Guild Wars 2

tom.7468:

These points can be capped by 1 player that give outnumbered servers a chance to be able to actually win some fights.

Not trying to insult, but this kind of thinking is silly.

Go to a WvW map and tell me which ones have 1 person flipping nodes with no opposition.

I stated this else where…..take a screeny of your WvW scores at primetime and look at which servers have the most orbs. I bet it’s the ones with the larger pop.

Jamais vu.5284:

They falsely think PvEers and WvWers mutually care for each other somehow.

I truly doubt the gap is as big as everyone thinks between the two. I’m hard pressed to find anyone considering themselves a hardcore WvW’r that hasn’t or doesn’t run a dungeon or participate in anything outside of the borderlands, at least not from the WvW side of things. I’m sure their are plenty of folks that call themselves PvE’rs that haven’t stepped foot in WvW.

Excalibur.9748:

Wraistlin.6072:

I know there has been complaints about this recently in GW2 with ascended weapons out now, but believe me as a MMO pvper for the last 14 years in numerous MMO’s (Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, and World of Warcraft mainly). This game has done a great job of not letting gear progression dominate their PvP.

Really it’s been over a year…and weapon stats went up a couple points per stat. Hell if this was WoW you would have had a 150+ increase on weapon stats. So for those complaining about the measly boost ascended gives please stop and realize how good you really have it. IT IS a lot worse everywhere else.

Still doesn’t make it acceptable.

So you would rather have no progression what so ever?

I do not have ascended weapons yet, and I run a D/D elementalist, which apparently the majority feels are weak to begin with, and I can still compete with guys rolling with ascended weapons. Any other MMO I would have no chance.

I know there has been complaints about this recently in GW2 with ascended weapons out now, but believe me as a MMO pvper for the last 14 years in numerous MMO’s (Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, and World of Warcraft mainly). This game has done a great job of not letting gear progression dominate their PvP.

Really it’s been over a year…and weapon stats went up a couple points per stat. Hell if this was WoW you would have had a 150+ increase on weapon stats. So for those complaining about the measly boost ascended gives please stop and realize how good you really have it. IT IS a lot worse everywhere else.

doomfodder.2906:

Winning matches in WvW boils down to very large coordinated pop with 24 hr coverage – nothing more. If your server lacks 1 or both of these 2 factors = no win. We all know sheer numbers overcome all the AC & other defense that can be manned by smaller pops trying to hold a point.

Recent WvW changes are “designed” with the intent to force action on the part of all the combatants. So the “design” of the current buff is supposed to force large pops (that want to keep the buff) to divide their numbers into more point holding groups. Based on my recent WvW experience + other threads in this forum, it’s questionable as to whether those changes are actually having THAT “desired effect”.

IMO all actions ANET takes to force action on the part of all combatants SHOULD be FOCUSSED on incenting the first sentence of this post. Everything else is either window dressing or further game imbalance. Once pops are EVEN, then and only then will things like recent changes/buffs force action on the part of all combatants. At least in the last week, it appears as if the recent change does little to incent more players on lower pop servers into WvW to address the pop imbalance caused by the current matchup algorithm.

A system which dynamically capped teamsize to within an errorbar of the smallest team would solve pop imbalance issue but obviously create discontent for those stuck in queue when they want to play. WvW has no autobalance feature like pvp & likely won’t for many practical reasons. Accordingly the playerbase must create its own pop balance solution to sustain the venue.

To the point of this post: Would ANET publish a histogram sub-grouped by map of WvW pop by server? Not a real-time histogram, but just hourly pop totals of previous matchup right after reset. Each server could more easily correlate when/where the match turned (if they also kept track of match points by hour) – stimulating tactics for future WvW matches. Think of it this way, if the entire WvW pop could see the historical pops by time of day, then sizable WvW pops from other servers MIGHT chose to transfer to a server where their contributions would make a significant difference (at least in 24 hr coverage). Those players that move probably won’t ever be stuck in another queue!! Give the player base enough data to make informed decisions prior to league introduction…

I touched on this a bit in the Bloodlust thread and somewhere else. I also suggested a player cap per borderland per server. My thoughts are if the que’s get to long for certain individuals or guilds that maybe it will promote them to transfer to a lower populated server.

My other suggestion is that WE as the WvW Community try and balance these things ourselves. That would take a huge amount of cooperation from those reading these forums to get the word out to the active WvW commanders, players on their servers.

I myself would like to start a thread that is more of a census to try and see if we can’t generate our own numbers and then communicate with some of the respected WvW leaders of each server and see if we can’t balance things out.

However the only way this works is with cooperation from Anet as well. Even if we managed to pull this off as a WvW community to essentially even out the playing field and pick teams as it were to balance out servers, and everyone was a willing participant, no one would do this without free transfers.

I’m curious if we pulled this off if Anet would allow one free transfer for players willing to straighten this out.

Gamadorn.2659:

Shiren.9532:

This is why we can’t take the buff hatred seriously. It’s a fact that you can cap and hold two ruins at the same time with a single person and run back and forth from them before they neutralise. A single person can easily maintain two ruins as long as another player doesn’t come along and neutralise one (and even then you have a window of opportunity to respond to that person). It may even be possible to cap and hold three ruins with a portal mesmer (I doubt it) but honestly, if your server can’t spare two people to cap the buff they clearly don’t care about trying to obtain it and have no right to complain about it.

There’s a lot of blind hatred for the buff and a lot of it is based around false arguments. There is a world of difference between the existing buff and the old buff and it’s clear a large number of the people complaining about the buff aren’t even trying to be smart about obtaining it.

It’s not the strongest server that gets the buff, it’s the server with the organised group that tries to cap the ruins that gets the buff. The simple fact that the meta needs time to establish around the best tactics to accomplish that is enough to put off a lot of this criticism. I often seen the buff held by the server with the lowest or second lowest PPT and my current match is a blowout.

I feel like I’ve been having this same conversation with people over and over…

No one is arguing that the smaller servers can cap it….or “the more organzied group” or whatever label makes you sleep at night….

maybe in NA prime time you server can manage to hold it for a few hours…maybe all three…I dunno…who cares…that’s not the point….

Again…the point is straight forward and simple….any point of interest on any given map, i don’t care if it was a camp that all three servers really wanted to hold throughout the day…the server that has more people and more coverage…will hold that point longer in a 24 hour period then the other servers….that’s it…

If you put a point on a map and give it something that makes it worth holding….again…the server that has more people and better coverage…on average throughout the day will tend to hold it more than the other 2 servers…

When matchups are even its a great mechanic!

Again, not saying its impossible to cap (they made it this way on purpose), just saying, if you could aggregate the amount of time that server’s have held 1,2 or 3 bloodlust buff’s…I suspect you will find that the larger server/better coverage server’s hold it longer than the others…

There’s a really simple way to prove this……everyone screen shot your current WvW Scoreboard, heck do it once a day roughly around primetime, and let’s see which team is holding most of the bloodlust. I’m betting it will be the #1 team with most of the BL capped everytime, which is usually the team that has the most population and coverage. This may not hold true in T1……..but I’m betting I’d be right 95% of the match-ups from there.

The logic isn’t hard here.
Team #1 has 100 players.
Team #2 has 60
Team #3 has 40.

Team #1 can dedicate 30 players to BL points and still have 70 players taking towers/camps etc. If any of those other two teams dedicated 30 players to compete for the bloodlust buff they wouldn’t have much of a chance to do anything else.

As they would have less than half of the players to match the 70 man zerg that could still run around and capture towers/camps.

Granted the numbers are all generalized for this example……but unless the population in WvW is close between the 3 servers matched up, the over populated server should win everytime. It’s that simple.

How can Anet fix this?
Honestly they really can’t…….it would really have to be up to the player base to try and maximize server population. Really, and my suggestion, is that Anet should allow one free transfer for anyone who wants to move servers before the WvW Leagues start.

And then it’s on the WvW community to handle the rest. We can set up a listing of WvW guilds, get a guild member count of active’s in WvW and start splitting stuff up upon request. Similar to most start up leagues of any kind.

I’d even offer to spearhead this if Anet offered the free transfer before the leagues started, and if the community truly wanted a more even WvW experience.

Yes, yes it is……

And might I ask where you are able to find these numbers? I’d love to be able to see that myself.

Edited for stupidity: I see you have it right in your comment. (millenium.org) I have to read these things fast at work haha.

Speaking of; FA has some solid commanders if anyone is looking to transfer one way or the other. We welcome all…okay well I do, I can’t speak for the rest of FA.

Krypto.2069:

Wraistlin.6072:

FA right now in my opinion is in the middle of no mans land. We’re either up against servers that dwarf us, or we are up against servers that we dwarf. I don’t remember the last time we had anything really close and exciting in my mind.

I would love to see some of the lower pop servers consolidated for this reason, or some of the top tier servers spreading out to lower pop ones.

Wow, man, you’re not joking!

I just checked millenium.org, and you have to go back to week 21 (17 weeks ago) for a non-extreme blow out match up involving FA.

Week 21 had FA/DB/TC. Where TC-rank4 won with 235K, 2nd place was FA-rank5 at 201K and DB-rank6 had 188K. Every contest from then til now looks like a 100K+ blow outs, except for week 24 which was around a 60K victory for DB.

17 weeks is a long time without a decent WvW match up.

digitalghost.7891:

just wondering if it matters using signet of air with air tree’s ’zephry’s speed’ and ‘one with air’? will all of those stack and make me move 60% faster or whatever it is?

Simple answer; No.

lunyboy.8672:

Yeah, I’ve been playing my ele for about 2 weeks now, and have a guardian as well. These videos seemed… disingenuous in that I can do better with the ele after 2 weeks than that.

You want to see a profession with a high skill ceiling? (because that IS what we are talking about) Try just clicking skills on the basic Engineer build. There is a study in a high skill ceiling with a VERY low reward, out pacing ele by quite a bit.

Also, conjures ARE OP. I <3 them.

Yeah I have to agree with this too. Engineer has got to be the highest ceiling when it comes to skill.

Yes there is a lot to know about Elementalist, but the attunements don’t change, and you generally know the kind of stuff your going to be able to find in each attunement; Ex: Fire – burns, Water – heals, etc.

Engineer your toolkit is always changing based on utilities selected….so figure you have how many utilities? That’s how many different F1-F4 abilities. I can see that being difficult to really get a grasp on.

Galbar.7843:

If conjured are so powerfull, why aren’t they being used??

I think it might have to do with survivability? For using them I’d have to make a super bunker ele (high health and armor) and wear d/d so I can have enough mobility to survive, maybe even s/d?

So for boosting conjures I have to go for 30 on fire trait line. Then Earth and water for bunker… maybe 20/20? Soldier equipment for more survivability, maybe some cleric jewelery for regen…

What do you think? I’m just wondering why don’t I use them if they have so much dps…

With the coming patch it might be viable to use them as your offensive weapons, and maybe run D/F or S/F for defensive abilities. Probably S/F (more blinds) I know I’m going to be checking it out once the patch actually hits.

ImProVocateur.5189:
Here is that D/D vid……tried to pull one off spec’d 30 fire, 30 air with D/D and I couldn’t do it. Probably could have if I busted out the earth elemental…..

In any case here is a pretty common D/D bunker build vid.
http://youtu.be/ihP0mn-2sXk

ImProVocateur.5189:

Wraislin.6072,
I do appreciate your contribution to this thread, and look forward to your d/d video.

Melody Cross.8465 and to All,
I have been mulling over an idea you might like. We have a few videos showing how well the burst works to dps enough for Svanir. The scepter is not really the issue I am raising. You are correct about that. Scepter videos give more perspective. Alright, so, I have been wanting to put up a reward for a challenge. Maybe 50 gold or 100 gold, and an assortment of crafting and mystic forge items. I would like to get 20 challengers. The reward will be split into two pots, and all successful challengers split the pots. The challenge is simple: beat Svanir and the Chieftain in under 2 minutes, in that order. 80% of the reward will go to that pot. A consolation pot of 20% of the reward will pay those who only kill Svanir in under 1 minute. Here is the catch: only d/d or d/f builds are allowed, and no racial skills or pet summoning skills. The reason for the “no pets” rule is because of the AI problem. So that is it. I want to get people’s ideas on how to hold such a challenge. It would take an hour. Can people guest into one server’s PvP practice area? The challenge will only work if both mobs are side by side, like in the practice area. Also, how can others spectate without tampering with the results?

Have you seen other classes only use some abilities and do this same feat? As fun of a challenge as this would be; limiting what abilities you use isn’t truly showing the value of your class.

That would be as silly as saying you can only kill these two NPC’s while staying in water attunement the whole fight.

And as I made mention above D/D or D/F is not this classes damage set of weapons. Just like there are certain weapon sets on other professions that lack pure burst dps.

I believe the original point was to have PvPers benefitting PvEers. That’s what those bonuses are when you’re earning points each week. It’s a way to have some synergy between the two types of game play which rarely happens in an MMO.

Yeah I started on FA and have stayed on FA even though my original WvW guild split to somewhere else, then I think they found out the grass isn’t always greener and the guild split.

I do enjoy seeing the 100+ views and no responses though. Just imagine if this happened how ugly and out of control the imbalance would be. Although Anet might make a whole load of money for people wanting to transfer back to where they left from.

Gamadorn.2659:

Wraistlin.6072:

Love how everyone is a game developer on these boards.

Granted there is always things that can be better and improved, but really guys how can you possibly know anything that truly goes on behind the scenes.

When your steak comes back well done and you ordered it rare….you have a pretty good idea what went wrong and you never once saw the chef make your steak…..

We don’t know all the details, but we can infer from the results we see and compare to similar processes other similar games go through with their processes. Your right we can never know 100%, but we can infer quite a bit with good observation

Very true, however you and I don’t see the chef ignoring the steak because he is perfecting some amazing dessert reciepe. If he focuses on the steak….then the dessert is mediocre. All we see is that steak isn’t the way we want it and have yet to see the dessert.

I’m saying there are always idea, changes, things in the pipeline for an MMO. It will never be perfect in any state at anytime in it’s lifecycle, much like it will never be finished.

I’m currently one who enjoys wPvP, have since launch, orbs where OP then to large pop. Bloodlust still is now.

No disrespect to Arenanet because I do enjoy this game, but I want to throw a challenge to those making these decisions. IF WvW as it stands right now is so fair, and doesn’t put a majority of the servers at a huge disadvantage; allow us players to transfer for free to the servers of our choosing before the leagues start.

Then we’ll see if the community begging for changes to make things closer take action to start populating lower pop servers or if everyone rushes to top tier.

One free transfer, you have one choice. What do you do?

Cap all WvW maps to 100 (100 was just a random number plucked….whatever number is more realistic) players per server, per map.
Will force population to spread out, or players sit in a que.

Then armies on each map are even.

Love how everyone is a game developer on these boards.

Granted there is always things that can be better and improved, but really guys how can you possibly know anything that truly goes on behind the scenes.

It could be much more simple than that. Lock borderlands at a certain population per side. You have 4 WvW maps, if you lock each map to 100 players per server, per map. The rest get que’d.

People get sick of que’s and start looking to transfer toward lower populated servers.

Johje Holan.4607:

I wonder how FA would feel about this? League 2 looks great. League 3 is a little whack. League 4 looks good.

The problem is that the server populations are so different. Until they become more even, someone is always going to have a bad matchup.

Hopefully, people in the top servers get tired of stomping and spread themselves out amongst the lower servers.

Honestly, though, WvW does not have the population to support 24 servers in NA. Realistically, we should spread out over about 12 – 14 servers.

FA right now in my opinion is in the middle of no mans land. We’re either up against servers that dwarf us, or we are up against servers that we dwarf. I don’t remember the last time we had anything really close and exciting in my mind.

I would love to see some of the lower pop servers consolidated for this reason, or some of the top tier servers spreading out to lower pop ones.

I do have one thing to say about this. How many people kitten’n on this forum transferred from their original server? Or are sitting on one of the more overpopulated servers for WvW?

This can be fixed it just requires everyone to stop jumping on the OverPop bandwagon.

ImProVocateur.5189:

Things to reconsider

Let me be the one to take the flack for showing what I am seeing. Now show me what you are seeing. Say it however you will. I want to learn just what you all think can be done to improve ele play. I spent only 10 points in earth to get the toughness bonus for channeling, so you can figure out where the other 60 belong.

I want your videos showing how you did it better. I want to see Svanir soloed with pro style. I want to see your points and traits and how that makes you wipe the practice NPCs in 3s. I want to see you attune your heart out while acting as a crucial member of an elite squad in PvP or WvW. Please, no lackluster videos of leeching eles that only pull off finishers on downed players for fear of actually fighting it out.

Not entirely sure what you want of out these videos but I accepted the challenge.

http://youtu.be/v3WYQDDqOF0
That’s a S/D build, half-donkey (take that kitten!) runed, traited pure dps for the most part.

I have a D/D build video uploading as well, since I’m getting the feeling that’s what you are really interested in. I’ll add the link later when it’s done.

BlackBeard.2873:

They really don’t need to change all that much. Just give daggers more damage (now that their survivability has been nerfed a ton), change the arcane skills to something useful, reduce the cooldown of our utils, and increase scepter auto-attack a little bit. However, we need more damage on our skills, that is the main thing. Given the survivability we have, we should be doing damage close to a thief auto-attack rather than the least damage on our auto.

Yeah, this and/or increase our base health.

I’d like to see a reduced cast conjure cooldown trait.

I’ve also noticed myself getting downed in Mist Form…..do conditions damage through it now?

That’s hardly invulnerable if that’s the case.

IceBlink.4317:

Has the new stats for superior rune of the traveler been interesting enough for usage in anyone’s elementalist build?

Just to remind people so they don’t need to look it up:
(1): +10 to All Stats; +2% Critical Damage
(2): +15% Boon Duration
(3): +10 to All Stats; +2% Critical Damage
(4): +10% Condition Duration
(5): +10 to All Stats; +2% Critical Damage
(6): +25% Movement Speed

Taking just two is tempting, haha.

Like you said; I’ve seen many take 2 of these, with 2 water, and 2 monk (think it’s monk) for the +15% boon duration for all of their second tiers. I haven’t tested it myself but that would be 45% boon duration increase if they stack.

Daecollo.9578:

Your not going to gain anything unless your willing to sacrifice and simplify your class, right now if they give you any meaningful buffs, it will just make highly skilled people gods.

It would make people who can’t play that well, normal. People that play very well so good that nobody will want to play anything besides Ele.

I’ve found people play what they like. I have a mesmer and enjoyed it, however I fell in love with playing an elementalist, and playing it well. Yes Ele’s are crazy in the right hands, doesn’t mean you keep nerfing them because a few are really good at playing an elementalist.

Also are you saying there are no highly skilled players playing anything else? Cause that would be silly, and then should also be stated that no other classes should get buffs either with this logic.

This is a common elementalist thread….

I agree with just about everything constructive stated.

Elementalist isn’t as horrible as most make it out to be, but yes there are changes that would be nice.

Simply put: There are specs and trait lines that offer the most benefit with certain weapon sets. Doing ANYTHING out of these “cookie cutter/weapon set” builds will make the elementalist poor to play, and even worse for players lacking certain skills.

Most DPS builds require scepter/x and traited for Fresh Air.
You’ve better understand dodging and your defensive ablitilies cause it leaves you weak.

D/D builds usually require bunkering and the typical x/x/x/30/30 or x/x/x/20/30
It’s nearly impossible to play d/d to perfection without 30 arcana, you need the speed in attunement swapping. Because it is also a melee weapon build you need some health or healing to survive melee fights.

Staff builds
From my experiences and what I can tell staff has the most variety of builds cause there doesn’t seem to be a solid nitch trait line, and of these weapon sets it’s probably the easiest to try and sit in only a few attunements. (However this is never the most effective way to play an elementalist)

Going against these proven builds will make life very difficult for an elementalist. If you seem to be struggling take a look into that.

With that said
I would like to see more build variety for all weapon sets that pull elementalists out of Arcana. Personally I’d like to see Fresh Air options for each of the 4 elemental lines, which I think would open up all kinds of options for staff builds.

Even with that the above (non staff) builds will hold true just because of the abilities on the weapon sets.

BlackBeard.2873:

Also, Frost Aura >> Fire Aura (by like a million).

A few extra might stacks might help too. 1 Might stack is nothing, 3 per hit and now you better make sure you kill that ele of they are coming back with a vengeance. Especially on a condi build, it could be some pretty potent defense.

I like this idea of 3 stacks per hit……I’d be happy just with that little change.

ThiBash.5634:

It’ll take a lot of toughness to get any significant increase in damage reduction. I like the stat (from other games also, I like to have high defense) but in practice toughness doesn’t seem to work as well as say, vitality or healing power.

There was an article on these forums about a week ago though, that showed you how to calculate optimal toughness.

Yeah I have to agree with this. I’ve tried builds with toughness and less vitality and/or healing power.

I’ve always had more success with vitality and healing power over vitality and toughness. Mainly because it is so easy to keep regen up on an Elementalist.

I like to keep high toughness builds with condition damage builds. Seems to be more synergy there.

FYI: I double tab to dodge, and make heavy use of auto run (my middle mouse click).

What works for me:
The biggest thing that helped me was changing A, D to the left and right strafe (instead of the default turn), and then I set F1-F4 to Shift, W, A, S, D.

That way I never have to move my hand off of the movement keys, and can quickly swap.

A side note: I do run a logitech G700 mouse, so I do have 2-5, 6, 10 as hotkeys on the mouse. For the utilities (7, 8, 9) I use Q, E, and Shift +Q respectively.

Overall I have less hand movement which allows for quicker response.

That would actually be a decent idea too……the auto attacks shouldn’t count towards charges.

But that would most likely make the LH extremely overpowered.

Yeah it seems the term “button mashing” has somehow lost its true meaning in the GW2 forums.

Button Mashing was a negative comment to players using classes that could press any button combinations all willy nilly like and still do fairly well at whatever it was they were doing. (pve, pvp, etc)

So at best the closest professions in GW2 too this would be thief and warrior imo. Granted just randomly pushing buttons is not the most effective for any profession, but there is literally a sPvP video of some guy playing a thief, not really traiting the character and just randomly pressing buttons, or spaming the #2 skill and killing folks in sPvP.

Doing this with an Engineer or Elementalist will get you killed everytime, no matter what. Those two professions require great thought and awareness to play even remotely well.

Just can’t stand the AoE Mechanic. There is no purpose for it, I believe only the FGS does anything based of the AoE placement.

Hell I’d be happy if they just added a field on the AoE summon. At least there would be a point to the AoE targeting.

Fiery Greatsword = Ring of Fire
Fiery Axe, = Lava Font
Frost Bow = Geyser
Lightning Hammer = Static Field
Earth Shield = Smoke Field (something like murky water from the trident.)

Plus it fits with the class….we already produce so many types of fields, might as well keep rolling with the concept.

So conjures, they are here to stay and I don’t mind that. I’m excited to see some of the changes. I know this discussion has been beat to death; with that I had a thought on a way to make conjures a little less clunky and maybe a little more useful. (Without a drastic change to our class.)

1. Get rid of the AoE placement.

I’d much rather use the utility and have the weapon in hand (like an engineer kit), I don’t care if there is a second weapon placed, and if that stayed just drop it next to us or behind us like a hunter spirit.

2. Allow weapon swap between the conjure and the attunement you summoned the conjure in.

There is always the argument on Elementalists needing the utility slots for defensive abilities, which more often than not is the case. However we have a nice weapon that has some great defensive abilities in the focus. So if we were able to swap between a conjure and a weapon set we would be able to utilize some abilities we’d be giving up for the conjure.

However this would then create another issue of an elementalist having 25 abilities at one time. My suggestion to that is too lock us in the attunement we cast the summon in for the duration of the conjured weapon.

Ex: I’m in earth attunement and summon lighting hammer. For the duration of the lightning hammer I can weapon swap like any other character between my earth skills and my lightning hammer skills.

Just my thoughts….

I know there is alot of doom and gloom on these forums. I love the elementalist class. I feel it has alot of variety compared to most classes. It does need to be played skillfully to be competitive in WvW and sPvP, it has some great builds for PvE solo or group. There hasn’t been anything in this game I haven’t been able to do with some variation of builds, traits, weapons.

I do like the “gimmick” of conjures, with some tweaking I think they could be in rotations. Hell the LH has already found a place in dungeons, along with the Ice Bow in some instances. Just need to get the clunkiness of the AoE off of them.

Any chance to post a vid of some fighting with this spec. Was checking it out a bit, only seemed to work for me once where I got enough confusion on my target.

Granted I played a bit clunky trying to get some kind of feel for this. Sounds really interesting.

It’s rough but can be done. As someone mentioned Lightning Hammer is the way to go.

I was running 30 fire, 30 air, and 10 earth (these last 10 could really be anywhere).

Run lightning hammer, arcane blast, and I was using arcane shield for defense when needed.

Take the 30 point trait in power that makes the fire fields last longer and gives fury.

I use Sceptor/Dagger.

I try to get into a rotation of Fire Attune ((#2 followed up by #4 fire field under the tooth from #2, #3 AoE in the fire field, Arcane Blast or Wave (which ever is the blast finisher) , Earth Attune #4, #5)). At this point you will have a nice stack of might and duration on fury.

Then whip out the Lightning Hammer and go to town.

Gear as you see fit to survive. Some players are better than others in dodging, but if you stay up an entire fight, you are more beneficial to the group as a whole, than a warrior can ever be.

Just takes time and practice.

I have to say it really gets annoying hearing all the kitten’n on this forum about how Ele’s are so bad at everything. I started this game as a mesmer, dabbled with guardian, engineer, necros……once I made this elementalist I can not go back to any other class. They have an answer for almost anything, you just have to find the weapon/stat/utility combination to pull it off. (and have a mouse with 7 buttons )

More importantly I’d like to add…..changing our base HP would be a much better improvement, so the water line isn’t such a requirement.

I agree it would open up more options if Anet set our attunement swap to 9 sec like most classes.

However I do think it would be a bit overpowered with the range of abilities an elementalist has per fight. 20 abilities not including utilities. Wether they are good are not is another story.

I think Anet is approaching this differently, to allow players to focus on a certain element more often than the rest. I know this is posted somewhere else, but I think they will add more “fresh” traits to the other 3 attunements, similar to air.

This is a balance between a 15 sec attunement cooldown and trying to focus on one element or a 9 sec attunement cooldown and having to use all elements.

I myself would like to see more fresh traits cause it would provide the options for more builds focused on one element.

This is a pretty sweet build, very different and quite refreshing.

One question I’m curious about however…..does anyone know if Chaotic Transference (25 in Chaos) and Superior Rune of the Undead +6 bonus stack?

Both give the 5% toughness to condition damage.

Agree with most of what the OP said, but honestly it would be as simple as increasing our baseline health as well.

Did you guys know we have 5k base HP then other light armor classes? My mesmer without armor at 80 has 5000 more hp then my elementalist also without armor.

That’s a huge advantage right there for any other classes. That never made much sense to me.

I was just curious if this trait takes 5% from your “total” toughness or just the trait line +300 toughness?

Anyone know?

Thanks.