Guild Wars 2

Archaon.6245:

I was pug 4 fun (Good old times) and he was r20 or something lol it would be a real problem if i can’t beat a r20…problem is that any other r20 with a different class just dies and it ends there, this one just kept running away coming back in seconds…sure he couldn’t do kitten but it just proves how easily you can avoid death and reset fights with just rtl away + massive healing, expec if you’re facing a class with less mobility than you (So pretty much everyone except maybe a thief, and you are not going to meet a thief defending a point alone for sure)

You didn’t say “this one time, a r20 ele came by and I beat him.”

As a side point mesmer i got many, and i mean MANY eles coming to my point, getting beaten, rtl away

Archaon.6245:

As a side point mesmer i got many, and i mean MANY eles coming to my point, getting beaten, rtl away (Since i can’t just leave the point to chase him, and even trying i’m not going to get him anyway) with 20% hp then come back full hp again to contest in just 3-4 secs and again, and again, and again…

I like the part where you repeatedly beat the ele and send him fleeing for his life “again, and again, and again…”, but then complain about how ele is OP.

Makes sense.

Switching weapons cancels your movement abilities.

I just checked WW, Rush and Savage Leap and their ranges are increased by swiftness.

zone.1073:

In every major game in existence, slowing skills only affect normal movement itself, not skills that displace the player. In League of Legends, for example, when a Nasus withers a Riven, yeah she’ll move slower, but the range of her hops are unaffected and she can still use her skills to their max extent.

This is the dilemma with melee vs range in this game. Slows are hyper effective in GW2 because not only do they reduce movement speed, but they actually cut the range of movement abilities in half. It’s a real game mechanic. ArenaNet really should just change the skill descriptions of all cripples and chills to include “oh by the way, this skill cuts the range of movement abilities by 50%, too”.

And why is it that some movement skills are immune to the range-reducing effect of slows, like the Elementalist’s Ride the Lightning? Yet others like the Warrior’s Rush is totally susceptible to range reduction? What is ArenaNet’s rationale behind those decisions?

Thoughts?

Attacks that are affected by chill/cripple are also affected by swiftness. It’s a trade off, and I wouldn’t want to give up the increased mobility the 90%+ of the time that I’m not chilled or cripple.

As for RTL, it’s completely different from normal charges. It can’t be canceled early, so getting immobilized or hung up on terrain is an unbreakable self stun, range isn’t increased by swiftness and eles are completely locked out of all of their abilities while in the RTL transformation.

“What are DD users affraid of ?”

Mostly condi engi/necro and having to stand in the middle of a mesmer’s shatter combo to attack them.

Things D/D eles are not afraid of: rainbows, unicorns and staff buffs.

Some good ideas here.

One technical note:

With a 9 second cooldown on your attunement recharges

Attunement recharge is 16 seconds base, and 10 seconds with 30 arcana. You see 15/9 immediately because the interface only shows full seconds remaining until you get under 5 and it starts showing decimals.

ANet should release the formula.

If it’s anything like the WvW rating system, strength of win is part of it and people will stick around to lose 500-300 instead of eating a 500-150 loss and taking a bigger hit to their rating.

Login.5102:

I’m 40+ r from mostly tourni’s and main a condi necro. In my experience I dominate most classes in 1v1 situations and feel like the MVP in team fights . Not trying to toot my own horn, but I feel a well played necro is beyond good, so reading the threads about tier lists and overall hate for the necro came as a shock.

Why do people feel that way about the necromancer?

When a necro has all of its cooldowns up, it’s one of the strongest classes in the game and can give anybody a run for their money. Once those are down, they drop off and are not as strong as the t1 classes (ele, engi, ranger, guard, mesmer).

If they had better long fight sustain, I would put them in tier 1. Thief has the same issue IMO.

ensoriki.5789:

World vs World IS conquest, The goal is the exact same.
Stand on a circle to claim it as yours and collect points from it. Collect more than your opponents. In WvW they put inherit protection around the circle, in the forms of a gate and some npcs.

Which is fine in itself.
If people were playing WvW just to win, you would see less 1v1’s because 1v1’s are “not” important to WvW. Since individuals matter less in WvW you’ll see all sorts of player rangers though and the depth that the format has fall to the wayside.

Less than 1% of your time in WvW will be spent contesting a circle. The rest is map control, logistics and siege.

Solo roamers are an important part of disrupting enemy strategy. Solo/small unit players can flip a camp, kill stragglers/reinforcements, kill supply yaks/runners, contest waypoints, distract zergs and more.

The main force does the heavy lifting of taking hard points and controlling the battle lines, but there’s room for all play styles to be useful.

Your WvW experience is going to be dictated by what tier your server is in. The competitive players and guilds have mostly congregated in the top 4-5 servers to fight each other, leaving the lower tiers filled with people who either don’t want to be competitive or don’t know how the game works.

Both are currently working in the mists.

I don’t know what to tell you. I use both (not at the same time) and have never had an issue with them not proccing on attunement swap.

Battle and energy work and are the two most commonly used sigils for an ele. You need to be in combat.

It’s kind of sad that it’s been ten years, and nobody has topped Shadowbane’s race selection.

Humans – dark age catholic European humans
Dwarves – forged from stone and metal by their god
Elves – evil people who want to enslave or kill everyone who isn’t like them (including the god who created them)
Irekei – the even more evil elves who worship the dragon and just want to watch the world burn
Nephilim – winged demons that can fly and shapeshift into mortals
Aracoix – A bad kitten Tengu that can fly.
Minotaur – they’re like Tauren, except not lame
Shades – Pseudo-undead humans
Vampires – they’re vampires
Centaur – half man, half horse, half chainsaw. That’s 150% son
Half giant – humans with the blood of giants in their ancestry
Aelfborn – lunatic half elves who are barely kept sane by magical tattoos that cover their bodies

loneknight.8425:

Skip the intro? My, you will miss the following EPICNESS which can be found in the cutscene:

http://8bittheater.wikia.com/wiki/Sword-Chucks

Wait, Fighter is the bad guy in this? I always knew BM was a bad influence on him.

randomfightfan.4091:

I wanted to see what all the hype was about it so I grabbed one with my zerker thief and the dps I was doing with that was significantly lower than what I’d be doing with just my daggers.

so I grabbed one with my zerker thief and the dps I was doing with that was significantly lower than what I’d be doing with just my daggers.

grabbed one with my zerker thief

zerker thief

thief

I seem to have located your problem.

Raif.9507:

Umm you keep saying quad cantrips, but you can only have 3, unless you magically made your elite slot another cantrip and if you did, please share I could use a 4th cantrip I can use on demand.

If your talking about the 10 earth bunker build for the extra Armor of Earth, well then he will have next to no crit, or zephyrs boon to get fury, and will hit like hes hitting you with a piece of paper. Or he/she will lose something else, in Arcana perhaps or in Water.

You have 3, count them, 3 slottable stunbreaks. That is all. You need to spec for the Armor of Earth at 50%, and you don’t “choose” when to use it.

The meta build has Earth’s Embrace. How do people still not know that after ANet made it the default ele build?

A bunker is going to hit like wet tissue whether he has zephyr’s boon or not. The people traiting into air are the eles that don’t want to be a bunker in the first place, but feel forced to take 30 water/arcana to be viable.

If a bunker ele is going below 50% health, he was likely hit with CC and needed to use a cantrip anyway.

haviz.1340:

Caffynated.5713:

-snip-

How do you get 4 cantrips and 4 stun breakers?

Earth’s Embrace (Earth III) gives you Armor of Earth when you reach 50% health.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Earth%27s_Embrace

Geff.1930:

That’s a lot of Retaliation damage…

What did that rock dog ever do to you?

This wasn’t funny or original 10 troll threads ago.

Geff.1930:

Based on reading the march end survey it’s easy to conclude that a majority of players consider Elementalists to be slightly on the OP side. I don’t understand why this is the case based on what I’ve seen while playing, for the following reasons:

1. It seems like a majority of elementalist damage burst avoidable because they are AoE based.
2. While elementalists do have some stun breaks, from my fights against Eles they seem to be very prone to CC. Even if you don’t kill them (likely unless you are with a group) you can force them to use up their few defensive cooldowns and retreat.

Compare this to Mesmers:
1. Blurred Frenzy, most OP skill I have ever seen. 2 seconds of invulnerability on a 10 second cooldown, wtf? What other class has 2 seconds of invulnerability on a 10s cooldown? I’m not even considering the extra burst.
2. Ilusionary Leap, while technically not a stun break can basically nullify the effects of immobilize or snare or freeze. On a 12 second cooldown.

You’re thinking of balance in terms of raw combat power. A meta viable ele isn’t going to roll in and destroy equally skilled people the way you would traditionally think of an OP class doing; at most they win attrition fights.

The problem with ele (specifically 0 0 10 30 30 cleric bunkers with 4x cantrips), and why they’re considered to be essentially ruining the meta, is their ability to contest a point with little risk. A cantrip bunker can contest the opponent’s close point by himself and keep at least one person there to fight him. If they don’t get help, the ele will eventually neut the point giving his team an advantage.

If help does come, the cantrip bunker can hold out for 20-30 seconds against two equally skilled players because of their large number of escape abilities (4x stun breakers, condition removal, nearly perma vigor, high up time on protection, and pretty decent up time on stability). When the ele does start getting behind, he can simply leave with RTL, heal up, get his cooldowns back and restart the process.

While other bunkers (guardian and ranger) are better at holding a point, they can’t reset the fight when it goes against them. When help comes to deal with a guardian bunker, he’s going to hold his position longer than the ele could, but then he’s going to get stomped and it will be awhile before he’s back. The other two bunkers also don’t have the mobility to constantly pressure far and return to help with team fights.

Mrbig.8019:

Sad stories tell that a bunker eles can’t outrun a half decent war using rush + bullrush and neither a thief.

If you play an ele and wars-thief let you go away, you were playing against bad wars/thieves.

If an ele has burned 4 stun breakers fighting a warrior, I’m going to go ahead and say bull’s charge is on CD.

But hey, maybe warriors have secretly been beasting all over bunker eles for months and nobody but you noticed.

A thief can certainly run an ele down. Mobility is a big part of why they’re competitive in the meta.

In my thread i was not wrecked neither it was gone over.

I think most people see it differently.

There’re people saying thief is fine, yet if you see Saatar thread, Phantaram thread and sPvP tier list ( that includes hotjoin player decisions, too) , the thief is bottom tier in all of them.

The problem is not about thief build being not viable anymore ( it isn’t ), the point is that soon the meta will revolve around bunkerish heavy DPS builds dye to quickness nerf, because now there’s nothing able to punish tanky builds for overextending.

If people in my thread can’t understand it, it’s not my fault.

A thief with all of its resources available is competitive with almost any build. They’re not top tier because their meta viable builds lack long fight sustainability. Necros are in a similar boat.

1: on a 0-20-0-20-30 build, with fury on ( 40 % crit chance) and 250 bloodlust stacks, a single burning speed can hit for over 6 k damage.
Assuming not, burning speed crits for 4 k , arcane blast for 2k , arcane wave for 3k , ring of fire for 2k +.

I’ve already dealth 10 k AoE damage, and i’ve not used fire grab.

How does adding 250 power from bloodlust to ~1900 power, increase damage by 50%? That’s a 13% increase, which would take a 4k hit (which is already higher than reality) to 4.5k.

As far as the likelihood of all of that critting with a 40% crit chance:

RTL 40% crit chance = 40% of all combos have a RTL crit
RTL crits have a 40% chance to be followed a burning speed to crit = 16% of all combos have a RTL and burning speed crit
RTL + burning speed crits have a 40% chance to be followed by a ring of fire crit = 6.4% of all combos have a RTL, BS and RoF crit
RTL + BS + RoF crits have a 40% chance to be followed by a fire grab crit = 2.5% of all combos have everything crit

Long story short, it doesn’t happen very often.

Mrbig.8019:

Quickness wars could punish an ele out of stunbreaks and down him 100% of the time.
Quickness thieves could punish an ele just the same.

Quickness was the only way to punish an ele for overextending.

A bunker ele who has burned 4 stun breakers and a nearly unlimited number of dodges would just leave, wait 20 seconds and come back. It’s why the quad cantrip bunker is OP.

As far as thieves, didn’t you just go over that (and get wrecked) in this thread?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Are-you-going-to-do-something-about-thieves/first

And no, i’m not exagerating about the damage, neither about the burst. Maybe it’s not as lethal as a single burst and of course more difficult to land , but it can be done more often and the ele still has more sustaining power and DPS than ALL other classes.

I didn’t say the damage was exaggerated. I said it happens 2.5% of all attempts, is easy to dodge, and takes nine times longer to pull off than thief burst (for far less damage). As far as frequency, nearly half the damage comes from firegrab which is a 45 second cooldown.

The issue becomes pretty clear if you stack more eles: you can’t dodge forever, and it’s all AoE anyway.

And no, conditions are not really a problem when you have a shout guardian covered by double S/D bunker eles with 30 in water removing 2 conditions on AoE every 10 secs and running through the map at super fast speed.

Add 2 D/D eles removing 1 AoE condition every 10 secs, and i really doubt you’ll be able to anything to them with necros and engies.

As I said, i would NEVER make a team with less than 2 eles + guardian
Maybe you can run engies, rangers or necros along with them, but there’s no competitive comp without double ele + guard.

And since now there’s nothing able to punish ele stacking, 4 eles team will become soon a sad reality.

People have been saying four and five ele teams were going to take over the game for 3+ months. Still waiting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny

Any change that gets eles out of the OP quadrule cantrip cleric’s build is a good development. Nobody worth anything complains about valk eles with 10+ points in air and arcane utilities. They’re competitive with other top builds in the meta, and have strong counters.

Mrbig.8019:

Eles were already dominating with that kitten bunker build with S/D;

Quickness warriors were never a counter to bunker eles. Thieves generally didn’t need quickness to put out their burst to begin with, and it had fallen out of use with a lot of people.

On my DPS ele ( 0-20-0-20-30 with valk ammo and arcane utilities), a dps combo ( switch to air, RTL-updraft-burning spedd + arcane blast-wave+ ring of fire + fire grab) can easily deal around 15 k damage AOE, and i’m talking about a TANKY DPS.

There’s a roughly 2.5% chance that all of those abilities crit (assuming 20% base crit chance + fury) and it takes about 4.5 seconds to pull off. You’re really stretching the terms “burst” and “DPS ele” to the out limits.

Anyone who still dies to RTL -> updraft -> burning speed probably deserves to. What is this, October?

Now there’s no way to punish ele stacking, we’re in the new ele meta, where a 4 eles team + guard can not only be viable, but competitive and , probably, unbeatable.

I would take a guardian, mesmer/ranger, thief, ele and engi team over a 4x ele + guardian team, especially if the eles are all wearing valks and didn’t spec 30 water for condition removal. It would not only wipe the floor with a 4 ele team, it would be much more difficult to counter comp.

Arc lightning is very poor DPS, but I think some people underrate it.

It does less DPS than staff air #1 single hit, and, obviously, less than half as much if air #1 bounces back to the first target.

It does have some really great advantages, like being on a strong air attunement with instant casts, it doesn’t have the draw backs of projectiles (i.e. never misses a target in range with line of sight), and the multiple rapid hits give a lot of chances to proc on crit effects.

It’s very consistent and reliable damage, but not high DPS by any definition.

Vena.8436:

I’m going to ask but… has anyone considered that the reason they only patched quickness as it is, offered no compensation, and left other classes untouched stable is because there might be another patch in… 3 days or so? Perhaps it was to test the waters on the maneuver before rolling out another update shortly thereafter.

I know they like to update at the end of the month and all but we’re also not following the usual norm of updates (many dev posts immediately before and after a patch) and ANet is notorious for their April Fools pranks (and we already have .dat file miners to help us figure out at least a part of what’s coming… and its already in the game so…).

Or I could be crazy.

They’re more likely to leave it alone for a month and see how things shake out with the new quickness. That will give them data to work with for future balance changes.

One point of toughness gives you one point of armor.

The damage formula is: Power * weapon damage * skill coefficient / target armor

The more toughness you have, the more each point is worth in terms of overall effective hitpoints and effective healing. In general, adding a little bit of toughness is fairly worthless and you would be better off going with vitality to add survivability.

I find that ~2500-2700 armor (25-30% damage mitigation) is a good spot to be in (valk amulet with zerker jewel, scepter earth 2 and divinity runes in sPvP). More than that and you start sacrificing more damage, healing, condition removal and utility than getting to that point. That’s not a bad thing if your goal is to be a walking brick. 3800 armor (~50% damage mitigation before protection) will certainly let you do that.

If the Bifrost had a white aura instead of rainbows, I would like it more. The rainbows just kill it.

Incinerator looks like a blow torch out of the movie Aliens with an animal head stuck on for decoration. I wouldn’t spend money on that.

No.

The only thing I ever heard anyone talk about when GW2 was brought up was WvWvW.

T1 ele, guardian, mesmer, engi, ranger
T2 necro, thief, warrior

Vicarious.3047:

It does when you get all the facts straight.

Endure Pain doesn’t stop condis and CC like others have said, and if you think that doesn’t matter then you obviously haven’t played very many tourneys as a warrior. Almost everytime you pop EP you die from conditions or you get CC’d into uselessness until the duration is up anyway.

Mist form has a 75 second CD, that’s 15 seconds faster then EP, plus it can be specced to regen you at the same time. It’s necessary for eles cause they can use it quite often and it is a very reliable defensive skill.

EP is neither a reliable defensive or offensive skill on a very long CD, thus it being abysmal.

Opinions vary. I consider being immune to direct damage (easily 80%+ of all damage reported in my average death breakdown) while I can go fully offensive and try to kill my opponent without worrying about being spiked down a very powerful ability.

Like I said, Mist Form is a better purely defensive skill, but you’re not a threat to anyone when it’s used.

We’ve obviously had very different experiences. I time EP when I see an opponent loading up a burst, and then happily watch as they blow their cooldowns on my invulnerable face.

The emo attitude of some warriors is getting ridiculous.

vorpal.1497:

Endure pain is not invuln. Incoming physical damage is reduced to zero, but every other source of damage / cc / whatever gets through.

Yes, but most of the damage you take in PvP is direct damage and that’s generally what I want to prevent when I pop an invuln. I would +1 changing it to make you immune to condis, but it’s not the difference between OP must have and abysmal. Mist form is an objectively better purely defensive skill, but I don’t think it’s better or worse as a total skill. The ability to use all of your weapon powers while immune to direct damage is very strong.

Mist Form
75 second cooldown
3 seconds of invuln
Breaks stun
Locks the ele out of his weapon skills for the duration

Status: Overpowered, must have ability

Endure Pain
90 second cooldown
4 seconds of invuln
Breaks stun
Does not lock the warrior out of his weapon skills for the duration

Status: “abysmal”

Makes perfect sense.

UnID dyes are one of the crafting materials needed for the legendary staff. It inflates the price. I don’t know of anyone who made money gambling with purchased dyes over a large sample size. The RNG always wins.

Larynx.2453:

Mesmers are also able to do condition damage, it’s a common misconception really. [/sarcasm]

http://tinyurl.com/d2kk46m

Give it a try. You can swap restorative strength for berserker’s power if the other team isn’t running aura share eles and shake it off is interchangeable with frenzy depending on team comps. I like the shorter cooldown stun breaker over the 5 seconds of burst damage though.

Horn 5 (vigor) and sigil of energy will give you plenty of dodges. You have 2 stun breakers to avoid getting pinned and burst down. Your condition removal makes it almost impossible to keep chill, cripple and immob on you.

Wooyadeen.6491:

Caffynated.5713:

Wooyadeen.6491:

Have you ever played tPvP (5v5) GW2?

Nope. Never even heard of it until you mentioned it.

Try sometimes. (you need to go to Heart of the Mists) There you can try some tPvP.

It’s very different than PvE.

Oh really? How do I get to the heart of the mists? It sounds very exciting.

Wooyadeen.6491:

Have you ever played tPvP (5v5) GW2?

Nope. Never even heard of it until you mentioned it.

Detcelfer.9736:

3) Gap closing. CC removal is fairly horrid on our class considering that we can only remove 1 or 2 at a time and it’s on a long cool down yet classes can eaisly stack 3-6 conditions in a matter of seconds depending on the class. So either we need a better method on removing chill and cripple, OR we need better options to close the gap that are not hampered by all the CC constantly used against us.

This is a common misconception about the warrior.

Mobile strikes (Discipline X) removes immobilize every time you use one of your movement skills.
Charge (warhorn 4) removes cripple, chill and immobilize and gives swiftness on a 15 second cooldown.
Mending (heal) removes 2 conditions on a 25 second cooldown
Signet of endurance removes all conditions on a 45 (36 with signet master) second cooldown.
Restorative Strength (strength II) removes crippled, chilled, immobilized and weakness when you use a healing skill.

You have tons of condition removal, and a lot of it is specifically targeted at mobility hampering conditions that are a warrior’s bane.

I run a 20 20 0 10 20 G Sword + Axe/horn setup and have very few complaints about the class.

http://youtu.be/I0togRMEc_o?t=55m34s

It was annoying for about 5 minutes and then I stopped noticing. They should add a toggle for people who can’t get over it.

Mrbig.8019:

Now the ele will have enough time to react

So, you’re saying it was ok to kill a bunker faster than a human can physically react to the attack?

From this point forward, all of your opinions are invalid.

Feel that OP ele damage on a 3 second channel.

Yes

If quickness was not in the game at launch and they added all of the quickness skills/traits to the game with this patch, people would be telling them they’re crazy to give +50% DPS on demand.

Condition damage seems normal to me. The death breakdown is just bugged and shows 30k burning, bleeding, retaliation, and confusion every death.

Dagger main hand – (2) AoE cripple with decent damage, (3) gap closer/immobilize. I primarily switch for D/ skills against fleeing opponents.

Scepter – (1) projectile finisher (2) +250 armor buff, (3) AoE blind. I switch to it every time I need to reapply my armor buff. The blind is a nice bonus, but I rarely switch just to use it.

Dagger offhand – (4) AoE knockdown with decent AoE damage (blast finisher), (5)AoE spike damage skill with cripple and bleeding (blast finisher). I primarily switch for /D skills for blast finishers in combo fields, or to use the knockdown to set up a spike.

Staff – (1) projectile finisher (2) decent damage AoE + bleed (blast finisher), (3) projectile reflection aura, (4) cripple field, (5) AoE immobilize. I switch to earth frequently to use 2 and 3. 5 is useful for stopping runners or to help immobilize people for your burst.

Elemental Attunement (arcana V) – Switch to earth when you’re expecting to receive a damage spike to gain protection.

There are only a few places where an ele can effectively use RTL to run the orb. Most places will get cut short, send the ele flying off the catwalk or end up getting him stuck on terrain. When you see the ele moving to line up his RTL in those few open paths, use immob and hard CC to push/pull him away from his desired course.

I know that requires you to do more than roll your face across your wombo combo keybinds, but give it a shot.

Razor.6392:

Posting in yet another Lordrosicky ele QQ thread.

Also, this. Sometimes I wish I could have that much passion toward a single subject, but then I realize I would have to be ridiculously bad at everything else and decide I’m better off.

Backslot items should be unlocked based on your tournament rating. They already have the models for books, quivers, backpacks, and fractal capacitors with various visual effects. It shouldn’t be that much effort.

The fractal capacitor has a certain “look at me” value to it.

Elemental Attunement is in every respectable ele build.

Outside of that, I find life more difficult without healing ripple.

They think they have a fix, and are hopeful that it will be ready for the patch in a few days.

Good survey. I think it gives us a good look at what the community is thinking.

I chose improving match making, but I include splitting solo queue and premade in that answer.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Cool stuff, but it’s clearly biased towards the most popular forum opinions. An in-game survey would probably lead to very different results. I doubt that, in-game, so many people perceive the elementalists to be the best, especially compared to the likes of shatter mesmers, thieves and even warriors, to whom many still think they are OP.

Most of the people who post on the forums get their opinions about the game from the forums. People still think engi, necro, warrior and even ranger are bad because of the forum’s self reinforcing feedback loop.