Guild Wars 2

Honestly, most of these are on autos, and I like autos being as unreliable as possible.

Mightybird.6034:

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

Mightybird.6034:

Engi’s largest strength over ele will always be that engi can do it all whereas ele will (almost certainly) never have access to stealth or reflect like engi does. Engi has a real elite as well…

Ele has a reflect, it’s called magnetic aura.

“like engi” Reflect wall? Do you really not know what I mean? Its not the same group utility. Do you not play the game or just like to waste time?

Ehh, if you decided to take powerful auras you could have a 5-person magnetic aura for five seconds on a 30 second cooldown, which isn’t bad at all.
I wouldn’t though because that’s the guardian/mesmer’s job, not mine.

Certain off-meta ele builds can apply silly amounts of chill (I think the most I’ve gotten off was 40 continuous seconds of chill without duration, though you would have to space it now because of the five stack cap).
Elemental surge + arcane power alone applies 5 stacks of 3 seconds (before duration, though if you equipped ice bow that immediately goes up to 3.6 seconds), which would be cool if it didn’t immediately get cleansed.

Toolbox.9375:

Oh, I knew I was forgetting things! Ice Bow, that was something I intended to mention, but it slipped my mind in the end. X) I’ve also heard that Lightning Hammer is a good Conjure. Does that still hold true after the Condition changes, or do direct-and-condition damage abilities pull ahead now?

How are daggers, at this point? They’re honestly one of the biggest draws, for me, simply because of that beautiful Incinerator skin. Which I’m a few years off from ever actually getting, BUT HEY, it gives me something to shoot for. :P

Lightning hammer is pretty cool and was meta for a while in PvE with s/f until might became a bit more available, because of the blinds and the blast finisher on autos (every third). Now it falls behind staff because the extra might stacking is no longer necessary, but is still solid if you’re willing to practice the strict rotation it has for top efficiency.
Daggers are the best PvP weapon, and are good in WvW roaming as well, with mediocre zerg potential (because low stats aren’t suited to frontlining, though it’s still possible). You can use it in PvE, and it’s fantastic if your group doesn’t have a whole lot of might production, but keep in mind that your personal damage will fall behind staff.
D/D aurashare used to be pretty cool, but fell off a while ago.

If you want to see really punishing combat, go play DOTA or LoL, where missing a single ability or even a single auto attack can cost an entire teamfight, and fights are decided for the most part within three seconds.

The plethora of defensive skills in GW2 make it relatively forgiving, compared to most competitive games.

Elementalist staff has the highest DPS in PvE of any weapon in the game (sadly with the least engaging playstyle possible), for starters, and if you need utility focus has an AoE 6 second projectile destroy, a reflect, and a full invuln that still lets you cast skills (cool in jumping puzzles if you have to worry about conditions/cc). They also have Ice Bow, which is a must in AC and nice on any large target.

These are essentially the only things that matter in PvE until very high level fractals, or soloing, or if you have little dungeon experience, none of which seem to apply here. In terms of efficiency, the meta will usually be 1 guard (aoe defense) 2 eles (damage) 1 warrior (banners are the only thing you can really stack once you cap might and crit chance) and 1 mesmer (purely for utility; portal, blink, and tons of reflects are nice), as it has been since launch.

You can, of course, run whatever you want, but you seem to want the relative merits of each in a PvE setting and that’s just how it is.

In terms of WvW, staff ele is king of support. Engi used to be a fun roamer, I haven’t messed around with mine in a while so I;m not sure of the state it is in now.

Just give us old mist form back, and then tempest will be viable!!!!

And also every ele build will be horrifically overpowered.

For those who can’t remember, you used to be able to continue casting skills while in mist form if you started them first (like ether renewal + mist form was basically uncounterable). So old mist form would have given a free tempest channel.

1) PvP in GW2 is moderately fast-paced, in that most fights are done within 30 seconds (if that). This is still slower than the top competitive games for the most part.

2) Staff has exactly one attunement worth spending more than five seconds at a time in, which is fire, and even then only if nobody’s watching you. Otherwise, you’re better off just using whatever skills you wanted from the attunement, then the 2 skill, then switching out.

3) Ele relies purely on active and proc-based defense. They do not have the ability to tank damage without using skills, or while only using one skill, because they have the lowest base stats and weakest autoattacks in the game. Not to mention that as any class with any build you will get rekt if you don’t clear conditions often.

4) Blind blocks one hit. Exactly one hit. You cannot stack blinds on top of each other (they stack duration, and not in hits blocked). Weakness gives a 50% chance of losing 50% damage (for an average of 25% reduced damage, which will be less or more in any given fight depending on your luck), and lowers endurance regeneration.

Frenk.5917:

FrownyClown.8402:

Frenk.5917:

FrownyClown.8402:

Those are all terrible ideas. The problem is the damage, not the stacks or cd of drakes breath.

How is reducing burning stacks and increasing DPS skills’ CD not nerfing damage?
Are you aware that, aside from burning speed and Firegrab (the first can be easily both predicted and dodged and the latter is on a 30s CD and is hard to land), the DPS comes from burning? Do you even ele?

for about 3 years actually. I meant the burn damage. The damage in general is largely due to the large amount of might the elementalist can have. I don’t care much about the burn stacks but increasing cd on skills would hurt builds that don’t rely on stacking burn damage.

You first post seems to be written by an entire different person. You basically said that burn is the problem, I suggested reducing burn stacks from cleansing fire, reducing burn duration and increasing CD of burning skills.
In your first post you said it’s wrong, in your last post you said it’s everything ele needs.

I am confused.

He meant that he wants burning nerfs overall and not specific to D/D ele.

I disagree though.
In my opinion (whatever that’s worth), elementalist needs some heavy power reallocation. Ele is one of the few classes whos builds basically didn’t change post-patch, and that’s because none of the problems with the class were actually addressed (power is all contained in one huge synergy).
Arcane is necessary because it gives the most general defense and support out of any line, not to mention that the attunement CD reduction simply just makes the class play better. My solution would actually be to leave it alone. It’s the generalist line, and meta ele is extremely generalist, but if specialist builds became more viable you would probably see it less (though still a lot, unless you moved attunement recharge elsewhere).
Water and Cantrips are linked problems. The whole reason you take water as a D/D is because of cantrips (you’re taking two major traits solely because of them), though it is also the best sustain line (ironically, because you would think that glyphs or sigils would be the sustain utilities), which is another reason it’s taken. Really, we just need to nerf one and the problems with the other will be reduced. Nerf water and taking it for cantrips will be more of an investment, nerf cantrips and other utility types (and thus other traitlines) will become more important.
Earth and air are weak despite certain classes’ protestations, earth just happens to be oddly hardcountery and thus can just be really obnoxious.
Fire is for the first time not actually useless, but I agree that blinding ashes is stupid in its current implementation. 8-second icd per target would be better, probably (10s is probably too weak).
D/D probably just needs the blast on Water 3 removed, blasts in water are weird.
With other nerfs, celestial will be fine.

If anything is done to nerf eles, though, Glyphs, Conjures, Signets, and Arcanes need buffing pretty desperately, as well as scepter.

As I understand it, overcharging does not force you out, but rather gives you a bonus cooldown which is added to the normal attunement cooldown if you swap out.
Examples:
1) You overcharge fire, then immediately swap out: Fire goes on cooldown for 20 seconds.
2) You overcharge fire, wait ten seconds, then swap out: Fire goes on its normal cooldown.
3) You have fresh air, you overcharge air, swap out, then crit: You can immediately swap back in.

Correct me if anyone else who read the reveal spots an error, but this is what I got out of it.

I’m pretty sure “meta” is a contraction of “metagame”, which is the aspect of a game that does not involve actual gameplay but instead involves discussion and optimization of playstyle.

Talking about facts here, D/D fire/arcane/water celestial cantrip ele is op in the current metagame. This is because it offers strong sustained offense and defense with no real weaknesses, excepting the lack of burst which makes it impossible to kill anyone else with decent sustain (this is basically limited to other eles, guardians, and possibly warriors though I wouldn’t bet on them).
In a game mode that rewards heavy sustain and doesn’t reward playmaking nearly as much (as in objective taking; there are no objectives that could force teamfight/pick/stalling strategies for later tactical advantages), this is overpowered, simply because it is too adapted to the gametype.
This is not to say that elementalists are in a good place though; the disparity between the top build and every other build is unbelievably huge. If an elementalist does not use cantrips, they’re immediately low-tier. The same goes for water and arcane: all defense and sustain are loaded into these lines and any build that strays from them becomes subpar. They also basically can’t use any amulet except celestial because of their low base stats.

I would say it is okay if our dependency was on a single thing, but to have nearly all key facets of a build invariably locked is somewhat indefensible.

I play zerker staff with arcanes and no water, so take this with a grain of salt, but I strongly think the way to go about it is to take power out of cantrips (and thus the water line) and move it into the other utility types. Glyphs and conjures especially need love.

Ironically, I think that Tempest will be very viable in both PvP and PvE with staff or focus (frankly speaking focus will be amazing for the spec, as far as I can tell), as much as it will be with warhorn.
Staff and focus both have a whole bunch of ways to keep people off you for the channel (focus obviously has earth 5, which is a guaranteed overload for earth at least, and swirling winds lasts longer than the overload as well, while staff can prep-cast AoEs all over the place to stop people from getting in range).

The only real things I dislike about tempest are some predictions I have:
Evasive arcana will be necessary for earth blast, period.
Persisting flames will probably also be highly recommended, because you will automatically have at least three fire fields.
Celestial (and possibly valkyrie if you run arcanes and/or persisting flames) will basically be the immediate meta for this, because you need to live long enough to cast an overload, but you need to have enough other stats (specifically damage for both fire and air) that overloads are worth casting.

I think what people need to keep in mind is that regardless of how weak Singularity is, it’s still probably better than any other spot-equivalent minor even if you can only cast one of them.

Definitely take arcane if you want to be supportive, both EAs help.
Then obviously take water, as I assume you are, and then probably fire because earth and air tend to be less team-oriented especially in zergs.

In terms of playstyle, even if you want to be as supportive as possible you’ll need to swap attunements constantly, even to fire which in your case is still solid damage with an evade and a constant fire field.

scerevisiae.1972:

Adjust.6903:

I feel we are more than ok. I’ve been running water arcana fire and have been no less than a complete pita to kill. Damage is sweet too. Just swapped fire to earth so I imagine I’ll be even harder to kill now

On the whole, earth traits are pretty ok. It’s all the earth skills that suck.

I have to disagree, it’s really just offhand dagger earth that sucks, and even that isn’t terrible. Mainhand has a gapcloser immobilize, which is cool, as well as a projectile block. Focus obviously has stupidly strong earth skills. Staff has a really solid earth attunement for utility, and scepter has a buff that can be recast for a nice-damage fast 5x 100% projectile finisher, with 3x 20% autos and an AoE blind.

The earth Grandmasters are really situational: Diamond skin only works if you’re tanky and against conditions, stone heart requires exceptional timing (and foreknowledge) and has a long downtime, and written in stone requires signets.
The first two minors are weak and boring, and the major adept traits aren’t all that great either.

I think it’s our weakest line by far.

Celestial is generally the best stat set for eles in general, and especially for d/d, which is very strong in PvP in general, as well as WvW solo roaming. Try to prioritize celestial armor and weapons over trinkets: trinkets are less efficient. Seeing as celestial is somewhat hard to get a hold of, a really good place to get cheap exotics to try out is the armor master in the WvW borderlands starting area. A full armor set is a mere 5 gold 44 silver, though the 950 badges required would limit your taking advantage fully and you would have to mix in some TP gear.

It’s generally accepted that our strongest PvP spec is celestial D/D with fire/water/arcane (or earth instead of fire if you find yourself overwhelmed by burst/conditions) and full cantrips (except for possibly the healing skill; in many cases ether renewal is too long of a cast and the signet heal ends up being better even untraited for d/d); lightning flash, armor of earth, and mist form being of course the ones you would take.

Sigil of battle is solid, as is bloodlust in WvW, although some people like to have an alternate set for sigil of night, during the night.

For runes, anything too good is expensive, so take a full set of what you like for now.

I hope this helps.

It’s generally agreed that you want either arcane or water for pretty much any viable build, anything else doesn’t have quite enough defense (due to cantrips being locked to water, and otherwise having very weak condition removal and no real defensive utilities), and meta builds have both.
Ofc in PvE it’s less relevant, but in any form of current PvP damage is way too high for eles to roll around without investment in real sustain and defensive trees.

I agree with Air about 2 and 3; 3 is unreliable to the point of just throwing it in case it hits, and 2 takes forever to cast, but the auto is acceptable (it brings a homing projectile to staff, which it doesn’t otherwise have).
I disagree vehemently with buffing auto damage in any attunement on staff; you could buff the other effects, but damage should belong for the most part to fire (the other 2 skills also do some significant damage, which is fine. You don’t want to be completely crippled when you switch attunements, and you aren’t). I also dislike auto attacks being generally strong, especially on ele. Situationally strong is fine, but general strength on an ele should be bound to combining skills and swaps and not pewpewing like a longbow ranger.

Other than that, as a staff ele main I welcome all buffs to staff.

My build doesn’t use water.

But water is good because of our cantrip dependency, and my build uses primarily arcanes.
I also have to accept that my build is not optimal simply because it doesn’t use the massive synergy between water and cantrips, which outshines pretty much everything else in sheer versatility (ironically, because I suspect Glyphs and Arcanes were meant to be more versatile).

When I was your age, mesmer shatter was Sword + Pistol/Staff.
Screw this GS nonsense the kids are passing around nowadays.

Works acceptably on ele with arcanes.

If you like being oneshot before you can heal.

If a game mode ever appears where 1v1s (true 1v1s, not conquest) or solo play is suddenly important, or probably even just a long-range map, rangers will immediately be the most cried about class.

Until then it looks like they’re going to continue trading team support for self support, which will forever keep them weak in team-based games.

I tried it out with a couple of modifications: I switched out Undead for Balthaazar, and rage sigil for smoldering.
At one point I got 21 stacks of burning on someone, which would have probably been higher if they didn’t immediately die. They stood in firewall for the full duration, I set off all my utilities, and had flame shield on and got off a Dragon’s tooth somehow.

This would probably actually be a good burst build if I didn’t suck monstrously at s/f, as is I basically camped fire and switched to earth if anyone tried to kill me. Even so, I was able to 1v1 a number of people (notably a rampage warrior with berserker stance, which was funny) and even put out some damage in teamfights.

This is pretty funny.
I did something similar pre-patch once for the hell of it, which let you stack 45 seconds of burning instantly, but I have to assume it would be better now. Now if only scepter fire auto wasn’t awful…
You could try casting Elemental Power in fire, then swapping to earth, double casting earth 2, swapping back immediately and then casting arcane power before the first hit goes off. If you did it right you could get all five hits off in about a second. That’s a projectile finisher too, so you could get an additional 5 1s stacks of burning if you dropped flamewall on yourself first.

I can’t seem to see your build, outside of utilities from the video. Personally I would run Lightning Flash or Armor of Earth over Cleansing Fire if I were you, but that’s up to you.

Gameplay-wise, the only immediate thing I would work on is spamming Lava Font more.
You have Persisting Flames, and Lava Font is why you take that. You should pretty much always use it between skills (especially before meteor shower, I noticed you miss that opportunity a few times like at 5:26ish) and before leaving fire, because it has nearly no cooldown and a low casting time (with a long easily interrupted aftercast).

Other than that, I think there were a few times where you could have gotten off an earth 4 but didn’t because you put it on top of them instead of putting it wherever you thought they were going to go.
I’m really impressed by your ability to use the default keybinds though. That 9 key in particular is something I could never hope to use as well as you do.

The fury is applied if you’re in the same radius as the finisher. It’s just like it grants you fury on top of the might.

Can stack like 40 seconds of fury with it too, for sheer overkill.

online.1278:

Dojo.1867:

Did you ever play any other esport game? Because what you say doesn’t match reality.

Companies like blizzard or valve will patch way more often even though their games are more polished on release than gw2 3 years in.

They may do update lot but it doesn’t matter since the fact that at least they never showed me completely killing a build or hero or skill and etc.

In league of legends, the biggest esport game, there is a champion named Poppy who, for a long while (probably twoish years), has been kept intentionally underpowered by Riot because she is a balancing mess and they don’t want her to be played. They have stated that if she is played competitively it means she needs to be nerfed again.
There is something called “Olafing” after the character Olaf, which is when a champion is essentially gutted because Riot decided they were unbalanceable.
They have a balance patch that can majorly change the metagame every two weeks (introducing Cinderhulk converted the assassin meta into a tank meta overnight).
Their new jungle system made pretty much every AP jungler unviable and has also killed nearly every ranged jungler off.

Tell me more about how Riot doesn’t make drastic changes.

It stacks duration up to five times, which is standard for conditions and probably a bugfix.

Not intensity.

I disagree with you about arcane power; five crits on a class where you have basically zero single-target capabilities is pretty useless, unless you’re fresh air on scepter in which case you have high crit chance regardless.
The only time it’s even remotely useful is with Elemental Surge, which lets you stack conditions on a single target pretty stupidly, but it still becomes useless immediately if there’s more than one person (or a mesmer, engineer, necromancer, ranger, ele, or guardian with summons shows up). The only other time it could be good is with Valkyrie, but even then it suffers with multiple targets. If it was the next five spells were guaranteed to crit, instead of hits, it would be awesome.
Glyphs are bad because only storm is actually useful, unless you’re trying to solo PvE and the earth summon somehow takes aggro.
Only one conjure is used in PvE, I would hardly say that makes them fine.
Our signets are probably only bad because we lack an elite one.
Cantrips just happen to be the best for nearly every situation, which is a problem.

bhagwad.4281:

Lexiceta.4156:

Explain? ok, Point assault has a huge advantage they know where point defender will eventually have to be i.e. the point itself with it’s limited space and with one exception no point has los barriers, where as point assaulter has many barriers and the freedom to move anywhere, this is not 1v1 , this is point assault and defense, as designed the advantage is given to point assault, this makes sense since the opposite would make the game pretty boring. But this not 1v1 where both players only have one objective, to defeat the other player. As a defender you have multiple objectives, prevent capped point from becoming decaped, prevent assaulting player from achieving a tactical or strategic advantage and lastly prevent re assault. Of course there are more such as assaults ability to disengage more easily etc etc but you get the point, pun intended. Assaulting player also has multiple objectives primary of which is decapping the point, so on so on defeating the other player may solve these objectives, but it not the goal as it is in 1v1. This why many teams try to defend points at choke locations on the map there by lessening the defenders disadvantage.

I think you’re getting confused between 1v1 and dueling. In dueling, the objective is to kill the other person. 1v1 is any situation where there are only 2 players in the immediate vicinity – hence, “1v1”.

And conquest has a lot of 1v1s. Therefore, the game has to be balanced around certain 1v1 situations also.

Also, curious about this statement of yours “As designed the advantage is given to point assault”. How do you know it was designed with this intention? Did the developers say something like this? Or did you just make this up on the spur of the moment?

It’s pretty obvious that the advantage will nearly always be to the assaulter rather than the defender, simply by nature of having multiple paths of approach and only one place you can defend from, and also the existence of stealth (surprise is a huge advantage).
I an also safely assume this is thought out and by design, because a game where the advantage is to the defender is extremely boring (think about it…).

I usually run along the following lines for my staff builds:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWnMICdOg9MAuMAsSgBCALKABgBgcC6ADxaNkGGDA-TJRBABxXG4m9H04BAAwFAAA

Sometimes I swap out ES for EA in Arcane, but otherwise the versatility offered by Blast + Brilliance is enough (With the four different fields on staff) that I feel the CDR is worth it despite Surge’s shortcomings. Lightning Flash is the only cantrip I take because it really is just too good.
I sort of feel like brilliance is now one of our better heals for staff just by virtue of having two water fields if you’re really desperate for the HP, or might/frost aura if you’re not. It’s also nearly impossible to interrupt, always does solid crit damage, and procs ES, while the others have longer cast times, bigger tells, and only sometimes slightly more healing (always less if you have water 3/5 handy) with similar cooldowns and lesser additional effects.

I’ve also been varying this by trying cele, which isn’t nearly as exciting but has the advantage of surviving forever.

Edit: Yours is pretty cool too, I just don’t like cantrips personally.

Tarkan.5609:

Will it also remove a condition if you gain lets say 3s of regen while you already have – as an example – 5s?

Yes. Any and all applications of regen remove a condition whether or not you already have the boon.

So for some reason Lava Font is listed as a skill with no cast time. It has a cast time, as well as significant aftercast which is uniquely cancelable by spamming your autoattack key.
It is also unique in that it is the only skill with no cast time that cannot be cast during other skills, and can be interrupted.

Can we just update the tooltip so that the cast time is listed, or something? It just bothers me.

It’s about trait synergy.

Works best with cantrips, has some use with glyphs, and Elemental Attunement.

Laraley.7695:

P Fun Daddy.1208:

TeuthidPurveyor.1970:

A bunch of people in this thread don’t know what Conjurer does. It gives you a fire aura when you summon the first weapon, and it gives you another when if you pick up your own second weapon. I’m not saying it’s a good trait (in PVP, which seems to be the focus, it’s still garbage), but it’s much better than you seem to realize.

Also, extra charges can be useful in PvE.

It doesn’t give you a fire aura when you summon the first, only when you (or anyone else) picks up the bundle, if I remember correctly from the one time I tested it before deeming it trash.

I’m pretty sure the extra charges are only useful on Ice Bow in AC, if at all (even then if you’re staggering them correctly you don’t need to use any other skills).

I tested it and it does give you a fire aura when you summon the first and when you pick up the second.

Better than I thought, then.
But still not what conjures need to be good.

TeuthidPurveyor.1970:

A bunch of people in this thread don’t know what Conjurer does. It gives you a fire aura when you summon the first weapon, and it gives you another when if you pick up your own second weapon. I’m not saying it’s a good trait (in PVP, which seems to be the focus, it’s still garbage), but it’s much better than you seem to realize.

Also, extra charges can be useful in PvE.

It doesn’t give you a fire aura when you summon the first, only when you (or anyone else) picks up the bundle, if I remember correctly from the one time I tested it before deeming it trash.

I’m pretty sure the extra charges are only useful on Ice Bow in AC, if at all (even then if you’re staggering them correctly you don’t need to use any other skills).

Taking bad players and putting them up against people who can just troll them because of it is not a measure of game balance.

D/D cele is too strong, but this is one of those games where bad players lose, and posting a video of a bad player losing does not change that.

My solution would be to nerf Cantrips and buff the other utility types (Arcane just a bit, Glyphs, signets and conjures a whole lot more).

So I’ve been thinking about what makes cantrips so much stronger than just about everything else, and the is what I’ve come up with.

Firstly, cantrip traits are not competing with strong grandmaster skills.
With the new patch, a large number of our traits got compiled into bundles, and for the most part this is a good thing. Cantrips, however, remained at master and adept tier while both recharge traits for Arcane and Glyphs were moved up to Grandmaster in the Arcane and Earth lines respectively.
In addition to this, the traits themselves are placed nicely in relevant lines (recovery in water, offense in fire) while the same cannot be said at all for Inscription and Conjurer (Air line for a slow-cast long-term effects? Seems legit). Frankly speaking Conjurer belongs in Arcane and nowhere else until they give it a more elementally aligned effect (no, getting an aura every time an uncommon condition is fulfilled does not count).
This is terrible.
Written in Stone is especially bad for this, mostly because the Earth line as a whole is mediocre. Elemental Surge competes with Evasive Arcana, which sucks, but the traitline as a whole is still nice.
The exception to this is Conjurer and Inscription, but Conjurer sucks (though it does give you fire auras if you pick it up yourself, if I remember correctly) and Inscription is similarly bad. Conjurer also gives you a meaningless boost to charges which assumes you will be basically just autoing for like ten seconds, with no CDR. Yeah.

Secondly, cantrips have trait synergy, and within the same line at that.
Cleansing Water and Soothing Disruption. It’s pretty cool.
No other type has that. Conjurer is on the verge of one, but gaining two stacks of might and a slightly longer fire aura is hardly synergy if that requires you to both cast your conjure and then pick up your second weapon, which hardly ever happens. Flame Axe would be the only one that even remotely has synergy there.

Thirdly, cantrips are nearly universally useful, but all other types have horribly weak skills in the set.
Arcane actually has a pretty good set with Arcane Brilliance, Wave and Shield, all of which are solid skills, but Arcane Power and Blast are weaksauce. The only time Arcane Power is even moderately useful is against a single target (the guaranteed crits are shared among all targets, so a single fireball on a mesmer with illusions neaby could consume four of your five charges) if you have Elemental Surge and are not in Fire. Arcane Blast has exactly zero utility. Missing an elite, too.
Glyphs have Glyph of Storms. Glyph of Elementals is okay simply because it is the only elite which doesn’t involve losing all of our skills. The rest basically don’t exist, because they are useless to the point of not having any measurable impact, for completely obvious reasons (GoEP is entirely random and doesn’t do much, GoLE can basically be ignored by any opponent, GoR actually just sucks in pretty much every situation ever. Mist Form is better at reviving than GoR is). Glyph of Harmony is okay and nothing else.
Conjures have Fiery Greatsword, which is at this point essentially an OOC weapon, and Frost Bow, which is useful in dungeons or against distracted targets. Lightning Hammer is just weaksauce in PvP and WvW, and close in PvE, Fire Axe is just weak and doesn’t give you anything special, and Earth Shield gives you a bunch of cool toys which are too clunky to use.
Pretty much all the signets are just bad, with nearly useless passives and actives (And bad cooldowns too). No elite either.
On the other hand you have cantrips, which give you your only source of stability outside of one 2s in Earth, are all instant cast outside of Ether Renewal and Tornado, have an instant damaging teleport, our only utility invulnerability, and our only useful non-trait cleanse, and as of this patch now also have a heal and an elite. They are all worth considering even if you have no traits invested in them or even if you invested in other trait types.

So yeah, Anet get on this pls.

TL;DR: Cantrips have good trait synergy and placement, and are universally useful. Glyphs, Conjures, Arcana, and Signets have none of these, and lack a full set of useful skills.

I hate to say it, but warhorn makes sense for tempest as much as sword does. Tempest could either be a caster-type stormcaller, which is cool in its own right but overlaps horribly with staff and glyph of storms, or a fast, mobile sword wielder, which overlaps with dagger.

Either way, I find it unlikely that a spec named after violent storms will be supportive, so I don’t think we have to worry about that.

xbutcherx.3861:

sinject.4607:

this is just a vague and short list of things i think need to be looked at

warrior:
rampage needs to be nerfed. stances should not be allowed to carry over into rampage, especially berserker’s stance. for many professions the only counterplay available to rampage is to leave the point entirely (hoping the warrior wont chase you) and wait for rampage to wear off, giving the warrior a free (de)cap.

Rampage is not an stance

He did not say it was. He said that stances should not carry over (as in activating them and then going into Rampage for invincible or unslowable rampages).

About diamond skin:
It’s a subpar trait that only exists to counter full condition damage classes without nearly any direct damage, and even then only does it if you sacrifice a whole bunch of damage for the stats needed to make it work.
The only reason it is being taken now is because of the massive amounts of people running around with condition damage builds, and is only obvious because full condition damage builds are trying to 1v1 someone who dedicated a full traitline (and if they have water, two full traitlines) to simply countering them.

If you’re one of those that is asking “Why isn’t there a direct damage equivalent?”, there is, and it’s a whole lot less expensive buildwise: toughness.

I would say, for conversation’s sake, that a good example of a balanced burst spec would be old fresh air ele (not certain about the new one).
If they didn’t all-in you they were a vulnerable glass cannon with acceptable sustained damage and mediocre utility. If they did all-in, they could down pretty much anyone instantly, but then had no disengage or sustained damage potential, so the best they could do was pick off targets with bad positioning. On the flipside, if someone mitigated their burst, they were done, and that was their biggest risk.
And now you have the copy-pasted mesmer build that everyone’s running, with huge baseline active defenses (distortion) and extremely low cooldowns on their burst (unless you happened to go mimic, but that’s blatant overkill for pretty much anything), in addition to high cc and stealth.
Usually, the point of tanky builds in a teamfight is the synergy between them and squishy builds, in that they have at least some capacity for shoring up the inherent weaknesses of a team-oriented damage dealer, but current burst classes completely remove that synergy by easily removing squishies without that interference.

Earth is the weakest traitline eles have right now.
If you are trying to play 1v1s and somebody plays a hard counter into you like diamond skin, then don’t play with them again. Those exist for team play.
If you are trying to run mostly conditions on a team and somebody picks a subpar traitline that counters you, then they played the meta well and deserve to be rewarded for you picking an easily countered comp.
If you aren’t running a mostly condi team and someone has DS, rotate away from them and watch them lose for picking a weak traitline with a trait that does not affect power damage.

I agree that the trait is oddly placed, being a specialist trait on a generalist class, but what can you do?

Yeah, I can safely say that tanky-stat setups having access to a near-instant one-shot-kill skill without any conditional setup like unique buffs or max might stacks needs to be addressed.

Squee Squashington.5189:

Supreme.3164:

Lordrosicky.5813:

Sunshine.5014:

Lordrosicky.5813:

mistsim.2748:

I haven’t actually found fresh air to be unmanageable. it’s the dagger cele eles that have gotten buffed via burning being OP

Yeh burning needs considerable toning down on ele in particular.

Alright, I’m gonna spoil it then. It’s the burning duration runes and sigil. They increase burning damage by more than 65% (plus more condi power and proc). That’s the secret. The power rune/sigil only increase the damage like 10% (plus more power). Condi build has a big advantage with raw percent increase.

Sigh. Now everyone knows what to run for meta xD.

Nah its not only that at all. That is like when everyone said might was the problem with cele and they nerfed might and it did nothing. Burning itself is too strong and the way elementalist in particular has to apply burning is broken. It has many repetitive burning skills

Because eles have not other condis, the devs should just add torment/confusion/poison to ele class, then it’s balanced to nerf burning ^^

Bleed?

Bleed is weak now though, especially with the small amounts ele has (autos are useless, churning earth never hit anyone, and everything else applies very little).

All I can say, with my limited experience this patch, is that pewpew rangers are terrifying if I don’t have my reflect up, guardians are doing horrific amounts of damage (enough to solo my entire downstate hp bar in less than a second, which is impressive) while maintaining solid defenses for some reason I haven’t looked into yet, mesmers are doing old fresh air levels of burst, but with pretty much no downtime, and everything else sort of just floats under the radar because of all the damage flying around.
Normally, the only thing I’m really afraid of as a staff ele is thieves, because of the massive surprise burst, but now that other classes can do the same exact thing they sort of fall under the radar a bit because there’s usually two or three bigger threats I have to make sure aren’t eating my face first.

Not to mention staff ele is a lot harder when your whole team is glass cannon.

robertul.3679:

Fresh air is borderline viable because it has a pretty hard to avoid burst and quite a few defensive cooldowns with swirling, obsidian, magnetic wave and pretty spammable blind via air#2.

Jihad isn’t viable because it has no defensive cooldowns except utilities and avoiding the damage means “don’t stay in the fire circle”. Yes you can sometimes trap people in the static field and drop lava font on them but that’s literally all you can do.

In a 1v1 situation sure, but I’m assuming that anyone playing staff in 1v1 should expect to lose regardless of build unless they massively outplay the other guy, and at that point your build is sort of irrelevant anyway.
In a multiplayer scenario you have massive amounts of baseline support regardless of your stats, and can take advantage of other people’s control and terrain to get your damage out.

I’m currently running full berserk staff in PvP with fire arcane and air, and it’s hilarious.
Can’t decided whether to run fresh air or bolt to the heart though, or maybe even that interrupt one.

On a side note, now that lava tomb has been condensed into persisting flames, you can pretty much instagib stupid people by dropping a lava font on yourself then getting downed.

Zietlogik.6208:

Grenades should have a fuse…like actual grenades, they should hit the ground, cause a red circle, and detonate a few seconds later, like enhanced throwable traps.

Maybe give them a bounce or 2 so people have to think about how they are throwing them rather than point-click-win

I think taking the current max distance travel time and making it always take that long to explode, regardless of distance, would be a good idea.

Another one would be to give the grenade a noticeable flash of the appropriate color for all the non-auto grenades, starting at the start of cast.
That would give it a tell and make it so that if you had a specific attack you wanted to dodge, you could do it.

Sunshine.5014:

Zenos Osgorma.2936:

Dark Red colour.

I actually prefer Dark White color more

Lol both noobs purple best.
Also colour not color lol noobs.

Only flame wars get attention.

PvE staff ele is basically spam your autos and 2 in fire off cooldown, and stack might when possible if nobody else is doing it.
WvW meteor shower zergs and godly tower defense.
In PvP you either pick damage or celestial and then roam semi-supportively. If you pick damage it’s sort of like an ADC in league if that makes sense, in that you nearly never 1v1 but if you have help you can be godly (self-heals + stupid damage).

I recommend Arcane Wave for all three (you have three different kinds of fields, and it’s instant damage), and all your other utilities are up to personal preference. I take Icebow in PvE and PvP, PvE because op damages on large targets and PvP because I find myself in 1v1 situations accidentally and like to be able to occasionally get off #5 and win by default rather than just accept my death (not to mention it’s pretty stupidly strong in a group setting).

Linnael.1069:

Novuake.2691:

Hahhahahahahh this thread. WOW!

Darksteel still complaining about engi is classic too. Boy was he vocal about turrets. Now its engi in general.

Grenades are good, I will give you that, but its not broken and you have tons of options to avoid it “at their feet”.

You have literally 0 options. There isn’t one single thing you can do when a grenade engie targets at their feet to tell the difference between autoattacks and skills 2-5 before you get hit. Stop spitting out bullkitten.

Before anyone tries the “well don’t fight at their feet then” response, this is the PvP subforum. In GW2, PvP is conquest, and conquest is standing on circles. Until that changes, you do, in fact, have to stand at their feet in order to win, and thus you have to get hit by a bunch of attacks with zero tells.