[Lucifer's Heaven]

Sounds like you've thoroughly got the hang of the point of the ele there Cerv

[cerveza_fiesta]

I'm really not used to how the elementalist can tank with the thor hammer and fiery greatsword. I guess I'm just so used to mages being kite-and-pew type classes. Maybe I'll bust out the second dagger and try some of the more tank-ish skill rotations.


@Illy,

What is your fave rotation for D/D when questing? I'm picking up fire and earth traits at the moment, but it traits matter little enough for questing and I'm not totally concerned with doing optimal damage 100% of the time.

Oh, I just found out the perma-swiftness combo for really getting around quickly. Equip staff, hit skill 4, followed by the healing skill (not the signet). Start going...drop a static field at max range and pop an arcane wave as you pass through the field. With traits to increase boon duration swiftness stacks and cools down more slowly than do the skills that produce it. Neato! Combo of course with signet of air for the extra 10% (not sure if that stacks, but sometimes you miss and need to slow down a bit)

[Illuyankas]

The thing with the ele traits that lets them down is that the individual lines support staying in one attunement, whereas it is by far superior to rotate them. The fifth line is pretty sweet though.

As for me, when going dagger/dagger and faced with a mob I start off in fire and hit Burning Speed (3) right into them, then hit Ring of Fire (4) and Fire Grab (5) covering as many enemies as I can, then strafe around a bit using Drake's Breath (2) before switching to earth attunement and hitting Ring of Earth (2) for bleeding, Earthquake (4) for knockdowns and to prevent them running from Churning Earth (5), which I usually hit Arcane Wave during since it's normally fast enough that Ring of Fire is just about still there and if not I'll hit it a bit earlier for the blast combo but either way it doesn't interrupt the channelling, and then Churning Earth comes up and boom, bleeding and burning everywhere. By this point if they're still alive they're next to you, so switch to air, Shocking Aura (3) and Updraft (5) to stun them if they hit you and to throw them back away from you, Lightning Touch (2) on the biggest guy then RIDE THE LIGHTNING (4) BABY YEAAAAAAAAAH RIGHT INTO THEIR FACE, switch to water, Frost Aura (4) in case they recover and try to hit you, Frozen Burst (3) to tag them all and keep them from following you, another circle strafe with Cone of Cold (2), dodge back and switch back to fire and Burning Speed to rinse and repeat if you're attacking a champion or something crazy.

Sadly, of course, you could play a warrior, use a greatsword, hit Hundred Blades (2) and get essentially the same results (warriors are so broken in PVE), but this way is far more fun (yay) and involving (argh my wrists).

Oh, and all the movement signets have been upgraded to 25% movement increase, which with the cap of 33% isn't that great for the perma swift classes but awesome for the others. Well, cap of 33% unless you have enough superior runes of whatever (Centaur?) that boost the max speed increase to 40%, anyway.

[cerveza_fiesta]

Sweet. I'm going to try some of that for my next session. Sounds fun and more indepth than the scepter dagger rotations I've been using. Problem with S/D is that the water skills are mostly underpowered and useless, so I don't much bother with em unless somebody needs a heal...and even then I just run away then come back and rez them 90% of the time.

Yes, warriors seem foolishly OP in PvE. They're great to team up with to knock off quests, but I definitely notice that they do most of the heavy lifting in any engagement.

Ah well, I'm sure arenanet gets plenty of complaints and will overnerf the shit out of them in the next balance update.

[Lucifer's Heaven]

cerveza_fiesta, on 28 December 2012 - 01:50 PM, said:

Ah well, I'm sure arenanet gets plenty of complaints and will overnerf the shit out of them in the next balance update.

Hopefully not, they've done a pretty good job of balancing things so far. And by that, I mean bringing up and taking down various skill and talents in such a way as to actually balance them. Nerfing an entire class is not balancing, it's just making more work for yourself in the future and they've done an admirable job of avoiding doing that.
I hope they continue to do so.

[Illuyankas]

If anything they're buffing warriors even further while nerfing other classes. The engineer is one of my favourite classes and they recently fixed it so while using kits - like the flamethrower or the grenade kit - the engineer gets the benefit of the sigils on his equipped weapons, which is nice, but they gave kits a global damage reduction to stop them being overpowered (pfffahahahahaha) with the sigil bonus and now they suck. They suck completely. And I'm depressed. When both the rifle and the elixir gun gives you better burns than the flamethrower and far more damage overall, you know something's gone horribly wrong.

LUCKILY they have a gargantuan update happening in January, said to be like an expansion's worth of content and mass overhauls, so they can easily pull their heads out their asses, give elementalists better minor and major traits that don't require them to do the opposite of how they need to play to survive as well as make their underwater skills not the worst weaponset in the game, realise that sending a portion of the overall character's DPS to the ranger's pet instead of the ranger makes them rubbish and change that to free rangers from the tyranny of bear/devourer pet pairs, actually fix mesmer phantasms, and just generally bring all the other classes up to the level of warrior and to a lesser extent guardians.

Ah, don't mind me, I recently did the level 50 story mission on my Order of Whispers character and you'll see why that would bum me out when you get there.

[Lucifer's Heaven]

Yeah, fair, I know why.

My point wasn't that they don't have fixes and balances to make, they most certainly do. My point was that when they have made them they haven't been completely retarded with them. Yes, they have made some mistakes with some, but I'm talking the "completely nerf entire class into an oblivion of complete and utter uselessness". Like WoW and some others tend to do, almost in a rotation.

And yeah, I have heard of a couple of small things coming in that update and am looking forward to it

[cerveza_fiesta]

Lucifer, on 30 December 2012 - 03:25 PM, said:

Yeah, fair, I know why.

My point wasn't that they don't have fixes and balances to make, they most certainly do. My point was that when they have made them they haven't been completely retarded with them. Yes, they have made some mistakes with some, but I'm talking the "completely nerf entire class into an oblivion of complete and utter uselessness". Like WoW and some others tend to do, almost in a rotation.

And yeah, I have heard of a couple of small things coming in that update and am looking forward to it

Your WoW example was more or less what I was referring to. I don't know enough about details of GW2 to know if they do the same kind of thing. I'll take your word for it that they're careful with class balance though....and hope for the best.

Also hoping they do something with ele underwater skills. They are teh worstez.

EDIT

on an unrelated note, I just got my elite asura "summon golem" skill. It's pretty awesome to have a temporary tank for tough fights.

This post has been edited by cerveza_fiesta: 03 January 2013 - 12:19 PM

[cerveza_fiesta]

Illuyankas, on 24 December 2012 - 07:09 PM, said:

The thing with the ele traits that lets them down is that the individual lines support staying in one attunement, whereas it is by far superior to rotate them. The fifth line is pretty sweet though.

As for me, when going dagger/dagger and faced with a mob I start off in fire and hit Burning Speed (3) right into them, then hit Ring of Fire (4) and Fire Grab (5) covering as many enemies as I can, then strafe around a bit using Drake's Breath (2) before switching to earth attunement and hitting Ring of Earth (2) for bleeding, Earthquake (4) for knockdowns and to prevent them running from Churning Earth (5), which I usually hit Arcane Wave during since it's normally fast enough that Ring of Fire is just about still there and if not I'll hit it a bit earlier for the blast combo but either way it doesn't interrupt the channelling, and then Churning Earth comes up and boom, bleeding and burning everywhere. By this point if they're still alive they're next to you, so switch to air, Shocking Aura (3) and Updraft (5) to stun them if they hit you and to throw them back away from you, Lightning Touch (2) on the biggest guy then RIDE THE LIGHTNING (4) BABY YEAAAAAAAAAH RIGHT INTO THEIR FACE, switch to water, Frost Aura (4) in case they recover and try to hit you, Frozen Burst (3) to tag them all and keep them from following you, another circle strafe with Cone of Cold (2), dodge back and switch back to fire and Burning Speed to rinse and repeat if you're attacking a champion or something crazy.

Sadly, of course, you could play a warrior, use a greatsword, hit Hundred Blades (2) and get essentially the same results (warriors are so broken in PVE), but this way is far more fun (yay) and involving (argh my wrists).

Oh, and all the movement signets have been upgraded to 25% movement increase, which with the cap of 33% isn't that great for the perma swift classes but awesome for the others. Well, cap of 33% unless you have enough superior runes of whatever (Centaur?) that boost the max speed increase to 40%, anyway.

I have been using your sequence with some minor variation because I'm not fast enough yet to do the attunement switch and pop the arcane finishers before ring of fire runs out. For most solo grinding, earth attunement is as far as I get anyway, since they're all mostly dead and I just kite skill 1 to knock off the last 1/8 inch of health bar. The full rotation through all four attunements is still something I'm working on. I can get most of the way through three attunements (ie most of the way thru air) but when I get to the point that I'm contemplating a fourth switch it just becomes a button mash. Fun as heck tho. You're right - D/D is way more fun to play and I'm easily aggroing/murdering 5 regular mobs at a time unless they have some crappy skill of their own like knockdown or immobilize....but if I know I'm going into an area with lots of that type of mob i just switch back to trusty S/D and wail away at a distance.

[Defiance]

Finally caved in and bought this since I had some leftover money on my Amazon account. Installing it now.

I really enjoyed the first Guild Wars since it allowed you to build your character in a variety of ways based on which skills you decided to use. The Mesmer class was fucking awesome too, unfortunately awesome debuff/utility-type classes have faded away in today's streamlined MMO world. The story was pretty shitty, but the game's environments - particularly Nightfall and Eye of the North - were beautiful. I also loved the holiday events that they had, which were infinitely more entertaining than World of Warcraft's.

I think I'm going to make a Charr Warrior to start off with (yay for awesome beast races!) and an Asura Mesmer soon after.

[Lucifer's Heaven]

Feel free to let us know your account name (including the four digit number) and we can add you to the Malaz guild.
A bunch of us are representing other guilds these days, but you can still use it as a list of people playing and when they're on. We can be fairly useful if you have questions as well

[Illuyankas]

Yes, whisper people if they're not representing.

Also I finally completed the personal storyline on my charr guardian! Zhaitan is a freaky freaky thing.

[Defiance]

Ugh, think I'm going to have to delete and remake my Asura. The eyes I chose looked good on the customization screen, but in game - particularly during the chat sequences - the eyelashes are absurdly long and make him look like a girl. Luckily I'm not too far in, but it's still frustrating.

ESGunslinger.8162. Made my character on Maguuma since it looked like several of you did as well, not sure that that really matters too much though since it seems like you can group with people from other servers for everything except WvWvW.

[cerveza_fiesta]

Defiance, on 16 January 2013 - 05:47 AM, said:

Ugh, think I'm going to have to delete and remake my Asura. The eyes I chose looked good on the customization screen, but in game - particularly during the chat sequences - the eyelashes are absurdly long and make him look like a girl. Luckily I'm not too far in, but it's still frustrating.

ESGunslinger.8162. Made my character on Maguuma since it looked like several of you did as well, not sure that that really matters too much though since it seems like you can group with people from other servers for everything except WvWvW.

I have an asura ele that I've been leveling when I can find time to play. Ele + warrior is a pretty awesome questing combo so if you want to level your charr a bit then I'd be happy to tag along if we happen to be online at the same time.

The down-leveling system means I'm not even wasting my time while doing it. I've already completed pretty much everything in the vicinity of the asura starting area and don't really want to repeat it all unless you need help, but stuff near the charr starting area will be all new to me.

My toon name is Wihzurdd and account is Ian the Barbarian. I'm on the guild list too if you want to get in touch.

[Lucifer's Heaven]

Defiance, on 16 January 2013 - 05:47 AM, said:

ESGunslinger.8162. Made my character on Maguuma since it looked like several of you did as well, not sure that that really matters too much though since it seems like you can group with people from other servers for everything except WvWvW.

And you're added
If you don't get mail from it, hit "G" and check the bottom left of the window. Should be able to accept there.

Also, if you ever decide further on that you want to change a character's look, there are two things you can buy from the Gem store. There's the Self-Style Hair Kit that lets you change hair, horns and facial hair. And there's the Total Makeover Kit that lets you change everything except class, race and sex.

[Defiance]

Is there anyone in the guild who can craft some decent-sized bags?

EDIT: Not hurting for bag space as much as I thought. Just discovered the collection tab, really glad they brought this back from the first game.

This post has been edited by Defiance: 16 January 2013 - 09:56 PM

[Illuyankas]

Anyone can make eight slot just by picking an armour crafting profession - armorsmith, leatherworker, tailor - without having to level it at all. If you catch me on at some point I can throw some 12 slot bags together for you or something.

Oh, and click the inventory cog wheel and check out Deposit All Collectibles, it is a godsend.

This post has been edited by Illuyankas: 17 January 2013 - 02:06 AM

[High House Dark]

Eeeeee there's a Malazan Guild??? I've only VERY recently bought GW2, so my characters are quite low-level still. But still, if someone would like to add me, that would be cool: thetinynina.5943

[Lucifer's Heaven]

High House Dark, on 11 May 2013 - 03:15 AM, said:

Eeeeee there's a Malazan Guild??? I've only VERY recently bought GW2, so my characters are quite low-level still. But still, if someone would like to add me, that would be cool: thetinynina.5943

Aaand done
It's not a particularly active guild, pretty much all of us belong to and usually represent other guilds, but it is a decent addition to a friends list.
So yeah, you can belong to multiple guilds, you can only represent one at a time, it will remember which one you represent on a character by character basis (so don't forget to pick one when you start a new character) and only people representing the guild you represent will see stuff you type in guild chat. If someone isn't representing that guild the green square (when they're online) next to their name in the guild page has a line through it.

I'm happy to help out if you need a hand or have questions and I'm online or on here, so feel free to whisper me etc (bet you can't guess which account I am in game )

[High House Dark]

Lucifer, on 12 May 2013 - 12:58 AM, said:

High House Dark, on 11 May 2013 - 03:15 AM, said:

Eeeeee there's a Malazan Guild??? I've only VERY recently bought GW2, so my characters are quite low-level still. But still, if someone would like to add me, that would be cool: thetinynina.5943

Aaand done
It's not a particularly active guild, pretty much all of us belong to and usually represent other guilds, but it is a decent addition to a friends list.
So yeah, you can belong to multiple guilds, you can only represent one at a time, it will remember which one you represent on a character by character basis (so don't forget to pick one when you start a new character) and only people representing the guild you represent will see stuff you type in guild chat. If someone isn't representing that guild the green square (when they're online) next to their name in the guild page has a line through it.

I'm happy to help out if you need a hand or have questions and I'm online or on here, so feel free to whisper me etc (bet you can't guess which account I am in game )

Yaaay! And yeah, I'm already in another guild with a friend, so I know all about that (plus, I lurked around the Player Helping Player subforums, and there's a super helpful sticky for n00bs). BUT I WILL DEFINITELY ASK QUESTIONS WHEN I HAVE THEM.

So super helpful. THANK YOU!