Guild Wars 2

Also, becuase it’s 1% on all parts, using Giver’s gloves will hurt your stats less than Giver’s chestpiece for the same benefit.

This can’t be anything but a bug.

It didn’t matter for the Triforge Pendant that I had added a gem to my Emerald Pendant. So I highly doubt the sigil will affect the weapon.

That is, unless sigils are removed when ascended weapons are added (but I somewhat doubt that will happen).

One of the reasons I left StarKitten Online was because of their love for paid random drop boxes.

Then came along Wintersday, and I really liked the costume, so I bought a gem card…and with some of the leftover gems, I bought 10 boxes. Surely Anet wouldn’t make the same mistake that StarKitten did?

However, 10 boxes later I had 2 random dyes and some other, useless items. And then I remembered again why I disliked lottery boxes again. It seems that no matter how much you spend on them, you will never get your money’s worth.

So yeah, I won’t be making that mistake again. Surefire stuff only from now on.

Ah, I get it now. Thanks for the clarification.

My personal tip would be to give Glyph of Elemental Power a try. There’s some useful tricks you can pull off with it. For example, if you cast it in earth, and then switch to fire, you can actually get a crippling meteor shower. Use it with water, and it’s good for 1v1 duels. Those two effects by themselves are pretty valuable to a staff ele.

Lifelike.5862:

I have no idea about ele though. For the most part you’re going to want to have your utilities full of ele skills. No room for racials.

Admitted, I am a fan, but still, it’s hard to find anything that’ll outperform the glyph. It’s just that good.

spacelion.9865:

I always ran something into air because i didn’t want to gear with precision/crit dmg so much. Also boons on aura were useful. Now the extra damage is just a free bonus lol

Yeah, a bit of air is pretty neat. I run it for Quick Glyphs personally.

JCorcoran.4081:

Now I need to test whether vigor on crit or arcane power at 75% hp is better. What do you guys think? Note: playing mainly WvW solo/small group.

It depends. How high is your crit rating, and how good is your defense? If you have, say 50% crit chance, then changing that into surefire crits at a time you cannot control, may not be very useful. Vigor however, often is.

Narhim.7345:

Another question (and I know I am way too late for this) – why did ANet nurfed Armor of earth? Any reason to take precious 2,3/4s away?

Cannot be sure, but it may be due to the boon stacking builds. 15 seconds of stability was a bit too much. It’s closer to 10 now.

If you’re going staff, then you might wanna avoid condition damage. We can do some condition damage, but not enough to make it useful.

For staff, I’d go with Power/Toughness/Vitality gear. It’ll do well enough for you.

What’s flipping?

To be honest, I hope it’s not about us either.

So basically, you want Tornado turned into a glyph…

Funny that you mention that. The targetting system really annoys me, as auto select makes me attack stuff whenever I swap attunement or even summon an elemental. Yet at the same time, I often seem to lose targets ofr no apparent reason, and my elementalist sometimes stops attacking altogether.

So to be honest, both options are unsuable to me at the moment. I kinda need to keep attacking at all, yet at the same time, it seems to always target way more than I want to.

When I don’t want it to work, it does, and when I do want it to work, it doesn’t. Does that make sense?

JCorcoran.4081:

I actually prefer my racial elites to the ele class elites. Probably not worth switching at this point, but try out your racials. As an asura, the 7 series golem does a ton more (single target) damage than the elite fire elemental.

People often think the golem is superior to the elite elementals, but in reality, it’s not. Here’s why:

Cooldown
Without any traits, and assuming the elemental lasts for 60 seconds, the cooldown is the same (180 for the golem, 120+60 for the elemental). However, if you use Quick Glyphs, the cooldown for the elemental is lowered to 156 (96+60) seconds at most. The other advantage of the elemental is that the cooldown starts the moment it goes down. So if it only lasts 10 seconds, your cooldown will also be 50 seconds less.

Damage
The golem has a barrage attack that has a weird way to calculate damage. Rather than listing each hit seperately, all previous damages are added to the next attack. This will give the impression that it does way more damage than it actually causes. Even so, the damage may be on par with the fire elemental. But the fire elemental also gives a might buff to its allies and itself.

Duration
The elementals can last up to 60 seconds per cycle, the golem only 40.

Casting
The elementals have a lower casting time and you don’t have to stand still to use the skill.

Versatility
The greatest thing about glyphs is the fact that you get 4 skills in 1. With the golem, you’re stuck with the golem. So if you need a tank, tough luck. Each of the elementals however, has a different use and they all cause at least 1 aoe buff.

The earth elemental gathers a lot of aggro, and with just a single healing rain, can tank the Champion Karka by itself. The fire elemental is great at bursting down stuff (and combined with the lesser verion, they both get 10 stacks of might). The ice elemental also casts an ice field, which can be comboed with. Finally, the air elemental’s ranged attacks can come in handy in things like the Rata Sum fractal. Note that not only its range is longer than the golem, but it can attack at range all the time. And the swiftness can help less skilled players with the jumping. So all in all, you get a huge amount of utility from just one skill.

Conclusion
The elementals are in many ways superior to the golem, and there’s no way I would ever use it if I had an Asura elementalist. However, for non-pet classes, the golem’s actually fairly decent. I’m having a blast with it on my engineer. But not for my elementalist.

You can get near-perma swiftness with just Windborne Speed and Glyph of Elemental Harmony. No need to jump through hoops.

With the +boon duration rune build however, using the earth/air combo, windborne speed and the glyph, one can get nearly a minute of swiftness.

So all in all, is Signet of Air a good skill now? Well, it’s ok. It’s redundant in most builds though, but there may be a few builds that can make use of it now. At least it’s somewhat usable compared to the other 3 signets. All in all, an ok change. Nothing great but not bad enough to complain about it either.

JonathanSharp

AOE balance. We feel that in PvP some AOE builds are too strong for the opportunity cost, and we’ll be bringing those in line in the next few patches.

This is among the current patch notes. What are your feelings about all this? What are your predictions this will do to the staff elementalist? Do you all feel that the AoE damage of the Elementalist is too strong for the opertunity cost?

There is 0 skill in pressing the space bar? Really? Then why do you get sick from doing the puzzles? You should be finished in no time.

SecondtoNone.7549:

It’s strange that people have been spouting off a lot of rage about how OP it would be without providing logical back up

That’s because you trivialize the issue. having acces to too many skill combinations was the major flaw of Guild Wars 1. It made it virtually impossible to balance. ArenaNet restricted skills a lot more in Guild Wars 2, yet you continue to ask them to drop their core game mechanic.

And apart from that, there are enough tools available to fix the issue that you claim to have. The conjured weapons could be rebalanced for example. Adding weapon swap will add a ton of potential issues that can be avoided simply by making a choice. And even then, Anet will have to tread lightly because even though YOU may not be able to think of an overpowered combination, doesn’t mean that someone eventually will. The more combinations, the more potential for disaster.

That’s what Guild Wars 2’s about. You can’t have it all. So it’s pointless to ask to get it all. You have to choose. Elementalists aren’t less restricted than other professions. They have different restrictions. That’s part of the fun, to have differences between professions, and if you wanna play one, you’ll have to work with what you got. Not demand that they’re made the same to other classes + some more.

My prediction would be:

-Boon duration buffs from runes no longer stack.
-Superior and Major Runes of the same type no longer stack their effects.
-Elemental Attunement’s protection boon now lasts 3 seconds instead of 5.

Because seriously, although fun to use, some of the permanent boon duration gained through the Water/Water/Monk combo are a bit too powerful. Add auramancer to the mix, and suddenly all other party support becomes redundant. So expect a nerf to those traits/runes soon.

Arheundel.6451:

…while a staff user should be the heavy artillery guy...

You do realize that Anet thinks they’re more suited as party support, right?

Roxy Painter.3691:

What about having the option of either Attunement Swap OR Weapon Swap.

System as it is now, single weapon, 4 attunements.
OR
Have 2 weapon sets, but locked into 1 attunement.

You’d have to use Hero panel to designate it, and can only decide out of combat, like we do now with switching weapons from inventory.

You’d still have the same problem of having way too many potential skill combinations.

Remember people, there’s a REASON why skills are separated. The idea is to limit the amount of skills, and especially the amount of combinations. That’s why other classes have weapon swap, but the engineer and elementalist get kits and attunements.

ArenaNet doesn’t want more combinations, they prefer to keep them in check. So this whole debate is pointless because none of you keep the game design in mind with all of your suggestions.

To add even more confusion to it all, I get this feeling that the observatory’s a fractal as well. Dessa responds pretty odd when you ask about the portal connection to Lion’s Arch, hinting that either her observatory or your onw world’s a fractal too.

Or maybe she comes from a different world or time, but they’re both ‘real’. At any rate, it seems there’s a lot more mystery to the Mists than can be explained.

There’s one already, posted a few weeks back I think.

To be honest, I don’t see the point in comparing skills to similar skills in the same slot. There will always be skills that are better or worse individually. What matters is: how well does the whole set of skills compare to the whole other set of skills.

That’s in fact the way Anet intends to balance stuff, judging by the fact that they group skills per weapon instead of letting us pick per slot.

The thing is, one of the major changes the developers intended for Guild Wars 2 (compared to GW1) was to separate the skills in order to reduce the amount of possible combinations. This was done in no small part because they were so tough to balance.

So, even if I agreed with everything you claimed (which I do not) I still don’t see them adding more possible combinations between the weapon sets. Sure, they could probably balance it. However, they chose to implement them this way so they wouldn’t have to. Because now, they only have to worry about balancing the combinations relatively to the other combinations (which as we’ve seen so far, isn’t a simple task either).

And there’s always some hidden combo that nobody thinks about until after weapon swap is added. Seriously, if you’re any good at playing the elementalist, it should be obvious why in combat weapons swaps aren’t the way forward.

I mean, Deathcall already found a way to abuse it if it’s out of combat. Shouldn’t be so hard to understand why it’s not ok to have 40 skills interact with eachother…and conjures.

Comaetilico.3645:

except that elemental surge doesn’t work on arcane shield ^^’ (it didn’t worked the last time I checked it and didn’t see any fix for it so I assume it still doesn’t work)

It does in the Mists, even though it can be hard to test.

… and anyway arcane surge is worth a GM trait only in combination with arcane power (that apply the surge effect to the next five attack… sometime…)

You still have 2 spare slots you can use for Arcane Shield. In fact, if you’re gonna go for an Arcane build then you might as well. However, the main reason that I posted my comment is to have all the variables in before a decision is made. Not to claim that every build should run an AS/ES combo. Quite the opposite in fact.

You can boost it with Elemental Surge, making it a lot stronger.

Lordryux.9785:

on ur staff put superior sigil of force

Sigil of Battle gives you between 3 and 9 might boons, which exceeds the +5% damage that Sigil of Force gives. I’d recommend using it instead.

Forzani.2584:

I just traited Zephyrs Boon so I will try it. Doesn’t mean I understand how it works though …which kinda drives me crazy

People use it combined with runes and +boon duration food. I’m not 100% sure which runes, but I believe Rune of Water is one of them.

Grevender.9235:

four auras
1) Shocking Aura: A3 (dagger)
2) Frost Aura: W4 (dagger)
3) Fire Aura: deploy fire field, select a target, switch to earth and quickly use Magnetic Grasp (dagger)
4) Magnetic Aura (E3, staff). Note: you can obtain this effect also equipping a full set of Superior Rune of the Earth

You’re forgetting the focus, which has Fire Aura on it as a regular skill.

What about a combination of Elemental Surge, Arcane Power, Dragon’s Claw + Fire Grab with a bucketload of +critical damage gear?

Hehe…funny that the one you ‘want’ is the one with the shortest skirt. :-)

Power/Toughness/Vitality gear would do very well. And it’s easy to get too, considering it’s available for Ascalonian Catacombs tokens.

EatThisShoe.5136:

Burning Precision: Honestly I think people over estimate crit proc rates. Try this out on a golem in the mists, even with 50% crit rate it just doesn’t proc very often.

The average chance would be your critical chance divided by 3. So with 50% crit chance, it has 15% chance to activate. Not great, I agree.

Plus our trait lines don’t really support precision/condition builds which means you are probably running power/precision and getting low burn damage. Also last I tested it was only 1s of burning

Since it’s only 1 second, it shouldn’t really be viewed as a condition, but more as a little added damage to your critical hit. Assuming you have 0 condition damage, it deals 328 damage. Now, if you assume your attack deals 3200 damage normally, it crits and the burn procs, that would essentially mean it adds another 10% damage. This means it’s roughly equal to +3% crit damage. Seeing as how the base damage of many of our attacks will actually be lower than 3200, this number increases (on staff auto attacks it can add as much as 50% damage per hit). However, it’s still pretty situational, I’ll agree with you on that.

Weak Spot: Another crit proc that I think is overrated. It’s not bad, but often you will be getting only around 3 stacks of vulnerability, even with fast attack rates like Arc Lightning. It’s a bit better than our 5% damage traits given the ally support, but not by much. I just wouldn’t rate it excellent.

Maybe it should be toned down a bit. However, a constant 3% extra damage for a party of 5 means this trait is essentially increasing your dps by 15%. Which is pretty strong. So maybe relatively excellent, assumed it’s used in a party?

Arcane Precision: It’s bad. A 10% proc chance is just terrible, and the effects aren’t all that strong, it’s weaker than Burning Precision or Weak Spot by a huge margin, and those traits aren’t that strong to begin with.

Agreed. It should be boosted to 30% chance at least.

Avatara.1042:

Rock Solid means 30 points in Earth, and you really need to couple it with 30 in Arcane for the quick Earth attuning. It is just flawed, especially when compared to the Earth signet traits.

It would do well with just 20, and remember, it’s AoE too. This thing is great in group events that have dragons that fear. Just pop into earth and your entire zerg can remain where they are.

Also, keep in mind that your water fields will combo with any finishers your teammates may have. Any projectile finisher will add a few seconds of regen, any blast will result in a heal. D/D doesn’t have that.

JCorcoran.4081:

Does elemental surge work with Arcane Retribution and Final Shielding? Or is it only for arcane skills on your utility bar?

Although I’m now doubting myself, I was pretty sure that it did in fact proc on the shield’s blast. I’ve tested it a bit on the Engineer NPC in the Mists. It’s not very easy to test to be honest, but I’m pretty sure it did proc. But maybe I’m mistaken and the effect was added through some other means. I didn’t plan to use it so frankly, I didn’t test it thoroughly.

Ayame Yoshimoto.1860:

Also, if you’re so great at underwater PvE, please show us. If you can really handle tons and tons of mobs with ease, then by all means please go record a solid chunk of underwater game play and post it

To be fair, I did notice that there’s quite a few mobs underwater (almost all) that can be kited pretty much indefinitely without getting hit, by just swimming in circles. in fact, we could probably solo the underwater fractal boss if we wanted to, just by constantly swimming circles.

That doesn’t make us good though, it makes the mobs suck.

I must admit, while I enjoy the staff a lot, not being able to either take hits or deal out hits is getting tiresome.

I’m guessing…Wintersday.

Imagine this scenario:

Me———————-CreatureA———————————CreatureB

Say I decide to fight creature A. Say I get unlucky and also aggro CreatureB. Say I decide to stay and fight anyway, and almost get CreatureA down. Say I pull back a little to my original position for tactical reasons.

Then this is what happens:

At 2% health, Creature A resets, runs back to its starting position and starts gaining health like there’s no tomorrow. Creature B on the other hand, continues to fight even though it’s much, much farther from it’s starting position than Creature A. Seeign as how they were both veterans, you now die because all YOUR healing skills are on cooldown.

This is what we call the “Throw-your-computer-out-of-the-window-in-frustration” move, and I would really like to see that it gets fixed. Because between the random resetting, the pointless invulnerabilities and the extremely high respawn rate, this is getting old.

Really old.

Creslin.1758:

So with arcane power, does it count a “hit” as an attack??? Like if my fireball hits 3 people, that counts as 3 attacks? Does it do this across the board, or does it behave differently with different skills??

To be honest, I’m not really sure. From what I’ve heard, Fireball counts as 2 hits regardless of the amount of people you hit with it. In general, aoe skills tend to respond pretty weirdly to it but I’ve not done extensive testing.

22 slots…and I don’t even use the 20 slots ones…got room to spare still.

Faren is awesome. If only he’d been around during the later parts of my story as well…

Curring.9752:

@Quizz, I don’t really see the point of having a 90 second cooldown stun breaker.

It also protects you against future stuns by granting stability. And the reason for taking both the skill and the trait is so you can have the skill twice. Because boons stack, their effects are never wasted even if the auto shield activates right after you use the skill. And they both have separate cooldowns.

Creslin.1758:

For example, I would be interested to see if an Ele could fire multiple AoE immobilizes if they trigger arcane power and then fire a bunch of AoE or bounce (chain lightning) abilities. THAT would be brutal in PvP…same with multiple AoE blinds…let me know if anyone has experience with this.

Unfortunately, unlike Glyph of Elemental Power, Elemental Surge considers your current attunement…so no mass immobilize (mass cripple through glyph + meteor shower does work though).

The issue with Elemental Surge is that it’s very buggy at the moment. Fire Ball removes multiple charges for being an AoE skill for example. Frozen Ground consumes charges but doesn’t apply an effect. Arcane Power + Arcane Wave in water causes 12 seconds chill, but in Earth only 1 second immobilize. And I haven’t even tried it with the other weapons, so who knows what they do.

Overall, the skill can be either awesome or worthless, depending on what combination you use it with. Three ‘safe’ combinations are AP in water with Water Blast, with Stoning in earth and with Chain Lightning in air.

I agree. My point was though that, compared to OTHER games, Guild Wars 2 has a relatively realistic levelling curve. One of the things that contributes is the fact that you get experience for more than just killing stuff.

konosh.4721:

So it breaks Elemental but could also be abused to use the skill twice in a row.

You’ll notice that I said in my post that, while you can cast it again in Mist Form, there’s no effect: no animation, no damage.

Could it be abused with ‘When casting an elite’ runes?

Fyras.3915:

Also, churning earth from Evasive Arcana, doens’t always work and its not hiting enemys in the suposed max 360 Radius.

Is it affected by Blasting Staff? Should it be affected by Blasting Staff? Could it be that Blasting Staff reduces the range?

Fun times? There was this one time I used a stealth fountain in the EB jumping puzzle, and Gusted a Thief down into a group of my server which he was preventing from going further.

Maybe that wasn’t fun, but it was poetic justice. An ele who stealth ambushed a thief for a change…

maddoctor.2738:

I think Arcane Power is bugged not Elemental Surge, when Arcane Power works it procs Elemental Surge correctly… when it works

Well, there’s more to the story. Like for example, if you use Arcane Power (with Elemental Surge) together with Arcane Wave, it causes double the amount of chill and half the amount of immobilize. You’d expect 2*3 seconds of chill yet you get 12 seconds. You’d expect 2 seconds of immobilize but you only get 1 second.

On a whole though, you’re right. Few things in the combination of trait and skill work as you’d expect and most of it isAP’s fault. A good change may be to have it trigger on the next 5 times you actually deal damage. That would at least make AoEs only trigger multiple times when you actually hit stuff multiple times, and Frozen Ground wouldn’t eat up charges without doing anything.

Or how Guild Wars 1 elementalists couldn’t change attunements on the fly but had to prepare them in town or another safe place.