Guild Wars 2

Ross Biddle.2367:

piffdaddy.8014:

Snorcha.7586:

RTL never hits as well lol.

Quoted for truth. A lot of times in point blank melee range this skill rtl will still go on double cd (a lot of the time)

It was just the typical sloppy job done by the dev team. Instead of a long CD if missed, it should have been a long CD if not targeted. That way you get the short CD anytime you’re gap closing, and a long CD anytime you’re running away.

Technically you could target NPC’s, but again, a little more effort on the coding front and that could be covered as well.

I don’t see a problem with gap closing to an npc. You get aggro and stay in combat.

BlackBeard.2873:

Just to save people time who are considering arcane power as a util/trait: don’t

It gives you 5x crits, which are actually individual HITS, not attacks. So if you lightning whip and it hits 3 people x2 procs, you just used up all of your procs. The immob/burn/chill/blind might be nice (they are now immobed for 2s each), but it is definately not enough to win a fight. Perhaps in a 1v1 you can use it for bursting with burning speed, ring of fire/other burn, firegrab, but you still are better off with another arcane utility.

If it actually made ATTACKS crit, it would be decent, but its currently per hit.

At least that is how it worked when I tested in the HotM on the large golem group

That is how it works, it is less effective vs. groups. The only use is 1v1 elemental surge procs.

silentnight warrior.2714:

Xenon.4537:

coglin.1867:

It has bothered me for a long time that I spend traits or utilities for mobility just to see some other profession create a gap while running away by using skills designed for gap closing.

I am okay with the skills that require ground targeting of some kind. But skills like rush should require a target that is in range to function.

In before they nerf such skills the same way they nerfed Ride the Lightning. Gonna be a tear-filled day…

Expecialy elementalist if is given the same treatment to RTL.

RTL already got heavily nerfed because it was being used for escape and not for gap closing, or did you forget?
It used to be on a 15 second cooldown with 1500 range, now it is on a 40 second cooldown if it misses, 20 if it hits, and had its range reduced to 1200, in case you haven’t been around long enough to remember. Most of us just want warrior dedicated “gap closers” to be given the same treatment.

zilcho.7624:

Mochann.5298:

Ele has far mobility than warr. It’s called Fiery Great Sword. No class can beat an Ele in a race because of FGS. You can disengage with this very easily.

Maybe if you mean a literal race, where neither player is allowed to touch the other. Otherwise, ele’s are not the most mobile profession by any stretch of the imagination.

You realize FGS 3 doesn’t break you out of Stun or Immobilize, right? If it did, ele’s would probably take FGS over the elemental. But it doesn’t, and everyone takes the elemental. (Cause it’s nice to do some damage as we are condition-spammed and CC-locked to death.)

FGS is for WvW, PvP is usually GoE (or Tornado for zerk staff).
FGS does temporarily give you the best mobility at the cost of an elite slot, and with a 120s minimum downtime for 60s maximum uptime.
However, using this ability and then losing the weapon, either when you decide to actually do something and not just spin all over the place or from when its duration expires, leaves you with fairly subpar mobility (RTL is mediocre as a mobility tool, and you only get permaswiftness on a staff).

So sure, you can win one race, but you definitely can’t win two haha.

ThiBash.5634:

One thing that works in most PvE situations is the elite Earth Elemental summon. It can tank better than most warriors, and it attracts aggro as if it had a target painted on its face. Well, if it had a face, that is.

He’s level 13, silly.

CMstorm.8679:

What if Arcane Brilliance was made into an AoE heal as well for more support, aside from the Antitoxin Spray, which I’m pretty sure that little to no body uses it so much in Pve generally. Maybe for TA?

Arcane Brilliance is honestly fine as it is, though I agree antitoxin spray is pretty much as useless as it gets.
Brilliance would be the #1 ele heal if it weren’t for the condition-heavy meta.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

Celtus.8456:

Guardian is fine…shelter/mace 3/focus 5 is all they have. No warrior can’t always be cced or immobilized (and they have so many condi clears it doesn’t matter). Berserk stance/defy pain/stability =invuln and does not drop orb or decap pts. Warrior gets special treatment in this game.

berserker stance = 1 utility slot, 8 seconds duration, 60 seconds recharge
defy pain trait only activates at 25% health, 60 seconds recharge, 4 seconds duration
balanced stance = 1 utility slot, 8 seconds stability boon

boons can be removed.
and that is 2 utility slots used up on defensive skills.

last i checked, going from the orb to the nearest capture point requires more than 4 seconds. 8 seconds is not enough either.

Which is still much easier on a warrior than any other class. It’s generally pretty easy to switch you build to a dedicated orb carrier warrior using high mobility weapons, defensive gear, and three stances to prevent cc/damage/conditions as needed.
They are undeniably better at this than any other class, who are all denied the abilities that would allow them to achieve the same orb-running capabilities.

I support the bonus duration OR the secondary effects.
Neither would be overpowered alone, but both might be.

Chaotic Storm.2815:

Snorcha.7586:

Chaotic Storm.2815:

Top of my head 25k toughness, 17~18k hp. I am planning to reduce my toughness down to a 21~22k range soon to try for stronger offence stats Just holding off to see how this new crit change goes down.

25k I want your build!!

Don’t worry it’s just typo it’s 2.5k

lol, with 25k toughness Diamond Skin would actually be viable.

LordByron.8369:

I have a great idea…

Why don t simply reduce the range and double the cooldown on miss?
Can be done with initiative cost also…should cost double and give half back on hit ….

I m sure it would work perfectly leaving untouched the gap closing ability…

Yeah, it even has a precedent!
+1 for consistency justice!

Wintel.4873:

Hi there, I’m have only recently started completing story & exp modes of most dungeons over the last few weeks. I play an Elementalist.

One thing I have noticed right away when looking for groups is that stacking the “heavy” classes (Warrior or Guardian) seems to have no downsides and only benefits, while stacking light classes usually becomes a big problem especially when trying to speed-clear.
In fact there seem to be entire Warrior-only groups clearing dungeons in full berzerker gear, it’s crazy. While I can do extremely high damage (especially into walls/corners), it comes at the cost of getting 1-shotted by virtually anything that looks at me funny and spending a lot of time in downed state.
I’ve also seen Guardians and Warriors do amazing things like mass-pull groups of enemies and just tank all that damage, if I tried to do something like that I would die instantly.

Am I missing something here? How is the heavy vs light balance at higher level dungeons (e.g. Fractals)?

Here’s the current state of the PvE ele:
We deal by far the highest damage in an ideal situation out of all classes. However, with the spec that allows that damage, we do not have nearly enough passive damage resistance to survive on our own. In order to achieve this maximum DPS, we need one, and sometimes even two, classes that can support us and make sure we don’t die, and a lot of group effort too.

So how it ends up is that elementalists are technically better n a perfect group, but heavies are a lot easier to use and thus end up being more desirable usually.

There are actually a few good points on the map:

1) The jump pads and arches are really fun and make for some interesting and complex play using LoS and AoE, as well as acceptable uses of knockback to give yourself breathing room or time to set up some longer-casting abilities.

2) The multiple layers that the map provides are pretty fun to play with and allow for some interesting plays.

3) The middle capture point is pretty fun to play around, as is the area immediately next to the ground level portal.

Despite this, there are multiple places where the map falls short:

1) It is far too easy to instantly kill with very little counterplay or risk. The way the game is balanced, plays that deal high damage should be very risky, and Skyhammer destroys that by making it possible to have almost no risk while getting nearly instant kills.

2) The above mechanics affect classes differently. Certain classes have enormous advantages over others while playing this map, to an unhealthy degree.

3) The skyhammer itself is sort of a pain in how it is high damage, cc, and knockdown, as well as how the design in the immediate area around includes every one of the other problems the map has. It is the single easiest place to kill with cc or knockback, in addition to the small size which makes positioning difficult to work with and AoE difficult to avoid. This makes it so that easy-to-play tactics are much more rewarded, and skillful play has barely any effect.

My solution would be to either remove the glass panels entirely, or rework the level so that when you fall through them you fall to another layer of the map rather than instantly die, and make it fairly easy to get back up so that you aren’t completely boned by falling through.
Secondly, the skyhammer itself needs changing. Falling off the platform should not kill you. My personal idea is that it would teleport you back down to the surface and apply a debuff that prevents you from entering the portal for several seconds.

I think we can all agree though, that the map is not particularly fair or good in its current form.

I’m pretty sure they’re planning on redoing all runes, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much until they actually come out.

I’m so worried
My one ascended piece is a celestial chest (found out after the fact that a helm would have been better).

As said above, staff is hard to learn on. It’s generally a good idea to pick up s/d or d/d to start with, as both have access to some very powerful skills that are both offensive and defensive, and also have a lower skillcap (skillcap is how hard it is to play at near-max capability). This will help you a lot with figuring out how to chain stuff together generally on the ele, as well as giving you a handle on elementary combo finishers and the more straightforward uses of each attunement.
Additionally, I suggest picking up either the Frost Bow or the Lightning Hammer utilities, as they are fairly high-powered and make your life a lot easier, as soon as you can.
Finally, personal story quests are never required to be done immediately, or at all. If you’re not enjoying them, it’s a good idea to go check out the other parts of the game until you feel like going back and getting the rewards.

oZii.2864:

Knox.3748:

oZii was that a joke? rotfl

No it wasn’t it also wasn’t a full preview of everything coming. It is also true that staff has gotten probably the most buffs of any of our weapon sets recently.

Staff is in a good place. Of course fire is damage but so is air with a touch of CC and utility, water is heals with a touch of damage and earth is for blast finishers and cc.

I would say staff is our most complete weapon set. It isn’t designed to be a 1v1 weapon .
You mention S/D Scepter is it’s own weapon. Off hand dagger is good save for RTL and Fire grab. Scepter I never said was fine though Jeydra must think I did.

Air isn’t really damage… Two skills deal no damage at all, one only does as a side effect of stunning, and one is mainly an AoE blind. That leaves the auto, which is a really bad thing to use in PvP anyway because it can’t be relied upon to hit more than one target and does terrible damage even if it hits two.
I agree that staff is our most complete weapon though, as well as the one with greatest depth due to the huge number of usable combinations it has, especially with blast utilities.

Ele
Strengths: Ability to do a number of things with a single build, high AoE, access to a number of boons.

Weaknesses: Not able to specialize as well as any other class, bad at taking damage, requires greater management and planning, several useless traitlines and many useless utilities.

The problem with conditions is not that conditions are inherently OP, or that they ignore armor, or that cleansing is too hard. It’s that compared with direct damage, conditions are very often difficult to avoid, and easy to apply.
For an example, look at high direct damage attacks. Hundred blades, Meteor Shower, Barrage, even Backstab to an extent are all easily avoided if you know what you are doing, and while they do high damage, they all require a certain amount of setup and risk to use, and generally are somewhat difficult to land.
On the other hand, condition damage has nowhere near the same difficulty of application. Lots of conditions are from passive procs on autoattacks and AoE’s with low telegraphing and comparitively short delay from the start of casting to when it hits, like necro marks (which can even be made unblockable) or various bow skills on a few classes.
My solution would be to make condition applying skills telegraphed and avoidable to the same degree that equivalent direct damage skills are, and to have autoattacks apply at maximum one condition (there still need to be autos that apply conditions, but having a single auto apply multiple conditions is somewhat silly).

reikken.4961:

P Fun Daddy.1208:

In katniss’ post, that last one resonates particularly painfully.
Any good team sees me, and I’m not only dead for that battle, but their thief then makes it his personal priority to stalk me the entire match.

I love thief duels though
I’m guessing you don’t

also, I like when I’m running D/F and run away from a group, and once only one guy is still chasing, I can turn around and duel him

I’m on staff currently
Pretty much never works out in my favor.

lorddarkflare.9186:

I like the updates to the staff section. While I think that particular build is too braindead for my tastes, I still really like the AL/single target variant.

By the way, should not the vuln. stacking variant include shatterstone somewhere in the rotation?

Shatterstone isn’t worth casting, ever.

Trying to dissuade you from doing a build based entirely round chill:

It’s generally hard to make builds based entirely on a single condition, because they get cleansed too easily, especially in the current meta where everyone is forced to run multiple sources of removal.
Also, condition duration only stacks up to +100%.
However, the biggest problem with this build is that elementalists on the whole do not have reliable access to a single thing. Generally, you need to be using all of the tools at your disposal almost all of the time. Not to say you are should be spamming off cooldown, but most of the time you are chaining between elements for various combos and maneuvers, because it’s nearly impossible to keep doing the same thing for any length of time with our high cooldowns and the specalization of elements.

It’s perfectly okay to play support, but you have to do it through a combination of buffs, control, and healing because all three are available to us and needed to fully contribute to team, or even to survive. Maybe someday specialized support condition elementalists will be usable, but currently, we need to put effort into other roles to do well.

No longer trying to convince you to not keep chill:

Lose signet of water. You can easily fit something better in that slot even if you are trying to go with the chill theme.
In fact, you would lose nothing and gain quite a bit if you dropped your points in earth for arcane points, and going with your theme took elemental surge and a few arcane utilities, because they would all apply chill on a much shorter cooldown, and deal damage/protect you too, on top of combo-field utility.
Rune of the ice doesn’t work with your build because of the 100% condi duration cap, in addition to all of the other chill bonuses you have on there.
Also, you didn’t do this, but don’t try sigil of ice, it has a 3% chance of activating with your build right now.

Hope this was helpful.

Quinlanp.1308:

Why is it that i get more dmg when i have celestial armor and zerker trinkets vs zerker armor and celestial trinkets?

Celestial pieces always have superior stat totals. However, the percentage increase is not the same from item to item, and trinkets have a much lower increase compared to that of armor. So celestial armor will give a higher percentage increase in total stats, when compared to any other type, than celestial trinkets.
Even within the category of armor, it still isn’t equal. Helms give the greatest percentage increase, with coats being second. Thus, if you are looking just to splash a small amount of celestial into your build, these are the pieces you prioritize.

Taldren.7523:

Well … seeing as they are going to nerf Vigor somehow … Renewing Stamina may not be worth it anymore.

Also, they are nerfing Boon duration on 2 Water / 2 Noble / 2 Monk to +10%/10%/10% … so you will lose 15% duration on your swiftness. Nerfing to make subpar traits look worth it.

Meh, staff can easily keep up permaswiftness without using any boon duration, zero kittens given.

More on topic, final shielding and even arcane retribution will still be better than windborne daggers if renewing stamina gets the nerf hammer, and running any arcanes at all makes arcane mastery better than anything other than our precious permavigor.
Frankly windborne is probably the worst option out of arcane adept majors. I might even prefer blasting staff over it on a D/D build, because you’re not going to see a practical difference anyway.

reikken.4961:

katniss.6735:

Spvp?
Don’t worry, I won’t go to the laser with Tornado off CD.
I will indeed fire that cannon, and pick up every single spawn of hero’s potion.
They killed our treb? Allow me to run the repair for it to be back up. I will even sit on it all game!
You’re being attacked? Don’t worry, I’ll show up and immediately, everyone will stop targeting you.

on this note, I immediately go destroy treb whenever it’s up like it’s my job
switch my weapon to staff, swap my trait to lava tomb, and run in there
lava font, pop armor of earth and meteor shower, and then even if I die, lava tomb will finish the job

I do full zerk, throw down lava font, arcane wave, burning speed over it, then meteor shower. Down within 10 seconds.
In katniss’ post, that last one resonates particularly painfully.
Any good team sees me, and I’m not only dead for that battle, but their thief then makes it his personal priority to stalk me the entire match.

ensoriki.5789:

roamzero.9486:

What’s ironic is that they are nerfing two sources of poison by about 40% for thief/engineer, poison being the only real counter to the signet :/ And by possibly changing the active the net result will probably be a buff for Warriors…

The actual counter to the signet is realizing that Heal over times need…as their description suggests time to live up to their full potential. Burst is compacting damage in a small time frame. The actual counter play to HoT’s is burst. Hence if a Thief is using signet of malice, if you focus him the signet automatically goes to garbage tier, Signet of Resto is in the same boat even with Written in Stone.

There is a slight difference to Healsig though, in that Warriors have enough passive defensive stats in their large health pool that, when coupled with their powerful defensive utilities and access to CC/Mobility, give HoTs more time to work than would be present on an ele or thief. Either one of those getting focused will either be forced to escape, outburst, or die, while warriors using equivalent setups will survive much longer, and often long enough for their HoT to be worth something, especially when considering it does not require you to spend a second casting it if you are getting bursted.

Keira Ferland.5619:

Qaelyn.7612:

That’s ridiculous.

I find it inexcusable that Anet continues to not respond to the very valid complaints about this map being in solo queue.

That’s a matter of perspective. I think that sky ham should be in solo queue. IMO, you have to pay more attention to what your enemy is doing or you will instantly lose. Which is how this game should be anyway. You make a mistake, there should be no chance to recover at all. You should just lose. Unless of course, the enemy screws up even harder.

Sure, so long as you make it so that it affects every class equally, which it doesn’t.

Why did you make two of these?
Anyway, my response copied from the other thread:

“I’m not absolutely sure, but I think it creates a cleansing/regen AoE at the point of contact.
Try using it in melee range and see if it works.”

Hmm…
“What is stand on it?”
I like it, thank you. I will be taking this.

apt.9184:

Right now projectile finishers with light fields and regen fields do not do what they are supposed to. When projectile goes through a light field it should cleanse a condi. We tested it multiple times with both fields neither proced the regen or condi cleanse.
<iframe width=“560” height=“315” src=“//www.youtube.com/embed/t2MOl79Ywxg” frameborder=“0” allowfullscreen></iframe>

I’m not absolutely sure, but I think it creates a cleansing/regen AoE at the point of contact.
Try using it in melee range and see if it works.

Zirith.6429:

It is literally just a heal guys, it has no other buffs like filling your adren or removing condis, engy turret already heals for way more than healsig anyway but no one complains about that. 30 hp/sec is huge, it is almost enough to completely fk warriors while fighting condi builds yet again.

and dont be all like hur dur warriors are condi immune cus zerker stance and cleansing ire because we all know condi builds are still the counter to warriors.

Losing 8% of your healing is huge? You essentially lose one tick every 12.5 seconds, which frankly isn’t a big deal at all. If 8% Hp/S loss on a completely passive heal makes you suddenly unplayable from being one of the top tier professions, the problem will certainly be you and not the change.

roamzero.9486:

What’s ironic is that they are nerfing two sources of poison by about 40% for thief/engineer, poison being the only real counter to the signet :/ And by possibly changing the active the net result will probably be a buff for Warriors…

It’s not like poison was ever more of a counter to healsig than it was to any other heal.

Dire will just make everyone angry.

+1 anet
Can’t really complain.
Less passive across the board (unless you count SoR which is still at least not completely passive), especially on Dhumfire and at least some AI builds, and of course Healsig, and rune changes which badly needed to happen.

Ugh, now I have to use D/D again to try these out
I thought I could stop with it for a bit…

Rhalas.4167:

Im gonna support my team by doing nothing til my Healing Rain is off CD.

Don’t be silly, you have geyser too.

@Orpheal
I would have liked Dexterity to be the new name. Reminds me of D&D, and thematically it makes sense.

Why in the world do you want your autoattacks to be strong?
Isn’t that kind of silly, that you think the one attack on each weapon that requires literally no thought to use should have good amounts of power?
Besides that, a skill that has the power that Pin Down has (Guaranteed projectile finisher, long range, 6 stacks of 12s bleed, and 3s immobilize on a 25 second base cooldown) should absolutely be obviously telegraphed and dodgeable.

Also “terribly”, not “terrible”. It’s really bothering me, you wrote it four times.

Also, for celestial, go for helm and then coat first, because they give the greatest percentage increase in total stats over other items.

jonwar.4186:

myself and some guildies have been working on these sorts of things as of late. what we have come up with as far as a healing combo/blasting finisher is something like this

cast eruption, count to 4 seconds for the actual eruption, attune to water, immediately cast water 3, arcane brilliance, arcane wave, water 5 over this field. we actually have yet to test this in a true combat situation but it seems very powerful

I suggest using water 3 and 5 at separate times. Usually in a staff build either one can heal you plenty if you blast them once or twice.
I usually use geyser with arcane brilliance and arcane wave because of how short of a duration it is and how small the AoE is, and reserve rain for my earth blasts because it lasts long enough to cast eruption afterwards and still have it finish (with a window of 1 1/4 second), and dodge roll in the meantime for the blast.

CMstorm.8679:

dangit. I wanted my Sandstorm glyph do burn ppls but I did find out it was more effective than I thought it was. I might recommend using Glyph of Storms with staff in Pvp/hotjoins maybe

You could cast it in earth, then switch to fire and hit arcane power.

Meh, tornado + any long duration damaging effect isn’t a bug. Exploiting game mechanics, sure, but nothing it does is a result of a glitch of any kind. Tornado triples base power, which makes any attack hit harder, including ones placed before it starts.

CMstorm.8679:

Shockwave.1230:

Elemental Surge + Arcane Power cause Elemental Surge’s effect to trigger for your currently active attunement, not the attunement it was activated in (unless the attunement you activated it in is still your currently active attunement).

So, Arcane Power won’t maintain the burn from Elemental Surge if it’s activated in Fire attunement then swapped to another attunement afterwards? The effect of E.S +Arcane Power will change when I swap to another attunement after using it?

Precisely. Elemental Power makes each spell you cast count as arcane for the purposes Elemental surge, regardless of when you activate it.

Neko.9021:

P Fun Daddy.1208:

Guys, its Burnfall.
We don’t need to address this any further. If you want to see this guy rage more because he can be killed by another class, go to the thief forum.
He is a little bit like Deimos in that he’s very often wrong and may or may not be trolling, but somewhat worse in that he’s always angry.

However, I do agree that this class needs some looking at. In WvW, we are relegated to a single, mostly boring role in zergs, and in sPvP we are relegated to a single, boring role in a one-shot burst that quite frankly thieves can do better (You can of course run glass staff, but I’m not going to pretend that’s viable, only that it’s fun).
If you’re having trouble clearing any PvE content, you should probably finish levelling up to 80.

I have a solution. What if we LoS Burnfall into the Warrior subforum and get him to post a rant about Healing Sig, and pull Demios’ aggro into the thread onto Burnfall. They’ll meet each other, wrack up infraction points, and then we can jump in at the end and finish them off.

Perfect!

Guys, its Burnfall.
We don’t need to address this any further. If you want to see this guy rage more because he can be killed by another class, go to the thief forum.
He is a little bit like Deimos in that he’s very often wrong and may or may not be trolling, but somewhat worse in that he’s always angry.

However, I do agree that this class needs some looking at. In WvW, we are relegated to a single, mostly boring role in zergs, and in sPvP we are relegated to a single, boring role in a one-shot burst that quite frankly thieves can do better (You can of course run glass staff, but I’m not going to pretend that’s viable, only that it’s fun).
If you’re having trouble clearing any PvE content, you should probably finish levelling up to 80.

I’m pretty sure you point your camera up at the sky, or something like that.

+1 to this.

/15chars

I do have a lot of problems with thieves as an ele. Backstabs will crit you for over half your health regardless of pretty much any build you run, and there’s very little counterplay, because any thief worth any attention will wait until he can open in stealth while you are either distracted or don’t know he’s there, and thus have no chance of an sort of retaliation.
Sure, there’s plenty you can do once you know he’s there (not that it will matter too much unless you’re D/D and can zoom off to save yourself from the spam), but the fact of the matter is that he’d have to be stupid to attack while you can focus on him.

Whether this is because Anet wants hard counters, or because they didn’t realize that being able to hit for 9k damage in stealth effectively hard counters any squishy, is up for debate.

Aza.2105:

Ahlen.7591:

Talyn Sneider.1825:

this is about all classes that are currently able to pull off the conditional bunker builds:

necros
warriors
mesmers
rangers

And to anyone defending this kind of builds, just go to a build site and see the kind of comments they get:

easy mode
it gets too boring so i changed to power damage
etc…

Uh, you forgot Engi’s, Guardians, and Ele’s. All of which can pull of some pretty amazing con bunker. (Hell Engi’s are the godfather of the conbunker).

The only class that can’t pull off a very good conbunker is Thief. And their direct damage, and escape mechanics are so good they don’t really need to.

Guardians have no condition build.

Neither can eles, with access to 1-2 conditions at a time in any element, most of which are short duration, not to mention only two damaging conditions.

I faced two asura MM necros that liked to stack a few nights back… Being someone that selects targets with a mouse to be precise, this was truly painful, even forgetting about the 5-target AoE limit which makes this just horribly annoying.

Wear no armor, use no traits. Only use berserker stat combo weapons.
This should make the game somewhat more difficult (and keeping weapons berserker should make it not take forever to kill stuff).
For extra justice, take no defensive utilities outside of your heal.