I’ve always enjoyed it and hardly cycle through Water Attunement without casting it; it’s quite convenient despite the delay because its actual casting time is rather short.
As is, the passive is better for phantasm builds because it’s bugged to do between 150 and 200% more health instead of 50%. Unless this was changed in an extremely recent bug fix patch, I have no reason to believe this has changed; I tested it right before the last big balance patch and don’t recall an announcement of it being fixed.
Today I got to experience the new lick wounds for the first time since it was updated.
While doing my usual circuit of southsun cove, I managed to get caught by a veteran karka. I went down, but was up in less than 3 seconds after hitting lick wounds. It’s massively overpowered now…It’s almost like getting revived by another player.
sigh I hate when people type without thinking. Ok first of all, yes when it works its very strong but the only time its OP is underwater, we are almost unkillable. On land, when it works, its very very strong, but not even close to op, CC pet and down, problem solved, now you cant dps a ranger when they are downed, we are in the same league as warriors except they can get up and beat on you. Second, its not as strong as getting rezed by a player, they heal for about 1800-1900 per tick, pet heals for about 900-950 per tick at about 18.5k hp. I knew as soon as rangers got some new shiny things people would use the word overpowered with them.
Lick wounds even if it worked 100% of the time wouldnt be op, or gamebreaking, even when rangers use lick wounds on me and it works I still stomp them because I stun pet and down them, use your brains, overpowered means that its so rediculously strong that no other class can compete with it unless they are OP as well, nothing about ranger screams that atm.
My pet heals me for over 1200 HP per tick. The majority of players heal for just a hair above 1400. You don’t start seeing 1800-2k until you start stacking healing power, and most people don’t…unless they’re guardians or banner warriors.
Also, nowhere in my post did I mention pvp. No a ranger isn’t going to avoid getting stomped in pvp any more than that warrior or thief will. I was talking purely about pve, and yes, lick wounds is overpowered in pve.
Perhaps you should take your own advice and think before you post.
If your pet gets downed I believe Lick Wounds stops activation when on land; this concept applies in PvE as well. Rangers already have enough of a problem in high level areas from what I understand. (I do not PvE extensively, so please correct me if this has changed)
My initial thought is to help prevent pets from dying; but a melee ranger wouldn’t solve that problem. Wouldn’t it be annoying though if your pet swapped really far from where you wanted it to be because your last pet was hit by a large amount of CC?
Blue Jellyfish have the best F2 far as damage is concerned..On Land it’d be Raven probably and Jaguar to some extent.
If you just want a high dps pet underwater you have the cats of course, but also the Armored Fish who has much DPS then the Shark…That’s right..You’re thinking “But my sharks damage is amazing”…his actual attacks are just awful……the Armor Fish can constant crit for 2k+ kitten near every hit if you keep fury up… and he’s pretty much impossible to kill underwater.
Underwater Sharks rein supreme for damage, and on land the Salamander Drakes F2 puts everything else to shame especially once you start buffing it up. You give that shark malice training and those bleeds will SHRED the enemy, plus sharks have THE MOST power out of every pet in the game, there is NO pet that has as much power as they do, so you start buffing their power up more via might or MB and they become a total killing machine.
@Person higher up, auto attack wise, birds and felines do the highest damage, cats don’t have that great of BURST damage but my god do they deal a ton of damage constantly.
Ironically, Armor Fish’s auto attack does more damage even though it has less power. Its F2 is just garbage though.
Sharks auto attack does less than armor fish to compensate for how much damage he does while F2 is active and with his charge.
I guess it’s pointless to calculate for long-term damage done, but who do you think would win out over a period of 5 minutes?
Ah, yup I see what you’re saying. Pets can be tricky for sure. I tend to let them go in and die first then fly in for a stun or possibly save someone. Rarely do I try and 1v1 people, but it just happens in every tpvp match, so I just build for survivability and hope to keep the point neutralized till the team gets there. Or hit their back point if it’s open. In the mean time I try and get Medic every game and just revive. Devoted my runes to Mercy and Shaman Amulet.
I run Valk amulet; I can’t stand not being able to do weapon damage. S/D and GS don’t have much in the way of conditions so I got as much power as I could out of a 30 BM build for myself. I have around 2150, which is respectable even though my crit rate is really low.
Blue Jellyfish have the best F2 far as damage is concerned..On Land it’d be Raven probably and Jaguar to some extent.
If you just want a high dps pet underwater you have the cats of course, but also the Armored Fish who has much DPS then the Shark…That’s right..You’re thinking “But my sharks damage is amazing”…his actual attacks are just awful……the Armor Fish can constant crit for 2k+ kitten near every hit if you keep fury up… and he’s pretty much impossible to kill underwater.
Underwater Sharks rein supreme for damage, and on land the Salamander Drakes F2 puts everything else to shame especially once you start buffing it up. You give that shark malice training and those bleeds will SHRED the enemy, plus sharks have THE MOST power out of every pet in the game, there is NO pet that has as much power as they do, so you start buffing their power up more via might or MB and they become a total killing machine.
@Person higher up, auto attack wise, birds and felines do the highest damage, cats don’t have that great of BURST damage but my god do they deal a ton of damage constantly.
Ironically, Armor Fish’s auto attack does more damage even though it has less power. Its F2 is just garbage though.
I love condi staff builds. You don’t need to worry about people standing in your fields because you only need to land bleed/burn stacks instead of having them stay still forever. Plus it plays right into the bunker abilities that staff eles have.
Finally, I’ve seen videos of ranger pets critting for 4k, but I cant seem to get that amount even with 30 BM and using a bird. How do you maximize pet damage?
get lvl 80 :/
if you are already, than i think you havnt even looked into any of the skills to maximize its dmg or looked into the pets skills …
but a friendly Protip: Pet’s tooltips are sometimes horribly wrong, you have to test them out individually and ravens are by far the strongest birds, their F2’s deal about twice as much dmg than the other birds.
Personal record was 14k on a raven F2 attack (not showing as 14k as its an attack that hits twice, but it was about 7.5k+6.5k)
I think that the strongest pet F2 skill is the Rending Barbs of Lashhtail Devourer , Am I right ?
THE Strongest is the salamander drakes Fire breath, however good luck getting that off in PvP… Highest i’ve hit hit with my salamanders breathe (i was downed and they were attempting to finish me so they didn’t move out of the way) was around 28k or so, granted that’s with 25 masters bond, 25 might and sick’em.
So salamander drake is the strongest amphibious / terrestrial pet , what about the strongest aquatic one The shark ?
Blue and Rainbow Jellyfish can easily crit on F2 for more than 5k without might stacks with 30 BM. They provide aoe regeneration with water field and a smoke field to blind their target’s area. They’re just all around fantastic. Red Jellyfish is a viable option if you don’t have access to Rainbow, but its F2 doesn’t do as much damage.
I more meant I have trouble with those professions/specs in the sense that they just don’t die; I’m more sustained damage with very little crit with my spec; the lack of AoE means I can’t reliably spike stealth spam thieves down and the lack of crit means a cleric amulet ele is going to heal through my damage if he’s decent. I sometimes swap to eagle/hawk for more sustained damage than dogs, but I always end up missing the CC dogs provide. I haven’t died 1v1 in a very, very long time; worst case scenario now is a stalemate.
I’ve been running one iteration or another of an evasion tank since beta; it’s wicked fun once you get used to spiking with your pet and a lot of people don’t expect it. Biggest problem is vs super tanky eles and thieves with excessive stealth spam. Some mesmers cause trouble but not as much as the aforementioned two.
I’ve been enjoying a variation of the “bunker” ele that’s geared to do conditions. Evasive Arcana’s fire dodge does about 3k damage worth of burns; very fun.
Your trait setup looks good, though I would change your Master Air trait to Aeromancer’s Alacrity. More usage of RtL and Updraft is super useful in PvP, and your current trait will really only help you on your auto attack since the significant recharge bonus from Alacrity will help you do more pulses with your other skills. I prefer Cantrip Mastery over Soothing Disruption when I don’t have 30 in Water Magic, but again, it’s just preference. I just worry that you will have redundant vigor stacking when you could be recharging your cantrips faster.
Ele probably has more versatility with rune choice than any profession because they are so versatile. I can change from Rune of Divinity to Rune of Dwayna and feel very little difference on my gameplay. If you aren’t maintaining fury a lot, you should probably rune up for it so that you can take advantage of Renewing Stamina and the crit damage bonus you will get from putting 20 into Air Magic. I would recommend either Valkyrie or Berserker amulets for you; the former if you are using runes to stack fury and the latter if you are using runes for more defense/balance. A lot of people run Cleric amulets, but you will probably get more damage from a Valkyrie with very similar surviability, esp since you have two fast weapon heals on Water Attunement when running S/D. For Fury stacking I would use either Rune of the Pack or Rune of the Citadel.
It’s one thing to stack might, and eles do it very well, albeit with a rather long combination of skills; it’s another thing to stack 9 might instantly; eles cannot do that.
And yet warriors have been able to have more than 9 since launch, engineers almost as long, and the semi recent change to necro blood is power for instant 10 stacks. Do people really need to bring these up over and over again?
Are any of those professions as strong as a mesmer?
This is a GRANDMASTER trait… not a MINOR — you need 25pts in illusions to get it.
What shatter mesmer does not have a decent investment in Illusions already? It makes investing in Domination almost obsolete save for vulnerability on daze.
Why are people saying Mesmer’s can stack this might instantly? How are they coming in to talk about a class when they have no idea how it works?
You have to throw up 3 illusions which takes time to do, the illusions then have to charge at the enemy where they can be dodged, blocked or kited and at any point during this the preparation or actual shatter attempt they can be killed. Which part of this is throwing up huge stacks of might instantly? Not to mention you are probably using your big damaging cooldowns to get the stack in the first place.
The way people are talking we are running around with 25 stacks instantly doing 3 illusions + IP shatters in peoples faces.
When I take my Mesmer into PvE I rarely get the chance to do 3 illusion shatters because PvE mobs actually kill our illusions, it is saying a lot when the PvE AI is smarter then the average PvP player.
Many people are aware of the problems mesmers face in PvE with the rampant AoE effects and awkward targeting mechanisms of illusions, but this sort of easy might stacking is not healthy for pvp. Believe it or not I’ve played a mesmer to a degree; and I’ve never, ever felt weak enough to justify getting 9 might just for shattering three illusions, not to mention it’s a simple enough task to accomplish.
@Blundby, I think mesmers are so unused to get buffs they just cant handle it. Like ppl win the lottery and cry tears while they have hard handle the situation.
/Osicat
I concur – I was pondering about this earlier and realised it opens whole new playstyles. My Guardian doesn’t need to wear glass cannon gear because I get so many boons to help with damage.
Now mesmer have good access to boons, I can mix more condition damage into my shatter build since it gets buffed by might, that in turn led me to realise that if I went all-out boon duration buffs on my runes and took some ranks in chaos I can become a buff-bot for my team, and still do decent damage all round with shatters, staff and sword.
Such a small change opened up so many possibilities, there’s now multiple ways to spec shatter
BINGO.
combine with signet of inspiration, shatter up as high a stack of might as you can, use signet, pop time warp, MELT WORLD BOSS
But this is a huge problem; such easy access to might stacking makes investing anything more than a basic amount in domination totally obsolete. A simple 10 stack of might is 350 power, more than you can get by maxing out Domination, and easy to maintain with fast rotation of shatters. Changes like this remove any glass attribute from glass cannons; leaving you with people who do stupid damage with ridiculous survivability. They’re moving mesmers in the same direction eles are at right now, which is not good for the game. Any good ele will tell you that the class is OP right now because of this situation; we do good damage with hella survivability to back it up, making a glass cannon completely useless in a basic comparison, especially since Fire Magic is a useless traitline and Air Magic is only good when it’s complementing the healing rotation granted by Water/Arcana. The worst part is that before this, Domination and Dueling were not bad traitlines to begin with; most of the problems mesmers faced had to do with phantasm AI and other bugs, along with some problems with trait synergy. Activating a single skill you were going to use anyway to instantly gain 9 stacks of might is unhealthy for balanced game progression imo.
Then why are people only complaining about this once Mesmer can do it and not when any of the other classes can?
Did you not see me just say that it’s not ok for eles to do it either? Why on earth does our Water Magic 25 minor give +% damage for each boon when water is not supposed to be related to damage in the first place? It’s counter-intuitive to the function of traitlines to begin with. It’s one thing to stack might, and eles do it very well, albeit with a rather long combination of skills; it’s another thing to stack 9 might instantly; eles cannot do that and the immediate benefit is that it completely makes up for any sacrifice of Domination Magic that you may have made. It’s a bad situation when some professions gain access to large amounts of damage in the same lines that give them amazing survivability, while others do not. This does not exclude eles or any other profession in the slightest, so please do not misunderstand me; I am aware that there are professions besides mesmer that have a huge advantage in PvP. However, I don’t think buffing traits like this to oblivion is the solution. I’m not extremely active on the forums, but many of the skilled players I know in-game (some of which also play elementalist) also understand the current state of the game, and that this is not the way to fix the situation.
@Blundby, I think mesmers are so unused to get buffs they just cant handle it. Like ppl win the lottery and cry tears while they have hard handle the situation.
/Osicat
I concur – I was pondering about this earlier and realised it opens whole new playstyles. My Guardian doesn’t need to wear glass cannon gear because I get so many boons to help with damage.
Now mesmer have good access to boons, I can mix more condition damage into my shatter build since it gets buffed by might, that in turn led me to realise that if I went all-out boon duration buffs on my runes and took some ranks in chaos I can become a buff-bot for my team, and still do decent damage all round with shatters, staff and sword.
Such a small change opened up so many possibilities, there’s now multiple ways to spec shatter
BINGO.
combine with signet of inspiration, shatter up as high a stack of might as you can, use signet, pop time warp, MELT WORLD BOSS
But this is a huge problem; such easy access to might stacking makes investing anything more than a basic amount in domination totally obsolete. A simple 10 stack of might is 350 power, more than you can get by maxing out Domination, and easy to maintain with fast rotation of shatters. Changes like this remove any glass attribute from glass cannons; leaving you with people who do stupid damage with ridiculous survivability. They’re moving mesmers in the same direction eles are at right now, which is not good for the game. Any good ele will tell you that the class is OP right now because of this situation; we do good damage with hella survivability to back it up, making a glass cannon completely useless in a basic comparison, especially since Fire Magic is a useless traitline and Air Magic is only good when it’s complementing the healing rotation granted by Water/Arcana. The worst part is that before this, Domination and Dueling were not bad traitlines to begin with; most of the problems mesmers faced had to do with phantasm AI and other bugs, along with some problems with trait synergy. Activating a single skill you were going to use anyway to instantly gain 9 stacks of might is unhealthy for balanced game progression imo.
It’s not overpowered. We’re already weak as hell as it is. Shatter is strong, but it’s still nothing compared to thieves and warriors. Anet stated that Mesmers are supposed to be strong while illusions are out…and more or less helpless when they’re destroyed. Well, you know what?! I guess it’s time for people to also finally learn to kill/disable our illusions and Phantasms instead of looking for that bugged World Completion star and go straight after us!
Sorry to break it to you, but if you think mesmers are weak, you’re doing it wrong. Coming from somebody who plays d/d ele (which is quite strong when played correctly), I’ve never had an easier time killing people than on a mesmer.
This trait is horridly OP the way it is now. It would be one thing if mesmers had to setup their burst with something like a triple diversion shatter to gain might and then mind wrack to gain more/burst, but they don’t even have to try anymore. This does not bring interest to the class, and is not fun for anybody but the mesmer to try and counter. Boon removal is not a viable option; the stacks apply too quickly and the burst is over too soon to reliably have that sort of counter on-hand and ready to apply.
I can only imagine the feces-storm the mesmer community will conjure up when they fix signet of illusions if shocking aura is this much of an issue. Earth 3 was intended to be a leap finisher and it functioned as such from the start; a previous update glitched it however.
So you are saying that one team managed to do a good cheese start and therefore should automatically win because of that? You are saying that the other team should just lose (even tho they might be even better) just because they got cheesed? No comeback scenarios? No evolving gameplay?
God.. posts like these make me so damn sad..
Historically, a well-balanced build is not going to get cheesed by anything but the most OP kitten, and anything that is clearly so OP will get nerfed. There’s a reason good balance teams in GW1 did so well and had a lot of respect from the pvp playerbase. Build advantages exist and that will always be the case; it is up to players to be good enough to overcome these challenges, and that’s the excitement you get from the game.
BIG indirect nerf to D/D and staff support builds.
Necros, Rangers, and Mesmers will be moving considerably faster.
I still like the D/D build though.
Big? I’m not seeing a big nerf to them. Other classes are just being brought up in terms of mobility; this doesn’t really detract from eles.
A big part of D/D survivability is the ability to break combat and either run or kite&heal. I’d say it’s pretty big.
I disagree; 25% speed increase was really the main mobility buff; this is not going to hinder escape all that much, and if anything it’s a necessary change what with eles being able to run so well. It will probably be noticeable, but not altogether game altering.
Shocking Aura: This aura is no longer incorrectly considered a boon. The aura will no longer be affected by boon duration, but also cannot be ripped by boon removal skills.
Does this still work with powerful allies, zephyr’s boon, and elemental shielding?
This looks like a nerf to the d/d auramancer build, is it?
Also monk/water/earth runes don’t help dagger 3 aura anymore? wtf.
What it’s referring to is the actual aura, not the boons granted by auras. Shocking aura was lasting more than 5 seconds, and that is what’s being fixed. The boons granted by aura application should remain unchanged if the text is correct.
It was also granting extra damage if you had the water minor trait and could be removed by enemies.
Yes, which means that it wasn’t really nerfed at all; we were probably helped more than hurt simply because boon removal could wreck anybody who used shocking aura at the wrong time.
Shocking Aura: This aura is no longer incorrectly considered a boon. The aura will no longer be affected by boon duration, but also cannot be ripped by boon removal skills.
Does this still work with powerful allies, zephyr’s boon, and elemental shielding?
This looks like a nerf to the d/d auramancer build, is it?
Also monk/water/earth runes don’t help dagger 3 aura anymore? wtf.
What it’s referring to is the actual aura, not the boons granted by auras. Shocking aura was lasting more than 5 seconds, and that is what’s being fixed. The boons granted by aura application should remain unchanged if the text is correct.
Send your pet out, have it turn around because the target is charging you then use the ability. Also kite infront of it so it does not have to move, it takes a lot of work to get used to but once you do it is really satisfying. The other trick to get it to use its ability almost instantly is to call it to return-then attack-then f2 in rapid succession and it will cancel any move it is trying to do. I do agree the charge up times are a little crazy but the river drakes attack is far to powerful to be instant, there are some weak abilities (such as fire, frost, and that new drake) which are just horrible in PvP as it has a large charge up and tiny cone.
I don’t want it to be instant; I want it to follow targets properly.
Ok so i basically have to play staff ele in tourneys to take advantage of the aoe swiftness buff in the build? How in the world do people think this promotes skilled played and build diversity? If this was intended next they will probably be locking utilities and traits too. GG casuals.
It does bring some interesting theory into play, such as traiting 30 into water and sharing swiftness/fury on aura with your team, assuming you are an auramancer. However, I don’t think this change is necessary.
I would be more ok with the charge up time if the pet followed its target during the actual animation. With how it is now, you can have your River Drake (which has an AMAZING damage f2) fully charge up the skill and then have it go on full CD because the opponent got behind the pet without even realizing what the pet was doing.
just to ask (still able to stack any amount of swiftness with rune of the pack).
What on earth swiftness is useful for? considering as you are engaged in battle its disabled?
Ever try chasing an ele with swiftness even in combat?
Pretty much this; Doesn’t matter if movement is scaled down; that ele is still running 33% faster than you are if you don’t also have swiftness; and he can keep it up constantly.
Or cripple, chill, daze, stun, immobilize, knockdown, launch, pull, fear, leap, charge, shadowstep, blink or line/ring of warding.
I really miss GW1. GW2 doesn’t feel anything like it, and even with the strongest attraction factors I could find I’m still bored and the year isn’t even finished yet. GW1 kept me occupied a lot longer than that; the skillcap was so much higher and more rewarding in my experience.
just to ask (still able to stack any amount of swiftness with rune of the pack).
What on earth swiftness is useful for? considering as you are engaged in battle its disabled?
Ever try chasing an ele with swiftness even in combat?
Pretty much this; Doesn’t matter if movement is scaled down; that ele is still running 33% faster than you are if you don’t also have swiftness; and he can keep it up constantly.
-Increase the speed of counter attack (this could be applied to pretty much any profession that has a counter mechanism in their weapon sets)
-Remove root on sword throw
-Drastically reduce the aftercast on counter attack; it is not a very fluid motion to go into any action from the counter; it seems to exist only for that purpose and combos off of it are awkward at best, though sometimes workable. This is partly because it knocks your foe back a great deal; but the small distance is often a hindrance and there would be little change to the efficacy of the skill if the knockback were decreased or the aftercast was removed/reduced.
Shortbow has much higher range that 1.200, just like many other weapons in the game.
What does this mean? This means that the autoattack will work fine at 1200 but you can still shot manually beyond 1200 and still hit your target.
So, the real bug is many weapons having higher range than the stated, rifle probably doesn’t have “extra” range…so, you are actually asking for a nerf
I believe what he is asking is for the attack to self-activate at 1200, not for it to hit.
@Leuca.5732 (the pro)….rotation is not unrealistic. I already tested it and killed a decent warrior in my first fight on the mesmer I made for testing (and I should not be killing anyone in my first fight using the class). I used exactly that rotation (with of course mixing it up, sometimes you bring BF snare and shatter together, sometime you use stun bf and shatter together, etc etc… no class can afford to be a robot in this game (except d/d elementalist) ). Rotation is just a starting outline for a fight and then you adapt to the circumstances.
I love your passive aggression. The “decent warrior” you killed did not die because of BF; I can guarantee that. You are telling me that a decent warrior did not see through your rapid weapon rotation or figure out what utilities you were running before you killed him? I’m just not sure what to say to that.
And yet I never saw a single person whining about how “overpowered” staff eles (or any eles) were when the “bugged” EA was there.
Where were you looking, if you don’t mind my asking? Bugged EA was horrifically OP. All you had to do was equip a sigil of energy on your staff and get vigor on cantrip for stupid amounts of might and aoe healing everywhere. Stacking a full minute of swiftness as you finish an encounter?
Jake, Asterisk:
You do not have to stay with sword in order to pull BF every 8 seconds. I explained above how you pull BF about every 8 seconds and still do normal weapon rotation (10 sec on sword/pistol and 10 seconds on staff).
Not just L2P for two of you, but also ‘learn to read’.
Basing a nerf cry on an unrealistic weapon rotation is laughable at best. How transparent of a playstyle would that be? BF is slightly OP, but it’s hardly as bad as you or anybody else makes it out to be. They could switch the function to Evade instead of Invuln and you would still be complaining. Sword’s auto attack is pretty much useless since you cannot afford to be that close to most foes while using a build that will actually get the direct damage, and 3’s immobilize is more than avoidable; it involves kiting the clone, which is not difficult since clones have obvious movement patterns.
Ranger is my second main; working in sync with your pet is very engaging and highly rewarding when done correctly, even though rangers/pets need a lot of work.
Might stacking indeed is troublesome, but burning retreat has long enough field for eruption+dodge after it, i´m not sure if that´s the case without longer fields trait though.
Yes, that´s the issue which bothers me right now. I think that the Burning retreat is long enough, but it must be done perfectly, which is often difficult in the heat of battle and you don´t have the room for this in some cases. Also if you want to do some dmg by this stacking combo, it is very complicated to hit…
Nevermind, we will se what Anet does in the next patch, I suppose that I will try D/D even if it don´t fit my imagination of the caster class
This is a huge problem with staff eles; they were spoiled on the old evasive arcana. In this situation, you could stack mass might, mass aoe heal, mass aoe buff with protection or fury/swiftness (both if you had the right traits), and now they are unable to do all these things.. at the same time. If you want might stacks, bring arcane wave and a sigil of battle; if you want healing, get a sigil of life or energy. You will still have a bit of ability in your other category but there needs to be some definition of specialization here; the number of free might stacks you could get just by running a sigil of energy was stupid, as was the number of free aoe heals by just dodging around like a stupid bouncy ball in your healing rain. You want the ele to be diverse but reject the idea of anything that doesn’t include mass amounts of blast finishers. The ele wasn’t made to be a one-trick pony, so don’t keep it that way.
I use a combination of keybinds and clicking. If you are going to click anything, it is imperative that you have the speed and mouse precision to execute your actions fluidly.
I would like to see you dueling people who actually move around somewhat instead of standing there to be smacked around. There is just nothing interesting about seeing who can auto attack the other person to death while burning all their CD.
I feel that the staff was lacking an interesting, specific skill sequence like that before.
Unfortunately no, it doesn´t. You just had more options of the interesting, specific sequences than now, because you were not forced to switch to Earth every time for the finisher (I refer to the fact that all of the EA spells were finishers, not to that bug which caused that every dodge was a finisher, to be clear, that was ofc hugely OP)
I don’t think we need a blast finisher on every attunement. What would be more interesting in my opinion would be to just make each attunement’s dodge effect more interesting. Water is pretty sound, but it should have the heal toned down like they did to our 15 Water trait. Earth seems relatively decent. Fire and air however are just paltry; there is no incentive to dodge in any of those elements to trigger evasive arcana. Fire could create small aoe damage and a small flame ring (just as an example) and Air could pulse a blind with a small AoE swiftness. In this kind of setup, one attunement damages/sets up combo field, another debuffs+buffs, another heals/removes a debuff, and the last is a debuff+combo finisher.
One of the best parts regardless of skin is that the Chilling Whirl does more damage than what the Red Jellyfish’s f2 does, so you can get double usage of the best underwater f2. Jellies are just great underwater pets on top of that, so you can’t go wrong.
They are pretty freaking amazing… An because of that I think I may to shelve my shark and bring my rainbow one back out, I don’t remember why I stopped using him tbh…
I was testing damage with a friend and my Blue/Rainbow Jellies can crit on f2 for about 6k if they get all of the hits critical. If you stack fury with effects like Signet of the Wild/Rampage as one, the damage is just stupid powerful for such a short amount of time.
@Leuca “You don’t need a ranged weapon to kite HB warriors.”
Please sir and/or madam, how do you kite something with a Melee weapon? Because last I checked that’s just called running away…
Dodges, strafing, etc. Ever dodged into a warrior as he started HB instead of away? You end up behind him and free to attack. If you are avoiding his attacks while still performing your own, this can be considered kiting.
That’s not kiting… however that’s a nifty trick i need to try because that may actually make me a hundred blades killer as well… i always try dodging AWAY because for what ever reason i keep thinking i can’t go through players (GW1 habits)
Kiting is keeping a distance between you and your enemy, you know, like you do with a kite… IE imagine theirs a string between you, if you get to close (where they can hit you) then the kite wont be able to fly and will crash on the floor, where if you can keep the distance open the kite will stay up in the air! (that’s always how i’ve imagined it, then again i’ve actually flown a kite xD)
The definition of kiting as MMO players know it does not really have a match in an actual dictionary as far as I know. I consider it kiting because I’m keeping away from the player’s weapon as much as I can, not necessarily the player. If I’m behind a warrior and he uses HB while facing his current direction, he’s not going to hit me; my distance to him at this point is irrelevant if I’m doing damage. Kiting is a garbage term to apply to this game anyway because so few long-range sets are actually capable of maintaining the distance with the game’s myriad gap closers.
To avoid arguing semantics, one could say that it is very possible to avoid a lot of damage while maintaining a comfortable melee range with your foe; it just takes a bit more analyzing of your opponent’s movement/tactics.
A friend and I have had quite a bit of success with Dagger/Focus and Axe/Dagger weapon sets.
and how do you deal against shatterkitten mesmers ?
i find mesmers extremely difficult to handle without AoE effects, and i hesitated a lot before giving up the greater marks. And now i struggle a lot more against them.
Really, i’m not being sarcastic, i just want opinions.
We actually have been dabbling with minions/wells a bit.
