Guild Wars 2

DrDivine.5378:

Thank you, I had no idea about the auras, the combos have been confusing me but im slowly starting to get them down.

I should probably ask too, what would you say a d/d eles main role is that makes it so useful when compared to other classes?

Combos are a bit confusing to start with, but they’re actually one of the most interesting mechanics I’ve seen in any MMO. You can read about them here: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo

For elementalist though, you only need to know how fire fields interact with your finishers, since that’s the only combo field we get.

A blast finisher on a fire field gives might, a leap finisher through a fire field gives you Fire Aura, which gives you 1 stack of might when you get hit and burns enemies hitting you in melee range. With Elemental Shield trait, you also get protection from auras.

The role of the D/D elementalist is fairly flexible, but it excels at 1v1 and 2v2 situations (so defending your home node, pushing a far node). You can also survive for a reasonable amount of time 2v1, although you won’t win that against any competent players.

You also provide great team support through your AoE might stacking, healing, condi cleanse and protection. That said, in a fight of 4v4 or 5v5, you won’t be as effective Your healing becomes less noticeable when there’s a lot more damage flying about since it comes from small burst heals and regen. So, you’re not useless, but it’s not your optimal situation.

You also have good burst mobility by way of Lighting Flash, Ride the Lightning and Firey Greatsword.

A little tip you might not have realized: Lightning Flash is a cantrip and therefore doesn’t interrupt channel skills. This means you can cast Churning Earth (Earth 5) and just before it finishes, teleport to your enemy. This makes it safer and easier to cast Churning Earth while also making it harder to dodge.

You can combine Lighting Flash with Burning Speed and Earthquake, although you have to be much quicker.

Speaking of Lightning Flash, you can use this to help kiting and escaping by utilizing the Z axis (i.e. vertical movement). There are certain spots in maps where you can teleport up a ledge, roof, etc. You can escape, survive or just relieve some pressure from yourself this way. It also confuses the hell out of people if you suddenly teleport through the roof.

I couldn’t find any video on this, but if you PM me in-game I’d be happy to show you the spots.

Eles are squishy. They have low armour and low hp, however, they have a lot of sustained healing.

When you take pressure, here’s the general defensive rotation:

Say you’re in fire, and you start taking heavy damage. You’re now down to half health.

Pop your fire field (Fire 4).
Switch to earth. This immediately gives you protection.
Immobilize the person focusing you and then use the Earth 3 again to leap through the fire field. This gives you fire shield and, thanks to your traits, more protection.
Dodge roll back into the fire field whilst still in earth, this’ll blast the fire field and cripple anyone near you.
Use Earth 4 to knock down anyone near you. This will also blast the fire field.

At this point, you’ve got protection, fire aura and you’ve crippled and knocked down people pressuring you.

Now, switch to water.
If your fire field is still up, you could use Water 3 to blast it and gain some more might – this depends on how much pressure you’re taking. It’ll also chill enemies around you which is great for kiting.
If you can, try to line of sight the guy pressuring you
Dodge to give yourself a small heal.
Use Frost Aura (Water 4) – this reducing incoming damage by 43% thanks to the aura trait and Frost Aura’s -10% damage.
Now use Water 5 for a big heal.
Use Water 2 to heal yourself a bit more.
If you still need more healing, you should be able to do another dodge in water soon.

You should now be back up to ~90% hp, maybe 100%. With might stacked and your air/fire attunements ready to go.

Rinse and repeat, basically. A lot survivability also comes from dodging the right attacks.
For example, if you get hit by a hambow warrior’s CC chain, you’re gonna find yourself dying pretty fast. Save your dodges for when he switches to hammer and kite him whilst he’s using it. Then when he goes back to the longbow, you can pressure him again.

It’s all about knowing when to be offensive and when to be defensive. If you’re getting seriously focused, don’t be afraid to pull out of a fight. Ride the Lightning will get you out of basically any fight. Use this to disengage and relieve pressure then either rejoin the fight or go elsewhere.

Hopefully this helps.

I play ele (main) and mesmer. I’ve just got an EU account, but I’ve got both NA and EU accounts so the EU doesn’t reflect my actual experience.

My IGN is Auldon.1972 (EU) or William C.6195 (NA) – send me a PM on either.

I also know an engi.

I’m confused. Is this a blog or something?

Anyway, answers to your questions:

The main role of a thief is to be a) decapping points, b) taking out high priority classes (other thieves, mesmers, anything with high DPS but low survivability), c) +1ing fights where needed and, d) watching and predicting enemy movement.

So yes, you should be roaming between points, taking out targets, that kind of thing. You should never ever be sitting on a point as a thief. Defending, maybe, depending on the situation, but bunkering a point? No.

Put it this way: if the enemy is constantly having to watch you and be on the look out for your movements, you’re doing something right.

A thief can 1v1 against most classes. You’ll probably struggle against anything with big AoE though, or a necro with full death shroud (good luck bursting through ~35k health). CC skills (immobilise, knockdown, cripple etc) are all kryptonite for thieves. They rely on mobility to survive and when that’s taken away, they become easy targets. So learn what skills inflict CC and learn to dodge/avoid them.

If you’re dying a lot in 1v1s, it’ll be because either, you’re not avoiding the right stuff (don’t bother dodging an autoattack when there’s a key skill coming that you really need to dodge), or you’re trying to tank too much. A thief wins fights through avoiding damage and doing high bursts. Utilise the super high mobility and evasion the thief has to kite your enemy.

One of the best ways to kite someone is to use the terrain to line of sight the enemy (put the terrain between you and the enemy so they can’t hit you). This is probably the thing that really separates good player from the bad.

Not to say that I’m good by an means, but I managed to kite 3 players in a match earlier whilst on about 2k health and survived long enough for some people on my team to arrive and relieve the pressure. Now, I wasn’t playing thief but the point still stands. With good kiting you can survive much much longer.

A thief should very rarely be in a team fight. You can jump in, land a burst or take out a low enemy, but don’t try and stick around for too long. You’ll become a target and you’re too squishy to survive any sort of focused damage.

Also, and maybe this is completely wrong, but it seems like you’re trying to role-play in pvp which is strange:

“My impression is that a thief is one who sneaks and gets difficult things done alone. That requires a good deal of strength, imagination, and ability to move around in a landscape in the least expected ways.
I am a bit of a coward, with my own kind of courage. Ready to go anywhere, afraid of being killed doing it, yet enjoying the thrill of danger while doing it, and all too happy to reap a good reward for my efforts.”

Every class has it’s own role, but it’s nothing quite so… Romanticized.

I recommend you watch some videos on thief play to compare.

To avoid direct harassment towards a single player regarding their MMR, I have a proposed solution:

-Show personal MMR
-Show the average MMR of the rest of your team

That way you have a way to gauge if the rest of your team is in theory better/worse than you without being able to single someone out.

So lets say you’ve got a team with 4 people with an MMR of 50 and one person with an MMR of 20.

The people with the MMR of 50 will see their team’s MMR as 42.5 and obviously their own MMR.
The person with the MMR of 20 will see that the rest of their team has an average of 50.

The main problem I can see with this is that unless your MMR was exactly the same as the combined average of your team, you’d think you were better/worse than the rest of your team, which might actually ignite more elitism.. Although I tend to think that elitists will be elitist whatever you do.

Alternatively, and I think I prefer this option, you could show the average MMRs of each team after the match.

I think the only reason people want to see MMR is to work out if their team just played badly, or they’ve been screwed over by poor match-making.

If you lose 500-200 and at the end of the match it turns out your team had an average MMR of 60 while the other team had 150, you’d go “Well, okay, we weren’t likely to win that anyway.”

And on the flip side, if you had the reversed MMR and you lost, you’d go “Okay, so what went wrong there?”

If displaying actual numbers is an issue, give us a fancy graphic with some comparison of MMRs (either individual or team).

Essentially, it comes down to wanting more information.

All the MMR numbers are completely arbitrary.

Please make a character called Swaydo.

That aside, a really good guide. A lot of the stuff I did anyway, but having it reiterated is always good.
I’d never really thought about not switching into water like that, so that’s cool.

Cheers!

I think the point he’s making is that the time it takes to search for a good match should be lengthened.

So, to take the DotA example, if it searchs for 30 seconds for MMRs within 50 of yours, then it should be increased to, say 60 seconds of that tier of search.

That way the chance of finding a closer match increases two fold.

A 3/4s cast time for Overcharged Shot would be a bit steep. Make it 1 1/2 or something. Long enough to allow enemies to dodge/counter, but not so long that it’s incredibly risky for the engineer to use. The self-inflicted knock back should stay: Engineer’s have enough CC already.

Adding torment to Box of Nails would make this a seriously OP skill. It’s a huge AoE cripple and bleed already, torment would just be ridiculous.

As for Slick Shoes, I don’t think you need to change the cooldown, just how it works. As it is, you get knocked down again and again if the engineer runs around you. Increase the interval on the knockdown and it’ll be okay – it’ll still punish those that are stupid enough to stand in it, or try to cross it, but won’t will knockdown then allow the person to move.

Other than that, some good suggestions.

Tone down celestial a tad, sure. That’ll help. So will reducing the might stacking ability of the battle sigil. But, for an ele at least, you need to buff it in other areas. Cele is basically the only viable amulet for ele. Berserker with S/F is okay, but it’s not really that great.

Make the fire trait line useful and then, instead of always putting 12 into water/arcana, you’ll have people actually using the fire trait line and there will be more variety in the builds and the meta.
That is, after all, the point of nerfing cele, isn’kitten To get more variety in the meta?

Cele does need some changes but don’t nerf it so that it’s useless.

infantrydiv.1620:

3. Glass Elementalists: Seriously, if you’re not mechanically good at the game, then don’t play S/F fresh air ele.

Essentially you don’t want someone who isn’t good? This applies to any light armour class, it’s not just S/F ele that suffers with poor positioning and kiting.

When I see my team’s comp, I tend not to be bothered about a particular class. What I don’t want to see is class stacking of thieves or mesmers. I don’t mind having one on my team. As has been said already, a good thief can be game changing. Two thieves, however, is a serious handicap. You’re basically 2 people down in a team fight.

I also don’t particularly like having any class which has a high skill cap, because the chances are the person isn’t going to be very good at it.

So, yeah, I worry less about the class and more about the person.

I’m similar to one of the posters above: I use celestial armour and swap out trinkets/accessories for more/less damage.

Eles are one of the few classes that really make best use of celestial.

I think I’d go battle/bloodlust. With 25 stacks of Bloodlust, Lightning Rod will be devastating.

You’ve got a lot of healing power, toughness and vit, so you might try Hoelbrak or Strength for the added damage.

Ogre can be nice as well. The rock dog does a surprising amount of damage.

Silentshoes.1805:

“What makes you think it’s based on team score not kills/caps/decaps/point defenses?”

Here you go:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm

What, you mean this bit?:

The metrics used during [the match making second phase] include: rating, rank, party size, profession, ladder position, and dishonor.

Other than that, I can’t find anywhere that it explicitly states that previous match scores are used, other than is working out leaderboard points, which are entirely separate from MMR.

They had it in GW1, but alas didn’t make it across. I don’t know why, it was one of the best features.

+1

Laserbolt.6731:

William,

No the matchmaking algorithm cannot analyze a match as a person could.

The idea here is to observe things that were not predicted from the MMRs. A reality check on why a prediction failed.

An MMR is adjusted after a match based on the accuracy of the existing MMRs in predicting the match.

This is circular logic. It makes me suspect self-reinforcing errors, and a somewhat inaccurate system.

Your MMR is not based primarily on your performance. It is inferred from you team’s score. And there can be many factors that mess up that process. Especially for a random solo team.

Maybe one team knows each other better and have established roles. Maybe they are using voice communications. Maybe the team makeup is better and MMR does not take that strongly enough into account.

All these things could make your MMR inaccurate.

The amount of random factors could drastically increase the time needed to determine your real MMR. You’d have to be in certain situations many, many times. Maybe it increases the number of matches needed exponentially. Maybe it could take 10,000 matches!

I understand your point, but I still don’t think having people reporting back to Justin saying “Oh, well one team was in TeamSpeak so that’s why they won” would help. As far as I know, there’s no way for GW2 to check if people are using VoIP so no way to change the match prediction because of it.

The same applies to things like one team rotating badly. The system can’t really identify this, and yes an actual person easily could, but what would the result of that be? How would you try and incorporate this into MMR and match predictions?

It’s basically just saying “That team was better because of x, y and z” which is fine, but in the end, it’s irrelevant to the MMR algorithm unless it’s a factor which can be incorporated.

Regarding whether MMR is based on performance, or inferred from team score, I’m not entirely sure. What makes you think it’s based on team score not kills/caps/decaps/point defenses?

Also, the answer to your ‘circular logic’ argument has already been answered:

Justin ODell.9517:

Silentshoes.1805:

What do you think about this:

Your MMR changes based on whether your team performs better or worse than expected.

The expectation is based primarily on the MMRs of each team!

So…if the MMRs are inaccurate, the prediction is wrong, and the MMRs are adjusted incorrectly.

Glicko-2 doesn’t predict anything. A better analogy would be that it reacts. We think A is this and B is that, so if A beat B then it must be closer to that and vice versa. It improves its assessment of players by adjusting based on the result of each game. It is the outcome of these games over time that is the driving force.

If you do queued matches (Unranked/Ranked) you’ll rarely get 4v5s. If you’re complaining about unbalanced teams in hot joins (Practice), I think you missed the point of hot joins.

Hot joins are for practicing individual skill or trying out new builds.

I’m pretty sure the matchmaking algorithm does this already. And if it doesn’t, it’d be simple to collect the actual match result and compare it to the prediction. Ta da: accuracy reporting.

Obviously, reporting qualitative things is difficult. But, in a way, that doesn’t matter. If you’re against a team who is simply employing better tactics, that should be reflected in a lowering of your MMR and an increasing in the opponents MMR.

I think a lot of people are forgetting that the more you play the more accurate the matchmaking will become.

You may also get put in bad match up if there simply aren’t any better alternatives. If you’re a group of 5 queued, and there’s only one other group of 5 queued, you’re probably going to go against them regardless of your MMR.
Like when my team faced The Abjured, minus one. We’re no where close to their ranks, but I suspect it was the closest match there was at the time.

Eles (celestial d/d) stay alive through sustain, so you have to do it chuck conditions on when they go out of water (the main condi clear) or focus them. A d/d ele has a really small healthpool (~16k or something). The current meta build excels at 1v1 and 2v2s, but they begin to loose effectiveness after that.

It’s also worth pointing out that the main damage comes from Burning Speed and Fire Grab, both of which are incredibly easy to dodge (you can just walk sideways to dodge Fire Grab).

Now, I do play ele so I’m slightly biased, but I agree that there are things which need to be tweaked. Maybe it’s too easy to stack might, or the Strength/Hoelbrak Runes are too powerful. I don’t really know.

I don’t think the answer is “nerf cele!” though.

Caélis here.

A long with what my brother has posted, I’d like to stress that we’re not that fussed about team composition. Not yet at least. We’re only looking to get into it and have some fun right now, nothing too serious. If you can play multiple classes that’s obviously a bonus.

Hopefully we’ll see you in the arena!

This is the first time I’ve played WvW seriously. I’m a BG player with RK.

From my perspective, we don’t have anywhere close to the numbers of TC and JQ; so often we were outnumbered 3:1, even more at times. However, we’ve got an insanely well organised commanding group with some brilliant commanders.

I particularly enjoyed taking JQs garrison. They gave an tremendous fight and it took us a long while, but eventually we took it. Holding the Lord’s Room whilst JQ kept pouring into it in waves was incredible.

Fighting SoS was really fun as well; they’re some seriously good fighters. It’s a shame they didn’t have the numbers we did, otherwise it’d have been even better.

Good fights all round!

If you use the Glyph of Elementals, you can then select another elite skill which isn’t on cooldown (see screenshot).
This way, you can have an elemental summoned and a FGS active. Or have an elemental and use Tornado. Obviously you can’t do it during combat, but you could easily do it before you enter combat.

I suspect that being able to have two elite skills active isn’t meant to be possible for any class.

With the announcement about some performance improvements and changing to the crafting interface UX, I wondered if there were any plans to improve the Trading Post?

Currently, it’s very slow to load up and any action, such as buying or selling, feels equally sluggish. It isn’t game breaking, but it would be really nice if the trading post was as slick as all the other systems.

So, any future plans to improve this?

Hiya,

I recently created a topic in the LFG section, but I thought I’d also be a bit proactive about finding a guild to join… So I found you.

I’m a newbie to GuildWars 2, but I played GuildWars for several years. I’m from England, and I’m 19; hopefully your members are fairly mature?

Thanks for your consideration.

Hello,

I’m looking for a fairly relaxed, friendly guild that does both PvE and PvP.
Primarily, I expect I’ll be doing PvE. I’d quite like to try WvW(vW?) at some point though.
Also, I’m from England and I’m 19. So I’m be looking for people around my time zone, and fairly mature. I would rather the guild was relatively large (I don’t know what constitutes a large guild in GW2).

I’m a newbie to GuildWars 2, but I played GuildWars for several years.

I started off with an elementalist, but didn’t really like it too much, despite having played as an ele’ in GW quite extensively. It didn’t seem very easy to use, so maybe I’ll return to it once I’m more familiar with the changes in game mechanics.
Now I’m a guardian, Sir Mandallorean. Cookies to whoever gets the reference. So far I’m really enjoying it. Although I’m only level 3…

Thanks for your interest.