Guild Wars 2

Alright, thanks for clarifying this for me guys!

Yeah, after reading all of your posts, I realize that the only way I think the minstrel looks amazing is on a human female mesmer with the chaos of lyssa. Other than that, its a nice skin but just average at best.

So I will go for the meteorlogicus even though I won’t be able to use it on as many builds as with a focus. I just know that its going to be a much longer journey. My goal for a legendary is to get one by the end of the month. For someone with only 200 gold and all of his clovers/gift of mastery, 250 ectos and 90ish of each T6 mat, do you think this is a realistic goal?

neonreaper.4805:

Having made the Minstrel and another Legendary, I would advise against Minstrel. You may get more use out of Minstrel but you won’t feel like your efforts are rewarded with something truly special. I’d rather take a stats hit and get a much cheaper and better looking exotic, if I had to do it over again.

I’d much rather have an AWESOME looking legendary item that I don’t use as much than a lame one that I use all the time.

Cost of Minstrel isn’t as high and I can see why that has a strong appeal, but, keep in mind everyone who sees you with Minstrel is going to say “ah, that sucks”.

Thanks for the input. While I personally like the Minstrel, I do realize that it has a very poor reputation amongst the player community, and it sucks that I could get hate for that. And I’d say I really do love meteorlogicus even though I can’t use squeeze it onto as many builds as I could with a focus. So maybe you’ve convinced me to go for the scepter. I’d probably grind out the fractal focus skin as a counterpart for it….

Anyway for meteorlogicus. I don’t know where to begin to get that much gold. It worries me greatly, but it seems so worth it to me. If anyone has any advice on how to defray the cost of meteorlogicus, let me know (besides the typical run CoE erryday for cores/lodes).

I main elementalist and also have a level 80 thief mesmer and necro. For my last 80 I was thinking about guardian or engineer. What sort of impressions do you have about your class that can help me make this choice? I’d probably mainly use it for pve and wvw. Also what weapons are best in each situation? Scepter/focus seems like a really cool combo as does greatsword, but I’m not sure about sword or hammer or staff.

Csele.1647:

Minstrel is more useful.. since its used in meta for guard , mes , necro , ele and is cheap

Meteorlogicus.. is nice for ele.. but you are on hammer fgs or icebow most of the time… its good for solo guardian lupicus? and conditionmancer lol.. or maitrin mesmer… i made meteorlogicus but it was my 7° legendary.. so i didnt care much that it wasnt that useful and the new footsteps looks cool (bigger than my asura ele xd) and scepter is terrible for mesmer specially now that are the worst dps class..

Thanks for your input. And yeah I only run scepter mesmer on condi builds for wvw/pvp. I rarely run mesmer in pve at all, I basically just use ele for all pve. So I guess in in terms of usability, the minstrel would see more use. Its just that meteorlogicus looks so kitten awesome :/

Hello, just a quick question about fractals.

Can you do multiple fractal runs per day and still get a chance for rings ascended armor and fractal skins? Or is that bonus chest linked to character? And would that still increase your personal reward level? Because if this is the case I might start running multiple fractals per day because I’ve grown bored of most of the explorable dungeons, and I have a yearning to acquire more fractal skins (I only have GS right now), and ascended armor/weap drops would be nice too.

I’ve been working steadily towards a legendary for about a year now (made the gift of mastery last july), and I’ve faced the problem of constantly switching which legendary I wanted, especially as I made and grew to main different characters. I main elementalist, but I also play mesmer as my original main and most often played alt, and I also dabble in necro from time to time and may roll a guardian in the future. My problem is that I can’t decide which of the two legendaries listed above that I should focus my efforts on, so I’m trying to see what other people advise. I’ll probably try to make them both one day, but I need to know which I should try to craft first.

Meteorlogicus: I think this scepter is by far the best looking in the game, and I planned on making it for some time before storm’s price increased by 5 times thanks to its visual update and the wardrobe change (which is sad because I liked it even before then, and should’ve tried to get the pre then, but I was poor and unfocused at the time). I occasionally use scepter on ele in LH might stacking builds in PvE (which is tough for me in PUGs) and I frequently use it in pvp/wvw roaming (staff for zergs) in a bursty fresh air set up. On mesmer I frequently play condition builds, either PU or lockdown, which use scepter and either torch or focus (focus for lockdown condition). On necro I don’t use scepter much since I usually go for power/wells, but if I roll a guardian I’d probably use scepter a lot as my primary ranged weapon. The drawbacks of making this weapon are that it costs almost twice as much as the minstrel, and I probably wouldn’t use it on my D/F ele builds that I run with in fractals (obviously lol) and for my power mesmer builds.

The Minstrel: I really do like the minstrel’s appearance even though its effects are more modest than most legendaries, the only thing I’m concerned about is that making it would feel more about instant gratification and less about the best possible end result. As mentioned before I use focus a lot in ele builds, as I run D/F in pve a lot and S/F in pvp a lot besides staff, and for mesmer, I know I could use focus in every single build other than PU, because its great as a general purpose mobility/utility weapon and and gives a lot of possibilities with lockdown. I also use focus in a lot of my chill and power necro builds and when I roll a guardian I’m sure I could use focus on a build.

Anyway, my concerns are about which of these I can afford in the near future, and which would see the most use. I feel like focus would see more use and would definetly be cheaper, whereas the scepter would be more expensive and probably used a bit less, but I like the skin a bit better. I only have 200 gold right now, and I’ve been flipping short/medium term items and I can usually get about 10 gold a day, maybe more as my wealth steadily increases. Any advice or suggestions on this matter would be greatly appreciated!

Blix.8021:

When you invite a ranger it’s like a 50/50 chance whether you get a useless bearbow idiot or a decent ranger. When you invite a warrior at least you know he’ll probably melee.

Theres some truth in this but its not always absolute. I’ve seen a cleric/knight’s gear rifle warrior in a level 20ish fractal once :/

Anyway it saddens me that stuff like this happens, but if they really are a group using archaic party organization (guard/war/mes) then they’re not worth your time. I get a lot of kitten from warriors because I main ele in dungeons. They don’t know that ele is pretty much the top DPS in the game (this is proven, in part due to conjure, in part do to fire staff) but they also provide insane utility. I’m tired of warriors saying that ele has the lowest DPS when I play full zerker fire staff or S/F-LH or even D/F with conjures for fractals. Just yesterday I had drama with a 1.9K AP warrior (I have 7K) in a level 23 fractal. He freaked out when I said you could use the ele’s earth elemental to block old Tom’s porjectiles by standing behind the elemental and bursting him down, and after I showed him it worked, he said I had crap DPS, no AR, and that I was a noob ele. I even died because he made me type during this fight and he gave me more kitten for that. Needless to say he was kicked (apparently he tried to kick me to, but the more rational people in the party sided with me).

Anyway, rangers are 100% fine with me as long as in content thats not faceroll easy, they stick to their dungeon running meta, which it seems like the OP sticks to. I get more upset when I see GS mesmers in melee range (sword/sword or pistol and sword/focus is their meta) or condition necro when dagger necro actually has good single target DPS (but pretty much no party utility, which I can live with in a PUG if he’s doing decent-high but not low DPS).

Yeah for fractals I usually run D/F but I switch to staff for the ascalon fractal where its really good, or for lazily killing tentacles in the jade maw.

If you want to use celestial, especially for PUGs, I don’t see it as a huge issue, and fractals can give you celestial stats relatively easily. I run full zerker, 6.6.0.0.2 and I honestly wish I didn’t sometimes. I die so easily in PUGs, and even though my DPS is great, if my teammates suck at reviving me then I usually die against some of the “harder” bosses.
Although I honestly suck at dodging correctly, so its my own fault

Earlier today I ran a fractal in which one warrior flamed me excessivley for dying a lot, and for my suggestions of how to use the earth elemental against old tom to make that fight go quicker (like in Deykeyz’s video). He basically said I was a terrible player that probably didn’t have AR and that I had crap DPS.. which couldn’t have been more of a lie, now that we know that ele can outDPS a warrior. He only had 2K AP, and needless to say he got kicked for being so impolite when he could’ve disagreed politely, although I feel like If I were a better player in full zerker, maybe that drama could have been avoided.

Thats why I’m just grinding out 20-39 level fractals until I can get drops. But last week I considered going to just craft one, I put this thread out then which has some helpful information. But be sure to read all of it, as I posted some wrong info in my original post.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Weaponsmithing-to-500-on-a-Budget-My-Plan/first#post4080248

Taygus.4571:

some advice.

1.Join team in organised map.
2.ask them to tell you when a round finishes.
3.Go do gauntlet.

when round is finished, spam join for 2minutes.
If you dont get in,
Reapeat steps 2 & 3.

This saves you hammering away at join when chances are no ones leaving.

alternatively… join a guild just for pav.

(also there’s no way this person uses any types of codes to get in quicker,she’s lying…..uness she’s using a script, and thats reportable)

Yeah, then I guess she must have used a script. I have no idea who it was anymore though, so I won’t report her. We were in the same taxi part and she got in right away.
I’d farm the gauntlet but I’m afraid I’m all out of entrance tickets, and until I get to a gold pavillion I won’t be able to really get more since I used all my festival tokens on T6 bags.

I don’t have time to spend an hour or two spamming join to participate in this event on an organized megaserver. I honestly gave up. One person told me she used codes to spam join for her to get in fast. For the rest of us, that is unfair. If queues existed, this problem wouldn’t exist, and more people would stand a reasonable chance of playing this event in a working environment.

Ah well, its not like I was depending on this event for T6 mats to help me finish my legendary by the end of the month, which I’ve been working on for over a year. I only have the gift of mastery and I’ve been too poor and too unlucky to finance a legendary when visual upgrades push the prices up even more. And I’m going for the minstrel. Anyway I got off topic, and yes this is a very immature complaining post, but I’ve done nothing but waste my time spamming join only to get nowhere in my progress towards my ingame goals. Having a job, running fractals and having an active guild means I can’t devote my little free time in this game to spamming join. I guess I’ll just run some dungeons or play pvp or learn how to lose all my money flipping on the TP again.

Yey.

Thanks for your advice! I actually tried going with a slightly more defensive 0/6/0/4/4 build, that took vital striking and cleansing wave, and elemental attunement, all the boons help me survive I guess. I didn’t fight many thieves tonight so I need to work on them more. I was vulnerable to glkittenter members that blurred frenzy gank me from behind or the side where I can’t see though, when my defenses are on CD, and warriors gave me some trouble because they’re too tanky to burst quickly and have enough control and mobility to come out on top if they focus me…, but most of the other classes I annihilate. Rangers are pretty much free kills unless they’re really good, and necros can’t withstand it unless they fear lock me.

I still need to work on positioning, but I feel like I’m getting better at it. I just need to be better at engaging from where I won’t be focused, and noticing when I’m about to get focused I guess.

Anyway I think I want to use this build/playstyle for small group play in WvW. What sort of gear would be ideal for that? Since full zerk is less viable there. I was originally planning on getting a mix of ascended celestial and knight’s armor (slowly from fractals) and for trinkets I can slot an array of things, for amulet I could run zerker, zerker/valk, knights or celestial, for rings I can run zerker, zerker/valk or knight/cavalier, but for accessories right now I only have one zerker and one celestial but in a few weeks I’ll either get another zerker another celestial, a PVT or a knights depending on what works the best..

And for a backpiece all I have right now is an ascended cavalier back, but I should be able to get zerker or PVT from fractals in a while. And for weapons I have zerker exotics, but I’m slowly upgrading to ascended once I make more than 200 gold and or possibly make a legendary focus lol.

Stacking Sigil’s still lose their stacks when you go underwater right? If so, I feel like battle would be more useful in general.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I personally think the staff on mesmer is a lot of fun, the problem with it, is that when it comes up against Diamond Skin it offers nothing. It has nothing that can break through the 90% mark and even if they have a weapon set that can once they switch to Staff the advantage is lost because you can be back up and past 90% health in seconds

When its condition build Vs condition build. Running your normal thing such as +40% food and such the ele becomes a much bigger threat. No pure condition build will beat ANY ele build with Diamond Skin that is where the strength in it is, especially roaming in WvW kitten many will be either bunker or condition builds.

I think the biggest problem that staff has is not only the lack of conditions but the long cast times of pretty much everything. This makes running Signet of Restoration more of a weakness than a strength. It offers very little mobility as well which is another problem.

Most good staff ele players don’t use signet of restoration for the reason you specified, we have other options for healing skills you know. The best staff eles go with arcane brilliance to blast their own fire/water/frost/static fields for various effects. As far as mobility goes, burning retreat and high levels of swiftness with air 4 and blasting 5 make it a fair bit more mobile than you imply. Sure it doesn’t have ride the kittenlightning, but it does have plenty of ways to stop enemies from disengaging, such as earth’s imobolize, unsteady/frozen ground, static field and what not. But I guess those are less effective on a condition build, as those don’t give you enough time to to kill someone, where as on a power build it does, so I see your point.

I’m honestly not sure if I’ve ever fought a diamond skin ele when I play condition mesmer. I go mostly rabid and run focus for lockdown-condition, so I think I’d be able to wear past the 90% by using warlocks/wardens and pulling the ele into the attacks with temporal curtain, which also builds might on my mostly rabid build. So I’d have to try it out but I’m not sure if it would be a 100% counter, espcially when mesmer can generally just run away from the ele. On a side note, some hybrid condition roaming mesmers exist running sw/torch and scepter focus/pistol, which of course would stand a good chance.

Okay I am now calm. And thanks for the moral support Gokil.

Also Ash, thank you for reading my original post. In the first sentence where I disagreed, I disagreed because I wanted to make sure that you weren’t condemning the staff as a whole, which I now see that you weren’t. I still will stand by the fact that staff has a higher skill cap, in part because I’m a member of a very tactical WvW guild that doesn’t just zerg and spam skills. Its all about using your control abilities to disable the enemy, and using them at the right time. Its about providing water fields in the right place for your allies to blast. Theres no standing in the back of a “zerg” at all. In smaller group fights, and 1v1s the higher skill ceiling is more obvious, the control abilities must be used well or you’ll lose for sure. With D/D on any kind of build you have much more breathing room to spam through your skills, but using them wisely is what makes you a good player. Scepter is all about burst and finesse, so I guess I shouldn’t mention it since its not relevant to the apparently very closed and narrow rules of the thread.

Lastly, I’m more of a focus fan. I feel like focus would be a better choice for a condition build. I understand that you want to use ride the lightning to catch up to fleers who could probably just run away from you like most non necro condi builds, but I think swirling winds would be ideal since it shuts down bow rangers and the like.. And doesn’t the flame aura apply burns on hit? Anyway I plan to never experiment myself with this so that doesn’t even matter. Once again, thanks for reading my post, and I “apologize” for mentioning the notion of power staff builds on a condition thread, because apparently thats a huge taboo in the kingdom of the condition elementalist.

I’m mainly a PvE/WvW player, but sometimes I like to mess around and have fun in spvp, especially now that there are actually pretty decent rewards. The trouble is that hotjoin is the most painful experience in this entire game. I’ll get caught up in a room where 1 team sticks together and chooses the same side match after match and basically spends the whole time kittening the other time in the kitten with a 500-48 end score. Now, I know this is hotjoin, but what I don’t understand is why most people seem to be so rude. I’ll vent my frustrations of how unbalanced or unfair I think the team split is, and usually no one will say anything, but sometimes people personally attack me and call me a horrible player.

Whats most frustrating are the people that whisper me something mean or awful, and then immediately block me after so I can’t even reply or verbally defend myself. In PvE trolls exist but they aren’t this maliscious. In WvW, my server is a kind and welcoming community, but in spvp its just some stressful environment where people only care about killing, insulting, and demoralizing the enemy. Is it not enough to just die from 4v1s? Why is insulting my player ability because a glass ele can’t survive 4 people kitten him? Its like I’m being bullied as though I were in the 5th grade..

I think it would help if hotjoin teams could be balanced in a better way than autobalance, but I have no idea how that would work. Anyway, after weeks or torment and frustration and disappointment, I’m finally going to quit spvp unless someone gives me a reason why this game mode isn’t a form of hell.

Pretty much. Especially against terror necro, if you don’t have more than 5 boons before applying stability, they’ll corrupt it off and have you fear locked against a wall unable to do anything, in which case cleasning water probably won’t save you :/

Its a good trait for moderate and intermittend condition cleanse, but ele still loses to most condition classes no matter what, unless diamond skin is taken, but id thats the case then you’d be likely to use to non condition classes..

Azhure.1857:

Suggestion: post your suggestions on Megaservers on the Megaserver feedback thread.

Creating your own is short lived and doesn’t make it any more or less valid.

What an awesome idea Azhure! I’m sure everyone would love to sift through over 2000 posts just to read this one, because seeing a giant title on its own thread is clearly an awful way to get anyone to read it when they can just read each and every megaserver post on the feedback thread as bedtime reading!

I’ll be sure to get on that. (Note: I am in a bad mood due to recent forum incidents in another thread, so I’m sorry if I took it out on you, because I just did).

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Everything you had said had already been said. When its not viable that kind of means that it doesn’t work. Though in my opinion you are wrong. While its not that great for roaming, that goes for staff in general.

It can be pretty decent in groups. Just not as good as D/D which offers more burning, more Bleeding, Chill, Weakness, Cripple, Vul. It just does what Staff can do, just a lot better and with much better defence.

Pretty much the ONLY thing it has going for it over Dagger/Dagger is Magnetic Aura which is hilarious considering Dagger/Dagger has to be in melee 100% of the time and is in MUCH greater need for projectile reflection. The focus has it as well but that overall is a much weaker weapon than Dagger offhand.

OH MY DWAYNA. I never said that condition ele wasn’t viable. I was just giving the OP an idea of how to make a staff condition build work if he was dead set on it. So stop twisting my words becuase you clearly don’t know how to read them.

Honestly I don’t roam in WvW. I run with a 10-20 man guild group, so when I’m talking about staff in small groups, I mean tpvp, and for that I mean a full GLASS kittenING CANNON zerker build. Hey do I sound really nice now?? NO I DON’T.

Okay, I wanted to be nice, I wanted to be tolerant. If you want to play a condition elementalist build and post wonderful videos about it, fankitteningtastic for you Ash. But please stop pretending to be the king of the condition ele, because you have succeeded in kittening me off by continually saying my advice is bad when you never understood my original post.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

How am i at all being hostile? NOTHING i have said has been hostile at all. The fact this topic is about CONDITIONS would make at least some assume he would want CONDITION based information, not power. That is what i was pointing out.

Honestly the caps on certain words just make it sound like you’re shouting it as I’m reading it. And you also assumed that I said that condition eles were noviable, which is not what I said. And I also did give him some information on conditions if you actually read my entire post.

Behold the Ocean’s POWER

but I’ve noticed norn females talk a lot less than other ele races. We just either whisper air, or shout EARTH, or whatnot. not really a whole phrase I guess

I like megaservers, I think they’re a nice addition to the pve aspect of the game, but they have certain inherent problems.

If you’re trying to get into a full a megaserver, whether for doing the Crown Pavllion boss blitz or an organized tequatl or wurm run, queues would be an extremely helpful feature to people trying to get the most out of content like that. Spamming join on a random party member is frustrating and impractical and often ineffective, and has gotten to the point where people ask for tips for people to spend 20 minutes spamming join on them to get into an event.

One person I talked to in a party, who had no trouble getting into one of these megaservers told me that he/she used a code written by his/her guildmates that spams join automatically for you, so that you can get into these servers more easily. I think that example right there is a testament to how great this problem is.

When WvW maps get full, they have a queue, so the people that get in line first can get in as soon as people leave, with spam join, this principle of fairness is thrown away to luck or whoever exploits the game with codes.

I don’t see why queues weren’t implemented with megaservers originally came out, like how they were automatically implemented for those in overflow maps in the first iteration of the game. Adding queue’s would make events like the boss blitz a much less painful experience to those wishing to participate efficiently, and I believe they would be a crucial measure of convenience as the game moves forward with LS season 2, as we can expect lots of events will create full megaservers that can efficiently do those events, and the demand to get in to them will be very high.

tldr: queues would make playing this game’s LS/open world content more fun and less stressful.

Can you be any more hostile ArmageddonAsh?

I never said that condition builds couldn’t work on ele. In fact I said it was a neat and different idea if you read my entire post.

During the first sentences of my post I was referring to staff in general regardless of builds. Staff can be a very powerful weapon for damage and support in a 5 man group with the right set up and communication, and I didn’t want you to paint a bad picture of the staff as a weapon in general, because players that don’t know better can be easily swayed. I ignored staff for the longest time before I realized how amazing it was in tpvp and in dungeons.

So unless you misunderstood my intentions completley, I really don’t understand why you’re so abrasive. Or maybe your capslock made me think your post was more angry sounding than it actually is.

I

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Staff is a terrible weapon for anything outside Zergs and big groups. .

I disagree with this statement, fire staff builds are proven to have the highest DPS in the game for an ele in PvE, and are actually used by top tournament teams. It has a much higher skill cap than D/D, as does S/x, but Its a little much to say that staff is a terrible weapon outside of “big groups”. You can 1v1 with it if you know what you’re doing, but you do need a good team to peel for you, which is a challenge I do admit.

While I don’t play conditions on any class besides mesmer, and only run power/blanaced builds for ele, I thinks its a neat idea that just doesn’t work on staff. S/x and D/x have a few reliable ways to cause bleed and burn and cover conditions, staff really doesn’t, the burning from staff is only on 1 skill reliably, and earth can barely stack bleeds. Water just gives vuln and chill clunkily, and air just does vuln. I guess if you wanted it to work, you’d need perplexity to profit on the many interrupt skills, but still

So the other day, I was playing hotjoin, which does nothing more than infuriate me. when I came across a champion magus running an S/F build who literally kitten d me several different time across 3 matches. She used frostbow 5 and 4 to devestating effect. Then I tried my iteration of what her build probably was (zerker ammy, strength runes, and I ran 0/6/2/4/2 for traits) and tried to use the bow on her, but she used earth focus 4 to reflect the frostbow 5 after dodging the icestorm, and then finished me with the firey GS. It was humilating.

I kept playing with this build, and while its burst potential is very good I am very bad at playing it properly because I die if I thief so much as presses F1. I do really like the focuses defensive skills though, but I still need help.

So would it be better to run a more defensive fresh air S/F build with say celestial? Then I’d feel like the damage would fall short.. And are my traits okay?

Miroe.2054:

Focus : There really need to do something good with that one. Not only does the current Focus legendary is really not legendary, but there is VERY limited good option for a focus. There is a lot of theme that need to be explore here. Focus is a popular weapon for Guardian, Elementalist and Necromancer, but there is still very few good option. This weapons really need more love, they can’t mess up the future Focus legendary.

I can agree with this. Focus is also a popular choice for Mesmers, and the good Foci skins seem to fit mesmer a bit too much, such as the Anomoly or Spirit Links.

I personally like the OP’s idea for a legendary focus, however it won’t stop me from making the Minstrel despite its shortcomings, because I would prefer the utility of an ascended quality focus that be have its stats switched, as I use focus for completely different types of builds on Ele, necro and mesmer. I personally think that while not being too flashy or impressive, the Minstrel is a good skin that I wouldn’t mind flaunting, and I’m glad they buffed the music note trail/glow back in September. The idea of a celestial type focus sounds amazing, but I don’t see the point in waiting for weapons that may never be implemented into the game at the expense of crafting a legendary in the near future.

Additionally I think some sort of chakram focus or fan focus could work too.

I play ele and it kittenes me off how guardians always drop their symbols when I try to stack might, but instead I blast retal instead. They have their fire fields, why can’t they just use those?

I agree, it is weird especially when other pets can swim. Maybe Anet should design a flesh shark like the risen shark instead?

This has always been a problem. It has to do with AI pathing for NPC type characters, which isn’t the simplest thing to fix.

But it was really funny how you described it lol. Its worse with a full undead cheer squad, with the bone fiend doing backhand springs instead of firing off whatever it shoots at the enemy. I’ve heard that its okay when you’re staying in one general area, but as you rotate to other points, and if you get in combat, their pathing will cause them to sniff the flowers instead.

Any ele in pvp will rarely take that trait for pvp/wvw because you give up so many better defensive skills in water/arcane. Why use diamond skin when cleansing water/wave with evasive arcana and elemental attunement can clear conditions at a really good rate while also ensuring a healing against direct damage classes?

And if they are running diamond skin, or stone heart even, they probably will lack the damage to down you unless they get you in some might stacking combo, which is easy enough to avoid from a D/D ele, S/D their burst can be nastier. I’ve heard of a few gimmick condition eles run diamond skin for the +bleed traits in earth along the way… so you know somethings wrong when people go that far into earth.

For T6 mats, I’d try to find a megaserver that consistently gets gold or silver in the boss blitz in the crown pavilion. Each gold win takes 6minutes and gives you 10 exotic champ bags, many of which contain T6 and other rare crafting materials as well as a ton of greens and bloodstone. Aditionally, you’ll also get festival tokens, a lot of them, which can be used to buy T6 heavy crafting bags, which contain 4 (or is it 3?) random T6 mats. You can usually get the 300 tokens for a bag every hour or so on top of all the champ bags, even more if you can farm gauntlet chances from the easy bosses in the guantlet from all the tickets you’ll get. (On ele wooden potatoes describes how to kitten hamli hammerfell with a blinds and a fire staff build with 4-5gambits).

Thanks for the advice everyone, I didn’t know about the WvW bonus. And Wanze, I follow your advice to the letter when I finally get around to leveling this (maybe this friday perhaps?), since that sounds like it will defray the cost significantly. And cormac, thanks for telling me that crafted stuff won’t yield an inscription, which blows, but I’ll at least be able to use the ones from dungeon exotics to help out with the cost a little bit.

Yeah staff is definitly a great weapon but if you want to succeed in this game later on, I’d recommend carrying at least exotic level weapon of each type (probably zerker stats or whatever) so you can switch in each different situation. For example, most fractals enjoy D/F due to the high sustained DPS and defensive skills, but a few of them such as the ascalon fractal are as I’ve heard and practiced a bit, to be more efficient on staff. And as someone said before, certain bosses are better for staff. specifically ones that can’t move out of lava font or have large hit boxes that let them be hit by many meteors/ice bow storms.

Exodius.3087:

Your character has such dark colors and it seems almost like 1 tone of colours. I’d add more colour. And the Crossing ( staff ) fits necro’s soooo well ^^ thats what im gonna get soon. Also, take a look at trickster armor, i really like it. got it on my necro.

Thanks for the input, I’ll try to mess around with my dye colors to make things pop more, like choosing a brighter shade of purple or something like that.

As for the crossing, I’d love that staff but isn’t the gift of souls recipe ridiculously expensive?

And as far as armor goes, I feel the need to keep it planty, so the only change I’d make there is either upgrading to partial T3 or putting more TA pieces in like the chest piece instead of the current T1 bellyshirt.

Axelifus.3269:

When that happens, I blast fields for myself only with the lazy firestaff.

If they wanted mightstacks they’d play better wouldn’t they? :>

Yeah exactly. Its so invigorating when you run through a dungeon in no time with perma 25 might and fury, that its almost like an adrenaline rush. The thing that irks me the most is the mesmers using feedback on bosses that have no projectiles..

Anyway I’m just going to focus on having fun with my playstyle and not becoming supremely agitated when the finesse of the scepter can’t be upheld.

Dragin.3521:

I would start using the dragonite, bloodstone and empyreal frags as soon as it will allow (lvl 450). At 475 they no longer give experience. The crafting booster will cut you down by like 3 – 5 craftings. The BL kit is a pretty good idea, that should cut costs significantly. Wish I had thought of that when I was making my way to 500 in all crafts….

Yeah, I’m surprised that more people don’t talk about it as much. Apparently the BLK only recovers an inscription 61% of time, which is still pretty good. With my calculations, and taking the booster into account, you’d probably need to buy about 8 inscriptions as long as you recover at least half of them. That could make it so you could finish leveling it at roughly 33-44% of the cost.

I’m going to hold off on it for a few weeks though. By checking the TP prices you can buy deldrimor and spiritwood for nearly the same cost as buying the mats and crafting them, so I don’t have the timegated stuff hanging over my head. In the meantime I’m going to continue to use the TP to gain money (I have about 100 gold worth of crap waiting to sell) and I’m just going to keep doing daily fractals so I might be able to get a drop if I’m lucky.

lLobo.7960:

go d/f on pugs, fresh air, just fgs as conjure…

its more reliable dps for pugs, more defense for when people screw, and you have more constant fire fields and blasts for when people mess up you rotation.

Yeah I guess you’re right

I have to personally learn to be less perfectionist in dungeons too, and to be honest I think I like paying D/F or fire staff better than the hammer builds. I was only running them because they seemed ideal for “easy” content.

Staff els is great in tpvp if you have a good team that can peel for you. If not, then you’re at the mercy of S/D thieves ham bow crap and glass power well necros.

It might be worth it to pump up the points in fire for persisting flames, since all of staff’s damage comes from fire.

Wyrden.4713:

elementalists dont rly work that well with pugs, anyway, try not to mightstack after the mesmer used feedback, u cant tell a mesmer not to feedback.

about other ppl taking ur conjures, i always make sure after getting pugs rdy if they first listen to me, can understand my language, then tell them at least 3 times not to take my conjures besides fgs

works mostly out that way

yeah, I just figured they’d have enough sense to leave the hammer alone. Anyway the mesmer problem is in part because flame wall has a cast time while feedback doesn’t so, if we open the fight with those skills the mesmer always uses it first. The guardian symbols are basically spammed too.

I suppose moving to less DPS heavy D/F build might be easier, since I won’t lose the hammer to an idiot or if I’m downed, but still it irks me. And I can’t not play elementalist for pugs. My only other choices are necro and mesmer, and mesmer is completely boring to me in pve, and I find necros to be a terrible class outside of WvW.

My favorite run was a PUG with 3 elementalists in CM. It was all fire fields with 25 might every step of the way.

Lately I’ve been using LF Scepter focus builds for easy dungeons, and it does nothing but kitten me off. Mesmers and Guardians. Oh how I hate them.

“Isn’t fun to spam symbols and reflects and chaos storm, usually on bosses or mobs with no projectiles anyway, so that the ele can’t put his flame wall down in time to stack might”?

That is the story of my life. At least rangers have water fields that are useful. Its just painful to think of all the DPS we waste to get retaliation and chaos armor.

And whats worse is when some idiot warrior takes my hammer. Do they not realize that I need that in order to not have kitten DPS for 30 seconds?

There all better. My frustrations are less now.

Mortifer.2946:

So someone who haven’t even played the first dungeon of the game gets 2 precursors in one day and already got the third?
Yeah, @ArenaNet this sounds completely right!!!! His gameplay must be legendary for sure!
smashing my laptop on the wall

I agree with this. I don’t mean to be rude, and I’m honestly happy for the OP’s luck, but I dislike the way that the most expensive component of a legendary is purely luck based. I’ve had my gift of mastery and mystic clovers finished for a year and I haven’t gotten any amazing drops at all. Granted I did take a break to focus on college,

If it were me, I’d require that a precursor be bought with 1000 tokens from each dungeon including fractal relics. Making these grand weapons should be about skill and perseverance instead of luck and wealth, especially when the luck and wealth components are already captured by the gift of fortune and the weapon specific gifts.

Anyway, because of my lack of luck and my inability to farm that much gold from the TP (stuff waiting to sell for a while, but I’m gradually increasing in theoretical wealth), I’ve decided to give up my original goal of the bifrost and go for the minstrel instead because I think I’d actually be able to afford it in a reasonable time frame because its precursor is so cheap and most of the gift of fortune can be farmed from doing boss blitz 24/7.

Well, I guess I just vented my frustrations on your thread. Well have fun with AC, and hopefully you’ll have elementalists with you to completely trivialize the dungeon in every way.

After quitting the game since September, I’m coming back for the summer, and hopefully the fall, and I’d like to finally start making ascended weapons. I have every craft to 400, but the price on GW2crafts.net is a little rough for me, as I’d like to not spend all my gold just to get it to 500.

So my idea to help counter that is to use the many Black Lion Kits I have lying around to save a lot of money. I plan on getting soldier’s, rabid, magi’s, and shaman’s weapons from dungeon tokens and salvaging them to get the inscription. Then I plan on making all of the weapons to get to 500 or at least 480 or so, but I plan on salvaging each one with a BLK to get the inscription back before crafting a different type of exotic weapon with the same inscription. This process will also generate several dark matter globs as well, which is always a plus. The only problems are that ectoplasm, orichalcum, and ancient wood are lost in each new generation of the inscription, but at least salvaging allows me to maintain some of them.

I will also use a crafting booster to help reduce the costs as well. According to gw2crafts.net, I need 23 weapons to get to 500. I’m not sure by how much the booster would reduce that number. I could also stop at 480 or 490 and just make mithrilium, spirit wood residue and upgrade my heaps of bloodstone and crap like that (so I should stock up on obsidian). With all of this combined, I think it could massively defray the cost of getting to 500 in weapon crafting.

I play mainly ele, as well as necro and mesmer, so I was planning on making a dagger first, followed by an axe for necro and a sword for mesmer. I hope that I won’t have to try this with artificer for a while as I hope that fractal daily runs can provide me with an ascended staff eventually (and scepter later on, which I use infrequently), and I’m slowly making the minstrel so I won’t need an ascended focus anytime soon.

What do you guys think of this process compared to the normal method for people with more gold to burn? I won’t start this for another few hours, so please let me know what you think!

Liewec.2896:

but what would it do?
scepter already covers range skills daggers cover close up and staff covers ranged aoes.

the only thing left would be close range aoes.

dagger already does close range AoEs. Thats all lightning whip, ring or earth and burning speed do.

If the focus was condi-based I don’t think air and water should provide the same conditions it already does, like you guy were suggesting. Thats why poison in water as a counter to healing (the focus of water) and torment as a counter to movement (the focus of air) would make sense to me and actually make condi builds viable.

Elementalist has the highest DPS of any class in dungeons, but its difficult to learn and you can die easily if you don’t know what you’re doing, or if you’re in a kittenty PUG group with bad DPS/support. For DPS, every weaponset other than D/D is used depending on the content. Higher level fractals and arah are best with D/F for its mix or survival skills and might stacking ability. Easy dungeons are best done with S/F or S/D combined with lightning hammer. If there are other eles in the party already running one of those builds, staff ele is preferred, basically to just sit in fire and spam lava font hahaha, which actually gets the highest DPS of all the ele builds. There are a bunch of guides on the ele forums which explain trait set ups and gear and how to play and what not so definety check out the 3 guides at the top of the thread! Eles also get two very powerful toys all of those builds use, persisting flames and fiery greatsword, which let you blast fury from fire fields and take down any boss pushed against a wall in mere seconds.

As for thief, it also has really good DPS, and is almost as frail. They aren’t ideal for every dungeon, but many love them for their AoE stealth skills to let you skip past trash mobs (best for CM and Arah, the other dungeons and fractals don’t have as many trash skips), and smoke fields for blinds. I think someone posted that the optimal speedrun DPS group was 2 eles one on staff and one on a might stacking build, a warrior for tactics/strength banner, and then the other spots would be for ranger (for spotter/frost spirit) mesmer/guardian for support or reflects (and mesmer skips) or thief for general high DPS and the stealth skips that help make speedruns possible.

Almoryk Kane.6085:

Well it was a 2 on one situation but either way I feel these skills are still not functioning as they should. He popped Elixir S after I was downed to stomp me. The problem is that now these skills are required in group. Forcing players that they must have this skill in order to do a quick stomp. Even if they are long cool downs the average fight leaves it so that it will always be up when they need it. I still think these skills are not suppose to function this way.

Could someone go into detail what Necro Plague stomp is?

Plague stomp is where you begin the stomp and press plague form to gain stability and a boatload of toughness to gurantee the stomp, or res.

The use of these skills is all about oportunity cost and resource management. If you bring these skills in the first place, you give up some other utility that may or may not have a more favorable impact on the fight. If you use these skills to guarantee a stomp or rez, then they can’t use them 30 seconds later, and they might have to take a hundred blades or blurred frenzy shatter spam to the face. Its all about whats more important, the possibility of guaranteering a stomp or soaking an upcoming burst? That just depends on the player what we thinks is more important. For example, finishing off someone in 1v2 or 2v2 is important, and these skills let you avoid CC or burst to be able to finish someone off and sway the fight in your favor. The only thing you can do if they use those skills to finish you or an ally off is to try and strike them while they’re vulnerable, while those skills are on CD, and in many cases that will make everything balanced if you can exploit that.

Zelulose.8695:

Yes the point is lich is imbalanced.
exaggerations aside. DS/lich damage should at least be looked at again.

If you’ve ever played necro, you should know that nerfing the DS auto (or lich auto for that matter) would pretty much destroy all power builds, which is probably the most viable way to play necro in every game mode. Yes Death Perception builds hit like a truck, and they are like firing squads in WvW, but that part of balance. Necromancers can’t escape or deal with CC at all. They either have to kill or be killed, or hope that a distraction lets them run. A good thief should have little trouble with a power necro, with enough CC/blinds and escapes to come out on top in the end. Although condi thief is kind of weak for anything besides roaming, since it only kills things that dont try and run away.

If in spvp, a necro runs a power DS build, they likely go with zerker stats, so if they are CCed or ganged up on, they can go down in seconds, especially if they don’t have life force. The damage of Death Shroud auto is in a great place, and if you struggle with it, then you don’t know how to deal with the necro’s obvious weaknesses and flaws which make it a meh class outside of well-bombing and AoE chilling everything in WvW groupplay (which needs DS burst to function, hence bombing).

I remember when I first started playing ele last year that people thought their DPS was terrible (specifically mean elitist warriors). But now look whos talking, Eles have finally gotten the respect we deserve! mwahahahah!

And for D/F might stackin dont forget that water 3 is now a blast too, and is a bit easier to use than comet.

Farming the gold boss blitz gets you tons of mats and money, thats what I’d recommend. If you can learn to play the TP, that works too, but thats risky and difficult.

Hello, so for a bit of time I’ve been working on the bifrost, but its so expensive and I’m not sure I like the rainbow projectiles even though I think its one of the few good staff skins the game. I main elementalist and have necro and mesmer as my primary alts, so I’d like to go for a legendary that I could use on all three of them at different times. While I use mainly staff in WvW on ele, I use focus with scepter or dagger for dungeons generally, and I could probably make S/F or D/F work for roaming and pvp, and I really do like the Minstrel skin for all of my characters. I think it would also go great with the fractal dagger skin I want to get for ele, and the chaos of lyssa backpiece if I ever can get that on mesmer lol.

I’m just concerned that this would be a sort of cop out legendary because its cheap and doesn’t have many effects besides the musical note trail. My only other real choices are the bifrost which I see almost too frequently (whereas the minstrel is less common), and meteorlogicus, which is probably my favorite weapon, but I don’t really use scepter that much except on ele during dungeons or PU mes. So what do you guys think? Is this a worthwhile investment or would I be aesthetically and functionally better off going for a different legendary?

For comparison, I ran some numbers and the minstrel would cost me 934 gold to buy everything I need for it that I dont already have, while meteorlogicus is 1716 gold and the bifrost is 2020ish gold.