Guild Wars 2

if your question was " can i still continue playing daggers? or do i have to go staff?" or anything like that.

Answer is noone knows, there is absolutely no information what they would change or even the direction what they would take. So speculating like that is useless.

SpiritofTrini.8374:

Howdy.. newb to game, so please forgive the chiming in. Where can i find this info? is it in the patch notes or something?

Howdy.. newb to game, so please forgive the chiming in. Where can i find this info? is it in the patch notes or something?…

Howdy.. newb to game, so please forgive the chiming in. Where can i find this info? is it in the patch notes or something?…So from what I am reading here D/D is not going to be good to stay in? :-( I really don’t want to turn into a stand and cast spells again type of person… I really like the fighting style that casters have in this game, because it is exciting and at times frustrating (button clicker).

Howdy.. newb to game, so please forgive the chiming in. Where can i find this info? is it in the patch notes or something?…So from what I am reading here D/D is not going to be good to stay in? :-( I really don’t want to turn into a stand and cast spells again type of person… I really like the fighting style that casters have in this game, because it is exciting and at times frustrating (button clicker).I’m not gonna give up on the class, so I just wanted to brace myself for a let down if it is coming. I’ll give a better response and thoughts when I’ve read up some more on what’s going on. Better to have a good opinion instead of a stupid one.

Howdy.. newb to game, so please forgive the chiming in. Where can i find this info? is it in the patch notes or something?…So from what I am reading here D/D is not going to be good to stay in? :-( I really don’t want to turn into a stand and cast spells again type of person… I really like the fighting style that casters have in this game, because it is exciting and at times frustrating (button clicker).I’m not gonna give up on the class, so I just wanted to brace myself for a let down if it is coming. I’ll give a better response and thoughts when I’ve read up some more on what’s going on. Better to have a good opinion instead of a stupid one.Thanks for help… see ya in the game!

They had a Q&A stream session yesterday in twitch.tv where they said “we think the opportunity cost on single target attacks are too high versus aoe abilities. Often times in 1v2 situation after downing the other one, the soloer just aoes on the downed person instead of downing him”. Bullkitten reasoning if you ask me, what they said in the stream. There is no problem.

edit: wtf is the quote so fked up O.o

doing direct nerfs to aoe abilities would be horrible decisions, done with kitten sPvP/tPvP goggles on. Which tbh, is not what the majority of the players play gw2 for.

Have to second comment above me, “I have no idea where this idea came from”. I’ve never seen gw2 aoe being a problem.

I can’t really see how they would pull this off, seems to me it would change all classes completely, unless they just go to nerf certain classes. Like say D/D & staff eles whose pretty much all abilities are aoe. But there it would ruin the class because of the neccesity of constant attunument dance. Say if they changed air to pure single target dmg it would ruin the whole attunument rotation. Only chance would be them buffing #1s to much higher dmg but pure single target, making things quite boring.

And even as a non-roleplayer. GW2s speciality is the more action-rpg style combat than traditional mmo, that’s why most of the abilities are aoe in the first place.

So I cannot give any support to Anet on this. Although they have given so little information about it so one can’t make a proper argument against it nor for it.

doing direct nerfs to aoe damage would be one of the worst decisions they could make. It would ruin wvwvw making blobbing better. They thinking it purely from sPvP perspective, and tbh that is not what most people play this game for.

But they prolly talking about nerfing specific things, and in that case D/D definetly would be having nerfs, as pretty much every attack we would do in a 1v1 case we would do for AoE in same order. Well heck that goes to pretty much every class, they simply cannot distinguish between single target and aoe attacks that much when there isn’t 25 skills on every class’s bars. It would also ruin action feel of the combat. Where greatsword or hammer always hits multiple people like you might imagine in a fantasy setting.

Hate when they do decisions with their sPvP goggles on…

Immolator.5640:

…
Lastly would like to say, RG you guys hit like a tonne of bricks, and a lot of them – my hypothesis that you guys could do the same to us as siN was correct heheh, very much did not appreciate the many many super-golem rush at our Overlook though, whilst we were all puzzlin, kitten move to be fair :p

In all honesty wasn’t impressed by that, you guys are amazing fighters and could easily just waltz in there with rams and take it; to take the easy way out for less hassle just gives the impression of a lack of skil but instead a surplus of wealth, which we all know isn’t true in the slightest.
…

Sorry but can’t really take that seriously :P… Serious?
We capped through whole AR side, all fully upgraded towers and overlook outside one. Epic 30 min+ AR overlook siege, had good amount of help there from PX (pax or px?), long struggle to survive all the mass siege, supply and full zone inside.
And following that to take whole gandara side.

We as the only commander and organised guild on the zone, never peaking above 25 people, last caps with under 15 people, PX left soon after first AR overlook cap and our gandara side Tag (and PX were only around 10 to begin with).
Gladly for the last hour we had a second commander tag (just tag, no full guild) for the north side to hold still the gandara side while we recapped the AR side.

And you have the brass to cry about using golems O.o?
About an attack that was scouted before any hits were done on the outer, with all the siege and cannons you have inside. Haters gonna hate rofl… Mayby if we ran through that jumping puzzle of yours naked lightnings shooting out our arses, riding unicorn donkeys playing mozart with a panflute. Mayby then you would be happy, even against golems.

Happy about you rising organisation tho, can’t stand unorganised kittens. That’s what it is all about. You could be the next Vizunah with everyone and their granny on same zone TS with spread coverage. Last week gandara had ques every zone most of the time so recources shouldnt be too big of a problem.

Ye lightning hammer can be great as its weapon damage follows ur level, doesn’t need to be upgraded. So often in staff setup u’ll do more damage with the hammer because of the possible outdated weapons and many staff skills are “backloaded” to overkill . Leaves your skills & possibly attunuments out of cd aswell, if that makes sense.

If you use daggers however you should dish out quite abit more dps if you keep your weapons decently into date.

Harder to give tip when you haven’t given your weapon preferance but this should help anyway. Prolly just a case of not understanding how gw2 combat works.

Surv:
- Dodge as regularily, avoid situations where you dodge 2 times in a row. Keep urself in that 50-99% endurance untill you learn some better timing and feel for the games combat timing.
- Keep eye on your gear and have atleast half of your gear with defencive stats (tough or vitality). Or even all.
- Learn the gw2 kite and avoiding, simply you avoid alot of dmg by constantly going around them or running through the mobs. → kite to staff fields/backpedal while channeling your dagger cones. And just run through mobs when the melee animation about to start, or dodge.
- great core for any build is 20water(V), 20 arcane (V VIII/VI(daggers)). You can work towards those. And experiment further yourself, untill you crawl yourself back to forums @80 and ask for the fotm spec.
- Get utility skill Mist Form asap and use it wisely.

Damage:
- Attunument rotation: change attunuments often because elementalists damage comes from skills 2-5, not 1s. So staff, E2→ W2→ F2 F3 F1… and so on are part of the basic skill rotation into which you mix in crowd control n buffs.
With daggers F3 F4 F2 F5 → E2 → W2 → A1 … and so on are part of the basic skill rotation into which you mix in crowd control n buffs.
Your rotation should feel like it’s in constant motion to the next step in cycle, but always make sure you actually want and gain advantage by changing the attunument.

legs are the only piece you can’t get PTV. http://dulfy.net/2012/09/08/gw2-templegod-karma-armor-sets/
Shoulders are from same as gloves, Archon. So get 5 pieces and let’s say Carrion leggings.

You should not go for healing gear without 30 arcane 15+ water (and a group to heal). So don’t worry about that.

About stats Power is always safe bet and in most cases the optimal stat versus crit and crit dmg. And because of D/D has alot of fury it makes crit even more “redundant”.
Altho if you run Pyromancers puisance and tend to blast in fire as often as possible (talking about 2600+ power and 70%+ crit damage (with fury)) you can concider using crit foods and crit sigil. Or swapping to knight accessories instead of say PTV.
So as you can see, you have to go quite far to make it worth it dps wise.

i’d like to hear how you got those numbers aswell. Surely if there is anything real behind those numbers it is missing some variables from power and crit damage.
Not quite sure how a linear function could peak in 4 points :P. But waiting some more base.

Extra for above (posted while i was writing). The direct damage formula is a linear against crit, there is no local maximas. Theoretical maxima is at 100 obviously.
And practical maximas depend on the available gear sets and their stat distribution. So if “23/41/70/92 %” were “practical maximas” they are missing crucial information about the other variables…

yea wouldn’t crusify you for doing that. It’s concidered quite standard and powerful to get all the karma PVT armor pieces. And then you can use more dps or more healing oriented crafted Bling if necessary. Or get the invader PVT bling.

I love you,
because message body length must at least be 15.

Notsure.7028:

…
I am not the most skilled player, however, I can hold my own. After trying many builds and gear setups in the mists, I have come to the conclusion that anyone who CLAIMS to be able to solo a champ is outright lying or hacking.

It IS NOT possible to solo champs. Don’t even begin to think you can. You will NOT have the survivability, no matter what anyone says. Go ahead and give it a try and see how quickly the champ beats you down.
…

Many of the champion mobs ingame are melee oriented that have slow and dodgeable attacks when you got to know the couple special attacks they have.

I don’t really go around looking for champions to kill but I remember killing some invading ogre champ (you know the ones who wipe out a whole town alone) while leveling in some norn zone, taking like 30 minutes. And then a harder one in Town of Nageling Ascalon town invasion requiring tighter timing as his attacks were always one shot + aoe fear.
It takes ages to solo champ with little reward. I don’t know what you mean by “survivability” as most champ attacks one shot anyway, or 2 shot. You have to evade their attacks, no choise really.
Though now with full 80 exotics downleveled such tasks would be alot alot easier.

Anyway I always had more success with staff while lvling, but I did have tendency going too deep with many mobs with the daggers. Can be real kitten fighting alot of risens in daggers unless you build and gear to survive that.

For staff: Just get 20 arcana as soon as possible for Blasting Staff. Then you are pretty much done.
Great base for any staff build is 0/0/0/20/20 and you can build any direction from there. Really you can distribute rest of the points anywhere you like and find quite equal argument for all. 30 fire, 30 earth, 10 fire 20 air, 20 fire 10 earth …
The fotm and FotM lvl 80 specs are still waiting for you after lvling, no need to think only about those.

For utilities choose arcane wave (damage and comboing), mist form and third one of your choise – try Glyph of Elemental/Arcane shield/Armor of earth/Lightning flash/ANYTHING. Doesn’t hurt to try different when your core is tight.

it is probably because Frost Aura and Fire Aura can be done with Combo Fields (fire aura can’t be comboed to be aoe).
So if frost aura has Shock aura durations it would be way too powerful to aoe blast for your group. But I don’t think Shock aura should have shorter durations with the ~10s base.

Bard.7215:

If you obtain might after burning the target, does the buff apply to all dots already placed on the target before the buff? or does it increase the damage on next application?

The damage is calculated always right when it shows on the screen. So let’s say you are burning with Pyromancer’s Puissance and spamming fireball. You’ll the burning you applied before ticking more and more because of the might stacks you slowly gaining.
8.75 damage per stack for every might stack.

In the same way, say you cast eruption and swap to fire and you have 10% extra dmg on fire attunument. Eruption will get that 10% bonus (on direct only ofc) from fire, but not from earth if you had the earth version. (noone mention Lingering Elements as it has nothing to do with these).

And I’ll repeat others. All conditions and all boons do exactly same damage and same bonuses irrelevant of the class played. Depending only of the players stats, and skills vary with the durations and possible stack sizes.
Also don’t be fooled by tooltips on some attacks that refresh it’s effect like Fiery Greatsword #2 or Drake’s Breath which give the total dmg for all ticks but only says part of the duration on the side.

Ive taken some numbers this week and for me I get badges in around ratio 1 badge per 5 kills. This is from set of 5668 kills.

I love that conjure idea, keeps gameplay fast and increases possibilities. Contrary what’s atm.
Would be awesome to jump in to the battle with a lightning hammer after doing your fields with staff without the delay.
You could fluidly use LH as a extra kiting tool with the leap aswell. And so on… love it.

Tsezar.6950:

well actually u can see u farm them without losses pretty easy.. u may not need bags or badges but kills for the archievment….nuff said A-net will judge

we get triple the kills by normally roaming, your logic is false.

Tsezar.6950:

well RG is communicating with other guilds to get free badges and kills.. dont think this is allowed

hahaha how stupid can people be.

U mean organising guild versus guild fight with balanced numbers to have great head to head on fights? kitten that must be illegal in guild wars. kitten pug casual players…

I have gathered around 10k badges in my chars lifetime, you think anyone of our players need badges or bags?

Great fights anyway, TUP is top guild in piken. Quite the opposite of “free kills”.

skinnyb.5920:

This is something I’ve been meaning to find out and this seems like the appropriate place.

Which affects my ally’s boon duration? My runes/stats or theirs? Same with healing power?

Stats should always be calculated from the person actually doing it.
If ally blasts in your water field, his healing power is used.
If you aoe buff might when swapping fire, your boon duration is used.
Aoe regening, your healing power and your boon duration.

Guardian buffing retaliation to you, his boon duration, but not sure whose power. By the same logic it should be his power.

Not sure if trolls or serious … hmm

Powerful auras is part of the very commonly used and powerful spec often called “Auramancer”. Where you want to have Zeryphs Boon from Air and optionally Elemental Shielding from Earth to proc buffs on your auras. And if you want to go hurr durr you can get Fire’s Embrace.

It’s easy to regard something weak if you don’t think about the synergy, watch the other trait lines and different weapon sets. Cleansing water is more commonly used for staff instead of powerful auras (unless u go hurr durr).

Heya, RG came to fight guilds of Piken :P not really to farm the campain. Just capping all the kitten as we had massive numbers and will have on reset & new server exitement.

kittenra Quo.1932:

What is it about RG? Just had my first really noteworthy encouter with them and to be honest, I’m everything but impressed. This stupid NPC commander is going down at briar and is at about 10% health. We’ve been like 10 random people defending that tower and out off a sudden RG shows up, builds a golem for a half downed gate.

If this is the guild everybody speaks so highly of I’m really wondering what all this is about.

/yawn @ golem rushs

I love ur “logic” xD.

“I heard about this guild. I saw em first time and they took a tower after entering the zone. The gate was already 50%! Why they’d attack that, I was expecting lightning coming out of their arses and diamond spikes raining from the heavens. I was not impressed.”

regen stacks duration, not intensity. So building elementalist around a buff like that is one of the worst choises.

Most healing you do is with EA water dodge and simply swapping water with 15+ water. And blasting (and having your allies blast) in your water fields.

And Incription is not aoe. So sorry to kitten on ur candles but this is not the way to go. Boon duration is way to go yes, but thinking Regen is the thing best thing you wanna focus on is not.

PvE condition spec?
Don’t go scepter, rather use staff. Atleast I see no reason using single target weapons for PvE …

Eruption is great skill and big lulz with condition duration, getting those 20+ stacks of bleeding alone. And it’s aoe so scepter really comes nowhere near staff for this.

And I’d use carrion.

I don’t quite see the point or neccesity.
Scepter and Staff are just as effective on melee range as in range. So the only neccesity would be, if I go dagger, I can’t ranged dps. And I see no problem in that.

I don’t think combaring “I use daggers but on some mobs I have to reset and go staff but with my thief i just fight with 1 set of daggers and use weapon swap only to go shortbow for world bosses” that fair.
In many cases the ranged weapon would be not as effective because not fully specced for it, or having melee weapon redundant.

The weapon combination is chosen based on the combos/rotations you can accomplish with them in tandem. Not by the range “im gonna be half effective melee and spam 1, and then half effective ranged for bosses”, atleast not in my eyes. And if it is then it becomes a “casual player problem”. Of which personally I’m not interested.
(not saying there is no effective melee+ranged weapon combo. But say, rifle+hammer is good because of the crowd control rotations that you can do with both in combination, not necessarely because of the range difference)

Anyway, if Focus had it’s fire skills and water 4 altered then we could have a sort of melee/mid range combination.

Occam.9841:

Sometimes I get 2 badges per kill, sometimes one, a lot of the time I don’t get any badges even for a solo kill.
If you claim 450 badges in 6 hours you’re saying you got an average of one badge every 75 seconds.
I guess it must be true because no one has ever lied on the internet.

It’s quite different playing in a roaming wvw guild than solo :P. Can get upto 1.5k kills a day, 1k standard.
We got player with above 100k wvw kills, (world first? wouldn’t be suprised), so playing like that, you kitten badges from every hole.

Anyway sorry to blabber out of the main ele topic.
In short:
Go for SAFE STANDARD 0/10/0/30/30 aura DD with full Cantrips, works super good solo, group and raid.
Use P/V/T armor with boon duration runes or soldier crests or ruby orbs.
For tips and tricks prolly on the topic linked above, but the specs are most likely outdated and just too many different opinions, so go for the standard.

EgonVenkman.1907:

Can you clarify? What class? Were you in a party? What was the time played?

Elementalist staff (our daggers get just the same or more) and played around 6hours with a guild raid.

You are not gonna get many badges if you run around solo or with pug zerg.

Checked yesterday got 450 badges and our raid wasn’t done, think went for couple hours after that. I banked all my badges before that so it was all from there. You can get kittenloads aslong as you kill kittenloads.

You get badges from bags, and you get bags by being combat with the dying enemy – doing dmg to it. I don’t think the dmg requirement is that high, healing doesn’t help much (none?). Same way as you get kill sigil procs and other stuff like that.

much rather think about the whole set than just 2 stats like that… Low lvl armor dont work exactly like that but all higher gear are categorized similarily.

So you are comparing Rampager (Pre/Con/Pow) and Carrior (Pow/Con/Vit) type armor. Of which I would go for Carrion because it’s more stat effective and pull more mobs than you would do with Rampager.

For more direct damage oriented you can combine Soldier (Pow/Tou/Vit) with few Berserker (Pow/Pre/CD) pieces.
There are many ways to go about it, all will serve you well.

If you go with Knight or Rampager you should have 30 Fire spec to balance out the power better.

BLASPHEMY! Comboing with thyself or activating combos with same class directly violates the third and fourth segments of the Holy Code from The Holy Book.

" If thy shall land a field above the holy ground, one same to thy Mastery be forbidden to land their Finishing Acts amongst them. "
and
“Thy shall not Kombo with thyself as Kombo be the First Sacred Act only to be engaged with members of apart Mastery "

Violating the Holy Code will result your Soul to forever wander between the mists of Fractals in eternal Agony.
Although some liberals interpret the “Mastery” word in the Holy Code reffers to Mastery lines but I would not take that risk.

epic post is epic, so funny, always loved internet meme humour
there is many great ones in the original post hope you can get more translated^^.
There is some propaganda lies there too tho but :P all in humour I assume.

Prolly my favorites are (not intented picture to this actually but i think it fits better )
When RG zerg runs past you without seeing you … this is what you think:
and
Zerg following a commander who is leading for the first time

Elementalist – op or not ?

We have certain specs that are definetly OP in the right hands in some sense. Ele is one of the classes who can do fights like 1v3+ in free roam (non tpvp), not through a single burst combo like a thief might be able to 1v3 (alot based on the enemy skill) but more through their own capability.
I like classes to be more like that, more possibilities and versatile. You could say, I like classes to be OP in that way – ready for everything, OP as a whole if used correctly. Not OP through some certain combo/situation.

yea I always have the same in every game. So far I’ve always managed to pick the class I love on the first time, and they are always multitaskers. So it’s hard trying other classes.

But engineer can be very fun for ele players. If specced the fun way.
You can do boring (non ele style) with turrets/elixirs and just spam ur main weapon attacks but personally I went with bomb kit, grenade kit and elixir gun, and healing turret.

And you’ll be doing trible water field blasts in that 1 sec water field from turrets, switching between 3 kits for complex dps rotation which resembles ele style but same time is completely different. And instead of snare/stun locks you’ll be doing blind locks.
Lvling process for engi was extremely fun. Just make sure to get swiftness on kit swap asap!
PvE perspective I like engi much more, but D/D solo pvp is much more fun than anything else. Can’t replace that.

huge thumbs down from me for this. It feels like you load wrong people all the time, you see useless allies and useless enemys.
Much harder to play than before because you loose your key friendly targets all the time. And the enemys suprise with massive numbers so muh more often.

Previous was better.

I just told u it does same damage in the video as atm on live :P…

in beta it was extremely common to run full glass cannon. It’s always like that, when you make char, you wanna see whats the max hurr durr dps it can do. You wanna see the limits.

Every warrior used to be haste + hundred blades.

I actually checked it now in mists (because i can get obsessed with these small useless details x) ). You get exactly same health with knight amulet with berserker jewel and runes of divinity.
And calculated with those stats versus a actually quite tank statted warrior (3000+ armor) u’ll get the same exact numbers as u see in the video…
Just as response to those who think that LA was high dmg (even without the summing)

vizuna really need to pick up their fighting skills to be respectable, sorry… After every keep take I see atleast 5 “Vizuna invader goes to sleep”, is that your best tactic really? Wipe and then just hide all mesmers…

Sorry to hate but it’s just getting quite tireing.
SM fight with 12 of us dicking you 30+ with mass siege around lord room triggered this rage of mine…

Dark.6250:

… Nice Nice dmg around 4:07
…

Let me correct you so no more people get fooled..

If you go and try Lightning Arc you’ll notice that the damage you on the screen is a sum of the complete channel like with all channeled spells ingame. Not a damage done per tick.
On the video you can see a bug (or what ever you wanna call it) that can still happen
that the damage is kept summing if you spam the channel after channel.

That 6204 dmg on screen is result of 4 full channels, with the small delay between casts it should average less than 400 damage per second. And you know thats horrible, don’t know why the video maker didn’t seem to understand that.

I see nothing good from scepter in that video. Seems exactly same as now.

edit: seems one guy got it right above me while i was writing.

If you are using dagger/dagger, you could use spec with 10 Arcane with Elemental Attunument, and then 10 Air for Zeryph’s Boon.

That gives you Swiftness when swapping to Air, using Air 5 and 3. And Water 4

If you using staff you can use those same traits too, and you’ll get swiftness with swapping to Air, using Air 4 and Earth 3. Also you should use combos, Air 5 + Arcane Wave (utility) / Eruption will give swiftness.

Elementalist shts out swiftness from every hole.

I’m just gonna give general tip for fighting vs D/Ds as a fellow elementalist.
You know them in and out! Counter them, you know what they are gonna do. Most DDs follow a standard rotations and standard tricks.

He is casting Churning Earth out of range of you? Still dodge just before end because he will blink on you just before tick.
RTL beaming to you → dodge because 90% of dds will follow that with Updraft.
You got updrafted, lying on ground and you see Fire swap, pop mist form just as DD uses Burning Speed, because 90% of them will. You will prolly avoid both BS and RF/FG. Possiby even some of the following Drake’s breath if he doesn’t react properly.
Be patient with dodges, use them on correct spells because DD “relys” on nailing these burst combos.
After you pwn avoided his updraft, burnign speed combo, you know he is gonna stack the burning on u, patiently watch him Drake’s Breath and then cleanse it with water swap. Nice ~4k dmg removed there.
Focus using CC right after RTL is on cooldown. Try not using CCs on basic fight situations, you have to get the opening avoided and then actually starting the fight from situation where he is out of range and out of fire burst & Air on cd.

Try aiming your ground aoes on top of yourself and kite just behind them.
Save either or both Shockwave and Static Field for actually finishing him, most reasonable way of you actually winning is assuming DD is too kitteny at low health, and gets caught in immobilize + eruption, lava font, ice spike combo, or part of it.

It’s a fight the DD shouldnt really be able to loose, but if you are really patient with nailing the dodges and countering his movement with cc. I’ll actually reiterate that.
- Counter his movement with CC, don’t have him countering your CC with his movement.

This is how I play DD v DD mirror fight too when i roam about, because every single DD elementalist, yeah, you too, follows the same combos. So I fight it with pure reactive style avoiding all his big combos, making him burn dodges on jukes so I hit all of my big hits.

Sorry you won’t be even 25% of the real power of elementalist with this setup. That is the truth and a single attunument setup like this will never work. Gosh would you event want it to work. Sorry to bash this to the ground, but if you want real feedback, here it is.

You will do poor damage and you will do poor healing.
Best healing comes from blasts (Eruption & EA earth dodge), EA water dodge and Healing Ripple swap – which you would have none of.
Obviously this is for PvE purposes but I’m still going to say you are relying on one condition for control, infinite duration of chill can be cleansed with a single condition removal.

Running with pets but still wanting mobs to be chilled to kite? They stand still on ur pet anyway.
I don’t quite understand whats this Chill obsession for pve purpose? Prolly result of actually trying to make this build – result of the poor dps, aka feeling problems with surviving and kiting. Which wouldnt be problem when mobs die 5 times faster.

This is not the approach you should take for elementalist for any purpose.
But if you absolutely must have your targets snared most of time use Superior sigil of hydromancy to freeze on swap, 15 earth to cripple on swap (20 for reduced cooldown) and water cd reduce. And 40% condition duration food. And just do proper attunument rotations.

Feels great to play with EA againg. It used to be insanely overpowered state. But now it’s very reasonable but still strong. Cheers for that.

I’d like to add few small personal notes oncouple of things. Altho I don’t have big “complaints” :P.. There is some leeway on personal preference on some traits.

Correct, Grounded does not apply to updraft for example.
Correct, Earth’s Embrace does give you all the cantrip bonuses if specced.
Tempest Defense, wayy too situational for “exellent”. 90 sec cooldown with no control on if it procs on important moment.
Lingering Elements is assumably supposed to work on 5p minors, it does on 3 of em. Not on Stone Flesh. And does not linger specs like in Fire “One With Fire”. Not that any would would use it :P, but I think it went upto like 50% proc which is pretty good.

I would say Rock Solid is Okay, in your standards. Thats first choise in my 30 earth spec. You are not supposed to have constant 10 sec stability, you need millisecond of stability just before the CC hits. It’s a great trait for sPvP for downing. Feels goooood to down succesfully everytime without blowing important cantrips.

Written in Stone, concidering how piss poor signets are in general, I wouldn’t really advertise this as AMAZING. Any ele running signets should right away change to proper cantrip/arcane builds.

0/10/0/30/30 all the way and u’ll hit all the “AMAZING” traits

/age 768 hours
/42245 kills
/ no idea, 5000 badges?

Mix of stats is indeed optimal. How the damage formula works, results in the more you have stat x, the more some other counter stat y becomes, relative to x.

And Power is the best direct dmg stat in almost all cases unless you have high might stacks, power foods, specced in fire and high crit damage. Or rely on some procs on crit.
- if you have very high power (all max power gear), concider using precission runes&sigils and food
- if you have high crit, definetly go for more power

Same goes for defences. Every point in toughness will make a point in vitality better than before. So having toughness in all slots will be less optimal for effective health than having combination of toughness and vitality. Same other way around.
Unless you can make up for this with alot of healing, making toughness stronger than normally. Or lack of condition removal – vitality stronger.

I won’t give exact values as I haven’t found the time to research “what is the highest possible direct damage setup possible” or “most optimal dps and defencive setup” of the available items.

But I can just say, as said in many threads, invader (soldier) type items are very optimal set because it gives power as main stat (most optimal dps stat in most cases). Gives both toughness and vitality (optimal).
With most optimal crit damage items, aka Ruby Orbs/Rune of Divinity + Exquisite Ruby Orbs. With 0/20/0/30/20 this tickles near perfection due to the Fury uptime.
(wvwvw pure direct dmg setup)

For PvE purposes I might argue, without further proof tho, very optimal setup with survivability is full PVT armor with rampager jewellery, with max crit damage runes.

There seems to be demand for the stat tips, so mayby I’ll find out the actual numbers, but it’s gonna have to wait till after cristmast :/ EXAMS!

how about not increasing ele damage? That 20% boost would be insane
Ele is insane amount of tools to control, dps, cleanse, mobility, everything. Why do people fail (i assume this is the case judging the constant whine threads)? Because it’s more complex to play ele than many other classes.

So rather see some other classes made more complex to play and more versatile. Than buffing ele, we are already so effing fortunate.
But guess that’s a design flaw that is hard to fix in live.

well if he got up 6 times, there is only one possiblity, rally obviously. So some mob/player died who he had attacked.

For conjures there are 3 main targets you can aim for in your traits, but you can sensibly have only 2 of them at a time. And they differ in playstyle, 2 of them want high crit chance one doesn’t care.

-First one is going 25-30 arcane for the proc and swapping attunuments all the time, this should be combined with air for higher crit chance, so you prolly wont have the conjure stacks. I would not recommend this because the proc chances are very low.

-Second is to get the 25 conjure stacks from fire, you can combine this with anything.

-Third is to have 20% dmg bonus vs vurnable from water, which should be combined with high crit chance so heavy Air. This can also get the conjure stacks and is the way I would recommend.

If you go conjures, why not go step further and use focus aswell? You want to have high cd skills and buffs that help you when using conjures, and procs that work inside weapons.
Do note conjures mainly work best for aoe dps. And Lightning Hammer is the highest aoe dps and same time the most bad kitten of them – obviously.

So build is 25/25/0/20/0, you won’t spam attunument swaps anyway, instead you stick to water while in conjures for the 20% bonus. Getting increased conjure charges and using Arcane Power to get that vurneability and the burns proccing right away.
Note AP works very good with Lightning Hammer as it counts 1 press as 1 proc, unlike normal abilities 1 hit is 1 proc. So spamming 1, 5 times gives you in aoe 4×3 + 5 = 17 guaranteed crits instead of 5.

You want to have good crit chance for this, so knight and berserker has good offers. Even rampager might be best if you take the same approach I will suggest below.

Build: you can try it in mists dummies, all gear and bling are applied in the editor.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJAoNhImMbyRAHAIKSxkIDBGQy4hKA;TkAg1U8YkRIjNMHPywGWMhA
do note this is just pve dps purposes, nothing more.

Pre conjure you want to stack conditions and buffs, and end up in water for the conjure. So you could do the following idea.

Fire 3 charge, Fire 2 channeled half/end and Fire 5 aura (fury and swiftness) same time → Air 3 (F&S) → Water + Conjure weapon → AP + hammer 11111.

Now you in trouble, in heavy dmg and conditions → drop hammer and Earth 4 and 5
→ and back to beginning (stack burning and auras (drop projectile reflect in air 4) → pick up second conjure).

I think this should be pretty well tought. Burning proc and burning duration not necessary, just something I concidered.

I love using 30 earth for the stability. It’s such a pleasant feeling being able to down people very easily by swapping Earth mid stomp. So I’ve used 0/0/30/20/20 when I went that direction. This was for 1vxs and such.

But using scepter in actual wvwvw (non 1v1) is no go. And condition builds is weaker for the actual wvw aswell – for elementalist.

Using mousebuttons gives no advantage in game like GW2. It is up to you what you like better, using keyboard hotkeys or mouse hotkeys.

Then for mousepad vs mouse for targetting and stuff. I have to say mouse will always be superior in accuracy, speed and ergonomic, in every regard.
And it will be quite unlikely to be as good as a “top mouse player” can be.

If you think otherwise, I’d like to see a video proof….