Guild Wars 2

Scorael.8952:

On Burning Fire, it only affects utility skills that already cause burning (unless there’s a tooltip error) and since burns do not stack intensity it feels pointless to invest the trait slot into it. No point changing attunements since they are all utility skills.

Burning Fire increases the base burn duration of Signet of Fire from 9 seconds to 12 seconds; this reduces the amount of condition duration required to maintain permanent burning through that skill alone from 127% to 70%. My condition build has 76-80% condition duration, depending on food, so Burning Fire is actually resulting in 100% uptime on burning, and I never have to leave earth attunement to get it (and the cast time of Signet of Fire is so short I barely lose any bleed stacks casting it)

In return that allows me a lot more freedom with the other utility slots, because I only need to dedicate one to inflicting burning. This is the only set-up I’ve found for maintaining burning at a 100% uptime without leaving earth attunement; there’s a glyph set-up which can work for up to 30 seconds before needing to leave it, but nothing else. Elementalists lose around 9-12 bleed stacks (minimum, and nearly every stack without points in Arcana) if they leave earth attunement to get access to burning, which means it’s not worth doing so (Burning’s only worth about 6 bleed stacks in a dedicated condition build)

They want to reward achievement points, but at the release of laurels they hadn’t decided on a balanced way to do so; the end result might be a reward other than laurels.

We haven’t heard much since.

Glyph of Elemental Power does nothing if the cast finishes while Lingering Elements is active. It simply gives a buff icon that says your attacks cause a certain condition, but they don’t.

Evasive Arcana makes your rolls in Water attunement cast Cleansing Wave at the end of the roll, once per 10 seconds; this roughly coincides with the recharge time of the water attunement.

It’s also a blast finisher if used in earth attunement, which depending on weapon or party set-up may be relevant to healing.

The healing for water kicks up several notches when you have access to Master, and later Grand Master, traits.

Simply put, you can trait such that the mere act of attuning to water becomes equal to casting Dagger Water V (Water’s 15 point minor trait adds the heal, and Water V “Cleansing Wave” adds the condition removal if you want it)

At Grand Master tier, you also get Arcana XII “Evasive Arcana” which again adds the same abilities to your dodge roll once every 10 seconds, if attuned to water.

Basically, once you have those traits, the healing potential of the water attunement more than triples, as these two heals are only a very low cooldown in comparison. Not to mention that you can use Arcana II “Elemental Attunement” to grant yourself and nearby allies regen when attuning to water, and for even more condition removal sourced from water take Water XI “Cleansing Water” to also make THAT heal conditions.

At level 35, you simply don’t have access to any of the traits that make water work as healing support. Well, with a staff, you can still use blast finishers within a water field (casting Healing Rain (water 5), switch to earth (earth 2), drop an Eruption in it, and Arcane Wave if you have that slotted – at higher levels with Evasive Arcana you can also dodge roll in earth attunement for a third blast finisher in the space of 3-4 seconds).

Anyways, point is, traits make it work. You don’t have them at your level.

Persisting Flames, at least, is mainly aimed at Staff. It increases the duration of Lava Font long enough that it should grant an extra damage tick, and with the 20% CD trait, the player should be able to reach roughly 100% uptime on that fire field – which, if your party is aware you’re doing this, can lead to a lot of might-stacking through blast finishers. It also makes it easier to land your own blast finishers with Eruption/Evasive Arcana.

The others, yes, they’re pretty bad. I’d personally replace Flame Barrier with a pseudo-Retaliation, and make One With Fire apply it as a party-wide effect (like water’s Soothing Mists)

Burning Fire… probably has a niche role. I’d say it’s aimed mostly at condition builds that don’t want to leave Earth attunement and need to get more sources of burning in utility slots. (As Navsar said, it might be a good candidate for boon hate, or possible condition removal, but I think it’s functional as-is, just niche)

Burning Rage is somewhat useful for stacking up on damage multpliers. A little boring, but functional. Maybe the increase could be larger.

Ele can provide very strong support, especially with staff, via combo fields. Every weapon set possible has at least one fire field for group mightstacking, but staff also has two water fields, one with a decent duration; this means the group can take advantage of it to heal themselves. In events with structures as the target, Frost Bow can be a very effective utility skill thanks to the #4 skill on the bow.

With a well-played healing build, eles can keep decent players alive. Really good players don’t need it, and really bad players will die regardless. Unfortunately, ele direct damage builds are more or less outshined by the more popular classes, except for the very large bosses that eat the majority of a Meteor Swarm or Ice Storm.

A condition build could achieve a good amount of DPS (around 3-3.5k DPS from a safe range once the stacks are ramped up), but I’d expect you understand the core issues of condition builds in dungeons and fractals. Unless the way condition stacking changes any time soon, it won’t really be able to shine.

At your level, a very powerful trait combination is 15 water and 20 arcana, with the traits Cleansing Wave (Water V), Elemental Attunement (Arcana V) and either Blasting Staff if you use staff(Arcana VIII) or Renewing Stamina (Arcana VI).

This will give you a tremendous combination of defensive abilties:
- When attuning to water, you heal yourself and nearby allies for around 10-15% of the base ele max hp
- When attuning to water, you cleanse a condition off yourself and nearby allies
- When attuning to water, you grant 6 seconds of regen to yourself and nearby allies
- While attuned to water, you grant Soothing Mists to yourself and nearby allies. This is reapplied every 3 seconds or so for up to 5 seconds after you leave water attunement
- You gain 2.4 seconds of fury every time you switch attunements
- You gain 6 seconds of vigor whenever you crit
- You also gain a stack of might when attuning to fire, 6 seconds of swiftness when attuning to air, and 6 seconds of protection when attuning to earth

In other words, when in trouble, swap to water attunement, and then to, say, earth attunement, and you’ll gain the following:
- Around 10-15% hp healed
- 6 seconds of regen, 6-9 seconds of soothing mists
- 1 condition cured
- around 5 seconds of fury
- 6 seconds of protection

On top of that, if you’re running Renewing Stamina you gain 6 seconds of vigor if you manage to crit. because you can manage a semi-decent amount of fury, this might happen even without precision gear.

This gives a lot of survivability regardless of your gear set-up. Gear with toughness and/or healing power will improve the value of all that healing. Gear with precision will give better uptime on that vigor boon, letting you dodge more often.

To compare whether I’d want more power than precision, I just look at the numbers in terms of % damage increase.

Before adding crit damage, precision increases damage at a flat rate: 21 points = 1% crit chance = 0.5% more damage; hence 42 precision = 1% damage (up to a cap at around 2016 additional precision)
Power on the other hand starts at 9.16 power per 1% damage and doesn’t reach 42 per 1% damage until you already have 4200 power; playing with a build editor I was able to cap out a warrior at 4395 power, with 25 might/bloodlust stacks, food buffs, traits that convert toughness into power, an offhand shield (with the shield grants toughness trait), signet of might, banner of strength, dropping the 6th rune bonus for another strength rune and the second sigil bonus for a crest of the soldier.

Basically, without crit damage it’s a very distant goal to make power worth less than precision for raw damage at any point. 50% crit damage means precision is level with power once you hit 2.1k power, which is attainable, but… there’s no set that gives crit damage without power, so you can never truly make the trade-off of precision for power. To make precision worthwhile, you’re forced to take power anyways. The more valuable you try to make precision, the more power you get as a side effect.

I don’t think Knight’s is wholly optimal for an ele – the only real crit bonuses we can get are burning on crit (in the Fire trait line, and needs condi damage to be useful), vuln on crit (requires 25 in air) and vigor on crit – for the latter, if we build with boon duration runes we get up to 70% extra duration, which gives a 3.5 second window to crit after the internal cooldown of Renewing Stamina. So you can get by with the crit increases from, say, master maintenance oil, having 10 points in air, fury and maybe a food buff.

Without any extra crit damage on gear, Soldier’s ends up better than Knight’s for survivability -and- damage. It is, however, somewhat harder to get, and you need some precision from food to ensure uptime on Vigor.

As for cleric’s, the only way for an ele to have lower damage is to be stupid and go with Magi or an MF set with no damage stats; however the combo of healing power and toughness goes extremely far for survivability on an ele.

Except for Rampager’s, condi damage gear more or less locks an ele into Earth attunement. This can be built around, but the issue with it is that the moment you exit earth attunement you give up 9-15 seconds worth of reapplying bleeds and damage drops off severely (however, with condition duration gear/food/runes, it’s possible to get 100% uptime on 25 bleed stacks while in earth for any weapon set…)

Condition builds really give up too much by being forced into staying in one attunement though. Rampager’s gear means a build doesn’t fail once it leaves Earth, but it still has no defensive stats.

Turtle Dragon.9241:

What purpose does the Unique mechanic serve and why does it exist other than to cause this kind of annoying situation above?

Seeing as nobody’s seemingly answered this directly for you, I’ll just go ahead:

Unique forces you to use “Defensive” and “Offensive” infusion slots if you want two of the same rings at the same quality (infused/not infused). This causes you to have to spend much more to get an extra 5 points in offensive or an extra 5 points in defensive stats, as you need to craft a versatile infusion for the second ring/earring if you want the same stats on both (which is much, much more expensive than the regular infusion you can use only in a defensive/offensive slot)

Basically, it’s a grinding goal for min-maxers. If you want 5 power on both rings, it’s gonna cost ya. If you can accept 5 power on one and 5 toughness on the other, much less so.

The fact that it’s simply not explained to a player in-game until they’ve already made a choice they can’t un-make sucks, though. At the very least the “Are you sure you want to buy this item?” dialog should have an extra line saying “(Characters can only equip one [item_name] because it is Unique)”

The description of the Sclerite Karka Shell, which has a similar design, is “The karka have mysterious biological properties.”

I’d say it’s still related to them in some way or another. Maybe karka have parasites. Maybe we’ll start seeing Sclerite Karka as the living story moves on.

tigirius.9014:

Hawkian.6580:

Two new sets of weapons were added with Fractals (the Fractal skins themselves, and the black and white exotics that drop already bound). The Fused skins, guild weapon skins, SAB skins, Braham and Rox’s skins and the new creepy southun stuff would be it I think.

Hmm that’s not what this guy was telling me.

I wonder what it was he was talking about then. Weird.

I thought they had really added something cosmetic I could get with gameplay and not money and not doing dungeons. Even if it was a mystic forge thing that would have been annoying to me as a crafter however it still would have been something.

(scrolls up) ahh guild weapon sets maybe that was it. Any solo way of getting these things my guild doesn’t always do the events or group up like this?

The only way to get them is with commendations, which require doing guild missions. The most expensive weapons need 7 commendations, which is impossible to reach in one week, but only takes about an hour of gameplay total if you’re in an organized guild. There’s a lot of time gating on it (max commendations per week is 6, in a guild that has every mission unlocked, if you attend one mission of each type; each mission only offers commendations once per week.)

There are some large guilds in some servers that run public guild missions that any player can join the guild temporarily to get the mission rewards. If your guild isn’t running them yet, it may be worth looking into whether your server has any guilds that do that; as the game supports multi-guilding, you’ll only be temporarily not representing your guild.

That’s the way people do it. Make sure you pick the stats of the white gear in the first step. If you’re unsure, you might wanna test with a cheap soulbound green item and regular transmute stones (i.e. buy a level 20 green off TP, get it soulbound, transmute that onto a white and see what happens)

Just a heads up, it won’t work with cultural armor (or even if it does, your human wouldn’t be allowed to wear the skin)

In theory, the new weapon sets can be acquired via pure luck as drops (the boxes drop in southsun cove), so I guess there’s that. The previous fused weapons could also be acquired by getting keys from map completion or personal story.

Also, the guild weapon set was added a couple patches back, as well as guild back banners in the April update. Also the new Fused Gauntlets and Molten Jetpack from the Flame & Frost content.

As for entire armor sets, I can’t think of any non-gem store sets.

I’d go as far as:

1) Remove Attunement Recharge Rate. Make the profession stat extend lingering elements (with buffs to the minor adept traits in air/fire/earth), or grant bonuses based on attunement.
2) Attach the current max attunement recharge rate to the “[Attunement] skills recharge 20% faster” traits, e.g. “Fire skills recharge 20% faster. Fire Attunement recharges 6 seconds faster.”

You want the game to be harder for downscaled characters… fine.

Please detail how you’d do this without screwing up the difficulty levels of Guild Bounties, Guild Challenges and Dungeons, all of which were designed to be hard with the current downscaling system. Or how you’d do it so a level 80 downscaled character can actually be useful during events compared to a level 5 character, when the events are balanced around the level 5 character, if the level 80 character is supposed to have a harder time.

It’s fine if a level 80 character works out being equal to the level they’re downscaled to, but ultimately the issue is that the zone was designed to be a certain level of difficulty, and making characters weaker than the appropriate level means they can’t contribute as effectively to content that they, by their presence, are scaling up (making the game harder for everyone, including the low-level players the content is designed for).

Palador.2170:

foofad.5162:

Seras.5702:

foofad.5162:

Because it would be overpowered. Two handed weapons have a much higher innate damage range than one handed weapons. That’s the short version.

But sigils don’t modify individual weapons. They modify your total stats. Are you saying that the inability to equip 2 sigils is offset by allowing 2h weps to deal more damage than 1h weps?
If so, that makes sense.

Correct. Compared to two one-handed weapons, two handed weapons do 10% more base damage. So if you also allowed them to use two sigils, not only would they do 10% more damage, they’d also get the only advantage (builds not withstanding) using two one-handed weapons offers.

I can accept this as a valid answer.

It’s not particularly valid, though – you can’t directly compare those values between weapon types because each weapon type has a different skill set with different damage multipliers. The damage range on the weapon is only useful for comparing weapons of the same type.

Plenty of classes have one-handed weapon sets that outdamage similar two-handed weapons, and quite often a weapon’s functionality is entirely separated from the damage numbers, i.e. condition-based weapons.

“The damage range is higher” isn’t a valid argument as long as you can’t have a pair of one-handed weapons with exactly the same skill set as a two-handed weapon. Skills are the central balancing aspect of weapon damage, not the numbers on the weapon.

Navzar.2938:

darkace.8925:

TooBz.3065:

A great sword deals 995-1,100 in damage. A sword deals 905-1000 damage.

A two handed weapon already deals 10% more than a one handed weapon. That’s like two sigils of force.

Okay, now take into account two sigils vs one. Where a two-handed weapon user must choose between the extra damage of a Sigil of Force or the extra damage on crit from a Sigil of Air, a duel-wielder can have both.

The 10% more damage isn’t taking up a slot, and it’s stronger than a sigil. If you consider the fact that you have less options, then it just evens outs. Stronger in exchange for losing some versatility.

Your example doesn’t really work because if you use two weapons and go force/air, then you have 5% extra damage and a sigil of air. If the two handed uses air, then it’s 10% extra damage and air. So it effectively has better than both.

Except the damage between weapons is already going to vary because each profession has different damage values with each skill in each skill set and they’ve balanced more around that; the numbers being different is just fluff.

Iron Maiden.7453:

What was todays update about?

Also when will the audiolog collectors befixed!?

That… -was- today’s update. That’s what it was fixing.

But we do have a large ability pool. Each character has:

20 utility skills
3 healing skills
3 elite skills
6 racial skills split between healing, utility and elite
A minimum of 3 unique class abilities (guardian), with some classes (thieves, warriors, engineers, rangers) having a vast array of options
A minimum of 17 weapon skills (engineer) with some classes having far more (elementalist has 80 including underwater)

Then there’s traits such as Evasive Arcana that turn otherwise non-skill actions into skills as well.

In GW2 we have a large amount of options. Between those, we have to narrow it down to around 15-20 skills available (kit-less engi gets the lowest, at 14; full conjure ele could potentially bring 50 cooldowns into a single encounter)

Seriously, the lowest amount of skills we can have access to at one time at level 30 is 14, and if you’re running an engineer with 14 skills, it’s because those are the skills you’ve chosen to build around and are prepared to use on a regular basis.

On the other hand, in WoW you have access to all of your skills except ones requiring talent trees to unlock, at all times. But my brother plays, and I’m 90% certain he never uses more than 5 unique skills during combat on the majority of his characters.

Keeping the turret alive:

Initial burst: 5040 + 1.0 * healing
Permanent regen: 130 + 0.125 * healing
Cleansing Burst on cooldown: 2520 + 0.5 * healing

Ignoring the placement heal, it works out to 298 + 0.158 * healing power per second; as the placement heal can’t be replicated if we’re keeping the turret down permanently, it’s hard to say the value for this calculation.

Instantly detonating and using the toolbelt skill on cooldown as well:

Burst heal:
Placement: 2520 + heal * 0.5
Cleansing Burst: 2520 + heal * 0.5
Blast finisher: 1320 + heal * 0.2
Regen: around 11 seconds without boon duration, so total 1430 + heal * 1.375

Total healing: 7490 + heal * 2.575
Per second: 374.5 + heal * 0.129

Conclusion: If the max possible heal is necessary, it’s still more mathematically sound to detonate the turret within the water field as soon as possible

Keeping the turret alive also falls further behind if you assume that other characters may be providing regeneration as well, but it DOES have slightly more uptime on water fields for combo finishers (and 25% faster on cleansing conditions). This isn’t even considering the difficulty of the whole “not letting the turret die” part.

Suggestion: Just put the full heal in cleansing burst; this increases the heals/second by about 128 + heal * 0.033 when keeping the turret alive permanently, without negatively affecting the burst heal from detonating it, as long as the turret can be kept alive until the first Cleansing Burst. End result: Keeping the turret alive is better overall healing, detonating heal isn’t massively affected.

Backpieces are typically very limited in stat range. Not being craftable except for a few ascended ones with the same stats as ascended fractal capacitors doesn’t help, either.

At the very least ANet should fill out the rest of the stat spreads on ascended backpieces to match what’s available in the other trinket slots, but making them craftable with at least one craft skill would help a lot (my cleric’s ele is current using an exotic magi spineguard – there isn’t a single ascended backpiece with healing power even as a minor stat. Making them craftable would let me at least get full cleric stats on it instead.)

For ele, sentinel can be almost directly compared to Cleric. One offers around 10k more hp, the other offers 1k hp per heal; an ele traited in 30 water/30 arcana can probably get around a 4:1 tradeoff on healing over 10 seconds, so any fight longer than 25 seconds, the cleric set is providing more effective health with the other stats being identical. The tradeoff is simply being weaker to burst damage with cleric, but bunkers tend to already run enough defensive utilities to escape from burst anyways.

Sentinel might be more viable for an ele attempting a bunker spec with earth instead of water, but… the reason most bunkers use water is because the heals add up fast enough to make the earth traits look pretty weak in comparison.

Bard/Songmage type class. Medium or Light armor caster.

Weapon sets:
Sword/Sword: Melee “dancing” style attacks. Cleaves, conditions and evades
Scepter/Focus: Ranged magic AoE, slow but high damage. Thematically, using the scepter/focus to force specific lyrics/phrases in the song to have effects.
Dagger/Dagger: Ranged single-target attacks (throwing daggers); bouncing, conditions. Lots of spinning in attack animations.
Staff: Melee sweeping attacks; low damage, crowd control (knockdowns and blowouts), full circular PBAoE
Either Longbow or Shortbow: AoE ranged conditions
Spear and Trident for underwater (melee/ranged respectively; spear functioning similar to Staff on land, Trident as a faster-but-weaker version of scepter/focus. One of the two should be viable with a conditions build, both should be viable with power)

Unique class mechanic: Singing
The character gathers magical power over time by chanting an incantation (singing). The character constantly pulses an effect every few seconds which is changed by F1, F2 and F3; F1 grants random boons to allies, F2 heals allies, F3 grants random non-damaging conditions to nearby enemies. While singing, the character gains energy (call this Rhythm for now) which increases the effects of skills. F4 expends all rhythm for a high power attack.

Players near the character (and the character itself) get a small UI popup that shows a rhythm meter; when a player attacks/activates a skill in time with the beat, the bard receives bonus Rhythm, while the player that triggers it receives slightly higher benefits on the next pulse of the song. Conversely, the bard character loses some Rhythm if they take damage from monsters.

Utility sets can include signets, instant-cast skills themed as words of power (possibly trigger shout runes), dance moves (effects like evades, stability, and stunbreaks), summoned instruments (provide bonus rhythm when they attack, or possibly can be wielded by other players like conjured weapons to form a band) and… well, I can’t think of a 5th set for now. Maybe instrumental solo’s with a long channelled effect.

Generic themes across all utility/healing/elite skills could include scaling skill effects based on Rhythm, increasing/consuming it and changing the flow of the rhythm meter (faster/more beats or less beats but a larger window for players to time them to). Party-wide boons should be plentiful.

Trait lines can include one line themed on each type of song (F1 through F4); 5th line can be based on Rhythm. Unique profession stat would either increase the rate rhythm increases at or increases the cap on how much can be stored (and hence the maximum output of skills it affects). Traits can do things like modifying the frequency of pulses from F1 through F3, adding conditions to F4, and de-randomising the boons and conditions F1 and F3 provide, as well as granting more benefits to players that hit beats (e.g. healing line: Heal allies whenever they hit a beat).

I… thought this through maybe too much.

Any of the signets could arguably be made into stun breakers, although currently only air has the instant-cast needed for actually breaking stun properly. I can see water or earth’s effect easily being changed to add in a stun break, though either would probably drop the chill/immobilize effect. Signet of Fire is… necessary in it’s current state for a condition build that never wants to leave earth, and I can’t imagine a stun break being added to that without nerfing the burn effect to balance it out. It could easily be given a stun break similar to Cleansing Flame, but the current effect would have to be reduced and it’s the only signet I use for the active effect…

I can’t see, thematically, which glyph could have a stun break added to it They all have cast times which are very much tied to the unique glyph casting anmation, and you can only use spells with no cast time while stunned. Maybe the elemental glyphs could be tweaked to add a self-destruct effect to elementals, with either earth or air elementals giving AoE stun break or something? But that steps on necro’s toes.

Conjure Earth Shield might be nice with a stun break. It’d give people a reason to use it, at any rate. Arcane skills could easily become stun breaks as well… maybe it’s most suited for arcane shield.

Focus wants stun breaks, but Magnetic Wave and Obsidian Flesh are plenty good enough already, and the other attunements probably want complete skill redesigns for stun breaks to make sense on them.

Maybe it could be worked nto trait lines? Earth has a trait that grants 2 seconds of stability on attuning to earth as a grand master trait – I could see a lot of people taking that if it was also a stun breaker (with or without an increased internal cooldown on the stun break); heck, Air needs a grandmaster trait worth using, too, and a stun breaker could definitely fit that.

My final haul is:

In bank:
1450 bauble bubbles
1 shortbow
2 longbows
2 greatswords
3 staffs
4 swords
5 shields

Spent:
150 bauble bubbles total on 1 staff, 1 scepter and 2 backpacks
1 GS sold on TP to afford a new character slot

I’m… going to wait til tomorrow to start spending my baubles, so I don’t make any mistakes in my current tired state.

Grevender.9235:

Dingle.2743:

While Air XI is a terrible trait, you’re suggesting removing something that affects any weapon set for something that affects a single skill in a single attunement on a single weapon.

RTL was intended as a gap closer. ANet are trying to force that. If you want a skill for running away, there’s still FGS (Fiery Whirl, Rush) and Conjure Flame Axe (Burning Retreat, Flame Leap), Fire 3 (Burning Speed) Mist Form, Lightning Flash and RTL on a nerfed cooldown. That’s still far more running-away capability than most professions can have access to at one time.

.

I would like to know who roams with ALL those utilities equipped at once

Brave Sir Robin?

Point is, elementalists have that many options.

Pure earth glyph/condi S/F build (20/10/30/0/10), discarding the Inscription trait; the only boons my ele gets are vigor from Renewing Stamina (which I only use because Zephyr’s Focus doesn’t work for Stone Shards as it should). Defense comes from perma-cripple (earth-Glyph of Elemental Power), vigor and focus skills.

It lacks the self-heal and mobility that makes D/D bunkers tick, though, relying on range, some snares and the heavily defensive earth set on S/F instead.

I think accepting one or two boons won’t be too much of a problem; boon hate’s currently fairly limited.

That said, my build melts pretty heavily under group pressure, being almost entirely single-target. It’s certainly not bunker.

While Air XI is a terrible trait, you’re suggesting removing something that affects any weapon set for something that affects a single skill in a single attunement on a single weapon.

RTL was intended as a gap closer. ANet are trying to force that. If you want a skill for running away, there’s still FGS (Fiery Whirl, Rush) and Conjure Flame Axe (Burning Retreat, Flame Leap), Fire 3 (Burning Speed) Mist Form, Lightning Flash and RTL on a nerfed cooldown. That’s still far more running-away capability than most professions can have access to at one time.

And if you’re not using RTL as a running-away skill, you’re not going to be affected by the change – the cooldown is still 20 seconds as long as you hit someone.

However, elementalists are in the unique case where the class mechanic stat is the main draw of the line for most builds, which suggests Attunement Recharge Rate is too valuable compared to other class’s mechanic stats.

IMO:

1) Buff the 5 point minors for Earth, Fire and Air (Fire and Air need to be useful at least – and it’d be decent if all 4 were party-wide buffs like soothing mists)
2) Remove attunement recharge rate. Replace it with “Lingering Elements Duration”; 30 points makes it last, say, 10 seconds total (with the 5 seconds from the 15 minor)
3) Have the cooldown reduction traits reduce a single attunement’s recharge to the current value at 30 Arcana (So: “Pyromancer’s Alacrity: All your fire weapon skills recharge 20% faster. Fire Attunement recharges 60% faster.”)

There goes half the necessity for Arcana while still keeping it useful in its own way.

The issue there is what happens if they get rid of D/D bunkers by making a better bunker still… when other professions already complain so much about D/D.

What they could do is move some heals from traits to weapon skills on S/F and staff. Change the water effect of Evasive Arcana to a different skill, then give Staff or S/F a new 1:1 heal on a skill or buff a heal they already have. Something like that. A sidegrade for Staff or S/F healing, but a downgrade for D/D (and making Evasive Arcana less useful would also push us towards builds without 30 in Arcana!)

The problem with what they’re doing now is quite often their bigger changes affect all weapon types. That water XI trait that gives condition removal on applying regen? That’ll nerf the condition removal of Staff Water 5 from 8 conditions removed to 6, because the removal on that is once per 3 seconds. Evasive Arcana’s nerf hit the weapons that weren’t overpowered as bunkers due to the extra healing.

RTL’s nerf is actually ANet forcing us to use the skill as intended (a gap closer for a melee range weapon set). Updraft is supposed to be the avoidance on offhand Dagger Air. I’d suppose the kind of skills D/D should get for mobility would be things like thief S/D flanking strike (avoiding damage while staying within range), but ANet don’t want Ele to feel like Thief.

Edit: Also, a water field on focus could be good, but I think Comet’s already a blast finisher; ANet have stated they don’t want a single weapon to have both a field and a finisher in one attunement. Maybe shatterstone could be replaced with a water field of some sort though, as it’s pretty useless.

BlackBeard.2873:

Dingle.2743:

I imagine that the intended role for D/D on ele was “DPS supported by mobility”, but the majority of D/D builds have turned that into “Bunker supported by mobility”.

If you look at the skills it’s fairly obvious that S/F was supposed to be our bunker weapon set (every single Focus skill has defensive usages; Scepter has less but still 2 blinds and Rock Barrier, area denial and ranged attacks); unfortunately avoidance/healing trumps damage reduction and as a result players are using D/D for bunker.

ANet are trying to push us towards using the weapons how they intended them to be used, which seems to just be revealing that D/D isn’t good at its intended purpose and is in fact better at S/F’s purpose than S/F is; whether the changes will make S/F actually the better bunker option I can’t say.

So then why are they nerfing the D/D mobility rather than the healing. If they want D/D to be inferior bunkers, then they should cut down on the bunker-ability (primarily the healing). Instead they are forcing D/D into being slow bunkers as you don’t have mobility to trade-off healing for.

The only D/D healing they can nerf without touching any other weapon set is Cone of Cold, which isn’t even a major part of D/D’s bunkerage; even with that they already nerfed Cleansing Wave to half heal in sPvP (and this also affected evasive arcana and thus other weapon sets). They can nerf the signet as well, which they… also are, if I recall correctly during the SOTG stream they mentioned fixing all of the non-skills healing with signet (i.e. dodge, attunement swaps shouldn’t be triggering it)

That leaves nerfing the mobility. It’s the only real option they have to make D/D a worse bunker than S/F.

Remember that most of the healing D/D gets comes from traits, and changing those will also affect every other weapon set; if their aim is D/D = DPS, S/F = Bunker, they can’t touch traits so heavily.

Bloodlust at 25 stacks is 250 power. The value of 250 power depends on how much power you have without it. If you somehow have gear with no power at all, and no power from traits, it’d be over 25% damage increase. If you have as much power as possible from gear/traits/food, it’s about 10%, and with 25 stacks of might drops down to about 8%.

Superior Force is a flat 5% increase, but doesn’t rely on killstacking to get the bonus. And of course there’s the option of using Bloodlust on one weapon set, stacking up the bonus, and then swapping to a weapon set with Force until you get downed.

Tagus Eleuthera.7305:

09. WvW exclusive skins

-I love WvW, but there’s no reward. Server pride is moderately fun for a while, but ultimately there’s nothing tying you to the people who just so happen to play on the same server as you. There needs to be rewards for doing WvW to get people interested. I’d love to wear a helmet or body piece that was WvW exclusive and displayed my accomplishments.

There is an armor set already that is only acquired through WvW badges

No WvW weapons, but armor exists. I actually kinda like the medium set. WvW weapons and backpiece would be good, though.

I imagine that the intended role for D/D on ele was “DPS supported by mobility”, but the majority of D/D builds have turned that into “Bunker supported by mobility”.

If you look at the skills it’s fairly obvious that S/F was supposed to be our bunker weapon set (every single Focus skill has defensive usages; Scepter has less but still 2 blinds and Rock Barrier, area denial and ranged attacks); unfortunately avoidance/healing trumps damage reduction and as a result players are using D/D for bunker.

ANet are trying to push us towards using the weapons how they intended them to be used, which seems to just be revealing that D/D isn’t good at its intended purpose and is in fact better at S/F’s purpose than S/F is; whether the changes will make S/F actually the better bunker option I can’t say.

1) Condition Cap – Limiting the combined dps of a group of builds to something that a single player can reach, no matter how many players using that build are present, should not happen. Whether it’s fixed by removing the cap, giving players personal caps or something else entirely, it should be dealt with so a player’s effectiveness is not reduced simply because somebody else is running a similar build.

2) More gameplay options should become available as the character levels. Right now we’re effectively playing the same game from 30 to 40, then we get master traits, then it’s the same game from 40 to 60 for GM traits, and then it never really changes and we just get the ability to choose more options at once, not new options. Add in that everything past level 30 is passive, and it feels pretty stale. Maybe we could have something like unlocking new weapons for each class via some sort of personal instance at higher levels, or gaining swappable skills for the weapons we have (but ANet don’t want to do the latter because weapons are easier to balance with just one fixed skill set…)

3) Underwater combat. There are traits that don’t work, no weapon set variety whatsoever, targetting can be buggy as well as camera issues (a chase camera that automatically follows targets in relation to the player position would be a godsend, especially with autotarget dropping targets if they’re not on screen when you attack…). Underwater combat needs at least 1 more weapon set per class so you don’t know all 10 of a character’s weapon skills just from their class, and more traits that benefit underwater weapons similar to the ones warriors get, plus an option to have separate traits underwater for when a build really doesn’t work there entirely.

Sigil of Fire is nothing other than raw damage, no fields. According to the wiki, it also can’t crit, so you’re looking at an extra 1000 or so damage every 5-6 seconds. The AoE radius is roughly the same as the blast radius from Fireball.

You’re looking at around a 10% damage bonus from bloodlust (before might), if you can maintain the stacks, so if 10% of your damage output over 6 seconds is more than 1k, bloodlust will be better if you can keep the stacks. If 10% of your damage output doesn’t beat that, Sigil of Fire would have a higher overall damage output (and not rely on you not being downed).

As another option, it’s fairly common for elementalists to run a Sigil of Energy, which grants 50% of your endurance on attunement swap (once every 9 seconds); that’s a free dodge on demand. Whether that’s worthwhile for you is up to you; it won’t increase your DPS but it will increase your not-being-killed abilities.

I do mostly the same run, but instead of digging your spot 6, I dig the spot at the end of the worm tunnel (20 baubles in a spot after you land)

With the 20 baubles that are kinda hard to miss in zone 1 and the 15 baubles from the boss chest, this gets to about 245 baubles per run of zone 1/2, and the remaining 5 are generally covered by extras picked up here and there (such as the 2 right at the start of zone 3, and the ones I get inside the wormhole which I don’t count towards my stable total because I don’t always hit the same ones and don’t go to any effort to pick them up)

6 runs done so far today. I got lucky and found 3 skins (GS, Staff and Sword); 2 more runs to go, but I’m doing those when I wake up later.

Glyph of Elemental Power really wants a build around it to work best (cooldown reduction, condition duration at the minimum). Glyph of Storms is viable as a damage output option.

Most people run some form of cantrips as stun breakers will save your life. I tend towards Cleansing Fire even without a cantrip build.

Turkashi.4502:

Dingle.2743:

Less so for water and air attunement, though a water-specific build could work for underwater combat… which is so little of the game that it’s more or less worthless, but as a thought experiment it seems like it could be interesting.

I’m a bit confused, you mean watter trait is specialized in underwater fight? O_o If that’s the case what you said, then if quit wrong. Water trait is more for healing, remove cond, more vit, cantrip empowerment, …

And tbh, I know some build for air and water only ;-)

example the epic hammer build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQFAWhMmMbsRAxjDA0DoEUIwASGWgBA-e
reason why you stay in water here: you can’t cast much skill except the hammer skill. So staying in water gives you that little extra healing (and to teams).

I’m talking very, very specifically about underwater combat, where water is actually the highest DPS attunement for elementalists (ever landed a full Tidal Wave by trapping an enemy against a wall/floor with the sink skill on 4?), and some of the better traits used in 0/x/x/30/30 builds simply don’t work (no evasive arcana underwater, healing on trident is very limited, no water fields for blast finishers so healing power ends up being neutered).

The problem is optimising it requires a completely different build to anything most eles use on land, which is why I made mention of it being worthless – generally we spend so little time underwater that changing entire trait set-ups just to make our lives easier there is a waste of time. We’re talking maybe a build like this , which would be very good DPS underwater but be terrible in most land-based combat without conjures.

…ok, so I made that before looking at the build you linked. Conjure builds don’t meet most newbies’ preconceptions of being able to stay in a single element, as they tend to revolve around the water element while using the lightning hammer. Heh.

Perhaps critical damage as a flat boost instead of a multiplier, so a GS would have:

179 power
119 precision
119 critical damage

And have the stat work as follows:
Final damage = ((Damage Coefficient * Power * Weapon damage) + (Damage Coefficient * Critical Damage)) * (trait multipliers, base crit damage %, etc)

So, taking some numbers from the wiki, let’s use the Elementalist skill “Fireball”. Fireball has a damage coefficient of 0.85 according to the wiki page, which means the formula for Fireball on a crit is:
Attack Damage = (0.85 * Power * Random value in weapon damage range/enemy armor) * (Misc Modifiers) * (1.5 + Crit Damage%)

Our new formula at 1000 crit damage would be:
Attack Damage = ((0.85 * Power * Rand. in weapon range/enemy armor) + (0.85 * 1000)) * (Misc) * 1.5
So 1000 crit damage adds a flat 850 * 1.5 = 1275 damage to the fireball skill

Perhaps rebalance the numbers as necessary and/or move crit damage to being the last thing calculated so it’s not affected by multipliers, but the idea is that crit damage is no longer a multiplier itself so it won’t break the game as much; instead it’s now bonus damage that effectively ignores enemy armor (which is something you’d expect a critical hit to do!)

Edit: For reference, if crit damage was changed to have the same stat total as precision on ’zerker gear, a full exotic+ascended set + 30 in crit damage trait line would be worth around 1.1k of it max, so adding an average of 550 (or 825 if allowed to be multiplied by base crit) damage to someone with a 50% crit rate on an attack with a coefficient of 1.0; this seems fair enough, as power as a secondary stat would add a similar, maybe slightly lower amount of damage without requiring anything else unlike crit damage requiring precision.

Leo G.4501:

Can’t Rock Solid let you break stuns (earth trait that grants stability upon attuning to earth)? If they just made the Earth line a bit better, that could be a viable answer right there. 10sec cooldown stunbreaker. Go wild with your utilities from there

Stability itself isn’t a stun breaker, it merely makes you immune to stun effects. Rock Solid only grants stability and not a stun break, and any player in PvP is going to know not to use CC during the extremely short stability period if they spot it (and most CC abilities don’t have a long enough tell to use it reactively, either)

Right now it’s very weak for a grand master trait, and I’d support it becoming a stun breaker as well at the least.

My girlfriend’s getting a new laptop in a week or so, and we’re buying her Guild Wars 2 in advance due to the sale. I’m certain she’s going to meet the system requirements for it with that laptop, however:

The computer she’s using at the moment has a graphics card with only 128MB of dedicated video RAM – the store page says the game requires 256MB but I’m wondering if the game would at least install and run, even badly and on minimum settings? We’re really hoping she’ll get to see the Super Adventure Box before it disappears, because she certainly won’t be getting her new laptop before the end of April.

We’ll end up finding out tomorrow anyways, but I’d like to know sooner rather than after she’s already downloaded the game.

While for the most part I can agree with everyone that attunement switching can be very useful, it is possible to trait an elementalist so that optimum DPS is achieved simply by never leaving either fire or earth attunement.

Less so for water and air attunement, though a water-specific build could work for underwater combat… which is so little of the game that it’s more or less worthless, but as a thought experiment it seems like it could be interesting.

However, you should take care to at least learn what every attunement on your weapon is capable of – even if you build your ele so staying in fire is the best option for DPS, the other attunements all offer unique utility and survival abilities.

I’ll put it more or less as Josh Foreman has said elsewhere:

Using the bauble bubbles in future SAB expansions is what he wants to do, but he can’t make any promises. It’s more likely that not, at any rate.

The single strongest attack the build uses deals so little damage Fire’s Embrace will never add more than 20 damage; on the other hand extending the burn from Signet of Fire allows for not requiring the Signet on CD and getting some benefit from the +90 precision passive effect (as this build gets burning, bleeding and vigor on crit, a 4% higher crit rate has more meaning than 5% damage on Stone Shards, which has a base damage of 50)

I was also considering the “Signets give Fire Aura” trait, but as we shouldn’t be in melee range to begin with, it’s a little hard to justify. That said, a D/F version of the build could make use of Written in Stone with Signet of Restoration and give the Fire Aura on signet trait some more use. D/F would be slightly less stable and slightly longer bleed ramp time, with less defensive 2/3 abilities, which is why I’m not running it, but could be useful with Sig of Restoration (and have some small AoE radius on the main attack)

Or rather:

Equipment drops are generally scaled to within 5 levels of your character, but have a chance of not being scaled. Chests will also have a chance of giving scaled gemstones/gear upgrade items like medallions.

All other loot is level-appropriate to the area.

xbaunx.6438:

That’s pretty much exactly how I run only I don’t use glyphs because I feel that my single target damage ramps up pretty slow and I need the burn/CC that running 3 signets provides. I also eat Rare Veggie Pizza for +condition damage and +40% condition duration.

A lot of players will look at a bleed build and point out that it is ineffective in dungeons & against champions where there are other players attacking the target. This is because bleeds hit the cap very fast and it rules out your major damage source. This problem has not been happening to me much because I think a lot of players know about that limitation and therefore don’t run bleed intensive builds in those situations.

However, there is an answer to the bleed limitation for when it does happen. This answer also applies to the question of how can we damage structures. All I do is slot Arcane Power in place of signet of air or signet of water (whichever you are running). This ability allows your next 5 attacks to crit. Come up with a nice burst rotation that allows you to hit 5 high damage skills in a row. This is where having 3 other attunements comes in to play. Pop it and go through your burst rotation when bleeds are capped or when you are facing a structure.

When bleed damage is discussed I hear a lot of players referring to the ability to stack 25 bleeds as the most desirable goal of a bleed build. I have a question here.

Is it better to hit a stack of 25 for a small amount of time (say 4-5 seconds) or to be able to maintain a stack of 20 permanently with a 12 second bleed duration and zero cooldown?

Firstly, Glyph of Elemental Power in my build can provide semi-permanent burning, just pop it in fire attunement, and as a plus effect, it’ll affect enemies caught in AoE just fine.

Secondly, structures can’t be critted.

Thirdly, my build does run Rare Veggie Pizza (well, I actually run Super Veggie Pizza because Rare Veggie Pizza doesn’t hit any break points in duration and 10 more condition damage doesn’t add 1 damage per tick to bleeding and Super Veggie Pizza is cheaper…), and hits 25 bleed stacks constantly (21 permanent stacks from Stone Shards with a 14 second bleed duration, and regularly Sigil of Earth covers the rest of the stack – 30% proc rate on hit, 12 second bleeds, 3 hits every 2 seconds). CC comes from cripple and Glyph of Elementals.

And yes, spiking to 25 bleeds is generally desirable because it rarely if ever prevents the ability to maintain a stable group of bleed stacks regardless, and 5 more stacks would be 20% more damage for that time. But if you can hit 25 permanent stacks… even better.