Guild Wars 2

I think the dev was attempting to say that a necro’s strong suit is control, if we trait for it. Being “inescapable” doesn’t necessarily mean being able to 1v1 everyone. It means being able to lock people down while our buddies beat them senseless.

Whether or not that’s true is open for debate, but I don’t think it was anyone’s intention for any class to be the king of 1v1 all the time.

I use crafting as an alternative to fighting stuff for xp. Basically, it gives me xp for playing around on the Trading Post. Considering that I’m pretty bored with roaming the lands and fighting random critters, it’s a welcome change of pace.

All in all, it’s ok. Sometimes I make money. Sometimes I lose money. Most of the time I break even and get some free xp.

So, yes, it’s worth it if you think crafting/trading is fun. If you don’t, then it isn’t. There are no real perks to having max crafting other than being able to craft whatever is profitable at the moment.

runeblade.7514:

Buy full Magic gear with magic runes with magic sigil using magic food.

No more easy mode, just don’t do it in dungeons.

Wow! It’s like they made “Hard Mode” into a gear set that you can take on and off whenever you want! Harder fights, but greater rewards!

How about that. This whole thread is now moot.

I always assumed bunnies and squirrels were put in the game specifically for skills like Dark Path

World PvE is mind numbing easy. I don’t know why this is such a gripe. I can faceroll it on any of my toons, including Elementalist.

WvW, sPvP, and dungeons are where your build actually starts to matter. Dynamic events are so simple as to not even be worth complaining about.

Your friend needs to try a solid bunker/support build with Cleric gear. Their damage will be awful, but it’ll all be worth it the first time a thief jumps them and they don’t instantly die (and then heals back up to full!). Their job should really be to maintain buffs and heals on the party during fights, lay combo fields on top of the melee, keep enemies CCed as much as possible, and generally make your team a giant PITA to fight.

I’m not suggesting that bunker/healing builds are amazing. They’re not. They are very annoying to fight against, and the burst healing and AoE buffs available to your team will come in incredibly useful. I thought Elementalist was a broken class until I tried one. The extra durability gave me enough cushion to actually practice with all my abilities and get better at playing the class. I’m not a pvp pro now by any stretch, but I am far better than I was.

I’ve since ditched the bunker/healing build just because it got boring, but it’s a very good place to start.

I collect badges because I like the way they look in my bank. I don’t even spend them, because they’re so pretty. I may one day trade them for a Legendary weapon. Until then the badges are enough. They’re the tally marks on my scabbard that track my kills for me. It isn’t much, but it’s enough progression for me.

He could do the same thing every staff ele does to solve every problem. Throw lots of AoE at it.

It doesn’t really matter if someone is stealthed when all your skills are ground-target, and the target circle is the size of the moon.

Tornado doesn’t prevent you from fighting/healing. You cast it for the stability buff and MAYBE the AoE KB, and occasionally one of the other AoE effects it brings. Then you drop it and keep your stability buff.

Running around as a tornado is dumb and nobody should do it except for laughs.

Forget about the animation.

It’s a button you press for a Stability buff and AoE KB. That’s all.

Just from running around a couple of days in WvW fiddling with a S/D Carrion build I can see one great benefit to conditions. Big numbers appear on your opponents screen too. When you hit them for 7k with one shot they go overboard with the defensive and healing skills. When you tickle them with bleed they seem not to notice until half their health is gone. I’ve got some more fiddling to do, and I’m trying to come up with a bit more burst to quickly take someone from 50% to 0% before they heal.

I was referring to stuff like the above video. We can’t really do that anymore.

D/D Elementalist could, assuming their fingers were fast enough, do their RTL, Updraft, Burning Speed, Cleansing Flame, Fire Grab, Arcane Wave, Arcane Blast combo and take people from full to zero instantly in sPvP.

So the damage got nerfed a bit.

MiniAchilles.4617:

I think, because he quoted me, he is on about popping Tornado and then cancelling it straight away, or after a knockdown so you have 16+seconds of Stability.

It’s a bit lame that our Elite itself is quite kitten, but you can’t knock that much Stabilty, as far as Elites go it’s pretty good imo.

Correct. I can’t imagine letting the thing run the full duration. I can imagine using the AoE KB and AoE Blind in certain spots, and then dropping it for a speedy getaway.

MiniAchilles.4617:

I only use Tornado for 16+ seconds of Stability

You, sir, are a godsend.

I don’t find the ability awful, but until I read the above sentence I found it mediocre. Now, though, if I ignore the silly tornado animation and just look at the mechanics….

AoE KB
AoE Blind
Whirl Finisher
16 Seconds of Stability

You know…when you read all that in one sitting it doesn’t look half bad as a defensive, GTFO kind of ability.

Eh…damage is damage. Conditions ignore armor, but can be cured off. Different people like different things. So, that being said….

Can anyone suggest a decent, balanced Power/Conditions build? I currently use Signets, and trait for an Aura based build 20/10/30/10/0. I run w/ Carrion gear and Undead runes. It works pretty well, and I like it, but I don’t feel like I’m getting all that much value out of the signets. I enjoy the uptime I get on Fury/Swiftness/Protection from all the aura combos, but I don’t know if there’s a better way to maintain Protection. I could probably ditch Fury altogether since Conditions don’t crit, and I have no Precision on any of my gear.

What do you guys use?

Looking over our selection of skills I’m consistently amazed with how many of them have Burning or Bleeding on top of them. We have several traits that add Burning/Bleeding, either by extending the duration or just having it proc when we crit. Several of our utility skills apply burning. Since we have so much condition damage folded into our weapon skills, how come more people don’t use Power/Condition builds (or at least talk about them)?

Whenever anyone talks about high damage they seem to be implying that damage has to come in giant spikes, but why is that the case? Is it because there’s a defense against conditions (Utility skills/Vitality)? Because there’s a defense against burst as well (Utility skills/Toughness).

There’s no real point here, other than me noticing that my scepter auto attacks hit for around 2k bleeding or burning with full Carrion gear. That isn’t terrible damage for an auto attack! So….what’s the deal?

Lots of healing. Lots of burn/bleeds. Cripple/Chill/Knockdown help you maintain the mobility advantage. Arcane shield/Mist Form help you avoid their burst and mess up their instant kill combos.

Shock Aura and Chill Aura are pretty decent against dagger thieves, assuming you survive the initial burst.

If you see them try to stealth/roll behind you dodge backward into them. It messes up their backstab sometimes.

Most of our Fire/Earth abilities are PBAoE, so it’s kinda easy to hit thieves even if they’re stealthed if you can guess where they are.

If they build for glass cannon, and you can drag the fight out without letting them get away, you win.

Yes.

Half of winning is still being alive at the end.

I’d be happy if Churning Earth had it’s damage reduced a tad AND the cast speed/cooldown reduced to match. At the moment, it’s nearly unusable. People are even starting to expect the blink when you start casting and run further. I suppose that makes it handy for making people get out of melee, but that’s about all.

merrydamn.9423:

Let’s say I’m against a decent engineer on the same level

D/D won’t win that fight. S/D or S/F will fare much better. Depends on what you expect to run into. Maybe take Frost Bow and make his comfy turret haven a living hell?

I find Ele to be (along with Engineer) very bad at adjusting to changing circumstances during combat. If you brought daggers and find out you needed to bring a staff you’re pretty well out of luck. Such is life.

I actually prefer D/D for how good it is at chasing people down. RTL, Burning Speed, and Magnetic Grasp gives you a HUGE range of engagement. The fact that Magnetic Grasp is on the same attune as a AoE Cripple AND an AoE Knockdown is amazing (and if you don’t need Magnetic Grasp to reach your target you get a bonus of extra Cripple on attune swap).

I’ve been trying to think of a way to incorporate the Earth Shield conjure into my build for even more Gonna Getcha Sucka awesomeness, but I can’t decide what I want to lose.

Only time I’ve been instagibbed is when I was jumped by multiple people. That said, we make better wingmen than point men. Imagine how hard that HB Warrior or HS Thief is going to hit when you’ve pumped 10 stacks of might on them and 15 stacks of vulnerability on your target, not counting all the CC and defensive stuff you can throw down to make sure your side gets the kill.

I backpedal a bit right before I use it. People try to chase me to stay in melee. They get a cone of fire to the face. It’s pretty funny, tbh.

Of course it’s much harder to use on non-morons.

I bought a Nostromo specifically to play GW2. It’s gathering dust in my gadget drawer now. GW2 just doesn’t have enough buttons to warrant a specialized tool. It was handy when I used it during beta, but not a must-have like it is in other games.

As for builds, I’m a fan of condition builds. Everything Arc said is true. Power/Pre is more reliable because you get your damage RIGHT NOW! That said, Power/Cond seems to have better overall AoE damage output and is great for making sure people keep their cleanse and heal skills on cooldown (so when someone bursty hits them they die faster).

It’s all down to preference.

Implement Diminishing Returns on supply generation based on how many camps a team already has such that the team’s net supply generation goes up but each individual camp’s generation goes down. It encourages organization, because gaining a camp on one borderland will influence battles on the others. It makes camp taking an actual decision, rather than a no-brainer. It also gives a quasi buff to the losing side, since losers will have far more supply generated at one specific location than their opponents, thus favoring guerrilla attacks.

God Like? No.

Able to actually play the game rather than fight the bugs/interface problems?

Yes.

Missing half my Fire Grabs and Lighting Touches was getting so irritating that I didn’t really use the skills. Magnetic Grab and RTL still need work, but they’re working better. I’m very pleased with this fix. The change to downed skills were a nice touch as well.

Elementalist is only predictable if you play it that way. You don’t HAVE to RTL+Updraft. You can do other things. RTL + Ring of Earth applies bleed and cripple early in the fight, where it’ll actually help the most. Earthquake + Drake’s Breath gets Burning on early as well, and will probably put you ahead of the endurance curve as they dodge your Earthquake only to still get hit with Drake’s Breath. Also, the earlier in a fight you can get lots of scary conditions up the earlier they’ll blow their removal skills (or you learn they’re a bunker/cleanse build and just leave). There’s load of ways you can tie abilities together, and with twice as many skills we have many more opportunities to be unpredictable.

I find all the trait lines to be pretty good, in general. The trick is finding good synergy between trait choices.

The +Damage While Attuned to XYZ traits are pretty weak, but otherwise all trait lines seem decent to me.

I had someone turn me down for an AC group because they needed a tank….

Yeah. They were serious.

Nice! I use a similar build, and like it a lot. I use Carrion instead of Shaman gear, so it’s a little squishier. Still, it’s decent and consistent damage and surprisingly resilient.

Nice job getting that warrior to rage-quit too

Played my wife’s 80 Engineer yesterday. Wow! Talk about easy mode! Rifle Burst is awesome! Turret belt kits, turret overcharge shots, and turret detonate AoE was almost instagibbing Orr mobs. It was surreal. Her gear is terrible, and not optimized at all. Stats are all over the place, and her build is pretty strange.

And it was like someone had flipped the “Easy” switch in the game. I was almost bored it was so simple just facerolling the zone. I still got killed by a Champion that I accidentally ran into, but wow…

I actually never believed it when people said other classes had a lower skill floor than Elementalist until then.

Conditions Build + Churning Earth & Blink + Drake’s Breath + Burning Speed + RTL….. + Undergeared Upleveled Newbs in WvW…..

Brings a smile to my face every time. I like to think somebody is asking themselves WTF just happened, even if they don’t die. It’s not all about kills. Sometimes it’s just about drive-by trolling the enemies.

I keep trying to play other classes, but none of them are this much fun. Effective? Sure, maybe. But fun? Not even close.

Mist Form on Downed is just more fun. Easier Fire Grasp…more fun. I don’t really care about winning every fight. I just like to make their lives a nightmare. You can’t really annoy your enemies to death, but you can annoy them enough to make them late for their appointments (keep sieges, node captures, hot dates, whatever).

I like to save my RTL and Updraft for speed getaways. I use Magnetic Grasp → Earthquake → Drake’s Breath → Fire Grab → Ring of Fire.

If they’re knocked down you can hit them with every tick of Drake’s Breath. Alternatively, I’ll use Fire Signet before Magnetic Grab to make sure they’re burning before my Fire Grab. And sometimes, depending on cooldowns, I’ll toss a Signet of Air right before Fire Grab just to have Fury.

I know I’m losing Might stacks by doing it this way, but I don’t like losing the point blank AoE from swapping to Fire. I haven’t done the math, but it feels like the extra nuke is more damage than I’m getting from Might.

And RTL→ Updraft feel more fluid when used to interrupt casts (when they don’t bug).

Welcome to the club. The profession is mediocre and overly complex by design.

On the upside, it’s fun to play.

That build is designed to counter conditions. So, yes…a condition build is terrible against a cleansing build. That’s why it’s a counter.

You could make a control/toughness build to counter the OP’s glass cannon the same way. That was sort of my point. Even the best build plays like trash if you play it against its counter. The real fun is guessing your opponent’s build before you engage.

Morkai.7645:

Stacking Condition = junk. Most classes have multiple condition removals at their disposal. We stack on hardcore burn and bleed just to have an enemy remove it.

Stopped taking you seriously right there.

Isn’t the entire point of condition builds (besides cutting through high-toughness bunker builds) to apply pressure to an opponent and get them to blow all their survival cooldowns? That way your bursty buddy can zip in and gank him down from 60% to zero, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

Wow, nobody’s mentioned Jumping Puzzles? That’s one of the most innovative things in this game, and they stole it from Tomb Raider (who probably stole it from someone else).

If I think back on my other MMO experiences there’s only a few things you’ve ever been able to do besides fight stuff. Craft, Trade, and Play Dress Up. They usually add Play House later on. Then there was Star Wars Galaxies, which at release was the least combat oriented MMO I’ve ever played (if you wanted it to be).

Of course, I’ve often logged onto an MMO just to chat with random people or guildies.

So, there you have it. Since SWG is dead and buried, there are only a handful of things you can do in any MMO that don’t involve fighting.

Play Dress Up
Craft
Trade
Play House (once implemented)
Chat with People

and now Jumping Puzzles

Air Signet Insta Blind is my favorite utility exactly because of moves like Kill Shot.

I wish I could find a decent D/F build, so I could completely nullify 100b with the Earth invuln but focus sacrifices too much mobility from losing RTL.

Melee assist means you don’t run through people you have targeted. So, if you’re a melee guy and you run at someone or use a charge type ability (like Burning Speed) you’ll stop when you run into them. If you turn it off, then you’ll run straight through them. Thieves usually turn it off because it makes landing backstabs easier.

If I’m wrong about that, then someone please correct me.

Run over downed people with it to get a kill without having to call flagpoles from the sky.

Use it to run away from people, since they’ll have to go around your giant flaming skidmark. Don’t forget to drop Ring of Fire, so they’ll have to run around your giant flaming donut too.

Turn off melee assist, and use it to run through melee attackers so they lose attacks. Saves endurance.

Use it on people in corners. You’ll do way more damage because every tick of the “skid mark” part will hit them.

My favorite parlor trick with staff is to spot people who’ve just been downed, are trying to rez someone that’s dead, or are manning an arrowcart. Basically you just take advantage of the fact that they’re probably not paying much attention to what’s around them, and they can’t move that fast because they’re locked into some other task.

Start in Earth. Cast your Immob followed by Eruption, swap to Ice and cast the shard on #2, swap to Fire and Lava Font + Whatever (I like Arcane Blast + Lightning Attunement nuke if you’re specced for it). If you time it right your Immob (since it travels slow) will land right before your Eruption, which will hit at the same time as Shard and Lava Font. It outright kills most people if it hits them. BIG IF! But it’s hilarious when it works.

CASLion.2301:

With written in stone signet passives are always up so heal often and stun often, especially to set up a dragon’s tooth or churning earth.

Sorry, but…Stun often? How are you getting stuns off of signet skills? I use a build very similar to this, and use the AoE Blind from Signet of Air frequently to keep from getting interrupted out of Churning Earth. Most reliable setup I’ve come across is Burning Speed -> Earth Attune (for the cripple) -> Signet of Air (for the blind and fury/protection/fire aura) -> Churning Earth. It gets dodged a lot, but I tend to use Churning Earth more defensively to get people to disengage from melee and give me some breathing room (and drain all their endurance). Of course sometimes people will stand their and take it while trying to melee me down (Fury + Churning Earth HURTS). This is in WvW, though. I don’t do sPvP.

Animosity.5231:

You know, if they just fixed conjures, all of the people who hate attunement swapping would be able to play it more like any other class, and you could have your swap between melee/range. Your change, OP, would completely ruin the class for those of us who enjoy the fast-paced attunment swapping gameplay.

Just curious, since conjures don’t really fit my current build, but what exactly is wrong with them. They seem ok for fleshing out overspecialized builds. Axe/Hammer/Greatsword add some mobility and melee damage. Hammer/Shield add some defensive abilities. Frost Bow adds some ranged abilities. What I don’t like is that people can pick up the spare weapon without me wanting them to (or even meaning to sometimes), but that just means they add some group support that doesn’t work in random PUGs or zerg encounters.

What’s the problem?

I’ve been asking this question in /map the past few days. Nothing but awkward silence in response. The only way GoM is going to get a decent WvW presence is if we build it from scratch.

So, I was tooling around with a crit Air/Water build and noticed that there’s a bit of synergy between the two trait lines where you get vulnerability stacks from critting, and vulnerability makes you do 20% more damage in water. In scepter this is a pretty good deal, because the auto attack hits 3 times and usually one of them will crit. Add in some Arcane utility skills and I’ll have 10-15 stacks of vulnerability on the mob by the end of the fight. This made it so I was doing more damage at the end of the fight than I was at the end of it.

The scepter-lighting auto attack does more damage at the end of the skill than it does at the beginning.

I’ve noticed a similar pattern in Fire/Earth builds. Bleed in condition builds typically does more damage at the end of the fight than it does at the beginning. Burning provides a consistent increase in damage, and does a lot more damage the longer the fight goes on.

Are elementalists designed to be long fight winners? Is that why there’s almost no burst to be found? PvP is usually decided by who can pile on the most damage the fastest (aka Front Loaded Damage). If it’s true that long, consistent damage output is folded into the fabric of the profession then it’s no wonder so many of us are so frustrated. Thieves, for example, have front-loaded damage folded right into their Initiative mechanic. They blow their Initiative in 2-3 hard hits, and then GTFO if their target isn’t dead. This approach is VERY beneficial in PvP (especially open world, WvW type PvP).

Elementalists seem designed around consistent, slowly building damage output that relies on stacking various conditions on our target so that if they don’t do anything they WILL die. While this sounds cool…how often is someone going to just stand around taking damage when they can burst us down in three hits? It almost requires a bunker build because you have to still be alive when this “mounting storm” finally pays off.

So, it’s ok that there’s fairly simple tactics to deal with almost any profession’s specialty besides thief?

Engineer = Move away from turrets
Elementalist = Stay off the wall/don’t stand in the red circle
Mesmer = Call Target
Warrior = Dodge the obvious 100b
Ranger = LoS or charge

Thief = Make sure you have an Immob/KD and enough Vitality to survive a full backstab combo and can get your Immob/KD off in 3 seconds (2 of which will be full of dodging) before he stealths again for a second attempt.

Thanks for the advice. That is easy to counter.

Basically, what that guy said.

I’ve enjoyed all the shiny graphics, but after trying to participate more actively in WvW I’m realizing that the class is pretty mediocre. Rolling a Mesmer to see if they will give me my spellcaster fix and actually work well.

“There are a lot of people rocking with the ele at the moment, and the devs are trying to make as little changes as possible simply as the more changes = more time till tournaments arrive. And the shift in that “eles are bad” to 3 weeks ago to “Ele’s are actaully kitten good”, the latter proportion of eles have started to come to fruition and is becoming the norm.”

In other words, people figured out that they bunker/support pretty well. The problem is, people have been asking since release only one question about the class. “Where the kitten is the damage?!?” That’s all I’ve read, over and over. Where’s the damage? Nobody has a problem with being squishy in glass-cannon. Everyone’s cool that we can build to be tough controllers, or support. Where’s the damage?

Basically, players who already have elementalists have given up on that question and just built around it. I know I have. I accepted a while ago that the damage was just going to be lackluster no matter what I did, and that I may as well build for utility and durability. It’s fun, after a fashion, but still…I shouldn’t be shoved into that choice by poor balancing decisions. It should be my preference. If I want to do loads of damage, then I should be able to build for it, even if it trashes my durability or support potential.

Thieves can currently build to AoE destroy entire zergs in WvW, and are still able to get away because of stealth. Sure, if they get CCed and focused on they instantly die. That’s their choice. Elementalist players currently don’t get to make that choice. It’s bunker and bad damage, or instant death and….better bad damage.

Most fun I’ve had in WvW was running w/ 3 guildies and ganking dolyaks.

That’s right…

Killing oxen is more fun than taking the same keep over and over again. I love WvW. I hate zerging. It gets boring after 20 minutes.

Dodging the zerg and killing their cows is actually somewhat amusing. Door smashing and catapult building is not.

I guess you get out of it what you put into it.

@daphoenix

Cool video. What do your traits look like? I can tell you have Evasive Arcana in there, and probably 20 in water. What else?