Guild Wars 2

Sword clone is better than iDisenchanter.

Sword clone rips boons, and does it faster than iDisenchanter. With sharper images, it does more damage than iDisenchanter. It also applies vulnerability. It can be summoned faster as well.

The tower is super fun. This is my favorite pve update since last winter’s day.

I got the mini toxic hybrid from the last instance in the tower, where you fight the toxic hybrid.

Bumping this because this build was buffed with the recent patch.

10/10/10/20/20

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQFAWhImibqx0gjFAEFm4SoABjChIKURRxM7A;TkAg0CsoqxUjoGbNuak1MEB

I’ve had a lot of success with this build, and have enjoyed being the only person I know of to run it, but I’m sick of people being negative about staff. You’re basically running glyphs, and you need a cantrip because lol stunbreakers. The playstyle is to summon both fire elementals and follow up with lava fonts and meteor showers. Glyph of storm can be used in fire for more damage, or in earth for aoe blind. Healing glyph is really useful when traited.

I like divinity runes because you need the defensive stats as well as crit damage. You’ll want a celestial jewel in your berserker amulet, since the crit damage is the same as the berserker jewel. The 10 points in earth can go in another tree if you like, you can try bolt to the heart or evasive arcana. I like having armor of earth auto cast, personally.

The amount of damage is basically unfair when both your elementals are up. I’ve never had a problem with a lone bunker. You also retain access to all of staff’s great utility, such as the best zoning skill in the game (static field) , a huge water field that wipes conditions, reflection bubble, lots of hard and soft cc, etc.

I use this build in tournies, and it’s a lot of fun. I encourage you to try it out.

Well this explains why my last post wasn’t working, thank you.

Part of the problem is that eles have the worst trait lines of any class in the game. Fully 38 of the ele’s 75 traits are utterly and completely worthless, and others are of dubious usefulness.

Furthermore, it is not ever viable in any way to build an ele without at least 20 points in the arcane tree, because you need the atunement swap cooldown. It will never be viable to do anything else as long as that is the tree’s bonus. The only way I can think to fix this is to reduce the ele’s swap cooldown to 10 seconds base, remove the cooldown from the trait line, and replace it with the “lingering elements” minor trait. So, the more points in arcane, the longer your atunement bonuses would last. This would simultaneously remove the necessity of going into the arcane tree, and make all the traits that only take effect when you’re attuned to a certain element useful.

I think I see what you’re saying, Zodian. Sorry for any miscommunication. I think we agree that what the game really needs is expanding depth of choice and rewards. It’s very hard to achieve, but that’s kind of the entire job of a game designer, whether it’s hard or not.

I understand how people feel this way. The emotional response is that if something is harder to do, it should have a greater reward, out of some moral principle. I argue that this is unhealthy for the interesting aspect of games.

A pushup contest is not interesting, one person will do more pushups in less time than another person. What makes a game interesting are the choices that thinking humans make while playing. This is why I think baseball is an awful sport. Everyone always knows the optimal play to make at all times while watching baseball, the only question is whether the players will be able to perform the optimal action, much like a pushup contest. Meanwhile, chess is fantastically interesting, because it’s very easy to move the pieces, so the only differentiating factor between players are the choices that they make.

I see desires to increase skill caps/floors as desires to add pushup contests to chess. The ability to succeed in twitch gameplay is largely inborn. You can improve a small amount, but there are genetic limits you can never overcome. This creates scenarios where one actor can know how to succeed, but is physically unable to do so, and so they lose to someone who made less optimal decisions.

In a game like gw2, it’s unavoidable that there will be at least a small physical barrier to entry to the game. But the more that barrier is minimized, the more the focus of the game can be on the actually interesting parts. One shotting anyone is never interesting, if you can do it, you always should. There’s no choice in the action, only the question of physical implementation, which is just a pushup contest. But the game needs to be balanced around choices, not actions.

All that said, there’s no real problem with having things in your game that are very hard to do, as long as their rewards are not greater than easier to perform actions. That keeps the game focused on choices that people make, and can still provide the exhilarating feeling of physical mastery for players that desire it.

You literally made a topic complaining that new people were playing pvp.

You fundamentally don’t understand what makes a game successful.

I believe healing is too strong in this game, and is causing a variety of problems.

The first problem is that defense doesn’t scale in a healthy way. Imagine one character of a class builds full glass, and another builds full defense, and they do nothing while someone attacks them. The character in full defense will last maybe twice as long. At the same time, having a “bunker” player is very important to the success of the team. But what allows a bunker to last on the battle field is not the base stats, but the amount they can heal. The defensive stats only allow you to live long enough to use your healing abilities when they are off cooldown.

This effectively creates a dichotomy of situations when facing a bunker. Either you can kill them, or you can’t. I once watched a bunker ele fight a bunker guardian for a good minute or so, and it was obvious that neither one could truly threaten the other. Their combat would have been eternal if teammates hadn’t joined the fight. I have also seen bunkers go down almost instantly to 3 people, because their tanky stats don’t let them last long enough to use their healing skills when facing that much damage. This destroys ambiguity in decision making, and limits player choice when facing a bunker. A player can think, “Can I kill this bunker? If yes I should, if no I shouldn’t engage unless a teammate gives me an advantage.”

The second problem is the high amount of burst damage many classes can deal before most people can be reasonably expected to react. This problem is directly related to the first. High amounts of damage in short time-frames have to exist, or there would be nothing to stop the aforementioned bunkers from being immortal. But being stopped from being able to play the game without any possible choice or counterplay is demoralizing, and worse, uninteresting.

The third problem is the lack of resource management as a direct result of two things: low cooldown self heals, and extremely fast health regen out of battle. This means that if you win a fight, you will have lost nothing. By the time you fight another opponent you will be at full health with all your cooldowns back. Again, this eliminates choices from the game. If you can fight and kill someone, you should, because it won’t cost you anything. If you can’t kill someone, you shouldn’t fight them, because it won’t cost them anything. Unless, of course, you are a class that can simply run away from the fight, because once your out of combat you’re back to square 1 with no appreciable losses. This does not promote good decision making, because there is only one good decision, but it does promote bad decision making, because you are not punished for your bad decisions. (It doesn’t even matter if you down someone, if you die after that, they come back at full health.)

I actually think this is one of the reasons dueling is popular. Fighting other low defense builds as a low defense build is one of the few interesting engagements in the game. Because both of you can kill, but will also be killed if you mess up, and because the fights happen within the timeframe of one bar’s worth of cooldowns, you actually have to pay attention to what abilities your opponent uses and when, whether to interrupt them or save your cooldown, when their abilities are on cooldown, how much dodge each of you has left, etc.

In conclusion, I think it would be healthier for the game if self healing and regeneration effects were significantly toned down, and if out of combat regeneration was removed.This would allow defensive stats and offensive stats to scale in a healthy way, and would foster more and more interesting decision making in game. Instead of “can I kill them, if yes I should, if no I shouldn’t engage” choices could be more like, “can I kill them or will they kill me, if I can kill them, how long will it take and how much will it cost me, how will the costs of this engagement effect the next” etc. These choices are more ambiguous and meaningful, and I believe would create a better gameflow. Thank you for your time.