Guild Wars 2

I’m making a caltrops bleed thief at the moment, and am currently trying to decide on what runes to put in my armor. A full set of Rune of the Afflicted or Rune of the Undead seems good (I’m a toughness build, meaning that rune of the Undead will grant something like 400 condition damage based off my stats).

I was looking at Rune of the Mad King, however. It seems to have some interesting properties for a thief. Bleed duration is nice, about the same as the bleed duration granted by Rune of the Afflicted. It also gives +10% condtion duration on top of that, and a bunch of power as well as the ability to summon ravens every time I do daggerstorm.

Has anyone managed to try out a full set of mad king runes on a thief? Or would that be a waste?

Sometimes you just gotta be in more than one guild, especially for us roleplayers. For example, I might want to be in “Biglevelingguild1” for when I’m just running pve content, but then I might also want to be in “roleplayingfun” guild, or that other interesting looking guild over there for my rping or chat.

Normally I’d just divide my characters equally between guilds, but I can’t do that in this game. Personally, I’m loving the multi guild feature. For someone like me, it’s perfect. I can remain loyal to my select few guilds and represent them on their respectively associated characters, but switch guild chats when I need to see what’s going on in other guilds.

Bunkers don’t need nerfing, sheesh. If a player wants to spec fully into defense for the purpose of survival, there’s nothing wrong with that. They should be rewarded for being defensive and have middling DPS, just like players who spec for damage can expect to see big numbers, but fall flat to a few attacks.

I use banners to attack fairly often as a warrior. It’s similar to elementalist summoned weapons. Pick up, attack, drop. Pick up, attack, drop.

banner of defense combined with a hammer is a double whammy for aoe knockback crowd control.

I use a bunker support heal bomb kit/elixer gun build and I can easily give 12 stacks of might to myself and everyone around me with this neat little combo:

BoB toolkit skill, fire bomb, healing turret, weapon switch, shield 4-4, detonate healing turret.

Warrior, Elementalist, and any other class who uses summoned/transformed weapons and kits also suffers from this.

The thing is, kits DON’T compete with the rifle for damage unless you’re using grenades. Engineer rifle actually has very respectable damage. My partner’s crit rifle build has insane burst that’s much more reliable than the grenade kits’ slow moving projectiles, as well as the huge amount of control that comes with wielding a rifle. Save for grenades with the grenadier trait, you simply lose too many stats with a weapon kit for it to be considered a ‘replacement’ for the rifle at all. I have no idea where you’re getting that from. Most engineers I’ve seen agree that rifle is the way to go for damage if you’re not using grenades, and wish that kits were stronger overall and/or carried stats from a mainhand weapon.

Engie rifle only does slightly less damage than Warrior’s rifle per shot, and comes with way more utility, moblity, and control. trait for trait, I think engineers get the best tradeoffs.

Excuse me? Rifles lack main hand damage? You are aware that engineers are capable of dropping 12k crits with a rifle build. also, kits don’t scale with stats. Their damage is naturally inferior unless it’s traited grenades.

Seriously.

That 1) complaint isn’t even gameplay-changing. It’s an aesthetic that you personally don’t agree on.

Warrior’s rifle skills are terrible. They lack the control that Engineer skills have, as well as the versatility. If you want a bland, direct-damage ranged weapon then you should be playing a warrior.

…all of those things you just stated are for cosmetic and preference related. YOU don’t like the shotgun theme. YOU don’t like the kits. YOU don’t seem to realise that turrets being popped creates a blast finisher, allowing for some of the easiest blast combos in the game with a turret build.

I play a pure heal/support build using bombs, elixer gun and pistol/shield and as far as team support goes, it’s fantastic. The secret? Combo fields, just like the OP said.

Burns are infinately easier to apply than bleeds, and one burn is worth 7 stacks of bleed. Opponents removing conditions doesn’t mean much when your fire attacks are constantly re-applying one of the best damage oriented conditions available.

Rather than focus on bleeds, consider condition damage for burning in a more realistic situation. This is why I feel that power + condition damage is good for elementalists. Yes, burning is easy to cure, but it will deal a sufficient amount of damage with only 1 or 2 ticks before it’s cleansed, and punishes opponents for not cleansing it immediately with additional damage. Elementalists have many ways to inflict burn, much more so than bleeds.

Main hand shield would totally make me delete my norn warrior, turn him into a charr, and then proceed to make him my main.

Someone never played Ragnarok Online, one of the oldest MMO’s around, where several melee attacks had cast bars. Who’s looking silly now?

Arsenica.2105:

thing here is, ok, engineers dont to half as much damage as any other class, let alone glass cannons

Elementalists would sourly disagree with this, as would Necromancers.

Healing Turret. It provides a lot of utility, including regen, burst heal, aoe group heal and most importantly it’s also a blast finisher, which is key to my might-sharing bomb healing build.

edit is disabled, so posting again.

Taking the feedback into consideration I’ve switched my utilities to Healing Turret, Bomb Kit, Elixer gun kit, Elixer C, supply crate.

With this setup, I get the best of both worlds from bomb and elixer kit, and I get to stack 11 might every 20 seconds or so thanks to blast finishers and HGH-infused elixer C, which is good for self-removing conditions. That could be replaced by any elixer though. Maybe S or B.

I’m still undecided about dropping HGH and taking 10 points off Alchemy. Kit refinement seems nice, but the tools tree doesn’t really give me much in the way of stats or benefits other than kit refinement.

The reason I use HGH is because it easily stacks up 10 ranks of might and keeps them maintained. When comboing bomb kit’s 2nd skill with BoB and shield’s 4-4 skill, I can get 6 stacks of might off on everyone around me, plus at least 3 more immediately from my thrown elixers.

Since my partner does such amazing DPS but doesn’t use HGH himself, I feel like this build compliments him well. I’ve been using it in the Mad King Thorn boss fight to fairly good effect, and my whole party was appreciating the constant aoe might I was pumping out. However I’m now realising that I can get the same effect by adding rocket boots and healing turret’s blast to the mixture, which lets me stack 12 might in one combo field.

My issue is that combo fields are unreliable in zerg situations and it takes a few seconds of immobility to do the might stack combo, which can be interrupted. There is always some guardian putting combo fields over the top of your own. Therefore I would rather have a few elixers on hand so I can easily throw might to the group while my blast finishers are on cooldown. Thrown elixers can be tossed while running and provide a variety of other random boons on top of the might.

If I get speedy kits, I can’t use bombs to heal, which means I’m not using the bomb kit + shield to do a quick aoe +6 might stack combo. However I will be allowed to use the elixer gun, which seems better for healing overall.

Ok, so I’ve decided to go full healer/tank engie. I’ve put 30 points into both defensive trees, but now I’m stuck on choosing where to put the next 10 points. If I’m using elixer gun, I put it in tools, but if I’m using bombs I put it in explosives. Tough decision, since I plan on only using one kit (I need the other 2 slots for elixers)

Sorry, but Elementalists cannot play glass cannon either.

I recently got my first character, a charr engineer, to lv 80 and am having trouble deciding on gear/sigils for my first general purpose build. I have enough crafting materials to make a full set of exotics of any kind, now it’s just up to deciding what to make of it.

So far, I’m drawn towards pistol/pistol or pistol/shield. My charr is coupled to my friend’s charr in game for roleplaying purposes, and his engineer uses a full glass cannon rifle build. For thematic’s sake, I wanted to go with a pistol build to compliment that, something that utilises thrown elixer might stacking (alchemy 30) to increase my partner’s DPS while keeping him alive. I also want to be able to do some damage of my own.

I do like the elixer gun for it’s support options, and I love condition damage even if it is currently weaker than direct damage. However, I’m not sure about using the elixer gun, since I lose a lot of stats when I have it equipped (weapon kits don’t scale or draw from sigils).

Could anyone help me decide on a support-dps pistol/elixer build? what kind of exotics would I be looking at? Please share knowledge.

Anet’s communication with the Necro and Elementalists so far has been really abyssmal. Though if you check the dev tracker, you’ll see that a majority of their posts are copy + paste responses and moderations.

Compared to Riot Games, who really do actually put effort into responding to issues in a timely and honest manner on forums, it’s actually quite embarassing.

yawn oh it’s another one of these threads. Move along people. Nothing new, funny, or original here.

Sooo…the inclusion of a powerful bleed to the downed state’s immob attack doesn’t mean anything to the downed state’s ability to rally? Good job just ignoring things like that conveniently.

Ring of Earth buff is amazing and so is Cone of Cold’s increased healing. That skill was already incredible for self heal and support and now it’s even better. They also fixed Flame Grab’s issue with having a very narrow hitbox. It’s now quite easy to land this critcal DPS skill compared to before.

Go check out the warrior forums. They are also complaining about being an underpowered class.

A perfect example of why the influx of casual gaming is detrimental to gaming as a whole.

“It’s hard to learn to use” should never be an excuse as to why an ability i s considered bad. That’s a problem with the player, not the class. Complexity is generally a skill barrier thing and what we should be focussing on is final results disregarding player skill, because skilled players WILL learn how to use this skill if it’s really worth using.

Currently it doesn’t have enough in the way of positives to really warrant using. I personally prefer it over glyph of elementals, but it needs to do a lot more damage given how long the recharge is and how few charges it has. It doesn’t really offer much utility either. Randomly striking meteor showers? Meh. Inconsistant DPS is not very attractive.

That. Fire Axe is very underrated. I use it too as my range skill with D/D.

Crafting in this game is how you powerlevel at 60+, no joke. Have gold to burn? Craft your way to 80.

Staff needs some tlc and scepter/dagger is almost there, just needs some small tweaks.

I run a D/D Ele and carry Flame Axe or Ice Bow as one of my skills (ohmagerd, those useless conjured weapons!) which allows me to go ranged with ease for a short period whenever it’s necessary. However I rarely find it necessary since Ele’s can get in and out so quickly. Since my Ele’s damage is a mixture of power and condition damage which comes mainly from the armor, burns inflicted by the Flame Axe still hurt enough to make hit and run tactics worthwhile.

All I see is “I can’t play this class by pounding a single button, so something must be wrong with the DPS.”

Ele is not a DPS class. Ele is a combo-oriented versatility class with tons of utility. The classic MMO mage tends to do a lot of SPIKE DPS but rarely ever actually matches up to melee classes in terms of raw overall DPS and power. They also tend to rely on big, slow attacks with large AOE’s to get the job done.

Elementalists have middling power, tons of utility and tons of mobility. In a game where everyone has a dodge, this is actually pretty good. A thief can do an 18k crit over the course of one attack. We can do 18k over the course of several attacks while simultaneously showering our opponents with hard CC, keeping them from doing anything else unless they blow their dodge/stun breakers.

Ele players really need to learn that damage is not everything. In 2-3 skills we can force an opponent to dodge or eat a hefty upfront chunk of damage and 8 stacks of bleed, followed by a burn, followed by a chill, then a launch. If they do dodge, then they blow their second dodge or they eat a burn followed by a chill followed by a launch. If they decide to eat it all and then clear their conditions with a skill, they’re going to get interrupted and/or probably damaged even further by the ele’s constant flow of attacks until they do wise up and start blowing dodges/evasive cooldowns.

If this were a fighting game, Ele’s would be that one guy who doesn’t hit hard, but has a ton of different option selects for just about every situation he can put the opponent in. If we consider that a dodge is like an air tech or a ground tech, and that dodges aren’t invulnerable from the very start of the animation, then it becomes easy to put a single opponent into a bad position after landing even one of our crowd control abilities, and from there we are at an advantage and can act based on how the opponent chooses to react.

And if your rotation hits a snag? Just turn around and run/heal to safety. Ele’s run better than almost any other class, arguably better than any other class (I still think Thieves outperform them slightly).

Come on, we’ve seen ele’s performing well in all kinds of PVP lately, including WvW. Everyone is aware of this classes’s issues, but it’s time to start properly exploring their strengths.

As others have said, full elixer build + condition based pistols doesn’t require any kits. Stack 10 might through rapid potion consumption and go to town.

That depends if you want to use banners solely for the purpose of buffing though. They can also be used for their skills and utility. I treat them as I would treat an engineer’s weapon kit. The large AOE knockback of the defense banner, charge gap closer, and swiftness buff are nice, as are the other banner’s various skills too.

For pure heal/buff, shouts are defiantely the more practical option, but banners provide a CONSTANT AOE boon that’s not limited by your cooldowns. By placing or running with a banner, you’re creating a zone in which you and your allies are considerably more powerful, regardless of whether or not they were in range for your shout to affect them. The buff re-applies whenever anyone comes close to the banner.

Banner skills also provide you with easy blast and whirl finishers. Good in combination with short bows and their fire fields. I personally would suggest a mixture of banners and shouts. Banner of defense is obviously my personal favorite

I’m currently making a banner warrior. I really like this playstyle so far. When combined with a double handed hammer, banner of defense allows for a surprising amount of AOE crowd control. Banners take a bit of getting used to though. Knowing when to pick them up and how to make use of their skills, when to drop them to perform special combos, etc.

Also the cooldown starts as soon as a banner is placed. You can plant multiple banners, but only one of each banner type at a time. You can only carry one banner with you at a time too, so unless you travel with teammates, it’s probably best to only use one banner skill at a time, and two other utilities when soloing.

Well if they’re close enough for you to have just hit them with Updraft, then they’re close enough for you to hit them with phoenix. I’ve tested this combo, and it’s even possible to forward-roll after an updraft to land earthquake before the opponent can stand up. Granted, I tested it against a PVE mob. I assume players can spec for decreased down time on knockdowns, but as far as I know, knockdowns follow the same rules for monsters and players.

Bond.4813:

@lifelike
Actually wrong. Takes pressing “v” and he dodges it. Really not possible to hit it vs player thats actually sitting behind his desk.

Nope. Do it fast enough and it actually hits before the player recovers from their ‘knocked down’ animation. Can’t dodge while you’re knocked down. If the player somehow does have reduced knockdown duration, then they still aren’t going to be dodging the Phoenix/Earthquake/RoF that comes immediately afterwards. remember that the ele can move again before Dragon’s Fang lands.

Updraft is your longest duration knockdown. If you use Updraft (wind 4) and then immediately switch to fire, you can actually land a fire 2 before the opponent stands up, providing they don’t use any stun breakers (and even then it’s a fantastic way to force a stun break)

1. 2. 3. Attunement Dancing. Let’s get it stuck so it becomes a thing.

I think there’s a charr cub somewhere in black citadel who hints at having two fathers. He says something along the lines of “I miss Daddy.” and a nearby male charr says “I know, son, he’ll be back soon”. The older charr could be calling the cub ‘son’ as an affectionate term though, so it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but I guess that’s up for interpretation.

Given that they are so militaristic, I would assume that Charr value breeding and keeping their numbers up. Homosexual pairings probably happen, but aren’t as prolific as the Sylvari.

OP posts several high quality videos showing his sucessful build in several practical PVP situations against an assortment of non-terrible opponents.

People still comment saying that ‘this build won’t work against a good player, etc’

wut.

Collecting, fetching and killcounting is a staple of the MMO genre, and gaming in general. You can’t very well expect any self-respecting MMO to not have these conventions. Somehow, you have to do work in order to gain your levels, not everything is going to be handed to you on a silver platter, or there wouldn’t be much game to play, would there?

“I want to go kill things in order to gain my experience and rack up my points” Well ok, you can go kill things, providing a more dynamic gameplay experience, but then you’re going to complain about the game being a grind. What else would you be doing? Oh, of course, events and raids. That’s just killing things in a specific way, probably collecting important item X for whatever it’s needed for, and making your character more shiny.

Or, you can do jobs for NPCS. Just like real life jobs, that’s going to involve getting something that NPC wants, getting something you want, getting something other players want, killing something the NPC’s want dead, etc etc. Would you rather gain exp by chatting to the npcs? No, that’s going to be boring for most players, because Americans hate lore. Maybe you should be getting EXP for putting banners on the field and inspiring troop morale…nope ,that’s just going from point A to point B and pressing buttons, but with a different package! Omg, like every other game out there! 9_9

MMOs are by design based on a sense of progression in a social environment. Loosely simulating real life conventions and processes in a way that makes them seem fantastical and fun. You play MMO’s to collect things, to explore, to fight monsters and collect more things, make those collected things into things, and slowly progress from a mewling newbie into a kitten with a +10 Legendary BFF sword. Take that away, and you no longer have an MMO. You may as well go play 2D fighters since the only grinding involved for PVP is practicing mad skillz in training mode (and even then people complain about that, still).

Ugh, gamers these days have no idea what they want.

I bought it because it was unfortunately a better game than Tera, and everyone else was playing it. I still prefer Tera for it’s art and combat, but GW2 just has more content and feels more alive.

Whoa whoa whoa…hold the presses. Some people actually think this game is grindy?

Like…seriously?

In this game you can CRAFT from 1 to 80 if you have the materials. It takes less than a week of doing events to get a character to max level through map completion alone.

I’d hate to see what would happen if these people ever played a real grinder, like Ragnarok online.

luchifer.6401:

Swap attunments? I dont think anyone can swap attunements FOUR times for a single fight ausing ALL the damage skills available (as the OP is describing) in a single fight against anyone who knows how to play. And even if you somehow manage to survive the fight, you only managed to blow all your cooldowns for the next fight.

By the time you’ve done a full cycle, your offensive options in the fire tree at least will have been off cooldown.

An example is such for double daggers:

Advance on a target with Wind 4, Wind 3, wind 5. Opponent is knocked down.

Fire Attune – Fire 3, fire 4, fire 2. By now they’ll be able to dodge, attack or move, so we’ll omit fire 5 unless we’re sure they’ll stand still to take it.

Earth attune – wait for them to blow their dodge/disable, then Earth 4 (knockdown), earth 5 (either they get hit or they blow a second dodge).

By now you’ve probably taken some damage, so.

Water attune – Water 2, Water 5, healing signet.

is your opponent still dangerous? Then re-attune to wind and get away with wind 4, or pop mist form and kite for a while.

Ther’es an example of how to use a majority of your offensive skills in a practical situation. And that’s just a simple example.

I really fail to see why everyone complains about being forced to swap attunements. That’s just how you play the class. There’s nothing hard or complex about swapping attunements, and if anything the other classes are just too easy. It’s about as hard as swapping guns in an FPS to avoid reloading in a heavy fire situation, or chaining special moves in a 2D fighter.

I don’t like these suggestions. One nice thing about the weapons is that you can use them while attuned to a different element. For example, you can have a thunder hammer while in earth attunement, lay down a lightning field, then immediately drop the weapon and use earthquake for a quick lightning blast finisher.

You have the ability to drop the weapons at any time, you get 2 per 1 cast, and they recharge quite fast. Nobody seems to understand that you’re not supposed to hold onto the weapons for ages. They are not supposed to replace weapon skills.

Since the Flamethrower doesn’t carry the stats of your weapons, isn’t it smarter to open with flamethrower skills, then switch to pistol/shield in order to maximise your condition damage?

Why should the competitive value of a class be based on non-competitive players? If you play a character seriously, you should be expected to learn and master that character to the best of your ability. That’s why a class should be balanced around skilled players who can unlock the classes potential in a practical high level situation, not around the average joe who isn’t going to be playing seriously anyway.

However, a class that takes more effort to learn should have greater rewards and versatility than a low skill cieling, high-rewards class.

Except that all of the summoned weapons except for shield, hammer and greatsword are ranged, not melee. They fit into our playstyles just fine, people just aren’t making use of them effectively.

I generally stick with one weapon at a time, plus lightning flash and signet of storms. Generally Lava Axe or Ice bow to give my D/D elementalist a ranged option, a new method of applying burns, or a jump finisher/gap closer. Since D/D is mostly a melee-range build, using lava axe 5 to jump to opponents and apply a nasty burn, then immediately dropping it and attacking with Flame Grip or earth skills works nicely for when Lightning Rush is on cooldown. Alternatively you can just lightning rush away, turn around, water attune, pop a heal, and kite with ice bow.

One nice thing about summoned weapons is that you can use them while in any attunement. So you can be using a flame axe while attuned to earth, allowing you to lay down fire AoEs to prepare for combo fields with your blast finisher without having to put Fire attunement or any of the other attunements on cooldown.

That said, I would like the weapons to be made a little stronger. Currently they are useable, but if they offered some kind of boon along with their skills, they would be useful. I also don’t understand why Frost bow’s summon doesn’t chill, Thunder Hammer’s summon doesn’t daze, etc. Why is Lava Axe the only one who has a condition on summon?