Guild Wars 2

Aether McLoud.1975:

Um Signet of Earth immobilzes for 3 seconds, and water chills for 4. I have no idea where you get these numbers from.

I got them from in game.

You should try it sometime.

Lately I’ve been running with a Conditimentalist build. This build calculator hasn’t been updated in a while so things like Signets and Traits are out of date (missing 90 Toughness and 20% bleed duration).

1. Diamond Skin is 100% worthless and you should never, ever go with it. The 10% additional condition damage is vastly outpaced by the passives maintained with Written in Stone. I honestly can’t even imagine what they could add here that would be better than maintaining 190 Toughness, Condition Removal 1/10s, and 25% run speed.

2. Signets are !@#$ing amazing. It’s a lot of passive gains you always keep on you that play into every part of a Condition build. One of the biggest problems playing as a Staff Elementalist or even a S/D Elementalist is a lot of our damage is avoidable because the lines that deal this ground based AOE have no way of stopping people for any length of time (chill, snare, immobilize, etc).

Signet of Earth comes with a massive 5 second Immobilize (4s without food). That’s enough to land anything you want in the game. Signet of Water also has around a 7 second Chill (6s without food). That’s a lot of Chill to instantly put on an opponent and often times can be used to catch up or use it to get them to use their condition clear before you use Signet of Earth. Signet of Air is awesome as a Stun Break and it was one of the biggest things lacking pre-patch. All of these are on short 30 second cool downs giving you a lot of CC on demand.

3. The whole Burning/Bleed thing isn’t as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of this has to deal with Attunement management and the weapon you use. All our sources of Bleed and Burn are fairly spammable in Fire or Earth so if they end up removing one chances are you’re still in the other to keep reapplying them. There’s no condition management in the game that can keep up with you spamming a bleed every half second with Stone Shards. Also really don’t undervalue the additional conditions we get in the form of Blind, Chill or Immobilize. When most people are Chilled their first instinct is to break that Chill and they will look to use their condition removal to break it (which again even if they do most condition removal tools are on similar cool downs to our Signets).

4. The biggest argument against Condition based builds is that direct damage oriented builds apply their damage instantly rather than having to wait to do their full damage. I can’t really argue against that point but I would point out that different builds excel at different things. For one I built in some Power into my build so I can get the full use out of things like the Dragon’s Tooth Fire combo (which is easy to land with Signet of Earth). For two I have a much easier time of things with stealth rogues because Condition damage keeps ticking without a target. I would also argue that raw damage have an advantage if only because their damage isn’t capped where as Conditions are debuffs. If you got a super weak Burn on the target from another source you end up having to wait till yours applies real damage. Bleeds stacks are a pain when another Condition player is in your group in PvE. Those are just real issues with a Condition based spec for any character type.

Honestly the biggest advantages of using Curtain to yank people off the walls are:

1. The AOE doesn’t even register cause it goes on the side of the wall so the people up top are clueless of what’s about to happen.

2. It’s an AOE pull.

Both of these are still true, the only difference is you won’t guaranteed catch someone who’s running around along a wall like a jackrabbit anymore.

Bolt to Heart too strong.

Linnael.1069:

Burning and Bleeding duration can both be capped out with only 20 in fire. Going 30 in both fire and earth is asking to get eaten alive by any decent burst build before your conditions actually do anything.

This is all on the player. In my build I have 1726 Toughness, 2646 armor and 18845 HP with rock barrier on. I’ve run other builds with less and survive both in smaller engagements and large group engagements. I find the extra power, condition duration, and might stacks I gain (5 from using all 5 fire skills before rotating out due to Puissance) to be worth more than any paltry amount of survivability I’d pick up going 10 more into Arcane or Water instead of Fire. This means, if I’m standing on my Fire field, I’m usually rotating into Earth with 14 stacks (6 blasts, 3 sigil, 5 puissance) of Might before Earthquake OR if I can’t get close enough that’s still 8 stacks.

Linnael.1069:

The crit, I agree, is not really useful. Some people run on-crit sigils and burn on crit, but I don’t like random procs either.

The burn, you are highly underrating. If you are staying in fire attunement to stack burns, you are not stacking bleeds. If you engage in fire and leave, you run the risk of condition removal denying you burn damage until you can swap back. This doesn’t even go into the utility of having a 1200 range harassment move that you can use to force a condition removal before engaging. (Throw it on another elementalist and they either need to swap to water, heal, or blow a cantrip before you’ve even started really working on them.)

It’s not that I’m underrating it, I certainly used it for quite a while and it was fun to basically outright kill anyone who didn’t remove the burn as you mention, it’s that I value the other advantages that Water and Earth bring over it (assuming Air is “required”).

I’ve gotten a lot more kills in WvW due to kitten Immobilize (not to mention passive survivability with a huge Toughness increase) and a 8s Chill (again more passive condi removal which helps since there’s so few points in Water) compared to a massive burn (with no real passive advantage).

loseridoit.2756:

Mesmer do not have much defense. They are designed to not take damage.

However, stealth condition mesmer now have good access to protect boon
New patch: Prismatic_Understanding have a crazy buff

Survivability =/= defense.

Blink is active damage migration which fits the design of the Mesmer much better than the ele.

Elemental have protection boon and other skills that are meant to minimize damage intake.

Vitality doesnt matter in this game because the lowest health pool classes have the highest survivability.

Eles and guards

Mesmers have the most active defenses of any light armor classes. They get a teleport, numerous sources of stealth, clones, leap (staff), blocks (scepter, /sword), distortion, portal, etc. I mean really, a well played mesmer is just as annoying as a well played thief and has a huge amount of active defenses and ways to avoid taking damage.

However unlike the thief who gets similar style escapability the Mesmer has the medium amount of health pool. This doesn’t really jive with the way the game is designed or balanced.

Protection on an Elementalist is fairly limited in it’s duration. All our sources of it are on extremely tiny amounts so even with maximum +Boon duration we won’t ever see it up long enough to really be counted for us. This is more of a Guardian mechanic and the reason why Guardians have such low hitpoints, not the Elementalist.

Ele’s survivability actually primarily comes from the combination of many small working pieces. When you take all the tiny effects and add them together you actually get quite nice survivability because a little bit of protection plus a little bit of healing plus a lot of condition removal plus little bit of mobility adds up. You can get away with having lower hitpoints and lower armor because all of that adds up.

The problem is…they’re continuously (patch after patch after patch) removing pieces. Our heals got nerfed. Our condition removal is decent but no longer crazy. Mobility was reduced. Boon durations repeatedly lowered. It’s making a class where you already had to be on top of your game before to be successful to now being on top of your game to be mediocre…

…or roll a Mesmer and dominate with ease.

So it’s like this.

Developers have plans. Sometimes these plans have good intentions but are implemented poorly. For example Elementalist may have been a “jack of all trades” character that had mobility, utility, bit of support (healing), and boons at the cost of health and having the lowest armor type. It was all a pretty strong and competitive package especially when in a 0/10/0/30/30 spec which became dominate.

They’re “gambling” on the concept that the only reason people didn’t play other specs was because the dominate spec was too good and no other specs could exist. However over time, in what can only be presumed is a plan to get Elementalists to spec in different areas, we’ve seen losses (nerfs) to our healing, utility, mobility and boons and zero gains to our survivability elsewhere. Unfortunately the problem is, and I say this as a person who plays multiple specs and swaps around, the REAL reason why people gyrated towards a 0/x/0/20/20 style builds was because the other trees (Fire, Air, Earth) were/are a mess. Consequently, they fix Air and Earth and you see a lot more builds going more points into them.

Unfortunately developers never admit to making mistakes design wise.

So now we’re left with this mess of a character that had a good amount of it’s core ripped out or reduced to the point of being almost entirely ineffective (the jack of all trades part) without anything to really replace it (no HP increases, no armor increases). The other few trees they fixed are more viable but ultimately the character as a whole is still weaker for it. Think of it like they were playing Jenga with the Elementalist class and they’ve removed so many blocks that we’re literally a husk of what we once were as a class…still standing…but no one ever replaced the blocks they took out.

The grim part is that based on how long it took them to even address our trait lines (and they largely skipped entirely over Fire) it will be probably another half of a year or longer before they even think about addressing the issues that resulted from their playing around with the Elementalist class design. They will claim the notion they want to give things time to see how it all pans out but anyone who plays multiple classes can see that other than staff fields there is literally nothing we do that can’t be done better by another class.

Save yourself some headache and just settle into another character if you’re intent on sticking it out.

Devildoc.6721:

Say you have 1500 condition damage (you have some stacks of might say), you stack burning on me 25 times all at once. I cleanse it after 2s. I take 1406 damage total from the 2 ticks.

You stack 25 bleeding on me, I cleanse it after 2s, I take 5875 damage by the time I got it cleared.

Stacking duration also allows me to mitigate damage by using condition duration reduction food and runes (-65% duration)

Stacking duration relies on playing against idiots to do any real damage.

The problem with your example is that there’s no way to stack 25 bleeds in the same time frame as it’d take to apply a burn. Realistically you should compare 6 bleeds (which are one of the higher bleed stack abilities) to 1 burn.

Or provide a complete example with all variables mentioned (abilities used, burn duration, bleed duration/time, etc).

Demon.5082:

Fire is going to need more changes than sun spot to be effective for pvp.
Does sun spot inflict burn like EA dodge roll in fire? If not then it is even worse than I thought it is :-(

But your ideas would really help improve them. Both of them should be like the earth/fire dodges with EA. (Honestly, I feel fire EA should either a blast finisher or a short duration fire field as well heh.)

EA used to always be a blast finisher at release. It was OP as hell and everyone on every spec had to pretty much play 30 Arcane. Drop a water field and EA roll into 3 massive heals.

Linnael.1069:

Signets need to all fire regardless of arc. It’s not a projectile, it shouldn’t act like one.

That being said, I think signets are all actually pretty useful right now. Air just got the stunbreak buff. Fire is the single best passive DPS boost we have for PvE while also being a conditionmancer’s go-to in WvW. Earth is hard-cc for combos. Really the only one with a problem is water, which sort of has a niche for kiters or people who don’t want to spec water for condition removal.

Actually as a Conditimentalist Fire Signet is pretty useless.

The Crit provides you nothing really since you’ll never have enough stat points to spread into Crit Damage without sacrificing strength elsewhere. Even if you wanted to go Crit Dmg by sacrificing Condition Duration (cause you could use Signet + perma Fury from 30 in Fire for Fire Fields) you’d need some sort of way to get mass amounts of crit dmg while not sacrificing Vitality, Power or Condition Damage. The only way to get Condition Duration was Runes, so that’d lead to ruby jewels which at 6 is still only around 18% crit dmg plus whatever from food.

The Burn on command is easily done with Fire either as Staff (Flame Burst) or Scepter (Auto, Dragon’s Tooth, Ring of Fire) which in both weapons can stack permanent burn without ever needing Signet of Fire.

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

problem is that the only damage conditions we can do are burn and bleed. Less conditions (diversity) means they can get removed quite easily. And what good pvp player won’t bring condition removal?

First of all I should say I do PvE and WvW PvP. If we were talking SPvP then my bad.

Second the conditional removal thing gets brought up each time but honestly that argument has been hyped to infinity. When I’m applying 3 bleeds every 2 seconds no condition removal in the game can keep up even just spamming that one ability. Once their condition removal has been blown you are now free to use your more powerful conditions like Signets for their big durations.

The usual counter to that is in a zerg (30 vs 30) there’s so much condition removal it wouldn’t matter but they also tend to ignore the fact there’s so many conditions being applied it kinda works itself out. There’s a 5 target cap both ways (removal and application) meaning you have to roll pretty lucky or bring way more than is needed to counter it. Even then most vids I see and most engagements I’m part of there’s always huge stacks of conditions on people because the amount of application usually greatly outweighs the amount of removal (both on myself and others).

I disagree entirely. I primarily run a Conditimentalist build (with -20% Earth Timers).

The primary advantage to Conditions on the Elementalist is that we have some of the highest base durations of any other class. Even condition focused classes, such as Necro or Engineer, all have extremely short duration Bleeds while under this build we can easily stack up to 25 bleeds with little to no effort. For example Eruption lasts 25+ seconds with 6 stacks of bleed with a 4 second cool down for a listed damage of over 15000. Honestly I see us getting nerfed if more people ever pick up on this because the base duration of our conditions are just outrageous when you compare them to any other class.

That said Signets also benefit greatly from this build. Most base Signet Durations are obscenely long. Signet of Earth provides a massive (nearly 6s) immobilize that will get just about anyone killed in WvW if they don’t break it. A 7s Chill on demand is nothing to scoff at either.

The biggest advantage of these is that they plug a gap in certain Elementalist play styles. Fire is one of our hardest hitting attunements either as Scepter or Staff but so much of is ground targeted that without some form of CC it is lucky to for a few ticks let alone at all. Enter Signets and their on demand crowd control. You can easily pull off combos such as Chill (they break), Immobilize, Dragon’s Tooth, Ring of Fire, Phoenix, Fire Grab, Earthquake and lead into Bleeds with Earth after stacking all that Burning on them. Even with staff you can pull off combos like Immobilize, Eruption, Shockwave, Lava Font, Flameburst and that’s a crapload of bleed and burn again.

Personally only time I have trouble landing signets is when the target is actually out of range or out of line of sight because the signet will let me fire it off regardless (target or not). I have no issues even standing on walls, finding one guy, targeting him and just ruining his day with the above staff combo.

If this really represents the Developer’s take on the Elementalist then I’m supremely glad I resisted the temptation to buy any gems and support this product any further after coming back to the game recently.

What a shame.

During Beta period I remember watching a few streams of some Developers going over a variety of builds for the Engineer (Condition build) and Guardian (some Fire Condition based builds). With the new trait options can you go over say 1-4 different build ideas you guys have or intended with these changes?

Can you address the common viewpoint on 20+ Arcane being mandatory for Elementalist builds in regards to Attunement timers? Is Fresh Air your way of admitting this is a problem and seeking to address it by adding in an option to reset the attunement timer?

Rangers have regeneration style defenses with a medium hit point pool. Thieves on the other hand have a lower hit point pool but more escape style moves and high burst. However in the Light Armor classes Elementalists have regeneration style defenses with a lower hit point pool but Mesmers have escape style moves, high burst AND the medium hit point pool. What was the design thought behind this discrepancy? Are these design thoughts still valid with the current state of the Elementalist?

I honestly do not expect those last two questions/points to be answered or addressed.

Never understand why you’d want 10% of Toughness. Even at 2000 Toughness adding 200 Condition Damage is nothing because chances are you already have more than enough (1400+) as is.

I’m having a blast with my Conditimentalist in all aspects of play.

Defies all the standard conventions and is a ton of fun to play

Pretty survivable too even in large scale WvW.

I think this is just dancing around the real issue of of base attunement timers suck and should be lowered.

Kinda bad/wasteful design really. They know what the issue is but instead of just directly addressing it they’re coming up with gimmicky Traits in order to change it. How many other classes would accept it if all their weapon swap cool downs were 15 seconds and they had to spec 30 points into a line to speed it up…but only if it’s <insert one weapon type here>?

Smooth Marc.8743:

S/D is the worst weapon choice you can make for pve.

The biggest problem with scepter is the auto attacks in every attunment are inferior to dagger and staff auto attacks.

For example with my current gear trait set up which is full berserker gear with scholar runes and using 30/10/0/20/10.

as dagger/x

Dragon claw is 6191dps
Vapor blade is 3850 dps
Lightning whip is 6699 dps
Implae is 3381 dps

vs scepter

flame strike is 1833 dps
ice shards is 3132
arc lightning is 2633 dps
stone shards is 2244 dps

vs staff

fire ball 3676 dps
water blast 1418 dps
chain lightning 2960 dps
stoning 2121 dps

Dagger mainhands worst auto attack is better than scepters best auto attack.As staff you’re better off sitting in fire and spamming fire ball > lava font only leaving every 20-30 seconds so you can stack fury.

This leads me to my next problem with using scepter in pve.

Only phoenix and dragons tooth do meaningful damage.The rest of the damage spells in other attunments all do worse damage than auto attacks.As s/d you’re casting two hard hitting skills, and then not doing meaningful damage for the next 16 seconds.

You’re better off playing dagger/focus or staff and stacking might to 9.

I think my head is exploding from someone actually using numbers to prove their point instead of the usual “rock solid” reasons for their opinion:

They “have a feeling that this is better.”
They “know that everyone knows what they are saying is true.”
They “have this video of them doing random attacks proving their point.”
They “have wicked screen shots as proof!” (that are just of the combat log showing you nothing)
They “can’t prove it’s better or worse but they know it’s better than what you are doing.”

Jarek.2430:

I wear Melandru armor, geo freedom and use lemongrass soup for buff giving me Condition duration -64% (chill, cripple and immobilize -98%).. Warriors can do the same. How do fair against folks who can just ignore conditions?

This is actually a very good point. However I want to point out that I have 90% Condition Duration on top of Conditions that already have arguably the highest base time in the game. I mean Eruption alone has 6 stacks of bleed that last over 25 seconds and the in game tool tip lists that as 15,000 damage. Even halving the durations on those timers is going to leave huge duration conditions that will stack high if not outright removed.

Really a much bigger challenge are classes like Shout Guardians who remove a condition on each Shout because their shout timers usually line up with our more deadly CC (such as Signet of Earth or Water) meanwhile they’re also pretty tanky to eat a majority of the damage we’re kicking out. It’s not impossible to kill, but definitely takes a lot longer than other classes.

Everything is sunshine and roses here.

Love this patch!

idorian.2859:

idorian.2859:

i dont’ know how cond damage works in spvp or pve, but it works awfully in wv3, especially while using staff. roaming with s/d and cond damge is funny and effective in wv3, but we’re talking of stakitten here

Actually it works pretty darned well. The big thing when using the staff is to remember with my build you have Condition Damage AND Power. You gain a lot of power from Might Stacks, 30 points in Fire and Carrion Gear. What you don’t have is Crit and Crit damage because instead you’re focusing on Condition Damage and Condition Duration instead.

half true. while in wv3 i barely have conditions on me, even against zergs, same for my teammates. repleacing crit dmg for cond damage halves my dps imo, because the resulting damage from condition damage it’s easy to counter, while crit damage is instant, and hardly to counter. I will stick to cond damage for a while and see what it will comes out, put i’m a bit pessimistic about it.

Do you not have conditions on you because they don’t do damage/removed all the time or do you not have them on you because everyone assumes Conditions are pointless and doesn’t use them? Condition Removal and benefits like that are every bit as capped on maximum targets as any other offensive ability and when you got a giant pile of bodies fighting there are more than a few who won’t get them. I mean make no mistake, conditions will get removed. That’s a reality. I think of it more along these lines: Everything you do will end up causing conditions. Fire will burn, Earth will Bleed, Water has Chills/Vuln. This is on top of damage.

Now you can ignore them and focus entirely on Crit and Crit Damage. That’s a totally viable route. What I contend is that not ignoring them is also another perfectly viable route and in my experiences so far that’s worked out.

Here’s a vid showing my survivability when diving into the enemy. I had a video of me doing some 1v1s against various classes but upon inspection I notice I was weapon swap bugged and my auto attacks were perma hasted so it would have been a bit skewed to show haha. @6:34 you can see me go back for DEM BAGS right into the enemy force and even mess up and RTL back to the enemy (haha). @9:52 the real fun starts as we attack StoneMist. I really should have swapped to staff but I didn’t think about it till I was too late and inside and stuck engaging.

Yes this and other animations were so over the top for me I ended up deleting my Asura Elementalist and going with a Human instead.

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

XD that’s insane, barely any toughness or healing power.

Survivability isn’t a problem. If you’d like I’ll show you a video of me diving into a full on Zerg and surviving plenty of times I made last night (currently encoding for upload). The most dangerous part was when I got stunned which next patch I will have a stun breaker. 1500 Toughness is more than enough when you are also rocking 19000 HP.

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

Wouldn’t rabid gear with its toughness work better +runes of the undead for even more cond. damage? But yea condition duration is also an interesting spec. Haven’t tried that one yet.

Rabid is Precision/Toughness/Condition damage. While it certainly would be a lot of Toughness, the precision is basically a dead stat because we don’t have the spare stat allocation to put into Crit damage to make any Crit we do gain meaningful. It also detracts from our Power stat which is something actually very useful.

Runes of the undead are alright, but 5% of our Toughness is a very small number even if it was 2000 (100). That little amount of Condition Damage isn’t going to really be a game Changer unlike being able to add +20% condition duration of 2 Superior Mad King and 2 Superior Lyssa. Since all of our Conditions already have long durations, any +Duration% is extremely effective. For example at +90% my Staff Eruption Bleed is over 25 seconds.

idorian.2859:

i dont’ know how cond damage works in spvp or pve, but it works awfully in wv3, especially while using staff. roaming with s/d and cond damge is funny and effective in wv3, but we’re talking of stakitten here

Actually it works pretty darned well. The big thing when using the staff is to remember with my build you have Condition Damage AND Power. You gain a lot of power from Might Stacks, 30 points in Fire and Carrion Gear. What you don’t have is Crit and Crit damage because instead you’re focusing on Condition Damage and Condition Duration instead.

Jarek.2430:

^ Not a staff elem. Interesting build just not sure why you have ignored signet of Fire as part of you utilities. With such high condition damage you could hit for alot per sec and only hope they are unable to remove the condition.

The build works surprisingly well with a Staff as well but you notice the lack of Blasting Staff. It has the Power Fire Attunement needs to make it hit hard enough plus the Burn is pretty fantastic on Flame Burst (AOE Burn) with a 9.5 second duration but a 8 second cool down. Also Eruption and Shockwave both are mega bleeds that can catch people unaware on walls.

I originally ran with Signet of Fire and admittedly it was pretty funny to put on a 17 second Burn on people. There was this one Elementalist during a Tower Defense I was picking on and kept forcing him to blow all his cool downs to counter the Burn or he’d end up in a downed state.

However what I noticed was that a 1200 range 5.75 second immobilize was pretty insane. In S/D it lets me easily land my Dragon’s Tooth → Ring of Fire → Phoenix → Fire Grab → Earth Quake → Stone Splinters Auto. In Staff it opened up Eruption → Signet of Earth → Shockwave → Fire → Lava Font → Flame Burst. Both of these weapons have plenty of Spammable burn to not need Signet of Fire while the Immobilize and Toughness are always useful (as are Speed/Blind and Condition Removal/Chill). Really when you think about it and look at our Attunements Fire and Air have little to no stopping power (Chill, Cripple, Immobilize) but Water and Earth do. Signets give us that stopping power and as Condition spec we’re able to fully utilize and maximize that stopping power and damage.

You might think that there’s a problem with condition removal but if you are able to keep sustained contact and able to fight there’s simply not enough condition removal to keep up. If they remove the damage initially they might miss the CC and if they catch the CC they might miss the damage. It’s literally a deluge of Conditions that are all absurdly huge duration compared to other traditional classes (such as necros and Engies who all have very short duration bleeds).

Been having a blast in WvW lately like this and it breaks every norm that’s accepted as “required” for Elementalist. If the leaked notes are true at all it’s only going to get better.

Razor.6392:

Actually… I’ve been really enjoying the focus. It’s arguably better than off hand dagger by a long shot now that RtL is useless to get away from anything.

Why are you still mad about the times I’d shut your face in embarrassment months ago? It’s not hard to use logic. You should try it sometime.

You mean when you kept going on and on about how they should nerf the 0/10/0/30/30 bunker builds and then were upset when they nerfed it by reducing it’s mobility effectively changing the way you play the character but not the bunkers? The irony was quite delicious then and continues to be so as you make more sad panda posts.

Think of me more as enjoying your misery as you got what you wished for.

LightningBlaze.4913:

Those notes can’t be real. There are just so many flaws with it that I doubt Anet would implement all of those changes at once…..knowing how cautions anet is with patch notes with each profession whether it is a buff or a nerf.

I wouldn’t be surprised if these were internal notes and half these changes probably won’t go through in the initial wave.

Benji.9203:

^This

Especially #4. Dagger main hand is all about sustained damage and control ( IMO d/f has so much synergy in the amount of cc its able to dish out….excluding fire 5 and 4).

For d/x to become a burst set the weapon skills would need a major rehaul and to be honest a trait like Fresh Air had to be implemented. If eles were to ever have a reason to get out of 30 arcane/ 20-30 water this is it.

Scepter burst can be insane (when used with arcane specifically) I will not deny that but at the end of the day the ele can still EASILY die with no means of stealth or damage mitigation.

See what you guys don’t get is the tale of poor Razor who’s been upset ever since they started nerfing RTL. See Razor used to run a D/D Zerker build and when he got into trouble he’d just RTL out of danger. But then they nerfed it and ever since he hasn’t been able to pull it off and everything has been doom and gloom.

Poor, poor Razor

You’ve been so down since the RTL nerf. I feel bad for ya

DiogoSilva.7089:

Now that I think of it, a “Fresh Earth” trait would be pretty important for condition elementalists, as they would be able to apply bleeding more often. It would actually work very well as an additional effect to the new Diamond Skin trait (which, imo, I’m not sure if it’s strong enough by itself). It’s more important for that than Fresh Fire, because elementalists can already apply burning outside of fire (signet of fire, cleansing flames, fire conjures, fire auras, etc).

I understand the importance of those traits to substitute arcana, but arcana still has a massive advantage: you don’t have to waste a grandmaster trait to decrease the cooldown of your skills. This way, I’m not sure if, say, a Fresh Fire would be good enough. Even a Fresh Water would be better to activate the healing, but probably not as good as Arcana’s universal cooldown decrease + evasive arcana’s water heal. But Fresh Air is good enough because the scepter’s air 2 has kitten cooldown too, and so does sigil of fire/ air, and both burst well with electric discharge.

A good offense is sometimes the best defense, and if you can kill fast enough, you don’t need the extra utility. That’s what makes Fresh Air a good alternative to arcana.

Yes and No.

Conditimentalists usually are S/D because S/D has the most amount of reliable sources of conditions when supplanted with the powerful conditions from Signets (6s Immobilize is IMBA). Even then we’re looking at spending most of the time in Fire (Damage/Might/Burning) or Earth (Bleed). Air is alright cause of your Power ratings but hardly ideal and is either used to escape (Updraft and RTL). Water is still used to recover.

The “No” part is the lack of Arcane (as in swap timers) isn’t really noticeable because most of your burst abilities are all on 16-45 second cool downs. I mean after you blow your primary Fire combo (Signet of Earth → Dragon’s Tooth → Ring of Fire → Phoenix → Fire Grab → Earth → Earthquake) it’s not like you want to go back to Fire until at the very least Phoenix is back up (16 seconds). When you ideally are able to setup and fire off all your stuff they are never an issue.

The “Yes” part is sometimes you do get caught where you did your Fire Combo but then had to swap out of Earth and into Water or Air for defense and now you’re stuck waiting to get back into Earth to continue to stack Bleeds (our primary auto attack). Usually during this time I stick in Air and do a bit of damage but without the exorbitant amount of Might we get from Fire and totally lacking in Crit this is rather lackluster.

Personally I’d much rather see them go the route where the cool down of Attunements is reduced either by the number of points you have in that tree OR by Arcane (non-stacking). This would be a passive effect baked into each attunement. So if you had a 30/30/0/0/10 Spec you would have a 30% reduction on Fire, 30% reduction on Air, and 10% reduction on Air and Water.

Wasting a Grandmaster slot for something like this that should be part of the class is pretty crappy.

mbk.4926:

I think they missed the point with elementalist. The problem is most of traits in a single line affect only one attunement, instead of boosting elementalist overall. Why does Internal Fire work only in fire att? The good start would be fixing Lingering Elements to work with more traits in one line, not only with the first minor. And this new Fresh Air trait.. why cannot it recharge ALL attunements but with different condition? For example, on crit but with 12s cooldown. That would be nice alternative for going 20 and more in arcana.

Well you have to remember from a design perspective they design a class for X, Y and Z but the player base ends up only using it as Z. The original design very well could have been one where if you put 30 points into Fire and 30 Water that you would spend most of your time in Fire and Water and not really utilize Earth and Air.

However over time, and especially with the popularity of Arcane builds due to the initial strength of Evasive Arcana, the players’ “meta game” take on the class is that swapping attunements is mandatory and there can be no other alternatives in play style. Really if you look at it the whole thing is circular: Players spec deep into Arcane -> Arcane encourages swapping attunements -> Players come to the conclusion the only way to play Elementalist is to swap Attunements -> Players spec deep into Arcane.

This situation is further complicated by another player “meta game” standard which is that most Elementalists will end up speccing into Water as the secondary attribute for defenses and recovery. This is another factor heavily encouraged by design as Water also heavily juices up our most powerful utilities (Cantrips) and we were designed to have the lowest HP pool (despite being more of a Ranger style defenses we got Thief HP without the Thief’s countless evasive moves which the Mesmer got both o.O ).

The devs actually do understand all of this and are trying to unball the mess that the Elementalist meta game has devolved into it. They’re just doing it extremely slowly with this being one of the biggest steps towards that goal. This of course grates against many of the players who have come to accept that “Z” is the only way to play the Elementalist and so we see the rage. One glance down at my post history will show you that sitting in Fire attunement and doing DPS is tantamount to heresy around here. Anything that goes against the current meta game standards for Elementalist devolves into huge multi-page arguements where 1-2 people are saying something against the meta and 5-10 are telling them they’re “wrong.”

Hopefully by the game’s first anniversary, that will no longer happen.

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

Same reason why I use this build as well but with the upcoming trait changes I’ll probably move out of water and into air or something.
0/30/0/20/20 maybe.
10% more crit dmg+trait that gives +10% crit damage plus food that gives +10% crit damage…. already running around with 50% crit chance so that’d be an instant 15% damage boost. Similar to the 30 in water.

also the 20th in water I use for the regen on mistform, signet of water and icebow. The downed mist form does damage that way too which is a pretty neat trick. Otherwise there’s the 20% damage to vulnerable foes, vulnerability on signet/arcane, equip signet of air (new stunbreaker and perma speedboost+blind) I wonder if that’d work with lingering elements and then swapping to air making the lightning strikes hit for 20% more too….?

After the changes I’m going to do something completely different from everyone else:

Conditimentalist

I’ve been testing it lately, it’s pretty insane. If they give me a Stun Breaker on signets (they said they will regardless of the leaked notes) it’ll become pretty great. If the leaked notes are accurate, it’ll become fantastic.

First, I’m going to say on the whole I agree with this topic from the perspective of what’s considered your standard/average Elementalist build. Arcane VIII is a great ability for staff users to being borderline mandatory. On most of my builds (I play quite a few) I end up going at least 20 Arcane for the swap timers especially with D/D.

Second, I’m going to say I have also found a build that rather defies most of the things discussed in this thread (specifically requiring 20 Arcane and Fire being useless) and I’m having a total blast with it.

This topic is absurd every time it’s brought up.

1. Almost every Ele you encounter will be rocking Mist Form meaning you’d think people would be used to people doing Mist Form -> Downed -> Vapor Form by now. This crutch is so heavily leaned upon there’s almost no excuse not to anticipate it.

2. With a 5 hard cap on almost all abilities no class is going to run in and “kitten up a zerg.” At most they might, maybe, somehow, mess up 5 people but a zerg will largely remain intact.

3. Since we can eliminate the zerg even being remotely effected by this, why the kitten are you fighting near an enemy tower? I mean ignoring Vapor Form, it’s super easy for many classes to just duck back inside when they are in trouble. You’re putting yourself in a bad situation by fighting the enemy on their home turf where they got the advantage. Your poor decisions should not determine game balance.

4. The entire thing is countered with Immobilize. As pointed out everyone has an immobilize and they are often times on the usual builds people have/play.

Every time this topic comes up it’s usually some stealth play thief who was hanging around in enemy territory and ends up losing a kill on an Elementalist cause they got back inside a friendly tower before dying. They have the most awkward of all the immobilize skills (stealth required or bring a under used utility that doesn’t fit neatly into many builds) and are most vulnerable to this.

I’d like to say I feel bad for said thieves but then I remember they deal stupid amounts of damage on demand and completely stop caring.

I have rolled up 2 elementalist to 80 now.

First time I really hated it. More than anything, it was abysmal. I didn’t “get it” and had a lot of frustration with it. I actually put it on pause for a long time and made a Mesmer instead. Eventually I got bored and forced myself till I got to 40 and went with a Conjure Lightning Hammer build (20/0/0/10/0) and then it was pretty smooth sailing to 80. Unfortunately I hated the Asura (animation, voice, etc) and remade my character a Human.

Second time after unlocking all the skills for each weapon I went with S/D instead of staff and had a much, much easier time:

1. Early stats you should focus on Power and Vitality for gear. At 20-21 you start to unlock the dual stat gear. Don’t worry about Crit at all.

2. With S/D you get a lot of kiting potential. Most of the time you will either be in Air (primary) or Earth (secondary) because both have pretty spammable blinds and some CC to get you out of trouble if you get caught. Always be on the move. Fire can be used in a pinch if you have to AOE a lot of targets down at once but it can be dangerous to setup the Dragon’s Tooth → Ring of Fire → Phoenix → Fire Grab combo but it’ll one shot most groups if you can survive. Be ready to swap to Water after to Cleansing Wave and use Signet of Restoration to heal (cause it’ll add regen).

3. At 40 you can start using Conjure Lightning Hammer build. (20/0/0/10/0). This will let you permanently blind most of your opponents. Fighting Dredge you’ll still need to use S/D and you will learn to hate Dredge. Otherwise Lightning Hammer does a lot of AOE damage, a lot of CC, and since you can sit in Water and use it you will pick up some nifty regen and defenses coupled with Cantrips.

That’s pretty much it. Isn’t that bad once you get it down.

covenn.7165:

From reading this this thread, I now fully understand why Anet made the changes they did to the class and it is extremely unfortunate. It would be awesome to have actual build diversity and actual viability doing different things, but some of these changes were just so poorly though out, I have to wonder what they were thinking and why they were listening to the people that suggested them.

I for one am ecstatic at the Earth Line changes because it really opens up a condition/signet build.

Kodiak.3281:

Let me bust out some numerology at you:

With this build I end up with 1117 Healing power with no food and no sigil buffs or anything of that nature (also only Rare Passiflora Jewelry and not the Exotic). Skill comparison = With 1117 Healing vs With Base 300 from 30 Water Trait:

Area Healing (Blast Finisher) = 1543 vs 1380 a 12% increase
Geyser (Skill) = 3262 vs 2649 a 23% increase
Soothing Mist (Trait) = 136 vs 95 a 43% increase
Healing Ripple (Trait) = 2419 vs 1602 a 51% increase
Regeneration (Boon) = 275/tick vs 166/tick a 65% increase

Here’s some numbers I threw up from another post.

What do you plan to do (besides imaginging yourself blowing things up)?

PvE? PvP? WvW? Group? Solo? These things help to know.

Raven.9603:

survivability has always been the number one reason dps specs havent been viable (wvw/pvp). these notes dont do anything to improve that (i take that back, the new obsidian focus does a little).

fresh air looks sick, sure, but scepter has always had good burst. all this does is make the burst easier to use by de-emphasizing fire. nothing for survivability for staff, scepter or dagger. nothing for out of control long kitten focus cooldowns.

if anything, survivability is hurt overall by putting stun breakers on skills that arent designed to be conserved (Glyph of Elements lol?).

Lately in WvW and PvP I’ve been doing a 30/0/30/10/0 build and honestly the only thing I need at this point is a stun breaker. You give it to me and it and a few of these other changes and it’ll break the build wide open.

You lack offense because your gear is a mess. You’re trying to gain a lot of Toughness with PVT and Cleric gear and then you go further defnesive with Vitality in PVT and Healing in Cleric gear. On top of this your traits you only put 10 into an offensive line (Fire) so you’re really sacrificing a lot of DPS both on gear as well as traits.

Personally I’ve found min-maxing that you usually only need one or the other OR go hybrid in both areas. For example I use a 0/20/0/30/20 build (offense from 20 Air and heavy Defense from 30 Water, 20 Arcane) but then use Berserker Armor with Rubies and Emerald Jewelry (A lot of offense and a bit of Toughness). Top all that off I go with Cantrips which are even more Defense so the whole thing comes together because I have satisifactory amount of DPS (I get plenty of kills) and Defense (I usually only die if I get literally ran over and often am one of the last ones standing due to good situational awareness).

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

I only use staff in wvwvw and dungeons because if you have people that distract the mobs you can rain lots and lots of fire on them from afar.
Switched to all zerker gear recently and standard build: 0/20/0/30/20
That way your water skills don’t become totally useless.

To chime in this is the build I use 99% of the time as well because it also opens up D/D play as well if I want it or staff play.

This entire topic is hyperbolic and clearly made by someone who is angry they died involving a situation where an Elementalist went down but made it back inside.

Avatara.1042:

You must never run with the zerg or assault towers. Or fight in prolonged, massive battles. Or fight near arrow carts.

…

Actually, what DO you do?

Haha, right?

Sitkaz.5463:

What does that make Necros?

Well Bots.

I’m exactly like you and always end up looking for and playing the “artillery” style nuker who sits in the back and goes nuts with ranged damage. If you catch someone 1v1, you just use all your cool downs and just blow them the kitten up. The truth is this game really lacks that play style and I’ve searched for it leveling almost every character to 80. However, it certainly exists for melee.

Phantasm Mesmer was pretty good for this for a while till the changes with Phantasms. Now it’s a shadow of it’s former self. It still does decently, but since you can juke Phantasm casts it makes it much harder. It’s probably the closest however you’re going to find what you’re looking for (use a 20/20/0/25/5 build).

Rifle Warrior is also pretty close to having a pure ranged nuke build but the main issue is that all the shots are a direct line of fire projectiles which makes them very easy to dodge/juke/outrange/reflect/etc.

Engineer the problems become you’re either P/P condition which is lackluster or specifically to WvW you’re Grenadier. The main issue with Grenadier is that the slow projectiles make it really easy to kite the Engie without going 100nades which I thought I remember reading they nerfed. Most 1v1 Engies I encounter are Crowbar oriented instead which is a tankier style like the Ele.

Ele just lacks enough survivability (be it tanky survivability or not) to go full ranged offense in WvW. It has the weakest HP pool but lacks the same escapes and trickery of a Mesmer who can afford to go full DPS and get away with it. I’m sure someone out there will argue with me on this point and say Eles are just fine but there’s a reason you don’t usually see them out there solo when not in a defensive spec.

DiogoSilva.7089:

5. Possible signet build

Same as above, has Signet of Restoration, Signet of Air (stun break), and not sure what else. 30 in earth for signet mastery (optional, yes) or rock solid or even serrated stones, written in stone, and protection on aura; 20 in fire for fire auras and +5% damage versus burning foes, 10 in air for zephyr’s boon, 10 in arcane for elemental attunement. Possibly a burst/ condition hybrid build with fury, +damage for conditions, +precision/ burning (signet of fire) and chill/ immobilize from water, lots of might that works well with both.

30 Fire (Internal Fire, Fire’s Embrace, Pyromancer’s Puissance)
30 Earth (New Serrated, Geomancer’s Alacrity, Written in Stone)
10 Water (Cleansing Wave)
Ether Renewal
Signet of Fire / Signet of Earth
Signet of Water
Signet of Air
<whatever elite>
Carrion Armor – 2 Sup Afflicted, 2 Sup Mad King, 2 Sup Lyssa
Carrion Jewelry
Carrion Scepter – Agony? (10% bleed duration)
Carrion Dagger – Battle
Rare Veggie Pizza – Food

Lots of Raw Power. You will have tons of Might stacks from Fire and it’s various blast finishers. You can even stack 14 stacks of Might without even being in combat.

Crazy condition durations at 90% duration. We’re talking Signet of Fire burning for 17 seconds for 700 damage a tick. Stone Shards (Earth 1) can build up to 20 stacks of Bleed. So much condition output that in initial testing I’ve been able to overwhelm a 0/10/0/30/30 D/D elementalist’s condition removal. Signet of Water alone is an 8s Chill on demand. Signet of Earth is a colossal 5-6s Immobilize.

Tanky defenses. This build gives me over 19000 HP and really good Armor (Rock Barrier) and Toughness (more available if you go with Signet of Earth). The new stun breaker from Air means you’ll finally have that as an option which was the entire thing holding the build back. Condition management is done via Water (which removes a condition) plus Cleansing Wave in Water and passive removal with Signet of Water. The huge duration Chill from Frost Aura really destroys opponent’s offense as well. RTL is also available for escaping.

The benefits of keeping Signets active (Toughness/Precision/Condition Removal/Speed) is far greater than getting 10% of your Toughness into condition damage which at most is going to be around 120-200.

Staff is also a viable alternative as there are many conditions spread out in each tree and you have the Raw Power to not be useless too. This way when you’re in a Keep/Tower you whip out the staff and outside you bust out the Scepter.

Initial Testing has proven a ton of fun and a complete change in pace from standard Elementalist game play.

I use staff a lot and have found reasonable success with it. It has it’s weaknesses and strengths like most other specs and classes I’ve played in the game. Needs work, but isn’t useless (unlike anything /Focus related).

I also have Written in Stone and am getting Stability for 2 seconds when I swap to Earth. Have been for days while mucking around on my 30/0/30/10/0 build. Personally I don’t understand all the hub-bub about it. 2 seconds is like nothing and there’s most likely a 5 player cap on it like most boons/buffs.

Seriously if these are Legit I’m calling it for a 30/0/30/10/0 build.

Most of our conditions have tremendous base durations. When coupled with +Condition Duration it makes them simply fanatically huge. I’m just going to put this out there: Signet of Fire has a 16s cool down with Signet Mastery but it’s a 17 second Burn with 90% condition duration. You have no idea how many kills I’ve caught on people who thought they were safe in WvW with this over the last few days just messing around. No one expects a 17 second burn that ticks for 700 a tick.

If you add in some of these changes the whole build is going to fly wide open. Signet of Air as a stun breaker would be colossal since that’s by and far your biggest weakness on a Signet build. Conditions are reasonably managed via 10 in Water for Cleansing Wave and either Cleansing Wave (S/D) or Healing Rain (Staff) on top of the passive cleansing of Signet of Water. A near 8 second, targeted chill on demand every 24 seconds is incredibly powerful as well. Could play around with Ether Renewal vs Signet of Restoration as well.

Change would also open up lots of benefits from the bleed duration but also Earth cool down reduction. That will bring extremely powerful abilities like Earthquake or Churning Earth onto some very slick low cool downs (36s and 24s each). Various staff abilities (mostly on 30s) would also be lowered down to 24s each which would be very handy.

Be kinda fun to turn my Ele into a monster Condition machine with actual survivability and damage now.

If this really is the case, which I doubt, I am pretty excited for a Condition based Elementalist with the new Earth tree changes.

Devildoc.6721:

I understand wanting to keep the second weapon for yourself for soloing but being able to give a weapon to someone else is just powerful. Especially in dungeons and pvp/wvw. Throwing down an ice bow for someone else means those burrows just melt, and throwing down a greatsword in WvW… well last night me and a warrior scared off a group of 10 trying to bring down a tower gate, and killed the stragglers. A combination of meteor shower, lava font, and 2 firestorms on their rams sent them running, and downed 1 that didn’t have as quick of reflexes, and then another was just slower at getting away. There’s a reason the FGS is called a “zerg buster” “Thanks for GS! #DPS” he said heh.

Hrm.

Kodiak.3281:

Personally I’d like it if they’d just allow you to pick up the second weapon and that would add the charges to the existing charges you have as well as add additional time for the weapon to be active. This way you can still share the weapon as needed but you can also double up and use both as well.

Kodiak.3281:

This way you can still share the weapon as needed but you can also double up and use both as well.

Kodiak.3281:

This way you can still share the weapon as needed but you can also double up and use both as well.