Guild Wars 2

Anomaly.7612:

renss.5764:

As a thief stealth player and a d/d elementalist i have to say this is so true
when running the perma prot spec u can barely be harmed, there are too many random aoe attacks going on that hurt the thief alot. I have had so much trouble killing d/d eles on my thief in wvw duels but the other way around, it was easy.

What is this perma prot spec? It sounds delightful.

For perma protection or nearly perma protection simply take 2 points in earth for protection on auras and take elemental attunement. This is using D/D btw and basically make sure that fire skill 4 is followed by earth skill 3 for the leap finisher. (every 15 seconds this is possible, and this is the reason i say nearly as failing this you miss out, this tactic will give you 20+ stacks of might quite easily though combined with other blast finiher etc) use armour of earth to top yourself up :p

I play ele main and thief second so i think i can contribute a decent amount to the post. The general rotation for a D/D ele is air-fire-earth-water, they will use water for a chill so watch it. as for counters P/D you will never beat them 1 vs 1 the cleave in air will make the blind field useless, only if they are bad you might beat them. learn to play S/D for when the enemy has an ele then you have a chance 1 vs 1. If the ele is decent even then i think you would lose.

Things to look out for.

Fire magic – just avoid it, no blind fields or anything just dodge and get out of the burning fields.

(my favorite) arcane shield – look this up on the wiki and ask a friend to show it you in game, even without a fire grab the ele is guaranteed to win if this hits you. Use SB to destroy it and watch out for lightning flash when the last bubble is on them.

ride the lightning combined with static aura – a good tactic to force a stun on the enemy. Dodge it then their ride the lightning has a full 40s cd rather than a 20s. Another point here the stun only works in melee range so you can use your SB when this is on them, but again look out for a forced stun via lightning flash or ride the lightning.

updraft – this is the skill that knocks the ele backwards, always shadowstep away after this skill has been used, this skill puts the ele in the perfect position for a full fire magic rotation. I will stress again shadowstep away or you will be killed. i cannot stress this point enough. a clever ele (myself :p) will expect this and remain in air attunement so they can use ride the lightning to get back on top of you, dodge this then their cd on ride the lightning is much longer.

The ele has 3 stuns / knockdowns where the cooldowns complement each other well and where the fight will go on long enough for them to use each of them at least twice. So ensure you manage your stun breaker effectively, only use them if you absolutely must and do not use your shadowsteps too aggressively, use them defensively.

This build is rumoured to be the new meta and personally with all the might stacking builds out there it is very strong. —-> http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-cF3V;1Vw-_06-V-Fd0;9;49;0TT2;612746BINl3L;1H7W3H7W35H personally this is the only build i will have a tough time against on my ele.

A good tactic is to use a flanking strike at range to get larcenous strike ready then use larcenous strike with steal to land it and get 3 boons. After this use skill 2 for the immobilize and try and get a full chain of the auto attack for weakness.

Don’t complain about the steal skill, chill is the best counter to an ele. use it after they have left water attunement because then there is less chance of them cleansing it. chill affects their attunement recharge time. Applying this after water attunement means it could be 16 seconds or more before they can enter it again.

lastly make an ele and learn to play it. Its the best way to kill any class and build.

well based on the equations in the wiki the healing power from your build (400) only gives you 50 hp a second more from regeneration and 400 hp more from your healing ripple (minor trait under the master tier in water). So the choice is yours there but i think generally think you need around 600-700 healing power to justify having any at all otherwise the dps sacrifice seems a little wasted.

I have done wvw in the past a little and know that it works a little differently to spvp however i think mist form is only really used as a safe stomp and is generally useless as anything else. In a 1 vs 1 i would only waste the cd if it meant my dodge roll in water attunement (with evasive arcana) would heal me enough to win the fight. However i think the stomping nature in wvw is not as vital in the sense that if you miss it you could lose. So for survivability i prefer arcane shield to mist form as it gives you the 3 blocks and the guaranteed crit at the end of it which is enough for you get the edge over a thief for instance. (basically use this skill offensively at melee range). Oh and its also a stun breaker so you get 3 of the best mechanics in one skill :p. But that depends on what you use mist form for. If you did take arcane shield you could swap out cantrip mastery for soothing wave.

the only reason i use inscription is for doing my world completion for perma swiftness however in a fight you will have perma swiftness without the heal glyph or inscription due to the elemental attunement combined with fresh air. i would consider IX or X in air as a trade off.

in terms of crit chance and crit damage i would try and keep your base crit chance at the 43% mark but increase your crit damage for more dps considering your most powerful attacks will be under the effects of arcane fury. If you took air training (X, air magic) instead of inscription then i think sacrificing some crit damage for vitality would be a decent trade off or even healing power. I think you will be better off with vitality rather than toughness as this gives you a longer time to cleanse conditions before they kill you and i suspect you are vulnerable to them with that build.

Have you tried signet of restoration? Its my preferred heal myself and you could substitute the might with runes of strength.

If you took the signet and 600 healing power this gives 262 (signet) + 205 (regeneration) + 110 (soothing mist)( pretty much permanent with lingering elements) = 577 hp a second, potentially.

When i was deciding my wvw build i used this site http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/ as it allows you to manually enter changes in stats to see the effects to regeneration for example as well as gives you your ‘effective hp’ which i can only assume is hp after armour is taken into account.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

(i will be concentrating on Earth and D/D in particular)

Skills:

Impale – Seriously poor skill. I would prefer it if it was changed. Maybe something kind of like Vapor Blade with a solid range that can hit more than one person and inflict conditions to each one.

Idea: Turn it into a Chain skill.
Chain 1 – 1/2second cast Damage targets and inflict Bleeding 1 stack (8seconds)
Chain 2 – 1/2 second cast Damage targets and inflict bleeding 1 stack (8 seconds)
Chain 2 – 1/2second cast Damage targets and inflict Torment 1 stack (2 seconds)

the “projectile” would look the same for Chain 1 and 2 but differ for chain 3 due to it inflicting a different condition. Would be like a Boomerang of rock sort of deal. The range would be increased to 900 so D/D has some reasonable kitting ability.

Ring of Earth – It is decent but could be improved.

Idea: Bleeding. Reduce the duration to 6 seconds, increase the stacks from 1 to 2. Keep Cripple the way it is, add 3 stacks of Torment for 5 seconds.

Magnetic Grasp/Magnetic Leap – This is needed, we just need it to be redesigned so that it doesn’t bug out and miss the target so much.

Idea: Magnetic Grasp, maybe add some Bleeding stacks to the initial attack as well 3 stacks of Bleeding for 3 seconds or something. Magnetic Leap could do with a buff. 5 stacks of Torment on leaping to your target in an AoE would be nice.

Earthquake. Good skill. Lower cool down.

Idea: Decrease the cool down from 45 to 30 seconds. I would kind of be interested in maybe it knocking people back rather than down as well.

Churning Earth – Threat yes, viable – No.

Idea: This needs to have quite a bit of work. Reduce the cast time to 2 seconds. Increase the Cripple duration per a stack to 2 seconds because even with it being 1 second people can still just walk out before it goes off. Finally make it more punishing just to leave. Like you have to decide what would be more damaging leaving it or staying and trying to block, dodge invul the actual attack. This could be done with high stacking Torment that gets applied during the channel, kind of like how Cripple works.

Traits:

Serrated Stones – I find this rather lacking. Who actually uses it?
Idea: Remove the damage increase, Increase duration increase to 50% and add chance on hit to inflict Bleeding (works in ALL attunements) for 8 seconds, 2 second cool down. 50% Chance. This would be on HIT and not on Crit.

Stone Splinters – Another rather terrible trait.
Idea: Remove damage increase and change it to 10% Increase to Condition damage when within 600range of your target. This is the Condition trait line after all.

Geomancers Freedom – Decent, could be better
Idea: Increase duration reduction from 33% to 50% These conditions are a killer to pretty much any Ele and not being able to change weaponset and changing from melee to range or range to melee is rather annoying and punishing.

Geomancer’s Alacrity – Average. Average. Average.
Idea – This goes for ALL the skill reduction traits. Rather than just decrease the cool down they should also have a secondary affect like others do. An increase to Toughness and Condition damage would be solid here. Say 5% increase to both.

Diamond Skin – Works well….against some classes.
Idea: change the health threshold from 90% to 75% Engineer has it so that it is immune from 0 – 25% so why is ours only 10% on a squishy class that can take that much damage from auto attacks…

While i think there needs to be a little bit of improvement to earth magic for DD i think idea of giving an elementalist such easy access to torment is ridiculous. that means even a full zerker elementalist with sigil of doom has access to 3 high damage conditions. When keeping burning on a target comes so naturally to an elementalist and when even runnning full zerker it still seems to be in the top 5 highest damage effects when killing an opponent torment is simply not going to be given to elementalists so freely. it would make them the most OP class in the game by a seriously long way. I mean 5 stacks on a skill that has a 15 second cooldown? naaaaaaaaaaaah

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k33;2B2-V0y47N-Z0;9;69TT;44;028A17ASB0;3H7W3H7W35T

This is my personal favorite. Full zerker for solid burst with 90% up-time on protection makes for a really strong dpser. Never thought the extra survivability with celestial was worth the loss of dps from not using zerker. earth skill 3 in ring of fire is where the 3rd aura comes from.

No need to go into fire magic for might you will get 20+ stacks easily, also the water traits can be played around depending on the team you face. If you want to talk further about how to might stack and rotation pm me in game

Macmoarning.3208:

Zenith.7301
Ele autoattacks need buffing anyways, especially water and earth attunement ones they’re terrible. Across all weapons.

Can’t totally agree, DD really have a cool sustain damage ( rly agressive earth and water stance ).
According to what you re saying : you are a Scepter player, which is a 900/600 ranged weapon and you’re expecting from that weapon to be at the same sustain lvl than a DD ? Do you think it is reasonable to have the sustain dps of a warrior while being at 900 range form your opponent ? I guess iam a bit extremist, i can clearly see what is your point, then allow me to ask something : what is the point in playin DD anymore ? if i have the same sustain on my Scepter, plus the actual burst..

nobody is expecting the overall ranged damage of a melee weapon however we would like to come close to other classes.

For example a rangers shortbow skill one takes 0.54 seconds to activate according to the wiki and deals a base damage of 134 and also has a DPS modifier of 0.4 thus in one second the ranger with a shortbow can deal 248+(0.4) damage in one second. (the (0.4) is that number multiplied by your power*weapon strenght all divided by the opponents armour in case people here don’t know. This also does not include bleeding

second example elementalists arc lightning (skill one air attunement) base damage of 634 over a course of 3.95 seconds = 160 base damage in one second with an average modifier of 0.1803. total damage is 160(0.18) in one second.

the elementalists attack penetrates, yes, hence why it should be nerfed a tad however a ranger has a pet to deal damage too and so they have a slight nerf to their output damage to compensate for this. So tell me Anet why the hell does our dps not even match that of other classes and most likely does not even come close to most ranged skills that can hit 1200 units away? Increase these damage coefficients now please and also while you are at it take evasive arcana out of the arcana traitline and place it in water traitline on a minor trait (the ones with an odd number 5-15 and 25) to give us a dodge roll similar to that of a guardian. this will stop elementalists from moving into the arcana traitline taking mediocre traits just to get evasive arcana and with this done we can finally take 30 points out of that line and would open up some potentil for a lot of other traitlines. I mean i like some of the traits in earth attunement but its just not feasible to spec into there right now.

And yes i like the idea of increasing their base HP it would mean a DD spec dps spec could actually remain next to the target long enought to hit their skill ones. Also as i have mentioned a serious look at their utilities is in order. one more thing i have not mentioned is that elementalists rely too much on CC to hit their attacks. This needs to change as most tPvP builds proffessions have access to a lot of stun breakers. So if i run S/D hit earthquake they break out of stun and i can only hit bolt to the heart. if a target has access to stun breakers then you can forget all about going into fire its just a waste of cd’s.

please please please please please sort it out. in fact make them ridiculously OP and forget about them for 4-5 months. Also i wouldn’t mind at all separating the skill set from spvp and pve at all just to keep the WvW people happy if that makes life easier for you.

Oulov.7913:

Devs have absolutely no idea how to nerf or balance thieves. It’s entirely their fault, because they created this class in the first place. Initiative? Wtf? Who came up with such a stupid idea?

The assassin in Gw1 was almost perfectly balanced. Sure, he could own you with 1 chain combo if you were inexperienced, but if you took a skill that blocked his attacks or blinded him…. he was an easy prey.

And here? Almost perma stealth, almost perma blind on the enemy, teleporting/running away easily with short bow, 1.5 – 2k with autoattack, 5k crits with heartseeker (that takes ONLY 3 initiative). This is insane.

REDO THIS CLASS. Next year, if spvp survives long enough, you will have only thieves and warriors running.

What? I am sorry thieves have been in a better position in the past. Remember the old days of dd thieves with a 150% increase to his next 5 attacks and we never had a million thieves running around. I agree that certain builds are unbalanced, pistol whip for instance has no side effect to using the insane amount of damage. I mean really an in built evade??? You don’t even have to think twice about blowi g it in the middle of heavy aoe. But overall the thief class is a good class. This is the first game where in the class description it says something along the lines of ‘do large amounts of damage in a short space of time’. A lot of other games describe rogue classes as such but the burst is so underwhelming. Don’t you understand the thief class is meant to be hard to lock down its how they survive but once you do lock them down the rest is a doddle and finally initiative is a geneous idea this is how they actually perform their burst and keep it up. Am I really the only person who looks at a thief’s top end burst and thinks ‘meh I can take it just wait for that dodge and then I have you’? And what is this crap about perma stealth? If a thief is perma stealthing he can only be using his skill one to do damage in which case you should be owning him with the cc.

Perma blind? A big tip for you mate. Don’t stand in that tiny little blind field and you should be ok.

I am sorry i personally think the high end dps is completely acceptable considering the minimum survivability of the build. And you guys seem to forget that if the elementalist doesn’t run arcane skills then their burst is only as good as a thiefs and without the sustain. And the reason why an elementalist runs with lightning flash and arcane skills is because they are the only really useful thing to them currently as everything else has a ridiculously long recharge time it is just not worth bothering with.

If their defensive utilities were worth bothering with then you would probably be able to stay up long enough to get a second bout of dps on top of an enemy. But yes overall i think elementalists are currently the most broken class and unlike the necro (talking about dhumfire) you could not fix them by giving them more dps. they need more sustain on their dps builds. That is another thing there are not really enough viable builds for elementalists. And they STILL go up into the arcana tree even though you attempted to take them out of it. Why is that you ask? because they get a tiny heal on dodge roll, its not for the attuenement recharge. They do not need a nerf they need some defense. A hammer warrior ( yes its a tad broken in places) for example get to place all defensive utilities because their damage is there to begin with. Elementalists don’t get that so they have to compensate for their overall lack of damage by taking their arcane blast and arcane wave.

I am rambling a bit i know but really i think it is a tad wrong that the weakest class in the game gets an invulnerability skill thats only real use is for stomping why can’t i be immune to damage and still dish 100% of it out at the same time? not to mention if i do stomp someone with it i have to wait 75 seconds to use it again before i can safely stomp someone without them dpsing me down in the downed state. it used to be the case where elementalists had a very good damage to survivability trade off and that has been severely broken in recent patches and i have my suspicions that it is due to other class buffs and not just eles nerfs. Delete warriors and the game is balanced overnight ( joke… -ish)

But yes i agree overall that if you you increase their sustain you will have to change that burst but only if their overall survivability improves as a result.

Dog.1472:

In an ideal scenario the class that will be able to deal the most damage is an elementalist.

This requires multiple things though. You will need a ranger and a warrior for their unique support, and you will need to be able to maintain 25 stacks of might, vuln and fury. You will also need to push the mob into a wall.

So, let’s say you were in a dungeon, ideally you would want to bring at least a warrior, ranger and engi in order to maintain maximum support, then an elementalist with a fiery greatsword using 3 and 4 into a wall with no target will hands down be the king of damage. Alternatively, I believe a lightning hammer Ele will still be the highest damage even without the need to fight into a wall. Not by as much, but still the most.

This is all situational though. If you want solo DPS then an Engineer wins because of their extreme ability to stack both might and vulnerability on their own.

As someone else said though, the numbers are actually pretty close. The only class that doesn’t keep up with the rest is the mesmer, which is unquestionably the lowest DPS class, but because of their unique support, they often find themselves in speedruns anyway.

The one class I would call useless is a necromancer. While it is capable of high damage, it offers next to no support aside from medicore vuln stacking at the cost of their own DPS, making it not worth it.

Lastly, warrior is not the highest DPS class. It is a faceroll class, definitely, but it is not the strongest.

Just to mention a point here about the fiery greatsword you do not need those circumstances for it to be worthwhile. think that if at maximum an ele can only get 10 or so stacks of might then all the other classes are going to feel that cap in the dungeon too. a warrior might be able to get 5 or so more but that simply alone doesn’t exceed the raw damage of the fiery greatsword.

if you religious speedrunners would actually listen to what people are saying here i find through experience the best speed run consists of 2x warrior 2x elementalist and 1x mesmer. warriors pick up elementaist gs and bosh the boss is dead in a few seconds. Obviously this depends on the dungeon.

in my experience the dps largely is based on the circumatances. A thief is the highest dps using a combination of ‘cloak and dagger’ and ‘backstab’ followed by ‘heartseeker’ when the enemy is at 25% hp, but as some have mentioned they don’t stack might themselves. So thief is highest dps in a group situation when they have access to the enemies back. So in any dungeon a thief will ultimately come out on top.

Warrs have a reliable dps as they are easy to play they are second to thiefs in dungeon play and i can guarantee that. I play both and run various teams of dungeons and find a thief in the party speeds the run up immensely. The people that claim warriors do more dps are those that just don’t admit thiefs are greater damage dealers, have never played a thief or haven’t met a thief that plays as a zerker properly. if the enemy is against a wall then the warrior will do a higher average damage but only marginally and even then a thief can pretty much nearly get access to the enemies back for a decent portion of the fight. Just to clarify i am NOT talking about burst damage i am talking about AVERAGE damage a second over a boss fight. So please warriors stop quoting 100 blades it takes a whopping 3.5 seconds to cast you tend to forget. When a thiefs heartseeker will do half the damage of 100 blades in 3/4 of a second it starts to look a bit pathetic especially when they don’t have the same cd problem as all other classes. And yes i am comparing them BOTH in optimum conditions.

lastly the elementalist, some of you may laugh but i have a loyal band of followers that ask for my ele before any of the other classes. with a lightning hammer build the elementalist will do more damage a second than any other class using the fiery greatsword when an enemy is up against a wall, again those that don’t admit this have never seen it. furthermore an elementalist using the lightning hammer (with the right build) will match a warriors dps over a fight when the enemy is not against a wall. Furthermore they can stack a tonne of fury and might before the fight or on the mob during the fight.

overall if you want a reliable dps go with a warrior as they are the easiest to learn how to maximise their dps rate, even then you still get warriors that think greatsword is better dps as it stack might ( they are wrong) use an axe for the love of god please. however warriors are a touch on the dull side so the choice is yours :p