Guild Wars 2

Relax. You’re level 5.

If it’s still a problem by level 50 you can start worrying, but at level 5 you won’t have had enough time in the game yet to know enough to be good at it, you don’t have your utility or elite skills yet, you don’t have traits yet…

For now just experiment with everything, learn some things from others by asking, learn others from trial and error.

If you want to level faster go with another player, or with people from a guild. If you want to learn faster, explore solo, and ask only for information, not direct support. The greater the skill curve is, the faster you’ll pick up abilities.

Got cut off by character limit.

To apply the above to your case, you’ll need to know exactly what you want to do in the game if you want a max-viability build. The Fresh Air type builds are generally the most viable for elementalist D/D sets now by a far margin (~85% viability overall for the Ele class), but when playing it you have to remember that your melee autoattack has a much greater range than all normal melee autoattacks. It not only cleaves, but its range is 300, not 130. Failure to make use of the additional range advantage will definitely make it inferior to an equivalent warrior build in most circumstances. In stacking scenarios, you’re generally going to be flat-out inferior to warriors because your additional range has no benefit. In PvP, open world, boss kiting etc scenarios you have the advantage of being able to deal melee level multiplier autoattacks while your targets cannot retaliate using melee because of the range gap.

The other attunements are situational ways to adapt to things that happen – your mainstay is Air attunement, in that build.

But it’s basically a PBAoE type build with limited burst. If you want greater damage in a short time a thief would be better, if you want greater survivability and/or greater damage with shorter range a warrior would be better.

Thieves are less survivable than Elementalists by a far margin in PvE content – Elementalists have far more damage mitigation, projectile repulsion etc skills, and cleanse conditions without difficulty; thieves only have stealth, which mobs will AoE through anyway, very low healing so you don’t have a second chance if you screw up, no invulnerable period for you to thin out the numbers of very large mobs, etc. They are more survivable in PvP content because the mechanics elementalists use are easily mitigated by better players, whereas invisible players are basically impossible to attack if your skillset does not include any AoE or PBAoE skills.

Get a warrior for her. The easiest few are warr, necro, guardian and ranger, but guards attract too much aggro for their damage potential so inexperienced players may die, necros aren’t that useful in PvE applications, and rolling rangers as a first class leads to picking up some very bad habits that may be difficult to unlearn later on.

On your end support her warrior with an elementalist. Should enable you to basically plow through everything with her except some world bosses, WvW and PvP. Plus, raising her damage and keeping her alive as a support-type elementalist (ie, ‘bringing out the best in her’), is always a bonus.

It’s muddy as heck because they’ve made a lot of possible combinations for the classes to do a rather wide set of roles, with very few exceptions (control ele doesn’t quite exist, tank thief doesn’t quite exist etc).

However, to determine what a class is ‘meant’ for, you’ll need to look at the power multipliers on their non-autoattacks; the power multipliers on their autoattacks; the type, range and duration of conditions they inflict; the type, range and duration of boons they grant; bouncing, cleave, piercing, PBAoE, ground-targeted AoE and target-centred AoE nature of their attacks and their ranges; the class unique mechanic (Steal for Thief, Burst for Warriors, Death Shroud for Necros etc); the useful traits in the trees (some are useless); what stats those traits boost.

It’s very complicated and extremely difficult to explain within 10,000 words, so I’ll save the explanation and skip to the results:

Warriors are meant for melee cleave damage and/or control, and do best with Soldier’s or Berserker.
Mesmers are meant for high single target damage and boon removal, and do best with Assassin’s or Rampager.
Rangers are meant for condition/direct damage hybrid builds or very long range direct damage (specialised function – this build will end up useless outside those specific scenarios). The earlier ones do best with Carrion/Rampager, the latter one requires Berserker.
Guardians are meant for tanking, AoE healing and PBAoE damage. They do best with Sentinel and Cleric gear.
Elementalists are meant for boon stacking or AoE damage. They are also the most resistant class to condition damage by a very wide margin, but one of the most vulnerable to direct damage. They do best with Celestial.
Thieves are meant for burst direct damage and/or control and/or boon removal. They do best with Berserker gear.
Necros are meant for AoE conditioning and tanking. They do best with Rabid or Dire gear.
Engineers are meant for covering the gaps in parties, regardless of where the gap arises – they’re the best at doing everything at once, but don’t match any of the other 7 in any specific area. Whatever gear they use depends on what you’re speccing them to do; Celestial is viable, but not necessarily ideal.

The problem arises that the lines are so blurred as builds vary widely… the above addresses it from a ‘maximum potential’ point of view. Most builds run at about 70-85% potential of the class, which is already good enough such that players often get the false impression a class is good at something that it actually isn’t very good at (ie. Power necros are much weaker than power specced mesmers for the 1v1 direct damage scenario and burst-type mesmers are much weaker than condition specced Necros for AoE conditioning applications), and player skill gaps worsen this discrepancy (a problem of special mention with Rangers, where the vast majority run with <60% class viability giving the false impression that the class is plain bad).

For the casual player you can basically play whatever class fits your style the most, then spec it to whatever you want your character to do. The game is easy enough that even 70% viability already makes all open world content a cakewalk (I generally upgrade gear every 15 levels and can still complete most Group Events alone while 15-undergeared), and dungeons don’t generally pose much of an issue with competent party members. Trying to get close to ‘optimised builds’ per class only really reaps significant benefits in carrying 4 useless teammates through a dungeon (usually, even 3 competent players already means normal builds work well), attempting to fight a 60 man zerg with 20 people, or trying PvP group tournaments.

I run the lvl 10 trait in the fifth line that gives +25% speed to all melee weapon wields, so swiftness loses its relevance. The additional speed you get from Greatswords 3 and 5, and Bull’s Charge is way more significant than the paltry +8% you get by adding Swiftness, which isn’t even on a 100% uptime unless you buff boon duration.

Setup Mace/Mace (Control, Defensive)+Greatsword (Pure damage, Mobility).

Never needed range for anything. Even the bosses in the Marionette you’re ‘supposed’ to range I just happily meleed away without any trouble, when 11 levels undergeared.

Runes of Perplexity…. =P

Mesmer needs Traveler runes. The clone death issue isn’t actually so bad since you can Burst them before the mob you’re attacking dies normally to do AoE – this often takes out a group. Also, depends on your traits. At the moment I can summon one Phantasmal swordsman every 9 seconds and both counterblade and blurred frenzy can essentially 2hit kill any normal mob. However, you’re stuck at 25% speed even with Traveler. It’s extremely strong against players and bosses, but weaker against very large groups – condi classes and Guardians do much better for those.

Elementalist is plain OP for openworld exploration – you get >100% swiftness uptime with hammer blasting, and if you blast in the vicinity of mobs you get free AoE kills in addition to the swift so you never really need to stand still to kill anything. Against vet+ mightblasting takes out all normals in the area and leaves the veterans there with only 20% hp left. In dungeons a good elementalist is also the most useful class – you can basically mightbuff 25 might permanently alone on your whole party, while healing more than any class except guardians, and having more invulns than most classes. You also have 5 (!!) condition removal skills at your disposal, while direct damage is generally nullified by AoE blind. Having lower armor also means your party members usually meatshield for you – so you can relax and nuke everything to death. However, it’s laughably weak in PvP applications, especially against a debuffer type build (mesmers, steal-spec thieves etc) to make up for its ridiculous overpoweredness in PvE.

Did I mention the Fiery Greatsword? Used against a wall, you can kill ANY nongiant champion in the openworld within 2 fiery greatswords – ie, one summon – takes about 1 minute 20 seconds. Nothing else even comes close to that.

Engi has more flexibility. Necro has better condition AoE and no cleave direct damage. Necros tend to be better for PvP type content, Engis tend to be better for PvE type content, between the two.

Dungeons. [/15char]

Zero. Our healing is too low for toughness to make a difference to sustained survivability, or for vitality to make any difference. When I screw up, I die, def stat or no. When I don’t screw up, I live, def stat or no. So I throw everything into offense to reduce the time within which I am at risk of screwing up.

I run celestials for my elementalist, cleric+sentinel for my guardian, etc etc. There is a place for survivability, but the way the thief class is built survivability stats don’t really help anywhere as much.

I run S/P though. The cc on demand and pistol whip’s evade completely nullify damage in the relevant scenarios.

Up to you. If you want to respec you can always do so at the skill trainer for like 4 silver max. Start a new char if you want a new type of gameplay, continue old if you liked it. You have 5 slots anyway.

We transferred about 125 gold to move one of our guildmates to our world via mail. Chatlogs wouldn’t have shown much activity since we haven’t talked much in the game prior to the transfer; we’re guildmates from another game. We didn’t see the need to say much more in the mail other than ‘rawr’, since the world transfer plan we already talked about in VoIP.

None of us had any issues.

Quaggan has been looking and looking but quaggan cannot find your page, only 404.
Quaggan does not think your page exists.
Quaggan sad.

The main problem is that the majority of people in balance discussions don’t play the classes they talk about. Experience against a class is very different from experience within a class.

Also, for some strange reason the balance team seems very enamoured with stealth. The thief class as a whole is too weak, but stealth specifically is too strong. You can see the glorious result when a stronger class is also given stealth (PU mesmers), an unholy result which only very specific builds can beat, of which nearly all are other types of mesmers.

Time in stealth needs a nerf. 50-70% uptime is good, the current 100% potential uptime is ridiculous. At the same time, thieves need a significant survivability buff that does not depend on stealth, AND an increase in damage. It would be ok to be less survivable than a warrior should the damage be massively greater to compensate; at the moment the damage numbers aren’t very different, but the warrior has so much greater survivability the whole scale is off-kilter.

To talk about a mesmer vs thief discussion properly you need experience playing both, to talk about thief vs warrior you need to play both, etc. Balancing all 8 classes against each other requires experience in all 8 classes. The current approach to things needs a lot of improvement… decisions by committee don’t work well because not all members of the committee have equal input.

I forgot to mention. Against quite a few bosses, people usually stack to reduce damage taken, share healing and boons more effectively, and force ranged mobs together into melee range where they can take the much higher melee damage from your whole party via Cleave. Some bosses also don’t use instakill moves when stacked – such as AC’s Spider Queen.

Sometimes, when the stack position is right the highest damage skill in the game, the Fiery Greatsword’s Fiery Rush, can be used to do high 5 digit-low 6 digit numbers of damage to enemies.

Backstab builds have the problem that you must backstab to be efficient. But when you stack, the boss’ front faces you. If you destack to backstab, then you miss boons, don’t apply some of your own, and in the worst case scenario can cause the boss to be allowed to use an instakill skill that will wipe your party.

For this cause, make sure you know what bosses you can backstab and what you should not backstab… and if you can’t CnD+backstab it, then revert to S/P for the MUCH greater power multiplier on its autoattack and Pistol Whip.

Even against bosses you can backstab you can’t maintain CnD and backstab indefinitely without running out of Initiative. In those situations use D/D to first burst down its health, then swap to S/P to autoattack until you regain full initiative, switch back to burst it down again, swap back to S/P… etc.

The smallest margin of error is actually in thieves though people might think eles are squishier. They’re not; with the correct spec eles can have perm AoE blind, invuln and blocks, as well as a very large amount of heals, in addition to perm vigor – this gives them far more survivability even though they wear only light armor. Thieves on the other hand, while having the most dodges of any class by a very far margin, have only 4 surv mechanics – stealth, dodge, interrupts and blind. Of these the third and fourth are invalid against champions+ which comprise all dungeon bosses, and the first is often invalid because of how much they AoE, leaving ONLY dodge.

The coordination and planning required to pull off a good ele is definitely higher than that for a thief, but the margin for error is lowest on the thief.

If you’re used to dying a lot on the thief, don’t worry – almost all other classes are easier to survive with. The longest sustained survival is on the guardian with its crazy healrate that doesn’t even require a target… but then your role in the dungeon is not to live as a guardian (easy), but to ensure nobody else goes down (not that easy, especially with a thief). Against burst damage specifically warriors are harder to take down than guardians, but their heal rate is too low such that they will tend to fall to sustained damage – they need healing support from other classes, and in return they can Warbanner AoE resurrect other classes which can be downed by single enemy attacks.

Unfortunately for you, it’s sword/pistol. Sword mainhand is compulsory for dungeons because daggers don’t Cleave. And between Sword/Pistol and Sword/Dagger, the former has higher damage potential because of Pistol Whip.

You can also space other skills in between. For instance, pistol whip initiate interrupt, auto attack 2 times, pistol whip evade, auto attack 2 times, pistol whip initiate interrupt, auto attack 2 times….

You can basically permanently stun-evade lock any non Defiant target nonstop. At present you can only stunlock using headshot, as pistol whip’s intiative cost is too high – but doing so means you can’t have pistol whip’s DPS.

If the initiative cost is the same, this is a buff. As long as they don’t do something like nerfing it later I’d see it as a Good Thing.

I’ve been doing a little bit of exploration, decided to archive this on this thread for clan use.

These are the locations of all the permanent rich ore veins I’ve found so far. That is to say, its position never changes from day to day – you can mine each once per day per character. Each time gives you like 10 silver, 15 iron or 10 platinum ish.

Many of these are guarded either by Champions or by veterans. If Champion, ignore the champion and mine it flat (unless your dps is so high that you can kill the champion without taking too long), then run before you die. If veteran, kill it then mine it.

Lastly, these respawn every 23 hours, so try to mine them at around the same time every day to make it a daily.

Snowden

Valslake Silver
Snowhawk Iron

Kessex

Overlord Silver
Cereboth Iron

Lornar’s Pass

Icedevil Iron
Durmand Priory Silver
Demon’s Maw Gold
Dwarves’ Gloaming Iron

Diessa

Silex Castrum Iron
Blasted Moors Silver

Brisban Wildlands

The Shattered Henge Silver
Gallowfields Iron

Dredgehaunt
Hessdallen Iron (East)

Timberline
Thistleweed Grove Platinum

Iron Marches

Grostogg’s Kraal Platinum

So it’s about 50 silver, 105 iron, 10 gold, 20 platinum per char so far with these… I’m still searching for more perm locations. It’s generally 2 perms per map, though Lornar’s Pass is so big that it has 4 perm veins. Multiplying… if you use 4 chars, that’s 200 silver, 420 iron, 40 gold, 80 platinum. At an average cost of 1 silver per, it’s about 7.4 gold per day from this alone (practically, 10 gold because there are other random nodes on the way)… and it’s blazingly fast. You can complete the whole rotation in less than 30 minutes per character.

More than one warrior in a party leads to a lowering of the maximum theoretical damage from synergies, but it works because most players are incapable of reaching it anyway, and a meh-played meta warrior is far better than a meh-played anything else.

Guardians, you only ‘need’ one per party, but sometimes you might want to run a second one if your first guardian fails. Don’t do this by default, it slows dungeons with more competent teams; just be prepared to swap to one should your team wipe. Also if your team is good enough you can actually go without one with no issues as well.

Ultimately you’re going to want one specialised character from every single class. Each one has a particular niche; if you spec them properly you can bring the correct character for any given random party makeup you’re given to maximise run speeds in dungeons, effectiveness in WvW, etc. There’s no class that is flat out better at everything than any other class once your skill is at a level that you’re able to use all of them optimally, though initially the warrior seems to be in that place because of how low its skill floor is.

To OP’s original final question, don’t just spec for full damage, spec for the highest damage you can deal without ever being downed once. If that happens to be full berserker/assassin/rampager, good. If it isn’t, it’s better you lose some dps and live than be a liability on the floor. Half my pain with dungeons is by people thinking they’re good and spending time on the floor because of their pride… and leaving 1-2 of us to deal with the bosses. I’ve never had issues with new players playing safe, on the other hand… only with ‘experienced’ players that get carried so often by others they don’t realise how bad they actually are.

Ele’s far better for support. Mesmer’s better for solo applications.

If you really want Celestial it may actually be better for you to get an Ascended version. Thing is… the recipes for the Exotics nowadays cost almost as much as making the Ascendeds…

However, do note that if critdmg% is nerfed without compensation, celestial will be the hardest hit of all stat combinations.

Basically all drives in laptops are 2.5" nowadays. Any drive of appropriate size is compatible with it; it doesn’t matter or not whether your manufacturer supports an SSD, you can just buy one off an SSD manufacturer, clone your current hard disk onto the SSD and then replace the hard disk with the SSD… then use the hard disk as backup thereafter.

AW wanted to charge me 1000 bucks for an SSD version of the computer so I simply bought the 500GB hard drive version, bought my own SSD for 500 bucks and swapped it myself.

That said, SSDs are still expensive. Normally for desktops I’d recommend changing the processor before even thinking about SSD speed upgrades, but given how nearly all laptop mobos are kind of fixed (and usually even the GPU is soldered into the mobo), the SSD may be your only hardware ‘upgrade’ option.

Alternatively, get a new laptop.

Defragging can give some speed, shutting off applications you don’t use when gaming can give some speed, but neither will increase performance as much as an SSD will. And an SSD will not increase performance as much as upping a processor will.

Mesmers can basically let their clones take all the damage (including the instakill ones) and thus rarely have to dodge.

Guardians can outheal whatever they get hit by, generally. The mistake many people make is in speccing insufficient Healing Power – survivability over time is determined by Healing Power and Toughness, while survivability for single big hits is determined by Toughness, Vitality, evasion, blind, protection, aegis etc. Of course to support this your healing skills must have good healing power multipliers – 0.1 won’t cut it.

Rangers have high evade, good healing and the pet can tank for you. Unlike the mesmer’s version though, the ranger pets can die, while the clones can be regenerated at will.

Warriors with healing signet and high toughness can survive long enough to dps down most attackers, though they don’t have the infinite sustain potential of guardians.

Elementalists have some blinds, some invulns, some blocks, but are somewhat glassy.

Thieves are super glassy and use stealth in place of invulns and such. This is good against players who can’t use single attacks against stealthed targets, but useless against mobs, who don’t care and AoE you all day every day.

The easiest way is to look at the map and look for blurred regions then try to get in there.

Saulius.8430:

not that you can get SSD for laptop anyway

What are you talking about? SSD are especially suited to laptops as the lower power draw translates to battery life, something irrelevant to desktops… they are stable in the midst of movement, critical for mobile applications, they generate less heat… etc.

Plus, laptops cannot generally run 10k rpm drives well due to the power and movement factors. Desktops can.

SSDs are laptop material. Desktops on the other hand normally do so well with RAIDed 10k HDD that SSD’s aren’t worth the price premium on them for those unless you have a lot of spare cash.

Do dailies. 10 per day is 3650 per year. Without doing anything else.

You can’t get repeated AP from Agent of Entropy by the way, only the first time actually adds AP. I know because I salvaged a 6 digit amount of equipment…

Go figure.

My build is condition plus direct based, but due to the condition stack limit you can only have either this or a necro in a dungeon, never both at the same time, as both will hit max stacks in the standard damaging conditions. Direct damage doesn’t suffer from this drawback, but the warrior’s better at it than the ranger at close range and the mesmer’s better at it from a greater distance.

Damage is approximately 6000 dps before might effects, but if a second condition user appears, you’ll zero all of their condition based dps, so it’s not as fantastic as the numbers initially seem to indicate. Also, it takes time to stack the conditions, so you’ll only reach this on champions+; for weaker mobs you’ll barely stack up to 4000 dps before they die.

Ranger would be the best fit. Necro can use it as well, but the low power multiplier on most of their attacks makes them better off with Rabid or Dire most of the time.

PvE solo and WvW…

Mesmer.

All we need is for this to be ground targeted so it doesn’t teleport you into a lava pool in the Volcanic fractal.

Let’s put it this way. If you already run both consumables and utilities, and you have your max gear specced already, it’s worth it in the very long run, especially for fractals.

But if you don’t use food, save money on the Asc, buy a lot of food, and use the food/utility buffs. They will give you WAY more stats than the Asc-Exo gap gives you.

lumpY.9087:

Hayashi.3416:

Purpose of fire field uptime? If might, the s/f ele and staff guardian can do both better, where the earlier has much higher DPS and the second has much higher heal. If burning, the Renewed Justice type builds with the guardian can do that just as well in PvE, and add in blindness, retal, might and vulnerability to boot.

I heard from several sources now that lafa fontain is the biggest dps + Meteor and Fiery Greatsword you can get in dungeons if the target is not moving much.

Hayashi.3416:

Phantasm/Glamour mesmer…..

And are you sure that there is no way to play Ele like this?

It’s not that there’s no way, it’s that the mesmer does it much better. To have utility skills you’ll need the focus on the ele, but its cooldowns are much longer; also, its dps is low so you’ll be forced to use the Lightning Hammer to be viable. For the Lightning Hammer to work well it must be Mighted, which sticks you into a very rigid Might stacking combo involving a lot of skills per second again.

lumpY.9087:

Hayashi.3416:

Purpose of fire field uptime? If might, the s/f ele and staff guardian can do both better, where the earlier has much higher DPS and the second has much higher heal. If burning, the Renewed Justice type builds with the guardian can do that just as well in PvE, and add in blindness, retal, might and vulnerability to boot.

I heard from several sources now that lafa fontain is the biggest dps + Meteor and Fiery Greatsword you can get in dungeons if the target is not moving much.

Hayashi.3416:

Phantasm/Glamour mesmer…..

And are you sure that there is no way to play Ele like this?

It’s not that there’s no way, it’s that the mesmer does it much better. To have utility skills you’ll need the focus on the ele, but its cooldowns are much longer; also, its dps is low so you’ll be forced to use the Lightning Hammer to be viable. For the Lightning Hammer to work well it must be Mighted, which sticks you into a very rigid Might stacking combo involving a lot of skills per second again.

And while the FGS’s stacked skill 4 plus skill 3 are without a doubt the most damaging attacks in the game without exception, the Lava Font isn’t that good. It’s only 0.9 power coefficient per second, not to mention the Staff weapon type cannot maintain perm 25 might alone. The Lightning Hammer, which CAN be used with perm 25 might, has power coefficients of 1.1, 1.1, 1.8 for an average of 1.33 power coefficient per second.

Not to mention the 3rd hit is both a Blast finisher and an AoE blind.

maxinion.8396:

Smarter folks than me have shown the dps of spamming staff fire 2 is comparable to LH (see the manly men build above). 100% fire field uptime is for other eles to blast with LH aa, gets you to 25 might easy.

I was under the impression we’re talking about single builds. If we’re adding in party effects the list becomes VERY complicated due to the number of possible combinations, but the ele that can buff 25 might alone is pretty much on the top by a far margin as it allows for the strongest possible combination (Boon ele + GS warrior + Phantasm mesmer + Condition Ranger + Permaburn/Vuln/Blind/Retal Justice Guardian) to stack 25 vuln, 25 might, 25 bleed, perm burn, perm blind, perm… heck, perm everything. By relying on a second elementalist to blast for you, not only does it not work well if there isn’t a second elementalist… in maximal conditions you cannot have all five max synergy builds together in the same party.

The dps of a staff ele is 0.85 mult per 1.4 seconds, and 0.9 mult per second for 5 seconds every 4.8 seconds with a 0.3 second cast time. In spamming mode your average mult will be (0.85/1.4) +0.9 = 1.5 per second.

A S/F ele, in 4 seconds, hits the following: [Dragon’s Tooth – 2.25 mult, Phoenix, 3.2 mult, Magnetic Wave, 1.0 mult, Arcane Wave, 2.5 mult, Evasive Arcana Earth, 3.25 mult for an average of 2.4 power mult per second] before moving on to Lightning Hammer at 1.33 mult average per second. Since the S/F stays in LH for 25 seconds and the mightstack combo for 5 seconds, the average multiplier overall is 1.5 per second.

They have the same overall damage multiplier, but when you factor in that the S/F version has additional utility, can heal, can boon protect, can condi remove AoE, can 25 might alone… and the lightning hammer summon itself adds an additional 5% crit damage and 180 precision… it’s not much of a fight at all.

The staff build is meant for nuking large mobs AoE in WvW. In PvE where every fight that matters can be stacked in a melee range, it is not possible for it to ever match a boonstacking build for damage by the way the skills are programmed.

maxinion.8396:

Providing 100% fire field uptime and top tier DPS in PvE.

Only the staff ele camping fire and spamming 2 can do that.

Purpose of fire field uptime? If might, the s/f ele and staff guardian can do both better, where the earlier has much higher DPS and the second has much higher heal. If burning, the Renewed Justice type builds with the guardian can do that just as well in PvE, and add in blindness, retal, might and vulnerability to boot.

lumpY.9087:

I’m basically looking for a class that can do 1v1 and 1v2 pretty good without using as much cooldowns as ele. I don’t like attunemnt swapping while executing your combo cause that means i.e. you may not have earth ready when you need that refelct. I want to to damage with 3 abilitys tops and use the rest depending on the situation cause I need a stun/knockback/blind just that moment. You can’t do that with ele cause you use those skills for damage. Something that has a strong autoattack and good CC.

Ele is basicly the only class I know so I might get what I want from any other class, but I’m still downloading the game so I might ask you guys here. What class has this gameplay/combat?

Phantasm/Glamour mesmer. Reflect is [Feedback] on utility, you can proc it any time you want. Null field is an on-demand condition (from you) and boon (from enemies) remover; both are on very low cooldown when traited. Your main role is to use these skills at their proper time. Your main damage skills are phantasm summoning skills, such as Focus 5, Sword 5 or Staff 3, after which you can kind of forget about them once they’re summoned. Staff 2, Sword 4, Sword 2 are your personal protective skills. Personal DPS is highest with autoattack, so you don’t need to care about ability spam.

If you’re looking for a more plan-oriented, action-reduced class type they would probably be the best fit.

Additional characteristics: very high direct dps against small numbers of targets. Not as useful in AoE, but can still do some using staff bouncing autos, staff 5, traited glamours for Confusion. Best gear type – Rampager or Assassin, depending on how much Confusion you intend to proc. If you want CC specifically, Sword/Sword, Staff would probably be the most appropriate set.

If you want MOAR cc than that you’ll probably need to run a hambow warrior, but you lose utility skills and behaviour controlling skills to gain more cleave DPS.

If you’re not using all 4 elements, why are you playing an elementalist?

Name me what role you want to do, I can name you a class better at doing that role than a non-switching elementalist.

Actually, 2/3.

Still fails though.

Axe/dagger works too, but axe is a MUST for conditions.

Shortbow’s skill 2 is AoE too, by the way, so it’s useful for poisoning targets – especially if running the Torch version which has no other poison source.

Condi builds for PvE roaming are different from power builds, mind. You don’t kill things, loot, move on, kill more things, loot etc like power users do, that would be slow as hell.

You condition them to a certain number of stacks and usually <30, <40% hp, then start moving on, harvesting a resource node, etc. They’ll die in a second or two, then AoE loot while running. Also, never fight 1v1, it’s slow. Kite 4-5 mobs then kill them all in the same few AoEs for double or faster kill speed.

Power works, but stay away from LB and use the Sword. You’ll be weaker than power builds from other classes though, but it’s good enough for open world.

You can delete your characters and pick a new home actually. But move all your non-soulbound stuff to account bank first, or it’ll be lost if it’s still on your characters.

https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/na/wvwbronze

And yes, Eredon terrace is the #1 most empty world at present, if the previous League results are any indication.

What the previous posters wrote is generally right. You’ve missed quite a few things that you can’t exactly play at the moment because they’ve been removed. There are a number of improvements to the general experience, but very little new permanent content except for fractals and Tequatl (though Tequatl’s revamp also DELETED the old Tequatl…)

You have nothing to lose in trying to play a week or so guested in TC or something, but frankly, if the original content wasn’t enough to hold your interest, I doubt you would be very much more interested in the game’s current state. There hasn’t been enough permanent additions to the game.

Are you attempting to safespot it? All mobs are eventually invulnerable when attacked from a position that they cannot retaliate against.

If you’re meleeing its face and it’s still invulnerable it might be a new bug. I did it a few months back without issues, but something might have broken since then.

Prysin.8542:

Hayashi.3416:

Splitblade on a condition ranger can do 5 bleeding for ~ 10 seconds, after bonuses, without critting. If all five crit, 10 bleeding. In that time, five noncrits do 5865 bleeding damage, five crits do 11730 bleeding damage to up to five targets. All this in a single one second attack. It’s easily one of the strongest AoE attacks on its disposal. It’s not meant for direct damage, which does a lousy 679 damage on my build, and up to maybe 2000 on the more extreme power builds – which still sucks.

Piercing arrow attacks, and most piercing attacks in general, hit for up to 5 targets each, as far as I can tell. Then again I haven’t really had that much experience with much more than 5 targets in a single line.

Conditions cannot crit. Only direct damage can.
If you spec for direct DPS, you are better off with sword. Axe are only a option if you run celestial + rampager mix.

I never claimed conditions crit, Prysin. The crit effect adds additional bleeding via Sharpened Edges. Every single axe adds one bleed if it crits, and a piercing attack like that can crit 5 times per axe per target, or 25 times in total.

And celestial isn’t enough. Condition rangers must run Carrion with Rampager or face being overwritten by another player with higher condition damage. The higher condition damage value is needed so full Rampager doesn’t work. In addition full Carrion, while not only being impossible to make, also doesn’t work because crit-on-bleeding requires a higher critrate.

Splitblade on a condition ranger can do 5 bleeding for ~ 10 seconds, after bonuses, without critting. If all five crit, 10 bleeding. In that time, five noncrits do 5865 bleeding damage, five crits do 11730 bleeding damage to up to five targets. All this in a single one second attack. It’s easily one of the strongest AoE attacks on its disposal. It’s not meant for direct damage, which does a lousy 679 damage on my build, and up to maybe 2000 on the more extreme power builds – which still sucks.

NPCs, in general, do not condition cleanse.

Piercing arrow attacks, and most piercing attacks in general, hit for up to 5 targets each, as far as I can tell. Then again I haven’t really had that much experience with much more than 5 targets in a single line.

Overall between swapping between axes and the shortbow to use condition skills off cd, I can maintain a very high bleed stack. Every second, the shortbow’s AA stacks two to four bleeds depending on whether it crits. Ultimately I stack for up to 11 bleed from normal attacks, 7 bleed from the crits, 3-6 more from crippling shot in shortbow mode – for a total of potentially 24 bleeds. In axe mode, it’s potentially 16 bleeds from crippling talon and splitblade alone, and about 3 from ricochet. Furious Grip Furies the main two damagers per weapon set – splitblade and poison volley – giving them a 66% crit chance every time they’re used. And my pet uses poisoning and bleeding attacks as well., which are under the effects of Might from every crit I make.

Zerg zerk LB rangers have the same utility as zerg zerk rifle engis. LB zerk rangers, however, are completely useless in a roaming context as >90% hp and >900 range are impossible to maintain in that context.

Thieves are almost useless in dungeons as their AoE is basically no damage, they’re glass as hell, mobs AoE a lot which hits them in stealth. Single target damage doesn’t save it from oblivion in a dungeon, and everything worth blinding in a dungeon also happens to be Defiant. Aside from utility proccing on Shadow Refuge they do nothing that another role (usually the warrior, because of how similar the two are) cannot do better.

Thieves are also useless in zergs.

They are overpowered to a ridiculous extent in WvW roaming, and to a lesser extent in sPvP. The main problem in all of this is how badly the thieves suck without stealth, and how overpowered stealth is – it shoehorns the class into an extremely narrow role, where it is broken in that role giving the impression they’re broken everywhere. Play one without stealth, you’ll see what I mean.

On an overall standpoint if players were of equal skill thieves should be kicked from dungeon parties before rangers. The main problem here is that most rangers are so bad that the weakness of the class is no longer the deciding factor for the kick. And of course that most of the kickers’ understanding of the game is so bad that it wouldn’t matter anyway.

Max dps isn’t even always the berserker gear set. The max dps build for elementalists is Celestial. The max dps build for thieves, warriors and probably engineers is berserker. The max dps build for rangers is rampager and carrion. The max dps build for necros is dire. The max dps build for mesmers is assassin.

Damage multipliers, number of conditions you can proc and number of stacks per condition (particularly bleed), traits that increase damage under certain conditions – these change the max damage roles of every single class drastically. The moment you see ‘berserkers only’ you can ignore that dungeon party because its members basically have no idea how the calculations even work. It is of no use to stack 3400 power if your multiplier is 0.6. And it is of no use to stack 1800 condition damage if you can only stack 3 conditions, of which your bleed can’t go beyond a 5th stack.

I see guardians with high stacked boon duration running symbol builds oblivious that their boon durations are being rounded down because symbols generally proc 1-2 seconds per activation. I see people running high condition duration builds on already-perm burn builds. I see people putting 800-1000 condition damage to have it hopelessly overwritten to zero damage by people with over 1500. I see people trying to create critical damage% builds using celestial without using any of the other celestial stats at all… and being hopelessly underpowered relative to berserker. I see assassin users with 100% critrate, wasting it in parties where fury can be provided without much difficulty. I see berserker warriors taking elementalists’ lightning hammers because they have no idea how the elementalist builds even function. I see people using the Fiery Greatsword without turning off Autotarget. And I see people trying on this forum to use a very low multiplier weapon whose range requirement puts them out of the might buffer’s effective range.

It’s depressing to theorycrafters to see people in the meta stumbling all over the place, then blaming other dungeon members for the uselessness of their builds, and seeing people insist on using very good classes in their weakest possible ways just because most people from other classes play in that particular way.

Fext.3614:

Hayashi.3416:

It’s doable, but…

I believe it is doable even with the 5 lb builds BUT it would take ages and tons of effort. And concerning tank builds, I believe you can’t really tank in this game, since you have no aggro building skills. Correct me if Im wrong.
Again, can you please illustrate on some build links. This is not flaming, Im really interested and want to learn new things. Lets talk more specific.

You know, the build is in my signature…

And the ‘List your build’ threads has the damage breakdown.

Fext.3614:

I even tried to do an experimental ranger only run in CoE. We hopelessly wiped (and gave up) on first subject Alpha in P3 we tried as first, and the trash at the beginning took ages to do. Note that I did a gear check and the ppl were wearing exotics with ascended, save for one fresh 80 who was partly in rares, and all knew the dungeon from runs on wars and guards.
But a war only run is not considered a problem…

It’s doable, but you need one full support ranger as the tank, 3 max direct dps users who know how to dodge Alpha’s AoEs while using swords and one full conditioner. If you have 5 longbow max rangers the party will wipe without exception.

Rangers are the best class in the game when using both condition and direct damage together. They are currently inferior to necros if using only conditions and inferior to almost all other classes if using only direct damage. They also have the second highest max range dps behind grenadier engis.

Survivability wise the support ranger is one of the hardest to kill behind only the full bunker engineer. Healing wise the support ranger is one of the best behind only the symbol Guardian. Tanking wise the support ranger is second only to the Guardian.

Rangers fail at applying cc (don’t worry, elementalists are even worse at this).

Attempting to use a class in an area where it is not suited will result in it being inferior to a similar build for another class which is better suited in that area. If you want to do something the Ranger is bad at, use another class if you want to be good at it, or use the Ranger and accept that it will be suboptimal. If a class can be the best at every role when traited/skilled properly, then it will be overpowered. If all classes can be equally good when traited/skilled properly that would be the optimal result, but given how different the class mechanics are, this is impossible to actually achieve.

As far as my calcs are concerned, rangers are only optimal in 3 areas:

1. PvE – Primary conditioner with heavy direct damage as well. Outdamages any other condition class in the game, but there can be only one of these per party. If you see another full conditioner, one must leave.
2. WvW – Max range max direct damage builds. Stick your bearbows here for zerg fire support. Your role is to destroy all cannons, burning oil, arrow carts, lousy defenders, and to down as many low-hp people as possible when the zerg is running. You will be glass. Don’t even attempt to roam in this, you will die.
3. High level fractals/WvW – Max survivability/healing support build. Your role is to keep everyone else, the rams, etc alive. Your damage will suck, you’re not there for damage.

The spirit ranger build and conditioner PvE build are both viable in PvP. The other two are not.

Durzlla.6295:

@OP: the build is meta for a reason, if you haven’t noticed, not a single kittening meta build is ever difficult to play

Just popped by to say that the very definition of a meta build is one which does a lot with players of very limited skill. None of the strongest builds in existence are easy to use, and thus none of them appear in the meta. If you meet one of them while using a meta build, you will definitely die because those are not only stronger, but the player behind them will also be guaranteed to be of a very high skill level. Meta players don’t care about this, because these builds and players are so rare they’ll almost never meet them, so they’ll still win the ‘majority’ of fights against non-meta unoptimised builds.

Exception to this is permastealth thieves. If running one you’ll still definitely lose, but you won’t necessarily die, because that’s what permastealth does.

Wrong weapon sets or wrong gear stats. If using condis you must use the shortbow and the axe, offhand is up to you but preferably either the torch or dagger. If you’re not going full condi don’t touch condi at all. Conditions have a stack limit – if someone has even 1 more condition damage than you on Burning or Poison, your condition damage is ZEROED. It’s one of those things about the game that I don’t like… an innate nerf to condi builds in general.

As a ballpark figure, you should be around 1500 condition damage, preferably higher, when you’re using a condi build.

If keeping the weapons, stack power instead of precision/condi. Critbleed trait is still useful, add on Spotter to it for party buff.

As it is your direct damage is poor (critdmg and crit isn’t enough – some targets are uncrittable, and a high power low crit always outdamages a low power high crit because a minor gear stat generally gives double the amount of damage% in power (9.16 power = 1% damage) than it gives in +%crit) and your condition damage will very likely be overwritten by another user’s for not being high enough. In solo you’d kill a bit slower, but it’s probably going to last you long enough to complete most champs and whatnot, though you have insufficient damage and will thus fail to kill all world bosses solo before their timer ticks down. In groups you’d be a liability as you don’t have the healing or tanking abilities of support rangers, your conditions will be overwritten by full condition necros and rangers, and your direct damage will be lower than even the Guardian tank’s.

I run SB, Axe/Dagger, and it will outdamage you with no difference in survivability.

Mobs do not hit in their back arc, even at melee range. Stay there.

If you can’t stay in a mob’s back arc, you’re using the wrong pet.

If you’re in a dungeon and you’re still using a bear for anything other than F2 when there’s already a dedicated tank in the party, you’re using the wrong pet.

If you don’t live long enough, you’re not running a build you can use.
If you don’t do enough damage, you’re not running the ranger’s specs properly.

Every class in the game can stay in melee range and survive. Even the elementalist.

It’s Razer, not razor. The second gives you a closer shave.

I’m using the Mamba with a claw grip plus the Orbweaver Stealth.

Dungeons
Fractals
World Completion
World vs World
Relevel on another class
World bosses
Try to solo every group event you pass by for fun
All the jumping puzzles, including Griffonrook Run w/ bomb

Have fun.