Guild Wars 2

My friend had the legendary hammer precursor drop for her from an AC chest.

stof.9341:

D/D elementalists are hardly what I’d call a melee class. Your dagger 1 attack range goes from 300 range (earth and air) to 400 (fire) to 600 (water). Try playing with 130 range attacks like the thief and necro dagger 1 skills and we’ll talk melee.

Fire 1 attack range might go to 400, but nobody actually tries tossing those out at range unless they feel like missing 2/3 of the attack. Hardly anyone actually sits in water autoattacking, either, unless they like doing subpar damage. Air’s autoattack is weird and while you can do a lot of damage, half the time you have to be on something’s nuts to get it to hit while other times you need to be at max range to get it to hit, otherwise it misses.

If you’re facetanking a ton of hits as a thief using d/d, you’re just simply playing it wrong, honestly. You can drop aggro so easily, and lots of stuff will just turn around as soon as you do so unless the mob is actually channeling something at that point.

I’ve got no clue about necros in general, but I do know that they’ve got the highest base HP in the game, as well as a second form that they can slap onto themselves as a sort of temporary invuln, so I imagine you could probably make it work if you really wanted to.

On the topic of the champicebrood wolf, it only does the weird aoe once every 15 or so seconds (never really counted, but I feel like its probably somewhere around there). Just let it use it once, then smack on it in melee for a while, then back off for a bit, repeat. Or just man up and eat it anyways! Although yeah, it really probably should have a better visible tell, as I can’t ever tell when it’s about to do it.

Zenith.7301:

Now try that melee setup without guardians. They said classes wouldn’t be required, but surprise! The 2 classes that can afford to melee are the high base HP warriors and the boonheavy guardians. This proves nothing other than you’ve stacked the strongest classes in PvE.

Guardians in this game are seriously spoiled and have a skewed viewpoint about how things actually are through their rose-tinted glasses of inflated survivability relative to other classes.

I’ve melee’d most encounters in the game on my Ele using d/d as well kitten f + lightning hammer. Generally speak, the only time I actually use staff is if I really want to have access to water fields for blast finish heals or if it just makes sense to (ex. staff fire 5 + frost bow 4 = stupidly massive damage against anything with a decently large hitbox, like CoF p2 crystal or TA nightmare tree).

I pretty much only use d/d on my Thief as well, with the only exceptions being when i need to facetank stuff for whatever reason with bp (s/p), or i really want to aoe stuff (sb).

So far, meleeing on my 75 Mesmer has been quite a bit harder in dungeons, but you also have to take into account that I’m wearing outdated gear by 20+ levels. My shoulders are level 40 greens, and my pants are 60 blues. And even so, I still usually don’t have too much trouble as long as I balance my skills correctly. Any ranged mob is still a joke in melee range as a Mesmer as long as I chain TC/iWard/Feedback, and with melee mobs I have to balance rolls + blurred frenzy + TC pulls. The fact that I can’t even rely on my vigor on crit trait with my current craptastic crit rate means things are a lot harder than they should be right now anyways. Though tbh I switch with the GS a lot so I can make more clones as I don’t have clone on dodge yet.

I think he means they did it in 2 rotations of firing the turrets.

When you actually have full groups geared to do damage and actually know what they’re doing, the “huge healthbars” of most stuff don’t become huge anymore. Running around with 25 stacks of might and plopping 25 stacks of vuln down while running in full or near full dps gear burns things quick, and dishing out constant weakness/protection lets you live easily. You can easily drop most bosses absurdly fast. The problem is that even most guild groups don’t know how to run dungeons very well, and in pugs it only happens very very rarely.

The huge love of P/V/T gear a while back in these very forums (and the fact that everyone said “if you’re a glass cannon, you’re doing it wrong”) just made it all the more obvious. Yes, being able to live a really long time is nice in dungeons, and you can certainly take the approach of just being able to outlive stuff. But its certainly possible to go the other direction and just kill everything fast enough that it doesn’t even matter.

Proper weakness/protection/skills go much further in keeping you and your party alive than your gear does, anyways.

That said, for most pugs and such, Evolved Destroyer will probably always be slow and boring as molasses unless some core mechanics about it are actually changed.

I’m always up for CoE, often run all paths daily, sometimes even multiple times since I have multiple characters at 80. Add/whisper me if you’re ever looking for someone else to run CoE.

What exactly has changed? Can you still stand on the edge after the shield goes back up and wait for the next laser barrage without drawing aggro? I usually melee it when I’m on my Warrior or Thief, but I still stand just outside the shield rather than make the jumps over and over again (it’s not like it’s hard to, but having to jump up and down over and over again just takes more time, period). On my Ele I just hit it from the centered cannon lol, can drop like 10-15k fairly easily while still firing the laser, so 2 others can go down instead without losing damage.

If he continues to aggro you while the shield is still up and you’re on the edge, then… gross, is all I really have to say.

I would be all for removing the ability to stand on the edge of his platform if the shield stayed down longer and the boss was actually more kittening interesting. Right now, it’s easy as balls, but insanely repetitive.

“Shorten paths 2 and 3 by 10-15 minutes and I think we’d see more people running it.”

I think path 2 is fine in terms of time. What’s wrong with it? If you really want to speed through it, you can skip through most of the risen after destroying the lasers. Especially easy if you have a thief or something to mass drop aggro.

Ummm, if you’re doing the 5 man stack, all you have to do is watch the air. If the air turns misty around you, dodge roll evade it. Otherwise, the center is safe.

Stand inside him when he fires a cone of spikes, and it won’t hit you.

Bring some condition damage removal and healing to ignore the burning.

That’s really all Alpha is.

If you’re in the US and can play in the mornings/afternoons, add me. I usually run CoE daily with a friend or two (one of which really doesn’t like fractals). It’s really a pretty easy dungeon as long as you understand how to dodge lol.

Our resident mesmer sucks at using the blink/portal trick, though, so we have been avoiding path 1 since the glitch.

You can skip the boss if you have a team full of blinks or a Mesmer. I don’t usually advocate exploiting bugs/glitching, but in this case the boss is actually broken and not working at all like intended. Go to the door blocking off the next area, rotate your camera so that you can see under the door, and blink past. It’ll probably take a few tries. Put entrance portal on that side, waypoint back, run back, and put the exit portal and have the whole team hop across.

It wasn’t the AoE might that was the issue. It was the AoE water blast finisher. Many people realized that, yes, being able to suddenly pop off 4 water blast finishers via eruption/roll/roll/arcane wave within a second (assuming eruption was primed already) was a little overkill and made bunkers really dumb to try and kill. Many people expected a nerf to EA. What people didn’t expect is for it to be completely gutted or for Anet to just completely remove a whole playstyle from the game, especially one that actually increased the need for better positioning/awareness and assessment of risk vs. reward (can I give up my ability to evade for these boons?).

Sigil of Battle combined with constant attunement swapping will give you a constant 9 stacks minimum, 12 stacks maximum. Prenerf, Evasive Arcana had blast combo finishers, and that was another 6 stacks or so. 1 stack per every time you swap to Fire. Another possible 9 stacks via Earth 4/5 + Arcane Wave if you choose. That’s 24/25 stacks of might there (-6 now without Evasive Arcana finishers).

Malediktus.9250:

Farming the lodestones is unrealistic. I get 3 cores and 1 lodestone on average per 10 CoE runs. Farming the money for them seems to be the way to go

Holy crap, in about 100 or so runs of CoE, I’ve only gotten one lodestone ever. I would kill to have your luck!

What kind of effect would you expect to see? As far as I remember from my hammer days, the main thing about hammer auto 3 is the huge AoE + hits more than 3 targets. I can’t really think of any really “fitting” effect other than maybe a cripple attached to it.

I think too much utility was popped into the other skills for them to really leave anything for the hammer auto. You’ve got AoE stun (on a very short cooldown if you trait for it), AoE knockback, AoE cripple, knockdown, and high weakness uptime. If you compare guardian hammer, you get protection that combos with an aoe into retaliation, an immobilize, and a warding ring (which is actually quite balls powerful but does have a fair cast time and cooldown). Guardian hammer probably also suffers the same difficulties when it comes to landing blows, if not more, given the way auto 3 works.

Getting owned by blind spam while using hammer sucks, but it’s kind of part of the flavor.

I used pretty much exclusively in S/F in PvE content. Although I will admit it’s no longer applicable due to the last patch.

Went full Knights gear, 2/2/2 boon runes, 0/20/0/20/30 with Evasive Arcana, Vigor on crit procs, boons on attunement swap, remove condition on water attunement. Usually started in Air for the blind/AoE projectile negation/knockdown/constant Vigor procs, then Fire attunement > Flame Wall > Dragon’s Tooth > Phoenix > roll on the Flame Wall while swapping to Water for water roll while casting Arcane Wave > Comet > Freezing Gust/Trident (depending on what I thought the group could use more) > roll on the Flame Wall while swapping to Earth > Magnetic Wave > Dust Devil > Rock Barrier > swith to Air > summon Lightning Hammer while using Lightning Strike and Blinding Flash. Then I’d go to town with Lightning Hammer, swapping Fire > Water > Earth > Air when they come back up but still holding the hammer.

This basically meant a permanent 23 stacks of 34s of Might for myself, and 21 AoE stacks of Might for my team (and do all this in melee in dungeons, so everyone up front would benefit from it. This permanent Might helped a lot for making up for the fact that Knights armor is Toughness/Power/Precision instead of Power/X/X. If I used my healing glyph in fire, that meant 25 stacks of Might. This also kept Regeneration and Protection up pretty much permanently, and I usually ended fights with at least a minute of Vigor left. After doing the Might dance, using the hammer conjure (which is actually pretty good damage wise) with its constant blinds along with Regen/Protection/water roll let me facetank for a good while and simultaneously blast finisher in whatever I wanted (AoE weakness, healing, etc.). If I wanted more damage, I would have taken out 5 points from Air and shoved it into Water for the 2% damage per boon. Between pretty much constant Might, Vigor, Regen, Protection, Swiftness, and Fury solo, that’s already an additional 12% damage up at almost all times. With any Guardian in the group and the lightning hammer, that’s pretty much 100% Retaliation uptime, too. Since making fixed rotations in PvE is a whole lot easier, this is easy to replicate constantly. The only reason I didn’t go 25 water is because I’m lazy and enjoy having 30 seconds of swiftness with a 20 second cooldown.

Unfortunately, with the gutting of Evasive Arcana and the breaking of Dragon’s Tooth’s blast finisher, I lost 9 stacks of might. More importantly to me, without the hectic dodging, it feels a whole lot less active to me :|

Terrahero.9358:

They gave Ele stats on their conjure weapons, but overlooked the Engineer.

At least your kits can generally be called useful. The conjured weapon buffs were buffs in name only and don’t fix the core problem behind them – they suck and cause you to severely limit yourself by using one. Not to mention the new “buff” is bugged. Nobody actually cares about the weapon conjure buffs.

Anet said they fixed Mist Form, Ride the Lightning, and Magnetic Grasp, all of which are very important skills (Mist Form for everyone, the other 2 for any D/D), and they managed to fail on all accounts. Mist Form still doesn’t take the cdr into account in open world, RtL is still buggy, and MG is actually worse than before because the only way to get the leap finisher needed in aura builds is actually to completely fail the leap and stun yourself for a good 2-3 seconds.

Not to mention Anet didn’t just straight up remove an entire playstyle (that also happened to be really popular and fun) from you.

boozer.7815:

Where did it say that EA was supposed to have a blast finisher?

Earth: Churning Earth

Like Navzar said, the truly OP part was being able to lay down a water field and double/triple heal off of it via rolls alone. That was something that pretty much anyone will agree was over the top. Global cooldown on the blast finisher? Bam, no more rapid fire water blast heals. Blast finisher only on the “churning earth” roll? Bam, no more rapid fire water blast heals. And you still keep part of what made Evasive Arcana fun to play with. I’d run through CoE at least 70 times on my Warrior and Thief, and after I took my Elementalist in there, I decided that if possible I’d probably only ever take my Ele in there. Comboing with Evasive Arcana while timing dodges with Alpha and ensuring I manage to get into the correct fields in a hodpodge of fields was by far the most fun I’d had in CoE in all those runs, and maybe in my whole PvE experience.

Did you know combos were once unintended and a gimmick/easter egg in fighting games? Once they were discovered and started to be heavily utilized because of what you could do with them, maybe they should have scrapped any ability to do so. Instead, they were built upon once game developers saw how much people enjoyed them, and now they’re an essential and fun part of pretty much any fighter.

Rocket jumping was once a quirk used to reach an easter egg and was supposed to be paired with invulnerability. Now it’s a very common gameplay mechanic that’s used to add a lot of speed and skill to different games.

In the original Tribes, skiing was an exploitation of the game’s physics engine. The entirety of the community learned how to use it and play around with it because it greatly increased the speed and fun of the gameplay, and by the next installment it was an “official feature”.

If your community finds something fun to play with, and you leave in there knowingly for months and give them months to build around it, you don’t just say “YOINK SUCKAS” and just remove it completely. You find a way to compromise and build around it, and integrate into the game.

The way Anet dealt with this is so kitten backwards that I seriously don’t understand how they could have come to the conclusion that this was the best way to deal with it.

RamzaBehoulve.5640:

Ithir Darkleaf.7923:

You guys should forget that statement. Better think on this: this game will never become an e-sport. This way you will be never dissapointed like happened to me when I was totally hyped before launch.

This game is just for PvErs, casuals and it has some PvP fix for people who want to kill others, not to compete seriously.

How long did it take for LoL to become E-sport already? Ah yes, 9 months after release for the start of the first season.

You have to remember that Riot was also a brand new company (though they did have the DotA experience). It was also intended to be far friendlier from the start, with becoming an e-sport a future goal. Anet in comparison had a ton more experience and money coming out the gate with GW2. It’s really not fair to use LoL as a baseline for comparison.

I also think it’s kinda funny that people think the PvE is in really great shape, too. It has it’s own set of bugs and 90% of the time you can’t even get into the final dungeon, which is probably the only really somewhat challenging one.

boozer.7815:

omgwtflolbbl.7142:

Generally, you want your game to be more active and interesting than not, right?

Agree, but I do not play this class just because of one trait, nor do I feel that one trait makes this class fun. Apparently, that is not the way Anet intends for that trait to be used. Ce la vie.

I guess we need to learn to use how our Combo Fields work when teaming up with other classes, like say.. A Warrior! Most finishers in the game of any class. Or how about a Guardian, or a Necro, or a Mesmer, and etc.. LTP the game as it was intended to be played, which is to use your abilities in combination with other classes as part of a team. I do not recall Anet ever saying that the Ele was supposed to be played strictly solo and not as a valuable part of a team…..

The fun of this class for me is in demonstrating ways in which I can use the Ele’s abilities in combination with others and then in all of us reaping the benefits through teamwork. The fact is that the Staff Ele brings more combo field options to the table than any other class this game currently has today. Those can be used in any number of ways to turn your team into a powerhouse. That is what the Staff Ele is supposed to be doing, IMO.

Who said I didn’t play the ele as a team player? The whole point of my build, with Evasive Arcana, was to be able to provide my entire team with long lasting 21 stacks of might while also having the versatility to provide more blasts with the lightning hammer or aoe damage with the frost bow conjure. Me actually using the conjures a lot already makes me one of the less orthodox elementalist players probably. Also, I’m not even a Staff elementalist – I only using that for either sieges (where it’s the obvious choice) or if there’s a boss that it will obviously rip through (ex. Nightmare Tree). I enjoyed the idea of being able to roll into my fellow Ranger’s healing field or debuffing with AoE weakness. If I wanted to play a more selfish manner, I’d play my 80 Warrior or my 80 Thief (and I do when I feel like it).

You know how I like to demonstrate how an Elementalist and combo fields are useful in dungeons? We rip down a boss and I ask how people like my little might dance that basically gave them 21 permanent stacks of might. Then even randoms start getting a little bit more aware of their own, and people even start to think about how to not obscure my might dance or to put down water fields when I pop out my hammer. It’s what let me rip through CoE in random pugs with first timers in 25 minutes.

What I really don’t get is why they a the very least didn’t separate the ea changes between PvE and PvP like they did so many others this patch. In PvP game balance obviously becomes quite a bit more important, but PvE is supposed to be all about having fun. It really makes no sense whatsoever to remove it from PvE. If you’re going to kill off a play style, at least let it live on in some form in an environment where balance isn’t nearly as important. It was definitely powerful as hell in PvP but that didn’t warrant basically killing the thing.

That’s why I said someone with quickness. I don’t mean for you to produce the blasts, but for someone else to pick it up and rip through the auto attack chain wih quickness. The ranger water field lasts 15 seconds, and with the water blast finisher visual effect, it’s pretty lol when you have blast finishers just beig ripped away in there. Throw in some quickening zephyr and you’ve got an interesting water show.

boozer.7815:

ThiBash.5634:

Dodge rolling into water fields made the roll heal twice as good.

Wildclaw.6073:

Evasive Arcana was the best dps trait that the elementalist had.

It was so much more than just a power boost. It had all kinds of fun possibilities with all kinds of combo fields.

Yea. It was OP. Its gone forever now. The fat lady sang and all that. We get it. Now to learn to use the abilities in the manner in which they were intended to be used by Anet instead of using some of them in ways that Anet did not intend for them to be used and etc..

I think you missed the part where he said it was FUN TO USE. Balancing energy use and positioning for potential combos is a lot more INTERESTING than simply earth 2 water 3 call it a day.

Rather than completely remove a FUN play style, they could have actually kept some of it alive by, oh, I dunno, keeping it only on the “churning earth” roll, or a forced global 10-15 second cool down on the blast portion, or whatever. There, no more super fast double/triple blast spam finishers into water fields for mass bunker healing, but you still keep some of the hectic FUN around.

Generally, you want your game to be more active and interesting than not, right? There are many games that have become successful in large because of the fact that the community managed to find some really interesting bugs to play with.

boozer.7815

when I have some support to soak up some of the mob agro

And there probably lies the problem for a lot of people. Personally, I don’t have any problems running through Orr at all on my Ele solo (and the first few times I did it, I was a level 80 in level 40 non-transmuted armor because I liked how it looked and didn’t have my exotics yet, mind you, so I didn’t have any problems doing it in conditions far worse than anyone should ever need to), but unless you have a fairly defensive build or someone eating aggro for you, you really can’t put your AoE to much use.

That said, even with the removal of blasts from Evasive Arcana, sets like D/D are still tons of fun and a lot more engaging than my Warrior or Thief. It’s just a lot less fun for me, since I really liked rolling into specific fields in groups where you’ve got a bunch of different fields going down. It required a lot of attention.

Also, Ele water field + lightning conjure w/ 25 charges + someone with Quickness + something to hit = broken video card and super mass healing lol. Try it with a ranger and their water field healing ability.

On the Valk armor, I use it on my Thief since I wanted to not be super squishy while still being able to crit hard. I rolled a constantly stealthing build that also traited the automatic crits coming out of stealth, so the relatively crappy critical chance wasn’t really a big deal at all for me.

On my Ele, I rolled full Knight’s gear in PvE (Tough/Power/Prec). Although it’s weird to not have Power as a main stat, I wanted gear that both gave me a high crit chance to combo with the Arcane major trait that can proc 5 seconds of vigor on crit, as well as gave me a high amount of Toughness so that I could stay in melee range. This way, I could basically sit in the front with the group and AoE spam 21 stacks of might with full +boon duration via Scepter/Focus (YEAH I USE A FOCUS), and have the ability to negate any projectiles at their source. The Toughness + high protection uptime from runes/traits also made it so that using the Hammer conjure for additional blast finishers (YEAH I USE A CONJURE) and its actually pretty good base damage wasn’t actually suicidal. The hammer auto attack can do some pretty stupid stuff – I got 4 blast heals out of the Ranger’s water field once before I finally lost my hammer. With Evasive Arcana water rolls + blasts and water/earth attunement AoE buffs I didn’t really lose all my other utility either, especially since I usually blew most of my normal useful group spells while doing my might dance already (fire 4/2/3 – roll while attuning to water + arcane blast – water 3/5 – roll while attuning to earth – earth 4/3/2 – summon hammer). By the time my first hammer was done, my CDs would be back up and I could refresh the stacks of might before picking up the second hammer.

Without that toughness, I probably wouldn’t be able to melee so much, and the pretty much constant 25 stacks of might meant that I (and everyone else) still did a lot of damage even though I had Toughness as my primary stat on my armor. I could easily poop out streams of 3k autos while wielding my hammer and still constantly attunement swapping while wielding it for the Fury + random boons. If need be, I could even facetank for a pretty long time even though I wasn’t like a staffie constantly rolling into water fields.

The removal of blasts from Evasive Arcana did mean that I lost 6 stacks of might, though. I might end up getting myself a Sigil of Battle to make up for it – before I was experimenting with a life leech one to help me stick it out while up in melee.

With Evasive Arcana, an Arcana tree grandmaster trait, you could roll to produce a spell effect + blast finisher, with the spell effect depending on your current attunement. Each was supposed to be on a 10 second cooldown, so you weren’t supposed to be able to stay in fire and double roll for double procs, but you could roll in fire, then roll in water for double procs (of one of each effect). The blast finishers on the end of roll made for strong combo potential and interesting gameplay trying to roll into specific fields. Many builds were based around this one trait.

The blast finishers were completely removed in the last patch, hence why there’s a ton of complaining right now. I think a lot of people expected it to be nerfed somehow, but I don’t think many expected them to just straight up remove all the blast finishers, because it just completely removed the playstyle.

Defektive.7283:

No, I’m not asking for Eles to be nerfed. I’m saying nerf Warrior damage but give us interesting attacks like Ele’s.

Warriors need more complexity – looking at how comparable attacks get benefits is the first step to seeing the gap in weapon attack complexity.

This I can agree with. Given that they completely removed Evasive Arcana’s blast finishers with this last thread, which was one of the things that actually made ele’s fun and a little more complex to use rather than actually compromising and balancing it, I wouldn’t have too much hope of that, honestly.

The whole reason I chose to roll an Ele to 80 after my Warrior and Thief was that I wanted a more complex and fun character. In the end, they gutted the one thing that made Ele really fun for me, crazy zig zag rolling into fields for nifty effects. Rather than nerf a playstyle, they actually completely destroyed it (not saying that Ele’s are ruined – but they literally removed a playstyle from the game that was arguably the most fun way to play for many).

I’d say most of the classes are exceedingly simple, and the game as a whole could really use more complexity.

Warriors with shout builds can bring good Fury uptime and some easy stacks of Might with FGJ, some decent AoE healing, up to 4 AoE condition clears on an extremely short cooldown, vulnerability, more Might, perma Fury, and Swiftness coupled with a ranged group ress with Warbanner, in addition to their damage. With a Hammer, you have an AoE stun, a blast finisher, AoE weakness with high uptime (or permanent depending on your condition duration or hammer cd traits), an AoE knockback, a knockdown, and an AoE cripple. If you take a warhorn, you can AoE convert another couple of conditions into buffs, also on a short cooldown, while granting Vigor and Swiftness. In dungeons, if the group is doing fine I just GS spam my way to victory since damage is all you honestly really need, but if I’m in a really bad pug then I’ll equip my hammer and then usually we’re fine.

This is amazing.

An ele conjuring a hammer, with the intent to use it, locks themselves in multiple ways. First, they have to actually be traited and geared for survivability. Secondly, they can’t mist form or tornado (lol) without losing their hammer. Third, they completely lock themselves off from their current normal weapon skills. Fourth, as soon as they drop the hammer they’re holding in any way, it will disappear. Fifth, in order to have 25 attacks out of it, you have to sacrifice a major trait for it (otherwise its fifteen). Sixth, you have to use a utility slot for it, meaning you lose either a cantrip (of which multiple are pretty much always good to have so you don’t get squished unless you’re an aura build), or some other probably infinitely more useful utility.

This is coming from a player who started out wih an 80 warrior and used hammer for the longest time, before making an 80 thief, followed by an 80 ele. With all the things you have to do to make conjures useful, they kitten better well be at less somewhat powerful. The majority of the ele player base already considers conjures to be jokes for anything serious other than some really niche cases. I don’t see you talking about how hammer get great weakness uptime or cripple or AoE knockback or a leap/stun combo. Wow, look at what the warrior hammer can dO that ele hammers can’t!

Anarchium.8046:

Udyr.9283:

And in dungeons ele’s suck, except with evasive arcana build. To support and heal is our only viable role. Area swiftness, might, healing. But now that has been nerfed.

That may be the only way YOU can manage to play your elementalist in a dungeon, but don’t wave your hands around trying to represent the rest of us.

Stop looking at the class through such a narrow lens. Experiment with new playstyles — it’ll support many (many) more than people like you give credit. It can definitely fill both offensive and support roles but it requries different ways of playing both. Imagine that! If all you ever find in your hand is a staff, you’re probably doing it wrong. Just saying …

It broke more than just staff support/healing. My scepter/focus/hammer (yes, I use a conjure, and it’s a melee one on top of that) build got borked too. Many other builds got screwed over as well.

It’s not just that evasive arcana was strong. More than that, it was FUN. It was fun rolling into fields. Maybe people chose that play style not simply because it was strong, but because it was FUN. If all these annoyed ele players wanted to do was to abuse the strongest thing out there, I’m pretty sure that rather they would have simply rolled one of the many other classes with their own really powerful builds that are stronger and easier to use.

If there was actually some kind of compromise to keep some of that play style alive, I am quite certain that there would be a whole lot less complaining. Instead, the whole entire play style got the shaft. Hell, just make it so that it’s only a blast on earth roll (which is SUPPOSED to be churning earth). That means you have to sacrifice not only endurance, but also an attunement cool down in order to get whatever effect, and it also prevents blast finisher spamming via roll. Bam, some of the play style is preserved, and you can’t spam roll blasts in your water fields.

This is like if they took skiing out of tribes once the community figured it out.

The bug created an entire set of play styles that revolved around it. What’s more is that is was actually a ton of fun just to use; rolling around into different combo fields and creating all of these awesome combo effects made you feel powerful. Granted, being able to spam blast finishers really quickly with multiple rolls was definitely a bit much in PvE and you could do some ridiculous things like super fast mass AoE healing, but saying “hey, we’re gonna take probably one of the most engagIng things you can do and completely remove it from the game” rather than saying “hey, the community found something cool, let’s see if we can balance it while keeping the style of play and feeling it evokes alive” just seems like complete kitten

I have an 80 warrior and an 80 thief, and the single reason I bothered to level an ele to 80 was because I played around with evasive arcana in the mists with dummies and found it pretty interesting. I spent a bunch of gold just last week after hitting 80 on a full set of knights armor, with the idea that I would basically go s/f and be in melee virtually 100% of the time, and rely on might stacking to make up for the power lost by going knights as well as help be a bigger asset to my team. I did it, and it was incredibly fun to get the build rolling. Doing the might dance in tune with actually dodging potential one shots was a lot more engaging than backstab spamming or pressing 2 on my warrior.

At the very least, I’d like to at least see the skill reverted in PvE, if the earth roll isn’t altered back to be a churning earth (blast finisher). There should be NOBODY who objects to that.

Milennin.4825:

Suaveh.6392:

Milennin.4825:

Aren’t Dark Souls and Guild Wars 2 two completely different games…?

Yeah, one is challenging and rewarding PvE and one is something I need to afk with autoattack for 10 minutes each elite

You go afk with autoattack on Alpha or Giganticus without dying, and show me a profession with an elite that has a 10 minute cooldown.

Also, why are you playing a game you don’t enjoy over a game you do enjoy? Your other game is over there.——>

To be fair, if you have a teammate that provides you with a bit of AoE healing and condition clears, you can pretty much just drive path 1’s Alpha into a corner, press 1, and go AFK. Heck, I’m pretty sure you could get 5 guardians with maces (AoE heal on 3rd autoattack) and have them all AFK autoattack on that path on that path. Actually, you could probably do that with a lot of bosses – wouldn’t exactly be fast, but it’d probably get the job done.

But really, there are tons of bosses and mobs with terrible design. Let’s take just CM, for example. In CM, you’ve got:

Bandit archers that spam invulnerability for absolutely no reason other than to live longer, and do absolutely nothing interesting other than stand there (and occasionally blind you – woo).

AoE bomb tossing mobs that are only dangerous because the tell on their one actually dangerous attack gives you pretty much no time to react if you’re anywhere close, especially when you factor in the fact that their TINY MODELS will probably be obscured by FIVE THOUSAND PARTICLE EFFECTS (a very common problem, sadly).

Tons of mobs that just sit there unable to move while you wail on their face, because movement is overrated. Everyone knows that when you’re using a rifle, the best thing to do when someone comes up to your face is to stand there and take it like a man!

A caster centaur mage (I don’t think this thing even deserves to be called a boss) who spouts a bunch of jibberish while you afk next to him, while pretending to be dangerous and threatening. I’m pretty sure Vallog has got to rank among one of the worst designed bosses I’ve ever seen in any game.

A boss that poses absolutely no threat because at most, she can down one person at a time.

A boss that goes invulnerable for no other reason than to, again, prolong the fight, and attacks you by… running into you. I don’t know who thought that was interesting design, both from a gameplay and a visual standpoint, but seriously?

A “bonus” boss that gives no real rewards and is stupid because he barely does any damage and is just a fear spamming health bar (and yes it’s pretty easy to dodge, but still – why is this “bonus” boss even there?).

As for the health pools being too high – I don’t really know about that, to be honest. Yes, I said that some mobs are just globs of HP, but I say that because there’s literally no reason to be interested in them for the duration you fight them. When I’m fighting a bandit archer, I seriously don’t give any kittens about them, and I just sigh when they go invulnerable because it feels like a waste of time. In any proper party where you’re actually stacking boons and such, things actually do die quite quickly. The other day I was in a half pug group for CoE, and we cleared each Alpha fight in every path in 1-2 minutes flat (I judge based off of my ele’s Lightning Hammer conjure, 1 minute cooldown – I was at most summoning 2 per fight, if even for the earlier encounters), and this was while we were all poking fun at each other in chat. It was actually a ton of fun.

I think the main thing with most of the health pools is that people just suck in groups. When everyone constantly has 20+ stacks of might, constant vulnerability stacks on the enemy, constant fury, and everyone actually smacking the boss and doing damage, stuff dies pretty dang fast.

Evasive Arcana + Blast finishers on roll was literally the only reason I leveled an Elementalist to 80. My entire ele playstyle just got destroyed by this patch.

I was just thinking today that playing my ele in CoE against Alpha while constantly outputting blast finisher combos and dodging like a maniac while doing the might dance was probably the most fun I’d had in my entire GW2 PvE experience, and now it’s been wrecked. Normally I just press 2-3 a bunch on my Warrior or 5-1 on my Thief, but hey, this is actually fun and engaging, not to mention I’m dumping kittentons of might everywhere!

WELL THEN.

ilr.9675:

drkn.3429:

To start with, just go melee range during most fights with Alpha and ignore all his AoEs…

Uninformed much?
That only works on the Sub. He eats every group alive on Tele unless they’re bugging him up the steps first. (and that’s another thing… sick and tired of seeing puggers cheating on boss fights b/c they all agree the boss cheated first)

Bring some condition clears and a bit of healing for the Tele path, dodge roll every other attack. He’s easy as hell to melee in that path (every path, really…).

Tele is actually probably my favorite path. I dislike the hacking portion on sub and enjoy the Evolved Husk fight. It’s fun rifle butting golems into your teammates lol.

BrunoBRS.5178:

like i said, the ranger is my friend, not me. i’m a thief, i can easily get infinite rolls. but i take his word if he says he doesn’t have enough dodges even with his shortbow.

He has an evade on both his shortbow and his one handed sword that have shorter cooldowns than that of the evade on my warrior’s greatsword. My warrior can EASILY 100% dodge every other attack (which is all you need) between that one GS evade and natural stamina endurance. There is absolutely no reason your friend can’t do it. Have him take Lightning Reflexes if needed, too (even though it’s unnecessary, it’s a utility skill that grants both a free evade AND 10 seconds minimum of vigor, so if he’s having trouble, there’s no excuse NOT to take it). Not to mention it just takes 5 points into Wilderness in order to get an always active +50% faster endurance regen, which alone is also probably enough.

Assuming your ranger friend is using short bow like 99% of all the rangers out there, take a look at this skill.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Quick_Shot

Evasion on a 9 second cooldown. That coupled with your natural endurance gain is enough to completely dodge every single attack you need to in order to survive Alpha. I do the same thing with the Warrior’s number 3 GS attack and have no vigor procs/increased endurance gain in my build or utilities. Main hand sword can do it, too.

On the Detha thing – I’ve only had her bug out once, and it was the same as some others have said. Detha died and we failed the event. After running back, the Breeder was still present, and my group decided they wanted to try just killing the Breeder via just attacking it like any other boss without the event actually being triggered. Afterwards, we could not get the Ascalonian Captain/Detha dialogue that starts off the mortar building event to appear. This was also the only run where I had ever failed the Detha Breeder/spike trap event, so…. yeah.

There may be multiple causes for it, but I’d say this is probably the best way to try to reproduce it.

Anrothan Aimhirghin.7381:

1: NOT a fun dungeon to do since basically, you will die and brake your armor so much, the profit margin is actually a negative.

I’ve got about 20 charged lodestones sitting in my bank from running CoE alone. A few days ago I could have sold those for about 3.5ish gold apiece or something like that. I’m not even running it to farm for lodestones like some people I know, I just wanted to make myself a full set of weapons for a couple of my characters (underwater dungeon weapons ftw). But if you aren’t able to make money from CoE, it’s simply because you’re terrible in CoE.

Harsh and rude maybe, but just the truth. I often take multiple first timer randoms with me, and I still rarely die while playing a class that actually can’t escape from crystals via blink. A staff mesmer could probably easily solo path 2’s version of Alpha, since he doesn’t use the line of spikes there (though it would of course take a really long time).

If you walk inside of him, you can avoid his line of spikes without dodging. The hitbox for that move starts not from the middle of his hitbox, but from a small distance away.

Sins.4782:

Skipping them means admitting you’re not playing for fun, and that playing (at least in that specific instance) is a chore.

I don’t think that really leaves much room for misinterpretation there.

Personally, part of the fun in skipping mobs for me is in watching people fail the skips due to some random knockdown or whatever. I always find that amusing, even if it’s me.

zencow.3651:

I don’t like Swirling Winds cos it doesn’t return damage. Just get a mesmer with inspiration 20, Warden’s Feedback trait and have him chain projectile reflection: Warden, Temporal Curtain, Feedback, Warden the CM mobs to death.

Awesome in SE too since dredge love their guns and can’t be blind so it’s the best method to counter them.

It doesn’t return damage true, but it’s a lot safer than Wall of Reflection and Smoke Bomb, especially against those big bomb spams. If I know I’m in a good group then sure I won’t use it much, but if I’m playing my ele in a struggling pug you bet I’ll switch to a focus to use it. The fact that it nullifies every projectile in a big area just makes it really hard for people to fail.

AdliBot.4718:

I might be wrong, but CM gave me a feeling that it was designed for Thieves or Mesmers. What with all the One Shot-Kill wonders Anet has scattered throughout the dungeon, it’s hard to get by without using some sort invisible skill or portal.

Elementalists and Guardians are also great in CM. You can use Guardian lines of warding + wall of reflection to easily substitute for a Thief or Mesmer while skipping the mobs in that big room stuffed full of them. Wall of Reflection and Ele air focus 4 make ranged mobs really easy, too. Jump in there with Ele and if you’re traited for it it’s like 6 seconds of AoE invulnerability available every 24 seconds against many of the mobs (ex. Riflemen, Bombers, Scattershots, Archers).

The real issue with dungeons at the moment is that people just don’t want to try to learn. They die and they waypoint ress without changing up how they play, then call bullkitten.

If you’re fighting him in the corridor, you’re making it harder on yourself than need be. Spammable penetrating cone shaped AoE + narrow corridor = headache waiting to happen. On that path, after you get Traffa to blow up all of the Asuran tech, a door opens to the outside. You can either drag the boss out and fight him there where there’s more room, or just opt to skip him completely by continuing off the to the part of the dungeon, which will cause the boss to leash back at some point.

Also, he usually double fires on a target before switching usually unless he gets interrupted. As in, if he aggros person X, then aggros person Y, he’ll aim at X, fire, aim at X’s new position, fire, then aim at Y, fire, aim at Y’s new position, fire, and then choose a new person to aggro.

And again, bring a stun breaker just in case you accidentally get caught by a knockdown. If he’s double firing on you and he knocked you down with the first shot, stun break, roll dodge the second shot, and get your rhythm back up.

Umm… he’s hilariously easy in melee. I craft leveled my elementalist up to level 40ish and took her into CM once she hit 45 and spent the entire fight sitting on him with double daggers.

Before he fires, he always stares in the direction he is going to fire in for about a second. That gives you ample time to sidestrafe it (or even just run through him). Just bring a stun breaker for just in case you get hit every so often. He’s really very simple and easy.

Edit: Although yes, you should be able to reflect his shotgun blasts. It’s just inconsistent with what you’d expect and there’s no reason for it not to be allowed to be reflected.

But seriously, if a super mega ultra squishy undergeared level 46 melee d/d elementalist that didn’t even have an elite skill unlocked yet could do it without dying, you should be able to.

Most people just skip them. If skipping isn’t your thing, then yeah, just pull the groups one by one, AoE nuke the non silvers, then focus down the remaining silvers.

Not sure if you know this, but if you exit the zone and come back, you should be unsuppressed. For example, if I am asking for people in Lion’s Arch to join my group and I get map suppressed, I usually run out to the zone south of there (Bloodtide Coast, I think?), send off a LFM message there, then go right back into Lion’s Arch.

But yes, there needs to be a better system for finding groups than what we have now.

The mood/atmosphere was well done. The guy talks, and moves around. The staging area was nice. He feels unique. Explorable bosses could take a good hint from that. Too many bosses are immemorable.

However, the fight itself is really easy. If all explorable bosses were that easy, well… yeah, that just shouldn’t happen. Maybe for a boss that’s like at the start or halfway through the dungeon or something, but by no means should the Mad King’s difficulty become a standard for explorables.

Story modes, though, maybe. I think it’d make more sense if story mode dungeons/bosses were closer to this level of difficulty in general.

When you choose to let the Inquest die, the shield he’s sitting inside overloads and explodes, killing all the mobs outside the shield. If you choose to save him, the shield can be overloaded by using the console after Alpha spawns to deal ze massive domoges. it’ll take off something like half his HP, and since you only need to get him to about 25% or so that particular fight, it makes it a really fast beatdown. It’s not automatically done – you have to actually use the console to get the shield to blow up on Alpha. Make sure nobody is sitting on top of him already when you do that, though, as I don’t think it differentiates between friend and foe. Alpha can spawn without aggroing, so if you have everyone standing back then it’s not issue at all to get it to hit.

Honestly though, I hate fighting those mobs, so I usually just let the Inquest guy die and fight Alpha like normal lmao.

I think this is also path 1, submarine route, only. I might remember wrong.

I still pretty much only get blues and such from dungeons, but one of the people I dungeon run a lot with seems to be getting lots of rares, way more than usual (and he’s not running MF gear or anything).

Warriors can go a banner regen/protection route, or a healing shouts/condition removal build. Warbanner is also amazing for pinch situations where you really need to ress someone (or multiple people) NOW, or just for group damage.

Guardian has aegis, wall reflection (reflection is always awesome and can make some dungeons cakewalks), awesome condition removal, quite a few blinds, aoe blocks, area denial, protection, retaliation, etc. Staff poops out tons of might.

Thief has venom sharing, large AoE stealth (great for ressing), regen on stealthing people, decent pulling ability (when scorpion wire chooses to work), and can have permanent blind/poison/weakness depending on how you play/trait, group boons on steal. Blinding Powder is just all sorts of awesome against troublesome mob packs.

Engineer can easily maintain tons of stacks of vulnerability with grenade builds while also dishing out tons of both direct and condition AoE damage. Traited turrets can bring tons of CC, and elixir gun is amazing for group support. Supply crate and Elixir R are also awesome.

Mesmer’s Time Warp is pretty much pure awesome. They’ve also got AoE stealth and portals if you like skipping stuff, reflection (again, always awesome), great condition clearing, and boons galore.

Aside from the water fields, an Elementalist can pretty much solo maintain permanent regeneration and protection on a party if traited and geared for it. They can also have a ton of combo fields to play with. You can do some neat pulling stuff with the arcane abilities, too. Condition removal/regeneration on water attunement, might on fire attunement, heal/condition removal on roll, protection on earth attunement, constant weakness with earth staff 1, etc…

Can’t really say much for Necromancer and Ranger, haven’t really tried them or taken too much note of them.

There’s tons of ways to support your group without having to trait specifically for it. It can be as simple as switching what you have in your utility slots. It’s absolutely ridiculous how many CM parties I’ve been in with a Guardian/Mesmer who refuses to use Wall of Reflection/Feedback. You don’t have to be thinking about how to keep your party alive and going 24/7, but dear lord if you’re a Thief, please don’t take that oh so awesome for world exploration Signet of Shadows into the dungeon if you’re not even going to use the thing to blind.

Honestly, if a group of 80s kicks you because you’re too “low level”, chances are that group was going to suck anyways and you’ll probably be faster finding another group.