Guild Wars 2

I’m really surprised that an elementalist who doesn’t stack might can win against multiple opponents. Are you recording on saturday nights when everyone is drunk?

I am disappointed

Both blink on mesmer and Judge’s Intervention on guardian are way better than Lightning Flash. What do you have to do to turn lightning flash into blink? Reduce the cooldown, make it a stunbreaker, increase range. I would sacrifice the damage of Lightning Flash for ANY OF THESE.

The reason for the off balance of this skill is that it wasn’t designed like that in the first place. At some point, Anet just took away the stunbreak to nerf ele as a class and never put the skill itself back into balance.

The purpose of magnetic grasp is to keep the enemy from running away from your fire field so you can perform your explosion finishers inside the fire field while also hitting your opponent. I rarely ever use the leap though because the animation is way too long until you can move again. IMHO, this skill has been broken for ages without any attempt of a fix.

Thank you. asdfasdfasdfasdf

“meh”

So I go with 3)

I could not find the ele warhorn skills and cooldowns. Help me out here pls?

I’ve played d/f condition ele for a while in wvw to test it out. It’s super easy to play, super cheesy and has a low skill floor. IMHO it’s nothing to stick to for more than a couple of days while there is celestial d/d which I find much more challenging, versatile and fun to play. Experienced players will immediately notice your signets and dodge them as well as removing burning and then you’re basically out of options.

Legendaries should remain unique. Mixing things up by unlocking footprints for all other collected legendaries would take away their individuality.

I don’t think Fires damage greatly outshines Air’s damage because 9% crit chance from Aeromancers Training and bolt to the heart aren’t anything to sneeze at.

It actually does. I would estimate that about 75% of your entire damage output come from fire. Aeromancers training only affects crit chance while attuned to air. You cannot expect to win by slapping an enemy to death with lightning whip.

Fire is your leading source of damage as a d/d celestial ele. Now the fire trait line gives you:

1) 33% cooldown reduction: This is a huge sustained damage boost
2) +150 power for your main damage attunement
3) permanent 25 stacks of might with burning fire and sunspot (combined with all other sources of might, e.g. sigil of battle)
4) if you start your fire rotation with drake’s breath which you should do in most situations since burning was buffed, you get a 20% damage boost for your burst that is not limited by a 50% enemy hp threshold

These benefits synergize. The synergies push your damage output to a level that I did not expect from those numbers in the build calculator. One has to experience it. IMHO, it’s totally worth going for fire/water/arcana with traveller’s runes because celestial ele also benefits from the entire set of stats.

@topic

The stats look good in general, thumbs up for selecting the CHEAP bufffood which you will actually use. Quite balanced. When going for air though, I would take a bit more power and ferocity and sacrifice about 1500 hp. But fine tuning celestial ele stats is more about personal preference.

Burning needs to be nerfed (for ele), but I think the rest is fine. Ele still has to work a bit for his damage compared to a warrior who doesn’t need to stack might in the first place because all the damage modifiers are passive.

Celestial D/F has always been an alternative to D/D but was never and is still not “the way to go”. Many of your arguments are a bit weird and do not make sense IMHO.

First of all, there is absolutely no need to take focus for fire aura. With the new fire aura and burning fire traits and sigil of battle, you can easily reach 25 mighstacks and maintain them, given you use hoelbrak or strength runes which is the case for your build. Even this (without fire aura from focus) is a bit of an overkill although I run the same sigils and runes on d/d since I like to reach 25 stacks a bit earlier.

While D/D is more dependent on landing burstier OH dagger skills in fire during 1v1s, D/F with the fire traits lets you overwhelm your opponents with might stacks, which lets you win most encounters should you dodge/invuln enemy burst.

That makes no sense at all. There is no difference in might stacks if you compare offhand dagger to offhand focus in pvp, given you run sigil of battle + rune of strength/hoelbrak and the fire traits. You cannot expect to land comet in your fire field so the only difference between those weapons is the cooldown on earth #4. But as I already mentioned, the 25 mightstacks can already easily be reached and maintained by offhand dagger. So why would offhand dagger be MORE dependent on landing “bursty” fire #4 and fire #5 skills?? There are no focus skills that deal sustained damage to justify this statement. Ring of fire and especially firegrab deal tons of damage. Now with the new fire trait that reduces cooldowns by 33% (which is quite a lot), offhand dagger has received a huge buff while offhand focus didn’t because the strength of focus revolved around earth #4 and earth #5. So if there is a way to go NOW, it’s dagger and not focus.

I don’t like it either. Because IMO, burning is op now. I guess what’s about to happen is this: People will get a clue of how OP celestial d/d ele with 10011 spec currently is, the number of elementalists on pvp servers will rapidly grow and the rest of the players will complain about it. At some point, the nerfhammer will hit us like a truck, destroying other aspects of elementalists that were strong. Consequently, ele will be trash in pvp for a long period of time.

I’d like to see burning nerfed (for elementalists) right now instead of having them wait and overnerf us like they did couple of times before.

That’s maybe because I’ve never had any issues with using Fire Grab? I really don’t think it’s that ‘’weird to hit’’ as you’re claiming. And I never said the skill needs to be hard to hit just for the sake of it, but I honestly believe Fire Grab is fine the way it is.

/signed

Fire grab is perfectly fine and does not need a compensation buff. It’s a l2p issue.

1) burning itself is already borderline op right now so even without firegrab it’s worth applying

2) a clever player will use drake’s breath and wait for the opponents reaction. If the opponent dodges away, let him eat your burning speed. If not, use firegrab. So even if you don’t even use firegrab, drake’s breath will be the setup for a good amount of burst damage.

3) with 8 seconds attunement cooldown and -33% fire cooldowns + traits like gaining fire aura when attuning to fire, there are several different options to apply burning before using firegrab.

BlackBeard.2873:

Honestly, I am thinking (as of now) you are best off running Air/Water/Arcana:

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-o33;2B2VU0z4-NkY0;9;432G;0147046146;9;1F-03F-030y

Why air over fire/earth:

Fire is honestly just bad. At GM, you only would take the blind-spam, but until that has a per-target CD it is just trash. They even nerfed the adept burns. Earth isn’t too bad, but the GM options are pretty lack-luster. Earth can work, but it doesn’t seem to provide that much. Air, however, gives you great mobility and damage options, and I feel like this is a time where a good offense is a good defense.

[…]

Fire gives you basically +20% damage for your fire skills and +150 power while in fire attunement. It also reduces fire skill cooldowns by 33% which brings burning speed almost on par with fire attunement cooldown. Considering that as d/d ele your damage comes almost exclusively from fire, this is a huge damage boost. Now add the 3 stacks of might from cantrips that also come from fire.

Air only has +190 precision while attuned to air which is worth much less since only a small amount of damage comes from air and +20% damage against foes with less than 50% hp. And that little 1k lightning every 8-10 seconds. That’s it. So the traitline that actually gives you great damage options is fire, not air. And Blinding Ashes has always been a very strong trait which has now been buffed in several ways:

- fire attunement only has 8 seconds of cooldown and all fire skills have -33% cooldown
- everytime you attune to fire you get a fire shield that applies burning and blinds for free

IMHO, 10011 celestial d/d is the new meta. But so far, this is nothing more than a guess.

This is the hardest thief counter in the game

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Last_Refuge

D/P simply offers more damage potential while maintaining an equal amount of defense/survivability (I count blinds as defense).

If you want to attract child molesters for the FBI, I’m sure this is going to work.

Skoigoth.9238:

Derenek.8931:

Command your minions to attack while you are out of Afro range

Thanks mate, now I can go to sleep

It’s not the class that is broken, it’s the fresh air burst build. It turns a fight into a coinflip. Opponent does two random dodges and the burst is wasted? He wins. He doesn’t? You kill him with 0 skill investment since random mashing of buttons that are off cooldown doesn’t require more than a face rolling on the keyboard. Yaaaaay I can put down a phoenix and spam my air skills and arcane utility, I’m the KILLAH.

The problem with this build is that, as already mentioned, there is no animation to see the burst coming since almost everything is instant. That’s what makes those dodges “lucky”.

Looks like a version of the D/F Signet Condition build that has been modified to be worse.

Exactly what I was thinking.

Forget about “meta” and simply enjoy the game with your own experiments as long as you level up. It’s a term used for endgame builds at level 80 with exotic/ascended gear. If you want to learn about elementalist mechanics, d/d with arcana/water/air traits is a good build which was very fun for me to level with.

One needs to consider that those cheesy condition builds are a counter to D/D ele. PU mesmer, dire condition thief and perplexity engineer are pretty much unbeatable. Metabattle explicitally states that those builds are direct counters. So instead of trying to fight an uphill battle against cheeseplay, I would rather take as much condi remove to cleanse the first burst, /laugh and then simply run away.

It’s only 2 conditions every 10 seconds. And people who actually run condition builds will have a lot of + condition duration so even with -36% duration they will hurt you a long time. I often experienced being stuck with a lot of conditions AND those nasty 5 stacks confusion which completely take you out of the fight if you can’t remove them.

But maybe it’s just personal preference since I like to use water attument as a fearbreaker which means you must not be loaded with other conditions (I might be mistaken here).

The stats look balanced, about 500 healing power, 1,6k toughness, 30+ crit chance, 180% crit damage and 16-17k hp unbuffed are what I’m usually looking for. But as I was taking a closer look, I noticed there are some weaknesses in your build. For example, you buy power and crit chance with your bufffood. However, since you’re not using ether renewal and go for soothing disruption in your traits, I would suggest you take reduced condition duration bufffood. Second, you don’t take zephyr’s boon which means you’ll often have only 33% crit chance. I think you’ll lack damage with a value this low.

I would sacrifice power in order to do some adjustements regarding critical damage output and condition management.

Interesting to see a rather team oriented build. But how do you cleanse conditions?

Well imho asuras are ugly as f*** but their animations especially as D/D ele are probably the best. Plus you can completely undermine the dodging system and therefore pvp balance which is based on seeing what the opponent is doing if you choose the smallest bodysize.

You must not throw away your burning speed like that. It’s really painful to watch.

For example 2:15, your blink is ready in 1 second and you use burning speed away from the opponent and then blink on him just for that tiny bit of damage without doing anything to follow it up. A complete waste of skills.

Celestial powernecro doesn’t work in spvp. Condition damage is neglegtable, healing power is pretty much useless. You’re just overall nerfing yourself to get a bit of a balance between toughness and power/crit but in the end you don’t have the sustain and still lack damage. You can’t power down thieves quick enough so they will be easily able to retreat without resetting the fight in order to whittle down your healthpool. The only way I see necro working in spvp is a condition build with fleshworm and spectral walk. Or go all in with berserker amulet but this gets also eaten alive by thieves.

Yes, it is really that bad compared to other classes. It’s a niche class that does very good in certain aspects of the game, but overall is in a bad state and anet just hates us. Don’t start a new game with a class that the devs hate. Play a class that they love. Like warrior. I started the game playing a necro and I got so frustrated that I quit. Then I came back 6 months later, started an elementalist and now I’m happy. Although I like my necro I would never suggest anyone to make it his main character.

Try thief/elementalist/warrior.

I think we need to show better appreciation and manners.

If a change hits your skill negatively, then don’t use that skill.
if it affects your build negatively, then change your build.

I’d like to add “if they put a big d*** in your b*tt every second patch, then don’t play the class.”

And

“If the balance work in this game is so ridiculously bad and you don’t wanna play the easy to win cheese builds, play another game.”

It’s so simple guys!

They keep doing it. This reminds me of the time when I bought Guild Wars 2 at release, started playing a necromancer and quit the game because my class just s*cked.

Nice button mashing. But imho, from the skill requirement, s/f fresh air is a bit overrated. Because in the end it’s just a lot of spamming of skills that happen to be off cooldown. Like 2:50 “ kitten I need to do something. Oh earth is getting ready again. Jumping to earth. Oh nothing off cooldown here. Ok let’s see what we have ready in fire.”

I played the living story with a d/d build and it worked out quite well. Just start from the d/d metabuild with balanced gear (about 1,5k toughness, 0,5k healing power) and remove some of the pvp-only stuff, like arcane wave for mist form, sigil of force over sigil of doom etc.

Close the gap and pressure them hard. But that’s not all; environment is the key. On open field a ranger is very strong and will probably beat you. And let’s be honest here: He is SUPPOSED to. If he couldn’t even kill someone in his favorable environment with all odds in his favor, no one would play this class. So don’t pick a fight in the open field, it’s that simple. You can disengage and you have more mobility than he does. Try to bring the fight to some place with obstacles, things that break line of sight you can run behind if he triggers his signet and you need to avoid damage. Outplay him there.

When a ranger attacks me in spvp (so he gets the first shot off), I immediately turn around and run away. Then I try to find a moment when he is not careful and get close to him. He will lose most likely. The problem in wvw is that there are fewer things that break the line of sight.

S/D thief is a counter to D/D ele.

I’ve played D/D cel ele for over a thousand games. A good S/D thief would usually beat me or at least give me a hard fight. And now as I’m playing the S/D thief I beat the crap out of every D/D ele. It really comes down to knowing the mechanics of an elementalist, then they are very predictable because their cooldowns on attunements force them into a rotation which whill always be the same. Basically, all you have to do is

- avoid lighting aura
- dodge his fire attument
- stay on top of him if he attunes to water (auto attack and gap closers if he chills you is enough)
- burst him down after he cycled through his healing

Don’t forget that you can steal his might stacks.

I appreciate how you pick your own build and play it because it’s fun to you since this is what matters in the end. But why not optimize it a little bit? Sometimes it takes a little push to try something different but maybe you’ll be happy that you tried it.

I don’t see this build working against good players either. 14% crit chance so you lack damage, extremely low hp pool and only 1 stunbreaker so you lack sustain. Your opponents are scrubs throughout the entire video. You get knocked down with a health pool of 12k hp and two opponents (with one of them being a zerk ranger) don’t manage to deal severe damage. You are in close combat, start churning earth without any kind of shield or whatsoever (which you should NEVER do) and that ranger just takes it and dies.

If you want a challenging build, go for the s/f blinding ashes/fresh air zerker build. That build will also work against good players if you can handle it.

I am witnessing very poor server performance. This starts in pvp where you get heavy lags and 5 seconds later other players asking if it’s the servers which are lagging or themselves and ends with entire groups getting disconnected while doing a dungeon which happened to me 2 minutes ago. What’s the reason for this?

As I have mentioned before in another thread, a D/D ele can be countered easily if you understood the mechanics behind it. People calling for a nerf are simply refusing to do so. And imho, if you don’t even try to understand the mechanics of the class you cannot beat, you have no right to participate in a balance discussion about it or call for a nerf.

[…]
For instance, if I fight a warrior I know that I can at most eat one eviscerate in the beginning of the fight and then I would still win if I do everything else perfectly. More than a few mistakes and I am done. But the warrior will eat Burning Speed, Earthquake, Lightning Touch, etc. Most opponents do not actively try to counter us. I guess that they simply do not understand what we do.

Cheers, a quality post right here.

You’re right I forgot about updraft. So there are three ways of landing your burst: #1 lightning flash #2 updraft #3 play around with drake’s breath. I would do it in that order.

After scrubs have been whining around about how op D/D celestial ele is, people finally seem to understand the truth: It can be countered very easily because the attunement rotation makes it very predictable. On my S/D thief I beat the crap out of every D/D ele in spvp because I’ve played it myself for a long time. It doesn’t need a buff by any means, but there are other things that need to be put in place. Engi is utterly op imho. Condition builds are way too strong for how easy to play they are. If I was in the balance team, the first thing I would do is nerf confusion damage by 50%. Well, lets get back to topic.

The problem of many (new) d/d celestial ele players is that they are so busy keeping their rotation up that they actually lose focus on AIMING their skills. They throw everything out whats on cooldown but if you miss your burning speed/drake’s breath/fire grab/magnetic grasp (these skills are the most important to land), the damage output will be neglectible because the only thing among all other skills that do decent damage is earth #2 and lighting #1.

Here is what you should do: Take lightning flash and use it to safely land burning speed on the opponent. Dont use burning speed and ring of fire at the same time (do it only if you ambush someone). Make yourself a little bit more unpredictable.

- If lightning flash is ready, attune to fire and immediately land your burst so your opponent doesn’t have time to react

- If lightning flash is not ready, use drake’s breath after attuning to fire. The opponent can either stay in the fire and take heavy condition damage or dodge away. If he dodges away from you, he will do you a great favor: He will make it much easier to land your burning speed. If he doesn’t dodge away, land fire grab.

In general, save your fire grab for the SECOND time you attune to fire because then you will have a decent might stack. Use drake’s breath, wait for the opponent’s reaction, run towards him if he dodges -> fire grab.

Always remember: The only thing that makes a d/d ele actually dangerous is the fire attunement. Without those skills, you are just a punching ball with good healing. So make sure they land.

Edit: I just checked out the build on metabattle. Elemental shielding is total crap compared to zephyrs boon. That’s why you lack damage. And strength runes > hoelbrak.

Wrong thread mate…

D/D is one of the better builds in this game but by far not the best. D/F signet/perplexity ele beats the crap out of D/D. Engineer beats the crap out of D/D. Necro beats the crap out of D/D. Warrior can roll their face on the keyboard 90% of the time and then land 1 evis on you to win the fight, no matter how hard you were working to this point. Of course I’m talking about good ele vs good <insert class>, any “counter” to a certain build can again be countered by its user.

The key to lower your frustration is to lower your expectations.

These days, if I get more than one person on me, I don’t feel like I have much of a chance to survive.

You’re not supposed to survive that for long. You see a second player engage the fight, you immediately gtfo. Or you hope you’re fighting kittens (which will be the case if you see a montage of any class successfully fighting multiple opponents) and stay, but that’s a gamble you cannot expect to win on a regular basis. If you try to get out immediately and haven’t blown your RTL 3 seconds before, you have very good chances to get away.

Just remember that other classes have their counters too. Warrior gets beaten by power necro. PU condition (-cheese) mesmer gets beaten by any necro who runs staff + plague signet. Necro himself doesn’t have the mobility that you have and is committed to every fight. You mentioned rangers give you a hard time. Ragners themselves have hard times against condition classes since they have almost 0 condition remove except they go deep into nature and even then it’s “meh”. Same for thieves.

I suggest you play some other classes to learn their weaknesses and improve your own play. Because sometimes if you “overplay” a class, you tend to lose focus and make mistakes you don’t realize (at least that’s what I noticed for myself).

There is no perma stealth in GW2.

2 days online and it has deserved every single one of its 30k views nice one

Not as unique as some other postings here but it’s something.

Dat backside tho…

Scepter water #2 could become a blast finisher to make the skill useful. Staff water #2? Have you used that thing in pvp as zerker staff ele? It crits for 6k. Higher damage than any other staff skill. It could have a slightly decreased delay time though.

D/D ele in pvp requires a lot of actions within very short time. You are a clicker.

See the problem?