Guild Wars 2

Hello frand!

Well it only stacks three times at least, im just glad it doesn’t stack 8 times like a lot of the other conditions XD! Thief immob did get nerfed a little in the patch and they added a little anti immob!

But yeah immob is strong!!!

Well the big disadvantage running d/d is you can’t really stack bleeds that well like most condi classes can. The advantage though is you have a lot of interrupts so it seems silly not to be using perplexity runes. That being said you seemed like you were stressing gold and the builds all exotics.

After the patch in a couple hours signet of earth will be an absolute must for any condi build. Lightning flash on the other hand can be easily replaced with mobility from FGS as your elite. You can’t really use lightning flash as a strong damage attack considering your using a condi build. That being said you’ll notice that perma burn + poison isn’t really enough to kill most people even if your doing 1300/second conditions potentially, which is why I suggestion signet of earth and perplexity runes to add another potentially like 1500-2000/second.

I’m making a ton of gold right now crafting these runes from gear that has them atm using black lion salvage kits. This price shock is still exploitable if people want to make some gold

Oh thanks Asuna for the quick response ^^

These runes have shot up a ton in price. They haven’t changed yet and they changed in the last feature pack so I doubt they will change them again. Anyone have any insight as to why they jumped in price so much?

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24738

There is a lot of lower hanging fruit in the set of runes. Runes of speed are still a couple gold each because they at least have some uses. I would like anet to fix the even lower hanging fruit before the buff some of the other runes. But yeah all the runes that give +swiftness duration are probably pretty silly.

fun raids lately, check out the new videos if your interested!

I’ll just start making notes. First your traits. If you are staying in earth why do you have a useless trait One With Air that gives you a bad ability when you switch to air? Also the build has pretty meh power and meh condition damage with only 10% condition duration so it seems like it won’t be doing that huge base numbers and conditions wont be hitting that hard, was your point to do hybrid damage? I understand your getting a nice benefit by having strength in stone with all your main stat toughness gear but I don’t really see it doing much in the build considering you have 10% condi duration and little access to condi cover, except air 5. Your runes also scale with healing power in which you have none so you’ll be getting a pretty meh heal/second back. Any power build that doesn’t use bloodlust to stack an extra 250 power seems a little odd to me too, i’d swap force out for bloodlust imo, will be adding like over 10% damage instead of just 5%. Your hp is low and you don’t have too much sustain since you’ll be in earth the whole time and 0 healing power or access to regen or anything.

One suggestion might be to try to add fury into the build somehow, maybe with runes or zephyr’s boon to take advantage of that 201% crit damage, I can see your LH auto attacks hitting for alright damage. Your lack of stun break is noticeable but temptest defence can help with that somewhat. Test out the build in wvw roaming or whatever tho, or in duels, its hard to tell on paper how good things are until you test it out!

2/0/6/0/6 use the bewildering ambush, venom share, venomous strength and leeching venoms with devourer venom, skale venom, and SR. You can get like 2600 condition damage in this build if you really wanted. You also make it sound like the 300 points in your trait lines dictates your whole build :P.

Volrath.1473:

Rocketmist.5436:

Lol you kidding me, you can easily make a stupidly hard hitting p/d build with venom share pretty easily. 5000 damage in bleeds bouncing around out of stealth attack sounds pretty nice especially now at 1050 range.

sorry but you are wrong, condition dmg trait line for thieves is called Trickery, if you want to spec venom share you need to go 6 into Deadly Arts and 6 into Shadow Arts which leaves 2 points left. good luck spreading out 5k bleeding dmg with a POWER build…

If you think about a torch, and were designing it for a weapon what would you have it do? Probably burning. And burning in this game limits the weapon to mostly condition builds, which not too many people use, especially on the classes that can use torch.

Also the super popular professions like warrior don’t use torch, so the mesmers/rangers (two of the most rare classes in wvw imo, and maybe engi) have the weapon but only if they run condis. There aren’t too many people that run condi rangers at the moment, and even condi mesmers are pretty rare for the time being, I bet we’ll see a ton more torches after the torment on AA :P.

Yeah unfortunately the condition runes get overlooked more since its not as meta in the pvp (esports) side of the game. Anywho, I think tweaks to runes/sigils could be a big thing for balance, its pretty easy to see which runes/sigils need some work. I don’t think I have ever heard of anyone using or even testing out runes of aristocracy, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit left to balance on the runes/sigils front.

Signet of earth, I love the long range immobs in wvw, great for bring those pesky warriors back into the fight, or snagging someone out of an enemy zerg running by. Can’t wait for the buff ^^

Does this stack, like if you shared 3 people a fire aura with your signet active, and you have the trait that gives 3s protection, will you get 12s protection? Or are you talking about the buffs going to them?

Velimere.7685:

Rocketmist.5436:

I mean sharing fire aura is again probably the worst aura to share. Doesn’t really do anything defensively… Also burn doesn’t stack and you’d be giving it to people with low condition damage. I had a thread not too long ago about my aura suggestions, but fire aura still is pretty bad XD

I could’ve sworn that the point of aura-sharing was the buffs provided by the traits when applying auras…

ArrDee.2573:

Hello frands! Vee Wee here, #1 Engi NA and world first rank 80!

Vee Wee wants to play condi Ele so bad! Vee Wee thinks Earth Scepter 1 needs to not be so goshdarn slow! Vee Wee also thinks Shatterstone needs to not be completely useless! Lower the cast time! Make it apply bleed! It’s a jagged icicle that explodes into icy shrapnel! How does it not cause bleeding! Vee Wee also thinks shooting out Rock Barrier could cause poison! That way you can choose to either beef up your defense or lower the enemy’s sustain!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

lol your posts are so fun to read, that is all XD

I don’t think runes are balanced overall though, thats why I think this is an easy fix hopefully, most all of the 1-6’s seem like they were trying to balance them out with eachother. However, in this case I feel like they could fix it not that bad. When they lowered strength runes from 7% to 5% a lot of people were happy they didnt wait 6 months to balance it, I think stuff like this could be dealt with very quickly and people would enjoy these oversight style balance fixes.

All scepter air attacks will trigger this or just the auto attack? The trait seems good, whenever talking about conditions keep in mind in wvw its not too hard to get to 100% condition duration, so now your talking about a master tier trait with potentially 133% uptime on burning, with burning being the hardest hitting condition in the game at like 900 damage/second in condition builds. All that being said I think the air def needs some master traits that can synergize with something since it really has none at the moment. I doubt the devs would put a trait that burns anywhere but the fire traitline, so maybe a different condition. The problem is the conditions that air could seem to do as we know are weakness and blindness and neither of those do damage. I also doubt they will give ele’s an access to something like confusion or torment.

Ah I really wish gw2skills.net wasn’t down or else I’d love to check it out. Also I think its really funny how your post is worded :P

Lol you kidding me, you can easily make a stupidly hard hitting p/d build with venom share pretty easily. 5000 damage in bleeds bouncing around out of stealth attack sounds pretty nice especially now at 1050 range.

Volrath.1473:

zapv.8051:

5. Thief: realistically they didn’t recieve that bad of nerfs and will still do the same things in all game modes, but the added reveal skills will affect them.

I think you missed the point here, no one thief complaints about the nerfs, they were well thought of and implemented.

The problem is that ALL other professions got nice buffs to them to spice up things and gained build diversity in the process, some more than others but in general every one ELSE will have new builds available to mess around with.

Thieves got “buffs” (if you can call them that) in areas that need to be reworked or even replaced, the so called buffs will be implemented in vain because the traits and abilities being “buffed” will not change anything at all, they are bad in design and nothing they can do will make them remotely appealing. So what I’m saying here is thieves are they ONLY profession that will remain the same after the patch with the aggravated fact that the only 2 viable builds to play competitively got nerfed (deservingly tbh), rangers and engis can now apply long lasting reveled, and no other spec was opened for us to play… so in sum, we are stuck with the same builds but less effective.

A-net keeps insisting on the venom share, trying to force us into it but it will never happen because by specing venome share the thief becomes completely useless, vulnerable and helpless in combat… we become venom dispensers, go in, share the venoms and gtfo asap because we have no stealth, no surivavility and poor dmg output. BUT still A-net insists on this nonsense… aw well , what else can I say…

8 months from now well have another “buff” to venom share and more nerfs to the <insert meta spec at that time>.

/rant

Ele’s have easy access to burning and bleeding, and can get confusion and poison via sigils/runes. Lots of vuln/immob/chill/cripples as well to mask and cc. I say condi ele’s are in a decent spot especially after the buff to signet of earth. That being said necros, engis and p/d thieves can still probably burst condi’s way harder than eles with the 10+ confusion stacks and fear but I don’t think ele’s are the worst condi class at all.

I think you could see way easier might stacking. Which is great, and you could lead into opponents in pvp etc, however it still loses a lot of benefit in killing seige and weird LoS tower fights in wvw. It’s a tradeoff, I could definitely see might stacking be way easier on something like s/f.

I mean sharing fire aura is again probably the worst aura to share. Doesn’t really do anything defensively… Also burn doesn’t stack and you’d be giving it to people with low condition damage. I had a thread not too long ago about my aura suggestions, but fire aura still is pretty bad XD

Also isn’t the shortest heal in the game 15 seconds, why are there even 10s icds on heal skills?

Yamsandjams.3267:

That particular on-struck ability is not that powerful, but it is odd that it isn’t on the aristocracy runes when it’s on the strength runes. In fact, I can’t think of any reason why it’s not.

One could potentially make the argument that the on-heal might stacks given by the aristocracy runes is so powerful that the runes of strength need both the on-struck might stacks as well as the +5% damage boost (which was previously +7%). However, I find that to be a weak argument as the +5% damage boost is exceptionally strong already, and most players will not simply waste their heal skill to get some extra might if they’re not hurt. Most heal skills can’t take full advantage of the 10s ICD anyways.

I guess the next time they do a rune/sigil balance pass they might add this onto them.

Yeah I just wish some of the condi runes were more usable. The perplexity runes are so strong that all the other ones aren’t usable and I figured fixing this easy balance with aristocracy runes might be the lowest hanging fruit to fix.

Huh? I think its fine to have increased durations of various boons/conditions on a rune set. I think the levels should be balanced tho, so the 4’s on various runes are roughly the same power level. Obviously having an extra ability for the same +15% might duration is a tad unbalanced.

Both of these runes have +10% might duration for their 2, and strength has the 5s icd gaining might on hit and +15% might duration on their 4 while aristocracy has only a +15% might duration.

Aristocracy runes should get that stacking might ability on the 4 for these to be balanced, it doesn’t make sense to have a 4 that is the same as another runes 4 but with a bonus, things should actually be balanced enough so that doesn’t happen :/

Yeah unlike cantrips, signets are something you can use multiple times in one fight, and now even more so, I think this makes signet mastery potentially usable now as well.

oh wow thats pretty nice then.

It’s hard to tell if they are actually trying to make the elites balanced between classes, I feel like they care more about making the classes overall more balanced.

LordByron.8369:

Rocketmist.5436:

Calm down, staff ele did lose the ability to see huge numbers, but a 10k meteor shower is OP anyways and they fixed it. On the plus side you got the best skills that work with the new blinding ashes which looks incredibly strong.

I know this game have given absurd concept of “balaning” since release.

But when a profession can just cast their elite spam 1 to deal 8-10K attacks, another can do more from INVISIBLE…

And another has to:
1) be the most squishy in game (don t even try to deny it because to get 10K damage you are a rallybot in fullzerk full dps)
2) STAND STILL for 4 seconds
3) have opponent stand sit in a red circle for many seconds
4) just once per 3 minutes

And yet only the second gets nerfed, it just tells a lot about the cmpetence of the balancing team we have.

There is something called risk/reward that is the base of balancing for any well designed game, in GW2 instead the less risk, the more reward is the balancing guideline.

And that is why we have no build diversity and even worse no profession diversity.
But whatever we say, anet decided and they only pretend to care about players concerns…
While they only post false CDI to give the idea they cares, while they instead go on with huge mistakes even when half playerbase tell them.

Then takes 6 months to delete them.

I have no faith in the balancing team since few months after the release.
They proved to lack the ability to balance this game with so many huge mistakes, that nobody could trust them.

And hiding behind the “forum negativity” mask is only a further proof they don t even accept feedback.

Doesn’t aura share only work with weapon abilities? I don’t see how this helps too much if you are referring to Fire’s Embrace trait.

JETWING.2759:

This was an huge buff to aurashare build. A great step to build diversity. GJ anet!
:)

This may be the new meta build.

One suggestion I would make is to make sure you have at least 87% condition duration so you get 2 seconds of burn from your fire 2 and fire 4 trait. It essentially doubles that damage.

LightningBlaze.4913:

oZii.2864:

I haven’t played in about 2 months or so. Looked at video today thought it was a good overall balanced update. Like the blinding ashes change since going 6 fire makes you squishy this gives you defense when outnumbered. Like the lightning rod change. FGS is better with imo with a real attack on rush not situational. Rush was going to get changed anyway. Like the elemental change to get a good attack on demand. I like the elemental contingency change also.

This is a WvW perspective.

Welcome back oZii. The fire trait line is meant more for condition builds. For example one of my favorites builds to play is the following

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJAodhMMKb25wuBf0ACAGpuQ4AQDoIOOIsDKCA-T1RHABD8AAcTPAjq/k7+D3pEEgTAwRK/IFgiSjA-w

It already works wonderful and after the patch it is going to be even better with the signet modifications and blinding ash aeo improvement

FGS – As a s/f roamer in WvW being able to pull back quicker than other classes is worth an elite slot in itself. Being able to reset a fight is almost like getting an extra life and is worthy of an elite slot in that sense. It also allows you to chase targets that are running and you’ll probably catch up, the mobility does make WvW a lot better in terms of not being run over everytime a 4+ people show up. That said I drop the sword when I get in any real fight.

Dragon tooth would be nerfed imo if it had ground targeting since that implies LoS being required and it currently isn’t required. So yeah thats kind of a nerf. You can legit hit arrow carts in towers in south east tower in wvw bl standing in the tunnel with dragon’s tooth, its super handy.

The reason they picked torment was there was only three choices, confusion, torment or bleed, and confusion woulda kittened people off more. Torment and bleed were the only realistic options. And theres a ton of bleeding AA in this game already so I bet they just went with torment to mix it up a bit.

Calm down, staff ele did lose the ability to see huge numbers, but a 10k meteor shower is OP anyways and they fixed it. On the plus side you got the best skills that work with the new blinding ashes which looks incredibly strong.

Oh worth yeah signet of earth also got a 5 second cooldown reduced and they all have 1/2 cast times instead of 3/4ths as well. Incredibly good stuff ^^

I’m a little surprised shatterstone didnt get changed, or dagger earth AA, or the resurrecting glyph but im super happy with the changes for my roaming build in wvw.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Lol I for one and pretty happy with the changes, although I do feel sorry to the ele speed clearers out there, was thinking of you when they announced the fgs change

Just expressing my satisfaction with the signet’s being buffed.

Added a 7s 5 stacks of bleed to signet of earth.
Increases damage of fire signet by 100%.
Reducing cooldowns of air/water to 25s.

These buffs are gonna help a lot with signet builds, this is more than I was expecting for signet buffs and im pleasantly surprised. Signets now are two relatively hard hitting actives and our stun break got reduced by 5s. Can’t wait to test em out in battle!!!

If your running signets your probably not using the regen on cantrip use thing so yeah you might need some regen. Most ele’s are super squishy so protection is how they stay alive, and you’d only be getting it when you cast your signet of earth active… come on now.

Add the elemental attunement boon to each active signet skill. So you get 1 stack of might for fire for 15s.

Necro’s can already get might when they use signets and their signet actives are deadly.

Prays for lightning rod to be on crit now crosses fingers. If they change it to on daze/stun/interrupt im going to be very sad.

So there are three main forms of attacks in this game, heavy cc, damage, and conditions. The new GM traits were supposed to beef ele’s up a little to make them more tanky. I’m just going to go in order and give my opinion, feel free to disagree or whatever.

Blinding ashes-
Vs heavy cc, you can maybe get lucky and blind part of the cc combo but this trait alone won’t save you vs a three hammer moves or a fear chain. It could make a small impact though.
Vs damage it is a minimal impact in terms of % damage reduced, the lack of insta cast, controllable burns makes it so you can’t really use it to time for adrenalin skills so you kinda just have to hope it works out well.
Vs conditions it again is super minimal. Most conditions in this game are from super fast attacking auto attacks, and stuff like signet of spite won’t be cast by a smart player when they are blinded, so you might stop one of those 5 quick pistol shots, but that isn’t going to help in any meaningful way.

Lightning Rod
Vs heavy cc this trait does nothing. Weakness won’t prevent you from being stun locked into oblivion.
Vs damage this trait probably isn’t gonna help too much either. The weird thing about this trait is you apply weakness right as the person your fighting is doing little or no damage (the point in the match where they are stunned or dazed).
Vs conditions, again this trait does nothing because weakness does not effect condition damage.

Stone Heart
Vs heavy cc this trait does nothing, you will still be tossed around like crazy even if those hammer stuns are doing less damage.
Vs damage this trait can have an impact, being able to negate a big part of full zerker build’s damage is actually accomplished here.
Vs conditions this trait has a minimal impact, it stops some of the on crit procs but one of the main condition classes in this meta which is the p/d thief doesn’t run any crit chance.

Water Thingy
This is kinda just a weird stat increase and I hate traits like this, nothing to say here.

Elemental Contingency (protection + vigor)
vs heavy cc this doesn’t really work since it procs on hit and the first hit will get you nailed into the cc chain so even added vigor to dodge won’t save you.
vs damage the protection might do a little benefit but the 30% base uptime while your in earth which in reality is going to be way less than 30% overall might have an impact. That impact is 60% of the impact of switching to earth with EA lol.
vs condition damage this trait does nothing, you might be able to dodge some stuff with more vigor but meh.

Overall takeaways. Some of the traits were trying to increase ele survivability. Heavy cc and condition damage isn’t addressed in any of these traits. Damage on the other hand is slightly effected. I’d love to see some GM traits or just more traits in general that could help out with heavy cc or conditions.

I would like to see blinding ashes improved somehow. I don’t think a separate cooldown for each burn is great because unfortunately there is an auto attack that burns and an AoE burn on the staff they are probably thinking about a lot when they made this trait. I feel like this trait is simply punished by the idea of someone running around spamming Fire Scepter auto attacks and no one does that. Maybe make it do 1 stack of vuln on top of the blind so you can bury your hard hitting conditions easier.

I would like to see lightning rod transformed into an on crit ability with an ideally low icd. Adding weakness to a stunned foe doesn’t even make sense imo. Most ele’s have very few interrupts, at most a couple on weapons and zero from utilties so GeeGee. Changing it to on daze and stun also does not fix the problem at all. However an on crit one could be a viable defensive option real builds could actually use.

Tbh I probably would use FGS even if it had only skill 3 and 4 and they did 0 damage. I need the mobility as a scepter/focus ele to avoid getting run over by zergs in WvW. Dueling or bunker mode I would of course use another utility that works with my build, i’d probably add cleansing fire into my bar or signet of water.

Ah yeah, fire aura removing condi’s idk why I didn’t think of that before. None of the auras do anything against condi pressure and considering fire does nothing now that makes a lot of sense.

Ah okie, so just have a blind on the aura and nothing else?

Jagstang.6912:

I wouldn’t be able to hit him because stealth makes you invulnerable .

I’d agree stealth would be OP if it made you invulnerable lol. It um, doesn’t though. Also your complaining about being bursted down by a thief on your likely glassy thief, thats the nature of zerker vs zerker type fights.

Lostwingman.5034:

Actually, I think I’d rather have a short blind on the fire aura. Would make it fit with the rest as a defensive option.

I’d agree a short blind would make sense, if blinding ashes GM trait in the fire traitline didn’t already exist. That would create a huge negative synergy with that GM trait and fire aura.

Nah, I normally play with scepter so thats 900 range. I just think there is probably a blanket statement that is somewhat true “a skill rewards not dodging requires less skill to play”.

I really enjoy auras and I think they are the fun defensive part to ele’s. I think there’s a lot of skill in knowing when to use which one’s as well. Frost aura is great for kiting people around or disengaging or just for the -10% dmg in a heated fight, lightning aura is great for warriors/thieves in your face, magnetic aura is great to counter those rangers sniping away or any other dangerous projectile incoming. Here are some of my thoughts for some fun and my opinion needed changes.

Lightning Aura

I like the lightning aura a lot and think it might be the best one. It is one of the few ways ele’s an interrupt a target and with the new GM trait for air I think its pretty well valued. One thing I think should be done is take tempest defence which gives lightning aura when disabled and +20% dmg vs disabled targets and move it down to master tier and remove the +20% dmg vs disabled targets from the trait. This way it would be possible for more builds to counter hammers/thieves without having to give up fresh air, and it also adds synergy with the new GM trait. I like the aura a lot and don’t think it needs changes, it makes a real impact in a fight.

Fire Aura

A lot of people think fire aura is the weakest of the three auras. A 1s base burn is pretty meh, and 1 stack of might isn’t really doing much. I suggest we make the base burn 1.5 seconds or maybe even 2 seconds, and remove the 1 stack of might and add a 1s retaliation boon on hit. Auras are supposed to be defensive so the 1 stack of might has always been the out of place part of auras, retal is defensive so it makes more sense.
This would clear up some of the complaints about the focus fire skills being super terrible. Also this will also make the fire traitline slightly better with fire’s embrace, as everyone basically agrees the fire traitline is the worst and needs improvement.

Frost Aura

I want there to be a way to get all the auras just through trait lines to make them really more a part of the elementalist’s build in general. My suggestion for a trait would be a master level one in water:
Ice Front: When chilling an opponent, you gain frost aura for 5s, icd 40s, chill lasts 20% less duration on you.
This trait would add the aura into the trait line and also give elementalist’s some more resistance against chill because it really messes up our attunement swap times making chill way more deadly to us than other classes. It will also buff the terrible focus 4 skill in water and also makes signet of water’s active better. These single target chills we had before were super terrible and some synergy with them might make them more usable.

Magnetic aura

Magnetic aura is a little different than the other auras in the fact that it is more of a hard counter play against people using projectiles. I’m fairly against long hard counters and focus has a 3s reflect already and staff already has the 5s reflect, I don’t think even more hard counter-ness is needed. That being said I think it could be rework in somehow. Here’s my suggestion.

The 5 trait on earth is enduring damage and basically says your damage is +10% if your endurance is full. This promotes unskilled play because it says you shouldn’t dodge your opponents attacks which is a big part of the skill in this game. Also the earth traitline is the condition traitline, it doesn’t make sense for a +damage skill to be the 5 everyone has to take. Overall I hate this trait a ton and think this would be a good spot to add magnetic aura into the traitlines. Gain magnetic aura for 3s upon reaching 50% health, could be as simple as that.

Anywho, thanks for reading my aura ideas, aura share can still be just with weapon skills im fine with that as a side note, would be OP if you could spread all the auras out, but I think it would be cool to place some of the auras in reachable places in the 4-5 spots in the trait tree.

Yeah, id rather have a worse tempest defense, most eles I know aren’t warriors who will shield bash then evis you either, take away the 20% bonus damage to stunned opponents and just make the aura a master trait and i’d be happy.