Guild Wars 2

Most people (except the pro ones who say they can beat thieves on any class while blindfolded and playing one handed) will agree with you to some point, but considering that the last patch did little to change things (other than a lyssa nerf) then you better get used to it or go buy a copy of eso and come back in a year

Completely agree. I dont see how the devs had the nerve to give eles a method to counter condition spam so well. I think changing the trait to 25% reduced condi duration while above 95% hp would even the playing field again, and maybe drop eles base hp to 9k at the same time.

Youre entirely wrong, eles have a very specific defining function that makes it unique and treasured among all classes. Its called carpal tunnel syndrome.

Try a med spec dps guardian. Theyre pretty fun and can do a lot of burst and have low hp while having a lot of tools to avoid damage, so its a very active playstyle, kind of like a d/d ele but with more armor. Thats if you want to do spvp or maybe small scale wvw. Engies arent a bad choice either, though theyre power builds are lacking at the moment so be ready to spam grenades and/or bombs a ton to do any damage.

Completely agree with you, I have 4 leveled 80s and the only one i ever play is the ele except in very specific situations, and even when i log on my engy im bored out of my mind in 10 minutes.

In spvp its a different story since you want to be useful to a team instead of having fun, but we are all hoping the patch will change this.

Skyhammer shouldnt be removed from the game but there is zero reason as to why its in the soloq rotation. Until its removed im sure a lot of players will continue to only join teamq when theyre solo, and it kind of says something when youd rather face a coordinated and experienced 5 man with a group of randoms than you would play skyhammer.

I cant remember the last time I ran AR since there are so many other more interesting engy specs, but i can say for sure that this does very little to change decap specs. Itl give say, a full condi necro a better chance of actually finishing off the engy in a 1v1 (though probably not since necros are getting some nerfs) but by that point the engy will already have the point decapped and will just run away, heal, and come back to decap once again.

It does seem like a change in the right direction, a nerf to passive condi immunity + a nerf to dhumfire in one patch is pretty great, but it would be nice to see a buff to other forms of engi condi removal

Seems really boring since there are already 2 support tactics in 30 water (both of which also seem a LOT better), so i dont know how this will help build diversity. A dps or debuff type trait would be nice so there is the option to run 30 water in a spec without being full bunker/support but hopefully the other new ones we get will be interesting.

Its about time, I was so sick of getting all that glory from matches and then having to spend countless seconds thinking about what to spend it on, and now i dont have to anymore!

Look at the ticket scraps from the black lion chests, you only get one from maybe every 5 keys, and 50 to 70 of them to get a skin, so only 250 keys to save up (if youre lucky). Kind of pushes it from “Maybe il spend 20 bucks a month on this game if it gives me some cool skins and it will support a game i like at the same time” to "they want HOW MUCH money for simple things that i can only use on one character?!?!? "

Though considering the cost of these things is basically 0 (minus staff salaries) i bet they make plenty of money on it either way

You wont get a ton of healing out of spamming 1 and you will never kill anything (or it will take you a stupid amount of time to do so). Ele healing is more from water traits/regen on attunement swap and blasting water fields. Eruption > swap water attunement > geyser > arcane blast+brilliance is a huge burst heal and you dont have to spec specifically for it or stack a ton of healing power (if youre quick you can use flame axe 2 for another blast finisher but its a lot of effort)

Your spec isnt bad either but youre better off taking cleansing water instead of soothing disruption, and id say put your last 10 points in earth instead of air, if youre going to be up close anyway stone splinters is a better damage bonus. Arcane brilliance, blast, armor of earth and lightning flash is what I run a lot when using staff, though the other 2 cantrips have their uses too. Boon duration runes like someone said are a nice touch to get more out of the regen you can give out, but be aware that in about a month most of the rune sets will change so dont blow money on expensive ones.

Although if you hit 80 and only want to do dungeons then all of this doesnt matter because the only stat that matters in those is dps, but staff ele healing is still pretty good in open world pve and wvw

Chill seems alright because there isnt a ton of it available and its usually on a decent cd (chill of death on necros is just silly, but it otherwise seems like that class should have a lot of chills anyway).

Immobs are worse since like half the classes in the game entirely rely on movement and dodging to survive. Granted its not the best spec in game right now, but my rifle engy can get a 2s immob on a 8s cd, compared to a 30s cd on a staff eles root break and then only with one specific weapon set. Way too much especially since +100% condi duration is easy to get to in wvw and even 40-50% is doable in spvp

Why not double the cast time and the damage, that way we can get twice the number of “NERF KILLSHOT” threads and twice the number of “OMG MY 40k CRIT IS BALANCED L2P” responses to entertain everyone.

To be serious though a game about fast paced active combat doesnt seeem like it should have abilities with such long cast times, so seems like a good idea. Churning earth on eles is in a similar state, its a gimmick that can crit for 12k but in real fights you can play for hours and never find a time its worth using.

Muchacho.2390:

Stand The Wall.6987:

I’m just saying its there and if people dont wanna use it thats their problem.
Other classes have practically no stability.

Other professions also dont need it as much…

Maybe i should be more precise. Professions like warriors/guardian/necros who are mainly in the fight need stability more then those professions that are more like poking in and out like thieves/eles/engies and mesmers.

Every class needs stability especially in spvp, why do necros need it so much more than say an ele or mesmer.

That said I still never got why well of power never gave stability per tick instead of just 1s at the start, its not like power necros are the OP class right now and i have to say it sucks to play one when the other side of a match is 3 wars/thief/engy like it usually is. Or maybe add it to a spectral skill but at that point the class would have more stability than everyone other than a war or guard which would just be silly, seems like everyone is overestimating the stability other classes get (eles 6 seconds on a 90s CD is OP!)

Your link is to a hambow war so unless this is a troll thread (seems unlikely) you might want to fix it. Your stats seem solid enough and s/f + sc/sh is a good combo, though in wvw greatsword might be better for mobility in helping escape the zerg, probably more up to personal opinion.

Im betting it will be a 8% increase to SoR since thats theyre idea of a significant change. I know right, 8%! So excited.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Vitality directly counters condition damage as well. So does Healing Power.

And vitality and healing power dont do anything against power builds? Interesting.

Every time i tell someone i know about this game that toughness doesnt affect condi damage they just laugh and ask me if im serious or not.

Really nice video, you can tell that youre always patient and wait for the best time to use your utilities, definitely something myself and probably a lot of others need to work on. But do you ever use renewing stamina instead of elemental attunement? The protection is great but its so hard to survive in this game with only your normal dodges especially in fights bigger than 1v1, which is one of the reasons ive never been able to run an arcane spec like that (granted im nowhere near as experienced).

Thanks for posting it though, gives a lot of great info for people who really want to play staff eles outside zergs but find it hard to

Solo I found d/d the simplest to level with, something like 30/10/10/10/10 (most damage but squishy), 0/20/10/10/30 or 0/10/0/30/30 would work depending on how squishy you want to be. Also better off going full glass in gear and practicing learning when to dodge early, it will help when you get to end game content and eles really cant just stand and tank things like a war or a ranger could anyway no matter your gear. Staff s/d or s/f builds like the others have described are also good and worth trying but theyre a bit more group orientated.

Also gear does matter quite a bit, if you can afford it buy a set of lvl 70 rares and a decent rune set to go with it. If you dont want to spend that you could consider going down to a lower level zone to finish leveling and just saving money for a good set of gear at 80, and then using that to go through the orr zones, its much easier and still worth it since map completion rewards are good. The difference between a poorly geared 70 and an 80 in rares/exotics is huge.

Well if you want to trade RTL every 40 seconds in exchange for 8k more base hp and a second health bar then my ele would be more than willing to make that trade any day of the week.

Not really a fair comparison I know but you have to give up something for the good stuff your class has. Comparing it to a war that has mobility and everything else at the same time isnt really a good idea, it might suck to solo roam in wvw on a necro but not every class is amazing at every part of the game

From playing a necro in spvp i have a much harder time dealing with cc spam than with mobility, thats an aspect of the class thats more worth complaining about

The funny part is people screaming “L2P” when the original post states that at least 1 of the players literally just started the game and the other is a d/d ele (probably weakest class in game vs a war) that he just met and probably was also new

Then again a lot of classes could do this in the right setup in wvw, im sure a tanky ranger or engi or something could just as easily 1v3 for a while then run into a keep when he gets low, so this doesnt prove anything new

There was a huge thread about this some time ago. To sum up the thread a lot of people agreed and thought combat based on dodging shouldnt have stacking roots, and a lot of people disagreed and said there are enough cleanses to deal with it if you “l2p and spec correctly”. But most agreed that changing them to stack was just plain dumb.

And yes there are actually immobilize/cripple/chill breaking abilities but each class usually only has 1-2 of them that normally dont fit into usual builds, like the ele one is only on staff while in air attunement so if you use a different weapon set youre screwed.

You know if the people who spent so much time whining in this thread spent half as much time writing up clear and detailed guides on how to do the content the right way, and then pointing new players in game to links to that guide, then the issue probably wouldnt be as big of a deal.

I bet 95% of those “bad” players dont read the forums or other online guides and have no idea about any of this stuff and only play the game for a few hours a week. This game has terrible in game hints/tutorials and people rarely give good advice in map chat other than “wear zerk gear or gtfo”. Temporary content doesnt really help either since slower learning players probably will take 2 weeks to figure it out themselves and by then its gone

It says 4 seconds when youre out of combat but when youre in combat it should last for 6 even if the tooltip says 4. if its still not then thats something fairly new and id report it as much as you can.

Dont agree at all that this would fix everything. Ele survivability shouldnt be like thieves in wvw, where you run in and try to burst someone down and if it doesnt work you instantly run away at the speed of light.

More mobility options and a fix so RTL has a 20s cd all the time would be awesome but it wouldnt do a lot for spvp builds or team play

Actually all 8 can do that much in a second if they spec specifically for it, even though some of those specs are completely gimmicks while others are actually viable builds.

Come on people just learn to dodge, its so easy to counter, thats why the recent tournament teams have been running 2 eles and 0 wars because all those eles have so many dodges they win every fight with ease. Wait, people have been running 2 wars and 0 eles and won those tournaments? Wow, well the people they fought must have simply not known how to dodge like all the really skilled people in these threads.

If composition of the “best” groups in the game doesnt point out that something is wrong then i cant imagine what could convince them

A 90s base cd on it would seem to be more balanced since most classes other than war/thief seem to have that as their lowest cd elite, but it doesnt seem to be high on the devs list of things to be fixed. But with their whole rune/sigil overhaul it might get changed anyway

The bigger problem imo isnt how conditions do damage its how they are applied, everything is just way too passive. I always laugh when my engy is fighting someone in spvp and they use a utility to fully cleanse thats on a 40-60s cd and a few seconds later i already have all of those condis back on them again.

And then i respec to a power rifle build or get on a power necro/ele and fight the same person in the next match and its an entirely different world, not trying to argue that power builds are so weak i would automatically lose, but it would take a lot more effort to do the same thing. Condi damage seems balanced enough but it just seems so much more about spam and procs than it is about rotations and managing cooldowns like playing a power build is.

Basically what the guys above me said. Even a rank 30 may have played 95% hotjoins and the 5% arenas he did people just yelled and raged at him instead of trying to help him learn to play.

There are plenty of people who wouldnt listen anyway, but trying to help is better than nothing, im still fairly new and I know i learn a lot more from calm people than people who yell “WTF u scrubs why u no play better go back to pve u scrub”.

That or you know join a pvp guild so you dont have to deal with randoms

Because eles have so much cooler animations than wars.

Ignoring the actual content of this post for a second, just pointing out that 99.99% of mmo devs in the history of gaming have always ignored threads that are titled directly at them.

And to the actual content, you really think they have been balancing based on the opinions of people on the forums? Really? Just look at the history of say, the necro or ele forums and the patch notes from those time periods and see how much they have based balancing on the forums in the past. God knows what they end up basing their final balance decisions on but its not these forums

Thieves and necros are good for it, condi engies can also melt them pretty quickly, you just have to be sure to load enough conditions on him BEFORE he gets below 25% and he wont be able to cleanse them all in time. Being able to keep a point fully capped while doing this is pretty hard for those classes, so if you want to do both a dps guard with all the stability/blinds/blocks/teleports you can spec for would probably work like the guy above me said. That or maybe even a condi warrior

From the ones ive opened it seems to be between 10 and 20% chance to get a scrap, depending on how lucky you feel, the time of day, the phase of the moon, ect.

Really just buy the skin outright on the trading post instead of trying to gamble on getting scraps to buy it yourself.

Its too bad too, they would probably sell a lot more keys if it was more reasonable, no one is going to actually buy keys with gems if it takes 300 of them to just MAYBE have enough to get one of the older skins.

If youre going for ascended armour I would say start saving up charged quartz crystals and wait (you can only refine one of them a day = 30 day min for celestial armor alone). The other ascended mats will take over a month to get anyway so by that time the new patch changes will be out and people will see what it amounts to.

If youre just going for exotic gear dont bother with celestial, the recipes are only available on the trading post and cost almost 100g so wayyyy not worth when ascended gear is out. Stick with zerker or swap in a mix of zerk and knight/valk if you want more defense. Though if youre only doing pve then exotic zerker gear is basically the only thing youll ever need.

The base cooldown should be 9 seconds no matter what just like every other weapon swap, since the attunements always seem to be considered a weapon swap anyway. And make speccing arcane give a different bonus, like a boost to the procs/boons you get on swapping attunements. Now that would help “build diversity”, which the devs seem to talk about all the time even though it never changes since you still have to spec into arcane for almost any build.

Agree with the first part, but their burst is reliant on using all three utility skills at the same time as well as a kitten cd knockdown and doesnt really do more burst than a lot of other classes can do in the same gear even though those other classes use less abilities to do that burst. How is that OP

The amount of time you spend at the crafting window is like 1/10000th of the time it takes you to grind the resources to make those items in the first place. Go google a guide and its mind numbingly easy once you have all the mats. I hate crafting in other games too but other than the stupid amount of time gated mats you need, its pretty much as easy as it could be in this game.

Its boring but theres no other way. That or wait 2 years and there probably will be alternative ways of getting it by then.

In spvp it seems obvious that it should be, since the only game type is conquest and 1v1’s will have to happen between people roaming around the side points. So if one class is so much better at roaming that people never run anything else for it then the game will end up with no diversity at all.

Which is probably why it takes so long to balance. Wvw this kind of thing doesnt matter at all, and pve players are entirely different too. Seems like it would be easier if there was an even bigger difference between pvp and pve/wvw abilities like there already is on some abilities.

Yes, please change it to something useful instead of a trait that is only good for dueling a few classes in dire gear or extremely specific team situations. Though to be honest relying on a group where 100% of your dps comes from conditions seems WAY more cheesy than relying on a group based around an ele that can be immune to those conditions at full hp.

Everyone already agrees that eles are awesome in pve, strong in wvw with a staff from inside a zerg, mediocre but passable with a lot of effort as a s/d or d/d roamer in small scale wvw, and mostly useless in spvp.

So no idea who your post is addressed to. Did you just want to brag that you managed to find the meteor shower button while calling the rest of us bad for not being as smart as you are? Or are you upset that space on the forums is taken up by people talking about spvp buffs while they should be spending their time zerging around in wvw.

Not trying to troll but posts like this are a waste of time and make the whole ele community look bad. If we can do pve and large scale wvw but suck in small scale wvw and spvp then the class is still lacking in 1/2 of the areas of the game, so how is that not a problem.

I cant wait til they nerf decap engies and (hopefully) buff/fix turrets. Will become much more interesting when people switch from complaining about decaps to complaining that their warriors cant beat a power engy thats setup on a point with 5 turrets out.

Hotjoin – Yes, run a zerk amulet and make sure you hit things before they hit you and things might die as long as they dont see it coming. That or run d/d full bunker spec and annoy people while your highest crits from a kitten cd ability will be like 3k.

Other modes dont bother if youre new. A really experienced one in the s/d burst spec can do ok in team/solo que but its still easy to counter and most of the ones ive watched put out burst every 40 seconds and spend the rest of their time respawning, doesnt matter how “skilled” he is at it.

Its not so much that the class is terrible its just that wars/thieves/engies/necros outclass them by a pretty big margin. New patch in march might change it though so if they become fotm again (lets hope not), now would be a good time to get some experience in before all the warriors reroll eles and youre past the point where you can say “I played an ele before it was cool yo”

I doubt anyone (other than the people who do this) would care about someone who afk’s for 45 minutes getting banned. It would be sad though if they start banning people for short afks. Ive played other games with similarly sized instances with a 2 minute afk timer and it was terrible, you could barely even go the bathroom most of the time. If its an hour long event you should be able to take a 5 minute afk but anything much longer than that should get a kick.

Those patch notes are entirely fake. No idea how so many people still think theyre real when there are multiple dev posts saying otherwise

My ele dodged signet of spite and then proceeded to kill a necro in a hotjoin the other day. Seriously almost all of those poor necros have quit by now because of the terrible OP eles running around everywhere 2 shotting things with those crazy arcane skills while dodging 100% of enemies attacks. Nerf plz.

Would be cheaper to flat out level leatherworking from 1-500 than it would be to buy 15 damask. Making damask cost so much silk and other mats was just dumb.

Also cant wait for people to come in and say “its your fault for not watching the market and buying 20000 silk beforehand when it was cheap, the economy is fine noobs”

Dont see how they could put in open world content involving the invasion of a large city and not have it be zerg content, though it is too easy with that many people. Still harder events that scale based on # of people (i thought this was supposed to happen more) you can actually fail and get no loot from would make it more interesting, but it makes sense they made it easy so casual gamers dont have to worry. It does get boring after 1 run but if its that boring then go wvw or do a dungeon or something until its after primetime and you can get in an instance of it with a smaller zerg.

I mean if people are playing a game for super challenging 5-10 man instanced pve content they why are they in gw2 and not in wow or something.

Just learn to find the real one and the fights become entirely different, thats what I had to do when i started the game. Making one and testing the abilities they have on the target dummies is probably another good way to see what they do. Once you figure it out youl find wars/thieves/engies are much more annoying to fight

Well as long as you have a decent computer and dont get seizures from too many effects on screen at once, though if you do then you shouldnt be in this game to begin with.

Should be in the bug forum because if other profession mechanics arent affected by chill, which i dont think any are, then eles shouldnt either

Also tool kits are not really the engy mechanic, tool belt skills are. I dont remember if they are affected by chill or not, though they probably shouldnt be either.