Guild Wars 2

http://www.twitch.tv/phantaram/

Team Paradigm EU elementalist. You can find his past broadcasts right there.

Hagnefelt.1286:

Edit: What’s the easiest way to gain PVT gear? You can’t craft it, and I’ve only found the gear at exotic karma merchants and dungeon merchants. Are those two the only ones?

You can get it also from WvW by using badges (exotics) or karma (lower quality). I would say that dungeon farming is the fastest way.

bodhy.9107:

I don’t care about PvP !Elementalists are seriously under in pve they die way to easy and don’t have any slowdowns or push back like other classes do!

Not sure what do you mean by “slowdowns” and “push back” but we have cripple, chill and immobilize available. We also have knockback, knockdown and blowout (launch) at our disposal.

I don’t have issues with survivability in PvE. As a non-glass cannon D/D I can survive a lot and when I’m playing with staff I’m keeping my distance and utilizing defensive utility skills.

While I have no problem with a class being more difficult, and I love the challenge of an elementalist, it seems a shame really that only the very elite players can achieve full potential of an ele.

A simple damage boost would do wonders for the class. I thought people were overreacting until I created a thief…now my god how weak we seem.

I agree, but the problem is that Anet is balancing around top players in tPvP. If they boost the damage then high-level players may make the elementalists look overpowered because of the flexibility and high damage at the same time. I think that is the reason why Anet is pretty carefull with the damage changes even if for us it seems quite obvious that we could use some extra pew-pew.

Yes, thiefs are stronger in the damage area (esp. frontload damage), but are lot more offensive focused. I have level 80 thief myself and sometimes I switch to him if I want to see some big numbers, but I like the flexibility of an elementalist and the playstyle more.

Erebus, I wouldn’t bother complaining about the state of eles here. Many have left the profession for other better professions, so most of the people left here are desperately holding onto the idea that ‘Eles are great and almost OP’, which is simply not true, though you’ll never be able to convince them otherwise.

Yes, please don’t bother complaining in a unconstructive and even incorrect way how the OP did. It servers no purpose. It is not like this post will be a sudden wake-up call for Anet developers who until now had no idea what the state of ele is and how many bugs to fix there are (hint: we have a sticky).

I don’t think most of the people here think that ele is OP, it is just that lot of players compalining are very whiny and often have L2P issues and there are new threads like this on a daily basis.

Occam.9841:

Alright if you like it the way it is. I play a thief now anyway so if you don’t mind being a free kill I won’t keep trying to talk you out of it.

Thank you. You are too kind!

I also don’t think that weapon swapping has anything to do with ele vs thief “metagame” because most of the kills are caused by stealth and burst which is nothing that weapon swaps will help with.

Occam.9841:

You may not want to compare thief skills to elem skills but those are the skills being used to kill you. And for an elem to kill a thief is an accomplishment, for a thief to kill an elem is nothing to brag about.

Thiefs and elementalists are different and have different weapons. Thiefs are mostly about big damage and their skills are reflecting that. They don’t have the utility of elementalists and therefore allowing us to get their kind of damage would be just crazy.

Also thiefs with stealth and burst are ultimate player-killing profession and therefore it would be quite silly if thiefs were bragging about killing players from stealth in under 2s. In 1v1 where good ele is facing a good thief it is not that easy for the thief to win.

Also skill floor for thiefs are lot lower than the one for elementalist so if you add that to the fact they have their burst + stealth it is quite obvious that most of the elementalist will be a food for thiefs. On the higher level things doesn’t look that bad and it is well-known that anet is balancing around that level of play.

@Occam:

You cannot really compare thiefs weapons with elementalist’s one. Apples and oranges. At 1200 range Cluster Bomb is definitely not faster than staff skills, because of the arc. Staff has less damage than shortbow, but lot more utility and it is the same when comparing D/D ele and D/D thief.

When arguing against weapon switching nobody is saying that our raw damage from combining our weapon sets will be insane. The thing is that we have access to lot more skills which also means lot more control and combo potential. To solve all these issues they will need to introduce non-trivial system of weapon switching for us and/or change/nerf our skills.

Also not everyone is playing with zerg in WvW and I don’t agree with your “if your goal is to actually contribute to your team in WvW you will have you staff equipped almost all of the time.”. You can help capping camps (ele can solo them non-upgraded camps too), intercepting dolyaks, clearing the sentries. Denying supply plays a big role in WvW. Often few good players doing these things are more helpfull for the server than when they join 40-man zerg.

And to see how much survivability and harassment potential D/D has even against bigger group of enemies I would like to recommend you checking out for example this video.

@Grevender:

I wrote that your example is very specific and 99.9% of the time you can easily switch to a staff. It is not something you are facing all the time and you are getting frustrated. At least I haven’t and I’ve played 300+ hours on my elementalist.

It is not really an argument for weapon swapping because majority of the time you can leave the combat. Planning in advance also helps and if you see that “super champion” you can (/should) switch to your staff right away.

On one side it will help with scenario like you described. On the other side tho you have either possible imbalance or strange complicated system of boon stripping, cooldowns, combo fields negation, etc. I really doubt implementing such a feature is worth the time and effort currently.

I’m personally against it until other issues are fixed, developers are really bored and they have a lot of time to implement it really well. I doubt it will ever happen.

Just wanted to thank you for your great build and all the material you are releasing.

I just recorded some seriously epic battles today. It’s 40 mins of nonstop action with almost every technique imaginable all in one video.

Sounds great. Can’t wait.

Thanks for the videos, Yin. Good job and keep them coming!

First of all I don’t think that this belongs to Elementalist subforum.

You can sell one manual on the trading post and you should get part of the price back or leave it in your bank and save it for your second character.

Mainly for for a cleric gear (power/toughness/healing power). Have a look here for information how to get your gear.

@Micro Hard:

I think most of the players have problems when facing thief’s initial BS burst unprepared. That burst will eat most (or all) of their HP if the thiefs are specced glass cannons. Given S/D and D/D skills I’m sure than if you can see the thief coming then we are one of the best professions to control him and recover from his damage.

I was surprised that thief was able to open for 19K damage on defensively specced ele. That is putting the ele into a huge disadvantage as he is either already dead or is basically one attack away from being dead.

I hope by air being your primary attunement it doesn’t mean you are most of the fight staying in that attunement only. That would make your preformance very suboptimal.

The answer depends on your goals – what are you playing (dungeons, general PvE, WvW, sPvP), your traits and playstyle.

I like tanky D/D style, so I invest more into defensive stats and trying to balance that with sigil of bloodlust (stacking power) and sigil of battle (3 stacks of might on attunement switch). If you want to go for extra defense, just use defensive runes or you can go for (expensive) divinity runes which are boosting all your attributes (works fine for ele).

Have a look here for a tanky D/D build setup and a lot of footage to check if you like it. There is a pretty long discussion in that topic about good rune setups.

I feel that offensive D/D specs are not working that well (very squishy) in most of the scenarios, so I like having a lot of survivability

Creslin.1758:

Stealth is tough…and I can only really catch a thief that is trying to escape if he is predictable and runs in a straight line. Otherwise, they are pretty much gone.

The only thing I have found to help against perma-stealthers is that DoT damage will still appear even when they are stealthed so you can find where they are.

I’m lacking experience against thiefs, but I’ve seen more experienced D/D PvPers to use earth #4 and air #5 to control the thief until his stealth wears off. Also things like earth #2 (cripple + DoT) helps a lot.

There are no real perma stealthers doing bursty damage in this game. There is just stealth + rendering issues making them not appear at all. You can be almost permastealthy in some scenarios (like C&D chaining), but you cannot kill anyone that way unless he is just AFK.

Crunchy Gremlin.5798:

they do a pretty good job.

If you have any links or some hints in what situations you prefer to use which conjures that would make me very happy.

It is hard for me to identify situatios n when to use shield, GS or hammer as a D/D ele. I can see the usage for the bow, but I’m not sure about the rest.

Sylosi.6503:

Apparently game designers can’t manage to learn invisibilty -> huge burst -> signifcant ability to escape, is impossible to balance and an absolute failure in every MMO, nor that such a potential low TTK = low skillcap, which for a game that allegedly is about high skill PvP is a joke.

I guess Anet expected that the temporal nature of the stealth in GW2 will give a fighting chance to other players to spot the thief and plan their dodges and/or oh-kitten skills to survive.

Unfortunately current rendering issues and inability to react when you cannot spot the thief before the fight are making that profession more of a issue to fight that it was intented.

But I’m sure that in a world where you are panning your camera like crazy, so you can see everything, stealth is working properly and everything is isolated 1v1 duel without any messy group fights and particle effects all over the place .. in that world BS thiefs are ok to fight against.

STRanger.5120:

@Kubetz: The renewal glyph is kinda unusable after the recent “bugfixes” and the Signet trait is still bugged as I read on the forums (didn´t tested it myself yet), the passive effect of signet of malice heals much less amount when on CD than when off CD

Yeah, it was a bug fix that put in the same league as other abilities like that. It is lot less useful now, I totally agree.

Haven’t tested those other changes myself and I agree that if we will be getting 3 new bugs for 2 fixes then I won’t be that happy. I hope the QA team will step up their game a bit.

STRanger.5120:

The class would be much more playable and smooth without these bugs (didn´t mentioned RTL, because this is mentioned literally everywhere). I can´t wait to see those fixed

Agree. I can imagine necromancers, engineers and other professions can’t wait to see their fixes too.

Thiefs are much more powerful now than they were 3 days ago. I was hit last night for 19k in 1 combo of Steal, Cloak and Dagger, Backstab (One of the 3 hit for 9k). All of this while the thief was completely invisible. By this point I was dropped down to about 2k health. This exact same combo was done to me constantly, because there were 9 thiefs in the game.

He was probably really dedicated glass cannon with might on signet use or staff like that and with juicy crits .. Or he was on steroids.

The discussion in thief subforum about this change is pretty long and for some it was a buff, for others it was nerfed (link here).

Burst of the BS thiefs is PITA to deal with if you allow them to successfully hit you .

STRanger.5120:

To be honest, I don´t see any true bugfixes in the last patch notes, there are some buffs of course (downed mode, Cone of cold, Ring of earth), but the wider cone on Fire grab/Lightning touch is rather a tweak than a bugfix (fixing netcode/terrain collision so you won´t miss those skills if aimed properly, that would be a bugfix).

You are not a crybaby at all. There are a lot higher standards on this forum for getting such a title.

Bug fixes:

• Signets: All signets have been updated to function properly with the Earth Magic traits Written in Stone and Signet Mastery.
• Glyph of Renewal: This skill no longer resurrects dead allies; it only revives downed ones.

Even tho we are not happy about the Renewal fix really, the functionality was not intentional and therefore it was a bug that got fixed. I think it got higher priority compared to other bugs because it can be quite a game changer in some specific scenarios.

I’m considering the “responsivness” issues to be bug fixes too, but I don’t really care if anyone else likes to put different label on it. If you have a look in the patch notes you will see that they don’t like to use word “bug” when it comes to profession changes. When they fix RTL in the future they may call it “improving the responsivness” too

Otaur.9268:

Thats what I thought too… However I decided to do some sPvP, i have 2,900 something armor, and still being hit for 3 – 5k by thieves. It is sad. I mean look how noob the class is, everyone in sPvP seems to be making thieves… This needs to be looked at, it is not coincidence that 80% of the games I join look like this.

The thing is that thiefs are noob-stomping profession that doesn’t have high skill floor when playing against the majority of sPvP players. That means that a lot of players are going to play them because it is easy to get high numbers playing them. Those classes are pretty popular in every kitten game in PvP unless they get nerfed into the oblivion.

I’m sure that if this trend continues then Anet will do something more about it. They already nerfed thiefs quite a bit (they nerfed PW, HS, LBD and changed signet functionality) and I expect them to continue if necessary.

Your best bet is to learn how to play against them as best as you can and just feel good about it. The weaker they will be in the future the stronger you will be against them. Now isn’t that cool in a very strange and masochistic way?

I feel your pain though (as my main is an Elementalist), why Thieves receive bugfixes like this and we don´t get at least the duration fixes (Healing rain, Armor of Earth etc…)?
I really can´t figure this out, honestly….

To be completely honest we got some of our bugs sorted out and some abilities were buffed, so I can somehow accept the fact that they fixed thiefs a bit. They also nerfed some of the burst potential of thiefs last few patches, so if this trend will continue I’m fine with this.

How do you know that all those issues are actually simple, easy to fix? Don’t you also think that even if fixing the issue is not that much work, they still have to test the changes before releasing them so it can take more time? Don’t you think that in such a big project there is a lot of bugs to fix and balance so they cannot do everything at once?

If you have access to GW2 source code and Anet’s development process, so you are more informed then me, then I’m sorry.

Are you really comparing the relationship between developers of game without a subscription fee and the players to the relationship between the employer and his employees? Wow ..

I’m sorry, but there are still some polite people on the internet that say “thanks” when they like and appreciate something. I know .. it is crazy ..

Grevender.9235:

…

I don’t think that your very specific scenario is a reason that we need a weapon swap. 99% you would be able get OOC and switch your weapon or use #2 & #5 in water with your D/D.

Having a weapon swap is not only about boons on you. As a example being able to switch between D/D and Staff enables us to provide a lot of control. You can also provide more combo abilities and stack a lot of boons on allies.

It is not that simple and adding such a feature requires a lot of thinking, because things my easily go wrong (not for us, but for the game balance).

<rant>
I wish some of you guys were a game designers, so you will realize how difficult it is. There are people all over the forum coming with “great” ideas after 2 minutes of thinking. If Anet was implementing such a huge changes without any deeper thinking at all we would be pretty screwed.
</rant>

Sorry for the rant.

Sora.5039:

…

I’m running D/D build by daphoenix, my gear is close to his current one and I’m doing pretty well. Yes, the gear is defensive, but I’m able to get a lot of punch using combos to get might stacks (incl. evasive arcana), sigils and auras. My survivability is very good.

When running with zerg I’ll switch to my MF gear.

That is pretty strange that all those hits hit for more or less same damage. Hearthseeker’s damage is based on target’s HP and damage when he is in 50%-100% range is half of the damage when the target is 0% – 25% range.

It looks to me either like a combat log issue or I’m terribly misinformed.

This video shoving a D/D trying to solo the supply camp. Some players joined him right at the end but he had no issues before and it is quite obvious he would be able to solo it completely.

NatashaK.9418:

That’s unthinkable to me on any class. Grats to you. The only way I’m going to “solo” a supply camp is to follow a pack of vet frogs.

So far I’ve seen an warrior (in PVT gear), thief (S/P build), elementalist (D/D), guardian, and ranger done that. I do think engineers, necromancers and mesmers with correct builds are able to solo it too .

• If they implemented something like that they would have to create 4 new utility skills to keep the number of skills the same across all the professions.

• Fiery Greatsword would dissapear because you already have Flame Axe for the fire attunement.

• It sounds very flexible and strong. You are giving up only one elite slot instead of your utility slots. So you will basically give up your Summon Elemental or Tornado for 4 conjured weapons with all those abilities and have the ability to put anything else you want in your utility slots.

• Engineers will hate us for having an elite granting us 4 “kits”.

Being able to switch weapons in combat sounds great, but I’m afraid that it might make good ele players extremely dangerous and it my lead to weapon skill nerfs, because Anet is balancing around good players and not baddies, which makes sense of course.

I agree with OOC weapon swap and with “revisiting” conjured weapons. After that we will see what is really needed and what is not.

Adding a huge feature like this before fixing all the bugs and balancing all already available skills doesn’t sound like a good idea.

Thanks for the changes. Keep them coming!

madatom.5218:

why do people insist on giving praise for doing whats expected?

Because there are some people on the forum who are not negative whiny kids and they have no problem letting Anet know that they appreciate the changes.

Can anyone link me a video demonstrating what was possible before with RTL and cannot get it to work after the patch, please?

Thanks.

I agree with Furby. They may have been trying to fix RTL and introduced some kind of inconsistent bug. Not sure ..

It would be great if somebody can show a video of what was possible with RTL and is not possible anymore so we can try to reproduce it. That RTL “leap” in WvW done by Intigo is still working and I’ve been able to reproduce it 3 times in a row.

Intigo.1653:

You mean to tell me I can’t do this now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3livg-UwU6Y

?

I’ve tried it 60 seconds ago and had to issues. I was able to easily use RTL the same way you did.

@Occam

You should check videos by daphoenix555 and IntigoGW2 and you will realize how strong can this profession be when played by somebody experienced. Now imagine if they were able to swap weapons in combat with standard cooldown.

Lone elementalists are free kill only if they are bad or they are specced for something very specific (like glass cannon siege defender holding a staff).

Just my $0.02 how I’m initiating fights and integrating BS into it + how am I usually proceding afterwards.

I’m using Evasive Arcana in my build and I like to use (in PvE):

• Ride the Lightning
• Updraft
• Shocking Aura – swiftness & fury from traits and bit of a control
• switch into Fire – 3 might stacks from the Sigil of Battle
• Burning Speed – you will go through mobs
• dodge back – 3 more stacks of the might because of the Evasive Arcana
• Ring of Fire
• Arcane Wave – 3 more stacks of the might
• switch into Earth
• Earthquake – knockdown and 3 more stacks of might
• Magnetic Grasp – it is a leap, so it will give me Fire Aura (= fury & swiftness)
• Churning Earth

Burning Speed after Updraft and dodging back usually means I’m now directly or very close to the mob(s) and my Evasive Arcana is granting me might from the fire field and damaging mobs right on top of me.

After that I can either switch to water to heal (#5, #3 which is now buffed), activate another aura for boons (#4) then switch to fire to continue with the damage. It really depends on what is going on.

Even when initiating the fight I’m pretty flexible – I won’t Updraft if mobs are clumped together. I will include Arcane Shield activation when initiating for extra protection and damage when solo, Lighting Flash instead in Orr farming for extra “speed” or to make sure Churning Earth hits if mobs are running elsewhere. Mist Form as a “oh-kitten” button solo or Glyph of Storm for extra oomph in events.

Ele is just fun to play.

Well, once we flee and they follow, they will be ready to stomp us when taking solid shape again.

Unless you will use it to come closer to your allies and buy some time or go into your tower in WvW and heal there. It is currently one of the best downed skills in the game <3.

You may find these links useful:
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/70934-supportive-warrior-builds-think-tank/
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/71682-supportive-warrior-builds-part-ii-numerical-analysis/

Subscribed.

Just ignore random dislikes. I think some people are autodisliking when they see GS warriors. Be happy you didn’t include glass cannon thief footage, otherwise your video will be disliked into oblivion :P.

My feedback:

The montage is done well and I liked the text describing your actions. I’m always happy when the video contains some educative elements. As Defektive wrote in the youtube comment it would be great if you can create a video with the whole match or just longer footage where you can describe by text or voice what are you doing and why.

I would also recommend having montage videos dedicated to one profession if the amount of footage allows it and include the name of the profession in the title. Players of that profession will be more likely to find it and like it, but I may be wrong about that.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks for the video!

Just a note – the link to your twitch is not working – the URL contains “…”.

fractal.7039:

Note: The extra damage listed in my rotation above is from my build. If you want it let me know…

Thanks for the tips and yes, I am interested in your build & gearing strategy.

SlicGW uploaded some P/D WvW and sPvP videos. His build is in the description.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnqE7xnqsyI&feature=relmfu

Have a look here for various builds and indepth discussion: http://www.youtube.com/user/rainythief/videos?view=0 .

I found this channel yesterday and the amount of thief PvP related information is amazing.

Thanks for the guide and videos. I appreciate all the effort you put a into it.

Subscribed.

Gryz.8376:

Still looks like we are very vulnerable. Still looks like we don’t add much to the survivability of the group.

You have “spammable” combo finishers which add a lot to the survivability if utilized properly.

I do think that AoE heals, Chaos Armor, swiftness, blinds, weakness, cleansing bolts, etc. help a lot. With no recharge time on the skills it is easier to finish the combos when time is right as you are less limited in that area compared to other professions. You need other professions for most of the combo fields but is not a problem as you are in the group with other players.

You can also blind tank, make pulls easier with Scorpion Wire, rez people more safely, ..

The “problem” with thiefs is that the utility of the profession may be less obvious compared to other professions because it is often hidden in the traits and conditions/combo finisher charasteristics of the offensive abilities. You don’t see tooltips on your skills where it is written “You heal ..” or “Grant protection ..” on skills. That leads the players into the pure damage dealing mindset and frustration in the dungeons.

WvW:

If we are defending a structure in WvW and we notice some smaller groups split up from the zerg trying to destroy our siege weapons from the sides, we can jump down, kill attackers and quickly portal back up before the main zerg bashing at our gate can focus us.

I’ve seen smaller group capping supply camp, killing dolyaks and porting out before our bigger group arrived to wipe the floor with them.

When a structure is going to fall because of the zerg, other players can leave, but mesmers will try to hide and after zerg leaves they can port the group waiting on the designated spot back to the keep bypassing the gate.

Portal is pretty situational and need a preparation and communication, but it can be very effective and it is soo easy to swap your utility skill for it when required. It is not that useful in scenarios like following a big random zerg, of course.

Jumping puzzles:

When you are facing a difficult part of the jumping puzzle you can use portal to make sure you are able to return back if you fail. When doing EB/borderlands puzzles with guildies you can make them love you by providing them portal right to the chest if they fail or join the fun later.

Mongo.2490:

I am currently level 17 and so far, I think I’m playing wrong. I’m using GS+S/F currently. Firstly, I don’t have any combo fields… from what I read here, it’s a big mistake.

You have Temporal Courtain on Focus, which is a combo field, but it is light and not ethereal. Some of the utility skills you have access to are ethereal combo fields.

Make sure you have 5 points in Inspiration, because that is a great investment. Also I would suggest using Blink and Decoy as it can buy you some time and get you into better position and make your general movement faster during leveling process. On ranged encouters switch to Feedback and don’t forget to abuse the fact that it is an ethereal combo field so you can use Sword #3 to get chaos armor on your clone and also on you.

You can always use staff on tougher mobs and use GS otherwise if you like it. Using Chaos Storm defensively can boost survavibility of you and your illusions in more difficult fights.

I never get tired of seeing an Asura GS mesmer tossing that big blade onto their shoulder and running around. So adorable (and awesome)

Yes, there is something very special about them running with GS or executing Blurred Frenzy. I have cute Asura female and every time she does it I’m like this .

Thanks for the video. Great job!

Top GW2 mesmer gameplay video! Need more!