Guild Wars 2

Nokaru.7831:

Was he level 80?

Sub 80 can’t open fractal lfg, not like lvl 80 is even needed for low tier.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Khisanth.2948:

The 18s Ley Run video was pretty helpful for the path to go.

Cool; that’s worth my taking another look.

However, like I say, I typically can’t follow someone else’s path as shown in a video. I have trouble translating what I see there into where I’m supposed to turn or when. It works okay for most JPs, where I have as much time as I need to orient myself; it’s not good for adventures, because they are timed. (Although, I will sometimes just go far enough in to find a tricky spot and practice that and restart.)

Anyhow, my point is: even people who are handicapped in some way for these type of challenges can eventually succeed (at least, if they are otherwise able to play the game). It’s just harder and takes longer.

That’s the cost of being human. People also need to realise they can spend their gaming time doing things they like instead of getting frustrated over a skin.

edit: OP, you could try the longer term memory approach. Spend time on the ley line challenge, watch vids, spend more time running it. Then forget about it, for a week or two.

When you try again, it’ll be much easier.

They used to cost less to craft before, I doubt many think the price is fair especially with +5AR.

fishball.7204:

Gimli.9461:

I have to say that after I started raiding my rotations/builds have improved drastically so t4 fractals aren’t a problem now

So if you’re having a lot of trouble you want to look up raid builds and try those out. Check out qT benchmarks on reddit, go into that golem test room check your dps.

For snowblind good party comp is important (I run dragon hunter for the icy part for reclects /pulls) and I think for end boss if you have a condi Viper class fully geared you’ll kill him much faster than if you bring all power classes

Problem isn’t really my own stuff though. I pugged T4 snowblind yesterday we had a p/p thief with 4 signets. I didn’t want to be a filthy elitist and kick but we wiped for 25 minutes on the first bit and yeah :/. Once we took another dude who wasn’t totally trash we cleared it easily.

Most people seem to have the swamps of the mists mindset and refuse to do anything that improves their game play or change their build. I asked people to food up/ oil up and take some utils for projectile block but the thief just ignored me and kept his 4 signet p/p =_=

/salt

edit: Oh and the final fight is easy it’s just super freakin long/boring because he has a lot of health. Reworking it to make it harder and not just HP sponging would be nice

Since the selectable maps vs 4 random were introduced, the general skill lvl in fractals dropped a lot, and nobody played dungeons when gold was nerfed so people had no need to improve.

forum bug

From my experience in average pug in T3/T4, it’s a relief not to see power elems and guards/DH in the party. With the rise in popularity for ranged DH, party support like reflects are becoming rare to see.

I don’t want to play my own power ele in parties like these, seriously my ele can’t facetank hits to pick up downed DH and others again and again.

So I made a viper necro, despite strongly disliking anything condi, I do appreciate the massive survivabilty boost, self buffing abilities + it’s easy to deal with some instabilities. It might be hard to believe for anyone promoting zerker only, lots of people have problems deal with condis on them. Just like they have problem pressing spacebar on molten duo and so on.

The scrubbiness in pugs is real and it’s misleading to tell people to go full zerker for stress free T4s.

I got so many alts I still haven’t got 20 slot bags for all so yeah.

Great introduction for new players to gw2, first trap switch not working, burrow before Kasha has bugged lizard respawn …

anet needs to fix broken stuff even if you can dodge through it or whatever

120 q’s on fsp + uw on reset, 40 sunday morning. I like more people on the map but it’s kinda impossible to get to eb sometimes.

I generally prefer toughness as it makes your heals more efficient and lowers any direct dmg you take. Vitality is a nice security cushion but with no toughness, it’s chopped away fast.

But for raids you want to have as little toughness as possible so it wouldn’t mess up with boss agro.

btw if you want to play condi then I am not sure if taking the role of a healer is a good idea. You apply condis in fire/earth mostly and everytime you’d hop into water you’d lower your dmg a lot. Direct dmg healer ele in raids can at least use fresh air and squeeze some dmg in between heals.

Or use the cc skills on staff, especially useful when you deal with a pack of trash mobs, earth staff 4,2 and lava font

Staff is a ranged weapon but it is excellent in melee as well, the guy above wrote it in more detail ^ ^

Dinosaurs.8674:

What class is “best” to play really depends on what the group you’re in needs. The best option for raiding is honestly to just have multiple classes available. Even when I’m doing training runs for raids, it’s a huge pain in the kitten when someone has only one class, because often that class is really good in some fights and really bad in others (engi, ele, and necro are the worst for this) and they wind up learning little because they go down a lot or don’t have a real role in the encounter. I could rant for hours about ele-only players “learning” to raid against vale guardian.

From my experience when squishies die a lot in a party, it’s either 1. lack of personal skill 2. other party members not doing what they should do, ie heals from druid in raids on Vale. Sure the squishy could roll a heavy class to reduce the impact of others’ bad gameplay, but it’s just a soft cushion vs solution to where the problem comes from. So if you do training raids, don’t just look at what class dies most, look at why they die.

come on don’t tell him how to play

his IPHIW is more important than everyone’s else IPHIW

TorquedSoul.8097:

baylock.1703:

I have noticed more and more that zergs chase me across half of a map whenever I’m roaming I have raven gotten few offensive whispers from enemy that I’m playing wvw wrong …… what has happened?

There are some that feel that everyone should play the game exactly the same way. And when they see a roamer running free and not on tag like god intended, they get mad and zerg the roamer down.

I think it’s more the fact that a lot of zerglings don’t dare roaming themselves so they join the security of a big group. If you lose on your own/small group, the blame is on an individual, if a zerg looses a fight, people don’t feel personally responsible for that.

Yea sure some want everyone to play the same way or some think roamers take spot that would be used by a zergling. But hate whispers/siege on corpses etc is a personal thing, it’s a little payback for destroying zergling’s security.

Asrat.2645:

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Asrat.2645:

Depends on what specific problem you are talking about, there are two I know of:
-Cant advertise the party at all. Usually at least one of your party members can. If not it should work if you leave fotm and do it from lions arch.
-Cant change the description. Have to advertise the party first, then change it. If people join a fresh 4-man 77,67,56 without waiting a few seconds, its their own fault.

There are also parties in the lfg that are advertised, but you cant join. I dont know where that comes from, if it still exists or how you can fix it.

How is it their fault? Often fracts parties are filled so fast that waiting few seconds gets me nowhere. Quite a few parties don’t even bother changing the description.

Well. Actually its Anets fault. But if you are joining a party with a bugged lfg so hastely they didnt get a chance to change it, you can hardly blame the party, can you?

And no reason to blame those who joined if they join a party with lfg that matches the content with lfg category. Sure it’s obvious the lfg wasn’t edited if it’s stuff like “up/fw” in a fractal lfg so it’s logical to wait. But “p1” that they never changed everytime they lfg for a new path? or “2/10/x” in low tier fract lfg while they are going for 50+? That’s just parties too lazy to edit.

While lfg is less “toxic” now, it also takes way too long to fill certain parties. If I dungeon with guildies, the party size is sometimes just 2-3 people and sometimes we can’t get full party. We even duo/trio the path with lfg up and nobody joins us. By no means my guild is super good in pve, we are a bunch of noobs so it does take a lot longer for us to finish the path with less people.

Seeing how my guildies do in dungeons, that’s why I think the dungeons are better than raids for people to learn simply because they can’t do raids at all and if they can’t play in a certain content then they don’t learn from it.

Using dodges for dps rotation? I play with people who don’t even have full exotics, let alone knowing what the optimal dps rotation for their classs is. Even when they try raids, they are so bad skill wise/inexperienced that they give up soon. Abandoning dungeons is a kick in a butt for casuals, not the elitists even if the casuals don’t get kicked from parties so often now.

Asrat.2645:

Depends on what specific problem you are talking about, there are two I know of:
-Cant advertise the party at all. Usually at least one of your party members can. If not it should work if you leave fotm and do it from lions arch.
-Cant change the description. Have to advertise the party first, then change it. If people join a fresh 4-man 77,67,56 without waiting a few seconds, its their own fault.

There are also parties in the lfg that are advertised, but you cant join. I dont know where that comes from, if it still exists or how you can fix it.

How is it their fault? Often fracts parties are filled so fast that waiting few seconds gets me nowhere. Quite a few parties don’t even bother changing the description.

Horrorscope.7632:

I haven’t seen this elitism in terms of attitude. Are there speed runs? Yes, but all games with instances have that, even the open world bosses are mob speed runs.

The so called toxicity/elitism left dungeons with the gold nerf. I alt a lot so my low ap account got kicked 2-3 a day before rewards nerf, now people are so desperate to get full party, they accept anyone. I don’t think I’ve been kicked from dungeons 3 times since the nerf.

Nightstormer.8526:

TL;DR: Re: Nike – Dungeon nerfs are bad but raid emphasis can ultimately produce more, better players.

.

Emphasis on only one type of content generates a player skill gap: those who are carried by others in dungeons or spam 111 in open world >>>>>>>>>>>>>> people who raid.

With dungeons going down the drain, the skill gap will only wider. Dungeons were perfect training ground.

Wolfric.9380:

Scepter is a combination of burst and sustained condi damage at 900 range. This is a bit weired and the weak auto attacks let it fall behind dagger. You burst and then are in kitten because if traited for burst you can´t use the condi auto from earth to a useful extent and the other autos are also weak. If traited for condi you get a weak condi spec because you now have a large number of power skills but are speced for condi …. So if you go scepter there are two options for me : fresh air zerker/maurauder or a hybrid damage build. I like the hybrid and am one of the rarer eles often using sage in PvP. For PvE a burn build with scepter should also work.

pve burn build is quite good vs single target enemies and since it’s only burn that needs any duration, it’s fairly easy to get 100% (45% runes, 20% smoldering sigil, 20% fire trait, 16% food) without viper but wouldn’t use it outside HoT maps/few special bosses like abdo or CoE 2 husk.

CrimsonNeonite.1048:

One Month is normal I think, once I stole a whole month of Aegis from a Guard, thanks to sigil of Absorption. Thieves don’t usually have the luxury of full duration boon steal, apart from S/D LS.

Good to know to it steals full duration, for some reason I thought it gives only some short default boon dur when stolen.

edit: any icd?

FogLeg.9354:

LilBiM.3581:

What I am trying to say is that is sending an email to x address really the optimal way to solve this issue?

The optimal way would be adding real GMs to the game who actually monitor all activities and insta-ban all such people.

We had many of these threads about year ago when hackers were active in lower EU tiers. It took several months to get rid of them, and even then the quickest way looked to be having lots of noise in Reddit. Most threads about hackers in specific servers, with links to proofs, videos and screenshots, got deleted from these forums anyway.

Too bad for the game anet sends in GMs only when people make countless forums threads about hacking players. If GMs were present in wvw, they would respond to any reports much faster and the players themselves wouldn’t hack as often. Only an idiot would do something like that knowing there is a gm around. The fact that I saw lately even high wvw ranks use 3rd party programs, tells me that some people got fed up after seeing hackers and decided to roll with it too.

Maybe it’s lag on my side but the last 2 incidents ended up with party porting to lab when there was 1 no, 1 yes voted.

Anyway, this button totally kittens me off cos after you spend ages with a party, some kittenlord decides we all need to suffer consequences of his inability to dodge and try again. I normally leave the party right away cos nothing is worse than quitters. Once I was too slow to release my anger by leaving and I saw in party chat “so lets try again”

lolol lol
/cry

Astralporing.1957:

The real problem so far was level 48. The fight just lasts so long with Anomaly having all buffs all of the time that platforms being permanently destroyed in phase 2 become a real problem. Boon stripping doesn’t really work. Boon corrupt might, but then boon corrupt builds are generally useless in pve outside this instability.

I recently tried (not thau but other boon on crit maps) corrupt build. Would maybe work if more people had boon corrupt builds but if 4 are regular zerker builds, 1 boon cor doesn’t do much cos those 4 just reapply those boons really quickly.

I don’t play this map in higher lvls so this is what works for me in unexperienced parties.
1. I tell them not to attack till I buff them, to take ranged wep and some pets.
2. When party has might stacks, I run to boss screaming so others would follow me.
3. We dps like crazy.
4. Those that are blind or don’t listen to cute asura npc telling them to move their butt die to the first falling platforms.
5. Time to range and kill others by running to them when beam is on me.
6. Spawn earth elemental when eveyryone is dead and/or things get steamy.
7. Enjoy the scenery while elemental is tanking, throw in some autos.
8. Boss dead and everyone in party is planning to make elem their next char.

ps: added a bit of flavour but that’s how generally unexp fights go in thaumanova. save your pet till you are either the only one alive or when boss is low. Pet makes the fight easy.

earth shield ofc, the only stuff good for a non bunker ele in zerg vs zerg is extra vitality/toughness to run away with.

Norbe.7630:

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Norbe.7630:

i one thought of creating a thread here called wall of shame
so everyone can post vids there for their hacking sightings
….but hackers get violent reaction so i didnt created that thread lol

Many reports are false, either on purpose cos the reporting player is seeing too much red, or he has no clue what he just saw. Anet should ban confirmed hackers and also anyone who reports everyone left and right. The latter would add plenty of names to your wall of shame.

30 seconds to mars, invulnerability mode (still unsolved)
https://youtu.be/jhbjG8lOKao?t=44

The last time the game didn’t update the location of a downed body, I ran back to where I got him downed first and spammed aa. Worked like a charm despite my gw2 client showing the invul icon on. Perhaps what you have on your vid is something different but it does look like what I saw in wvw couple of times.

Obtena.7952:

No more dungeons doesn’t not result in reduced playtime unless you don’t substitute for other content. Anet does not tell you what content you will do; you decide that.

Your logic is absolutely perfect.

These days I substitute the amazing mmo experience by rp’ing in LA.

or I just log out

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

• LS Migraine without bugging out

I still have nightmares about ! stacks of burn lol.

ShinigamiPL.4086:

After 10 days of playing as a thief(s) i have some mixed up feeling. Yeah – class is great, traveling with shortbow is fast and i really enjoy finding new shortcuts with teleports. Also as mentioned above – skipping the enemies, opening guarded chests is so convenient! Definitely its gonna be my new character for pve. But unfortunately i found out that its not easy to pick appropriate race for this shadow master. I started as norn female (i admit that t3 cult armor was main reason) and it all seemed fine until i heard the voice of my lady (i was so suprised that i even googled voice actor for norn female) . My thief looked like goddess, but her voice didnt match at all. Then i decided to give a try for my old thief who was created long time ago just to check skills for pvp and was moved to alternative banking department (aka storage ) This time voice was nice but size in jump puzzles or HoT content became a problem. From my perspective I needed to jump from the air and i needed to land in the air, so sorry asura, you go back to storage role. Currently im almost sure that all this new experience will not be fulfilled – charr male seems to be only option – so i will have exactly the same as my Charrzooka-engi…

lol, my very first character in gw2 was a norn female thief. I even went for the biggest body size available. Her chest armour would hide two asuras but you woudn’t even notice :P

Norbe.7630:

i one thought of creating a thread here called wall of shame
so everyone can post vids there for their hacking sightings
….but hackers get violent reaction so i didnt created that thread lol

Many reports are false, either on purpose cos the reporting player is seeing too much red, or he has no clue what he just saw. Anet should ban confirmed hackers and also anyone who reports everyone left and right. The latter would add plenty of names to your wall of shame.

William Bradley Knight.2609:

I must suck at gliding because I have yet to get the Flights of Fancy achievement. Somehow I always get hit, although there a couple of times that I never noticed getting hit and still didn’t get it, so maybe there is a bug.

if you got hit during updrafts and then died, the death doesn’t reset the flights of fancy achiev.

Drakz.7051:

Good thing I don’t care about Legendary weapons xD

Same with me but I still want them to add legy weps to the game, I might even like one and try to grind for it. If I won’t like any, I can still laugh at guildies grinding elder logs like crazy in orr.

the fact that i don’t need billion macros just to use skills

I quite like the distinction between classes and armour weights.

bladex.9502:

Quality bait thread m8

Exactly what I though when I saw OP’s msg, the fact that other guildies including you rushed to this thread simply leaves me thinking all OP wanted to do is to get some flaming over lowbies vs pugs while showing off with the vid.

Reminds of that other thread a while a go, lvl 40 something ele soloing AC p3 cos people normally learn all burrows while pugging on their 400ap account.

I find the warhorn sounds rather refreshing in comparison to all majestil magic sounds eles do, always makes me laugh especially when I play with asura midget.

Ele is amazingly versatile, excellent dmg and party support too but you need to learn the class and how to use it in different encounters.

You might actually find thief easier than some other classes, use IP and get big heals while running around in full dps gear.

I haven’t seen people trashing thieves in pugs for dungeons/fractals for long time. With dungeon gold nerf, the pugs’ expectations are so low that they are willing to stay in almost any party, even if the thief has no idea about skips/breakbar, let alone pathing, most will ignore it.

Smurfland [hc/hP] all you can expect are arguments on why others don’t want to pug with their lowbies or low aps while they solo stuff. Magic.

forum bug

Simonoly.4352:

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

There have been times when condition builds were plentiful but this is not one of those times.

So much this. Conditions in WvW have never been an issue outside of those unfortunate 1v1s where you don’t have enough cleansing. When a battle begins to scale up in numbers and diversity of classes with copious AoE cleanse, the conditions users become almost completely superfluous. Anyway, condi food was already nerfed so nothing else needs to be changed.

The real issue in WvW right now is in fact direct damage or specifically, ranged damage.

Condi builds still have dire, which creates a situation where one build deals high dmg to and mitigates most of dmg from another build. No need for retraiting, changing skills, dodges or blocks.

That added to the fact that bigger groups (guild raids or zergs) have less support guardians these days and no wonder why condi dmg is becoming popurlar even in these fights.

Some of you in gold tier are oversensitive to anyone who not running right on top of a tag. The other day I wanted to pick some items from TP, no queue in eb so hopped in and in the short time it takes to run from spawn to tp npc and take stuff from him, one guy got almost a full page of chat qq’ing about spawn afkers (2 guys).

Did you take her scalp as a trophy?

Decaying Seart.6793:

And even now I have the toughness issue because I’m running rabid trinkets. Some folks told me that rampager is better than rabid. I don’t know exatcly how the condi+Power damage is calculated (too lazy to do the math), but again, my toughness is not so high now so the tank should be able to easily surpass me. I could still fulfill a tank job as well with some boosts from the “flesh of master” trait. But sadly, NO CHANCE AT ALL. PUGS ARE LOOKING FOR EXPERIENCED>

Well, depending on the class that was tanking in raids you joined, that tank could be a full viper necro with flesh of master for tanking, so ofc your rabid trinkets would mess up the agro. Rampager is an easy-to-get option to sinister when starting raids as they don’t interfere with agro.

PyrateSilly.4710:

They did not “nerf” dungeons. All they did was slightly reduce the gold gotten. The rewards are still the same, the dungeons are the same.

On the other hand they do now have the new 10 man dungeon/raid available.

Friends that used to run dungeons with me now ask me why I run them with gold nerfed.

They barely ever do this content now.

They play raids even less.

I would like EU version too. I got full asc tempest/thief on my main.

TexZero.7910:

Thaddeus.4891:

TexZero.7910:

You must not be reading the same thread i am then, where in people are indeed asking for them to gut the raids by adding an easy mode.

ADDING an easy mode. You still have the normal mode, which is as hard as the current raid. The raid would still be 100% the same. There is just another mode that is easier with less reward.

Ever heard of subtraction by addition ?

That’s exactly what adding an Easy mode does.
Since you like to use games and game principals as examples i’ll use one you should be familiar with.

Have you ever wondered why as you climb in ranks for PvP your time to play becomes longer and longer ? It’s because as you climb the selection pool gets thinner and thinner. The same can be said in this case when add a mode to Raids which already has (if you believe the fantasy numbers) only 5% of the player base doing it.

Now does adding an easy mode actually add to people doing the current content ? No. Pretty straightforward.

It would add people to the current content as some of the less skilled could learn mechanics in easy mode and then move to normal difficulty. If people from normal mode would move to easy one, that’s a problem caused by rewards, not the difficulty itself.

Coulter.2315:

RyanCid.9270:

Yeah but with the easy mode you can learn how to play raid properly since the boss and the mechanics are the same

So you think people dodge boss attacks that don’t kill them? The reason people learn the mechanics is because they suffer when they don’t.

If none of the bosses’ attacks hurt you (being easy mode) you won’t learn.

We don’t need to split the Raid Team up… The Raid does not need an easy mode.

I found it way more time effective to spend some time on boss encounter using “easy mode”, ie tankish gear, that simply allowed me to learn the mechanics without wiping on that boss to a single attack. This is especially true when learning to solo some of the content as a single fail means a complete reset. Once I learned the animations and timings, going full dmg gear was easy.

Not saying everyone needs this but a lot people do. Not everyone’s skill is amazing and when there are other constraints added to investment to learn new stuff, a lot of these not so amazing players end up not learning at all and they stay from the harder content completely.

msalakka.4653:

Álways roam with a necro if possible. This way if things go kittens up, you can pop swiftness and slip away while the necro takes one for the team.

lol so true, getting away with a necro is rather challenging. for the fights itself tho, necros with guards are really nice or necro with supportish tempest (used to roam in this combo and it was really good).

Tobias Steele.2071:

Tiffany.8576:

I think WvW (large scale combat situations) actually requires HoT the least among all gamemodes to be effective, at least for several classes.

Traditional staff elementalist can still run fire/air/arcane or fire/water/arcane and have very good personal survivability with triple cantrips and Evasive Arcana even when running glassy to allow them to output very high DPS in addition to providing water fields, etc. and being able to blast them with earth dodge rolls. Overloads are often not easy to get off in large scale fights as you have to be closer to melee range and you’re very susceptible to being interrupted anyway. I personally prefer running a high DPS build (fire/air – bolt to the heart/arcane) in a large scale group fight setup. Tempest can be used for more organized group configurations utilizing aurashare with proper party compositions but certainly isnt’t a requirement to be useful as an ele, or even optimal in many group situations.

Zerk power wells backline Necro is still a very strong build and one I desire more, more often than not, than reapers. In this pirate ship/ranged meta the traditional backline necro with standard death shroud is more desirable than melee reapers and one I wish more necros still used. Necros are better as a backline class than in the frontline as reapers do not offer that much in terms of party boons or other utility. I’d rather guardians and warriors in my frontline, with zerk necros wrecking things with wells from afar.

A standard stance warrior build without berserker seems more optimal in the frontline to me than anything using the berserker line. A sword/warhorn + hammer warrior with warbanner using tactics/discipline/defense is perfect and adding berserker would actually make the build worse. Berserker is only really useful in niche backline gunflame builds mostly used for pinsniping.

A traditional frontline guardian build is still a solid choice, although for guardians the Dragonhunter line, it could be argued, does have a place in frontline builds as well as specific builds utilizing longbow for coordinated CC bursts.

Obviously roaming is a completely different story and the elite specializations certainly shine much more when building for 1v1 or small scale scenarios, but for general WvW large scale fights I would consider some core builds stronger and more meta than their elite counterparts as I outlined.

Bingo! Someone here actually understands wvw. This is your best answer so far op. Unless you roam, the classes listed above are 100% viable without HOT. Now having more choices is always better but honestly the players saying you can’t play the game mode properly without it have no idea what they’re talking about.

Base PU mes is still a pain in the backside to fight if you roam, but in general having HOT does matter more for that playstyle.

OP asked about (dis)advantage not viability.

Magira.6390:

I have leveled now 7 Elite over WvW. Everything as a solo Roamer. For none of activities for Roamer it needs the elite. I can NOTHING better after I have the elite. For Zerger is may be different, but that is not my part and uninteresting to me.

The difference is more noticable in small scale rather than in zerg.

Tiffany.8576:

I think WvW (large scale combat situations) actually requires HoT the least among all gamemodes to be effective, at least for several classes.

Traditional staff elementalist can still run fire/air/arcane or fire/water/arcane and have very good personal survivability with triple cantrips and Evasive Arcana even when running glassy to allow them to output very high DPS in addition to providing water fields, etc. and being able to blast them with earth dodge rolls. Overloads are often not easy to get off in large scale fights as you have to be closer to melee range and you’re very susceptible to being interrupted anyway. I personally prefer running a high DPS build (fire/air – bolt to the heart/arcane) in a large scale group fight setup. Tempest can be used for more organized group configurations utilizing aurashare with proper party compositions but certainly isnt’t a requirement to be useful as an ele, or even optimal in many group situations.

Zerk power wells backline Necro is still a very strong build and one I desire more, more often than not, than reapers. In this pirate ship/ranged meta the traditional backline necro with standard death shroud is more desirable than melee reapers and one I wish more necros still used. Necros are better as a backline class than in the frontline as reapers do not offer that much in terms of party boons or other utility. I’d rather guardians and warriors in my frontline, with zerk necros wrecking things with wells from afar.

A standard stance warrior build without berserker seems more optimal in the frontline to me than anything using the berserker line. A sword/warhorn + hammer warrior with warbanner using tactics/discipline/defense is perfect and adding berserker would actually make the build worse. Berserker is only really useful in niche backline gunflame builds mostly used for pinsniping.

A traditional frontline guardian build is still a solid choice, although for guardians the Dragonhunter line, it could be argued, does have a place in frontline builds as well as specific builds utilizing longbow for coordinated CC bursts.

Obviously roaming is a completely different story and the elite specializations certainly shine much more when building for 1v1 or small scale scenarios, but for general WvW large scale fights I would consider some core builds stronger and more meta than their elite counterparts as I outlined.

I agree with guards and necros, but for ele, still I see the elite as miles away ahead of old spec, in both zerg and roaming. The new heal is massive in comparison to old heals, that kitten thing heals allies almost as much as old heals heal the ele. Often I had to slot ether renewal for that condi cleanse, tbh I hate that heal, super obvious animation with long looooong channel. Random cc would kitten me up, in a fight with a conscious mesmer, I couldn’t use ether renewal at all.

Now, wash the pain away heals tons and I barely ever get interrupted. I don’t need the condi cleanse from ether renewal anymore because I have water overload. The stab on overloads helps a ton, sure won’t do miracle in middle of zerg bomb fest but ele shouldn’t be there anyway.

Dps overloads are amazing. I don’t use them in melee, I use them to kill that pesky thief that decided to kill our backline, I use the fire “spin to win” overload on low HP players or downed, fire fields everywhere, vanilla ele can’t compare.