Guild Wars 2

Ways eles can get swiftness:

Without traits

Staff air 4
Blast finisher in staff air 5
oh dagger air 5
Glyph of elemental harmony in air
Air elemental randomly

With zephyrs boon,
all of the auras
leap in ice or fire field
blast in ice field
any rune/sigil/trait that triggers auras

With inscription, all the glyphs cast in air

With elemental attunement, simply attuning to air.

Combining any of those should give any setup some kind of a access to perma/near-perma swiftness.

Vasham.2408:

Angry Joe is part of That Guy With the Glasses and thus loses all credibility as a critic of anything.

Somebody seems kitten over somebody saying something over internet.

None stack, only the highest applies.
And since you´re ele, just forget about those and roll with perma swiftness. Well unless you try to perma stealth the wvw JP.

Roysten.3456:

A d/d ele or any other burster can kill you if you do that, it might take 2.5 seconds though.

It´s really confusing when same set can do burst or bunker, you´re about to cry bullkitten, and then remember there´s some gimmick there.

Chipies.7654:

Strang.8170:

Difference between pve and pvp equipment is like day and night. It´s a shame we can´t test pve equipment anywhere really, since those dummies don´t take crits(big part of damage calculations).

And we’re not even mentioning conditions…

indeed.

Difference between pve and pvp equipment is like day and night. It´s a shame we can´t test pve equipment anywhere really, since those dummies don´t take crits(big part of damage calculations).

Solori.6025:

shochinhwa.1648:

Solori.6025:

shochinhwa.1648:

“Thieves are the masters of mobility, stealth and high single target damage”. This is where the problem is, doesn’t matter what nerf/balance you do to the thief skills, if you want to maintain this design philosophy you don’t need to balance thief

No matter what change you make to thief, they will always be the masters of the 3 best things in this game now – mobility, stealth and DPS. Period.

So with this in mind….
Why are we ( forum warrior’s on both sides and in the middle of the fence) still having this same conversation every hour?

Cause we are human and we find things to argue about.

Thats aggravatingly illogical -_-

Its like the saying

" why scream if no one can hear you?"

Because screaming is fun!

Solori.6025:

And for dungeons, I cant think of a single reason why staff would be better that S/D or D/D

but then again..

I hate staff

2x waterfield for starters.
Ridiculous amounts of soft cc.
Fields beyond your wildest dreams.
oh, and 1200 range.

Staff is awesome weapon, and infact is the only thing i used when levelling my ele, everything else seemed rather lackluster. Mainly because with staff your traits really don´t matter, nor does your gear…well they matter, but having subpar build and gear doesn´t harmstring you.

And then to weakness accusations:

Lightning hammer and spam 1.
Glyph of storms in earth and profit.
All you need for levelling and clearing maps.

Or you can learn to actualy play and profit. Orr in gear ranging from blue to yellow and from lvl 60 to 80 is a breeze. You can facetank 3-5 mobs easy enough.

Thunderbrew.7034:

lol really? thats anet doing that?

yeah

Thunderbrew.7034:

Someone make a build to crit the person who started “kitten” on these forums,
SOOO sick of that term.

ermmmm…..it´s the profanity filter

I wish i had rolled other professions before ele…my alts wouldn´t feel so bring if i had.

Ele´s are great, you won´t be dissapointed…well except on the damage department.

Benjamim.9120:

Awww i’d like to find a nuke build with a bit of survivability…..playing D/D bunker gets boring after sometime….anyone?

Lol, nuke build with survivability…good luck finding that in any game

But yea, GC build that spikes out a target or two in a second? Fine enough.
People who keep building squishy will keep wrothing over it like they do over BS thieves, kill shot warriors and what not.

Seems really fun build though, i might try it sometime when soloing.

ThiBash.5634:

What kind of trait would you recommend instead of Blasting Staff?

Renewing stamina is awesome. All the fields constantly ticking damage make sure vigor stays activated plenty of time. There´s no better defense than avoiding all of the damage with extra dodges.
Arcane energy if you have many arcane utilities or signets.
Arcane retribution if you have some crit dmg in your stats, and even without crit dmg if you wish to go more offensive. Description doesn´t make it clear, but it gives 5 seconds of guaranteed crits, everything you do after ti activates crits, no matter how many hits you score.
Final shielding is worth it too, when it chooses to work.

They all offer something that simply cannot be achieved with training, unlike most of what blasting staff offers.

I don´t understand being upset over double teamings even if there was communication involved. Like i earlier said, double teaming is part of the game, essential part at that. Claiming that communicating outside the game makes it any more evil than when done without communication, makes me sigh just as deep as making it evil in the first place. Devs didn´t design this game to be played in a vacuum, i don´t believe even a second that they didn´t take in account ouside communications.
Well, that´s what i think of it anyway. Sadly though i will keep on sighing considerable amounts while people keep getting slandered for the audacity of doing something rather than meekly getting trod over in game.

That aside, i wish i could already get in game so i wouldn´t have to rant here on forums

Holding Enemy BL and your own BL completely, 145 points for you times two. 4 Tallies in an hour gives 1160 points per hour. If we assume rest of the maps are divided equaly, that´s 1160 points difference per hour. Four hours would give 4640 points difference in matter of four hours.

Add to that points from dolyak kills and sentries(1 point per veteran, dolyaks vary), extra income if rest of the map is also not equaly divided…5k increase in difference isn´t hard to do.

Maximum difference per hour would be 2780 points, 11120 points in four hours.

<edit>

In this case, the server had 240 pnts per 15 mins. The points are pretty even. 240, 230 and 225. Though that is approx. and the more recent was about the same when I posted the question.

Most likely they flip the camps for tally. That can net a nice amount of points difference, and can be gone before you notice.

Staff support.
Auramancer or aurasharing.
Signet-aura build.
Tanky D/D

Tortun.5946:

You may be following your commander blindly into an unfair win which is how we currently see it as the scores are still pretty level between Piken and AR and both sides are sticking to the same halves of the map.

Not directly aimed at you, but that unfair win part really ticked me off….

There´s a reason they put 3 servers against eachother. Reason is that things wouldn´t go stale, if 1 server was clearly superior. 2 losing servers could start working together and do something about it.
The game is designed that way.
It´s not supposed to be fair, it´s not supposed to be balanced and it´s not supposed to give everyone a medal for simply being there. By design the wvw is unfair. It was designed so that such strategies would be possible.

Then people go on and on and on how they were double teamed, how rough they have it, how unfair, unjust, unchivalrous and just about anything they can imagine it was.
News flash, it wasn´t. The game was designed to allow it, it´s a core feature. You fail to use it, you fail to play the game. Doesn´t matter if you choose to power on alone or play the situation to your favor somehow, if you can´t do it, you don´t deserve the victory. If you win, it´s not any less a victory if you used the other 2 servers to your advantage. It´s not any more a victory if you stood alone and fancied yourself a martyr.

Each time somebody says they were double teamed and it was so unfair, i give out a long sigh…and since i´m from piken, i do a lot of sighing.
Please, just stop inflating your ego by claiming yourselves martyr and declaring yuorselves holier than thou. That goes mostly out to my fellow piken players, but i´ll give a honorary mention for you gandara fellows.

I wouldn´t fret over nerfs anytime soon.

If LoD paintrain was anything to go by, such things aren´t frowned upon by devs.

Cempa.5619:

What other builds -from any class- can do what this build is doing?

oooohhh, trollolo thread resurrection.

What other profession can stomp on clueless people? Why all of them i think.

TwoBit.5903:

Strang.8170:

TwoBit.5903:

Eruption>Ice Spike>Ice Field>Lightning surge then boom!

Eruption>Magnetic wave>icespike>frozen ground>lavafont>signet of earth>lafafont etc.

I Find lightning surge lacking in damage and cast time.

You can cancel out of it via attunement swap or dodgerolling and it’ll still go off. I find it to be great damage that way.

Really o_O, well aguess it shoudn´t surprise as many other skills suffer of the same bug…i wouldn´t expect it to stay in too long thouhg.

Caffynated.5713:

Without Blasting Staff, Lava Font barely reaches over the lip of a tower wall. With it, you cover half the battlement. It lets you hit people who would otherwise be out of range. That’s often the difference between killing somebody and them getting away.

A 50% increase in radius is a 125% increase in total area. That’s huge.

I would not run staff in WvW without BS. It’s mandatory to be effective in wall fights, and helps a lot in open field zerging.

I just want them to increase the blast radius of the individual meteors in meteor shower.

Staff is perfectly viable without BS in wall fights too, be it on the wall or under.
CC at the right moment does everything BS could do and you save a trait.

I`m not denying it doesn´t make things easier, but everything it does can be done with little practice aswell. Other traits offer benefits far harder to compensate with training.

Before this turns into another combat swap up/op blah blah blah thingy.

It would be great, and has been requested since first beta weekend.
Reply back then was that they wanted to do it properly and make a complete template system, so you can switch whole sets of gear, skills, traits and such in a rapid manner.

I run basicly the same build, but with even more focus on group support: reduced cd on water skills and cleansing wave, for group wide condition removal and bit more frequent aura buffs.
2x monk, water and earth runes.

Shame that boons from cantrips aren´t shared :/, but cant have everything.

TwoBit.5903:

Eruption>Ice Spike>Ice Field>Lightning surge then boom!

Eruption>Magnetic wave>icespike>frozen ground>lavafont>signet of earth>lafafont etc.

I Find lightning surge lacking in damage and cast time.

You can aswell cycle through water to drop it when doing dps chains, no reason not to if you´re not being thretened at the moment. But staying in water for cooldown and recast is not efficient, unless your other attunements are on cooldown.

As for actualy hitting with it, rune of earth is rather nice, as is starting with earth skill 5.

SecondtoNone.7549:

Sure, you can still hit enemies without blasting staff but it’s harder and it’s also easier for enemies to run out of it. Blasting staff is superb in pvp and wvw. Sure, in pve, you can get away without using it but not in pvp and wvw. It’s just… strange not to use it. Why would you not want to hit more easily? Give heals more easily? To combo more easily? To have it harder for your enemies to escape from your AoEs? For longer lasting chill? To force people to sit in your AoEs because they encompass the entire cap points in pvp? Without blasting trait, you’d have none of this. It is very useful to have your AoEs take up the entire cap point in pvp. People will sit in it and take a lot of damage because they dont want to leave the cap point.

It´s harder, but gives better results in the end, atleast in my opinion.
I can see why it would feel required for spvp, but for wvw? Nah.

In wvw there´s usualy plenty of targets available, with 5 person cap on aoes i find it rather useful that my skills hit my intended target, and not some five dudes sitting at the edge of my screen (exaggeration, but you get the point).
Being able to more efficiently control areas is nice, and having easier time landing things is nice, but my opinion that added survivability from renewing energy, arcane energy or final shielding outweighs that ease. Imho, survivability in wvw is the king.
Little practice can make you as efficient in hitting things and controlling area as you´d be with blasting staff, but no amount of training makes your energy bar fill any faster, other traits do.

EA and arcane wave make wonders in your fields, i strongly recommend using both if you´re running support build. Takes just little practice to always keep yourself close enough, about dodge rolls distance away to be more precise.

Geyser > healing rain > eruption > ea roll > arcane is about largest amount of healing one can do solo after ea nerf.

Burning retreat > eruption > ea roll > arcane wave gives good amount of might, but the combo needs too precise timing to be of use most of the time, normaly eruption > lavafont > arcanewave is all that can be managed in more active fights.
Frozen armor is not really all that useful in pve, same for swiftness, so i tend to save my blasts for fire and water fields.

Magnetic aura usualy gives me enough defence to just out dps ranged mobs.

Telling your team that when they see water fields they should use finishers does wonders usualy. If they get insulted or ask what a field is it just tells you may not want to run with em in anycase.
Announcing fields on voice comms is even better, if you have access to those.

Normaly i also try to cast my fields on melee players. They have highest propability of staying there and using finsihers. Usualy their health starts to drop rahter rapidly too, so casting water fields on them even at the beginning is always worth it.

SecondtoNone.7549:

There is no good reason to fight with smaller AoEs. The only mild argument for it would be that increasing meteor storm radius is bad because the meteors hit less often but even then…

Get it. It’s a MUST. Best trait ever for staff ele. The increase heal radius is very very nice. Allows more room for you to run inside it and get the passive heal from it.

It takes just a little more practice to get your enemies stay within normal lavafonts area, and when you can do that blasting staff is just a waste of a trait.
Drop it and you can get final shielding, arcane retribution, renewing energy, arcane mastery or arcane energy. All of those far superior IF you don´t need the blasting staff to hit stuff.
Because little practice can make this trait redundant it´s overrated and waste of a trait in the end. Just my 2 cents.

plasmacutter.2709:

cznrhubarb.5946:

Avatara.1042:

Lingering Elements: Excellent. Makes the already ridiculous Elemental Attunement skill even better!

Lingering Elements does nothing to Elemental Attunement. It is actually really bad

Yeah, when I originally read the skill I assumed it meant for elemental attunement as well. It didn’t seem like it was affecting it though, so I actually dropped from 15 to 10 points in Arcana on my build a while ago.

At least I know I wasn’t being crazy, now that other people are confirming there is something fishy with this trait.

It really should extend arcane fury at least by 5 seconds. 2 seconds of fury is REALLY short and pretty much useless without something extending it. Even boon duration runes stacked to high heaven won’t add much to a 2 second boon.

You can hardly expect 5 points trait investment to net you anything big.
The trait has it´s uses, especialy combined with zephyrs boon, perma fury is easily achievable.

FourTwenty.4268:

Not what I’m asking, but keep playing!

Given that hitboxes determine when you lose line of sight and get obstructed, i thought it was what you asked.

Might be that they are marginaly harder to target, but i haven´t noticed much of a difference myself. Might be because i tend to only pay attention to giant glowing red name above the characters.

Rain King.5914:

Saying that it increases all AoEs is misleading:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blasting_Staff

There are some bugs with this trait & they had the sense to not increase the size of your larger AoEs because that would reduce their effectiveness in WvW.

More precisely it seems to increase ground targeted aoes…but yea, buggy and unclear in practice.

Overrated trait and not worth it imho anyway.

Hitboxes are the same for every race.

“I was into eles when they weren´t mainstream, now they are ruined.”
The woe is you.

kanikani.2430:

@Marcus Greythorne – visit the forums to see all the threads to see what is important. Some of those are not important to me at all. And culling is important to you, not the biggest priority for everyone and who knows if even fixable at this point. So far not so good on culling.

@Draygo – The maps are not balanced as it is, so no I do not think it takes much thought at all. Have you seen the BL maps, you really think they are balanced? Do you even play? The SE tower is very useful/well balanced right?

WvW is already dieing the populations are down mostly across the board. I have spoken to people on many servers who see this trend, and I know many hardcore players that have left. This kind of interview and attitude is what kills MMO’s that is just what it is. If you really think this is good enough see what happens to GW2 in the future. This interview confirms they wvw is very low priority.

At this point I would say WvW was not ready for release and 6 months in it still isn’t. You can still jump over walls into every tower/keep in the game in less then 5 min, seriously you are going to talk to me about balance and fine tuning.

You can argue about population and such for all eternity, fact remains that they have the data and numbers that they can base their actions on, you only have subjective perception of players.

On balance….what are you smoking? Because i want whatever it is too. Balance people are speaking of is not perfect balance of every object on map. It about balance of non-symmetric maps. If they introduce 3 different BL maps, and one of them happens to be easier to defend on average than other 2, the team that has that map has big advantage over other 2. It has easier time holding it´s homeland, and therefore can direct more effort on other BLs. Single tower being easier than another has nothing to do with overall balance of the game mode.
Just take a look at EB. It´s asymmetric and as a result some teams have noticeable advantage over other 2 according to many anyhow. They propably spent a lot of time polishing, designing and polishing that map, and still it´s not balanced good enough for some of us. If you can´t see what happens if they just throw up 3 maps for borderlands there´s really no hleping you aguess.

Jackie.1829:

Hah if you think all it takes to have 100k kills is running around with a zerg and spamming aoe skills then good for you.

Question? How do you then kill the opposing zerg in order to accumulate said kills? Hmm I wonder… the answer may lie somewhere in “being good” though you may ponder over it as you please.

Anyways I have read this argument before, its what the spvpers say about spvpers having a high glory rank, yet I think 9/10 times the dude with the higher glory rank wins. Maybe it has something to do with more experience which grows into skill, who knows.

You beat a zerg with a bigger zerg.
In spvp atleast you´re skill increases as you´re constantly getting practice.
In wvw when you´re spamming aoes from behind a zerg, all you get practice in is spamming aoes from behind a zerg…or clicking 1,2 and 3 on siege equipment.

It propably is faster to get it with good play, more nejoyable for certain. But it can be easily achieved with blindly zergging, and therefore doesn´t mean kitten.

Most might from a single combo.
fire 4, earth 2, ea dodge roll, arcane wave. You need rather good timing to pull that off in a battle, but that combined with might from sigils/traits i think is the most might you can get from single staff combo after ea nerf.

Oh, and better start getting used to that eearth 2, you´ll be doing lot of it.

If youre using aura build, leap+firefield is nice.

Bute there seriously isn´t all that much, just 2 fields, leap and blast (earth projectile isn´t worth mentioning really).

Ways eles can get swiftness:

Without traits

Staff air 4
Blast finisher in staff air 5
oh dagger air 5
Glyph of elemental harmony in air
Air elemental randomly

With zephyrs boon,
all of the auras
leap in ice or fire field
blast in ice field
any rune/sigil/trait that triggers auras

With inscription, all the glyphs cast in air

With elemental attunement, simply attuning to air.

Combining any of those should give any setup some kind of a access to perma/near-perma swiftness.
Oh, and the burning retreat/speed, rtl, magnetic grasp when in battle and updraft.

If all else fails, the air signet and one with air trait give pathetic 25%increase.

o_O ….to me that looks just a player with bad connection….

Granted it propably looks more like hacking when it´s live situation (might even be) but if you want to prove a point, you might consider using a footage from someone who´s main form of locomotion isn´t heart seeker spamming.

Occam.9841:

Suggest your chain and lets analyze it.

You still haven´t replied to my last post….i feel left out

Churros.7196:

Strang.8170:

Zorlak.7926:

I cannot get much if any better at playing a Warrior, I have 1000+ hours on my Warrior where a lot of that is spent in PvP. I’ve invented lots of builds that the people in the guild I am in, are using.
There is no way, no damn way I can kill 4-6 players that are all on me at the same time, I can down a few of them, maybe, but I can’t hope to reset the fight/finish people while invulnerable or out heal their damage.

D/D ele will never be able to burst people down like you can while still retaining as much defense as warriors naturaly have.
Eles can never hope to cope with large amounts of cc as well as warriors can.
In team scenarios, eles can never push into enemy zergs the way warriors are able, atleast without quick retreat right after initial push.
Any good warrior could propably add some more things to that list, those are things i´ve observed my guild mates doing.

Actually I find, D/D eles to be the best at pushing enemies away. Warriors do not have the mobility of D/D eles to just go straight into the back line without dying or getting perma cced and return to your own zerg alive after your initial rotation.

When running with large amounts of randoms maybe.

That you are required, rathter fast i might add, to return to backline, is not good pushing.
When you push it good you break into enemy and stay there, eventualy making them completely break apart.

Zorlak.7926:

I cannot get much if any better at playing a Warrior, I have 1000+ hours on my Warrior where a lot of that is spent in PvP. I’ve invented lots of builds that the people in the guild I am in, are using.
There is no way, no damn way I can kill 4-6 players that are all on me at the same time, I can down a few of them, maybe, but I can’t hope to reset the fight/finish people while invulnerable or out heal their damage.

D/D ele will never be able to burst people down like you can while still retaining as much defense as warriors naturaly have.
Eles can never hope to cope with large amounts of cc as well as warriors can.
In team scenarios, eles can never push into enemy zergs the way warriors are able, atleast without quick retreat right after initial push.
Any good warrior could propably add some more things to that list, those are things i´ve observed my guild mates doing.

This is still going on?

1 single knockdown, launch, immobilize, stun or daze at ~20seconds mark of that video would´ve meant dead ele…did it happen?
No, because his opponents were attacking an elemental or picking daisies or lord knows what. They seemed to be mostly lowbies and zerglings anyway, barely any focus on actual battle.
Infact all the cc in that video can be counted with one hand.

People died. True, but shouldn´t be a surprise when they stand in a giant ring of death without hint of a dodge, or even without attacking the ele, and then proceed to eat flame grabs to the face like a champ…a dead champ.
Do you seriously say that people shouldn´t die when they basicly just stand on a field getting attacked?

But, but, but it´s hard to counter and he can escape and and yadayadayaa…..
Here´s a few counters:
Stun, daze, cripple, chill, immobilize, launch, knockdown and root.
Boon removal and actively putting pressure on him afterwards.
Condition damage, that particular build didn´t have all that much condition removal (cleansing flame 3 conditions on a 50 second cooldown, cleansing wave 1 condition on40s cooldown and water attunement 1 condition on 9s cooldown in theory, a lot more in practice) Any respectable condition spec can pump out more than enough to overcome that.

Equaly skilled mesmers, or thieves could propably pull similiar feats. Not every profession can pull it off, but then again if they could what would be the point of having cprofessions in the first place?
Squishier professions don´t have the sheer staying power of guardians, necros or warriors in bigger figths. Guardians walls and rings basicly stop any amount of players in a choke point, that is something no other profession can pull off.
There´s somethign other professions can´t do for every profession.

Short version:

Elona is taken over by a lich, bad kitten happens.
Cantha went extremely xenophobic and shut all connections to everywhere.

Leuca.5732:

Biomanz.9302:

LordByron.8369:

just to ask (still able to stack any amount of swiftness with rune of the pack).

What on earth swiftness is useful for? considering as you are engaged in battle its disabled?

Ever try chasing an ele with swiftness even in combat?

Pretty much this; Doesn’t matter if movement is scaled down; that ele is still running 33% faster than you are if you don’t also have swiftness; and he can keep it up constantly.

Or cripple, chill, daze, stun, immobilize, knockdown, launch, pull, fear, leap, charge, shadowstep, blink or line/ring of warding.

nightwing.2179:

I run dungeons and PvE, and my build centers around condition damage. I personally don’t know if it’s the best way, but I do enjoy my bleeds cutting away the health bars

And it´s rather fun when all you can see of mobs is little white numbers popping up.

Lot´s of apples and oranges here.

It´s pointless to argue about this by taking skills out of context, or in very specific contexts.

LF is good strong skill. I wouldn´t object it having bit longer range, but i don´t really think it deperately needs it. 1200 range is bit more intuitive and easier to perceive though, atleast for me.

Gladiat.6278:

Zplus.4217:

Gladiat.6278:

Also, stealth works as long as they haven’t stealthed within 3 seconds and aren’t hit by an AoE.

Stopped reading from there. Sorry but stealth does not work that way, thieves can still stealth even if hit by aoes and chain stealth right after they come out of stealth, no 3 sec gap needed.

It’s 4AM so I should rephrase. You’re forced out of stealth if you’re hit by an AoE. Correct me if I’m wrong on this. When you say chain stealth right after they come out of stealth, I’m assuming you do not mean attacking after you enter stealth as that is not possible.

This may or may not be the case I’m not entirely sure, but Guardians have removed me from stealth several times in the past with their symbols and I didn’t use any skills at all and simply tried to run away, which led me to the above assumption.

Nope, stealth doesn´t break unless you yourself break it, period.

You can be damaged when in stealth, but they don´t see you.

That using any cc on that ele in those fights would´ve cut the video at 20 seconds mark?
That people who sit there and eat all the eles easily avoidable burst skills get killed?

Murderin.8269:

The players appearing from nowhere was not a skill, it was a slow rendering bug that caused entire armies to not render until they were on top of you.

I could have sworn legendary weapons were slightly better than exotics at one time, i guess i was drunk.

Culling is being fixed, i had to list all options for enemies appearing as i couldn´t have known which exactly was meant.
They did a test on workaround for culling this matchup, but it was rather disastrous, so they´re reverting it back. Luckily though it was just a quick test, so they are and have been working on a long term solution all this time. Personaly i´m anticipating major improvements in february along the content updates they´ve advertised to go live around that time.