Guild Wars 2

That is correct. If you bought enough gems, you get a backpack and if you bought A LOT of gems, you get a mini as well.

The mini was cool enough to pursuade me to buy a lot of gems. :-)

mginn.4502:

Redeemed a $25/2000 gem card from Christmas and bought myself $35/2800 from the gem store with Christmas money.

I received the backpack a few minutes ago. (yay!)

No Mr. Sparkles yet… ;_;

I’m hoping they’re doing this in waves like usual.

Let’s hope that it wasn’t 4000 gems in one go after all. We never did quite got confirmation on that, did we?

LelouchViBritannia.3607:

So, a combo field is as good as one of our grandmaster traits? Figures.

Well, with the limitation that it only works for armor of frost. :-)

It’s also got a very fast activation and you can trait it do do even more (AoE blindness for example).

It works fairly well with Signet of Earth and/or arcane skills. You’ll have to combo it somehow of course, but if you can pull it off, it’ll be a nasty spike. But for everyday use and duelling, it’s not that great.

Whether healing power is amazing or not, depends mostly on how effective it is compared to vitality and toughness. As a simple example, for eles, healing power has a relatively easy time to ‘add more health than vitality’, especially if you get the extra heals from traits. Basically, most eles have so many heals that the healing gained from 1 point of healing power exceeds the 10 health they gain from 1 point of vitality.

Meteor Shower is one of the fastest ways an ele has to clear large groups of open world npcs. Staff works just fine in any form of PvE. The people that claim it doesn’t confuse it with PvP. But the issue in PvP is that players are more adept at dodging/avoiding staff damage spells. NPCs don’t do this, so the staff has a much easier time.

Columbo.5924:

An aura that is shared using powerful aura shares any boons associated with it (for example when using zeyphrs boon or elemental shielding).

As far as I know the auras that are generated using a blast finisher in an ice field do not.

You are misinformed sir. Auras from ice field blast finishers DO share boons. What it doesn’t do, is if you use Powerful Aura and an ice field blast, is apply boons double.

You don’t need Powerful Aura for aura boon sharing…just an ice field and some blast finishers. Staff has an ice field, as do the ice elemental summons. And we just got an additional blast finisher in our heal.

Instead of a tree, we got a decorated golem. That’s much better!

The boon duration from say, Arcana, goes a long way in making up for the loss of stats you would otherwise get from say, Fire Magic. But only if you make sure you use at least some might stacking and other boons. Elemental Attunement seems a must for any ele boon duration build because of its spammability and long duration.

It would be interesting to see how effective Arcana is in providing stats like power to an ele using it. If we just take Sigil of Battle, and assume it refreshes on cooldown, we get 6 stacks of might on average. At 30% boon duration, that would mean 7.8 stacks on average, or 1.8 might gained, which equals 65 power or so. Compared to the 300 power you get from Fire Magic, that’s pitiful.

However, you also gain near-perma fury (=420 precision) from the same attribute line. Assuming 50% uptime, it adds 210 precision on average. Adding the 210 precision to the power and condition damage from the sigil of battle, that sums up to+340 offensive stat points.

Add to that the might from combos, the extra protection and regen and I think you might actually get more ‘stats’ from boon duration that you would get from attributes. Or gear for that matter.

Fuzzion.2504:

Boon duration gear only if u are going the classic dnd route. Otherwise, the conversation is a waste of time.

I see. So boosting your party heals or extending your might durations isn’t useful?

extreme.8526:

Facing 1vs1 is part of the game in wvw and tpvp, what are you talking about. It happens and is not against the design of the game lol.

If WvW was designed for solo play, you’d be able to take a keep all by yourself. Going solo there is a choice, not mandatory and in most cases, not very efficient unless you run into people that also go by themselves. Regardless, WvW is neither based nor balanced on solo play so if anything, the WvW merit of a profession shouldn’t be judged on their ability to solo there. That’s just a side topic. Regardless of how much you enjoy it, WvW is not a solo area.

Nikkinella.8254:

I’m speaking about WvW. Ele is severely lacking there.

Staff eles are fantastic in larger groups.

As far as housing goes, I’d be totally ok with a hall of monuments/home district mix. I’m already feeling like the Home Instance is actually home due to the npcs there, as well as the ore nodes and the krait obelisk. Expand on that a bit, maybe add some dialogue to said npcs based on personal storyline and you’re 90% done with making player housing a reality.

They’re talking about character progression in the CDI threads right now. Maybe we should go there and tell them that Home Instance progression (hall of monuments style) would be the way to go!

And guild progression with guild halls of course.

Columbo.5924:

All that doen’t matter if the sum of it doesn’t bridge the obvious gap. And by the way: Additional heals? You obviously have no idea how much a warrior/guardian/engineer/anything can heal when traited for it. And don’t tell me you get those heals without traiting and speccing for it. Almost every competitive build i’ve seen uses water traits and something like 500+ healing power. And I doubt the competitiveness of the builds that don’t.

You’ll get those heals without traiting or speccing for it. You’re comparing the ele damage to a full zerker warrior, then compare the healing to a full zerker too. And the inherent condition removals. And whatever else comes on the table.

Combo fields? Only staff has a decent amount of them and it is lacking combo finishers.

Stoning, Shockwave and Eruption are on every staff. You can expand it with utilities if you like.

So it all depends on your team what you get out of it.

Duh. It also means that combo fields get exponentially more powerful the more people are around to make use of them. Meaning you can get far more mileage from a water field than those pitiful warrior shouts can ever do.

Columbo.5924:

And if you are looking for a fire field: warrior longbow brings a much better one and two blast finishers on top of it.

Warrior doesn’t get fury with that, and an ele can match it with just their healing skill and a rune of altruism.

Larger AoE? That only applies to staff, even then you would be surprised how large a combustive shot field can be.

The AoE and range of dagger attacks is generally larger than that of typical melee weapons.

Given that the elementalist’s profession mechanic is attunement swapping, you’ll be hard pressed to make a single element build that will be as effective as swapping at least some of the time. However, that doesn’t mean you cannot make single element builds work

You wrote that you enjoy water magic. The main reason water deals so little damage is because the water auto attacks are generally weak. The only exception to this seems to be Vapor Blade (the dagger auto attack), which deals ok damage and hits everything in a line twice. It also causes vulnerability. You could build on that, taking the Piercing Shards trait from Water Magic and the Stone Splinters trait from Earth Magic to significantly boost your damage. You’ll want Aquamancer’s Alacrity as well. As for your utilities, you could pick up both elemental glyphs so you can summon 2 ice elementals to boost your dps and utility a little. Ice Bow as a conjured weapon is a good pick in PvE because of it’s AoE attack that deals massive damage. Finally, to complete the theme, Mistform seems appropriate.

It won’t be optimal, but maybe with some condition duration added to the vulnerability, you could have a build that works well enough. For PvE and dungeons at least.

Columbo.5924:

Let’s compare to the usual suspect: the warrior. Warriors have a built in advantage of 800 vitality and 300 armor. Now compare the average damage on the skills. You will hardly find anything with the same damage/damage per second of the warrior skills outside of fire attunement. Even if all the skills are equal in damage and both players have the same heal per second, elementalist always starts with a disadvantage due to the armor/hp disparity, making it more susceptible to burst/focused damage.

But what about the additional heals, the combo fields, the extra range or the larger AoE that you DO get? Not everything is directly measured in stats or damage.

Wintel.4873:

When players of other classes are saying they have no issues stomping 90% of the Ele’s they run into, and that they would literally prefer having any other class in their team over an Ele, you know there is a problem. I’ve seen it from their perspective when playing as Engineer or Mesmer.

Yet apparently there’s 10% that can play the elementalist to such a degree that they are challenging. Which can also indicate that a large part of the problem is learning how to play them properly, rather than actual power.

Nikkinella.8254:

I’d trade all of my ele’s team support for just half of warrior’s survivability. I don’t like playing in groups, i prefer to be alone most of the time. If i could sacrifice all my team support to purely focus on my own self survival, i would. But they won’t allow us to do that.

Eles have one of the best self survival elites in the game, in the form of the elite earth elemental summon. I cannot think of any solo content you couldn’t do with the earth elemental as your tank.

If you’re referring to WvW or sPvP however, then I can understand. However, that’s technically not solo content and playing solo there is actually going against the game design and then demanding things are adapted to suit that.

Wintel.4873:

When something “works” with Ele, it’s primarily due to skill gap and out-playing the opponent. Build plays a very small role, people adapt builds to their specific requirements/playstyle and after that it’s all skill + out-playing.

True, but if you phrase it like that it sounds like you’re actually asking ArenaNet for a build that gives you an edge rather than having equal builds and getting the edge from being the better player. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there are NO issues. But I do feel the elementalist’s poor reputation results in a more negative attitude towards anything positive. The positive aspects of the elementalist are being scrutinized more closely as opposed to, say, a warrior build because everyone feels they’ll be powerful regardless. The elementalist is then compared to the best aspects of the other professions and has to measure up to all of them. Sometimes, it appears as if people WANT the elementalist to fail, rather than succeed for whatever reasons they may have.

My personal reasons are the ability to adapt to the situation, and the combo fields.

Part of the elementalist’s poor reputation comes from threads like this, where whenever someone posts something positive about elementalists, people are quick to list all possible counters to explain why it won’t work. However, apparently it does work…but of course it won’t work all the time. Nothing does. Realistically you have a 50% chance to win any 1v1 fight…there should be 0% chance to win 1v2. Any build can be countered, and any spike interrupted. So maybe the expectations are simply to high…any build can be countered.

Kyon.9735:

Nobody cares if you’re good or not in playing the class, but when OTHER classes gets the general consensus of elementalists being underpowered and crippling to the team, isn’t it enough to prove that not only elementalists see the class underpowered but the GW2 community as a whole?

Not sure…the thing is, once something gets stuck in peoples’ heads, it’s hard to change their opinion. There have been several threads in the past 2 months that showed how to deal dps equal to or greater than that of warriors (both with and without lightning hammer) but somehow those threads are drowned by the huge amount of cries of players who aren’t satisfied with their performance. The elementalist has a poor reputation, and if that’s not the whole problem, it’s certainly half of it.

Wintel.4873:

The very fact you said that the issues have merit and need to “be played around” proves it’s NOT a matter of opinion.

The reason I wrote that is because I realize that the skill level required to play the elementalist effectively may be a bit too high for the majority of the players, that don’t want to invest the time needed to learn how to play the profession well. That doesn’t mean that it cannot be amazing in the right hands.

I don’t blame people for going for the warrior and skip 3 months of practice for the same results. But I do not agree with the statement that because the ele requires a lot of practice, it also means it’ll never equal professions that don’t require a lot of practice.

Professions that are harder to learn attract less players, which results in fewer top players, which lets people think it’s a poor choice, which in turn leads to less players…it’s a vicious circle.

Those “Class Tier” threads really rub it in, almost everyone ranks Ele’s dead last. Like…dead, dead, dead last.

The majority rules in a democracy but that does not mean they’re always right.

P Fun Daddy.1208:

Still a net loss of zero skills compared to the ele if you take three kits, and an engi gets vastly more versatility because of the variety available to them.

True, but how effective are those kits unless you trait for them? How good is a grenade kit without the grandmaster trait? Or a bomb kit for that matter? The ele’s skills are decent right off the bat, and they get the versatility as baseline rather than having to take specific kits or skills for them.

As for the versatility, the ele has more on-the-spot versatility, whereas the engineer has to pick his tricks when making his build.

Wintel.4873:

I wish this was a matter opinion, but it’s not. There’s just no way anyone an sugar-coat the huge list of issues Ele has right now.

It’s still a matter of opinion, because while those issues have merit, they can be played around. I’ll kindly refer you to my signature: if I can do it, anyone can because I’m really not that great a player…just a creative one.

It depends…if you mean burst, then the thief will always be a bit stronger. However, in terms of overall dps, the elementalist will do just as well. In terms of AoE, the elementalist wins easily.

As for when that will happen, it takes a bit more practice and build refining to deal massive damage with eles than it does with other professions. Some of the better traits won’t be available until later in the game, and a good part comes from your rune and sigil selection as well (which you’ll likely leave until level 80). My advice would be to read some guys to get some insight on how to make an ele work, and try it out a bit while levelling.

sorrow.2364:

Actually, the utility slots you’re losing because of picking a kit is compensated by the Toolkit skills.

That would be true if you didn’t also get a toolbelt skill for other utilities.

Wintel.4873:

You won’t be waiting for dumb attunements to come off cooldown, your entire pool of abilities (kits) are always ready. You have LOTS of survivability, excellent condition builds, excellent bunker builds, decent power builds, etc.

Except that you sacrifice utility slots for those kits and the ele gets 4 skills slots just by equipping a weapon. As for the rest of your post, in my personal experience I have all that on my ele and not enough of it on my engineer.

Like you said, the grass is greener on the other side…but that goes for the other side as well.

Ulion.5476:

That is an interesting idea to make eruption apply its damage over the duration but that would make eruption like necro wells. Which is suppose to be unique to necros. I would prefer a instant cast eruption.

Maybe, but its main purpose is to be a blast finisher which you’ll later place a field on top of…so an instant eruption would be a nerf. Besides, they wouldn’t be exactly the same because the wells are combo fields while eruption is a finisher.

Hehe…that can be read in 2 ways. Do the eles need to come over and get stomped, or do the targets of said eles need to come over and fight you and get stomped?

To me it feels like the elementalist was never designed to be either a supporter, damage dealer or condition spammer, but rather a mix of all at any given time.

However, regarding staff eles, if there’d be anything I’d change for conditions to be more effective it would be to make eruption deal it’s damage over its duration rather than all at the end. That would make it much easier to apply bleeds for staff eles, without adding more power to the skill overall. It would also be the thing that would make celestial gear equal in dps to soldier’s.

Note that erution could still retain it’s blast finisher, and maybe the damage/bleeds could be higher at the end and lower at the start. But staff would need a second semi-reliable condition source for condition damage to be viable rather than an afterthought.

There’s a Jotun in Hoelbrak (Thruln the Lost or something) that states humans came ‘from over the sea’. The gods favored the Jotun at that time, and ignored the humans until they developed. That story, although obviously prone to generations of hearsay, does put some doubt in the whole ‘gods brought humans to Tyria from another dimension’ idea.

The guide is decent, but it would really help if you reformatted things a bit to make it easier on the eyes. Use less abbreviations please and divide it into paragraphs.

Oh, and please use you and your instead of u and ur. Guides are for beginners, so you need to help them understand what you’re saying.

No wonder these potions are so cheap.

It also happened to me, continuing while I was standing still. I’m not sure this has much to do with running…

Ever since the change to culling in PvE, there have been instances where visual effects simply didn’t show. Most of these were minor, like ghosts not being ghosts or ranger spirits not having glow, but there’s a few that actually impact the game.

Yesterday, I was in CoF path 2 and apparently, some of the NPCs there use Eruption. I say apparently, because the only way I knew is when I checked my combat log to see what instantly downed me. There never was an animation.

The same happened at the Golem MkII world boss event: the static field that is supposed to show before it actually triggers, didn’t always show (but always triggered) making it very hard to survive.

While this happening is fairly rare (once every month or so fortunately) I’m sure you can imagine why this is a big issue. One-hit downed attacks aren’t my favorite to begin with, but if you can see them coming then I can live with it (pun intended). But this graphic issue should be looked into, because it’s greatly interfering with gameplay at times.

The purpose of fractals was to add a vertical progression gear grind option to the game for those that like it, while still allowing those that don’t acces to all ingame content without grinding gear.

Yes, it’s tiresome to get all the AR you need for max level. However, it’s 99% player choice. You don’t HAVE to go there in order to enjoy fractal content. It’s like saying you should have instant acces to the semi-finals for a world sPvP tournament. If you want it, you’ll have to put time and effort into it. In some cases an extreme amount. However, the difference is that you can enjoy the content even without the grind.

Unlike World of Kittencraft, where you had to grind dungeons and reputation just to be able to enter raids that allowed you to grind to to enter the top level raids, you can enter Fractals at level 1 and enjoy them. That is the no-grind in the game that Anet is talking about.

1) The active combat system
2) Boon stacking
3) Combo fields/finishers
4) Jumping puzzles
5) Town clothes & minigames

Maybe something like guild achievements, which function pretty much like personal achievements except you work on them with the entire guild.

It’s not original, because it’s seen in World of Kittencraft, but their guild achievement system is actually pretty neat (the guild XP system much less) and relatively simple. It can be integrated into a ladder system, possibly divided by category so you could see how much WvW/sPvP/PvE achievement points a guild has. And like WoK, you could give rewards for certain achievements like minipet unlocks or (minor) guild bonusses.

You’d basically be tracking the guild’s overall proces, not the individual player’s participations should they decide to hop guilds.

1) Personal Home Instance expansion
2) Guild Halls
3) More story and lore bits (make the story its own reward basically)

Anierna.6918:

Guides are good, but only if you follow the “Meta” guides.

That only works if you never want to learn to think for yourself. Ultimately, you can look to guides for advice but you’ll want both meta and non-meta guides just to see what’s possible. A (fictive) ‘earth auto-attack spam ele’ guide may not be the best way to play but it can give you all sorts of pointers of how you can use your earth skills effectively.

Anierna.6918:

If you choose to start with Ele (I did, but in hindsight, I recommend War), use the Lightning Hammer. The various meta builds for Ele are in my guide (link’s in my sig). The LH simplifies life AND does fantastic dmg while preserving utility (keeps might/fury/vuln stacking options open, and provides blinds and AoE). Play the game for a bit to get a handle on the technical terms before reading my guide though, or you’ll quickly get lost in the theory-crafting.

worst advice ever

If you want to learn how to play an elementalist, don’t start with a gimmick. Instead, learn how to play and then use the lightning hammer build where it works well. Starting with the lightning hammer build won’t teach you WHY it works.

Dead Jim.4317:

So at this point, having looked at the cleric’s stat option on trinkets, my Hit Points dropped by 3.76k, and I’m up from 330 Healing Power to a tad over 1k. (All of this is still with no runes) I have to wonder if the healing power will fully compensate for the loss of what I consider to be a large amount of health? Does anyone know the math behind this, or where to find it so I can run the numbers?

There was a guy that has done extensive calculations on effective health based on vigor, healing and toughness. It’s buried somewhere in the forums though, but it was very thorough.

which in turn would cut my vigor up time. (I think…) Thanks for the replies so far guys!

I wouldn’t worry about that, you’ll have a lot of hits (fire auto is divided in 3 hits for example) so if you go critical just for vigor, you’ll be fine.

Also, your food’s endurance regen won’t stack with vigor right?

Got nothing to add to what the others wrote, as it’s mostly solid advice. The one alternative I see, is that you could try using Powerful Aura combined with Rune of Fire to add a little offensive support to your frontlines too.

Also, keep in mind that you can use Earth 3 to leap through your fire fields to get another aura, or (though it can be hard to time) use blast finishers in the ice fields created by the Ice Elemental summon for AoE frost armor. You’d have to switch elite for the last one to work, but the various elementals’ boons could work well with your frontline support goal.

Like everything else, it has its strengths and weaknesses.

Anierna.6918:

If I see a hammer guard in a dungeon, the first thing I tell him to do is swap to sword/focus. That is the guard meta; there is no reason whatsoever for him to be using hammer in dungeons. If he doesn’t, I kick him. Why? Because I have no tolerance for: 1) players who spam useless combo fields, and 2) players who don’t play the meta for their class.

So how do new meta builds get developed if nobody is allowed to try different things?

It’s hard for me to not to resort to personal attacks in this matter, so I’ll just say I strongly disagree with you, that I now understand why we never agree on anything and, in your example, would rather be the one that got kicked than one of the remaining players that are stuck having to play that dungeon with you.

Good thing it takes 2 people to kick someone…

Elfis.9102:

It’s true the elemental can do significant damage compared to you if you’re tanky built. Its entire lifespan is still worth only one or two of your attacks if you’re largely berserker, and it’s only to one target. I’m almost full celestial, and a single arcane wave against 5 men will eeeeasily outdamage that elemental’s efforts for its entire duration.

As it should be, or they would become staples for dps builds. It’s their utility skills that makes them useful.

KazNaka.4718

However, it needs to be rewarded with more damage than we are getting right now.

It’s rewarded with more base utility instead of damage. Why’s that so bad?

MarzAttakz.9608:

although I question “zephyr’s focus” I’ve never really tried to see how much regen we’d get from channelling drake’s breath, cone of cold, ether renewal and churning earth.

Maybe it’s not so much the amount of regeneration, but the timing (or the fact that it’s in the Air traitline instead of water or arcana).

DiogoSilva.7089:

The trait spreading is smart. It allows your elementalist to be walking with 16-17k health, good toughness, massive power, and decent critical chance/ damage.

Agreed. It’s a pretty clever build, that balances offense and defense pretty smart.

I’ve just checked on what Rune of Fire’s effects are, and it makes sense. It’s just not very good, considering how underwhelming fire aura is, and even more so at a 90 second cooldown. Yet, gaining might, protection, fury and swiftness the moment someone hits you is… not a bad idea at all, and I assume arcane wave is there somewhere to take advantage of the might stacking.

The idea behind it is that it’s not just the fire aura proc…it stacks with any other applications of boons, making for pretty good uptime. Just like how a staff ele can pretty much get perma fury from Magnetic Aura if they also run Arcane Fury.

I think that this build shows that at least one ArenaNet dev is actually a pretty skilled elementalist player…the build looks lame at first glance, but is actually very well constructed.

KazNaka.4718

Go duo toe-to-toe with a warrior and tell me we have the same level of DPS with the same level of defenses (dagger/focus).

Haven’t used dagger/focus in quite a while, mainly because it has more defense than I feel I need. It’s more aimed against ranged opponents too. However, in sPvP I usually go toe to toe with them on my staff ele and I end up winning or tieing 75% of my encounters. The main trick is getting through their healing signet, which I’ll admit is tough. However, they have to close in to deal their damage which opens them up to aoes. If they dodge those, they have to stop attacking. If they range only, their dps will be too low. So it makes for some interesting (and difficult) fights. But it can be done.