Guild Wars 2

DotDotWin.4357:

I played an elementalist to 30 and I think they are possibly the worst class ever made.

Then you haven’t played far enough. The elementalist doesn’t start to shine until near max level. If you can make optimal use of boons, and evasive arcana, you can notice how powerful they can be. Sure, it’s mostly just that 1 build. However, claiming that you’ve seen it all just because you managed to level an elementalist to level 30 is a bit daft.

If anything, don’t expect the elementalist to be a typical MMO mage. They’re not, and shouldn’t be played like one.

They’re all very viable for PvE. The main differences is in their role rather than their range though.

Staff is AoE, with many combo fields that get stronger the more players make use of it.

Daggers are up close, to deal a lot of burst damage.

Scepter has some good blast finishers, combined with an offhand it can stack a lot of might, and better against single targets.

Focus is mostly defensive, especially against projectiles. It also has a ranged daze and knockdown.

Fire Shield is ok, but it would need to trigger on ranged attacks too to be actually useful.

Chaosky.5276:

Stone Shards autoattack, which does pitiful direct damage.

Glad that you mentioned direct damage, because the bleed easily carries it to 2k total damage. That’s quite a bit for an auto attack.

xiv.7136:

The key is to not focus on one thing. As an ele, use a combination of every attunement, all the time.

Agreed.

Fire elemental is mostly for when you want the added dps. Otherwise, just pick a different elemental. The other elementals bring much better utilities, but of course at lesser damage. Just don’t automatically go for fire ‘cause it’s dps. GW is not a dps race.

Can see where you’re coming from, but what you’ve got to keep in mind is that because the elementalist is designed as versatile build, it does have pets but they’re not the same as those of other professions.

The main appeal of them is that you can pick what pet you’d like, rather than be stuck with whatever was on your bar when you placed it there.

They’re fine to me anyway. It’s just a matter of picking the right one for each situation.

I’d say yes. The reason for that is that D/D, but especially S/D, have a large condition damage component. Celestial trinkets will buff that too, meaning your overall dps will be slightly higher.

But to be fair, I’ve done the math and celestial is pretty much equal to soldier’s. Wheter it’s better or not mostly depends on how much conditions you use.

Xillllix.3485:

Actually, why not allow swaping during combat with a 60 seconds delay or something? Would that buff us so much? We could do some new Staff/dagger combo and dealt perhaps more descent damage.

We are already dying more than other classes as soon as we move forward.

The design philosophy of the game is to limit the total number of possible skill combinations. Therefore it seems unlikely that ArenaNet will implement in-combat weapon swaps for elementalists. Just remember, if you can’t think of it, and ArenaNet can’t think of it, that still doesn’t matter there won’t be some player that can find a way to abuse it.

For example, how about a Frozen Ground followed by a Magnetic Leap? Chill your target, immobilize it in an ice field, add another second of chill thanks to the projectile and get Frost Aura on yourself to boot.

And then you’re gonna start fighting for real…

Gaudrath.6725:

I don’t have to prove it. Do you ask people to prove six is greater than two?

Neither of you has to prove anything, yet at the same time, you’re not gonna convince the other until you do.

Cirax.9231:

I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I’m sure you can achieve just as good of extra offensive power with celestial jewelry, with the benefit of other helpful stats like cond damage &healing, and you still gain just as much crit damage.

Maybe I can help here. I’ve done a bit of math comparing Soldier’s and Celestial ascended trinkets, and as it turns out: they don’t differ all that much. If you dismiss conditiondamage, the soldier’s trinket wins out (especially when stacked). However, with the condition damage they’re pretty much equal dps. Equal enough at least to assume that Anet balanced them out much more closely than you would guess.

Assuming that the same can be said for the defensive part, the main benefit of the celestial trinkets seems to lie in the fact that your partywide healing will be stronger (though your own defense on average will be the same as soldier’s). And then there’s the magic find of course.

Kirbyprime.2645:

There’s a bug right now with Water 1 of Dagger where it “looks” like it’s going further than it should. In a quick WvW testing which was verified by 2 other eles, the shot goes to around 900 range but in fact it only hits at 600 range.

That’s probably so it will also hit on the way back on targets at max range.

Really love the bug fixes in this patch, as well as the elementals gaining my agony resistance.

Just done some calculations and as it turns out, both PVT and Celestial have roughly the same average damage. This however, includes the Celestial user to also use conditions. Hence if you choose to apply conditions only as an afterthought, PVT will give you more dps.

So ArenaNet did do their homework well. Both items perform the same role, and their performance is about equal. So the only real advantage to using Celestial Gear would be th magic find. As it should be, I guess.

Minion of Vey.4398:

This isn’t a snarky reply, I just don’t feel like going back and loading everything up again, it takes a while.

Didn’t take it as such. You make some good points, especially regarding the low powered criticals.

The thing is, none of the stats seem worthless to the Elementalist. Even condition damage on a staff, while certainly not the end to all means, does get used a fair bit. The 5 points Arcana trait makes critical damage rather useful too. The rest speaks for itself.

And that makes it the optimal choice for me. I don’t like playing either bunker or glass cannon. And thus celestial seems to fit me quite nicely. However, I do get your points and I guess that in the end, the overall difference won’t be as large as I may have thought earlier.

Vanillea.5764:

There is a reason why Celestial amulet is not very popular in spvp.

For sPvP that may very well be true, however I’ve also noticed that the critical damage component of the Celestial Amulet is rather low. For the PvE versions, it’s much higher which causes the precision/critical damage part to be a lot more useful compared to power.

A grandmaster trait that turns Glyph of Elementals into Signet of Elementals with the following effect:

Active: summon an Elemental based on your attunement. (150 seconds recharge)
Passive: elementals you summon will follow you around as long as you have this signet equipped, or until they are destroyed.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, but the maximum number of elementals summoned by the signet would be 1. No infinite summons intended. :-)

No, the main issue is that you’re trying to duel with a group support weapon.

As long as a weapon has combo fields, it will have to be weakened for 1v1 because in group play, combo fields become exponentially stronger.

Having said that, I feel that the key to making the staff balanced for both large battles and duelling lies in the auto attacks. They can be buffed relatively safely without overpowering the aoe aspect of the weapon.

Dolan.3071:

If a signet build were more viable then the final trait Written In Stone would be… INCREDIBLE. But it isn’t, and signets have nothing on cantrips.

I feel that on scepter/focus, which doesn’t need stunbreakers or condition removal as much, signet builds might be viable.

Minion of Vey.4398:

Problem with celestial gears is the loss in power, where the “extra” stats in precision and crit dmg don’t help you as much as you’d like.

In a bunker setup, replacing some PVT gear with celestial gear is often both a survivability and DPS loss…though it isn’t immediately apparent until you crunch some numbers. Of course this isn’t ALWAYS the case and depends on your full stat setup.

The thing with stats though, is that they tend to be cumulative. For example, if you have more power, precision becomes better. If you have more toughness, healing power becomes better. So while what you’re saying may certainly be true for individual celestial pieces, the cumulative effect tends to get stronger the more you equip.

For example, for precision to add the same amount of damage as power, you’ll need 100% crit bonus, or 50% critical damage. The current celestial items grant 29% critical damage, and with most eles running 10 points in air, that’s 39% already. My prediction is that by the time the full celestial set is released, it will be best-in-slot for elementalists. Add in the condition damage, and you’ll far outperfom a bunker in terms of damage without giving up nearly as much defense as picking berserker trinkets would have.

The main thing to keep in mind though, is that picking celestial gear is mostly for those that don’t want to play either full bunker, or glass cannon. And for that, it simply out performs mixing full offensive and full defensive trinkets. With the elementalist making use of all the stats in any of their builds, it’s a very efficient choice.

Kodiak.3281

Signet of Earth’s 3 seconds of Immobilize or Signet of Water’s 4s chill each with a 30s cool down is atrocious. The strength of the effects aren’t worth the huge cool downs associated with them.

They’re not THAT bad. For starters, if you use them, you’re likely to have 20 points in Fire, which increases their durations a bit. Second, the effects are ranged and don’t have projectiles. That’s pretty strong. Compared to let’s say the Engineer’s net, you can’t see it coming (and it’s a lot harder to dodge).

The main issue with signets I think, is the fact that the Elementalist needs stunbreakers. And that’s something the signet build doesn’t provide.

sapphyredragon.6437

No problem. I can understand the confusion, as it’s not a very clear effect.

The idea behind the aura build is not to combine the signet build with it. Also, keep in mind that you can also generate auras through the use of combos.

The point of my earlier post, is that you’re not supposed to be supporting everyone all the time. That’s not how this game works. Party members are supposed to support eachother. You may not be able to spam an aura every second, but you’re not required to either.

But you’ll also be unlike to be 100% a damage dealer, or 100% a tank…the point of the game is to compliment eachother…not to take on a role all by yourself.

sapphyredragon.6437

I’d be slightly satisfied if they reduced the cooldown on the Glyph of Elementals or just made it work differently. I don’t understand why the cooldown doesn’t start until my Elemental is dead. That is weird. Honestly, I almost feel like I’m cheating when I use the Elemental, though. I prefer to win on my own merit, y’know?
Unfortunately, it’s the only elite skill available that I actually like.

You misunderstand the skill. The fact that the cooldown starts as soon as the elemental goes down, is a bonus. In essence, if the elemental goes down early, the recharge of the skills is lowered.

Compare it to the Asura Golem. The golem has a recharge of 180 seconds, that starts as soon as it is summoned. If the golem dies after 10 seconds, you still have 170 seconds to go before it’s ready.

Glyph of Elementals also has a recharge of 180 seconds: 60 seconds during which the elemental is alive, and 120 seconds during which it is not. However, the 120 seconds will start as soon as it goes down, so if the elemental lasts for only 10 seconds, the total recharge will be 130 seconds, instead of the full 180.

Maybe we will get a way to have a permanent elemental summon too then someday.

Would be interesting concept…a signet version of the summons. Though maybe better not on the elementalist…

sapphyredragon.6437:

However, the point of GW2 was supposed to be that you could have pretty much any build you wanted.

You can play any build you want. Nowhere does it say they’re all equally good at everything though.

You should be able to focus on just about anything (within a realm of reason, of course) in any class and make it viable.

Apart from the fact that there are NO dedicated healers in Guild Wars 2 by design, you can still give some decent healing support…by switching to staff.

And why give me those lovely heals and clearly meant-for-a-support-role Auras, but make a support build lame? You can’t possibly focus on all the things needed in a D/D support build because of the Trait lines.

That depends on your definition of support. Support in Guild Wars 2 isn’t limited to damage prevention and healing. The support you give as a dagger/dagger ele is either offensive (fury, might,snares) or to lessen the pressure of the other melees (minor heals and condition removal).

Staff is better as support in the same way daggers are better for damage. If anything, healing is a small part of the supportive nature of the build. You may not be able to keep a facetank up, but you can save a dodging teammate by first chilling the opponent and then heal him for whatever damage his own healing skill couldn’t cover.

You are NOT a healer. There are NO healers in this game. You can however supplement the self-heals that every player has.

The most important thing in this, as far as I’m concerned, is that ArenaNet DID listen to the player’s concerns and has made some effort to improve things.

Thank you for that. This one mission will make a big difference for my guild. The fact that you’ve so openly adressed players’ concerns makes a big difference to me personally.

If it were instant cast (as the tooltip suggests) then it’d be fine. If too powerful, just add a little cooldown. But being as easy to dodge as it is, that’s all I’d change.

Armor of Earth…it was my favorite skill in GW1, and I use it very much in GW2 too. With just 1 trait, it can become the ultimate protective skills…stability, regen, protection and vigor. It’s very versatile too, and I like it enough that I also bring the trait that gives you an auto Armor of Earth all the time.

Don’t need any other cantrip when I can just use Armor of Earth. :-)

The thing what most people tend to overlook is the sheer number of combo fields that come with the staff. This means that the weapon’s effectiveness increases exponetially with the number of players in the group. Also, PVT isn’t the best way to create a support build, Celestial gear is much better suited for such. My final point is that you’ll also need to build around your staff a bit more with utilities. People tend to go with the full cantrip build, but I’ve found that in practice, glyphs work a lot better to compliment your role.

Yes, the staff ele has some issues, but there’s also a learn to understand issue. It’s not a duelling weapon, it’s a group weapon. And if you play it like D/D or the standard MMO glass cannon caster…well, that just doesn’t work as well.

Skills that aren’t Healing Skills (slot 6) should per definition be weaker. As for why it’s not useless…

You’re looking at individual skills. The main appeal of healing power on an elementalist is that you have multiple, often usable healing. On a typical D/D, you get Cone of Cold, Cleansing Wave, Healing Ripple and heal from dodge roll (and of course your main healing skill). And then there’s also regeneration and Soothing Mist, which you’ll likely have active 90% of the time or more.

Assuming you use each of them on cooldown, every 30 seconds (roughly Cleansing Wave’s cooldown). That ill be 3 Cones of Cold, 1 Cleansing Wave, 3 Healing Ripples and 3 Evasive Arcanas.

No healing power:
740*3+1302*1+1302*3+1302*3=11334
925 healing power:
1132*3+2527*1+2527*3+2527*3=21085

That means your added healing power will give you roughly 10k extra healing every 30 seconds, and that’s not even considering the effects of regeneration or your healing skill. It’s like getting a second slot 6 skill.

I’d call that significant.

For your utilities, you could consider Glyph of Elemental Power and/or Frost Bow. The first will give your nukes either extra burning, or snares (which can both be very useful) and the bow grants you an additional nuke skill (though at slightly shorter range).

The second thing you may want to consider is the elemental summons. The air version could also strengthen your long distance damage quite a bit.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I tend to use devourers frequently due to their better defenses and the retreat skill specifically. Sometimes they use it oddly, but more often than not they use it only when an enemy has closed distance and is hitting them, in which case they retreat and I am happier because of it since they can drop aggro and manage themselves a bit more.

Sounds like a very useful skill imho. I think I may just make a Charr ranger instead of a human after reading this…

kokiman.2364:

Oh and keep in mind that you won’t get anything for having a high rank in leaderboards. So no need to cry about how A.Net hates casualplayers who don’t want to grind for those points.

Anyone who selects their dungeon parties based on achievement points clearly needs others to carry them. You’ll be better off without them.

Achievement points say nothing about how skilled a player is at the game.

I like it.

If you focus solely on power, your Earth dagger attacks will do a lot less damage (effectively giving you a second low damage attunement next to Water). Also, some skills (like Drake’s Breath and Churning Earth) gain extra damage from both condition damage and power, so their overall damage will remain the same. You also have plenty of healing skills to make good use of healing power, and toughness/vitality is always nice (especially given our low base defense).

The reason all stats gear works so well on elementalists is because they are jacks of all trades. There’s no stat that doesn’t contribute to your build (except with maybe, a condition spamming dungeon team).

For me, a good change would be to move Renewing Stamina to Fire, and change Elemental Shielding to trigger on signets instead of auras. That would open up some new playstyles imho.

Lavadiel.6231:

it is almost mandatory traitline for all ele builds except for staff “nukers”.

Yes, that’s true also. :-)

Maybe if the cooldown reducing traits also reduced the attunement’s recharge, but didn’t stack with Arcana? That would certainly promote single/dual element builds a bit more….

Glass cannon might be a bit more viable if the trait that grants vigor on crit was moved to fire or air. It seems out of place in Arcana atm.

Trollhammer.7439:

Fact: rangers are highly suboptimal for end game.
Fact: most people recognize the above statement as fact.

The first is an opinion. Thus the second is also wrong.

LordByron.8369:

An ele is forced into scepter for example and could have a bad build for that weapon set.

Staff attack rate is too slow for the shield part.

Staff can handle it pretty well actually. Toss some bleeds on it through Eruption and Shockwave, and use the elite Air Elemental (which has a multi-hit auto attack). Also, you can hit it with Lava Font and Meteor Shower while also auto-attacking it.

You’ll get plenty of hits out of those skills.

Yesterday if possible.

Once you can do it, it’s the easiest fractal out there.

But for beginners and PUGs, it’s horrible. The main downside being that no matter how skilled you are, you cannot compensate for your group. You have to have at least 3 decent runners.

Would be nice if say, the timer was doubled for groups doing fractals at levels below 10.

This has been vrought up in the past, but since it’s still an issue, I’d thought I’d share my recent experience.

This morning, my group was doing a Fractals run. We did fairly well, and our second fractal turned out to be Cliffside. Just before we got to the shielded seals, our party leader informed us of his low tolerance for groups that didn’t do exactly as they were told. He also mentioned he was likely to ragequit when they did.

So we explained to everyone that, if you didn’t beat the first group of chanters, they wouldn’t repair the left seal. As you may have guessed by now, the group accidently defeated them regardless.

The party leader left immediatly, and we got all kicked out of the fractals.

Let me repeat that.

The party leader left immediatly, and we got all kicked out of the fractals.

Because one person with the social skills of a peanut left the dungeon, the entire group was forced to start over from scratch.

By now, I’m begging on my virtual knees…please fix this. Please make it so that a different player is set as party leader, and the group won’t have to start all over again. This particular feature has so many downsides, wheter it’s forced restarts or people losing chests because the party leader didn’t have the patience to wait 10 seconds longer.

Please…fix this.

That’s kind of what I meant Kaleden. You however explain it better than I did. With the playstyle you describe, generating boons is a byproduct of the the playstyle. Attunement swapping doesn’t occur for the boons themselves though.

haviz.1340:

Amazing semi-glass play. Great job!

Isn’t semi-glass just a fancy word for ‘balanced’?

Saogai.9105:

The problem with the negative reaction with the Cantha district was the fact that the original area appears as an East Asian “ghetto” towered over by Europeans walls and castle spires.

So I’m guessing that any movies that involve china towns are also ‘not done’?

Also, what about the Ossan district? That’s an african themed ‘ghetto’ that’s towered over by european structures.

Sorry, but I’m not happy with such an explanation. The people from Asia should by now be aware that most western people think they’re much, much cooler than they are. The western love for ninjas and samurais and such, is at an all time high!

It seems to me that other cultures just get offended too quickly, and at such times conveniently neglect the times they’re portrayed as awesome.

Don’t mind that it takes time. Do mind that unless you got a 300+ guild, the bounties are unplayable.

Kodiak.3281:

While the rest of your post is pretty debatable still (I mean really, blowing your heal just to maintain protection?) this seems pretty contradictory. Intelligent swapping should always take priority over all cases and circumstances.

Yes, you’re right. I believe we’re pretty much in agreement, except the way we go about it is differently. You prefer to remain in fire for optimal dps, and then switch whenever the need arises. I prefer to switch preemptively, and get some cc conditions active straight away. There’s of course some plan behind it, but it’s not always in response to something my opponents do. It’s probably true that against dummies, fire’s dps is in fact optional. However, the damage from Ice Spike, Eruption and Blinding Surge (as well as the fact they have larger AoEs) is pretty solid too. And in zegr vs zerg, I much prefer the added snares, blinds and stuns over the little extra damage that fire may have.

That’s not saying that your way doesn’t work. It actually sounds like a solid strategy.

Use the Priory daggers on my ele…they look properly caster-ish.

Kodiak.3281:

Swapping to Earth for projectile finishers provides limited usefulness for yourself to combo. Can it work? Sure. However since everyone’s natural reaction is to roll the hell out of any AOE field they sure as hell aren’t going to just sit there in the combo field to be repeatedly Chilled after the fact projectile or no. This means you pretty much have to drop it on yourself to get the Chill combos reliably which is roughly the same as just dropping it on them.

Granted, I was speaking from a dungeon perspective here. However, since any attunement you swap from will have a field, you might was well make use of the combo finishers you have. After that, you can eruption and swap again for the second combo.

Also, I forgot to mention it, but Evasive Arcana allows you to combo from another attunement into earth as well.

My experience with Meteor Shower and Ice Spike combo has always been I’m now stuck in Water for 10 seconds and usually want to be back in Fire to drop another Lava Font

My playstyle usually involves going through the attunements repeatedly because although Lava Font is good, swapping back and forth to (or even staying in) Fire isn’t the optimal way to contribute to a fight. Both Ice Spike, Blinding Surge and Eruption deal considerable damage, and while they individually lack the dps of Lava Font, casting the in sequence gives a higher damage output that just spamming Lava font every 4 seconds. Especially if you add in the fury.

As for Boons, at max you got around 70% boon duration. You can’t keep a 3s boon up forever like that when the skills got a 9s recast.

On its own, no, it doesn’t. Combined with a GoEH every 20 seconds, you can easily get permanent protection and/or regeneration.

With Staff, you don’t always want to swap because a particular scenario may be more beneficial to stay in your attunement. Can you get some boons? Sure. But it’s no where near the same efficacy as D/D boon setup.

While swapping should always be done intelligently, for the vast majority of the time, switching quickly will be preferable to not switching quickly. Why sit in fire waiting for Lava Font to recharge when you can pour on some CC in the meantime? The other attunement’s skill 2’s will more than make up for that 1 missed Lava Font.

The thing with stuff being ‘all over the place’ is that it’s by design. The elementalist is supposed to do a lot of things within a single build.

Though it may not be a bad idea to swap the air skills on scepter and staff.