Guild Wars 2

Yes, Warriors and Guardians can faceroll their way to top-of-the-line effectiveness. That probably isn’t going to change for awhile, as it would kitten the classes in PvE. When you decide to play an elementalist it usually comes with the caveat that you’re not interested in facerolling your way to victory… or so I figure.

That said, I mostly agree with Larth. Two entirely different classes here, that approach their group contribution in different ways. Warriors strike me as extremely one-dimensional compared to the Elementalist. Hell, I’d actually rate the Elementalist in the top three or four classes for PvE. And WvW. And maybe even sPvP. I’ve had a quadra-Elementalist group clear Arah at a rate that would rival pure Warrior/Guardian setups – on top of being really fun, to boot.

As I post this I’m in need of two for an Arah run of the Mursaat path.

Unfortunately, the Gates of Arah have bugged out on my server, so I’m looking specifically for someone that’s not on Tarnished Coast, has finished the story mode, and has working gates on their server. Quite the resume, I know.

@John: It’s regrettable, then, that over half the contrary forum posts ended up locked and/or deleted by your moderation team.

There is a lot of good feedback that never sees the light of day due to being off topic, or a ‘complaint’, or ‘unconstructive’.

Just replace one of the less useful minor Arcana traits, have the effect differ depending on attunement like all the others. Ring of Flame, Geyser, Static Field, Eruption. Done.

It’s awkward as heck slowly and carefully following groups down the levels of the Mad King dungeon simply because I’m the only one that doesn’t have a fall damage trait.

Indeed, why not? As someone who plays almost exclusively glass cannon in PvE and WvW, folks seriously overestimate the “squishiness” factor, as if cantrips and a veritable army of bodies between you and your enemies never existed. Pretty much everything the previous poster said is true – depending on your opponent, your damage varies from “formidable” to “unstoppable”.

Any downside a glass cannon elementalist has is easily mitigated by, well, playing well. The more experienced you are, the more leeway you have to sacrifice defense in favour of offense. Knowing when to pull forward, when to retreat, how to deal with certain classes, all that jazz will stop you from folding like paper. Yes, even dagger/dagger can work – you just can’t go diving into zergs willy-nilly.

One thing that may really help you – swap out some Berserker gear in exchange for Valkyrie gear. Precision isn’t that important a statistic when you have multiple forms of Fury available, and the extra vitality makes a huge difference. I run a Valkyrie amulet, two valkyrie earrings and two berserker rings as accessories.

I’m running 20/10/0/10/30 at the moment. But after some experimentation in sPvP, I’m seriously questioning the usefulness of many Fire traits.

MK does seem to count against the diminishing return system.

Haven’t run it since release, finished Arah a couple minutes ago, 60 tokens.

80 Elementalist for Arah, any path but Seer/Human/Simin. Done all paths and would prefer a group that doesn’t rely on glitches etc. over just killing the dang bosses in a timely manner. Currently 3/6 for the armour, looking to nab a piece or two more.

Also have an 80 Mesmer but I’d rather not play it.

Problem is, most pubs suck at it and unless they’re shooting for the Gift, they have absolutely no incentive to do it.

The reason why AC and CoF are so popular is because they provide popular stat distribution at an easy difficulty. If you want berserker gear, are you going to run CoE or Arah instead of CoF? Of course you’re not, nobody runs that stuff. It would take two or three times the investment for the same reward. Nobody in their right mind would choose otherwise unless they particularly like one of the dungeons or armour skins.

Now with the release of the Mad King “dungeon” you can pretty much kiss the notion goodbye. Nobody is going to be running an unpopular dungeon until November, or perhaps even later depending on how long it takes Arenanet to sort their loot problem out.

I sort of agree with the OP.

Decided to give my Elementalist a concerted push after getting bored with my Mesmer at 80. It is leaps and bounds more enjoyable and effective, especially in PvE. In PvP I generally have to watch where I stick my nose and can’t zerg-dive at random as I could with my Mesmer… but even then, I feel leagues more effective.

Mesmer gets a lot of flak for being effective in PvP, but I find a lot of the conceptual and mechanical issues held me back from enjoying the class. Elementalists aren’t perfect by any means, but it feels so much more active. I never feel like dead weight for my group; if anything, I feel like the MVP. My autoattack deals just as much damage as my shatters did.

It’s not worth casting at all at this point.

A combination of low damage, long cast time, low cooldown, damage delay, tiny AoE, low-duration condition, poor condition choice (vuln on its own isn’t all that powerful, and can be applied much faster by other classes) pretty much mean…

Hell, the skill is flat-out awful. It has no redeeming features. I feel this way about a lot of the sceptre. Fire attunement can put out decent damage, but no more than a decent dagger elementalist could. Air is completely thoughtless and not dynamic at all. Earth attunement also suffers from similar problems, except pretty much none of its spells feel worth casting. I’ve seen some fairly successful sceptre elementalists in WvW, but I’ve no idea how they pull it off.

Here, I’m stupid tired and tried to re-imagine the skill in a more dynamic/useful form:

Shatterstone
.75s cast time, 900 range
Fires a block of ice at target enemy. On contact, applies Chilled (3s) and Shatterstone (3s), in addition to light damage.

When the Shatterstone debuff fades, target enemy and all adjacent enemies take heavy damage from the Shatterstone detonating. Applies 10 stacks of Vulnerability (8s) to all affected individuals.

Scorpio Shirica.1286:

I think the real issue is that TC has platue’d as the best PUG server ever. We don’t really have big guilds, save for maybe 3…. PiNK is the largest. We’ve got the best skirmishers for any other tier, but we can’t get more than 100 people into any VOIP and even when coordinated… it takes a little while to get moving.

This is probably the most accurate summary of the situation I’ve seen thus far.

TC can do really well against other semi-organized servers. But it doesn’t really want to be high-tier. Some of its members do, but the server as a whole is fairly amateur and, given our brief brushes with some high-tier servers, they don’t want to climb any higher if they can help it. It’s settling into a rhythm of “stomp or be stomped”, which is rather bittersweet.

Not going to happen. Eredon can’t field a force outside its own Borderlands, while Rall can cover everything at once.

And if you think you’re going to trick people into feeding you karma, well…

I wake up.
I tentatively hit ‘B’ because surely the night couldn’t have been too bad, right? Nahhhhh.

Enjoy a(nother) week of no WvW.

Oh, look.

Another week of WvW
Another matchup that might as well be 1v1

minion.6245:

@Arhendul; Im going to have to disagree with you. My warrior is pretty much glass cannon (20/30/0/10/10) Full exotic/runes of lysaa Axe/Axe. I burn things down so fast is unreal. All my traits are specced to increased damage/crit/crit damage in same way shape or form also.

I think the thing is I played an Ele for so long I find myself playing warrior the same way. Im always circle kiting, never standing still, which is why I choose axe/axe over greatsword seeing how HB roots you.

I’ve soled the quaggon champ Group event in frostgorge sound with my warrior as well as soloing the champ up north toward to lone ori node, I have also soloed other champs depending on their attacks.

In orr I can take on 4-6 mobs at a time. Warrior is pretty epic.

10-12k Eviscerates, 10k killshots, 12-15k volleys. Auto Attacks that crit 1.5-2k (80% crit chance) while adding bleeding/vulnerability and lighting strikes for another 1k (duel runes of air)

I feel my eley is cheated in the DPS department.

EDIT: This post is meant for PvE, however, I had a full defense specced warrior (0/0/30/30/10) get 16 kills in SPvP awhile back, I routinely get 8+ kills also. =/

Well, yeah. Relative to a warrior, every other class in the game is cheated, except for certain engineer or guardian builds.

I really don’t understand where the flood of tears originates. In PvE I feel several times more effective than my Mesmer. Oh, woe is me and my 8k Churning Earth crits. ;_;

A rather narrow litmus test. My own involves a combination of the following:

- Presence of signets on skill bar
- Frequency of attunement swaps
- Deliberate utilization of combo fields
- Ability to respond to changes in battle (e.g. healing allies)
- Utility nuances (e.g. mist form stomps/rezzes)

Doesn’t even get into stuff that extends outside the class, like general awareness, communication, teamwork, etc. Context is also a huge factor.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Thanks for the heads-up on this. We’ve identified the problem and are in the process of fixing it now.

I hope that includes a fix for the Shoggaroth WP showing up in the Forgotten route but not the Jotun one (where you actually fight the boss).

oh god that runback ;_;

Man, the flying was half the fun of the skill.

It’s not 100% required, but it’s easier.

I did it with 1 Ele, 1 Mesmer, 1 Thief on Simin. While another Mesmer and another Thief were on tear/spark duty. Took us a good hour or so even after we nailed down our strategy.

I find it more curious that, despite probably near a hundred threads about this particular boss, I can’t recall Arenanet ever speaking up about the state of it.

Which ice are you talking about?

He has this regular concentric circle that makes a patch of frost on the ground, which later ‘erupts’ into a ring of earth that almost one-shots you. This is where stacking together is fairly safe, since the middlemost circle does no damage.

He also has another ice attack that makes one large circle, and then a smaller circle inside it, where an ice crystal manifests in the air and ‘explodes’. This looks identical to the former if your group isn’t moving at all, since the ‘inner’ circle tracks your movement at the time it forms. It doesn’t hurt as much as the former, but does 6 bleeds. He seems to prioritize this on downed people, but it’s inconsistent.

Basically…

Ice on ground = OK
Ice in air = Ow

Two words:

Foreman Kreutzerova

They don’t have heat vision per se, but they will lock down when they detect proximity to a player/NPC, most of the time. Chances are they were going after someone else but passed by you on their way over.

I usually tackle this with a party split. One console, four ’platform’s where golems spawn. We have one person with accessible/non-interrupting block skills (Elementalist is great for this with Arcane Shield and Mistform) bypass the console, while the remaining four each pick a platform and just aggro/kite any golems that spawn there. After a bypass we meet up in the middle, kill the new elites, and repeat.

Edit: Oh, also worth noting – the golems will zerg the console platform as soon as they spawn in absence of anything else aggroing them. You can notice this if you just trigger the event and run out; they’ll just be blowing up a fiery holocaust all over the console despite nobody being there.

There’s supposed to be a waypoint after the Shoggaroth, according to my teammates all three times we’ve done this route. They could see it flicker in and out of existence when they moved around the area, but it never spawned.

For what it’s worth, the only thing that can kill me in WvW is a dedicated group of people, or a thief that REALLY catches me off guard with a 10k+ backstab. I really enjoy roaming and small skirmishes, but feel tempted to pull out my Elementalist during big sieges.

William Fairfield.1428:

Hey everyone.

Looking at these grenadiers they are indeed using a high modifier than was planned, I am currently working on reworking this area of this dungeon and making a few tweaks to some other areas of it as well.

Unfortunately due to how our patch process works, these changes will not make it in for several weeks.

I apologize for this inconvenience to you, but I hope you will enjoy the modifcations I am making in this dungeon

Honestly? Take your time. If you know the terrain glitches and skips this particular route can be done in 10-15 minutes. Even if you were to nerf the grenadier health, you’d need some form of (preferably meaningful) difficulty after them to balance out the timesink.

The “count the uncounted” thing is nothing special. It’s just an OoW code phrase, to verb the unadjectived. If you pay attention to other conversations with OoW agents they all follow the same format.

It’s not in-game, unfortunately, but you can find the skeletons of its species all over the place.

I just want them to make up their mind with this clone business.

As it stands it feels like we outclass Minionmancers due to a combination of their bugged traits and awful AI. This is stupid. I don’t want to play a minion master, I want to play a misdirection master. Instead, minions are pretty much grafted on to my class mechanic with zero negotiation as to that fact, while Necromancers can ignore theirs entirely.

I don’t really suffer from effectiveness issues, it’s just the class mechanics that bug me. It doesn’t feel like a Mesmer, it feels like a magic knight. A really flamboyant one, at that.

Any sky-to-ground AoE that deals more damage based on the surface area of what’s under it (cough Elementalist spells cough) makes short work of burrows.

The only thing really wrong with Arah is Simin’s fight, and some general glitches on that route. Plus waypoint discrepancies between all the routes in general – for example, the Shoggaroth fight on the Jotun route should be spawning a waypoint. You can occasionally see it flicker in and out of existence if you walk near it, but it won’t spawn. Makes it have the longest runback for Lupicus of all the routes, which really bites.

Yes, it’s viable. It can bring some tricks to the table most other classes can’t match. I can’t really call it the ‘king’ of anything, though.

Dat one-month thread necro.

I wonder how many responders have changed their tune given the recent patch?

I’m pretty much pidgeonholed into focus and blink, even when I’m specced for dueling/roaming and would much rather bring along a pistol.

The focus is just so kitten good in comparison to the other offhands, especially in WvW. I’m already anticipating another round of nerfs.

Ender.3508:

Staff ele traited into healing toughness and arcana.
Utilities are:
lightning flash (for escaping crystals, bugs sometimes)
frost bow (for destroying crystals)
[was using glyph of renewal, thanks anet for making that completely useless]

And we did get in his face a good bit which really helped, but even then I had to run when hp got low

Swap out bow for Arcane Shield, Glyph of Renewal for Mist Form. Pop these when you’re out of endurance and need to survive. At least, this is what my ele friend does for this fight. He also likes to swap to Sceptre/Dagger for the Arcane trait that improves endurance while wielding a sceptre. Deaths seem pretty rare for him, and he uses Mist Form to help with risky rezzes.

But, yeah. R.I.P. Glyph of Renewal. You finally found a place on my skillbar, but it was too good to last.

ProphetSword.5427:

In my experience, the more players that are around, the slower the frame rate. I think it has a lot to do with all the different kinds of armor, effects and whatnot. My frame rate is usually pretty high, but it can drop dramatically when I’m in Lion’s Arch or if I go into WvWvW.

Head out into some unpopulated areas and see if it improves.

I ran around a bit afterwards. After a bit of relogging, my framerate gradually returned to its new, higher ‘normal’. It seems to plummet dramatically whenever I enter LA, though, and I have to relog a bunch to get it back to normal even after I leave.

Guess this mean’s I’ll never be visiting LA, at least until I get a new graphics card. Pity.

@Sabo
20 Domination I, X
20 Dueling IV, X
30 Illusions I, V, XI

Sword/Pistol + Greatsword
Signet of Inspiration/Mirrored Images/X

Fairly standard shatter build, tweak as desired.

Yeah, what omg said. He faces you. Move around a bit and if he’s staring at you, he’ll launch the spike volley just before the dragon fangs hit the ground.

Can you give us something more specific – for example, what your class and utilities are? Most classes have utilities that can greatly improve their survivability in this fight.

The earth Renewal bringing up dead allies was the only thing that made the skill useful. It was a GOOD utility, then. I’m willing to bet the Fire/Water/Air versions still don’t even work.

Actually, scratch that. I got the Fire one to work while screwing around in WvW. The buff it gives you last all of 15s. Given how much finesse it took to pull that off (getting up an ally within a 5 seconds+ window of time, before they rally, are revived, or finished) I was honestly expecting it to last something near an hour.

Kushtaka.5640:

Did they change the name of this thread? I thought it was “Is this patch a joke?” or something….

Unconstructive thread title.

Granted, it would draw more negative feedback than generally constructive feedback.

Honest question.

I’m sitting here wondering why everything is getting nerfed with every patch, but all the bugs, awful weapon skills, useless/bugged utilities and traits and the general class mechanic problems remain untouched.

Was this to compensate for the abundance of recharge traits or something?

And I’m trying to figure out why this happened, and how I can get it back. It lasted for around 24 hours or so but ended after I woke up this morning.

Beforehand I’d be idling in open areas at 10fps or so, dropping to 4 in fights.
After the sudden change I was looking at 30-45 idle, 10-20 in fights.

Lowest of low settings in both of these instances – windowed resolution, subsample, no shadows, etc. Nothing has changed between the two screenshots in term of in-game settings. I don’t know how it happened, and I’m wondering if there’s common program culprits that could be sucking up resources or anything to that effect. It came about almost entirely at random; I was in WvW, going to the northernmost supply camp and … bam. 30fps. And it stayed that high for the rest of the day, no matter where I went, even when I went in Crucible of Eternity (fairly notable for its FPS drops).

It lasted up until when I woke up this morning. Logged in, 50fps on the login screen. Boot up my character, 20-30fps in Lion’s Arch, no problem rendering characters.

Then my queue popped for my native server, Tarnished Coast, since LA had an overflow. I took it. Now, 8fps. Characters taking ages to pop in. I don’t even know what to make of it, but my framerate has been that low ever since.

My specs:
Operating System
MS Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i5 2500K @ 3.30GHz
Sandy Bridge 32nm Technology
RAM
8.00 GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 665MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
ASRock B75M (CPUSocket)
Graphics
W2061 (1600×900@60Hz)
Intel® HD Graphics 3000
Hard Drives
932GB SAMSUNG SAMSUNG HD103SJ (SATA)

Any sage wisdom would be appreciated, as I really want those frames back. Yeah, I know the graphics card is a bad one, but it meets minimum specs and I’m working with what I’ve got at the moment.

I’m not finding it terribly fun, as close as the score may be. This matchup might as well be called “Mesmer Portal Exploits: The Game”. I haven’t run into a single guild that isn’t trying to port invisible armies on people.

You answered the question yourself – the real one is the one that’s running, healing, or killing you. Look for the telltale blue glow on the heal. If all the clones are attacking you from range, stand still a second and look for the one that’s moving, because the clones won’t move at all unless you move out of their range.

There are other nuances – the clones of Mesmers that use a weapon in each hand won’t be holding an offhand weapon. You can ctrl-t the Mesmer once you find him, but target focuses on them seem to break inconsistently.

When you down the Mesmer they’re going to try and clone away 90% of the time. Don’t interrupt your finisher; it sometimes goes through if they fail to blink far enough away. Look around – the real Mesmer to finish is the one with a red skull icon over his head.

Staff would definitely be better for survivability. I forgot to add you can still use ranged phantasms, so long as your group is coordinated to clump on the person with the shortest ranged attack distance. If they’re not on the ball with grubs in the event one -does- pop on a phantasm, you’ll need to reserve Distortion to shatter them, as F1-F3 may end in them being unable to cross the distance to GL before their grubs come out.

Cleared all four Arah routes, if you need advice on any other fights. For this fight I typically run:

25 Dueling I, X
25 Inspiration I, VIII
20 Illusions V, X

Sword/Focus + Greatsword

Mirror + Signet of Inspiration + Blink + X + Timewarp

X can be either Mimic or Illusion of Life.

Phase 1: Stand back and plink away at him with your greatsword. You can use clones and phantasms, you just have to be sure to shatter them. Use mirror blade/mind stab/zerker/blurred frenzy on any locusts/grubs that get near, as necessary. Soon as you see the words ‘Invulnerable’ pop up on Lupicus, SCATTER. Very straightforward phase.

Phase 2: AoE/shadowstep nightmare. Focus on surviving and spam clones everywhere to absorb hits. The occasional aegis/swiftness from inspiration will save your life. If you’re in truly dire straits, stand inside/behind your own temporal curtain. It will reflect any of his autoattacks sent against you (but not anything sent by the AoE). You can chain this with Mirror and Mimic to further block his ranged attacks and extend survivability.

On the AoE itself, I find the best trick is to run. Just straight up 180-degree turn get the frell out of dodge. Double dodge away – blink if needed. You need to outrange the attack completely. Why? Because after the initial volley of red-circled AoE, he sends a second volley that has no circles. If you can’t make it out in time, either due to blink being on CD (I usually save it as a stunbreaker for a shadow step that hits me) or having no energy, just swap to sword and ride it out with Blurred Frenzy and Distortion. If you’re in totally dire straits with regards to HP, just run to the other side of the arena and shatter your clones – you’ll eventually leave combat and regenerate to full. Do not do this if it is only you and one other person fighting GL, as he sometimes resets when he has less than two targets.

When he’s not AoEing, you can semi-safely resurrect allies. The bubble produced by Medic’s Feedback will reflect his ranged attacks, as will a well-placed Temporal Curtain. As a last-ditch thing you can use Illusion of Life to get up someone that’s about to be downed; just be sure to communicate to them beforehand that it’s not permanent, and they should just run to some obscure corner to die again and bandage themselves safely.

Phase 3: Super easy compared to the early ones due to no more AoE rain. Continue crapping clones; he’ll whiff bubbles/life siphons/autoattacks on them. If you get trapped in a bubble, blink out. If it’s on CD, use Blurred Frenzy/Distortion to tank it. He will sometimes do a ‘puke’ attack a bit after a life siphon, in a large AoE circle in front of him. You can drop Temporal Curtain to reflect some of the projectiles back at him for mega damage.

Sorry for the wordiness, but I hope it helped. You -can- perfect his Phase 2; I was once in an awful pug with a friend, and that friend and I ended up two-manning the entire phase, primarily because the pubs literally couldn’t last more than 10 seconds.

Nebilim.5127:

Can someone please teach me how are we supposed to fight him in that tiny room of front door? The last battle.

You simply do not have any space to dodge the earth spike and his aoe covers the whole room. I can do him just fine in the other paths, dying only 2~1 times, but i died dozens of time in that part

It’s rough, but manageable if you time your dodges perfectly. I actually did CoE a good 15 or so times on the Front Door route alone without even realizing his AoE had a safespot. Yeah, I had to perfectly dodge everything from the beginning to the end. I figure it’s doable.

Effective positioning also helps. I made up a rough diagram of the final fight’s staging area. It gets rough depending on where the undead tendrils spawn, as they can really chip away at your HP over time without you realizing it. But the important part is to avoid overlapping one another as much as possible for the earth crags, and there’s plenty of small nooks to hide in – though, be careful of LoSing him, as a sudden change in position can make things messy. The enclosed area also makes it fairly easy to pick an Essence and focus it down when he spits them.

I also have a suspicion that his Earth AoE actually does more damage the farther away you are, much as its size increases. It’s just a suspicion, though. I’ve had an easy time meleeing him.

A+ guide that manages to be both humorous and informative. Especially with regard to Agent Spire’s inhuman reserves of fortitude and willpower.

I do want to add that the Alpha’s Essence stun is a legit thing. Gives you about 10-20 seconds worth of risk-free burning. However, it requires coordination to pull off – you have to kill one in a short time, and he spits a lot of them, while few people can manage to solo one unless it gets caught on terrain. Sometimes they won’t spawn at all since the spit lands ‘inside’ the terrain. If your party is doing badly (I.E. PuG) it will often be impossible for everyone to have enough breath to burn an essence while dodging Alpha’s attacks, between spammed dodges/downs/blown cooldowns/etc.

There is also a current bug where, while stunned, he’ll continue to act against the party – except all he’ll do is spit more essences. This can allow you to keep him chain-stunned for the entire fight, burning him down in 2-3 minutes if you don’t drop the ball. This probably won’t last forever, though.

Healing Spring on the Rangers.

Thief/Ele should bring anti-projectile for the enemy rangers.

Thief should bring Shadow Refuge for stealth rezz.

Would make things considerably easier.

It is kinda stupid. At the same time I know why they do it.

Part of the reason why I like Crucible of Eternity. No skipping, no baloney.

0/20/10/20/20 (Greatsword + Sword/Focus)

Focus + rezz reflects bring so much to the table in WvW, it’s ridiculous.