Guild Wars 2

Greatsword and Axe/Warhorn is my preffered weapon set up for getting around.

Signet of Rage+Warhorn’s Charge buff gives you near perma swiftness, then Greatsword gives you 2 mobility skills (Whirlwind attack and Rush). Greatsword’s mobility skills are affected by swiftness, so having swiftness alongside GS is pretty important for maximizing move speed.

Hundred Blades and Whirlwind attack are pretty fast attacks for the GS, but the other 3 attacks are relatively slow hard hitters as opposed to fast animations.

It only bothers me that they say they are gaining adrenaline when I start losing adrenaline for being out of combat.

1)Trait quick glyphs.
2)Trait Inscription.
3)Use Glyph of Elemental Harmony in Air
4) use any other swiftness granting skill (gust, updraft, any other glyph in air)
5) Repeat 3 and 4

Infinite swiftness. (For perma swiftness only the traits and glyph are necessary)

I’ve had 2+ mins of swiftness on me and I could keep stacking it infinitely, much more simple. Then you can use your combo fields and blast finishers for other things.

On the flip side, it’s extremely rare that I actually see elementalists do this (or maybe that’s just because I kill other Ele’s fast enough that they don’t get the opportunity to do so).

But hey, if they want to use one of their long recharging valuable defensive cooldowns to ensure a fast stomp, I really don’t see a problem. It’s not much different than thieves using stealth to stomp (which can happen ALOT more due to shorter cd), or quickness buffed stomps.

The bow is fabulous for the PvE dynamic events. It tags EVERYTHING for you to get xp off of and loot, no matter how many people are there.

Other than that it is pretty crappy.

I sort of feel like a thrown melee weapon would be more fitting to a warrior than a pistol imo.

The only problem is warriors already have axes, so they couldn’t do a thrown axes set… and thrown daggers would be more of a thief thing.

I’d love to see a spear/javelin set (not underwater)

1) If you don’t have a problem with your dps now, it’s not going to get worse later.
2) Dagger/Dagger or Scepter/Dagger
3) Staff for full support. Scepter/Dagger can also work for a more offensive approach while still being able to give massive might stacks to your group, but Staff is reccomended for being full support.

As I leveled my elementalist I got to constantly try out new combinations of skills and ways to improve my efficiency and potency, and ways to maximize my damage and survivability as well as team support.

As I leveled my warrior I spammed Hundred Blades over, and over, and over, and over, and over.

Pretty much same effect. The difference being my elementalist was significantly more fun.

@Micro Hard – I’d be fine with Dragon’s tooth getting a cd increase or damage nerf if it means getting the delay significantly reduced. With that said though, if they did reduce the dmg or increase the cd on dragons tooth then they should also decrease the cd or increase the damage on fire grab so that fire attunement still has a respectable attack chain.

DaedalusDragon.3754:

There isn’t a peep from Anet about any issue about the elementalist. Just the way the cookie crumbles I suppose.

Just because they haven’t said anything doesn’t mean they aren’t doing anything.

A1 in sPvP.
A2 in everything else.

A gaming keyboard/mouse just isn’t needed for gw2. ~25 skills+movement does NOT require anything more than basic hardware.

Compared to aion where you have 40-45 skills that all need to be hotkey’d and another 20 or so for consumables/marking/other various keybindings and then movement on top.

Wulfrim.4793:

Ah, I figured it would be something like that or else it would be too overly powerful. Is it worth grabbing instead of the other arcane grandmaster traits?

If you’re going to be using it as a blast finisher, yes. Otherwise, if you’re not picking up Evasive Arcana and using it to it’s full extent, it’s not worth going past 20 pts in arcana, imo.

You know about the internal cd, right?
And you know it only works in combat, right?

Apos.5184:

incisorr.9502:

you kidding me? warrior has vengeance, best skill ever. You can get the sweet vengeance trait and it is totally game changing

warrior downed skills are top tier unlike the class itself lol, the single target KD may be a bit weak but veng + sweet veng makes up for it

Please tell me which class will you kill within the 15 seconds. Apart from a ranger or a necromancer and I still have doubts about the former.

Will you kill a mesmer?
Will you kill a thief?
Will you kill a guardian?
Will you kill an elementalist?

The thief and mesmer can buy 5-7 seconds only when they are downed,let alone when they are alive.

Game changing,sure, when you play against dummies. Or against an engineer I guess. And I’m fairly certain I’ve seen an absolute zero of them so far in spvp.

By the time they down you, you should have done AT LEAST 50% dmg to them. On a burst dps warrior spec it’s not hard to do 50%, down, and finish them within 15 seconds. It’s not really a trait meant for a tanky warrior as much as it is for a burst dmg warrior.

Also keep in mind in the time that you are downed, your skills are recharging, and people don’t use expect a warrior to get up when they are standing right next to them as they start HB’ing all over their faces (followed by a whirlwind attack is usually enough).

With some practice you can do this to pretty much any class sans mesmer (which lasts too long in the downed state). Thieves are np.

What’s with the weird camera movement?

Nefarious, what you’re not getting is out of combat Elementalists can already switch weapons, the only difference between what we have now and what we are asking for is being able to hotkey it instead of having to dig through our inventories all the time to switch weapons.

Make the begining of the immobilize channel push the target back X distance then immobilize them after being pushed back for the duration of the channel.

Skill fixed.

I don’t think I’ve really scored higher than low 300s (of the screenshots I have, 315 is the highest, and the majority of them are 280-305), but also 90-95% of matches I have the highest point total.

That’s kinda besides the point though, as achieving X points doesn’t really prove anything. There have been some matches on Capricorn where I scored very low because all I did was defend the ruins most of the match, but I was also easily the reason that we won because of holding the ruins.

If you’ve burnt through all your cds and stuff, Stone Shards is still good ST DPS to fall back on.

Dragons Tooth just needs to animate faster. People shouldnt be able to just idly walk out of it without needing to dodge or anything. Heck even in PvE I’ll usually kill my target before it lands or it will overkill or the pve mob will run out of it. No spell should be like this, and the damage on dragon’s tooth isn’t THAT high to justify being nearly unusable in a large number of situations.

What hotdogs said.

As far as I’m concerned, Glyph of Elemental Harmony is one of, if not the best heals in the game when traited for (and it is worth spending 1-2 of your traits on it, at least for inscription if not quick glyphs). A 20 second rchg heal, with access to 20+ seconds of swiftness or regen, 7+ seconds of protection, or 2 stacks of might is incredibly good. The potential overall healing it can put out when factoring its ability to give perma regeneration is really good and I can honestly say I wouldn’t have hit 100% world completion on my Ele as fast as I did without the perma swiftness, it just makes things so much easier.

edit: of course if you’re one of those eles that dies in <5 secs, the regen won’t help you that much, but neither will much else in terms of healing.

They also need to change it to make it unaffected by autotargetting.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/earth

5.
the solid matter of this planet; dry land; ground.

Tornado is bad.
Glyph of Elementals is better than Hounds.

The “When you swap to this weapon in combat” sigils do work on attunement. There is an internal cd though mind you.

WvW is part of the world…. Keep it as is. Don’t forget your position rotates constantly, so it really isn’t hard to just wait til your base is by the points you need.

Also@Defektive, You aren’t required to get the WvW monthly achievement and the XP w/out dieing achievement at the same time. They do give you a whole month to complete them, which is plenty of time to do them seperately. If anything were to be changed about the monthly achievements it would be the insanely high salvaging requirement.

Pretty simple and I feel it’s something we need.

Right now we are limited to 2 builds. 1 for sPvP, which can be changed at anytime, and 1 for everything else, which includes Soloing, WvW, and dungeons, all of which aren’t necessarily compatible in a single build (moreso for some classes than others).

For example, on my elementalist I use an offensive scepter/dagger build for running around and doing my own thing in PvE and roaming WvW. However for dungeons I’d rather use a healing staff support spec, or for WvW sieging I’d rather use an offensive staff spec. Or on my warrior I use a glass cannon spec for sPvP and running around but that is hardly viable for dungeons. Effectively changing to these roles isn’t as simple as swapping your weapon and changing some major traits, we need something more.

When we swap to a secondary build we would be able to:
-Have a different distribution of traits
-Have a different set of gear stored (armor+weapon) if desired.

Potentially put a cooldown on switching builds if it is deemed necessary.

Switching to a secondary build should a simple click of a button in your character profile UI and further it should not cost gold to switch builds. Gold/Gems could potentially be used to unlock the 2nd build slot, but after that there should be no fee (even though I feel this is something so basic that it should have just come with the game).

Any kind of LFD type queue thing that would fill your group up with a bunch of randoms I would not want.

A LFG chat channel is something I would want though.

Don’t try and out last a thief, outdps them. As mentioned earlier, invisibility is not invincibility, I’ve downed thieves plenty of times while they were hidden, don’t stop attacking them just because you can’t see them. The only thieves I really have trouble with are the ones that use deathblossom and spec feline grace and dodge everything.

All they need to do is allow you to weapon swap back and forth between the conjured weapon and your actual weapon until the charges run out, and maybe do a balance pass over them to make sure they’re competitive and worthwhile to use compared to your normal skills.

You either abandon all your defense and spam the Air1 attack in melee range, or you fight at range and do crap damage. If you can somehow corner your target, Water5 can do a ton of damage though.

Build

Standard(?) Stance dance spec. Great at stacking aoe might with ring of fire. Great CC between earth and air. Water provides healing and condition removal. Mainly built for PvE, works alright in sPvP and Roaming WvW as well.

With Quick Glyphs and Inscription, the Glyph heal will provide 20s of swiftness, 20s of regen, 7s of protection, or 2 stacks of might, depending on attunement, typically just use it for swiftness or regeneration.

Glyph of Elemental Power is mostly for triggering Inscription if the heal is on cd, I don’t want to use the heal, or I need 2 inscription buffs. This can be replaced with Glyph of Storms, Mist form, Armor of Earth, or Arcane Shield depending on preferences.

Arcane Wave is mainly for triggering Aoe Might off of Ring of Fire and providing extra burst dmg (it has no cast time).

The 2 Elementals provide extra dmg and distractions. Actively protecting them with your 2 blinds and 2 knocks in air and earth are important to make your summons be as effective as possible.

The 10 pts in Fire can also be moved to Earth for Armor of Earth at 50% hp, a bit more toughness, and condition damage, or it can be moved to arcana to pick up evasive arcana. This is a relatively flexible build.

Making use of your on attunement buffs is very important for keeping up the fast pace of this spec. One of my favorite uses is switching to Earth when CC’d to apply 33% dmg reduction while you can’t move. Switch to water often to remove conditons and apply regen and healing, but don’t stay in it too long, the sooner you switch out the sooner you can switch back in.

Scepter/Dagger has alot of CC in Air and Earth, use it. Also learn how to stack your might. Put at least 20 points into Arcane with Elemental Attunement and Vigor on Crit. Learn all your CDs and know when they will be recharged even when not in that attunement (mostly only applies to cds over 10-15seconds). Abuse the crap out of Ride the Lightning as a travel and escape tool. Glyph heal+Inscription+Quick Glyphs is really good, but not particular to S/D (can be used in any spec). Being a mid range set know when to be in close and when to keep your distance and how to keep distance while dpsing. Don’t overuse your “1” skills. Air 1 is good for tagging mobs, but Fire1/Water1 are both pretty terrible, Stone Shards is the only 1 with decent dps.

What Arcane said. I have some general rotations that I use, but it all changes depending on the situation.

(Scepter/Dagger)
Fire Attune>Ring of Fire>Arcane Wave>Dragon Tooth>Phoenix>Earth Attune>EQ>Churning Earth (use mainly for PvE aoe might stacking)

Air Attune(lightning strike from attune)>Lightning Strike skill>Blinding Flash>Arc Lightning>Ride the Lightning>Updraft>Lightning Strike>Earth Attune>Dust Devil>Stone Shards or Rock Barrier>EQ>Churning Earth (CC rotation, not static, often switched up depending on situation)

Only really switch to water when I need to heal or remove conditions. The above rotations aren’t the only things I do, but they are the closest thing to a standard rotation I have. Pretty much everything else changes depending on what the situation calls for.

I never really liked MH dagger that much, but maybe I didn’t give it much of a chance. Scepter/Dagger just gives you alot more options, imo.

I usually just focus on buffing the crap out of the melee, cause whenever I try to buff the ranged dps it ends up with me chasing them all over and only buffing one person instead of a couple melee even after explicitly stating exactly what I can give them if they are standing near me at the start of the dungeon run. Part of it though is that due to the way the majority of dungeon mechanics work, you can’t just have everyone stand together all clumped up.

An increased radius for alot of aoe buffing type abilities would be appreciated.

Naraldeth.3862:

Usually 30 Strength, 30 Arms, Picking up all Greatsword bonuses and whatever else suits your playstyle. You don’t have to pick up the bladetrail bonus since that requires 10 points in tactics which is a very underused tree for the GS warrior. I myself run with the 10 points in Discipline and run faster with a melee weapon but honestly, I barely see this working as intended.

To recap, 30 Strength and 30 Arms is pretty much necessity, take all GS damage traits and possible crit traits.
The last 10 are for your own choice.

20 strength, 30 arms, 20 discipline is better IMO. Don’t undervalue the crit dmg when you can spec to have 80-90% crit chance.

From strength you need Berskerker’s power and Slashing Power, past that the rest is meh. On the other hand from Discipline you want Heightened Focus and either Sweet Revenge or Mobile Strikes.

Elementalist is fine in PvE, where it is struggling is PvP. If you’re failing at PvE on an Ele you’re doing it wrong.

After playing aion for so long (which requires upwards of 50 or so keybinds just for skills), I’ve been avoiding using the shift/alt/ctrl keys since I don’t need to.

Right now I’m using 1-5 for skills, F1-F4 for attunements, Q for dodge, E for heal, TFG for utilities, and Y for elite. Works fine, my hands are already used to reaching for much more difficult keybindings.

Compared to aion where I’d have to use 1-7, A1-5, shift1-5, ctrl1-4, F1-F6, shiftF1-F4, QWETYUIFG, ShiftF and shiftG, numpad, and mouse buttons, it is so much better, JUST for skill keybindings, it is a complete world of difference.

At this point I’m just echoing, but yeah, Signet of Rage is one of the best elites in the game, not just for Warriors. Both the passive and active effects are extremely powerful and relevant.

Earth Elementals are quite good at holding aggro, I haven’t used Hounds, but I don’t see why they would be any better, mostly considering Glyph of Elementals recharges in half the time hounds does.

Glyph of Elementals isn’t without flaws though. Non-Earth Elementals die too fast unless you are heavily focusing on keeping them alive or they have other means of not attracting attention. It could also probably use a slight cd reduction (It is still too long even with glyphs traited), and potentially made to hit a bit harder.

Fiery Greatsword is a short range weapon, not a melee weapon, you can still kite and dps melee mobs with it. But otherwise it still has issues. Namely locking you out of every bit of utility you have while not really being any signficant dps increase.

Tornado has pretty much just 1 use, which is disruption in PvP. It’s garbage in PvE, which is a serious issue, and again locks you out of every bit of utility you have.

Some ideas of things we could use:
An amped up Glyph of Elemental Power ie:
Same conditions on hit, but in an aoe fashion, and boons based on attunement

Some kind of defensive form. And by form, I don’t mean replace our skills.
Give us Protection/Regeneration/Stability/Condition Removal, whatever. Make it unique and not just another mist form/armor of earth though.

Or hell give us an elite skill that reduces the cd to swap attunements to 0-5 seconds (this is pretty much the ONLY way I would ever accept having 0-5 rchg on attunement swapping since having it like that all the time would be OP, even having attunement swapping at 5 seconds would be extremely strong). And then maybe some sort of effect whenever you switch attunements while the elite is active.

At this point you can’t really say, just remove X elite skill since it’s garbage, because some people will inevitable like said elite skill in some form or another. But maybe in another patch additional elite skills will be added to each class where something like this could happen. (IMO all classes could use a good 3 more elite skills to expand diversity)

The best fix for Ele will be something simple, ie: increasing/decreasing numbers on skills and traits, adding effects to existing traits/skills, but not creating new mechanics/skills/animations.

If it’s too complicated or would require too much development work, it won’t happen. Balancing Elementalists just needs to be what it is at face value (balancing), which can be done entirely by simply adjusting certain numbers in very specific, intelligently chosen places.

Elementalists do not need wide sweeping changes that completely redesign the class.

phaeris.7604:

Does anyone really fall for the bullsrush/frenzy/Hb combo anymore?

If i’m up against a warrior who is relying on that it’s an automatic win for me.

Yep, I still wreck people with it, thieves included (I do have trouble with mesmers though, but thats more due to their obscenely OP downed state)

You need to be smart about it, but it’s still just as strong as ever. Learning to bait dodges, weaving it into the middle of your auto attack chain, leading with it (only if you know they don’t see you), and being able to kite off a failed attempt is more important. Being able to get kills without using bullcharge/frenzy on a GS warrior will also get you far, that way whenever you do have bullcharge/frenzy up its just extra, vs relying on it.

Traited Vengeance is also something I’ve been getting alot of use out of, and pretty much guarantees a win against every class sans mesmer, because as a burst dmg GS warrior by the time they down me, they’re also very low health, even if HB doesn’t connect, and most players will not expect the 2nd Hundred blades when theyre standing right next to me trying to finish me off followed by whirling attack. This only doesn’t work if they immediately start finishing me off right as I’m originally downed, since it means I can’t enter vengeance state due to the cd even with perfect timing on the KD, or if there are 2 players trying to finish me off, or if it’s a mesmer since I can’t get up from downed, kill them, and finish them off, before vengeance wears off 90% of the time. Otherwise traited Vengeance greatly increases win ratio when hundred blades fails, for whatever reason.

As an elementalist, I just want to be able to weapon swap OUT of combat, and have a shortcut key similar to that of other classes to do it instead of having to dig through my inventory.

I don’t want an incombat weapon swap. This isn’t Aion, and I don’t want to manage 40+ skills. I just want to be able to have a different weapon to use for different situations and not have to fiddle with things to do it or decrease my already limited inventory space.

Of the things the OP listed, only #5 has happened to me, but there is no way I (or you) would know if they chased you just because you’re an elementalist, that’s just silly. Regardless I ran a good 10-15 of them all the way to my base without dieing, was sorta funny, in a sadistic bloodthirsty kind of way.

In sPvP I use Rifle. Hands down better (for the rare occassions I actually switch to it)
For PvE I use Longbow as my secondary weapon mostly for the burst skill, Longbow Burst+Arcing Arrow is really strong wide radius aoe, great for events.
Currently I only WvW pvp on my Ele, but I’ll just assume Longbow for Sieging, Rifle for roaming. Pretty basic, it’s just single target vs aoe.

TBH, I didn’t really like my thief…. compared to my warrior

Toughness/HPS builds are boss.

Stack toughness with regen/soothing mists/heal on cast signet, win. Not something I personally run, but it is quite effective.

Scepter/Dagger can already get a very respectable stack of (aoe) might anyways without having to trait anything.

Ring of Fire>Dragon Tooth>Phoenix>Earth Attune>EQ>Churning Earth= 12 stacks of aoe might. If you have arcane wave you can raise that to 15 stacks, or 16 stacks if you have elemental attunement as well, 17 if you heal in fire, or 18 if you heal in fire with Inscription (healing in fire is significantly less advantageous to healing in other attunements though)

Edit: I just remembered Phoenix also cures conditions, so technically the 40 sec water cd wouldn’t be your only conditional removal, my mistake. I pretty much never use phoenix for condition removal though being as good as it is for so many other things.

The biggest reason on my elementalist that I use the condition removal on attunement to water is for removing Poison, since when you switch to water it is typically to heal (trident, wave, soothing mists, elemental attunement, and the glyph heal (which has 10-20 seconds of regeneration in water)) which all get hit pretty hard by poison (-33% healing, and a DoT that cancels out gain from HoTs). Obviously it can also remove any other troublesome condition as well, but poison is the main reason I actually traited it. In PvP it’s not as amazing because typically you’re going to be getting hit by multiple conditions, but in PvE where you’re usually just hit by 1 type of condition at a time, it’s really amazing.

But otherwise yeah it looks like a really nice build. I still have 10 points in my build that I’m not entirely happy with so I’ve been constantly scouring builds to get ideas of better places to put them, which may end up being earth. (they’re currently in fire for +10% dmg in fire, but since I attunement swap so much and lingering elements not working, it can be a let down at times)

You have no way to remove conditions other than a 40 second cd in water. I’d reccomend putting 10 points into water for condition removal on attunement to water. It’s extremely good.