Showing Posts For Isila.2574:
1 2
I support this idea!
As long as the chest contains nothing but one of those little two-cent party razzers and a note that reads, “Congratulations, your server had more people logged in for more hours of the day and/or abused the largest number of exploits.”
When the game decides its matchups using a relative ranking system (meaning the servers that get put together are of similar ‘skill’), and yet one team ends the week-long matchup with 3, 4, 5 times as much score as both of the other teams COMBINED, the system is flawed.
The original theorycrafter was working on thief, which has bursty bleed stacks. Elementalists going for condition damage typically use Dagger/Dagger or Scepter/Dagger, and in both builds bleed stacks are fairly stable (and then there’s burn, which is the other part of our condition damage that doesn’t even stack in the first place).
There are two main situations of stacking bleeds: soft targets (normals and vets) and hard targets (champs and bosses).
Soft targets don’t live long enough for duration to run its course and make a difference. Duration’s main draw is allowing you to have more stacks active at the same time, thus having more DPS for the time period in which you have all of your potential stacks active, but it takes us a bit of time to ramp up to that (we don’t have easy access to bursting it like thieves do) and by then the soft target is dead.
Hard targets have the problem of running into the bleed cap. They can only have so many stacks of bleed active at once, and not all of them will be yours, so the main benefit of duration is out.
Burns of course don’t really benefit at all from duration, as when we’re actively burning a target we keep refreshing the duration pretty much indefinitely.
In PvP, a longer-duration condition just gets cleansed before the duration is up.
Generally you’re better off with condition damage to make every tick count.
I like the playstyle of elementalist. I like the concept of elementalist. I even enjoy playing elementalist, in situations where I don’t have to be concerned about performance.
But to reduce the performance of elementalist any further is to render the class unplayable by anyone who is serious about the content they play in. It is barely viable to play a class that has to work so much harder to put up the same performance as other classes; it will be outright non-viable to play a class that has to work so much harder to put up LESS performance than other classes.
The Living Bomb: A might stacking, PvE, close ranged staff Ele build
in Elementalist
Posted by: Isila.2574
Another variation you might try, if you’re up for a further playstyle change, is to use scepter/dagger. You get four blast finishers on your skills this way (Phoenix in fire, Earthquake and Churning Earth in earth, Arcane Wave) to quickly lay down 12 stacks of might before traits factor into things with F4→3→E4→Arcane Wave→5. You might not get your might stacks quite as high quite as fast (you have to wait for Ring of Fire to come off cooldown, rather than having Lava Font and Burning Retreat to use for fields), but Churning Earth hits so hard that I feel it more than makes up for it. This build doesn’t have quite as much kiting and healing ability as the staff, but it does get a lot of control (blinds and knockdowns in Air and Earth, all of them AoE) and, if you take Glyph of Storms and use it in Earth, you get an AoE attack that pulses bleed and blind to create a sort of safe zone in the middle of mobs (which allows you to make the most of Dragon’s Tooth on Fire 2, since mobs won’t be moving).
I also use this build in dungeons; as after the might stacks go up I can use sandstorm and Tornado to keep mobs blind and on the floor for long periods to reduce their output, and spam vulnerability (via Water 2) on hardier targets.
I think one of the biggest problems with dungeoneering right now is the lack of visual communication the game gives when combo opportunities are available. Let’s face it: not everyone is going to be in a voicecomm’d guild run every time they do a dungeon. That’s just not a realistic expectation in this day and age. People that aren’t in voice comm can still strategize before a fight through text chat, and they can still work together through combos and such, but the simple fact is that there is too much going on on the screen. There are too many flashy whiz-bang effects being thrown around, and important information such as “Fire field over here” or “Water field over here” gets lost in all the visual spam. It makes things tougher than they should be.
That said, dungeoneering in general just requires a shift from the old trinity of of tank-heal-damage to the new trinity of support-control-damage. Often a player will overlap somewhere in the middle of two of those roles, but the idea remains the same; you need some people to crank out the damage, some people to keep the party buffed up to maximize that damage as well as survivability, and some people to keep the mobs under control so that they’re not just spamming high-damage attacks constantly and overwhelming the party’s ability to heal/evade.
As an elementalist, I cover the control/support side of that. I run with Scepter/Dagger and spec 10/30/30 air/earth/arcana. My traits and utility skills are based around stacking up might on friendlies, vulnerability on enemies, and reducing mob output via blinds and knockdowns. Now elementalists are squishy, and when I get focused I have no choice but to start running for my life and try to evade — but even in those situations I can still be doing my part for the party, using Scepter 2 in water attunement to drop the ice crystal ahead of my path of travel so that when it goes off, the mob or boss chasing me is in the area and takes the 4 stacks of vulnerability.
There are things you can do even when you’re running, you just have to know what your class can do on the move and multitask it.
Having server rankings in a gametype that can be so heavily influenced by sheer population numbers is a patently silly idea.
It is a true statement, support was touted early on in the development process with even a developer saying he loved his support thief.
At this time support does in fact gain little in the way of drops in WvW.
Oh, you can still play a character geared towards support. You may even love doing that.
Just don’t expect to get rewarded for it. That privilege is reserved for all the mindless AOE spam.
WvWvW in this game will not be worth bothering with until significant major exploits are fixed. Namely being able to server transfer to enemy servers in the matchup to spy and/or supply dump.
As more and more people figure this out, more and more people will stop wasting their time. It is pointless to play a game that your opponents are not playing in good faith.
I guess it’s easiest to do this by element…
Water: Stacking 4 and 3 is a waste, unless you’re specifically spamming skills for the heals when using the healing signet that heals with every spell cast. 4 chills enemies that attack you, 3 chills enemies in a radius around you, so it’s something you’d want to space out normally. Regardless, I typically switch to water late in the fight to provide a buffer while I finish an enemy off, as it’s really only good for keeping your health up and keeping enemies off of you.
Fire: Using 4 before your other fire skills is kind of a waste. Since you’re already in close range, 4 isn’t going to do much to the enemy on its own. What it DOES do is combo extremely nicely into Earth. I use 4 as a “parting shot” before leaving fire to set up..
Earth: 4 is a Blast finisher, doing it inside the ring from 4 will give you (and any nearby allies) 3 stacks of might. Considering using Arcane Wave as well; it does pretty good damage in AoE and can be used at any time — and since it’s also a Blast finisher, you can chain it with 4 inside the ring from Fire’s 4 to get a total of 6 stacks of might for you and your allies instantly. 5 is your best damage as a D/D elementalist, but you have to wind it up — for this I typically use Glyph of Storms, in Earth attunement, to create Sandstorm which spams blind on enemies. Drop it on yourself just before going into 5 to give yourself a buffer.
Air: Honestly, I don’t use air much in PvE except for its utility with my traits. I go in with 4, use 5 to knock things down, hit 3 while I’m in the air (because I’m traited to get boons when I use Aura skills), then switch to Fire or Earth and use their 3 to get back into melee range.
Elementalist is not weak in the sense that it is not viable. It is perfectly viable as a class.
Elementalist is weak in the sense that it requires far more effort and proficiency at the game to get the same results as other classes get with less of both.
Leveling from 1 to 80 and then playing at 80 pretty much entirely with a close friend of mine that plays warrior, our situation has been the same throughout the entire game. I work my butt off switching elements and planning out combos two and three element changes in advance… he spams For Great Justice and hundred blades. We get similar results. He can take hits like a champ, I have to evade for my life as soon as something looks at me funny (yes I use Carrion gear and Earth traits with defensive utilities, it’s not for lack of survivability in the build).
I believe its radius is a bit larger than DT, and it cripples within its radius. It also puts up 10 stacks of bleed, which is a different condition than burn.
1 2