Guild Wars 2

I would really like to see warriors get some love, but it’s something that anet has to be careful with. Imagine an unccable glass cannon warrior coming after you. That’d be about the scariest thing in the game. They need something, but too much and it’ll be a disaster.

It’d be really cool if bunker warrior ever became really viable. I tried playing it for a while, and I liked the general feel of the build, but the lack of heals and damage avoidance just made it so hugely inferior to every other bunker.

I personally don’t like celestial. It’s certainly tempting since the stat value is so high, but I felt too many of the stats gave too minimal a benefit to really count. The ascended gear has a good crit damage efficiency, so it’s a pretty solid choice for that. I ended up going zerk/cavalier ascended and changing some armor pieces to make up for the loss in survivability.

Rune of Vampirism Minor +10 power 2% chance to cause your next attack to steal life when hit. (cooldown: 15s) — — — —
Major +15 power 3% chance to cause your next attack to steal life when hit. (cooldown: 15s) +35 power Your next attack after using your heal skill steals some life. — —
Superior +25 power 5% to cause your next attack to steal life when hit. (cooldown: 15s) +50 power Your next attack after using your heal skill steals life. (Not in) +90 power
You become mist when below 10% health. (cooldown: 60s)

So much theory crafting, so little actual experience.

Raptured.9307:

Razor.6392:

I do all of that while inflicting 4x more damage. And I will keep doing that.

Enjoy your 700 damage lava fonts

If that’s the case that you can do what every bunker can do WHILE doing 4x more dps, why doesn’t every one roll it? And that it does more dmg than a warrior? are you saying that others are simply being ignorant (everyone else who thinks that eles can’t do more dmg than a warrior/ rolls a bunker ele) are simply worse at the game or are ignorant of this almighty build?… cmon man you know better than that.

Wasn’t long ago everyone in the game knew ele was one of the weakest classes and d/d was a terrible build and staff was the only viable way to play.

Some people figure out successful builds ourselves without worrying about what ‘everyone’ else thinks, and some of us don’t.

Raptured.9307:

Okay. Please roll a warrior to 80. The only dps you know about is necro and ele… lol
Or even go to spvp and fight a gc thief.
Or you know what, here’s one that hits closer to home for you.
Get dagger warhorn on your necro, spec double wells, blood is power. Get all power and prec traits and other traits that go with glass cannon necro
BIP, throw down some wells, press 5 (warhorn) get close to something, autoattack. HF

Yep, I only do about 40-50% of the damage on a single target as a warrior, thief, or necro. Luckily, I can hit five targets at once. I’ll let you do the math on that one.

You want facts? My elementalist does more damage than anything else in the game. That’s a fact.

Ugh. I keep falcepalming every time I read a thread and people start throwing out completely incorrect information about running dps on an ele. I’m starting to think I should write a guide so the people who want to go that route have a place to get correct information.

@OP – You have some problems with that build. When looking at damage gear, you should check out http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/69773-mixing-berserker-and-other-gear-how-to-do-it-right/ to give you an idea of the efficiency level of all the pieces of gear so you can better judge what to go with.

Also, fire is the primary damage element for all the ele weapons, although the benefit of the trait line is questionable. But what that means is for pve, you really don’t need the 10% air damage and 20% faster recharge rate. You also don’t need the run speed trait in pve.

Generally speaking when looking at sustained damage (like most pve situations), eles actually get more damage out of water and arcana than the actual damage lines. Admittedly I don’t do a ton of pve so I can’t give you the level of advice I’d like, but this trait build would give you a solid starting point which could be tailored to your preferences as you become more experienced. http://www.gw2db.com/skills/calc/elementalist#6|3|0|0|0|0|0|10|1653|0|0|15|1619|0|0|0|0|0|0|25|1684|1683|0|20|2250|2252|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|

Jayne.9251:

Our small teams typically run 5 players … never more than 10. Often solo.

When exactly do these people play? I admittedly haven’t wvwed much at all this matchup, but in the bit I have, I certainly haven’t seen any TC smallmans looking for good fights. Anyone that didn’t outnumber me turned and ran until they found help, which was generally pretty fast considering the number of TC around.

I have one acronym for you guys who think ele dps is low: AOE

This is actually a reasonably large problem, but mostly because of the play now button. The fact that they haven’t fixed or removed it 7 months in just blows my mind. These dueling servers wouldn’t get randoms if not for people who are new to the game going to the pvp browser, figuring the best way to get into things is to click a button that says “Play Now,” and ending up in a server with two people dueling and not wanting to be interrupted. While they should add dueling, they could fix a hell of a lot of the problem by just removing that kitten button.

Lol. All I’ll say is, if anyone reading this is considering a dps ele build, I strongly urge you to ignore the bunker ele and listen to the people who actually play the build.

I don’t care what build you prefer. I’m saying you shouldn’t be giving incorrect info on a build you have no experience with.

Lert.6287:

I’m not talking here about 0 critical damage. I’m talking here about ballance between chance and around 20-45 critical damage as for D/D ele. Going for 90+ critical damage and 50+ critical chance will lead you nowhere beside grave having 13k health and 1.9k armor.

My current gear setup has 70% crit with wrench and fury, 88% crit damage, just under 2k power, 14.8k hp before any bonuses, and 2.3k armor. Your numbers are way off.

It’s true you can optimize certain pieces of gear (http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/69773-mixing-berserker-and-other-gear-how-to-do-it-right/), but at the end of the day, you still need those damage stats if you want to do damage.

Like I said, good intentions or not, you shouldn’t be spreading bad information about a build you aren’t familiar with. Ele dps builds are 100% viable, and even more so as staff with the 1200 range.

Lert, you really shouldn’t be giving advice about a build you obviously don’t have experience with.

I haven’t wvwed since before the latest matchup, but I doubt anyone is actively trying to get back to t4 now. There’s just no point. If we drop, all our fairweathers come out and we zerg all over t4 and it’s a terrible matchup.

It’s just terrible wvw regardless of if we’re in t3 or t4, and I’m pretty sure most people have either accepted t3, or left.

saiyr.3071:

You’re right, I really don’t understand how a person could be so egotistical and I never will

It’s easy to be egotistical when you really are better than everyone else.

But I do think Maguuma is infact more skilled overall than the majority of servers. It’s just a natural result of being a near permanent underdog. Our zerg guilds go head to head with the other servers’ “tactical squads.” Our semi zerg guilds are better than other servers’ roaming guilds. And our roaming guilds are still looking for a challenge.

:p

Gibbly.5480:

You are missing Plague and Lich stomp for necromancer.

You can stomp in lich form? I’ve only been playing nec a few days, never even thought to try. Figured it’d be a definite no.

I run a pretty much identical build to the OP in spvp except much tankier gear. How do you figure the 10 points in SR instead of Cursee is better for pvp? It seemed to me that Target the Weak was my best option for damage.

Not a fan personally. Too easy to run the orb. Unless you have your whole team there to focus someone, it’s pretty easy for a bunker to run the orb and pretty much just ignore everyone. Maybe it works in higher level premade vs premade where that kind of focus exists, but doing pugs on this map is pretty unpleasant.

Deyja.6745:

Straegen.2938:

I hope Friday night hasn’t been an indicator of the week as we never found any skirmishes and finally joined in with commanders just to have a chance of a fair fight. That PINK/PiNK/Pink (whatever it is) guild hawking QL, Danelon, etc early on was just a big ole zerg bag farming DB.

I really wish there was a tier full of DB sized servers. I like the no queues and skirmish fighting but that system simply doesn’t work well against TC sized servers it seems.

We had 2 15 man tactical squads on EB working alongside TV, please do not insult our guild by calling us a zerg. That said I personally managed 280 badges for the time we were running as a guild.

Three groups a “tactical squad.” Sounds like another week of wvw not worth playing.

Been doing tpvp all night, almost every single premade I encountered had 2-3 mesmers. But I’m sure they were just doing it because they wanted to play something underpowered so it’d be a real challenge.

The matchmaking seems pretty useless. I’ve been playing tpvp all night, still getting matched up against full premades with a pug. Still getting 4v5s. Most games are still one sided stomps. I don’t know if their matchmaking is simply bad or if there just aren’t enough people to make it work, but either way, I don’t think it’s doing anything.

You guys can defend mesmers all you want. It is and has always been a ridiculously overpowered fotm bullkitten class.

Mesmers are gamebreakingly overpowered. I don’t give a kitten what anyone says. They are hands down the most powerful class in the game. Nothing else even comes close. I truly don’t understand in the least how they don’t get nerfed to more reasonable levels.

This is a small thing and obviously not that big of a deal, but it kind of drives me nuts that it takes so long for the hotjoin menu to spit out that a game is full. You click on a game that says it has room, nothing happens. Try to click another game, nothing happens. You sit there, nothing happens. About a minute later “the game you are trying to join us full.” I’m not sure why it takes so long, but I’d really love if it were faster.

My guess is it was an axe necro with a power build. But ya, next time check out your combat log so you can see what hit ya and people can give you better advice.

saiyr.3071:

dreztina.4820:

Are there any roamers on TC to look for?

Since when did you have an axe necro?

Yesterday. :p Been slowly working on the nec for a while now but finally got him to 80 and geared.

Are there any roamers on TC to look for?

Roleplayers. :|

I find this frustrating as well. The aesthetics are completely arbitrarily ranked. The set of armor I’d like on my necro is the Dredge set, which from a bit of googling has never been unlocked and is speculated to be available at rank 70. Rank 70 is probably a couple years of play to unlock some armor I can get in a week in pve. It’s just silly. If it were some super uber looking armor then sure. But it’s just a relatively plain dungeon set which Anet decided should take a ridiculous amount of playtime to get in pvp.

Too much theory crafting in this thread and not enough actual experience. Was seeing the same stuff when I started playing my ele and everyone said d/d was terrible and staff was the only viable build. Look how that turned out.

I’ve been playing an axe centric build in spvp for the last couple days and it’s awesome. It’s not an easy build to play, but if you pull it off, you have some really impressive damage and utility while still being pretty tanky. I’m not even good with a necro as I’ve always played ele, and I’m still doing work.

I’m not saying axe is the best weapon in the game and everyone should immediately rebuild to axe power, but to say it’s not viable or even bad is flat out incorrect.

I love getting spawn camped. It’s like delivery. Your food shows up at your front door and waits for you.

There is no ‘join solo queue’ option. There is a ‘join solo’ queue option. The patch didn’t add solo queue, it just added a button to make it more convenient to queue up by yourself, but you still get matched against everyone else playing tpvp, including premades.

I don’t play spvp all the time, I usually play a while then go to wvw then come back. Every time I come back to spvp, hotjoins are more foul than they were when I left. These days, almost every hotjoin I join has multiple people talking kitten and cussing each other out. It’s like being back in league of legends a couple years ago.

Why does this community keep getting more and more toxic? Is it because it’s shrinking and these people are the ones that are staying? Are people bored of the gameplay itself so they’re looking for entertainment somewhere else?

I don’t know what it is causing it, but the hotjoin community has completely gone to kitten.

Mag will be back in T3 soon. Couple of my friends already transferred off the server because they hate T3 so much, and considering the Mag fairweathers make it so I can’t even enjoy T4 on the rare times we are here, I’m starting to think they did the right thing. Either that or it’s time to get back into spvp. Don’t like the game mode, but at least I can find good fights in tpvp.

Here’s a radical idea. Instead of having your scouts sit inside the tower watching for inc, have them sit outside the tower watching for inc. I know, by doing that, you might find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to actually fight other people in your pvp experience. But if you do that, then maybe, just maybe, the scouts will have some fun and all of a sudden scouting isn’t some horrible task and this change is not some horrible change.

First off, I think the spvp devs are some of the most passionate and communicative devs at anet. However, I am worried that with anet’s uncertainty with how much to communicate, you will take this negative reaction to the patch as a sign that you said too much and raised expectations, and that you will try to avoid this by not saying anything at all in the future. That is the exact opposite of what you should do.

The reason there is such a strong response is because we are told nothing. All we hear is “when it’s ready.” And then we finally, after so long, get a solid date, a date when it IS ready, and everyone thinks finally, this will be the patch filled with all the stuff they haven’t told us. Expectations become astronomical because it’s finally a break in the silence.

If there was more communication about the process, if we had some idea what you were working on and how the development process was going, people’s expectations would be more reasonable with the patches. We would know what your major goals were, and we would know there were some unexpected delays (or whatever) and that this patch would be more modest. The expectations would be more in lne.

This isn’t some feel good idealistic strategy; this is what other companies do, and do well. There’s always going to be discontent on patches no matter what, that’s just the nature of trying to appeal to a community of millions of people. But it doesn’t have to be this bad.

Look at your fellow game studios, look at how they manage expectations and keep their players informed without creating too many problems. I know you guys are trying and that this negativity must be very frustrating, but the best thing you can do isn’t turtle up, but rather to realize that the only way to really manage expectations is transparency.

Vanillea.5764:

30 in Arcane + 30 boons duration from runes make the vigor stacks incredible well :P Even if you use a glass cannon build, it is still an option to take arcane and boon durations. It is not a major nerf I would say.

Well that’s the thing. I don’t think anyone running 30 arcane and 30 boon duration runes considers themselves glass. Bunker eles took a bit of a hit in power but were given no incentives to change their build at all. DPS eles however took a hit in power and are incentivized to move to a tankier build to compensate.

I don’t want to give the impression that I think these changes are a huge deal and the dps build is no longer viable, I am just concerned that the changes did the exact opposite of their intended goal.

I ran around wvw a bit, and I do think these changes did basically the opposite of what they intended. When I was fighting constantly and not having to take breaks, I didn’t notice much of a difference. Barely anything really. But that’s not how you play a glass ele. Most of the time it’s in and out, taking shots at the right time. And that’s where it started to hurt. Swiftness/fury/vigor were all wearing off during that time and I was finding myself much more vulnerable.

It wasn’t awful and the build is certainly still viable, but ya, it doesn’t seem like the changes affected the right people. If you play like a bunker ele (especially with boon duration), there’s no change, but if you play like a glass cannon, you start to feel it.

The ‘big pvp patch’ is always the month AFTER the disappointing patch that changed almost nothing.

kfarb.6732:

I’m not an OG fanboy and I think wvw could use some skill splits from pve, but you’ve been the most vocal on this forum about confusion and how you don’t know how to deal with it.

Please detail the spvp/pve&wvw skill splits you’re referring to.

All of them. The thief changes. The engi changes (which eventually became universal). Confusion. And now the ele changes. Any time anet does split balancing, they are saying we know this ability is overpowered in pvp, but we don’t want to mess up pve and we don’t care about wvw.

Ahmrill.7512:

What people don’t understand is Arenanet made multiple content to appeal to all player types and interests. I don’t understand the need to lump it together…. if you don’t like the game, stop playing….. lots of MMO’s out there.

What kind of stupid attitude is that? If you don’t like something just leave? Is that what you do? Any time you don’t like something, you don’t bother trying to change it, you just leave?

Funny, this is the first thread I’ve made about the subject, and it’s not even just about confusion. Maybe you guys haven’t noticed, but there have been a lot of skills split between spvp and pve, including an ele nerf in this patch which would also be part of wvw if this was changed. Maybe you also haven’t noticed that other people have asked for this, just like other people have asked for confusion nerfs.

But hey, keep being OG fanboys if it makes you feel good.

At this point it’s pretty clear wvw balance is lower priority than pve balance. We wouldn’t even have split balancing if not for the fact that anet doesn’t want to make certain skills weaker in pve even though they know they’re unbalanced in pvp, hence the nerfs to spvp.

So, simple solution. Change wvw to spvp balance. It won’t be perfect since wvw will still be secondary priority (not even going to bother asking for wvw to get balanced for itself, not a chance in hell anet would put forth the effort to do that), but at least wvw will be balanced off of a pvp mode instead of pve.

RyuDragnier.9476:

I can see why they nerfed RTL. I got hit with that far too often by D/D elementalists in WvW while on my ranger, which made it fairly easy to die, especially considering how fast they could reuse it. Also, to the one complaining they didn’t nerf Swoop, I’ll tell you why…it doesn’t make you invulnerable and you don’t knockdown everybody around you. Those two things combined makes RTL very powerful, so feel lucky they nerfed the cooldown and not the fact that it does those.

RTL doesn’t make you invuln. It makes you extremely vulnerable in fact. You can still take damage and be immobilized while using RTL, and if you do, you have no access to your abilities. It functions no differently than any other dash except that eles have the extra joy and losing all of our abilities when we use it. With the CD nerf to a regular dash, it should have its mechanics changed to a regular dash too.

I’m looking at trying a d/d power necro build in wvw, but I’m not sure what to do for gear. My general idea was something like:

Optimized knight’s/zerker’s armor.
Zerker daggers.
Valk trinkets with ruby jewels.

I think that would give me a solid mix of all the stats a necro needs, but I’m fairly inexperienced with the class so not sure. This isn’t for running in a zerg, this’ll be solo/smallman.

What RTL needs now is to make it so you can still use your abilities. If it’s going to be “balanced” like a regular dash, then it should have the perks of regular dashes as well.

JonPeters.5630:

There are some updates missing from the notes. We are tracking down those, but some changes to the D/D and S/D ele build are in this patch despite not being in the notes.

I’m trying to write a response to this that doesn’t have any words that will get caught in the word filter. You guys have been making games for a while now, right? This isn’t the first patch you’ve done, right? How come every single patch has multiple major changes missing from the notes?

I just don’t get how a major veteran game studio constantly does the same crap you’d expect from some indie team making their first game with the change in their pockets.

Wizardauz.3761:

dreztina.4820:

What a surprise. It’s that guy who follows OG members around to every thread they post in.

Whoo me?

What do you think about the patch really?

No the guy above you. You and I posted same time.

I wanted bunker ele to get nerfed. I wanted D/D to be a skill based weaponset, not a go triple cantrip bunker roll your face on the keyboard and perform at 90% efficiency weaponset. At the very least I wanted the changes to affect both wvw and spvp. The RTL change is dumb just because of how crappy RTL is mechanically. It’s just dumb. I see patches like this and I have trouble believing anyone at anet actually pvps.

It’s just a terrible patch which is going to result in even more fotm 30 water bunker eles because instead of nerfing the kitten build, anet buffed it.

kitten patch which shows how little anet cares about class balance in wvw. No confusion nerf? No bunker ele nerf? Instead bunker eles get BUFFED in wvw? I am just truly blown away by much disregard anet gives wvw balance. They just don’t give a kitten at all.