Guild Wars 2

Here is the issue: all classes are not out of the box equally easy to play, which leads to bad players doing far better than they should be doing against even or better skilled players on other classes.

You put low skilled mesmer or thief against an even or slightly greater skilled elementalist (and by skill let’s just say experience with class and gw 2pvp), and the elementalist will lose probably every time. A thief or mesmer can do the exact same sequence against every class they encounter with a higher level of success than an elementalist who tries the same thing.

OP may not like it because he’s convinced he out plays everyone, but I assure you this isn’t the case as some classes have a very strong early advantage as they simply have to understand how their attacks work, whereas several other classes have to learn how other classes attacks work (as well as their own) to be effective against them.

Pistol whip is just hundred blades with a stun, which if hundred blades also had would make it wildly op — but that’s the kick, right? So long as you can free to dodge an ability isn’t OP.

PW didn’t need a damage effect imo, just remove the stun so it can be dodged when used by idiots and the problem is solved.

This is a pretty standard glass cannon build honestly.. and squishy as hell once targeted.

@ Kriet

I literally have no trouble with warriors of any flavor save Axe (either single, or double — the triple axe build gives me nightmares). If a warrior swaps to rifle, the only ability I care about is volley — again, the moment the animation starts I dodge, and take less than 1k damage total.

Same with a thief, it’s like you completely disregard dodge — and pistol is just like rifle in that there is only one move you need to care about.

The difference in our views here comes down to potential, I think. Yes, the abilities you mention are very hard hitting and can potentially win fights. Elementalists do not have an ability cut from the same cloth — but we do have 20 instead of 5, and this allows us to do more things over a shorter period of time. I think a good elementalist needs to know other classes probably moreso than anyone else, because we can really get a lot of milage out of dodge to take away big hits, whereas a dodge against us really doesn’t cost us much as we just shift attunements and carry on.

Necros are in a bad place, but lying about “3v1 in seconds on a warrior 111!11!111” doesn’t help make your point… unless 3 people were afk and therefore all stood in 2 hundred blades which, at best, are 8 seconds apart.

Greatsword is about landing hundred blades, which is multiple swings. Easy in pve, harder in pvp against better players who are looking for it.

Axe is about your eviserate, which is a single hit with a lunge after building full adren.

Personally I find the damage from axe to be far more reliable and is less telegraphed.

The damage of that hit is about stacking crit damage and forcing a crit with full adren, as well as finding the rare target who has not put a single trait point into taking a hit.

I think an eviserate crit would’ve hit you for more.

I disagree, and my warrior is 80.

If you play warrior dps, most go with GS and rely on setting up HB which is easily avoidable and you can counter with strong damage while they put out zero with HB on it’s traited 8 second CD. A bad warrior who stays with GS on a miss will die before GS is up again, a good one will shift to something/shield and block with 5, followed by a stun to create space again, or chain into another HB.

Neither of those are better survivability than what any ele can get just by traiting into water and getting regen or protection/cripple on aura shifts into earth — not to mention the heals and escapes we get by weapon selection alone.

That being said, a really well played eviserate triple axe warrior can be a problem given their 8 second evis, and weapon swap crits with sigil of intell, and how quickittenhey will build adren (I know on my warrior running this is the only time I’ve landed a 10k crit against anyone, and the target was an ele with no toughness). But, again, this build is only a threat from a good player, and does come down to who plays better against their opponent.

I can’t remember the last time I lost to a thief on either my warrior or ele 1v1, the problem most people make with them is not understanding that AEs still hit them when in stealth. The moment one engages you strip off the conditions they place, drop into Earth dagger and 4 to 5, or ice dagger 3 to 2, fire dagger 4 and 3, or lighting dagger 3 and 4 away (or just 5 and knock them away). Point is there are multiple combinations ( and I only listed dagger!) the leave glass cannon thief builds completely exposed.

And if I’m seeing a ton of pistol 3 thief spammers, I’ll swap to a staff build and earth 3 to let them kill themselves, or just mind my end better and dodge them to negate more than half the damage. I think people are caught up in WoW playing where one strong ability means the class is OP, without remember that a well used dodge is there specifically for that.

Downed state 2 is worthless, especially if killed by a melee who is already in stomp range..

Yay, you’re rooted right next to me so you don’t accidentally run off and not stomp me.

The issue with Eles is the same with every class: if you do high damage, you’re made out of paper — and if you can take a hit well, your damage is lower.. and every class complains about the same.

Where the Ele shines is when you don’t go 30 points into any trait line, but spread out and play all your attunements to their strengths. No, earth and water are not powerhouse damage lines — but what they can do is amazing in the context of a fight because we get 20 abilities in any build.. and because of the crazy number of available abilities we can access, people cannot faceroll their keyboard and expect to do well like with a warrior, thief, or guardian who plays a single role based on build. I love my warrior, but on him I play hammer / mace+shield and he’s a CC beast, with lots of self healing. No real damage of note, but I’m great when paired with someone who can. On my ele, however, no one can clear a point like him with earth dagger 4, stability, 5 (huge AOE people will either stand in and take solid damage, or run to get out of thus buying me time). I can leap into the middle of a fight on him to save a team member with lightning dagger 4 (gap close + damage), then 5 (KB + swiftness), attune ice dagger and 3 (3 second AE chill), circle strafe 2 (cone damage + heal allies), then turn on the fire and light everything up to start bringing damage.

The best thing about an ele is that there is no situation to which I cannot bring benefit, which is something I can say is not the case on my other pvp toons who, quite frequently, are just overkill to a fight.

The auto attack would never be the reason for shifting attunements, I’m confused how by making lightning whip better that it makes fire dagger 1 worse.

Lightning has 1 real damage ability, and it’s whip, with the rest showing more utility. Fire has 5 damage abilities with really zero or minimal utility (fire step being arguable).

Personally, I find the change to be great and only adds to the value when lightning attuned.

I always find it curious to ask what class you think is exciting in WvW?

if you can name one, why don’t you play it?

I’m actually surprised someone let this horrible warrior land a HB on them with such a obvious setup.

Warrior WvW is really about weapon/warhorn + longbow.

I actually kind of enjoy standing in the back in my plate and plunking away.

Personally I think the Capt. Hammer build shows an incredibly strong role for the warrior: wildly annoying to multiple foes at the same time, without ever needing to be a damage powerhouse.

My warrior is 80, closing in on 30 from pvp, done all the SM content in the game, etc etc.. and I think you guys are crazy. If you want survivability, we have it in spades. Want damage? We can put out an insane amount. The problem is that this isn’t WoW, and you can’t have both to the extent most people want it — seems you want to be unkillable while spamming hundred blades and doing 10k a pop (which, btw, we can do in a single eviserate against cloth if you trait and gear properly for it).

We have insane damage and pressure with cliched HB spamming, with no effort. You can be one of the most mobile builds in the game with a traited warhammer and shouts, you can bunker up and by an unkillable CC god with hammer, mace+shield (Taurgrims Capt. Hammer build is downright amazing).

I can’t find a real flaw in warriors, and the trade offs are, imo, incredibly well done.

I’m going to go with: because most of our broken stuff is annoying, not really play impacting. Warriors are in a very good place still.

I love watching you dagger guys, mostly because I can’t do it. I need S/d range to do anything of value — probably because my brain can’t do the attunement switching as fast as you need.

Go ahead and post your log comparison showing that peak dps between the two classes heavily, and consistently favors warriors.

I’ll wait here for you to post the data you obviously have.

My quote function isn’t working.

Anyway, I don’t understand this:

“And if specced/geared/played well all other classes shine even more than us…”

What is this based on? Non-existant damage logs? Anecdotal ‘grass is greener’ observations? The problem is that every class thinks they are weaker than X, and has literally no evidence by which to prove the statement.

I’m not clear why anyone would choose GW2 for the pve.. It’s like wanting to fly commerical airlines because you like peanuts.

Raka – it doesn’t matter what you say or show, the fact is that Elementalist is not X class, and therefore worse. The damage is fine, the utility is fine, the mobility is fine (save for the earth dagger 5 ability, which I routinely kill myself while trying to cast).

The only thing that routinely surprises me with my elementalist is how fast I can take damage at times, and how there doesn’t seem to be a fundamental trade off on any level for wearing light armor and having lower base HP.

Great video — but I can’t help but mention in that first fight the laughably bad GS warrior who can’t figure out how HB works to you see him off in corners just swinging away at nothing.

I would highlight how long the game has been out, and that this class is more than playable.

Prioritization of issues is important, and I don’t find any class to be so broken as to be unplayable and needing to be moved to the front of the line.

stefanplc.5234:

You are giving your party members a second heal. Most professions have a 20-30 seconds CD heal that heals them for 4-6k. You give them another heal pretty much with your shouts. If that alone, excluding the buffs is not worth it, then you’re doing your math wrong. You also remove conditions, you res people faster, buff people for extra damage, something like 15-20% with “On My Mark” + “For Great Justice”… just a lot of advantages overall

If you want to have a great experience in PvE as a warrior I highly suggest a toughness gear composition with 0/0/30/30/10 (the 10 points in Discipline so shouts give you adrenaline). You want to use your mace/hammer for stuns to reduce the damage people are taking but then you also want to get your adrenaline back as fast as possible so you can get your passive heal. Use the signet heal too for PvE.

Seems like more bang for the buck to spend the 10 for the 20% signet cool down reduction, so that you only have 9 seconds of downtime between signet of rage uses.

Yojack’s “min/max” (dumbest name ever since there is no comparisons or damage meters) is a fairly poor output pve build. Sword is lower base damage as it relies on condition damage to beef it up, has no vulnerability, no weakness, and if someone else in group is also condition damage it still only allows a single stack up to a certain value .

I would question anyone trying to main a war horn in group dungeon play because the damage sucks and the war horn abilities don’t do much for pve ( consider your 2,3,4,5 abilities all offer little value in a dungeon where you need damage)

That being said, you’d probably do significantly more damage standing back and using your rifle… and stay safer while doing it.

Can heal just fine so long as you have + healing gear to match the build. The shouts heal over 2k a pop, use a 30% to heal teammates offhand, etc etc.

It’s ghetto, but works.

I’ve been playing Capt. Hammer since I first saw the video, only difference being I went hammer, mace/shield for the lunging stun and +90 toughness.

Good stuff.

It’s AOE, you can dodge while it’s going off, and it’s a crazy adren builder.

No warrior who uses it is under the impression it’s amazing damage, but that is not the point of using it.

The more you play other classes, the more you’ll see they all have to make the same sacrifices — but keep in mind that melee will generally hit harder per hit than ranged, since they have to, you know, melee in melee range.

To have high dps, you can’t take a hit. If you shrug off hits, you don’t have higher dps. Now there are caveats to this, and little subtle differences, but the general rule stands.

Caliber.2987:

Edit: Also I see no feasible way to hit “100 % crit” with your stat allocation. Can you elaborate?

There are two variants to this: Yojacks 1h sword build can get pretty close to 100% crit (amulet, 25 in the crit stat, +10% chance to crit with sword talent), but the damage is low and the crit is used to proc heals from the sigil of greater blood. Then eviserate builds can have 100% crit on eviserate and hit some wild damage, but these are done via a sigil (sigil of intelligence) that gives crit on next hit when swapped, rather than an overall 100% crit chance across the board.

I LOVE when people think they are tanky, and use banners.

You do realize the other team can just pick them up and run off, right?

The problem is that a warrior can take damage in these builds, but cannot recover HP well or do damage well in higher toughness builds. It means you can stand there and hope your team comes before you die, and most classes will kill you 1v1 because of your lack of damage.

I think Yojacks build, in this thread, offers a viable build that focuses on mobility via warhorn — but every build that has respectable damage has to trade the ability to take a hit (and recover from it) for it.

Sadly in the current game, a guardian does what the OP wants far better… especially since they can do it with higher damage, which is certainly a plus in pvp.

I’m not sure why people are asking about pve here — you can look at the build at see very quickly it’s built around mobility as opposed to damage.

So, the answer is play whatever you like, but this build is not remotely optimized for pve.

Fun build, but it struggles against heavy burst builds.

I dueled about everyone I could find, and while GS warriors are wildly predictable, triple axe/eviserate builds chewed through me because I couldn’t really exploit their lack of defensive CDs because of the wild burst they were capable of.

Obviously in normal pvp situations I could just run away — but it’s certainly something to be aware of in that your lack of damage against a class with heavy burst can put you in a bad way quickly.

The only thing I want to add is that if you’re getting mauled by a warrior with HB, you screwed up. Dodging the charge they HAVE to land to get off HB in it’s duration is about the easiest thing you can do, aside from just walking out of it when they try and use it w/ charge down.

I have no trouble with GS warriors, but the ones with shields do tend to thwack me about.

Wow, that video was something.. especially the warrior trying to HB with no stun/KB setup.

I don’t really think beating bad players makes the point you were looking to make.

Very new Ele here — so ymmv.

I first rolled a warrior to 80. Great class, and I don’t ever play with a greatsword because good players make you look like an idiot every time you try HB — but the play was very intuitive (which I can now do to any warrior trying to setup HB). Wasn’t difficult to find several builds that all work for different reasons, and in the end I went with a shout build that heals and is incredibly tanky. Good fun.

Played a few classes, and started an Ele. Really fun in pvp, but holy crap can do I die quickly in situations where I take really ANY damage. My damage output is slow to build up, but good once I get there assuming I’m, you know, still alive. So pve, if anyone cares, the damage is slow and could use some tuning. Now, in unorganized pvp, the class is a little rough. I like the idea of support for sure, but the problem is that unless you have other players who understand your support roll, and potentially build into playing off it, you really lose a lot of value quickly — people build for their deathmatch play, leave you on your own, and realy we get to pick burst fire damage based off arcana/signets, or more durability and weaker damage output.

So far, my real gut feeling on the class is that it simply can do too many different things, and in trade for that it doesn’t do any of them particularly well (well being subjective). Playing as an ele is challenging, and I have yet to really find how to shine.. it’s fun, but frustrating. Inversely playing as a warrior (axe/shield // rifle) I run into two types of else: glass cannons I can wipe the floor with, or ones that are really good at running away.. i’ve never really seen one that was a threat to me 1v1, or made the difference in a group fight they were a part of. Admittedly though, this could be just a function of bad players.. but videos with mad editing of 100’s of fights for 3 minutes of footage aside, I’d really like to see a good ele from the other side just to understand how one can be effective.