Guild Wars 2

If it’s just about finishing your legendary, transfer servers.

I hear “I only need that vista/poi for my legendary, I have everything else!” a LOT.

How much did you pay for all that other stuff? Precursor, lodestones, t6 mats, etc.

How much would it cost to transfer? (and would you even need to transfer back? seeing as guesting can allow you PvE access and if you’re making this complaint in the first place you probably don’t like WvW, so who cares what server is technically your home?)

Have you made a thread on the forums yet to complain how it’s unfair that PvE players can make a ton more gold (progress toward their legendary, that is, since gold=grind=legend somehow) by facerolling a 5 minute dungeon over and over than players who dedicate their time to taking and holding WvW objectives (that, you know, benefit those PvE players also…. what do your CoF p1 speed runs benefit my WvW experience again? right, they don’t, so why should I care if you have to pay a few of those easily earned gold to transfer temporarily? right, I shouldn’t, and don’t).

I wouldn’t mind some random rotation to the colors, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just pointing out some pretty big discrepancies. People will throw more gold into the mystic toilet hoping for RNG to look favorably on their prayers for a precursor/clovers than it would take to transfer to a server where they could be sure of getting their map completion.

Welcome to GW2 and the Elementalist.

Wiki on combos.

The tooltips on each skill will list if it is a combo field or finisher. Each type of field reacts differently with each finisher, and every field reacts in some way with every finisher. It takes a bit to learn them all, but it makes gameplay much more fun and generally easier once you do.

Best advice I can think of for a brand new player rolling an elementalist as their first character: don’t be too hard on yourself when dying. Elementalist probably has the steepest learning curve of any profession, it’s ok to go down a lot at first.

Try to minimize dying, of course. As others said, learn to time your dodges and stay behind enemies as much as possible, that is the main form of damage mitigation in the game. Make sure your gear is up to date, keep it within 5-7 levels and use masterwork gear if you can afford or craft it. Make sure you use the closest level trinkets you can as well (amulet/rings/accessory) and use the toughness ones if you are feeling squishy.

The boons from Arcana V will do more to keep you alive than the first traits in water and swapping attunements faster will improve your damage more than 5 points in air.

Learn to use staff and scepter and even focus depending on what you fight. There seems to be a common opinion that D/D is the “best” weapon set, but that is not true for leveling. It’s a true melee weapon set, and that puts you a lot closer to a lot of the damage at low levels.

Scepter has a toughness buff on #2 that you can keep up permanently (just don’t use the toggle “hurl” for damage unless the fight is nearly over or the cooldown is up so you can refresh the barrier immediately) and will really improve your damage mitigation. It also has two blinds, which can be timed to avoid big attacks when you don’t have a dodge up. I leveled mostly with scepter, and still feel it is generally the best leveling weapon for the sort of solo/exploring you are doing. It’s weaker than staff for large groups, but you shouldn’t be pulling groups that big till you feel comfortable anyway. The only soloing situation where I’d recommend a different weapon is against dredge (dang blind immunity). Once I got comfortable with dodging and stuff I switched my build to Air/precision (around level 25-30ish, iirc) and found I could “oneshot” groups of mobs with a dragon’s tooth>phoenix combo and if that didn’t totally finish them ring of fire>earthquake>churning earth surely would.

For skill challenges, veterans and such, use your Earth elemental summons to “tank”. You can heal them with your water attunement heals, and if you reset to have the Arcana V trait (resetting is cheap, no need to buy another trait manual, just take the reset option at the trainer npc) your attunement swaps will buff it with regeneration and protection. The elite elemental glyph you get at level 30 is a better “tank” and will ease your soloing a lot.

I used to run the boon duration 0-10-0-30-30. I’ve since dropped the boon duration in favor of damage, and although it’s a much less forgiving build, it hits a LOT harder.

This is pretty much my current build. It gets really close to the magic numbers of 16k hp and 2.5k armor, which I also consider to be the target for basic survival in WvW, and does nearly double the damage of the bunker build.

In 1vX situations, this build quickly downs low defense characters and puts heavy pressure on tanky builds. It’s not about wading in and facetanking everything then just RTL>heal to full>repeat, so there isn’t a rotation I can recommend. It has enough toughness not to get oneshot, and enough condition removal to escape/sustain, but it’s not built for trolling the masses endlessly.

I still have my old soldier’s/boon-duration set, but I haven’t equipped it for anything in a long time.

I prefer s/f to d/f. There just isn’t much synergy with d/f, it’s kind of like they forgot those weapons could be equipped together during development. Most skills on focus have a 900 range (same as scepter) or a ranged component (projectile reflect on the only PBAoE). The gap closers on dagger mainhand aren’t even 900 range, making combo initiation clunky.

I use full knight’s gear with rubies in every slot, traits are 0-30-0-30-10, and I swap major traits around to get different levels of survivability or damage output. It’s a much squishier (less forgiving) build than the popular bunker, but I found that the tanking skills on focus make it quite workable, even for soloing (although it is really best in mid-sized group combat).

“High skill cap” and “quick summary of the skill rotation” are pretty much mutually exclusive.

This is a very in depth and useful guide.

PinCushion.7390:

The real problem isn’t the healing. It’s the healing, coupled with mobility, coupled with massive cleansing. If I was going to weaken any part of that trinity it’d be the cleansing.

How would you suggest they do that without even further damaging hybrid builds?
Removing the EA cleanse would nerf non-water/cantrip builds even more. Removing the regen from cantrips would nerf any non-arcane/boon-duration build’s ability to use regen. Reducing the amount of conditions removed by ether renewal would nerf any non-water/cantrip build. I just don’t see a good way to reduce the cleansing and not even further damage hybrid/damage builds ability to survive.

Then there is class balance to consider, with the lowest health pool and base defense, elementalists should have good healing/sustain.

Shout healing warriors specced to remove immobilize on movement skill and using a warhorn already have superb condition removal, healing and mobility. Just that most don’t spec that way because it limits damage and their damage builds have better base survivability than a hybrid elementalist.

Bunker guardians might have less mobility, but they have amazing ability to generate boons and healing, including boons that are rare or impossible for elementalists to self generate (retaliation and stability), clear conditions, etc.

Both guardians and warriors can spec to clear more condtions from allies than elementalists can (with d/d anyway, healing rain on staff might be technically as many or slightly more condition clears, not sure about that). Cantrip condition removal is self-only, and with the amount of conditions being spammed in WvW these days, self-only condition removals aren’t game-breaking.

The difference between an elementalist running cleric’s gear and one without healing power on his gear is nearly double the self healing. That’s why I’d suggest reducing the scaling of healing power beyond 300 (the most without any +heal gear). The healing output of the weapon skills that heal others (and the EA roll) should remain the same to avoid discouraging support builds, but change signet and self-applied regeneration scaling to have diminishing returns for high healing power.

Give 0-30-0-30-10 a try, or 0-25-10-25-10, or 0-25-0-25-20……

Basically anything with at least 15 water and 10 arcane, but there is some pretty awesome synergy in the top ends of air and water.

This is basically what I’m running at the moment, although I don’t use d/d as much anymore, more often s/d or s/f now.

There are many counters to this “OP” build. Not sure how it is in the lower tiers of WvW at the moment but that build is basically useless in tier 2 these days as there are so many builds running around which simply hard-counter the boon-heavy bunker d/d elementalist.

Even for classes without tools to directly remove boons, just apply poison consistently and you’ll win (if you know the elementalist’s healing/damage rotation, if you don’t, then learn, the PvP in this game is about knowing your enemy).

Bunker d/d beats glass cannon builds. That’s where the complaints come from. Glass cannon players are used to games where the “mage” class dies when you push buttons at it. Glass cannons are worthless in this game where you have to be your own tank and healer sometimes.

If bunker d/d eles are killing you, seriously look at your build and consider adding a small amount of toughness and maybe a condition clear or escape move. As has been mentioned, every single utility that ele is using is an escape/condition-clear. If all you have on your bar is haste and some signets or CCs, it’s not the elementalist’s fault for being better prepared for a long fight, it’s your fault for thinking you can end the fight quickly in your favor and having no backup plan.

Don’t run from a d/d elementalist. They can and will chase you down. If you are running, you aren’t damaging them, they are healing while they chase you.

If there’s a d/d elementalist fighting you and 5 others and he actually manages to down one or two, don’t all go kneel down to rez. He will aoe the crap out of that spot and you might actually take some damage. Keep hitting him, he will have to blow a long cooldown to get one stomp or retreat to heal up and you can then rez under less pressure.

Learn to time your CC. All those cantrips are on long kitten cooldowns, make him burn them. Apply cover conditions before immobilizing.

Balanced builds are more powerful in WvW than bunkers, because they can actually kill (besides green arrows and glass, anyway). In sPvP I’d imagine bunkers are more powerful, since damage is less overall, holding points is more important than actually killing, and the cap circles are tiny.

I can’t imagine a good way to nerf bunker elementalists without making the other (arguably weaker already) builds even less viable besides a straight nerf to the scaling of healing power. Maybe some sort of diminishing returns on healing power over 300. Maybe even across the board for all classes, bunker guardians, despite the statement of the previous poster, can heal themselves to full from basically nothing repeatedly as well.

Not saying I favor zergs or anything, so don’t take this out of context.

Large groups fighting doesn’t necessarily mean they are unskilled. The “standing in a ball” effect isn’t just due to aoe caps, it’s part of the trinity-less system.

In other games you have the tanks soaking damage while the healers, well, heal them and the others do their various other things like press attack macros. In this game everyone is somewhat of each tank/healer/dps/control. Moving together allows the use of combo fields and the sharing of boons and healing.

Removing the aoe cap wouldn’t limit zerging, it would just make fights end faster as whichever side got their aoe burst off first would win.

I’ve seen plenty of small teams who think they are playing some awesomely coordinated spec but really are just focus-fire gankers who specialize in cheese-derping lowbies and support builds on their way to bigger fights. I’ve seen plenty of humongo-zerg-hoardes with more coordination than many little gank squads, it goes both ways. It’s totally possible to be (or consider yourselves) effective with a small group of thieves and mesmers without even knowing how combo fields work, the same really can’t be said for large groups (if they plan to fight any coordinated groups their size anyway).

Other than skill lag due to technical issues, with culling gone, I find some of the big zerg fights to be quite strategic these days. Generally I tend to prefer small group combat, but often that ends up as me trying to save a few randomers from the 5 man gank squads, which I’m sure is fun for them, and makes them feel oh so coordinated and skilled.

tldr; Small groups don’t necessarily have more skill than large ones.

You might be missing trait synergies or damage stats on your gear. Without listing your build, there’s not much room for people to give advice.

Short answer: yes, you are missing something, but I’m not sure what.

Waking.6052:

The points are the game, it’s how you win. It shouldn’t be the game but it is.

All you get for winning the points game is a few days of slightly higher PvE bonuses, which reset every week.

“The points are the game” is like “the forest is the trees”.

DevonCarver.5370:

I don’t have access to the exact numbers at home, but I do know that the points do not change based on the number of people that receive credit.

Thanks for the answer, Devon. That helps a bit.

You hear that guys? Stop zerging the poor dolyaks. ;p

I doubt there will ever be any official statement of exactly what gives exactly how many points and why. At least I hope not.

Metagaming based on maximizing point gain undermines the whole idea of an epic open world siege simulator. You’re supposed to be killing yaks to stop enemies getting supply, not farming them in a specific pattern to “win” the points game.

The points are meant to be a reflection of coverage and ability, used to determine the most balanced matchups. The points are not the game. There is no prize for first place (other than massive queues, perhaps).

pulsecodesgnl.3470:

This makes me wonder if I am missing out on tons of experience by not being a t1/t2 matchup. I’ve been WvWing every second I can since the patch and I am only up to rank 7 -_-.

Where is everyone finding the majority of their WXP is coming from?

(are the lack of bodies to kill in t8 hurting us that much?)

Zergballin’

I mostly roam/scout/sentry, but a great majority of the wxp I have so far came from running with a big group, either killing other big groups or quickly capturing objectives.

Also, I have multiple characters I consider my main. The two I have taken into WvW since the patch are both barely rank 5.

pulsecodesgnl.3470:

20 game days? What does that even mean? Assuming you’re playing 4 hours a day (which is way above casual by the way), it would take you just over 4 months to get 500 hours.

Assuming you spend every second of those 500 hours in the most efficient zerg possible. It’s more realistic that it could take 700 on average as someone calculated above with the hour average that dev’s cited.

Now, that’s over 4 months, to max JUST the supply bonus, on ONE character. I’m sorry, but that’s just dumb. No other part of the game functions like this, it’s fine with goals that take years, make them vanity items and account bound, like sPvP does.

These ‘rewards’ are unnecessarily time consuming.

This ^

But hey, it’s getting closer to summer. More reason to go outside more often.

Falling behind the curve of power creep won’t motivate me to play a game more. Not having 8 hours a day to play WvW will make me fall behind, nothing I can do to change that.

There’s a ton of "Assaulter"s running around already. I have two rank 4 "Invader"s at the moment. I probably won’t level up my guardian or engineer any time soon, will be trying to get the wxp on my “mains”. What will take a year for the average player, will take me three years (or would, if it didn’t act to discourage me rather than entice me to grind).

“Play your way” as long as that way doesn’t include having alts.

(There’s also the issues of much less wxp for support roles, none for rezzing allies or guarding dolyaks, but that’s another rant, for another thread.)

What’s really fun about it is the 5 supply which your character is attempting to loot (causing the bug resetting it to 10) appears as a “rare” drop chest instead of a standard loot bag.

“Sweet! Rare drop!”
-grabs-
You receive 1 Hoof
“Hey, wha happen mah suppliez?!”

A small ICD to the damage output of retaliation would help balance it. I think the recent addition of an ICD to omnomberry pie made retaliation worse unintentionally, as any class without boon-stripping could use it with a crit build to mitigate some of the damage from retaliation.

Balancing is a constant process and we’re largely subject to PvE based balancing effects due to conditions in dungeons and DEs which are far different than large scale PvP.

Nerfing retaliation in PvE would make it pretty useless, and in sPvP it’s pretty easy to see your opponent’s buffs and deal with them effectively, so don’t hold your breath for a WvW retaliation nerf.

People will find a reason to complain about anything.

The only thing I see wrong with it is the lack of trinkets, but those are all available for karma in Orr anyway so it’s not a big deal. The gold cost is way less than crafted stuff, and anyone who plays WvW much probably has an excess of badges anyway.

It would be nice to have some unique skins for WvW gear rather than the simple racial/karma skins. Facerolling CoF for a week gets you a shiny set of flaming armors/weapons, but playing WvW for months gets you the same skins you can get from basic PvE or karma vendors under level 60. The thousands of objectives we take and defend contribute to easier and more profitable PvE (through passive bonuses) but we get generic clothes to do it in. It’s not a big deal though, just an observation.

Ephexi.7061:

With GW2 everyone is essentially a DPS class, with (light) shades of support and control.

I guess my shout-healing leg-specialist hammer/mace-shield warrior with warbanner is just a DPS class with light support and control, eh? His DPS is amazing (-ly bad) and his CC totally doesn’t knock zergs around like ragdolls (when they have stability anyway, which is countered by the specific skills of a couple of those other essentially DPS classes without much support or control and no real unique uses, cause they are all the same, right?).

You sir, win the prize for best understanding of GW2 mechanics. The prize shall be delivered to you on April first.

The people who are willing to gamble on these items must generally be willing to pay more in total than the people who would buy them if they were sold directly (or at least their marketing research causes them to believe so).

It works great for players like myself. I dislike monthly subscriptions and I dislike even more the free-to-play/pay-to-win model of selling highest-tier gear. I won’t gamble for skins, but it’s not the end of my world if I don’t have every new shiny.

I suspect that the range of players who are obsessive enough to desire every new skin but not obsessive enough to gamble excessively for them is a pretty small demographic.

Geez, people will complain about anything.

Do you read books and watch movies the same way? What is it that destroys people’s ability to simply enjoy a story without the constant critiquing and back-seat editing?

Maybe he’s becoming confused from standing next to the dragon’s tooth. It seems to have addled the mind of the norn standing there anyway, he keeps saying the same 3 things at 30 seconds intervals…..

(I like Thruln, hope they keep adding more “living” characters like this, great for the immersion factor. Would be nice if they disabled the random dialogue from the npc standing right next to him though. “Years ago I won the great hunt, still one of my proudest moments” right over and through the Jotun’s conversations is a bit jarring.)

Just opened on Tarnished Coast (NA). 3pm Pacific Time.

Failed it so many times yesterday I lost count, Jonez is too squishy and stands in a really vulnerable spot……

Taldren.7523:

EA causes blast of the Earth Dodge roll. If you are in earth and dodge into a fire field and swap to water you will set off both a water and earth dodge effect … the earth one granting 3 stacks of might to everyone around you.

If so, that’s a bug. EA is supposed to have an internal cooldown, so you should be getting only the earth roll blast and the heal from the water swap, but not an extra heal from EA rolling into water.

exos.6831:

it would be nice if there was a build for elementalists to effectively use conjured weapons, and i dont mean situational. kind of like engineers with kits.

Depends what you mean by effective, and where. There was a thread somewhere about a Lightning Hammer dungeon speed run dps build, but I can’t find it at the moment. I tried a variation of it out in the practice lounge of the mists and was getting 5k crits on auto-attacks on the heavy target golems. The person who made the build did some math to show that it could out-dps a 100blades warrior. Not sure how really viable it is, but hey, it’s pretty subjective in PvE.

If the mobs die, and you don’t, it’s a good build. WvW and s/tPvP are different environments though. It’s hard to want to take any utility other than cantrips there, due to the low-hp/low-armor nature of the class.

The shield conjure needs a serious buff and the lava axe could use some work as well, to make conjure builds more useful.

The best fix, IMO, would be to combine all conjures (except the elite, it’s fine) into one utility that functions like the glyphs (even make it a glyph so traits synergize better). One slot skill that summons one conjure weapon based on attunement.

I am disappointed with this update.

If a small guild can earn enough influence to get to Art of War 3, then 2,700 influence every 3 days (72 hour build time) doesn’t do much to help. Without the new currencies or any decent rewards from the boss itself there isn’t any reason to do these “training missions”.

I just wish they hadn’t tied ascended gear to this in any way. Adding more currencies, more daily/weekly/raids/etc. just smells like the games I came here to avoid. Then making it accessible only to the “hardcore” and massive guilds is a bit of a kick in the newts to the rest of us.

The devs have said it plenty of times, WvW is not meant to be completely balanced. It’s a 24/7 siege warfare simulation played by a worldwide playerbase. There is a game mode in GW2 which tries to be perfectly balanced by having teams limited to 5 players and using the same standardized gear sets, and for all the complaints, it’s pretty balanced (as in, you enemy doesn’t outnumber or outgear you).

(Also, nice comments about honor and integrity while insulting people, there’s some honorable behavior right there. I assume you weren’t actually calling them “kittens”).

A good idea. It’s been suggested before, or variants anyway. Another idea is just to set attunement cooldowns to a base of 9 seconds and change the stat modifier in arcane (to something basically useless like the warrior’s +1% burst damage per 10 trait points if nothing more useful works).

It works with any build, but if you want to see a lot of damage out of it you’ll have to climb out of your bunker. I know, it’s safe and warm down there, with all those emergency candles, stacks of ramen and porn, but you’re just made of pixels anyway….

I don’t play much sPvP, so my perspective is mostly WvW oriented. I always preferred riding my skateboard along the bike path by the beach to the ramps at the skate-park, it’s the same in video games.

If you can live with it, I’d highly suggest 25 points into air for “weak spot” and taking the “piercing shards” trait in water with a high crit build (at least 30% without fury). Personally I am currently running 0-30-0-30-10 with soldier armors, boon duration runes, knight’s trinkets with rubies, and knight’s/valkyrie’s weapons. I can’t make anything like this build with the limited amulet/jewel combos in sPvP, which is one reason I avoid it generally, except to test general ideas.

As far as using the big flamin’ sword, it’s all in the positioning. I’d disable the auto-attack so you don’t burn charges, the #1 is good in some cases but you don’t want it channeling all the time. #2 just sucks, takes forever to cast and makes one pitiful little lava font, don’t use it on anything but downed players. Try to achieve the flaming blender effect, it’s all in the positioning (much like many fun things).

The only time I’ve seen it disappear other than from timing out or using all charges was going into mist form. That will do it every time. I don’t know if it’s a bug (hope so). Sometimes it will randomly stay in your hands after the timer runs out, I’ve run around with one for quite a while just for looks this way.

sapphyredragon.6437:

Which means that Cone of Cold heals for a total of 1,132 per use. That is split between 4 tics, which means 283 health per tic. Yeah, it’s a noticeable increase per tic, but that’s still pretty lame considering most teammates run out of the cone before getting all 4 tics. If 283 doesn’t look like a lame amount of healing to you, then you must not realize how dps works.

……

But yeah, other games have higher multipliers for good heals or you have more ways of getting higher healing power.

This seems to be a recurring theme in your reasoning. While you make good points, this specific game is specifically NOT like those other games. Healing in this game was never intended to match dps. There are many other forms of damage mitigation.

ANet’s vision of active combat doesn’t include standing around taking hits to the face and insta-healing to full repeatedly. Whether or not you enjoy this style is another topic altogether.

sapphyredragon.6437:

TheGuy, thank you for posting that, however it changes nothing. My statement still stands that D/D is weaker than Staff healing-wise.

Also, staff is weaker at self might stacking, gap-closers/escapes, aoe interrupts, auras, casting speed (healing signet? still sucks huh? ok….) and handling anything in melee range. Also, these apples are way redder than these oranges.

Ascended gears are no longer a concern of mine. I have so many characters that it would take me years of dailies to outfit them all in just the currently available stuff for the various builds they use (and I don’t like dungeons much, so I won’t be grinding fractals, no need to remind me that is the “best” way to get ascended).

I got frustrated at first thinking about it, but then I realized, it’s just a game, they don’t own me or my time. I’ll probably get the mystery cat tonic, and maybe a Chauncey. Far more fun than an amulet with slightly bigger numbers that no one can even see unless you shift-click it in chat, and now it doesn’t feel like a grind to me.

Culling was meant to be an answer to skill lag. In beta there was no culling and many EB fights were insanely laggy (7+ second delay on even auto-attack, enemies apparently standing idle for several seconds then huge spikes of movement+damage, etc.). At the time we were told culling was being implemented to solve this issue, the server hardware was supposedly so close to the bleeding edge that there wasn’t really room to improve in that area. The removal of culling will be interesting, to say the least.

Responses in BOLD below

destroywhatdestroysyou.4301:

1. Should I try out a different weapon combination? I don’t see myself using D/D, simply because that’s SO close to the enemy. Out of all the weapon combo’s, which does the most damage?
Single-target/small-aoe: Scepter/Dagger. Max range/largest-aoe: staff. PBAoE/sustain with signet heal: D/D.

2. Should I stick with my CC/CD build, or should I go pure fire to get even MORE +power? Or should I mix the two?
For your level, anything is fine, feel free to experiment. At higher levels you’ll want to mix all 3 stats (after 60(?) all gear has 3 stats anyway). I’d suggest trying 10 trait points in arcane for the “V” trait to get boons on attunement swap, access to protection/regeneration/swiftness/fury should make up for any loss of dps from the air line.

3. Am I able to switch weapons? I see a button that allows it, but when I click it in game, nothing happens.
Nope. Not in combat anyway. Elementalists have 20 skills on each weapon set, that’s already double what other classes have even with weapon swap. Each set has all the tools you need: heals, damage, CC, etc.

4. About how many levels should I replace my equipment?
About every 10 levels unless you feel like you are dying easy and having a hard time killing, then try every 5-7 till you get used to timing dodge and heals.

5. I really REALLY like the Air skills, both for Staff and Scepter/Focus. Should I just stick with them, or use Fire instead? Which does more single target biggest number hitting skills? Learn to use every skill in every attunement, not just randomly or on cooldown, but when necessary or useful. Generally fire hits harder and air hits faster, but there are too many exceptions to list easily, so just play around with it.

6. Should I pay attention to movement speed? I like using the Lesser Elemental while attuned to air, so I move 10% faster I think with it on. And then I also use the fourth skill for staff air, so I move an additional 10% (these numbers might be a little off). And then I also have a new boon that let’s me move up to 25% faster, because every five seconds it adds +5% movement speed (until 25%). Do all these stack? Where do I find out my current movement speed in game? Is movement speed important for an Elementalist?
The lesser elemental randomly grants swiftness, +33% move speed, which is the cap move speed and over-writes the passives from traits. Passive movespeed bonuses don’t stack, the highest one takes precedence. With 10 points in arcane, you can get permanent +33% speed by swapping into air, using the healing glyph, then using staff air #4 and repeating on cooldowns.

I just want to put up the highest possible numbers I can lay down on enemies, thanks.
This isn’t WoW. Stop thinking of it as a DPS race. At early levels it’s easy to go glass cannon, as the early mobs were toned down quite a bit in damage since beta (ah, the days of getting 2 shot by deer….) but at higher levels you’ll need to be really freekin good not run full glass and not die all the time. Dead elementalists dps sucks…..

destroywhatdestroysyou.4301:

Hmm okay. I was thinking about playing a Thief too, (with a Shortbow), or a Ranger (with a Longbow/Shortbow). Do either of these classes have better DPS than an Elementalist?

Short answer: yes. Longer answer: maybe, depending on builds.

Aggro in this game has a lot to do with smell.

If you smell funny to the mobs, they ignore you. If you smell good, they eat you. If you smell bad, they eat someone else or throw things at you to make you smell better.

Grawl, trolls, ettins, etc. like the smell of meat, if you’ve killed any deer or moose or anything like that recently, you probably smell like food to them. Leave the wildlife alone, you big meanie.

Skritt are all about pie. If you are a cook, or have any pie or fruit in your bag, watch out for Skritt aggro. They also like cookies, and legendary/ascended gear (shinies!).

Oozes have “fur-envy”. If you play a Charr, try to avoid getting downwind of any Oozes.

Asura, or anyone who has rubbed up against one recently, will pull the most aggro from risen. “Brainnnnnsssss…..”

Icebrood have no sense of smell, noses are frozen. You get their attention by yelling (like my girlfriend gets my attention….). Shout warriors and guardians are perfect for this, but elementalists can end up with aggro by swapping attunements too often.

(All this info is verified by my extensive research, and contradicted by common sense.)

vinceftw.5086:

CuRtoKy.8576:

15 second CD on RTL to now 20 second CD on RTL. And with an attunement CD at 9 seconds (30 arcana), there are times now where your RTL might not be up when you switch back to air attunement while previously it would be up.

This. Even though it’s actually not that much of a longer cooldown, it makes a lot of difference since now you actually have to attune twice to air to have it.

Or give up your addiction to 30 arcane. Going 20 air for aeromancer’s alacrity puts the cooldown at 15 sec if you want.

Most skills cooldowns are longer than 9 seconds anyway, the only reason to go 30 arcane and spam attunement swaps is for boon uptime (and a bit more healing, condition removal, etc). When the “boon-hate” patch comes in we might see a lot more low/no-arcane builds.

Walls/gates not down yet and carts hitting you? Don’t stand so close.

2 warriors holding a choke point against 50? If you got 50 people and none of them have the skills or guts to push through (hint: 2 warriors could counter this with endure pain and shield #5, then hammer-slam the 2 enemy warriors off their carts, or 2 elementalists with mistform>lightning flash>earthquake, etc.) the fault lies with your team, not the arrow carts.

That said, it could probably use a duration cap or something. Put a 2-3 sec cooldown on leg specialist procs and that should solve it. Several warriors could still chain it, but it wouldn’t be nearly as easy to stack it to OP levels or whatever.

Atherakhia.4086:

Want to know why Warrior’s laugh at your comments about thier mobility? Because unlike every other movement skill in the game, their movement skills are affected by movement impairing abilities.

I’d love to see the forums light up when that 1200 RTL on a 20 second cooldown actually only went 600 yards because you were chilled. Whirlwind, Rush, and Bull’s charge combined wouldn’t keep up with an Ele if both were snared.

Another problem is the obvious where Greatsword really isn’t the greatest choice and they’re forced to use it because of the kitten movement abilities it has. I’d wager most warriors out there would give anything to be able to use Hammer/Axe+Shield instead of GS.

So no, Bull’s Charge, Rush, Whirlwind, and Leap don’t really work as well as Mistform, RTL, and Blink. And most warrior’s only use sword+horn on their offswap for running around in the open terrain out of combat. In combat they’re almost always axe/gs.

I play both warrior and elementalist. My warrior can facetank things that my elementalist HAS to run from. Specced for highest possible mobility and survivability it’s no contest which wins.

Warriors can spec to remove immobilize with every movement skill, warhorn clears all chill/cripple/immobilize, so if you are having problems with those conditions, it’s you or your build choices. Elementalists have to spec into a cookie cutter setup and use only one weapon set to achieve much survivability, warriors have choices of many viable specs, that’s the only difference.

Last night, on my warrior, I ran solo into a guild group of about 15 which was taking a camp, casually picked up some supply, knocked a few of them over the head and ran off just as easily, or moreso, than I could on my elementalist.

People are just frustrated that their expectations of a cloth class to simply stand still and die under melee pressure aren’t fulfilled in this game, but I bet they’d complain just as much if elementalists could easily oneshot them from range like the cloth classes in those other games which have programmed their subconscious expectations. For example, people mention mist form a lot in their complaints, compare it to endure pain and tell me which is better (hint: endure pain allows you to keep attacking….).

The reason warriors don’t all run gs/s-wh is because there are ways to survive other than simply running like a wuss every time you take damage.

Morena.9604:

I really believe that devs prepared this game for a really specific(even unique) type of a player base.

They did, because there weren’t really any games out there for this type of player, and perhaps some of the devs themselves are this type of player.

Then along came the profit-monster and it’s hunger.

Now we have an interestingly unique game design, with a hastily tacked on progression-MMO added on top like a mother-in-law apartment over the garage of a victorian inspired mansion. Not only is the plywood frame ugly and out of place, but the mother-in-law herself is just as distasteful to most of the family who bought the house for it’s beauty and uniqueness.

Okay, maybe that metaphor went a little far, but it bothers me when unique products are homogenized in an attempt to entice more customers than the original design. Profits are king, but they come at the expense of art so often.

If I want to play an RPG style game, online, with my friends around the country I have to choose one from a list of basically identical titles and jump on a gear treadmill. I’d hoped to avoid that with this game, but instead of simply saying “this game isn’t for you” to all the people complaining it wasn’t the same as every other MMO, they added a nice long grindy treadmill straight out of “The Idiot’s Guide to MMO Design”.

I’m concerned about this boon-hate thing. I’m hoping it’s not an example of the developers being months behind the meta in their planning, or basing the entire game balance off a few tPvP teams.

In tier 2 NA WvW at the moment, boons are already often a liability. The sheer amount of necros and mesmers specced specifically to remove/corrupt boons makes front line combat dangerous for any class that leaks boons out their ears.

If the damage boon-hate causes is negligible, then why add it at all? If it is considerable damage, classes with boons really will be hated. Good thing I leveled up my warrior, I’ll just switch “great justice” to balanced stance or endure pain or a banner or something, don’t want to give off too many boons while healing after all….

titaniumm.2983:

so i just wondering if there’s any other viable build out there…

really sorry guys again…:(

I linked my build already, but here it is again. It’s viable, with any weapon set or utilities, just swap stuff around as you like. If you already are familiar with playing a 10 point arcane build, it’s easy enough to learn.

Here’s the standard D/D bunker build on the same site for reference.

Compare the “Damage & Survivability” sections on the lower right. You basically trade 4k (effective) HP and 5.5% damage mitigation to gain 1.8k (effective) power. I find this trade acceptable for the increase in damage output, nearly doubling damage at the cost of about 5% survivability.

Using a focus as offhand more than makes up for the loss of defense. The upcoming patch should even make S/F viable against thieves, which is currently the only real danger to this build.

That site also doesn’t show condition removal, which is far superior with this build than a signet-heal 0-10-0-30-30 D/D. I don’t like signet-heal because it loses effectiveness when you get CC’d often, I find myself running away spamming random skills to heal at least as much as the few seconds ether renewal takes, plus you remove 4 conditions every 15 seconds instead of relying entirely on cantrips and water rolls .

Of course, if by “viable”, you mean even better than 0-10-0-30-30 at everything it does best (mobility and survivability against lots of people), then I don’t know what to say other than good luck, my friend.

(edited because caffeine kicked in)

With the nerf to RTL cooldown, D/D elementalists lost a big part of their mobility edge already. Kick boons in the newts and we’ll probably be seeing less D/D eles, not more.

When specced a certain way, my warrior can already outrun D/D eles (also, he has about 12k more HP and 800 more armor, permaswiftness with 2 buttons instead of 7, aoe heals with condition removal every 7 seconds, automatic stability on CC, 2 immobilizes with cripple, automatic invulnerability at 25%HP) but he can also facetank so much that I usually don’t have to run. But yeah, D/D eles are sooo OP, lol.

(Edit: Just noticed this thread was started by a thief player….. For whatever that’s worth.)

There are plenty of good builds, if you can get over your addiction to evasive arcana and ultra-fast attunement dancing (I know you’re hooked, we all are or have beekittenome point, it’s ok, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem….).

I posted this in another thread, it probably sucks, but whatever.

S/F burst/hybrid.

Using this build in WvW I’ve gotten over a hundred kills in a row without going down, and not just standing at the back of a zerg, front lining it most of the time with some small group roaming. It doesn’t work as well in 1v1s with thieves as ye’ olde’ bunker build (unless they are pistol spec, then nonomnomnom), but it’s passable against most others and exceptional against anyone running a ranged glass cannon spec (I’m lookin at you, mister “kill shot” rifle warrior <.<)….

I tend to assume most build discussions are about WvW, my own bias I guess. For PvE, I don’t get the issue at all, most of it is easy enough to be played with any old build. For sPvP I don’t know much, limited experience since it messes with my claustrophobia or something, such tiny battles…..

My current build.

Scepter/Focus, balanced build with an eye toward burst damage on low hp and CC’d targets.

I switch weapons/utilities/traits as needed, but I find this build effective in many situations. I realize there are many “better” builds out there, but this is a playable one, that I currently enjoy, using the weapons “nobody” likes. I agree to some extent with the consensus that scepter and focus could use a bit of a buff, but they are hardly unusable.

I’ve been playing elementalist since day 1 of BWE1, have tried every build I could think of, as well as running the good ol’ bunker D/D 0-10-0-30-30 for quite a while.

The plan (back in beta) was to have loot go straight into your inventory, however, there was some major design issue with the game engine itself blocking this from being implemented. Loot bags were the solution they came up with until the engine could get the overhaul necessary to make true auto-looting possible.

My guess is that there are a lot of other things on the engine devs tables taking priority (such as culling), but hopefully they haven’t totally abandoned plans to do away with the loot bag workaround.

Both of those videos are from last year.

I mean….. I can’t say what you saw cause I wasn’t there…..

My previous comment still applies though. Either it was a bug, or no one was contesting.

Making a waypoint uncontested via hacks would require modification of server side code (probably, I mean, since I don’t know the software specifically, but yeah, I’m on the internet, so don’t believe what I say anyway, those internet people aren’t to be trusted).

My ideal 20 person team would be any 20 people who are familiar and comfortable with the build and class they are playing. Ideally their builds would not be totally glassy. Other than that, I believe a mixed group of any professions can accomplish awesome things as long as the players themselves are fluent with their skills.

Your ideal band might be drum/guitar/bass/singer but I think great music can be made with any combo of instruments played by skilled musicians. The same thing applies to this game.

Teamkiller.4315:

style.6173:

Sorry engi and thief. You don’t bring enough value to the table in a 20v20 matchup.

I could agree with engis maybe, but really? Thief doesn’t bring stuff to the matchup?!?

-Theives can build for toughness and still hit like a truck. You can be almost as tanky as my guardian and still land 6k backstabs on non-bunkers. That way, you’re not a rally for the enemy team.

-On top of that they have cluster bomb, which is a deadly aoe skill on its own, but it is also the *most spammable blast finisher in the game. For an on demand water field area healing or fire field area might nothing, and I mean NOTHING, works better than cluster bomb. It makes the pre-fight might stack a whole lot quicker for your team. And there have been times where we didn’t even have enough blast finishers to go around. With a shortbow thief this will never be a problem.
-Shadow refuge is amazing for rezzing, provides a bit of healing and gives the thief’s most powerful weapon: stealth, to non-noobs who know to stay inside the shadow refuge for 4 seconds and not attack to stealth themselves. Actually once it goes down your allies just have to know to go inside (it can be up for 3 seconds, and you enter the last second and will still get the last 8 seconds of stealth). Amazing for an on-demand flank.
-Speaking of giving stealth to teammates, thieves also are one of the only sources of smoke fields and can easy stack blast finishers to stealth their team.
-Daggerstorm is one of the few skills that hit over the 5 man AOE cap causing both bleeding and cripple, invaluable skills against a zerg (not to mention reflecting projectiles.) and is very very effective to open with on an enemy zerg.
-A well timed blinding powder from my neighborhood friendly thief has saved our entire party’s kittens multiple times. It doesn’t give as long of a stealth as shadow refuge but it’s just about instant cast. Thieves can trait blinding powder on falling which is frigging awesome for those “drop from up high pushes.”
-Black powder will protect high value targets on your team from melee classes while providing smoke field for you or your friends to blast
-Did you know one of the smoke fields can block trebuchet and catapult shots? No lie
-Venom sharing is…OK I’m getting too far ahead of myself lol.

TL;DR you don’t know how much support thieves can give. They can give a kitten ton and still hit like a truck.

I generally agree with the above except a couple of points.

1) In a group of 20 situation, a banner warrior has as good or better blast finishing capability then a thief. Every banner is a bundle weapon anyone can pick up. The #5 skill drops the banner and acts as a blast finisher. The cooldown is per player, not per banner, so that’s a continuous stream of blasts with just a couple banners. As a side benefit, the #3 skill on banners can quickly stack aoe swiftness as well. Thief blast output is comparable, but eventually drains initiative unless traited a certain way.

2) Engineers also have smoke fields. They are quite viable in several ways, but not going into that here. Suffice to say, I disagree with the statement that engineers are useless.

(I’m also under the impression that dagger storm is capped at 5 targets, but like other continuous pulsing aoes it hits a random 5 each pulse, which looks like a lot of numbers all over the place. The reflect effect isn’t capped, and there’s usually a bunch of dumb people shooting the spinning thief, greatly adding to the “holy crap numbers everywhere!” effect of this skill.)

Unless it was bugged somehow for that fight, Gorefiend is probably right. To contest a location, the structure itself must be under attack, meaning walls/gates taking damage. It is entirely possible (and I’ve seen it happen before) that no one in your zerg actually knows this or was paying attention.

Next time you notice the enemy streaming out of their waypoint, instead of suiciding on the spawn, try hitting a door and see if they stop. You can also tell by looking at the map, if the icon for the location itself (not the WP icon) has white swords, it’s contested and WP should not work except for a few seconds between defend event cycles.

How about 70 engineers with turret builds all dropping every single turret on the same spot? They could also do pretty well at moving in stealth…..

One of the best things a D/D elementalist can do in defensive sieges is to run supply. Use that speed and ability to get through the door under fire to bring in more supply to build defensive siege or make critical repairs.

Another thing that’s fun is leading suicidal charges at enemy siege in the field. Updraft and earthquake to interrupt and scatter siege operators. Blast out some fire damage to grab more “aggro” then mist form and have your allies beat on the people focused on killing you while they are in tunnel vision mode. If/when you go down, use your #1 attack to damage enemy siege if possible.

You can drop conjured weapons to help support sometimes as well, when the situation doesn’t favor melee combat but might change at any time so you don’t want to get caught with your staff in your hand. Ice bow #4 wrecks siege, and #5 is an awesome single target CC. Lightning hammer has a really nice skill set for front line fighting also: a stun field (the only one in the game besides staff air 4, and anyone can use it), a leap finisher/gap-closer and an aoe blind.

pinkijoo.6017:

Someone here said we should attach a screenshot for proof…I’m sure some DB people do this, too. Oh, I’m sure the lot of you wouldn’t be tolerating this. And I apologize ahead if I sound kitten …there were 15 of us defending DB Garrison in our borderland. We held TC off for as long as we could.

It was tough, and I’m sure those in that TC zerg knows it. Surely, this guy could show a little more respect.

From the look of that screenshot, you are lying on the floor long after the battle is over and you have no visible allies there to rez you. Which means you are either corpse scouting, or waiting for a stealth rez, both tactics at least as unsavory as corpse-dancing.

I normally limit emotes to simply /bow or /salute after a good fight while roaming. Laying around a inside keep/tower after a battle is clearly over waiting for a rez, or trying to act as a scout, are the exceptions in my opinion.