Guild Wars 2

Empyre.2531:

[…] kodash, who more often than not are the cause of blobs.

Yeah, our small to medium sized groups are actually that good, so that our opponents are forced to mob-up to stand a chance…

The skill lags are insane at times. Many of us start to have noticeable skill activation delays whenever around 50 characters clash (e.g. 25vs25 or 20vs30), and it gets worse when there are more on the field.
Though I don’t like running that many numbers, I think a mixed raid of ~40 should not cause such lags when they face similar numbers. During previous weeks this wasn’t much of an issue, but now it is. There are many new players in WvW who really enjoy it… but they also get frustrated by the skill lags. So do our core players, because it does not promote skillful play (PvP, tactics, strategy, team play, …), which WvW should always be about imho.

We’ve got queues on 2, 3 or all maps since noon which pop after about 2 to 10 minutes. I haven’t expected such a huge influx from PvE, but here it is. Hopefully the achievement hunt is over soon… (not beeing rude here, but it sucks when the guys playing WvW exclusively cannot join any map)
Our weekly Jumping Puzzle event was a mess because some mesmers couldn’t join the map, and players couldn’t switch maps in time. Also it seems as if it’s ganking time in JPs again (haven’t experience that in a while).

Wemil.7052:

hello??? RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDA? wake wake.

One really has to wonder why some players don’t feel home on certain servers any longer…

[WdR] from Kodash recently moved to Dreadfall Bay. Next match up we intend to progress to Faithleap.

Perhaps http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Sigil_of_Battle?

Hey there!

Since it will take you some more months to improve the guild system in GW2 further, I’d like to suggest a small but effective improvement to the formatting of the “Message of the Day” feature in the guild dialog (thank you for the new edit function, this was very helpful!) by changing the font to a mono-space (aka fixed width) font.

We have a guild homepage and a calendar on it, but we also like to give our members and guests a fast overview about our guild’s schedule and events in-game. I recently changed the format to sth. like

Mon - 19:00 guild raid
    - 22:00 music hour
Tue - 19:30 roaming time
Thu - 20:00 guild missions
    - 23:00 night raid
Fri - 19:30 reset preparations
    - ~20:00 weekly reset

Another possibility to help us out here, would be an in-game scheduler with proper formatting and some kind of notification mechanism, maybe…?

Devitz.2136:

Hehe guys, this LNM guy is raid leader on ELE STAFF. I think it says enough.

Yeah, let’s all roll the same builds and group setups, led by a VTP-Guardian. Melee train ftw!

Anyways… My guildees and I like this match up so far (at least during our main times). Only bad thing while solo-roaming is the constant adding of Vizunahs (many great opponents so far from both sides, btw!). I don’t blame them – guess most of them are bored and are happy to find some red tags while travelling the map. At least I can try some new stuff for disengaging from big numbers…

Monkeymonger.9235:

FURY […] is looking for an opportunity to gvg.

Are you interested in 5 golems vs 5 golems?

Sequoia Mint.4803:

Im sure i saw you guys on JS tonight. TUP ran pretty much to oursleves. but if im not mistaken Wdr were running with some other kodash? Hmmmm

We started with around 25 peers at 5:30 pm and ran apart from our other groups (another guild group and the public lead). An hour later we were between 15 and 20 when some organized friendlies joined; Except from two random collaborations at Longview and Godsword with [FoF] and the clustering at Bay keep (which mostly affected Jade) we ran apart from the zergs and other groups.
We always try to, except for when we can’t have fun because of too many enemies in one spot, defending one of our structures, or whenever there is no other map lead available. I think clustering during a defense is okay, but we have a bad history with T1 – T3ish servers just riding the wxp blob trains, even if they already have the upper hand. I wish for this match to be different from such demotivational weeks.

Thanks for the explanation. I know of TUP, VcY, VII, Wipe and others to be good guild groups with lots of great small to big scale players. Our group doesn’t stand a chance against you in an even encounter, so it becomes even less of a challenge for both of us whenever either side has a great advantage in numbers.

What I’ve seen so far in this match up are mostly huge WXP trains (also from Kodash), many Arrow Carts (they once called Kodash the “home of arrow carts” – guess the ACs found a new home on Jade), some perplexity trolls (still not nerfed…) and some mindless night capping. Hopefully it’ll get better during the week.

I wonder what might have happened to AG – I mostly see your prominent guild groups stacked with a huge number of non-related players. It makes running smaller numbers pretty hard and frustrating because the even fights are lacking and the steamrolling increases.
If you are holding events for your community this is all fine (some guilds of my realm do this as well), I hope for some action with less than 20 guys and gals in one place during the week though.

XRKUN.1782:

some german nonames

May I suggest to you to not measure things by the homogeneity of guild-tags? /reserved

Jonathan Sharp wrote about plans to improve the combat log:

JonathanSharp.7094:

Further down the Road

• We’re reworking the combat log to make it more easily used. This will involve help from a ton of departments, but it will help every player in the game. By providing you better combat information, you’ll be able to better make tweaks to your build, and you’ll be able to better adjust your play to deal with difficult encounters.

I hope they’ll introduce sth like they already show to you if you die in sPvP plus a historic list view of skills, stats, boons and conditions on you. I guess it will just take some more years for anet to implement it…

Oxe.6142:

If you’re claiming to be the first, I’ll ask you if you ever spend gold or karma. The obvious answer is yes, you do, just like everyone else. People spending time and effort in the ruins are playing the game, just like anyone else and they are just as entitled to the same rewards. They should get them.

Of course I like me some shinies. When I run around in the middle of the map though, I know that I don’t get any stuff from it other than some loot bags and wxp from kills, and this is totally fine. Nice fights are the reward which pay me for being there. If I want / need gold, there are easier and faster ways than WvW; at least my repair bills are covered by loot bags.

nielscase.6258:

Then go sPvP, or ask them to add an sPvP mode where you are not bound to the current restrictions of that system. Do not however try to bring your sPvP kitten into the middle of WvW.

What has my post to do with sPvP? /shrug
Most of the guys I meet in ruins enjoy the fights there for the sake of fighting, and also being able to contribute to their realm’s performance in a way that is fun for them (solo and small scale pvp). There just is no need for extra incentives.

The ruins are places designed for players who don’t care about rewards too much, and who are looking for like-minded and challenging small scale fights. If you want rewards, you capture structures and kill dolyaks and sentries. Please don’t try to change everything to suit your personal demands — it’s just not for you if you don’t like it yet.

If you don’t want to waste more stat points in healing power than neccessary (regarding the coefficient on your skills and traits), you should aim for a value which is divisible by 200 without remainder.
Cleansing Wave and Healing Ripple scale by 1.0, Soothing Mist by 1/20, Cone of Cold by 8/25. Regeneration scales by 1/8 of your healing power. LCM of the fractions is 200.

Any value with a reminder means, you wasted some points (due to rounding down) which you could’ve spend somewhere else.

Personally, if I run around in my support build, I aim for ~800, which gives a clean 230 hp via Regeneration, 120 hp via Soothing Mist, and around 2.1k hp via Cleansing Wave (2x if you also use Arcane Evasion) and Healing Ripple. Cone of Cold gives ~1k and Ether Renewal heals for up to almost 6k (Signet of Restoration would get me 282 HP per spell).

If I’m on a killing spree, I like to aim for 600 healing power, but depending on my gear, sometimes I only run 400 and can do just as fine against most enemies, whereas sometimes an additional 20 HP per second are the thing that keeps you alive / allows you to keep pressure on an enemy.

hihey.1075:

Haha! And you still haven’t met the new Dire Stat LB Warriors!

Think I did – but they were never alone but ran with other condition heavy specs (condi necro, another LB warrior, scepter condi eles, troll staff mesmers, …).
I hope they’ll tone down condition damage or ease of application… Just look at those numbers!!1oneelven

DanyK.3842:

had my fair share of cross server roleplay

Were you the almost-nude norn ele with arah wings, running around AG borderlands last night?

hihey.1075:

chuuuuucky.8532:

instead of forming formation spray sausage and run around like headless chicken.

Could you draw a picture of that? I have a hard time trying to figure it out in my head

It’s a word-by-word translation of a german phrase describing diarrhea. English for runaways…

The match is pretty enjoyable so far, I think. The general small scale fights are of so so level, but overall better than the fights and duels against PS and SFR. Yesterday however, most of my encounters while solo roaming were FotM sPvP S/P thieves (hurr, durr, I can spam evades!) and tPvP bunker condition builds (in groups of 3+, hurray – 3.5k HP per second by conditions alone, after dodging the first condition spam wave and cleansing the second… so much fun in that…).
Also with 50+% Crit Chance not a single Fire Grab or Churning Earth hit for a crit (and i used both skills many times), got flamed for disengaging when 2 adds jumped into a fight, and later got stuck in the ground south of Overlook ruins while kiting a group of 4 [lion], which then accused me of hacking – Not my day, I guess…

Tekyn.5376:

IMHO they should remove commanders altogether. It would solve SO MANY problems with the current state of WvW.

If it wouldn’t be solely used as a rally spot for unorganized players, many players on our server would tag up for easy and fast map-wide organization. Currently – even with voice chat communication – it happens far too often that groups run into each other. If you have several u-cakes on the map, you can spread out more / anticipate where your own group is needed.

Imho the idea of a “commander mastery” line is great, but the OP’s suggestions favour zerg-play instead of resourceful and organized gameplay. I’d welcome such masteries like:

- ~5 pts: access to /supplyinfo & /squadinfo
– ~10 pts: increased radius of /supplyinfo and ability to invite near players to your squad
– ~25 pts: access to alternative tag-colours / shapes
– ~100 – map-wide markers, visible to everyone
– ~200 pts: players in fortifications which your guild has claimed, gain a non-stackable +25 stat bonus to all primary stats and condi-dmg and healing power if you are near that structure and having a squad.

Hebril Amolebin.9817:

And it comes from guild like yours? honestly you just run every time you see CoN or other of the big guilds…

Nah, I don’t think so, Tim.
Whenever we raid with our 10 to 20 guys and gals, we jump into guild groups and blobs alike. When you see our backs, it most probably is because we haven’t seen you yet, or because we have better things to do.

Hebril Amolebin.9817:

And even if you kill a single struggler from the big guild, it is probably because we run team builds,not for 1v1 or small scale, if you catch glamour mesmer or shout guardian ect with small group or stun lock warrior you can kill it.

Please don’t give me the “team build” talk. This is just bullkitten. I know most classes and tried different builds, so I know what they are capable of. If you cannot extend your life time (e.g. to get reinforced by your guildees) by timed dodges and skill usage, this is just bad game play and has nothing to do with a supportive build.
Also: Who brings a hammer/mace+shield warrior to a guild raid of 20+?

Hebril Amolebin.9817:

btw we in CoN run 25-30 on maps so? we blob?

Nope. But you certainly outnumber every guild group on Kodash by 10 to 20 players…

Arcade.8901:

So, you think if a Shout War can’t kill a fotm spvp Mace,Shield/GS War, it’s the shouter’s fault ? Get your facts together, with those fotm 1v1 builds you ll be able to scare the cows of or leech the wexp from your already struggling blobs.

Except: None of us runs sPvP or any kind of fotm build… Also:

I’d acknowledge if you know how to defend yourself by your movement and the usage of your skills – but I’m sorry to bring this to you: most of you just suck at fighting in this game.

It’s okay to miss a dodge every once in a while – happens to the best of us. It’s another story if you’re unable to use snares and stun breaks, and to evade soft and hard cc at any time of the fight. Just standing there and waiting for the raid lead to tell one, when to dodge and where the nasty sections are, probably?

Arcade.8901:

Btw i can twist the fact and place it like this, Kodash players are just bad, they getting 4-7k Earth shakers, they need to change bers to smth else.

maeggle.6021:

(Before you bring it to me: Me and my guildees are suckers, too, but we don’t claim to be anything else anyways).

Reading and understanding are two different things, which work great if they go along…

Take it as a yes — just depends on the goodwill of a.net if they let us play wuvwuv and build some golems by then.

(No offense in my previous post, just a cynical comment on the numbers SFR is able to field atm)

Wolfheart.1938:

I’m up for a 2 vs 2, can’t gather any more than this.

This coming from a Seafarer…

We’ll sit out the obvious hot fixes on patch day and would like to invite you to join us at Desolation borderlands in the southern or south-western ruins at around 20:00 GMT.

Dear fellow desolation players, if one side outnumbers the other two match participants, one should think about the possibility to use every chance to kitten up the superior force (e.g. reset their way point in bay when we open every gate for you), instead of getting wiped again and again from the other sufferer (e.g. in hills).

SFR appears to be nothing more than a huge pile of not so great players and mostly self-proclaimed pseudo-elitist guild zergs, blobbing the kitten out of everything.
It is funny how easy all of your “top” guilds’s players die when they get seperated from their zergs. I’d acknowledge if you know how to defend yourself by your movement and the usage of your skills – but I’m sorry to bring this to you: most of you just suck at fighting in this game. (Before you bring it to me: Me and my guildees are suckers, too, but we don’t claim to be anything else anyways).

Don’t get me wrong… I had some great and informative duels and small scale fights with both Seafarers and Desolates, but unfortunately none of those opponents had a tag of the oh so glory SFR and Deso “core” guilds on them.

Btw: Still looking for a 5vs5 GvG (golems vs golems) tomorrow night – Is any group of SFR or Deso interested in some fun?

Covis.6037:

@maeggle i havent seen kodash zergs below 40 except VII , where are your so called small groups ? :p and im not talking about solo roamers / camp flippers.

Our PuG Zergs contain lots of rangers and mesmers – maybe all the minions fool your eyes -, but the ones I saw today on Kodash BL had between 20 and 40 at most.

We dont have any mercenary-like guild groups which run group builds for 20+ on Kodash, but mostly zergs of pick-ups (another reason why this match up will be really boring on either side). Your best chance is to watch out for [EoW] if you’re looking for a guild raid of 20+. Maybe you run into a ball of [AofT], but they’re a bunch of noobs. If you stumble upon a bigger group of [WdR], don’t be afraid – many of our guys and gals are newbies and are on the same skill level as some of the SFRs I stomped this afternoon.

If we’re talking about small scale as in 5 to 10 (or if you really want to stretch the term, make it 15 tops), you may be surprised about the [Buka] or [MS] guys, and also about our small scalers from [ZdD], [NSG], [WdR] and what not.

You can find most of our small scale groups taking camps to attract enemy forces, doing sneak attacks, or just frolicking over the maps. When the new capture points arrive, your best chances to meet them / us will be near the new ruins.

Apart from that: Is any group of 5 interested in a GvG (Golems vs Golems) for an initiation event in the south-western arena?

Take whatever you want and work out the synergies for yourself. Really, there is no objective answer to your initial question of what works best together. Just play the class you like the way you like, communicate and develop strategies – That’s it.

If guardian and mobility is an issue for you, you may try a S+x/GS meditation build.

Might have to do with Vizunah not beeing the evil dominating force of blobonlyton anymore, and SFR now being (again) the melting pot for inapt elitists and emote spamming kiddos (does not typify every Seafarer, but the ones that stand out)…

We did run in a small group of 1 to 5 peers yesterday at reset and came across several guild clusters of SFR as well as Desolation which roflstomped soloers and ran over PUGs of 30ish with twice the numbers. Whenever I saw our “zergs” they might have matched one of your guild groups numberwise; but you wanted to give them a challenge and rallyed all your guild groups in the garrison. And this is how the lag party began…

Weli.4568:

it was awesome cap.

You mean lag…

Dawdler.8521:

You have to do razor sharp cuts into the melee train to reduce their strength

Most guild groups get bored quickly / give up and try to find easier targets. The Kodash PUG Cloud™ does that since head start.

Look at that aweful ele’s stuff.

Well, your best bet as a guild group is to switch out the guardians’ hammers with great swords and use sth else than skill #1 and #2 sometimes hint, hint.

Fun stuff aside, I really hope there will someday be some viable alternative to the 2/3 melee train for (somewhat) organized raid groups. It really hurts variety in WvW, this being the easiest to play and strongest composition for groups of ~20+.

I’d like to thank all participants for a very nice match up. It offered both many opportunities and challenges for almost every play style I like in WvW. Aurora has many awesome and talented mid- to large-scale guild groups, and Vizunah is a prime example of – what I think – Arenanet thinks WvW should be like: players playing together for their realm, very organized, sometimes a bit too “casual” (as in: players don’t know their tools). I enjoyed fighting you guys when we weren’t severely outnumbered. This also goes to all the AG groups I and my mates encountered during the week.

Also many thanks for all the nice and challenging duels on Vizu borderlands this afternoon, it was a really refreshing experience compared to some of our last match ups. I wish you all the best! May the holy spirit of match making be with you

Lag Party at Kodash borderlands… have fun…

SFR – where small scale roaming still matters

As a wuvwuver who enjoys almost every aspect of wvw (be it small scale, guild group, zerg or zone-wide coordination), I have strong concerns about the type of stat bonuses given to the server having the bloodlust buff on them.
There are plenty of – in my opinion – reasonable suggestions, e.g. give +mf and +gold, or limit the bonuses to owned structures only (just like the guild claim buffs work).

I really like the points on stomp mechanic, because it may provide further incentives for small scale fights (though, I can see zerging down small groups and then stomp them won’t be that hard anyways).

Yes to buff mechanics, No to buffed stats.

Silent Shino.7239:

if it wasn’t enough that Kodash got involved with SM, they even did suicidal charges into the center to try and stop us taking it.

Such is the reason for my love for Kodash. Most of us really don’t care about PPT as we drew the short straw during in over 9,000 matches anyways.

We have much fun in this match on Kodash BL since reset. Vizunah is very organized and fields huge numbers which we neither can put up, nor can we organize them in such a way.
It is not my / our preferred play style, but it is a nice experience to fight for and defend our paper garrison a whole evening, night and morning. Vizunah runs in blobs, yes. But they also have some solo and small group roamers as well as guild groups running alone at times. This is something, Elona and Vizunah are better at than e.g. RS or PS right now, where you can only meet 25+ guild groups running together. Their skills may vary, but at least there is some variation to the common guild groups of 25ish to 35ish.
Also, Vizu offers real sieges (yes, they also golem rush, but who doesn’t?), which is a blast compared to other servers. They also did not run on Kodash BL too many times. Maybe they thought we are easy targets, but 4+ hours of continous fights (without breaks) speak for itself.

I don’t wish to fight you anytime soon again, though, because it is exhausting… really. But I got my share of fun out of it until now, so let’s get the best out of it. Happy tagging!

That’s the RvR / competetive play spirit… yeay!

AydenStar.4216:

Stand your Ground, Lemongrass poultry soup, Super Runes of Melandru, Super Runes of the Soldier, and so on. Good for WvW? Do they need to be nerfed? Or do crowd control conditions need a buff?

CC conditions need a nerf, if you ask me (maybe a short temporal invulnerability to heavy cc after stun break?). Imho it’s dumb how spammable all this becomes for some builds and how others lack effective counters. Some professions have only few (viable) stun breaks, which are mostly followed by the next long stuns (e.g. a hammer + mace/shield warrior), let alone blocks or stability spells (which only last for a few seconds), which are very rare on any other than the heavy classes.
Same goes for conditions. They are mostly easily spammable and spreadable (and in case of well-specced condimancers even unblockable most of the time), and once cleansed or removed, they are applied really fast again (especially in fights of less and up to around 15, and more so when such a group does not run too many anti-condition-support-builds). Buffing condition duration is very easy for condition builds, effective reduction comes at high cost for most professions.

Guardians provide nice team condi removal and conversion via shouts, soldier runes and defensive traits, and bring some major support buffs to the table, which most other classes are lacking. Therefore it would make sense to me to bring other classes more in line with the benefits of guardians for team fights, than asking to reduce their effectiveness or the benefits of buff food and equipment which does not offer many benefits in fights without heavy condition application.

I hope for some nice fights during the week. Atm it looks as if Elona could field some major numbers, which they were lacking during the last weeks, which probably puts us – again – in the situation of beeing outnumbered constantly.
At least we saw several ER guilds not running in zone blobs during reset night on ER borderlands (at most 2x 20ish groups plus pick-ups when defending something), which gives me hope for some (almost) even fights during the week. We did not see that many Auguries last night, but that should not mean anything. I’d be glad to give you guys some nice fights this week, as well.

Been having a bad experience from the last week’s match; let’s hope none of our communities gets too excited and begins to run any sort of lame, never-ending WXP train with everyone aboard.

Maskaganda.2043:

cleanses and -durations food/gear aren’t enough? ^^

No, they obviously are not. If we have to use Runes of Melandru and Condition duration reduction food, this should tell one, there might be some serious balancing issue.

Condition removal usually are on high cool down and cleanses are on high cooldown and self-centered for the most part, wheras condition stacking is mostly AE, and further spreading is pretty easy and fast for some classes like engineers, necromancers and rangers (if they spec for it).

kiwituatara.6053:

I don’t think poison affects regeneration, it only affects rejuvenation and heals.

Poison reduces the healing power attribute by 33%, which means that one’s regeneration boon does not tick for 130 + (1/8 * Healing Power) but for 130 + (1/12 * Healing Power), thus if you would run 800 healing power your regeneration boon would go from 230 down to 196 (-34 HP per second). It also does not fully effect the healing spells but just the coefficient for the healing power (which makes the warrior regeneration signet extremely strong against poison, because your base HP refill is at 392 HP per second).

There is no pure condition meta (as in “everybody runs it because it is OP on its own). Many organized WvW groups are assembled of a melee train of shout guardians with either crit-AH-builds or regeneration/block-builds, as well as CC/shout heal warriors and sometimes some plague necs (which most of the time run pretty glassy well builds, which are thrown into the enemy just before switching to either death shroud or plague form). Well, this was the old guild group meta, to be precise, and we called it the CC-meta.
During the last weeks and months there was an uprise of condimancers in such guild trains. Conditions (damaging conditions as well as CC conditions) are pretty nasty things right now, because they are easy to apply, easily reapplied, hit really hard (especially the classes which have to spec in vitality thus reducing the number of alternative viable builds) and are hard to counter the smaller your own group gets (less condition removal). A condimancer has around 1,800 base condition damage – add some might stacks and we are at ~2,675 condition damage. Now let’s take just burning and some bleed stacks, which are easily achievable on single targets in group fights of 15vs15 and above: Burning ticks for 428 + 1/4 * cond-dmg, that is 778 HPps at 1,800 and 996 HPps at 2,675. Now add some bleed stacks, each ticking for 42 + 1/20 * cond-dmg, equals 132 HPps or 176 HPps… per stack. Let’s assume 20 stacks, which are very plausibly values with some bleed stacking and some more epidemics – 3,525 HPps plus the burning, plus some poison, etc. Up to 4,500 HPps (and some more if you also use poison, confusion, torment and retaliation), unaffected by armor, regeneration (which with 1,500 healing power would regenerate 380 HPps… Who the kitten runs 1,500 healing power in WvW?) and what not.
All this can be applied from far away and mostly instant (”Kiting me? Idc, I’m a necro!“), cannot be countered by blocks (”unblockable" my kitten, is hard to dodge (most condition necros are in the back line and please don’t tell me you can see everything in a clash of 15vs15, also staff marks, boon corruption, signet of malice and epidemic are instant and AoE). At least, most heavy direct damage requires something like melee range (130 units) – condition specced necros are well behind their melees at 600 to 1,200 units – kiting the melee train to get to the casters is – in the age of heavy CC- and condition-spam not always viable. If you run anything else then the CC-/condition-train, you are at a heavy disadvantage, regardless of how well you use your group’s synergies and the player’s abilities.

Also: We can reduce direct damage with weakness. Is there something against condition damage? shrug
(yeah, i know you can use blinds, but this is very unreliable against a stacked group)

20 omegas, oh my… You want to WXP-train hard, you gotta pay for it. Seems fair.

Back in the old days™, we used rams (with a limit of 5 in closer proximity), catapults (same as for rams), arrow carts, ballistas and trebuchets to siege an enemy for some epic battles. Funny thing is: Except for trebuchets, they won’t despawn on server reboot…

xbaunx.6438:

I’m a long time staff player who has just picked up the scepter with a serious effort to apply it in all modes of play. S/D seems like the only answer to the Elementalist problem of combining long and short range.

You can go meelee range with staff, and you can take d/d to mid range. If you want to play s/d effectively, you have to constantly switch between range and meelee (even more meelee than d/d at times) for might stacking and effective use of your control abilities (earth-4, air-3, earth-3 will probably miss if casted on the move or from far away) and high damage skills (fire-5 and earth-5).

xbaunx.6438:

Considering PvE, PvP and WvW, in your opinion, is scepter our most versatile main-hand weapon?

I find every main hand weapon we can use a.t.m. to be versatile in its own domain.

xbaunx.6438:

The only weakness I can see is the lack of AoE. Not that scepter is completely bereft of AoE, but it doesn’t compare to staff’s and d/d with its pbAoE. How do you compensate for lost AoE?

My experience with scepter so far is, that you use it in situations where you either are facing single targets which you want to burst down, or you use it as support to achieve area denial or high area pressure in small groups (concerning WvW and PvP).

xbaunx.6438:

Lastly, the auto attacks in fire and earth are almost entirely condition damage. I find myself not even using them in most situations because we have enough direct damage elsewhere. In S/D, is it worth it to build anything into condition damage to make use of earth/fire auto attacks—or should they just be ignored/used circumstantially?

Ele condition damage is accumulated with might stacks and “by accident” (e.g. FGS), but should not be your primary focus. Get good sustain with defensive attributes, raise your power, crit dmg and crit chance (use the fury and might boons via boon duration and traits), and there is not so much left for additional condition damage.

Fire-1, btw, is nice to set an enemy on fire for your fire grab, and earth-1 puts a lot of bleeds on your enemy which a friendly necromancer will gladly spread across the enemy’s team mates.

Sorry, WoT incoming…

Primernova.5791:

I have played Necro, Ranger, Thief and Warrior and all of them have the close range and long range weapon swaps

I don’t think a meelee-range-approach is a good way to pick weapons. You should pick weapons (and gears and traits respectively) which suit your play style.
As an ele almost every possible weapon or weapon set provides several tools to either get in range or out of it. As a D/D elementalist, e.g., you got many gap closers (one of them got ultra nerfed, which needs to be rolled back asap) and soft and hard cc which you can either use offensively or defensively; Also most skills have a range of 300+, whereas meelees only hit within 130 units. You should use this to your advantage.
Same goes for S/D, which lacks some gap closers / exit strategies, but offers decent mid-range skills for good burst damage with some nice defensive gimmicks (extra armor, blinds and several area denial skills) and neat ways to raise your damage numbers via might stacking.
Foci provide us with awesome damage mitigation skills which shine in groups but is balanced by the limited mobility compared to other weapon sets.
Staff provides good sustained but slow and predictable damage, awesome support and CC and should not be left out in groups which are able to use combo fields – all that at a range of 1200 units (and more, if you know how to).

You pick your favourite play style, you live by its limits. This is how every build in this game should go. Your suggestion would lead to totally unbalanced stuff like scepter-fire + staff-water and oh-dagger-earth: water field + 2 blasts via fire + 2 blasts via earth + evasive arcana + arcane wave. trololol
It would make balancing even harder, and we all know how careful a.net sometimes is when they “balance” skills…

btw: Most effective builds for other classes combine 2 meelee sets or 2 mid-range and range sets: Warriors with hammer/mace+shield or gs/s+h, guardians with hammer/mace+shield or staff/scepter+focus, thieves with sword+dagger/sword+pistol and so on. You have to use your weapon and utility skills wisely to counter your enemy’s strategy. That’s that.

Kodiak.3281:

Eles live off by relying on mobility and healing but They reduce our mobility and healing with zero compensation

This is one of the issues I see as well. Due to some – what has been seen as super effective – mechanisms used in certain builds, other builds and attemps at making this class work got nerfed into the ground. What bothers me personally, are the long cooldowns for our most effective spells (which also bug out at times – how many firegrabs did you miss today?). They are area effects for the most part, I take their reduced single target impact or the longer cooldowns for granted. But please revisit some of them – Either by making their effects safer to land (fire grab, gust, dust devil – even if you position yourself well, those skills are likely to bug out) or lower their cooldowns by some seconds (e.g. fire grab, updraft, windborne speed – or add vigor to its benefits, if one condition got removed).

From a PvP PoV it is much easier to spec offensively for other classes without getting instagibbed due to reliable blocks, CC on lower cooldowns and better base damage output. As an elementalist we have to rely on boons like protection, regeneration, swiftness and vigor to compensate for our lack of base defense, we need to stack might and fury to get some not-so-meh damage numbers, and we must use evades, displacement, invulnerability, stun breaks, blinds cripple, chill and immobilize to mitigate damage because we cannot eat anything (direct damage as well as condition damage).
That sounds pretty solid. The rate at which we are able to use some of these abilities does not compare to the rate at which we need them against good opponents. Also, we have to hope our more effective skills will work (not getting dodged, interrupted or blinded or just miss it for no apparent reason), otherwise every other class is at a logic advantage when playing against us because of our high cooldowns and our low base sustain. (I think every elementalist using his boons knows how easy we melt to condition pressure and boon ripping, as well as soft and hard CC).
Currently we have a condition-heavy meta and the CC-heavy meta is on the uprise. Both are effective counters against elementalists playing with boon-support, and this is one of the big reasons my ele feels pretty week right now. Stun breaks, endurance and condition removes are forced on long cooldown, but oh wait – there is some more CC and condition pressure on super low cooldowns while we hit like wet noodles (gimmickery builds with low sustain excluded), thus being not able to finish an enemy off before his cooldowns pop up again.

We were on AM borderlands yesterday, starting off with 3 guys, meeting some old friends from [CE] and [ADAC] (both transferred from Kodash to Abaddon), getting more and more momentum and finally taking hills. Since then it went “up-hill”, and our guys got to siege it up and fortify the kitten out of, still having the outnumbered buff. Abaddon players were free kills, even when facing them 1vs3-5 at times; Later on we flipped camps with 3 and had some challenging fights against the odds, and still won most of them (AM players, y u so bad?). It was a blast, meeting some guys from Aurora, especially from [TUP] and [team] (that CC-warrior’s damage output, wtf! If you read this, I’d be glad to get to know your warrior’s build). You wiped the floor with us in 3vs3 and even 3vs4 situations – Very nice team play and also individual skill, which my group and I were looking for for such a long time.

Unfortunately you guys don’t seem to be able to stage big huge numbers like AM or Kodash (at times) – Speaking for myself and my fellows, you are the ones, who make this match worthwhile for us. You offer the challenge in small to midscale fights and skirmishes, which AM could not provide yet. Please keep it up!

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I’d like to thank all the Baruchians for the nice fights on Kodash BL this evening. Special praises to [Scnd], who gave us some tough fights and showed great sportsmanship on several occasions.
I’m really sorry we formed a blob from time to time, but there was no other lead on the map, and I needed the tag for in-fight coordination, so naturally we attracted more and more Kodashians…

What I did not like, were your break-ins in our third, when we tried to open hills – Everytime we went to hills, a scout announced some enemies at our west or east tower, and our pugs got distracted, which led to us getting wiped by Elona ACs and their blob.

Hopefully we can have a pug commander on the map during our next guild raid. Meanwhile wish you all the best, and again: sorry for the occasional blobbing.

genowefapigwa.5769:

You are going to meet more small teams tomorow.

cheers Are we speaking of “SFR small teams” (i.e. groups of 4, accidentally running along with 10 other such groups) or groups of 5 to 15, having fun together without any meta-builds and stuff?

Lemoncurry.2345:

Kodash lost a lot of people.

Finally we may drop some more ranks in the next weeks and will probably be matched against servers which we are more likely to be a competitive enemy for. Currently we neither offer great zerg vs zerg (looking at Deso zergs) nor a decent amount of guild groups of 20 or more (looking at PS guild groups like GH or FG). Last match against guilds and small groups of Gandara were, what I think would be best for us right now (though I really wonder where all the players, who caused queues last week, are right now)

Daftendirekt.5280:

Frustration about? It’s just the truth, as i said always funny wipe those blobs with few people…keep it up

What is shown on your screen is a zerg of ~35 players. Please let us refrain of using the word “blob” for what was long-before called a mindless zerg. I’d like to suggest to use “blob” exclusively for clusters of players, which cause (severe) server lag, or we have to find another phrase for such misbehaviour anytime soon… :/

Simonoly.4352:

but I recommend at least strafing a bit, maybe using a dodge every now and again

This is hilarious (even if we are on the same server), and I’m gladly confirming that we got many such players on the fields atm.

We ran with 12 today on FSP borderlands (there was nothing to do on Kodash BL ), but couldn’t get too many even fights. Mainly got rushed by big zergs or ran over small groups and many thieves ourselves. Our performance wasn’t that great either, lacking discipline and strength in fights. Hope this was a one time low today. Sorry we didn’t offer too much of a good fight tonight.

I want to give a shout out to [PunK] for that nice veil chain on south west gate of garrison. We saw you far away and turned around, but it was too late by then.

[Yarr] – I like your guild name, and hope I will get a chance to get revenge for the chase around ruins, when meeting some of you alone.

The zerg of [TAC], [INT] and [CNTK] gave me some giggles – There were red tags from bay to garrison without any gaps, when we just wanted to pass north. Met some [TAC] later, who were really bad, when roaming alone. If you don’t know your build too well, you probably should get to know it better, first. Might prevent you from getting rofl-stomped. Recommendation for your thieves: Get some toughness. It’s pathetic to spec into zerker if you cannot mitigate any damage. At least I didn’t have to chase invisible stuff around cause it gets downed in 2 seconds… sigh