Guild Wars 2

Since it’s blocked by the forum filter, can I assume it’s not allowed ingame either?

Is the word [edited by filter to remove] in a name allowed? I’ve been reporting people who use it for a while now, but no action was taken. If it’s not against the rules then it’d be good to know because that would save both Anet and me some work.

Interesting…but you’d have to make sure it doesn’t stack with Arcana, or you’d get people taking advantage of Elemental Attunement to stack boons indefinitely.

I’m not 100% sure but I believe I’ve read somewhere that it doesn’t.

You gotta keep in mind that the staff has only 3 ‘damage condition’ skills, one of which has a long cooldown, one of which is tough to hit moving targets with and one of which can easily be outdone by your team comboing through your own Lava Fonts.

So condition damage may not be the most optimal pick for a back piece. Like Knox, I would probably go with the PTV piece. I’ll work well in both defensive and offensive builds, due to Power being a major stat. So in a way, it’ll save you gold sicne you’ll only need 1.

As long as increased difficulty doesn’t mean permastun, instagib or pinballpull then I’m all for it.

It’s a good question and one I’ve been pondering about as well for various build ideas. The one sigil that keeps coming forward though is the Sigil of Superior Battle. For elementalists, it basically reads “gain 6 stacks of might”. Seeing that each stack of might adds roughly 2% damage, that’s just too good to pass up. Even if you only get 3 stacks out of it, it would still outpower Sigil of Force and that’s not even counting the added condition damage. With a boon build, you could get as much as 9 might all the time. It’s very hard to justify picking anything else unless you’re really set on not swapping attunements at all.

The main reason that I’m not too much into offensive builds is the fact that the current gear options are either all glass cannon or defensive with added power. There’s no middle ground. An example:

Say I wear Power/Toughness/Vitality gear. And I decide I want to do more damage. My options could then be:

Knight’s Gear (Toughness/Power/Precision)
With power demoted to a secondary stat, and precision only half as effective for my dps, I now do the same damage except I get a bit more toughness.

Berserker Gear (Power/Precision/Critical Damage)
Ok, so now I get twice as much damage as that I had before…but the 2 minor stats combined have the same effect as power has by itself, so basically I just lost 25% stat points.

Rampager’s Gear (Precision/Power/Condition Damage)
Power gets booted to second fiddle again, but between precision and condition damage, you’d think I’d do more damage. Well, that would be except they don’t work together at all.

Valkyrie’s Gear (Power/Critical Damage/Vitality)
A decent set…at least Power’s a major stat here. However, what applied for the Knight’s gear applies for this set as well. I will still need to get precision from somewhere or the added damage will be meager at best.

I could continue for the other options but I think I’ve made my point. It takes twice as many stats to increase your damage by the same amount once you’ve maxed out power, and you can max it by picking one of the better defensive sets. Combined with the fact that only D/D has the burst capability required for a crit build, this makes the offensive path very inefficient for the Elementalist. Combine that with the fact that our base defense is the lowest in the game, our best traits are in water&arcana, and you can see why defensive builds are so popular.

In my country, gambling is legal only when the company keeps track of what people do, to prevent them from spending more than a reasonable amount and protect them from themselves.

Since I doubt ArenaNet has such a check in place, they may be very close to doing something extremely illegal in my country. Especially since they make it available to minors too.

Troponin.4081:

Arcane line gives you +5 seconds to your attunement boons, which is pretty significant.

If you’re referring to Lingering Elements, that’s not what it does. Lingering Elements makes the attunement last 5 seconds after you swap out of it. It has no effect on boons. Arcana itself however does increase the boon duration by up to 30%.

But other than that, I agree. The thing is, the boon extention effect from the Giver prefix is pretty minor. Even for long lasting boons like 20 seconds Might, the effect is only 0.2 seconds per armor piece. Also, you’re giving up a lot of power for it. Even if it’s a minor stat on Cleric’s gear, that’s still around 200 power that you get from it and that’s quite significant.

If you really want long lasting boons, then I recommend the popular 2 Runes of the Monk/2 Runes of Water setup. They give you much mroe boon extention for the amount of stats you have to ‘give up’ for them.

Has this issue been fixed yet?

Disagree with OP. The issue isn’t Wintersday, it’s the fact that it lasts more than long enough. This will give everyone the opertunity to get the things they want, but those that completed everything on the first go will have little to go back to.

The one issue that I have are the buyable lottery boxes. No game should have them unless they want to show that they prefer exploiting players over creating a loyal and happy fanbase.

Seriously, I’d have paid $20 for the quaggan mini but I’m not gonna spend a dime on lottery stuff.

Once Kudu leaves his powersuit, he gets a kill shot ability. However, this ability is bugged as it is unaffected by reflection abilities, weakness and protection (on the target).

I know you’re supposed to dodge it, but when fighting at range, it’s pretty hard to see what he’s targetting and how far his charging has progressed. Asura are tiny after all.

Tough call. Personally, I went for +20% protection duration but I think it doesn’t matter all that much.

One of the things that could have been nice is to have the allies from the beginning of the game re-appear later. They wouldn’t need a major role per sé, but they could appear as allies or visitors. A random text-only reply would have sufficed. But the thing is now, the player will never see their former friends again and if they go back to their home instance, if they do see them, they’re mostly ignored.

Make the first friends part of the story, even if just through the use of cameos. That way, it wouldn’t matter as much that the Pact is led by Trahearne.

Maybe he combined the signet with a massive amount of healing power, and maybe a dolyak signet added to that.

With the proper setup, he could basically get 4 types of ‘permanent regeneration’. They would be normal regeneration, the passive from the signet, the passive from water attunement (which can be made permanent with the arcana major trait) and the passive regeneration from the dolyak’s rune.

Combine that with toughness…

ProxyDamage.9826:

is utterly ridiculous. It’s absolutely baffling that you can have two different words, with the exact same meaning, where one of them is a “bad word” that offends people just for being spoken, and the other is perfectly fine and acceptable.

That’s because they don’t mean the same thing. Sure, they may refer to the same object or action, but they do not mean the same thing. Saying you like something or that you love something is essentially the same thing, yet you cannot deny that they both mean the eaxct same thing.

Humans are pretty good at communicating far more than the words they use. It’s why sarcasm works in verbal speech. And it’s why some things offend more than other things. Saying Katrina to an American is far worse than saying hurricane.

Words often mean more than their direct literary purpose.

shochinhwa.1648:

Of course you are allowed to start fire, here … light up cigarette. Started one without a fire extinguisher nearby.

You know what I mean.

Saying a profanity filter should allow you to swear is like saying that the presence of fire extinguishers should allow you to start fires.

Ok, thanks for the advice.

It’s not that bad right? And you can always gather a few through the use of PvP emblems too.

BRAiNZ.7480:

Out of combat weapon swap would be great in PvE, but still overpowered in WvW/PvP.
Imagine enabling Obsidian Flesh and then bum rushing in with Ride the Lightning.

And that is why. :-) People are creative enough to find overpowered combos with out of combat swapping. Imagine what they coukitten with in combat swapping…

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

To my knowledge, that is indeed possible.

Barnabus Stinson.1409:

Give ele weapon swap it makes no sense not to.

It makes plenty sense, and if you read through some of the older threads you’ll learn why.

Out of combat swap is fine for me, though maybe it could be made part of a larger build swapping system like we had in Guild Wars 1.

Whatever you prefer. They’re both viable and fun to play.

So it wouldn’t matter that bunker builds can now stack vigor on top of the buffs they already have?

Or that all eles can now use boon stacking to the point that boons are no longer temporary effects but near-permanent stats?

Or that water 25 suddenly no longer becomes optional, because all eles’ mechanics are now centered around boons?

If none of that matters, then I suppose it’s a possible change.

Self styling probably.

maddoctor.2738:

100 Condition damage = +25 damage per second for the Scepter’s auto attack (burning) and since you can keep burning on a target forever with that attack it’s a constant armor-ignoring +25 damage

Yes, and it causes 2 seconds of burning, so in effect it adds 50 damage to the attack as a whole.

One maybe…where’s poison?

Also, did you consider adding burning, bleeding and poison into the same attack chain and then see what happens? I’m currently pondering a bit about a build with Sigil of Doom (poison on weapon swap) in a scepter build for WvW…not sure if it would work, but in theory it could…

MistyMountains.3751:

If anything on staff needs editing I would say the auto atk on earth

It causes weakness and it’s a projectile finisher…what more do you need?

Agreed with the poster above me. Also, testing at 0 condition damage and high power makes the scepter look very poor, while with high condition damage and 0 power the opposite would be true. So a note should be added for that at least.

100 condition damage would increase the scepter’s fire auto attack by 50 damage for example.

The elemental glyphs do make PvE a lot easier. Especially the aggrograbbing Earth Elementals.

Hmm…I see. What would that accomplsih exactly, other than making bunker builds even more powerful relative to dps builds?

It depends mostly on what you wish to achieve. However, you can’t really go wrong with 20 points in water since it’ll not only give you some vitality and healing power (which you’ll make good use of), but it’ll also give you a good heal/condition removal each time you swap to water (and it’s aoe too). With minimal investment in Air or Earth, you could get Quick Glyphs and/or Earth’s Embrace, which are fairly decent too.

As for the randomness, it’s not as random as it may seem. The major themes are Cantrips (Water), Signets (Earth) and Auras (Air/Water). I suggest that you look up those builds, they may give you some insight in how to pick traits.

The range for the boons granted by Elemental Attunement differs per element.

Also, Blasting Staff doesn’t increase every AoE, just some.

Use the traits to strengthen your auras, then use your auras and things like magnetic grasp/fire field combo for a leap finisher that adds even more auras.

That’s basically it.

Scepter does focus a bit more on damage conditions with its auto attacks, so some condition damage may be useful. The main advantage though is that it gains double bonusses from might.

Yes, that’s the thing. You’re supposed to switch, not stay in 1 attunement (though it’s possible for some niche builds).

So it doesn’t matter that water doesn’t deal much damage, because that’s not what it was meant to do. You have fire for that, and you swap between the two whenever you think you need them.

You do know that Elemental Attunement already gives boons to allies right?

alcopaul.2156:

i don’t see the point of this change apart from the karma bonus.

That’s because you’re probably at a high level already.

As a low level fractal player, I can asure you it’s not that easy to find a fractal group. Joining someone else is also pointless, because if the entire party isn’t at the level, then some will miss out. Also, high end players won’t join below level 10 because they won’t get the ascended drops. Now at least, lowbies can join up with the other lowbies and * all gain a level* instead of just one, making group finding a whole lot more likely.

As for the higher levels, not much has changed, but for levels 1-10, it’s a great change. You have no idea how tough it is to catch up and get to the point where we can at least work on making those infused items.

At worst (no +crit damage at all) Fury adds 10% to a person’s dps. Might on the other hand, doesn’t seem to go over 3% per stack. So the fury would be pretty useful…especially in combination with the might.

The rune is basically a 20% dps increase whenever you heal.

Being able to douse fires (and burning) with water healing skills.

bookman.9260:

What really saddens me is the scepter dps output. I like running scepters and I wish it put out more damage.

That’s in no small part due to the fact that he uses no condition damage. If he would have, the damage would have been a lot higher. Of course, that would mean you would probably have to regear, lose some power etc. so it would be hard to compare.

However, the main advantage of the scepter auto attacks is that they benefit from might twice. So might stacking on the scepter will actually be a lot more effective than it will on dagger or staff (considering these auto attacks of course).

That should allow the scepter to catch up as it were.

Wow, that’s just…wow. :-)

From the few tries I did, I think Let Me Entertain You may also be possible…any chance you could record it?

Seeing as how boon duration buffs stack, there’s little reason why these wouldn’t. As for the exact numbers, the best way would probably be by testing it. Isn’t there an NPC in the PvP area that causes conditions? Maybe the engineer and immobilize?

It’s a new skin. So the main thing that’s new are the looks.

The one thing I just don’t get with this whole random-boxes thing is why it’s so hard to give people at least some sense of value-for-their-cash.

I mean, let’s be realistic, it’d be easy to program something to remove doubles from minis after you get 2 of the same kind. It’d also be easy to up the droprate a bit (and since they’ve already made the model, it doesn’t matter wheter 10 or 1000 people get the mini, there are no additional costs).

They could even have added a bit of code that would ensure that anyone paying say $25 on gifts would get all minis.

But they don’t. They’d rather have upset people than happy people. Yet it wouldn’t cost them a penny to have happy people.

Tell, me, what management concept am I missing here?

There’s lots of npcs with white hair too…supposedly they’re old, yet their skin is still flawless…the only old lady in Tyria I know of is handing out creepy food as a skill challenge…

Still working on them slowly in case I ever do want one. However, I must admit I like the look of the Melandru’s Staff better than the Bifrost. And since I never intended to get the for prestige anyway, I may not get one after all.

Not unless I could upgrade my current weapon to legendary status…now that would be awesome.

You can make each profession into any role, but they way they go about doing so is totally different.

Take a ranger for example. If they wanted to go party support, they could use spirits that (when traited) run after them buffing all allies in the vicinity. On the other hand, an elementalist could use something like the Elemental Attunement trait to buff nearby allies whenever they switch attunements. then again, a warrior could do so by shouting at his allies and placing banners.

The professions are just different way of being able to perfom the various roles.