Guild Wars 2

Assassin, if it ever exists.

No no, I’m just talking about the scenarios where Anet may or may not take an action. So if he can cleverly dodge the subject like you have described then no, Anet won’t ban him. But people won’t tell him the trick either.

They will ban you if you post an LFG “Hey, I’m gonna exploit AC. Come join me.” Or after doing AC, come here and create a topic “Hey, it’s evident that I have exploited. Do you ban me now, Anet?” and ask others “did you guys exploit like me as well? Do you usually do it again without risk?”

Amirite?

Oh boy! So the former cheater thinks it is good to advise new people to cheat because he himself can’t get caught for not playing anyways. Do you think it’s a good advice? Or just come here to proudly brag about how you cheat?

A bit of side story I was reminded of a cheating scandal 5-6 years ago. A very bright PhD student faked her entire 4 years worth of thesis. It was so detailed and convincing that her talent which was put into deceit could have brought out an actually excellent work. So her cheat bought her fame; three articles on the most prestigious journal. Soon, it was found out. Her degree was forfeit; her boss and her department were put into investigation for improper work ethics. The girl's name went viral on every major university's talks in North America. Cheating is bad, even if it starts small. You never know if it becomes a habit and ruins you.

Kodiak.3281:

Sizer.5632:

Fully organized groups doing speedruns (like you see in those videos) are almost playing an entirely different game than pug groups are. Yes, it is better to wear more offensive gear to get yourself ready for being in those kinds of groups, but if you dont know the behavior of every boss then there is nothing wrong with wearing some defensive gear. Believe me, 99.99% of players who yell at the top of their lungs about people having to be in zerk gear 24/7 would never ever notice if you are in their group and doing 8k dps in your mixed gear instead of 10k dps in full zerk.

Yep. I join full Zerk groups all the time. They ask for link to gear, I link them Zerker gear with same visuals as another suit of gear. Pretty nice and no one has ever figured out the difference. I was called out once for using S/D instead of Conjure Lightning Hammer but I explained it away as frustrated as too many noobs were picking up my hammer.

Not to say that I float on by and get carried or anything, only that no one realistically in game has any way of telling what you are spec’d or how much DPS you are doing so it’s far too easy to get away with it

Please don’t be this embarrassing person https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/3rd-party-programm-overlay/first#content. You know what’s worse? What if you got caught in a stream, or recorded?

My extra rifle skins need to go. Please let me get rid of them

I’d like to appear smart and insert some expression about this pointless argument here. Does “grasping at straws” work?

Also, good luck at playing with your pug. I’m outta here. Always in game if anyone needs practical advices, not some pointless cheesy pug tactics. o/

The auto attack is mighty fine against ranger <3 <3. Buff the Surge please…

cursE.1794:

No one said that burning speed deals more dmg against a wall. Icebow is only a dps plus against targets with large hitboxes or groups. It’s not worth using against a single, normal sized target like the first cof boss. And did it ever occur to you that burning speed and whirlwind might move you away from the group?

Do you know the “camera-facing-down-the-ground” and “swap-weapon-during-the-channeling” tricks?

Even if the ele doesn’t use Ice Storm (because god knows what he’s thinking, idk), 3 seconds of deep freeze is worth it for the whole group to burst the boss down in safety. Scholar bonus? Check.100 blades? Check. Whirling Wrath? Check. Meteor Shower? Check. Lightning Storm? Check. Full chain of your favorite 30k Lightning Hammer swoosh swoosh? Check. Insert ____ skills.

Let me entertain you with some real, cold fact:

- Burning Speed is nerfed. Your fire trail doesn’t stack damage. It’s an old news.
- Warrior damage is nerfed so badly, I can hear Purple Miku cries a river in every topics mentioning Warrior’s DPS (poor guy!). Both Whirling Wind and Burning Speed should never be the priority before Deep Freeze and Ice storm.
- If everyone is meleeing the boss, you don’t need to corner stack on him.
- No, that is a very rare scenario. Unless it takes 1 minute to kill such a boss. Even Subject Alpha won’t get pushed that easily. Most of the time people just back down after eating so much damage.

Jerus.4350:

It is a pain… personally I’m far from perfect on my Ele and I struggle a bit. But you have a LOT of tools at your disposal. Like Iris suggested for spider queen, fail to initiate that burst fast enough, look at other tactics to recover with.

And btw, Engi also has reflects/blinds/stealths/condi removal and well just about everything but aegis, Ranger has a solid reflect in axe offhand, Nec can even toss a blind field down. Warrior is the only profession where things can get iffy, but for say the SQ fight they could always bring fear me and at least temporarily help with those annoying little guys.

Point being that the problem is more the strict adherence to the pure damage focus rather than assessing the situation and knowing how to properly adjust. Many of the people writing the guides know these things (and often hint to them without full explanations) but they would have to write a novel no one would ever finish to explain every situation with every different combination of things.

Like Tom’s guide to Warrior on Dulfy. That one is a masterpiece.

Iris Ng.9845:

I can record my other pug run if you have any specific request.

Here to help. Not to preach how zerker is universally the best. It is the best if you know the encounter.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

Iris Ng.9845:

Or just go D/F

go D/F.

I like to summarize

That sinking heart feeling

Have you guys lost your mind? Do you wish to get infracted? o.0

DigitalKirin.9714:

Frost.1503:

I play for fun. I don’t want work hard, absolutly not.

Even with 70AR, FotM 50 would be the wrong place for you. If you can’t equate hard work with fun in your mind, then you shouldn’t be there.

Oh my god, so well-put!!!

First CoF boss, he doesn’t need to be pulled and shouldn’t be pulled ever after since FGS is nerfed (hello, wake up call!!) Let your group know that you will DEEP FREEZE the boss and rain ice bow of death to him. If you cannot dodge his Fire Grab (which animation is rather obvious to me), get on your second most OP skill <Lightning Storm>, and your truly OP skill: <Meteor Shower>. Or just go D/F as popularity demand.

CoE 2: go D/F. If the other golem lazer you? That’s cute, Gale him. Swirling Wind in between of the golem and use your second most OP skill.

Okie. Scepter/Focus is a single target burst weapon. In dungeons, you will have a lot of problems against multiple trash mobs, especially if not LOS properly. If you ever find yourself in situation of “fighting one but ten fighting you” then I convince you to slot Lightning hammer as a cleave weapon.

If conjure weapon is an absolute no-no then we can have some glyph build, which is kinda lazy neat. The rotation is to stack might (Dragon Tooth → Fire wall → Phoenix → Comet → Magnetic Wave) → Rock Barrier → Hurl → Lightning Strike → Blinding Flash → Arc Lightning, swap to Fire mid cast → Spam Dragon Tooth. Then re stack might when fire wall is up.

Use your summon Glyph as you see fit. Use Sand Storm when you need blind against trash mobs, or Lightning Storm against boss.

Thief is much easier than ele. I have 4k hours on my ele, once I tried thief, it has been a cake walk for me in any dungeons and fractals. Things you really need to know when playing high risk-high reward classes:

• Position (flanking for thief, max melee for ele)
• Timing (evade, dodge, block, invuln, blind, stun, daze, immobilization)
• Rotation (pull off a killing rotation means stuffs die faster, less defensive mode for you)
• Cool down management (or initiative management for thief)

Also, do spend a good time to read over every skill and trait tooltips to know what they do and try to improvise your play style.

Your mistake is to misjudge your group DPS and decide to go to the face-tank-all-out-DPS-or-die route. It’s not the aggro system is broken. Even if you put on some toughness, as long as you deal the most aoe damage out there, chance is mobs still find you to attack. Once your swirling wind is down, retreat back to your LOS corner in the end of the room and kill off some of the small spiders which follow you. After that, re-engage the spider queen. Watch out for her spray, you need to be at least 900 range away from her frontal area, or dodge to her side. Approach her, deal damage, as soon as she spits poison aoe, dodge back again.

If you watch all the Spider Queen solo video, all the small spiders and gargoyle had been taken care of prior to engagement.

Go for CM, quite easy to solo as a thief and there is no selling market there.

At Mai Trin. Before her shield is taken off. You can use earth shield as a defensive skill to kite her around.

My engi loves having fun.

Windsagio.1340:

Iris, are… are you trying to shame him for complaining?

What are you talking about? I edit my post to answer the OP’s question in a more straight forward way now.

@Zel: Lightning surge and Ice spike deals roughly the same damage for 8 stacks of might. It is about 3k with crit. It’s meh overall, but not too shabby if aimed at an unsuspected ranger, I guess. The AA is slow and meh as well, unless it bounces between two targets. In general, not saying that this skill doesn’t need a buff. But right now, it’s not a skill that we “should completely not use at all”.

Which encounter do you plan to use this build with?

I can record my other pug run if you have any specific request.

The reason I picked CM because: it’s largely dependent on the reflect and stealth roles, both of which, ele is an essential secondary support. It extends the roles of ele, not only a might/fury/DPS stacker, but also a full-fledged important team player.

Hey OP,

In pug, it’s all about situation awareness and knowledge of the mechanics which help you survive. For example, in this CM’s run, I don’t know any members of the group except for Sam (the thief), whom as thief was the first time I ran with. I could have gone for staff because the other ele went with LH, but with my miserable mistrust to others’ support, I stuck with Sc/F/LH. There are a few key moments I’d like to point out:

At 1:01, party member was staggering the cutscene (which is not a good thing), noticing that the guard was late to engage, I immediately went for a Deep Freeze to neutralize the boss. I did a first dodge as I know that the rifleman would knock me dead if I got hit by the projectile. Right after that, the guard messed up his Wall of Reflection position. However, boss was deep frozen, so it was safe to burst him down before backing up inside the wall. At 1:16, the other ele was res-ed up. Knowing that the next Shield of the Avenger would have cast time, I covered the group with Swirling Wind, then decided to go for LH as soon as I saw Flame Wall was cast. Notice how I moved around the boss while attacking? This boss has a habit of knocking back people in front of his face when the group not max melee him. This can be negated with possibly Hallowed Ground or max meleeing. Too much to ask in pug? Then try to move away from his frontal area.

At 1:58 I used Magnetic Wave as my personal protection when I picked up my chest.

At 2:28, I used Swirling Wind on the turrets to protect the slower party members from getting immobilized should stealth ran out for them. This was made while seeing that stealth was blinking. As expected, we did aggro one Rifleman later on.

3:06, Bloody Victoria went on stealth. This boss has a deadly stun and oneshot mechanic once she goes out of stealth. Knowing the threat, I strafed and dodge away as I predicted she would attack soon. Swirling wind was used to cover the other ele as she got knocked down by the rifleman.

3:41, Ele is not only a might stacker but also an essential stealth blaster. Thief has limited initiative, so don’t be lazy and try to help out in stealth stacking as much as you can. In NA speedrun, we usually blast stealth again before the stair. It’s different from EU as they prefer to run straight after the stair and SR. The confusion resulted in my bad aim at Comet and the hazardous reveal/aggro. Keep calm and stay in SR. I got some stealth up. The rest of the skip wasn’t too bad as I cycled through my defensive skills. For the last boss, Frost is super squishy but his freeze thrower hits so so hard. If you ever get aggro, just step back outside of his range, summon Earth elemental to face tank him and then safely attack him from his side. Focus on staying alive if you have aggro, as Frost is easy to deal with even with 3 or 4 other members attacking.

I hope this particular run helps you understand the mindset of most veteran zerker ele and how we can breeze through everything.

I want the sharpness of SweetFX

frifox.5283:

Iris Ng.9845:

My asura engi may have enjoyed herself a bit too much today…

kawaii overload !!

Thank you, foxy <3

Dub.1273:

Iris Ng.9845:

Except that it’s not. There is way too much down time between the boss jumps around to different locations in the room, dodging the aoe pull and the poison spin that an ele cannot face tank at all. You can throw all the skills and try to burst him at one point hoping that he won’t teleport in the middle of your burst, but your dps isn’t 10k as you think.

That boss didn’t even jump once. And I honestly have no idea what poison spin you’re talking about. I have zero idea what boss that was, I only remember the pattern of small-large-small orange circles.

It sounds like the troll boss. Never mind. That one is easy to defeat and has no healing mechanics.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/3rd-party-programm-overlay/first#content

This guy joined frifox’s “Zerker only, experienced Arah p1” LFG with his effing 29k HP warrior. Got kicked flying for being a big fat liar.

Hi OP, it exists. You may use it as your own risk. It’s also a very convenient lie detector to those who join “zerker only, dungeon speed clear, etc” with their full pvt/nomad gears. There is no way to detect the end users of this program. Even if the person (gets kicked by lying and) wants to report the program user, it will not be enough for GM to open investigation and ban the subject. Last but not least, it is not a bot, so it stays in the gray area.

• Edit for clearer intention.

Hey Zo,

You listed all of them right. I picked Streamlet as the blue that can match the crystal of your warden weapons while Shy Iris both Black Maple are very subdue colors which looks like the tree bark under the blue mist. I used different shades of purple/rose/pink/violet to mimic the delicate and prismatic change of the Pale tree’s leaves. I aimed for the harmony of all colors so that the gentle sophistication of the Pale tree can be preserved.

My asura engi may have enjoyed herself a bit too much today…

Pistol. Use your duelists.

Except that it’s not. There is way too much down time between the boss jumps around to different locations in the room, dodging the aoe pull and the poison spin that an ele cannot face tank at all. You can throw all the skills and try to burst him at one point hoping that he won’t teleport in the middle of your burst, but your dps isn’t 10k as you think.

Hey Zo,

This is my interpretation of the Pale Tree. All the colors used were shown in the video as well. http://youtu.be/157BmHIKVDM

I just leave Copper for another boss when I see people safespot him.

The best way to deal dmg is to melee the boss. Either range him (low dps) or aoe (heal the boss) isn’t ideal. But to melee, you need to dodge his pull and also need a body block against the poison spin, both of which I think are too advanced for a random person in the zerg. I doubt that a singular DPS can ever reach 5k there. Actually, reflect works insanely well against this boss :x

spoj.9672:

It looks more likely that when you CC the bar drops to 0 and then gradually builds up to max. So you can only CC when its full. Otherwise i dont see why they would use a bar for the UI and i dont see why it would be full when hes not been CC’d.

I hope it decays naturally, with condition damage, maybe? Other wise, it’s just a make over from a number of stacks to increments in a bar.

You forget that boss has a second heal mechanics by people bursting poison bubbles, right?

I would be very happy that they tweak Air 2 on staff. Either shorter cast time or increased damage is fine. It’s my favorite sneaky nuke on power range classes in PvP.

Elementalist. Higher skill ceiling, better utility, more versatile, strong in every game’s aspects.

Well,

1. Your team rotation needs a lot of work. I see a lot of redundant movement. Normally, classes to push far are thief → mesmer → engi → ele. Ele is amazing at big team fight and holding capped point 1v1 or 1v2. But that doesn’t mean you keep capping far and die trying to run away every time. Your team should send ppl to help you hold that far cap and put the fight on their home point. Generally, if you don’t intend to hold far cap then ele should shuffle between mid→home while mesmer/ranger push far. You should watch Backpack’s tips for rotation and team fight: http://youtu.be/6Z-k9OMpJOY

2. It’s good that you guys do make effort to call out for rotation. But it’s confusing and contradicting sometimes. And I see 3 or 4 of you running to the same node at the same time, which is unnecessary. What needs to call out:

• Which classes of enemy are heading to a certain point: If the numbers don’t sum up, there is likely one trying to backcap an unattended node.
• Which enemies go down and are soon to respawn: It means they will zerg far points. If you pressure on far, you need to bring team fight there.
• Calling CC/immobilize, focus and coordinate burst.
• Calling for downstate and group heal. Always try to down inside the point that you capped.

Also, after you win a big team fight, send one to watch the enemy’s camp. You’ll gain an edge from knowing where they will head to after respawn.

3. Mechanical wise:
I wouldn’t try to use Churning Earth every time. You might is very very low (only 9 stacks), CE doesn’t deal much damage and basically asks people to CC/burst you. You need to focus on build up your might to 14+ asap and not double dodge too early in the fight. Also save Armor of Earth at your last resort, instead keep your Aura up. I also think FGS is better for mobility. Your group doesn’t have any high mobile class, FGS really helps to secure the mid point fast and as a safe disengage.

Jerus.4350:

A thing to note though hammer’s abilities can be quite handy, there are situations where immob is really cool to have, and then ring of warding layed down to stop any charging trash mobs can be absolutely amazing. Banish also has it’s niche uses and mighty blow for blasting things like stealth for fire fields before battle.

Pretty much this. I tend to hammer more in an organized CM run, and Gsword at boss.

Isn’t this similar to AC p3 burrow part? __

spoj.9672:

Iris Ng.9845:

In my group, we have a code: I take even and my bro take odd. Warrior is allowed to take the first defiance. If it’s a pug, we tell them not to use mace 5.

We dont even organise it lol. I literally just link icebow 5 or say strip defiant. And the group does it. Only very rarely do people overdo it. I guess thats the benefit of playing with the same core people every time.

We had a pug mesmer in fractal 50 the other day. I set up my own icebow 5 and then just before i finished channeling the mesmer gs 5’d bjarl across the room. >.>

It just makes our timing and cd management easier. Since some of the CC isn’t instant (i.e. Comet), it can be chaotic if our CC overlap. It also helps us tremendously in the champ room in the Uncategorized fractals. As we can 3-man the part easily now.

When my bro or I on thief and the other goes ele, we make sure no one but thief to do defiance management. Although the best practice goes to Lua’s group. Exceptional 4 deep-freeze chains on HotW bosses.

Speaking of fractals, this is not how one should ask their friends to help with his fractal leveling. Bonus some post-show chat up with my bro as he was practically mute the whole time.

In my group, we have a code: I take even and my bro take odd. Warrior is allowed to take the first defiance. If it’s a pug, we tell them not to use mace 5.

Classic. 10/10. Would kick again.

This is so interesting: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2uz66m/fractals_of_the_moists_snowblind_firepits/