Guild Wars 2

I’d just like to chime in as you guys are discussing bleed builds on an Ele; I recently mad my own build and posted it in these forums. The most recent state that I actually run is here: Linky

I’m reaching up to 25 stacks of bleeding with ease, with permanent burning on anything without condition removal, permanent cripple, and almost permanent poison and weakness (the last two are Asura-only; Radiation field is amazing for condi builds) That means around 3.3k damage per second, and 33% healing reduction, 50% move speed reduction and 25% overall dps reduction on my target.

Playing that way never needs to leave earth attunement. there is also an option to run Glyph of Storms instead of Signet of Fire; in that scenario I cast Glyph of Power in fire attunement and then switch to earth, giving the earth-mode Glyph of Storms burning potential, as well as the bleeds and blinds it already stacks (radiation field also gets this bonus). That brings some level of AoE to the build.

A bleed build is also potentially effective on Staff as Eruption has a large amount of long duration bleed stacks; this allows for AoE bleeding but takes longer to reach the bleed cap (it can reach it without Sigil of Earth, however). That might be more appropriate to group play, however; staff’s self defense skills in earth are nowhere near as good kitten F.

Dagger’s kind of a midpoint here – using Sigil of Earth, it can reach the bleed cap in around 18-20 seconds (compared to staff ~20 and S/F ~14) but the AoE is smaller than staff, and the defensive capabilities are less than scepter. However, it’s more accurate than staff in PvP and has a high enough cast rate for Signet of Restoration to be useful – especially considering it’d be possible to run Written in Stone and have the Signet’s active cast effect. I haven’t tested it to see if it’s really usable, though.

Serrated stones isn’t necessary for any weapon except dagger to reach the bleed cap, and even with dagger you’ll get close. Which is good, because the bleed duration from Serrated Stones isn’t reflected in the tooltip and it can be hard to work out if it’s actually reaching a breakpoint in duration.

Some of the biggest bosses are quoted as scaling up to 100 players (shatterer I believe is the one quoted as doing this on the wiki, but the other dragon bosses likely do as well). It feels like these zones actually go into overflow before 100 players are actively joining in the event anyways, which means that the limit of scaling here is probably a good point to stop it at.

The majority of events only scale to 10 players or so, which is very likely what is happening to the jungle wurm, even though it’s a group event. Some collection events seem to scale nearly infinitely in order to allow any player passing by to participate, though in some cases this makes the event take far longer with more players around.

However, we have 2 things to note
1) ArenaNet have been working on updating scaling mechanics, as seen in Orr temple events and the Claw of Jormag fight in recent updates. These may propagate to other major events in the future.
2) They’re planning on fixing the Ancient Jungle Wurm very soon, likely in this month’s update.

My current total as of tonight is as follows:

Bank
1163 bauble bubbles
1 Super Staff
1 Longbow
1 Shortbow
3 Swords
5 Shields
1 Greatsword

Spent
50 bubbles: Staff for my elementalist
50 bubbles: Scepter for my elementalist
25 bubbles: Backpack for my elementalist’s staff build
25 bubbles: Backpack for my elementalist’s scepter build
1 Greatsword, sold on TP

In other words:
1313 bauble bubbles, 13 skins. My personal drop rate is slightly higher than 1/50 (I’m averaging 7 bubbles per run due to picking up 250 baubles minimum in my route)

I can post a screenshot of my bank sometime tomorrow, when I wake up.

Edit: Here’s images for everyone

I think guardians need a viable condition spec, if only because they can’t -not- burn things, and I’d rather they can have a viable condition spec so it’s not a feel bad moment whenever they get in the way of a condition player simply because they can’t turn off Signet of Justice entirely. Fixing the condition cap might help with this, but having a class mechanic that’s not worth building around because the class has little support for other conditions is sucky.

Elementalists need some major relocation of traits to encourage build variety away from 0/0/10/30/30, and probably an overhaul to the attunement recharge mechanic, such as making the default recharge time 9 seconds, removing the lingering elements minor trait and using that effect as the profession stat for the Arcana line (and then buffing other attunement bonuses to make arcana a viable-but-not-completely-necessary match with any attunement and not just water in this scenario). Oh, and also general buffs to air and water attunement attacks in order to make builds that want to stick in those viable (it’s possible to make pve-viable fire or earth builds, but they’re just not fully pvp-viable right now due to all the best defensive traits requiring full water/arcana)

On a general all-round thing, signets and raw stat bonus traits/abilities need rebalancing so they’re not better at lower levels than higher levels; they give too much of a sense of being good and mislead new players. It can be hard to convince a signet warrior that the build that was quite honestly OP when they started using it at level 20 is terrible at level 80, simply because they’re used to it being good and don’t realise the effectiveness drops off significantly as they level up.

ThiBash.5634:

Wasn’t there a rune that increased the effectiveness of swiftness slightly?

Superior Rune of Speed; + 25/50/90 vitality, 20% swiftness duration, 5% chance to gain swiftness for 30 seconds when hit, 5% increased speed during swiftness.

I’m not sure if 38% movement speed is worth it, but it exists.

Adastra.9821:

The major drawbacks of bringing condition builds to a dungeon are always going to be burns stacking duration and bleeds stacking to 25 unless you coordinate your group to use mostly, if not all, direct damage skills. Having a guardian or another elementalist in the party is going to decrease the burn uptime by quite a bit. In a party, you already regularly see ~10-15 stacks of bleeds on bosses and permanent burn.

This is an issue with condition builds, yes, but ANet have confirmed that they’re working on this. Having a viable build available when that time comes will speed up the process of getting an optimal build (I’m not going to claim this is optimal now, but it’s certainly viable if the environment shifts to enable conditions)

Adastra.9821:

In 1v1, it would still suffer from the problem of having no stun breakers, low hp, and reliance on earth attunement for damage. You yourself can be vulnerable to condition damage if you use your earth4 to reflect leaving only phoenix. You lose half your dps as soon as you leave earth to heal. You’d have to swap out pretty quickly unless you burn your earth4/5 cds right off the bat. It would absolutely destroy anyone without condition removals or CC though. I can see this doing particularly well against most warriors and mesmers. Rangers would seem to pose a problem because of your lack of CC and they can make use of the spring to remove conditions and burst heal.

This is mostly right. It’s possible to opt out of Radiation Field to provide room for a stun breaker (radiation field provides about 6.25% of total damage output, but the healing reduction and weakness are strong utility. Most players, however, would step out of it before they stack high), though that would bring the total unique conditions down to 3 and be easier to deal with.

Theoretically the build works with Staff as well, which provides enough bleeds to hit cap without Sigil of Earth (and also in an AoE), but takes longer to ramp up to the cap and naturally eruption is nigh-impossible to land in PvP. It also has less defensive options, having only magnetic aura, which is essentially a weaker magnetic wave with a longer cooldown unless you have powerful auras… lasts a little longer, though it’s actually visible to players. That last part could be important for Magnetic Wave – because the only visual indicator is a very shortlived and uncommon buff icon, it’s likely players won’t realise it’s there and keep using projectile attacks.

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Cymatoperior.5942:

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Cymatoperior.5942:

Condition damage such as burning and bleeding means you can do damage while you are dodging or running away. So in terms of actual dps you can actually do more than a zerk build where you hit a few times and run/dodge most of the time or stay dead.

Not really, no.
All that time you’re spending dodging is time you aren’t applying conditions. Your immediate dps may not take much of a hit, but your long-term dps is still dropping just as badly as a direct damage build will.

I play an earth staff elementalist. I press skill 2 twice and run far away. Never failed any fotm before. Max 1.5 hours.

And you’re losing damage that you could be dealing by switching to Fire and pressing 3. You are losing damage because you aren’t attacking. Ele staff isn’t a very good example of a condition weapon anyway since only a few skills apply damaging conditions, none of them autoattacks. Compare to an actual condition damage weapon like Necro Scepter. If you aren’t attacking constantly you’re losing damage because you aren’t applying more conditions. Stopping WILL cut your long-term dps.

Switching to Fire and pressing 3 costs at least 2 casts of Earth 2; fire scales to the point that one stack of fire is worth around 5 bleeds. Staff Earth 2 deals 6 bleeds, so missing even one cast of it to gain burning would reduce DPS.

Staff can be used as an effective bleed weapon – the bleeds can last over 26 seconds in a dedicated build, and Eruption can be traited down to 4.75 second cooldown, which means just casting Eruption on cooldown hits the stack cap easily (even without traiting for earth cooldown reduction, a stable 24 stacks can be achieved). As an Asura, add in Radiation Field with Stoning’s 100% projectile finisher, and you’ve got decent AoE Poison/Bleeding; burning could be found in Signet of Fire (permanent single target burn) or using Glyph of Elemental Power in fire attunement before initiating combat, as well as the Burning Precision trait if running Rabid or Rampager gear (if running Signet of Fire, add in Glyph of Elemental Power for permanent cripple anyways, and of course our auto-attack would be permanent weakness on top of that)

I wouldn’t use it in PvP because of how hilariously easy Eruption is to dodge, but it could be effective in PvE. A full DoT condition damage output is roughly 4k damage per second, and staff could potentially hit that on groups of mobs – I’d say the only reason it isn’t a popular choice is because it limits the character to only staying in earth (and of course all the inherent problems with conditions anyways…)

Glyph of Elemental Power: The buff appears to do nothing if applied while Lingering Elements is active

The only speed stacking I can think of is one necromancer trait that gives speed bonuses when equipped with a dagger; it stacks with itself if dual-wielding. Maybe the ele dagger trait does the same.

Unfortunately, move speed bonuses simply grant the biggest bonus available and disregard the rest.

I wouldn’t suggest getting One With Air; ele has no weapons which should ever stick in air for that long; it’s counter-productive as air is generally worse at damage than fire, even though it’s supposed to be the single-target DPS attunement. Most staff and D/D builds can achieve permanent swiftness, I’d look into that instead.

Staff ele will bring 2 fire fields, 2 water fields, 1 ice field and 1 lightning field. Dagger and Focus only have fire fields, Scepter has no fields. Trident has fire, lightning and smoke fields. Conjure Lightning Hammer gives access to a lightning field.

All land weapons except mainhand dagger have at least one blast finisher; staff, dagger and scepter all have projectile finishers (staff’s got a 100% projectile finisher as an auto-attack). Dagger has a leap finisher. Every conjured weapon has at least one combo finisher, but I’m not gonna list all of those here.

Support-wise, ele bring some of the game’s best healing (numerous instant cast AoE heals with decent scaling, lots of party regen and condition removal), and plenty of boon support, especially in the form of might and again regen (but also swiftness and protection, and in an aura build fury). They also have a lot of snares to slow mobs down, access to blinding on every weapon except dagger and access to weakness and vulnerability; also every combo field and finisher already mentioned is generally useful for support. We can also build for aura sharing, which is something no other class can do, but most auras are pretty short-lived

Most elementalist utility skills are focused around self protection or damage output. The only utilities we have which help party members are arcane wave (blast finisher), conjures and a few which snare mobs. Everything else we have is selfish. Elementalist party support comes from weapon skills and traits, for the most part.

This has tested fairly nicely in open world PvE so far; running the build in my last post has actually enabled me to solo certain melee champions in Orr. Gotta love permanent cripple + 80% vigor. Having that much to keep away from mobs while maintaining 3k damage per second is pretty nice.

I’m yet to take this into WvW or a dungeon, but there are some bosses that it may perform well against (bosses with primarily melee range attacks), and some builds are likely to be very weak against this (e.g. warriors without a strong ranged weapon set). Having 15% uptime on projectile reflection and 10% uptime on obsidian flesh will probably help in situations where cripple + vigor isn’t enough for full damage reduction.

No/weak AoE means it’s not so good for zerg scenarios, but it should perform well in 1v1.

I managed to get it to work and it is just being weird. I gues the game just gives up working out what attunement you’re in if lingering elements is active, because I can switch attunements and have the glyph work normally if I don’t have 15 in arcana. Well, it applies the new attunement’s effect if I switch before it finishes. With Lingering Elements it simply did nothing.

I… also heavily changed the build to a version with only 10 points in arcana and none in water, resulting in this

I heavily invested in fire and earth to reach the next 2 second breakpoint for stone shards, which enables a stable 21 stacks of bleeding, plus the critbleeds from Sigil of Earth results in nigh-permanent 25 stacks (the bleed readout says 13 seconds but should be 14 seconds according to the numbers… which may mean I’ve hit the condition duration cap). This frees up the slot that Glyph of Storms is in, although that glyph is still useful in AoE situations with Glyph of Elemental Power.

I actually initially replaced Glyph of Storms with Glyph of Elemental Power, because I was using Signet of Fire at the time. Signet of Fire lets me maintain permanent burning with just that and Burning Precision, so I decided to use Glyph of Elemental Power for the cripple effect. This has resulted in something… quite defensive, while still having a full condition output.

Defensively, it has 3k armor while channeling with Rock Barrier active, around 80% uptime on vigor (1 dodge per 6 seconds or so), 20 sec cooldown on Magnetic Wave (strong condi removal, projectile reflect), 40 sec cooldown on Obsidian Flesh, permanent or close to permanent cripple and an elite elemental, which will likely be a tanky earth elemental. Oh, and heavy condi removal from Ether Renewal, which is likely to be cast while Obsidian Flesh is active.

Offensively, permanent 25 bleed stacks, burning and poison, with about 1.6k condition damage.

Edit: Some testing shows that radiation field can trigger Glyph of Elemental Power. I just killed a level 80 Dolyak with a single utility skill that deals no direct damage. The pulses are infrequent enough that it doesn’t always trigger any burning at all, though.

Edit2: actually, radiation field does have some direct damage, it’s just not listed in the tooltip and may be mistaken for the poison ticks.

Adastra seems to think otherwise, so I ran another test on Glyph of Elemental Power.

I turned off any traits that might give me burning for any reason, fired off the Glyph in Fire attunement, swapped to water for the ice shards attack, and waited for the Glyph to cause burning.

It didn’t. The glyph’s buff description currently reads “Chance for fire spells to cause burning”.

I’ve tried looking up if this has ever been a change in patch notes, but as far as I can tell, the glyph has never officially been changed. Either it’s always been this way and the wiki’s plain wrong on it, or ANet never told us they changed it.

Ribos.8350:

Ryuujin.8236:

You’re forgetting conditions are not purely about damage; indeed the only conditions that are pure damage sources are burning and bleeding.

Poison serves as both damage, and is a counter to healing and all other conditions don’t even deal direct damage themselves. If condition damage was equal to direct damage, then it’d be a no brainer whether to roll direct or condition – condition, obviously, because then not only do you get decent damage, you’d also get to slap your opponent silly with debuffs for the same gear set

Thus, the average DPS of conditions needs to be lower than the average DPS of direct damage sets.

It’s also worth remembering that conditions cannot “crit” mitigating the need for precision in many condition builds – so, again, conditions give you all the bang for only 1 stat (condition damage), Vs direct damage which usually needs to be tempered with precision AND power

Condition builds may not NEED precision, but they can get slightly whacked into forcing the issue. Engis and Necros both share c.damage and precision in the same trait lines, and everyone has to go into their power lines if they want condition duration.

And, of course, all this assumes the traits that benefit your condition build are even in those lines in the first place… with all this, there’s a lot of pressure to NOT focus on condition builds and opt for power/precision. Which I think is a bit lame. Why not put condition duration and damage in the same line, at least for necros?

Adding to that, most classes have traits which deal with adding some form of condition on critical hits, and then there’s the Sigil of Earth. Crits are far from simply being damage bonuses in this game, as just about any class can build in such a way that they have benefits related to other stats as well.

Case in point, I’ve got an elementalist running Burning Precision (fire trait; 33% chance of burning on crit), sigil of earth (30% chance of bleeding on crit; 2 sec CD) and renewing stamina (100% chance of 5 seconds of vigor on crit; 5 sec CD). It regularly reaches permanent vigor, burning and 22-25 stacks of bleeding, but only does that because I’ve got high precision stats on it, resulting in a 50% crit rate.

Other classes can do similar things. Warriors, rangers, engineers and necromancers can all get bleeding on critical hits, though it’s not very useful on rangers/necromancers due to short duration. Mesmers get bleeding when their illusions crit. Thieves and Guardians are the only professions that get no direct benefit to condition damage output from precision, which is really surprising in the case of thieves, but less so for guardians, who only seem to be capable of burning things.

The biggest issue with condition vs direct damage is that while we both benefit from crit in most cases, direct damage benefits a lot more in terms of raw damage. Condition builds get a -chance- of an extra 1-8 second bleed which may not even add 50% to the final damage of the attack. Direct damage gets a flat 50% which can be further increased by a common gear stat; condition duration requires dedicated rune, sigil and food slots to be used and has a series of breakpoints. For example, my elementalist needs 16.66% condition duration to get any more damage out of Stone Shards, any less is meaningless… and sometimes a condition build can reach the point where any more is also meaningless. Direct damage has the luxury of 1% always being better than 2% and so on forever.

And then there’s the condition cap, which hardcaps condition damage. But last we heard, ANet are working on something for that.

sostronk.8167:

Not that I disagree with you, but just pointing out that condition duration stats are available on armor. Search for Giver’s.

Giver’s armor gives boon duration. Only Giver’s weapons give condition duration. A total of 20% between MH/OH or 2H.

Condition damage is more or less capped at the moment. Damage over time caps out at about 4k per second, if a character can maintain full bleeding, burning and poison, while fully traited in their condition damage line, using condition damage food and sigil of corruption, with condition damage as main stat on all gear.

Berserker damage varies on class, but generally gets as high if not higher, while having no ramp up time for building bleed stacks. Especially when you consider how many damage multipliers most classes can trait into that don’t affect condition damage at all (warrior can get up to 40% damage bonus or so from traits, but those same traits will never affect their bleed output, for example)

Would kill for traits like “your bleeding deals 10% more damage”.

ThiBash.5634:

The concept seems viable and if anything, I commend you for trying something different.

One thing you may or may not have thought about, is that earth scepter 2 combines pretty well with radiation field. The result will be 5 seconds of extra poison. To ensure optimal use of poison, the key is to combo with the radiation field as much as possible.

Another option could be to use Sigil of Doom on your weapon. Since eles swap attunements fairly often, this could provide a good chunk of poison to your build.

I hadn’t thought too much about earth scepter 2, but that definitely works fairly well. Stone Shards should have a similar effect in the downtime.

The idea with this is to stick to earth attunement as much as possible, so it won’t get much benefit out of Sigil of Doom; also, sigil cooldowns are global, so it would interfere with Sigil of Earth.

xbaunx.6438:

That’s just a quick summary of how I did it, I won’t get further into it because I find that mine just didn’t really work out. The problem that I could never resolve was that my setup was entirely limited to single target. There are far too many situations where single target DoT is just not sufficient for a conditions build.

I’d love to run it though, so if you find that your build works out after testing please let us know!

With mine, single target should be somewhat alleviated; Glyph of Elemental Power’s internal cooldown is on a per-target basis, meaning it should be constantly burning anything caught in my incidental AoE effects, which will likely include Glyph of Storms, Radiation Field and Dust Devil, Sigil of Earth will similarly occasionally bleed additional targets and Radiation Field will help maintain poison.

The hard part’s going to be learning to play it.

Annnnd the glyph only functions while in fire attunement; it stops applying burning when in any other attunement and doesn’t even start applying the condition for the new attunement. Gonna have to rethink a few things. Edit: The wiki and skill tooltip don’t mention anything about the glyph only functioning while you stay in the attunement it was cast in. Really annoying.

How to play

In theory:
1) Initiate encounter in Fire attunement
2) Pop Glyph of Elemental Power (Must be in fire when we cast this or it won’t cause burning)
3) (Optional) Use any skills from fire that cause burning (Flamewall and Fire aura are both appropriate with offhand focus, as is offhand dagger’s Ring of Fire)
4) Attune to Earth
5) Drop Glyph of Storms to accelerate initial bleed stacks
6) Spam Stone Shards
7) (Optional) Cast Rock Barrier at any point for the bonus toughness

Use any of the following on cooldown if appropriate: Glyph of (Lesser) Elementals, Signet of Fire (if opponent is not burning, else keep for precision bonus), Radiation Field. If you have Cleansing Fire, use it when necessary. Try to aim dodges towards opponents for the additional bleeds and burns (unless in water attunement, of course)

When Glyph of Elemental Power expires, switch out of earth to any other attunement (likely water to quickly heal up). Switch to fire (if not already in it) once the GoEP’s recharged and start over. Glyph of Storms has a longer cooldown and may cast later with each rotation during long fights.

During fights, this build should start out burning things and quickly ramp up to 20-25 stacks of bleeding (+poison for Asura characters), but have a brief lull during the period when not in earth attunement. Sigil of Earth should help maintain some level of bleeds at all times, however.

Theoretical DPS output is somewhere around 100 damage per second per bleed stack (2500 with 25 stacks), 600 damage per second for burning and 200 damage per second if an asura and using Radiation field. That’s around 3k-3.3k damage per second before factoring in the (weak) direct damage, which doesn’t sound too bad for a build with a small amount of defensive stats.

I ended up staying up to long thinking about this and it may not be the best build in the world, but it looks like it should be relatively solid. The biggest weakness appears to be lack of AoE damage, as Stone Shards is single target, so once the Glyph of Storms/Radiation Field expires, we have no further AoE for a while. Anyways, thanks for reading this far, feel free to leave comments and let me know if you try it out and it works.

Remaining traits

Cleansing Wave (Water V): The only water trait that’s significant for this build in the Adept and Master traits; damage multipliers won’t affect conditions, and the other traits affect skills we won’t be using. Water’s been taken to 15 purely for Healing Ripple and Soothing Mists.
Evasive Arcana (Arcana XI): This build benefits heavily from the effects of this trait in fire and earth attunements, as they burn and bleed respectively. As always, water dodge is useful too.
Renewing Stamina (Arcana VI): We have 50% crit, and 30% boon duration means 1.5 seconds in which to crit in order to maintain permanent Vigor. Vigor is a nice thing, after all.
Elemental Attunement (Arcana V): More or less a staple of any build. We’re spending a lot of time in earth and may benefit more from another trait, though there aren’t many other options in the Adept or Master slots that are relevant.
Inscription (Air VIII): a 3.9 second protection boon every time we cast a glyph in earth, or 13 second regeneration if we cast one in water. Not too shabby if we run lots of glyphs.

There are 5 free trait points as there aren’t any Master traits in water worth getting with the current skill set-up. These could be spent in fire to get 5% condition duration and reduce food costs (with 5% extra condition duration, the food can be Super Veggie Pizza instead of Rare Veggie Pizza and save a fair amount of money).

Optionally a further 10 points can be removed from Air, as Inscription may not be useful for everyone. In that case, I’d personally suggest 10 in fire for Burning Precision (30% chance to burn for 1 second on crit) and 5 in earth for condition damage and the minor trait, as we’re likely to be in earth most of the time (the extra condition duration going from 5 to 10 in fire doesn’t let us reach any extra break points in bleed duration, unfortunately)

Or you could replace Inscription with Zephyr’s Focus, as Stone Shards counts as a channelled skill (essentially, we’ll have Vigor while casting it, which is most of the time – however, this renders Renewing Stamina nearly obsolete, and there isn’t much that can be used to replace it that’s relevant)

(Finished in next post)

Optional stuff
Everything else is secondary and interchangeable, but here’s my reasoning for what we have

Offhand Focus: As we’re going to be sticking in earth for the majority of the time, focus has decent defensive abilities with Magnetic Wave and Obsidian Flesh, as well as Fire Aura and Flamewall for some additional burning while we’re in fire attunement. There’s also some decent utility in water and air attunement. I’ll accept that dagger is likely viable here as well, but the earth skills for it aren’t as strong defensively and prevent casting of our main attack, where Focus’s earth skills are instant-cast

Glyph of Elemental Harmony: We’re taking glyph traits, so this has some decent synergy. Ether Renewal is viable if using a Focus, however, thanks to Obsidian Flesh (pop Obsidian Flesh for 4 seconds of invulnerability and use that time for Ether Renewal)

Sigil of Corruption: This is simply being used for the bonus condition damage; in situations where killstacking is difficult, perhaps a Sigil of Agony to extend bleed duration (and allow for lower food costs) or a Sigil of Smoldering to help maintain burning uptime instead.

Glyph of Storms: Used in earth attunement, this stacks a 2 second bleed each second (4 seconds with our bleed duration); this helps accelerate our bleeds at the start of an encounter. It also periodically blinds things, which against non-champion mobs will heavily reduce damage we take at the beginning of a fight.
Glyph of Elementals/Lesser Elementals: Just more stuff to synergize with the glyph traits, though the elite apparently doesn’t work with Inscription right now. These guys should help take the heat off of us in PvE, as this build will likely be quite squishy.

As for other potential utilities, Glyph of Lesser Elementals can be dropped; potentially for something like Cleansing Fire for stunbreak/condi removal + extra burning, or Signet of Fire (entirely for extra burning). Asura characters could even go as far as using Radiation field, which would have 6 applications of poison for 5 seconds each over 15 seconds (giving 50% uptime on poison, around 80-90% uptime on burning and potentially somewhere around 22-25 bleed stacks at all times, until the Glyph of Elemental Power expires)

The other elementalist elite skills are fairly counterproductive for this; if we want to maximize damage output, we need access to our scepter, so FGS is out; same for Tornado.

(Cont’d in next post)

Update again: Glyph of Elemental Power glitches if exposed to the Lingering Elements trait. The cast must finish while only a single attunement is active, and must be fire attunement if you want burning
Major update: Glyph of Elemental Power’s burning on hit only functions while attuned to fire, which may completely destroy the “glyph” part of this build. Currently thinking what else to do.

I’m up late and perhaps not thinking entirely correctly, but I’ve looked at the elementalist recently and wanted to try and work out a build that might make conditions work. After screwing around with a build editor for a couple hours tonight, I ended up with this (PvE/WvW-specific due to sPvP having different stats on gear and no food) build:

Build link

The core features of the build:

Mainhand Scepter: This gives us access to Stone Shards which will provide the bulk of our bleeding output
Glyph of Elemental Power: this will give us a near-constant burning effect.
100% bleed duration: With 100% bleed duration, stone shards should give us 12 second bleeds at a rate of 3 bleeds every 2 seconds. This means we should hover around 18 stacks of bleeding before considering other sources.
70% general condition duration: This will extend the burning from Glyph of Elemental Power to 5.1 seconds, so it should usually be reapplied with the next attack after it wears off. Also benefits any secondary conditions, as we’re likely to occasional cripple or chill things.
Quick Glyphs: Reduces Glyph of Elemental Power’s cooldown to 36 seconds, minimising downtime on it
Sigil of Earth: Should theoretically provide the rest of our bleed stacks, letting us hover at or near 25 full stacks
Giver’s weapons and Rare Veggie Pizza provide a major increase to our condition duration, and are important to this working. Neither is available in sPvP, so this build is limited to PvE and WvW and will be hard to test in sPvP

Due to lack of funding and only making this today, I haven’t gotten round to actually trying this out in-game yet. However, exotic rabid armor and trinkets are available at 42k karma each, so in terms of gold this should be fairly cheap to initially gear. It’s just the Giver weapons, sigils and runes that should be expensive. Giver weapons give 10% condition duration regardless of rarity, so it’s possible to grab cheap masterwork/rare ones instead; the only drawback is slightly less direct damage output and vitality. That leaves the sigils and runes as the major barrier to testing this quickly.

(Cont’d in next post)

Radiation Field is one of the best racial utilities in the game. Unfortunately, it only works well for condi builds and ele doesn’t have a strong condi build.

Most other racial skills are fairly poor. Norn Snow Leopard and Bear form can be used for running away, but as an Ele that’s covered by FGS without losing your healing/utility slots.

If you were a class with a decent condi build, I’d say asura for radiation field; mesmers might be able to get some use out of pain inverter as well, but being single target doesn’t help that much in WvW.

From what I remember, the trading post is actually a highly specialized web browser, rather than specifically being part of the game (which is why they can update it on the fly without bringing down the game). It’s… possible that it could be used to run this minigame as well. But given that the TP browser is specialized, it may not have any support for the code the minigame’s written in.

The game’s also got scripting to hijack the default web browser and open a webpage for the /wiki command; it might be possible to script an object in the game to open Rytlock’s Critter Rampage in the player’s default web browser. Not exactly playing it within the game itself, but making it possible to access it from within GW2 would mean a lot more people would get to see it; not everybody checks the website.

To answer your question, yes.

Basically, for “stacks in intensity”:
- Each stack has it’s own timer
- Stacking conditions cap at 25. If new ones are added, the oldest ones disappear

Because each stack has its own timer, duration increases of less than an entire second don’t do anything – bleed only deals damage once per second.

Conditions that stack duration are a little weird at times when it comes to damaging ones. Basically, each player adds their own burn/poison to the stack, and it operates via first in, first out (Player A burns a mob, then player B burns it; Player A’s burn will deal all of its damage before Player B’s burn starts to deal damage)

But then the duration cap is reached and I’m not sure what happens after that.

In both cases, the game will track any changes to your condition damage stat; if you gain stacks of might or swap to a weapon set without condition damage your burn/bleed/poison/confuse will deal more or less damage to match. Doesn’t… always make sense with things like bleeding. I cut you! You bleed! I magically become stronger! You bleed more for no reason at all!

Edit: You edited your post, so I’ll answer that, too.

Basically, the tooltip shows the expected total damage of that condition. The number of stacks is indicated by a number on the condition icon; in that case there isn’t a number, which means it’s just one bleed. That attack will cause a single bleed effect which lasts for 8.25 seconds, dealing damage 8 times for a total of 152 damage.

As some more information, the damage a condition deals is a fixed number, unlike direct damage which is random. The damage is based on your level and your condition damage; if your condition damage changes, even pre-existing conditions will change their damage output. So that bleed in your picture deals 19 damage per second, as would any other bleed you inflict at that condition damage and level combination.

Thanks for correcting me.

It still remains true that for about 20% more healing and more condition removal, Ether Renewal takes more than twice as long to cast, and if you take even two hits during the cast time you’re probably going to end up worse off than using the glyph, unless you’re using it primarily for the condition removal. And if used in water attunement, the total healing from Glyph will be higher, and if used in earth attunement it’ll give you 3+ seconds of protection…

Math there is… simple enough. Ether Renewal is 5000 + 1.2* healing power over 4 seconds, Glyph is 4894 + 0.75* healing power in 1.5 seconds, followed by 10+ seconds of regeneration at 130 + 0.125 * healing power each, 2 ticks brings the total multiplier before Ether Renewal finishes to 1.0 with a base of 5154 + 1.0 * healing power – this requires 770 healing power before Ether Renewal is better healing over time, and once you count in the rest of the regen ticks it’ll fall further behind.

It’s likely than an ele will have other regen sources, and if it can be more permanently achieved via other means the Glyph can still be used for Protection, which can potentially be worth more effective health than the regen (and hence even better total healing than Ether Renewal)

As for condition removal, there’s a ton of ways to trait into that, but not using those is one of the only reasons to use Ether Renewal over the glyph. At least, that’s my opinion. Those extra 2 seconds are 2 seconds I could be doing something else, and my build is giving me condition removal elsewhere (2 whenever I attune to water, 1 whenever I dodge in water, 1 whenever I use a cantrip or 4 if it’s Cleansing Fire, 1 if I cast glyph in water, 8 over 9 seconds from healing rain – so much delicious trait synergy for elementalists)

Signet’s best on a heal-stacking D/D, as the benefit from healing power on it is a larger percent of the total healing than Glyph/Ether Renewal. Scepter and Staff’s attacks are too slow to it to be worthwhile on them. Signet’s heals can’t be interrupted unless you use the active effect, which you really shouldn’t unless you seriously think you’ll die without it. Skilled opponents in pvp may be able to prevent you from healing as effectively by putting you in situations where you can’t use skills; signet is especially weak vs confusion if you can’t remove it. Signet would be very powerful if having 30 trait points in earth is viable, as you’d be able to use the active effect without losing the passive… but a build that does that gives up a lot from either water or arcana, and those are more or less a necessity for any pvp situations.

Glyph is fairly useful all-round, but works best in builds that have a lot of boon duration increases. Faster cast speed than ether renewal makes it more reliable without building around it, and you can also reduce the cooldown with traits, and trait to cure conditions whenever gaining regen to make it weak condition removal in water. Depending on the situation it can be used for quick might stacks (if you don’t expect to need additional heal/defense) or a few seconds of protection (if you expect to take enough damage that the regen would be worse overall) or some swiftness (for when you’re just travelling)

Ether Renewal has the best condition removal and the shortest default cooldown (though matched by traited glyph this was wrong, thanks for correcting me Chaosky). However, the long cast time means it can be interrupted unless you have stability/mist form ready, and once a single pulse has fired an interrupt will put it on full cooldown, where the glyph would be available in 3 seconds. If it goes off properly, it cures 8 conditions total, which is the most any elementalist skill can deal with, but needing to cure that many is rare outside of pvp/wvw.

They have their uses, but I think glyph is the best general purpose due to the overall utility, thanks to the boons. It has the best healing total (in water) before taking gear into consideration, but scales the worst with healing power (but scales better with boon duration). Signet only works in specific builds (but does a great job in them), and Ether Renewal can’t really be built around in the first place and is just used as-is.

So what it comes down to is if your build supports Signet or Glyph, use those as appropriate, if not, use Glyph or Ether based on personal preference.

I’m thinking right now, apart from the novelty value, these are… unfortunately, fairly useless. Looking at them:

1) Each zone has 1 beedog queen, hidden in a certain location which is off the main path (and with the exception of zone 1’s maze, players don’t even lose out on achievements by not finding the path to the queen)
2) The beedog queens take about 1-2 minutes to solo, slightly faster with a group
3) The reward is around 30-40 baubles

Now, obviously they’re pretty amusing, finding them the first time is fairly interesting, that’s all well and good. However, there’s issues with them. Firstly, they’re not part of any achievement, when it’s obvious they could be. Secondly, they have very little reward, to the point that in zone 2 by the time the player reaches the queen, they’d earn more baubles over time by restarting the zone to respawn all the dig spots.

In other words, they’re not rewarding, nor are they required. Once the novelty wears off, they’re just useless time sinks… and they shouldn’t be. I don’t know what to do about them in the long term; the amount of baubles required to make them worthwhile might be too many to get all at once, but it’s hard to reward anything but baubles from enemies in SAB. Maybe make them drop health potions or extra lives.

In the short term, giving them an achievement like “Minor in Apis Canis Studies – You have defeated all of the Beedog Queens in World 1” could be fun. Not sure if that’d be the correct latin. I’m no expert.

Kain Francois.4328:

I’m just wondering how successful this is, because the gemstore is a weird combination of a cash shop and ingame shop.

If things are priced too high, people will usually not use real money. If priced too little, people will use ingame gold as well.

What is the middle ground where ANET earns profit? I’ve been reading a lot of stories about the pickaxe, so I’m just wondering about it.

All gems bought with gold were originally bought with cash; That means that ANet gets the full $10 for 800 gems whenever somebody buys a pick, regardless of whether they used gold conversion or not.

Heck, gold conversion acts as a gold sink due to TP taxes, making it slightly better for the health of the game overall. The molten pick has also caused an increase in the value of gems to gold, which results in buying gems to sell them for gold being more appealing.

The middle ground for what’s best is the point at which the average user can afford to exchange gold for gems, but the price is high enough that it’s worthwhile to buy gems for gold. That is, the point at which there are a large number of users who can afford gems with gold, while the exchange rate to gold is good enough to be appealing for gem sellers. If the price of gems gets too high, less users can afford to buy gems, and a single seller has to buy less gems to get the amount they want; result is sellers buy less gems, some players don’t get gems at all, and maybe some more players buy gems because they can’t afford gold conversion, but less gems are likely bought overall. If the price of gems gets too low, nobody will be willing to sell them (but lack of supply pushes the price back up sooner or later)

I am not an economist, but it’s very likely the optimum state of the gem exchange is more somewhere in the middle, as far as I can tell.

Edit: also, I bought one pick with real money. I don’t mind a good excuse to help support ANet. Or, if you see it differently to me, a bad excuse, but still.

Today, my guild “Grawl Just Wanna Have [Fun]” attempted Guild Bounty and Guild Trek on Aurora Glade, start times roughly 7:30PM and 9PM respectively.

Both bugged out; we couldn’t activate 2-Mult or Shaman Arderus for the Bounty, and certain targets in the Trek didn’t spawn emblems for us to interact with, namely Snowden Safehouse and Skalefound Cove. I took a screenshot of Skalefound Cove to confirm – I’m at the location with the target not visible. We failed that trek because of this.

“Mystery God Knights [MGK]” helped us track targets for the bounty hunt; they also received Shaman Arderus as a target and also couldn’t activate him. Hence, both guilds failed a tier 3 bounty entirely because of a glitch.

Dailies and monthlies already give a small amount of money scaled to your character’s level. Caps out at 5 silver for dailies and 50 silver for monthlies.

That’s enough, really. At level 80 you can easily earn 1-2 gold even while doing the daily anyways.

It’s happened for me as well. In recent memory:

1-3, first area, the flytrap jumps. Died and respawned after landing safely on the other side of the gap.
1-1, 4th checkpoint. Similar; died while on the middle of the platform before the 3 bauble jump

I’ve also died from green water while standing in front of the King Toad, 2 seconds after reaching that pad.

I expect it’s due to the same issues that are causing major skill lag in WvW – the server can’t keep up and doesn’t correctly simulate our movement because it’s not receiving movement packets or something similar.

(Cont’d; hit the character limit)

Some number of Fragments of Legend, for example 100, can be traded into a certain vendor in exchange for a “Prelude to [Legend]” (e.g. “Prelude to Twilight”). The Prelude is a consumable that when consumed unlocks a personal story-style instance which a player has to complete in order to receive the precursor for their legend. Within that instance the player should be given some level of information on the actual background of the legend they’re working towards. This instance is available continously until the player completes it, at which point it closes. A character may complete any given Prelude mission for rewards once only (Prelude consumables may have a red line of text saying “You have already completed this Prelude” similar to dyes saying “You have already unlocked this dye”). Like any personal story instance, the player can bring friends, but only those who’ve unlocked the instance will receive a precursor.

The final step is intended to give the legends some in-game lore, as right now there is very little about them. Alternately, some of the random missions may include bits of lore about specific legends, or something, and the player just flat-out buys/crafts the precursor with the fragments.

The overall idea is to have something that requires gameplay, some level of skill and no full RNG dependency to obtain a precursor, while being interesting to do. In this scenario a player can make concrete progress towards earning a precursor, but the less-skilled may still be able to buy/mystic forge their own if the missions are too hard, or choose to do a single mission each day (which should be relatively easy compared to doing, say, 5 or 10)

This popped into my head a couple days ago and I decided to flesh it out. If ANet are still throwing ideas around the table for the scavenger hunt, I’d like to throw mine at them as well. The short version comes first for people without much time to read a wall of text.

TL;DR SHORT VERSION:
1) Craft “Shards of Legend” in MF.
2) Once per day, bet a player-chosen number of Shards of Legend on a mission.
3) Player has to complete that many randomly-chosen missions within a time limit.
4) Completion rewards “Fragments of Legend”, 1 per Shard the player bids.
5) X number of Fragments of Legend can be spent on unlocking an instance themed around a Legendary weapon, which can be attempted until successful.
6) Completing that instance rewards the related precursor, once per character.

Full Version:

New crafted item (Mystic Forge) “Shard of Legend” (costs, say, around 50 silver to 1 gold to make). Shards of Legend are used to activate scavenger hunt missions; players may activate scavenger hunt missions once per day using any number of Shards of Legend. Scavenger hunt missions work like bounty hunts – the player is given a list of missions and a timer to complete them in, one mission per Shard of Legend used. The time given is dependant on how many missions the player has to complete.

Missions are intended to be solo-able, but take the form of dynamic events that other players can join in with and scale up. As they’re intended to be solo-able, missions which have specific targets may be marked on the map for players, while missions that may involve searching just have a general area marked. Scavenger Hunt events are activated similarly to bounty hunts (a player with the event as a target can start it when they reach the location)

For each mission successfully completed, the player gains one “Fragment of Legend”. Alternately, Fragments are rewarded if and only if all active missions are completed. Hence,

- Player may activate missions once per day using X Shards of Legend
- Player must complete X missions to receive X reward
- It would be wise for a player to choose a number they believe they can achieve, because activating the missions consumes the Shards of Legend, and missions can only be started once per day

Other players in the party when a mission is activated are given the choice to join in; to do so they must agree to spend the same amount of Shards of Legend. All players in the party that join in receive the same mission set. The missions in this regard may function like a guild bounty, such that each party member could tackle separate missions, or possibly each player must be present to get credit from a specific mission (which may result in the party completing a given mission more than once if they split up)

Missions may include:

- Boss fights/Communes similar to skill challenges
- Searching an area for a Fragment of Legend
- Defending/attacking a location
- Collection events
- Escort events

Some flavor for it: The hero throws several Shard of Legend into the Font of Legend, a mystical fountain found at a certain hidden location. The Shards are charged with the power of Legend, and are thrown out into the world as Fragments of Legend. The hero must locate and stabilise each Fragment of Legend before the energy disappears, leaving them as little more than shiny rocks. However, this may be difficult; some Fragments have been found and taken by powerful creatures. Some have been picked up by strangers who may only give them up in exchange for our services. Some have ended up in locations suffused with magical energy which could make them difficult to track. Only once the hero has claimed them once more will their power become stable.

Balancing: Missions should be completable solo, but be around as difficult as a combat skill challenge in Orr, or slightly harder. Mission time should be assigned with the assumption of around 5 minutes to reach each mission, and 5 minutes to complete it (10 minutes per mission) but give slightly less time for each additional mission.

Speed buffs don’t stack in any way, if you have Signet of Air, Windborne Dagger, One with Air, or swiftness then Zephyr’s Speed doesn’t apply. Only the single biggest buff is applied.

I personally never spend long enough in Air for the swiftness to run out because I’m using staff, which only ever dips into Air until all skills are on cooldown at best (and one of those grants even more swiftness…)

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Lane.3410:

It is simple to fix yourself.

It’s not my job to try and find ways around an unintended bug. There’s always a way to bring the camera back. I’m just asking if Josh and his team could perhaps fix it, so I don’t have to jump through hoops to reset my camera.

Well, it’s not simply a problem with SAB, it’s a glitch that can occur after many of the game’s major boss fights (Shadow Behemoth, Tequatl, Claw of Jormag, Shatterer) – just change characters mid-fight with those guys and you’ll encounter the same glitch.

As the glitch is inherently a part of the boss camera mode, I doubt Josh’s team has any members which are actively able to fix it, and the most they can do is bring it up as an issue with the guys that designed the camera in the first place (same as the issue with the camera going crazy when forced into a tight spot, etc)

Edit: Well, they might be able to move the event that resets the camera to “boss death” instead of “leaving the boss arena”, but an actual fix would help the game elsewhere.

Once you reach a new zone, it’s added to the level select at the start in the fountain area. as the level select is the only way to enter World 1, you won’t miss it.

World 2’s zone is selected from a different house to World 1, but is also selectable once you’ve unlocked it.

Our underwater skillset is fine, just takes some practice to get used to.

However, we have a number or traits which simply don’t do anything/do less underwater that are core to many elementalist builds – Evasive Arcana does nothing, none of the underwater weapon skills are auras for Powerful Auras, weapon-specific traits like Blasting Staff have no equivalent.

On the other hand, there’s warriors, who get benefits from Greatsword traits when using Spears, benefits from Rifle traits when using Harpoon Guns, and don’t seem to have any frequently used traits that become worthless underwater. Fact is, many of the popular warrior builds work perfectly underwater, while popular Elementalist builds don’t. I’d kill for an option to have a separate trait set-up while underwater so I don’t end up switching traits every time I do underwater content and forgetting to switch back later.

I play on a laptop and hence the movement from my mousepad is very simple; as such I dodge jump by moving my hand between mouse and keyboard. Being able to coordinate between two fingers for the timing makes it extremely easy. I’ve got a 10% failure rate on it.

Considering dodge jumps can’t change direction, there’s almost 0 reason to have my hand near the mouse when using one – I’m sure the same applies when using a standard mouse. Point your character in the right direction, switch your mouse hand to your keyboard and get the timing right.

On the first day, I believe it was possible to kill the amulet.

Doing so would cause it to no longer be targetable, and because it couldn’t be attacked, it would stop dropping crystal fragments to attack the boss with. As far as I know, it had no death animation because we weren’t intended to do enough damage to kill it…

That was fixed pretty quickly. It’s immortal now.

@Zebulous: There’s a spot in the arena that his lick doesn’t reach. Find it. It’s a little higher than everything else you can stand on.

On poison:

- Maybe make the first check activate a flag on the player, instead of immediately damaging them
- Said flag can wear off after 2-3 seconds of not being in the water
This would ensure a minimum amount of time that players can expect to not take damage for.

On adding more skins in the future:

- Remember that new zones are going to increase the rate at which players can acquire bauble bubbles to some degree
- However, it won’t be fair to charge more for the new skins just because the rate of acquisition has increased
- So, we’re going to need something else to spend bauble bubbles on as well which is a decent target with the increased rate which we can earn them at.

I’m thinking new minis, “Super Mystery Tonics” and maybe a second set of weapon skins as long term goals taking the increased bauble bubble rates into account. Just, something new other than Super Skins in the next release as a target.

…heck, Super Ranger Pets? Could that be a thing?

Note that I didn’t suggest armor. I don’t know how you could make armor properly meet the theme while including dye zones. Maybe town clothes could work?

Finally, one more niggling issue: When my character’s taken damage in SAB, the bloody effect around the edge of the screen from regular gameplay starts to show up, and obscures my vision. Firstly, that doesn’t fit the mood of normal/infantile mode SAB at all, Secondly, having my vision getting reduced in a jumping puzzle doesn’t feel good, Thirdly, unlike regular play it won’t go away by itself when I’m safe, becaue there’s no automatic health regen in SAB.

Perhaps you could make the health work more like Costume Brawl’s health (a status on the character) that kills the player when it hits 0, to avoid that? Might be easier than disabling the blood effects, I don’t know.

Daily Healer’s been renamed.

It’s “Daily Reviver” now. Still works exactly the same.

Do you know of:

1) The two secret rooms opened with bombs
2) The secret room near the bottomless pit
3) The secret spider area
4) The two chests
5) The top of the highest tree in the zone
6) The wormhole

Zone 2 has a load of baubles that are incredibly well-hidden; zone 3 in comparison has very little you can’t see from the location of another bauble nearby.

May as well add any bugs here, then, as Josh knows about this thread.

There’s inconsistency with assigning the pointy stick as auto-attack. Sometimes it stays assigned between zones, sometimes it resets. Fully understand if you decide to take auto-attack away from it entirely, but either way – either work out how to keep it assigned, or take away the ability to make it auto-attack.

Poison water is entirely inconsistent with how long it takes to deal damage, and has on occasion damaged me long after I leave the water (I’ve died on top of the log with baubles at the Cage in zone 2 because the water kept damaging me after I left it)

I think a decent method would be something along these lines:

- Each kill scores a point
- Each keep, castle and spawn area has a “scavenger” npc, responsible for looting the battlefield for us
- You can speak to the scavenger NPC to trade all of your points for loot bags
- Loot bags contain the same items as the loot bags which drop now, including bags of loot. Bags within bags, the madness.

Tornado’s a transformation, which disables your healing, utility and elite skill slots.

Hence, you don’t have signet on for it to heal you.

This is the reason trasnformation elite are more or less universally terrible, across all classes and races. They lock you out of too much elsewhere.

Some easy options I’d use for certain traits and sigils:

Dodge traits: Blue bar over endurance that fills up and glows when dodge traits will function (kinda annoying for elementalists that have 4 cooldowns, though)
Weapon swap sigil: Blue bar over weapon skills, same idea.

Blue is an underused colour in our UI and would stand out well for these things.

This came up as a joke in guild chat, and we accidentally decided it would be a good idea to make a suggestion of. Here goes.

Features:
- Upon entering the SFotAB, players are sent to random jump puzzles, either selected from the stages in the current SAB, or new ones, or perhaps even jump puzzles from outside it
- Each stage as a time limit
- Players gain personal reward levels in SFotAB, just like FotM
- As difficulty level increases, the time limit decreases

As for why this exists:

Something about the SAB glitching out when players access a buggy NPC in the starting area; because of the glitches each zone is unstable and will disappear after the time limit.

Just a weird little idea my guild had and accidentally fleshed out.

Healing Power scales 1:1 (1 healing = +1 hp healed) on dagger 5, attune-to-water heal, and EA water dodge.
Blast finishers in water fields scales 5:1 (5 healing = +1 hp healed) if you group with somebody who can easily get one up (staff ele, engineer and ranger; anybody with Healing Seed Pods in general PvE). Blast finishers are churning earth, EA earth dodge and arcane wave. The EA dodge rolls currently have separate cooldowns, so if the opportunity arises you can use earth’s roll on an ally’s water field without wasting the water dodge’s cooldown.

Cone of Cold is a total of 1:0.32 if it all connects, with 4 small heals with a bonus of 1:0.08

Healing skills on ele vary, but the signet’s heal-on-attack is 10:1 (10 heal = +1 hp healed) with a 2:1 on the active cast, Glyph is 1:1 and Ether Renewal is 1:1.2

Oh, and also water Arcane Abatement (fall damage trait) has 1:1 healing, if you somehow enter a situation where it’s usable during combat.

Elementalist has a ton of healing options regardless of weapon set, which is why healing power’s so useful for us.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Some jumps, especially the one in World 1 Stage 1 (the secret cave behind the waterfall) are too tight. They are barely doable, even with a running jump. And with the camera backed in a corner like that, that jump is way harder to make than it should be. Please make this jump a bit easier. I am of course talking about the jump that comes after the two jets of water. Try and not make jumps that are exactly at the maximum jump distance

That jump and a few like it are only required for 100% completion, which should be hard.

Also, it’s easily possible using the magical powers of dodge jumping – jump then immediately press the dodge key, and you’ll get the added speed of the dodge during the jump. Some of the jumps that otherwise feel like they need “perfect” timing have quite a bit of leeway with a dodge jump (and dodge jumps are actually mentioned as something you might need to learn in the FAQ for the box)

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

The big slam attack of the Frog boss is nearly impossible to dodge, which is very frustrating. Even when you know its coming, it still hits you as you dodge-roll. I think this could be made a bit easier.

Just run out to the small lily pads when he’s preparing for it, and hop on one of the rocks. The boss has very simple tells for all his attacks.
1) Makes a noise, then raises one leg and stomps – dodge to the lily pad opposite that leg or run out to the smaller pads/rocks
2) Makes a noise, bounces slightly, then jumps and stomps – run out to the smaller pads/rocks
3) Shakes his head from side to side, opens his mouth for a few seconds, turns his head briefly and then licks – start dodging the moment he turns his head

All of his attacks can be avoided, and only the lick requires a dodge roll at all.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Fix the targeting! It is really hard to select the frog boss, or the necklace. And if the wrong one is selected, your character will throw every gem into the ground!

1) Auto-targeting
2) Aforementioned autotargeting can only target the boss during the phase that you’re supposed to throw the jewel, it won’t get caught on his necklace.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

The bee queens aren’t much of a threat, due to the fact that they can be stun-locked so easily with the whip.

Nothing in this is much of a threat when you know how to deal with it, and that’s exactly how it’s designed. Bee Dog Queens are also tremendously easy to range to death with bombs or the slingshot, too – the entire game ideology for SAB is “things get easier once you know how to do them”, and that goes for every single enemy, boss and jump.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Please don’t make us whip a turtle or crocodile from a sinking lily pad in hazardous water. Those things sink instantly, which means we sacrifice health to hit the kitten animal.

The trick at that spot is to attack the crocodile or turtle while in midair moving from one safe platform to another. The crocodile you have to pass on the lower route through the last section of Zone 3 can be jumped to from both lily pads – the trick is to hit him mid-jump between the second and third pad, and then jump to him. Most turtles you need to hit will eventually walk within melee range of a safe platform.

I generally agree with bugfixes and actual quality fixes such as allowing us to skip the dialog/cutscenes at the start, but everything I’ve mentioned isn’t a true issue

Also, camera fixes are incredibly unlikely – it’s been mentioned many times that the original JPs were designed with a camera that freely clips through walls, but the WvW and PvP teams needed the camera to not do that to prevent cheating via positioning a camera to look through walls. Programming a new camera mode just for jump puzzles probably isn’t high on the priority list – and keeping us from seeing through walls actually hides one or two secret spots in this puzzle, too.

That said, there aren’t any spots outside of secret rooms where the camera doesn’t zoom out properly some angle (directly downwards helps a lot in precision jumps), and I think the waterfall room in zone 1 has a high enough ceiling anyways. Sometimes there’s a better camera angle to use.

(6+6+7) * 3 = 57 chests.

No skins.

A guildmember I did most of the runs with has opened 45 chests, and gotten 4 skins.