I would like to be able to turn them faster. Especially if I maxed out the mastery in them.
Edit: Them meaning trebs, catas, and mortars.
Video-lag induced queue vs queue isn’t fun. Winning and getting loot is. When the skill lag kicks in, then it’s not fun at all. Those are the issues.
Having less people out in open-field combat would reduce this, but to do that, they need to have something else they can fight for. That’s what the quaggan nodes did. But bloodlust didn’t make it any easier. It just made defense easier, because losing siege to lightning was a problem. And losing camps to npcs was also a problem. The bloodlust should unlock something other than raw stats for the server. Or you could have underground areas on the map for maze like battles that we used to enjoy in Obsidian Sanctum. Kiting to choke-points is one of the only options an out-numbered server can do right now, but there’s not enough of them to balance it out. Being able to cross distances without just waypointing or jumping off a cliff should also be made available. Suchas those teleporters in skyhammer, or jump plates at tequatl. You could put stuff like that near bloodlust, and random places that can only be unlocked if you own things near them.
In WvW you can hide behind a group of people and AoE tons of enemy players/ npcs/ creatures for maximum loot bags and experience. It’s easy mode if your server has players in it.
Now they just need to increase thief and warrior mobility cooldowns if they aren’t used to hit something first, like ride the lightning!
I agree with the swapping of arcane shield for lightning flash, and vital striking for cantrip mastery. Earth 4 and 5 already act as your 2nd safety before mist form. I hope you go and get extra hp from full mastery in guard defense in wvw, because 12k hp dies to everything. The 1800 tougness is only going to help vs players with low crit damage. Do you already have that gear made? Because full knights isn’t ideal.
I personally just roam with my meta staff spec when playing s/x. The damage is pretty bad, but I’ve kited multiple warriors and thieves all over the map with bunker, so it’s fun having that option available still.
For max annoyance I run max immobilize from arcane blast with elemental surge, and signet of earth.
Overall you want at least 15k health, though. And I would practice in hotjoin first, because that’s basically what it’s going to be like.
You get 10 trait points at level 20, right? I would get 10 arcana first so you have faster attunement cooldowns, and trait for windborne dagger for increased movement speed, as you should be leveling with dual daggers. Air autoattack is a cleave that does a lot of damage.
Then start spec’ing into at least 5 water so you can get passive regen whenever you switch to water to heal. Run signet of restoration (heal) so you can stay in a group of mobs as long as possible. You won’t have a cleanse until you take cleansing fire utility, or etheral renewal healing trait. At 20 in water you can take a cleanse every time you attune to water. So try to unlock both heals. Use your auras in air and water when you need them.
Most of your damage will be spamming air 1. Ride the lightning, updraft in air, and burning speed in fire will all propel you forward, and apply sprint to keep you moving along smoothly.
Ring of fire, and burning speed will be your only combo fields. Switch to earth after and earthquake and/or churning earth on top of that to gain might.
For staff, fire 2 is your main source of damage. You can stand on top of it when mobs run toward you. Instead of running away, you will just keep them in the fire while you auto them. Earth 2, then fire 2 will give you might. Earth 2 has a delayed blast on it, so you can use it to blast might in fire, sprint in air’s static field, and regen in water’s healing rain.
Opening with meteor shower, static field, frozen ground, and unsteady ground will demolish any trash in front of you without it ever reaching you if you start at max range (1200)
Dagger/Dagger is terrible these days. The survivability was all taken away. You get slightly more mobility, but way less defense that x/focus gives. Landing churning earth is a miracle when it happens, if you even bother casting it. How do you even fight a necro with daggers? How do you out-pace a thief with daggers?
If you’re going for max survivability, then you will be going 30 arcana. If not, you don’t need it. Also, I would say that most Eles in WvW are/should be using staff or x/f. The meta is 30 arcana, but for dps it’s 10-20. Based on the meta being 30 arcana, does that mean most eles are running that? No. Because they aren’t.
Meta is 0/0/10/30/30 for all weapon sets. For pve and spvp, if you have no burst, it will take you far too long to kill anything. I’ve just started using s/f recently, and I enjoy that in pve raid settings. I imagine it excels in dungeons as well. The more common burst staff spec is 20/30/0/0/20, and it’s been like that for a year. After the reduced time on attunement cooldowns patch (15s reduced to 13s), alongside having the option to put blasting staff on at the adept tier, people have dropped 10 in arcana for more survivability that 10 water adds. However with Lingering Elements paired with Elemental Attunement, you offer more support, and gain some extra buffs for a short duration (with 20 points in). Having a low cooldown on meteor showers can be huge if you have a lot of eles running this. Heal on crit/kill food will help make up for having 0 in water.
So more on topic now: Anyone who has played with fresh air specs knowns how great it feels to be able to jump instantly back into air to get a free hit (Electric Discharge) on someone. What I was proposing with the Alacrities was to have that same kind of feeling with whichever damage type we were going for. Each Alacrity is already good as it is, but swapping to each attunement to chain our cc’s is tedium with them being based off the Arcana line. We can get more Static Fields off with Fresh Air, but that’s nothing compared to more chills. I know people are wishing for things like Fresh Water and so forth. Lets be honest here, opening on a group with chill, then blasting it so they get chilled, for anyone they hit in the huge radius that just gained Frost Armor, is going to get nuked harder than if you put a 2s static on them, that they simply stability’d out of immediately. The best time to static is after a meteor shower so they take 1-2s of extra punishment, and more-so (20%) with having Tempest Defense in place over Fresh air. They will have had to use a cleanse from the chill, and a stun breaker for the static. You just put everyone in a horrible position defensively as they are trying to deal with all the other damage coming at them. If they didn’t clear either thing, they are probably dead. I mean, this is a method that good eles are banking on in zerg vs zerg.
Time and time again I hear complaints about not getting water fields when they’re asked for. This is mainly due to the water field being on cd, or the attunement. As a back-liner by nature, we are rotating attunements constantly to get off the most CC that pairs with our meteor shower best. We don’t want to meteor 1 person. Even with reduced water cooldowns, our healing rain is still 36s apart. Then, are we the ones going to be blasting it by removing a cantrip for arcane wave? If you want the most support, then yes. And you have to be calling them out. Which is hard with character model lag. So we set our target to our driver/ commander and say something like “big water on x” and that’s the main method we’re going for now. We can see their bar, but not their conditions with this. The healing ability in other games is made extremely easy as you had mods to see everyone’s conditions and health at all times with bars you click on. It would auto-target that person so you knew exactly where to put the healing. What this game avoids in screen-clutter, it loses in productiveness.
So, you’re welcome for a massive overview of staff eles in WvW, as that is really the majority of my interest in this game, and with this topic.
How about just turn these all into giving -20% reduction on recharge rate of the attunement you are using them in? This would open up the traits outside of Arcana. Most people are only using 10-20 arcana now anyway. Unless you really need that dodge in earth and water so bad.
I’ve been playing with focus for the last few days in pve, pvp, and wvw. It’s pretty fun to use. Not quite used to d/f yet, but s/f feels like the true bunker Ele.
I dominated .
That spec works well in tpvp btw. ;-)
I’m using fire runes to maximize power, pvt ammy.
Guardians and thieves are still OP damage to it.If you run Ether Renewal in PVP without Rock Solid you’re gonna have a bad time.
This is my current tpvp build for D/D: 0/0/20/20/30
Congrats on trying to down-play a fun recount of the game for the guy.
That spec works well in tpvp btw. ;-)
I’m using fire runes to maximize power, pvt ammy.
Guardians and thieves are still OP damage to it.
I feel like s/d has no real survivability without arcana in it, but I always miss surge after swapping out of it. The immobilize is not enough to keep it in. You can get extra damage with your dagger sigils that eliminate the need for immob.
When are these chumps gonna man-up and come to NA?
I’m thinking of changing my name to Get Glory Here.
I’m going to corpse camp keeps to let my team know when it’s safe to attack, and where all the siege is. Rotating camera is our best trait.
Need that gate repaired? No worries. I can max out swiftness in my spec for running back and forth from camps!
Out of supply traps? No worries, because every elementalist knows to get burning oil mastery first, and hop off to do swirling winds/ heal up for this highly neglected piece of siege.
Do you need a tower trebbed from the third floor of stonemist for 8 straight hours? I’m there! I won’t even be botting because I’ve adapted to this. I’m still playing an elementalist after all!
Spvp?
Don’t worry, I won’t go to the laser with Tornado off CD.
I will indeed fire that cannon, and pick up every single spawn of hero’s potion.
They killed our treb? Allow me to run the repair for it to be back up. I will even sit on it all game!
You’re being attacked? Don’t worry, I’ll show up and immediately, everyone will stop targeting you.
I hope this is just one of the changes to spvp for us.
Cross your fingers on being able to get past the “%” category in tpvp win/loss ratio.
Does Josh even lift?
There’s really only a handful of people that want to play defense to make sure we have waypoints. Everyone else wants to ignore that to follow the blob. You can only play that way so many times before you become a blobber yourself.
It’s not fun hanging back and refreshing siege that you yourself ran to and from north camp 500 times to build from your own blueprints, while everyone else leaves the map outmanned to go actually kill people.
On Mag we have never not been out-manned during 16 hours of game time. Right now SBI has more players in Oceanic AND NA prime time. WTH? In the middle of the week they have queued maps.
The only way to fix this is to limit the amount allowed players on a map based on how many the other team has. This is what WoW did to an extent, but they buffed the lower populated faction exponentially for each % of out-manned. So instead of 60 vs 10, you have 20 vs 10 until 10 has 20, then the cap increases to 40, then 60, then whatever the actual queue is. Abandoning a map can’t really force people off a map with this method, but that team will get bored there and start trying to queue toward somewhere else. This gives at least some chance for the losing/lower-pop team to keep an interest. This hurts people who transfer-to-win only.
People would rather get the champion loot bag from towers, and dragonite ore from keeps and the castle, than go from camp to camp exclusively.
I’ve gotten far more exotics from champ bags, than ranks. I’ve gotten 1 ascended ring from ranking up. I’ve gotten the most rares from players and npcs. Zerging down npcs with the out-manned buff on and 140% account magic find nets me a rare every 15 mins if we’re not wiped at any point in time.
These methods of loot farming is what are keeping people interested in WvW where perhaps they had no interest, and basically just wasted money upgrading things in the past. I see no problem with karma training as long as there’s still fights. 60 wxp per fresh player, more with outmanned buff, and more again if they haven’t been killed in awhile adds up. If your crew can make minced meat of 60 players in short order, you probably have full bags from just that.
WvW can be very, very, profitable.
D/D 0/10/0/30/30 or 0/0/20/20/30 boon duration 75%.
- This will provide your group with lots of extra buffs, and heals. The 2nd is an aoe stability every 9s (if required that often). The first one can roam easier and harass the back line along with thieves. Full travelers also works for runes. Passive always on 25% movement speed, or near 100% uptime of 33% from swiftness, prone to boon stripping/ corruption (which is less likely to happen in blob vs blob unless you’re ahead of everyone). You also have the option of finished a downed clump with ported churning earth if you can afford to use up one of your life-line cantrips.
By far, staff will provide the utmost support to zerging. 3 types of cc’s per rotation. Large aoe cleanse and heal. Smaller heal for yourself or others. Passive aoe regen. Reflect projectiles. Huge aoe radius meteor shower that we’ve all seen do 10-15k burst with trollnado. Personally, I spec pvt/celestial for every weapon set and do 5-8ks with tornado, as a living Ele is better than a dead one in zerkers.
My staff specs have mostly had Fresh air, and at least 10 water in them, and at least 10 arcana in them. Other times I just swap out of 0/10/0/30/30 and throw on a staff, and swap out ii in arcana for blasting staff.
1 dagger should have an energy sigil on it, and you should carry a 2nd staff with energy on it for maximum survivability. You know there are going to be hammers running toward you at any given time. Dodge is how you avoid them. Usually double dodge will save you having to waste armor of earth. I sometimes use magnetic aura/tornado/water attunement to go through a hallway in stonemist without getting stuck in anything on the way down, while also knocking everything out of the way for my teammates.
All of the Alacrity -20% reduction spells are key to maximizing dps/hps/ccs.
If your zerg is 20, you should have at least 3 staff eles. 40, you want at least 5. If you have less for this, you will probably be getting wiped. The higher the number of eles you have, the less defensive traits you will need, and can run specs like 20/30/0/0/20. 2x Alacrities, or 1x and increased crit damage, or sprint on aura is what I like to run sometimes. You can pump out a ton of meteors if all of your eles are running this. You should have at least 1 ele running 30 water, though, because every group needs to recover, and blast up health quickly to get back in quickly before the other team can.
wats a gc ele? global cooldown insta gib?
if 2 thieves and a warrior can’t kill an ele, they need to uninstall for realz.
immobilize and chill = gg ded ele.
heck, even poison.
(edited by katniss.6735)
Just: “Golems!”
I’ll go first:
Ask for timer on a keep you just lost 10s after losing it.
D/D
I would like signet + 30 water to give me 300 hpt. I have around 267 with those two things and half celestial. bleh. Stacking healing power to 800+ nerfs our damage way too much (I have 679 gear+infusions+runes). We need big heals to be effective at D/D roamer, and we need to be able to burst. It’s hard to find a proper balance vs most classes now. More fights result in having to leave after not being able to kill someone due to pressure.
CC
Also buff the immobilize duration on, and range of, magnetic grasp. Our cc is crap.
General Updates & Speed
Stop buffing skills we don’t want to use because they read as if they’d be cool to use. They aren’t. Having interviews about our class talking about Conjure Earth Shield. Nobody uses that. You’re wasting everyone’s time. Please get pvp players on the dev team. The ranger access to haste makes them viable in 1v1s with ranged weapons. We could really use faster casts on autos, and channels. Everything feels slow not just in cast-speed, but also because our cds are terribly long in every weapon set. We’re forced to spec into faster air, water, and fire alacrity’s if we want to be of the most use with a staff. 40s cd on static fields, 45 on healing rain.
Staff speed & cc issues
Gust is a 400 range knockback. How does that help with survival? Maybe than one time it lands in 1000 tries and knocks someone off a ledge. Otherwise there’s no point wasting a gcd to cast this. It’s usually a waste of a gcd to use Lightning Surge because of it’s cast time, too. It’s a random scatter of blind in a tight 120 radius. You can’t interrupt anything useful with it like kill shot, unless you’re a mind reader and can predict it in time to get it off in the 0.5s cast time disparency. It’s just a bunch of misc things here, but they really aren’t well thought out.
Speed in general
We’re the only class that’s rotation is solely based on trait points spent in Arcana. You can live with 10 points in Arcana with staff now. This opens up more talent points, but when you want to swap to anything clutch, you’re pretty much out of luck. Fresh Air helps you get back into Air Attunement to cast that helpful Static Field, but that’s it. The overall feeling you get when you play staff ele is: Big burst, slow as hell, rez pls (okay, that last one was sarcastic, but not far off, even if you’re good at what you’re doing).
Tempest Defense in question
IMO Tempest Defense is bad because Static Field lasts 4s. That’s 4s of +20% damage (and given the cast time of everything…). The tooltip says that you deal the extra damage when targets are stunned or knocked down; does this apply to other people knocking them down and stunning them, or just from your own use of Static Field? If it includes other people, then it’s amazing to use.
Some TD reading: For D/D and x/F
(edited by katniss.6735)
Make Churning Earth like Magnetic Grasp. ie. You charge it first, and use it when you want. Just an idea. Having our biggest burst on a channel that requires a 40s cd Lightning Flash, to be guaranteed hit, is just bad. Churning Earth is our Kill Shot, but misses way more easily, and is thus used way less.
Another idea is to have it knockdown and suck the opponent in toward it, such as an earthquake or twister might do. Something that would make Tornado better as well.
Re-design Geomancer’s Alacrity to reduce cast times on earth spells, instead of cooldowns, because who sits in earth for more than the CC effects anyway? It would make staff earth 1, and scepter earth 1 far better if it was being spammed at the opponent, instead of spurting laughable damage at them.
I don’t have to stand on a circle to advance.
I don’t have to fight underwater.
I don’t have to stand on a ledge to keep someone from shooting me with pve junk.
Age: 5081 hours (and I’m still alive on vitamin D3’s)
Deaths: 5459 (I’m an Ele. This should be 10x higher)
Kills: 70485
Rank: 876
Spvp: 52.90% solo win ratio / 40% team win ratio (I solo queue that), Wolf.
Achieves: 12324
MF: 139%
5/6 ascended armor. everything else ascended. 600 hours spent on alts. 5 80s.
4000 hours hating this game.
So I play zerker s/d in spvp. I can’t get guardians below 80%.
They simply spam staff 1. That’s it.
I have to bail or die.
Not full glass spec because I don’t want to die every 5s.
0/30/0/30/10.
How do you beat a guardian? (in spvp)
I’d rather see something more practical put in place, like diminishing returns, rather than herding people into corners. Every “I can’t move” situation is a bad situation.
Yay. Another hammers in red circles with tonics video. Sweet!
Nose-diving to change colours.
State of the game now.
P.S. warriorsnecroswarriorsnecroswarriorszelelolnecroswarriorsnecroswarriorsnecroswarriors
You’re all fun as hell.
(edited by katniss.6735)
Solo roaming is dead. Even in full zerker s/d, the damage and defense is far below that of other classes in like-wise gear. You can kill under-geared bads. That’s it.
Can’t wait for Wildstar at this point.
So I decide to take a break from tpvp because everyone it’s just randoms roaming… join hotjoin and it’s all necros.
In wvw I value 6/6 traveler’s more for every weapon set.
In close-combat pve, boon duration wins (almost) every time. However, I just use scholars/zerker in fungeons.
In spvp I use Lyssa.
Because it’s the only class where winning takes effort. Fact.
i got hit for 8600 arcing arrow in pvt gear. gg. keep buffing warriors.
I’m just wearing full zerkers and running into blobs over and over.
State of the game now.
Bears prefer honey and fish.
At r31, the only successful eles I ever see are running s/d and staff. Some use icebow. You can do bunker d/d, but you can’t solo hold a point with it anymore. Everyone else’s cc and damage just craps all over you if you’re solo somewhere. You can’t take guardians off a point ever.
It’s a go-burst-or-go-home scene where you have to tag along with your teammates or perish. It’s a horrible state, imo.
Also, s/f is probably the best defense you can get now that still pumps out ranged damage. You don’t want to be in melee range anymore unless you’ve got burst and immunities.
My perspective is all solo queue/hotjoin. I’ve never had a full 5-man tpvp team where I could actually rely on/vocalize with.
A horse stable for mounts is clearly the answer.
TC so mad about losing WP in ebg, they crashed all the maps.
That was clearly TC’s best guardian in the video.
I was going to transfer to TC once, but I got shot with an arrowcart on the way there.
It’s a shame, I was so anxious to play with my many facets in Maiden’s Whisper Tavern.
Re: Arcane Abatement
Why do you and daphoenix use this skill?
Most open field fighting there’s no place to drop far enough to use it.
Does it proc when you get hit with hammers or something?
It seems like something that would only be good if you were being zerged in a northern part of a boarderland or jumping off a tower wall/ get pulled off of one.