Guild Wars 2

Brigg.3961:

I started off with all celestial gear, then adjusted based on my playstyle. Once I was comfortable with the more defensive utilities and abilities, I began swapping out pieces for more offensive gear. I still have a bit of work to do, but I think my armor set is done, just working on trinkets now.

Point is, all that crit damage isn’t going to do you any good if you can’t survive. start off tanky, then build into an offensive set as you figure out how much you can take.

I disagree with this method. Not only does it teach you bad habits (rely on armor and not learn to dodge and survive when you are wearing your end armor) but it’s a haphazard way to do it and you waste money getting gear you don’t need.

In my opinion one should gear with a specific build concept in mind, and then learn to play that build’s playstyle. If it’s a fail, or you find out that you don’t like that style, then you find another build and/or another set of armor.

Of course, if your concept is to create a powerful “I have super stats” well-rounded build then by all means go all celestial, divinity runes. I will not be doing that just yet, though, as I prefer to specialize.

All the classes are either useful or great in Zerg fights. Mesmers being the least useful in direct combat, but great for portal, veil and Focus Pull.

Warriors all around great. No, not great, more like Godly. Guardians too, especially the buffs. Eles are great for combo fields and AOE DPS. Necromancers deal debilitating conditions en masse and have lot sof warm bodies lying around to distract the enemy as shock troop fodder. One of the most overlooked abilities of the Necro is their ability to “inflate” the size of the zerg, which is helpful in making the opponent lose the will to fight or get intimdated. This is especially effective when you are just on the edge of vision of the enemy, and they just see a blob of enemy name tags floating and can easily cause a panic when they see 6 tags which actually just belong to one person.

Engineers very good all around with heals and area damage, buffs and crowd control — though frankly I don’t see too many of them in zergs, mostly I just see them roaming.

Rangers, dunno what the hate is, they are great as roamers but in zergs GS rangers are not half bad. Though GS Warriors or Guardians are, strictly speaking, better in just about every way. Longbow though is good for AOE backliners, but Eles are better at that, too.

Thief maybe the least viable class for Zergs, I usually just see thieves hanging out in the back in Zergs and picking off weakened enemies at the fringes of enemy zergs. IMO the best use of a thief in zerg fights is to kill high impact squishy targets — like Staff Elementalists. A staff Ele left alone can change the flow of a zerg fight all by himself, whether he is spamming combo fields or raining death with fire, so it’s important to take them out.

As for 30 Mesmers vs. 30 everythign else, it would be fun to see, but I don’t agree that 30 good Mesmers can take on any other class. In single combat, sure. But group ZvZ is totally different from single combat. First, there’s a geometric increase in potential when you group things like a lot of guardians together. The boon stacking alone increases their power multiple times beyond what a mesmer can do.

Mesmers can also buff, but their buffs aren’t insta buffs the way a Guardian does it, Guardians just need to press 4 buttons and everyone in the group has 20 stacks of might, aegis, regen etc. etc. and loses all conditions. Mesmer has to cast Chaos Storm, create some clons, fire Winds of Change a few seconds, and wait for signet of inspiration to give a buff, then activate it before they can give everyone a substantially lower amount of stacks.

Second, Guardians and Warriors can cleave with their auto attacks. Among others. Mesmers will create clones and all, all of them will get cleaved to oblivion in an instant by simple auto attacks in a group battle. That’s not even counting the AOE effects from Necro or Ele. And there is Mesmer’s greatest weakness — no AOE. Mesmers have pathetic AOE. Either create a ton of clones and shatter, or rely on GS Phantasmal Berserker or iWarden. Neither of which are really gonna hit consistently or fast enough.

So lesson is: teams win on synergies. All these other abilities in a zerg work synergistically so that the whole is greater than the individual parts. Mesmers unfortunately do not give that much synergy when it comes to killing others, they are lone wolves in this respect. Their group tactics are good, but are not killing techniques — Veil, Focus Pull, Portal. Their best group ability is Chaos Storm and Time Warp, but Time Warp last so short. Oh and Null Field. I love Null Field.

Who needs trap builds for fire fields hitting 1k a second, when you can get an Elementalist spam perma lava fonts hitting for 2-3k a second? Followed by Meteor which is the best skill to clean battlements and destroy ACs.

Along with 4 water fields, one of which is also a giant waterfield that strips conditions. Elementalists can do everything Rangers can do, only better.

However, Rangers are more survivable than Eles by quite a bit. So if you can’t handle being as squishy as an Ele, then Ranger may be the next best thing, but it really doesn’t compare IMO.

As for Mesmer dazing…. all those hammer warriors have Balanced Stance (some of them have Last Stand, so they even do it automatically) so it doesn’t do a thing. Feedback doesn’t affect Elementalists who are spamming lava fonts and meteor swarm.

No, I like this idea. Big zergs should move slower and have less rewards. Small groups should move faster and get bigger rewards.

In the real world a smaller group moves faster anyhow. Larger groups need better coordination to move together in a meaningful way. I’d like to see something similar here in WvW and this idea is a great concept — needs to be worked on a bit but the concept is sound.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Gasmic bro you already know I support ya 100% and would love an invite. I think this is an awesome initiative and this thread inspired me to tough it out with Staff ele in pvp again, we have something similar goin on in the Mesmer forums called OMFG [Official Mesmer Forums Guild] .. maybe we could collaborate an event sometime. Mesmer/Ele tower of nightmare run!?

That would be, well, a nightmare.

And yes… I’ve run the tower as both Ele and Mesmer. And yes they were both hell! Got easier though when I brought some mango pie.

Chain Lightning is next to useless. It needs to attack faster, and shoot faster. Actually the entire Air Tree is pretty bad, although swiftness is nice (but ultimately still has a too too long cooldown) from Air 4, and Static Field has its uses. But skills 1-3 are just terrible. I disagree with Swagg’s statement that Air does great damage with AA and Air 2. No, just no.

Chain Lightning has its uses, but dealing damage it isn’t particularly good at. Air 2 is slow as hell, hits weakly, and only hits one target. It’s sad. The only use Chain Lightning has is for tagging targets in zerg events. And even then, it’s not particularly good at it because you can do something similar with Fire using Lava Font and Flame Burst — and Flame Burst is faster.

Fire Ball as noted is awesome. It’s the only awesome AA we have. It’s not great, but it’s not bad. Fire in general is a good skill tree, where all the skills are useful or good.

Water is great. It’s not gonna deal damage, but water fields can really make a huge difference in a big fight, or even against PVE bosses.

Earth is generally a pretty sucky element, but is useful because it has our only combo finishers. It’s supposed to be our condi element, but frankly fire’s Flame Burst is better at condi than whatever earth has, mostly because it’s next to impossible to get Eruption to hit anyone, and that time is better spent just killing things outright in fire.

Now, while it’s true that Ele Staff attacks are ranged and as such enjoy and avantage over things like Warrior and Guardian melee attacks, the truth is they aren’t all that effective due to thing like slow projectile movement, slow cast time, and how you can’t maximize them as opponents can easily dodge (like out of a lava font).

When you take into consideration that we have lousy armor, whereas Warriors/Guardians have great armor and thus can afford to melee without much problems, and then take into consideration that their melee attacks cleave and serve as AOEs, then you see that there’s little point to really stick to Ele and tought it out, other than wanting to roleplay as a mage. But most of us are role players so that floats our boat, no matter how crappy the class is.

Is that really that bad? Is forcing the staff ele to use skills other than auto-attacks really a bad decision? I argue that that’s what makes staff ele one of the best composed weapons in this game. It’s so ingrained in support, range and target-lead play that it’s really defined as something apart from some of the other more “face-rolly” weapon sets that exist in this game. It really serves as a model for what weapon sets could be.

That’s well and good, but the thing is, every other class has weapon sets that are “Face roll” and Eles are the only class without one. I mean, we only have 3 weapon sets — Staff, Scepter and Dagger. If none of our weapon sets are “face roll” that really puts us at a disadvantage.

I run 30/20/0/0/20 Staff Ele in WvW. Generally speaking, I die against any other opponent in 1v1. Staff Ele is not meant to duel. But if it’s in a group setting, I can pretty much kill anything, but what stands out if I think about it is:

Ele – easiest to kill. Squishy as hell. Even bunkers are generaly easier to kill, I’ve killed many Bunkers, even my Level 20 Uplevel warrior can kill Eles. I should note my Warrior cannot kill anything but Eles. That tells you a lot.

Mesmers – generally they are easy to kill in mass combat situations. Sometimes they can be wiped out with one Meteor Shower.

Rangers – surprisingly also easy to kill

Necros – They seem resilient for some reason. Not so easy to kill. They also restrict my movement with all their AOEs.

Engineers – I hate fighting engineers, they leave so much junk around and that junk can kill me

Thieves – well this is split. Stealth Burst thieves kill me all the time. But if they are not stealth bursting me, they die fast and tend to be squishy too. But a lot of them stealth burst me

Guardians – they are so tough to kill. They can’t really hurt me, but man they are tough to kill.

Warriors – hardest to kill, no questions asked. Actually, they tend to kill me before I kill them. All the time.

Yup I’m on the forum and in the Teamspeak already. Still learning, there’s a lot to do.

silvermember.8941:

Ever heard of grasping at straws? This is an example.

Maybe we should rename Dagger 5 from Fire Grab to Straw Grab.

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

Zerkers just seems really stupid for a squishy support build. Need explaination for why that would work.

Like, you get killed just a few seconds slower, yay! You wasted other stats so you lived another 2 seconds. Wheee!

Staff Eles are squishy no matter what you do, so might as well emphasize your best trait and specialize: by being a walking nuke. You’re especially great at siege attacks, as your meteor swarm is the best tool to destroy enemy arrow carts on the battlements. Most classes can’t reach those hidden ACs but meteor swarm gets them all easily and deals massive damage to anyone on the battlements. I’ve killed many idiots who didn’t think to retreat from the battlements with these swarms.

Like Grim said Eles are walking siege. Sure you have only 11k hp, but if you play it right most enemies in a Zerg will ignore you as they only focus on the closest enemy at hand. It seems that since most people have Show All Enemy tags on in options, they only have time to check the foremost opponents in a big zerk battle and lose sight of you in the back lines. Use this to your advantage. It helps I think if you have a really small Ele, like an Asuran, people will just ignore you.

Word of warning : stealth burst thieves are your hard counter. I die more from them than any other opponent in wvw.

I go pure zerker.. Ignore all this nonsense that pure seeker Eles are useless in wvw. And just rally bait. Being that heavy damaged nuker can turn the tide for your Zerg.

Yes, it’s a difficult role to play, but as an Ele you are probably used to fighting uphill battles all your life.

I’m very rarely rally bait and its all about predicting the opposing Zerg’s movements and playing smartly to avoid getting downed. If I get focus fired yes I will go down, but I typically only die when we are outnumbered and almost never when we are equally matched or with superior numbers. Stay at the back of your Zerg and move up smartly to lay down those AOE and you will rake in the kills, turn the tide of the battle, and get lots of loot.

Chain lightning at least should be attacking faster. It’s freakin lightning for crying out loud.

I wish Anet would try buffing staff sometime, it can get pretty pathetic.

I finished the obsidian jumping puzzle (ugh) then tried out the commander tag on my current GC Ele just now. Spent thirty minutes only as I need to go to work now.

It was an interesting experience. We had about ten people on. I took a supply camp at BL, then moved to EB as keep was the only thing left to capture on Bl. On EB we took a supply camp, tried a tower and failed due to being outnumbered.

Moved down to -another word’s tower, smashed some rams in, the defenders bunched into the lord’s room after we broke the gate. We fried them, I fell for a bit despite hiding in the back, that commander tag sure attracts attention from enemy archers. But my meteors got him so I rallied. The proceeded to fire storm the rest to oblivion, we took the tower and won.

Yay, first tower capture.

We then went to resupply and got creamed by the larger Zerg as we weren’t moving together. As an untested, inexperienced GC commander clearly I do not yet inspire the confidence of leadership to bring the players together. That will change with time.

Overall it worked out better than I expected, I was expecting to get clobbered all over the place. Fortunately we did capture a few points so it wasn’t a total failure. We did get wiped twice but that’s fine.

Will continue to practice and work with the GC build first. I have enough resources to get bunker style armor so I’ll prepare that as well to experiment with later.

Imagine if Eles could use Great Swords, and their Great Sword was the Fiery Great Sword. The FGS is the best weapon in the game — it has the utility of Warrior’s GS with a kitten kitten auto attack and good range, as well as hit stacking ability against walls.

Chain Lightning — make the lightning travel FASTER. It’s LIGHTNING you know.

Gust – make it hit a group of targets in front of you and not single target, sort of like how Flame Burst works.

Lava Font – agree, damage as soon as it drops.

Eruption – cut the delay time by half. It takes too long — though I realize some people like that so they can switch attunements for combo field. But if we had:

Flame Burst – should be a a blast finisher. We need a blast finisher outside of earth.

Water 1 – give it a chill on hit effect

Maybe this makes us too strong, I don’t know. But I know that staff needs some loving, too.

Then viola! Great to use. Maybe overpowered. I don’t know. But come on give us a bone for once.

Retsuko.2035:

Bhima.9518:

Mochann.5298:

Ele was my first character and my main. It was hell levelling to 80, and everything you said is true. But!

WvW is where Ele shines. Screw being a water field generator. I’m no support, I’m a freaking massacring machine! Went full zerk, all exotics, and rained ungodly death n enemy Zergs with Meteor Storm, Lava Font, Flame Burst and the auto attack.

With this kind of “who cares if I die when they sneeze on me” build I get 3,400 base power with relatively ghetto exotic gear, and I can smash enemies with about 2k per auto attack, 3k per meteor and 2k per tick on lava font. Enemies melt fast.

Been on a killing spree since last Sunday… I completed wvw season 1 Avenger kills earlier today with 500 kills in a week. I’m sure others can kill faster, but we are no pushover in WVW.

This same build decimates dungeon bosses too, as long as you can survive long enough.

Sigh… running full zerker as a staff ele in wvw might be fun, but in the end your real class with that build is Rally Bait.

He’ll find out once he encounters a bigger blob than his. A zerg who is outnumbered can still win against a bigger one easily, but not when you have rally baits among your group.

This hasn’t been my experience so far. Maybe in Gold or Silver tier servers the game is a lot tighter; I’ve only fought Fergusson’s Crossing, Gate of Madness and Anvil Rock so far, and I have a surprisingly high survivability rate.

We are used to fighting outnumbered in Eredon Terrace, and I’ve been doing relatively well. As long as the enemy zerg isn’t more than twice ours we usually do pretty well. Though latey I’ve been noticing Anvil Rock’s tactics have been getting better — but I’m still racking in the kills so I’m not particularly worried so far.

More concerned with completing my other achievements for Season 1 right now.

For dungeon runs, either Warrior or Guardian will do just fine. Both are always in demand in parties. But Warriors are definitely more in demand, some people will kick you out of CoF runs if you aren’t a warrior. Warriors are ALWAYS welcome in any dungeon run party.

I am currently raising a Warrior, Eles are fine and all but sometimes I want to, you know, actually survive taking a few hits.

I also have a Mesmer, which is great, but limiting when it comes to walking speed and AoE damage. Great for 1v1s though. In PVE, also good but only for small mobs. Crowds will give you a fit.

As for what else to do with your Ele… from your post it seems you are only doing PVE. Are you doing WvW or PvP? Those are excellent timesinks if you’re not in the mood for PVE grinding in Fractals or Dungeons, or just calmly exploring the map.

I see. Well the role I intend to fulfill will be a bit different then, as I only intend to lead random PUGs during off hours when the need arises. For now anyway. I guess there’s nothing like diving in and trying it out! I’ll just go ahead and experiment, what the hell. Hahahaha!

I will be sure to post my results here, perish or prosper. Will probably try a run tomorrow as I am still at work and only now about to go home. sigh

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

This is one of those situations where the story is just bad. You save your sister (YOUR SISTER) and after that you never hear from her again, ever. You only see her once, and ONLY if you follow a specific mission path (one I did not pick because I had no idea) and if you pick that mission, she barely even talks to you.

The story in guild wars 2 has so many loose ends. I would say it’s not deep enough, but in fact it’s so shallow it actually can’t be called a story at all.

One situation among many. The writing all throughout Guild Wars 2 is pretty bad in my opinion, but this is one of those gems — and yeah the reunion scene was pretty… bad.

Most of my issues with GW2’s story though stems from Trahearne and his innate unlikability.

I most enjoy seeing Rytlock and Logan, especially when they’re together.

Hounds is the only one that seems worth it, and if you’re using an Ele, your Elemental summon is strictly better. I find the other god abilities pretty bad. Grenth was pretty disapponting, the oakheart transformation one almost useless and actually detrimental in most cases. I would only use these elites if I were using a Mesmer and didn’t need group stealth or time warp.

The original picture was more like Asuna’s Titania/Fairy outfit.

For her original look, KeresLee did a great job. I would do almost the same, except use Exotic Karma pants instead of HOTW pants. Something like this:

Human Light Female Armor
Durmand Priory Coat
Exotic Karma Pants
Exotic Karma Boots
No shoulders/gloves

Can’t post the pic right now, you’ll have to try it out at the TP Preview.

I once thought this skill was useful. Then I realized it can’t res, it can only bring back from downed status. It takes so long to cast, and has an aggravatingly long cooldown.

Frankly, it’s one of our worst skills, if not the plain worst skill, and should never be touched again with a ten foot pole until ANet reworks it again to make it actually useful.

Well I’ve just been playing WvW for a little over a week and am only decked out in Exotics. Your build looks like the typical x/x/x/30/30 build with a focus on power precision and vit/toughness added in to complete the suvivability on the Arcana and Water traits.

It’s a completley different playstyle from mine, which is solely focused on dealing AOE damage with staff. I have little to no survivability, still die relatively often, but normally not before the rest of the team or zerg dies. I am pathetic at 1v1 and never win 1v1.

But I must say I do pretty well for a week. Managed to finish 8/15 achievements in WVW season 1 so far, not including Big Spender and the Jumping Puzzles. The first thing I accomplished was invaders killed — I’m currently up to 680 kills.

Since our server is pretty PUGgy in nature with a few organized guilds, I just run with the pack with no guild and no real plan. All I have are my survival instincts and my killing instincts — it’s working out so far. Just run with the pack, drop those fire fields opportunistically, and watch the kills rack in.

Using a 30/20/0/0/20 build with Blasting Staff and Fire Alacrity trait and Longer Firefields trait. Full Zerk, so focusing entirely on criticals and power. Hit for 2.5k auto attack on Fire about 2/3s of the time (funny since crit rate is “only” 54% but most of my attacks are crits), and supplement the damage with Fire 3 for burn and of course lava font, which ticks for similar damage to auto attack. The the meteors which rain for 2.5k-5k each, and Glypf of Storms which deal similar added damage.

It’s working for me! I anticipate I’ll have finished my WvW season achievements by next week — the achievements I’m behind in are Sentry and Supply Camp taking, which I haven’t been concentrating on since I’ve been having so much fun hunting zergs and blasting them to smithereens. I’m also really, really good at breaking towers and keeps — meteor swarm is incredible for clearing battlements of opposing players, and lava font kills NPC archers dead.

With your build, figure out what you want to do with it and how you can contribute to your world. It looks like you are more built for roaming, so you’ll probably want to do that and capture supply camps, duel enemies, and capture sentry points. I really don’t know though, maybe that build excels in zerg rushes as well. I honestly don’t know as I lack experience in that kind of build for WvW.

Starting today I’m gonna be an ELEtist.

That’s very encouraging, for sure!

How do you avoid dying? I am pretty good at surviving as an Ele Glass Cannon, but I usually hang out at the back of the zerg when the two zergs collide. After the intial collision I then pick my spots, drop bombs and flit out with Fire 4 or dodging as needed, and I am usually the last to die in the zerg — usually only die when the rest of the zerg has fallen, or when I do something reckless and stupid. But when I play smart I usually never die until everyone else has, or I make a quick getaway.

But if I am the commander I’d imagine I wouldn’t have the luxury of sneaking off to the rear at the start of the fight. Or would my zerg rush into the enemy zerg if I stop in my tracks and backpedal? Especially a PUG zerg… if it’s an organized zerg I can probably instruct them on my tendencies and have them work accordingly.

Anierna.6918:

MarzAttakz.9608:

The difference is you can faceroll with close to zero class experience as a guardian or thief, it works differently for an elementalist, but you should know that already.

I disagree. You can faceroll ele about as easily as war, and both are only slightly more difficult than mes, guard, and thief. This is talking PvE, of course.

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snip —-

You see what I mean about PvE? Ele is no harder than any other class, so there is simply no point in wasting time between lvl’s 1 and 80. Just level your toon up, figure out the meta, do a few dungeons, and you’re golden. This idea that “ele has a steeper learning curve than any other class” is just a myth. It doesn’t. All classes are approximately equally easy in PvE.

You’d still be wrong. Aside from the rotation being more complicated than what other classes do (including Warrior — Ele’s have 4 skill sets while others only have 2, have longer cooldowns for attunement swap compared to weapon swap and faster cooldown to switch again), the biggest difference is that Ele’s skills are generally harder to land with due to long casting times, auto attacks that typically only hit 1 opponent or have a small splash radius (lighting whip being the big exception, although chain lightning does hit several targets and fireball can splash dmg despite the small radius) and which have slow projectile speed, and the way the different skills you need to combo together tend to be on separate attunements, AND coupled with Ele’s lack of passive defenses and having the weakest armor and smallest hit point pool, make playing an Ele substantially harder than any other class, even on PVE, but especially in PVP o WvW.

Hmm, I guess that the problem is that “my squishies” here includes me, myself! Gah well might as well buy another tanky set of armor I suppose. I got tons of badges to do it with (or Ascalon Tears, for that matter). I have enough gold to buy a commander badge right now, maybe I’ll try it later when the friendly experienced commanders turn in for the night and the server is left with no one to lead.

If the glass cannon approach doesn’t fly (and I doubt it will) I will go get me some bunker spec armor.

Thanks for the advice.

My first 1v1 I lost. I was a Mesmer, he was an Engineer. I died because I was built for PVE and had no condition cleanse.

The next day, I bring out my super phantasm Mesmer build. I kick kitten . Then the opponent, on the verge of defeat, runs away. Slow as a pig stuck in tar, I couldn’t catch up.

A couple days later, I duel again. This time I kick their kitten with super phantasm. I figure I fought an uplevel because he sucked. Yeah. Then I realized I am wasting my time dueling when I could be breaking zergs and doing mass murders.

Now, a few days later, I run a super specialized nuking Ele and burn zergs to a crisp. I tend to kill 10-20 people per zerg battle. I only fight when I’m in a group of 4 or more people, preferably ZvZ fights, the bigger the better. I die if I’m ever put in a 1v1 position. I suck at running so I usually can’t even escape. Oh but the kills I rack up….

I’m rank 21. Whee!

Outnumbered definitely needs a better buff. It’s not enough.

oZii.2864:

Chuck Zitto.2367:

I still think the problem is shadow refuge. I have no problem with the short duration stealths of thieves mesmers or engi. The problem is shadow refuge can give up to 15 seconds of stealth. Virtually every single thief in the entire history of gw2 uses shadow refuge. It is a absolute must have utility for any build. Doesn’t that tell you something is overpowered when 100% of people playing the class use that utility. I feel its stronger than any other skill in the game even elites and it only has a 1 min cooldown.

No! Popularity of a utility skill for a profession doesn’t mean it’s overpowered. Every profession has popular utilities. You will have a hard time weeding through mesmers not running decoy, necros rarely don’t run epidemic, eles almost always have 1 cantrip on their bar, Endure pain is probably on almost every warriors bar.

While I agree with you that popularity does not equal overpowered, try not to use Elementalists in this discussion, because I can assure you Eles don’t have a single utility skill that even comes close to being overpowered, and there are plenty of Eles that don’t use cantrips, because frankly most Ele utlity skills are lousy so none of them are really a “must have.”

That said, Thief Shadow Refuge is fine, it’s part of the flavor and core mechanic of the class. It should be there, and I’m saying this as a Glass Cannon elementalist for whom backstabbing stealth thieves are a hard counter. Same as how clones are a core mechanic enhancement for Mesmers.

Ele was my first character and my main. It was hell levelling to 80, and everything you said is true. But!

WvW is where Ele shines. Screw being a water field generator. I’m no support, I’m a freaking massacring machine! Went full zerk, all exotics, and rained ungodly death n enemy Zergs with Meteor Storm, Lava Font, Flame Burst and the auto attack.

With this kind of “who cares if I die when they sneeze on me” build I get 3,400 base power with relatively ghetto exotic gear, and I can smash enemies with about 2k per auto attack, 3k per meteor and 2k per tick on lava font. Enemies melt fast.

Been on a killing spree since last Sunday… I completed wvw season 1 Avenger kills earlier today with 500 kills in a week. I’m sure others can kill faster, but we are no pushover in WVW.

This same build decimates dungeon bosses too, as long as you can survive long enough.

Thank you Mash Hog, Quick Mouse and Valinor for relying. I’m more interested in hearing from actual Ele Commanders who have done it and have had successes and failures as an Ele Commander.

I’m interested to hear details about how you command and how the battles usually go. Do you do big Zerg vs. Zerg smashes, or do you do hit and run skirmishes? Do you go in then dive to the back of your Zerg, or do you just stay in the heat of it!

And I’d still like to hear if anyone had the balls to be a glass cannon commander.

Hey guys, I’m playing a staff nuker ele full glass inWvW, and enjoying it a lot. I eventually want to go commander to support my server as we tend to have staffing issues. I can change to an alt for this, but would like to keep playing my ele if possible.

What builds and styles do you ele commanders use when commanding? I need to learn tactics and strategies for this. I figure if glass cannon doesn’t work it’s simple to re trait and swap to spare armor to do it, but I have no idea what Ele commanders do ad offer on the battlefield as I’ve only been watching guardians and warriors command so far.

My first two characters were Ele and Mesmer. Eles are a Freaking pain to level in pve. They die so often and most of your skills have issues in not really being synergistic with your classes’ attributes. I found that even as a level 80 I wasn’t really effectively wiping out enemy mobs effortlessly. It’s always an uphill battle with Eles.

Mesmers on the other hand handled like a dream, so much easier to kill and survive. Only problem is lack of effective and consistent AoE damage options, and slow slow slow run speed.

Then I rolled a warrior, and I was face rolling mobs without even trying. Lol. What the hell, right?

dasging.2980:

I’m neither for nor against trolling ppl in the wvw jp,s. But there is a line. If someone is clearly running away from you, show a little common courtesy and let them be. At the end of the day is it really worth making someone’s life harder just for 2 mithril ore?

Duh, it’s WVW. We’re here to kill people. Don’t want to die by other player’s hand, stay in PVE.

KOK.2650:

Johje Holan.4607:

People are talking about different things here.

Defense is only fun if someone is actually attacking. Standing somewhere waiting for someone to show up and attack is boring.

Defense is also pointless if you’re server is vastly outgunned. So that’s another reason people don’t do it.

Attackers come near tower,
Attackers hit the door and notice the huge number of AC circle
Attackers leave.
The end of defense.
Then Attackers attacked a undefended T1 tower and takes it in 1min.
Problem is taking a empty T1 tower give the same reward as taking a defended T3 tower(maybe less since some of u are needed to clear the enemies on the wall )
Why bother taking the risk?

The answer to this should be obvious. Are you playing WVW to fight NPC guards or are you playing WVW to, you know, fight other players? If you just want to fight guards play PVE in the normal map. It’s called WvW because your world’s players want to demolish the other world’s players.

It’s true though that incentives aren’t properly balanced here. Loot bags are great but something is off about completing “events” for defense. I feel like I’ve never completed a “Defend this land” event unless an enemy actually passed by. So what that means is an attacker can be more productive with his time, as anywhere he attacks he can complete the event, but someone who defends won’t always be able to complete the event unless someone attacks.

That said, someone brought up Starcraft and even in RTS attacking is the way to go, you don’t win RTs games by defending and while you do need to be able to defend, it’s attacking that wins battles. Same principle applies here I should say — attacking intrinsically should net you better rewards. The challenge is for good commanders to have their scouts in place to know where the enemy is, and defend appropriately based on enemy zerg movements.

It doesn’t make sense to be gain rewards for just sitting around doing nothing — in this sense, your gain is the WXP points for keeping the objectives rather than from karma event completion.

But come on, again why is this an issue? People need to stop with the carrot stick approach — that’s what’s killing the game. Whatever happened to playing because it was fun to beat other people up?! When I get into an FPS multiplayer fragfest the fun is in killing people, not in getting karma points or whatever. While RPG gamers do expect some advancement and loot, the fun of a game should be in the core gameplay mechanics first. If we are playing just to get that carrot and not to enjoy the gameplay mechanics, then we might want to re-evaluate our reasons for gaming.

By the way — what does “Reset Night Required” mean? Still kinda new to WVW.

I am totally seeing it. We’re often outnumbered but the past few days I’ve been playing WVW (last Sunday, Monday and yesterday) showed me we have got some really good players doing WVW. I was in several mid-size zergs that obliterated much larger zergs — the ones from AR were in particular very easy to break. (hahha trash talk there!!)

FC is just so numerous and their zergs tend to play it very safe, don’t take risks much. I was in many situations where their zerg could have broken our zerg easy (and killed me for that matter) but since they didn’t like to attack so much they missed their opportunity.

Imagine if we had more people playing we could easily dominate the maps. The problem is really an issue of man power the way I see it. Often we are defending towers and keeps with just 5-10 people. Our zergs hit maybe 40 people at peak times but after one good run it’s suddenly down to half. But we still beat bigger zergs with just 20 people.

Problem is after we take some points the players log out and call it a day, and we’re left severely undermanned and the Fergs take all our points back!

I’m in another guild but I just started WVW last week and have been having a hell of a lot of fun breaking Zergs. Have an Ele and Mesmer, but using Staff Ele more as it is just awesome obliterating a Zerg with full zero meteor nuking.

I really want Eredon Terrace to become a force in WVW, just seems we are severely outnumbered most of the time. So far I’ve racked up 250 kills in three days of playing and it’s been great; I feel I need to step up into a more coordinated teamspeak level of play.

I’ll go ahead and apply later as I want to join in a more coordinated effort.

I’m at Eredon Terrace currently, unfortunately.

Seras.5702:

posthumecaver.6473:

As an Ele I always feel I have to stay in Water Trait line or Arcana and wear PVT gear so I can survive and do something useful, then nothing is left to take from other trait lines.

Ele is versatile but is also boring because of these restrictions, I see they are trying to put some nice traits in fire to cleanse and so but kitten CD will be enough to ignore 30 points to water.

This statement scares me more than any others in terms of looking forward at my new Ele. I hate boring. It’s why I stopped playing ranger and couldn’t get a warrior past lvl 18. And while I think Ele is dynamic and fun to play, I really hope creating builds doesn’t become boring when it seems everyone is forced to take so many Arcane and Water traits just to stay alive. And while I understand Anet’s resistance to making really strong traits Adept, they gotta see the trend that everyone is taking them not just because they’re awesome but necessary to living long enough to kill something.

The thing about Elementalists that kinda makes them boring is limited build options. Imagine:

• We technically only have 3 weapon loadouts. Staff, Scepter/Dagger(or Focus, not much diff), and Dagger/Dagger (or Focus, and yeah nobody uses that). Since we can’t weapon swap, that means we really only have 3 weapon sets, period, and you can’t mix two different sets to swap between (like say a Warrior can keep a Great Sword for melee and then swap to Long Bow for range).

• Because of our kitten poor survivability, we are often forced to take points in Water.

• Because of this squishiness, we tend to be awkward in different combat situations, so we have to rely on attunement swapping to get utility when switching — so because our normal attunement swap cooldown is so freaking slow (like 16 seconds compared to weapon swaps which are like 8 seconds) we need to take points in Arcana to facilitate faster switching.

• In addition, some of our best traits are in Arcana — which is sad because it really means our traits in other lines tend to suck — so people go into Arcana anyhow.

So yeah that means most Eles go heavy in to Water and Arcana, that coupled with our very limited weapon load outs make Eles kinda boring.

I mean, when I rolled a Warrior, it was like going into a candy store. I could choose so many weapons and mix and swap to my hearts content! Why couldn’t Eles have this kind of freedom? Sigh.

On the Mesmer Ele thing, yeah you are so right in that. Mesmer is “slower” to level because it takes so freakin long to run around the map. Ele, just pop a signet and 5 points in Air and you are the fastest thing on land. Mesmers however are SOOO much easier to use for killing monsters while still surviving without any difficulty. I felt like Mesmer was easy mode after playing Ele. I was soloing Ettins and smashing them way faster than when I was an Ele, I had nightmares fighting Ettins as an Ele while levelling.

Yeah, that’s what Ele needs for sure!

But you know what other buff I’d like to see? Give us godkitten Weapon Swap. That would help improve build variety, I’m sure!

Hi Mice!

I just started playing my Ele in WVW and had mixed results at first, then switched up my strategy, and am getting some really good results. Last Sunday I killed 100 people in two battles. That was awesome.

I see your build is doing the usual x/x/x/30/30 build. I am really saddened that almost all Staffies seem to play with this kind of basic build… actually all Eles it seems and not just Staff users. The other two builds I saw linked in this thread are also 30/30 in Water and Arcana. That’s just sad. Happy to see one Condimentalist doing 30 in Earth over Water. I should try his build too.

I don’t know about Support/Damage… it seems that if you want to do any kind of decent damage with Staff you can’t go support, and if you go support you just throw your damage out the window.

I ended up doing a 30/20/0/20 build, going Full Zerk and taking Blasting Staff. I tell you this: I am a scrub in 1v1 but I do reasonably good in a small warband (4 -10 people against similar numbers).

I can’t roam by myself, but I can roam with 1 or 2 more people and still be reasonably effective. I can still sneak in kills in these small encounters, but I need to be running with a Warrior or a Guardian who is doing melee. Otherwise, I am useless. So in 1v1 situations, I just slip to Air and run away (I have the Air Signet and 20 points in Air, so I move pretty fast even without Swiftness).

In small groups I tend to be the last to die if we are losing, and if not I can sneak in a kill or two. I can usually kill 4 out of 15 people in small encounters as long as we aren’t losing. Just skirt behind your teammates and burn the enemy with your fire skills (in small groups Meteor Swarm isn;t useful, but Auto Attack, Lava Burst and the Flame Burst or whatever are great skills for killing enemies, Flame Burst in particular is great at tagging and finishing off all enemies, so I tend to get credit for kills).

Where the build really shines though is big zerg vs. zerg battles. In these kinds of battle I utterly demolish the enemy, I rake in around 20-30 kills per battle with very little danger to myself. It’s all about sneaking around the flanks and rear of the Zerg and opportunistically nuking where the enemy Zerg seems to be moving. Also great for clearing parapets in sieges. Meteor Swarm in a full Zerk build is just an awesome nuke. I have something like 3,300 attack, 55% crit rate and 80% crit damage without food or maintenance oils, so I hit pretty hard.

When your zerg needs it, you can easily switch to water and drop those combo fields, but I find when I do this the zerg doens’t do too well. I am better supporting damage, giving fire fields to blast for might stacks and we decimate the enemies faster this way it seems. I think my timing is the issue: since I switch to water if I feel we are losing and rather than from the onset, I think by the time I switch from DPS to support it’s too late and we’re already losing. At least I tend to be among the last to die in battles because I am so cowardly I stay by the sidelines. I hate those sneak stealth thieves though, they are my bane!

I used to use another build someone posted, something about a super DPS staff, it’s like 30/20/10/10/0 with Vital Striking and Stone Splinters along with Student Runes (in optimal conditions these traits give an extra 30% damage!) but I wanted blasting staff so I tried putting the points in Arcana. It also helps me switch between Fire DPS and Air run away faster, makes boon duration longer and keeps me alive longer.

But I do miss that extra 30% and may opt to go back for it. I don’t have Student Runes yet, though, might have to buy a set.

All in all, let me know if you ever make a good roaming build that can solo. I just suck at soloing with Staff, can’t figure it out.

Serv.6073:

How are non gem buyers supposed to compete with players who buy gems? I feel gw2 is becoming another mmo where you have to pay with real life money to be the best or grind until you are dead.

That’s stupid. I have only been playing for two months. This is my third month playing.

I have spent zero real money on the game.

I have achieved the “Golden” title (which means I have held 200 gold in my hands at some point), I have two characters fully decked in Exotics, the only thing I am missing is Ascended and Legendary — and I can spend Laurels to get Ascendeds if I wanted to. Legendaries… that’s gonna take a lot longer.

But pooh. Basically you can play this game and compete just fine without spending a cent outside of the cost of buying the game. I have just started WVW last week and I have already racked 100 kills. How is that for competing?

You just need to learn the game and figure out what to do. My tip: if you want gold and gear, do Dungeon Runs. They’ll be hard at first but after a few runs you’ll do them easy. I can make 10 gold a day on dungeon runs easy just by running 6 dungeon paths or so. You can make more if you’re more dedicated. These are quick runs, taking like 10-20 minutes each, usually less if you’re with a good party.

Added benefit are the dungeon tokens which you can trade in for exotic gear at Lion’s Arch.

Silver.8023:

Some elite skills in GW1 had 2-3 second cooldowns :O
Granted, things work differently now.

GW1 had a far, far better skill system in general than the limited, cookie-cutter system of GW2.

Pro Tip to the Devs: if you want more build diversity, don’t make a game where skills are locked to weapons without the ability to change them up (and have a very limited weapon set at that). And give us more traits. Tons more.

I would love to see GW3 with something more like GW1’s skill system and GW2’s world/loot/roaming mechanics.

You Warriors have it easy. At least you have an elite skill that is useful 100% of the time — Adrena Signet.

Mesmers have to yawn at how pathetic their Elites are. These massive cooldowns on Elites just plain suck.

Actually Cooldowns on skills in general suck, but elite skills are even worse because you only use them for 10 seconds every two minutes. That is just not enjoyable. Can we please have mana/stamina mechanics in GW3? Cooldowns just suck.

Well the best way to make money in this game is still to do dungeon speed runs.

The inflation rate in the Trading Post is just reaching ungodly levels, that’s all. We need an economist to fix the economy!

Yeah I made a post about this some time back, it’s clear that classes are being toyed with in order to break builds and thus require people to buy new equipment.

I mean I’m shocked to hear that entire trait lines get re-ordered in this game! My first reaction was: won’t that break builds? Why yes, yes it will. And that is necessary or else people would stop buying gear.

It kinda sucks, though.