Guild Wars 2

Did someone just call the elementalist OP?

Berserker… Objectively the best… wut?

Carrion, Soldier, Valkyrie, Rampager, Celestial, Dire all have places in PvE builds. Try running a Berserker build on a condi necro and I’ll laugh at you.

Something being the best suited to the most common builds doesn’t mean that it is the best for everything.

Most people don’t even know how much Precision is needed to get 1% crit chance, and by extension of that how bad Precision is as a damage dealing stat relative to Power or Condition Damage. Or that precision still has a place when used with oncrit traits, sigils etc.

Let’s just put it this way, OP. Decide on your weapons first, traits second based on weapon style, utilities third based on traits, then gear to complement what the build needs. Some builds need only 3-4 stats. Some require all. Celestial is not a dumping ground for people who can’t make up their mind what they want to do, or for people who don’t know what stat to boost. It’s meant for the few builds that use either every, or all but one stat – in all other cases you’ll want to mix 3-stat equipments instead.

Based on GS/Sword+focus by the way, your condition damage is going to be low enough that your optimal gear sets will end up being based on Berserker, Soldier (if you are main damager), Knight (if phantasms are main damager) and Valkyrie gear, and Celestial will not be of use to your chosen weapon combination. That does not mean it will not be of any use at all.

There are no fail stats/skills/weapons, there are a few fail traits, and there are many fail builds.

… why not both?

Staff = AoE range.

GS = Utility; damage is limited as it’s difficult to keep a mob at max range, and if you do, your offhand sets become kind of useless.

Single target damage at distance is maximised with Scepter/Pistol.

WvW is a different story, where max range attacks are common, then the GS becomes a bit more useful. But in PvE, anti-mob group attack damage is maximised by Staff/Sword + X where X is anything except Torch, and single attack damage is maximised by Sword/Sword + Scepter/Pistol.

Since most PvE encounters in dungeons are in groups, you’ll find Staff/Sword+X to be stronger more of the time, while the Sword/Sword | Scepter/Pistol will be stronger against bosses specifically.

Why not both?

Scepter/Pistol, Sword/Sword works extremely well, but is in the realm of builds-people-don’t-even-think-to-try.

I’d say anything requires full Traveler really.

Mesmers are so kitteningly slow without it.

Yes, but not for 100G alone.

Should really have a requirement to do WvW to have it. 100G + a vision crystal + 1000 world badges would be good, with a minimum account world rank of 100. >.>

Too many people using a tag as a cosmetic plus instead of what it’s meant to be used for.

Hell, half the commanders out there don’t even know how to use /supplyinfo and /squadinfo.

I had the impression Kiel’s activity would be in the activity rotation, but it isn’t, even though she won the election.

What gives?

Now the only thing we need is an NPC that will allow us to reallocate World Skill Points to different traits for a price, and we’re good to go.

Someone needs to learn what ‘play to win’ means before using terms he does not understand. Not telling you who.

I’d be happy enough if…

1. Self’s combo field is always highest priority on overlap.
2. Party members’ fields are second highest priority on overlap.
3. Everyone else is of third priority.

Then within these three broad classes, the first field to activate will have priority over the later ones, etc.

What Grimm said.

And the Quiver of a Thousand Arrows method definitely works. Just used it a week ago for my Ele’s ascended celestial wind catcher.

Since you’re moving from the usual Trinity…

If you want a healer/supportive role, you can try a staff support elementalist, Guardian, Ranger or Necro.
If you want single target high melee DPS, either Warrior or Thief.
Single target high ranged DPS, mesmer.
AoE melee DPS, Warrior or Guard.
Ranged AoE DPS, Scepter/Focus Elementalist.
Tank, Warrior or Guard
Debuffer, Necro or Thief.
Troll, Mesmer.
Everything, Engineer or Elementalist.

The last two options are the absolute hardest to master, where the Engineer/Elementalist is a skill/reaction time/memory type difficulty, and the troll-type Mesmer is an understanding-the-enemy type difficulty. The easiest is the DPS Warrior.

And for certain classes, race is critically important – especially engineers, because every skill for them is actually two skills. For instance, the Sylvari Engineer gets an additional Invulnerability type skill from the toolbelt that is inaccessible to other races.

@ OP

I recently swapped to Sword/Sword | Scepter/Pistol for WvW on my mesmer, it’s surprisingly powerful against players. Sword 3 immobs runners, Sword 2 is damage + invuln, Sword 4 blocks one attack (including ranged ones). Scepter 2 does the same shielding thing , Scepter 3 Confuses targets (so you can make them hit themselves while you hit them using blocks), Pistol 5, Sword 4-4 and F3 interrupt.

Running this on an interrupt-traited build with secondary traits on Manipulations, so you can dump necros’ condis back on them, steal warriors’ might while returning Weakness back to them, catch runners with Blink and gain 4 seconds invulnerability against melee (blocks) + projectile reflection using Mimic. Mimic’s insane number of block triggers, together with the blocks from Scepter 2 and Sword 4 also benefits from the Retal-on-block trait, giving nearly permanent Retaliation uptime.

Sword 4, Sword 2, F4 and Scepter 2 are your go-to skills when a permastealth thief is about to backstab you, it nullifies their most important source of damage; Scepter 2 and Sword 4 have the additional advantage of instantly counterattacking, and generating a clone for you to F3 them with.

Mesmer dual wielded swords is a very viable build, if a little hard to use.

… not as good as the Staff | Sword/Focus for soloing camps though, because it lacks AoE capabilities.

Domination 20 II V
Duelling 20 I III
Chaos 30 III VIII XII

Full Celestial/Soldier depending on your preference
6x Runes of the Traveler because mesmers don’t have +25% skills, and because Runes of Perplexity are not only broken, they’re also getting fixed soon.

Effective range = 900 units with both sets, though closing in will increase the damage of the Swords set, as you can still attack from range with Swords 3, 4 and 5.

… if you want to use it.

Tanith.5264:

My theory does not involve Scarlet on any level.

Somewhere, nestled in ArenaNet’s headquarters, is a special counter that ticks over every time someone “touches it”.

And sitting next to the timer watching it count steadily upwards, is a group of devs. Laughing themselves sick.

’How many times is this guy going to touch the pole?

Tell you what guys, let’s kill him the next time he touches it.

…

……

YEAHHHH’

Right click their names in the chat screen and click report.

You must think monsters are human players who spam every non auto attack skill on their bar. AI does not use skills as appropriate when off cooldown. They use skills when certain predefined criteria are reached, and when those criteria do not apply, they use skills in a predefined skill rotation.

Have you actually attempted to kill a world boss alone, or looked at a fractal boss’s behaviour properly? Certain skills are one-hit kill affairs, and only trigger in certain rotations – if you interrupt them, it takes the mob another 40-50 seconds to reach the same point in the skill rotation again, whereby you could interrupt them again.

Take for instance the Whirlwind attack of the Risen Priest of Melandru. It AoE downs all players without Invuln who did not dodge in time and it has far more than enough hits to pierce Aegis and Protection easily. It activates as the 7th skill in a 40 second rotation involving cleave attacks with his weapon, a knockback single attack leap skill with his weapon, an Earthquake AoE with a 300 unit radius which launches and damages, tossing 5x black projectiles which bleeds immobilises all targets it touches, before following up with 5x earth spike attacks from the ground which can be dodged, and finally the whirlwind AoE knockback. Interrupting the Whirlwind ensures he cannot use it until the entire rotation is repeated. Formerly, his morphing of players into drakes at the 75%, 50%, 25% marks was also Interruptible, until Anet decided to change that 5 second animation into an instant cast. Knowing and using that Interruption is why I could solo Melandru to death, where full parties fail. (Past tense, because the instant cast nature now makes that mechanic compulsory.)

Or the Megadestroyer, whose Summoning attacks at phases 75% and 50% can be entirely cancelled out by an Interrupt chain at the correct timing, so that he never disappears beneath the lava.

At higher level fractals, players, especially Elementalists, always Interrupt the Jellyfish boss’s stunning Whirl attack, preventing it from doing any damage. This is made possible by the fact that Float and Sink are exempt from the Defiant mechanic.

In guild missions, the bounty that swallows players (Big Mayana) can be Interrupted to keep all players in a fight.

Against the Legendary Risen Priestess of Dwayna, the Priestess’ revives on the Veteran Acolytes can be Interrupted. If left to revive, they will summon Veteran risen Knights and Risen Plague Carriers, whose explosions are the main cause of downs at the temples.

The Champion Krait Witch at present is impossible to solo due to its summoning of 4 veterans and approximately 9 normal mobs, most of which use ranged attacks. If Defiant wasn’t there and one could Interrupt at will, none of its summons will ever get to proc, making it easy to solo.

The Orrian Champion Risen Drake Broodmother must be fought underwater so its eggs don’t hatch, or the 30 summons it creates will lead to instadowns. If it could be reliably Interrupted, the Charge attack that creates the eggs can be nullified.

There’s a lot more examples that anyone who actually bothered to fight will know about. The current version of the Defiant mechanic, in placing too many stacks of Defiant there, makes it harder to Interrupt mobs when they should be Interrupted. Knockdown is still ok, what gets on our nerves is people who waste a zero-defiant stack status on a useless 1 second stun without even Interrupting anything important.

In Celestial, my mesmer has 2500 defense and an attack of 2700.

Assuming weapon power of 1100, if I were to Flame Blast myself, that would do 1188, which is within the 1000-2000 range.

Higher values will be obtained if using Power-boosting gear specifically, against targets with less defense than me. Bearing in mind the average PvE mob has kitten defense but high HP, 2000 does not sound like an unachievable observation by a Berserker set user with an Ascended weapon on a PvE target, or a glass Elementalist.

Harper.4173:

Except you need support roles to do any sort of serious high-end content ( see fractals) and you can’t dps your way to the top of the new LS tower – some examples.

Another role could easily pop up – control – if Anet would kindly fix the horrid idea that is Defiant on bosses.
Currently you have DPS and Support. No control – because you can’t do it.
In sPVP you have a lot more " meaningful " combat roles because there’s no such thing as defiant.

Well, you can in a zerg, but you can do anything and its kitten in a zerg nowadays. As for soloing the LS tower… that’s only possible with at least Celestial level survivability, though Knight survivability makes it even easier.

Defiant has a place in that no boss will be a challenge if people can stunlock it nonstop until it never gets to attack. However, I do agree the current defiance mechanic is nonsensical, and should be replaced by a global cooldown (say, 10 seconds) rather than stacks that must be removed one skill activation at a time, especially when people spam skill nonstop and don’t seem to understand the importance of using control skills to Interrupt.

Because everyone and their kittens play most other classes, but so few can handle the ele that it’s used in single form? =P

You should try getting 99 in every skill in RuneScape. Then come back and say this takes forever.

This would make it even harder for outnumbered worlds to do any good on borderlands.

Even a decrease in the WvW playerbase only led to a WvW league, instead of account-bound WXP.

Haven’t done merc camps because LS, SMC because CD, and repairs because wth is this.

It’s random. The best I’ve had was 2 charged crystals and 5 normal crystals. The worst, which is almost every day, is one normal crystal.

Then again, I use a green Master Mining Pick from Personal Story rewards specifically for quartz mining. Not sure if it has an effect or not.

Only use celestial if your build is designed for celestial. Using celestial because you can’t decide what you want to use leads to substandard performance.

As a general guide, if your build is mainstream, it’s not designed for celestial.

Pyroatheist.9031:

colesy.8490:

I doubt it. When I did COE story with some pug full of bads there are a bunch of mobs there that I think stack toughness the more damage you deal but I just zerked it all down. Not sure what the point of this thread either, who asks for a second best build?

I wouldn’t necessarily count them out yet. Anet definitely knows about the whole stacking deal, and I guarantee that they don’t like it too much. With this instability thing, they could easily introduce some pretty nasty mechanics for stacking.

Imagine if you did aoe damage to allies, or applied a debuff, or something like that. They could even do something like cleaving attacks do damage to yourself for every additional enemy hit.

There’s a lot of pretty creatively nasty things I can think of that would instantly kill stacking.

Edit: If you did aoe damage to allies equal to outgoing damage you dealt. THAT would be nasty.

Actually they’ve already instituted an antistacking mechanic long ago for Sorrow’s Embrace – General Molradovich.

Playing the best you can is something they’d encourage, rather than simply spamming a single mechanic all the time, every time, everywhere. A skilled player can adapt. The bads will just die and complain about how GW2 is broken.

Elemental Attunement provides regen and protection. Renewing stamina only increases dodge frequency – and if you dodge only the attacks that matter, that increase doesn’t matter as much as it seems relative to protection and regen. In addition, EA benefits other players, and synergises with boon duration buffs. RS synergises with attack on dodge traits in the Grandmaster tier.

Of course if one dodges everything, RS would be more important, but that isn’t exactly the best use of the dodge mechanic. Thereafter which is more important depends on what forms of synergy the build contains.

Power scales the best among the damage stats. While someone who can survive without healing in Berserker gear would do the most damage, Soldier/Valkyrie gear offer almost the same level of damage with a much higher survivability, leading to less time taken for heals, and higher overall damage because of that.

That depends on your build and your playstyle. No shortcut to getting an ideal build.

Khisanth.2948:

If you are making celestial weapons you might as well go with the ascended ones. No point in wasting charged crystals.

This.

Also, no point in buying an recipe for something outclassed in every way by the Ascended celstial tier.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascended_weapon

They won’t show up in the Black Lion Trading Company interface as all Ascended weapons are untradeable. The link goes through how to make one.

I don’t think so. Get 50 more. Champions drop quite a few [Scrolls of Knowledge] that give a skill point each in addition to the levels you already get from events though.

There’s no limit to number of skill points you can get, and after lvl 80, it takes the exact same amount of time to get each successive skill point.

Best rewards yeah, but 1 hr 15 minutes is enough for completing any map, really. I thought it was 1 hr, then I timed the runs.

Perma swiftness or at least permanent +25% speed is important, as well as not attacking everything in sight. for Champions, try to use stealth or a pet/summon or Stability or Aegis to occupy them while activating the skill point/make your activation undisruptable. Some classes have it harder than others at doing this, though it’s possible for all (and easiest on the Thief).

1. B2P.
2. Cosmetic customisation options. Though we can use more options below lvl 80, at the moment you only really get to change looks at 80.
3. Build diversity, removal of traditional resources in preference to original ones per class.
4. Cooperative, not competitive PvE gameplay.
5. Art – animations, environment etc. The biggest reward for map exploration to me is the scenery and Vistas.

zenleto.6179:

The collection pre for Shatterer is less of an issue. The more people there doing it then the longer it takes to do since the event will scale up the number of pieces to be collected. Unless that has changed. I don’t do world events anymore so I don’t even know when timers were added.

This is correct. Moving to ‘help’ resource collection will actually make the event take longer; there’s a limit to how many siege weapons may drop, but the event scales up anyway.

The perceived need of wearing max dps gear to compete only really applies to people who subscribe to the meta, and who don’t fully understand game mechanics.

I’ve never gotten complaints from the dead berserker thieves/warriors about my Celestial elementalist in the Crucible of Eternity when I solo down the bosses after they die 3 times, using up my invulns in the process of reviving them. Only the occasional ‘how the hell did we all get 25 might’.

A former guild mate of mine is doing rather well with his own original Toughness/Healing power build on his Ranger, in dungeons, WvW and fractals, without him people can and will wipe.

And the best player I’ve ever met was a virtually unkillable Guardian in the Aetherblade Retreat; when we did the dungeon in the early days of its release, that guy tanked Mai Trin and her lackey long enough alone to revive the entire dead party.

There is no need to subscribe to a meta just because many people do it. The strongest builds in the game are builds that maximise the characteristics of each class, and very few of them are well known, other than the permastealth burst thief. The celestial buffer/support/AoE elementalist, max clone tank/single target attacker mesmer, the healing power specced recovery ranger, the tank/conditioner/healer necro… all of these are extremely strong in their regard, and most players will never have met even one of them.

There’s more diversity than just ‘tank’, ‘healer’ and ‘dps’, and certainly a lot more diversity than ‘dps’ alone. Meta players just ignore their existence to specialise repeatedly farming the same events the meta is specialised for. Sometimes there’s even better ways to complete the same meta, but it requires too much effort to understand compared to ‘wear zerk carry GS spam 2’, so they’re left by the wayside in preference to those builds that can do relatively well and are very easy to execute.

Everything profitable in terms of reward per hour for PvE can be done in Berserker for players able to keep themselves alive on builds that rely on direct damage. Qualifiers are important.

The people I’ve met who wear Berserker and use condition damage just because the meta says it’s ‘the best’ without bothering to check what they’re doing… and the far greater number of geniuses who spend more time on the ground than fighting…

Also, there’s some dungeon paths for which full berserker/rampager parties will die… they’re just not an issue in the meta because people don’t do them, because berserkers/rampagers can’t do them… and frankly their rewards aren’t anything to write home about anyway.

Anti zergball/stacking game mechanics and better rewards for less commonly done dungeons (tokens as well – not just gold) would demolish the PvE meta.

Well, maybe not. There’s Tequatl. Look how that turned out – an event you can’t do by zerk zergballing alone? An event nobody does! \(^v^)/

Of course everything in PvE being done can be done by zerk zergs if everything that cannot be done by them is simply not being done. Does this surprise anyone?

Balthazar, where healing is important or else the NPCs die? Nobody does it! \(^v^)/

Dwayna/Monkey Lyssa, where survivability is important? Nobody cares because you can just zergresurrect the downed! \(^v^)/

Grenth, where surviving is essential, skill in evading portal circles and shades is needed, understanding the event in that shade killing and boss killing both have roles, where stacking is discouraged by shades and portal placement, and possibly where healing Jonez is important…. People rarely ever do it! \(^v^)/

Mind, I speak from a Crystal Desert perspective. Maybe Blackgate is different. Maybe the super low population servers are different. I highly doubt it, but maybe they are. But as far as I know, compensating for a weakness by avoiding situations where the weakness arises does not justify saying the weakness doesn’t exist.

Actually, eight more characters, 50 bucks more for another account, and at least 2000 gold more in equipment, not to mention the Living Story/Daily AP/Laurels that cannot be reacquired, the karma, etc etc. And 400 gold for the permanent black lion merchant. Maybe it costs even more now. >.>

How hard can it be to guest?

I’m that guy who goes to Tamini upon completion of monastery pre pre pre event, and destroys the portals alone within 30 seconds of them spawning… then I ignore the other two portal locations, and WP to the swamp to catch the main event by destroying the third of 3 portals. Why teams of 2-3 players can take 4 times as long as me to clear essentially the same objective is puzzling, but it only barely works.

Fixes:

1. Give an additional 30 second delay before the heart of the swamp portals spawn after the third of the peripheral portals spawn.
2. Give 1x dragonite ore per event completed. You destroy all three surrounding portals, get 3x dragonite ore.
3. Give 4 times the amount of silver per event. Why this absurd amount? BECAUSE WAYPOINT COSTS. Also, double the karma reward while you’re at it, so it isn’t as pathetic – at the moment, you get way more karma from WvW/dungeons/champ farming.

It’s always an issue on the other events where difficulty, rather than laziness, is the factor. Especially cases of ‘artificial difficulty’. Sure, Dwayna’s priestess can be 3-manned, we’ve done it many times before because nobody else came along, but it’s a little unnerving when a fight that is at least twice as difficult as the statue fight – a simple dodge-when-she-casts-light-up mechanic, has rewards so severely insignificant to it. Perhaps a second boss chest for the Priestess will help. Ditto for Melandru. 5 manning melandru gives us next to nothing, then the horde comes in to kill spiders and gets guaranteed rares. That’s kind of broken.

While they’re at it, removing the Melandru Priest’s stupid metamorphosis skill would help greatly. Trying to coordinate 4 pugs who are barely willing to do it to kill the acos properly is an abject nightmare. Prior to the patches, when Melandru was at least reliably Interruptible, he was soloable – so at least I know that if I spend half an hour killing him, I can summon the zerghorde not long after. Now, I don’t even have that guarantee… when the pugs end up being unable to coordinate. As a result, the temples are just Not Done.

Balthazar is the worst offender. People are so bad at guarding the rear that it fails most of the time even in the rare occasions a guild decides to do it for the Obsidian Shard merchant. Allowing the NPCs to be ressed after the mobs are cleared and the event to be continued would increase Balthazar participation sharply.

Other possible ways to incentivise events, other than just giving chests for boss type pres and 1x dragonite ore (and improved rewards for map-crossing pres) for nonboss pres, may include classing pre-events separately for achievements, particularly daily achievements. People will do stuff for achievements’ sake while the economy is largely unaffected.

It’s entirely possible to switch characters to different world servers. If they are operating on separate physical infrastructure, it just entails a transfer of the relevant data to the destination server, which can be completed within seconds, a minute at the most.

If data transfer incurs a cost, a gem unlock cost would defray that.

I’d hate to beat a dead horse, but will we ever be able to guest to Europe based servers from North America, and guest from North America based servers to Europe?

If I had to, I would spend gems for the ability to unlock this.

We have friends over in different world servers whom we’d like to do dungeons and whatnot with, but at present the North America/Europe divide is making this impossible.

‘Critswitch’ Elementalist

WARNING: VERY HIGH SKILL FLOOR

Fire 0
Air 10 VI
Earth 15 VI
Water 15 V
Arcane 30 V VI XI

Weapons: Scepter/Focus, Trident.
Utilities: Ether Renewal, Arcane Wave, Arcane Shield, Lightning Hammer, Glyph of Elementals.
Swap Lightning Hammer for Frost Bow as needed
Sigils: Bloodlust, Battle
Runes: 2 Water 2 Monk 2 Traveler (45% Boon Duration)
Food: Chocolate Omnomberry Cream

Dungeons/Fractals 10/10
World Bosses 8/10
Story/World Exploration 10/10
PvP 6/10
WvW 7/10
Underwater 7/10

Neglected Celestial stat: None.

===

‘Shattered Mirror’ Mesmer

Domination 0
Duelling 20 IV X
Chaos 20 V X
Inspiration 20 II VIII
Illusions 10 V

Weapons: Staff|Sword/Focus, Trident|Spear
Utilities: Ether Feast, Feedback, Null Field, Blink, Time Warp.
Swap Feedback for Portal, Null Field for Veil, Time Warp for Mass Invisibility as needed
Sigils: Corruption, Accuracy, Strength
Runes: Full Traveler (+25% movement speed)
Food: Omnomberry Ghost

Dungeons/Fractals 9/10
World Bosses 10/10
Story/World Exploration 8/10
PvP 8/10
WvW 9/10
Underwater 10/10

Neglected Celestial stat: Doesn’t use Healing Power for anything other than self-healing.

In descending order of ease

Another Ele, most are really bad
Ranger
Engineer
Warrior
Guardian
Necro
Mesmer
Thief

Anything that can repeatedly apply stealth is a problem. At ~400 ping, by the time the server sees my skill activation of even a nearly instant cast skill, the target has already disappeared back behind stealth, and my skill hits ‘nothing at all’.

Complaints and plans aside, what ANet COULD do to not wreck the whole building is:

Realise that without usage of a Aura Protection trait chain, the only ways for an elementalist to survive are to either A: Outheal damage, B: Dodge and C: Elemental Attunement-Protect from Earth. Movement of survivability-critical heal traits in both water AND arcane is basically asking for elementalists to go and die, by raising the trait cost of option A, and forcing elementalists to choose between B and C.

Elemental Attunement and Renewing Stamina cannot BOTH be moved to Master tier.

Since Renewing Stamina is less critical to the Arcane type of specialisation, it should remain at Adept. Elemental Attunement, benefiting more from Arcane’s lower attunement switch, can go to Master. If you really must move an Arcane trait to Master, move either Arcane Mastery or Final Shielding; though Final Shielding itself needs a change from 25% to 50% because of how little of both Health and Toughness Elementalists have as the lowest HP light armor class in existence.

Also, reduction of elementalist attunement bonuses to 1% from 2% and keeping the lowest attunement time as 10 seconds only is unacceptable; if you want to decrease the ‘reliance’ on Arcane you shouldn’t simultaneously make Arcane nearly pointless to spec in. If attunement is something you must really change, then raise boon duration % from 1% per point to 2% per point so builds that swap often with Elemental Attunement can actually get better use out of it. That would be a ‘balance’ change, rather than a nerf – because nerfing an already possibly underpowered class is anything but balanced.

===

Nikkinella.8254

All we need:
1. Higher base hp. As squishy as we are, we will NEVER get out of water with such low hp because we need the vitality. Swap Mesmer and Ele base hp, problem solved.

2. Better mobility. Other classes have so many mobility skills on such low cooldowns its ridiculous. Revert ride the lightning to its original state. We also need mobility options on focus but i’ll get to that soon.

3. our extreme dependence on arcane for reduction in attunement swap. This is remedied easily by removing attunement recharge as something that is boosted by arcane and making our base attunement swap 9 seconds.

Theres only 1 problem after that. What do you replace the attunement reduction with? Aura duration. This is the first step in a series of changes they have to make that will give us endless build possibility finally moving us away from arcane. If you want an aura build you can still spec into it, but its no longer necessary. Remove all auras from all weapons and replace them with mobility skills. This also solves the problem of our kitten poor mobility. Make elemental attunement trait inherent to the class. I don’t know why it was never like this to begin with. It needs to be done, it shouldn’t be a trait. Replace elemental attunement with a trait that acts sort of like it, except with auras. “Gain an aura based on your attunement on attunement swap.” All weapons now have access to auras, and you can extend the duration if you feel like speccing into arcane.

Some people will still spec into arcane just for the water dodge for healing and condition cure. You can fix this easily by combining the cleansing wave with stop, drop and roll. Which is a totally lackluster trait that no one ever uses. Change it to “when you dodge remove 3 conditions and heal for a small amount” It would have the same healing as cleansing wave and remove 3 conditions. Perfect for a master trait in water.

There are plenty of other things that need to be changed, but I don’t feel like getting into it now as thinking about everything that’s wrong with this class gives me a headache. And other people have stated it already anyway, so there’s no need for me to repeat.

Alternatively, this idea is good in general – much better than the proposed ones. Start the basic aura at 3 seconds, then add 0.1 seconds of aura per point in Arcane… such that at 30, the auras last for 6 seconds. Remove all aura skills from weapon skills, replace them with mobility skills. For instance, Fire’s Focus 5 can be a trait that teleports the user to a target within 900 units and inflicts AoE burn with a 300 unit radius for 5 seconds, cooldown 20 seconds.

Lastly, add an ‘Arcane Aura’ utility skill that will activate an aura based on our current attunement for 5 seconds base (which will be boosted up to 8 seconds by Arcane traiting), which has a cooldown of 20 seconds.

And add Launch to Arcane Blast, because it just sucks right now. If it could be a Control skill we might see Arcane Mastery with Blast/Aura/Shield starting to appear.

This patch may force me to change my build to an alternate one.

Former ‘critswitch’:

F 0
A 10 VI
E 15 VI
W 15 V
A 30 V VI XI

Weapon set: Scepter/Focus
Utilities: Ether Renewal, Arcane Wave, Arcane Shield, Lightning Hammer, Glyph of Elementals.
Strengths: Permanent 25x might stack to party, semi-perm prot, swiftness, regen.
Weaknesses: Immob/CC/instantkill skills used more than 4 times within 10 seconds. Super high skill floor.

A similar build after nerf will be:

F 0
A 10 VI
E 10 VI
W 20 V VI
A 30 V VII XI

Nerfs:

1. Permavigor (+100% endurance) nerfed to +50% endurance, as V must be kept – +90% buff duration on those makes Regen, Swift, Prot and Might basically permanently active on the party. Losing V would make the boonstacking ability of the build be limited to only Might, which is a severe nerf and destroys the point of the build entirely. Survivability reduced, heals from water dodges reduced, damage from flame dodges reduced, chances to use earth dodge’s blast finisher reduced.

2. Lose the ability to use Earth attunement: Earthen blast, reduction in attunement AoE dmg and cripple capabilities.

Benefits:

1. +10% dmg if hp above 90%. How I can keep my HP above 90%, I have no idea. Probably need to use more invuln skills than I really should.

It’s annoying how the arcane change is a hard nerf to something that throws 30 in Arcane. If the attunement speed was to be reduced even 1 second to 9 seconds minimum, I wouldn’t complain about it being so bad as it currently is.

Auramentalist Build:

F 20 VI IX
A 10 I
E 30 II V XII
W 10 II
A 0

Weapon set: Scepter/Focus
Utilities: Signet of Restoration, Signet of Earth, Signet of Air, Signet of Water, Glyph of Elementals.
Strengths: Permanent ~15-20x might to self, ~10x might to others; permfury, permprot, permswift in combat, 50% uptime on fire aura, lower skill floor.
Weaknesses: Large stacks of condition damage due to unpredictability of condi removal.

Changes: VI is nerfed. The fire aura build kind of does extra damage by keeping enemies in a permanent burn. Adding duration does nuts. The entire build is buffed by global reduction in attunement cooldown.

With this set of changes, my Elementalist will retire from WvWvW permanently and be reserved for PvE (Fractals, dungeons) use only. I’ll move agony stats off my mesmer and use that for WvWvW now. It used to be very hard to be viable in WvWvW given the class’s characteristics even using the stronger build. Now, it’s no longer viable.

I mainly play PvE content, but now that the league’s on our guild’s been doing interdiction strikes in WvW.

And as someone who does like the Living Story stuff in general…

I think it’s a remarkably stupid idea to dump it into critical WvW points on the map, esp. the merc camps.

Please remove it on Tuesday, and turn the person who gave the idea to put it there in the first place into a Friendly Rabbit, or a Kitten.

Also, do keep your promises next time.

Kthxbai, back to killing another 105 yaks because the AP said so.

Elementalist is higher AoE direct damage.
Mesmer is higher direct damage on single target.
Necro is higher condition damage on multiple targets.

Tier 1 Asura
Tier 2 Human Norn Sylari
Tier 3 Charr

Salvage everything up to yellow, but use a Mystic Salvage kit for lvl 68+ yellows, and sell on the TP yellow equipment below that level, as ecto won’t drop on salvage. You can sell low level greens if you want as well, but it doesn’t make too much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. Doesn’t really matter what you use for the others. The materials from salvage are generally around the same cost as what they’d sell on the TP.

Also, for what you sell on the TP, 5% is a listing cost deducted immediately from your wallet, and 10% is deducted from the profit after the sale is complete – if it doesn’t sell and you need to relist at a lower price, you’ll have to pay the 5% again of the new lower price. Because of this the maximum you can earn is 85% of the cost of an item you sell.

Normal yellows are about 31 silver ish at current prices, ectoplasm is about 33 silver. With Mystic salvage kits the average amount of ectoplasm per salvage is 0.9, but if you sell your yellows instead on the TP you get 0.85x because of the listing/transaction feeds. 0.9*33 > 0.85×31. Generally, you will find you need to use more ectoplasm than you can get normally, once you start crafting Ascended/Legendary weapons, backpieces or Infusing your gear (or crafting Celestial Exotic armors for those who want that stat combination), so it is in your interest to generate and keep ectoplasm.

If you already have all the ectoplasm-requiring gear you need, permanently, and don’t intend to create any new characters, then you can start selling your yellows instead.

Exotics – salvage with Black Lion kits when their inset rune is approximately equal to the price of the Exotic. Salvage with Mystic kits when their inset rune is worthless, for Dark Matter – unless the gear costs a lot because of its appearance. Generally you will want to do separate price checks for exotics, there’s no easy rule unlike yellows and below.

Lastly. Unless some troll has created a gap in the pricing, whereby you should adapt accordingly, the best price to sell an item is generally minimum sell price minus one copper or minimum sell price, depending on quantity at that price. The best price to buy an item is the maximum current bid price plus one copper.

Do NOT buy material at the minimum sell price unless it’s some kind of emergency… it makes a very big difference in the long run to your finances, as the difference in price can be up to 15-20%.