Sometimes I get upset at the devs for the lack of information on class balance.
Then I remember that back when I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, we only heard from the devs about once every few months, and all we had on the forums were some PR guys whose job was to tell us that they didn’t know what was being worked on, or couldn’t tell us.
let me get this straight, Earth has no offense, Fire is also unreliable and Air arc lightning sucks, its a wonder I die to ele’s.
Regardless I think that this argument can go back and forth, so I suppose we can agree to disagree on the usefulness of Arc lightning.
I conceded that Arc Lightning is fine when built offensively, and I’m only concerned about the effectiveness of the scepter at 900 range, in which case what I said should be true.
You can see Arc, doing over 3k in the video (with about 1 crit in the channel), I have also had it do over 4k; just because it doesn’t do damage in a bunker spec doesn’t mean that the spell is weak, you can also use lightning strike and a blind without breaking it channel.
I’m aware that instant skills can be used without breaking activations/channels, I’ve spent a lot of time working with my ele (don’t mean to be rude, just saying).
As for the video, I suppose I did forget that the “standard” ele build is actually a bunker – a problem with traits more than the skill itself, then. The scepter still has more than enough trouble with the unreliability of Dragon’s Tooth and Phoenix, the general uselessness of Shatterstone, and the lack of offense in the earth attunement, though, so I can still complain.
Both the mesmer GS auto attack and Ele scepter do significant damage; its the first time I have seen someone claim otherwise, they may not be the best auto attacks in the game but they are far from being weak.
Ele and Mesmer already deal a large amount of aoe damage, I never understood why they should get a buff to their aoe damage if its already border line op.
Also please don’t try and compare a range skill to a melee auto attack.
I can’t speak for Spatial Surge, but you do realize that Arc Lightning only hits for about 1.8k over 3 1/2 seconds with the standard build, right? That’s also only if you even channel it for that long, which you won’t, because you need to switch to other attunements to use other skills and keep fury up. That’s not even considering that the scepter’s fire skills are absurdly easy to dodge, and that the earth attunement lacks offense.
I’m not saying that I want more AoE damage – I actually want less so that our ranged single-target capability can be improved – but the elementalist’s scepter is not an effective weapon for ranged damage as-is.
Heh, I came into this game thinking that scepter/dagger would be ranged with a bit of melee. Turns out I might as well use daggers, ’cause all the good stuff only hits in melee range, or not at all.
Almost every post I’ve made on the forums has been a cry for an effective ranged weapon for solo play.
Pretty sure physical strength isn’t an issue for any profession (character appearance and environmental weapons say hello). I don’t see why I can’t make a warrior that spends their off-time studying the equivalent of quantum physics, either.
I do like to imagine that my engi was born without access to magic, somehow; makes justifying not practicing it easier.
Speaking of emulating Batman, engis could use a melee weapon.
When are we going to stop talking about our class as if we were solo all the time and realize what we bring to a party in combo fields, finishers, crowd control, healing, boons, and condtion removal?
Seeing as I often am solo, I’d stop only if I ever quit the game. I do a lot of roaming in WvW, and I really dislike melee focused combat, so I take major issue with these problems.
I came into this game hoping scepter/dagger would support ranged combat with some melee (my preferred playstyle), and dagger/focus melee with some ranged. I still don’t see why it can’t be that way. (Maybe with a new offhand, though, as it seems pretty clear that the focus fills a defensive role.)
As long as we’re on a similar topic, what’s with the disparity between dealing damage with dagger/x and with scepter/x and staff?
Seriously, I’m okay with doing less damage at range, but why does it have to be so much harder to actually hit things with ranged skills than with melee skills?
I suppose I can understand the staff’s situation because of its massive AoE and support capability, but what’s the reasoning behind the scepter’s state?
Tried a signet bunker… It wasn’t all that bad, but it was better with an offhand dagger than a focus. In the end, though, it just didn’t have enough healing power, and the attunement recharge rate was too slow.
S/F bunker with 100% protection, 100% swiftness, 100% fury, a large invunerable time, reflect and projectile destroy.
from memory:
20, 10, 30, 0, 10
Grab all signet related traits and the other obvious ones. 4 signets (3 if you want a stun break) and whatever elite you want.
Armour and weap and amulet, you can work these out. Either full defensive or conditions.
I’ve tried signet s/f builds. Many times, because I really wanted them to work. The problem I ran into was that I lacked mobility and control, and poor and/or unreliable damage + relatively unremarkable defense + lack of escapes = dead ele.
I haven’t tried a full bunker signet build, though, so that’s worth a shot.
I don’t understand, scepter is a viable ranged weapon. =/
There’s ways to land dragon’s tooth, but there’s lots of other spells that are good too…
If I can’t effectively fight my enemy from a distance, it’s not a viable ranged weapon. As it is, Dragon’s Tooth, Phoenix, Shatterstone, the lack of offense in the scepter’s earth attunement, and the weak autoattacks make it ineffective at ranged combat.
Scepter/Dagger’s good, but mainly when close to your target (Phoenix, offhand dagger skills), and I don’t want to be forced to adopt a support-oriented playstyle by taking the staff.
I guess you can do it that way, but I was referring to Updraft > Dragon’s Tooth > someone else follows up with a CC, and Earthquake > Dragon’s Tooth > someone else follows up with a CC.
As far as scepter goes, like caed said you don’t need to land Dragon’s Tooth for scepter to be viable. It’s 1 spell that is situational. You still do good burst in air, and if you have a dagger offhand you still do good burst in fire with phoenix and fire grab. Not to mention arcane skills if you choose to take them.
One way i use it to land dts lately(just an experimental build) is i use glyph of elemental power to keep my enemy on weakness and after i see them out of dodges
i roll on oearth for evasive arcanas 3 sec cripple and then cast the dt.If the guy doesnt react immediately he wont manage to avoid it.If he blows a defencive cooldown for a 6 sec cd dt You Win.
I can’t seem to keep my target immobilized long enough with Elemental Surge, but perhaps if I combine weakness with Chilling Gust I could get it to land.
Who says you have to bring Signet of Earth? Who says you have to bring one long CC? Who says YOU have to bring the cc?
So for s/d you have updraft and earthquake as basically 2 two-second CCs. One is a knockback, and one is a knockdown. If you chain this with another CC then you’re good to go. If you run focus you still have a 2s knockdown.
So lets say you’re playing with a mesmer, you can updraft > dragon’s tooth and chain the mesmer’s illusionary leap > shatter so it all lands. That’s a lot of burst, and if the build doesn’t have any escape cooldowns (or doesn’t get any help from his team) he’s going to lose a lot of health, along with anyone near him because all of that damage is aoe.
There’s so many CCs in this game that you can do this with every class.
- Maybe you want to do it with a thief w/ basilisk venom, or maybe venom share.
- Maybe you want a guardian to put a root down, or you can chain it with his knockback.
- Maybe you want to chain it with a d/d necro's 4 second immobilize. I’ve never tried this, but you can probably pull off fear > dragon’s tooth > earthquake before the fear moves him out of range. Maybe you need to put criple or chill on first.
- Maybe you want to chain it with a warrior using bull’s charge, throw bolas, or any number of the weapon CCs that they have.
- Maybe you want to chain it with an engineer's rifle knockback, rifle root, or magnet pull
- Maybe you want to chain it with a ranger's pet fear, an RNG pet knockdown, or any other kind of pet CC. Maybe you want to do it with the trap that immobilizes. Maybe entangle.
There’s so many ways to chain CC in this game yet no one does it.
If I chain Updraft and Earthquake to get Dragon’s Tooth to land, I have to forego all my other fire skills. I’ve also tried CCing my target after casting Dragon’s Tooth (scepter/focus is better for that because of the ranged knockdown), but they usually leave its radius by the time I can do so.
As for chain CC with allies, I’d like to have at least one ranged weapon that doesn’t require team support to be effective with. (Not referring to bunkers.)
I feel the same. Balance in this game is appalling. In 6 months they haven’t fixed kitten either.
Dragon’s Tooth is the perfect example of incompetence. It’s a skill that’s designed to miss. Ridiculous.
Or maybe you should use Dragon’s Tooth on players that are CC’d, downed, or resing. Maybe it’s not designed to be spammed every time you’re in fire attunement.
No offense, but there’s a lot of posts like yours and they’re ridiculous.
Even a 2 second CC isn’t long enough for Dragon’s Tooth to hit an enemy before they can dodge. Signet of Earth does the trick, but Dragon’s Tooth isn’t powerful enough to warrant sacrificing a utility slot for.
The thing about conjured weapons is that they’re only good for a few skills before cooldowns render them useless. ‘Cept maybe the Lightning Hammer, it hits pretty hard. The Fiery Greatsword isn’t particularly limited by recharge times, but its skills aren’t all that good.
Point is, even if they had unlimited charges, I’d generally still drop them after using a few skills. THAT’S why I like the idea of conjure kits.
Increase Dragon’s Tooth drop speed. It doesn’t even do that much damage, why does it have to be so slow that enemies can walk out of its radius? A one second activation time during which you can see the tooth forming above your head is MORE than enough warning for you to dodge it.
Increase the projectile speed of Phoenix, and fix it so that it functions properly on targets at different elevations. Currently you can outrun Phoenix with swiftness, and it only travels diagonally, so it will often fail when cast in a vertical direction.
A 2 second activation time for Shatterstone is absurd; I say reduce the activation time, reduce the time until it shatters or increase its AoE radius, and increase the damage.
The scepter’s earth attunement suffers from a lack of offense; I’d suggest adding a new offensive skill in place of Dust Devil.
The scepter’s fire and air attunement autoattacks are very poor, and its earth autoattack is pretty bad without condition damage, as well. Damage increases would be welcomed.
The GoEP helps, but staff damage is still quite unreliable with it.
You do realize that the glyph activates based on the attunement it was cast in, not the attunement you are in when it triggers?
Sure, not every skill will hit…but you’ll hit a lot more often than without it.
Yup, AoE cripple with Meteor Shower is fun. My point is that I don’t like the staff because its skills are designed to be dodged, and our other ranged weapon suffers from similar issues, albeit to a lesser extent.
Scepter/dagger with Conjure Frost Bow is the closest I’ve been able to get to what I’m looking for.
How does earth lack offense? The scepter 1 on earth applies 3 bleeds and can stack 9bleed EASY.
And staff is only unreliable if you make it, you have snares, you have immobs, you can predict (or force) enemy movement so they go into your effects, etc.
It takes time to stack bleeding with Stone Shards, and even then it’s only worthwhile with condition damage; a mainhand dagger is much less restrictive.
Weapons such as a warrior’s rifle and a mesmer’s greatsword are reliable ranged weapons, as opponents are not given much of a chance to evade their attacks – this is not the case for an elementalist’s staff. Sure, you can use Static Field and Shockwave to keep enemies in your AoEs, but that can’t be done very frequently.
I’m not saying that the staff can’t do ranged damage, but players simply have more control over the damage they take when fighting a staff elementalist than most other ranged combatants.
On one hand, I feel the division between elementalist weapons isn’t so much indicated by the range, but by the role they play. Dagger/Dagger is very swift, opertunistic and proactive playstyle, whereas the staff is reactively, more planned and supportive. This also means that I think of the D/D as more of a duelling weapon, and staff more as a group weapon. This is emphasized by the staff’s combo fields that get exponentially stronger the more allies you have.
Second, I’ve found that the utilities that work for D/D, don’t work as well for staff. The key skill for me when playing the staff is Glyph of Elemental Power. When used in earth or water, all your attacks gain the ability to snare foes. When duelling someone 1v1, this greatly helps in hitting my opponent with the ground targetted spells. In turn, when those spells hit, they too cause snaring which…you get the point. Combined with the lesser earth elemental, which causes weakness and crippling (and can hardly get destroyed), kiting and hitting stuff becomes a lot easier, and the elemental adds to my dps. Also, since the cooldown of the glyph works per individual foe, when used against groups I can literally spam cripples or chills with my aoes all over the place.
That’s my take on it anyway. Will it work as well in duels as D/D? of course not. But since I started using the glyph, the fights have gone a lot more in my favor than before.
The GoEP helps, but staff damage is still quite unreliable with it. The skills of the scepter’s fire attunement are easy for an enemy to dodge (and its earth attunement lacks offense).
An elementalist’s ranged damage potential is fine for the most part, but many ranged skills perform poorly when it comes to actually connecting with a target.
*Obligatory complaint about how elementalists suck at ranged combat.
*Obligatory counter argument against false but popular statement.
Do you really have a build like that? I only care about PvP, but if you can show me how the staff and/or scepter are/is just as viable as d/d, I’d happily recant my previous complaint.
I can’t really comment on this as i don’t like the scepter myself? Have u tried S/D? Cause if u dislike that perhaps the weapon you dislike it the scepter and not the focus.
Well, truthfully I don’t really like any of the weapons available to the elementalist (Why can’t we just get a decent long range single-target oriented option?), but in my experience s/d is far superior to s/f unless you’re dealing with a massive number of projectile attacks.
I’ve played scepter/focus extensively – it’s kitten outside of PvE (which I don’t really play anyway), and even in PvE the staff outclasses it. ’Cept against ranged enemies, I guess.
I want to like the focus, but its lack of mobility, offense, and control just makes it a poor choice. (Might be different with a mainhand dagger, but I don’t like using a mainhand dagger, so I wouldn’t know.)
So there was a havoc made up of a d/d ele, a thief, and some guy that shot rainbow arrows (didn’t get a clear look).
The ele pressured and tanked and the arrow guy attacked from range. The thief would drain 3/4s of my health bar before I could see them.
Not a fun group to fight.
*Conveniently leaves out the part where he forgot that thieves could stealth downed allies and ran around like a maniac looking for the the magical disappearing ele.
I know this might make me seem terribly elitist and uninterested in working with a team (which isn’t the case), but 1v1 capability is the primary thing I look for in any build. I don’t need to kill anyone, but I do want a chance to at least survive against one other opponent if I play my cards right.
That said, this game is probably closer to being balanced in terms of 1v1 than any other MMORPG I’ve played. For instance, staff eles are terrible 1v1, but they can still build defensively so that they can hold their own against an enemy and adopt a more support-oriented role.
…another favorite of mine is to drop eruption down and then put a static field around them so when they go to dodge through it they end up getting stunned and eat it, AND waste their dodge, and end up stunned for 2s which is great for dropping a lava font below them.
1. Standard bunker stats, but put a shaman amulet on instead of cleric, and change your runes to nightmare.
2. Learn how to stack conditions with different rotations/evasive arcana.
3. Profit. A lot of people don’t expect condi damage from eles and they’re half dead by the time they remember to cleanse conditions. Rangers (with empathic bond) and other eles are going to be your only main problem. This kind of setup is great for holding points because the damage is relatively well hidden until they’ve taken a lot of it. When facing necros simply hold out on your big burn stack until they’ve used their heal slot.
Eh, Eruption is pretty easy to dodge when you have the timing down, and burning isn’t terribly dangerous on its own. This spec’s great for point defense if no one dodges, sure, but otherwise the damage is less reliable than it would be with direct damage – and that’s saying something for staff eles.
You know what happens when they dodge all your eruptions? They can’t dodge after that… And you can always pin em down with shockwave and/or frost field/rock line. Eruption has a REALLY short CD, dodging does not.
Eruption has a 6 second recharge and takes 1.75 seconds to activate (longer to actually “erupt”), so you can dodge it more often than not. I’ll concede to your point regarding Shockwave, though.
1. Standard bunker stats, but put a shaman amulet on instead of cleric, and change your runes to nightmare.
2. Learn how to stack conditions with different rotations/evasive arcana.
3. Profit. A lot of people don’t expect condi damage from eles and they’re half dead by the time they remember to cleanse conditions. Rangers (with empathic bond) and other eles are going to be your only main problem. This kind of setup is great for holding points because the damage is relatively well hidden until they’ve taken a lot of it. When facing necros simply hold out on your big burn stack until they’ve used their heal slot.
Eh, Eruption is pretty easy to dodge when you have the timing down, and burning isn’t terribly dangerous on its own. This spec’s great for point defense if no one dodges, sure, but otherwise the damage is less reliable than it would be with direct damage – and that’s saying something for staff eles.
Earth: III
Water: III, V, XI
Arcana: V, VIII, XI
Amulet: Cleric’s
Jewel: Soldier’s
Runes: Superior Rune of the Fighter x 5, Superior Rune of the Soldier
Heal: Glyph of Elemental Harmony
Utilities: Cleansing Fire, Lightning Flash, Mist Form
Elite: Conjure Fiery Greatsword (Useful for escaping, though I really take it because I want a melee weapon.)
I do kittentastic damage, but at least I don’t die.
If anyone’s got something more offensive that works in a 1v1 scenario, I’d love to know about it. (Builds that rely on perma-fury don’t really seem work for the staff, as there are many times when it is wiser to remain in a given attunement. Plus, Magnetic Aura is situational but powerful, and activating it whenever possible seems wasteful.)
I’ve got an idea: Whenever you get spawn-camped, sneak over to SBI’s spawn in your BLs and set up a kittenton of anti-infantry siege. Stalk those who get through, and portal-bomb the kitten out of them. Get them to chase you into a waiting hail of ballista bolts.
this is war, ya hear?! yer fightin’ fer the very life o’ yer world, fer the power o’ the mists will give ye that edge ye need to o’ercome the elder dragons! it ain’t pretty that ye gotta leave the other worlds to suffer, but it’s gotta be done!
never give up, never surrender! to victory or death!
(Okay, I don’t know what the point of the mist war is, but that seems to make sense.)
So, why not take the people to task who post 685 PPT screenshots as if it is an accomplishment. They happen to be the same type of people who lose with equal numbers, come back and then lose with double the number, and then come back and win with three times the numbers at which point they spam laugh.
Solving problems with numbers is nothing to be proud about. And, spam laughing us when we finally get overwhelmed after killing you repeatedly makes you look bad, not us.
I agree, I don’t like this either; it was nice to be on top for the first week of this matchup (first time since I joined SBI), but now it seems like we win mostly due to population/coverage and don’t really have to get creative.
The thing is, that was posted on a forum that pretty much only SBI players frequent, so there isn’t the potential for discord that there is here.
I only play an ele because I like the concept of controlling the fundamental forces of nature. If I didn’t care about role-playing at all, I’d probably go for something with decent ranged options for PvP, like an engineer or warrior.
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