Guild Wars 2

I really enjoy courtyard.

For peeps who don’t like it, focus targets (call targets!), use line of sight, try not to over
extend, and bait enemies to overextend. It’s a lot of fun!

I love the courtyard

I just came to forums to say almost the same thing. It’s not actually the UI, which is great, but the gameplay that has improved. I’ve been able to play 5 or 6 games straight, most of them reasonably close with players only leaving once. People worked together and every game was fun.

I have nothing against smack talk, but it was interesting noting that all of the communication in these games was either strategy ( a little) or people saying gl;hf and good game. I can only pray it stays the same!

Thanks anet folks,
Very casual Uwo.

@sorrow Point taken. My comments were meant with current balance aside.

There were some decent points in his post. I would love some arena; it would be good for the game balance and direction, if not a little painful for developers. Pets are pretty mindless and spammy. There were also some bad points.

Sure, GW2 needs duels, but only ‘cause they’re fun. Balancing around duels is a bad idea, which, incidentally, is something Blizzard developers have repeated often. That’s not to say that 1v1 should be way out of balance, and Reinhart has a fair point there.

I’ve frequently seen this argument that lack of a healer precludes balanced arena. We simply can’t know until it’s tried. Yes, if arena were introduced currently, it would be a mess. That’s because zero preparation has gone into balancing the game around deathmatch. But if developers were willing to try it and willing to balance around it, I think it’s likely that support characters would quickly evolve from the already existing design. At any rate, there’s been no space to look at this empirically, because we don’t have arena.

Fuzzion.2504:

Pure breed glass canons would be around the 11k. And thats 30/30/0/10/0 with crit hitting 90%. But eles weren’t designed to be glass. They were meant to be partial support and the other part being dps. This is a stark contrast to gw1

I always thought the best glass cannon was scholar runes + the equivalent talent in water scepter/dagger. Fun for a second, but really brittle/too much glass.
10/20/0/10/20

OP is a bit myopic. If I had to guess, I’d say the dev team wants bunkers and glass cannons to be the outliers on a bell curve, and “balanced” builds to predominate.

I’m not saying these “balanced” builds exist yet, but it is a smart and reasonable aspiration for the dev team, given that too much bunker and glass cannon results in shallow play.

I also agree with milo. I haven’t been playing recently, partly because my work has ramped up, but also because it felt difficult to meet people playing pvp. I did mostly hotjoin at first hoping that I’d meet people who liked my play style and vice versa, but I was naive and stubborn with this expectation.

I also really like the development team at ArenaNet, and I practically bought the game because I wanted to see them succeed. They’ve really innovated and made PvE a more social experience, at least by MMO standards. The PvP on the otherhand seems to merely rely on preexisting friendships. If I had friends that pvp’d in this game, it would be a lot more fun (stating the obvious, I know).

Currently we really need to bootstrap the pvp community, and collapsing the spvp venues into one like the milo suggests seems worth considering.

Thanks again for all the responses. You guys are a gold mine.

I was able to get a significant improvement from installing the best driver, (oops) so the fps drop isn’t as terrible now.

I play ele almost exclusively and I think a “nerf” – or adjustment, call it whatever you want – will be very good for the class. The builds people are playing right now are very easy, in particular healing and condition removal happen almost entirely for free. Add unmatched mobility and you really lower the skill floor for this class.

I think this promotes bad play because players don’t need to be aware of their positioning, they don’t need to be careful about timing their cleanses, etc. Sure, at a high level of play, eles who go into water at the wrong moment are going to get blown up, so it’s not like these players can disregard positioning and timing cleanses.

I would include firewall in this. An easy fix in my opinion would be to give it a very short, or instant casting animation. Currently ring of fire is far superior in my opinion, as it’s a very fast cast, it’s more difficult to avoid and easier to combo thru, it does point blank damage, and, finally, it’s on a shorter cooldown.

In spite of this, I’m a glutton for punishment and play s/f.

Thanks for the responses.

@wauwi My settings are already all at their lowest. Here are some specs:

*AMD Radeon HD 6770M
*intel core i7 2.4ghz
*~Gig of Ram
*windows 7 ultimate

Also, @Toolbox. I don’t think I’m streaming the client. Though I’m not sure I’ve ever been doing that. How would I know?

Edit3000: @wauwi. frame rate drops associated with camera turning used to be alleviated by lowering all settings. So much so that they were no longer perceptible. So, yes, drops are to be expected, but my coping strategy is no longer working.

Something I’ve noticed is that even on lowest settings my graphics look a lot better. Before the update playing on low settings felt kinda retro; not runescape bad… just retro. It’s almost as if the lowest settings are now higher.

Hey, this is my first day in since the update; awesome work by the way. All i do is pvp and I spin my camera around a lot, so, since my -laptop- is only so-so, I had taken to playing on the lowest settings so that the frame rate didn’t drop while I was spinning the camera. Today I observed something that seemed like the old frame rate drop.

Can anyone recommend a setting I might change? Has anyone else experienced this?

The difference isn’t massive, and might not be noticed by everyone, but it’s enough to make it a struggle to play.

Anywho, thanks for any advice you have to offer.

Edit: Yeah, on second thought I’m not certain this has anything to do with camera turning, but some sort of graphics change that’s causing me problems. I’ll go ahead and post a support question.

@mj. I agree it’s not incredible. I was just getting sick of the same builds and this works decently. Even 100% uptime on swiftness is nothing close to RtL.
Crit chance is 50% with fury, which again isn’t that great. The condition duration can be quite long. It’s around 20 seconds of burning if you hit both wave and blast, but then you’re waiting for 25 seconds or so before you can apply it again easily. I don’t think the problem is heals, so long as your not doing the rambo.

Anyways it’s fun in hotjoin, not tournaments.

Cross post from elementalist forum.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Focus-is-OP-Ele-condi-guide-hotjoin/first#post1282615

Getting blown up
So, brass tacks. How do you deal with decent dagger thieves. Well, honestly, this is one reason that this build might be a liability in high-level tournament play, though I don’t think we should be resigned to that fate.

At full health, you’ll usually have at least a half-second warning before you’re dead to mug/backstab/whatever, even if they have haste. Shifting into earth and pressing 5 needs to become like breathing to you. If your invulnerability, Obsidian Flesh, is up, and you play your cards right, you can be confident going into a 1v1. Now if you’re at 50% health in a team fight and you don’t know the thief is coming, that’s a different story. In a tourny, my only answer is, you should have known it was coming.

Once you can handle un-telegraphed thief burst, you can easily handle telegraphed Warrior or Mesmer burst. Reflect kill shot, and quickness/haste spamming ranged opponents for quick gimps.

Good Guardians and Necromancers put out heavy, consistent damage, so be careful about timing your condition removal, and jump out of the fight for a moment if you have to.

Chasing
Use water attunement, not earth, plus elemental blast to chase. Use earth + arcane to aid your melee teammates in sticking to a target. Throw in a knockdown to seal their fate.

Alternatively, chase with a lightning flash into earth attunement for the cripple. Then freeze if you have to.

Stomping
Swirling winds is a free stomp against Warriors and Engineers, and that’s arguably overkill as Blinding Flash or an arcane ability in lightning attunement can block the knock-down/pull.

Shifting to earth at the right time also helps your team stomp Guardians and Rangers, Warriors, and Engineers.

Magnetic Wave, in addition to working against Warriors and Engineers, can be used to stomp Necros. If for some reason you couldn’t blind, just cleanse the fear immediately.

Obviously, absolute invulnerability with Obsidian Flesh allows you to troll res and stomp – like with their entire team on you.

Ugh, everyone knows Light Flash stomp against thieves, and to a lesser extent mesmers, right?

General pointers

You cannot use the same “rotation” for each class. Know the class you’re facing, particularly necros and guardians.

For god sakes, stop tunneling and swap targets.

Stop turreting into retaliation.
… with 7 stacks of confusion

As a footnote, with this build, try arcane power and Fiery Greatsword while attuned to fire or water. Hilarious.

General Defense and Utility

Positioning matters a lot more here than in x/dagger full water builds. Don’t let the kitten-ton of toughness deceive you. You are brittle.

This means you need to work on your situational awareness, and move the camera around like the director of the blair witch project on speed.

Teleport early when getting trained. Making distance with Lightning Flash can often discourage chasers in big fights. Then just turn around, cleanse with phoenix and start turreting.

If you are on the back foot against someone who wants to get in your face, kite with freezing: water attunement focus 4, arcane blast and wave. Don’t stack it. Wait for the cleanse or gap closer, then and then apply another. Shifting into earth while they’re in melee range simultaneously slows them, and prevents them from applying hard control for 2 seconds.

Unless it’s ripped off, you should have nearly 100% swiftness uptime. This does a lot to make up for lack of dagger mobility. If you’re not in combat, heal in air and stack swiftness. It doesn’t matter if your health is full. Your swiftness is ever increasing, since the duration of the applied swiftness is always more than the Elemental Harmony cooldown. In combination with Elemental Attunement, the Runes of the Centaur give a generous amount of swiftness to nearby team memebers as well.

If you’re not healing in air, you are in combat, you are healing in earth, and you are healing early. With this build, it’s more important to time protection before enemy burst than it is to be fastidious about overhealing. If getting trained, guard your heal with stability by shifting into earth right after you begin the heal.

In addition to high base toughness, you should always have Rock Barrier up. I take Obsidian Focus, which means that spamming Stone Shards in earth gives tons of toughness, though I supspect most of you will take Earth’s Embrace, which isn’t a bad choice. Scepter lightning 1 will also give you the extra toughness with Obsidian Focus.

Cleansing
You have two cleanses (condi removal). They are phoenix and magnetic wave. USE THEM WISELY. Don’t cleanse on one stack of confusion. Try to cleanse right before you heal if poisoned. You aren’t running full water anymore.

Both cleanses are conveniently located in earth and fire, the attunements in which you apply conditions. So, if you’re facing a necro try to bait early condition swaps, and then cleanse it immediately.

Phoenix: In bursty builds, phoenix is a great skill shot because it can hit three times. For this build, you will want to save it to cleanse. As a perk, you get some vigor and, if the timing is right, a blast combo.

Magnetic Wave: Unfortunately, you can’t think of this ability as only a cleanse. An entire post could be written about this ability alone. Suffice it to say, timing this with your opponents projectile burst in combination with burning and bleeds will lead to incredibly fast gimps. It’s also an excellent running ability, as you reflect range snares while clearing conditions.

Focus is OP: Ele condi guide (hotjoin)

Looking for a fun hotjoin build? Tired of playing bunker x/dagger builds? Why not play scepter+focus condition build!

Currently I see two builds being played by elementalists: many variations on 0/../../30/30 and berserker staff, with most people playing the former. It can be difficult to survive hotjoin, especially as a new player, without tons of mobility and an oh-kitten buttons, so, if you’re new to elementalist, proceed at the risk of frustration.

While this build might be viable in tournaments, I haven’t had a chance to try it, so tell me how it works out. Also, while you will have fun with this build, it’s not easy glory – not immediately at least. If you’re like me, you stopped caring about farming awhile ago.

Alas, I won’t be posting a commentary guide on youtube, because my computer can’t handle the game and recording at the same time.

The build:
10/0/30/0/30 (traits in parenthesis are recommended)
10 fire > Burning Precision
30 earth > (Geomancer’s Freedom, Obsidian Focus) Rock Solid
30 arcane > Elemental Atunement, Arcane Mastery, Elemental Surge

Scepter – Minor Precision
Focus – Superior Geomancer
Elemental Harmony
Arcane Wave, Arcane Blast, Lightning Flash
Rabid Amulet n’ Jewel
Runes of the Centaur

You read that right. Full earth, and a fire trait!? Madness. Unfortunately for your opponenets, this is Sparta.

This build is so much fun because of the variety of strategies at your disposal. This variety is mostly thanks to offhand focus and Elemental Surge. There’s too much to write here, so I’ve treid to isolated strategies that you can mix and match.

Offense
Your damage comes from a very small set of abilities:

• arcane wave and blast in fire
• fire & earth 1, periodically earth 2
• superior geomancer’s sigil every 9 seconds
• a crit from any ability can cause burning

(The huge footnote to offense is the 3 second reflect with Magnetic Wave.)

While you can apply a huge amount of burning at once, you shouldn’t. Wait for and bait your opponent’s cleanses.

You want dance into melee to land Sigil of Geomancy as often as possible, so try to get a sense for 9 seconds. With full arcane your attunement cooldown is 10 seconds, which helps a lot if you lose track. Earth 15 minor trait and Rock Solid mean that you are crippling foes and giving stability to team mates when you swoop in.

Harass with fire and earth 1 and arcane blast (in fire). This allows you to keep your distance and get a sense of how trigger happy they are with cleanses and dodges. It also allows you to eat through aegis.

If your target is not being smart about cleansing, i.e. if they’re tunneling, call target when they reach 50% and get ready to shift into air for focus 5 and water for focus 4 and 5. Assuming your team members train the target, you will force cooldowns even if you don’t get the kill.

Unless you are being ignored and are free to turret, the majority of your animation time will be dedicated to defense and utility. Because bleeding and burning are applied easily, you are freed to watch and react to your opponents, peel for your teammates, res, stomp, etc.

nerva.7940:

youre absolutely correct. so if im missing 20% of my health, im dead. i wouldnt mind getting bursted down from 60%. thats a lot more reasonable. again, not asking for tips, or discussing the bunker ranger. please stop hijacking the thread. if u can think of an alternative buff/nerf for the thief, please discuss it instead of diverting attention to my abilities and credibility.

this is a well known, serious issue and id like for discussion to continue.

On topic. I don’t think damage is the problem. In fact i think damage could go up if a thief was responsible for aiming his abilities.

A thief doesn’t need to know where their target is with steal, or with heartseeker. Give steal a reticle and make heartseeker an aimed shot like burning speed, and suddenly i don’t think their damage would be high enough.

This class is mostly autopilot.

Edit: Oh, I forgot to say that -all- burst should be telegraphed.

I’ve also been looking to do some tpvp, but my time in game can be irregular. I play ele, if you’re still looking for players.

@butch. I agree with toning down the number of 8v8 servers. I can hardly find a 5v5 that’s not 2/10 or a guild practicing dueling.

I like haste. Mainly because i enjoy forcing people to waste it.

@hackks. well said. i like your design.

Excellent post. In particular, you did well to point out the history of how eles have been cornered into this, admittedly overpowered, build.

Kyle.2193:

uwo.8197:

Kyle.2193:

Or maybe they don’t want you speccing for duels and don’t want you occupied with it.

The problem with that outlook would be that guilds using 5v5 servers as duel servers is getting in the way of players who actually want to play 5v5.

No, no it isn’t. Go join another room.

It’s good to hear that you find it easy to find 5v5 games, but when I’m online there aren’t many near full 10 man servers. Lots of 2/10 and 3/10, and 16 man zergs.

Kyle.2193:

Or maybe they don’t want you speccing for duels and don’t want you occupied with it.

The problem with that outlook would be that guilds using 5v5 servers as duel servers is getting in the way of players who actually want to play 5v5.

@Preen. Lots of people playing aura share, of course. I wouldn’t say the problem has to do with d/d or s/d. It’s the 0/x/x/30/30 builds with heavy heals, condition/stun removal and mobility that’s a little over the top. It just feels a little too easy.

I’d be curious to know from those of you who play lots of paids how well double ele teams are doing. Seems rather obnoxious. (I play ele.)

Gallrvaghn.4921:

I do believe Burning Speed distance traversed, like other gap closer skills, are reduced by cripple (and chilled?). Not entirely sure, need mo confirmation or testing.

But we are deviating from the topic. Blind is a very tricky condition. It’s effective for one-hit damaging skills like BS or killshot and targetted casts like Mesmer phantasms, but is pretty much useless to multi-hits like HB, unload, and Burning Speed.

Yeah, blind really shines against control abilities. Engi/Warrior downstate pull/knockdown is fun. Hammer-time abilities. Etc.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

However, stay the hell away from an imob ele since you’re gonna eat all of the point blank AOEs he has and Burning Speed Being one of them will hit like Nicki Minaj in American Idol.

LOL!

Yeah, actually, I’d prefer to land an immobilized burning speed on someone point blank. Hits like… what you said.

TGSlasher.1458:

Elementalist with 60% chance on crit to remove boon? (no one uses this sigil, I don’t know why not). Also if you apply a shorter duration of stability it will replace your plague stability. How ever, your a necro so you probably only get that from traited death shroud.

If you think that is bad, come and play in Australia where you can get CC in the middle of your dodge animation due to the lag that Anet says doesn’t affect us. You have to predict roll 500ms – 1sec early or whatever may hit you will hit you.

Yeah, ping seems like a likely candidate.

Also you can’t remove stability that is applied from Rage as One, or transformations like Tornado.

Also, no one uses that sigil because it’s internal cooldown is 10seconds, which is ages against builds that use buffs heavily. The opportunity cost is too high.

Burning speed has a number of hits so blind isn’t effective, as you pointed out. But here’s a fun tip (from an ele).

Immobilize obviously stops the travel of the ability before it’s activated, but it’ll stop burning speed during as well!

gwawer.9805:

Yeah maybe we should just stop focusing on trying to make this game into some big E sport and just focus on making it as fun of the game as possible.

Yeah, I’m thinking that’s a more important first step.

I’ve noticed a lot of guilds using 5v5 servers as dueling servers. I think Anet should play off this interest and give a dedicated venue to dueling. But not just that, guilds also grab 5v5 servers to practice 2v2, and 3v3 deathmatch.

The pvp population also isn’t enough to consistently find real 5v5 pickup games if you want to play that only. People also jump out of the 5v5 rotation on Raid of the Capricorn, so you might consider allowing people to select the maps in their rotation for hotjoin. That would also give you an idea of which maps are not popular, etc.

mjharrison.3209:

D/d ele is hard countered by ranged that can apply any of cripple/chill/immob/stun. Stop being bad.

Nah, we ele’s run heavy stun break (cantrips) and condition removal. This isn’t a problem.

Also, @Khenzy. I’m in complete agreement. It’s super easy mode; boring to play (unless you enjoy farming glory), boring to play against.

Damage is not the problem with heartseeker, imo. It’s the auto-steering. Make it a skill shot like burning speed.

This suggestion is only for pvp, so apologies if it should go in that forum instead.

Once the buff/happy bunker builds for ele are tuned down (or strong countered), I’d really like to see the attunement cooldown reduced. (reducing it now would make buff stacking even more broken.)

Like many people, I often play full arcane to get the maximum reduction, but I find that it’s not enough particularly when I play off hand focus because the cooldowns are much longer (because they’re more powerful abilities, of course).

Poplolita.2638:

Wait, wait, wait, wait! Being killed should be fun? kitten I think I need some sleep O.o

You bet! When I lose a game of chess, or wrestling, or a MOBA, you can bet I get angry, but more often than not it also propels me to work on the things that my loss put into relief. That kind of losing can be “fun”, once the initial anger fades, or if your resolve is strong.

My guess is the author never get’s a chance to have this kind of fun, because he feels losses too often result from mindless play or rote gimmicks.

muscarine.5136:

As well as fixing being able to auto aim targets behind your back without even turning the camera in the right direction, like so many skills (leaps, charges, even some range attacks like black powder) allow it… That would help positionning becoming a bit more meaningfull, it is already in bad shape due to all the AoEs and having to stand inside a tiny circle to win some points…

THIS. Auto-aim has no place in a competitive game. For instance heartseeker should be a skill shot like burning speed.

I use siri.

…

w,e,r – strafe left, forward, strafe right
q – dodge
(shift – mouse side button)
shift + q, 2, 3, 4 – attunement shifting
s, f, v – util 1, 2, 3
c – elite
a – heal
F3 – weapon swap (because i played ele for so long, this one is less than ideal)
` – autorun
caps-lock (remapped to control) – about face
g – stomp/interact
4, 2, 3, D, 5 – standard 1-5 abilities, in that order

The fix is to make it not auto-aim to the target. Make it a skill shot like burning speed and everything is fine. As it stands a thief doesn’t even need to know where their target is to land this ability.

While icon readability is a small issue, I think a better solution is just to build on the already excellent set of visual queues. For example, the flame effect for the ranger ability Rage As One does a great job of indicating that that player has stability. Something like this should happen whenever a player gets stability. Retaliation could use an obvious spell effect as well.

I know a lot of people like that name, but you didn’t happen to play text MUDs, did you?

Please share where my thoughts don’t jibe with yours, if the spirit moves you.

Background:
The majority of my games have been as an elementalist, 1247 out of 1348. I’m rank 31. I do not have any illusions about my class preference or rank meaning anything about my insight. It’s only context.

I have not played in any tournaments, so I will not, nor can I, speak to gameplay in a voice-com coordinated setting. I am eager to meet people and play in this setting. Unfortunately, it has not happened yet, for one or another reason. (Hey! PM me if you like. I’m willing to transfer.)

What’s not fun:

• Accidental success. Namely, Auto-facing and skills that hone. It’s only mildly irritating when your opponent takes advantage of this. What’s boring is when it benefits me.
• when burst is not telegraphed
• limited visibility of teammate health bars. It currently requires cone of vision, mouseover, or targetting.
• the feeling that a few core mechanics interfere with positional awareness. In particular:

1. I find that reduced speed strafing forces more involved camera work, which makes it easier to get blind-sided. The look-behind keybinding often does not ameliorate this, because incline of the terrain is reversed in relation to the camera, which requires more camera correction.
   I understand why this was done; developers want players to move forward and be aggressive, not kite to success. However, I believe it to hinder positional awareness.
2. when the about-face keybinding turns the camera. There’s a way to prevent it, but it’s unreliable. Ideally, this wouldn’t happen when the camera is free.
3. limited zoom out and camera collision. I know zoom out has already been increased once, but I still blame a lot of blind-siding on this.

• when combat feels like one minute blitz chess.
• being in downstate: unless it’s a close team fight, I will not deny the stomp in a pick-up game. I’d rather get back into the action. This changes in coordinated games, of course.

What’s fun:

• Clutch plays. This could be anything like interrupting heals, dodging burst, reflecting heavy damage, teleport stomping rogues or mesmers, haste ressing, etc. The variety here is testament to fundamentally good design.
• Aimed shots and predicting player movement. For example, landing Firegrab, Pistol Whip, or a max hit Phoenix, especially without an immobilize or snare.
• When combat feels like 15 minute blitz chess (the duration isn’t meant literally).
• the free camera and reduction of camera inertia, hooray! (good for positional awareness)
• denying stomp denial (lol). Stability stomping is the most obvious. Blind, reflection (against warriors and engineers), teleport, and short duration invulnerability stomping is more impressive and more fun. I separated this from clutch plays to point out that downed state can provide for fun gameplay. Haste or stability ressing also falls into this category.
• visual game play, hooray. Not always having to squint at buff and debuff icons is a major improvement over other MMO’s
• not having to target in melee range, hooray

What would, or will be be fun:

• more aimed abilities. For instance, heartseeker would be fun if it was aimed like burning speed.
• the ladder, hooray
• more visual feedback for some buffs and debuffs. Stability should be very obvious. Something like the flame animation for rangers Rampage As One is very clear, and should be present whenever anyone gets this powerful buff. Retaliation is another buff that could use a more obvious visual effect
• a downed state suicide option (button #5, baby), would give more time in the action during pug stomps.
• while it would be nice to see different game types, it’s probably unwise to do currently, because the active PvP population is too thin.

Nominally – and this is sometimes the perspective of marketing – a competitive game is one that hold competitions. In reality, games that reward skillful execution are what we expect in a competitive scene, and that should include pick up games.

All in all, I’m really excited for and – perhaps this will sound strange – proud of ArenaNet for taking risks and going into some uncharted territory. The above are my thoughts on small changes that might encourage more aware and skillful play, which is good and healthy for the game over the long haul.

Peace.

Mrbig.8019:

lightning flash +earthquake -switch to fire + fire grab + arcane wave

ele bust is instant, you have the same time of a thief burst to react.

maybe building as a glass cannon and using something different than Rtl -updraft (that any decent player would dodge 95% of the time ) is a good idea

Hmm, the only unavoidable burst in that combo is the arcane wave. Unless you’re unable to move, you should be consistently dodging teleport+ earthquake. Just look at the rumbling earth and the initial white circle and dodge right before the two coincide; the ele will teleport right before that happens and you’ll avoid the burst and the bleed.

Firegrab is aimed and if you’re not careful your target will simply strafe out of the way.

You’re definitely right, though, that ele’s have a lot of instant damage. The difference is that thieves don’t telegraph their burst (usu. cause they’re not visible).

At first I loved the downed mechanic, because as an elementalist I could build for stomping and ressing, which can be pretty fun. Go X/focus with full cantrips and you’ll have enough invulnerability, projectile management, and stability to stomp any class – don’t forget teleport for thieves!

But, after playing tons of pick-up games i hardly even mist away after getting downed, except in rare occasions when the team fight is close or I know someone likes ressing. On average just dying gets me back into the action faster.

It’s obviously more interesting in voice com coordinated 5v5’s, but, even there, mass res skills are starting to seem gimmicky.

Oni.5429:

Valkyrie is an excellent amulet for Eles and they’ve been the standard for a long time.

First of all, eles have plenty of fury, giving them 20% critchance. This means you’ll get full use of the extra crit damage from valk, giving you more damage on valk than you get on soldier.

The builds you linked had between 8 to 12 percent crit, so ~30%. Personally that’s not enough for me to build for crit damage.

I run valkyrie if I have arcane power on short cooldown, or high precision from lighting and runes.

Arheundel.6451:

The problem is not that it’s hard to play a power ele..it’s impossible, as soon as you try to move away from water line and the corresponding vitality, you’ll get one-shotted by thieves.
Regardless of your thoughness level a thief is able to deal over 10k dmg with 2-3 hits done within 0.5-1s and here goes 90% of your HP bar for an ele, the current build for eles ( the only viable one in PvP) is direct cause of the outrageous burst of other professions

I’m currently playing scepter/focus with a precision based condition build (Burn, vuln, bleed on crit + rabid amulet). With elemental surge and all arane utilities (shield, power, and blast), you can stack burning incredibly quick, and the other procs offer a little protection against cleansing.

Honestly i thought i was it was going to suck kitten, but it can really turn team fights if you don’t target players with immense condition removal, namely most ele’s right now. Focus offhand goes some way to make up for lack of cantrips, and you can kite decently if you get focused in a team fight, though nothing close to what a d/d s/d + 0/../../30/30 can do.

You have to target team fights – at least 2v2 – and if you’re team is seriously outranked, then you’re toast even if you’re a skillful player. The main problem, is as you said getting caught off-guard by thieves. If you could see them coming, i.e. if they telegraphed their burst, it would not be frustrating. But as it is, I can see why most players don’t enjoy experimenting with builds like this.

WoW was not designed with PvP in mind originally, GW2 was. GW2 skill design and combat mechanics are brilliant. At a higher level, GW2 is still at a very fragile bootstrapping stage; it’s incentive structure and tournament system are not working. We’ll just have to wait and see how things play out.

Aspen Tie.5084:

I could never play WoW again after playing gw2.

In regards to death-match style arenas in gw2. If you really stop to think about it, it would be a pretty kittenty experience. As much as people enjoy this style of pvp, i don’t foresee it anytime in the near future. gw2 was not designed to support this type of gameplay….

That is what worries me. I don’t think that PvP will mature properly without the death-match style. Warcraft arena was also a kitten-y experience when it was introduced (with many relapses), but arena pushed players to innovate in ways that battlegrounds never could have, which pushed developers to design the game around those innovations.

Battlegrounds in WoW only encourage gimmicks, much like the game type in GW2 currently.

Zosk.5609:

As usual, a bunch of people who think less people automagically means more skillz… if you believe that why not just do 1v1? Of course different fight sizes require different types of strategies…or should if the game is well-designed?

In no other MMO-style game is 8 people a ‘zerg’… and that’s assuming all 8 stick together …which never happens in any of the 8v8 hotjoins I’ve seen?

Basically, you want to force everybody into your idea of what the game is about (evidently button-mashing execution and counter-button mashing in 1v1 and other really small fights)…. despite the fact that 8v8 was first and presumably what the devs designed the game to initially?

5v5 was most certainly what pvp was designed around.

Even at the highest competitive brackets, 5v5 in WoW arena was thought to be a cluster-kitten, and nearly unbalancable. WoW’s combat system was not originally designed with pvp in mind, however.

Because GW2 combat mechanics are well designed, and designed with PvP in mind, it’s possible to enjoy playing 8v8 for a short periods of time, but being mindful of positioning is nearly impossible (made much worse by lack of a zoom out, in my opinion).

This means that after a player gets sick of getting serial stomped, he starts to look for the other green dots on the map and moves with them. If you’re the type that enjoys getting glory points, then this behavior is further incentivized, as most players will earn more glory following the zerg than they will defending or back-capping nodes.

Please build with stun breaking, condition removal, and mobility in mind. Then just be honest with yourself when you die because you are OUT OF POSITION.

In your defence, 8v8 is a trainwreck and discourages position mindfulness.