Guild Wars 2

I thought the OP was being sarcastic. Nobody would actually compare guardian and engie damage to thief with a straight face.

Not even on the internet, while their brain is dying from oxygen deprivation.

Without Blasting Staff, Lava Font barely reaches over the lip of a tower wall. With it, you cover half the battlement. It lets you hit people who would otherwise be out of range. That’s often the difference between killing somebody and them getting away.

A 50% increase in radius is a 125% increase in total area. That’s huge.

I would not run staff in WvW without BS. It’s mandatory to be effective in wall fights, and helps a lot in open field zerging.

I just want them to increase the blast radius of the individual meteors in meteor shower.

AoEing zergs with eruption, magnetic aura, ice spike, lava font, meteor shower, lava font, followed by fireball spam got me a lot of bags in wvw ^.^

I wouldn’t want to fight a competent person 1v1 on level ground with a staff, but there’s no denying that it is a godly zerg weapon.

It seems like the range is for when the projectile will hit the target in the chest. The projectile doesn’t dissappear when it reachs that range and will keep going until it hits the ground. Water and earth attacks do the same thing, but their arch is steeper, so the range is a bit shorter, plus fireball has a 90 radius aoe effect that extends it’s range a little bit more.

It took the guardian 3.5 seconds to down a glass cannon thief, and the engie 4 seconds to down the guardian.

The thief could have done the same damage in 0.5 seconds coming out of stealth. There’s just a tiny little difference there.

NightyNight.1823:

D/D eles complaying BS thieves are OP.
This ,Right Here , is the most ridiculous thread on forum right now.

The OP is playing S/D…

It’s like you actually want people to point and laugh when you post.

4/10

Poor map design
Poor choice of game mode
Poor game mode variety
Some balance issues, but mostly ok with the exception of brokenly overpowered things that they refuse to touch.
Class design concept makes GW2 basically the least team oriented MMO I’ve ever played.
They somehow manage to introduce new game breaking bugs every single patch. (see infinite loading screen resurfacing in multiple patches)

All in all, it needs a lot of improvement. After listening to the weak kitten interview about the promised WvW update, I’m leaning more toward uninstalling than logging in.

10 seconds is a lifetime in GW22222.

Could you be more specific about how the fight played out? What skills did you use and when?

Quickness is a rather absurd mechanic and should not function in PvP/WvW. You can’t take a game with burst damage that can kill people in 2-3 seconds without quickness and then cut that time in half. That’s insane.

As far as HS goes, other than the automatic tracking, I feel like it’s fine. They need to change it to work like elementalist burning speed where the thief jumps directly forward and does damage if his path crosses his target. That would make it require skill to use and create situations where it’s not a good choice.

Still, I would much rather face some horrible 222222 thief than a CnMugD → backstab for 20k damage in 1/2 second.

I do basically what I’ve always done, except now I include the fire field. Lure your opponent near the bottom or up against a wall and then:

Fire 4 cripple, 3 blind, 2 fire field
Water attunement
Water 5 into the bottom/wall for 10-15k damage + leap finisher
Water 3, 2, wait for 2 to hit then detonate both for another 6-10k damage

Fairly easy to pull off and does a lot of damage in a short window (~8 seconds with the burst hitting in a 3-4 second window).

It’s working as expected. 30 arcane (30%), 2x water(10%), 2x monk(10%) in sPvP and I’m getting a little over 7 seconds of protection from attuning to earth.

There is no preferred race for ele. Each race has a few different utility and elite skills, but they’re mostly useless.

Human has some of the better elites with hounds and avatar of melandru. There’s no reason to change unless you just really want to use one of the other racials.

They’re all worse than your class utilities and elites though, so it really isn’t an issue.

I don’t like the WD puzzle at all. The snow flake segment is too long and repetitive with no skill or timing required. None of the jumps are difficult or require the least bit of precision.

MKCT had a lot of jumps where you had to be very precise and land exactly the right distance. The jump onto the little bar just before the leap of faith, the jump onto the teeth of the gear, etc.

In the future, I would like to see them add different levels to the puzzle. If you fall, you don’t go back and sit for an hour, you land on a lower level that is a little easier (not that this one could have been any easier) and continue on for lesser rewards if you can complete them. There should also be additional chests along the way on the highest path. Stopping to grab them all on the way up added to the CT challenge. Am I having a good run? Can I stop and grab the 2nd chest and still make the next jump before the mist catches me? It added a lot to the puzzle.

I said the mesmer bug was important and the others were minor.

With ~600 healing, healing ripple heals my ele for around 1,700-1,800. If you think that is gamebreaking every 15-20 seconds, you don’t know what the term means. It is overpowered, and does need to be fixed, but it is in no way an I win bug.

Ele could get permanent swiftness and fury before this patch. The only significant change the MG bug introduced was increased up time on protection, and that was only a difference of going from 75% uptime to 100%.

Yes, they’re overpowered and need to be fixed. No, they’re not gamebreaking and don’t call for a doomsday thread.

muscarine.5136:

I’m not sure i understand the complains about how the game is balanced toward a top player %

You realise it is not how it works right ? If anything they pay more attention to experienced players feedback, but there is a huge difference between this and not caring about an entire player base.
Sure there are still a lot of things that need attention but it’s not that different from how they handled things during GW1, as far as i remember they would balance pvp toward GvG mostly, and a few tweaks considering RA and HA.

I think we can’t expect them to balance the game around spvp thinking about how you can get killed in 3 seconds by a glass canon while standing exhausted in the middle of a zerg fest.

I don’t think you’re quite understanding the argument people are making.

In WAR, I could take the worst player in the game, stick them on a tank and as long as they stayed close and guarded my DoK, they were an MVP candidate. I’m obviously not going to let my guard bot die, so they got to stay alive through the fight, feel useful and (most importantly) have some fun. That player is inevitably going to get better as they play, and as long as it is fun for them, they will continue to play.

I’m a terrible DOTA player. During the brief period that I tried it out, I was still able to enter “PROZ ONLEE!!!” matches and fill a roll that made me feel useful. Once, I was playing the Tauren hero and got zero kills. My use of stuns and the fissure skill to trap people got the other guy in my lane kills and we easily won the match despite my lack of overall skill and general ineptitude in scenarios where I had to fight 1v1.

In GW2 there is no role a newb/low skill player can fill in sPvP and feel useful. They log in, do a little fighting and then fall over dead in 1 second from CnMugD → Backstab or 2 seconds to hundred blades. They’re left going “wtf just happened?” You can argue that it is an L2P issue, but there has to be an opportunity for the new player to learn. Dying faster than they can react or even recognize that they’re being killed doesn’t create that opportunity so they’re never going to get better. They’re only going to die that way so many times and get the “L2P newb” response so many times before they give up and stop playing.

GW2 needs to be designed with all skill levels in mind. Otherwise, the game will continue to shrink and die. The only way to do that is to create a gameplay experience that is positive for new players. GW2 is essentially a giant kick in the balls for anyone who isn’t good at it, and they’re quiting instead of taking your “L2P” advice. It’s not going to be long before you can go days without getting a paid tourney or having to wait all day for a free tourney. At that point, even those of us who enjoy the game are going to quit and the game is going to die.

The doomsday tears aren’t necessary.

Yes, these things need to be fixed, but other than naked clones these are minor issues that don’t have that much effect on balance. Eles could already keep up protection for 30 out of every 40 seconds. The bug is just an issue of being able to do it with less effort. Overpowered, obviously. Gamebreaking, no. RTL resetting 9 second attunement cooldowns every 15 seconds is a minor issue. What are they going to do, jump back into an attunement and stare at the 40 second cooldowns they already used? The on swap effects would be helpful, but are still only overpowered and not gamebreaking. They’re bugs and they will be fixed when they can get to them.

The issue with low tournament population has little or nothing to do with ticket cost. sPvP has a limited number of players and a lot of them a newbs who don’t want to join tPvP and get pug stomped over and over again. Making it less expensive isn’t going to get one more newb to queue up for a beat down and isn’t going to bring back one more person who left.

You’re acting like this is the end of PvP. Stahp.

Seems to be fine for me in PvE, WvW and PvP. Do you have a non-English version?

Fire, air and earth work as advertised.

Water has a graphical effect similar to earth, but doesn’t heal. I haven’t had a chance to test condition removal yet.

*edit- it doesn’t seem to be doing anything in water. It doesn’t even trigger my signet of restoration heal the way the other three attunements do.

*edit 2- after some more experience with it, water will go off when your health is bellow full, but it seems to trigger before fall damage is applied and will only heal the amount you were already injured and not the new falling damage.

KirinDave.6451:

Elementalist is the most depressing class for me, because I took a Necro and Engineer to 80 and all I have to show for it is an elementalist dancing over my corpse in WvW. :\

You’re doing something wrong then. Necro is an awesome class and I love mine almost as much as my ele.

You can make him burn through 50k+ health while you keep up retaliation, drain his health and turn his boons into conditions. Any D/D ele is going to have to stand in your wells and that’s just pure pain.

Don’t give up on necro. There are some bugs, like any class, and necro doesn’t have a great burst damage build, but it’s definitely a competitive class. It has tons of potential that people haven’t even begun to tap into yet. The best part is, people think it’s underpowered, so you’re probably going to get buffed! =D

Frizz.6704:

Ok for all of you that think Ele’s are not represented more in sPvP here are the stats…

I did a survey on classes in 8v8 that you can see here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/sPvP-Class-Distribution-Stats/first#post444933

Alternatively here is the % breakdown of the classes a month ago:

1. Thief – 22.7
2. Mesmer – 14.6
3. Warrior – 13.9
4 Guardian – 11.7
5 Necromancer – 10.4
6. Ranger – 10.2
7. Elementalist – 8.7
8 Engineer – 7.7

And now…

1. Thief – 23.2
2. Elementalist – 14.1
3. Warrior – 13.5
4. Engineer – 11.3
5. Mesmer – 10.8
6. Ranger – 9.7
7. Guardian – 8.6
8. Necromancer – 8.6

As you can see the biggest change by far is the popularity of the elementalist.

Everything except thief falls within or very close to the expected margin of error for the given sample size (+/- 3% for a ~1k sample).

I would settle for the cursor being red when we can’t reach the location selected. Wasting a utility slot and not even moving from your original location is enough to make me go all rage guy meme.

The best buffs? What?

In the last month:

Nerfs:
Removed blast finishers from Evasive Arcana
Auras no longer count as boons (no +duration)
Auras gained from finishers do not proc traits
Arcane resurrection duration decreased
Reduced the healing contribution for healing ripple
Ice Storm now applies bleed instead of confusion
Leaving Tornado’s transform strips stability

Buffs
Restored a blast finisher to evasive arcana in earth
Reduced ether renewal channel time
Conjures now have stat bonuses so they can hit gravling mounds extra hard

The downed state buff 7 weeks ago was nice (maybe a little too nice), but other than that, we’re seeing nerfs and bug fixes. The only thing that was a meaningful net buff was Ether Renewal, and it’s still not a good PvP heal because it’s easily interrupted and ends up healing for little or nothing; great in PvE though.

I just don’t see how anyone could call the class underpowered a month ago and overpowered now. I would definitely say it is (and always has been) better than most people gave it credit for, but it’s not top tier even after thief, mesmer and guardian took some nerfs. I think it’s in the middle with necro and engie, and well out in front of the generally gimmicky/inflexible classes like warrior and ranger.

How did ele go from being considered underpowered a month ago to overpowered now, when it has received pretty much nothing but nerfs during that time?

I love my ele, and I think it’s a strong class with the right build, but if I had to pick a class to win one fight with, I would take guardian, mesmer and maybe thief in the right situation before I would bring out my ele.

Esrever.8613:

L2P noob. Or go play single player or casual games like call of duty.
If you can’t take any game that takes skill you might as well go play mario kart. You are literally suggesting they give less reward for being good. Every class is viable with 20 apm at the level 90% of the players play. If you don’t have 20 apm, you might as well be sitting there twiddling your thumb.

Your first point was bad enough. Im not going to even comment on your second point. It made an already ignorant post just that much more ignorant.

L2Read bad. You may have noticed that I’m still here. That should have given you a rather strong hint that I’m not one of the random people who was run off by the balance issues in the low – mid level game.

The game has to be balanced at all play levels or you’re going to destroy your population and the tournament level of play is going to choke to death. You need newbs to have fun so they play a lot, learn the game and get better so that they will eventually join the tournaments and keep the game alive. If they get pug stomped or face rolled by the same poorly balanced mechanics over and over, they’re just going to quit and you’re going to keep waiting 4-5 hours for a tournament pop where you fight the same people you fought in the last tournament.

You can bury your head in the sand and spout the mouth breather “l2p” nonsense all you want. The end result is that you end up with nobody to fight because you want to be an arrogant see you next Tuesday.

There are two main problems that have driven people off.

1. Poor game balancing for the general public. ANet has made the decision to balance the game around the < 2% (RNG stat, but I doubt if it’s far off) of the player base who do paid tournaments regularly and now everyone is shocked that many from the other 98% are unhappy and have largely quit playing. Did you really think a bunch of newbs/noobs were going to take being told “L2P” by a dev without consequences? Worst design decision ever? I would say, it comes in second to making Frogloks a playable race.

2. Repetitive gameplay on one of the least fun game modes and worst designed maps I’ve seen in a game. sPvP consists of fighting over 3 capture points arranged in a V shape with forest critters, fighting over 3 capture points arranged in a V shape with sharks, fighting over 3 capture points arranged in a V shape with trebuchets, fighting over 3 capture points arranged in a… you get the point. The ‘stand in a circle as long as possible’ style of gameplay has resulted in some of the least entertaining gameplay in MMOs today with absurd bunker meta. At least part of this is on the players though. WAR scenarios were essentially stand in the circle and the game never devolved into max defense regen tanks standing on the flag for an entire SC.

Kryden.5817:

but he covered at least 2000+ ground, with burning speed.

The distance burning speed covers is influenced by your movement speed. If he covered that kind of distance with just burning speed then he had to be speed hacking.

If he charged from a long range and then knocked you down, it was probably ride the lightning + updraft; possibly bugged animation didn’t show the lightning ball.

From there, it’s into fire for burning speed, ring of fire, and fire grab, possibly with arcane wave and/or arcane blast. That will do a little bit of damage. ^.^

He could use lightning flash just before the end of burning speed to extend the distance out to maybe 1200-1400, but there’s no knockdown in fire so I would still guess it was RTL + updraft.

If he did that, he could follow it up ring of fire, fire grab + arcanes, then switch to earth/air to knock you down with earthquake/updraft, but unless he was using a sigil to proc quickness, that probably would have taken longer than you’re suggesting was the case and I don’t think he would have had the damage to finish you that quickly in earth attunement. Air would be possible. Updraft then RTL back to the target to mop up with a few lightning whips, but again, that’s stretching things out well past the 2-3 second window that you’re describing.

I’m leveling a necro atm and it feels very strong with S/F or D and staff.

I can easily face tank damage that would have my ele scrambling to survive while stacking conditions to the sky. It doesn’t have the same mobility as an ele, but it does have some slipperiness with the ability to drop what amounts to a personal mesmer portal with Spectral walk/recall. I pop this before wading into a zerg to drop wells/marks and then blink back to my zerg when I start getting low health. The range is a little shorter than I would like though.

You have good condition removal in your weapon powers without having to spec for it, because a lot of the class focus is on transferring your conditions to your enemies.

Death shroud doesn’t have great abilities, but it gives you a giant mess of health to buy time while your cooldowns reset.

Maybe things are different in high level competitive play, but I don’t know why this class isn’t more popular. If you enjoy being really tanky and wearing people down with conditions, necro is a good choice.

Calle.8746:

None of the Elementalists speed bonuses work. But it’s pretty easy to keep up permanent Swiftness with Elementalist. Mixing that with RTL and Burning Speed and you got yourself the fastest moving proff in the game.

One with air seems to be working fine for me. I often have to stop and wait for people who are not keeping swiftness up and get slightly outrun by people with swiftness.

Rock anchor them to the bottom → Tidal Wave → Ice Wall → Ice Wall Detonate

It kills most people. You can’t base ele balance underwater on broken thief mechanics that let them evade forever without making the ele brokenly overpowered too.

Exactly what is wrong with elementalist damage?

Our burst damage specs do as much damage as anyone, they’re just the least survivable builds in the game. Any changes to improve damage oriented eles should be on making them capable of surviving more than a stiff summer breeze.

You can already kill most other glass cannons before they can get back up from updraft. How much more damage are you looking for?

Human for Avatar of Melandru.

1200 range AoE binding roots on a WvW staff ele is very nice for immobilizing people for your eruption, ice spike and lava font.

It’s a process of logical deduction

Considerable survival -> not a heavy fire/air build and almost certainly heavy water because being survivable is difficult when you can’t clear conditions.

Protection up often -> 10 earth and 10 arcana are our most reliable means of gaining protection. I wouldn’t describe other methods of gaining protection, or even one without the other as having protection up often.

High direct damage attacks -> not deep into earth. Further, not being deep into earth and having considerable survivability points to heavy water.

The follow on attack after updraft caused high damage and burning, almost certainly burning speed + ring of fire, so D/D. It’s possible that he was hit with dragon’s tooth, but I think he would have mentioned a giant tooth appearing and hanging in the air long enough to introduce itself and its 31 closest relatives.

The points may be shifted 5 here or 5 there with some different choices in traits, but I’m fairly confident that what he ran into is close to the build I posted.

Azunai.5974:

LOL at the responses here!

I did say that I play a touchpad, but not that I’m actually bad at playing. I can turn the camera just fine (probably better than most, since I can do complete 180’s with just a flick of a finger compared to all of that… clumsy mouse moving when you reach the edge of the mousepad)

I was just wondering if it was that big of a deal, lol

If you ever reach the edge of the mousepad, you need to crank up your mouse sensitivity. You should be able to turn the camera 360 degrees in less than an inch with DPI set properly.

Definitely get a mouse. Preferably with a dozen or so extra buttons so that you never have to take your fingers off your movement, voice bind and dodge key while fighting.

Most likely D/D

0 10 I 10 V 30 III IX XI 20 V VI

If he was doing good damage, he probably had a berserker amulet (assuming sPvP) or Power Toughness Vitality armor with berserker accessories in WvW.

If he was doing mediocre damage, he probably used a soldier amulet, or PVT armor with Sapphire or Emerald accessories in WvW.

This build and ones generally close to it are the current standard build for eles outside of pure glass or pure bunker spec. Your auras, in addition to their own very strong effects, proc fury, swiftness and protection.

Crunchy Gremlin.5798:

well just use it.
consider it a valid ability.

It will be interesting to see 20 ele’s jump down and go through a dagger rotation on the folks on the door every minute or so. the range on vapor form is pretty limited.

If there were 20 eles inside a keep, you wouldn’t be able to get within 1200 range of the door anyway.

Even if you pulled off some miracle and managed to out duel 20 of the best wall fighting class in the game, they can just AoE the back of the door and instakill anyone attempting to build rams.

They should come up with some sort of condition that ignores mist form invulnerability. That would be new and unique. Like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

I run 0 10 10 30 20 and switching to 30 10 10 0 20 is a net gain of about 30% damage on average with the same equipment, which seems nice enough on the surface. The problem is that when you lose your primary condition removal, health regen and ~15% more healing you are less than half as survivable.

Without condition removal off long cooldown, you have to use your cantrips to get out of immobilize instakill situations and you get chewed up by big stacks of bleeding and vulnerability that you can’t get rid of. You also have trouble with poison staying on you and kittening what limited healing you had, and other conditions like chill that cut your damage in half, defeating the point of gaining 30% damage in the first place.

I would like to see them put condition removal deep in the fire tree. I mentioned a new grandmaster perk in another thread: Cauterize – 15% chance to remove a condition when you gain might. It’s not as frequent or reliable as water condition removal, but it at least gives the damage oriented ele something other than cleansing fire and ether renewal. It’s also deep enough in the damage tree that bunkers won’t go get it and become more tanky.

Then you have the issue with long cooldowns. A glass ele can do a lot of damage if he burns through all of his weapon skills, but then what? He doesn’t have the survivability to last until they’re back up, so he either has to run or die where the more balanced 30 water build can just heal up and keep doing damage while the damage ele is respawning or hiding in a corner.

It just isn’t worth it IMO.

WASD movement
1-5 weapon skills
shift dodge (I can’t imagine having to actually move a finger with all the dodge or die moments in this game)
Q heal
ERT utility
x elite
attunements extra mouse buttons

Apothecary has Healing major and toughness/condition minor. Mix in some Shaman jewelry for Vitality major and healing/condition minor.

Alternatively, you could get the Vhc gear from CM and use apoth jewelry, but the jewelry is 10-15g each so you would e paying more than if you bought apoth armor and shaman jewels.

Cosmic Teapot.9162:

I agree that frenzy makes those numbers irrelevant (still an interesting fight though IMO). Although the second video from 9 to 11 seconds shows 17490 damage. If earthquake had crit and I had used arcane wave that would be an extra 5k dmg for 22500 dmg in 2 seconds (All AOE as opposed to thieves’ mostly single target). Fire grab hitting at above 25% health (no additional 20% dmg) for 11596 is quite powerful.

I suppose I don’t even really have a point to make with all that info I’m just throwing it out there.

I’m not criticizing you. You actually noted in your thread that the warrior popped frenzy and the damage was overkill because of it.

I’ve actually found the whole discussion stemming from your attempts to create the ultimate ele cheese combo to be refreshing. I get tired of arguing with the people who insist that ele does poor damage when anyone who knows what they’re doing can put out damage on par with anyone except for people with quickness and the broken CnMugD -> backstab < 1/2 second instakill.

I’ve actually dusted off my old zerker/zerker gear a little bit recently just to see the big numbers fly by again. Unfortunately, it’s still terrible against good players because all ele has in the fire tree is +damage and a little more +damage. Survive the first few seconds while they put everything on long cooldowns and then destroy them at your leisure or watch them try to run for it.

It’s fun though. You have to give it that.

Igneel.2618:

It’s always easy talking ‘bad’ about others but not about ourself.
Just saying. I’m not here to point Eles (I have one myself) to be nerfed, but I want to write something:

There were (hope I’ll never see one more, sob) TONS of thread about nerfing the Thief, because some players were really surprised to see 11k damage, 13k damage, 15k damage with backstab, and so on. The demonstration were all similar to these on this thread (or far worse – only screenshot about the damage itself); all were shouting to nerf here, nert there.. and well, the nerfs coming. I think all of you know the last patch news about the Thief class.

Now, we have a similar situation with Eles. Well? I think, if this burst build (like the backstab thief) have this kind of potential – MAYBE it’ll be nerfed. Maybe.
A couple of second and Boom!, Player death. You can talk about circumstance, skills, AFK’s, Burst on Warrior ecc.. yea, you’re right. Just like Thief’s player did at that time.. but no one listened reasons, and the cry-cry of whiners didn’t stop.

IF I remember correctly, all were saying this thing: ‘No matter what – you can’t put that High Damage in so little time. Nerf’.. I see the same situation here.
But nevermind, Anet know how to deal with serious thing, and if Eles need nerf, they will get it. If not, I think all of us will be good the same.

2 seconds is 4-8 times longer than CnMugD -> Backstab takes to do the same damage.

Between internet latency and the limitation of human reaction time, people are dying to this broken combo before they even realize they’re being attacked, much less have a chance to respond and prevent it. That’s broken.

2 seconds is way faster fights than I want (in other games like WoW and Rift most hard cast spells take that long to cast and travel to the target), but just about every class can do it. If they’re going to nerf anything, it should be a blanket nerf to the core game mechanic of the way + % damage stacks and maybe to how much power/condition is given by each stack of might.

I really wanted a cross between the Pyro, Storm Caller and Elementalist from Rift, using different elements to intensify the effects of the others. Like getting a target wet and then electrocuting them for big damage. Using cold to freeze targets and earth projectiles to shatter them.

It’s the type of thing I envisioned when they talked about combos, but the actual combos are a bit of a let down. It’s not that they lack effectiveness, it’s just the lack of direct correlation between the elements and the effects produced.

I did get the concert pianist requirement from Storm Caller though, so that’s something.

*the preceding is not a complaint about the elementalist class as is, only disappointment in what more could have been.

sorrow.2364:

I like how the Warrior popped frenzy just when the burst started.

You’re not supposed to notice that the warrior is taking 50% more damage from his own buff. It’s counter productive to the whiner’s argument.

Being tanky tends to win 1v1 in almost every game, including GW2. It goes for every class. Defense is a personal ability that doesn’t help anyone else, where as offense stacks with everyone around you.

A bunker build is difficult to kill and can eventually wear you down if you keep fighting them, but you could just leave if you’re losing. What is he going to do, beat you to death with his 450 damage Dragon’s Claw spam? What he can’t do is contribute much beyond that. If you need to capture a point, a bunker isn’t going to be of much help. A bunker on a point could hold it for an entire match against 5 bunkers without breaking a sweat.

You need offensive builds to help break his tank and kill him because offense stacks. Two offensive builds who know what they’re doing should be able to kill a bunker fairly quickly, or even one offensive build with a good CC bunker assisting. If one offensive build could blow up a bunker, it would be generally pointless to build defensive in the first place.

PvP in GW2 isn’t about dueling. It’s a team game, play accordingly.

As far as specific strategies against D/D bunker eles, you need to wear him down before you try to burst him. Get him to switch to water and use his 2 heals there and you will have 9-11 seconds to unload on him while he has limited healing from signet of restoration and can only remove conditions by burning cantrips to grant regeneration.

If you’re really lucky, he will have Ether Renewal as his heal and then he’s kind of screwed. It only heals about 2000 / sec and has to be channeled the whole 3 1/2 seconds preventing the use of other skills. You could easily blow him up while he’s trying to heal.

If you have any abilities in your spec that rip boons (you could use the sigil also), that will hurt him a lot. Ele depends on protection and regeneration boons to keep them alive. Ripping those off is going to ruin his day.

If you can CC an ele and apply good pressure damage, he’s generally going to burn his mist form or lightning flash to get out of it. Once his escapes are on cooldown an ele is just as vulnerable to the cheese burst combos in the game as anyone else.

Just be thankful he was D/D and not D/F. You don’t want to unload on an ele with projectile reflection.

I use Bloodlust + energy, and then swap out the BL sigil with a 5% damage sigil when I have 25 stacks.

The extra dodges you get from the sigil of energy will win a lot more fights than a couple of stacks of might.

You worry too much. If they nerf anything it will be the way that + % damage stacks, which would have limited impact on any competitive build.

@ OP: My favorite part of your second video, was when the other ele saw you casting churning earth and just kept walking into it like “hmm, seems an interesting red circle on the ground. I should investigate!” LOL

frans.8092:

Both guns blazing? P/P doesn’t have much stealth and the initiative cost of Unload is pretty high, with mediocre damage. I can’t believe you’re complaining about Unload? And P/P has stealth only from utility skills, which already have a cooldown, and you want to effectively disable them? For a P/P gunslinger?

I’m not sure if you’re being serious here, but incase you are:

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/with+guns+blazing

if you do something, especially argue, with guns blazing, you do it with a lot of force and energy

The boy’s mother arrived at the school, all guns blazing, furious that her son had been suspended.

Dagger

Fire
Ring of Fire – 2 seconds of burning to everyone hit by the initial AoE
Fire Grab – reduce damage vs. burning by 20%. Always crits against burning targets. Improve hit detection. Reduce the cooldown to 30 seconds

In glass spec, I average over 9k damage with Fire Grab in WvW against targets with nearly full health. That’s with an actual good spec, not +20% damage when above 90% health, +20% damage when target is below 25% health and 20% damage when target is knocked down. Combined with Burning Speed and Arcane Wave, that can three shot half the people in WvW in a little over 1 second.

Air
Lightning Whip – Improve hit detection
Lightning Touch – Reduce activation from 3/4 to 1/4 so that using it isn’t as disruptive or improve the damage a lot so that using it is effective.

Earth
Impale – Reduce activation time
Churning Earth – Break up the damage from 1 big hit at the end of the channel, and make it so that you hit once per second doing 15% 35% 50% of current damage for waves 1 2 3. The bleed stacks would be applied 1 2 5.

Much like Fire Grab, this ability can hit for > 12k damage (before bleeding is counted) in one hit. It’s overkill. This change both limits the one shot potential, and improves functionality for use outside of flashbombing.

Scepter

Fire
Flamestrike – Increase direct damage by 100%. The skill currently takes a long time to cast and only does about 1.5k damage between a crit and burning on the target.
Dragon’s Tooth – The tooth and red warning circle should not appear until the spell is finished casting. Right now there is too much warning before the tooth falls. Increase the AoE radius to 240.
Phoenix – increase the phoenix movement speed. It’s currently slower than a player can run, making it worthless outside of melee range.

Water
Shatter Stone – This is like a really sad and depressing version of Ice Spike. Maybe it should have similar damage. It even looks and sounds weak.

Air
Arc Lightning – Reduce the channel to 2 seconds with the same damage. Even spamming Lightning Strike, the damage between the two is terrible.

Staff

Fire
Burning Retreat – It would be nice if this was the reverse of Burning Speed. Have a blast at the beginning of the roll backwards.

Air
Lightning Surge – make this an instant cast with a 20 second cooldown
Gust – Increase projectile speed

Earth
Unsteady Ground – 4 stacks of bleeding 6 seconds
Shockwave – increase projectile speed

Focus

Fire
Flame Wall – improve hit detection. I can cast this on a stationary target with the line passing directly under their feet and it doesn’t hit them.

I still think you would be happier with the results from:

Earthquake
Lightning flash
Fire attunement 3 stacks of might sigil of battle
Cleansing flame +1 might
end EQ
Ring of Fire +1 might
Arcane blast +4 might
Fire Grab +1 might

You’re missing out on a good chunk of extra damage if you’re just going for the pure lulz overkill number. Of course, then you might accidentally kill him with the 5k damage ring of fire and not get your big fire grab money shot for the video. Dilemmas dilemmas.

As far as key bindings go, I would bind keys that I’m going to use right after each other to the same key and add a shift/ctrl modifier.

4 Earthquake
shift 4 lightning flash
E fire attunement
Shift e cleansing flame
4 ring of fire
ctrl 4 arcane blast
5 fire grab

I think everyone who read the grounded trait tried something like this at some point. Everybody gave up because it’s needlessly complex and burns too many utilities to be effective. The standard issue updraft → Burning Speed combo can do just as much in about the same time without having to use utilities to burn and get onto your target.

Those who want to compare this (2 seconds from first damage to killshot) to thief ( less than 1/2 second from first damage to killshot) need to settle down. 2 seconds is enough time to use a teleport or invuln to stop the damage, but between internet latency and human reaction time 1/2 second is not. They’re not even remotely similar in burst or situation. Notably, the ele isn’t invisible.