The fact is this our big hitting skills are on a long cool down making maximizing dps not nearly as useful as it would be on shatter mesmer, thief, gs warrior etc. Simply put the time between burst is too long.
To break it down a little more the more access to you have to your burst the more likely you are to crit with it. This http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fire_Grab and this http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Churning_earth are terrible skills for a crit build overall. The cast are too long and the cds are way too long.
What drives this fact home even more is that we have no http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bull%27s_Charge http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Basilisk_Venom http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Devourer_Venom and any number of other cc skills that will make churning earth land. Even if you could guarantee the crit you cant guarantee the hit. The gap between skill cast and dps application is too long and there aren’t enough cc skills to make land consistent for burst[….]
[…]to summarize
You have weak access to big hitting skills, strong access to conditions, and you end up losing a kitten load of stat points chasing after precision and crit damage with nothing to justify carrying it in the first place.
I be a little more blunt if anyone is going to respond read it all I don’t want to play the opinion game. What I stated above are the facts I didn’t design the game but there is no reason perpetuating a stereo type (big crit means more dps) and rather bring this back to reality (Not on Ele).
Edit: Link
This is because D/D is not a burst weapon set. It is a pressure DPS weapon set with 1 high-damage burst skill (Fire Grab) and 1 high-damage area denial skill (Churning Earth).
Scepter main-hand has far more access to burst skills with shorter cooldowns, and Focus has more access to CC. Unfortunately, the cast times and animation times on those skills make it exceedingly difficult to use.
Staff has a similar problem, with loads of back-loaded burst potential and a fair amount of CC. It’s too bad that any moron can dodge out of the big red circles and negate all your burst.
Even so, there’s something to be said for setting a target up for a well-placed Immobilize, dumping all your slow-build burst moves on them, popping Arcane Power, and swapping to Air to land all the burst at the same time. If they Stun Break out of it then you utilize whatever escape plan you have (Swiftness, Blink, whatever) and try again later.
It’s very much like Thief spiking, only Thieves have stealth which makes everything far easier.
It is true that very recently people got HOW to play the class. Dont mind the hyper defensive trolls. Things didnt change much since lost shores. Many bug fixes but no major changes. But i think you got it all wrong back then …
My guess is that you went for staff ele, that is why u maybe disappointed by dmg and survivability. Try D/D or S/D, i think you will find it more fitting.
The truth is that newcomers to the class dont get that Staff as a weapon is designed for aoe-combo field offering and support. It is a squishy choice and a low dps one as well (compared to S/D).
Probably the other decent thing about staff is it’s really awesome for destroying someone’s endurance at range. Earth 1 can apply nearly permanent weakness, and the plethora of red circles you put down will practically force dodges out of your targets. It’s not bad for setting up a group member for a decent spike. Just rotate Earth 1 and Earth 2, watch for 2 dodges kinda near each other, then Earth 5 → Earth 2 → Water 2 → Water 4 (so they don’t run far when Immob ends). If you can squeeze more damage into that 1 Immobilize then go for it. Arcane Blast is great for getting a tad more spike in.
The trouble with this is that if they close to melee on you, and you can’t scare them off with fields or cripple/kite them with Earth 4…..you die.
EDIT: just thought of something when mention playstyle…although we have 4 attunements but those attunements are on a single weapon single playstyle while other class can easily switch from range to melee and vice versa. were stuck with one or the other.
There’s always Conjures…..
Yes, your build is one of those fotm bunkers. Point taken.
LOL! That isn’t my build, and it isn’t a bunker. That’s some amusing glass cannon vid I spotted yesterday. It’s mostly a comedy build for trolling newbies in WvW. Zerker gear and all points in Fire/Air. RTL to your target and blow all your Arcane cooldowns at once causing their instant death.
I found it funny, and an example of us not doing “crap damage.”
that CD is per attacker guys, if you charge into a huge team fight you’ll see the might stacks jump up like crazy.
For example running head on into an enemy zerg, and then lightning flashing out before your obsidian flesh completely runs out and leaves you dead.
PS: Scepter + Focus combo has a ton of blast finishers they can combo with that fire wall to give a nice burst of aoe Might.
I’ve been toying with Scepter/Focus lately, and I think the primary issue with the Focus is that you lose so much mobility and versatility with both weapons. Scepter sacrifices a lot of on-the-fly, target-free damage in exchange for single-target control/conditions. Focus does the same. Dagger/Dagger moves also are highly mobile, so you can use them for multiple things.
One thing the slow, deliberate style that both S/F and Staff have going for them is that they allow a lot of spike damage IF (big if) someone hangs around for all your slow stuff to hit them at once.
Or you can use D/D and stay alive longer while still doing respectable dps and spike. No wonder most people don’t bother with S/F!
I personally can’t stand D/D it’s so much weaker compared to staff and focus (i’ve perfected the art of forcing my enemies into either eating the attacks or not doing much), it does have mobility though, i’ll give it that, but the lack of range and raw power upsets me…
And scepter -does- have a lot of AoE damage, it’s just all based around one persons location with a few exceptions (shatterstone, phoenix, and water trident), so what you really wanna do is just throw a few short CD skills that scare people (like dragons tooth) into the heart of their little team group and then throw other stuff into their escape and make them decide which they want to be hit by, they -normally- will run into the shatterstones, which is amazing for me because that makes me deal 24% more damage to them, make them eat a few more of those and then some Arcana Burst and they’re down for the count.
I’ve been trying to run Sigil of Earth to immobilize right before DT/Phoenix/Lightning Strike/Arcane Blast fast enough so that DT hits while my Water attunement is still up (hooray for Lingering Attunement). It currently doesn’t last long enough to guarantee a hit, but I haven’t tried runing for condi duration yet. I’m hoping that makes the timing a little less impossible.
The idea behind the build is to toss my water auto attack at someone while applying chill to keep them at range, and when they hit 75% health unloading enough spike to kill them instantly. Shatterstone might be just the trick to eat up their dodges beforehand, though. The cooldown is short enough that spamming it could work.
Or I might try to squeeze Arcane Precision into my current build for the Air Attunement Weakness procs.
Thanks for the tips. Very helpful!
What i really like to do for a more bursty build is to take the signets cause vuln trait, and then the lingering attunements 20% damage while they’re vulned and i’m water and go dragons tooth + phoenix + sig of earth —-> air + gale —-> water attunement + shatterstone, and the dragons tooth normally lands right as i get over into the water attunement for the wopping 23% dmg boost on the dragons tooth leaving them in a world of hurt.
I -really- like being able to turn water attunement into the strongest attunement just by putting a single stack of vuln onto them xD
That combo sounded fun, but also impossible to land (especially in PvP/WvW). How often do you actually connect with it?
TL -> DR Version: Elementalists sucked at release because nobody knew how to play them. They rock now because most of the good builds and playstyles are on YouTube for everyone to study.
Not true. The builds people use now were used in beta and are not hard to pick up. D/D Ele’s was much less effective when rtl would self stun you for 2 seconds and go no where. Same with magnetic grasp. Also fire grab not missing 90% of the time also helps. Plus earthquake was speed up, water #2 on daggers was buffed and we got a cleave on air. Op ignore the idiots in this thread. There are a few viable builds you can find in these forums. We still have major issues with certain trait lines but water and arcane are very strong. Give ele another try.
I guess I mentally blotted out all the post-release bug filled frustrations. I remember the RTL bug. It happened often enough to be maddening, but not often enough for the ability to be unusable.
that CD is per attacker guys, if you charge into a huge team fight you’ll see the might stacks jump up like crazy.
For example running head on into an enemy zerg, and then lightning flashing out before your obsidian flesh completely runs out and leaves you dead.
PS: Scepter + Focus combo has a ton of blast finishers they can combo with that fire wall to give a nice burst of aoe Might.
I’ve been toying with Scepter/Focus lately, and I think the primary issue with the Focus is that you lose so much mobility and versatility with both weapons. Scepter sacrifices a lot of on-the-fly, target-free damage in exchange for single-target control/conditions. Focus does the same. Dagger/Dagger moves also are highly mobile, so you can use them for multiple things.
One thing the slow, deliberate style that both S/F and Staff have going for them is that they allow a lot of spike damage IF (big if) someone hangs around for all your slow stuff to hit them at once.
Or you can use D/D and stay alive longer while still doing respectable dps and spike. No wonder most people don’t bother with S/F!
I personally can’t stand D/D it’s so much weaker compared to staff and focus (i’ve perfected the art of forcing my enemies into either eating the attacks or not doing much), it does have mobility though, i’ll give it that, but the lack of range and raw power upsets me…
And scepter -does- have a lot of AoE damage, it’s just all based around one persons location with a few exceptions (shatterstone, phoenix, and water trident), so what you really wanna do is just throw a few short CD skills that scare people (like dragons tooth) into the heart of their little team group and then throw other stuff into their escape and make them decide which they want to be hit by, they -normally- will run into the shatterstones, which is amazing for me because that makes me deal 24% more damage to them, make them eat a few more of those and then some Arcana Burst and they’re down for the count.
I’ve been trying to run Sigil of Earth to immobilize right before DT/Phoenix/Lightning Strike/Arcane Blast fast enough so that DT hits while my Water attunement is still up (hooray for Lingering Attunement). It currently doesn’t last long enough to guarantee a hit, but I haven’t tried runing for condi duration yet. I’m hoping that makes the timing a little less impossible.
The idea behind the build is to toss my water auto attack at someone while applying chill to keep them at range, and when they hit 75% health unloading enough spike to kill them instantly. Shatterstone might be just the trick to eat up their dodges beforehand, though. The cooldown is short enough that spamming it could work.
Or I might try to squeeze Arcane Precision into my current build for the Air Attunement Weakness procs.
Thanks for the tips. Very helpful!
Rolling a bunker doesn’t solve issues with crap damage.
This class is at a good point because more people have learned how to play it. There is a rather high learning curve, not only because we have more skills on the bar, but also because it takes time to learn how all those skills interact with all our traits. If you’re ok with a lot of spastic button mashing and learning to get into the rhythm of our cooldowns and combos, then you’ll do very well with this profession. If you just want a straightforward, simple playstyle then you will hate this class with a passion.
TL -> DR Version: Elementalists sucked at release because nobody knew how to play them. They rock now because most of the good builds and playstyles are on YouTube for everyone to study.
P.S. This changing of the metagame is proof-positive that this community isn’t toxic, but merely rude from time to time.
(edited by Moderator)
I am running a power+tough/vit build and I feel completely safe when fighting most classes. I have no much CC if I play it right I can 100% to dead most classes inside of my own CC chain and if I don’t kill them I put them on the defensive which they never recover from. The only thing that gives me trouble is a stance warrior who manages to charge and get a 1bazillion blades while burning stability and quickness. Yes I realize this is a very specific example; I was hoping someone could give me pointers on how to counter what appears to be a hardcounter for my spec.
I’d be interested in what build you’re running here? I’ve run the cookie cutter MM build, but wasn’t impressed at all.
that CD is per attacker guys, if you charge into a huge team fight you’ll see the might stacks jump up like crazy.
For example running head on into an enemy zerg, and then lightning flashing out before your obsidian flesh completely runs out and leaves you dead.
PS: Scepter + Focus combo has a ton of blast finishers they can combo with that fire wall to give a nice burst of aoe Might.
I’ve been toying with Scepter/Focus lately, and I think the primary issue with the Focus is that you lose so much mobility and versatility with both weapons. Scepter sacrifices a lot of on-the-fly, target-free damage in exchange for single-target control/conditions. Focus does the same. Dagger/Dagger moves also are highly mobile, so you can use them for multiple things.
One thing the slow, deliberate style that both S/F and Staff have going for them is that they allow a lot of spike damage IF (big if) someone hangs around for all your slow stuff to hit them at once.
Or you can use D/D and stay alive longer while still doing respectable dps and spike. No wonder most people don’t bother with S/F!
I always like to compare the engineer to our step-sister, the elementalist. King of versatility, great group support and control. That´s roughly how the elementalists class philosophy goes.
As we know the elementalist has incredible boons and can support groups like no other, do comparably good damage and has good survivability.
Somehow I can´t see a way to achieve only one of these things without a huge tradeoff. And yet it´s the engineer who has to pay the prize for versatility in damage.
Of course elementalists also use traits to push their skills but is there any attunement that you have to trait for, just to make it viable?
I main an Elementalist, so I’ll chime in here.
Elementalists have incredible boons and support if they trait for it.
They also have good survivability if they trait for it.
They can also have good damage if they trait for it.
Most Elementalists currently trait for survivability and support (because it also helps survival), and let gear choices take care of the damage. If you decide to trait for straight up damage you die a lot, and fast. Without all the boon spam and healing Elementalists are the glassiest of cannons, with the lowest health and lowest armor in the game. In exchange for that they get mediocre damage (for glass cannon), better than average burst, and carpal tunnel from all the attunement swapping and dodging they do.
They are designed to be versatile and flexible, but are forced to specialize in shoring up their biggest weak spot due to flawed trait tree design. Sound familiar?
I borrowed my wife’s Engineer for a bit, and was amazed at how similar it plays to an Elementalist.
Now you cannot kill a thief with your ele even if the thief is bad (and they fail their burst because if they succeed you die) he will simply get away easily…
It is for that reason that I’ve begun changing my build to focus more on control and spike damage rather than survivability and sustained DPS. My theory is that I’ll have to avoid the thief’s spike, counter-spike him back, and use control abilities to keep him from running off before he’s dead.
When it works I win. When it doesn’t I die, but I would have probably died anyway. It just would have taken longer.
Culling makes this very very challenging (read: nearly impossible), but it’s a fun game to play.
Compared to the Frost Mage / Subtly Rogue cooldown fight in World of Warcraft; that is incredibly shallow.
Having not played WoW since Vanilla, and never really PVPed in WoW, I have no idea what this means.
Now you cannot kill a thief with your ele even if the thief is bad (and they fail their burst because if they succeed you die) he will simply get away easily…
It is for that reason that I’ve begun changing my build to focus more on control and spike damage rather than survivability and sustained DPS. My theory is that I’ll have to avoid the thief’s spike, counter-spike him back, and use control abilities to keep him from running off before he’s dead.
When it works I win. When it doesn’t I die, but I would have probably died anyway. It just would have taken longer.
Culling makes this very very challenging (read: nearly impossible), but it’s a fun game to play.
I run PVT armor with Berserkers Staff and Trinkets on the standard 0/10/0/30/30 build in WvW. I think of myself in WvW as damaged focused support. I run 4/6 boon duration and 2/6 might duration runes, and a sigil of battle which grants might on attunement swaps. The main problem I have with deep Fire traits is it tends to force you into Fire too much, when you really should be swapping through attunements more often and utilizing all your skills. Plus, the deep Water and Arcane traits are just so useful in WvW, not to mention the great passive bonuses.
I disagree. As long as you have 15 in Arcane you can take 30 Fire and not have to stay in the attunement that much. Just off the cuff, you can get +10% to burning targets (Major + Minor Traits), +10% while in Fire Attunement, and 3 Might from Cantrips. With Lingering Attunement that gives you time to pop into Fire, press 3 to get burning up, pop into Air (and get a free +20% nuke with 15 in Air) and press 2 for +20% Lightning Surge. If you took Air Training and Bolt to the Heart that could go up to as high as +50% on a single spike.
I’ve enjoyed running my Scepter GC build in WvW because of it. Everyone expects Elementalists to take forever to kill and hit like wet noodles, so the good players tend to avoid me so long as I don’t use a staff.
Then I burst off 3/4 of their health bar from 900 range >:)
It ain’t OP, because I die to a strong breeze and the damage is fairly weak outside of occasional spikes, but it makes me happy.
I appreciate the help Ort but I’ve already been playing D/D ele in SPvP tourneys for weeks now and I do well. It’s not really a concern.
The point is, I’m basically impatient and just trying to steamroll to 80. I know all that stuff works, but I’m looking for something quick n’ easy to get me there with minimal effort, long story short.
So I’ll probably just craft my way up.
I leveled with Staff for the most part, and traited 15 Water for heals and condition removal. I think I dropped points into Arcane for the free boons and Lingering Attunements. My method may not be possible anymore, since it basically involved chain-running zergy world events and AoE spamming every mob I could for loot and kill credit.
I don’t know if any of the lower level world events have enough people in them for this to work now, but there may be a few.
I also ran a lot of AC with a similar build, and just focused on spamming combo fields and blast finishers. Earth 2 → Fire 2 → Arcane Wave; Earth 2 → Water 3 → Arcane Wave….repeat.
Until I got to 80 and had decent gear I found the high-damage builds to be too fragile to bother with, as I’d run out of cooldowns before all the mobs were dead.
Fire shield only gives you might if you are hit, and lords know an ele would try to avoid that. It’s usefulness is very limited, although evading all damage is impossible, at least for an ele.
Fire Shield + Obsidian Flesh + Kiiiiiiiiiiiiillroooooooy Stooooonekin = 25 stacks of might and no damage taken, enjoy my eles brethren.
@OP I think that freezing gust and gale need to become AoEs or have shorter CDs/ longer chill/KD duration (doubt KD will get buffed) and it’d be in a good spot, earth is already amazing, fire is in a fairly good spot, swirling winds and comet are both good after the comet buff.That being said, if they make it so i could detonate my fire wall and just have a huge eruption of flames that scorches everything around out or maybe even a KB added to it i’d be VERY happy with the focus even if they don’t buff gale/icy wind.
I think Firewall exists purely to buff other people’s ranged damage through projectile finishers. It’s too niche and situational, but has a few combo uses.
I think the worst thing about scepter is it doesn’t really have a sensible offhand to go with it.
If we had an offhand with sensible offensive minded 900 range attacks, the scepter would have a good feel to it.
I think you’re right. Scepter/Scepter would be pretty sweet, and could be the solution to fill in the gaps in Scepter deficiencies, as well as build diversity.
I think it’s supposed to be Scepter/Focus, but Focus is just so clunky and Dagger is just so good that nobody actually bothers with Focus.
Also, Focus doesn’t have RTL.
i use full zerker with rubies on 30/30/10/0/0. i am just about as squishy as u can get as an staff ele.
usually for ele, u either go glass cannon for aoe, or u go bunker for support. dont expect to take hits if u do go glass cannon. ur either, alive, or ur downed theres no tanking anything involved. oh and u should make sure to have arcaneshield if u got GC, its ur 1 lifesaver.
I do this as well. I make it my mission to keep the keep walls clear for our siege operators. The build excels at this, but it’s cumbersome at most anything else. It’s lots of fun, especially when it works. When it doesn’t you die very quickly, so at least there’s no suffering.
The problem with Elementalist is this. In PvE or huge zergs our AoE (especially Staff) is fine. In anything smaller, such as sPvP it’s just pathetic. Too many of our skills have huge telegraphs that make them exceedingly simple to dodge or just walk out of. Until that issue is fixed we’ll see most of our “go to” builds as overly tanky bunker builds that predominately use X/Dagger and crow about our insane “mobility” and healing abilities.
Odd that our incredible mobility comes from 1 ability on 1 off-hand weapon, yet it supposedly defines the entire profession. Strange that our supreme healing comes from a build entirely devoted to the purpose, which sacrifices almost all damage output.
And as for the telegraphs, ask yourself this. How many people have taken Lightning Flash just so you could occasionally hit someone with Churning Earth once in a while?
Yeah, me too.
Elementalist healing might need a nerf, but I personally don’t think so. One Corrupt Boon or Null Field and we drop like a rock. What we need is a BUFF to the stuff we all wanted to be doing in the first place…. DAMAGE!
At the moment the class is too reliant on “Do loads of damage to those too stupid or laggy to move” skills.
Nerf Big Red Circles.
12k?! What the heck does your build look like? I’m running full Berzerkers and I’m lucky to get 5k on anything.
Also, you can take the trait that gives you a Fire Shield when you use a signet. That’ll activate Zephyr’s Boon as well.
Elementalists are amazingly fun and useful in every portion of the game. There is one area where they are severely lacking. They cannot compete with the damage output of a might-stacked, vuln-stacked, time-warped 100-blades Berserker Warrior. Therefore they are “suboptimal” to the elite forum warrior CoF farmers. Otherwise, they are one of the more interesting classes to play and quite effective at just about everything.
Do you swap to staff when you go into DS for those high crits? My build is very similar, but my crits are nowhere near that good.
I do feel UP when compared to Thieves, but that’s mostly down to what I wanted the class to be in the first place. I wanted the class to be the counter to burst classes like the Thief, by forcing fights to take far longer than most burst classes are prepared for and crushing them by putting out more sustained DPS than they can compensate for and soaking bursts with DS.
All that works great, and there are multiple builds that do exactly that. Unfortunately, in WvW two things invariably happen that cause that concept to be worthless. Either someone’s friends show up or they run away. If their friends show up I have almost no way of retreating, and if they run away I have no way to chase them.
Stealth makes this even more frustrating, but the heart of the problem is that our class concept is designed around longer fights and we lack the mobility to ensure that those fights actually last as long as we need them to. The easiest fix to both problems would be changing Dark Path so that if it doesn’t hit anything we at least teleport to to max range (and speed the projectile up a bit).
But, that would give us a viable escape as well as a viable chasing mechanic which may be unbalanced….somehow.
According to another thread a long winded answer by Anet came down to 1 thing… Bandwidth
Can you link to the ArenaNet post?
https://twitter.com/DragonSeasonCom/status/304252471147122689
So condition builds in this game are just for solo play… really?
And they have no plans to address this?
Pardon the hysterics.. but WHY THE FACE!!! (you know what I mean)I love the class building in this game, or at least I did when I believed there were options. Now half of the possible options are off the table if you plan to play this game with other people… it’s an MMO right?!?!?!
Wow. Just wow.
Ulari
Yeah…I’m speechless too.
So, now to either uninstall or reroll a warrior. Can’t decide.
I’m just waiting to see the Feb 26th patch. The January patch was laughable, and the big WvW patch we were told about has both been pushed back and downscaled (not a good combination). Basically, this patch needs to set the groundwork for serious revamps of the skill and gameplay system, and bringing Engineers, Necromancers, and Rangers up to par. I’m gonna go ahead and write off the living story thing if the the fetch quest prologue was anything to go by, and they’ve already said we aren’t getting serious WvW updates. For their sake, this update needs to be substantial.
Bringing Engis, Necros, and Rangers up to par? I’ll believe it when I see it.
What about Rampager’s instead of Rabid? It’s much easier to get, and seems to offer similar stats if you don’t mind being squishier. Is it actually a damage increase? Or is it just squishier?
Survival only matters if you can take out your opponent with the extra time surviving gives you.
Necromancers suffer from clunky, annoying, or simply ineffective damage sources (beyond simply “hitting stuff” with weapons). Conditions are cleanseable. Minions are killable, and have moronic AI. Wells can be avoided easily. Our direct damage potential is mediocre at best.
Most of the time I have no trouble lasting for a long time. Most of the time I have trouble lasting long enough to actually kill my opponent before he runs away or his friends arrive and overwhelm me.
EVE had to implement Time Dilation to fix this type of problem. For them it was server node crashes and mass disconnects. Now they have battles composed of hundreds of people shooting at each other at the same time. The only problem is that those huge battles take place at 1/10th normal speed. I wonder how this game would handle a similar implementation, where everyone in a certain area just slowed down a certain degree to allow for everyone’s models to load.
There’s a trait that makes your wells cast Protection on everyone, and a trait that makes them ground target (On top of the AoE Heal, AoE Cleanse, and AoE Blind they already do). There’s a trait that makes your staff marks very large, and Staff #2 can keep regen up on 5 people constantly.
Mix that stuff with the trait that makes life transfer AoE Heal people and you’ve got a support build.
I’d probably take Plague for more AoE blind, but you can take Lich for the AoE Cleanse/Boon Strip too.
You can indeed stomp in mist form. Start Stomp → Mist Form → Finish Stomp
Carrion gear is Power/Vitality/Condi Damage
He needs the points for survival. He skipped the Power line so he could take stuff in the Toughness and Vitality lines.
Viable? Absolutely! In fact, it may work better if you don’t mind being more aggressive in your use of the Fury on DS trait and a touch of Precision in your jewelry or runes.
Necro trait lines are a hybridized mess.
The profession structure seems to be leading us to stat for Conditions AND Precision AND Crit Dmg AND Power all at the same time, while somehow leaving room for defensive stats.
Hence the multi-page long, continually tweaked, constantly revised, never quite optimal “Critmancer” thread.
What’s probably intended to be some kind of “synergy” ends up being a sloppy exercise in frustration and gear swapping.
I mostly run the Precision/Toughness/Cond Damage. Use that with might stacking runes and you have a nice hybrid of cond and direct damage.
I run all Soldier’s gear, but I swap runes out pretty frequently.
I’ll probably switch to this setup sooner or later, or just collect a spare set of gear to try it out.
I’ve been trying to just use the time people spend rezzing as free hits on them. Once they start rezzing their buddy, I swap targets and unload on the rezzer. Then it’s back to 2vs1 again, only with both at half health.
Soloing is incredibly hard because of the downed state, but that’s probably as it should be. It makes me feel awesome when I do win.
I’m guessing your Toughness is too high. On your next run, try retraiting/regearing a bit (use cheap gear) and drop the bottom out of your toughness and see if he still aggros you as much.
I’ve read that mob aggro sometimes focuses on the party member that has the best defensive stats.
Also, it might be the conditions. I’ve read that conditions can cause extra aggro in some encounters.
(edited by PinCushion.7390)
That’s some pretty weak design IMO. The way I assumed the skill would work (and I really feel that it should work this way) is that the scythe is fired and bounces between me and and my opponent granting regeneration/vulnerability to any ally/opponent in between me and my target. Given the range, the cast time, low dmg, and CD duration, this seems appropriate and in a PvP combat situation this would be a respectable skill that could function reliably. In the current state though the steep drop off in successful bounces makes the added range from the Spiteful Talisman trait almost worthless, since it’s only truly reliable (read as: worth the low dmg and long cast time in order to place the vulnerability stacks) at close range.
Learn to DS and Reaper’s Touch becomes totally OP…
And in an effort to not be a TOTAL troll, I agree with you. But it’s what we got, so we may as well work with it.
They should have put in chain fearing in this game. e.g. a la spiritmaster in aion.
That’s always fun.
They put in an OP stealth/mobility/burst class, don’t see why they couldn’t put this (or massive nukes etc.. seem like they just hate casters)They have massive nukes. They’re called Burst Skills and they belong to the Warrior…
Don’t forget shatter Mesmers!
… my Flesh Golem, despite being summoned in combat and immediately charge/KD to the enemy, to charge through the enemy (knocking it down) and never come back. He’ll just wander around on the far side of the field where his charge ended.
Does the Flesh Golem ever face the original enemy, or does it wander while facing away, as if it couldn’t see the enemy that was suddenly behind it?
Do people see any indication that minions have a a “vision cone” and only sense things in front of them? Perhaps some dev thought it a good idea for PvP or something strange?
(This could tie back into Drarnor Kunoram’s observation that minions seem to try to avoid passing through or co-locating with other minions: perhaps jostling minions tend to face “the wrong way” if facing matters.)
If I had to give it a anthropomorphic description, I’d say he looks like he’s thinking about how to get back to combat (lots of walking starts and stops), but he’s just very very stupid.
“Man, the guy I just knocked down is way over there but how the heck do I get up that hill? Maybe I go left….no that isn’t it. Maybe right…..nope. How about straight…..yeah, maybe straight…..oh, he’s dead. Nevermind.”
Edit: Differing elevations seem to give melee pets way more problems. I need to test this sometime to see if it’s where the problem comes from.
(edited by PinCushion.7390)
in Beta our DS was originally our Downed state, they changed that too what it is now and its design is flawed because original concept for it was our downed state, Now when our class is highly advertised as a minion spec you exspect that to be the thing that acctualy works with the class it doesnt ( they AI is broken you have to admit that sometimes they attack other times they grab popcorn and stare at a monster beating you too death ) Fear was good until they nerfed it too 1 sec ( only class who got their fears nerfed like this btw others have theirs still at 2-3 sec ) and add in the fact the huge amount of bugs people have a full right to be negative, When a key part of the class is not working properly its my theory its broken ( again i mentioned some parts of it work but Minions are a keypart so ill stick with my broken comment )
Death Shroud being a downed state during beta explains why it feels like such a half arsed implementation. It never lost the “downed state ability” feel.
I’m curious what the stable “class mechanic” was prior to Death Shroud then? Anyone know?It was Death Shroud, actually. Necros didn’t have an active unique mechanic originally. They were supposed to make up for it with Death Shroud being a LOT stronger than other downed states, making you tons more likely to rally than any other profession. Admittedly, with this particular setup, necros were probably a little too hard to kill.
No wonder current DS implementation feels like a band-aid.
I was doing some map completion stuff in Lornar’s Pass and it happened all over the zone as far as I could tell although I primarily noticed it in the Dredge tunnels where I was in a lot of combat in a short space of time.
Good information. Sorry to ask so many questions, but if you could talk about the 30-40% again: was it a) 30-40% of engagements they did not enter combat quickly or at all during that particular engagement, or b) 30-40% of engagements would throw them into a state where they wouldn’t enter combat then or in following engagements until you did something to break them out of it.
That is, are they non-participating in one fight, then the next fight they’re fine, or are they participants up until some particular fight after which they won’t participate in future fights until you do something to kick their butt.
In terms of kicking their butt, I’ve heard mention of commanding minions that can be commanded to take offensive actions, and also dragging minions until they are actually damaged. Evidently, destroying minions that can be destroyed then resummoning them would also work, since I’ve seen multiple mentions that minions that are summond in combat don’t seem to glitch.
Minions I summon in combat very rarely glitch, with one glaring exception. It’s very common for my Flesh Golem, despite being summoned in combat and immediately charge/KD to the enemy, to charge through the enemy (knocking it down) and never come back. He’ll just wander around on the far side of the field where his charge ended. If the melee lasts long enough he’ll EVENTUALLY get back to me, but fights are normally too quick for that.
After a few of those I quit using it.
From what I gather, it’s unintended by AN. On the other hand, Elementalists can stomp in Mist Form or even with Invulnerability (Earth Focus skill I believe), so it doesn’t really seem unfair until those kinds of loopholes are closed.
Yeah, I agree that it’s fair. My question is if it’s an exploit. I don’t want to learn a playstyle that will inevitably be patched out of existence.
AFAIK, all might duration 2-sets stack, so you could have 3x 20% might duration and end up with 20s+ mights.
Test this in the mists BEFORE you spend money on runes.
IIRC, 2 of the +Might rune sets count as the same set. So you end up with 4/6 in Fire/Hoelbrack and 2/6 in Strength, rather than 2/6 in all 3 sets.
I think ‘fire and forget’ minion missiles are probably a better work around (with some adjusted timers), target what you want chewed on and the critters run off and bite it until they or it, is dead. Rather than doing what they do most of the time-
A: stand around picking their bum
B: agro’ing something halfway across the zoneThe other thing if we’re looking at an overhaul (which IMO is the better option than trying to ‘fix’ them- which has been tried and failed completely miserably since Beta), is that we get a couple of ‘spiritual advisers’ so to speak, which are just mob/npc transparencies which give buffs to people within a certain radius and would give us a certain ‘group appeal’ that Necro’s currently don’t have.
Reason being-
Mesmer pets aren’t great, but they do work ‘most of the time’ for their intended purpose and are proven code.
Ranger spirits aren’t great either, but also do the above and are proven code, just make them different buffs.
If we’re proposing solutions, I think you might be onto something here. I’d be fine with our pets being even more disposable than they currently are. Rather than try to shoehorn permanent pets into the game with all the pathing and LOS bugs that involves, why not make all our pets temporary and dramatically increase the performance of them.
Example, make Flesh Golem KD as soon as you summon it, NOT charge through targets (because it creates pathing issues to get back to them), do a lot more damage, but only last 10-20 seconds before it dies. If it’s still bad you could add a buff to the summon as well.
It’s kind of sad that it’s 4 months past release, and minions of multiple classes are still in an Alpha state.