Guild Wars 2

For pve open world it doesn’t mind, but for dungeons yeah, not using nades or bombs ( or both) will seriously put you behind, both in terms of damage and support.

For staff pve, you just spam 1,2 and 5 off cooldown, and use 3 to proc your fire 5 damage modifier. S/D is really squishy, if you’re dying use focus offhand instead. The base rotation you should adapt to your needs is something like: fire 2, fire 4, fire 3, earth, earth 4, earth 5 if prestacking might and you have time for it, switch to water or air depending on your build, use air 2 and 3 with rtl if you’re using an air conjurer build,and conjure a hammer/ ice bow/ fgs. For utilities, signet of fire, arcane wave, and lightning hammer are a possible offensive setup. Since you’re not 80 yet and probably don’t have special damage modifiers, you’re not forced to camp in any attunements for your conjure, but it’s better to get the hang of it faster. If you don’t mind doing low tier damage, you can decide to not use LH and camp between air and fire. Those rotations are all for pve, in pvp there’s no set rotations, most S/D builds are bursty and are really effective with the fresh air trait you don’t have, and staff just switch attunements depending on their need.

Blast Finisher: Area protection 3 seconds.
Leap Finisher: Self magnetic aura 3 seconds.
Projectile Finisher: Cripple shot 1 second.
Whirl Finisher: Cripple whirl 1 sec each.

So, warhorn 5 gives 3 sec protection, gs 3 gives a magnetic aura. Still not much. I know the ranger skills, i’ve all classes to 80, but apart from the cripple shot, everything is group oriented, since 3 sec of protection is too much, if it ever comes, you’ll need at least a few blasts to have the full effect. It’s not like you could use muddy terrain+ Warhorn 5 to counter a burst, both cast times are too long for a quick protection counter. The magnetic aura is interesting by design, but i don’t feel like it would fit in actual gameplay. More ways to gain auras or boons are a good idea to up ranger, but first it doesn’t really need a buff in solo setting, and doing so by blast finishers and combo fields is unecessary. If anet ever put a earth field, i’ll use it just as i use the others, but that’s not something i’m looking forward.

I’m not talking about ""my precious fields", i’m just saying that in a zerg situation protection uptime is already high enough, aoe reflects would hurt ranged specs ( ranger even) even more, and vigor stacking isn’t really Anet’s cup of tea, see the nerfs to vigor on crit traits. In solo, rangers won’t benefit from it since you need blast finishers/leaps/ any kind of finisher.

For really small scale roaming ( basically solo or duo) a regen shout condi ranger is powerful, and it’s also really fun to play, i think koroshi had a guide on his youtube channel it should be up to date. For tpvp/spvp, spirit rangers are powerful but in the current meta i don’t see them put to use much. Tbh, i don’t see much rangers at all. Your options are tankish close holder with shout regen, spirit ranger for deadly condi spammer, could also defend a point like a mm necro, or zerker burst like a staff ele, but meh. I’m not aware of any other builds suited for high level pvp, since i’m not bringing my ranger here. Sword aa is indeed clunky, it has its use for chasing though. There’s some small tips for sword aa: if you need to dodge quickly, cancel the animation by either weaponswapping, using a high priority skill, or sword 3/dagger 5.

It’d also hurt ele ability to take advantage of their fields, with the risk or overwriting a fire/water field by an earth field for instance. Group projectile reflection would be op imo. Rangers already got quite a few improvements so let’s see how this packs out. I don’t think adding new fields is the way to buff rangers, maybe give them more blasts via traits if you want them to be a field user class.

If you’re going for 4 water, you may as well take the 5th bonus and let another ele take care of persisting flames. The main reason for 6/6/2 builds over a 5/4/0/5/0 is the vulnerability for weak spot. If your party is already capped at 25 vuln and have fury covered, here’s some numbers from the DnT forum by Dekeyz:
6/6/2/0/0: 13096 DPS with Fire/Air Conjurer rotation. Your first 6 LH chains each do 34948 damage, then drop to 33586 as you lose Arcane Lightning. Average 34607 damage per chain and you stack vuln and fit in more RTL+LS combos for nearly free DPS if not prestacking might.
5/4/5/0/0:13763 DPS with Fire/Air Conjurer rotation. All 8 LH Chains each do 36339 damage since you camp air the whole time. But this tanks to DPS lower than 6/6/2/0/0 as soon as you dodge.
6/4/2/2/0: 12734 DPS with Water/Air Conjurer rotation. Your first 6 LH chains each do 36259 damage then drop to 29139 as you swap to air and lose Arcane Lightning. Average 34479 damage.
5/4/0/5/0: 13152 DPS with Water/Air Conjurer rotation. Your first 6 LH Chains each do 37507 damage, your last 2 do 30121. Average 35660 damage.

What Hayashi said is spot on, except for the dagger survivability ( the aa refills endurance) and the thing about warrior. Thief dps is just well over, especially in this conjured meta.
Also, the signet heal with pistol whip spam or fgs is fun.

Wouldn’t be useful in pve and it’ll add another field to watch for when stacking might in pugs. Overall, meh, don’t really like the idea.

Rainshine.5493:

oxtred.7658:

For www, your main healing will be done by guardians and warriors blasting your fields.

Depends on what you’re doing. Small-scale the ele will be doing much of the blasting — or should be, anyway. Works really well with warrior buddies especially, because you give them that extra time to pewpew without withdrawing and they have enough natural defense to give regen/soothing mist plenty of time to keep ticking.

I wouldn’t take a full cleric ele, especially using staff, in small scale. Staff is just too slow imo to keep up with a D/D or S/x roaming spec, and the healing from dd or even d/F is already high enough with celestial or a bit of zealot. But maybe that’s just me.

IF you’re using grenades, the ideal choice would be to put all your firearms trait points in explosive. Thing is, the explosives traitline is pretty boring with passive damage buffs, so try it a bit and if you feel like it doesn’t suit your playstyle take back your other build. But speccing for 30 explosives gives you one more grenade per skill, and it’s incredibly powerful. You’ll end up with my ( it’s not mine per say, just using that since day 1) WwW build, 6/0/0/4/4 with similar traits, the advantage of this build is it works with direct damage and condi damage, so you can switch between clerics or rabid or even berserker if you want to. Celestial could work, but it’s expensive to get without doing fractals.
I’m not a great fan of elixir x as an elite, i feel like supply crate is funnier ( and better!).
Glad i helped you, have fun with your engineer ^^

Did you read what i said? Are you really complaining there’s something optimal? Every single game has an optimal gear/comp. You can still complete a dungeon in cleric, nomad, rabid, naked, or whatever suits you, and it’s not even harder. What do you suggest to make selfish gameplay useful? ( Because, let’s not lie here, stacking toughness for yourself is far from group friendly). Also, bingo, i’ll try to avoid corners in dungeons since it’s an exploit. Yeah, the fastest pve set is the most damaging one. How surprising, a good team can maintain themselves alive without stacking toughness or vitality. I gave you exemple of support, and you keep spreading nonsense like corner exploiting or full berserker team exploiting. Do you even know what that means?

Let’s recap, you want all armors to be necessary. Ok, so we design a dungeon where the mobs deal so much damage you need to play in ptv. Now, dungeon running guild needs ptv to barely survive. What about pugs? The irony here is you want people to play your way whereas I’m defending the “phiw” playstyle.

Condition is indeed a problem in dungeons, with all that condition cap things, but making at least one condition user necessary won’t change the meta, it’ll just bring a new trinity, and Anet ( me as well) doesn’t want that.

As a side note, you keep involving support is tied to gear, tell me how your tanking worked while you were pewpewing with a scepter as a full ptv guard while your team was dying.

Sorry if i seem a bit harsh, but repeating the same things and just getting called an exploiter for that isn’t really enjoyeable. That said, back on topic, would you like more hardcore content suited for above average players or the kind of dungeons we have now with new mechanics and possibly punishing for fgs stacking if that’s really something that bugs you?

Mesmer isn’t a good solo class. Thief is meh at best since they lack selfbuffing, but they are easier than, say, an elementalist. Ele is the best damage dealer in the game and have decent/ great self buffing, but they are harder to play than everything else. Guardian are great, they lack selfbuffing as well but they have reflects and a lot of survivability tools.
Between those 4, i’d say guardian if you’re not comfortable with soloing yet, thief if you’re average, and ele if you really know the game well.

For tpvp you could actually trait for staff bunker with either celestial or cleric. I don’t like staff so i can’t tell you wich set is the best for that, that’s the only part of the game where you may want to invest in a staff healing build though. For www, your main healing will be done by guardians and warriors blasting your fields, and for pve, you won’t need that healing.

Speaking for open world pve since that build isn’t dungeon related:
The main flaws i see for your build are:
-you’re playing cleric, wich boosts your power, and you’re mainly using burning for damage. That won’t boos your burning damage really high, leaving you with no damaging auto attack/ meaningful condi application.
-You lack aoe. Maybe try a bomb/grenades build, plus you get the awesomeness of throwing grenades everywhere.
-The health regen from dolyak is meh; maybe a more damage oriented rune won’t hurt your survivability and allows more damage. I’m thinking of either balthazar for condi or scholar for direct damage, for instance.
-Protection injection is more of a pvp trait, mobs in open world won’t cc you much, vigor on swiftness will get you more dodges, thus more escaping wich fits your theme.
-You have no condi removals, even though it’s not that useful in open world, you don’t want to be stuck in combat with a 1 min poison or something. Maybe play healing turret?
Think i’m done. Keep in mind those suggestions are just thoughts to make your build more fun overall but it’s far from something optimised, in case you’re looking for that. Have fun.

Can’t really help you for medium scale www, as rangers aren’t really powerful there. With the latest changes a backline single target burster to take down eles could be a thing, not in optimal gameplay though. For dungeons, your best bet is a spotter sword build with frost spirit, found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=via57Pzvm58
Most people recommand using a tanky pet and a longbow in open world pve but i find the ranged playstyle boring and just love greatsword+sword/x. Up to you i guess.
Condi specs on ranger are mostly duel specs and tpvp/spvp related.
So yeah, i’d say stick with zerker at least for the pve part, for www zerging i don’t really know the viability of such a spec, i always found berserker lb rangers not that great because of the lack of aoe. Spirit will just insta die just as your pet, and condi isn’t that useful in zergs, so..

Empower is pretty bad for 3 main reasons: it stucks you in a bad weaponset if you’re switching to staff just for empower, the might stacks duration is short and will overwrite longer stacks from fire field+blast, and the cast time hurts your personal dps by a lot.
In solo, you can use it prefight to burst open world mobs, but it’s not really needed ( just fun to see higher numbers). SIgnets are usually a bad choice for dungeons since you want to use the right utilities to mitigate damage and not a passive boost, not that helpful. THe increased power signet is decent if you have nothing to take instead, in solo i usually run save yourselves/ retreat/ signet.

Ascended armor isn’t really needed in any pve content, they are only useful for high level fractals ( see agony resistance mechanics). Weapons are a bit less expensive and provide a pretty good dps gain ( around 5% iirc) but if you just leveled, focus on exotic gear, trinkets are pretty easy to get ascended with fractals, laurels from dailies and guild missions. For pve, the best gear set is berserker with scholar runes, i don’t think thieves should get a berserker/ assassin mix, you should check out the DnT theorycraft forum for min/max gear. As for www, i find myself comfortable with berserker, and i find thieves to be more efficient as burster in team play, but solo you could try a P/D condi build, it’s a kitteneese mode and even an average player can win pretty easily. Ultimately in all end game content, be it pve or www, thieves are imho more suited for direct damage and direct damage burst. The spec i’m playing on my thief right now for solo and small squad roaming is a trickery d/p build, 0/6/2/0/6, i’m waiting for the incoming patch to see if the build is nerfed though. For thief www gameplay, you could start by checking youtube videos, like yishis commentaries or I am mugi channel for instance. The thief subforum provides help as well.
Hope this was clear, if you have any questions, i’ll be glad to answer them.
edit: typo

Every dungeon runner wants new content. That doesn’t mean the old content is bad, i’m still having a blast trying to get record times or soloing things, and the gw2 combat system is really good. You keep telling us cc and support is useless, but any good dungeon runner will tell you otherwise. IF you never used support or cc and still survived, it shows that an inexperienced group may be able to end a dungeon path, why would you complain about that? You’re being elitist for the sake of being elitist. Harder content is totally welcome and needed, but the paths we have now are far from bad designed. Some players find the fgs meta boring, i personally don’t but i can understand their point, apart from that pve fights are generally fun and chalenging when doing them for the first few times. If you balance the game to be hard for pve hardcore runners, all the pug playerbase won’t be able to even finish the content.

I do agree with you, new content would be great. But saying the dungeons we have now never use support or cc isn’t true at all, and you probably know it. Might, fury, stability, banners, frost spirit, projectile reflection or absorbtion, damage mitigation, conjured weapons, condi removal.. That’s support. CC is used in any high level guild to gain dps uptime, like interrupting arah P2 abom, CoE golem, berserkers spin, illusionists aa, etc. You may not need those when playing a selfish survivable build, but if my full zerker ele doesn’t interrupt or support, i’ll just get oneshot by a random critter.
(may contain typos)

tl;dr: You’re right, we need new content, but i wanted to argue against that misconception where full berserker teams are only focused on dps.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guide-DPS-Guardian-for-PVE
this guide is just the only thing you need pve wise, made by one of the most talented guards in gw2. I do not know the other guides on the guard subforum but they should be up to date. If you have any questions about guardian you can hit me up ingame, although i won’t be here for a week. After that, i’ll be glad to show you some tricks or how to improve, if you want it

Mesmer suffers from a lot of problems right now, in pve they aren’t really wanted except for a few portal tricks so you can’t really take a mesmer in dungeons if you don’t know what to do, they kinda are cheap guardians with more reflection uptime but less damage. Pve as well, they just so lack burst damage you won’t be as useful as an ele or a guardian. In pvp, shatter specs are powerful for aoe bursts but you’ll lack condi removal and be squishy. Some 1v1 builds are really op ( mainly PU stuff, check mesmer subforum) but that’s about all. There’s maybe an hundred bugs for that class no one wants to fix. Pick what you feel is fun though, you can succeed as a mesmer and a skilled mesmer is 10 times better than any guy sticking to what’s the best. I played mine quite a bit before switching to other classes in www roaming and their stealth, boonstrip, and control are really good. Their damage is lackluster apart from shatterburst.

I’m throwing things out of my heads not really in the order so that may be not that useful, just some advantages/disadvantages in endgame.

I myself have 2 guardians, one for pve and one for small scale roaming, it’s a really powerful class but since they lack mobility especially with a shout build, if you don’t play with 2 3 other players you’ll just be too slow to do anything. By all mean main guardian, it’s a great class, but remember those few things guards rely on active defense, especially in pve, so you’ll need to understand what to block, what to do etc; there’s some stickies in the guardian subforums with great players for all game modes, you should stay those. Guardian is a good choice if we’re speaking about how they perform compared to other classes, in pve they bring to the table a lot of damage mitigation, aoe stability and condi removal, and reflects. In pvp/ roaming, they are kings of boon spam and can remove condis quite effectively. So yeah, guards are always wanted in all games modes; you should test the classes and you’ll probably end up playing multiples. Welcome to gw2

Guardian is trait dependant at high levels, meaning you can’t really jump in level 2 and be a killing machine. All classes can work in solo roaming, in group settings you’ll pretty much always want a guard, then it depends on what you like. Generally speaking, here’s how meta builds for each classes feels in roaming:
ele: Difficult class to master, D/D has some really fast animations, it’s one of those classes you always want to play for the swag, damage isn’t that good if you want to stay in the fight more than a few secs but some hybrid dps/tankish specs can pump out respectable damage while being tanky. They are countered by heavy burst.
Guardian: gets stronger in a group, their groupwide boon application is just insane. A well played guard can takes aggro all day long, they do lack mobility except if traited for meditations.
Warrior: Easy to play class at an average level, really resistant with any www build, good cc/mobility/ single target burst depending on the sepc.
Thief: bursty deceptive class, mainly single target burster, it’s a high skill ceiling class imo and it lacks condi removal usually.
Mesmer: Deceptive class just as thief, good stealth uptime, fun skills, but always get nerfed to hell so it’s less and less exciting.
Necro: I don’t like playing my necro much since it feels slow and just not that fun but others may not agree
ranger: not that great in small scale roaming, good in solo with a condi tank build but they doesn’t give much to a group setting outside of pve frostspotter.
enginer: great and fun class really powerful in group, stupid aoe condition application, lacks condi removal and burst mobility but really fun to play.
Tl;dr: mesmer and thieves are “stealthish” classes if you’re into mindgame and all, ele and engis are about explosions everywheres and good survivability with moderate aoe damage, ranger and necros are imo slow and not that great but many players could prove me wrong, guardian is a great group class, war is easy to play, think i’m done. ^^

For pve, ele is just king.

Did you know? I’m a magician. Look. I’ve a magic solution if you’re forced to play berserker. I know i’m awesome, that’s the way it is.

Open a lfg, say " P1, everyone welcome"
WOW
my god, I’m so intelligent it hurts.

Seriously though, you rant about something, we give you counter arguments, and you just deny it saying it’s an angry outburst? I mean, meaningful discussion is always nice, much less after the 1000th time but still; on the other hand why would you post a question on the forum if you’re not even looking for answers?
Also give me an exemple of a pve fight where support doesn’t make things faster.
Edit: typo

i’ll bait
So, exploit isn’t what you dislike. Full cleric teams are an exploit, since it allows to complete any pve content without dodging. See, that’s not the way it works.
I don’t know how many times this has been said, but wearing a gear ( berserker here) doesn’t kitten you in a role. A full berserker guard is actually your typical “support” role for trinity mmo: it gives damage mitigation and condi removal mainly, and the meta build isn’t a max damage build but rather a group friendly build. All classes but necro have some team support, and wearing full ptv or condi or whatever doesn’t prevent you from using these.
If full berserker teams are an exploit, care to explain why? What mechanics did they bypass? Dodge? Oh wait, wearing an offensive gear means you’ll use damage mitigations, and wearing tanky gear allows you to facetank stuff. That’s an exploit.
If dungeons doesn’t give you the ability to use cc, support, or even boonstrip, you’re just a selfish individual not supporting its team. Gear has nothing to do with role, every class is a damage dealer.

Yo,

First of all, ice bows and fgs are used for burst aoe damage against large hitboxes bosses or, in the case of fgs, mainly for foes against a wall ( if you don’t know how to deal damage with fgs, use the 4th ability against a wall/ large mob without auto targetting).
People will ask you to spawn these because they’ll be able to pick up another version of the conjured weapon you get, that means you’ll be able to use fgs 4, and another guy in your group will do the same; the dungeon meta is nearly all about those conjures since they are the best burst damage in the game over a quick period of time;
All pve eles can use fgs, although you may want to equip a D/F or S/F build since those allows more might stacking outside fgs and thus an overall dps increase for your party.
Staff is the highest ele dps weapon but it requires external sources of blasting to be efficient. Dual dagger is the only weaponset you don’t want to use in dungeon pve.
Again speaking about dungeon, the optimal set is berserker for eles, but since they are really squishy, you could try a bit more survivable set before going crazy on dps. Ultimately the goal is to dish out the maximum damage while supporting your team with fury and might, and projectile reflection with focus.

Staff guard 4 is a bad ability to stack might since the might stacks are really shorts, as an ele you can easily buff your party to 24 out of combat using weapon switching, and about 15 might stacks solo with D/F or S/F. The big advantage is since you’ll be stacking with fire fields and blast finishers, other people in your party can contribute to the might stacking and thus you’ll have 25 long lasting might stacks and fury using persisting flames ( 6 in fire). For more informations about dungeon ele check the stickies on this subforum or Dekeyz videos on youtube. For open world you can go whatever you want since you’re solo and no one cares about what you play there.
Hope that was clear.

well, it may have been misunderstanding from both parts, but i’m pretty sure you refused to relog. Maybe you thought the group was full since we had 2 fillers, i don’t know. If i just didn’t understand what you said, then my apologies, but the way you said you wouldn’t log back sounded really agressive ( i’m not implying it was, it felt like it) and i’m pretty sure it was you since i was the guy asking you if you were the same fror from those forums ^^

Hello,
you did join my group for an arah selling, let me briefly explain what was wrong for our point of view:
we had still 2 spots to sell so i asked if you could swap back for a bit since i wasn’t able to put the lfg back; your answer was something like " i’m already nice enough to buy and i don’t care about your 2 others spots, now kill the boss or i leave"
so yeah, i’d rather sell 2 more spots and not deal with this kind of answer. Concerning your question, i already had sub 80 buying arah, it’s not a problem at all.
Good day, good luck for your leveling.