features we already knew about.

I’m not the one claiming to be able to get there.

IMO the damage tradeoff for that kind of survivability isn’t worth it. I was simply pointing out that with at least 25 water you’re not going to be complete dead weight (dependant on the rest of your build).

What the heck is the point of 10 30 30 without healing?

2% damage per boon at 25 water. In a D/D build you’re pretty much rolling 5 boons minimum in combat (Fury/Swiftness/Regen/Vigor/Might) with options for 2 more (Stability/Protection).

There’s 10% more damage.

Having near permanent uptime on Fury alone is 20% more crit chance.

Might runs at minimum 3 stacks, frequently at 6-7, occasionally higher. 3 stacks from first attunement swap using Sigil or Battle, a further 3stacks from 2nd attunement swap 9s later, 1 stack if you switch into Fire, any excess from blast finishing into Fire Fields. Either way, 10 seconds into the fight you’re not going to drop below 6 stacks unless you get boon stripped.

If you’re using Sigil of Minor Accuracy that’s another 14% crit chance at max stacks.

In any case, the +healing from Water is a secondary effect. The primary focus is the synergy the tree provides with D/D Aura Builds, or the condition removal and cantrip synergy for non-Aura builds.

Compared to a more burst-oriented build, I’m sure the damage isn’t much to write home about if you’re stacking up to 20k HP and 2.2k Toughness, but you’re not going to be complete dead weight.

I don’t actually use the twister elite for the twister form. I cast it and then cancel it immediately for 24 seconds of stability (15 base +60% duration).

I used to do this, but eventually decided that while a long stability was pretty good, it wasn’t worth the massive cooldown (to me). Switched back to Glyph simply because it adds some very helpful extra damage on the odd occasion I run into a mes 1v1 when I’m roaming.

Other than that, my build is pretty similar. 20 Air for Bolt to the Heart while dropping down to 20 Arcane and losing Evasive Arcana (I can’t justify spending a trait on something that only does about 30% of what it’s advertised to do) for a more aggressive damage-oriented play. Runes of the Fire with Sigils of Battle and Minor Accuracy on weapons.

I’ll probably go back to Evasive Arcana once they actually fix the Earth dodge.

Jay, people might take you a little more seriously if you didn’t type like a 9-year old pepped up on Skittles. Your posts make my head hurt.

That aside, it’s not a revolutionary build, and there are no default win combo’s when you’re playing against other, intelligent, players.

It’s pretty easy to bounce someone off a point and throw a little damage at them every now and again to stop their healing skill.

You do know that 14k HP with 1700 toughness is about the same as 18k HP with 900 Toughness, right? As a light armour wearer that is.

I’m not saying that as though it’s some excuse for the ridiculous damage thieves can output in such a short period of time. I’m just trying to point out that big toughness numbers don’t really mean as much unless you have a solid HP pool to back them up, and with 14k you’re just as glass cannon as I am in my 17k/900Toughness build (playing D/D Ele, FYI). You’re actually even more vulnerable to conditions in your build.

Warmage Timeraider.5861:

Never said you need it at every spec, if you have an spec based with dodges, avoiding etc. … Sure you dont need it.. But that guys build looks like he will be targetted and can expect a beating

Apologies; the implication was ‘you don’t have 1200 toughness? everyone has 1200 toughness! You’re doing it wrong!’. Misinterpretation on my end perhaps.

But yeah, it’s a fairly standard, reasonably glass cannon build, and additionally, the chances of managing to pull off the miracle combo in one uninterrupted chain are fairly slim, and open you to a whole world of pain if you do it wrong.

It’s not a terrible build, but it’s not exactly a groundbreaking discovery.

Warmage Timeraider.5861:

Well ok, it can be used as burst but let me say it like this
Even if you had 40k health and permanent regen… You would still be squishy.
The lack of toughness is enormous and causes people to do massive dmg against you.. (1200 toughness (preferably a bit more ofc is kinda the minimal if you intend to get hit more then once (unless you like glass cannon ofc. Nothing wrong with that))
So, yes it may work awesome for you, yes you may be an great killer with it… But still, its a glass cannon

I run a baseline toughness build and have very few problems staying alive most of the time. This is as a D/D Ele.

Simply stating that you need 1200 toughness is false. It depends a lot on your build/utilities/rune setup. It also depends a lot on what is actually killing you. Sure, I’ve been caught by thieves without stunbreaks up, and not been able to strip conditions faster than someone can apply them, but having 300 extra toughness probably wouldn’t have made that much difference in all but a few situations where it was very very close.

The difference between baseline toughness of 900ish, and 1200 toughness, is about 12% more survivability (maybe even less – I can’t be bothered working the exact math out right now). Is it helpful? Sure, nobody would turn down 12%(ish) more survivability if it was free, but the question people have to answer is whether it’s worth sacrificing damage/utility oriented traits/runes to get it.

Either way, the core of my point is that ‘you need 1200 toughness’ is wrong. You don’t need it. What you need is some means of avoiding death every time someone looks at you with an angry frown. If some people choose toughness, that’s cool, but others might choose utility skills or specific traits or specific runes/sigils that offset that lack.

Portals are very simple to fix.

Simply make it so that any bundles are dropped when moving through one. Apply the same restrictions to all teleport/transform/stealths and bingo! Intercepting the repair kit carrier is now something that’s actually possible, since the only thing that will allow you to get back a bit quicker is going to be swiftness, and you can’t just dodge past any interceptors any more.

It jumps directly away from your target, so simply target something as you move past it and use it when they’re behind you.

Tornado being a cantrip wouldn’t change anything. A bad elite on a shorter cooldown is still bad.

The pvp progression is the drive to improve your play, not getting gear to make you think you’re improving your play.

Yes it will take a while to kill a bunker. Sorry that a build designed to live takes so long. Their team will probably show up to hold the point, but you still managed to either kill or make him call for backup all by yourself. Normally that would take about 3-4 facerolling dps classes. Once you get the bunker start calling for help 1v1 he is going to be calling a lot earlier for the rest of the game, because he knows that even in a 1v1 with you it isn’t safe. Just the possibility of there being MORE than just you makes him call for help.

Nonsense. They won’t send their team to see off one guy. They’ll send their bursty roamer to assassinate you while you’re engaged with the bunker. Then he’ll go back to roaming. It doesn’t take a whole team effort to kill one sustained damage class poking at a point, and by the time said sustained damage class realises the backup has arrived it’s too late for you to dedicate another man from your team to where their weakpoint is at that moment.

And this only assumes one bunker. Bring 2 and either one can hold off any form of team split long enough for their backup to arrive. You can’t quickly drop one bunker unless you bring almost your entire team, which leaves 3 guys on the enemy team to run around uncapping the point you’ve left undefended and/or support whichever bunker is under attack, prolonging the engagement and at the very least denying you control of that point for long enough to result in the assault becoming a net point-loss anyway.

It makes no sense to assault a bunker unless you have to because it results in a net-loss for your team, and the only way you can feasibly do it right now is to bring utterly overwhelming odds to mitigate the fact that they soak a stupid amount of damage, ergo sacrificing map control elsewhere because, y’know, most of your team is in one place.

Because if they don’t have a weakness that can be exploited in a very small timeframe, they are effectively immortal, since by the time these condition builds finally wear them down it doesn’t matter, because the bunkers roaming, burst support has shown up long ago and killed the counter before it could counter the bunker.

5v5 is as much about application of resources as it is builds and what counters what, and the simple fact is that you can’t drop a bunker 1v1 right now before his suport shows up, which means you instead must dedicate 2-3 players to taking down one guy, which leaves you with 2 other guys on your team trying to hold off 2-3 enemy teamplayers, therefore you are outnumbered and will probably lose unless you yourself rolled with a FoTM bunker build.

Which is what is dictating the metagame. Roll with a bunker build because if the other team has one you lose. Roll with a mes because if the other team has one on on Khylo you probably lose since you can’t keep their treb out of action and they can keep yours out of action. Roll with a high dps burst class because if the other team has one and you don’t you’ll take longer to kill their trebs/lords/creatures and risk having to pull too much manpower to kill something than the opposite team, ergo freeing up manpower for them to spend elsewhere.

The trinity is still in the game, it’s just not the trinity people are used to.

WvW is a numbers game. While class balance has some influence, it’s not as important overall as the co-operation of the server/keeping supply chains up/general strategy/amount of bodies you can put in one place or any number of other myriad factors. Ergo saying you do fine in WvW doesn’t really mean anything. Any class could do fine regardless of how well balanced it was. You have dozens of guys standing beside you to eat damage and deal damage, and, since it’s primarily a numbers game, it wouldn’t really matter that much if you were an Ele or a Necro or a Ranger.

Assuming you’re not terrible, you can pretty much play any reasonably solid build in PvE and find success with it. It’s not really that hard as long as you know what and when to dodge. You’re playing against a machine with a finite amount of variations in it’s actions, which can all be predicted and/or prepared for assuming you manage your surroundings with some skill, and show up with a build robust enough to deal with those actions.

Hence why I personally don’t really consider balance suggestions drawn from these areas of the game with much stock. They’re too abstract to come to any reasonable conclusion on the finer balance details. Gear comes into question. Bodycount/discipline comes into question. Too many external, non-classbalance related factors skew the results one way or the other. That’s not to say they’re worthless opinions or that they’re always wrong, but more to point out that it’s hardly a fair test.

Well thank god you have all this experience killing A.I and undergeared/levelbuffed players amongst zergs to draw upon!

Not that I’m saying extra HP is the answer to Ele’s problem (since I think it’s much more complex than that, and more related to the work:payoff ratio that other classes have by comparison), but doing fine in WvW/PvE doesn’t really mean a thing when dealing with class balance in a closed, team-oriented environment against compatent players of other classes.

The amount of classes in this game that can perform even at an average level by simply popping a couple of big cooldowns and single-buttoning their way to victory is astounding.

Yeah, it’s fun seeing the same M/T/G/?/? setup in 95% of games.

What variety we have!

Papaj.9035:

The bigger question should be why are you not using both, given the fact that 90% of the other Ele utilities rank in on about a near-useless level and those 2 are in the top 4 – the gap of usefulness between 4th place and 5th place is approximate to the width of the Grand Canyon mind you.

Because Lightning Flash and Armor of Earth are both stun breaks and can both be used in different ways to guarantee a Churning Earth landing (if you’re dagger offhand, like most non-support ele’s are). Whether by AofE providing stability/damage reduction for the duration of the long cast time, or by LF allowing you to move the position of the final blast mid-cast to ensure hits.

We can get personal condition removal from Water, and while Cleansing Fire is far from useless, the 2 alternatives provide more utility and options in my opinion.