Guild Wars 2

any other opinions on the runes?

Like penatbater said, staff or scepter+dagger is best for PvE. For startes defensive gear (soldier or valkyrie/knight) and defensive build (30P in Water, 10 in Earth or something like that) could help you get used to ele-gameplay since you don’t die that fast. Cantrips will also help.

Build may look something like that: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-kZ;1J0R0VV075cN-Z0;9;49J9J95;052-2;045-4;05;5sV2DsV2D8BB

The more you get used to the playstyle of elementalist the more offensive you can go – more points in fire or air and more offensive gear.

As the thread title says I’m looking for the best runes for sPvP with a 10-30-0-10-20 D/D build and Berserker Amulet.

Currently I tried Eagle, Rage, Air and Divinity. I also considered using might-runes.
Which one do you think might be best?

Sigills are Fire and Precision.
Do Sigill of Fire/Air share a cooldown with the Air-Runes and does Sigill of precision work? (the +5% crit aren’t shown in the character-screen)

Is Sigill of Fire or Air more effective? The dmg seems to be the same but Fire is AoE… doesn’t make sense to me

LightningBlaze.4913:

After a little while, I just didn’t like the scepter as main hand anymore haha but some of the idea behind this build has been transferred to my original build and It is definitely an improvement.

same here ^^ was fun for a while but when switching back to D/D i realised how much more effective D/D is.

hmm i’ve already read that these traits work but also that they don’t. Just tested them and they seem not to work. Can anybody confirm it who knows it for sure?
Lingering Elements would be nearly useless if these don’t work…

Hey guys,

there are 3 traits that improve dmg by 10% while in earth, air or fire. (internal fire, strenght of stone and air training).
Now my question: with lingering elements from the arcana-tree attunenmets stay up for 5s even if you switch out of them so it is possible to have all of the three (or even 4) attunenments at the same time – do the traits mentioned above even work with lingering elements and also do they stack?

regards

Don’t think that is overpowered. 6s are useless because of the Skill-CD on weapons, but instead you don’t need the 30P in Arcana just for the reduced attunment CD (if you don’t need the traits) and could specc into other elements and still have ~10s CD.

Lillian Wandom Hale.7102:

If I collect 15 seconds , and increase my recharge by 60%, I will “collect” 24 seconds

24 – 15 = 9 seconds REMOVED
15 – 9 = 6 seconds CD Remaining

You are increasing the CD by 60% which doesn’t fit the description of the tooltip at all. Like stated before it increases the recharge rate – so you have to calculate with the recharge rate. The recharge rate isn’t 15s it’s 100% or 1s/s

Assuming with 0P you have 100% recharge meaning you lower the 15 CD by 1 each second.
Then with 1P you have 102% recharge rate which will lower the 15 by 1,02 each second.
…
30P you have 160% recharge rate which is 1,6 less per second. Then how many seconds have to pass to get 15 to 0 when 15 is decreased by 1,6 every 1 second? -> 15/1,6=9,4

using your example you would collect 1,6 apples instead of 1 per second. So you can gather 15 apples in less time (9,4s)

edit: still i would appreciate Anet to change this to direct CD-reduction so 20 or even 10P might be enough for PvP.

the CD isn’t directly lowered but the recharge rate is increased

assuming you have 30P in arcana that would mean a racharge rate of 160%
-> 15s/1,6=9,4

Gaudrath.6725:

And if you try ignoring your class mechanics in WvW, well, prepare to be farmed for badges. If WvW’ers give you lip about you staying only in fire and not dropping Static Fields (if you run staff) and Frozen Ground in front of enemy zergs, you deserve it.

If you happen to be solo roaming with D/D, nobody will give you lip about staying in one element only, you’ll just die a lot.

so … when did the discussion-topic change from staff PvE to D/D and WvW?
Also I always mentioned that a build fokussed on staying in fire (with staff!) is needed to overcome the benefits from attunement-swapping. 30-30-0-10-0 for example. (http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQFAWhImSbqR5gjDAkCoEeQADJIeYRFUA;TkAg0U5YCSEkVHXOSdGkittenA) No boons on attunenment switch, no fury on attunenment switch, no explo-finisher from evasive arcana, little condition-remove from water, no Sigills that procc on weapon-swap, ect. – but 15% (5% throught constant burn) more dmg in fire (would be 15% more overall-dmg when not switching), reduced CD on fire-spells and might on fire-spells – maybe in combination with might-duration-runes and all the glyphs beeing cast in fire for additional might-stacks.
Attunenment-switching could never help you outdamaging this build.

I just came up with that build, never tested it or completely thought it through.

Gaudrath.6725:

Gorni.1764:

Andovar Edoras.2143:

Ill start: i have a friend who i play with, we both have ele alts, i like scepter focus and he likes staff. What makes me cringe though is the fact that he uses fire 99,99% of the time…. Just spamming fire 1 and sometimes fire 2 and 3. He only switches to air only while travelling for the speed buff.

depending on the group and the eles build, this may be the most effective way to play staff-ele

No, no and no. ONE Earth #1 and you just applied 3s of weakness. This means every non-critical hit is a glancing blow which only does 50% damage. Now do you think an overall 50% damage reduction is something to be neglected in favor of a little more DPS?

What about chill? What about AoE healing and condition removal? What about stacking vulnerability on bosses?

Staying in one attunement 99% of the time is pretty much the only wrong way to play an ele, regardless of your build and trait lines. Players who do that ignore our main class mechanic and do not take advantage of it in any way. End of discussion.

I never said you should avoid using other attunements at all costs. But for pure DPS staying only in fire is the best way (like said, depending on group and build). For example applying vulnerability might be good for the whole group but your DPS is so low in water that the overall-dmg of the group will be lowered. Of course switching to earth/air when you have to kite or to water when you have to heal is necessary. But a standard-rotation with staff isn’t the right way to do DPS in my opinion.

@original topic: speccing into earth or going for condition-dmg; also speccing less than 20P in arcana if you use D/D oder S/D

Andovar Edoras.2143:

Ill start: i have a friend who i play with, we both have ele alts, i like scepter focus and he likes staff. What makes me cringe though is the fact that he uses fire 99,99% of the time…. Just spamming fire 1 and sometimes fire 2 and 3. He only switches to air only while travelling for the speed buff.

depending on the group and the eles build, this may be the most effective way to play staff-ele

1. take all skills from conjures
2. create a single new 2h weapon with those skills
3. replace conjures with useful utilities
4. ?
5. profit

you just continue to get Utility-Points (don’t know what they’re called in english) but you will stick to 70 Trait-Points at lvl80.

other question: does anyone know if Lingering Elements works for all traits such as 10% increased dmg in fire/air or 20% more dmg on vulnerable foes in water? Or does it just work with lesser traits such as zephyr’s speed?

@Video: did I hear self-rezz?

I’m not a D/D fan in particular. I play S/D or sometimes staff in dungeons. Staff in WvW-zergs (sometimes even S/F, depending on the situation and group), and like stated D/D in PvP and whilst soloing in WvW (or PvE for farming).

I never said that D/D is harder to play than the rest – what I meant was: every weapon has it’s niche, but I think it’s wrong to say staff or scepter is harder to play than D/D just because its spells never hit in a 1v1 situation (I’m mainly adressing PvP/WvW here, because it seems to be the main issue in this thread). What are your arguments for saying D/D is easiest to play?
You can’t ever win a 1v1 with staff against any decent player – but that for sure is not because it’s more difficult to play – it’s because the weapon seems not to be designed for that purpose. You also can’t CC a large group of enemies as effectively with D/D as with staff or deal an equal amount of AoE-damage with D/D.
Playing dungeons with a Staff most of the time you can just relax and stand back at 1200 range in fire-attunement dealing the same overall-damage as a D/D that has to time all of his attunements perfectly to use the potential of that weapon-set. (I know staff can do much more through combo-fields in other attunements – but basically staying in fire would do the trick in most fights). How can that be more difficult than D/D?

To come back to D/D: it’s our melee-range-weapon-set. Guild wars seems to reward melee-range-spells with a higher amount of damage. That combined with it’s great mobility and best (small-range-scale-)CC makes it the ideal PvP-weapon-set – and sadly the only efficient PvP-Weapon-Set in my opinion (regarding 1v1 or maybe 1v2-situations). Therefore you can’t even really compare the weapon-sets with each other in every different aspect of the game, because they have different functions and potential depending on the situation.
It’s difficult to perfectly use and place combo-fields with staff to support your group in WvW or dungeones, also it’s difficult to find a good rotation for ideal support and damage playing S/D, same goes for duelling a single enemy in PvP with D/D.

Another factor might be that our traits are mainly crap and there is poor snyergy except for the popular D/D-aura-specc. The lack of efficient builds designed for other weapon-sets also makes D/D stronger than the rest – but easier to play? – no – only more efficient.

By the way

All atunement can actually do AoE dmg in short CD

same goes for staff. I’d also say that staff is way more efficient in dealing AoE-dmg on static targets than D/D is. And hitting mobile targets with D/D is nearly as difficult as with staff.

Vanillea.5764:

It is popular because it is easy to play. There are not much to aim as D/D just go in to range and cast. It has the lowest skill floor out of ele’s weapon set.

in PvE Staff or Zepter are by far easier to play than D/D. Also in WvW. It’s just PvP or soloing in WvW where D/D is the weapon of choice – just because the other weapons have mostly fail spell-mechanics for PvP. You’re confusing efficiency with difficulty.

Nice idea. Haven’t read it all yet but some kind of editing to your list would be nice.
like

[A-XI] Evasive Arcana
Create an attunement-based spell at the end of your dodge. Each spell can be triggered once every 10 seconds.
Fire: Flame Burst. Water: Cleansing Wave. Air: Blinding Flash. Earth: Churning Earth.

• Rating: 5
• Really strong trait and useful for any build. Essential for a lot of builds. If you ever used this trait you will love it. Synergizes well with a lot of other traits.

[A-XII] Elemental Surge
Based on attunement, arcane skills cause:
Fire: burning for 5 seconds. Water: chilled for 3 seconds. Air: blindness for 5 seconds. Earth: immobilized for 1 second

• Rating: 2
• Useful if you use arcane skills. It adds damage and utility. Useless if you don’t use any arcane skills.

Also don’t use 2 ratings on the same trait. It should be clear that a trait that only works on staff is crap if you use daggers. Just write the rating for staff and mention the rest in the description. And don’t just write things like “usefull if you use arcane spells, useless if not” – instead write something like “for grandmaster-trait the conditions added are kind of weak and compared to evasive arcana this is completley useless unless you have 3 Arcane spells as utility and maybe even specced for further proccs in the arcane-traitline” Here you could also mention synergies with other traits (like in that case Arcane-III and -IV)

Having experienced several scenarios with both D/D and staff in WvW I can say the following:
Staff has it’s niche. It’s good in PvE (dungeons) and in zergs in WvW when you have a large group of allies making sure you won’t be focused easily so you can practically do what you want at safe range of 1200. With berserker-gear it might even be awesome in that scenario.
Everywhere else it fails. You will never ever win a 1v1 against any class (played by a mediocre skilled player). Also saying you win 8 out of 10 fights against D/D Eles … can’t be true (unless all of those were lvl10 or something) – D/D will always deal more damage than staff and at the same time easily outheal staff-damage. Best scenario for staff might be that you can outheal D/D damage too, resulting in a draw. But you will never be able to actually kill a D/D with staff (first because of the fact that he can run away anytime he wants with rtl, and second because you won’t do enough damage with your autohits to kill him (your other AoE’s will never hit because of D/Ds great mobility)).
So for soloing in WvW (in order to kill single enemies or groups of 2-3 people) i always run D/D. Every time i get caught by enemies whilst wielding a staff i find myself either dead or instantly running away, trying to kite as long as possible in order to find some allies to help me. Therefore I’d never join WvW alone wielding a staff…

@first video: I think if you’d use the heal-signet instead you wouldn’t have to disengage combat that often and could keep more constant pressure on your oponent. It should be better than ether-renewal even without heal-gear. In regards of condition-remove you could either specc 30 in water or if you really want air-15 use cleansing fire (maybe instead of lightning flash – since good oponents will dodge your churning earth anyway; or mist form – since you mostly used mist form only for your ether-renewal)

i prefer arcane-spells or maybe earth-armor

TheBeedon.6031:

Windwalker.2047:

Rolyate.6753:

Easily the strongest class at this point in time. Don’t expect to win every fight.

HAH what you mean that one viable build we have?
Yeah sure that sounds op as all kitten

By one viable build you mean the very powerful D/D aura share or the S/D hybrid mobile tank or the Staff bunker or the S/F bunker?

those builds are all quite the same … the only difference is the weapon-set

Funny how some people keep comparing ele-“bunker” with guardian-bunkers since the playstyle is completly different. Eles can never just stand there like a rock like guardians do with their bubbles, heals, low-CD-CCs, heavy armor etc.
The “bunker” in bunker-eles comes from the mobility we have, skills like rtl or flash that give us a short break from incoming dmg. Also perfectly timed dodge-rolls (with perma-vigor) and cantrips in case of need and constant little heals.

Also I’m fed up with reading kitten like

Mean while, in WvW a d/d ele tanks 15 people while killing 3 and gets away!.

With the common bunker-spec you can barely kill a single proper lvl80-player that knows what he’s doing not even thinking of 2 good players. I often happen to run into single D/D-Eles that lurk from a distance while I run with 1-3 friends in group ignoring him. He proceeds to lurk then rtl into us doing some laughable dmg and then rtl away. We proceed to ignore him. Why would such a class even bother you? It’s some kind of nasty but not least dangerous to you.
Also all those vids out there where a single ele “tanks” a bunsh of noobs. I’ve never seen any video where an ele acutally wins against a larger group and doesn’t run away at the end or gets support from other players.

Pathetic arguments all over this thread …
Rather than demanding a nerf to D/D you should urge for a buff of offensive speccs and other weapons so not everyone has to run around with this build. I’d love to play more offensive (even if it would result in dying more often – but at least i can also effetively kill) – if there was a decent alternative I think nearly nobody would run around with this kind of boring build.

does anyone else have the feeling that we take much more dmg than before the patch?

teg.1340:

PVP/WvW:

DD bunker ele has strong survivability + mobility and thats it. Damage is mediocre compared to other professions. Ele is forced to go full PVT armor where other professions can easily go for Knights (warrior) or just full Berserker (thief) without sacrificing too much defense. And ele is forced to go deep into arcana + water (again no damage).

So at the end its a trait-off. DD bunker ele sacrifices damage + range dps for survivability + mobility. The prob is people are complaining about dd ele without factoring in the trait-offs.

Its easy to just pop mist form, armor of earth + RTL away. But its extremely hard to actually kill decent enemies.

I had many 1vs1 vs decent thieves, mesmers, guardians or warriors in WvW which took FOREVER.

PVE:

Ele is far from strong.

nothing more to add

Matt Witter.6982:

There may be some cases where players can build for AoE damage, but are just not viable

meaning, we’ll get a buff

Matt Witter.6982:

other cases where AoE is clearly the dominate way to build, and as such the other builds get left on the side lines. Its these classes/builds that we are concerned about.*

since it’s our only way to play it’s also our dominate way … what now Anet?

how could they even nerf AoE in general?

just compare ele staff 2 with warrior 2h-sword 2:
- both spells have nearly same CD
- warrior doing 10-20k+ per target; ele doing 3? ~1500-hits per target dealing about 5k dmg in total per target
- warrior with haste deploys this load of damage within about 1-2 seconds while the ele-spell doesn’t even do any damage before 1-2 seconds when it’s already on the ground → can be easily avoided thus usually will do max. 1 tick of damage (one could also choose to just keep standing in it, since its damage is so low)
- only advantage of ele-spell is that it can be cast at 1200 range (but what’s the use of this, if it doesn’t do any dmg)

how is this fair? (and please spare me with your “ele got 20 spells”-argument)

Magnetic Aura can also be obtained by (Earth?) Runes.

You say ele is OP because of its ability to run away? c’mon there are better ways to troll…
What’s the deal with jumping into a group of enemies and escaping with rtl and lightning flash? You can’t really do any harm alone to a large group, the group could even completely ignore you and you still wouldn’t have the chance to stomp an enemy … so why complain? What’s the benefit of moving around with ride the lightning randomly without actually doing anything productive?
I guess the situations you described were just some random impressions from WvW where you played against a bunch of lvl10 noobs. No wonder you can troll them with a defensive build.
I bet you play with soldier gear and like stated 30P water, 30P arcane and 10P earth with 3 cantrips. You can’t even play more defensive like that – it’s just fair to survive since you can’t kill either with such a specc (maybe a 1v1 or 2v1 against enemies below lvl80) but that goes for nearly every class. Saying you can survive a 3v1 or 4v1 indefinitely you can’t have ever seriously played sPvP or tPvP.
Don’t judge a class just by killing noobs in WvW. If you seriously want to check if a class is OP or not go to tPvP and play against equally skilled players.

Eles have a great mobility, that’s what makes them shine in WvW. D/D (with defensive spec as stated before) has mediocre damage that is moreover difficult to deploy. Utility/Support is nice but compared to ingi not a bit OP.

I’d rather complain about the fact that we have to use a defensive specc to be usefull/playable at all.

lure your enemy to a wall or ground then make earth-4 followed by water-5 against wall/ground and then water-2/2 and water-3/3. Only way to bring enough pressure on your enemy to actually kill him. All other skills (maybe except elite, which can be dodged easily) are quite useless.
Make sure to also use at least one or even two arcane Spells.

my advice: try to do it alone without doing any events. Worked perfectly for me. Tried it 3 times before with group (always someone left or already had the achievement). Then I tried it alone and got it in one run (~5-10min)

There’s a huge number of players experiencing that problem. The problem seems to affect mainly systems that use Nvidia grafic-cards and the crashes usually occur during WvW or in loading screens. Some players have these problem since months (many since a november update) and there is still no reaction from anet…

No, they don’t stack.
Plus: Windborne Dagger is bugged, doesn’t work at all. One with Air is strange too. Only thing working seems to be One with Air.
So your max. movement Speed should be 110% (or 130% if you have a speedbuff)

Kaleban.9834:

make the traits always applicable regardless of attunement

I totally agree with you. Take Piercing Shards (Water-IV – 20% more damage on vulnerable foes while in water attunement) as an example. Since water-spells deal extremely low damage (on all weapon Sets) and vulnerability can’t even be applied by all our weapons this trait is completely useless unless you have at least 15 points in Arcana and/or use conjures (which are still too weak even after the buffs) and have someone in your party applying vulnerability.

Mobott.5908:

since Anet is doing AMAs next week

what’s AMA?

Kethryes.5712:

WHY THE HELL DO WE GET ADDITIONAL DOWNED PENALTY WHEN USING VAPOR FORM???!!!

I guess it’s because the end of vaporform counts as another death as you can see on the right where the kills are listed.