Guild Wars 2

Lightning rod D/D for me as well.

When I think about it, I preferred any iteration of ele over this one. Even during the long period where we were non-existent in PvP, since we did more than fine in WvW still.

Fun video.

If anything I would say the pacing is a little bit slow. There’s a lot of time where nothing’s happening before and after the fights.

I’m not sure about these changes.

DPS ele has never really been viable, and imo that’s more an issue of tactical value than quality of life or matchup potential.

To put it simply, look at what we’re up against for that contentious “DPS roamer” spot.

- Thief. Extreme mobility. Bordering on the absurd. Steal with all its tactical value in guaranteed interrupting, ripping key boons, etc… Practically immortal to anything but other dps roamers

- Mesmer. Portal. Game-changing elites. Boonrip. Not a strong pick atm, but still a contender to keep in mnd.

- Revenant. God-tier downed contro(unparallelled through reveal, glint elite, very strong cleave and cc). extreme survivability under focus, AoE boons aplenty. Good mobility. Similar to old medi guard in that it’s a competent but not top tier team fighter while still being an excellent roamer.

- Warrior. Pushes the limits on sustain + damage + cc in one package. Very condi resilient. Decent mobility.

And then there’s ele. What would we want ele to be downright best at? Can we realistically expect to ever take a spot off of any of the above?

In my opinion, the closest we ever got to being viable was in the shoutbow/cele engi/cele ele/medi guard/shatter mesmer/thief days. The only time we really offered someone noone else did. Ice bow. Now I know you’re laughing, but it’s true. Back then there was nothing else that could actually stop the sustain triumvirate from ressing something. Besides that, landing icebow 5 on a target, was a guaranteed kill on all of them, except thief, mesmer and ele. I can’t overstate the value of that. It’s pretty much the equivalent of moa morph, especially when you can coordinate a thief for example to pick up the bow and steal-deep freeze.

On top of that we had some silly mobility on a high cooldown with superspeed fgs, before the mobility changes. Superspeed fgs 3 would almost take you from legacy mid to a side point instantly. The distance was insane.

And lastly, stunbreaks/stability were so much less prevalent back then, prominently on cele engi and shoutbow, which only ran 1 stunbreak and no stability, that we were one of the only specs that could kill them so effortlessly with gale – fire combo. I remember being mocked for pushing far against shoutbows, and cleaning them up in seconds.

Even then we had our issues. Mainly the fact that a coordinated mesmer+thief, which was meta back then, would tear you apart. But we were close.

I can’t even imagine what ele would have to be capable of, to be worth picking over its competitors now. I can tell you it’s gonna take a whole lot more than shatterstone buffs though!
-

Pretty sure they won’t.

Cheers.

Arcane not reducing overloaded attunement cd’s intentional?

Adding a stunbreak to conjure earth shield would go a long way.

Restoring lightning hammer’s status as a very niche #1 melee dps weapon isn’t too far fetched. Its main competitor lightning whip has been buffed substantially since the time lightning hammer was a thing. I’d say buff dps. LH builds were neat. Especially in synergy with a mesmer, which has no decent melee autoattack by itself.

Ice bow is arguably still a thing. Personally I’d love to have the old damage back in pvp, since it’s one of the very few things that brought glass ele close to viable back in the shoutbow days.

Earth shield is pretty well rounded and has some cool uses. Add a stun break and we gucci.

Fire axe I have no idea. It’s to conjures what signet of water is to signets. Just terrible imo.

Fiery greatsword is bae. Even though its mobility got cut severely in the mobility patch and the fgs 4 nerf, it’s still incredibly fast. Seriously I love this thing. If anything, take a look at the monstrous aftercast on #5. It’s a dps gain to dodge out of the aftercast, since it’s a full second, whereas dodging is 3/4ths.

Healing power is better at increasing certain sources of healing than others.

As you stated, soothing mist and water trident scale well. As do regeneration, healing ripple and elemental bastion.

There are other sources that don’t scale nearly as well, the most prominent being blast finishers in water fields and Wash the pain away.

Outgoing healing modifiers such as the ones on monk runes, aquatic benevolence, sigil of transference, … Affect all forms of outgoing healing equally, with the drawback of not increasing self-healing whatsoever.

I feel compelled to remind you that you might run into some resistance when trying to run a build like this. Whether they’re right or not, people in your dungeon/fractal runs might call you out for using it, moreso because the meta dps ele spec does unparalleled dps. Blasting fire fields is more or less obsolete with phalanx strength and revenants, and vuln is not hard to come by either.

That said, if you’re intent on doing this, then I’d say yes, healing power is a great stat in group. With decent investment in healing power and outgoing modifiers you can be ticking nearly 1k aoe heals per second just from regen and soothing mist.

If you’re looking to run a build that keeps some of these themes, while not being… well… bad. Look into running fresh air D/WH meta build, but swap fire for water. You’ll still be keeping up 100% soothing mist uptime and be able to use your important water skills off cooldown, while also having very competitive dps from air overload spam, excellent vuln stacking and great healing over time with harmonious conduit. Using S/WH instead is a pretty meaty dps loss, but doable. Using zealot’s and monk runes and the like is also not totally unreasonable, since they’ll greatly amplify your healing (although not strictly necessary)

Xillllix.3485:

The elementalist doesn’t need an HP buff. Just needs the useless skills to be fun to play again for me to come back to the game, specially the boring tempest stuff.

If you’re interested take a look at the gvg footage from my GW2 farewell video: https://vimeo.com/139760047

Over 18k hp most of my build setups and the numbers are pretty good. I know it’s possible to do even more damage if you sacrifice all defenses (I was there in the times of 15k meteornadoes) but my build was optimized so that I could maximize damage modifiers while still having pretty good hp and armor.

You still get 1-shot by mesmers in GvGs anyway no matter whats your hp.

That was a really fun video to watch actually! Music isn’t up my alley but I can definitely appreciate the footage.

This is what I run in wvw:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJArdhcMoyh9MwzB8RM0AYVW4KEFmUQH4FIVgAwHE-T1BFABXpEEgTAg+q/Uz+DppHAJlfL8AAIEg5tA-w

It’s not as entertaining as fire/air/arcane once was, but at least it’s pretty competitive compared to what’s out there atm. Surprisingly durable due to an obnoxious amount of active and passive blocks/invulns/cleanse/stunbreak, and good sustain. Even tho it’s pretty much full glass gear.

Here’s some footage I never released of what it looks like in action
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JUHIt5srfA

Yeah tempest I think is a bit of a response to the numerous threads over the years in the vein of

“What do all these buttons do/ele is super hard to play”
“Can I play with one attunement alone”
“The playstyle of attunement dancing turns me off from the traditional weighty feel of a mage archetype”

There’s not really anything of the common complaints left to be covered as far as I can see(maybe condi ele), so hopefully we can have some fun with the next one!

I think the only thing ele kind of lacks is a playstyle that doesn’t revolve around high target cap cleave or support. It’s kinda always been part of the elementalist identity, but also a big part of the reason we were tricky to balance, since all our abilities, both defensive and offensive tend to be aoe. (Think elemental attunement for example)

So if anything this would be the most logical next elite spec, since the idea is to open up some new ways to play the class.

Also, as the only class without a true melee weapon, I’m kinda hoping for a sword mainhand with a focus on positioning and solo/duo capabilities.

I have a draft of what I thought it could(/should) look like, but decided against posting it since there were so many being posted at the time.

LughLongArm.5460:

Boons and boons duration(concentration stat) is greatly under valued by A.net, the same way condi duration was pre- HOT. Look at sigil of concentration for example, its 450 worth of stats on weapons swap, imagine you get a bonus of 450 power on weapon swap… For ranger for example is easy to get 100% boon duration with just food/sigil/utility, NM trait line and … rune of durability. Premium boons like protection/quickness/resistance are too common, common boons like swiftness/regen/fury are almost native embedded with 100% duration up time on most builds.

This will make A.net future design process very problematic and they will have to do some kind of reduction to boons, in the form of duration limitations or quality. Perhaps they will change more boons to the stacking mechanic or go with boon duration to specific boons only or just ignore balance issues out pvp completely.

The most problematic stats wise is protection as damage reduction values got diminishing returns so long duration on this boon makes toughness an obsolete stat, which limits build diversity.

The list goes on…

The strange (well… not really) thing is that boon duration has long been a balance offender on many fronts. It’s been targeted by many nerfs over the years, and Anet seemed to know it was a dangerous stat to hand out. Think stat-trait decoupling, and 2-water 2-monk 2-traveler runes setups getting nerfed hard.

Note the past tense. Hate to be this guy but Anet either hasn’t got a clue what they’re doing anymore, or has run out of kittens to give. Maybe both. As you say, the list goes on…

I’d say compared to other professions we’re pretty well off in terms of weapon variety in PvE, now that tempest has given us a viable way to play D/Wh and to some extent D/F and Sc/Wh. Don’t think it’s realistic to expect every weapon to be as prominent.

Also, for what it’s worth, offhand dagger has a very niche use in bursting bosses for record clears as shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYEP6iFGYyU or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E78X1zyN4RE
Prestacking might as well.

As for PvP and wvw, offhand dagger viability is a good indicator of how much the game has changed, since it was a fantastic weapon for years, but since HoT it’s a lot less forgiving to play without offhand focus utility. I’d say in general it’s still a good weapon, and the attention it’s been getting (churning and fire grab) is overall quite good.

The only really substantial nerfs it’s had are the ring of fire nerf, which I’m personally in favour of, and the frost aura ‘normalization’, which cut the duration from 7s to 4s, which I personally really dislike. They standardized all aura durations to 4s for some reason, which left frost aura very underwhelming. It used to be a hidden carry for the weapon, which, while hard to notice, could keep you alive in wvw very effectively (both to outrun longbow rangers and get out of melee of thief/war/guard). Now it’s more or less just a button you press to get whatever aura-related traits you have.

Guildie of mine carried to an absurd extent on this build.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vVAQJAWTnsABVditCB+7AEEhFLiSu2z9fHLAOgHIL8KvzD-TFDEQBaRpBmUJofqBEv9HewjAwdHBQTw70B4LlYTUZA/U1RQKBBwFAgUAeN1C-w

This was before the nerfs though, but holy hell did it carry. As shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_kQq-bQzqY

This is a fun little thing that snuck into the game a couple weeks ago. With the new skill retargeting option, you can leap to a different target than the one you have tagged with magnetic grasp.

Can be (ab)used in a myriad of ways. Have fun!

I (ab)use this when I really want to run D/D. It’s expensive to maintain and a pain in the rear to get though.

That food is completely out of this world power-level wise. It’s actually silly. Its damage reduction stacks additively with protection, meaning you have a permanent 50% damage reduction.

It’s got so much boon duration it can stack protection out of combat while running. Use overload – insta swap to earth – swap to another attunement and overload, rinse repeat. In combat you have the added armor of earth, elemental contingency proc and the rune proc to keep you at 100% pretty comfortably.

Power is kinda low, but I just happen to have my durability on a cele set, which I don’t feel like changing.

Signet vs ether, armor of earth vs a shout, gale song vs unstable conduit and harmonious conduit vs invigorating torrents are all debatable, as well as both sigils.

FrownyClown.8402:

Gokil.2543:

Since this is a very hot topic, I figured I’d weigh in with my 2 cents.

D/D ele used to be strong because it was the king of controlling an engagement. Mainly soft cc and medium range were its greatest assets. Enough CC (chill/cripple/immob/stun/knockdown/knockback) to keep the enemy at bay and avoid being overwhelmed by him. Enough range to keep the pressure up against both heavy melee specs and specs that were built to kite.

It’s innately a low damage spec, but a medium-high pressure spec due to its ability to keep the damage rolling at all times, by virtue of its medium range and ability to control the engagement. (I know this sounds a little vague, but I had to edit out a lot of text to keep things concise)

Heart of thorns did 2 things mainly:
- Establish ranged damage as a cornerstone of combat, with specs like rev/druid/dh (and buffed necro scepter to some degree) being able to apply unprecedented ranged pressure
- Litter melee specs with hard immunities to counter balance the added risk of being a melee spec in this landscape

Both of these are very hard to reconcile with what D/D ele is and has always been. The point I’m trying to make is that trying to make D/D ele work in the game as it is now, would require completely turning around what the spec is, or completely turning around what the game is.

If you’re still here at this point, I’ll try to explain why this shift in meta hits D/D ele particularly hard.

- All the options D/D ele has to keep someone out of his melee range are obviously useless vs ranged pressure. The main tool of damage mitigation it employs is therefore rendered obsolete vs a very large portion of pressure. If you go through the list, pretty much every ability on the D/D set works to stop other melee-based builds from going full pve rotation on the ele. That’s its main tool of damage mitigation. Soft CC. I hope it’s starting to make a little sense.

- D/D ele being a low damage but high pressure spec falls apart when its contestants in melee range get spammed with immunities. The reason old D/D ele could get away with having low innate damage, is because it could keep very high uptime on its damage. Both by staying healthy due to high sustain, and by outranging its opponents slightly. Now think about a scrapper, which is one of the most prominent competitors for the bruiser role. It’s no longer possible to keep a decent uptime of damage since they can avoid so much of it by hard immunities (hammer 4, 3, sneak gyro, stability uptime). Rev is the most notable offender on this front, but daredevil is also very problematic for ele in particular. This ofcourse impacts every class, but D/D ele suffers especially, since it’s a low damage class by nature, meaning it can’t reach killing pressure anymore without proper uptime and control of engagement.

So in short, DD ele can’t really work in this game anymore without either changing everything the spec is about, or changing the game’s landscape.

I’d love to discuss this a little. I skimped over some stuff(DD sustain) to try to paint a clear picture, but in hindsight im not sure it worked out.

Yes, I see what you are saying, but keep in mind that d/d was nonviable in pvp for most of GW2’s life. It was really only good in pvp because it passively took enemies down from burn damage while outsustaining.

If you took everything about cele ele before the nerfs and put it into this meta it would still do a good job because people are forced to fight on point and take the bulk of the burn damage.

To me it was a lot of small things that made it unviable. What you said has merit and I can see the shift, but its really a small piece.

D/D ele will probably never be viable again for a dps/bruiser spec unless damage can be completely negated.

True, I speak mostly from a WvW perspective though. D/D was, while its popularity fluctuated pretty wildly, always a very solid spec there. PvP has much less emphasis on the playstyle I describe because of capture points, though it’s definitely still present.

Since this is a very hot topic, I figured I’d weigh in with my 2 cents.

D/D ele used to be strong because it was the king of controlling an engagement. Mainly soft cc and medium range were its greatest assets. Enough CC (chill/cripple/immob/stun/knockdown/knockback) to keep the enemy at bay and avoid being overwhelmed by him. Enough range to keep the pressure up against both heavy melee specs and specs that were built to kite.

It’s innately a low damage spec, but a medium-high pressure spec due to its ability to keep the damage rolling at all times, by virtue of its medium range and ability to control the engagement. (I know this sounds a little vague, but I had to edit out a lot of text to keep things concise)

Heart of thorns did 2 things mainly:
- Establish ranged damage as a cornerstone of combat, with specs like rev/druid/dh (and buffed necro scepter to some degree) being able to apply unprecedented ranged pressure
- Litter melee specs with hard immunities to counter balance the added risk of being a melee spec in this landscape

Both of these are very hard to reconcile with what D/D ele is and has always been. The point I’m trying to make is that trying to make D/D ele work in the game as it is now, would require completely turning around what the spec is, or completely turning around what the game is.

If you’re still here at this point, I’ll try to explain why this shift in meta hits D/D ele particularly hard.

- All the options D/D ele has to keep someone out of his melee range are obviously useless vs ranged pressure. The main tool of damage mitigation it employs is therefore rendered obsolete vs a very large portion of pressure. If you go through the list, pretty much every ability on the D/D set works to stop other melee-based builds from going full pve rotation on the ele. That’s its main tool of damage mitigation. Soft CC. I hope it’s starting to make a little sense.

- D/D ele being a low damage but high pressure spec falls apart when its contestants in melee range get spammed with immunities. The reason old D/D ele could get away with having low innate damage, is because it could keep very high uptime on its damage. Both by staying healthy due to high sustain, and by outranging its opponents slightly. Now think about a scrapper, which is one of the most prominent competitors for the bruiser role. It’s no longer possible to keep a decent uptime of damage since they can avoid so much of it by hard immunities (hammer 4, 3, sneak gyro, stability uptime). Rev is the most notable offender on this front, but daredevil is also very problematic for ele in particular. This ofcourse impacts every class, but D/D ele suffers especially, since it’s a low damage class by nature, meaning it can’t reach killing pressure anymore without proper uptime and control of engagement.

So in short, DD ele can’t really work in this game anymore without either changing everything the spec is about, or changing the game’s landscape.

I’d love to discuss this a little. I skimped over some stuff(DD sustain) to try to paint a clear picture, but in hindsight im not sure it worked out.

Yeah for sure, air ele is where my heart lies! Just hasn’t been working very well for me, although it might be worth revisiting with the new icd on dodge stab for herald, and stab nerfs on scrapper and reaper.

I’d be inclined to say concentration, but it’s pretty close. Consider dropping zephyr’s boon for one with air, since you won’t need zephyr’s boon for perma fury and swiftness with concentration anymore.

Personally would advise against air, since the amount of stab is ridiculous. Tempest line still feels like it adds the most value, as annoying as it is to play. Fire line also flows a lot better with the cooldown reduction of frozen burst to match the 33% reduced fire cooldowns for might stacking.

This would be sad if it wasn’t also hilarious.

Taken from reddit:

[–]manny2494 St Platano.9271
How does ANet find out that another person was using one of the team member’s accounts?

[–]Joshua_Davis Grouch
I can’t get into the specifics, unfortunately.
That said, planning a scheme such as this entirely through in-game chat is generally not advised.

Longbow berserk f1 cleanses 6 condis instead of 3 with cleansing ire.

Cleanses 6 condis instead of the intended 3.

Well what do you know, they fixed it. Wasn’t expecting it, props.

Incidentally, this is a pretty substantial nerf to meta clerics ele, im curious to see what happens (and legitimately wonder how many people were aware of the bug in the end).

That’s sad… Anyone tested flash freeze+soldier runes?

Josh XT.6053:

reikken.4961:

Fortunately, 99.38% damage reduction is not something you can get without rite of the great dwarf. Protection and frost aura stack, but rune of the scrapper and geomancer’s defense don’t stack additively with them. Protection + frost aura = -50%. Adding geomancer’s defense makes it -55% rather than -60%.

You’re doing math incorrectly. You don’t add percentages, you multiply.

Protection 1.4 (40%, got that?)
Frost Aura 1.1
Food 1.1
From Trait 1.1
Scrapper rune 1.07

1.4 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.07 = 1.993838, which is 99.38%.

This link may help you pass middle school math.
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071202081920AA5VwIj

Also where is your source that the trait and scrapper runes don’t stack?

You’re making a massive fool out of yourself.

CETheLucid.3964:

Swooooooooordssssssss. Gib. Want sword. Give me the sword. Want to use a sword. Slash slash slash stab BOOOOM. That was an explosion.

Because I’m an elementalist. I make things explode. With fire. And now with swords. Swords AND fire. Burning and hurting.

And water. Healing and stabbing. Freezing and hacking things. And lightning bolts. So much zappity zap zap. Huge spike damage.

Who’s that coming? It’s a gods forsaken OP ele with a freaking sword. Better Alt+F4 to be safe.

And earth. Swords and earth. Bleeding + more bleeding. Lots of blood. Or that’s what I would say… if I could use a sword as an elementalist.

I want to use the sword.

You’re my new favourite person.

Or you would be if you had a flipping sword.

I went through the same thing. Still am to be honest.

D/D + tempest doesn’t mix. I’ve tried many variants, but it’s fundamentally not compatible sadly.

I could go on page-long rants about just how thorougly screwed the game is, and anything solo is basically dead, but I’ll save you the depression.

Basically, nothing you can play is scrapper/druid/rev/reaper levels of great. The most effective I’ve found after quite a bit of time, is playing earth/air/arcane S/F (with written in stone). Marauder/zerk with pack runes. It’s obnoxiously hard to kill, even on 1900 armor. I feel like it has the most okay to favourable matchups currently. It falls off steeply with teammates or outnumbered though. With mist form, obsidian, flash, arcane shield x2, armor of earth from traits and a whole lot of superspeed you’re basically a mini elite spec with the amount of immunities.

Doesn’t sound too hot, but it works decently well. Other options are D/F fresh air, which does utterly ridiculous damage, but feels very dumb to play at times, D/D tempest stacking all the OP stuff to get by (dmg reduction + boon duration food, durability runes, quadra stats + cele,…).

reikken.4961:

does it only apply to flash freeze? or does it work with all shouts?
and do the ones that don’t hit enemies work?

Didn’t work on aftershock. Didn’t test the other 2, but from my experience it doesn’t work on feel the burn either.

With a bit of further testing, turns out it’s indeed scaling with the amount of targets hit. With 1 minion up, 2 condis are cleansed. With 4 minions, 5 condis (5-man target cap).

TheNickPrice.8457:

No, it will remove a condi from you for each regen applied

That’s not how it works, or at least not how it always has worked. Besides, the person in the video uses powerful aura. I lined out in my initial post that I’d spotted this bug while playing without cleansing water as well.

Supreme.3164:

Gokil.2543:

Found some good footage of it happening:

https://youtu.be/_s1AAJ71YNE?t=2m55s

It’s wvw+several shout guards+necros close…can’t really see that’s happening, anybody would have noticed by now if flash freeze would cleanse 7+condis in one go, just pure coincidence and we don’t know what’s triggering

Cmon now. You can slow down the footage to .25x and clearly tell it’s a fully instant cleanse. The odds that 3-4 different cleanses lined up in the same frame of 1/60th of a second is non-existent.

Found some good footage of it happening:

https://youtu.be/_s1AAJ71YNE?t=2m55s

Dinosaurs.8674:

It sounds like diamond skin is proccing and removing the extra conditions. This makes sense as diamond skin will only go off when you are hit (very common in a teamfight), and this is also a time when you will use flash freeze pretty much off cooldown.

I considered that, but diamond skin has a 1s icd, which rules it out in this case.

I might be imagining things (though I’d say I paid a lot of attention to it all the way through ruby and diamond). If noone notices even after reading this, then I guess I’m just hallucinating.

I didn’t play around HoT launch up till season 1, so if this is common knowledge by now I apologize.

Does anyone else get the feeling that ele shouts, mainly aftershock and flash freeze, cleanse far more conditions than they should with soldier(trooper) runes? It seems like the amount of conditions removed scales with the amount of enemies you hit with the effect. Flash freeze in bigger fights consistently seems to full cleanse.

I know this sounds a little absurd, and people would be more vocal about it if true, but teamfights tend to be messy to the point of not being able to tell these kinds of things. Took me a lot of games to start suspecting something, and then a lot more to actually be at a degree of certainty to post it on the forums.

And no I’m not running cleansing water + invigorating torrents.

The best we can hope for at this point is for non-elite specs to become viable. But even that is very optimistic.

Tomiyou.3790:

Blimm.5028:

Ele has burst. It’s just really high risk most of the time. I’m 70% sure nothing outbursts a S/D Earth/Airburst combo. And it’s basically instant.

It’s a one trick pony, that still does less damage then a backstab thief or revenant if done properly.

It’s a one trick pony for sure, and about the furthest from a viable build you can get.

But credit where it’s due, nothing even comes close to the amount of burst it puts out. No way.

Have been frantically trying to make sf fresh air work, but I’m noticing a lot of inconsistency with phoenix. The big explosion hit tends not to go off when used in close range (like the phoenix flash combo). Anyone else?

BlackBeard.2873:

Daishi.6027:

Justification for the proposed change is celestial removal right? So… Why is 1050 Healing power + 560 vit, or 560 Healing+Vit with 1050 condi not enough to keep the bruiser role?

Sure you miss out on the toughness but based on how toughness scales is it that big a deal?

Don’t flame, I am only asking to understand.

With 0 toughness, even with perma-protection, you take too much damage for your vitality/healing power to be worth anything unless you can burst something down super-fast (doesn’t happen with all those passives/invulns/blocks/etc. in the game now).

With 0 vitality, you don’t have enough “body” to survive an initial condi-spike or burst spike, making your healing power/toughness irrelevant. You don’t need a TON of vitality, but 11K HP, even with prot and 560 extra toughness still gets killed with backstab burst combo in 1 go.

With 0 healing power, you do not have any sustain as an ele, so your vitality and toughness just mean you wind down to 0 rather quickly against bruisers such as scrappers, reapers, and druids.

You need a good deal of toughness and healing power, with at least enough vitality to get above 15K HP to have a chance at survival, especially when banging bodies in melee range.

All of this is predicated on playing a bruiser role – the only role ele can play. This is because ele’s main problem for viability is defense, and 90% of the defensive mechanics ele has are soft mitigation (protection + applying a bit of weakness) combined with healing to make that soft mitigation effective. A dps ele has far too few hard-mitigation mechanics (obsidian flesh, lightning flash onto high ground, arcane shield/mistform), all on long CD’s to compete with other burst builds, and even has fallen far behind in the damage department too. DPS ele gets farmed by any thief or mesmer who is patient enough to make you blow your super-long CD defenses (vs. their comparatively short CD’s) before just crapping all over you. Other dps builds also bring more to the team in terms of map control (mobility for thief, portal for mesmer, mobility for rev) while ele brings a bit of healing, cleanse, and soft-mitigation – all within a radius too small to utilize effectively on such a frail body.

Good write-up.

I know the theorycrafting itch all too well

I’m not sure where to start on your build though. It’s pretty lackluster in a number of areas I’m afraid. Most noticeably lack of cleanse. You also do a few ‘thematic’ picks, that hurt the build by being underpowered.

For example, rune of the undead, strength of stone and serrated stones are all three pretty undertuned. You’ll be better off replacing them in almost every case.

Your sustain will also be the absolute bare minimum you can get on ele. With an untraited glyph as the only source of healing.

For me it’s the combination of proactive and reactive plays.

There’s a constant tug-of-war between rotation and situation. As a beginner, you’re using skills randomly as you see the need, then you learn to do the leet rotations, and finally you end up appreciating reactive skill use again.

Personally I’m not a fan of the engi playstyle. If all your skills are available at all times, that’s a loss of depth rather than a gain in my humble opinion.

In short, you can get pretty far with rotational knowledge alone, but weaving the steps of the attunement dance according to the situation is the true joy of playing ele.

lucadiro.4519:

I said “one of the best, if not the best Ele in game” said earth is the best choise for a SF fresh air and i said that because people said me that earth is not worth to take.
Actually is under performing in this metà, but compared to how squishy is F/A/Ar is like godmode lol

From watching his stream a bit back then, there was/is a lot of difference between EU and NA. Phanta would very regularly just push far and win matchups vs weird builds, or be in sustained teamfights without getting focused terribly hard.

My experience was a lot different. This was at the peak of mesmer+thief+medi dominance, and the game had evolved to a very 2-layered style. On one layer you had zerker roamers blinking, stealthing and bursting one another, and on the other you had the dd eles/cele engis/shoutbows and bunker guards fighting over point and assisting zerkers wherever possible.

In that environment, earth trait line became a lot less useful. The clashes would be so explosive that sustain was all but useless. Fire however, would regularly proc cleansing fire-blinding ashes after steal, allow you to phoenix burst far more often, and survive the occasional pin down+doom with instacleanse.

TL;DR: Sustain is only useful in specific matchups. NA ran into these matchups a lot more commonly than EU I feel.

Shadowflare.2759:

Laraley.7695:

Shadowflare.2759:

Laraley.7695:

lucadiro.4519:

Laraley.7695:

posthumecaver.6473:

Aenesthesia.1697:

Yashuoa.9527:

Now they want to get rid of Celestial amulet.
However doesnt that leave us crippled if they dont change something about the Ele?

Depends on the rest of classes, but it shouldn’t. Ele has one of the highest damage potentials in the game. Sure, you won’t be durable, but you still can spec hybrid damage if you want to take advantage of direct damage and burns. You just won’t be able to deal considerable damage while tanking like a pro.

What is the difference of Thief and Ele in current META?

Thief needs 2s to kill you, Ele needs 10s to kill anybody.

So if Ele can’t tank little bit to deliver its damage, how is it going to kill anybody. Ele has, in no weapon set, an attack that can deliver 8K damage in one skill, we out sustain people and kill them that way.

Now you take our sustain but then where is this 8K hit for us, we still don’t deal damage and die in one hit.

I would say something basically is wrong here.

So next META look like this, Thief kills people in 1s and Ele dies 1s and acts like a res bot.

This is not completely true. Cele was about sustaining and then killing your opponents, but not the damage oriented builds. Of course, those are gone now, but Pheonix was able to hit 8K. Sure, you had to land it perfectly, but that skill hit hard. I’m not sure about now, but it will still have decent damage.

However, there’s no way marauder staff ele will be a thing. It never was and never will be without complete revamp of the class. You have absolutely no survability and you’re rooted for several seconds to even get some damage on point. If not thieves, revenants or anything will eat you alive. People tried to make it work in the past, but it just never did.

I tried yesterday in a 1v1 arena. Vs a revenant without protection (assuming he had close quartier trait and durability runes) I hit him for 5k total for a 3hit Phoenix. Were all crits.
Just 1k more than the new thief’s AA on sword lol.

Well, first of all. Revenant is a heavy class, that’s one thing. It will obviously hit less.

Second of all, since I found that unlikely, I went to test it. Marauder, scholar on ele and zerker, durability on revenant, no might. Without protection I was getting 3.8K-4.5K hits on explosion and 1.5K-2K hits on rest (all crits). So you either didn’t land the explosion hit, didn’t crit or he had protection. Fyi, three hits with scholar runes on revenant without protection was nearly 9K. I obviously do not know what you run but 5K with all crits and three hits on marauder/zerker if revenant has no prot seems unlikely. The only difference was that he didn’t use Close Quarters, but that can be played around, too.

Third of all, Phoenix can hit more times than three, so you were missing damage there, too. However, it’s hard to consistently land more on a class such a revenant due to their mobility and evades. But imagine landing all hits and critting, the damage from the skill would be a lot.

Phoenix is one of the good skills on scepter, let’s not bash it.

Edit: Was running fire, air, arcana. I mean if you run some less damage oriented build, it’s normal you’ll be getting less damage, but that’s not the skill fault.

> Scholar runes
> fire, air, arcane with no defensive trait lines

In what universe would that be a build that’s remotely realistic to use in competitive PvP given the current opposition? We all know ele has high theoretical damage, PvE proved that long ago. But what’s the point of all that potential damage if you can barely survive long enough to use it?

It’s pretty obvious that lucadiro tested the damage using some build that is more likely to be used than (nearly) full glass ele.

Arcana has defensive trait lines.
Fresh air was never viable in competitive PVP.
The post wasn’t about damage of the spec, but a skill that someone claimed hits 5K with only, which is unlikely. He runs lots of defensive stuff, sure, but his damage is so lacking, it’s not even worth it.

Arcana is a mixed bag of things, whereas water and earth are clearly more aligned with defense.

Doesn’t really matter if FA was ever competitive, you still wouldn’t use a F/A/Ar build even if you were to use it, unless you were in PvE or just going yolo.

Again, theoretical damage is all nice and good, but if that’s not something we’ll use, there’s no point in bringing it up.

Random testimony from yours truly, F/A/Ar was actually an excellent choice before blinding ashes nerf. Sustain and cleanse over time was less valuable than blinds and burst cleanse from fire imo. For a long time it was the best pick (imo), and it’s still up there. You’d be hard-pressed to weigh the blind vs the ~1.5k heal/10s from water for example. Simply because there aren’t many abilities that hit less than 2k on a glass ele.

Just some food for thought. I ran a lot of fresh air at a respectable MMR. But then again I used icebow, so perhaps my opinion isn’t worth much :-)

I’m honestly not too concerned with the whole thing, considering the meta cele tempest build isn’t fun whatsoever. I just want to clarify that by choosing to remove cele, instead of nerfing it or its main (ab)users, you’ve put ele unbelievably far back. Thinking any of the new amulets are on a comparable power level to celestial on ele, is a mistake. Again, no ele is the same is the same to me as having only the DS cele tempest, since I wouldn’t play that anyway, but the difference is that we’re a lot further now than we were before.

But you’re a little delusional if you think the buff to shatterstone will suddenly bring marauder tempest out of the dumpster into the meta. This might not be so obvious since the meta has shifted so much, but the story with marauder tempest is this. Is it worth picking over thief or mesmer? Thief has god-tier mobility and is incredibly hard to pin down, mesmer has portal, game-swinging elites and is incredibly hard to pin down. So here you are, as a fresh air ele. You do marginally more damage than the two, but your impact on the game is nowhere near the level of your prime competitors.

Pretty dramatic title, but in all honesty it’s pretty true.

I’ll make it real simple, ele needs toughness, vitality and healing power to function properly in pvp. There’s no amulet that gives all three and has noticeable damage.

I get that it’s a very spectacular change, and a lot of negativity has been projected on the amulet as the ‘centerstone of any and all aids’, and I don’t even necessarily disagree with most of it.

But truth is, no cele, no ele.

Perhaps fresh air tempest will be good, which would be great fun, but any other spec can no longer exist this way.

I saw grouch talk about mender’s amulet as the new go-to ele amulet. Try going toe to toe with any relevant power spec on 1900 armor.

I can’t help but notice the whole no swiftness, no lightning flash, no RtL, no fgs thing. Same as the last ‘greatest condi build’ you put up.

That sounded more cynical than I wanted it to. But I am truly curious how you deal with that. My preferred roaming builds have always gravitated extremely towards mobility. Not being able to pick your fights is excruciating imo.

I’m thinking maybe full cleanse at a certain health threshold. Keep in mind it’s a grandmaster trait.

I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited for this kind of communication.

Here goes:

- Elementalist: Glad to see diamond skin receiving attention. I think the main thing that needs attention is damage reduction stacking. Currently, damage reduction stacks additively, and elementalist is the most obvious abuser of that fact. With high uptime of protection (-40), frost aura (-10) and geomancer’s defense (-10), direct damage reduction is quite simply too high. Especially coupled with ele’s god-tier sustain. To clarify, additive stacking means the reductions add up (40+10+10) for a total of a whopping -60%, or 100% when a revenant uses or procs jalis elite.. With multiplicative stacking, these 3 sources would only add up to little over 50%, while also eliminating the silly 100% damage reduction thingy. It’s only logical that incoming damage modifiers work the same way outgoing damage modifiers do. Buffs to air grandmasters sound good, although 2 out of 3 are already excellent traits. I would suspect they intend to move bolt to the heart, so it can once again be taken in conjunction with fresh air. That would be a glorious change indeed. Let’s hope these QoL focus changes adress the pitiful fire attunement! Meanwhile scepter could use at least one decent autoattack.

- Engineer: Personally I think scrapper, herald and chronomancer (and to a lesser extent dragonhunter) all suffer from a similar problem. They have too much active defense on a too low cooldown. Between sneak gyro(!), hammer block and evade frames from rocket charge + whatever they get from utilities, surviving in marauder gear is so easy there’s really no reason to run any other amulet. Couple that with stability uptime, which prevents lockdown, and it’s all a bit overwhelming. A nerf to any of these, specifically to cooldown would go a long way I think. The damage is high, but that’s always been part of the engineer identity imo. It’s just that their traditional weakness to lockdown is now completely missing. Same thing as ele, when you have a class with high sustain, you have to be wary of giving it too much defense in any other shape, because that quickly compounds the problem.

- Guardian changes sound alright, though I’d argue for re-evaluating the stability on longbow knockback. I’ll be questioning many of the new stability sources in this write-up. Especially the uptime of this incredible boon. Perhaps spear of justice could do with a projectile velocity decrease. Pulls are incredibly strong, and it’d make sense to make it dodge-able with good reflexes, seeing as it’s already unblockable.

- Mesmer sounds good too, especially the notes on alacrity. Shield block nerfs+ well of precog changes were excellent changes. I’m not a big fan of the cooldown of continuum split being so much lower than that of time-warp and moa, making the latter rather irrelevant. Upping one or reducing the other could bring some variation to how continuum split is used, as it’s currently just copying elites 90% of the time.

- Necromancer: Those notes don’t really mean much as far as I can see. I’ve really no idea what to make of it. Once again, I’ll point out the abundance of stability on reaper, though it’s not as out of place as others. Slowing down the pulses of RS 3 a little would be nice, even if you leave the amount of stacks untouched. That’d give some room to boon-rip or stability shred plays.

- Ranger: The HoT pets are out of line imo. Especially the bristleback. There’s almost 0 variation in what pets are picked nowadays. Even the wolf, which reigned supreme before HoT can’t measure up.

- Revenant: The sheer uptime of evasion/blocks/… is too high. Glint heal, shield block x 2, unrelenting assault, riposting shadows, dodges, hammer 3,… It gets to the point where you can almost rotate through your defenses with little downtime. Other than that, I love the sound of those design decisions, further specialising legends leaving clearly defined weaknesses to compensate. Once more I’d like to point out the stab on dodge trait being super powerful. A duration cut perhaps?

- Thief: In my experience, thief autoattacks were never weak, which is why this note surprises me. Most of all I’d like to stress that thief is a very sensitive class to balance. Nerfing its main opposition in the same patch as giving it substantial buffs can and will likely lead to trouble. As Sindrener said, it’s more the other classes being out of line, than thief being lacking in any aspect. This might sound like a ‘chicken-or-the-egg’ argument, but it’s not. This same logic does not apply so extremely to other professions. Acro changes are very welcome

- Warrior: I’m not very comfortable giving much feedback on this one. Burnzerker needs looking at, but besides that, I think taking a look at how specifically the mobility changes hit warrior harder than any other profession by far. Their mobility got absolutely gutted in that patch. I’d agree it was out of line before, but I’d say they were hit too hard. Giving them back some of that good stuff will alleviate their worries much more than other changes of similar scope, since it allows them to pick and control their engagements more aptly.

In all honesty, I’ve kind of started to accept the reality that tempest is an elite spec tailored to all the people who have asked for an easier to play/attunement camp playstyle version of ele. Over the course of the years, that’s probably been the biggest recurring theme on this forum. Many people tried ele, couldn’t accomodate to the attunement dance and gave up on it.

These are the people tempest was designed for, and that’s honestly fine.

Or it would be… If not using it was still a viable option. But it’s not. So yeah, I’d say branch out in to other classes. It’s what I’ve always done when I didn’t like the feel of ele in a metagame, but it’s something I’ll probably be doing a LOT more, the way things are looking.

Even if S/F fresh air tempest was the greatest thing ever, waiting in air for 5 seconds, to then push 1 button for a 4s channel gets old really, really fast. Compared to old-school fresh air, it’s just laughable.

Wish I could give you a different answer, but that’s how I see it. The upside, lots of new and shiny stuff to try!

Sunshine.5014:

Ele water swap has no damage but actually activate on hit (clear aegis).

Small note, they fixed that a while back.