Guild Wars 2

KrazyFlyinChicken.5936:

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

Nice video! I really enjoy watching staff eles in a non zerg setting. Anyway, I am not sure if ya knew this but celestial ammy is getting buffed in pvp so yea I think you will enjoy that Also, Imo arcane lightning would still be better then air training since it would be constant 10 percent damage boost rather then 10 percent in a specific time, and also you are running all arcane utils

I made a post above about Arcane Lightning — you’re completely right. Arcane Lightning is definitely a great trait and (arguably) better than air training for this build. I’ll have to give it another look.

Thanks for watching!

If you were using multiple Arcanes for burst, without Arcane Mastery, you might lose the benefit since the trait doesn’t stack – but with your heal being Brilliance, and with traited Arcane cooldowns, you’ll probably have higher uptime on AL than the time you spend in Air attunement.

Hey, we got the pre-match exploits fixed, didn’t we?

Well, apart from on Skyhammer. So now it’s the only map with a known major exploit.

Note: don’t explain the exploit to anyone, if folks ask about it. Even though it’s on it’s-fair-and-fun-and-not-buggy-so-you’re-going-to-kitten -well-enjoy-it Skyhammer, describing how to cheat on it is still against the ToS.

...is it Legless Legolas?

AlbertoUlkesh.4517:

So… I see some good suggestions on how to improve on the map, if not removed. And how Team Q might be able to counterplay it on a premade team.

What I don’t see is a single reason why they are in Solo Q, but not in Team Q.

Interesting.

No, I explained the extra problem with teamq – premade vs premade might be able to counter each other, but premade (with gimmicky builds for that one map) vs anything that’s not a full premade (so isn’t running synergetic gimmicky builds) would absolutely dominate it.

Premades already have a pretty good advantage in teamq, since they’re, um, a team that’s queueing together. Letting them run 5 preorganised map-oriented builds on such teamcomp-reliant maps would be OTT, though.

NinjaEd.3946:

I meant in the sense you steal from anything and you always got to choose what you got. You can’t steal from a thief and get consume ecto. Letting people control every little detail of a system is just too much. It should allow some say in it, like prioritize your fields over others, but not “I want water fields #1, fire #2” etc. I agree, in hotjoin or wvw zergs you can’t really control who puts down what field as much, and there should be some way that you can control how you’re playing, and not have other people override a combo you set up. There should be options at the very least.

A Thief can only steal Consume Ecto if there’s a Mesmer within range, but also you can only blast a water field if someone’s placed a water field – it’s not like we’re wanting to let people choose the effects of their blast finishers without having prerequisite fields, which is what your Thief-Steal example sounds like.

At any rate, if most people are very strongly against a personal priority list, or if it’s technically just too much hassle to implement soon, I’m still very much in favour of my-fields-take-priority – this would mean that (for example) Guards could aim their blasts carefully to trigger fields they wanted to, and Eles could still use their important combos without wasting all their blasts on retaliation.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

cheese.4739:

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Our Niche: Average at everything, best at nothing.

Fixed that for you.

I had a feeling that specifically you would have something to say on that. If you ignore traits then we are good at nothing. So really unless we go full cele on everything and 15 points into each tree we arent really specializing in anything and we are still then just average at everything.

The problem comes when we TRY to specialize at something. We always have a disadvantage that the other classes don’t have. That being our defensive options are SHOCKINGLY weak – Sure we have AoE, Arcane Shield and Mist Form but then take into account the cool downs and such and the effectiveness other classes similar kind of skills and it shows alot.

Then we get into the fact That we NEED points in Water and Arcana. We have no choice. The choice comes in how many points we point in, some think 10 is fine, others 20 and others still think 30 is a must.

The problem is that we can’t really try anything new Earth, Water and Arcana are just to important. Sure you get those that go the Fresh Air scepter build but they have the problem that if someone blocks, immunes, dodges there burst they are pretty much going to down.

It would be nice if we were given a bit more defense in terms of Health/armor and lower cool downs so that we could try other things. Fire trait line for example, seems interesting but i can’t spare any points currently in my build Earth is needed for toughness, Water needed for the healing and Arcana for the attunement cool down reduction and other things like Evasive Arcana.

our niche is pretty much: Meteor Storm and then going Tornado.

We aren’t “good at nothing” without traiting or specialising – we have great versatility built into our weapons, and can do a reasonable job at many roles. We just aren’t the best at any one thing based on our weapon skills*.

Were you around when D/D Ele had high mobility, strong heals and a bunch of other powerful defensive skills while still being able to dish out damage? I’m pretty sure it was the first big meta build, and was nerfed to hell several times while the balance team tried to work out what made it so good. Eles have spent most of the last year gradually recovering from these nerfs, but they happened in the first place because Eles were the best at several things, or at least very very good.

Our massive utility from the multiple weaponsets means that we can’t be overbuffed in one area, since anyone playing at all well would vastly outshine another class trying to do the same thing. You need to actually use all your skills, and in conjunction with each other, rather than just write off half of them as useless and then QQ about how you suck.

Yes, we still aren’t in the best place, and yes, our traits are messy, generally encouraging us to spec into only one or two elements but requiring that we’re locked out of those elements for large chunks of playtime – but the problems that you’re experiencing seem to be mostly a combination of:
1) you need to practice and improve. Many of your problems sound like you need to learn how/when to dodge or use defensive skills, and to run the hell away from those bloody WvW thieves – or to better use your defences and actually spec for any damage at all so you can ever kill anything. The longer the fight goes on when you’re doing 0 damage, the more time in which you can slip up or your foe can do their burst. The offensive trait lines are rather more powerful than they used to be, and our attunement cooldowns were improved greatly in Dec10 patch, so the general consensus is no longer “you need 20 water 20 arcana to do anything”.
2) you need to stop thinking about “what’s weak and needs buffed” and instead think “what’s useful to me, and how best can I use it?”. You make far too many threads with complaints about other classes (or your own) or OP suggestions, when you could instead be theorycrafting and saying “hi guys, what do you think of this build?”. People can’t give you tips or suggestions, or even make use of your ideas, if you only contribute meaningless noise then plug your ears when your nonsense is called out.

*note: this isn’t actually true. Compared to other untraited weapon sets, Staff has superior AoE damage and control, S/D has great might stacking, and so on.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Our Niche: Average at everything, best at nothing.

Fixed that for you.

As several people have said before, every Thief runs shortbow for its mobility, blast finisher, poison, etc., while not many Rangers use it in PvE.

In PvP, the only regularly seen Ranger builds (outside of Sky-knockback-party-hammer) make use of the shortbow, as it reliably procs spirit effects and can apply a lot of bleeding and poison pressure.

Gear unification makes it very likely for legendary skins to become available in PvP soon, so if you ever plan to PvP at all you should maybe consider the Ranger - but there, too, every experienced Thief you find will be running with the bow.

In a little more depth:

Warriors are wanted for their high health and armour, and high reliable damage output, making many difficult tasks somewhat easier since they can absorb a lot of damage. They’re “easy mode”, and as long as you’re not terrible and you know the path you should be welcome in a PuG as a War.
Guardians are wanted for their team utility, with heals, protection, blocks, some might stacking, some swiftness, and decent dps. They’re pretty much a staple, you’ll see one or two in each group for most organised dungeon runs.
Elementalists are wanted for high dps, might/fury stacking, and their conjured weapons (which gives one to the Ele and drops one for an ally to use). Conjures like the Frost Bow and Fiery Greatsword are very useful in many specific dungeon situations. Eles are squishy, but at least one is seen in most organised dungeon groups.

Mesmers bring some utility (portal and stealth are very useful for some parts of some paths) but are squishy and tend to lack the AoE damage output required for dungeons. They’re pretty situational.
Engineers… are in a very weird place in PvE. Roll one if you want, but if you join a lfg party you may get asked why you’re running it.
Thieves can do high single-target damage, and the long-duration stealth from Shadow Refuge is very useful for running through large, unimportant and enemy-filled sections of dungeon paths – or for ressing downed allies safely. They’re really very squishy against the powerful AoE attacks of many bosses.

Rangers lack many useful abilities for PvE, with low damage output from weapons, and reliance on conditions and pets. Since pets don’t dodge attacks and their activated skills are… unreliable… the Ranger is seen as a bad choice for dungeons. Many other things, too – they were voted for some proper developer-player discussion well above all other classes recently, and a revamp is hopefully on the way at some point in the future.
Necromancers can bring some group utility, but lack AoE direct damage – and condition damage suffers from a number of problems in PvE, especially against the high-health bosses found in dungeons.

After rereading the thread before posting, I see the OP says they’ve not played for about half a year – sorry if you’re already experienced and I’ve gone into a lot of depth that you were already aware of.

As longshot says, Warrior is a safe bet, and Guards and Eles are also strong in the meta. It’s possible to run any class if you play well, but these three classes are reliably useful for the majority of dungeon paths, with others only occasionally being in demand.

It’s probably a buff your guild has activated, yes - this doesn’t show up anywhere on your status bar with other buffs/debuffs. You can see what effects your guild currently has active by hovering over the guild icon on the upper left of your screen - the same can be done to check which WvW buffs have been earned active without having to look through all the menus.

I’d say that Artificier is the best choice, since a large number of its items are useful (scepter/focus/staff/potions/crystals) to the Ele.

My Ele’s other choice is also Weaponsmith, but I’ve honestly never used it yet* - it’s usually cheaper to save your items up, buy the equipment you want from the trading post, and only use your crafting materials to sell or make the rarer weapon skins.

*Ele main is the only one with an Ascended weapon, and she runs Staff the majority of the time

Pip.2094:

I use a hide-chat build, very effective against any kind of PvE-PvP-WvW jerk. I suggest you to give it a shout

I approve of this, though it’s important to keep chat up open at the start of the match just in case your team isn’t made up entirely of eejits (and so that you can use it for actual communication rather than an abuse-hurling medium).

Oulov.7913:

Yeah, I like the idea of "a completely new skill bar and no utilities". Those skills, however, have to be pumped up to actually be usefull, otherwise nobody will want to be a carrier.

There are two options I can think of for this:

1) make the orb spawn less frequently and be worth more points, so that carrying it is very worthwhile but doesn’t have to be done for the entire match

2) give the orb powerful skills when held, with maybe a rush, a stunbreak, a stability, a CC... but reduce points given for running it to 15/5 (owned/un-owned point) or similar

If you have any other speed buffs on, the 10% won’t help at all. It works if you don’t have Windborne Daggers, or swiftness, or anything else buffing your speed, but much of the time it’s completely useless.

Drakent.9605:

For example I discover that bleed’s works the same way as Vulnerability.
Vulnerability is a condition that stack and for every Vulnerability you get 1% damage increase for every physical damage you deal for a total of 25 stack effect. Well bleed has the same effect for every bleed stack your bleed damage will be increase base on your condition damage.

Few questions:
1) why have devs never pointed this out or clarified it?
2) why are your numbers so incredibly off? 1.2k condi damage would do 2575 damage per second for 25 stacks of bleed; 1.5k would do 2950 per second. Please post screencaps to verify your claims.

Nikaido.3457:

fishball.7204:

Cuz some classes have crazy mobility for orb running whereas others don’t (ie. imbalanced).

The funny thing about that is that they didn’t consider putting it in teamq, where you CAN control what classes are brought to the party, but not in soloq, where you can’t control anything (yelling that you don’t want to play in a team with two+ elementalists is not going to make the players change their characters). That imbalance is inherently worse for soloq than it could’ve been for teamq.

Aye, in team queue you can at least expect some counterplay in the case of premade vs premade… though also this would mean that premade vs randoms (or premade vs partial premade) would result in horribly OP team comps completely dominating on these maps.

If you have *lots* of heals, the healing power investment can be worthwhile (such as a Staff Ele bringing several blast finishers for their own fields - note that if you expect allies to blast your water fields, your healing power is irrelevant since their finisher takes their stats).

Does your build only have its slot 6 heal, and no others? Cleric’s is probably a waste of stats, and you’d be much better off with something like Soldiers for survivability and higher damage output.

Healing power tends to scale pretty badly, so you really do need to have several skills and effects making use of it for the stat investment to pay off at all.

Oh, yes, sorry - I was only referring to the "proc on-swap sigil every time it’s off cooldown" issue, florence, by noting that two classes pretty reliably do this right now anyway.

Warriors getting to proc up to 4 on-swaps, every cooldown, could prove to be problematic though. Nerfing the cooldowns to 20 seconds would affect Engineers and Eles, who arguably need more love than War right now, and nerfing the sigil effects would just make them less useful for everyone.

Guess we’ve got to wait and see what the balance team have come up with.

NinjaEd.3946:

cheese.4739:

I think what I’d prefer:

An option to choose how combo fields are prioritised, with the default being “oldest field”.
If you switch away from default, you can create your own order of field priority for your finishers, by ordering a list of field types.

That’d be far to convenient for the player. That’s be like letting thief choose what stolen skill they get each time. A more bland system would do far better job here, like was listed before and maybe some more. Like an ele can create fields for days, so maybe a “self prioritize” + “most recent” or “oldest”. For example, they use burning retreat to escape some damage and immediately switch to water to put down a field to blast, and by accident the field from #4 fire was in the way.

In PvP scenarios, the thief does choose their stolen skill each time, since they only get one per profession.

As for personal field management, that’s pretty easy to do, and if the Ele is casting and blasting their water field over the top of Burning Retreat they’re the one at fault (though this change would help them out, I’ll admit).

What the list of field priority would do is help out in less organised areas, where you can’t really expect players to coordinate their fields – in Solo Queue sPvP, for example, a Warrior’s full Longbow burst will produce a huge fire field (covering more than an entire capture point) that sticks around for several seconds, but which will prevent an Engineer from using their heal effectively (assuming Turret) without leaving the battlefield. In an organised team players can discuss this beforehand and be aware of what their allies are running, but Solo Queue players often can’t do that.
The same is true of PuGs running dungeons, or zergs in WvW that have picked up randoms.

As ThiBash says: we can do everything with one build.

Can a guard do both dps and have reasonable survivability at the same time? If yes... can they also have good mobility? If (somehow) yes to that too - do they also provide team support?

Ele weapons can do a greater variety of things than other classes - hell, our Glyphs are specifically designed around adding more utility, with different effects per attunement, even if they do need some work to become properly useful (smoke and ice fields on glyph of storms would be delicious, though the smoke may only be able to exist for a short part of the spell’s duration to avoid massive stealth stacking).

We can’t do any one thing quite as well as others, apart from (particularly AoE) damage - but an Ele that specs for full S/D burst or full zerker Staff is faaaar squishier than anyone else running their profession’s burst builds.

runeblade.7514:

Jackums.3496:

runeblade.7514:

Okay, Anet nerfs hammer warriors to death. So what is next? A new meta will pop up and you will complain about that too.

That’s how the game’s meant to work. It will never be balanced, but the meta is supposed to change constantly to keep things interesting.

But it hasn’t, and Warriors are still over-powered.

And then if it changes, you’ll be complaining about the new meta.

However, if we can possibly expect the top meta builds to lose some of their edge in future balance patches, there should be at least a little less complaining about them – but when we were stuck with hambow for three months, then it got significant damage nerfs, and it continued to be a very powerful build for another three months…

We really do need more frequent, but smaller, balance patches. With 3-month-cycles, things tend to get overbuffed or overnerfed, and the new meta builds (that usually emerge within a couple of weeks if not sooner) are almost guaranteed to dominate others for long enough to get frustrating and stale.

People will always be... unfriendly, yeah. Play what you enjoy, aim to constantly learn and improve, and try your hardest to ignore the trolls and not reply to them.

You’ll have decent damage and survivability with that setup, so it’s a pretty reasonable plan.

It’s relatively cheap to pick up a second set of Rare level gear (a few gold at most) to experiment with, and the stat difference isn’t really all that huge for doing open-world PvE. Just make sure you keep it in an invisible bag slot so you don’t accidentally salvage or sell the stuff!

Another suggestion is to go to the Heart of the Mists and check out come stat combinations there for your build - sadly it’s pretty limited compared to PvE/WvW, but there are test golems of various configurations to test your attacks out on.

*you don’t get up to 14 bits of gear to mix and match with, instead getting only:
- an amulet that defines most of your stats
- a jewel for that amulet for a bit of flavour
- your runes
and the stat combos available are well out of date compared to what’s in PvE, with any introduced over the last year not being represented

Generally people go for generic boon duration runes, though - taking 2 monk, 2 water and 2 traveler runes will give you +45% duration on *all* boons you apply, rather than the extra 15% for just might (which is easy to stack with fire fields anyway).

@OP: Engineers and Elementalists can already proc their on-swap sigils every cooldown, so the Warrior gaining this won’t be anything new... but with the current state of the War, it better be done in such a way that they don’t dominate the meta for /another/ million years to the next balance patch.

oZii.2864:

I suspect any condi build running rabid can get past it. The thing is if a diamond skin Ele build could be made that does enough damage and has enough vit I don’t think there really is one though not one that makes people give up zephyr’s boon.

A ele can bunker with the trait if they like though but I don’t see it being a difference maker if your build is designed to burst/do damage since you probably have a low hp pool to begin with.

Actually I specifically build for low hp when running Diamond Skin, with high toughness (and good protection uptime) and regular, powerful healing.
It means I really can’t bunker down in a team fight (though I can give great pressuring damage and supporting heals/boons from nearby if someone sturdier’s in the fray) and someone with reasonable CC and power damage is a dangerous opponent (though the protection + heals can really help there, and I have mobility enough to run away if I get scared).

Building with lots of vitality may sound like a good idea for Diamond Skin, because hey look it takes more damage to break the skin! This… isn’t really the case, though, because:
- you’ll have a harder time healing back up above that 90% when your skin is broken by a strong attack
- 1000 health increase only adds 100 to the skin threshold, which really isn’t very much

In sPvP right now I’m running Valk amulet (primary power, secondary toughness, shared secondary healing power/crit dmg) with Grove runes (for healing power, protection, and the hilarity that is randomly rooting people). My health is at 10.8k or 11.8k, depending if I’ve put my 10 points into Water or Air traits.

I think what I’d prefer:

An option to choose how combo fields are prioritised, with the default being "oldest field".
If you switch away from default, you can create your own order of field priority for your finishers, by ordering a list of field types.

Lawful.5314:

I don’t understand the concept of might stacking, its technically impossible to have too many stacks, as each stack has its own timer, thus they do not all refresh if you build up a new stack, and they will decrease every few seconds by one stack, thus getting up to like 20 stacks is impossible?

I regularly hit 25 stacks, though can’t maintain it in PvP areas if I want to not die immediately in combat.

Boon duration helps a bit, but mostly you’ve just got to regularly do your might-granting combos. Blasting in a fire field grants 20 seconds of might, and most blast finishers recharge rather faster than that, so you can maintain the stuff pretty easily if you bring a few finishers.

Example of how a nice might-stacking chain would go for me, requiring staff, 30 points in arcana for Evasive Arcana, and certain utility skills:

Start in Earth
Lay down Eruption (blast finisher)
Conjure Flame Axe, use skill 4 (Ring of Fire) for a fire field
Skill 2 (Explosive Lava Axe) for a blast finisher
Arcane Wave for a blast finisher
Arcane Brilliance for a blast finisher
Dodge while still in Earth Attunement for a blast finisher
15 stacks of might so far
Burning Retreat into foe for another field, then leap through that for a nice fire shield and to kill some time
Skill 2 will be off CD for a blast finisher
Drop the axe, place another Eruption
Switch to Fire Attunement, cast Lava Font for a field
Pick up the other flame axe and blast in the font with skill 2 again

This takes less than 20 seconds, and including the 1 might from switching to Fire Attunement under Elemental Attunement, gives 25 AoE stacks (8x3 + 1).
It’s a simple enough task to continue to rotate between Fire and Earth attunements to keep the stacks above 20 permanently.

Of course, this isn’t nearly so reliable in PvP, since your opponent is likely to be trying to kill you (rather than just slap you gently as PvE mobs do), but I still often hit that 25th stack, and can maintain my might somewhere between 12 and 18 stacks much of the time.

I would only be okay with Diamond Skin getting taken away if we then had some way of dealing with conditions outside of the water trait line or cantrips. Right now... we don’t, and our low health pool means that condi users are far too powerful against the Ele.
As I’ve said before: I don’t like that it has to exist, but as long as condi is this terrible I’m won’t feel bad for running it.

As for the trait being useless: it’s definitely not, since most folks gearing for condi will go the whole hog and be left with very low power damage. High regeneration and protection uptimes, regular heals (as a Staff), and watching out for the bursts of direct damage (Life Blast, Flesh Golem or maybe Lich Form for necro) make it a very useful defence that still takes effort to maintain.

Definitely can’t faceroll with it, and that 10% health will vanish in moments if I stop paying attention, but it gives me much-needed assistance in 1v1s while losing its usefulness in group fights.

Baladir.2736:

BlackBeard.2873:

………

Edit: Also, I forgot to mention this: ele’s aren’t allowed to have nice things.

That makes me so sad, but it’s so true! Why can’t we have that one thing that other classes can point to as OP and complain about? Something that even the worst of us could get some satisfaction out of.

Oh, they’ll do that. I get decap Engis (most of whom run Automated Response) complaining that Diamond Skin is OP because they can’t condi-pressure me. Rather than learn how to deal with it, folks running full condi (that would previously completely destroy most eles) cry out that it’s completely OP.

And, of course, there’s the S/D FAir burst – very high damage in a short space of time, many folks complain about it.

At any rate – we really /don’t/ wan’t to become OP. We want the other stupidly powerful builds seriously toned down, so that actual balance can happen. Getting broken skills given to you isn’t ever a good thing, because it’ll lead to big nerfs – the best-case scenario being the removal of the broken ability, but often it’ll lead to the entire class becoming useless. Look at what happened to Ele when they were trying to deal with D/D bunkers.

dukevonart.2691:

(Not sure if I can claim first posting of it, but I can probably be blamed for repeated mentions of it.)

Eh, pretty sure I’ve only seen it mentioned by one person, so if you’ve brought it up recently it’s probably you I got it from.

As an example of how balance would be destroyed by removing attunement recharges altogether: the Staff #2 skills.

They give, every 6-second rotation or so:
- fire field + damage
- 5 stacks of vulnerability + damage
- AoE blind + high damage
- blast finisher + damage + condi

If traited for reduced cooldown on Earth and Water skills, you could get very frequent blasts in water fields for a lot of healing along with high might stacks and pretty decent damage output. With the Blasting Staff trait, this can be applied to most of a PvP capture point, which the Ele could be standing in the middle of for the entire period.

Note that this build doesn’t even consider use of:
- weapon skills that aren’t #2 (apart from maybe water 3 & 5 for their fields)
- healing skill
- utility skills
- elite skill
- 20 trait points (currently we’re on x/x/20/20/10 for Earth and Water cooldowns along with Blasting Staff)

It would be OP.
_

We’re really not at all balanced around having instant swaps – else our #2 (and to some extent #3) skills would either be much weaker or have very long cooldowns.

One suggestion that I’ve seen,* that sounds pretty nice, is for attunement cooldowns to start when you /enter/ an Attunement, rather than leave it – so if you’re primarily Fire Attunement, you can cast some spells, switch to Earth, lay down an Eruption, and get it to blast in a Lava Font – without having to wait 10+ seconds in other Attunements while Fire recharges.

It would require rebalancing – primarily by reverting attunement cooldowns to pre-Dec-10, I expect – but it would add so much more choice to how the Ele was played, instead of forcing us to generalise (so we’re not forced to stay out of our builds’ main Attunement(s) when we switch out) while most of our traits still strongly encourage staying Attuned to one element for extended periods.

­*sorry, can’t remember who I first saw suggest it, else I’d’ve mentioned

Ash, are you NA or EU?

a t s e.9614:

ele ’s have no stability besides from armor of earth?

We have three sources of stability:
Armor of Earth, as you know.
Tornado, which is a powerful transform but very situational and locks you out of all other skills.
Rock Solid, a major master (20 point) earth trait, which gives stability to you and nearby allies when you attune to earth. Very useful, but it relies on having earth attunement off cooldown.

Other regularly-used skills that help against stunlocks:
Mist Form, a long-cooldown cantrip that gives complete invulnerability for 3s - though you’re locked out of all skills and conditions still tick.
Arcane Shield, also with a long cooldown, though it doesn’t lock out all your skills like Mist Form. 3 blocks, or 5 seconds, whichever runs out first. Will deal with most stun chains - but against someone with fast attacks (like a thief that knows to autoattack it down, or a MM necro with their pets, or a shortbow ranger) it’s pretty useless.

___
Oh, and Ash:

I have no need for proof. I know it happened. That is all that matters to me. Who really cares what people online think...

This is your problem. You don’t want to learn facts because you’ve convinced yourself that your ideas are completely true already. It’s like you have some sort of "I suck" religion.
You will never do well if you won’t listen to other people and consider their suggestions/ideas. A pro player who sticks with their build if it gets nerfed to hell... isn’t actually a pro player.

All i know about him was that he was using 2 Legendary daggers

Do you know how much more damage legendary gear does compared to ascended? Or even exotic? Hint: it’s not over 9000.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

again i think thats down to a pet, so that would make sense.

DO YOUR RESEARCH BEFORE YOU MAKE ANY MORE POSTS
This includes actually trying out staff and seeing how much single-target or open-combat damage it does compared to D/D, and comparing group utility to damage output, and shutting up about fields. They are different weaponsets and they function differently - giving one some of the features of another, when they’re already vaguely balanced, will throw everything completely out of whack and massively devalue the one the features are copied across from.

Also: can you explain how it would "make sense" if down to a pet? What is it about pets that magically makes lots of fields OK for rangers to get?

Oh, and check this out as well. Go shout at the Engineers while you’re off to see the Rangers - they get access to fire, water, and ice fields... as well as light, poison and smoke. Why does the GRENADES attunement get access to POISON fields? Why does the BOMBS attunement get access to FIRE and SMOKE fields? They can even take all 6 of these fields into battle at once!!!!!!!!

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

cheese.4739:

Why do rangers have access to fire, water and ice fields, while not being masters of the elements? They can even chuck poison fields down with a pet! I think you should leave the Ele forums for a while and go yell at them for getting more access to fields than D/D Ele.

Poison makes sense considering the pet, Fire field is down to the torch so again that makes sense. Water field is rather annoying.

And Ice, too!

Srsly, you should go yell at them and leave us in peace.

Please.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I know that, who else has access to Lightening Field? Isnt it just Ele? As for Water fields and Fire fields yeah they are for other classes but for a class that is meant to be in control of ELEMENTS why is it only one weapon that actually gets access to Ice, Water and Lightening fields…

Why do rangers have access to fire, water and ice fields, while not being masters of the elements? They can even chuck poison fields down with a pet! I think you should leave the Ele forums for a while and go yell at them for getting more access to fields than D/D Ele.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

surely being an ele is part of the reason they have access to such fields to begin with.

FIELDS ARE NOT UNIQUE TO ELE

THEY ARE NOT OUR PROFESSION MECHANIC

YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO ALL FIELDS JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE AN ELE

The only field type that is unique to Ele is the lightning field, which is on Trident, Staff and Lightning Hammer.

Ice fields are very rare, and all terrestrial Ele weapons have some access to chill.

Water fields, the ones you seem most obsessed with, would be completely OP in a build with several blast finishers on the weaponset. A water field on Cleansing Wave would let S/D players get /four/ blast finishers they could use in it, not counting traited or utility blasts.

Rangers’ water field is on their heal skill, so if used for group support you then don’t have a heal yourself.

Engineers’ water fields are also on heal skills, and have such short durations that high levels of team coordination are required to let allies blast in them.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

That is simply terrible. We belong to the same class, why is it ONE weapon set that gets the bonuses of being both Melee AND range possible, more options with the ability to reflect projectiles and to be able to slow targets down and make range.

Have you ever actually tried fighting with a staff? Tell me when you can reliably kill someone at melee range who’s kiting you. Then tell me when you can /ever/ kill someone at range without team support distracting them or locking them down.

While staff can do a lot, it most definitely can’t do everything – you’ve just convinced yourself that it does and are running around going “LALALAA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” whenever anyone tries to explain why your ideas are terrible.

And yet I made further posts trying to get my point across. Oops.

First up: the retaliation things was a joke (bloody stupid light fields) and I am well aware that it stacks in duration. Stacks of time are still stacks! ^__^

And let’s look at this whole thing another way - what if I want to increase my reliable single-target damage while wielding a staff? The weapon can’t do that without building very specifically for it (such as chucking utilities and traits into Elemental Surge and immob/chill chaining maybe) because it’s primarily designed around group fights and team support.

What if I want to use a Shocking Aura as staff? I can’t without taking Tempest Defence, because staff can’t use that skill. That’s not right, surely? I ought to have access to stuns on melee attackers instead of an unreliable Static Field that has a cast time.

What if I want to do a leap finisher, or a knockdown, or even a launch? Staff has none of these, but D/D does. What if I want to use my one staff knockback skill and hit anyone more than 100 units away?

Every weapon set is good at different things, and not every weaponset can reasonably be given access to all abilities.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

cheese.4739:

Guys, Ash just wants D/D to get everything every other Ele weaponset has, rather than to learn its strengths and play by those. Don’t waste your breath explaining why the suggestions are silly and/or OP, because that part of your post will get ignored.

No, i would just like us top have something other than Fire field might stacking. Its easy enough to stack might. AT least give us different options

Okay, one more time:

1) You have other options: play with a team. This is always the case in PvP, and very regularly necessary in PvE and WvW. Get organised, learn each others’ fields, shout at Guardians when you end up with 5 stacks of retaliation instead of anything useful.

2) You have other options: take a utility. Lightning Hammer gives you a lightning field, the summoned Ice Elementals give you ice fields (though they’re admittedly kinda terrible).

3) You have other options: use a different weaponset. Staff has lots of fields for AoE support, but lacks the targeted damage that D/D gets - and has to either:
- invest in utilities or traits to get most of the finishers /for/ its fields
- rely on a team to finish in them (see point 1)
Different weapons are good at different things - if you don’t like how D/D plays, stop playing D/D? You really don’t seem to understand this bit.

4) You have other options: roll a different class. Try going Necro, with several combo fields but few finishers. Boom! You have the same problem as Staff Ele does - and Necromancers can’t even pump their traits and utilities into further blasts. Or roll Engi, with lots of short-duration fields and requiring utility investment to get at these fields or most finishers.

You have other options. Try them.

Acandis.3250:

I think if they just made it so every consecutive cast of the same skill costs + 1 (Eg. Cast 3 heartseekers in a row will cost 3 + 4 + 5) it’d go a long way towards the blind spam of the same skill.

Would also be nice if chill affected initiative regeneration.

But hell, I’m only a player with top competitive background, leave it to the bright minds of the balance team to dig us out of this meta.

Another +1 to this idea.

Maybe add a cooldown to each skill - it doesn’t disable it like everyone else’s cooldowns do, but using the skill again within this cooldown window incurs an additional initiative cost?
Chill could also affect this ’background cooldown’, again not stopping the Thief from casting skills in any order, but meaning that they couldn’t use any one skill so frequently.

Oh, ninja’d by Pyriall - my method would potentially stop a single AA from resetting initiative penalties?

With regards to your second point, I think it’s to do with the way the skill is coded - the new Arcane Brilliance on Ele announces the combo at the start of cast (with the heart popup) but doesn’t apply combo effects until the end of cast*. I’ll try to test this tomorrow with someone who can give me smoke fields, and see if this combo-effect-at-start is the problem (and how the Ele’s other blast finishers work in smoke fields).

*would be fun to get infinite 1s blast finishers if you could just interrupt the skill

Guys, Ash just wants D/D to get everything every other Ele weaponset has, rather than to learn its strengths and play by those. Don’t waste your breath explaining why the suggestions are silly and/or OP, because that part of your post will get ignored.

I dislike that Diamond Skin, but as has been said:

Fun fact: Pure Cond Damage Necros stand more chance against a D-Skin Ele then an Ele did before the patch against Necros.

They were almost impossible to take down as an ele pre-DS, due to the sheer number of conditions they can lay down, quickly and pretty spammily, combined with Ele’s lack of strong cleanse (which we’re getting back soon, meaning that there might be other ways to deal with such opponents).

Now, a Necro has to do up to 2k power damage, which really is very little (One well-timed flesh golem charge? Use your Death Shroud skills then fear them while below 90%? Go into Lich form if you really have to? You have plenty of choices!), and any conditions applied to the Ele after that 90% will stick pretty hard if you’ve gone full condi.

Alternatively... run away from the 1v1, come back with a power user, completely ignore Diamond Skin. Admit that you lost to an Ele that you could previously faceroll because wooo shifting meta.

Style sure does reply to a lot of threads.

Yeah, if you’re looking to survive, or deal damge, FGS is superior.

For optimal use, disable autotargeting (first options pane) and either click or tab to select a target for combat. Skill #3 (Fiery Whirl) doesn’t care about targeting, but skill #4 (Fiery Rush) tends to go terribly if you don’t disable autotargeting first.

For damage... yeah, in WvW you’re definitely better with the FGS.
Were Take Root available in PvP it might be worth considering (maaaaybe) but in the open battleground that WvW is, you definitely don’t want an elite that forces you to stay in one place to make use of it. This is one of several reasons that Engineers struggle there.

FGS lets you do a lot of damage at moderate range, or escape/close gaps very quickly, or waste your elite by jumping into water. Take Root only really lets you do the last of these.

Yeah, your health pool means that folks need to do more damage to get through your skin, but you’ve sacrificed damage mitigation and healing power to get there - or you maybe have no power, so do almost no damage to your opponents who can just whittle down your health until you’re vulnerable to condi.

By ’workable’, I mean that I win more often than I lose and continue to climb the leaderboards in PvP, with this build, on a staff ele. I should’ve maybe said "I have success with it," sorry.

And I kinda expected you’d reply with something like "oh, you’re using the wrong weapon". That’s not what I said... but let’s look at other GM traits (though not all of them are in current meta builds, and not all are necessarily viable):
- Prismatic Understanding. Torch is the only Mesmer weapon with stealth, and just about everyone running PU takes torch.
- Right-Hand Strength. Guardian trait, "Critical-hit chance with one-handed weapons is increased." Not useful for a staff/hammer guard.
- Lingering Curse. Necromancer trait, "Conditions inflicted by scepter skills have increased durations." HMMMMM

Just because the trait doesn’t specifically state a weapon in its description doesn’t mean it won’t work better for certain weaponsets - and it’s worth noting that just because you can’t get a certain weaponset to do well with a trait doesn’t mean that that trait/weapon combo isn’t viable.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I have plenty of Toughness and range between 1700-1900 most of the time, condition builds STILL hit hard enough to take you below the 90% threshold. The trait simply is not Grandmaster worthy.

I have run it, i removed it after seeing how little it actually helped me and my build. With it i had A LOT of toughness and still seeing as all you have to do is take 1-2k damage and boon you are under 90% health means it is rather useless against pretty much all Condition builds.

Now if you went for PURE condition counter sort of build then yes it would be okay but as it is, no it is not worthy of a grandmaster trait. Hell, even Condition Thief can BS you for 5k+

The problem is, to counter conditions we have to build to PURELY counter them and nothing else. We wouldn’t have the damage to kill them and in the end they WOULD win.

Sorry, what? You have up to 1900 toughness? Also: what’s your vitality?

My PvP build is on 2780 toughness, with only 100 vitality above base (from 10 points into Water Magic for a trait and the healing power).

The low vitality is an important part of the build - I have very low health, but moderate-high healing power (594 right now), meaning that while I can get below that 90% pretty quickly, I can also heal back up even faster. Without the healing power, and frequent heals, it’s very difficult to get back up past the 90% threshold.

I’m not sure how viable DS is on D/D or S/F or some combination of these, but it is workable on Staff, if you take blast finishing heal/utilities instead of the ER/triple cantrips. Remember that not every trait or utility is perfect with every weapon, though.