Guild Wars 2

You said no thief can skill you in 1.5sec, you know their backstab combo can be done in less than .5sec even without quickness right?
As for stun breakers, you guys should realize that they fix stun, daze, fear, and knockdowns, not just stuns. They just don’t work on most conditions, including immobilization.

I disagree on which one is useful. In PvE earth and ice are great for tanking mobs while you spam aoe on staff or scepter. In spvp, elementals kind of get ignored, so they can actually dish out some decent damage, and the ice one helps bunker again with its heals.
Of course the fire and thunder ones could use a survivability buff, and a control on them activating their aoe damage/protection/swiftness/heal would also be nice.

Fiery greatsword on the other I don’t feel raises dps much. It’s not really worth losing your other attunements and being forced into close range. It needs a damage buff, maybe in the form of might stacks when you conjure it.

Tornado is just bad atm, and needs a strong damage buff and/or mechanic change (pull in)

It would suck it in but it’d just make it more dangerous as that new mass is now swirling around too.
Anyway, 15sec of invulnerability actually wouldn’t be OP offensively, because tornado is so weak right now. The only reason it’d be OP is because it’d boost bunkers even more…
I feel a much better fix would either be increasing the damage output again, or making it suck IN rather than OUT.

CelticWish.2314:

CHOAM Is Quick Glyph, Glyph Mastery?

We ask because here was the formula given above:

Healing glyph+quick glyphs trait+glyph mastery trait=perma 33%ms

It has both Quick and Mastery as seperate, I too cannot find Mastery and I’m interested in Perma 33%.

It should be Healing glyph+quick glyphs+ inscription.
This will make the glyph give 20seconds of swiftness and have a 20second recharge.
P.S. Glyph mastery does not exists, I had the trait name wrong.

This really just a post about how hard PvE should be, rather than whether elementalists are good or bad. OP is just using eles as the standard for how hard PvE should be for all the classes.

Anyway, buffing eles wouldn’t necessarily mean a change in play style. It’d just mean that using the same complex style, they should be able to achieve results similar to other classes. People aren’t calling for it to be dumbed down to a 2-3button class.

rickshaw.5279:

. I called out how powerful D/D could be long before D/D ele started getting popular. You can check my posting history on that. It’s amazing more people haven’t caught onto this.

Could someone please explain this part to me? I don’t understand what’s so OP about d/d ele atm, unless you’re talking about bunker builds, in which case you’d just want a staff?
Of course I don’t d/d much and it’s been buffed recently, so I maybe I just didn’t notice…
P.S. please do get started on it
As for thief gripes, its mostly just about backstab and rendering atm.

I think quick join matches should allow quick leaving as well. Especially if they end up joining in a situation you described, where its 300-50 or during small games where it just ends up being 2v1

Where is this Glyph Mastery you speak of?

Sorry, my bad, I meant to say Quick Glyphs, its an air adept trait. It reduces glyph recharge time by 20%.
I mixed up the name with signet mastery (same effect on signets).

Yeah, it was probably shortbow+shadowsteps+steal to catch you. Anyway, to out run a thief, use an offhand dagger. Even though it has bugs, Ride the lightning is still a very nice skill for traveling. Turn off auto target and it makes a great get away ^^

Thanks for the constructive and polite replies guys.
Sorry if it was a bad idea, you all have good points.
I was hoping to increase the overall damage while reducing burst.
I hoped since d/d’s death blossom was already liked for the bleeds, it’d be ok to make backstab more condition oriented since thieves don’t have much option for melee condition attacks and steal interrupting your action still only brings it up to .75sec to use the chain without quickness (In the end, I just took the easy way out and tried changing the core skill.) But hey, that’s why I included its related skills too :p

Signet of water used to be a condition every 3 sec, nerfed to 10. Dragons tooth, meteor shower, phoenix, lava font and fire grab were all obliterated, but were latter rebuffed slightly. They are currently at 54% of their original raw damage, except for meteor shower at 47%. Phoenix used to be 10sec recharge, arcane blast used to be 20 sec recharge. Fire grab used to have a 30sec recharge. Lava font used to be 6 sec duration instead of 4.

And probably a lot of other things I’m forgetting, but those were most of the fire nerfs.

Oh the gear and line investments sound a lot like mine, but I usually use S/D.
Full soldier’s equips, 10/0/10/30/20 Arcane Power, lightning flash, signet of earth
Bulky, but it still has some decent damage and burst potential. It’s just the nerfed S/D burst ele reworked for survivability.

We have perma swiftness anyway. For the easiest one just grab the master trait inscription from air magic, and the minor trait glyph mastery Quick Glyphs and use glyph of elemental harmony. Also allows perma regen or perma 2 stacks might ^^

Some user page with all decent foods
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/User:Dacromir/Food#Power_2

What I think is Best?
wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bowl_of_Curry_Butternut_Squash_Soup

The main point of this is to generate suggestions for the inevitable backstab update. So feel free to post what you think would be a fair change for back stab, mug, and CnD.

Rather than general suggestions, please try to keep them around these backstab and its closely related skills.

As you know, a backstab rework is coming.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Backstab-time-to-nerf/page/2#post601420

So how about making some suggestions on how it can be changed without being nerfed into the ground?

My opinion: Why not just nerf the raw damage, and add conditions to compensate?

As an example back stab currently has 403 base damage, and 806 base damage from behind. Instead of dealing double damage from behind, how about the normal 403 base and extra conditions?
maybe : 5 stacks of bleeding for 5 seconds (1062 base damage).
Or perhaps: 3 stacks of confusion (400 base damage a skill use) for 3~5 seconds
Not those exact numbers, but something along those lines. The result would be more damage in the end, but less initial burst. Bad point would be that condition removal can destroy the extra damage, that’s why I tried to keep the time somewhat shortish, with stacked conditions.

Fear: It might add too much to condition builds? Idk, tbh

Disclaimer: I didn’t put much time/math to find the right amount of condition stacks/duration, so they’ll obviously need rework. It’s the concept that I’m putting forth.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Backstab-time-to-nerf/page/2#post601420

You’ll lose your precious back stab burst, but you’ll probably be better off and/or have more viable builds in the end.

He probably meant lava font.

Magma is just a normal DoT, it’s not really part of the problem. The thing Ghazzog doesn’t like is that ele have AoE skills like meteor shower, ice storm, and thunder storm that can potentially deal a large number of hits to a large structure. The problem is that they’re not overpowered or anything outside of hitting structures, so it’d be kind of hard to find a fix. That being said, mes is OP when it comes too fixing it :p

Thank you! There were a few too many for my liking, nice to see underwater combat is getting a look at too

I think this was intended, and the whole reason skills that can activate without interruption were introduced, although thief can use it a bit too well.

Also, Churning earth is rubbish without this. A player doesn’t have to be very smart to get out of the red circle, so it’d be a wasted skill otherwise. Even using this, a smart player will just dodge at the end of the skill, so the attack will miss even if you warp to them, because they’re in their avoidance phase from dodge.

Rauphz.2869:

1) Pick Ele
2) Go to WvW
3) Live forever

Mist form in first downed state is a joke, srsly.

No, even if you miraculously survive 20sec for vapor form to recharge, the down penalty would kill you if you use vapor form.
That being said, as an ele, I do see the concern. It’d be ok if it just kept your current HP from when you used it (and got rid of that darned extra downed penalty :p). If there are technical issues with that, I guess it could just be changed to a generic warp, but that’s kind of boring and they’d have to rework the icy mist trait too.

Atomic Sharks.7250:

maybe they can only regain part of the whole health instead of the full.

They already only get part of their whole health, half actually (on the first use, less/death later).

Daays.4317:

Sky.9347:

Daays.4317:

No.

I’m making an analogy to the reaction time needed to succeed. You say 1/2 a second is too short. It needs to be longer. You can’t react.

Scripted PvE events in another game require multiple people to react within half a second or your entire team fails.

If you think half a second is too short, then your reaction time is too slow. Improve upon it.

There is a major difference between scripted events, and PvP.

If you don’t understand that, then there is nothing anyone can say that will change your mind.

There’s nothing I can say to change yours. You failed to draw that same conclusion that Blizzard designed a PvE raid encounter around a 0.5sec interrupt rotation across multiple people. It was designed to be beaten. You could react fast enough.

Yet I’m being told half a second is too fast when the average human takes 0.215 seconds to react to something.

Not only is half a second too fast though, I was told that it should be increased to 2-3seconds.

Over 10x the reaction time of an average person.

So since it takes a couple of days to fully change someone’s mind, I’ll see you in 20. Maybe then you’ll see how ridiculous it is claiming you have fast reflexes and need at least 2 seconds to react.

I love how you conveniently ignore my post explaining why that .5sec is a problem when it comes to reaction and continue to argue. That’s .5sec without Quickness. So yeah, quickness, and even low amounts of latency. Also, who said it should be 2-3sec to react? One person did say the burst takes 2-3 and I said that would be an acceptable amount of time to be able to kill someone in. You also failed to respond to the obvious flaw in the .5sec scripted events argument. The player knows it will happen, and is expecting it. Why do you always assume the player already knows the thief is there? The point of insta gib builds is to attack a player who hasn’t noticed you.

As for people saying thieves if they fail, that’s not exactly true. If a player is running glass, he/she should be taking some escape option as well. If the backstab missed, then the thief is still invisible, even if it hits and fails, rendering issues means other still can’t see him for another .5sec. That’s more than enough time to switch to a shortbow and warp away to start escaping.

edit: P.S. Before you point out that it can still be countered… Of course it can be! Anything can be dodged/countered by something, but the amount of burst damage a thief can put out is just obscene compared to other professions. Heck, look at S/D elementalists. Their signet of earth>dragon tooth>phoenix>fire grab was nerfed to 54% of its original damage (actually even more, but it was later rebuffed slightly) and it took 4 seconds to hit, as well as having a very obvious your-about-to-be-clobbered sign.

Underwater 5 is very strong if you use it on either a big enemy or against a wall/floor (but it’s a melee skill unfortunately). Overall we’re not too bad I think, seeing as most classes complain about underwater combat… We just have to use ccs and keep backing away, which isn’t hard with the chills thanks to water magic.

I’ll admit earth and water 3 are both pretty useless though. Bubble is only useful for running away. Autoattack is weak as usual too, fire in particular could use a better mechanic since the delayed explosive doesn’t stick to the enemy.

Good thief=.5sec combo time. good thief with quickness, now its .25sec. Average reaction time = .215sec That’s a 35ms leeway. But unless you have godly connection, ping is going to be more than that. result? average person can’t react. gogo math skillz
edit: Fixed some things to clear up the message.

Well in pvp its usually cured quickly. For pve, its not as good for large scale events because of stacking limits. Overall there’s nothing wrong with it though, you can use it while using a tanky build, or when the enemy has high defense. I think people just want more instant damage.

You forgot the 100~200ms from ping. Also, the target WILL be standing still. One would obviously use a venom with the build. Either basilisk or devourer, or both. And lets not forget quicklness either, that wasn’t factored into the .5sec time for the 3 hit combo.

No, half second delay means the combo is already done and through, unless that thief is a noob. Also, except for endure pain, blink and lightning flash, you need multiple reacts to break it. Even if you do dodge backstab, that thief is still stealthed and half the damage already connected.

2-3 seconds is okish, that means you can respond. 1/2 is not ok. And yeah its not new, what makes you think I’m treating it like that? But guess what, that huge burst is usually nerfed, like you said, this isn’t new, and that’s how high burst is usually dealt with. My point is that while there will always be OP builds, hopefully they’ll at least give people some time to react.

Daays.4317:

Scripted PvE events in another game require multiple people to react within half a second or your entire team fails.

Trying playing PvE. Guess what? Its incredibly predictable. You know it’s going to happen,where it’ll happen, what direction it comes from and what’s going to do it and it’ll happen the exact same way each time. Besides, .5sec changing the whole party is incredibly unlikely, and if it does occur, its probably in some high end dungeon. Which means countless guides will exists for it, so you’ll know exactly how to react. Besides, bosses usually have some sort of visual cue telling you its about to happen.
Guess what doesn’t have that? Shadowstepping.

Yes, but hopefully that next OP build doesn’t can’t do its whole chain in 1/2 a second.

Lightning flash doesn’t remove immobilization. Are you using a tank ele build perhaps? There’s a trait that adds regeneration to cantrips, and another trait that removes a condition when you apply regeneration. So you might just be curing immobilization because of those traits working together.

Nageth.5648:

Normally I’d agree but since this is a limited time event having it be a huge grind would only punish people with more casual playing time. With RNG casuals at least have a chance.

Frankly, those casual players will probably never see them either. The vast majority of them are just going to come from hardcore grinding of the dungeon anyway. So it’ll pretty much be hard core grinders who didn’t get the rare weapon and hard core grinders, who are also lucky, and did get the weapon. That’s just because the chance of winning is so low, its almost meaningless for casual players.
As far as a token system goes, it’d probably have to be tradable tokens for a short event like this or else many people won’t be able to make it. Of course, the end result would still be very expensive weapons that casual players won’t get, but at least we’ll make some money from the tokens :p

I don’t mind the single use thing at all, but I would love to be able to use my costume in combat. It doesn’t really seem worthwhile if I can only use it when I’m not taking or doing damage (a very small portion of the time).

edit: of course that didn’t stop me from getting the mad king costume, I just couldn’t pass up on that :p

While I don’t think the price is hurting my gold pouch too much I do find the waypoint tax kind of strange, and I definitely think it stops people from warping around to help each other. Like most of you said, if its silver you’d rather not lose, don’t warp around too much. Of course that would mean not going around helping much when people ask for it.

Also, they said their goal was to keep wealth somewhat fairly distributed, but the tax on waypoints and armor repairs hit the poor hardest and are almost meaningless to the rich. Think about it, a 4.5s a death (3s repair+1.5s waypoint at lvl 80 using exotics) is around .5~1% of what I carry in my inventory, whereas to a richer player it’d only be around .01%, so small they can ignore it. While it does take money out of the economy, it takes the same from everyone (thus a larger % from the poor), so it doesn’t help even out the wealth distribution.

Those are just some thoughts though. The price is pretty low so it doesn’t bother me too much, it just stops me from traveling around much. While I would prefer it was based directly on distance rather than a base fee+ distance, it’s not too bad. On a side note, a heart can take a few minutes to fill and there’s a limited amount. Most (lvl 80) people aren’t gonna spend 10min finishing twp hearts just to cover warp fees :p
P.S. I support the notion of low lvl opinions not counting toward because the fees are so low back then

Short: Titles should show off something impressive, not every random thing you did.

I actually like the idea of titles being hard to get rather than a silly kill 1000 monster. I usually feel like titles are worthless in other mmos because they’re too easy. Looking at the tiers, a lot of them are just far too easy (ex. master of overkill) and don’t really mean anything. Titles give distinction to players for actually doing harder things, and I feel a ton of nooby titles would take away from that. (As it is now, anyone with a title actually had to do something impressive.)

That being said I’m all for more titles being added for difficult achievements, right now the variety is rather lacking. More one time task titles would be nice too, you know, like beating the game (rather easy but meh). Maybe one for doing all the optional jump puzzles, or finding all the secrets in the field boss battles.

Time logged off doesn’t seem to count towards relieving DR much (or maybe not at all?). Just leave it afk for 30~40min while you eat or something.

edit: AFK in a safe spot of course, just thought I’d throw that out there before someone reads this and gets mad about being killed :p

The answer is in the title, its a dungeon chest. Unlike world/jump puzzle chests dungeon chests can be opened each instance. So no, its not a bug.

Prices will go way up in a few months anyway. That’s how seasonal rares usually work in MMOs

I’d like to start off by saying great job on making a guide like this, it totally deserves to be stickied This should help out a lot of people who are new to elementalists.

It would be worth mentioning that signet of air can is instant activation and doesn’t interrupt what you’re doing. It’s practically scepter air skill 3 with a bit of damage, so it can be useful once in a while, like when you’re trying to get churning earth off. That being said, I still wouldn’t use it over the others :p

Remember when they said gem store delivery was really slow atm? That usually applies to TP as well.
P.S. that means you’ll get your orders eventually

I don’t think that’s a problem at all considering the party won’t stick together… Besides its a short time event thing, so it doesn’t matter much if he doesn’t regen. Players can’t really exploit that or anything, and events are supposed to be on the easy side.

Mine didn’t crash, but the party won’t stay together -.-

TheBob.9863:

Azrayne.2983:

TheBob.9863:

Azrayne.2983:

LordXy.4278:

the only problem with elementalist currently is that it isn’t something a noob can use, you have to study it deeply in order to use it effectively, if you give up because you cannot fully utilize your elementalist that only means your level of understanding is much shallower than those who can use it quit effectively.

I actually agree with you that you should go back to games wherein the mage play style is really really easy and requires little to no thinking at all when playing.

Going to disagree with you there, while the class definitely does have a rather high skill ceiling, that’s far from it’s sole issue. Even an excellently played elementalist will find themselves working much harder to achieve less result than, say, an equally well played warrior or thief, or even a mesmer or guardian. There’s nothing wrong with a challenging class, as long as the challenge pays off, but with the elementalist, it doesn’t.

I disagree with you completely, all you have to do is watch a stream of a competitive player playing an elementalist and realize how strong an ele is in the right hands

Yes, a skilled player, when backed up by a skilled group in the right situation, can make the class work, but the fact remains that outside of very specifics roles/situations/specs (AOEing from behind a zerg/wall, bunker staff in SPVP), we work much harder for less surviveability and less damage than many other classes. Not to mention the array of bugs and many weak/useless/broken abilities (how many other classes do you think sit there wishing they could use their elite slot to fit in a 4th skill because all of their elites are so terrible?).

This isn’t a black and white issue, nobody is saying that the class is absolutely and totally 100% useless 100% of the time, but the reality is that there are a whole pile of areas in which it needs to substantially improved before it’s on par with the other more balanced classes within the game.

So why do the top competitors say that they would always take an ele over a thief if a thief can perform better? Paradigm never plays thief, guess they only want to play the weak classes like Elementalist …lol

He just told you why, for the specific role they work really well in.

Daharahj.1325:

Daharahj.1325:

make cantrip"s" remove condition"s"

Was speaking generally, obviously I meant 1 condition per cantrip.

But yeah, it’s very situational.

Selix.5670:

Spec 30 into water. You just removed 1 by going into mist form, and another 2 by changing to water. You can remove another one by using your heal if you are taking damage. If it’s that much of a problem, bring cleansing, and you can remove every condition on you at once.

You forgot Evasive Arcana in Water Att.

You can’t dodge while immobolized.

TL;DR Our dps is always going to be inferior, and that’s why people complain.
At risk of feeding a troll and or being a troll.
lvl 30? You haven’t even run into most of the game yet, probably all normal speed melee enemies…
PvE is PvE. Outside of dungeons, it’ll always be easy. The monsters are just AIs, so you can kite indefinitely and survivability shouldn’t be problem. What really matters is how long it takes you to do things, because that’s what many people use to measure how “good” you are. First of all, if that war is only hitting 1 mob with his 100b, then he’s doing it horribly wrong. 100b is a point blank aoe, so he should be killing everything around him with it. In case you haven’t noticed, GS war has loads of pbaoes, and war DPS is MUCH higher.(Blade trail with max targets can be pretty godly) Why? Because they have a viable glass cannon option (and still have moderate tankiness to boot). So they have similar attack range as DD, but do much more damage= “better”. You mentioned having to ball up your enemies before fighting them or else it feels like a waste. How long does that take? That’s and extra 5-10 sec that you have to include. or so As for being better than thief, people only call OP on them in pvp… If you consider good to be how likely you are to succeed, then yeah we’re well off, but if you consider by how long it takes to succeed, then we’re fairly lacking, simply because a war hits so much higher. They also have low cooldowns so they don’t have to worry about recharge between fights…
It’s not about being more “effort” or harder, it just straight up takes long for us to kill things.
Now, its my belief that eles actually only need a few small buffs and fixes, and that wars are just OP. But if war is considered to be in a good position, then we (and a few other classes) are definitely in need of tweaks.

Pvp? You’re using a bunker build, which is one of the things we’re good at. The complaints are mostly about the lack of other viable builds. We’re well off, but people want more working variety. Now that our downstate is much better, I don’t there will be as much complaining about it.

Oh and the site description is a lie.

I would like to mention that this post is not supporting or bashing the OP’s main point about skill, I’m just posting more mathz people were asking about

EaGrimdarK.7849:

EaGrimdarK.7849:

The math here is extremely skewed and incorrect.

Incorrect? No.

Skewed? If you believe the moon landing was faked… then yes. Feel free to fix what you feel is wrong. I look forward to your math.

At the time of original post, assassin signet was at +50%, so I’ll be using that. Using wiki, CnD base damage is at 504, while backstab is at 806. Similarly, on my glass thief, CnD is at 1259 damage, with back stab at 2015. Result? Backstab hits for 1.6x CnD, factor in the assassin’s signet 1.5x and backstab damage should be 2.4x CnD.

But if you look at the first post, his backstabs ar only doing 1.5x the amount of his CnD. Result? Backstab damage is slightly skewed, being slightly lower, and it wasn’t considering Assassin’s signet. Also, mug hits for about 80% (half of backstab) of CnD (again, looking at base values from wiki)
@Edel thanks for that CnD+steal at the same time tip

And really guys, everyone knows the moon landing never happened.

vince.5937:

Thanks for the insight, Sarisa. I’ll save up my next 10 points and drop it on Tornado and let you know how it goes.

Tornado is 30 points, and you have to unlock at least two ten point elites.

Albane.8367:

You mean the Whirlpool that now does 1/3 the damage while leaving you snared and incredibly vulnerable?

It does 2/3 the damage, and it doesn’t slow you down.

A good way to avoid damage using it is to move around slightly, so you keep pulling the enemies (and thus disabling them)

Sounds like a fun idea, but tbh, I thought arcane attunement sounded more like a new elite skill :p, you know, another form skill add to the pile. Only difference is this one wouldn’t make us melee OR rob us of our utilities :p Just a standard tome of courage type elite skill: for 30 seconds, insert uber skills here. Maybe one of them can even give eles that much wanted quickness.

Are you a staffer? Don’t forget to toss in some support, use those rolls, the 4k heals and aoe might is a nice bonus after. But you’ll still be standing most of the time :p (til a monster comes after you anyway)

While I understand this is very situational, I think there should be a limit to the additional damage.

Ye did tests myself … and when i managed to hit 12 targets at once i did close to 30k to each

If its like this, it can completely slaughter a group in wvw. The additional damage per target should be reduced and/or the aoe should be limited to 5 targets like other aoe skills.
However, as far as spvp goes, I don’t think its really much of a problem outside of the unfortunate MM.

/signed. A fix is very much needed. Maybe self detonate might do the trick?