Guild Wars 2

Ryou.2398:

Am I the only one not impressed by elemental power? It only gives you a 25 percent chance and you have to activate it and it has a cooldown, im sorry but that slot is far more useful having something else in it. Signet of water is more useful then that. Why would you choose that over revive even? You can atleast trait revive to make it more powerful.

It is a 25 percent chance every single time you hit an opponent for the duration of the buff with a 5 second icd per target. So since the buff lasts 30 seconds, assuming you keep constantly hitting your target you will generally proc it about 5-6 times. For reference using it in air will allow you to apply around 35 seconds of weakness which comes in spaced out increments so it can’t just all be cleansed at once. Throw in the stun breaker and this is the only respectable glyph for pvp purposes as the rest are garbage, especially the heal, the revive, and the lesser elemental.

I am pretty happy with fractals currently and am doing them daily unlike when swamps of the mists was the go to thing. I just wish the hp pools were reduced a bit so that soloing could become something fun to do again instead of just a hyper tedious chore. But it is better for groups than it was before where bosses at max level could be burnt so quickly that they wouldn’t be able to outlast an ice-bow chain stun.

It should be the map that you have the highest win percentage on, that would be a kind of interesting statistic.

Dagger focus fresh air builds work well with some combination of water arcana and fire as the other 2 trait lines. One general piece of advice I can give is instead of heading south from the initial way point in verdant brink try going north instead. While going south is layed out as the more intuitive way to go, it is full of pocket raptors and veteran stone heads which are relatively dangerous. If you go north instead, the mobs are generally more tame, and you can do the itzel questline for some experience for mastery points.

skarpak.8594:

probably (freshair) eles would have to do a stack rotation in between their dps rota and also share those boons with heat sync.
that would leave the rev free not to run their fury skill, instead might would come in and mesmer copy’s stuff then anyway.

heat sync snowballs might pretty hard, if 2 eles blast just 9 stack of might each, one copys to the other, the other one has 18, he copys again, boom even more.
i don’t think too much would change regarding the teamcomp…rather that you have to play better in terms of when to stack and maybe some minor adjustments to food / armor (maybe strengh runes / boon dura food / traits…like imbued melodies instead elemental bastion)….but nothing too much.

I think the big problem with freshair eles stacking might is that they need to wait for the lightning field from air overload to go away before they can use any blast finishers not even considering that they still need to work around every other classes combo fields. Fresh air without air overload is very mediocre dps. Heat sync would definitely be used more though.

This is just a hypothetical question which I am curious about but how would the raid meta change if phalanx strength was changed to no longer be viable for raids? Might is one of the most important factors in increasing a group’s dps and since the start of raids, people have covered the requirements by adding a phalanx strength warrior or 2 to every raid group. So if phalanx strength was essentially removed from the game, how would the raid meta change?

For dungeons before ps was a thing, people would use fire fields to stack might at the beginning of the fight and burst the boss down before those stacks wore off. However raid bosses are much more durable than dungeon bosses, and using fire fields for might in the middle of a fight is currently unreliable since there are so many other combo fields such as mesmer wells, air overloads, guardian symbols, necro poison fields, etc. Would groups be willing to have everyone stop using all non fire combo fields every 30 seconds or so to restack might? Would they instead start stacking heralds with strength runes? Would classes start investing more having their own sources of might such as hgh for engineer with elixers? Would groups accept that they may not have good might access a lot of the time?
Then there is the question about which classes would gain or lose popularity. Would warrior still be used regularly, and would they keep using tactics for empower allies, or go arms for more personal dps? Would classes that spam tons of non fire combo fields such as hammer guardians become less used?

Lastly do you think the meta would be more fun without phalanx strength? On one hand it would likely take a bit more teamwork coordination to keep everyone in the raid with might capped and bring more value to the many alternative sources of might in the game. On the other hand it could make classes and builds that are non conductive to might stacking non viable. This is just something that I think would be interesting to think about and discuss, would love to hear everyone’s thoughts.

Ryou.2398:

Tomiyou.3790:

In all honesty, all races (except norn) have good animations for ele. From there on it’s just what you want to pick (your personal taste). Sylvari have very good ones indeed (they just feel right, my favourite of them all), asura feel like they are dancing, and humans are just humans (in a very good way, they feel natural). Charr feel robust, but their robust moves feel appropriately powerful (they just feel like they are powerful) for a melee, staff fire autoattack (Fireball) is amazing too. I don’t like their Meteorite shower channel animations tho.

Thanks ill look into charr and sylvari, but arent charr against magic is there a story with some form of magic for them?

Depends on the charr, for instance flame legion love using magic but they are the flame legion so no one likes them anyways.

As for racial skills, the reaper of grenth for humans is better than any of the ele elites for dueling purposes in wvw. Human avatar of melandru has some decent uses such as immobilizing spirits for the gorseval encounter in raids. The norn snow leopard form offers a really good escape in wvw in many cases better than fgs having less sustained mobility but stealth to make up for it. Asura’s technobable is pretty nice for breakbar support in pve and that is all I can really think of as far as useful racial skills go.

It doesn’t matter, unless it is a re-skin of forest or legacy people will hate it because they always want new maps until they find out they are different in some way.

InsidiousWaffle.7086:

At this point supreme, you are just making a fool of yourself. For the umpteenth time, in not asking for a nerf to healing, I’m asking that instead of initially healing 4k, and build down, it start at 1k, and build up. The total healing would be the same

If the healing would be the same, why bother changing it? Because ultimately the healing would not be the same on average. You would be able to interrupt the main portion of the healing much more frequently regardless of whether you time your interrupts or spam them and hope you interrupt something. Keep in mind interrupting a channeled heal is already extra punishing compared to a normal heal since it goes on full cd. So yes, this would be a large nerf to ele personal healing considering how much cc spam is going on and the class’s relative lack of stability.

Ele self survivability is already absolutely horrible compared to any other class considering how much they have to invest into it just to reach the same level as a marauder scrapper. The only thing ele has going for it is it heals its allies more than any other profession can, that is it. If wash away the pain is too strong, you make it heal allies less, not the ele less. If you want more counter play for heal skills let us complain about the ones that actually are not realistically interrupt-able such as healing signet and withdraw before we move on to one that is fair in that regard.

XTR.9604:

https://www.twitch.tv/asphyxiaxt/v/69568483

Another video of 1v1s against a Guardian that is actually pretty good running my Ele build a few days ago.

Have to comment, that guardian was awful. He let you complete so many overloads when he had interrupts available. I stopped watching when I saw he got you with a binding blade during your water overload and instead of simply pulling you out of it he whirling wrathed for no reason.

So I was playing around with this build for a bit and have to preface this by saying it is one of the cheesiest builds I have ever played, on the level of minion master and turret engi. However there are certainly weaknesses.

I would say the biggest weakness of this build is retaliation. It is damage that not only goes through evades but hits the thieves 2 primary damage dealing skills particularly hard. Death blossom and impaling lotus are each 3 separate hits, so retaliation procs 3 times for each of these skills. Combine that with thief healing potential is not terribly great, this can wear the thief down fairly efficiently. Of course the build still uses bountiful theft, so retaliation must be able to be reapplied frequently, or have enough cover boons so that retal isn’t stolen reliably. Mesmers with traited retaliation on phantasm is extremely effective in this regard, as a thief can’t strip retaliation off of all the phantasms especially when the mesmer’s stolen item is too good to pass up. Other things that work well would be: scrapper with elixer b, elixer b proc, and light field combos; warrior with spiked armor which is too short of a cd for steal to take it every time; guardian with numerous sources especially on gs.

Another weakness of this build is the lack of ability to deal with ranged pressure from kiting opponents. It spams a crazy amount of cripple in melee range making it very tough to stick to in this regard. However against ranged opponents it doesn’t have nearly the sticking power as most thief builds with only steal and heart seeker as gap closers.

The last major weakness is against builds that have frequent small condi cleanses such as diamond skin elementalist, and ironically escapists absolution dare devil. It simply doesn’t have the cover conditions to allow the bleeds to stick. Watching two condi dd thieves going at each other is about as exciting as watching 2 bunker guards duke it out since they are clearing conditions off each other with every dodge.

As for the notion that the build is weak to cc, it really isn’t, it has 2 on demand stun-breaks and an additional one on auto proc. Bandits defense is on a measly 12s cool-down traited so very few builds can apply enough cc to lock this build down.

Out side of these weaknesses the only thing you can do against this thief build is to just out play them by hitting them after the death blossom evade frames end. While this puts the burden of skill on the non thief, it can be done.

Bunker ele doesn’t even have great survivability considering how much it invests in defenses. There are still several builds that can solo it reliably, and with 13k hp and no on demand stunbreaks it isn’t too hard to burst down in a team fight. The only reason why it is decent is all of its defense is aoe so it can be classified as a support. So they could definitly tone down the aoe healing in favor of improved selfish survivability.

Both too much cc and too much stability. Used to be that stability came in small durations or had huge cool-downs associated with it. Now you have revenants, scrappers, mesmers, necros, warriors, guardians able to achieve nearly 50% or even more up time on stability without much investment. This stability though generally comes in one stack at a time but lasts a substantial amount of time, so if you want your cc to actually do something you need to be able to spam it readily. So you get a massive arms race, where everyone either loads up on stability, loads up on cc, or becomes a ping pong ball.

One thing that confuses me is the general mentality of just dodge headbutt, skull grinder, and shield bash they have huge animations, can’t miss them". While with precision strike, the mentality is “no way to dodge something like that reliably, the cast time is way too fast.” Though funnily all 4 of those skills have the exact same cast time of 1/2 second, and the animations are all about the same difficulty to read. So if those 3 loaded warrior skills are easy to dodge isn’t precision strike the same?

I will be playing a different class again this season, not positive which one, but it will not be ele. I can’t stand the heal bot build and everything else is trash.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Xanctus The Dragonslayer.2318:

It’s fine. It already got shaved. It can be countered. invulnereability, block, blind. teleport.

Power revenant should still be viable.

Your warrior can easily take it ross biddle

But what if I don’t want to play my war XD

Fortunately for you it is pretty hard to lose against power rev with the standard build for mesmer which is apparently your main class.

The holy hand grenade for rev is condi builds especially mesmer.

I was in the minority that enjoyed courtyard, nice change of pace from time to time and I would like to see it come back at least for unranked and hotjoin.

FrownyClown.8402:

Locuz.2651:

FrownyClown.8402:

shows how much a know about mesmer lol

So please tell me which of these regular non elite wells chain CCed u?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Well_of_Action
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Well_of_Calamity
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Well_of_Precognition
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Well_of_Recall

And ofc the elite well (which must be the well you talk about since its the only well that has CCs as effect:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gravity_Well

Now lets look at the overview of mesmer elite skills and check if you can spot the moa one + the gravity well: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Elite_skill#Mesmer

So you cant have both at the same time lol.

Yes I see this thanks for correcting me. In all seriousness I was caught in that well followed by their double stun skill (shield 5 I think) while a thief spammed 2 on me and I died. How affective are stun breaks against that well?

The pull is pulsing and isn’t a ward so you can dodge it. You just need to time your stun break right after a pulse, and instantly dodge out. If you are off on your timing by a bit though, you will waste your stun break and just get pulled again.

Novuake.2691:

“double blink” hahaha this is funny.

I don’t disagree that mesmer is pretty strong and a little overtuned, but OP doesn’t understand the class one bit.

Maybe he was referring to the all mighty mimic which has not been gaining popularity recently but is still a thing.

The main reason I can think of why quickness affecting movement skills helped warrior was whirlwind attack. With quickness it would cover a very short distance there by making all the hits connect against its target for massive damage just like what happens when it is used against a target that is next to a wall. It was a lot like the old fiery rush/lightning flash combo, the difference being much less damage overall but nearly instant in execution.

Anyone else having this problem? He some times is following but is very sluggish for the most part. We were using a chrono tank, going to try something else to see if it helps.

Edit: Warrior worked better, still slow

Ruru.1302:

Fivedawgs.4267:

I doubt it, primordial legends are sticking to their primordial title; now that says a lot. Now if by season, you meant meta included then it’s up for debate, otherwise last season (S1) was better.

Primordial Legend sounds better than exalted legend. Exalted legend makes you look like some kitten that farms AB all day

The other reason to stick to primordial legend is if you have exalted legend, then the legendary icon next to your name already shows you have it making the title redundant for now.

Interpret Interrupt.3824:

ArthurDent.9538:

Eviscerate along with most power based skills also does 0 damage when it hits an enemy using endure the pain, is blocking, evading, invuln or if user is blinded. So why is it when you try to burst into those methods of damage mitigation it is fine even though they are all much more common than an ele that stacked defensive traits and received out side help from a revenant’s elite skill which is the only way to get that much damage reduction? Rite of the great Dwarf has a low up time at best (especially on an ele), so handle it like you would any other form of defensive skill and don’t mindlessly use your main burst skill into it.

Massive damage mitigation usually has major tells. Engi small form, Ele mist, evade frames, etc.
But this is much harder to see.
I am not actually sure if the ele gets an icon for the rev skill.
Frankly when I used eviscerate, I was expecting reduced damage, but this is like 99% reduced for something the target did not even do.

Imagine if I popped endure pain, and you took zero damage as well.

The texture change and icon applies to both the revenant and his allies and is about as visibly distinguishable as obsidian flesh. This leaves it as a bit more obvious than endure the pain and much more obvious than signet of stone which are 2 other main skills that provide extreme damage reduction without straight up invulnerability, so not really out of line in that regard.

Eviscerate along with most power based skills also does 0 damage when it hits an enemy using endure the pain, is blocking, evading, invuln or if user is blinded. So why is it when you try to burst into those methods of damage mitigation it is fine even though they are all much more common than an ele that stacked defensive traits and received out side help from a revenant’s elite skill which is the only way to get that much damage reduction? Rite of the great Dwarf has a low up time at best (especially on an ele), so handle it like you would any other form of defensive skill and don’t mindlessly use your main burst skill into it.

Chaith.8256:

Shylock.4653:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Infiltrators arrow needs LOS otherwise it won’t work yes you can ground target ledges and bridges to port not but LoS is needed can’t go through walls.

That’s not correct. You can teleport through walls (0:37) and roof (0:42) in Khylo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqqCmqYoIDA

Both arguments are pretty irrelevant, of course targeted teleports require LoS, and yes, even if you go to the other side of a wall/roof you still need to have LoS to the area you’re targeting.

But what happens if the thief casts infiltrators arrow, then while it is still in flight uses one of its other shadow steps to position it self in an area that would not have LOS for where the infiltrator’s arrow lands. I actually don’t know the answer to that.

It is worth noting that sigil of energy got its effect split between pvp and pve/wvw. It still gives back 50 endurance in wvw keeping it as good as it has always been, but the vigor from the pvp version is absolute garbage.

MadRabbit.3179:

None of them if you are backline. Not even Ice Bow, because you can’t move during Ice Storm animation and you can’t break it early like Meteor Shower.

And because you will murder yourself with retal, while doing tickle damage to the enemy.

style.6173:

Chaith.8256:

Also, lol @ deleting Clerics. Ele doesn’t get carried from having 13k HP so much, man.

I’m sure your team just uses an ele because Wakkey looks good playing it. *facepalm

Ele is a huge problem and needs to be nerfed

Only thing about ele that could use nerfing is the healing it does to allies since that is the only thing it has going for it right now. It’s self survivability is actually pretty poor considering it is taking 3 defensive traitlines, with 9 defensive major traits, defensive runes, defensive utilities, cleric ammulet, and even defensive sigils. This leaves it with next to no damage, less mobility than even a reaper, and 14k hp which isn’t terribly hard to spike down in a group fight. The build doesn’t even have any on demand stun breaks, as overloads are not reliable for this purpose and can easily be played around. The only thing it is good for is that nearly 115% of its healing is aoe (slightly less, sigil of leeching proc is not aoe everything else is though, and gets 15% boost to allies from water gm minor).

ezd.6359:

You will not win a ranked arena against equal team by standing afk on close whole match.

If the teams are equal, they will also stand afk on close, and if they don’t they are the superior team, not equivalent :P

OtterPaws.2036:

The machined weapon parts can be gained from the meta event chest, at an almost 100% rate after you unlock the collection.

^This though it is worth noting that if you are trying to get multiple collections done at once, you can only get one at a time.

d/w uses the trait that increases precision while attuned to air and spends the majority of its time in that attunement. Staff just camps fire mostly

I did most of mine in verdant brink since it is the first map you enter and it is pretty easy. Dragonstand is probably the quickest and easiest to complete since there aren’t many poi’s or hero points, and all the waypoints are given to you. But you have to walk all the way through all the other maps which takes time. Auric basin is also easier and quicker then vb, but you need to do story or find a mesmer to get to the inner chamber. Tangled depths is just a pain until you learn the map pretty well.

Only thing I would kind of like to see with moa is let me jump in it. It is annoying getting stuck in a tiny little area that you can’t get out of because of tiny little ridges that you would normally not pay attention to as you jump over them. That is basically a guaranteed death sentence and I highly doubt mesmers ever plan it out, they just get lucky.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Lightsbane.9012:

is it fair to compare dragon’s tooth to true shot?

No.

This is correct dragons tooth was designed with the intention of being borderline useless, while true shot was meant to be good.

To get exotic berserker gear just buy it off of the trading post, it is cheaper than leveling tailoring your self.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Zhed%27s_armor or Berserker’s Exalted pieces are going to be the ones you want. Will cost about 30-40 gold for all 6 pieces which isn’t too bad. Don’t worry about ascended armor for a while, it will take some time.

This will work well for everything in pve but it is very glassy so if you have trouble surviving you can use soldiers or knights jewelry which has some toughness and vitality. The extra survivability is especially useful in wvw where everything is a little more dangerous.

They are a strong class overall, but they have strengths and weaknesses like any other class. They were designed to be at the same overall power level as the others and will be balanced in the future as such.

With powerful auras instead of cleansing water you won’t even really be able to hold 1v1 against a condi necro. With that being said, if they are off point like you say they are, then you don’t need to be on point and can give chase, even then if you need to bail off point to line of sight to survive that is fine, dying is much worse then getting decapped.

Infernaeus.8473:

Alekt.5803:

Kuya.6495:

Alekt.5803:

Kuya.6495:

Alekt.5803:

Kuya.6495:

Could the OP at least explain why he want these nerfs? I’m at a loss.

What do you think kept the revenants alive during the finals?

So?

Maybe they are overperforming?

You’re defining overperforming as being the healer in a group. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, especially if the healer can be bursted and the healer can’t burst back.

I think support ele is fine. I believe a better definition of overperformance might be rev, given that most teams ran two of them.

I think we both saw the Nos’ Reaper getting 1v1’ed by the cleric ele at far on Forest game against R55. Now, this build vs build is going to be balance defining to say that “Elementalists are doing fine against Reaper”, when it is so far from the truth, unless going specifically Focus, and auramancer.

We also saw Wakkey on the very same build lose to Oracle’s Necro in a 1v1 on Temple as well..

They actually weren’t the same build. Wakey was running powerful auras while the R55 dragon’s ele was using cleansing water which makes a massive difference in that matchup. With powerful auras you give out more auras so more healing, regen, vigor, and protection, but you lose a lot of cleansing so the 1v1 against condi necro isn’t really feasible.

I find it amusing that I find playing rev rougher than reaper, scrapper, druid, daredevil, tempest, and dragon hunter and not all that dangerous to play against yet it still does so well at the top level. I guess the class is just has a higher skill cap then people give it credit for.
The forums also seemed to echo this sentiment as most of the complaining was aimed at reaper, scrapper, and druid. However now that pro leagues have shown rev to still be very strong at top level play, I predict everyone will start crying for rev nerfs and cite these matches as evidence for imbalance rather than judging off of their own experiences.
The same thing happened with dragonhunter in reverse last season. At first it was the most op thing ever conceived according to the forums, then when proleage teams stopped using them, the forums took a 180 degree turn and complained about it being under powered.

Doing map rewards for the appropriate maps. This addition is also why they have tanked in price over the past few months. With that being said, generally it is just best to buy the bulk of what you need.

Marthkus.4615:

I play necros. The one’s who reck my face either use CC or kiting. Very few people just straight up fight.

That is a large part of the problem rev only has one ranged weapon and it has no way of maintaining distance from the necro.

So what do you do against teams with multiple necros or just one decent one other than reroll? They are just completely shutting me down when I try to play revenant. And it isn’t like oh well I can’t beat them in 1v1 but it is a team game, because they pretty much just murder me in any fights regardless of the scale of the fight. Then when I play necro it is more or less the same, enemy revenants just die unless they jump me at low health/lifeforce.

It is almost like the turret engi days again when thieves would occasionally get killed trying to cap a point guarded only by the engi’s turrets while the engi was on the other end of the map.

Ammazzo.7351:

In the VG 1v1 tourney that just happened the finals were condi mes vs condi mes. One of them never even lost a round….falselights was in it so maybe he can speak more on it. But I think mesmer is maybe higher on the 1v1 list you made.

It is amusing how for those little tourneys mesmer is always the class with the most traits/utilities banned, and it still pretty much always wins.

It was like this but then it got nerfed as a “bug fix” even though the way you describe how it should happen makes more sense.

reikken.4961:

Clearly the answer is to give ele back Lava Tomb (increased damage while downed).

Let’s face it. As a damage built ele, you’re going to go down quickly and often. But with this trait, people can’t stomp you because they’ll die to the lava font if they try to, so you are now immune to stealth stomps, among other things. And even your formerly useless downed skill 1 can drop people.

…

This was actually my favorite trait back in early 2013, when ele was trash tier, and I ran zerker ele. It was hilarious watching people try to stomp me and then realizing they couldn’t, and then dropping to a fire sigil proc off skill 1 as they backed off.

Downed lava font trait is still there it just got merged with the persisting flames gm trait, though I think they dropped the increased damage part got removed.

Ele has much better personal dps, while mesmer has much better group support, at least from a pve raiding perspective. As a result ele is replaceable by the other classes that do damage at or above its level, however having multiple eles is not bad for the group as long as all the necessary support is covered. Mesmer on the other hand is irreplaceable for a group and the most valuable class for increasing group dps. However once you have one to cover the alacrity/quickness, it generally doesn’t help much to add more.

My list:

Chrono
Rev
Druid/Tempest/Scrapper
Reaper
Daredevil/Dragonhunter
Berserker
Non Elite Specs

Sandrox.9524:

ArthurDent.9538:

I will offer to trade rebound for the chilled to the bone, any takers?

Only if you trade earth armor with signet of undeath

Why trade one of the best utilities on ele for one of the worst on necro? Of course that isn’t a fair trade how about plauge signet for cleansing fire two of the best utilities for each.