Honestly S/D works perfectly fine with any of the common D/D builds. The switch from MH dagger to scepter isn’t drastic. You’ll have slightly more defense from earth and air blind, slightly more burst heal with an instant instead of a channeled, and your fire rotation will be a bit more bursty as well.
I actually prefer it in pve over d/d, because the fire burst (ie DT) is not hard to land as compared to pvp. The only ability I really don’t care for is shatterstone.
Agree on using it in PVE. S/D is my main selection in dungeons and fractals, unless I’m intending on running aurashare (Which I choose based on group comp), where D/D has two to give.
I end up almost always using the earth elemental, simply because it at least stays alive for a bit.
I guess the main problem is just that cantrips are just the best.
If there was a glyph or signet that broke stuns/granted stability you’d see more builds with them.
This is a big one. I’ve been wanting to run inscription with a bunch of glyph signets to have fun with all the buffs I’d get, but lack of stun break holds me back.
It’s not terrible, but it’s iffy playing it at close range in the little tpvp circles trying to contest/hold points. Particularly when you only have 4 teammates and are more likely to engage in 1 on 1s. Of course, no RTL so longer travel time assisting points elsewhere. Staff water 4 on a point is your most powerful tool, stacking lots of chill if people hang out in it, though it’s a long cooldown if/when the condition is cleansed.
It’s better suited to the 8 player hotjoins imo. Not because of the quality of players but simply because of the nature of hotjoins. More people on your team, meaning higher likelyhood of fighting alongside 1 or more teammates which staff ele prefers. Also more prolonged fights on a point meaning less situations where you need to travel to a different point (where you don’t have RTL to speed the trip)
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I think i’m doing something wrong with the buildcraft, when I replace celestials with cavalier i only get minor boost to effective power. i didn’t try replacing it with berserkers because i don’t know if that’s an appropriate setup for eles like d/d.
Cavalier has toughness as primary stat and the crit damage bonus doesn’t help much if your crit chance is poor.
There’s a buffs section where you can account for fury. If you anticipate 100% fury uptime in most situations you can set that and it’ll bump your crit chance up accordingly, making the crit damage bonus more useful.
Even then, if you have no precision on your gear in a 0/10/0/30/30 build or something, full fury still is going to mean your crit chance is relatively low, meaning less value on crit damage.
Best gearslot for cavalier gear on an ele is the backpiece, where ascended backpieces trade 35 of a stat for 5% crit damage. The best tradeoff you’ll find (outside of celestial gear where you get the crit damage “for free”)
Some stuff that would help staff without causing any problems:
Earth 2: This should have the casting time reduced by a full second.
Earth 4: Unsteady ground should be increased from 2 to 4 seconds of cripple.
Water 5: Allow this to be cast while on the move.
Air 3: Increase the hitbox on this so it can actually hit things. This shares similar problems to fire dagger #5.
Don’t look at celestial gear, see all the total stats, then think “Eles use everything, time to load up on celestial! It must be better!”. It doesn’t necessarily work out that way. You’ll be surprised when you see how much losing power when you put on a celestial item affects your damage.
There are certain setups where a PVT item provides more damage AND survivability than a celestial item and it isn’t always immediately obvious at a glance. Of course, this isn’t always the case.
Celestial gear is probably the one time you’ll want to use gw2’s answer to the WoW DPS spreadsheets of old:
www.gw2buildcraft.com
Plug in your planned gear setup, then try subbing out individual items of different types for celestial to see just how it affects your damage output.
well keep in mind the +4stat comes with the 5 agony resistance :p
I don’t think that’s correct…
Well that’s what the wiki says. I don’t fractal so it may be misleading *shrug
The infusion bought with laurels is just +4 stats and that’s it.
There’s infusions that have been in for a while, which are quite expensive to make, that do +5 stat +5 agony resist.
If a guild asks you to rep 100% of the time and you don’t want to…then just don’t play with them. Join some other guilds that don’t care.
There’s nothing you need them for in this game.
<—- Unguilded, has legendary and ascended in all slots. Not some big accomplishment either, anyone can do it.
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Okay, see, I didn’t say “If they just out of the blue added a sub-fee” I said “if it had one.” Big difference.
That’s exactly why your statement has no ground, the game would have to be different with a sub-fee as well.
Actually it does have ground, a sub-fee would improve the game overall, I mean, unless you cannot afford 50 cents a day (if high end of sub-fee spectrum).
It sounds like they’re actually making more from the cash shop than what they would likely be making from the people that would stick around and choose to keep subbing. Worked out to something like if 600k people were subbing consistently since release at $15 according to the earnings report.
I suppose it’s possible more than that would have consistently subbed, but it’s not like they’re not making loads of money here on a weekly basis with the gem store. More than enough to fund anything they want to do with the game, and bank a tidy profit.
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It’s a good game.
I complain about a lot of stuff that I think would make it better. But it’s a good game.
It isn’t a matter of it being the most efficient way to make money. It isn’t.
It’s about it being passable income, while being something you can just alt tab back in for and say “Eh, I’ll pop over for a few minutes and kill the dragon”.
Also you get to goof around with the load of other people there for a little bit, instead of your interaction being “ping zerk gear plz”
I’m an ele but I think the 5 target max is appropriate.
Not really interested in tactics where a small group of people can outright reject any amount of people from crossing through an area.
I can’t give you a number as to how many people are playing, but I can tell you the higher populated servers (and there are many) are pretty kitten crowded.
It’s one of the only MMOs I can think of in recent years that hasn’t fallen apart population wise within months of coming out. So hurray for that
not warrant it but counter it, its almost impossible to win a 1 v 1 vs 1 elementalist right now , and lets say you’re close to killing them, they will just mst form to safety and then ride of the lighting, there is no simple way to catch them, they remove conditions on dodge and heal! and have so much stability :P! they are the perfect class right now and to balance them with boom hate would mean to break every other class that uses boon :P hopefully they just balance eles instead of adding boom hate, i know warriiors, thief and engi would thank them on sPvp at least lol
The 0/10/0/30/30 ele build which everyone complains about may or may not have armor of earth slotted as a utility which gives 6s stability/protection on a 90 sec cooldown.
The earth’s embrace trait which gives armor of earth(and thus stability) at 50% hps you mentioned earlier, most eles don’t get to pick up. Stuff like rock solid (30 in earth) that gives stability on switching to earth…well if you fight anyone that goes that far into earth, be glad. 99% don’t. Of the 1% that do, most don’t even take that trait, they take the other GM trait that lets you keep signet passives.
The most popular ele utilities taken are cleansing fire, lightning flash, and mist form. In the popular 0/10/0/30/30 build, they actually don’t have the stability stuff at all.
Weird thing to complain about. Kinda like complaining about backstab thieves doing too much damage, stealthing too much…and then working in a complaint about them using venom share too or something. The stuff isn’t all in one build.
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I want a mechanic where I do more damage to people the higher their base hps are, you know to counter it like boons apparently need to be countered (the thing the low hp eles and guardians get instead of high hps).
Worst problem with scepter is lack of an appropriate 900 range offensive offhand to go with it. Offhand scepter, or pistol, or whatever.
I got the incinerator first (With corrupted shard, fire/ice ftw).
Bonus since you can run S/D as well and still use your incinerator.
Working on a bifrost also. Bifrost is neat too. I’m glad I got Incinerator first though.
My only tweak to staff would be to give it RTL.
That’d be good times.
I’ve never gotten any laurels from the pvp daily or monthly…
Save yourself grief and regardless of the response or lack of response, don’t put an valuable infusion in the amulet any time soon.
If you think dust is too expensive, go farm it and sell it to people, heh.
Funny stuff, since keys have gone on sale already.
Does each level continue to always cost 1000 xp?
Is there a limit to how many you can get? I remember previous talk on the forums by ANET about this seemed to imply you needed to make choices.
Wondering if it’s safe to go ahead and make the cheap purchases in lesser categories without worrying that I’m kept from doing the more expensive stuff like supply due to a hard limit on the amount of levels you can get.
It’s more than you had before.
Besides, I like that some of the stuff is going to take a long time. Means a month from now I don’t have everything maxxed and back with nothing to do.
Not like you need any of this stuff. Most of it is more to look pretty on the stat screen than something you’ll notice much of it seems.
Supply is one of the few that’s noticable so it makes sense it’ll take a long time.
I play on an unremarkable laptop and strangely enough, with culling turned off and with 50 enemies nearby I can see…I’m experiencing a little less lag than before.
But if you turn titles off, you won’t know that 60 people nearby have completed the prestigious Combat Healer achievement.
I think it should be taken further. When anyone is standing next to you a random achievement they’ve done should blink on your screen for the next 5 minutes in 72 point font. Also for the last minute it should reverse your controls.
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The best gear can’t ever come from whatever in an MMO is fun.
I don’t know why that’s such a constant from one MMO to the next, but it is.
Definitely agree with abbreviating all server names in the titles.
This shows an alarming disconnect with the game they’re working on, if they’re putting up skins with badge costs that I can go buy on the TP for 1s 50c.
Biggest issue facing elementalists:
Too many core features which should be baseline to the class are tied to either traits or the arcane traitline attunement cooldown reduction.
Fix that and suddenly you’ll see variety in builds.
I’d be very happy if they made a Legendary dagger that changed what it was depending on what attunement we were in. A long flickering flame in fire, bolt of lightning in air, shard of ice in water, and a jagged piece of rock in earth. That i would actually go for. The incinerator is cool, but doesn’t really fit with ele. I’m currently using the Ghastly daggers from AC. I know, those don’t really fit either, but I just love how they look when they glow at night.
Having incinerator change based on your attunement would be serious swag.
Esp if the footprints changed too on attunement. How skittenzy would that be.
I’d like to see more survivability for the ele at the base level, with a small damage increase. And an appropriate reduction in healing of course.
Probably need to move the profession into the mid tier of hps (15k hp base folks, i.e ranger, mesmer, and engineer). If not that, it’ll really take a big rework on adding more defensive/evasive effects to our weapon kits.
Good point on taking more damage. I think the quickness nerf is appropriate, but the increased damage taken during frenzy should be reduced as well.
Ecto prices went down with people mass farming dragon events, precursors went down.
Ecto prices went up due to people realizing dragonfarming is being nerfed, precursors went up.
precursors sell to buy orders. Prices on posted precursors up for sale should be ignored.
I don’t think you have anything to worry about with arc lightning. It does like no damage.
I’d like to see a lottery added. It’d be a moneysink but it’d be something people could goof around with.
Have an npc that lets you buy tickets for 5 silver each. You can buy as many as you want.
Every hour, there’s a drawing for first second and third place. Winner gets 50% of the ticket money. Second place gets 25%, Third place gets 15%, the last 10% goes poof (money sink). Maybe have it span all servers so there’s a hefty pot regardless of time of day.
I know John Smith likes money sinks so here’s one people with side cash can throw money away on and have some fun with.
Should have good movespeed while in tornado mode, it wouldn’t make it good but…it’d be a start.
I use incinerator with corrupted shard, looks pretty good.
Wouldn’t complain if they made incinerator more “legendary” though with the effects
Markets with a lot of volume and a high turnover rate tend to have a small margin, if any margin at all. Markets without a lot of volume are difficult to invest a lot in, as there simply isn’t the volume for your money to chase after, and you can’t put a bunch of money into those markets without disrupting the prices pretty badly anyway.
Not to disparage pulling your 2-4% off of flipping fine materials, but the real benefit of having a lot of money, from a flipping standpoint, is being able to throw it at dozens or even hundreds of items at once. You get volume by having buy and sell orders on a bunch of items with decent margins, not by stacking it all into a single item. It takes a lot more work managing the price expectations of dozens of items at once, but that’s why there’s a margin there – people haven’t done the work.
There’s also sometimes a margin on cracking containers, salvaging items, crafting, or throwing things into the forge – these take time in game to actually go through the motions, but can be pretty profitable if prices align. Here you have to invest in the research to know drop rates to have some idea of what things are worth – which, again, is why they are profitable.
No, I’m not going to tell you which items are profitable and which ones are not. You get paid for doing the research. Otherwise, stick to getting your 2-4% from flipping the stuff that everyone knows you can flip, and hope you don’t get wiped out by a market movement.
+1 to you.
I’ve long been a proponent of investing in a wide variety of things rather than trying to be lazy and put large amounts of money in single items. It takes more work, but you get paid more too. It’s also much more consistent money.
So let me get this straight, when ecto prices went down due to dragon events and precursor prices dropped with them…well that wasn’t worth talking about.
But now that they’re just going back to about the price they were before all this nonsense, now they’re unattainable? What was everyone doing all this time?
Best place to find crit damage is on ascended backpieces. exchanging 35 stats for 5% crit is the best deal you’ll find. It’s a good place to wear a berserker item (Or cavalier my preferred backpiece, pow/tough/crit dmg with toughness as the primary)
The worst way to play an ele is to think that because they’re loaded with healing power, sitting in water attunement is a good idea, when a large amount of healing comes from the switch TO the attunement to get the burst heal and regen.
It is superior to put the abilities on cooldown and leave water, do something else, then come back to water and put them on cooldown again. More damage, more healing, no downside.
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The charge attacks (not ground target teleports) that don’t require a target are the ones that are affected by chill/cripple/swiftness. Personally I believe that if it does not require a target RTL should have this same weakness, just to be fair and to give people a chance to prevent out escape, if they know how to time their attacks.
If it requires a target then I am fine with the current state of ignoring movement effects.
If RTL was affected by cripple/chill, wouldn’t that mean we’d need to be given more mobility to compensate? After all Warriors, who have about 8000 more base hps and a couple hundred extra base armor, can beat us in a footrace using their abilities.
Warrior ones are affected by chill/cripple, naturally. Though if RTL was affected by it as well, we’d just be left in a situation where we were less mobile than a warrior in combat while having much less base hps and armor…and doing less damage. Doesn’t sound right to me.
That won’t be enough for people either, then it’ll be the healing.
Complaining will continue until eles can’t run away, can’t come close to mitigating incoming damage with their healing, while still maintaining the same poor damage bunkers do. Basically people will feel they’ll be “balanced” when eles are free kills every time.
Problem with celestial gears is the loss in power, where the “extra” stats in precision and crit dmg don’t help you as much as you’d like.
In a bunker setup, replacing some PVT gear with celestial gear is often both a survivability and DPS loss…though it isn’t immediately apparent until you crunch some numbers. Of course this isn’t ALWAYS the case and depends on your full stat setup.
The thing with stats though, is that they tend to be cumulative. For example, if you have more power, precision becomes better. If you have more toughness, healing power becomes better. So while what you’re saying may certainly be true for individual celestial pieces, the cumulative effect tends to get stronger the more you equip.
For example, for precision to add the same amount of damage as power, you’ll need 100% crit bonus, or 50% critical damage. The current celestial items grant 29% critical damage, and with most eles running 10 points in air, that’s 39% already. My prediction is that by the time the full celestial set is released, it will be best-in-slot for elementalists. Add in the condition damage, and you’ll far outperfom a bunker in terms of damage without giving up nearly as much defense as picking berserker trinkets would have.
The main thing to keep in mind though, is that picking celestial gear is mostly for those that don’t want to play either full bunker, or glass cannon. And for that, it simply out performs mixing full offensive and full defensive trinkets. With the elementalist making use of all the stats in any of their builds, it’s a very efficient choice.
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/elementalist/
This isn’t a snarky reply, I just don’t feel like going back and loading everything up again, it takes a while.
It’s worth fiddling with to see what celestial gear does and doesn’t do when paired with other various gear types.
It’s iffy throwing in celestial gear with PVT and clerics gear. That’s where both dps and survivability losses can appear. If you want celestial to actually raise your damage more than PVT gear does, it seems that some choice berserker items are needed in the equation as well. Back slot being the best place to start with ascended backpieces offering 5% crit dmg vs 35 stats, the best tradeoff available atm on gear.
As for more celestial items being available later on where you could really load it up (and I’m not sure whether that actually works out, as your power would be very low, offseting the higher crit chance/damage to the point where the build would value more power by far the most) there’s also the possibility that ascended weapons/armor may not have celestial variants.
When considering bunker setups (or any setup really, but especially ones with hefty amounts of additional boon duration) there’s also might stacks to consider, fortunately the build calculator allows you to add stacks of might to your character so you can put down a reasonable average point as to where your character tends to be might wise.
From what I’ve seen, celestial items seem better used to add survivability to a glass cannon vs being used to add damage to a bunker, where bunkers can sometimes end up losing damage from celestial too. With heavy berserker setups that sub a few pieces of celestial in though, they’re able to maintain damage at a higher level subbing in 2 pieces of celestial vs 2 pieces of PVT gear.
It’s a neat toy and worth fiddling with. One thing it can’t really do for you is quantify how valuable the added condition damage is though. Lots of stuff to do on it, so you may well find combos of celestial gear that are viable which I didn’t.
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I want an offhand pistol focused on direct damage with 900 range and a couple mobility tools.
Then scepter/pistol could be the more ranged version of D/D with less control but more single target damage.
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Please, feel free to elaborate. Your strange outburst means nothing to me without some facts to back it up.
Didn’t realize my comment would be hard to understand, seems pretty straight forward to me o.O
I mean an ele can fully heal themselves 3 times in 10 seconds while in a full burst spec and continue keeping up pressure on their target….
Seems fine to me lol
You can’t even fully heal yourself 3 times in 10 seconds with a full bunker spec.