Guild Wars 2

I’m a D/D Ele (suprise), and I mostly only play Dungeons with a little PvE. I was running full PVT gear until recently, and while I was having a lot of fun with the class and my survivability, my DPS was dismal, so I decided to work some Precision and Crit% into my build.

At first I totally dropped all my PVT gear for Knights and a little Valkyrie mixed in, but I was dying all over the place. I started working some PVT back in, and I’ve found a medium where I never die and I’m doing at least 50% more damage than my original PVT build. While I really like it, I am constantly second guessing myself as to whether I can dial back the PVT more in favor of more Precision and Crit%.

So, here’s my current build:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/elementalist/?1.3|8.1c.0.8.1c.0|0.0.0.0.0.0|1n.7x.1n.9c.1n.7x.1n.7x.1n.7x.1n.7x|4u.d1f.1p.61.1p.61.1n.64.1n.64.3v.0|0.a1.a3.k35.u56b|0.0|1n.1t.1v.1y.28|e

I liked the idea of going 6x Divinity, but it’ll cost me a fair chunk of HP. I see a lot of people going for Boon duration, but I feel like I’m pretty good at keeping Fury up a good half the time, and my sigils allow me to keep a good 15+ stacks of might on most of the time.

What do the pros think?

SkyChef.5432:

They are there to enhance player’s escaping skill.

Lol, that’s one way of looking at it.

Murderin.8269:

I don’t really want to be the leader of my first ever dungeon in this game. I have no idea what i’m doing inside one.

Being the person who creates the group isn’t the same thing as being the leader. Like I said – there are tons of people just waiting to get into a unpretentious group, but want someone else to take the initiative. I create groups all the time on dungeons I’m very inexperienced in. No one complains because I’m not putting “Experienced Players Only” in my LFG.

Don’t be afraid to post a LFG of your own. There are many people just like you who are looking for a non-cheese (zerker war) group, and the moment you create one is the moment you get slammed with invite requests.

I still do AC. I’ve gotten so good at it, I don’t mind helping other people along. I wish it was as fast as it used to be (all three paths in under an hour), but I’ve got CoF for quick gold (until they patch that at least).

If something rediculously stupid like this was to ever be implimented, they better make it so trash mobs give you something besides pointless XP. I’m sick and tired wasting time on OP trash mobs only to get nothing but a few coppers out of it in the end. I’d GLADLY pay those copper just to never even see them appear in the dungeon. They are there only to slow progression. They aren’t there to add to the experience of the player or enhance the meta-game.

If you want to waste everyone’s time on trash mobs, create you own group and make it clear to the people who join that you think your experience is worth more than their time. Short of that, don’t force your unpopular opinion on the entire player base.

You’re complaining about how other people want to play? I suggest you stop worrying about what other people want to do. If you would prefer to sit there and grind through trash mobs which have literally no purpose in the dungeon besides slowing you down, then start your own group and make it clear to people who join you that you want to waste everyone’s time for no reason what-so-ever.

I agree cheesing your way through a boss via exploit is dumb as I get a lot of joy from beating a boss properly, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to sit there and kill no-loot trash mobs for experience I don’t even need.

If other people with it could test out what they know vs. the gains they are getting, it would be helpful. I will post in the bug section so a dev can look into it if I know it’s not just me.

I’ve been running the same dungeon over and over to make some cash for a little while, now, so I’m pretty familiar with how much money I get from champs and bosses.

I run AC, and I usually run Omnomberry bars in them. If I remember correctly, Kholer, the Spider Queen, and the end boss would always give around 22-24s, each. Ever since I put in my Gilded Infusion, I’ve been getting about 16s, each. It seems like the infusion is cancelling out my Omnomberry boost.

Has anyone else noticed this, yet?

I think they should have focused their efforts into making new, more challenging/involved dungeons instead of revamping old ones. AC was a nice, casual dungeon for those who aren’t MMO stereotypes. There was no reason to take that piece of content away only to appease the inherently contrary fools who demand content which ensures they have no gaps in their gaming time. The rest of us have better things to do than invest precious extra time into increasingly mundane tasks.

penatbater.4710:

Just like to say, soooo annoying. But after 13s of repairs, we finally managed to do it. What we did was to stack aoe heals and regen. and by Ogdin’s hammer, it worked! :o

I mean, I’m still blown away. Aoe healing. who knew right??

One thing i’d like to suggest is that whatever the npc is doing (charging, knocked down, etc) so long as he’s not dead, he’ll pop the shield bubble along with the falling rocks. this way, people will reliably know grast will pop his bubble and will try their best to heal him up.

You are totally wrong. I wouldn’t normally bother to point something like that out, but for the sake of making sure less experienced players aren’t following terrible advice, I felt the need to.

If Grast gets knocked down… He. Will. Not. Deploy. The. Shield. I can’t make this any more plain. He will lie there and die like the rest of us. Healing has absolutely nothing to do with whether he deploys the shield properly or not. Most of the time, the idiot will just be using his ridiculously slow and pointless auto-attack, or be in the middle of hobbling back into melee range to complete a queued attack when the ceiling caves in on him and kills him.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I’ll look into it and try to make sure Grast uses the bubble properly, but we also made the roar he uses to summon the boulders interruptable so a focused group could stand a chance if Grast died or ever misbehaved.

Totally disagree with that one. Sure, maybe interrupt once or twice, but CR does his roar so quickly, there’s no way even the most focused of teams can get rid of the 4+ stacks of defiant after every interrupt plus manage to interrupt the roar consistently over and over.

This mechanic doesn’t promote tighter teamwork – it promotes exploit discovery.

So, if I do the same 3 dungeon paths two or three times a day, will I get hit by the DR? I’m not sure if I’m understanding this correctly.

haviz.1340:

Trash mobs had their hp vastly reduced.

He’s talking about hatchlings (spider and gravelings), and no they weren’t reduced, they were vastly increased, along with a huge toughness buff. On top of that, their auto-attacks have massive CD, now. I know each graveling hatchling auto-attack will stack 3 bleeding. Stand still for only a second or two and you’re guaranteed to have 15+ stacks on you.

You can’t attack more than 5 at once due to AoE restrictions, and they flood you with 10+ at any given moment. There’s a difference between “challenge” and “cheap”. Personally, I think that is pretty lazy.

Other than the fact they doubled the length of time it takes to do the dungeon and the horrible NPC bugs it’s riddled with, that’s the only complaint I have about the update.

Haha, the amount of gold these people are going to put into their Lv35 gear is going to be more than most people put into their Lv80s. Time to jack up the prices!

Bukkebruse.2810:

Come on, this is a change/bug that’s not hard to adapt to. Use CC skills to tear through his defiant stacks and stun him when he uses the scream. People keep saying they want harder content, and when it’s released (although it was due to an accident in this case) it turns out they simply aren’t up to the task.

I’m all for more challenging content, but never at the expense of eliminating casual content to do it. All the things in AC they changed would have been great… if it wasn’t AC. It is the beginner dungeon – why on earth would you make it more difficult and un-PUG-friendly? Revamp a harder dungeon, or better yet – create brand new ones. Just because a certain group of the player base wants something doesn’t mean content has to be removed to accommodate it.

Still happening

The Colossus can be interrupted, but only after you debuff the 2-4 stacks of defiance he has on him (the yellow-ish icon). While it’s utterly moronic we are expected to be able to take him down 4 defiance stacks AND still be able to interrupt in the short period of time the Colossus can cast his falling rock move, that’s not really the issue with this fight.

The issue is that Grast’s AI is ****ing stupid. HE. WON’T. CAST. THE. SHIELD.

I have no problem keeping him alive in the fight… until the rocks start coming down. If he doesn’t cast the shield, it’s insta-kill for all but the most slippery team members, including Grast’s own death. I’m not sure what they’ve got programmed for his skills and moveset, but they need to make so that no matter what he’s doing, he ALWAYS casts the shield when the Colossus does his finisher. If that means reducing the skill’s cooldown or removing his other skills and auto-attacks, I don’t care. If they aren’t going to make it so he casts the shield 100% of the time, they need to make the ceiling avoidable. Period.

I like the idea of needing to protect the NPC, but Grast needs to be updated to use the hammer skill 100% of the time. I don’t mind keeping him alive and I don’t mind paying the price if he dies, but I do mind when he dies due to him not using his own move when he’s supposed to. It’s really dumb that an entire team can be do everything right just to get wiped due to poor programming and quality control.

Just finished path 2 on AC, and the patch notes from today say that the Ghost Eater getting stuck on traps was fixed. Well, it’s not. It sat on the second trap and would not attack or move.

Luckily, something was changed so the traps regenerate faster, so we were able to just keep charging up the second trap every time it became active again and finished off the boss that way.

Better than before, but still pretty buggy.

Lol, I have a friend who hardly ever plays – his top character is a Lv55 Engineer. I tried showing him the update, today, and sat looking for a group for 35 minutes before we quit trying. Every person who joined the party immediately left when they saw the Lv55. The stereotypes in these topics can tout their GW2 prowess all they want, it doesn’t change the fact that so far, the cons of the update have far outweighed the pros.

Lucky.9421:

Pretty sure everything has less health in AC now. If you don’t wipe it should go faster now. Just saying…

I still think it is too hard for level 35s, though it always was.

Too true on the Lv35 comment, but there are definitely things with a lot higher health – mainly mini-mobs. The little spiders and gravlings have WAY more health than before. While that isn’t a critical change, it has caught be by surprise quite a few times already. Nothing like thinking an AoE cleared them all out, only to find you suddenly have 22 stacks of bleeding on you from freakin hatchlings, lol.

Ioflux.4369:

Complaining = Higher priority than not complaining. You wouldnt complain if you didn’t want change (thus caring). Nice try though. I too hold an office job and I find it helps pass time to get on the forums and read terribly logic’d people make posts that contradicts their purpose.

Lol, you don’t even know what point you’re trying to make, do you? I never said I didn’t care, so don’t put words in my mouth. I stated I don’t have a lot of time to play these games unlike the clinical contrarians, and the dude insinuated post an awful lot for a guy who doesn’t have time to play the game. I pointed out I have hardly any posts, and I post when I’m working, not when I have time to play. Might want to either pay more attention to your job or the posts you’re reading – either way. Nice try though.

DeathPanel.8362:

I agree with your points here but to be fair you seem to care enough to post alot about it for someone “whose gaming is the absolute lowest thing on his priorities”.

I have, like, 20-30 posts on this site, total. It’s called having an office job and taking a break. That’s quite the reach you’ve got there, though. Assumptions about someone’s priorities based off 4-5 posts is always a solid tactic.

Druzo Blint.2893:

You sure do have enough time to sit here and troll though. Perhaps if you took the same amount of time you need to QQ then you can discuss tactics or builds.

I’m sure this will be very difficult for someone like you to understand, but there are a lot of us who are adult gamers with jobs, families, and lives. And just because we can take a break from work and easily pull up a website and chat about the game for a few minutes doesn’t mean we’ve got all day to sit in front of the game, groveling over our own narcissism.

Malediktus.9250:

You must be bad, even if you kill all silver dropping bosses and troll it takes less than 30min per path.

Ah, our resident internet stereotype who flames and misses the point, completely. I was waiting for some tool to show up and fill the spot.

The point is that it’s much harder and much longer than it was. I don’t care how quickly some shut-in obsessed loser can blow through the new AC – for someone like me whose gaming is the absolute lowest thing on his priorities, I appreciated the quick and consistent AC runs I could squeeze into my extremely limited time, and now I have to focus elsewhere.

I’m pretty certain the gravlings have also gotten a toughness and vitality buff. They definitely don’t die as easy.

Don’t listen to the crying? More like don’t listen to the MMO stereotypes who invest entirely too much time and energy into this game.

It’s a shame people are allowed to do this. As a developer, myself, I can’t think of any good ways to prevent people from being able to do this which can’t just be circumvented or would detract from the overall experience. Until ANet figures something out (and I wouldn’t hold my breath), my recommendation is to always host the dungeon. It wont stop them from kicking you, but at least you get to imagine their rage after effectively booting themselves in the process.

DeathPanel.8362:

AC is not trash. It’s just harder now when you have trash players in team.

I’m a casual player, so I PUG 100% of my dungeons. I’m used to having 3 of my party members who are completely clueless, and don’t mind giving tips and walking them through things. Now, I just have 3 party members who are dead and waiting for a chance to rez all the time.

Ioflux.4369:

Cof 1. I highly doubt you can get 4g from 1 run of AC w/o exotics unless you meant 4g for running all 3 paths.

Clearly, that’s what I meant.

Now that AC was needlessly ruined, what’s a quick and easy dungeon to grind gold out of? I used to run all three paths of AC in about 30-40mins for about 4g each run, but now it’s taking that long to just run one path.

Talk about a phenomenal failure… Sorry, but huge, ridiculously long lasting and ridiculously powerful poison AOE does not make the spider queen more fun. Glitched out Stalkers who get long periods of invulnerability are not engaging. Cave troll fearing you off a cliff, then resetting is not more challenging.

Each and every single one of these things is plain old arbitrary. It’s like it wasn’t even tested – just plugged in and go!

I will mention that the boss fights are a lot more entertaining, now… when they work. Ghost Eater is buggier than that one scene in Indiana Jones.

Anyway, where are you guys going to grind cash now?

I just don’t think there are enough healing/support skills to justify a full support/heal Ele.

While Eles are no longer the best at any particular thing anymore, they are still the most fun to play. Avoid the class if you want, but there’s more enjoyable things in a game than DPS.

Daecollo.9578:

Dresden.1736:

As someone who just learned of this exploit… LOL

Except it wasn’t an exploit.

Yes, it was clearly working the way the intended it, hence why they left it the way it was and didn’t apply the cooldown to ALL similar food types, right?

Zookeeper.2513:

Effect.6408:

Next they’ll make Kohler a mandatory fight.

I would like this actually….

Ditto. Only nubs skip Kholer. He’s so incredibly easy, there’s no reason to skip him, either.

As someone who just learned of this exploit… LOL

Load up the game, load up a character, and after about 30s in-game, it kicks me out to the character select screen with an error message.

One strange thing to note is when I select my character, it starts loading a map I’m not on (Plains of Ashford), then after a second or two it loads my actual map.

Also, dailies can be repeated for multiple laurels because when you crash, it doesn’t save your daily progress.

I just don’t get why they didn’t just get rid of the cheese dailies (laurel vendor and crafting) and open the entire list to choose from. The 4 extra “choices” are hardly an improvement, especially “choices” that involve things you have absolutely no desire to partake in (PVP, keg brawl, etc…).

I’d definitely have chosen an all-stat laurel amulet had they had the 50% increase of stats, before. Kind of messed up there was nothing posted about this before, since I literally bought my 3-stat amulet two days ago and most definitely wouldn’t have.

The concept is nice, but the choice is merely an illusion. You’ve still got the 5 you didn’t want to do before, and an extra 4 to choose from you’ll never do.

Why not just let us choose from the entire list since everyone’s play style is different, and you can’t lump the entire player base into 5 of 9 randomly selected “choices”?

Thanks for the replies, guys.

So, I know the Sigils which apply some sort of bonus on weapon swap work on attunement swap. I was wondering – does a rune that shortens weapon swap duration shorten attunement swap duration as well?

If you’re going for a tank build, there isn’t any Lv80 gear that gives PVT that you can get off the TP, so I’d just start grinding AC and upgrade your armor as you get the tokens.

I don’t think you have enough Karma to do much with in terms of Lv80 gear. I know the PVT daggers are 60k+ for Lv80, and I’m not sure about the armor.

So, long story short, no, I can’t think of anything you should/could get that would help you before you grind dungeons. Maybe some Knight’s or Valkyrie’s rares?

“d/d is freaking boring”

HA!

Hm, I might angling down a little too far. I’ll try leveling out the Y-Axis to see if I start landing more hits.

Just to be sure, though… there’s no stat in the game that increase accuracy? I want to rule that out.

Every time someone says the Ele is OP, I feel like a catch a case of their dumbs.

What other sigils are you using? You cannot use more than one on-kill sigil at once.

Does anyone else have issues with skills missing their target far too often?

I play a D/D Ele, and I’m constantly missing with the Fire Grab and Lightning Whip skills. It’s particularly annoying when you’re point blank on a massive boss or champion mob and one of your highest damaging, longest cool-down skills misses for apparently no reason at all. Lightning Whip connects, maybe, 60% of the time.

Is this an effect of the class/skill, or something to do with my stats? Does precision have anything to do with missing, and would increasing it cause me to connect more?

Anyone who thinks a D/D ele is OP has clearly never played one. Of course they have their perks, like condition removal and evasiveness, but just because you can’t conveniently lock them down and DOT them doesn’t make them OP.

The PVT build has absolutely dismal DPS, and their survivability comes purely from their equipment – which is LIGHT armor in case you need reminding – not from the class/traits. I skype with a friend who plays a PPV Warrior, and we’re always comparing damage, and I’m lucky to do half the DPS as him.

With the attunement swapping, there are a lot of skills to choose from, each with their own particular use, but the most useful of the skills are coupled with far-too-long cooldown times, further decreasing their long-term DPS in a battle, and that’s not even considering the fact they don’t do enough damage as-is.

The traits in the cookie cutter builds are mainly focused around boons, healing, and attunement recharge rate. And for whatever reason, the healing is STILL terrible. I don’t see how any of those can be considered over powered. And don’t forget the base these things are built upon are set so low that bringing them up a little doesn’t even meet par.

All that said, I play a D/D Ele not because it’s OP (it’s not) or because it’s tanky (it’s not). I play it because it is easily the most entertaining of all the builds. The level of attention and involvement it demands in a fight is unparalleled, and all other classes are just plain boring to me as a result. I’ve gotten quite used to the fast-paced combat of a D/D Ele, and each fight is superbly satisfying knowing it took that much more to emerge victorious than your standard DPS builds.