Guild Wars 2

For the last 3 days, the only time I’ve spent outside of the Adventure Box has been spent:

a) Travelling from where my characters were to Rata Sum
b) Depositing baubles in the bank
c) Gathering a group for the Super Adventure Box
d) Dailies

This coming from somebody who regularly does all mega-boss events and players about 5-6 hours per day; I know spend less than an hour outside the box each day and half of that is facilitating more time spent in the box… I got my Distinction in Applied Jumping an hour after logging in on day 2.

Heck, I just spent an hour getting the wallet upgrade and secret skill on 5 characters, and I’ve guided guildmates through getting 100% on each zone multiple times. I hope zone 2’s fun as well.

It’s getting one

The value of 1 gem changes on the fly dependent on the amount of gems and the amount of gold traded on the BLTC. If more players are selling gems than buying gems, the value in gold slowly declines, and ther everse is true if more people are buying gems than selling them.

That the price fluctuates so much is very indicative of how many players are using the currency exchange.

I still want an option to say that I’m buying 200 gems, instead of trying to hit the sweet spot and having the prices change on me constantly while I’m doing it.

On karma: there’s a few karma sinks available. Orrian jewelry boxes contain some unique endless tonics and a mini, and also have chances of dropping lodestones and obsidian shards. You can also try your hand at the mystic forge trying to upconvert masterwork gear from level 70+ hearts, which can give rares → ectos/money

On laurels: only amulets require laurels; there are other methods for getting rings and earrings.

I don’t mind that there’s lots of currencies everywhere; each form of currency gives incentives to try out different areas of the game, and it’s rare that something with any statistical value can only be acquired through a single token currency (Gift of Battle/Dungeon gift/Ascended Amulet/Backpiece is about it)

Only real issue I have is with losing all my inventory space to tokens because they don’t stack above 250. We really need them to be removed and just have tokens tied to the account in the same way laurels and gems work, imo.

In fractals, Agony damage is dealt based on a % of your max hp. This means that increasing vitality increases the damage you take from Agony. Healing, however, doesn’t work based on your max hp – it’s purely linear scaling, and hence increasing your max HP only moves the point at which you should start healing.

On the other hand, toughness directly increases the value of self-healing vs direct damage (1/Damage Multiplier = Effective Healing Multiplier; for example 25% damage reduction = 1/0.75 = 1.33 x healing on self), while not being adversely affected by agony.

Toughness doesn’t help against condition damage in any way; however, elementalists have a large amount of on-demand condition removal if you trait for it. With staff: EA water dodge = 1 condi removal per 10 seconds, Healing Rain = 4 condition removals over 9 seconds (40 sec CD, 32 if 20% CD reduction traited), Traiting Cleansing Wave (Water V) = 1 condi removal per 10 seconds by attuning to water, Traiting Cleansing Waters (Water XI) = 1 condi removal per 10 seconds when attuning to water if you have the buffs-on-attunement, 4 extra condi removals from Healing Rain, 1 condi removal from water-attuned Glyph of Elemental Harmony and 1 condi removal per cantrip if you also trait Soothing Disruption; finally you can have 3 condi removals on one slot if you using Cleansing Flame.

With all that condition removal, and the sheer amount of healing options a staff elementalist has, Vit… isn’t really necessary, and toughness will multiply the effective self healing. Slotting full minor stat toughness gives elementalists a total damage reduction of about 30%, giving a 42% effective increase to healing. If that minor stat toughness gear is cleric’s, you also have about 1.3-1.5k healing power, most of which is applied at a 1:1 ratio on our heals, for 1.3-1.5k additional hp per healing ability (which is effectively 42% higher due to damage reduction). On staff that’s: GoEH, Attuning to water, dodging while in water, blast finishers on water fields including: Eruption, dodging while in earth and arcane wave (and with allies you could grab a Warrior’s banner to drop it for a blast finisher). Geyser’s a 1:0.8 on healing power and then there’s regen effects all over the place for staff eles at a lower rate.

You can easily set up an elementalist so more vit than the 300 provided by Water trait points isn’t necessary.

Edit: Blah, I got caught up responding to the guy above me and forgot you’re talking about D/D in OP. If it existed, I’d go Power/Healing/Toughness on any ele weapon set (as opposed to Healing/Power/Toughness on ele – I want power as the main stat)

Edit 2: In PvE, D/D ele can carry Healing Seed Pods to generate water fields on demand for blast finishers. They’re not useable in WvW or sPvP, however. D/D has as many options for blast finishers as Staff, but Churning Earth’s on a longer cooldown than Eruption.

Elementalist Fireball’s range, while listed at 1200, is only the maximum range at which the autoattack will function. The fireball arcs and hence, depending on positioning and camera angle, can go further. I believe the same also goes for Water Blast, but that’s less useful.

Valandil Dragonhart.2371:

The only problem is at this event, event though it’s by default, #1 skill has to be manually spammed. Auto-attack for some reason is disabled there, and I still can’t figure out why. Perhaps it’s the range, I don’t know. The range of the Fire Missile is 2000 if I’m not mistaken, and the Fireball is only 1200.

It’s the range. An attack will only function with auto-attack if the target’s within the listed range, even if the attack’s properties should make it possible to connect.

Should do. Other relevant attunement traits apply when using conjured weapons, most notably Soothing Mists in water.

Sigil of Life on my PvE staff ele. Healing power scales well for us, to the point which we can potentially get better returns from it than raw vitality.

As for weapon swap sigils:
1) They activate when switching attunements
2) They have a 9 second internal cooldown, so elementalists can’t break the game with them
3) This cooldown isn’t visible, as far as I’m aware.

If you’ve got Arcana at 30, you can use the recharge timer on the attunement you just left to work out when a weapon swap sigil will be able to trigger again.

Delayed answer here, but basically:

Flame and Frost is an ongoing story arc happening for the next month or two. The events contained in it happen in parallel to your personal story (there’s been a blog post in which ArenaNet discuss the implications of designing this content to be capable of coinciding with any level of progress in the personal story). It has no direct connection or dependence on personal story, but the missions are activated in a similar way. You can start the missions regardless of where your personal story is, and the Flame and Frost missions won’t prevent you from accessing personal story content once started.

It’s as yet uncertain if the missions will be available forever; we’ve been told that some things introduced by Living Story arcs will have a permanent impact on the game (such as Southsun Cove) and some will eventually disappear and become part of the world’s history (such as Southsun Cove’s Ancient Karka, or the xmas/halloween events). I personally believe, though it’s not verified, that the missions and events added during these patches will remain in the future, but the minor features like refugees, lost items and dead drops will likely disappear once this arc is wrapped up.

This forum thread contains a rough description of all of the current features of the Flame and Frost living story additions; if you open up the spoiler tag it gives instructions for each new feature.

Firstly, the missions are intended to be done by any player who’s had access to the game for about a week or so, so the mission itself needs to be doable.

As they are, I had no real issue soloing them on an cleric-exotic-geared elementalist, although it took a significant amount of time to complete each mission (around half an hour each). Didn’t get downed, but I came fairly close.

A new player will not be so skilled at the game, will not be fully geared up, and on most professions will experience the mission as hard as you want it to be. I’d say it doesn’t need to be any harder (and the new Molten Alliance enemies in Wayfarer Foothills are probably a tad too hard for a starting zone – a guildmate got roflstomped on a new engineer exploring there after the update). As it stands, I don’t think the mission rewards quite meet up with the time investment either, but that’s a separate issue. 1k karma and around 6-7 silver for half an hour’s work… doesn’t particularly match up with any other level 80 content.

As for having a group-centric mission, remember that there’s still one more update to come in the Flame & Frost arc, and it’s likely to contain the finale to this story. It wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility for that to be a group mission or even a full-blown dungeon, complete with post-story explorable mode.

However, I’m mostly against being forced to party up to experience new content which is focused around telling a story. It’d be fine if they make a story mode dungeon that scales up difficulty and rewards for groups while still being solo-able, though

Heck, there might even be a couple more story missions that’ll just unlock in the weeks to come like the lost objects did during March. Nobody outside of ANet really knows at this point.

Before I start, I’d like to state this thread is intended to be a discussion of the issues with the signet build; what causes it to be popular with under-informed players, and why it’s so poor in end-game. There’s a brief tl;dr version at the end of the post.

As I’m sure most of you are aware, there exists a very simplistic setup for warriors that revolves around the trait “Deep Strikes” and having as many signets active as possible. This build is extremely effective at early levels, and then starts to get worse as the character levels up. Let’s take a look at it.

At the earliest possible point Deep Strikes can be unlocked, level 20, the player will have access to the following:
1) 100 precision from the trait line itself
2) 30 precision from Signet of Fury
3) 4 equipped signets, worth 40 precision each (total unlock cost is 14 SP minimum, which is lower than the SP awarded by level 20)

This leads to a total of 290 precision, which isn’t scaled down in level 20 zones.

At level 20, according to the wiki Precision is worth 1% crit per 3.16; this means that at level 20 the signet setup by itself is worth 91.77% crit rate, plus 4% base crit.

Obviously, that’s quite a ridiculous amount of crit – a new warrior comes across it by accident at level 20, and thinks to themself “Holy kitten, this build is amazing” – a single trait and 4 skill slots grants an overall DPS increase of nearly 50%

At this point, the build really is amazing. There’s no other minor trait that can give such a huge benefit – at level 20. Levelling up from here is where the build falters.

Firstly, the precision granted by the setup only increases by 1 point per level, and only when the player isn’t downscaled. The only exception is at level 30 when the player gets an elite signet. After level 30, the precision carries on increasing by 1 point per level, and possibly 100 additional points at level 40 and 60 when the player gets access to master and grandmaster traits.

However, with the precision increasing so slowly, the crit rate begins to fall – at level 30, the setup grants 340 precision. At level 30, 4.96 precision grants 1% crit rate – the setup’s crit rate has dropped to 68.55%, and from here on, it only gets worse.

So it’s fairly apparent that the build significantly gets worse a the character levels up. What’s less immediately obvious is that the build does not return to it’s prime when the character is scaled down – the additional precision from Deep Strikes and the trait points is treated as part of the character’s total stats and reduced upon returning to a level 20 zone.

As a result, we’re left with a build with somewhat of a paradox – it’s most effective at lower levels, and yet it’s only effective if your level is not reduced in any way.

We can also look at the signets in the same way. The dolyak signet, signet of fury and signet of might all drop off similarly as the character levels up, although these specifically downscale correctly. The issue here is that the stat increase granted by the signet increases linearly, while the stats themselves increase at an exponential rate as the character levels.

For example, again at level 20:
A character has 128 base power
Signet of Might adds 30 power
Therefore, Signet of Might increases power by (30/128=23.44%) of the base

At level 80:
A character has 916 base power
Signet of Might adds 90 power
Therefore, Signet of Might increases power by (90/916=9.825%) of the base

The same applies to all raw-stat signets; a precision signet grants around 10% crit at level 15 and 4% crit at level 80, and so on. The value significantly declines as the character gains levels.

This all adds up to what I think the core of the issue with the signet build is: Players new to the class are unaware of the build significantly decreasing in effectiveness as they level up, and by the time they reach level 80, they’ve gotten used to the build being “good”.

tl;dr: I believe that ANet need to have another look at stat-increasing signets and traits, decide on a base level of effectiveness for those signets and traits, and then apply scaling appropriately so that this base effectiveness is true at all levels, instead of changing over time. As things are, new players get a false impression of how effective these traits and signets are, and may end up with a build that’s subpar because they don’t know it’s become worse over time.

Dolan.3071:

This…. Is actually a good point. I run D/D with healing power myself so the staff healer being far from combat didnt even cross my mind. Also I do believe that the Earth EA isn’t actually Churning Earth, it just looks like it and is actually just Shockwave, which does NO damage?

It’s churning earth, minus the damage aspect. It cripples, bleeds and blast-finishes. (Shockwave is immobilize, bleed and projectile finisher). The duration of the conditions is slightly different as well.

It’d be pretty OP if it was the full effect of Churning Earth, as CE is actually the second biggest single hit in the game, after Warrior’s Kill Shot. A fully-traited-for-glass-cannon elementalist would potentially be one- or two-shotting people by dodging if EA’s earth effect was the full skill.

I actually play staff elementalist, full cleric’s gear, with a support-oriented trait set-up and playstyle. Heading into range to heal people with traits puts me in a lot of danger I’m not as geared towards surviving as D/D is (although I can and do regularly aim my trait-heals at players that need them). Yet… mostly I’ve only posted in this thread to give arguments in favour of healing spec as a D/D. I think the only weapon elementalists get which can’t be used as group support on a decent level is Focus, which has very situational skills that actually have a group support capability. Ele focus is a very selfish skillset, without powerful auras.

Vol.5241:

misterdevious.6482:

Big changes to badges of honor this week.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/7244/Guild-Wars-2-World-vs-Worlds-Time-to-Shine.html

The skins are not new, they are just alternatives for people who do not play PvE at all and wish to get those skins just through WvW.

However, the ability to choose the type of stat you get is good.

Especially as even in PvE, some stat types have very limited ways of being earnt – the article specifies Cleric as one of the stat options badges will be able to purchase. Cleric stats on exotic gear can only be crafted in PvE, asides from rare instances with mystic forge and a couple rare world drop weapons.

Having more options to get stat sets like that is a good thing; let’s just hope the pricing is better than the current PVT armor.

For staff, at least:
Water and Air reduce your DPS in all circumstances.
With no stats, Eruption’s DPS roughly matches Lava Font + Flame Burst. Eruption + other earth attacks roughly matches Lava Font + Flame Burst + Fireball autoattacks, but only for the first 10 seconds (at which point the fire skills are all off cooldown, but the earth skills aren’t)
With power, there’s no reason to use Eruption.
With condition damage, there’s no real reason to use fire attunement (the total damage from Flame Burst is lower than the DPS drop-off from Eruption’s bleeds running out)
Also, Lava Font can be traited to last 30% longer (one extra hit, unless that trait only extends the combo field and doesn’t allow it to pulse one more time), and with the 20% fire cooldown trait as well, has 100% uptime for the combo field. That may be very useful in the long run.

Just looking at the numbers, for a pure damage scenario, it looks more appropriate to just stick to fire or earth, depending on build. If you somehow have no offensive stats, then it’s viable to switch to earth occasionally just to mix things up, but the only advantage is the non-damaging conditions.

Unless you’re using a condition damage build, the only reason to leave fire (with staff) is for utility. Air 2 and Water 2 in staff are just “something to do while waiting for ether earth or fire to recharge”. Which is a little sad for Air, because the attunement description states it’s a high-damage skillset.

Venirto.4208:

Let me guess, you have only read my post because it’s the shortest, I am right? And capslock was used as a highlight, so that some people would think again before posting more stuff which will never be added to the game.

Now use your gray cells and tell me how:
-removing condition stack limits
-adding ascended gear to loot table from world bosses
-upgrading all WvW sturcutres to castles
-giving 30% more crit damage for ele
-more guaranteed rares from activities
-removing/breaking stealth mechanics
and other similar stuff would NOT affect the class balance and trading post?

Some people are just selfish or don’t realize the consequences which would come with these changes. Im not saying that all suggestions are bad, im just speaking about these which would negatively affect the gameplay.

I’ll only reference the ones that I also suggested here, but here goes:

Condition stack cap: There are three factors in play here.
1) Pure condition builds (with no defensive stats) have less damage output than pure raw damage builds (i.e. berserker)
2) The majority of pure condition builds rarely hit max stacks on anything. If they do, as they have a combination of long and short bleeds, there comes a point when they might apply a bunch of short stacks and lose out on several high-duration stacks, prematurely ending the effect with no real way to control which stacks are lost.
3) Because of the stack caps, multiple condition builds in a group will step all over each other, and even characters with incidental bleeds and no condition damage will destroy the good bleed stacks made by condition characters.

Again, condition characters have less DPS than raw damage characters, and don’t work well together. Removing the stack cap will not in all cases raise their individual DPS, but it would definitely stop a lot of players feeling useless once another condition user joins the fight.

Ascended items available as world drops : Ascended items are not inherently tradeable, and the drop rates are likely to be lower than precursors if they were to become world drops. It’s not going to affect the economy more than “one player per hour per world finds an ascended item which may mean they don’t have to spend 3g on an exotic for that slot, if and only if the ascended item matches their build and they didn’t already buy an exotic”. What’s that, the economy is short 3g per world per hour? THAT WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING, CLEARLY.

ThiBash.5634:

No, the main issue is that you’re trying to duel with a group support weapon.

As long as a weapon has combo fields, it will have to be weakened for 1v1 because in group play, combo fields become exponentially stronger.

Having said that, I feel that the key to making the staff balanced for both large battles and duelling lies in the auto attacks. They can be buffed relatively safely without overpowering the aoe aspect of the weapon.

I’d go as far as saying the problem with staff is that it’s only a group support weapon, and that’s all we get from using it. Every other class has access to weapon swaps (or in engineer’s case a selection of kits, each with different focuses) which allow them to proerly adapt to situations.

ANet has give elementalists “the most versatility” in total weapon skills, and then made all 4 sets on a given weapon effective for an identical single purpose. Warriors have a list of well-defined weapons they can mix and match to suit their needs, but we’re locked into the same 4 attunement sets with a single weapon… and in staff’s case every single attunement is “Long-range, easy to avoid AoE skills with subpar damage for 1v1 opponents, with a weak 1v1 auto-attack we don’t intend you to use very often”

Staff elementalists simply have no option to switch to a 1v1 skillset when appropriate, unlike: every other profession in the game. That’s why we feel so bad in 1v1 compared to other professions. Unlike them, once we’re in combat we don’t have the option to change.

I also don’t think buffing the autoattacks is the best option. We’re touted as one of the most versatile classes in the game; reducing us to “press 1 and keep the opponent on camera because we’re most effective that way” would suck. Staff needs a few dedicated 1v1 skills, but the autoattacks shouldn’t be more appropriate than any other skill for raw damage. The special effects on Stoning and Water Blast are more indicative of what Staff’s autoattacks should all do (ex: Fireball: chance on hit to AoE might on allies, Chain Lightning: Bounce to allies for swiftness, or give enemies vuln)

Dolan.3071:

Sorry Taldren, not buying it. EA is no longer a blast finisher, I have never seen a dual EA happen, ever. My guess is that you’re seeing your health go up from simply switching to water attunement as water EA has no animation to identify it. Other than that, the actual skill Cleansing Wave has an ungodly long cooldown. Therefore most of your healing is coming from simply being an Elementalist, having very little to do with your weapon choice. Staff (literally) blows this out of the water with blast healing from Eruption and Healing Spring. If you dare try to add Cone of Cold into this argument then I will truly write you off as the troll that you are.

The blast finisher was removed from the dodges in Water/ Fire and Air attunement, where it existed as an unintended side-effect of Churning Earth (the earth dodge’s skill) having a blast finisher.

Blast finishers were removed from all attunements’ dodges, but later added back into Earth’s dodge. That said, D/D’s only combo fields are fire fields. In theory they could carry Healing Seed Pods to generate water fields on the fly to blast finisher in, but that’s only applicable in PvE and dungeons.

One of the biggest benefits for D/D healing is that the player is always in range of party members for all the small AoE heals, whereas the only reason a staff player would wade into melee range at all is to use Healing Ripple and Evasive Arcana. Thus the D/D’s healing will happen as a side-effect of them playing normally, while a staff user has to go out of their way to use those traits. Most players I’ve encountered also move very erratically during combat and are hard to target with a geyser. Some even actively avoid them… I actually find it easier to heal people with the short AoE burst heals from traits than actual staff skills at times. The healing is delivered instantly, making it a lot easier to connect with.

- Bleed stack limits removed; each character gets a personal stack of burning/poison.
- Current ascended items become available in all modes except sPvP; at least one method should not be time gated.
- PvE locker added to the home instance in which players can permanently store weapon and armor skins. Players can exchange the skins of items in their inventory with skins from the locker. A small gem fee/fine transmutation stone is required to add a skin to the collection.
- Legendary weapons can only be added to the PvE locker by the account which crafted them. Once traded, the tag which allows them to be added to the PvE locker is removed. Legendary weapon skins can only be used by level 80 or higher characters (the latter in the event that the level cap gets increased)
- Healing and buffing players during combat earns some portion of the reward that player receives from that combat (strictly, event/loot credit and experience). For example, each boon granted to a player would grant you 1% of their total credit as credit towards your own rewards, which may be the tipping point towards getting loot from a mob.

Underwater combat changes
- New weapon sets for each profession, allowing variety in builds (where previously all warriors/thieves/rangers use Harpoon Gun + Spear, all mesmers/necromancers/guardians use Trident + Spear, and Engineers and Elementalists have a single weapon each)
- New functionality added to ground-targeted AoE healing, utility and elite skills, enabling their use in some form underwater (for example, making the AoE a sphere centered on either the enemy or player character)
- Minor quality fixes to enemy AI in regards to monsters leaving combat when they shouldn’t
- Underwater major trait selection updates automatically when entering water, similar to healing, utility and elite skills
- All traits which have no functionality underwater (such as Evasive Arcana) are given new functions specific to underwater combat, or in the case of the example, now function underwater (Seriously, there’s no real reason why Evasive Arcana can’t work underwater except for the animation of the earth dodge – the hitboxes of each dodge are already spheres or cylinders around the character)

Also:
- New weapons on each profession in general
- New elite skills, rebalancing on existing ones to actually make the underused ones viable
- New zones with content equal to the zones included at launch

OK, I understand that getting all of this in one patch would be unlikely, but we’re being asked for our “perfect patch”, not a realistic one. These are all things I’d like to see happen eventually, though.

Simplicity.7208:

Fortus.6175:

any major buff is because they excel at WvW. Sadly they are a victim or their own strength, if there was a way to give it power without gutting their WvW potential then we would finally see fulfilled the long-range mage-archetype nuker……. at last.

From shooting pea in sPvP to an actual glass cannon, like they were intended to be.

My suggestion: Make AoE damage divide among targets, the more people the less damage, consequently, in a 1v1 or 2v2 scenery the damage is INCREDIBLY increased (to the point it is actually worth going 30/30/0//0/10)

Or

Make Fire and Air traits just as good as water/arcana, there is no real reason to go any other way when these two make up for the low hit points and armor and actually have good synergy/good traits.

I see two options here:

First, ANet could make fire/air/earth traits 4x better to compensate for the 1/4 time we get to use them or second, ANet could make fire/air/earth traits affect other attunements.

The trait that is +10% damage while attuned to fire could become “Fire’s power increases the damage of all your attacks by 10%” or “Deal +40% damage while attuned to fire”

Granted the 40% may be a little excessive, but yeah…you get the idea. Power them up or spread them around, they’re not worth the points as it stands now.

The point of the Lingering Elements minor trait (Arcana 15) is that it extends the “X effect while Y element” to other attunements. In theory, you could get all 3 of those, start casting a high-damage spell like churning earth, and flip through fire and air to get a total of +30% damage.

Whether a build with 10/20/20/0/15 as the base is a good idea is another question, probably answered by “no”, but…

Regardless, those few traits are fine if used with Arcana 15. Some traits need a little reshuffling between elements to make builds more diverse, still.

As for the whole staff issue, we’ve got a couple compound problems.

1) “AoE is too strong”
2) Staff AoE attacks never fully connect

As a primarily PvE player, I want to see staff get damage added to Frozen Ground and Static Field. However… those two are fairly reliable at snaring players in some form in WvW. A WvW player would love to see Ice Spike and Eruption become easier to land, but then they might be too strong.

I’m not sure if there’s any one solution. WvW is supposed to function with PvE mechanics, including the mobs, so a skill split between WvW and PvE probably wouldn’t happen. However, the two have more or less opposed balance needs for certain classes. =/

TheGuy.3568:

Winds.3087:

Dingle.2743:

DD gets the best burst healing

But scepter\dagger has even better burst healing.

Nods

Agreed. I should’ve specified I was talking in reference to staff vs D/D.

sapphyredragon.6437:

Thank you, ThiBash for the info. I am truly appreciative. However, it is unfair that I cannot stand toe-toe with a Staff ele in PvP.

Uhhhh… what?

If you can’t handle a staff ele in PvP because of their healing, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Geyser requires the elementalist to more or less stand still for 3 seconds if they want the full heal.

Healing Rain’s overall healing is so slow that you can outdamage it anyways.

Water Blast only heals in an AoE around the target – the elementalist themself is rarely in close enough range to benefit from this.

Blast Finisher from Eruption on water fields… is incredibly predictable. It tells you where the elementalist is going to be in just a few seconds.

Everything else? OH WAIT DISREGARD THAT D/D HAS ACCESS TO ALL THE SAME TRAITS. lulz.

Once you realise that a staff elementalist is never going to get the full healing out of their skills, have difficulty landing most attacks in PvP, and are pretty much outclassed in terms of damage by D/D… why complain that they heal better? Destroy them and move on.

Besides, if I recall correctly, you titled your thread “Heal stat on D/D elementalist Useless??”, you’re complaining that the stat doesn’t feel useful, and then people here are pointing out that even on D/D, 900 or so healing power is worth 10k hp over 30 seconds, which means in any fight that’s 30 seconds long it’s worth 1000 vit… and bunker D/D elementalists can survive a heck of a lot longer than 30 seconds.

DD and staff get different types of heals.

DD gets the best burst healing, Staff gets the best heal over time. Burst healing is what’s going to save a player from glass cannon builds. Staff’s Geyser can and will miss active players.

You’re also apparently disregarding all of the heals DD can trait into just as much as Staff can – EA = an extra cleansing wave every 10 seconds; Healing Ripple = an extra cleansing wave every 10 seconds (though you have to use another trait slot to make it cure a condition), Soothing Mists is a passive half-regen; then there’s the extra regen buff on attune from that one popular Arcana 10 trait, and your healing slot.

Add it all up, and healing is worthwhile no matter which weapon set you use for an elementalist. D/D has worse healing over time, but it’s far more likely to actually save somebody’s life.

Condition removal as an issue… as an elementalist? You can take the Water XI trait which gives condition removal whenever you gain regen (Glyph heal skill, regen on attunement), the water trait which makes cantrips give regen, stack 3 cantrips and that gives you 4 instant cast condition removals. 7 if you take cleansing flame. At least 2 of which are stun breaks and could potentially give you invincibility for a couple seconds, or an escape option, or stability. If you give up the 20% water skill cooldown, you can also grab the “cure a condition when attuning to water” trait to boost that number up to 8 instant cast condition removals spread over 4 skills, every single one of which grants you regen on top; plus the condition removal whenever you dodge, the condition removal from Glyph of Elemental Harmony, the condition removal from Cleansing Wave… If you don’t want the Glyph there’s Ether Renewal which will give 8 condition removals over the duration of its cast.

Elementalists have some of the best freaking condition removal options in the game.

Intigo.1653:

Arheundel.6451:

Intigo.1653:

eldain stenlund.4306:

lol.. “massive damage in a single attack” pfff.. lol…

Ok but…

1) 22 stacks of might
2) bonus food
3) fury
4) maybe vulnerability from friendly zerg

Sure ele doesn’t lack damage for sure, but the picture you’ve posted is misleading

I never said it wasn’t, it was just all the effort that I felt like putting into a reply when the original post was this wrong and uninformed.

Churning Earth is still one of, if not the strongest, hitting abilities in the game.

Also, it was 23 stacks and don’t forget the 25 Bloodlust stacks on top of that. Still had pretty bad gear back then, though.

Churning Earth has the second highest damage single hit in the game; first place goes to Kill Shot, which deals roughly 15-17% more damage at equal stats; third place goes to Eviscerate, which deals roughly 6-7% less damage.

Churning Earth, however, takes twice as much time to cast compared to kill shot, which is already slow enough for anybody to deal with. That’s the same issue as most of the big hits elementalists have. It also has triple the cooldown time. Traits can boost the damage by around 50% total, though, and utilities can guarantee that it will crit, so it may be possible to build around it.

Primary issue is that water and arcane are too useful, considering our low base survivability.

Both give us access to free heals in exchange for… doing things that any elementalist should be doing regularly during gameplay. Water gives us a 30% increase in base HP if we max it, which is huge when we’re made of paper. Arcane gives boons whenever we switch, extends the duration of said boons and the passive regen from water, and a massive cut in cooldown time which increases the rate at which we can trigger all of the above.

There’s very little reason not to take both when they have so much synergy with each other, especially when that synergy boosts our most lacking aspect (survival).

I’d say either the other trait lines need a major buff, or water and arcana need nerfs… but nerfing water and arcana would take away what elementalists pretty much require to stay alive.

A first step would be vastly improving the 5 point minors for Fire, Earth and Air. Soothing Mists just blows them out of the water – a passive regen for up to 5 allies against:
- Chance to burn enemies when struck in melee range : Something that we should actively avoid
- Move 10% faster.. when we get 5 seconds of swiftness which doesn’t stack with this whenever we attune to air, and probably don’t spend more than 5 seconds in air anyways (heck, staff and offhand dagger will both also cast a spell for swiftness which will outlast lingering elements)
- 80 toughness while attuned to earth, providing less effective damage reduction per second than Soothing Mists provides via regen to an entire party.

Step 1: Make these bonuses apply to the entire party at the least. Burning enemies when they hit any ally makes it far more useful, as a balanced party will have melee characters
Step 2: Consider seriously overhauling all 3 effects anyways. Perhaps:
Air: Generate a passive aura that blocks one (ranged?) attack, then regenerates over 5 seconds; alternately make Air’s passive speed buff stack with other boosts.
Fire: Chance to cause burning when you hit enemies; alternately just deal flat damage when hit instead of burning things (so it doesn’t screw with condition players)
Earth: Reduced damage from conditions / block conditions at a set chance

And all of this only starts to help deal with the problem. There needs to be traits in the master/grandmaster tier that are enticing enough to pull people away from 30 water/30 arcana. Earth needs better damage reduction somewhere, air needs better damage avoidance (Knockback enemies and reflect projectiles when attuning to air as a grandmaster trait? Switch Renewing Stamina and Inscription between Air and Arcana?)

Disclaimer: I have no idea how balanced any of these suggestions would be for PvP. I’m primarily a PvE player.

Short version: I find our current list of elite skills rather anaemic; racials are mostly considered useless for anything other than personal amusement, and even a fair amount of profession elite skills are considered duds. I’d like to see a new set of elite skills, one for each weapon type (though this may lead to a skewed distribution because some classes have few weapon sets *cough*engineer/ele*cough*)

Long version:
- One weapon elite skill per weapon type (possibly ignore offhand weapons)
- Possible minor mechanical variations based on profession
- Possible graphical variations based on either profession or having a legendary equipped
- Can only be used with the matching weapon type
- On weapon swap, switches to the new weapon’s elite skill if unlocked
- Either: Global cooldown for all weapon elite skills OR each of a character’s weapon sets has a separate weapon elite cooldown (but balanced in some way such as very high-length cooldowns on each individual skill, or the skills only being a slight step above utility skills)
- If off-hand elite skills exist, remember whether mainhand or offhand elite is equipped for a given weapon set
- Possible give elementalists Attunement elite skills and engineers Kit elite skills to boost their numbers, though that would essentially give them profession-specific elites.
- Affected by traits for the weapon type

Unlock requirements:
30-50 skill points
Either:
1) X progress in [weapon] master achievement track
2) X kills to “develop” the skill after paying the skill points (similar to unlocking core weapon skills)

Possible example:
Giant Cleave
Greatsword Elite – [Some casting time] [Some high cooldown time]

Description: Summon an oversized greatsword and cleave through a large area.
Mechanical effect: High damage attack with a large radius (300-600 range)

Possible graphical variations:
Warrior: Character model increases in size, including weapon, before the attack.
Guardian: Uses a giant spirit weapon greatsword and simply commands it.
Ranger: Giant green spirit-style sword wielded by a giant green spiritual bear.
Mesmer: Attack is performed by a giant phantasm.
Twilight/Sunrise: Sword used is a giant Twilight/Sunrise, including all of the regular special effects for those.

Class-specific bonus:
Warrior: Wield an enlarged greatsword for X amount of time (or ends on weapon swap, or both), doubling each attack’s radius.
Guardian: Heal self and allies the attack passes through / places a symbol of greatness which pulses might to allies.
Ranger: Pet evades attacks during its own attacks for X amount of time.
Mesmer: Creates a phantasm wielding a giant greatsword / causes a bunch of confusion stacks on victims.

Anyways, the class-specific bonuses and graphical variations are optional. The core of the idea is having an elite skill set tied to weapon types – preferably done so that each is a viable option

The only freeze available to players I can think of off the top of my head is the elementalist Ice Bow’s 5th skill.

(He’s suggesting I’m a horrible, horrible person… better act the part.)

- Underwater maze now has currents that force players in certain directions.
- Currents will change paths periodically
- The maze now contains doors which can only be opened from one side
- Opening these doors will change the current as well

Everybody, enjoy your new underwater puzzle. We strongly believe that this will provide appropriate challenge for the average player, and will be watching it closely to add more features if necessary.

Stooperdale.3560:

Underwater combat just isn’t good enough for a full zone, for all the reasons that other people have mentioned. An underwater zone could be puzzle heavy, but it would probably need a new alternative to the jumping puzzle. I’m glad underwater combat is in GW2 but that doesn’t mean I want to see whole zones of it.

Three. Dimensional. Underwater. Maze.

I’ve got a mostly default setup, but my keyboard’s a little suited to that. It’s a laptop keyboard, so my F# keys are incredibly close to 1-5. I can hit them without having to move the palm of my hand.

Movement:
Default directional keys – mostly almost always holding down RMB, which makes turn become strafe anyways.
Z for descend (underwater)
X for about face
V for dodge (thumb, next to jump)

Skills: Default keybinds for the lot. However, considering moving utilities to BNM, which is very close to my mousepad. Right now I’m used to quickly switching my right hand to the right side of my keyboard from my mousepad; keeping the turn keys and about face gives me some level of camera controls for these brief moments.

I’m also thinking of moving the movement keys to ESDF, which would free up Q and A, but it would take a little getting used to. Also moving the healing skill somewhere, on rare occasion I accidentally hit it while using the utility on 7. Of course, if I move the utilities, that won’t be a problem anymore.

I for one enjoy underwater combat on my necromancer, elementalist and warrior. Haven’t played any other professions far enough to really get a feel for what they’re like underwater, however.

I actually enjoy having a 3rd dimension of movement; it feels like it adds another level of depth to positioning. A lot of the underwater skill sets are actually fun to use, as well. It’s a different experience that stops the land combat from getting too stale.

It has a few issues, admittedly – every profession has a fixed weapon set that can’t be changed except for using two of a single weapon type, some utility and elite skills are entirely unusable underwater. Traits being useless is… arguable. If we had a map that was entirely underwater, decent players would start traiting to suit their underwater combat before going there. Some classes even have bonuses to underwater weapons from their regular traits – warrior’s Greatsword traits also work for Spears, and their Rifle traits also work for Harpoon Guns, for example. The Sonic Boon build functions effectively in water and on land… warriors get pretty lucky there.

Having a fully underwater WvW zone would probably lead to some players eventually crafting builds purely for underwater combat, other players would find those builds, get used to them, and get better at underwater combat in general.

But as to whether such a zone should exist…

In PvE, a fully underwater zone would be fine even right now. Lack of diversity would limit the lifespan of that zone on a per-player basis, though.

In WvW or PvP, the game definitely needs more diversity to underwater combat – new weapons, a full set of utilities/elites, possibly new traits specific to being underwater. As it is now, you can tell just by a character’s profession what weapons they have equipped, and the limited elites and utilities make people easy to predict as well.

Until that’s sorted a WvW/PvP underwater map probably wouldn’t work too well.

Staff air definitely needs some help.

Air attunement is described as having “heavy damage and control abilities”. This is true for D/D, and it’s true for Scepter (focus lacks on the damage part, however).

I think staff air needs to stay a little more true to the description. Maybe a damage over time effect on static field (forcing opponents to eat the damage or risk being stunned would be neat); gust could definitely potentially deal damage, or be merged with Windborne Speed (AoE knockback when casting it) and give us a new skill in air for staff.

Similarly at least one more skill should deal damage in water. Probably frozen ground to match staff having a focus on AoE damage. Ice Spike should land faster (as should Dragon Tooth on Scepter…)

Earth’s mostly fine, though I’d be ok with Eruption working like churning earth (cripple enemies while the animation before the attack plays)

Fire’s definitely fine, although I feel that for a few occasions in PvE, Flame Burst is useless – it does next to no direct damage, as most of it’s payload is the Burning condition. Any player attacking the same target that actively works towards conditions as a build invalidates the skill, as does those few enemies immune to burning. I’d take a trade-off of some of the burning duration for higher raw damage on the skill.

Losille.5419:

There was an update on the last hours, right? But I tried the mission again, and it keeps the same thing. I thought I would be able by now to keep with my missions (after reaching level 80 with crafts and exploring).
I think the only way to complete this mission is make a party with 30 players, and I don’t really know if we can win, because the summons looks infinite.

Just 1 or 2 other player would be enough, personal story doesn’t scale. I’m content to wait it out, as personal story isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

It is nearly impossible to solo right now, though. Maybe with full zerker’s and just burst the boss down before the summons get out of hand.

There isn’t any particular downside to healing – it’s got completely linear scaling, where for a given skill X healing power = Y additional HP healed. This results in a natural diminishing returns as each point of healing power increases your healing by a smaller % of the total compared to the last (2 = 1 + 100%, 3 = 2 + 50%, and so on), but this isn’t any different from power, precision, vitality, toughness or condition damage.

There is a point at which the only way to increase the total will reduce your other stats too significantly to be worth it – in theory you could use Magi gear and the air trait that converts precision to healing power to squeeze out about 40 more, but that results in a massive nerf to general DPS, and the vitality doesn’t work well with healing power as compared to toughness.

However, full cleric armor is efficient for elementalists. We benefit a lot from healing power.

Just browsing the net as my connection’s currently too slow to load the video, I found a reddit thread with some of the changes summarized.

Relevant elementalist stuff:
Scepter Air skill 1 (beam of lightning) will hit additional enemies that stand in the beam

Our heals will become easier to interrupt, somehow. No real information as to how. Probably longer cast times on healing skills.

They want to give more classes a trait line/build that’s focused towards countering builds that use lots of boons, such as bunker elementalists. We’re talking things like “deal additional damage based on enemy boons” or things like the necromancer already has which turn boons into conditions, or mesmer’s boon stealing.

They want to encourage more trait setups for elementalists, but haven’t given any information on what they might do apart from giving other players better option vs. our bunker build.

Graybes.8251:

A question for anyone who runs full clerics on a d/d elementalist: How much does each cast of a spell heal you for when using Signet of Restoration? Just looking to see how high that heal for each spell cast can get

In this case d/d isn’t really significant to the math behind the answer, but here goes:

Signet of Restoration heals 202 + 10% of healing power, per cast

If we go with this build we have 1765 healing power, sigil of life isn’t calculated in so we can get 250 more for a total of 2015; this gives an addition 201.5 hp per cast with the signet. (total 403.5; not sure how GW2 rounds healing)

Going full magi with the %toughness/vit to heal food actually reduces our healing with that setup, but with any other food it’d be a slight buff. (according to gw2buildcraft, the site might be bugged)

rolos.7491:

You do raise some interesting points. I tried going full soldier and power/prec food, ended up with more effective power than my original build.

However, it is hard to test accurately without important variables such as fury and might, which an elementalist has (almost) permanent access to.

Which would you say would be the optimal setup for a balanced build?

I did some playing around in the editor, and with a certain set of sigils, traits and food, the best balance of gear for damage output seems to be Knight’s weapons and armor, with Soldier’s trinkets; however, it drops a fair amount of survivability for a fairly minor damage increase. Here’s the breakdown:

Full Soldier’s, 2639.27 Effective Power, 29446 Effective HP

Full Knight’s 2618.05 Effective Power, 22204 Effective HP

Knight’s Armor, Soldier’s Trinkets 2668.95 Effective Power, 25898 Effective HP

The effectiveness of a given armor set may change depending on food, traits, runes and sigils; with that set I was trying to get a reasonable level of crit rate for the soldier’s set to get some reliability from Arcana VI. The Sigil of Leeching doesn’t have much of an impact on the difference between Soldier and Knight and could be freely swapped with any other sigil if you wanted, and the Sigil of Accuracy is less effective than Perception if kill stacking siils are reliable for you; the boon duration from the runes/traits gives a 3.5 second window for either set to trigger Vigor again, which should hopefully mean 100% uptime even for full soldier’s.

Seeing as with average luck the Vigor effect is more or less permanent even on the soldier’s set with that set-up, I don’t really think the additional 20 power (less than 1% damage) from optimizing for DPS is worth the 3548 (12%) effective HP dropoff.

I should’ve been a little more specific when I mentioned that 10 points in air makes knight’s power go up to 2082.2 – that number is higher than soldier’s, as knight’s benefits more from crit damage.

Similarly in your build you’re also running a crit damage boosting food buff on top of air 10 – which leads back into my original point that knight’s needs things like traits, food and runes to be better than soldier’s, and there’s an important question of whether the slight dps advantage is viable compared to the significantly higher defensive capabilities of soldier’s.

As for your mention of the profession’s reliance on healing – yes, this is why I believe cleric’s has better survivability than soldier’s against sustained, non-bursty damage. However, the defensive capabilities of it rely on reacting to damage, and without the vitality on top of the toughness, there are several classes that can potentially kill a cleric-statted elementalist before we get a chance to heal at all

Cleric’s better vs. Sustained dps (toughness increases the effective value of healing power against anything but conditions, and elementalists have plenty of condition removal; a cleric set’s healing power outweighs vit in any fight that lasts more than about 20 seconds)
Soldier’s better vs. Burst DPS (More vit to survive the burst; most burst-based builds falter as soon as their rotation’s over)

Knight’s is a trap. If you use a tool like GW2 BuildCraft, you can see that the toughness increase works out to worse defensive stats than Soldier’s, and the damage from power/precision as minors is actually lower than simply Power as a major stat.

Actual Knight’s comparison figures, using full soldier stats vs full Knight stats (except backpiece, which doesn’t have Knight stats) and no upgrades (ascended accessories w/no infusions; no runes, no sigils):
Effective Power (Power adjusted for crit chance and crit damage):
Soldier’s: 2019.6
Knight’s: 1973.03

Effective HP (HP adjusted for damage reduction from additional toughness):
Soldier’s: 25256
Knight’s: 17492

Essentially, in terms of both offense and defense, Knight’s is worse than Soldier’s. The only advantage is a higher crit rate which may be advantageous based on runes/sigils/traits. Having 10 points in air ups it to 2082.2 effective power, which probably isn’t significant enough to cover the defensive stats being about 30% lower. (As an aside, 30 in water brings them a little closer together, to around a 25% difference, because the extra hp is worth more with Knight’s toughness)

So again to clarify – Knight’s is only ever worth using if supported by traits, sigils, food and/or runes. The only significant on-crit effect for elementalists specifically is the one from Arcana that grants vigor, which is a little hard to measure in terms of defensive/offensive value (one extra dodge per 10 seconds, if you use it on cooldown – but different opponents give different value to that dodge)

It’s incredibly unlikely, as race is core to the personal story and home instance, as well as potential issues involving cultural armor.
I’m no dev, but ANet seem to put a lot of weight on the personal story being something that we can’t change once decisions are made, but a race change would totally screw with the first 3 chapters up to level 30.

The most likely implementation of this will probably involve individual rewards tied to each achievement (so either each achievement adds a balanced score to our new achievement token type unrelated to actual achievement points, or each achievement has a unique reward), rather than a generic points mean prizes system. Basing anything off points alone would mean imbalancing things towards long-term players who’ve farmed hundreds of points from dailies/monthlies, as well as the unlimited achievement lines like master of entropy.

It’s also unlikely to be a functional reward – we’re probably looking more at unique skins and titles, so that players don’t feel like they “have” to drink 100000 units of alcohol, kill 5000 enemies with every single weapon type, kill 1000 giants, etc.

Razor.6392:

Dingle.2743:

full zerker’s risky unless you know your toon perfectly.

No man PVT all the way otherwise you die wtf you want your teamss to waste time reviving you over and over i tried berserker you cant survive like that in dungeons lol so run pvt all the pros run pvt l2p ele support class not dps reroll warrior bro if you want dps

boon

Dingle.2743:

Aim for a decent level of survivability in solo play; full zerker’s risky unless you know your toon perfectly.

Oh god, talk about taking what I said out of context. Nothing in my post was about dungeons or fractals.

-Shrink the level ranges of some of the earlier arcs
-Use the extra space to have an additional race chapter after the battle for claw island. The player character interacts with their race’s central government in an attempt to get support for the pact. The player’s actions during the first race arc are used as leverage in this negotiation
-Have the last arc before Arah significantly affected by the player’s order, in terms of mission styles (the player character, being Commander, has some influence on planning, and they’d naturally plan more towards their order’s style)
-Make the final Zhaitan battle more epic in nature, with each of the races contributing. The Sylvari’s incorruptible nature is studied by the asura, who manage to perfect some method of preventing Zhaitan from corrupting the players mid-battle; Professor Gorr’s anti-dragon weaponry is upsized by the Charr; the humans and norn call upon the gods and spirits for their blessing, and the player group is upsized to the point that they can fight Zhaitan on even footing, using the weapons produced by the Charr (which somehow conveniently match the player’s regular equipment perfectly in terms of functionality). The final battle is thus reached by the orders working together, and won by the races working together.

…and the racial sympathy chapter still has no long-term meaning. I really don’t know what to do with that.

She’s summoned up to 6 krait at once when I’ve tried it (the AoE cap being 5 targets, so I can’t even hit all of them at once if they stack up). Each of them has cc abilities… really annoying.

I’ve tried killing off the summons, but my cleric-statted ele can’t kill a batch before she summons more.

I’ve tried bursting her down before she summons more, because if she dies the summons will disappear as soon as the encounter resets, and she won’t respawn. But I couldn’t survive long enough to kill her.

I’ve tried kiting the lot while hitting her from afar, but they each have a cc ability, mostly pulls, and they’re mostly ranged anyways.

Broke all of my armor on her, gave up. Literally never had a problem in the PS before this.

They’re item drops and generally appear at blue/green rarity, so they’re not accountbound or soulbound on acquire. You should be able to search them on the TP.

Conjurer and Cabalist armor are level-dependent drops; you have a chance of getting Cabalist armor as a drop once you’re level 40 or so, and Conjurer armor once you’re level 55 or so. You’re more likely to see them in zones above those levels as all drops will be in the correct level range, while low-level zones have a chance of dropping gear at the zone’s level (and hence not a high enough level to be cabalist or conjurer)

Unlike weapons, there aren’t zone-specific armor skins. Which armor skins can drop is dependent on the level of the drop, that’s all.

WvW: AoE is a lot more important here than sPvP due to zerg size, so most elementalists I see here are running staffs. 0/10/0/30/30 works just as well, with some minor modifications to suit the staff (e.g. Blasting Staff as the master trait from Arcana). The grandmaster trait from water isn’t so necessary; Cleansing Water can be useful, but it’s probably viable to move 10 trait points from water to another line if you want. Berserker gear is suicide against a large zerg, which leaves you with soldier’s or cleric’s. Soldier has more dps, cleric has a little more survivability at the cost of some dps (this survivability comes from many elementalist heals having a 1:1 healing power ratio; an extra 3k hp from heals every 10 seconds can beat out 8k extra starting HP against everything but burst). Cantrips remain the utilities of choice.

In open world PvE, heck, do whatever you want. Everything’s viable, thanks in part to mobs being stupid enough to get hit by scepter attacks like dragon tooth and shatterstone. Aim for a decent level of survivability in solo play; full zerker’s risky unless you know your toon perfectly.

Early on, a combination of water and arcane traits does wonders for survivability, and the ability to help a group. At 10 points in each you have a passive heal to all party members while in water, and can trait for condition removal and a temporary regeneration boon whenever you attune to water (and 1 stack of might when switching to fire, 5 seconds of swiftness when attuning to air, and 5 seconds of protection when attuning to earth, which can all be useful, especially as they’re essentially free). At 15 points in each that expands to an AoE heal when attuning to water, and the passive heal lasting for a short period after switching to another element.

Investing in Arcana also gives a nice decrease to the cooldown of attunement switches, meaning more frequent big attacks, and gives a boost to boon duration, which is a nice little benefit to all the boons you’ll be putting out.

In short, all those popular elementalist builds that revolve around 20-30 points in both water and arcana are also decent builds for levelling, as having that extra survivability is important in open world PvE and the personal story for squishy mages; and you share more or less all of those little bonuses with everybody around you as an added benefit.

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

20/10/30/0/10
Equip all signets, equip S/F and enjoy the perma swiftness, fury, fire aura etc.
30th in water allows you to share the auras and thus also the boons associated with it.
Get boon duration runes. As you’ll get alot of might with this build I’d go for PVT gear for the bit more defense.
All of this will make you very much tanky and hard to kill while you’re able to give your allies a ton of might.

Cantrips and arcana is awesome because they’re instant-casts so if you are to run a S/F+signet build you’ll have to realize that all those skills have actual casting time resulting in you being more of a caster than a close combat D/D that we’ve all come to love.

Air Signet is instant cast, AoE Blindness + small damage. That’s on top of the passive being a good substitute for perma-swiftness when travelling. Recharge time’s pretty good with 20% CD reduction, too. I’d be quite fond of Fire Signet if I had ‘zerker gear, too – the passive for Fire Signet is a flat 10% crit, not 90 precision (~4.25%) like other classes’ +precision signets.

Earth Signet’s passive is a mere 90 toughness, which isn’t even 5% damage reduction with full ‘zerker gear, and gets worse as you add toughness-based gear to your character. Immobilize might be useful at times, but is dependent on baiting out another player’s condition removal.

Water Signet’s condition removal is very unreliable – 1 condition every 10 seconds. Which condition? Will it trigger when we actually have a condition we want to cleanse, or will it proc on a single stack of bleeding and not help us against the large quantity of immobilizes we’re about to get hit with? It’s better to use the water traits that revolve around cleansing than to use this, imo (though if you go 30 into water you could get the “Water Signet grants regen on cast” and “Cleanse 1 condition when gaining regen” traits… but then both of those also apply to Mist Form, which is more likely to save your life, as it’s also a stun breaker)

So ultimately if I was using a signet build my 3rd utility would probably be a cantrip – I’d get cleansing from water traits (at the very least Water V) and stun breaks from a cantrip.

That’d put my build at… 20/10/30/10/0 if I wanted to abuse zephyr’s boon, elemental shielding and fire’s embrace, and probably 0/0/30/30/10 (or 20 water/20 arcane for Arcane Energy… or 10 Water/30 Arcane for Evasive Arcana…) if I wanted more long-term survivability instead of aura hijinks. Speaking of Aura Hijinks, 90 trait points would make for insane support – Zephyr’s Boon, Elemental Shielding, Fire’s Embrace AND Powerful Auras? Near permanent protection, fury and swiftness for an entire party. No idea if, or when, the level/trait point cap will go up high enough to make that happen, though. It’d break many things.

TurtleofPower.5641:

In my opinion I’d just like to see the ones that exist start being fun before they add any other elites.

Most of the elites are fun. The problem is that they’re so gimmicky and situational that most of the time they’re not useful.

Are you one of the people that equate “fun” to something being useful in combat?(and most classes have at least one useful elite; racials tend to suck, though…). Other people consider fun to be “Turn into a giant freaking tornado”, “become a rampaging juggernaut” or “turn something into a Moa”.

The problem is that most of the elites that are “fun” aren’t useful for general purposes, while the ones that are tend to be very generic. Warrior’s Signet of Rage or Guardian’s Renewed Focus? They offer a lot of general usefulness, but they’re not exactly fun gameplay. They need to be a little more flashy than they are, but the ones that need looking at are the plethora of transformations we have. Most of them drop all access to utilities and healing skills while active, which is the main reason nobody likes using them, as well as many of them not allowing movement during attacks.

…this thread isn’t supposed to be about the issues with current elites, but designing fun new ones. I’ll stop talking about this now.

Elementalist
Arcane Signet | Signet + Arcane | 0 sec cast time | 90-120 sec cooldown time
Passive: Attunements recharge faster ((Level-20)/2)%, doesn’t stack with bonuses from the Arcane trait line
Active: Grants quickness for 10 seconds; puts all attunements on cooldown afterwards

The main idea for this was to take some importance off the Arcane trait line, by allowing the player to get attunement recharge from somewhere else. The math behind the scaling would mean that it would lag behind a player maxing the arcane trait line until level 80, but have the same effect at that point. The active effect, quite frankly, is an afterthought, but the idea comes from arcane spells being instant-cast, therefore an arcane signet would let you cast other spells faster; the penalty for the quickness comes from the loss of the signet and attempts to add a slight skill factor to the active effect (players will be stuck in their final attunement for 9-15 seconds, and if they were abusing quickness for that attunement, may also be stuck with autoattacks, so it’s important to have some self-restraint)

Signet + Arcane means it should benefit from traits that effect either signet or arcane skills. Whether the CD reduction for those skill types should stack, I don’t know.

But mainly I want the passive effect so that some other builds become more viable.

Twilight Arbor story: Kiting Brangoire’s army of spiders for 5 minutes while ever so slowly picking up the entire party whenever I had a chance to stop.

Nearly killed him with incidental damage I hit him with while passing by, too.

So basically:
Party wipes, nearly solo boss while slowly reviving the lot of them

Ygdrad.7839:

I’m basically trying to figure out which classes can get the most use out of the sigil of intelligence to land single powerful crits without having to invest in precision.

I’ll just note again for this point then:
1) Elementalists can change attunement during cast time without interrupting spells, which would proc Sigil of Intelligence (a trick that couldn’t be used for Kill Shot…)
2) Arcane Power makes the next 5 hits crit (read: every single possible hit of an AoE, as they’re capped at 5 targets) and can be used without interrupting cast time

Though, admittedly, we don’t have a high damage single-target attack that I can think of.