Guild Wars 2

0-0-20-20-30 with mostly your current setup and a few cavalier’s trinkets would boost your toughness a lot without too much of a hit to crit damage. Rock solid and automatic armor of Earth provide much needed stability. Maximizing your own damage is unnecessary in a zerg, 40 people hitting someone for 500 each has the same effect as 40 people hitting someone for 3k each, they go down nearly instantly either way (hence the hurrdurrgiantPVTblob meta).

Being able to give your group stability for 1/5th of the time is more beneficial than 10% crit damage for yourself alone.

Being dead from a 2 shot basilisk>backstab is a detriment to your team. Having no toughness or stability pretty much guarantees this will happen.

I’d ditch the glyph heal too. Ether renewal + rock solid is pretty awesome. Glyph has to be cast in water or earth attunement for maximum effect, has a longer cooldown even when traited and causes you to rely heavily on water and arcane traits for condition removal. Ether renewal is the best path toward a real damage or hybrid build IMO, as it frees up 20-50 trait points depending on how much condition removal and heals you can live without.

Melanie.1240:

Hey folks. I have a Berserker set and I want as much as DPS as possible from it (I also have another set for dungeons, WvW and whatnot, I use the Berserker one just for open world PvE and things like that).

Leave the ruby orbs. For overland PvE, divinity (or even scholar) runes are ridiculously expensive and ogre runs don’t help much since the rock dog is just single target dps.

For dps, the only decent boon dutation runes would be the ones which specifically increase might duration, so if you want, try replacing two rubies with two of those type of runes.

Hermes.7014:

There seem to be some people who think dailies and monthlies shouldn’t be awarding achievement points because in their opinion they’re not achievements.

This sentence wins the internets today, for two reasons.

It correctly states the situation of people thinking their personal opinions should control what others do, enjoy, or receive for their time.

It also demonstrates the correct uses of all three forms of “their, they’re, and there”. This makes me happy in ways I am not properly able to express.

Xenlai.8694:

And in the real world the government comes and takes your hard earn money from your bank. Thank god this is a game or else anet might take our moneys from our banks!!
Anyway, I have yet to see a post which even hints of what you say. No one asks for free AP. This is clearly a balance issue.

Tax in GW2 works much like it does in Washington state (where ANet is located). There is no tax on paychecks (your earnings from events and sales to NPCs) but there are taxes on sales (TP fees) and gasoline (waypoints).

Ruin.3461:

Engineers are also incredibly powerful at roaming.

Ssssh. I’m okay with everyone and their grandma not knowing this yet.

Depending on the cost. Not many regular defenders have a glut of extra WXP.

Another boost for the single-main playing zerger. Another random thing to try to keep people interested.

Better go get in that blob, so I can get more points…..

Aether McLoud.1975:

D/D doesn’t really have any burst as a bunker spec…

You’re asking how to kill someone without damage then? Um, throw hard looks at them and hope a zerg comes to help you, I guess.

But yeah, necro is a pretty hard counter to D/D at the moment.

I bought a scepter and put 30 points in air. They usually run from me.

0-30-20-0-20 with ether renewal, flash, armor of Earth and arcane blast. Stability on Earth attune, at 50% hp, and the active cantrip (lol, what fear?). Yeah, I know, stupid build, sure, no water, bad ele, blah blah…..

Edit: didn’t see this was about sPvP, yeah, don’t use my build there, only cookie cutter FoTM builds work there, I think the current one is something like 0-20-0-20-30 with s/d….. yay for variety……

Could re-roll as engi too. Trait for protection and reduced damage on CC, (around 50-70% damage while CC’d, depending on amulet and other traits, and if it works with fear).

As for the lore, there is a good bit, just not right in your face at first.

Check out the great lodge in Hoelbrak, there’s a Jotun standing in the middle usually who will tell you about the origins of magic. A lot of the lore is kinda there in the background, because this is a sequel, it’s a bit redundant to go through the same things as GW1.

This guy has a ton of videos detailing the GW world lore.

But yeah, probably guardian. Elementalists are really fun, but you’ll get carpal-tunnel-syndrome trying to be half as effective as a guardian.

Melee is weird at first (as in, “why did I just die?” weird). Get used to it though. Main thing is watch for red circles, and the “dust up” animation that most PvE mobs get a couple seconds before they are gonna oneshot you. Good luck seeing it through the guardian’s burns, but hey, it’s there somewhere. ;p

^

There are no actual dedicated healer classes in GW2, for many reasons.

It sounds bad, at first, to people who like playing healers, but trust me, it’s not. Unless you want to do absolutely nothing except watch health bars and use dedicated heal spells. That option is not available, just like the option to play a “tank” and stand still getting face-punched by godzilla’s mom is also not available.

Every player is responsible for keeping their character upright and fighting as much as possible. Every player is also a healer by default, when an ally goes “down” anyone can revive them. Don’t think of this as a “rez” from other MMOs. Downed does not equal dead. Reviving a “defeated” (dead) ally takes much longer than reviving a “downed” ally, so if you want to focus on a healer role, watch those HP bars. Towards endgame you can also spec heavily into quicker and more powerful revives, no matter your class. It still surprises me how many veteran players equate downed with dead (mostly in PvP).

(putting this in it’s own line because it’s so important)

Reviving someone from downed is effectively a 50% HP heal.

I will often go “down” as a tactic to GAIN hp, when I know I can revive quickly myself by killing a low hp mob, or if I know I have allies ready with a quick rez.

With zero healing power, you can still give anyone a 50% HP heal simply by using the “interact” button near them at the right time, or killing something they have “tagged”.

In addition to the downed mechanic, the damage output in most situations will far outstrip the ability to heal no matter the healing power.

Damage in this game is mostly supposed to be avoided (dodge, block, aegis, blind, immunity skills, etc) or mitigated through boons and traits/gear. Theoretically, (at endgame anyway) if you are taking significant damage, you are doing something wrong (or you’re in a dungeon, and hopefully your party understands reviving and mitigation by then). Positioning is extremely important, using terrain and tactics to mitigate damage are more important than straight up healing.

For PvE stuff, I run a build with zero healing power, and I have never heard “stupid ele, why you no heal?” like in most other games. Full damage cleric anyone? Yeah, don’t want that in the party…..

My WvW build has a bit of healing power by default because of the traits and gear I chose for different reasons, but I wouldn’t seek to stat healing power even there. An extra 50hp per sec regen for 5 people isn’t worth the loss of 1-2k damage per second aoe. The important group skills, CC for enemies and healing fields for allies to blast finish (your healing power does nothing for blast heals anyone else procs in your fields) are unchanged by lack of healing power.

Your own survival stats should not be ignored, however. A dead elementalist heals for 0 and deals 0 damage.

I don’t play sPvP much, but when I do, I definitely stack healing power. It’s such a tight meta there aren’t really many builds which work for anything but screwing around. At least you don’t have to buy separate gear or level up for it though, so it can be a good way to learn a bit about class mechanics and stuff without committing to leveling and gearing a full character.

It really depends on your role. I keep a set of soldier’s armor with boon durr runes and a sentinel’s staff for zerg fights, that gives me about 2500 armor and 18k-ish hp.

For roaming s/d or d/d I use a full knight’s armor set with beryl jewels, a mix of knight’s/valkyrie’s trinkets and weapons and a ascended zerker/valkyrie amulet. Around 2600 armor and just shy of 15k hp.

In zergs I prefer a slightly higher HP to deal with all the condition spam and soak damage while CC’d. Enemy zergs (well all zergs) tend to be stacked with soldier’s gear so there usually isn’t a lot of direct damage coming from them. What really kills is the CC+condition spam.

In smaller groups I prefer more toughness to deal with burst built thieves and more crit damage for killing before I am killed. Most roaming groups are running some crit-damage builds as killing quickly is key to roaming. Some toughness to take that “call target, three thieves spam #2 while a guard/war/ele/engi pins enemy to the ground” tactic is pretty necessary unless you have your own pocket thieves to refuge-rez you every 10 seconds.

But then, I run builds that many would probably consider borderline blasphemous, so have some grains of salt with any “advice” I may give.

Limit number of possible rallies per kill to 5. Priority to those who have caused damage to the target while themselves in downed state. Second priority simple proximity.

Fixed and balanced.

Now gimme a cookie.

Avatar of Belle.9623:

I agree that medium armor classes got the shaft in terms of team or zerg play. I’m better off using them as solo classes or in spvp. Please give me usable blast finishers for my engi and ranger. I would love to use one of them in teamplay WvW.

Have a couple warriors in your zerg run with a banner or two. Then everyone has a blast finisher: "interact">5.

Ranger has the longest lasting water field in the game on a 50% uptime, there’s a reason they don’t have blast finishers. I am not sure I agree with it completely, perhaps warhorn should be given one as warriors was, but it would be hard to give them many without it becoming the best group-healing class. Which also, I’m not opposed to, but that’s ANet’s balancing style, make guardians and warriors the best at everything group related and every other class just some gimicky animations.

Engineer has a crapton of blast finishers as well as easy access to 2 water fields and two more aoe healing options that stack with everything if traited for healing bombs and using elixer gun. A lot more juggling skills than a guardian and maybe not even as good, but it’s not like they have no fields or finishers. Engineer is my current “main” so I’m familiar with the burst healing potential and regeneration application of healing turret, elixer gun, bomb kit and offhand shield, could even add thumper in there for 2 more blasts but I like toolkit too much.

Around release everyone was saying elementalists and necros and engineers were bad at everything. Then it became “elementalist OP!”, now it’s necros turn. Engineer’s time is coming soon. Ranger’s may have passed quickly due to the “put on a blindfold and throw darts at the board of random ideas” method of balancing…..

wads.5730:

heres a suggestion, when you need upwards of over 10 arrowcarts to siege creep on the offensive in that garrison, and still wiping repeatedly against even and sometimes less numbers, you’re doing something wrong.

you’re not utilizing your numbers correctly and relying too much on carts.

Just going to quote myself here because I am so awesome and what I say generally applies to more than one situation…..

Thrashbarg.9820:

Every enemy is counted twice, and no one sees their allies standing behind them.

I am always outnumbered.

I’d also like to add that every enemy arrowcart is counted at least twice.

At no point during that battle did I see more than 5 arrow carts in any one area, on TC’s side, that is. Magumma had at least as many arrowcarts and ballistas and players in that fight.

Anyone who has been in a garrison fight such as that (and has any sense of perspective) knows that the advantage is massively in favor of the defense. Which is why your server waited until we were all so bored that no one was even on the map then brought their full map zerg and as many golems as possible to take it in the first place. Not that it’s a bad strategy, and I don’t fault anyone for wanting easy points. In fact we used the same strategy to take it back and it worked quite well, except we didn’t need any golems, and it only took us about 10 people to walk in and mop up the last of your stragglers after the main force got bored or whatever.

It would be cool if magumma would bring the kind of numbers they obviously can for anything other than a karma train or farming opportunity, but it is what it is and snowballs are wagons and all.

Static.9841:

Tricare.2946:

Why TC, you too SoS, do you have to fight with greater numbers? 90% of Mags will see a 1v1 fight and just watch and wait until the end to tag the player.

I think this is the biggest lie in the thread so far! Good show!

Haha, yeah, I got a good laugh from that too.

BlackBeard.2873:

emikochan.8504:

Penguin.5197:

kostbabis.8791:

Aether McLoud.1975:

kostbabis.8791:

^ they also have ride the lightning with 20 sec cooldown :P

And it even removes cripples and immobilizes!

TwoBit.5903:

kostbabis.8791:

^ they also have ride the lightning with 20 sec cooldown :P

Their RTL doesn’t glitch and get caught in terrain, either :P

And its a freaking blast finisher !!!!!!
Lol :P

lol The jealousy is strong in this thread. Its only 600 distance plus roll so its way shorter and the super jump (about double distance) needs two skills and is on a 40 sec cd.

But I still feel for you eles, someday you will have more viable builds….someday.

Yes a 40 sec cd… like RTL :p
If I could rtl (and it worked while immobilised) for 600 every 16 seconds (AND 1200 every 40 seconds) I would…

My engi feels as fun as my ele did on launch, glad to have both though. Fresh air is a lot of fun.

My engie has the playstyle my ele used to have, and it is a blast! Rocket boots makes the class for me (like RTL used to). Rocket Boots is 600 range, but as I have perma-swiftness due to speedy kits, it actually goes much further. I don’t bother with slick-shoes, as the elixir gun’s acid bomb creates more distance with a few camera tricks.

That being said, I still think the ele can be good and fun when using rock solid and signet of air in a 0/0/20/20/30 build. The blind application and stun-break actually make the signet much better now that blinds are really good. The stability + ether renewal is also really good. In my mind, the ele and the engie are pretty close to one-another right now, with the exception that the engie can customize his kits/attunments to cover all ranges and situations. The 0 CD on kit swap also gives lots of build options as 30 in an “arcane” line isn’t mandatory.

Couldn’t agree more. Everyone who misses the fun of the old school D/D elementalist should roll an engineer. Playing my old elementalist after a couple months on mostly engineer feels like playing a soft-shell snail in a blender whenever I try to do any zerg vs. zerg fighting. Not even needing a stunbreaker is so much more fun than having to slot three just to survive more than 10 seconds.

Here’s a build I have been using:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/engineer/?2.0|a.1n.h8.e.1n.h1j|0.0.0.0.0.0|1n.7r.1n.7r.1n.7r.1n.7r.1n.7r.1n.7r|1c.64.1c.64.1n.61.1p.64.1p.64.1c.64|u48c.0.a0.a6.k60|y.7|2c.2x.2e.2n.30|e

(the 2 unlisted traits are the new ones, “stabilized armor” -20% damage taken while stunned, and “leg mods” -33% cripple/chill/immobilize duration)

Try living at all with this trait setup on elementalist. Then look at the numbers for this engineer. When stunned/knocked/etc, he gains protection and an additional -20% damage reduction, added to armor and food that’s a total of -93% damage taken while stunned. Who needs stunbreakers? It doesn’t have the condition removal of an elementalist, but slot elixer gun and it does (which I often do, just trying slick shoes so that’s what’s listed, but rocket boots, elixer gun, throw mine, elixer U or S, thumper turret, flamethrower etc are all good choices as well for various uses). Rifle can be swapped for pistol/shield as well, if you want the leap/immob/cond-clear instead of the block and blind.

This build also hits quite hard, and can change weapons/ranges without losing anything as it works great with a grenade spec as well. Perma-swiftness with a single button, perma-vigor with a single trait swap (I like the protection-on-stun trait, but there are several others that are great also).

I’ve got a useful engineer build for just about every trait distribution. Can’t say anything like that for my elementalist.

The armor rating is a bit low for my tastes, and maybe a bit more hitpoints than necessary. Consider a few cavalier’s or knight’s pieces to get that armor rating up around 2500 minimum. You may also be able to swap those sentinel’s pieces for soldier’s without much loss to survivability, but a decent gain to power, and gold savings.

I’m also not a fan of divinity runes. 54+ gold for a rune set is crazy to me, but if you have the gold and don’t care, I guess go for it. Rubies or beryls are better for damage and muuuuch cheaper, and only a few less other stats which can be made up elsewhere or don’t even matter (how much healing or damage do you get from 60 healing power and 60 condition damage? that’s right, barely any….). Beryls will give more HP than divinity, rubies will give more crit, both give over double the power.

Not really a fan of celestial stats anyway, they are the “I can’t decide on a build” stats. You wouldn’t assign your traits 14-14-14-14-14, would you?

Jabberwock.9014:

I would be happy if they got rid of ele if they let us change class and legendary. I’m seeing less and less point every day to logging in with mine. Mediocre in PvE, mediocre in WvW, mediocre in sPvP. At least with another class I’ll be good in one of them.

Unless that class is a guardian, then you’ll be good at all three!

How much for a profession-reset scroll?……

As someone who long stood up for ANet and often reminded people on this and other forums what real pay-to-win is, I am highly disappointed with this recipe only being available through gambling “chests”.

I’m pretty much at a loss for words, and that’s rare for me.

Caffynated.5713:

oZii.2864:

Ele vs Ele duels are not a good way to gauge the effectiveness of a class. Duels aren’t really a good place to start anyway tbh. 15 air 25 water will get you more damage than going 20 air 20 water % damage traits are always better unless you take something like air training which is more conditional than bountiful power.

Ele is primarily a roamer (despite losing a lot of mobility) and 1v1 effectiveness is very important.

Mirror matches make it a test of skill instead of class balance. When you go from 50/50 to winning 100% of your fights against someone after they change spec, there’s a clear indication that their spec is weaker.

In the particular match you mentioned, you were using different amulets as well as traits. Making the assessment that the flaw in the build was the traits could be an error. Not saying it is, for sure, but your data is inconclusive at best.

PvP is a different animal from WvW. What works well in one is often useless in the other. Both of the new GM air traits, and the former GM Earth trait being moved to master, have given me some options for hybrid/burst builds which seem effective so far, but would be pretty bad in tPvP due to lack of sustain and the low cap on crit damage.

My limited experience in sPvP leads me to believe the choice of amulet and jewel make a huge difference in survivability.

I’m probably a mediocre player at best though, so there’s that as well. ;p

Besides the lack of understanding of the game displayed (someone apparently hasn’t noticed that every class can specialize and still have access to a range of options more effectively and there are also better Jack-of-all-trades classes) the biggest thing that bothered me about that whole thing was the cash-shop food buff he mentioned. That is exactly the sort of crap I came to this game to avoid, and it may be the last straw for me, but that’s beside the point and this is now an epic run on sentence so there.

Every enemy is counted twice, and no one sees their allies standing behind them.

I am always outnumbered.

Would be cool to make a guild of 20 upleveled minion master necros called [BLOB] and run around scaring everyone into thinking a 150 man zerg is coming at them.

Durzlla.6295:

Yes, every prof can be any role, HOWEVER they can not be every role AT THE SAME TIME, a “DPS” ele can have almost as good of support and control as a support/control ele, just as those 2 can have similar damage to the “DPS” one, all other profs need to pick one or the other and they completely suck at everything else.

Nonsense. Support elementalist has nowhere near the damage of DPS elementalist. The difference is that one falls over in a slight breeze and the other doesn’t.

Hybrid guardian will both outdamage and outsupport a hybrid elementalist, as will the full DPS and full support builds. There is a reason gw2lfg doesn’t have many posts specifically asking for elementalists (actually never seen one) but every page tends to have several specifying guardians preferred. One water field is enough to heal a zerg, and one static field is enough to cut an enemy zerg in half, so more than a handful of elementalists in a group are redundant.

It’s “Jack of all trades”.

/grammarlesson

Every class can play every role in this game. Developers saying the elementalist should be a Jack of all trades show either a lack of understanding of their own game or a lack of a clear vision for the profession.

(this all basically refers to WvW, we all know that warriors/guardians/andsometimesamesmer are all you need for PvE and tPvP has it’s own little meta about holding and flipping/contesting 2/3 circles for ~10-15 min which is just weird to me)

My engineer packs better support (water fields, fire fields, a light field that pulse heals, blasts, condition removals, various CC, perma-regeneration) and ranged aoe damage (spammable GTAoE with a ton of conditions, I’ve made many groups of 10+ run for their lives chucking grenades off a wall, can’t say the same for meteor shower). The only things my elementalist can still do better are static fields, auras and conjured weapons…..

My warrior can be built to put out massive damage or support (in either role can exceed the capabilities of my elementalist) and has several good hybrid builds that can do both. Static field is good, but earthshaker has a shorter cooldown….. Also: Warbanner. ’nuff said

My thief has more HP and armor than my elementalist, moves faster, can stay invisible indefinitely has 3k attack and over 100% crit damage and auto-crits from stealth. Sure, he can’t lay down water fields, but as long as there is someone who can, the shortbow blast finisher spam is actually doing far more “healing” than the elementalist. Hybrid thief seems to actually outshine hybrid elementalist in nearly every way except fun (for me anyway).

So really they don’t want elementalist to be a Jack of all trades. What they apparently want is elementalists to re-roll as kit enginners. I did, and dang is it fun. Kit swapping is like attunement dancing without a cooldown. Either that or get a staff and be a field slave (preferably an aura share build….. see below…..).

(Ah, aurashare, the one thing elementalists can do that no other class can. Besides conjures, okay, two things. The way traits are arranged, makes the ideal aurashare build impossible. This locks one possible high end build into mediocrity. Imagine if the relevant cantrip traits were spread so that you could only take 2/4, well, that’s aurashare’s problem.)

I like the new traits, for what that’s worth. I’m having fun dusting off my attunement swapping skills while I experiment with new builds, but I can already see going back to engineer for most things. I don’t feel that they have brought elementalist to the level of viability that most other classes enjoy, but they are a start. Currently running 0-30-20-0-20 as an experiment, had to switch from knight’s back to mostly soldier’s to make up the lost survivability from the water line. Even with the added toughness and stability, the hp pool is too low to survive spikes (necro condition bombs are the new meta anyway).

My suggestion for balance is simple. Bump base HP to the level of mesmers. Guardians have aegis and virtue-regen without any traits or utilities/weapons and they also have higher base armor (don’t give me that crap about how it’s not much different either, damage reduction is damage reduction in this game of number vs. numbers more numbers is ALWAYS better, I’ve long lost count of how many times I’ve lived by a handful of HP). Thieves have escape/damage/mitigation built into every weapon, we have to actively choose to have damage or mitigation available and what to put on cooldown when. Elementalists need to trait for water/arcane to get similar regeneration to an untraited guardian, have limited active and no passive blocks.

This is not the balance I am looking for in a game.

Snowball.3497:

Do fresh air really reset the Air attunement’s global cooldown?
Meaning can I get a perma static aura, with swiftness and vigor (Zephyr’s boon)? That sounds really fun!

These words do not mean what you think they mean.

Global cooldown refers to the (brief in this case) period after activating ANY attunement in which you are unable to switch to any other attunement. Not the cooldowns of the weapon skills themselves.

/edit: dang, ninja’d

Yep, it’s bugged, but even so it gives me an idea of how useful it will still be for my build(s).

It’s possible, in the current state and with a high crit build, to blow every attunement “immediately”. The thing about that is all of the others go on full cooldown. Taking any time at all during the rotation to cast another skill from another attunement causes the cooldown to naturally approach 5 seconds anyway, and just blowing through attunements for no reason other than to get back to air may be funny but isn’t a really good battle strategy.

Thieves can still pump out more damage (with built-in gap closer) by spamming 2,2,2,2,2,2. Hopefully they leave it bugged. Could be fun having more than one (effective) burst class in the game.

emikochan.8504:

It’s aoe stability though isn’t it ?

Yes.

Allelya.6830:

Stability is not a stun break, but it will prevent you from being stunned.

Not worth the trait slot imo.

Depends what you’re doing, I guess.

If you don’t think stability is worth the slot, you must not play WvW or any dungeon besides CoF p1.

Stability. So good I had to put the word all by itself.

Lightning hammer. Take the conjurer trait and as many damage traits as you can stack from other lines. Faceroll stuff.

I’m too lazy to look up any of the builds.

gesho.9468:

Adastra.9821:

Why can’t it be that you have both melee and ranged advantages?

it can sure be, in fact it would be great. may be it is.

but then there are seven other profs in the game and they need their gameplay too. if melee caught up with ranged – melee is supposed to win. if ranged managed to stay away from melee – ranged is supposed to win.

single class can’t have advantage in both scenarios. balancing, right?

Every class can equip a ranged and a melee set if they choose. There is no such thing as a melee class or ranged class (they are called professions anyway) in GW2.

Having options to deal with both ranged and melee fights on a single set is necessary for game balance in this case. It’s also a fun style once you get the hang of it.

Zamiel.2130:

Phantasmal Berserker was “nerfed” or “fixed” when it didn’t require LOS to cast, I don’t see this being any different or is it a case of double standards?

It’s a completely different skill for one thing. Dragon’s tooths (teeth?) don’t hang around dealing more damage every couple seconds unless you get off the AC fast and kill them, so the functionality if different.

Talking of “double standards” when discussing different professions that were designed to have different skills is a bit misleading.

It might be a bug, but if it is, that has never been even alluded to by a developer as far as I know. Several skills were given a LoS requirement at the same time, soon after release. Dragon’s tooth has been known to have this functionality since beta.

I’d be all for making it ground targetable though. I’d much rather have a usable blast finisher and the possibility of actually hitting a player with it occasionally. Currently it’s main function is to be a suicide move when commanders who read the forums and think it will instakill siege or something demand all the eles switch to scepter, thus rendering themselves useless in the actual siege.

As was mentioned above, and arrow cart (especially with a traited master operator) is far superior for clearing siege.

Solo.9027:

If 5k damage on a stationary object every 4.75seconds if traited in full glass is gamebreaking what are thieves who can do more vs mobile players and stealth away?

If its so destructive to you why don’t you just shoot the ele with something from the wall? He will likely die or run in 3 shots from practically any class.

Pretty much this ^

It takes a looooong time to kill even an arrow cart with dragon’s tooth, and it isn’t going to kill the operator or even knock them off preventing them from firing back. It also has a short range, so you know they are close, just aoe the wall as close to the cart as you can, that’s where they have to stand.

This thread again? Cool, haven’t seen this one in a while.

Hey guys, this is GW2, and in GW2 there’s this thing called the “downed state”. When “downed” you are not yet “defeated” (dead). This is part of the game’s core combat mechanic.

Each profession has access to a different set of skills when “downed”, just like they have different skills when upright. Learning to use your own skills, learning which skills are good to have available, and learning to counter your enemy’s skills both in normal fighting and “downed state” are part of the process of “learning to play”.

The problem here is people thinking that “downed” is actually just a sort of pre-stage of “defeated”. It’s not.

The class with the lowest base health and defense has less room for error in normal combat (leaving aside arguably OP trait combos) which makes it only logical to have more room for error in the “downed” state. At the point where an elementalist goes down, any other class (similarly specced) will still have a couple thousand hitpoints left at the least, at which point they could run the same distance vapor form covers anyway.

If it seems OP, try to learn to counter it before calling for nerfs. If you ALREADY know how to counter it ‘cause a bajillion people in this thread and all the others like it have already said: “CC” and you refuse to do so, it’s YOUR OWN FAULT, not the game’s design.

Benji.9203:

Grevender.9235:

Sitkaz.5463:

Grevender.9235:

the choice is easy when choosing between mages in GW2:

Easy Mode: Mesmer

Nightmare Mode: Elementalist

What does that make Necros?

oh right, necro does exist too.

Necro: beginner mode with free cheats enabled

Since when were necros easy mode?
It’s pretty much the one class in the game that has to commit themselves when they enter a fight.
To put it simply: A necro escaping a zerg or surviving/winning a 2v1 is a highlight reel in and of itself.

It’s totally easy mode ;p

Here’s what you do:

Find a zerg near a high cliff. Get them to chase you off the cliff. Stand on their corpses spamming /laugh.

Or maybe that just means cliffs are OP….. Or players brains are UP…… Or something.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

They do terrible damage though, which makes actually killing things underwater a lot harder than it needs to be.

I used to think that too.

Water attunement though……

The #2 attack crits 2-4k and has a short CD, #3 also hits hard and chills and is a blast finisher, #5 is the strongest burst damage underwater (of any class, afaik).

The elite skill also packs a punch and has built in CC and gives a good bonus to hitpoints.

Part of the issue is you can’t might stack as easy and access to fury is limited with no auras (other than a hard to use combo) in the water as opposed to land. This makes the 0-10-0-30-30 build particularly weak in water combat damage, since that build relies on might stacking and fury uptime quite heavily. If you’re running that build, especially with soldier’s or cleric’s gear, expect to do no damage, the only reason that build does damage on land is might/fury stacking.

The other part of the equation is that ALL classes do less damage underwater. This seems to be a design choice overall (and I’d say a good one, as 3-D active combat is much more demanding than 2-D active combat, more time to react balances the more possible directions your opponents can move).

What I use, for a damage-staff-WvW build is:

0-25-0-25-20
Bolt to the heart or zephyr’s boon and areomancer’s alacrity for more static fields.
Piercing shards for more damage on meteors (start channeling>swap) and cleansing wave.
Elemental attunement and blasting staff.
Full knight’s armor and trinkets with beryl orbs in everything (I don’t have any ascended, too many builds and alts to bother, but a mix of knight’s/valkyrie’s/cavalier’s would be ideal).

Lotta good advice in the post above, basically do what he says.

[quote=2264118;Ptolomy.6984:Maybe heal earlier? [/quote]

This ^

Especially using glyph (make sure to be in either Earth or Water when you use it). Better not to though, glyph has too long of a cooldown unless traited, ether or signet are preferable for sustain.

Without knowing your gear and utility choices (just gonna assume soldier’s/cleric’s/boon duration) it’s hard to know exactly what’s wrong.

Don’t let yourself get low, swap into Earth and Water as often as possible to keep protection and regeneration active. Use dagger #2 or scepter #3 every time you swap to water and save dagger #5 for “oh crap” moments. If running ether, use it as soon as possible on every cooldown if you are taking damage or conditions, if using signet do the exact opposite: don’t use it till the last second before you are about to go down, then get the heck out of there and wait it’s cooldown before re-engaging if possible.

I have 250 healing power at the moment and I do fine. It depends on your build. You need enough hitpoints to survive a spike/burst and as much toughness as humanly possible after that, if you have that stuff AND high healing power you’ll be pretty dang tough, but you’ll have limp-noodle-arm-damage. I prefer to trade healing power for damage and keep as much mitigation as possible otherwise.

Not sure if they nerfed the lower rank chests or if it was always like that and I just didn’t notice last time…..

Precursor? None so far……

What’s your build? Hard to give advice if I don’t know what you’re using or how you’re playing.

I mostly WvW so here’s some stuff about that:

For 1v1 and small group ranged burst go S/D and get off the stinking bottom heavy traits. I see a lot of complaints that we can’t do much damage, but generally those are coming from players with 50-60 points in water & arcane and running all cantrips (and never using nor understanding how to use firey greatsword).

If you play in large groups, damage staff is totally viable. Especially since so many elementalists build super tanky, people tend to just stand in the aoe (if they smarten up, use some of the 745872 bajillion CCs on staff before attacking).

If you’re looking for a ranged class that can destroy all opponents before they can react, you’re gonna have to go to another game probably. That scenario exists in plenty of other games, but it’s not balanced (aka, also fun for the guy you’re fighting). Instagib anything has to be glass as hell (which you can do as an elementalist, but yeah, dying and all….).

Should even be easier to go full burst in a few days, with the air trait that resets cooldown on air line. x-30-x-x-x builds can burst every 5 seconds……

Also, engineers are fun. No harm in having more than one character, you won’t need 3 months of dungeon runs at endgame just to gear each.

Doomdesire.9365:

Instead, they should have nerfed Ether Renewal.\

That was last patch, it was called the mist form nerf.

This patch they are buffing it. Hello rock solid tanks!

I see it as a buff, or at least a balancing move not a nerf. Specializing in cantrips has a ton of benefits, overshadowing all other types of utilities. Spreading their positive effects and reducing their cool-downs is okay.

I’m sure that some children see removing the training wheels from a bicycle as a nerf. Having 3 stunbreaks with inherent benefits of their own and more traited benefits is a bit like training wheels. Try playing an all-kit engineer then come back to cantrip elementalist and tell me you need a stun-breaking-condition-removing-regeneration-and-vigor-giving skill in every single utility slot.

The buffs to rock solid and grounded are awesome. 0-30-20-10-10…….

NotInTheFace.6075:

Thank you Jackal for the lesson in the proper way to sack a T3 garrison on a servers home borderland. TC great half an hour worth of fights to get it back. Those bags were delicious. For those complaining about the TC spawn camp, yes it stinks when it happens, but you have options. You can either give up or you can follow the FaTe example and take the fight to their home, don’t fight where they want you to, form small groups sneak past, or hop to another BL to draw them away. After we sacked their garrison TC pulled most their forces home to TCBL to oust us and we solidified all of SOS BL and EB made a come back. Think outside of the box. Being out-manned seems like it will be a way of life in T1 and T2 and defense will play a greater and greater role. With more bodies online all the time like they have would we be more competitive yes, but that doesn’t mean you have to lay down and take it. Form small groups to sack all camps continuously, sack towers where you can with ninja style. Would it have been much better if CD ever worked with us to balance things a little sure, but if they won’t we’ll have to be ready for situations like that and simply burn the weaker team down going forward instead of focusing on the top server.

Anyway thank you TC and CD for some good fights at times this week and some horrible ones at other times. I hope everyone gets better matchups following the server reset tonight. See you all on the battlefield. =)

I’d like to commend SoS on that Garrsion take on TCBL last night. Awesome rush, well played, good taking advantage of most of our forces being on other maps.

I was just sorta screwing around on TCBL out of boredom, I don’t like fighting when the odds are so far in my favor so I’ve been absent from WvW most of the week.

me: “Hey I see swords at briar, anyone there?”
/m: “yeah, it’s lost”
me: “how many? where are they headed?”
/m: crickets…….

and that’s pretty much how it went through the SoS take of woodhaven——>garrison, which was entirely well played on SoS side and pretty sloppy on ours, lol.

We were sad after we got garrison back and you left the map, but I understand. It was a good clean cap and there wasn’t much else to be gained by staying on the map. The fights inside garrison were fun though, I hope SoS players got good loot from my corpse (6 pieces of damaged armor from those fights, lol).

/signed
the little asura staff elementalist that kept respawning and dying trying to contest that circle

Bountiful power nerf:
Sorta sad about this but sorta saw it coming. Engineer has the same trait, and it’s 1%. It’s intended to give a bit of damage to bunker builds, and that’s good, it still will. It’s obviously not intended that 25 points in water give more damage than 25 points in fire, but under some circumstances that’s exactly what happens at +2% per boon.

Putting a stunbreaker on signet of air is so awesome I can’t even say. Not sure about the glyph, hopefully they removed the cast time because stunbreakers sorta need to be insta-cast to function properly.

Signet aura-share should be playable now. Glyph builds may be more viable as well, time will tell on that one.

I’m really looking forward to the air trait line changes. As a long time player of 30 air builds, the combined GM traits and the new one both sound too good to be true.

For staff gear, especially if you are new to elementalist, I’d recommend soldier’s gear to start. Then begin working in damage gear as you get comfortable. A mix of valkyrie’s and cavalier’s is good if you can put at least 20 points in air for some precision and have some source of fury. I tend to avoid berzerker’s in WvW except for adding rubies to trinkets (that’s the absolute best point for point trade for crit damage, so start there). Berzerker’s armor/weapon/trinkets cost around 150hp or 15 armor rating per point of crit compared to valkyrie/cavalier, trinket upgrades are 3x as effective point for point.

With the addition of a stunbreaker to signet of air, I’m going to revisit my signet-aurashare build for large scale WvW.

20-0-10-30-10 with full Altruism runes+ether renewal and 3 signets. Gives 100% protection uptime with a decent amount of other boons. The only problem I ran into with this build before was the lack of stunbreaker. A signet can be swapped for arcane wave for an extra blast finisher for frozen ground (frost aura is pimp).

A stability sharing (rock solid) build might be interesting as well, gonna try something like 0-0-20-20-30 (I know, so revolutionary right? way to go making those fire/air build viable with new traits!).

Personally I’ve been running 30 air for a long time, so I’m actually pretty stoked about the air line changes. For offensive small scale I currently run full knight’s with rubies in every slot and 0-30-0-20-20, so they may have actually buffed my favorite build for once (well, and nerfed too, since I’ll only have 2 stunbreakers now instead of 3, but that’s ok, I also play a 4-kit engineer, so kinda used to not having any stunbreakers). So on the bright side, get ready to self-stun and eat 12k churning earths, muahahahaha!

Renxian.6982:

Yes, all classes except thieves are being removed from the game. No big loss, they were all useless an weren’t viable. Elementalists? Guardians? No one plays those. Mesmers? Necros? No one has ever been killed by those. Ranger? Warrior? I don’t even know what those are. Perhaps some kind of npc?

What does that make Engineers?

Really depends on what “tier” and time zone you play in. If the total enemy forces on most maps is less than 20 during your play time, a thief will be a very effective class choice, and in some cases may seem the most effective. If the enemy generally totals 80+ on any map and considers 10-20 players a “roaming” or “havoc” group then many other professions may be better.

Thieves are designed to be spikers, quickly finishing low health and downed enemies, and clutch-rezzers with refuge rezzing. In groups bigger than 10 these jobs becomes less important as the technique for finishing shifts to just applying more aoe damage, negating the need for specialized finisher classes and making kill-rallying the preferred method of rezzing.

In larger group fights, thieves tend to survive if they play well, but they often end up leaving their team dead. They also tend to be pigeonholed into the “mobile blast finisher” job (no stealthing off and killing, you stand on commander and use all initiative for cluster bomb heals/might).

Or, you could kill their mesmer, aoe the exit portal, etc. There’s only one tiny little spot where this works and it’s easy to lock down.

If you’re in an enemy garrison (only place you’d be having this issue) and you aren’t coordinated enough to cut off reinforcements from one tiny spot, then you deserve to lose, as your skill is obviously below that of your opponents and the only reason you are in their garrison anyway is you outnumber them significantly.

Zenith.7301:

Arcana also provides the vital fury on attunement switch (we have no other source of fury outside zephyr’s boon, which only D/D sets can benefit from as the other weaponsets only have one aura on a long cd).

It’s only scepter which lacks an aura.

Staff can actually get as much or more fury from auras than d/d with the right traits and utilities. 3x blast finishers (eruption, arcane wave, Earth EA roll) in frozen ground gives quite a bit of fury (and it’s applied to allies without needing the water GM trait to aurashare).

But yeah, fire and air traitlines need survivability built in or something. Also, traits need a pass for underwater usefulness and bugs. The arcane line needs a total makeover, attunement recharge is far too important and evasive arcana is disproportionately good compared to other GM traits. Spreading some of the effects of the most popular water and arcane traits and effects between other traitlines would make more builds possible.

Even my “burst” builds use at least 35 points in water and arcane.

Woah, does this mean the “living story” is like, still going? Like being, um, alive, or something?

Dang, it’s almost like ANet has come up with a cool new way to present MMO expansions an no one even noticed yet…..

Southsun tied into Flame and Frost, which tied back into Southsun, which introduced us to the NPCs for the story of Dragon Bash, who are now investigating something which seems to be leading to….. the next update…..

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the story progression. But then again, I’ve never really been a person to read one page of a book and go “this sucks” before seeing the story through.

Titles? Seriously? Like my screen needs more words spamming “I was online and pressed buttons in June!”. Great job bro.

Okay, sorry for being mean. It just seems like there are already enough meaningless titles.

Wallace MacBix.2089:

Evon Skyfyre.9673:

What amazes me the most here is no reply from Anet/NcSoft. It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out. Another gaming company is under investigation for pushing players to spend real money and possibly using deceptive practices. I sense new rules and regulations coming in the future for all online games.

What kind of response from Anet/NcSoft are you expecting? Everything they stated at the start of the event is true. “a greater chance” is a greater chance (~1.4% >> 0.05%). [with one exception: "Each festive dragon coffer contains candy, tonics, or fireworks. It may rarely contain a Mini Holo Undead Dragon Knight, recipes, or a Dragon’s Jade Weapon Skin Ticket. " as no one has reported finding a recipe from a rich coffer yet]

And what do you mean that they are “under investigation for pushing players to spend real money and possibly using deceptive practices”?

Who is being pushed to spend real money? and how?

GW2 isn’t even in the same league as the game (companies) under investigation. That’s a bit like comparing apples and candy with razorblades.

I used to play one of those games, and yeah, forced is a good word for them. Good luck getting into any endgame dungeon or PvP in the last game I played without at least several hundred dollars worth of gear (granted, it could be “farmed” but even then, it came from the cash shop, so represents someone’s money spent).

I’m not saying I like the gambling box model, in fact I’d have bought several skins if there was the option to simply buy them. I can accept it though, because they are just skins. If it was 0.005% to get ascended weapons from coffers, and that was the only way to reasonably get them, I’d be leaving the game.

Selling skins = Great! Woohoo! Lemme at the cash shop!

Selling gambling “boxes” with skins = Errrm, okaaayyy….. I’d rather be able to buy them, but I guess you don’t want my money.

Selling “power” (stat increases) = Bye bye GW2, I’m going outside…..

The outmanned buff should allow members of other winning servers who are in queue to choose to fight for a random outmanned server as a “mercenary”.

When population is high enough that the outmanned buff disappears, no additional “mercenaries” will be allowed to enter the fight.

If the home server has players wanting to enter a battleground containing “mercenaries” and reaches the cap, “mercenaries” will be removed from the game until there is no queue (or no more “mercenaries”).

Should be possible to implement using the guesting mechanic.

This would make it more fun for players on all servers (in my opinion, obviously….).

glittergirl.4162:

We are 400 strong, but our numbers during prime time vary. It is physically impossible to get all 400 online, but we sometimes get close if we can get an event message posted with a fair amount of time, like a weeks notice.

On average, every day of the week, we mass about 150 between us. The good thing about our guilds, is we don’t try and bolster numbers inside the guild by keeping inactives on the roster. So out of the 400 odd people, all 400 are active at least 3 times a week.

I can see how people will feel that we are stacking a server if we go to T1. This is just the way Anet has built the game though, there is not much we can do about wanting to fight with the best on NA. The slope in coverage from T1 to T2 is poor. A T2 server would be very much a great destination to try bring a 4th server into the top tier to fight against JQ, BG and SoR. Fact of the matter is that both Tarnished Coast and Dragonbrand are far from perfect and for us to move to either we would have to be reassured they still have a passion for the game and are willing to change a few of their current bad behavious.

I hope this is just a troll post. If it’s not, kindly stay away from TC. We like our bad behavior just the way it is, thanks.

glittergirl.4162:

Two posts from Tarnished Coast people pretty much sums up the way the server is driven from an outside point of view. Unfortunately it reflects upon your server albeit not the opinion of the majority.

It is a two way street and we by all means we will endorse change to better fit the server we move to. But we would love to work closely with the server of choice to help change the meta for that server as well as work on community bonds and communications to secure the durability, and continuation of that server within the WvW area so not only WvW’s longevity is increased, but the game all together for those on that server.

Still pretty sure this is just trolling, but hey, I’m bored so I’ll play along. What bad behaviors do you feel need changing, from your perspective? Can you offer some proof of your tactical superiority? Who are you again? 400 person alliance from some low tier server we’ve never heard of? Can you post some videos of your awesomeness for us all to see? Because I really think we could benefit from your massive knowledge and experience. Can your TS server handle another 500 people, and will you be making it available to the server, or are you expecting someone else to foot the bill there?

Another plan that probably got backburner’ed due to the cacophony of demands for “progression”. Long ago in a galaxy far away there was talk of making this happen, why oh why did they have to go to the dark side?

covenn.7165:

JaredKincade.9761:

The glicko system itself hasn’t changed.

You are right, the glicko system hasn’t changed. Therein lies the exact problem because it is no longer contextually relevant

It never really was contextually relevant. It’s a system for rating the performance of teams and individuals in competitions with static team sizes and limited duration.

Baseball teams can’t outnumber their opponents or score runs while the other team is at home asleep.

Football teams don’t have players stop half way through the fight because they are bored or are going on vacation.

Chess players don’t suddenly get worse because 20% of their brain transferred to another player.

Marathon runners aren’t expected to play a relay race style week long 24/7 race where they hand off their scoring/rating to some random dude who happens to queue up when they get tired.

covenn.7165:

Eleir.9325:

TC beats SoR when we have equal numbers easily.

No offense to you, but before making this claim, you should realize that this week’s match up against SoR doesn’t reflect reality. Many of the guilds are leveling alts or simply not playing period until the match up gets better. Heck, one guild even took a vacation to JQ for a week because this match up was so poor.

Which doesn’t sound like a good strategy if trying to avoid more boring matches in the future, as it results in SoR and TC bleeding rating points, and SoS gaining rating.

Not really any player’s fault, as no one wants to play in a boring match as much. Well, a certain type of player seems to enjoy each side of this situation, but sadists and masochists aside, there’s less people playing on every server then usual.

For my part, I haven’t seen a lot of green arrows on SoR players, and I’ve seen plenty of times they pulled a full map queue to push or respond to pushes, but I’ll take your word for you not playing at full strength. When numbers are equal I think we (TC) are able to put up a pretty good fight, and I’ve had fun this week. I’d like to fight SoR again, with a more active 3rd server (or even SoS if they’d stop doing crap like flipping every one of our supply camps as soon as the 80 man SoR zerg hits the map with 10 golems….), we’d probably lose again, but maybe we could offer a bit of a challenge.