Showing Posts For wolfer.1587:
Lots of people seem to be confused on how things are working. Depending on your situation, your expected win % can vary a lot.
MMR – hidden rating that moves around and tries to estimate your skill level
Pips – reward rating that measures a mix of your effort and your skill level
Matchmaking will find players who are within 15 pips of each other, then order them sequentially by MMR, putting the top 5 players on one team and the bottom 5 on the other. This ordering is done by MMR, not by pips, so a team with lower league players could be the higher MMR team; you really can’t tell if you’re on the high or low MMR team (so don’t worry about it).
Here are some scenarios:
- You are more skilled than players around your pip level – You win more than 50% and climb fast
- You have an equal skill level to players around your pip level – You win about 50%
- You have a lower skill level compared to your pip level – You win less than 50%
If you’re in the first group, ride the wave and be ready for when you hit the wall. If you’re in the second, keep playing and you’ll slowly gain pips thanks to streaks (and if you’re below ruby, tiers). If you’re in the third group, you need to focus on improving if you want your win rate to improve.
There’s also a secret scenario: Your MMR does not accurately represent your skill level at the moment. This can be due to being on different profession or build than you had been using, as well as natural gameplay quality variations. This scenario can and probably will apply to some number of players in any given game. If this is the case, then higher MMR team might actually be the weaker team and the lower MMR team the stronger.
At the end of the day, you should ride the win train until you hit the wall and then either focus on improving, keep playing if you’re having fun, or quit until next season. The system may slightly stack the teams, but unless someone is really far from where they should be pip wise, it won’t matter much.
I got it yesterday evening.
If you are better than the average player you are matched with you should be gaining pips. Your team has 4 of them and the other team has 5, so your team should be a bit better because of you.
Shouldn’t your division be pretty even with your mmr?
Pips are generous up through sapphire in that if you play enough you can rise with lower than 50% win rate.
Armor sets take a lot of work to make because they have variance between armor classes and races. Since they take more work, ANet decided that armor sets they make should be available as in-game rewards to be fair to players.
Gem store weapon sets take a lot less time, and doing them takes very little away from development on the game itself. Additionally, if new races is in the future for ANet, making a ton of gem store armor sets will be a big debt to pay back retrofitting them for new races.
I’m hoping that Living World will introduce more mastery tracks. I’d be fine with the possibility of capping out if soon new things show up. The gap between HoT and living world is probably longer than most future gaps would be.
Putting auto-cast on your heal skill causes it to activate on cooldown. It sounds like doing this along with being afk, pet killing things, and autolooting is a violation. Even though there is no macroing involved and it’s all abusing game systems.
I’m fine with this, but this is the nuance that is confusing people. Ideally it seems like game systems should be changed so this wouldn’t happen.
Maybe as a fractal or something they could work, but otherwise why would you want them to just rehash old content into GW2?
This has nothing to do with PvP. They changed it so that it worked in larger scale PvE content (if your chill gets overwritten, you don’t get damage anymore).
The first three times you do the JP, bell choir, or arena you get bonus karma.
If you want karma, every day you should pop your boosters, donate to orphans, and then do a few rounds in the activity. You’ll earn more than it costs to buy 100 daily presents from the merchant doing this.
It’s likely a byproduct of the megaserver changes they made after HoT launched. Just keep trying to get in and you’ll get one after around a minute.
They don’t. No fear. You need I think 18 of the achievements, which gives you 3 to spare after the four infinite ones that won’t count.
Spend utility/trait slots for movement
I love what they’ve done with Aetherized weapons. Take old BLC weapons and turn them into super rare rewards for fractals. I don’t care if I don’t get item X right away, especially if they’re blocked behind the gem store. But if they trickle into rewards, it motivates to play the content for a chance at them.
All the work ANet does to make skins makes them money in the short term, but then everyone gets to enjoy them in the long term. It’s a good system. They just probably need to reduce the time between gemstore and in-game a bit.
a “consume 30” would be ideal so that you can max out your stacks of them
Set your secondary key bindings to the original number keys. Unless you have them bound to something else it’ll work perfectly.
… sell your booze. Consider the gold infusion your holiday gift/reward. They are selling for 8s and you can get 2 of them from each gift. The gold/hour from every holiday source is very good.
Want nice and easy relaxed pve content? Play the Infinarium for 50 gifts a run.
Have good rhythm or piano skills? Turn your keyboard into a piano and ring some bells.
Enjoy jumping but don’t want to grind out 10k drinks? Run the JP for sweet profits.
The snowball fighting is fun too, though it seems much less rewarding.
This is Guild Wars 2, if you don’t like any particular content, you can go play something else. Items that give you an aura require work, or a ton of cash. People need to stop expecting them to be easy.
Personally I think this collection is way better than Nightfury. Instead of having the price tied to a rare holiday bag drop plus a massive amount of a common HoT resource, it’s tied directly to the most common holiday bag drop. This causes every bag to have value and will be a nice gold infusion for people who decide not to go for the collection.
I just throw them on my daily home node harvester and eat through them eventually. Not a big deal. Once you clear backlog from before getting the items the daily limit barely even matters.
I consumed a few before getting the collection unlocked. They will still count towards your collection, as the collection is actually just checking for the achievements.
Do not fear!
You can’t get it yet, you are going to need loot from each of the raid wings and only the first is out.
:O
Are you kidding me? They’re going to “reset”? Why the doggie (tired of seeing kitten, but you can think of a word that starts with F!) wouldn’t they be like dungeons/fractals where you could run as many as you wish repetitively!?
/sigh – please tell me this is a bad dream!
Because all raids eventually end up on farm status in every game. No matter how difficult they are. Raids are meant to give significantly better rewards than other content. And i don’t think they want yet another source of raw gold being dumped repeatedly into the economy.
Okay, then make it “daily” just like dungeon “rewards”. Of course you could “do” a dungeon more than once per day, but you only got ONE chest with the “daily reward” for doing it. Example, 1g55s for AC. So of course you could run more than one dungeon per day even, but you wouldn’t/coudln’t get your fancy chest with your golds (so ofc most people wouldn’t do more than one per day because the loots themselves just weren’t/aren’t worth it). So I’d be fine with raid’s being “daily”. NOT weekly, unless it was offset properly. Example, the reward was 100-200 (168g is a decent number) gold for the “week” (for doing your one raid for the week). If it’s going to be “so hard” this shouldn’t be a problem. However I still don’t “see” this happening, especially after their (which I am also kittened off about because I wasn’t a “gold farmer”) dungeon nerfs. Yes, I’m actually mad about that, not because I was one, but because of the unfairness that so many people were allowed to do it and for so long, and now even if I wanted to I couldn’t. Call it buthurt if you want, but it’s plain and simply NOT fair!
So if they’re not going to make it “daily” (@ about~24g), or they’re not going to reward something to the likes of 168g for doing one (for the “week”/“weekly”) then it’s not even going to be worth it! If the drops themselves are typical ANET account bound or soulbound, then they’ll make it even more worthless (no way for me to turn my efforts into moneyz if that’s what I so happen to want to do)!
I can understand if they want to minimize/control the “raw gold” going into the market, but by robbing people of the opportunity to make big money like others have already done, is simply not fair – period FULL STOP. If they want to control the “raw gold” by not giving good gold rewards, but rather make GOOD drops that will be worth tons of money, that would actually be a perfect solution that would keep them AND me happy! This way people who have tons of gold (prior dungeon gold farmers) can spend their money on my drops! Then less ‘raw gold" enters the economy, yet I can make tons (if I chose to sell my drops). The key is not only having “good loots”, but assuring they’re NOT account or soul bound!
All short of one of the two above, it simply wont be fair. And if they’re not fair about it – I’m gone for good!
In the DnT post on Reddit from the guys who cleared it, one person got the ghostly infusion and sold it instantly for 900g on the TP. They do have rare rewards with raids.
100 gold is clearly way too much for the amount of time commitment a raid would take after having mastered it. You could make a lot of money running dungeons in the old system, but it would take up your entire day to do so. With raids they made the reward higher per time spent (once you master the raid), but a lower ceiling for mass farming. That’s the general trend that ANet have been taking with rewards.
Your other wish for drops that have value was actually fulfilled. Crafting materials have skyrocketed in value since the HoT economy changes. You can make a ton of money by selling them.
You could probably run Ulgoth once per day in about the same amount of time many dungeon paths would take and would earn more money than before on linen and leather drops.
It’s not at all about when you got the ring.
I was unable to put my two rings in the forge until I removed the agony resistance infusions on them already, then I could put it in just fine. The system apparently is just preventing people from wasting infusions.
I expect they’ll make some changes to the meta event in the patch tomorrow. Wait till then before rioting.
Well not everyone has spare amulets/earrings apparently. Also I’m talking about being fair, how fair is grinding some item just to salvage it and get nothing in return? Also haven’t ascended armors/weapons risen in price since HoT? (I can’t say personally as I’ve never made any)
You have to salvage rare items to get ectoplasm to craft exotic items. You have to salvage exotic items to get dark matter to craft ascended items. You salvage ascended items to get dark globs to craft legendary item. This isn’t some arbitrary pattern that they added for this, it just happens to be the first time that acquiring the item to salvage is actually costly.
If you haven’t even made ascended items, then don’t focus on making the legendary backpack. It’s a step after for people who already have a ton of ascended.
Ascended weapons have risen in price a bit because wood and steel are needed for legendary precursor crafting. The price will go down, since people are selling ascended mats daily for profit. That’ll dry up and it’ll probably stabilize to around where it was before. Ascended armor is about the same. Silk drops increased greatly, so damask is much cheaper, but the added leather requirement fills in the gap.
Verdant Brink:
Tendril Torchers
Fun: 2
Difficulty: 4
Basically just tests your ability to dodge bombs once you have a route down. This one is easy enough to get on farm, but took effort to figure it out. I think usually I’m battling the flamethrower instead of the tendrils, sometimes stuff just doen’t want to burn. Maybe action mode makes it easier to aim?
Bugs in the Branches
Fun: 8
Difficulty: 4
I love gliding adventures. Bugs is great because you can get gold on it with only updraft, but once you get lean techniques it opens up a ton for you. It’s easy to get on farm with 100% gold success rate, but I enjoy actually doing it, and really enjoyed figuring it out.
Flying Circus
Fun: 4
Difficulty: 6
This adventure unfortunately is mechanically frustrating at times, and success is basically a matter of if you have advanced gliding. Updrafts that you have trouble getting out of and snipers that are hard to dodge even with stealth really drag down the fun factor here. It should feel like a race, where you’re zooming through rings in the sky, but instead you’re just battleing mechanics and feel like you’re doing slowly. There’s lots of missed opportunity here with the powerups.
Shooting Gallery
Fun: 5
Difficulty: 9
This has a few issues and the gold rank requirement seems too high. Extra targets only start to spawn late into the game, but they should probably start a little sooner. There’s issues with the adventure not being open very often, character height mattering, and invisible hitboxes on stuff blocking your shots. Shooting and aiming is fun, but there’s too much that gets in the way of that.
Salvage Pit
Fun: 0
Difficulty: 0
Adventures just don’t work if they’re this easy. I got gold on the first try without even realizing that I needed to pick up every scrap. I had to walk back across the arena for the last few. Tendrils tend to just shoot where you are, so you can keep walking forward and be fine. You just have to dodge the pbaoe attack. If the tendrils actually made it so you can’t walk from one salvage to the next but had to route around them, it’d be fun. I’d do this daily just for the easy farm, but it’s also not open all that often.
Auric Basin:
The Floor Is Lava?
Fun: 6
Difficulty: 9
I don’t have the route down for this yet, and have come up to 3 shy of gold. I like the mechanics of it (as long as you have poison mastery and speed mastery), but it may be a bit too tightly tuned. The other problem is that the complex routes to figure out are near the end of the puzzle, so it takes extra time to test routes out.
On Wings of Gold
Fun: 5
Difficulty: 0
Got gold on the first try with tons of time to spare. Flying and collecting dots is fun, and the constant redeployment of the glider this adventure has you do is great, but adventures with zero difficulty feel lacking. There’s a lot of route optimization that could happen with this puzzle, but there’s no reason that you ever need to do so. I’ll have it on farm anyways.
Sanctum Scramble
Fun: 10
Difficulty: 5
Favorite adventure. The egg skills are fun, and needing to use them efficiently is a great contrast to when you fumbled through them in the story step. There’s a few clever tricks and route optimizing to figure out here, but it’s not that tightly tuned. I’ve got it on 100% gold farm, but I have a blast every time I do it.
Fallen Masks
Fun: 6
Difficulty: 9
After much trying I managed a gold on this. I enjoy the mechanics of it; learn the mushrooms, learn the spawn patterns, get good at quickly figuring out which one spawned next. There’s too much speed optimization needed though. You have to do little tricks like starting with speed mushroom active, dodge rolling off of platforms to fall faster, running with speed mushroom instead of gliding since it’s a tiny bit faster, and most of all just optimizing how you grab the masks. These things that you need to do aren’t the fun part, and they shouldn’t be so critical on top of an RNG element. You should be able to grab masks while flying, too. Great adventure, but the tuning is off.
A Fungus Among Us
Fun: 5
Difficulty: 6
The main challenge here is how wonky the mushroom skills are. It took some trying to figure out the gold path, but it’s not particularly interesting. I haven’t gone back to it since.
Tangled Depths:
The Ley-Line Run
Fun: 4
Difficulty: 4
Maybe it’s because the devs showed the optimized path on stream, but this one feels too simple. It should be longer, and should have more choices in how to get around. I’d also like if it required more jumping. Just blinking around isn’t too compelling. 100% on farm, and cool concept, but the magic is missing for me.
Drone Race
Fun: 3
Difficulty: 1
Animations are clunky and it’s too easy. There’s barely any mechanics to using the car, so I don’t see how they could make it any harder. Cool idea, but this adventure is just miles away from being any good. 100% gold farmable at least I guess.
Beetle Feast
Fun: 3
Difficulty: 3
This one is a case of skill overload. There’s so many tooltips to read, and remembering which button does what when in a hurry isn’t the best. That said, it’s easy to get gold without even using your skills to their fullest potential. The blink skill (3) is really cool, forcing you to quickly cast it to maximize it, but it feels out of place here. If that was part of ley-line run it’d make much more sense, and you’d actually have to use it to traverse rock islands. Here it’s just whatever. Run around, grab mushrooms, get easy gold and call it a day.
Haywire Punch-o-Matic Battle
Fun: 4
Difficulty: 10
Mechanics just punish you here. There’s chak guys right in front of you with barely any health, but you have to like back up then punch them? Skill 1 should be an in-place punch. The concept is cool, and some of the skills are cool, but as a whole you’re fighting the golem instead of fighting the chak. Add that to very tough tuning and it loses my interest a bit. I spent like an hour working it out till I got silver, and called it there.
Scrap Rifle Field Test
I haven’t done this one yet, it’s usually blocked off, and for a while I didn’t know where it was because there’s no icon on the map for it (same issue for punch-o-matic).
It’s the part of crafting the LEGENDARY backpack that infuses gold cost into the deal. Most legendaries cost a lot of gold.
If you craft ascended weapons and then salvage them, you are guarenteed a ball. Unfortunately they had to keep the drop rate on backpacks and trinkets/amulets low because there are some ways you can get those for pretty cheap (fractal backpack and LS trinkets which you can buy for bandit crests).
So yeah, keep in mind that it’s a legendary item that you’re crafting and it should put it in better perspective.
You can’t please everyone. Most people who have been complaining about masteries are complaining that they gate too much content.
I disagree with you on the two masteries you chose as examples. Ley-line gliding is pretty sweet and opens up a lot of map traversal. Stealth detection helps you fight enemies that were previously very annoying, and treasure mushrooms are pretty neat, though a small part of the game. The entire gliding line is great, with each mastery significantly improving your ability to get around.
Masteries that are lacking include the Auric mining, Exalted Assistance, all 3 faction champion fighting ones. I don’t have the Chak acid one or the adrenal mushrooms yet, so TBD how much those help.
Are you selling materials that you salvage and harvest? That’s where most of the gold has been since HoT launch.
Additionally, play maps that give Shiny Baubles as their map reward. Do events, work towards map currency, and you’ll collect a handful of them worth 30s a piece.
i have 20+ characters whose builds went from fun to not functioning in this patch literally every build i used isn’t capable of being used as i very rarely used a grandmaster trait before and now i’m restricted down to 3 trait lines all of which MUST be maxed.
ArenaNet originally said they were going to try to preserve all builds, but that’s not possible when you’re cutting and rebalancing traits. The end result is they wanted to just improve things as a whole. Your 20 builds may not work as-is, but that isn’t a bad thing. It’s an opportunity. Explore the new system and find new builds that excite you. You’re clearly a veteran player, you should cherish the opportunity.
The grim truth of it though is that you may have to switch up some gear pieces to put your stats back how you like them. I suggest you do this by switching around ascended trinkets. They’re account bound and not too hard to get, so you jiggle things around until you find what you like.
Guys restore my wvw build pls too.. !
It consisted of sitting in water spaming auto to with d/d to stack vuln and casting cantrips for the boons which then gave more damage due to bountiful power
Now that the trait is an arcana grandmaster my build is killed.
Going into arcana is no option cause i dont swap so im at a complete loss here..
kitten Anet killing build diversity.
Also im still mourning for my 15 15 15 15 0 build back in the days..stacking those master minors and owning people left and right.
It sounds like you’re joking, buf if you aren’t, you should play a ranger if you want that play style. Train people down with the longbow while stacking crazy amounts of vulnerability with remorseless. If you really want to do something boon heavy, then you should really not be afraid of attunement swapping because with Elemental Attunment + Elemental Contingency + Bountiful Power you can really go crazy.
However, we also gained:
- 10% crit chance while flanking
- 7% crit chance with spotter (if your previous build couldn’t run it)
So if you focus on damage, you should be able to crit more, but the crits do quite a bit less damage.
Worthless.
I never ran spotter in WvW since the crit chance is highly overrated if you ran full zerg. Prepatch I could get 83.5% crit chance with just fury.
Look at my pics below, prepatch vs post patch. I didn’t even have spotter in the first pic. You’re only getting 4.1% crit chance with spotter, something that could be gotten with food lol. This is a nerf across the board, period.
Hmm, stacking sigil and guard stacks changed, too. Spotter gives 7.14% crit strike.
Lets also consider the flanking change. Before you get 10% damage boost, now you get 10% crit chance. Before your crit modifier was .8757 * 2.2 + .1243 = 2.05 (205%).
Now it’s .9757 * 2.2 + .0243 = 2.17 (217%). Wow! that’s actually a 12% damage boost! Thanks for the buff anet.
Of course your burst damage when you got lucky with crits before was higher since the damage when you crit was higher. Your overall dps boost from flanking is really the same though.
You ignore the people who are trying to help you and complain about the few people who tell you to change your build. Do the opposite. Ignore the people who aren’t helping and talk to the ones who will help.
First off, you can make a Fresh Air build that uses attunement swaps for Electric Discharge procs. You start channeling Arc Lightning, swap to fire, fresh air recharges air, swap back. Then do the same for Earth. You get 2 damage bursts in there from Discharge, and even thought you swapped attunements, you were still using Arc Lightning the entire time. Doing this you can also get attunement bonus traits, like fire aura when attuning to fire, and have it help without ever casting a fire skill.
However, if you don’t want to try that, I would use the following:
Air – Ferocious Winds, Aeromancer’s Training, Bolt to the Heart
Water – Soothing Ice, Cleansing Wave, Cleansing Water
Arcane – Arcane Precision, Elemental Contingency, Elemental Surge
Your build got “nerfed” for a few reasons:
- You can’t stack as many damage % modifiers as you could before.
- You are more invested in healing power than you were before
- You are less invested in ferocity than you were before
The trait build I set up tries to shore up the lack of ferocity with Ferocious Winds and Elemental Surge (you’ll need to run some arcane skills)
All of that said, I find it highly suspect that you were killing people with three ticks of Arc Lightning before.
As someone who usually plays condi or bunker/beastmaster, I’m very excited for these changes.
1) Shortbow skill 2 is super strong now. At melee it’s 5 stacks of poison for 4 seconds. This puts Splitblade to shame.
2) With poison stacking intensity, Poison Master’s damage boost is actually good. Rangers can realistically burst 10+ stacks of poison on people.
3) Remorseless got a HUGE buff. Opening strike whenever you gain fury. You gain fury on weapon swap for one, and greatsword gives you fury every 10 seconds. Add a few more and you’re suddenly dropping huge amounts of vuln on people.
4) Quick Draw works great with Moment of Clarity. GS + LB using their interrupt skills after swap. Tons of interrupts, great for bunker decap ranger.
5) Quick Draw is also great on condi burst builds. Use it with SB 2 and Axe 2. You get two of those skills in per swap instead of 1.
6) Nature Magic got some nice stuff (instead of just survival/condi removal from before). 20% boon duration from a minor is TONS. Quickness when your health drops below 50% (it’s a boon now, too). 100% regeneration uptime with the Marksmanship trait. Protective Ward is also great value for defensive builds. Lots to love here.
7) Beastmaster tree is good now too. The adept traits cover all the essentials that made pets feel awkward before, along with a good damage boost. The F2 traits are all absurdly good, depending on ICD. Some pets have 8s F2 cooldowns. That’s 5s of blind and 4s of weakness every 8 seconds. Most of all though:
8) ALL PETS ARE NOW WOLVES. 2s taunt on F2 usage with only a 15s cooldown. Wolf CC has a 45 second cooldown. Now you get it with additional effects from other pets at 15s cooldown.
There’s some stuff I don’t like:
1) Honed axes looks unappealing. Winter’s Bite is one of the best weapon skills in the game, but making it AOE doesn’t really improve much. It probably doesn’t effect the weakness part of the skill either. I’d rather this add some effect to Splitblade that makes it more appealing to a non-condi build.
2) Shouts are still really unappealing. Removing the cast time on Guard makes the perma swiftness + regen build a little less tedious, but the skill still doesn’t do anything. The fact you can get perma regen with the warhorn trait now probably means the build is dead.
3) Invigorating Bond has always been pretty bad and boring. Why can’t it provide boons to go along with Lingering Magic? AOE boon depending on pet type would actually be pretty sweet for support.
4) Most Dangerous Game looks super awesome until you realize that it’s a lot of work/risk for just 8 stacks of might on 100% uptime. Maybe with Strength Runes it’s something, but I’d like to see the duration a bit more.
5) Light On Your Feet looks decent, but it sucks that it competes with Quick Draw, which is a fantastic shortbow trait.
6) Putting the two condition removal traits together is a huge nerf, but I think it’s better for build diversity. It was pretty hard to justify not running survival skills when you could use both, but now that it’s one or the other, you aren’t losing too much by taking Empathetic Bond over Wilderness Knowledge.
Overall, I think the changes are great and I’m excited to try out new builds. I usually play Ele or Ranger, so I have a good grasp on the impact of the changes for those classes, and Ranger made out much better.
A few items that I think ANet was clear about that you seem to be confused about:
- In the announcement for tomorrows livestream they said they will show every single trait as it currently is. This will quell concerns about broken builds, and give plenty of time for us to give feedback if a trait we really want is gone.
- They said that skill point scrolls will be replaced with mystic forge materials. They did not mention tomes, those will still work like they always do.
- They mention that a character at level 80 with zero hero points from PvE will be able to use multiple builds. Sounds like you only need to run around doing hero points if you want to unlock 100% (also, note that there are hero points in WvW, so WvW people aren’t getting screwed).
As for my personal opinions, I love these changes. For a few reasons
- Clear improvement over NPE Trait acquisition. You can get the traits you want doing any content.
- More trait points. You get 3 grandmaster traits! This should open up extra builds.
- Streamlining seems like a good idea. There’s too many bad traits currently. Having fewer options will make them easier to balance. If there’s three compelling choices at each level I’ll be happy.
- All utilities will have a type. Extra synergy with traits is great.
- WE GET TO SEE EVERYTHING TOMORROW. A huge data dump to pour over and theorycraft. It’s going to be like christmas.
Lightning Reflexes is already a skill that basically every ranger takes on their bar. Why do we need to buff it? There’s already a lot going on with it.
Muddy Terrain meanwhile is also a staple in survival builds and has a very clear purpose.
I entered this topic thinking you’d post something about ways to make shouts more interesting and enable shout builds, or to help underused traps or signets have a niche. If you think a smoke field would be a cool tool for a Ranger to have, you should change spike trap into smoke trap or something. Don’t just overload the skills that Rangers already use and make builds even more locked in.
Fire 9 trait actually has an interesting synergy with signets, since it makes your signets proc on-aura traits. This gives you 100% uptime on fury and swiftness from Zephyr’s Boon, as well as around 75% uptime on protection from Elemental Shielding.
I like to run it with Carrion amulet as Fire and Earth signets do some serious condition damage now.
Same issue as you outlined, very little condi removal. It’s excellent against power builds though thanks to the protection.
My favorite thing about running the Written in Stone signet build is that it turns Signet of Restoration into a super-powered heal. You get to use the active heal every 20 seconds and you still get the heal per cast.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJAoYhcM6b22wsBd0AEAW4AQCIIOOH0DCCiuAA-TJRHwAFOBAILDA4BAQa/BA
Written in Stone signet ele is a very durable build that I have run before. The build could potentially be very buffed thanks to the new grandmaster fire trait, depending on how exactly it works. Why? Because you have nearly 100% uptime on the fire aura, which applies burning when you are hit. Anyone trying to fight you has to deal with getting blinded every five seconds, and there’s no dodging or outplaying they can do about it.
Signets and other aura skills give you protection, fury, and swiftness on use. Written in Stone plus Signet of Restoration is a great combination, as you can use the active heal and still keep the on-cast heal.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vEAQJAoYhcMKb23wuBf0AQ4BBIAw4hIgQiowDA-zEBBYjBMRtIasqaER1qkYAA-w
It’s pretty weak to conditions compared to 30 water 30 arcane tanky D/D elementalists. I find moderate condition pressure to not be a problem, but condition necros and the like are a bit brutal. You can always quick-swap to Diamond Skin and include some extra vitality on your gear, though.
Still, it’s a fun build and is a good variety from the standard cantrip setup. A good fit for Celestial gear as you make great use of every stat.
(edited by wolfer.1587)
I use shift+1-4 for attunement swaps. Works really well since you’re already pressing those keys for the skills.
We also could do quite well if we had a trait which caused Chill to deal damage, similar to the way that Necros have a trait which lets them inflict damage with Fear. The devs are worried about making Water too strong though, so we prob won’t see that for a good while. Our Chill-inflicting skills also need to have longer Chill duration than what they currently inflict.
Im not sure how anet justifies a 25 sec cd chill that only chills for 3 seconds and deals next to no damage. You know if that was an engy ability or a necro ability its cooldown would be 10-15 seconds tops. (focus chill)
Take a look at what Rangers get: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Winter%27s_Bite