Guild Wars 2

I’m 41 of 75 in solo. And 2 of 7 in team.

More carrots pls. I’m a chef.

Maguuma zerg unveiled

This will probably get infracted, but here’s mine:

Warriors are close to guardian now, but guardians are still on top.
I would put Engie directly under that, and above spirit ranger, even if you almost never die on a spirit ranger.
Necro and Mesmer are on par under this.
There are a lot of terrible thieves in spvp as compared to WvW. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s definitely not below or on par with Ele. Ele is dead last.

The main reason why eles are in a bad place is that they are always focused first, or 2nd after a thief. If they aren’t, the other team is just confused about how to play. I only ever play bunker D/D now, as I can’t stand getting slaughtered. I’ve won games just by having 3 people chase me all over the map instead of try to cap anything.

Yes. This is so much better than the locked ele thread below this.

0/10/0/30/30 d/d tripple cantrip still works.
random bursty specs of s/d arcane still work.

Are any of them balanced or on par with other classes? No.
I’m R27 or something if anyone cares. This is because I started doing spvp late into the game due to preferring WvW by a long shot. (Got WvW season key in the first week on the lowest ranked server in Gold League.)

Swapping mid-match, and auto-balance need to be removed.
If people leave a losing match, just add in new people that are queueing matches.

If people leave a match for anything other than a wvw queue opening, they should get a cooldown before they can queue something else. Call it man-up syndrome.

I remember last year when warriors really meant posts like this.

If you switch to earth after meteor, and use magnetic aura, then tornado, you are increasing your damage and safety.

It is up to your teammates to see/hear you call out tornado to drop fields near it. You’re then aoe cleansing/healing, bursting opponents, reflecting damage back at ranged, and moving with ease from the stability the tornado gives you. You simply turn it off early if you have confusion on.

Tornado/Mag. Aura is great for getting through a choke point. Tornado as a solitary dps is bad, but the knockback could be very useful in places like an East Keep defense on cata wall, bridge, and knocking people down from hiding spots.

Drop a lava font, then tornado, to get that thief pressuring the backline. Or do it over a chill field. Or small water.

Meteor/Tornado is the single best downed finisher in the game. It should not be overlooked. With enough critical damage %, there’s no war-bannering though it.

I would not suggest solo roaming with s/d, as the air 1 damage will be too low 75% of the targets you face.

Norn for racial elite. Its the only way we’ll ever have stealth and unbeatable escape. Especially if you use stability with it.

Human’s are prettiest imo.

Sylvari have cool glowy patterns, but the racials are crappy. I’ve used the treant twice, the roots immunity about 5 times, and the utility turret about 20 times (in jumping puzzles).

I didn’t know about any of the racials when I made my Ele.

CAMPS for D/D 101:

A lot of the borderland camps have an area where you can pull all of the mobs to one place to aoe them all down. I like to pull with water to have soothing mist up, and it’s a ranged hit. Then swap to air, and while summoning fiery greatsword, I spam 3 so that shocking aura is up just before i get the sword, and it fiery whirls into the mobs. I then swap to earth for protection, and lightning flash gs4 onto the stack.

If you are a tankier build then (after pull with water) setup with ring of fire LoS of the mobs, swap to earth, dodge in it against a wall so you don’t move, this will give you might, then earthquake for cc and might, and armor of earth/churning earth so you get a huge hit/uninterrupted stack of might again. As churning is finishing, swap to air for fury, and hit shocking aura. Then swap to water for a heal, and another protective aura that can give protection and fury if traited that way.

For south south camp, I like to use 1 lesser, and 1 greater fire elemental for alternative targets that aoe. The archers have a tendancy to stay ranged there, and the claimer can reset if you pull too far back on the side of the wall.

For fully upgraded camps, the enemy has to be distracted with orange swords somewhere else, and pay no attention to the camp for at least 2 mins, because the white swords of contesting start on the first attack, and we are not very good at tanking level 82 guards, and I’m saying that as someone who runs 20 earth, and full guard defense. You start by clearing the pats that circle the exterior of the camp. Then you move on to trying to pull small groups from the camp itself. The immobilize that the guards do can be killer, so you will need either armor of earth, or a cleanse available if you don’t dodge this initially. I find that if I don’t use signet of regeneration, I don’t stand a chance against 3+ level 82 guards. Most cases you pull 5 at a time + claimer, especially at north north camp. Focus down 1 guard that cripples. Use earth 3 to immobilize the 2nd one. To make a long story short, just don’t do it solo and an elementalist, because there’s a chance you will either die, or the effort will be wasted because 1 person can likely save it before you can clear it. Any time wasted trying to kill the defender, is time that 1+ of the 10 npcs can respawn. And that other defenders will show up. TL:DR don’t waste time trying to clear fully upgraded camps solo. You can run supply and ballista down the guards, though. :p

Hours of pounding at our backdoor. When will it end?

Use cleansing fire on downed thief/mesmer to apply burn to them when they try to hide in stealth.

Use lightning flash and/or cleansing fire as part of your burst vs >10% health targets.

Use lightning flash/updraft combo to prevent players escaping. (Check if they have stability up first).

Give other eles some tips for WvW prowess.

I’ll start: Use updraft as a dodge when you’re out of endurance.

Replace “Blasting Staff” with “Blast Radius” to improve aoes with all weapons.

Make is so condition duration makes the meteor shower last longer. >:)

JaNordy.6149:

Let us remember those who lost their stealth. RIP.

Lol. They brought 21 thieves and 2 mesmers to ruins and called us scrubs for winning. We had no thieves or mesmers.

Because we have this spec, other classes have simillar specs, and they are very frequent at using them ASAP against eles in case we are running this spec. It’s a dog eat dog world out there.

P.S. He probably dies 100s of times when his burst fails, or he’s loaded with conditions, or already used all 4 attunements. The video is a series of individual fights that he put together to show his best case scenarios. There’s really no frequency of getting away with this style of play, unless you’re bronze tier perhaps.

It’s the least forgiving of specs across the board for all classes.

Burnfall.9573:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBOc6Lv_BYk

(10k+bursts= Unacceptable))

He has 0 in arcana to achieve those numbers. It’s probably +10% damage traits all over place. He has his opening burst to fully down anything around him. He has no stunbreaker, and 1 cleanse on 15s cd. He is full zerker, but has at least 10 in water for the damage trait, giving him slightly more than base 12k hp.

Other classes can pull those same exact numbers, while having just as much speed, or more, in the delivery. With even more escapes, like stealth, sprint, leaps, etc.

10k is unacceptable? Try backstab from zerker thief with 3 stacks of bloodlust against fully PVT elementalist. This will hit you for 14k.

What class do you play that you don’t know how to counter an elementalist? A d/d one of all things. Where 100% of the burst is in melee range.

We make fun of our own karma trainers, too.

Those are glass (+/- bloodlust/might/sigil stacks) vs glass numbers. Any class can achieve that, or more, in less time.

Killshot warrior for example.

Will condition duration, range of application, and speed of application be addressed in this patch, or next one?

Can you turn the icons back on for each condition?
I can’t tell bleed from burn. Or cripple from chill.

The main problems we face are that the durations are all extremely low, and if we want condition duration and damage, going 30 fire and 30 earth, means you can’t swap back and forth, and basically have a spec that can’t even perform. Fresh Air would have to continue in those 2 attunements at the 30 point mark for each attunement. ie. Fresh Fire/Earth variants.

Other than duration, and horrible spec. options to make such a build, all of the applications can easily miss due to simple kiting from the enemy because they are all ground AoE, and channeled. Churning Earth is amazing, but it takes forever. Most of the time you try to use it, it is easily interrupted, or you get bombarded with various AoEs/ incoming conditions trying to get it to go off.

I said it before that I think cond. damage and duration should both be in earth or fire exclusively. Fire would make more sense, since earth fits toughness better. But you still need both trees to maximize a condition build.

If we could bump everything to a min of 5s, instead of 1-3s, we’d be doing a lot better. 5s of CC conditions: shocking aura, magnetic aura. 5s blinds would mean we can’t be easily kited while receiving damage. 5s of burn and cripple.

And lastly, the range on most of the conditions is far too short. Water 3 in dagger main-hand doesn’t do much of anything. Both auras can be waited out in dagger off-hand. We spend more time using these auras for traited protection and fury, than for their cc potential. Air 15 is great. Why can’t the cripple from earth, and flame blast effect from 15 in earth/fire have the same range coefficients? So we can keep up the pressure. Plus the fact that dagger earth 3 misses countless times, despite the wiki stating that it’s unblockable. This needs to be 1200, and actually unblockable. I’m not saying you should be able to land it through immunities or stability, though.

I can’t wait ’til they arrive…

Even I can do better condi damage than this.

I like auto-cleanse as a boost to staff specs in wvw. It’s typical to use a 20 point spread in fire for max meteors while still holding onto 30 air, and 20 arcana. I never use dagger/focus, or s/f more than once a month.

@OP Why did you say that auto-cleansing fire was also a stun breaker? They removed stun break from Cleansing Fire several patches ago.

However with III in water 10, the auto-CF becomes really worth having as a defensive spec. Extra condi duration makes celestial builds a lot more fun. I can see playing 20 fire in D/D, but you’d have to run the burn duration or boon duration runes to get the most out of it. Still, those kinds of specs will pale in comparison to 30 earth, 20 water, 20 arcana.

My goto specs will be 0/30/0/10/30 for fresh air with reduced cd timers on zerker/knight sets. And 0/0-10/30/0-20/10-30 on zerg pvt/knights/clerics. With the latter spec, having 30 water seems like it’d be the most tankiest version of a spec you can pump out, but you’ll probably want traveler runes, because playing without 10 in air means you won’t be able to break away for diddly-squat, unless you have stab/FGS available.

The only thing I really care about from the patch is our ability to play front liner again with respectable sustain. I hate having to run Ether Renewal. That is not good sustain at all.

Wow. I got to make a sammich and the same two guys are quoting their own posts talking about each fight.

If I “run away” it’s because eles have super long cds. If I’m using s/d, my health is super low. If I’m using staff, I can kite for days. I’m just not spec’d for your immobilize spam that you guys are running right now, so of course I’m not going to just stand in 1 place and wait for it.

I don’t know why this celeron guy is even responding if he wasn’t involved. Nothing he says makes any sense.

Mag’s lack of scouts proves we aren’t here for the fights.

Wat.

P.S. Gratz BG on achieving your wk back 9 hours later against a server that was outmanned from reset. Well done!

Mag still platinum tier in NA prime.

kitten , I idled out, and logged back in the map right away.
You jelly?

I find other classes complex after main-ing elementalist. Melee you have to time things and use certain abilities more than others. Sometimes never using certain skills 90% of the time. And then weapon swap is your main thing to do. I have an 80 mesmer, thief, guardian, and warrior that I don’t enjoy playing at all. The mesmer was the most fun of all my alts, and their talents make me drool. I see how other people play guardian and warrior, etc, but I have not learned the timing/ combos for them yet, and don’t really feel like learning them either.

I would say weapon swap, but they’d probably remove attunement swap procing swap sigils in its place. Though it’d still be better to have weapon swap.

And old RTL cd. With conditions where they are, and stackable immobilize, we need to have our break-outs. Especially if we’re going to stop using evasive arcana after patch.

I use s/d in pve. With lightning flash gap closer. Fresh air spec, with shorter air cds. This allows you to have ride the lightning up as much as possible, and attuning to air with a target does a ranged lightning strike to it.

Use combos like ring of fire, earthquake, then armor of earth or arcane shield to finish with churning earth. All the mobs around you should either be dead or dying by this time. You can swap back to air while doing this to blind a mob that normally applies an interrupt, such as an ogre doing a club smash. Porting the churning onto mobs that are even in range will add extra burst from the damage that the lightning flash does. Sort of like using cleansing flame for the damage it does as well as removing a condition from you at the same time.

Documented bug from months ago. Doesn’t seem to be a priority. I still have 4 daggers sitting in my bank forever.

P.S. They are soulbound, too. So can’t even use them on an alt.

Gonna watch tv until Dec.

Well that’s fair.

I didn’t stand in any wells, and a necro applied 5 conditions that I cleared, and he put 5 more on right away. Then I get slowed, and I can’t even out-run that. I’m out of clears at this point.

1. What just happened/ how?
2. What the kitten am I supposed to do here?

I have over 1900 toughness and was downed in 20s.

When meteor shower is on cooldown, waypoint back to spawn.
That is how you play WvW.
You don’t want your teammates to be killed rezzing you, or rally the downed players from your meteor storm.

An easier to view gallery: http://dulfy.net/2012/11/13/gw2-staff-skin-gallery/

Probably an SoS player.

If swapping to each attunement regularly = “quite a hassle”, then there’s not much help we can offer you, because that is how you’re supposed to play. Now, unless you’re clicking all your spells, or haven’t touched the keybinding system, then it’ll probably be next to impossible for you to enjoy the class.

All I see is a video of an overpowered necromancer that can sit in 21s of immobilize and walk away.

Probably $5000.

With renewing stamina I don’t have to put sigil of energy on my off-hand, and don’t have to get hit by everything when playing staff.

I don’t have to wait to swap to something else, so I can pump out those combos in D/D with ease, and heal up in a fell swoop. I can change it up in a longer fight where a guardian starts anticipating my next move.

Dodge cleansing is uber.

My cantrips that I commonly use are: armor of earth (you should always have stability), cleansing flame (because 3+ conditions with water on cd is bound to happen), and lightning flash. I prefer those last 2 because they have short cds, and provide more mobility, which is the most important thing as a squishy.

So lets talk about mobility. We need the 10 in air. We need fiery greatsword to escape and to chase. We need to remove cripple and immobilize. We are not in-tune with other fast classes, ever since the Ride the Lightning cd nerf. Sure, the timer will be reduced if we hit something, but when breaking combat, we don’t want to hit anything and be locked into combat movement speed. The best way to get away from a zerg right now is pop armor of earth while summoning feiry greatsword, while you’re already at least 900 yards away from the people chasing you, then greatsword 3, dodge in water if anything was placed on you, and greatsword 4, while switching into air for the sprint from Elemental Attunement. The 2nd way to do this is to have stability on earth attunement which takes 20 points in earth, which is something people might add to their new spec. in December. A third way is to earthquake the people chasing you, ride the lightning, then summon the greatsword. Or summon greatsword ahead of you, lightning flash/mistform under heavy fire, take 2nd sword, and sail away. I only ever use mistform as a way to run through enemies into a portal of a keep/tower usually. That said, the thrill of D/D was always the ability to get out and heal. The simple change of longer ride the lightning cooldown and heal in mist form took that element away, while other classes still are able to do this, namely warrior and thief, while they already have better healing, better armor, and far superior offensive skills. So, it just does not make sense to me that we had those changes made to us. Breaking combat to heal had to have been a huge complaint to warrant those changes. But then moving our stun breakers around just made that first change a real letdown for the class as a whole. There are so very few D/D solo roamers now, and clearly these 2 things are why.

I pray that our anti-conditions options save us in the long run.

As an avid d/d player in WvW and spvp:

I will be looking at trying out 10/10/0/20/30, and 0/10/30/0/30, and 0/0/30/20/20.

IMO losing Elemental Attunement to still hold onto extra vigor from Renewing Stamina isn’t a big deal. They are multiple ways to give ourselves the sprint and regen after the changes. Windborne dagger should be the last thing you put points into. I would instead take final shielding. For speed you can do 10 air or travelers runes. For regen you use 20 points in water for Soothing Disruption, which is far better than taking 8s off of lightning flash and cleansing fire. The only time I used the cantrip reduction was when I had 30 in water’s Cleansing Water, because then you would be doing 3 things every time you used a cantrip. Now we are left with 2 strong things to test: 1. auto-casting cleansing flame (which should also grant regen and vigor from Soothing Disruption if it works properly), and 2. keeping topped off in health from both high armor from 30 earth, coupled with shorter water cds to prevent the application of debuffs being applied to us. This will likely require some clerics pieces to ensure.

My questions:

If we have conditions on us while running diamond skin, then heal ourselves back over the 90% threshhold, are they automatically removed?

Will you remove the ability to apply cripple/ immobilize to us while we’re in mist form? It is very common to apply these 2 things before an ele can escape with either mistform or vapor form, but people are applying them after they are used, and it’s really annoying. I’ve also been killed instantly while moving in mistform by unknown sources.

- I see now that the dev might not move Elemental Attunement to master trait. So we can still proc. sprint and protection on swaps.
- He also mentioned the popular fresh air spec being combined with diamond skin, which I was also considering, since the damage (of fresh air) is a lot of fun in both s/d and d/d. 0/30/30/0/10 is very doable, because my common fresh air spec has been 0/30/0/10/30, and living without the 10 points in water is easily done with the proposed changes.

As D/D I feel that every time I dodge I’m going to heal or cripple my foe, even when I don’t put 30 in arcana, I still think I’m going to do those things. However it’s only ever the dodge in water that has ever played a noticable role because the range on the damage attacks is very easily avoided by players. The blind almost never applies to anything. I try to dodge in air to finish a downed player in spvp and the blindness almost never shows up. It’s like we need to stand directly on top of the person at the start of the dodge if we want it to land. Overall, Evasive Arcana has taught me how to waste dodges more than anything. lol – But the cleansing wave on dodge has been a lot of fun using. Playing a new spec without cleansing wave in it at all will be a nice change of pace, really. Especially if I never need it.

To be continued > ran out of space with my wall of text. >>

And besides, a gold rabbit finisher is better than a silver dragon one.

Being on Maguuma is it’s own reward.

Thank you for posting these changes way in advance. And the elementalist stuff sounds like it might be game changing for us. Probably 90% of my posts are complaints about our state in pvp currently.