Guild Wars 2

DiogoSilva.7089:

The rune/ sigil changes affect all professions, and most professions are getting directly nerfed too.

75% boon duration is was crucial to D/D eles in WvW though. A few condi necroes also do 2xLyssa, 2xMad King but mostly other professions didn’t rely as much on rune mixing since full sets like Lyssa’s are more OP for them anyway.

The patch will bring D/D eles abit closer in line with the other professions and will let you be abit safer in zerker amulet/glassy gear but it’s not like D/D eles in soldiers/clerics/amulet/gear are magically going to start being a threat again, except (those shatter mesmers who would be alot more vulnerable with their vigor halved huehue)

Firstly my rationals are for staff zerging are:
Healing Power: 1) ratios are horrible, 2) most of the heals in an organized zerg come from many other people blasting in the water fields which does not benefit from your healing power.
Condition damage: Eruption will likely never land/have a minimal effect, your burn uptime is only 50% of the time with Flame Burst.
Which pretty much makes Celestial’s all-stat benefits pointless.

Which leaves you with Zerkers/Knights/Valkyries/PVT etc to consider from.
1400 Toughness and 15k Health would be a luxury to have for survivability but you should really aim for full zerk to be a real asset to the zerg by obliterating foes.

Knowing when to Meteor Shower is crucial and being on voice com to lay down water fields is optimal/know when to engage and retreat is very important to not dying especially if doing full zerker.

The 100% safe way to engage zerg fights as a mega-squishy is to go in with Magnetic Aura up, channel Meteor Shower and Lightning Flash immediately away if it looks like you’re being targeted (will not cancel the channel/move the Meteor Shower). Throw Fireballs, lay down Lava Fonts and watch big numbers and Burning Retreat away from danger, it’s not really hard as long as you’re not lagging.

I think it’d be more like 30% boon duration too. They would probably do something like a 6%/10%/14% for 2/4/6 runes.

See, they want you to use Burning Speed to cover for the loss of protection uptime and the Frozen Burst blast to cover for the loss of might stacks.

There’s no such thing as free buffs for eles.

Pretty sure PvT armor with clerics trinkets slotted with zerker jewels with 2x water 2x monk and 2x divinity was the go to.

It was many nerfs and bug fixes that stopped D/D being op (trap rangers countered D/D eles in sPvP at the time though). The RtL nerf was the last straw that removed the hit and run tactic that turned D/D from mediocre to underpowered in conjunction with everyone else getting buffs.

The major ones were:
Soothing Disruption’s base regen and vigor durations reduced from 8 to 6 seconds
Bountiful Power from 2% damage to 1% per boon
Auras stopped being treated as boons
Shocking Aura’s applying Zephyr’s Boon and Elemental Shield twice bug got fixed
Impale no longer activates Signet of Restoration twice
Evasive Arcana no longer activates Signet of Restoration twice
Skills no longer usable in Mist Form
Cleansing Fire and Lightning Flash stopped being stun breaks

WvW:
Food that procs effects no longer procs Signet of Restoration

PvP nerfs:
Cleansing Wave dodge healing power ratio nerfed
Cleansing Water received ICD of 5
Signet of Restoration nerfed by 18% (yep after all the bug fixes they still hated Signet of Restoration that much for being a passive heal… and of course they buffed Healing Signet in spite of that)

silvermember.8941:

I would kick you so hard it wouldn’t be funny. Except for the fact that the player self heal is the most effective heal available. you staying in water is actually SIGNIFICANTLY slowing the part down and like the others have said, I might hate the zerker meta, but I don’t like people being useless in my group (then again I barely like group activity, so my anger is going to be amplified by playing with someone that is being dumb), either.

Now now, sure healer wannabes of all stripes are deadweight, but I admit even I have to appreciate pretty the green numbers of full heal-specced water-camping staff ele are:

At 1500 healing power;
Water Blast: heals for 745 with an attack interval of 1.35 seconds which is 551 HP/s. Soothing Mist: 155 HP/s (100% uptime easy with lingering uselessness).
Regen: 317 HP/s (at least 50% uptime with Water Alacrity with Healing Rain, possible to maintain permanently by attunement switching via Elemental Attunement and/or spamming stoning through Healing Rain.)

= 1023 HP/s (2 and a half Healing Signets worth of heals for everyone gasp)
[while you do about 200 damage per Water Blast for about… 148 DPS]

But wait, there’s more!
Geyser: 1183 × 3
Evasive Arcana dodge + your Blast Finishers in Water Field: 1620 per
Healing Ripple on returning to Water Attunement: 2820
(Sigil of Renewal proc: 524)
(Sigil of Water proc: 520)

The role-playing potential is out there!

MotherKitten.6795:

I never see Arcane Power mentioned in burst strategies. Doesn’t guaranteed crits on your next five attacks fit in with bursting?

The Insta-kill scepter burst people love involves many packets of damage from pressing a total of 8 buttons very fast/at the same time. Hurl+Earthquake→Lightning Flash→Air Attune+Lightning Strike+Arcane Blast+Arcane Wave+RTL. Packets of damage also come from Electric Discharge and Sigil Hydromancy or Geomancy (soon possibly both) for those who use Tempest Defense. Hurl itself is kittens and easily ruins AP.

AP is still used by pansy bursts Eles who seek survivability through Valkyrie Amulet but they die about as fast as Zerker eles anyway since despite the toughness they only 12-13k HP.

Bear in mind Zephyr’s Focus is still bugged.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Elementalist-Trait-bugs-1/first#post3100291

For PvE purposes, you’d get more DPS out of dagger mainhand (in settings where you don’t have to be a might-stack slave) and more Zephyr’s Focus uptime especially with the bug it has with Cone of Cold that makes it last even if you dodge mid channel.

Diamond Skin is a terrible step in making the game even more passive/buildwars. Attributes that further removes this game from being e-sport worthy.

It’s broken in the sense that it is either A) totally useless when getting focused in anyway whatsoever and against power builds or B) ridiculously OP in 1v1 situations against condi builds where you can just faceroll the opponent and chase them around the map till they ragequit since they can’t get past the 90% health threshold and there’s absolutely no counter-play they can make as an individual.

It’s nice to have something to utterly beat condi builds with but it’s changes like this that makes the game worse by adding to the passive, no counter play culture of this game that no serious PvPers are interested in.

An enormous amount of health.
A shatter mesmer doing a full burst on it only does about 10% of the ice block’s health.

Being a structure it’s also immune to crit and condition damage.

Pretty much if you land it it’s guaranteed to last the full duration. But bear in mind while even teleports/blink skills – irrespective of a stunbreak component – will not break the stun, they will be enough to get them out of the aoes you set on the stunned target so (mesmers and sword thieves being pretty much immune to CC as they are won’t be hindered too much even by the greatness of Deep Freeze)

Mochann.5298:

What am I missing?

Maybe tornado?

Moving 10 air into 10 water for vital striking would help. Losing 5 fire and 20 arcana and getting 25 earth for Stone Splinters, Serrated Stones and Enduring Damage would also gain you more situational damage (25/10/25/10/0).

Alternatively 25/25/0/20/0 with Vital Striking and Piercing Shards and lava font→ flame burst→meteor shower+switch to water. I don’t think you’re counted as in Water Attune when you are in tornado though so there’s less synergistic damage there but it’s easier than getting the earth damage traits to happen.

Emanuel.9781:

TL;DR version of the morale of the whole thread: Pugs are bad. You are bad too, if you don’t use proper DPS builds, which provide other damage/defense buffs to the group without lowering your DPS. If you don’t do this or at least try, you are as bad as the pugs you’re talking down upon.

You wish.

The OP would probably prefer shout ranger and support tank necro with massive facetank potential over their respective top deeps builds.

Marks are dodgable.

For sPvP you must use a zerker or valkyrie amulet to have any chance of killing a necro or warrior by yourself (or anything else really). Alternatives don’t give you enough damage to get past life force gains/heal sig and you will lose in a prolonged fight.

Zerker amy is your best bet agains’t necros since the small amount of vitality is much better than valk’s toughness and 12k health vs condi.

Saulius.8430:

Qaelyn.7612:

… This is the first dungeon new players like me are likely to try. What a horrible experience …

its not about level, but about number of experienced players in group

number of experienced players vs dungeon difficulty:
5 – breeze
4 – smooth
3 – average slug pug
2 – struggle
1 – frustration
0 – no idea what we are doing

so if you want healthy dungeon experience, make sure to grab at least couple experienced friends before using lfg tool

pro tips:

• if you encounter experienced players who don’t mind lower levels in the group, don’t be shy to befriend and chat with them after dungeon. they might help you with dungeons in future
• avoid people who don’t want lower levels in party and/or do dungeons just for gold reward

False. Soloing/duoing dungeons involves only 1-2 experienced players yet does not = struggle/frustration.

Anicetus.1253:

Hm, might have mixed it up with meteor shower then.

That’s casting meteor shower/ using FGS 4 and then tornadoing.

Rampage (both engi and warrior version) is a special case unlike other transforms and still allows you to pick up bundles conjures, banners etc and even stomp unlike tornado/lich form etc where you can’t do that.

Most likely a bug though.

Fuzzion.2504:

The question about crit damage and crit % has been debated before. Here are my views

The flaws are threefold, primarily this “maths” views damage output as linear scaling, which is not.

1) The “maths” ignores the extra ingredient of power and might.

2) The theory fails to include fury as a benefactor.

3) If you say 1/3 for 50% crit damage + 50% (30% crit chance+20% fury). Add in base power, power from might stack of 25 , bloodlust sigil, wvw rank bonus, ascended weapons and you easily go from hitting (i.e. A1) like a carebear to hitting like a mactruck.

This topic really has been suggested a bazillion times and now with ascended gear, the min max stats should provide somewhere around 50% crit damage without sacrifice.

The nature of damage calculation is kind of irrelevant in comparing crit damage and crit %.

It’s better just to look at it as a crit multiplier for your average hit:
Crit multiplier = 1 + Critical Chance * (Critical Damage + 0.5)
Which means you want Critical Chance to be as near as Critical Damage + 0.5 as possible since similar numbers always produces a higher result.
E.g.
3 × 9 = 27
4 × 8 = 32
5 × 7 = 35
6 × 6 = 36

If accounting for fury then compare (Critical Chance + 0.2) to (Critical Damage + 0.5)
Given that it requires 21 precision to raise one Crit Chance% and the given stat combinations though, crit damage of ~50% and crit chance of ~30% are around the best values you can get when min-maxing for damage with some tankiness or losing too much power.

Just avoid going full crit damage and completely ignoring crit chance and vice versa. And you should build 30% base crit chance (which will become 50% with fury) before building crit damage if you want to maximise tankiness since the normal crit is at 50% more. i.e. Knights and not Cavaliers.

Nokaru.7831:

The Spider Queen’s AoE has a minimum range, so stacking on top of her makes her not fire it off. It’s not our fault the designers made it work this way. Some “exploits” are just players knowing how the game works.

Yeah it really is a mechanic. It’s there to punish afk auto-attack bearbows. The CM story golem, TA wurm boss, CoE Alpha 1&2, Arah 2 deadeyes, Belka and Abom all don’t use their deadly ranged attacks if you are close to them.

If anything people should be complaining about people ranging Lupi to avoid his melee kicks/claws and kiting is an exploit since it doesn’t let melee mobs use their melee attacks/hit you.

Zelyhn.8069:

This game could be so great, and waiting for it do achieve what it could be is a bitter hope. How are you coping with your frustration?

I’ve went through that stage ever since Flame and Frost and I saw where the game was heading and the achievement → rewards made dailies feel like a chore whereas I preferred to chase APs when they are arbitrary. Just lose all hope and have zero expectations for the game and be pleasantly surprised when the few good changes happen.

And of course, embrace the casualness.

Loss of Electric Discharge is pretty huge.

Some people do genuinely have difficulty with certain parts

And plenty of people pop in time to time stating their distaste for low level ele and since it was so long ago since I levelled one, I wanted to stay up-to-date with the experience to provide better advice.

Wethospu.6437:

So can you break it or not? Bit confused since Basilisk Venom change.

You can only escape the crystal with a teleport; Blink/Lightning Flash etc. Thieves are the only ones who have a teleport on demand with no CD with sword 2.

Occasionally it doesn’t work though?

viciouspike.8624:

zencow.3651:

- Solo CoE Alphas with crystal escape on demand

I was told “Shake it Off!” can’t break crystals so no other class was able to solo Alpha.

I saw that post x)

Some people are just so sure about themselves when they make ridiculous claims.

http://youtu.be/3P3u8mc5ito

Nothing too tricky, just be careful about the downed state mobs who will kill you if ignored.

Gear tips:
- Lvl 20 Masterwork (green) gear are pretty expensive for new players, especially the power stat, but I think you’ll be okay in Fine (blue)
- Your weapon stats matters the most since it carries Weapon Strength and has a great effect on damage dealt.

I also highly recommend getting a cheap minor rune of geomancy or hydromancy to boost your DPS though.

hybrid.5027:

zencow.3651:

a t s e.9614:

Btw thieves are becoming worthless , arenanet hates us , you better roll warrior . And you will survive more , 20k hp in zerks instead of 10k.

It’s not like they’re devoid of any moments of glory though. I was glad I happened to level my thief up to 80 just before Deadeye Dunwell came along and gave me 1300g.

filthy casual

We also had war of casuals going on about friends bringing in too many friends into our private overflow.

It got to the point where our faction got free-trial accounts and dual-boxed with them to queue in other people’s arena’s and afk there to sabotage the arena snatcher’s farming (only Dunwell default aggroed after the ‘nerf’ so putting in the pirate crew was perfect).

The other thief glory era:
- Skipping ahead in CoE past first alpha encounter and grabbing the golem waypoint, reliably teleport through the doors to perform CoE3in1 and using portal gun to WP the rest of the party.

Still good at:
- Easy mode CoE p1 1-4 defender
- General skipping
- CM p1, stealth dragging the asura to blow up things without having to fight trash
- Solo CoE Alphas with crystal escape on demand
- Solo Snowblind Fractal’s melt the ice wall event
- Safe lupi meleeing in PuG settings with immunity from bubbles

a t s e.9614:

Btw thieves are becoming worthless , arenanet hates us , you better roll warrior . And you will survive more , 20k hp in zerks instead of 10k.

It’s not like they’re devoid of any moments of glory though. I was glad I happened to level my thief up to 80 just before Deadeye Dunwell came along and gave me 1300g.

What’s up with most of the weapon skins being blue?

- Glyphic
- Pact
- Mystic
- Corrupted
- Foefire
- AC
- HotW
- Arah
- Super (originally only blue)

And recently:
- Zodiac
- Re-coloured TA
- Toxic Weapons

I understand that it’s the most popular colo(u)r but it’s getting so excessive and there’s annoyingly so few red and green weapons.

Maybe it’s an EU thing? :P

I’ll go do it right now on my second ele at lvl 20, you just watch!

Rising Dusk.2408:

FT has a blind too, and packs a pretty high uptime fire field. Also, are those FT auto attacks per tick (since it ticks multiple hits)? My gut also says that with the 50% chance to cause vuln on a crit, that FT would maintain a much higher stack of vuln on targets than nades would (though this could be a wash since each nade throw chucks several grenades). Flamethrower also maintains a lot of might on its own assuming Juggernaut and has a +15% damage trait (I’m assuming your FT numbers have this, though). Is there any documentation of the dps differences of these in the current meta anywhere?

I also just realized that this is probably the wrong forum for this discussion, but I’d rather talk to you cats about it than the angries in the Engineer subforum.

1. That’s the total damage by one auto
2. Long as channel, major downtime between autos
3. Solo might stacking sucks

Damage difference is so enormous and obvious most engi players default to grenades. I’ve never seen a PuG use FT even.

hybrid.5027:

They started soul-bound

I think that’s where burn guardian initially came from… those who were stuck with CM/TA tokens.

Pro tip: Harpies don’t shoot orbs if everyone is in melee range.

Vox Hollow.2736:

@Zen
Devs don’t seem to quail in fear of doing something because players run something alot of times, else we’d all still be crammed in CoF Path 1.

That’s quite the reaction.
Look, I didn’t mean to hit a sore spot.

There’s no shame in finding yourself caught up in the Grind. It’s insidious like that. Designed to be insidious like that, even. But once you’ve realized you’re not having fun, do something about it. Branch out into other activities or take a break for a while. Whatever you can do to get back to doing something because you’re actually in the mood for it, and get out of the routine of logging on and doing something automatically.

I promise, that is the single best you can do for yourself when playing an MMO.

No, but the opposite is true. Creating content that would just be abandoned is a waste of time.

And you understand me so well, grinding is like, the only thing I ever do.

All it comes down to with repeated dungeons is the question whether you’re stuck grinding slowly, or being able log off while you’re ahead at 15g+ in 1 hour from speeding through dungeons cause pretty much everything else is too boring to do.

Vox Hollow.2736:

Me thinks if you’re seriously entertaining the thought that cheese should stick around because it makes your empty unfun grinding go faster, it might be time to go do something else for a while.

If you think this ‘cheese’ WON’T stick around after the huge success and popularity that is the new TA path that everyone runs nowadays, you need reality check.

Dungeons lose their novelty much to quickly, if you find slowly killing mobs and grinding slowly at an efficiency that is worse than the even more unfun champ train farming, go ahead with your own LFG party. I like to preach ‘play how you want’ when I’m bored of it all.

a t s e.9614:

People discovered berserker gear through CoF back then? I mean it’s a pretty cool armor set on all clases , so they started wearing it and became elitists .

CoF p2’s old DPS check did alot to inspire Zerkdom. The other drive was CoE, especially back when Alpha and Destroyer boss had twice/triple+ health pool sizes, and people realised crit+vigor and dodging could overcome the need for defense and get things done quicker.

Most CoF p1 zerker farmers probably all went to form the champ trains after realising how sucky they were at other dungeons. Unfortunately though, a few have persisted as the ignorant Warrior/Mesmer/Guardian speed clear elitists that still mistakenly believe Herndred Blerds and GS camping is top DPS and aren’t representative of the knowledgeable, Ele/Thief/Ranger/Necro loving populace of this dungeon subforum.

Celtus.8456:

It is understandable that people want to speed through these things as fast as possible for the most efficient profit or other outcomes. But I think it is a shameful waste of content and gameplay mechanics when the playerbase is allowed to boil everything down to: stack together, terrain exploit/obstruction, spam aoe. But as I mentioned, people can be reasonably expected to do this because it is efficient. I wouldn’t be too optimistic about things changing, as GW1 pve was very much exploited too.

@people saying content cannot be cleared without these tactics. That might be true for higher level fractals, but it is not true for everything else.

The alternative is for the dungeons to be completely dead. Everyone who’s skipping has most likely already enjoyed learning dungeons and facing the variation in trash mobs.

But if anyone killed every mobs one by one for 100+ runs without being bored to death, let me know.

So, go enjoy your first time experience/impressions with other new players. Figuring out dungeon mechanics for yourself for the first time can be really fun so join a party who has all the time in the world killing respawning monsters in swamp fractals without realising anything remotely related to wisps/wiping to spider queen and don’t ruin it by joining a party that just wants to get it down quickly.

CryxTryx.9208:

AntiGw.9367:

CryxTryx.9208:

I don’t understand the people that say ‘this is not what the devs intended.’

Ok, I’ll explain.

You don’t design and balance a variety of classes and skills just to have people ignore most of them in favor of one “tactic”. You don’t design a huge dungeon full of mobs just to have everyone skip it all to fight the end boss in 5 minutes. You don’t design and balance a variety of gear options just to have everyone use one gear type. You don’t design a huge beautiful world just to have everyone grind in one area and miss most of it.

Whenever you see results like the above, you have a design that failed to some degree. We are not trying to be psychic and read the thoughts of the developers. That’s basic design concepts.

I dislike very much when people quote my posts out of context.

If you included the rest of my post you would see that the reason I say I don’t understand when people say stacking isn’t intended is because all evidence is to the contrary.

‘Line of Sight’ is clearly a designed mechanic. Monsters are programmed to move toward the target when they can no longer draw line of sight to it. It would be just as easy to program the monster to stay stationairy and fire a ranged weapon at the wall until you moved into view. Similar to what the eyes do in Arah because they can’t move.

They could even design monsters to ‘power up’ the longer you stay out of line of sight and build stacks of might until you came back into view.

However they have not done this. They desgined ‘Line of Sight’ to workt he way it is, and we are simply using the best tactics to defeat the current design.
*******

As for boss stacking, it is not the easiest the method by far for many bosses. It actually a high risk high reward method.

When you stack against Alpha you do so because it is the most efficient damage wise because you stack in a corner so when you dodge the aoe you don’t go anywhere. This allows you to continue to DPS.

The Aoe is just as easy to dodge if he is in the middle of the room and all spread out, however then you have to run back to hiim to begin to dps again and this will slow the fight down a lot.

When you stack he also stacks the AoE’s all in the one spot making one missed dodge often fatal. High risk, high reward.

The only caveat to this is that stacking also does makign ressing easier because you are all already right there.

---

Stacking on AC P3 boss works well because all your dps is right there and he goes down fast. However it is just as easy if not easier to fight him legit. It just takes a bit longer. Grast works well now, he throws up that bubble to protect you from the falling rocks which is a much bigger area then that little corner everyone hides in. However it takes longer because because you have to move aroudn, people get knocked back ect. But you all take less damage over all.

---

AC Spider Queen fight for good players is easy to do legit. You range her and stay out of the AoE. The reason why we choose to stack is because melee is faster and it keeps the boss in one place so everyone can dps her together. This also allows the boss to melee everyone and hit everyone at once with her cone web attack. You see many PuG groups still wipe on the queen while stacked because of this. It’s high risk high reward.

---

You certainly don’t stack lupi because it’s easier, unless your Obal’s Ranger group. Killing Lupi at range is mind numbingly dull. You will only down if you fall asleep. It also takes a really long time.

When you fight Lupi stacked in melee you have dodge and it is very easy to make a mistake and die. (I’m no pro.) But he goes down quick. Again and High risk strategy for a high reward.

**
I would like to know if the boat skip is a bannable offense thoguh, because it if is I certainly wouldn’t use it. The run is tough but it is actually pretty quick once you master it.

I don’t know why you bothered to write that Wall of Text, he’s beyond cure and probably doesn’t even play the game.

To him, using the game mechanics isn’t playing. LoS, Stacking, Skipping, etc are all exploits due to some dysfunction in mental comprehension. Totally why monsters can see through walls instead of following you around. He’s also of the notion the later is to prevent farming, which obviously shows he’s never tried to hit more than 5 targets at once, cause you know, dungeons are meant to take 3+ hours to complete.

Burning Fire is also incredibly niche for Diamond Skin. If you don’t take it it’s pretty much: hurray, auto-cleanse gone 2 hits into the fight, back in 40 seconds. Hurray! You just wasted 20 trait points that could’ve gone elsewhere more useful sucker, enjoy your Flame Barrier while you’re at it.

Keep Soothing Disruption at adept so above trait could be abit more useful.

DiogoSilva.7089:

zencow.3651:

Eles used to be able to sit at 90% for Vital Striking but that was before Signet of Restoration got nerfed to the ground and given over to warriors.

I wouldn’t say a slight 14%(?) nerf meant the signet was “nerfed to the ground”, especially considering how useful it still is. Of course, on the other hand, Warrior’s Healing Signet is an offense, but we don’t need to be elementalists to realize this.

With 30 points in earth, a Valkyrie amulet ele is going to have all the toughness it needs, and some access to healing. I personally prefer healing power over vitality – it makes it easier to get back to full hp, even if it’s easier to get out of it. With some points in water magic for extra healing and regeneration, you could still invest the remaining points in air for some burst damage. Add in runes of scholar and sigil of accuracy. 20 air, 30 earth, 15 water and 5 arcana for the fury to burst.

It would be close to the 20 air, 20 water, 30 arcana s/d burst builds. It should have the same burst power, and when you can kill fast and heal back to full health once, Diamond Skin can shine because the opponent would have to spend valuable seconds NOT bursting you with conditions.

You realise that would only leave you with 1.2k health? A few random hit will get you below 90% easily, let alone 85% if Peters delivers a compromise.

Your spike won’t be enough to kill anything non-glassy and you will run out of mini-heals to keep up the 90% health. Once below that threshold, if the opponent manages to land a few condis on you and you don’t have CF, it would again bring you below 90%.

The uphill battle is already vivid in my mind and until I see otherwise in action once the update actually hits, that’s my stance on Diamond Skin.

DiogoSilva.7089:

zencow.3651:

Eles used to be able to sit at 90% for Vital Striking but that was before Signet of Restoration got nerfed to the ground and given over to warriors.

I wouldn’t say a slight 14%(?) nerf meant the signet was “nerfed to the ground”

Ahem, it used to be 250 with just 30 water, up to 330 with clerics amulet. Then it was nerfed down to 220 with 30 water healing power scaling was nerfed again and then they finally applied the 18% reduction for sPvP to 168 base as it is today, 180 with cleric amulet.

Evasive Arcana also let it apply 4 times in one dodge which they also fixed without taking that into account before they nerfed SoR.

The fastest ele skill cast time is Dragon’s Claw at 1 attack per second. NONE of the ele attacks are as fast as displayed on the tooltip, meaning the only times it applies more than once a second is upon attuning, using arcane skills and auras and other instant cast skills.

miriforst.1290:

What happens to the ele? He still got 90%health left and can easily clean and heal up to correct his mistake.

Once brought below the limit, the ele could easily eat a few condi stacks which would promptly break the Diamond Skin again.

A PvT ele in sPvP, which does joke damage only has 17k and up to 20k with more Water Magic. A 10% threshold of 1.7-2k is incredibly easy to overcome, with Clerics/Valkyrie/Shaman it sits at 12-14k and even easier to break by ANYTHING. Eles used to be able to sit at 90% for Vital Striking but that was before Signet of Restoration got nerfed to the ground and given over to warriors.

Shaman/Cleric Engi have 18k health and sits comfortably with a 4.5k Health threshold which is far far more forgiving and of course the option to go PVT for 23k health and a 5.7k threshold.

Take the left staircase if you’re skipping through.

The problem is caused by Detha dying while talking. When you take the left staircase, the oozes spawned there are further away from the event trigger zone and so will deaggro without killing her.

If you skip through quickly without stragglers though it should never bug out.

I don’t think the play how you want builds are play how you want enough.
These are more accurate:

AH Shout mostly staff camping Guardian
MM Axe camping Necro
Double Bearbow Cleric RegenShout Ranger
Grenade Bunker Engi
Heal Shout Rifle-GS Kill-everything Warrior

Actually, play how you want guards would take 10 Radiant and take Signet of Mercy instead of WoR. My bad.

S/D quakeflash-> air+double arcane instakill suicide burst would be alot more stronger with access to Blasting Staff at adept and the Ember’s Might and Burning Rage merge since Ember’s Might used to compete with Lava Tomb.

When you down someone/people you can now secure the kill with a larger Lava Tomb thanks to Adept Tier Blasting Staff, and 1 second longer with Persisting Flames!

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEAQJArYhImIblx5gjDAhHCYQBiHW4gElCAA-ToAg0CnIQShkDJDSSksINAZWA

Condi is strong in that it takes only 2 stats investments to get damage out of it, leaving alot of room for defensive traits.

But condi is also weak because there’s only 2 traits that affect it: condi damage and condi duration, which means in PvE environments there’s little you can do to trade for more damage. Also condi damage scaling with condi damage is linear while power+traits+crit damage are exponential.

In the end, Condi damage of any sort, even shamans/settlers will output more DPS than PVT/Clerics against things that don’t cleanse/are non-structures and of course if the other party members don’t intrude with bleed cap/overwrite your burns/poisons with their weaker ones.

Condi is especially good for casually soloing content since it’s safer to use than zerker.

AntiGw.9367:

They don’t need to say anything, their design principles speak for themselves.

Definitely. Monster behaviours in Gw1 and Gw2 indicate they endorse skipping. Exploiting Consume Corpse + Rebirth was also part of Urgoz’s Warren and The Deep’s dungeon designs.

What you think the designers intended =/= what the designers intended.

Syn Sity.5826:

Agreed, at this point you guys just look for any reason to troll anyone who has a differing opinion and instead of presenting an argument you collectively make him feel like he is an idiot (of course he isn’t so your tactic is wasted). Reflects are very overpowered, especially at lupi. And if we’re being completely honest, autoattacking on ranger sword and swapping and hitting whirling when lupi has his heart attack is not all that difficult. Bring in 5 people who can feedback his aoe and you’ve got the dream team. No offense but that’s just the way it is, and it’s like that because reflects are way too strong at lupicus.

I think they’re overpowered too but it did took alot of preaching the ways of projectile defense to get it to become PvE meta among PuGs without having people say ‘Play how I want’ and calling me elitist for suggesting they take out one of their signets for a Wall of Reflection.

I personally think it’s a nice shortcut for people who know how to read skill descriptions and know their profession, which alot of people still don’t, but yeah I do agree sometimes it does need to be toned down abit. Reflects should disappear after voiding a certain amount of attacks, not just block EVERYTHING. It should also only reflect skills of the first 5 targets who throws a projectile at it.

haviz.1340:

zencow.3651:

It does not circumvent game design purely on the fact that Anet can choose which skills are unblockable and thus unreflectable e.g. Bloomhunger. Ergo, they designed the skills to be reflect-able.

Also, it actually does take abit of timing and practice to achieve a lupicus p2 skip.

Except that none of bloomhunger skills are unblockable.

I guess I’m just horrible at standing behind WoR then

Jennah pro tank!

http://youtu.be/7SWBSMO_daI

It does not circumvent game design purely on the fact that Anet can choose which skills are unblockable and thus unreflectable e.g. Bloomhunger. Ergo, they designed the skills to be reflect-able.

Also, it actually does take abit of timing and practice to achieve a lupicus p2 skip.

The word ‘exploit’ gets thrown around so often these days.

It’s pretty dumb how ele patches keeps making ele stronger in PvE (yay more fire-staff camping goodness) yet have no effect/make it worse in PvP.