Guild Wars 2

lazycalm.5186:

Hi guys
What race do you think I should make my Elementalist, mainly for roaming in WvW and some PvP?
Norn = Snow Leopard form (very good escape mecanism in WvW) – Is Fiery Greatsword a good replacement for this in case I don’t choose Norn?
Asura = Being small, less noticeable (good in both WvW and PvP)
Also, regarding looks, if I make an Asura, does it matter a lot if I make it the smallest or the tallest in character creation?
Thanks

FGS is a way better escape mechanism for wvw. And you can actually do something else with it, like LF+FGS exploit.
For spvp you should use asura, without any questions. As much as hate these kitten midgets ele’s spells are very clearly telegraphed and playing asura is a must. In wvw roaming this means a bit less due to lesser cluttering in fights, but still works. Surely you should make it as small as you can.

But surely you should think if you want to sacrifice decent-looking character to be better in a game modes that kinda suck itself.

Jil Dongha.4658:

You cannot have 50.000 defense when you do massive damage.

No matter what damage you can do if you aren’t really doing it because of being oneshotted from the start.
Jokes aside not only there is no universal “dd/def” parameter, but even if it would exist – a lot of classes would be better at it.

And one more note: ele != burst s/d.

Jil Dongha.4658:

The ratio Damage/Defense is perfectly balanced on Eles..

You cannot divide by zero, you know.

Lil Puppy.5216:

Now that a precedent has been set for event meta items, all future items will require 500 crafting skill and only the BiS ascended one will be the one everyone wants because orange colors suck. And while we’re on the sub-topic, why are all metals in-game gray?

Nothing bad with that, crafting in this game is pretty useless now.
And orange color doesn’t suck.

You are quite a pervert, do you know it?
Passive buffs are mostly defensive so such battle would be even more boring and spammy than usual.

Phantom Master.9582:

Why do players want to make every class easy in this game, you all want to play tanks while being able to do good damage, what happened to the old Risk/Reward philosophy.

Elementalist is practically the only class left who still requires a huge amount of skill to be effective, they take SKILL, burst combos take a LONG while to master. Yet you people want to have that removed for simply more sustain? You want to see the last skill required class get obliterated by Anet’s balance and become brain-dead like most others?

Screw sustain! Give them Mobility, more ways to get out of enemy fire, timing required immunities… give them escapes which requires skill, not more PASSIVE sustain…

Because ele != freshair s/x.
Because SKILL isn’t “land one combo, hit or miss”, but long, dynamic sequence of decisions. And when it comes to such fights ele loses no matter what, just due to inferior stats. Yes, we have this one minmaxed abomination that somehow bypasses this restriction by “all or nothing” tactic (in other games this would be called “cheesy”, but here it a SKILL) but other ways are so ineffective that people seems to almost forget abut their existence. That is where ele needs more sustain in damage and defence.

Actually you may try thief. This is the class that had it active defences buffed at the point where they became almost passive permaevade\stealth spam. SKILL, I guess.

Rottaran Owain.6789:

It’s also:

-One of the highest damaging skills in the game (in the top 5 as I recall)
-Causes 8 stacks of fair duration bleeds
-Has a wide AoE
-Is a Blast finisher

Should it really be a surprise that this is the most difficult to land skill in the game?

It is so hard to land (without LF exploit) that spell itself became completely useless. I’d be happy to see it nerfed in damage, radius or whatever, but usable.
Or add immobilize instead of cripple on every tick to prevent dodge – that would be fun.
Or make ele invunerable (like earth shield’s skill) – that will make it nice defensive/area denial skill.
But currently its a joke usable only with LF or in tunnels.

This game needs sooo much UI improvements, not just one (bugged) button. I always feel myself severely dumbed by what I get on my screen here.

I agree, but burst shouldn’t be just nerfed in numbers. Instead typical fresh air combo should be nerfed in indicirect way, by destroying instant untelegraphed air-arcane sequence.

Its just you. Water isn’t some kind of “healing” magic, you aren’t cleric kind of character. Water spells will only give some support to you (minor heal, some cleanse) or your team (staff heals which is also water fiedls to blast).

style.6173:

Actually this is quite true. I’ve seen eles at upper levels who are insanely good.

How am I bored of this kitten. People are saying this after they get killed by perfecly landed fresh air combo after failing to kill ele for few seconds (mostly because of arcane shield). Well, I wont deny that it looks skilled (quite fast in execution compared to other classes), it may even take some skill (or time) to imprint that combo so you can do it fast and good, but what does it have aside from it? Nothing at all. It is just a one-trick nuclear pony that even works only because on untelegraphed nature of air and arcana.
Remember my words – if ele get more passive defence and thus more space for mistake (and, maybe, shorter cd’s) fresh air will be even dumber than current hambow.
This abomination have nothing to do with real ele issues, balancing class around it is like balancing engi around decap spec.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

All you have to do is see the attunement they are in, see what weapon they have and boom. You already know what to expect. That takes what, less than a second?

We aren’t in warrior subforum where 1 second is just a time to drool on hammer 4. For ele 1 second is a lot. Even more, in teamfights some people may even not target ele! I cannot explain it, but it happens. So they cannot see it’s attunement buff.
We need every little advantage on ur side.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I would rather us having like Aura around us, or like flames coming from us in Fire attunement and such little effects on the hands is terrible

That would be good for swag but I dont think that we need more signs that will allow to predict out actions. Currently the only kind of burst that really can be landed without CC is dumb freshair+arcana, all that firegrabs, earthshakes and churning suicides are already losing big part of their effectiveness due to visuals.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I would rather they remove the icon and give us REAL attunement effects, the terrible rings around the hands just smell of lazy work.

For some reason I think these effects should look like big, attunement-related colored crosshairs floating above elementalist’s head. From time to time he should be also marked on minimap and be accompanied by line “Here’s ele, mash you buttons!” in enemy chat.

I thought you mean heavy loot bags not this. I’m dissapointed.

This game just hardly need a proper UI with customizable buff display, cast bars, moving windows and everything else.
Until then enjoy burning you eyes trying to see unremarkable warrior stance buffs and nigh-invisible “telegraphed” attacks of asura midgets.

Azukas.1426:

I must say though if you are having trouble with thieves than either play one or do what I did…..duel em all the time. Once you learn their tricks they become the easiest class to counter

That reminds me old good WoW days where both mage and thief were high risk – high reward classes and their duels were really spectacular. There you could know enemy’s cds, tactics, countertactics, ranges and every high tier fight was the feast of skill, mindplay, fake opening, kiting, lightning reflexes and strategic thinking. It was a real fun.
Here – nope, sorry! Thief will just spam uncounterable evades, uncounterable stealth and always will be few steps ahead – just because he is better by desing and have more threats than you can answer to. Enjoy!

From my experience in ele’s defence I can only say that it doesn’t have hard counters (depends on build, but mostly). Playing condi grenade engi you can say that you will not won condi necro ever, playing ele you can at least get every fight to draw (if losing a point to engi can be considered a draw) if you can outskill your enemy. So yes, you can kill thief, you can kill necro, you can kill warrior – if they are doing mistakes. but woth equal skills you are inferior to anything. Overall it feels not like pvp, but like hardmode to a slasher game, you should do a perfect streak of moves (evade all the hambowwing, catch thief in 0.05 sec opening between evade frames, CC necro all the way, land the terribly slow burst) to have even a little chance or lose instantly while “boss” isn’t really doing anything special. He is just a boss.

Second wave incoming. I’m not even going to appraise ele from video (but he’s terrible) or explain why clicking is inferior to proper usage of UI. But

Nikkinella.8254:

The advantages of clicking explained in details in description of the video.

Here is that description:

Yea yea yea, I know " clickers suck, ANY good normal player would own you"
“GW2 has no healers” “1 hammer warrior would kill you in seconds” " try 2 on 1 and see if you last"

Bla bla bla heard it all 5000 times.

Funny how many of these kiddies STILL have no idea the 2 huge advantages "clicking " gives you.

Like most zerg blob servers, DB is ONLY good when 10 on 1….or more. When numbers are even or close, we OWN them.
They do not have ONE good solo player or roamer.This is typical for chinese based servers in general.

BEST D/D ever on any server : Washu Rivers .

Conclusion: Hey DB (whoever you are) – he owns you, kiddies! Clicking is cool! /laugh /laugh /laugh /laugh

Thats just hilarious. Playing pvp with ele is already suffering, but we still can have fun with showertornado in wvw! NO, EAT YOU CIRCLES. Still, we a decent class in pve! NO, HAVE YOUR CRITICAL DAMAGE NERFED.
Why not remove ele from the game already?

If you want to play spvp – take asura and check pvp forums to know why. Otherwise take whatever race you like, racial differences are very minor.

Allie Murdock.8152:

I’m going to move this to the Ele forums. As for the actual topic at hand, I’ll bring it up to the designers and see what they think.

Thanks for the feedback!

Yay, need more nerfes to ele.
Sucking in pvp – check.
Sucking in wvw – in progress
Sucking in pve – pending, first steps like nerfing crit damage already taken.

Luto.1938:

If this stealth nerf were put in place you would soon be screaming for an evade nerf…

We already do. Uncounterable stealth and cheesy permaevades are most utterly broken mechanics of this game. “E-sports”? Don’t make me laugh. Not with this around. Not until whole class will be reworked and rebalanced to provide real skill (not spam) based high risk – high reward gameplay like rogue in that another game (at least how it was when I still played it).

MarzAttakz.9608:

Yeah I’m reserving judgement until we have some data on the duration and cooldowns. Seems very situational for an elite skill though. Quickness stomps ftw.

Not nearly as situational as other ele’s elites, showertornado or flashfgs. Depends on numbers that can be a great alternative to more consistent, but hardly noticeable elite elemental.
Too bad we cannot really control quickness with it (swapping attunement has other priorities) or really benefit from it (apart from staff ele and lightning autoattacks). But hey! Imagine that this may make a churning earth into a real skill with only 1.55sec cast time. That would be great.

Brew Pinch.5731:

Besides, they’re only going to improve from here.

Oh, thats the best part of playing ele. You are at so much bottom that you are pretty confident about class future – it just cannot be kitten worse.

Well, rabbits on one side, deers on another side. Nothing wrong with matchmaking actually. Maybe something is wrong with your mmr?

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I was talking about D/D auto attacks.

Me too o_o. Oh, wait, impale doesn’t have projectile finisher, I mistook it with sstaff’s 1.
Well, that doesn’t change much without proper fields anyway.

Ele isn’t really supposed to use autoattacks unless his rotation is broken. You have a lot of spells to be busy with.
And for the water and (especially) fire 2 are pretty much autoattacks: they have short cd’s, nice damage and long channeled cast time so you can fill attunement swap time with them.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Earth: Full redesign. I just can’t stand that it is a single target and that it has a terrible animation. Not quite sure what it could be changed to though, keep the bleeding and add a AoE aspect to it. Maybe have it as a sort of reskinned version of Dragons Claw where it fires out 3 stone spikes or something. Any target hit by any of the spikes gets damaged and bleeding. The Range to stay the same.

Earth 1 have a nice and unusual feature – it goes up the cliffs. Useful in forest’t mid. It also have guaranteed projectile finisher that can be used to… wait, nothing reall, d/d ele have only crappy fire field for that. Well, maybe someday we’ll get water field on cleansing wave – that would be a real buff the we deserve. Or we’ll get a condition option to put that burnings and bleeding to a good use. However 300 range is really sad for single targeted spell that supposed to be applied continuously.

style.6173:

Just saw team with 2 eles win. Eles played correctly are quite strong. The problem is that I do not see all that many good ele players.

How often do you see team with 2 warriors win?
I guess there are a lot, really a lot of good warrior players.

Jackums.3496:

That’s exactly what power creep is. Buff enough professions that the general power bar for the game is raised. At this point the devs can’t nerf everything without causing the fans with all of the good professions to go into an uproar. Meaning the only solution is to bring the weaker professions up to the level of the rest. Then the cycle continues.
Nerfing the powerful professions is ideal, but not realistic. If anything, ANet’s Warrior favoritism and 8% “nerf” of their Healing Signet is proof of that.

You mistook balancing with implementing diversity and new features. In second cause this isn’t just upping numbers, but introducing new ways of gameplay that shouldn’t be much more effective than previously existed.
Look, even Dec 10 ele hypocrisy was positioned as “increasing build diversity”. “We dont like that all eles use arcane, water and cantrips (but still suck) and we decided to… add some interesting features to fire and signets. Wait, no, just kidding. Eat nerfs, motherkittens!”
Adjusting numbers if done correctly have no relevance with that. So there is no justification to “8% balance patches”.

Yasha.5963:

Is it workable?

I love raining fiery destruction down on group fights with a 30/30/0/0/10 berserker staff build, but it is also the most masochistic build I have played. You can turn group fights with huge aoe damage, but are pretty much dead whenever someone so much as looks at you. Very frustrating since there seems to be no concept of “peeling” in GW2.

Has anyone had much success in tpvp using a build like that (or other glass canon ele?)

I highly doubt that such build will work even in hotjoin. Maybe with high skilled and coordinated team against some pug in teamq it will work, but then again – such team can win even 4v5 w/o ele.

Writetyper.1985:

“I don’t think the problem is that Elementalist is weak, I think the problem is that other classes are too stronk.”
ya exactly this, power creep in this game is insane. 7 months or so back D/D ele was the most rediculously overpowered thing in the game and now it’s one of the worst after a few minor nerfs.
also the amount of people who blame their losses on ele players is disgusting. I bet they’re the same people who complain about “ELO hell” – it’s not them, it’s me.

This wasn’t minor nerfes. Infamous 8% is a minor nerf. Previous 20% nerf for same topskilled class was a minor nerf that no one gave a kitten about.
Ele get everything that made it good methodically crushed, again and again. So now it is either a ruin or one trick nuclear pony with fresh air.

Actually people have rights to complain about ele in their team since it is statistically much worse then some top spec. But you have the same right to dont care about that since it is your fun. World is full of conflicts, you know.
The only one who have no right to allow such situation is balancing team. But I dont even remember that they recognized ele issues or told that they are going to fix it (not by adding lame blast finisher on crappy skill).

Personally I have so many questions about balance that I dont even know what to ask. Eles, warriors, condition, decappers, skyhammer, just… Just is balancing team ever aware that GW2’s pvp in desperate need of major surgery? Will something be done about all that the same questions that are asked in dozens of threads every week?
Oh “we are aware but haven’t decided what to do, have your -8% meanwhile”.

Phi Is Sly.1857:

Why do we have to wait so long to be balanced :S Mesmer got ninja patched cos they changed some clones depawn when someone hides.

We been waiting a year almost, time to jump ship? i cannot stand other classes too little effort!

What makes you think that current state of ele isn’t intended? You are waiting for some kind wizard that will come and fix it all? Meanwhile “positive ele thread” was closed by moderator. I find it quite symbolic.

Oh my… broken mechanic of stealth neutralize broken mechanic of A.I. combat. Thats horrible!

Domey.9804:

Just one wish: pls disable commander tags on eotm…we alrdy have 4 zerg maps.
i so wished this was a map for roamers, and small scale play. maybe it will be like that in the future.

Is small scale fights this map suffers terribly from scumhammer syndrome. No, thanks.

Last time I’ve checked my server was ranked 5th in EU WvW ladder and my ele’s rank was 85. So I guess I have an idea about WvW stuff.

ErazorZ.5209:

Well i for one always dodge when i see a single meteor land, making the entire shower just a whack a mole ‘kill the ele when hes STILL busy casting!’
Any thief/warrior can chase you till the bitter end since they have MORE mobility then any staff ele could ever wish for. And as it happens to be in wvw these days about 30% of all people ATLEAST are warriors and thiefs.

So you’re sole purpose in zergfight is to dodge when meteor lands and then find that single pesky ele in whole enemy raid and kill him while he is still casting (which lasts ~1 second after that first meteor shows up)? Really? And then all thieves and warriors are rushing carelessly through that whole zerg to “kill da ele”? It isn’t “ele vs zerg”, you know, that green nicknamed guys around you exist for some reason.

ErazorZ.5209:

Also please enlighten the elementalist community as a whole by telling us what kind of mystical legendary ‘defensive’ capabilities your talking about.

Burning retreat alone is one of the best defensive skills in game. Not to say about magnetic aura, lightning flash or two mistforms that actually make you unkillable in defence while you are on walls/near your portal.

So yes, stop whining that ele is kitten by default just because it is ele. It sucks in small frame pvp but in other aspects of game (dungeons, worldbosses, wvw zergs) it is pretty fine.

Destiny Edge 2.0 (and all LS-related team) starts to remind me annoyingly politically correct action movies. I have nothing against all that groups in particular but it is just statistically improbable that we will have it all at once. Just stahp, I want realistic characters.

Thats why I also hope that Taimi die horribly. Cartoony baby-genius is even worse than Scarlet for me.

oZii.2864:

if you want you can get 1 and 2. For PvP imagine you had 5 people standing around D/D Ele 30/20/10/10/0 full zerk and scholar runes you Burning speed+LF ROF and Fire grabbed or used the S/D combo double arcanes on both you probably will kill those 5 people.

Hmm… let me guess, ele will be dead somewhere halfway on burning speed. Same thing as with earth 5 – great potential, almost useless on practice.

As for WvW – I play scolar fullzerk staff ele there and its a lot of fun. Surely you just cannot roam in small groups or solo in such build, but when it comes to zergfights you are doing just terrifying damage combined with decent CC. Don’t trust those who say that people aren’t taking this damage, if you place your attacks right – they do, they just have no choice. Absence of red circle on shower helps that too. Don’t believe those who say that you will be downed on sight – you wont. You have great defensive and escape abilities, 1200 range and whole your zerg for meatshielding. If you are doing right you’ll probably escape even when your zerg is defeated, even without fgs. And don’t believe those who say that zergfights are 1-spamming. Placing your attacks, managing fields and CC, thinking about self-security is challenging and fun.

Tei.1704:

You’re very likely to be snared and they are less likely to be the conditions removed.

Swithing to air already gives you swiftness from trait. Not to say about updraft and zephys’s boon. So pretty much every RTL is casted from swiftness.

So there will be more space for minimaxing and more variables to balance. Okay.

This isn’t why spvp sucks, really.

Just simple buffs will not help this situation. There will always be most dps-effective 1+2 combo and everyone will use it. Even if it will be water.
Something that may fix it is more powerful synergy between spells in different attunements. Like you stack vulnerability with earth 1, place firefield with fire 2, blast it with water 2 and blow the kittens out of target with air 2. Or maybe unique combos designed just for ele’s spells. That would be good. If proper attunement rotation would provide more dps than just fire spam people would really do that. Currently I feel something like that only about earth 2, not because it is effective, but because thats the only staff ele’s finisher and timed blasts look cool.
But to be honest such gameplay would be far above of GW2’s 1-spamming pve meta.

On the side note I really want to have powerful and fast single target skills on ele. Give it a gun. With attacks that would concentrate on pure 1200(1500?)-range cannon action, without this crappy “support” and “aoe” effects that come with a cost of being slow and boring.

This isn’t a feature, its quite unsophisticated bugfix that said be implemented over a month ago.
So… we aren’t getting it at Feb 4. Our next waiting stop is 8%balancing patch?
I’m almost at rank40 and still didn’t even get r30 avenger title btw.

Is there a way to do something good with them? I thought about using them with 3 75lvl rares to gamble in mystic forge – will it possibly give me some profit? (in case I dont believe in precursors) There too many variables like exotic prices, possible runes and such, it is too hard for me to say it right away, did someone researched it?
Or maybe I should just do that salvage kits and save some money from buying them from vendor?

sorrychief.2563:

People who think FGS is weak have never exploded 3 people reviving one downed guy with fiery rush + lightning flash.

Yeah, go and run away with fgs in a tpvp match. Super helpful.

So the you are using 3 min cd AND utility to perform this one bug-based trick and this is what makes ele’s conjuries strong? Nope. They are pretty much useless in spvp

This changes doesn’t really buff d/d, you know. People who wants to win (nice joke, isn't it? People who wants to win & elementalist) will still play scepter.
So it is the same 8% kitten as always. We need at least 3 or 5 such buffs to make ONE ele build viable.
And staff will suck anyway.

Skady.5916:

And once again – guests have no priority, guests cannot get into main map if it is queued.

This guy is right. All hail network error!
As for guesting – I guest desolation every day. Not for wurm (I participated in 2 or 3 wurm tries there – before and after that kill and came to conclusion that it was mostly pure luck with buggy scaling/random 2nd phase movement and wurm trying now are contrproductive), but for telquati. Why? Because on my server no one cares about TQ. 85% servers doesn’t care about it. And what are those who care doing? Correct, they are guiesting on deso too! Majority of players in TQ fights are guests, TQ is killed on deso so frequently not because deso is stronk, but rather because its a gathering point for people who want to do things.
How will A-net deal with such matter is for them to decide. Maybe they’ll finally sacrifice epicness for good scaling.

It is also fun to see how after wurm kill everyone signed on desolace billows with proud, especially those who didn’t even participated in that kill. Sorry guys, zergling from one spawning pool isn’t that different from zergling from another. There are a lot a guests that can carry your champ-farming 1-spamming kitten . Fact that they managed to get on map through “network error” bug already shows their detemination to win.

daterxies.6479:

Also i ran into a Ele earlier and it looked like he had a lighting chain thing.. it looked really sick but its not in any of my skills yet. Any idea what it was?

Dagger air 1, I guess. I love it animation and it is actually pretty good (the ele’s only good) autoattack skill.

As for leveling I’d suggest d/d too since it has best fast and dynamic dps. But it wont hurt to switch on other skills in encounter requires so.

Shockwave.1230:

That’s silly, every class is able to do this.

It is like saying that some class in condi spec is fine. Because look, everyone can do this! Especially ele, look how he can stack bleeding and apply burning!

This thread is pointless in describing special cases because there will always be angry defenders that will turn thread into walls of demagogy and hilarious vacuum math like that in healing signet threads. Unlike wars they maybe have a reason to do this, fixing this thief’s playstyle by simple nerfs will quite likely turn class into dust (somewhere just near eles).
But I hope that anet will somehow gather feedback and eventually *re*balance thief to produce more sane and interesting gameplay.

I’m only rank38 and haven’t played thief too much, but I’ve noticed too that instead of “high risk, high reward” popular thief builds produce spammy “evade uptime” gameplay.
This and GW2 uncounterable stealth mechanic (thing that just shocked me when I started to play) makes me feel really bad about this version of “rogue” class.

Elementalist isn’t really “stand your ground” afk-defence class like guardian or engi, that bonuses will never be taken as trait (except maybe somewhere in low fire). For staff ele that is twice as true.
However this would increase our effectiveness in Ascalonian Catacombs by about of 5,89%! Hooray!