Guild Wars 2

Unload, and all ranged direct damage abilities are supposed to deal much less damage than melee.

Unload lasts longer than the dodge evasion, and even with no traits you can unload 3×. So dodging it helps, but doesn’t make you immune or anything.

It’s easy to LoS, but the unloader should be using some other ability (or weaponset) if that’s going to happen.

Not that I’m defending the P/P in general. The set needs work. But the problem is not unload

S/P with SB. Caltrops, Roll for Init and Shadow Refuge is what I use

Against blindable mobs, Black powder+autoattack

Against bosses, Pistol Whip spam for evasion

Soldier armor mostly. Knight and Zerker jewelry. Ruby gems in everything

Because then you’re like a staff ele without meteor shower or water/air fields

Also, because cluster bomb is sooooo sloooow.

Aside from that, some people do make it work.

I’ve seen SoM used successfully in WvW video on this very forum last week. It was in a P/D + shortbow video (condition damage with caltrops. Full carrion gear)

It lends itself to P/D very well because you can’t be kited, and it’s a very evasive ranged playstyle that can save it’s init for CnD. Also, the out-of-stealth attack is 5 hits.

If you really aren’t seeing them and they pop on you, then you’re probably not looking hard enough. While thieves can stealth for a long time, there’s usually a clue they’re around: showdow refuge or blinding powder graphic. I’m going to assume this isn;t the case.

If you see them in the distance and they vanish, some things to try:

Stability will allow you to dodge out of the BS (you still take mug and CnD damage)

Stand on the fear mark

Time your dodges. They have 3-4 seconds of stealth (more if they blow their heal for extra stealth duration), and they have to attack in that time or run.

Lich form as soon as they stealth…odds are they run

Run the other way if they stealth (yeah, this is a non-solution, but good if your cooldowns are down)

Invuln the BS. Possibly the whole burst if timed right

Protection is great against burst

Aegis is great because it absorbes mug, but needs a guardian. Block is also an option for some classes

With the significant amount of healing you generate, have you considered adding some toughness?

Either cond/prec/tough, like whispers from dungeon/karma sets or shaman (tough/heal/cond) armor.

Neither heal or precision is an ideal stat tradeoff from power, but at least shaman weapons are relatively cheap to test with.

The lowered cooldown on stealing doesn’t compare to any of the other stats that a thief gets from traits (power/prec/condition duration, etc)

It compares to the Warrior +0-3% burst damage, the ranger pet-swap cooldown reduction, the elementalist attunement switching cooldown reduction, etc.

All classes have a trait line that enhances their class’s special ability. Some are more useful than others.

Does this mean we can use 2x Rage to get a 19% chance to proc quickness on crit?

Instant cast abilities designed to be outside the skill queue, so they can be cast in the middle of other skills. They can also be cast while stunned/knockedown.

Design decision from beta. Probably not going to change because all classes have instant cast spells (warrior shouts, ele arcane/some sir skills, many more)

However, steal could be changed to not be instant, but just have a very short cast time (ie, .01s). I think some warrior abilities are like this (warhorn maybe?). They have no cast time, but cannot be used during other skill’s charging.

If both hit, it actually has good single target damage for the init spent. But it’s a long animation, so the DPS blows.

If the second hit misses, both DPI and DPS suck. Maybe a quick fix could be to balance more of the damage to be front-loaded? Swap the damage of the 2 attacks?

Compared to elementalist, the thief elites are amazing. I solidly hate all of my ele elites for different reasons

Compared to Warrior, they’re more interesting than everyone using sigil of rage. Although most classes would take sigil of rage in a heartbeat.

Daggerstorm is good in many ways, but not great at anything (stability and reflect alone are very powerful). It’s not like you can’t dodge out of a melee bomb

The coefficient on BS when it’s not from behind is about the same as C&D

They could easily make a from-behind backstab only be +50% more damage (it’s now 100% more), but apply a bunch of debuffs. 5 stacks of vuln, 5 of bleeding and poison.

Which would drop our D/D burst, but make D/D conditions a lot more viable.

A short duration buff that allows for “only” +50% damage is also borderline OP. If they lower it to +50%, they need to keep in the drawbacks

I just don’t understand how +100% has managed to stay in. Maybe they look at it in respect to the fact that everyone has 2 (or more) 100% immunity dodges. And many classes have 3s damage immunity like Endure Pain and Mist Form

Why is this ability not used more? I can understand why it would be niche in PvP, but in PvE it seems almost essential:

Caltrops is widely used, and counts as a hit every second per target hit -> good self healing

Most weapons have AE and/or multi-hit. DB, Unload, Pistol whip, Cluster Burst, etc -> more good self healing, some with evasion built in

I’m pretty sure that lifetap procs and on-crit spells (Flame Burst) also count for an added bonus. Even with S/D I find myself back to SoM in PvE

Is there really so little condition removal that we’re forced to use Hide in Shadows? Or is it just that the more important fights are against one enemy?

Carrion armor from the TP is your best bet (prec, power, vit). If you want to save your gold, you can buy some Rare L80 armor that will probably only cost ~20s a piece.

The reason why you want to save your gold is that it’s not worth it to buy rare accessories (they’re more expensive than rare armor), and jump right to exotic amulet, rings and earrings.

Full carrion on all 5 accessories, but replace the jewels in all of them with Zerker (ruby)

Then, as you gain karma, cash, badges, etc, you can replace the rare armor with exotic (whispers, soldier, rampager, whatever) to tune your stats a bit better.

People act like gear doesn’t have 3 stats (or more for some amulets) on it. Full toughness gear still leaves a lot of other stats.

It’s a fact that toughness and protection mitigate direct damage. +1000 toughness on a guardian removes about 33% damage taken. Add in protection and I’m pretty sure you’re taking 1/2 the damage of a no-toughness, no-protection guardian. Which is still 10% less damage than a clothy takes.

Condition damage shouldn’t remove stealth. That’s just stealth breaking, because conditions are all over attacks in this game. Many high DD attacks also deal bleed/dot/burning.

Being disabled (knockback, stun, fear, etc) might be a reason to remove stealth, but even that’s going to have to be looked at closely.

Random proc has a place in GW2. See elementalist Glyph of Storms…or any on-crit sigil.

Venoms as the OP wants them would IMO be much better as a Signet-type ability. Equip them and have a passive chance for a weapon proc. Activate them for the guaranteed effect (only 1x probably)

Only make the active effect get shared to the group with venom sharing.

Short bow is a great weapon. Great utility, AE damage and good condition damage. I love short bow

But it is not a single target weapon, not even close. Single target damage is poor at best, even with shotgunning. When comparing to D/D, remember to factor in Initiative-based attacks, stealth attacks and finishers.

S/P can cure a condition for 3 init with shadow return from sword #2.

D/P works great at low levels

At higher levels (60+, and especially in Orr, etc), I find that the heal from SoM is necessary, unless I want to spend all my init on Black Powder and a lot of time auto-attacking. When mobs take 5 cycles of Pistol Whip (or 10-15 sec of sword auto attacks) to kill and are hitting you for 5-10% of your health every attack, you need evasion and/or mass healing.

SoM+Pistol Whip provide that

You get 3 bleeds for splitting, and a tiny bit more damage. Also 3 chances to proc hits/crits (SoM, Init on crit, etc).

But, you get the risk of not hitting with a split shot because the spread is pretty large unless your timing is perfect

Is it confirmed to cost init to split? I can’t get in game, but the builder shows a 1s cooldown, not a 1 init cost

Where is my leather bikini?

(I’m open to it being a fur bikini)

It’s only going to get worse as gold farmers (and gold buyers) drive inflation

So, a simple solution:

4 exotic (weapon) each from 4 dungeons will give you the precursor

ie, run arah until you get enough tokens for 4 staves. Put them all into the mystic forge and get a “special” arah exotic staff. Do that for 3 other dungeons (the 3 highest level ones). Put those 4 “special” exotic staves into the mystic forge and get Legend

That’s a medium grind, but it is guaranteed. Make it all bind on aquire and someone will have to do it all themselves. 390 tokens per staff = 1560 tokens per dungeon. At 180/day tokens, about 9 days of 3x dungeon runs (for each of 4 dungeons).

With the added bonus of motivating people to run dungeons more.

Jumping puzzles are worse on a charr. They’re the same size, but the awkward sideways running animation (when in combat) or four-footed running makes small ledges horrible.

Doing the PVP jump puzzle on a human was ridiculously easy after charring it for so long.

For all the lowbies, 5 signet is superior until about L60, when you can trait this properly. You can use any weapon set. I personally used sword+warhorn with GS for PvE. IMO leveling is all about mobility. I also used the +damage and +crit with high adrenaline traits

The reason for 5-signet is because of the trait that gives +40 precision for each unused signet. That’s a flat amount, so is pretty OP at lower levels

Ravnodaus.5130:

90 power is 10% increase from base damage. The damage from the signet is 15% to totaled damage.

90 power is around 5% increase in damage, unless you are a condition build

Base power: 916
Power from gear: ~900
Total power: ~1800

Adding 90 power to 1800 is +5% damage.

Activating the signet loses you that 5% damage, but adds 15% to what’s left. Basically a +10% damage increase

However if you have bloodlust stacks, might stacks, food, etc that increases your power, then you could be up to 2700 power. Then the passive part of the signet is worse (+3.33% damage) but the active part of the signet becomes a bit better.

Ranger axe, elementalist staff (Air #1) and thief shortbow all have the same bouncing behavior. There are probably other classes too

Doing it the “in-game” way, there is no substitute to just exploring, grinding hearts, events and gathering. Note that being an obsessive gatherer helps tons when levelling an alt, as you have lots of extra mats

Doing it the “shortcut” way: Get a bunch of gold. Buy mats from the TP, craft a skill to 375, getting about 9 levels each time. Cooking and jewelcraft are the cheapest. You can hit 80 in 5 hours this way.

Note that fully gearing at 80 is pretty expensive, and there is no substitute for gold when gearing exotics…other than dungeon runs or karma farming. Other costs:

L40 book: 1g
L60 book: 2g

So a good compromise of fast and cheap would be:

1) Craft/heart grind to 50. TP buy a full suit of L50 green gear, weapons and gems (they’re about 1.5s each…cheap).

2) Run dungeons until 55-60. Do not spend badges on any gear under L80

3) Craft to 65. TP buy a full suit of green gear

4) Run dungeons until 70-72. Do not spend badges on any gear under L80

5) Grind Straights of Devastation, Malchor’s Leap and Cursed Shore events/hearts. 100% these zones for decent rewards. You are now L80

6) Gear yourself up with L80 exotics from badges/karma and cash.

The easiest way to lie is with math

Lets start with: “On 3200 armor backstab will hit for 3855 damage.”

1. To get 3200 armor you need complete toughness gear up to and including Runes. Usually limiting vitality options, but doable

1. a crit with +100% crit damage (a mostly glass cannon) will deal 7,710

1. a crit from behind with the right runes (+10%), with +10% damage on sigils will deal 9,252

1. add assassins signet (50%) and 5 stacks of might (~8%) will deal 13,723

I’m sure we can add some more math (is the player under 50% health, is there room in the build for +% damage due to another flanking bonus or +% damage from having high initiative), but haven’t we gone far enough?

Either the damage coefficient of BS is too high, or it is too easy to stack +damage buffs, because the tankiest player in the game just got hit for 13k by one attack.

Or does my math lie?

Is auto-running really a measure of speed in the game? You might as well say that guardians have worse defense than anyone but ele or thief…assuming you’re using no abilities or traits and just standing there getting hit!

Flashback abilities are where you can port to a preset location. Thief sword #2 and some mesmer abilities. ie, you teleport to and then flashback. They can be very handy in combat…or just running around town.

Assuming other classes just instantly get perma swiftness is not conducive to discussion, just like assuming all thieves have +25% move speed. It costs the thief 1 util slot, just like swiftness costs other classes cooldowns and/or traits.

For example, to blast out swiftness on an ele, they have to use a 40s cooldown lightning field…not to AE stun, but just to run faster for 10 seconds. Then a 30s cooldown for another 10s of swiftness, then use a glyph or signet and attunement swap to fill in the rest of the time, depending on +% boon duration. It’s not hard, but it does have to be done…and it limits your combat options.

To get perma swiftness on a warrior, they need to use Signet of Rage and warhorn (a utility weapon with no attacks)

Other classes have similar tradeoffs

Swiftness is 33%, up to 40% if you use 6 Superior Runes of Speed.

It’s the thief active abilities that make them faster than anyone else, especially in combat.

Blast combos have a very tight area of effect. It’s a problem with many combo-buffs. I think the area of the field is the limit, but I’m not sure.

With a ranged blast and a ranged field, there may be a chance for things to get out of sync?

Assassin Signet: nerfed. Might stacks, +10% to the next 5 attacks, guaranteed crit of the next 3 attacks, etc. Something that spreads out the damage.

Quickness (all classes): 50% instead of 100%. Cooldown reduced from 60s to 45s…or removal of the disadvantage

Heartseeker…maybe

Backstab…maybe

So much misinformation:

Warrior is very mobile, can have perma swiftness which requires a specific (but very usable) setup to attain it. If they want to go nuts with mobility, sword+warhorn and GS is amazing with basically 3 charge abilities and a snare/immob removal

Ele is very mobile, can have perma swiftness with moderate trait/skill investment. But even dagger/dagger (2 charge abilities) is not as mobile as warrior mentioned above. Scepter/dagger has 1 charge and Staff is just not very mobile. Also has a snare/immob removal skill

Thief is very mobile. +25% movement and several teleports. Saying that they can’t use initiative to move around because it keeps you from starting combat at full init is just misleading. Wait until init is full, and use a move skill to travel 900 units every ~5-6 seconds (or a short heartseeker leap every 3 sec if SB is not for you). They also have the best in-combat mobility with several shadowstep abilities and charge abilities, plus flashback.

On initiative vs cooldown:

Neither is always better, but it depends on the cooldown vs init cost. An ele using a 30s cooldown for swiftness means there’s a good chance he’ll miss out on using it for freedom (snare/immob removal) later on. It’s even worse when when using Static Field (40s cooldown) for swiftness blasts, because that ability is often used to initiate combat.

Now, using warrior sword (8s)/GS (~10s and 20s) or ele using Ride the Lightning (15s) has less risk, because the ability is more likely to be up because you can usually se combat coming.

Initiative recharges at 1 pt/sec, so using SB to travel will put you 6s away from full init. Not bad, but init affects all abilities. So if you’re jumped right after porting, it’s a lot rougher than being jumped and having 1 movement skill on cooldown. In general, thieves have it better as long as they have situational awareness.

Divinity runes vs boon duration (2x water, 2x monk, 2x earth, OR 2x water, 2x monk, 2x major water):

If you’re not as good with timing your buffs, +30% (or 40% or 50%) boon duration is amazing.

Going from 130% boon duration to 180% boon duration =

1.5s more regen on attuning to water
2.5s more protection on attuning to earth (technically 100% uptime with 9s prot boon on earth attune), and 3s more from Armor of Earth
4s more vigor from each cantrip
Fury and swiftness uptime over 100% (might also be that high without extra boon duration if you swap attunements fast enough)

Really, the extra vigor and protection durations are the biggest wins from this setup. Is that worth 300 stat points and 12% crit damage? I’m not sure.

However, you can probably run 0/10/0/30/30 like this. And either aura-share or have a lot of condition removal.

Why do you think there would be a problem if ANet simply stopped free transfers to certain “full” servers.

The free transfer criteria doesn’t need to have anything to do with the status that’s on the server select screen.

It’s easy enough with 22 servers to build a list of servers that are free to transfer to. Pick the bottom 4-7 and done. Change the list every week. This keeps people from nighttime switching to high pop servers.

Exotic armors are also available for 42,000 karma per piece. Look at the karma vendors at the end of events in Cursed Shore (ie, Grenth event) or Malchor’s Leap.

Elementalist is best in WvW of all the different things there is to do in GW2. Mostly because of meteor shower, 20 arcane and a significant amount of DPS gear.

There’s also a place for S/D in open field, but you will need more group support. Although our guild’s primary S/D bomber switched over to warrior because that class does it better.

Fire grab is on how long a cooldown? Right….45 seconds. The problem is that almost all ele 1-5 abilities fall into these categories:

Easy to avoid (ie, the #2 problem): DT, lave font, ice spike, eruption, shatterstone, etc
Low damage: Most autoattacks
Marginal utility: Rock armor, water trident
Good, but with ridiculously long cooldown: Fire grab, earthquake, frozen ground, healing rain
Easy to avoid and a long cooldown: churning earth

And scattered in there are some good abilities, but there are not enough “good” abilities with moderate cooldowns.

30 arcane w/Elemental Attunement+gear+constant attunement swapping allows for nearly 100% uptime of:

Protection (70% uptime)
Swiftness
Might
Fury
Regen

Attunement swapping is instant, so can be done in the middle of casting another skill (with 15+ arcane). Allowing you to cast 1-3 spells in the 2-3 seconds you spend in each attunement.

But kitten it’s hard to keep going that way. I always feel like a whirling dervish doing it. It also takes a lot of skill to pick and aim the right spells.

Some weapon sets (scepter/x in earth for example) don’t have enough abilities to cast the second time around, so all you get from going into that attunement is 1 auto-attack.

Other classes got their weapon specific traits reworked at the very end of beta to be more versatile.

For example:

All offhand weapon cooldowns reduced by 20%, rather than mentioning a specific weapon.

or

Hammer abilities have a 20% reduced cooldown and deal 25% more damage to stunned (incapacitated?) opponents.

Shortbow and longbow cooldowns reduced by 20%

For ele, it’s just a 20% cooldown reduction to fire/water/earth/air for a major trait. Fire is one of our 4 weapons, compared to 2 weapons for most classes. So, not only do we get less of an effect, it only applies to 1/4 of our weapons.

It’s better than every elementalist elite…

If you’ve played other classes, then you’ve noticed that the #3,4,5 skills for ele are significantly longer than most non-ele #3,4,5 skills, but don’t have a better effect.

For example: Compare Air/Staff #4 to Warrior/Warhorn #4. Same effect, but a 20s cooldown for warrior and a 30s cooldown for elementalist.

Meteor Shower is an exception. It’s the compansation skill that carries the ele on it’s shoulders.

The karma vendors that sell exotic pow/tough/vit armor are all at the end of chain events in cursed shore/malchior’s leap and maybe straights of dev too. For example: finish Grenth event and look at the karma vendor

42k karma for 1 piece of exotic armor. Look closely before you buy, because non soldier-type armor is mixed in randomly

Staff, heal glyph, arcane shield, arcane wave and whatever else

Killing 1-2 mobs takes a little longer than S/D or D/D

Having the ability to run with perma speed, and down groups of 3-4 mobs by blowing all your utilities is very nice

Downed state: already been talked about

Atunement time reduction reworked. Too many eles have to go arcane to avoid being locked out of skills.

Elementalist support also needs to focus on debuffing as well as buffing. Don’t ignore the utility of a well placed frost field, or similar effects

Since engineer is the closest comparison:

Engineer:
Gets a new weapon set with no cooldown, no timer and no charges
Gets a F2-F4 skill for the new weapon
Gets 1 weapon and no swapping

Elementalist
Gets a new weapon with charges and a time limit
Gets a second weapon for someone else to use
Gets 4 weapon sets

IMO, the elementalist should have a perma-weapon like the engineer, but the dropped weapon for someone else should have charges and a time limit

Scepter/air’s single target damage is horrible. Arc lightning’s channel does crap damage for the first 1/3rd, low damage for the second third and good damage for the last third. I shouldn’t have to channel for 2-3 seconds just to get 2k single target damage

Most ele’s pass through this attunement in 2-3 seconds

S/D’s problem is that most of the #1 skills suck, and the #2 skills are easy to avoid. Resulting in massive bursts, or zero damage.

Look at all classes. The #2 skill is on a 6s cooldown, and it’s usually a high damage skill if used right. But it’s a lot easier to land a shotgun skill than DT.

It’s a fire trait, so it shouldn’t increase all of our combo fields. It should, however, increase the duration of Meteor Shower

As it is now it’s a pretty lame tier 3 trait

I’m not really sure how you can say Scepter is single target. Most of the #2 and #3 skills are AE:

DT and Phoenix
Shatterstone and trident
Earth Line AE blind
Lightning is all single target

I think one of the problems with elementalist in sPvP is that scepter is full of easy to avoid AE damage….and that’s 1/2 of staff’s job.