Guild Wars 2

Air traits

Zephyr’s Speed: The trait is useless at the moment. First of the 10% movement speed increase is barely noticeable. Second if you have swiftness applied, the buff is completely nullified and swiftness is not that hard to come by. So instead my idea would be that this trait reduces the cooldown on skills you cast in air attunement by 10%. This would by a decent buff to fresh air builds in particular, because they have ready access to air whenever they want to cast an expensive skill.
Glyphs are a bit of a problem here. Currently there are some where the attunement you start in determines the effect (Glyph of Storms) and then there are some where the attunement you end in matters (Glyph of Elementals). The first type would be affected by this, since the cooldown only starts when the skill is fully cast. The second type, however, would only benefit when specializing in Arcana to get Lingering Elements. I’m no big fan of having that separation anyway, so I’d suggest that for any glyph the attunement you start in determines the effect, but that is probably going to be pretty controversial.

Electric Discharge: It’s a good trait. The only thing I’d suggest is that it inflicts something between 3-5 stacks of vulnerability to match the theme of the third minor trait. This would be another buff to fresh air builds in particular.

Weak Spot: Great trait, no changes needed.

Zephyr’s Boon: This trait also seems to be in a good spot and it’s a good choice for utility in the Adept slot.

One with Air: The trait would be OK if superspeed actually did more than swiftness does. At least it is my impression that both increase the movement speed by the same amount. If this gets fixed it seems to be a decent utility choice.

Ferocious Winds: As others have pointed out this trait is crap. The old version gave you healing power based on your precision. If you specced in air you at least had some precision so you would actually get a buff. But now you most likely don’t have much healing power, so the buff to ferocity is abysmal. The whole trait should either be removed or changed to something sensible like “Gain ferocity based on your precision”. Overall I think removing it makes the most sense to free room for Bolt to the Heart, but I will come to that in a bit.

Inscription: Merging those two traits made sense and the trait seems to be well rounded overall. I think 1 stack of might for 20s is a bit low, however, and should be 2 stacks instead.

Aeromancer’s Training: I fully expected Air Training to get merged into this trait, but apparently they went for +10% crit damage instead. It makes sense as well, since this used to be the precision/ferocity line, but of course it’s a nerf to damage. Considering how much a class like warrior is buffed in terms of group support and personal DPS, I think it’s not to much to ask that ele can keep this damage modifier. Therefore I propose that precision is being increased by this trait as well. +150 precision would amount to about +7% crit chance, which is a bit strong most likely, but you get the idea.

Tempest Defense: It’s a nice trait for fresh air burst builds because of the +20% damage modifier while also offering some utility and — if traited — support from the auras. For a master trait the ICD seems to be in order.

Bolt to the Heart: This is obviously one of the changes that hurt the most. Overall it’s just a 6.7% damage increase at the moment, so totally not worth being a GM trait. If Ferocious Winds was removed, a slot would free up for this trait and it could be brought back down. This reason why moving it to GM is bad is because you have to choose between Fresh Air and this one. In PvE dagger builds only work with Fresh Air, so you miss those 6.7% damage. A staff build — which is already stronger than D/F in this scenario — can pick Bolt to the Heart, so the margin increases. In PvP scepter builds also rely heavily on Fresh Air, so those are also missing out that damage modifier. Given the one-trick-pony nature of scepter builds in PvP this breaks the build. Either they can burst down a target or they have to back off and wait till the burst combo is back up since scepter offers no sustained damage.

Fresh Air: It’s one of the traits that best match the “build-defining” nature GM traits are supposed to have.

Lightning Rod: I don’t see many uses for this trait other than very gimmicky builds involving tornado. Ele does not have enough disables for this to matter. Depending on how defiance bars on players work, this trait could maybe be triggered by blinds as well. This way burst builds could be created without using Fresh Air. With the ready access to blinds from Blinding Ashes it could get a little too strong, however, but tweaking some numbers or adding an ICD should work around that.

Continuation of the fire line discussion from above

Persisting Flames: This trait was already a worthwhile GM trait and now some more utility (downed state) was merged into it. Overall I think it is the right spot to put it because of the self-synergy.

Pyromancer’s Puissance: This trait was only chosen over Persisting Flames against target that you cannot crit, like world bosses. So buffing it by increasing the might duration seems like a good move.

Blinding Ashes: I always like the idea behind this trait, but the CD felt too long. This got changed now, so the trait should at least be worth considering. I doubt it will be enough to bring eles into the fire line in PvP, but that is something I will talk about later.

Summary: So the fire line seems to be quite good at the moment. Overall I’d suggest to swap Flame Barrier and Burning Precision, while also dropping the 20% trigger chance on Flame Barrier and have it activate every time. Conjurer needs to be looked and the effect should not trigger on signets. Finally the might from One with Fire should be applied for every aura.

I doubt Ether Renewal will ever be instant cast. Look at the arcana utility skills, which are all instant cast, yet the healing skill Arcane Brilliance has a casttime.

Here’s my two cents about the ele changes:

Fire traits:

Flame Barrier: Without supporting traits like One with Fire, Zephyr’s Boon or Elemental Shielding this trait is useless. Fire Aura by itself is pretty weak and having a trigger chance of only 20% does not help either. So instead of keeping this as a minor trait, I’d suggest swapping it with Burning Precision and reducing the increase in burning damage duration on this trait back to 25% and only having it active while attuned to fire. Now you can strip the trigger chance on Flame Barrier completely and have it activate every time. This way there is also a decent support option in the Adept tier which still matches the fire theme.

Sunspot: It’s a trait you don’t notice at the moment. The damage could be increased, as well as the range and it could apply some burning as well (say 1 stack for 2s). Especially when burning can stack now this would be helpful.

Burning Rage: That’s a very good trait, so there’s no need to change anything. It would also synergize well with the new minor trait Burning Precision and with the burning from Sunspot. Depending on how many stacks of burning can be applied, it me might be an idea to add tiers to this trait. If burning stacks are capped at 5, the damage could be increased by 2% per stack for example.

Burning Precision: I talked about this one in the section about Flame Barrier.

Conjurer: This appears to be messed up now. It’s obvious that the +10 charges should stay, but the part about getting a fire aura when an ally picks up a conjured weapon or when you use a signet just does not feel right. Stuff about signets is much better suited in the earth line, where you could pick Written in Stone at the end. So scratch that part. Since Flame Barrier would be a new Adept trait, we already have a reliable source of Fire Auras in this triple, so granting Fire Aura is not the way to go. I’m currently playing with some possible replacements:

• Move the attribute bonuses from the conjured weapons to this trait. So Ice Bow would only grant extra condition duration and healing power if this trait is slotted. However, that approach would make this trait absolutely mandatory to pick, so it should better be kept baseline.
• Add an effect to whoever is picking it up — that’s how it’s handled at the moment. However, it should apply to the ele as well. One possibility could be different auras depending on the conjured weapon. Lightning Hammer would be Shocking Aura, Ice Bow is Frost Aura, Earth Shield is Magnetic Aura and Fire Axe is Fire Aura. I don’t know yet what FGS would be. But this would again be just about Auras. Still making it more diverse than always granting Fire Aura seems like a good idea and there are lots of other options, too.
• Have an effect at the location were the weapon is summoned. Lightning Hammer could strike foes in the area with a blinding flash and deal some damage, Ice Bow could heal allies in the area, Earth Shield could grant protection or inflict bleeding, Fire Axe could inflict burning and deal some damage. FGS is again a bit more difficult, but I’m sure you can come up with something. This way you would always have to make a choice where to place the conjure. Do you want it to be picked up easily or do you want the conjuring effect to be as efficient as possible?

One problem with some of those solutions is that they don’t fit the fire theme well, so maybe you can come up with something better here.

Power Overwhelming: I like this trait and it’s a decent offensive choice between Conjurer for utility and Flame Barrier for support. I know numbers are absolutely subject to change but anything between 7 and 10% seems to be alright for an adept trait.

Pyromancer’s Training: Great offensive trait. Nuff said.

One with Fire: This would be the (offensive) support choice, but it’s quite weak in it’s current state. With the above changes, you could gain a Fire Aura every 11.25s from Flame Barrier or by using Fire Shield (40s CD) on focus or by leaping through a fire field. I’m not great at doing exact uptime calculations, but on average you won’t have more than 3 stacks of might from this trait. So staying at the aura theme, I’d suggest that the trait instead grants 1 stack of might for 10s when you apply any aura to yourself or an ally. Along with Zephy’r Boon, Elemental Shielding and Powerful Aura this would make this trait quite powerful and Auramancers worthwhile. Just as with Zephyr’s Boon and Elemental Shielding, giving an aura to an ally with Powerful Aura, should apply the effects on that ally and not on the ele. So if you give Fire Aura to yourself and 4 allies, everybody would get 1 stack of might instead of you getting 5.

Cleansing Fire: It’s a good utility choice and I think you merged the right two traits here. No complaints from my side.

D/D is taking yet another hit:

Josh Davis.6015:

The amulets will be rebalanced to compensate for the loss of stats originally gained from trait lines.

This is probably as good of a place as any to mention that we’ll also be using this opportunity to rebalance PvP’s celestial amulet to be slightly less effective. We’re probably looking at a 10%~ decrease in overall stats, but this number can change as we draw closer to releasing the core specialization changes.

(source)

While this is not a nerf that only targets eles, since Shoutbow warriors or engis also use that amulet it’s still noticable on top of the Elemental Attunement change.

Edit: To be clear here, shaving off some stats (~5%) of celestial is OK in my opinion, but moving EA to Grandmaster level seems like too much and it’s pushing Eles into yet another defensive line instead of being able to pick some offensive traits.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

Thank you for doing this.

There is likely a big mistake though: I am almost certain that the devs were using strength runes during the stream, thereby resulting in a 45% increase to might duration – which is reflected in the tooltips. Therefore you should adjust the might durations shown from the stream to take this effect into consideration: only Pyromancer’s puissance has its might duration actually inscreased (10s -> 15s).

Thanks, should be fixed now.

And the traits could be specified by 1 = top, 2 = middle, 3 = bottom. So a full build could be F112 R231 W233 for example.

I created a list of the ele trait changes over at Reddit (better formatting) using Dulfy’s picutures. Let me know if anything is missing or wrong.

MasterMc.7543:

Coldtart.4785:

Run earth, water and arcane and enjoy being able to reduce any zerker’s dps down to zero!!! every time you pop earth attune.

And also do no dps your self as almost all earth skills are low dps.

It could still be a great bunker build for PvP together with Ether Renewal and Melandru runes (if they exist in PvP) to deal with condis.

Neko.9021:

Persisting Flames merged with Lava Tomb. Awww yeah.

Now Discharge Lightning just needs to match it’s description and be a blast finisher and ele’s are going to get mighty furious when you down them.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Jekkt.6045:

no, feline grace gives vigour now which is 120% and another trait that makes it 140%.

I believe feline grace’s trait description was already updated to take into account the other one. But I might be wrong.

Yeah, basically this. Once you pick a specialization, you automatically get all minors, so it makes sense that the tooltips update appropriately.

Neko.9021:

I’m glad, honestly. Using Ice Bow to fire off two skills then putting it away always felt really weird and cheesy to me. Hopefully if they nerf the skills, Conjures could be re-balanced into something more general purpose and useful (kits?).

I just hope it does not end up like FGS, which is now pretty useless for damage after they “balanced” it.

Right now it seems like staff is the (only) way to go in PvE. You don’t have to invest in arcana anymore to get blasting staff so you can basically go full damage. That build is also not reliant on fresh air, so you can pick bolt to the heart – something a D/F build can no longer do. Scepter builds are also getting nerfed, since lightning hammer and frostbow get changed. So right now I’m not super confident this is going to work out well. All those three builds were pretty close together, but the margin between them seems to have increased by quite a bit.

I had the same thing happening twice and I also submitted the reports.

• Will you be able to unlock every specialization for a given profession on a character even if there are more added in the future?
• How are mystic forge recipes handled that require ingredients from Miyani you formerly bought with skillpoints?
• How can you get stats like boon duration or condition duration if they are removed from the trait lines?

DarkHorse.1059:

Turret being conditioned is immersion breaking. You’re breaking my immersion. This is unacceptable. A turret isn’t alive how can it be poisoned or suffer bleeding?

Since a fire elemental can burn and an ice elemental can be chilled, we’ll get used to poisoned turrets.

Talking of poison: Does it reduce the healing from Autotool Installation?
Edit: Nvm, Josh is faster at answering questions than I can ask them.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

I just completed Gwamm title in gw1. Is because of this bug and temporary shutdown my title not copied to gw2 (and the corresponding ap? Hall of monument calculator doesn’t seem to update either.

I am not sure whether the titles were also disabled, but you definitely have to log out of GW1 before your HOM gets updated.

Another option might be to add something to the bases only archers can effectively destroy. The doorbreakers obviously have their doors, but the archers don’t fulfill any role that cannot be filled by players. They could for example add a cannon that puts heavy pressure on players, basically forcing them to focus them down first. I think players should still be able to deal some damage to them and the attacks should be blockable. Archers however should deal similar amounts of damage like the doorbreakers do on doors.

Draygo.9473:

Archers on the other hand shoot the gate at a much greater range, and are easier for us to defend against glass cannons, plus they don’t clump as hard.

They deal next to no damage to the gate, however.

You will lose skills, traits and experience as well as anything you currently have in your inventory. By putting the non-soulbound items in your bank you can save those, however.

Of course I had not enough time to really see how strong archers are, since I only played about 10 matches. But my first impression matches yours, archers seem to be pretty useless at the beginning and as long as the gates are up, you are better off summoning doorbreakers. During the final push, archers might be more valuable, but at that point just going after heroes still seems to be a better option.

Noein.1685:

Here we are, a month later……………..they added kittening hair. You kittening kidding me?

I doubt that the people designing new hairstyles are the same people fixing bugs. But I agree that it is sad that one month has passed without anything substantial happening. We don’t yet know how they will handle the problem or if they are even able to properly remove the titles and achievement points.

There was a skill called Signet of Spirits in the first game that was akin to Supply Crate – the PvE version of the skill at least. The PvP version was not toned down, it’s functionality was completely different. To be exact here, the PvE version was the same as the PvP version in the beginning, but later they were split and the PvE version was reworked.

Going back to Gw2, Anet should start to balance the three gamemodes separately, otherwise a good balance cannot be achieved. Supply Crate is not OP in PvE, especially because of the long CD, but making it a little weaker in PvP would not hurt. The rate of fire on those turrets could be reduced by x% for example, while leaving the normal turrets as is. I also like the suggestion of making turrets susceptible for bleeds, burns and crits in PvP. Taking the player stats into consideration to determine the actual damage is worthwhile as well.

If you play in EU, the guys from gw2community.com do him pretty much every time. You just need to be on their TS about half an hour before the event starts, the rest gets explained there.

They did say before season 2 came out that they absolutely want to bring season 1 back. Of course plans change over time, but Colin sounded very confident that they would do it.

Edit: Now that the streaming client is in beta I think it became even more likely that this is going to happen. I mean they will put the old Lion’s Arch map back into the game, so why not restore Kessex Hills and all the other stuff as well at some point?

There is a bug in the game that cause utility skills to go on cooldown right after swapping them in (video). The most consistent way I found to reproduce it is to use an elementalist. Have one of Ice Bow, Lightning Hammer, Earth Shield or Flame Axe, Glyph of Storms or Glyph of Renewal (my personal favorite because of it’s huge CD) as your third utility skill and Signet of Fire as your second one.

Now use the third utility skill and – if it is a conjured weapon – drop it after a few seconds. Next swap your second utility skill for Arcane Shield. Your second utility slot sometimes inherits the cooldown of the third one. It does not work all the time, but I have been quite successful at triggering the bug this way.

The message seems to have been game wide, but only the Blackgate borderlands where actually affected (source).

I doubt anybody can help you here on the forum. Instead you should submit a ticket.

Or get a personal storage guild. For 105 gold you get 250 slots for all your non-accountbound items.

Cakemeister.5792:

I’m not sure if this was posted on March 31 or on April 1. This whole thread might be a hoax.

You can click on the “2 days ago” or whatever it is saying to get an exact timestamp of the post. Alternatively you can hover over it. In this case the opening post was published on March 31st, 17:16.

Slowpokeking.8720:

BobbyStein.2315:

Cakemeister.5792:

I’m not sure if this was posted on March 31 or on April 1. This whole thread might be a hoax.

It’s not a hoax. These changes are definitely real and we’ll announce a specific release date sometime in the near future.

Will you guys revamp the disappointing Zhaitan fight since this is the best chance to do it?

BobbyStein.2315:

Please note that the core gameplay and structure of this story instance has not been changed—the difficulty has been adjusted to allow for solo play and will therefore be more accessible for players.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Synosius.9876:

This biggest design flaw of WvW was adding a score.

What metric would you suggest determined a winner?

I think RNG would be great here. Joke aside, WvW is not about even fights. If you (OP) want those there is structured PvP.

Any legitimate mail from Anet shows their logo, while any mail send by a player — such as this one — shows a warning at the bottom.

When I checked a few hours ago Desolation was the only full server. So only looking at population, this is probably your answer.

Aikawa.8726:

I agree. This issue with the GWAMM title is kind of a big deal for those who earned it the hard way.

I can only wonder if the pun was intended or not. Anyway, I’m a bit disappointed that we still did not get any information about the way they want to fix this bug. At this point a complete rollback is no longer an option, they would have to have done this last week. But anything that does not involve getting rid of every incorrectly awarded title is not solution.

According to the wiki the cooldown on the console is 20 minutes, which also matches my experience.

I used to do world bosses a lot before the megaservers came out. Since I played on a smaller server, we only had about 20 people doing the world bosses at a time. When megaservers came out I quickly stopped doing the world bosses since it was just zerging now. About two weeks ago I tried them out again and while some bugs have been fixed, like the overly chatty Taidha, the core problem remains. Some improvements to the existing world bosses are definitely needed, even though I understand that Anet has other priorities at the moment.

Shadow Behemoth:
In my opinion the fight is boring now. It feels like it’s dragging on forever, because most people go AFK during the portal phases. It’s also close to impossible to get the 20 seconds portal achievement because of this.
In order to change this behavior it should be unsafe to stand near the damage spot during the portal phases. Have Behemoth drop more meteors there or have him put his arm down in that area. The latter summons the same high damage AoE that surrounds his body. Additionally people should be punished for not destroying the portals quickly enough. The portals should spawn a mob about every 5 seconds and have those run towards the Deathroot Shack. This is the direction where most people stand. The necromancer inside could even say lines along “Help, they are coming for me” to make people aware of this.
I know that this is just a starter boss, but in my opinion that means that it is close to impossible to fail the event and not that it is close to impossible to die during the event. A world boss should still be challenging.

Fire Elemental:
His attacks are actually quite strong. I always used to have one or two stunbreaks on my bar to recover from his knockback projectiles should I miss a dodge. Nowadays, he dies way to quickly for this to matter. So this guy need more health when he gets upscaled, I’d say about 5-8 times as much. The whole event chain should still fit in the 15 minute window this way, but shortening the pre events by a minute or two would also be appreciated.

Jungle Wurm:
Before megaservers came out we had some people focusing solely on the husks using whatever crowd control and damage they had available. Now the wurm dies too quickly for them to even reach them. So again the wurm needs more health — say about 3 times as much — and the husks need to spawn sooner. You usually always have a 10 minute break after the event, so this should work out.

Frozen Maw:
His skills are strong, but he does not use the strongest of them. If you prevent him from moving from his initial position, he summons neither the tornadoes nor the ice spikes dropping from the sky. If this gets changed, he should be in a good spot. For this to work, he should get the new orange AoE telegraphs, however. It’s close to impossible to notice those attacks if you are surrounded by 100 other people and when you only have 5 FPS.

I’ll write about the other world bosses later.

Farming Flats.5370:

Rifled Yolks.2097:

its cause of the 39 HoM points people were able to cheat and get over the last few days. So Anet shut it down until they can roll back all the cheaters HoM points lol and to stop them from getting skins they didn’t earn.

Actually they just got the achievements , no skins

Yes, but if you have enough points you can unlock the skins by going to the merchant in the HOM. This is why it got disabled.

Are you sure that your character is still a tailor? You can only have 2 crafting professions active at any time (4 with gemstore items). In case you swapped out tailor for something else, you can reactivate it by talking to the NPC at the crafting station. It should cost 42s 30c.

1. Do you represent the guild on that character?
2. Did you try the workaround that worked before the hotfix, i. e. changing your status to invisible and then back to online?

Report a bug seems to be back to normal now. They apparently changed and reordered the categories and added one for beta bugs.

I noticed this as well before the latest hotfix. I’m unsure however if this bug only affects the description or the actual behavior as well. It might be related to this bug.

Are you affected by might?

The ingredients for feasts (craftable by the chef profession) are missing their description when hovering over them. It just displays (30m):. I could only check Feast of Truffle Steak Dinner and Feast of Spicy Lime Steaks, however.

Malediktus.3740:

Scribbin.2307:

Anet could always make a new title for those that earned GWAMM in GW1 legit.

No. GWAMM is the best title, even close 3 years after release. Even the 25k AP title sounds like trash compared to it.

And the whole idea of GWAMM is that you are carrying your GW1 title over to GW2. Just creating a new title would defeat this purpose.

The first trap switch in AC story after the first champ cannot be activated. Because of this the traps cannot be disabled.

I really don’t want to be rude, but this bug has to be fixed as soon as possible and any incorrectly awarded achievements have to be reset. Those achievements were not exactly easy to get and I personally don’t want everybody being GWAMM.

It’s a bug: Clarification

I really like that change – as an option. It reduces the clutter on your screen and you can focus on the things you really need. But I still want to be able to buy skins for my alts.

Yes, it no longer stands out as much as it should. The red was way more visible than the green, especially when there is some light falling on my monitor decreasing the contrast.

Maybe you can summon some of the Destiny’s Edge guys – at least if they dies in the assault.