Coeruleum.9164

> @"Loosmaster.8263" said:

> In a perfect world, your own fields should have priority...

Yes, a priority system could work, but I think ideally you should just be able to use every kind of field you step on. Having up ten light fields from all the guardians in a zerg might be a bit much, but at the very least, if you have five light fields, two fire fields, and a darkness field under you, you should get one light effect, one fire effect, and one darkness effect, kind of like how vulnerability maxxes out at 25 stacks but getting 25 stacks of vulnerability on a boss won't stop you from applying stacks of burning or torment.

> @"Trise.2865" said:

> So... you'd rather they kill you _faster_?

No, I want to use a dark field to heal myself but instead I get a light field that removes conditions when I don't have any conditions and this causes my reaper to die to world bosses like Tequatl.

> @"Czerny.6530" said:

> Play unranked

Unranked is a kitten piece of kitten kitten.


A picture that's too cool to display on this site because it's in the Shiverpeaks, but if it did display, it would please you deeply. Mmmmm.

When we make a combo attack, could we have it use all the fields that are up, or at the very least use one of each type of field that's up? I don't like guardians killing my reaper by putting up light fields when I don't have any conditions. Thanks!

> @"fuzzyp.6295" said:

> I don't think that would be a very good idea. Off hand dagger is already one of the weakest tools in the ele's kit. By removing Ice Aura you are taking away one of its only tools for defense, something that it desperately needs considering dagger is designed for you to be up in your opponents face. Focus also is mostly a ranged weapon and because of that, Comet and Freezing Gust works well with its play style of keep your enemies at a distance. I don't really think either of these skills would work well with off hand dagger unless they are changed somehow.

>

> What about Fire Aura? Most Eles would tell you that the Fire Aura and Flamewall are utter garbage and should be swapped out for new skills on Focus rather than the water skills. At least now Fire Aura has more utility with its detonation atleast, but Flamewall is still a skill that was designed for GW2 2012 where you were expected to drop it for Ranger's to pew pew over it for CoMbOs.

>

> Not to mention all of the base ele weapons were designed to have an aura attached to them (Focus/Fire, Dagger/Air, OffDagger/Water, Staff/Earth) so that would mess up that aspect of the elementatlist's tool kit.

>

> EDIT: steki pretty much said everything I said so +1 for that haha

Dagger doesn't need defense though if it also has crowd control which it does. Focus doesn't really need crowd control because focus is a defensive weapon on multiple professions. Necromancer focus has a self-heal and a debuff, Guardian focus has a block and ranged attack, Mesmer focus has an illusion that blocks and a swiftness field. I can understand Elementalist focus having crowd control on air or earth, but water doesn't generally have a lot of crowd control so putting crowd control on elementalist focus for water just feels like shoehorning it in. In addition, it's not necessary because elementalist focus already actually does have crowd control on air.

Also, Firewall and Fire Aura/Transmute are GREAT skills. Firewall would probably be better if they did the same with with it as they did with Spectral Wall and make it into a ring, but it doesn't really need to be changed besides that. Have you used Firewall and Fire Aura on sword weaver? You can leap over the firewall and just keep making fire auras and transmuting them. I think ice aura would be better for that kind of playstyle. Focus largely isn't a good ranged weapon on ele at all. It mostly gives you blocks and projectile reflects which mostly help you when playing melee. It can totally also work with scepter like intended if you want more defense with your scepter, but scepter already has a lot of ranged crowd control on air and earth and you don't need it shoehorned in to water focus. If you want more defense with your dagger and to be a bruiser, you should either go dagger/focus anyways which would be really nice for making and transmuting auras and blocking projectiles and attacks, or you can go dagger/dagger to have high amounts of mobility and crowd control and take more defensive traits and skills.

Combos are actually great even though it's not 2012 anymore. Auras are really great too and I like making auras. However, most of your combos are probably going to be with yourself. Rangers can make rings of fire and pew pew over them all by themselves and it adds a lot of damage, or make other fields and add other effects like poison and chill. If your friend puts up a field that's also useful, and random noobs putting up fields is usually harmless at best although I think there should be a better mechanism for determining which field you want so people don't replace my whirls and projectiles on dark fields with whirls and projectiles on light fields so much and reduce my damage and self-healing, or change my lunge on a fire field into a lunge on a poison field and it's useless against a big boss instead of turning me into the Human Torch.

I want to be able to get multiple of my guildies or friends together and do ranked. Could the cap be increased to more than two? Thanks!

The Order of Nags is not (currently) an in-game guild, but I've joked we need a guild to nag the devs for all the things we want so they get done. The Order of Nags is an ancient Elonian order like the Order of Whispers and the Order of Shadows, except instead of whispering, we nag. The Order of Nags was founded because they were skeptical that the human gods were the highest powers that existed and they wanted to appeal to yet higher powers. However, the higher powers seemed to never answer their prayers, so they gained a reputation for nagging. Like many movements, what started as an epithet became the actual name, and the Order of Nags was born.

Sign this thread to join the Order of Nags and help begin the journey of badgering the devs.

> @"Methuselah.4376" said:

> > @"JohnnyBoy.2314" said:

> > > @"Methuselah.4376" said:

> > > Condi scourge is not good for fracs.

> >

> > That is not true.

> > In certain fractals it's decent maybe. But in general (T1 - T3 fractals) it's quite viable. Please be more precise.

>

> I am working off the assumption that it's an optimized group (HB, Alac and good dps) and in T4s. I said it's not good for fracs, didn't mean it's not viable. As others have said, Scourge shines better with a bad group.

I don't think making scourge worthwhile means you need a bad group. I think most groups just don't know how to adapt to off-healers because it's like Henry Ford's assembly line. People said Henry Ford made the assembly line to be more efficient, but he actually just made it because he thought most people were stupid and he wanted to give them jobs they could handle. "Elitist" builds that only do one thing are like that. Everyone knows polymaths are smarter than people who can only do one field and can't even make eye contact or bathe themselves without help. Generalist builds are the real elite builds like generalist people are the real elite people. However, specialist builds are perfectly viable and are lower effort because they don't require any communication between team members and everyone knows what everyone's going to do just by knowing "the rotation."

This doesn't mean scourge is better than reaper though. Reaper can be an intelligent and versatile class too even if it's possible to make really lazy reaper builds for open world content. It mostly just depends on whether you prefer reaping or scourging. I love the technical aspects of this game as much as anyone else but the technical aspects exist to help you realize your concepts, and if you can dream it, you can do it, after you get a lot of exotic/ascended/legendary gear, sigils, runes, levels, hero points, and all the prerequisite materials that you pragmatically need to realize your fantasy RPG dreams.

I think WvW just needs a complete overhaul. Honestly, the story reason for WvW makes no sense. I don't think people in any of the alternate Tyrias call their world stuff like "Blackgate" and "Dragonbrand" in-world. The WvW map should still be used, but the rationale for using it should change. It should be guilds fighting over resources or something that actually makes sense. Also, it would probably make sense to make Tyria maps useable too. How it should work is guilds decide to be enemies. The battles are NOT arranged all like "let's fight because we all know wars in real life are like a friendly football game," rather you can drop in and drop out any time once your guild decides to be enemies and the battle ends once your guilds stop deciding to be enemies (maybe the battles will need to be terminated, but I doubt it, because the only reason Dragonbrand, Blackgate, Maguuma, and Tarnished Coast aren't perpetual enemies is that servers have to be shuffled automatically.) You can link up a ton of guilds in the alliance so your tiny guild with 10 people can join a large guild, kind of like server linking now. You can also be ganked in open world maps, but only if you're repping the guild that's fighting in that map, so if you're trying to do something and you don't want to be ganked, rep a different guild. Some guilds will probably just be neutral like Switzerland or something so people will always have a gank-free option (probably mostly raiding guilds and sPvP guilds.) Your guild can end up allying with the centaurs, Sons of Svanir or the Nightmare Court if you're on a map where you're fighting those enemies... you can already ally with Palawa Joko and Mad King Thorn, so allying with a bad guy expediently in GW2 is not weird. I think this is a way better open-world PvP option than the lore-unfriendly WvW option, though as long a we have WvW and not this I'm going to play it, because open-world PvP is fun.

Denmark and Canada still fight for territory despite both being part of NATO. We might as well hint that there are groups of players fighting for each other and not just evil dragons vs. good players. Not everyone who fights is exemplary good vs. exemplary evil even where good vs. evil exists. It's supposed to be "Guild Wars," not "Dragon Wars" anyways even though I love fighting the Elder Dragons and harvesting their magic and that's very cool.

I think the main issue with this probably is that it'd lead to a huge overhaul to the "feel" of the game even if it involves virtually no new mechanics or removing anything that already exists. The game has been too implicitly United Federation of Planets kumbaya between all the playable races' strongest forces, even though this isn't actually Star Trek and there's no good explanation for that. However, if there were open-world guild alliance wars in designated territories that are NOT SCHEDULED but still chosen by declaring war on different guilds and agreeing to be enemies (not to fight specific battles, that's stupid and lame) and to dispute territories for resources, services, spreading freedom and democracy, the true faith, or whatever ideals (this should probably be a mechanic, but it wouldn't be a hard mechanic to implement and I know this from developing small games myself) absolutely nothing about the lore would change. There are already rogue bands running around and fighting each other. You even fight your long-term friends and allies in dungeons when they simply get mad at you. End the kumbaya and give us open-world PvP alliance wars! All the WvW maps should still be used as territories you can choose to dispute and they should be the Mists territories which have valuable synthesizer nodes that can make rare materials as well as the Obsidian Sanctum jumping puzzle. You shouldn't even have to have all of them packaged together, but if you choose the borderlands, you can get Borderlands Bloodlust and then use the buff to fight for territory, resources, people, services, etc. in Tyria and not only the Mists so people might always want to choose to have their guilds dispute those anyways.

> @"MidnightX.6294" said:

> Could we get event-vendors **outside of the event times** to exchange at least a bit of decor items?

> Getting Guild-hall-decor from events just once a year is ridiculous. The hardgrind for these 2 weeks is horrible and without fun, jsut to get all the decor u want in time before the npcs are gone for another full year. Looking at u halloween-, wintersday- and zephyr-vendors !!

Yes, this would be great. You can pretty much buy all the Festival of the Four Winds items year-round anyways because most of them are available for laurels and gold. Making many of the Halloween items available would not be ruining anything at all, especially since the Halloween pail is only a reasonable deal on a 20-slot bag if you've never played WvW at all and the Bloody Prince Thorn mini is just one mini. Even if there's at least one person who's obsessed with Prince Thorn, they want a Prince Thorn mini and no other minis and they want it to follow them around on all their characters, they're probably still going to want other Halloween stuff besides that mini because guess what, some of it's based on Prince Thorn.

I personally think it's really weird that offhand dagger randomly has defensive skills when you use water and focus randomly has crowd control skills. I thought focus was supposed to be somewhat more of a defensive or support weapon. If focus gets the fire aura and transmute fire skills it should get the ice aura and transmute ice skills too. Anything that works better mechanically also works better thematically. If you use offhand dagger you can use the lightning dagger skin, turn into a lightning bolt, and summon hailstorms, and if you use the focus, you can use an elemental crystal and project auras around yourself. Why does the dagger even come with an ice aura and the focus with a fire aura, when the focus is more defensive and should just get all the auras while dagger should get more lunges and crowd control moves? Thanks for your consideration!

> @"Funky.4861" said:

> They would have to recolour the whole set (and they might do, for next year) but is disagree. I love the purple/blue haunted/demon-haunted torch because orange/yellow/red are so common in torch skins. I wouldn't mind green, for my scourge :)

It's nice that they made a blue one, I just think recoloring it would be easy. There's a reason so many torches are orange, yellow, and red, though frankly red isn't any brighter than blue perceptually and green is actually brighter.

Could we have more stuff added to the festival vendors? Specifically, I'd like the Endless Halloween Enchantment added to the Halloween vendor. You sell more stuff if you give us stuff we want rather than stuff we don't want. I don't want a Mini Bloody Prince Thorn and I'm not going to buy that. Thank you very much!

In the future could we have a recolor of the demon-haunted torch to something brighter like yellow, orange, or green? I really like the style where the torch is a row of candles but I don't feel like I can go for it because I don't personally like getting torches in dark colors like blue and purple. Thanks!

> @"Kodama.6453" said:

> Engineer - Plaguedoctor

> Icon: https://imgur.com/kqiIvK0

> Plaguedoctors are the descendants of the scientists of the Am Fah, which were trying to use the plague in Cantha to strengthen their cult and claim reign in the city of Kaineng.

> They experimented with a wide array of diseases, chemicals and other concoctions and modern plaguedoctors are now known to be masters of chemical warfare as well as medicine.

>

> Plaguedoctors are a support elite spec, their focus is on boons they can share with their allies through injections and fumes as well as having some slight healing here and there.

> Their weapon choice are maces, which they are able to dual wield. Plaguedoctors were always looking for ways to carry as many of their concoctions into the battle as possible, hence why they started to use maces, hollowing out the heads to fill them with their chemicals. Maces are applying different conditions on enemies, primarily confusion and poison.

>

> As utility skills, plaguedoctors might either get corruption skills or preparations.

> Corruptions go really well with their lore, since the plaguedoctors are handling dangerous chemicals to create great effects. Instead of applying conditions on themselves to cast them, I imagine their corruptions to have a flat health cost, making vitality a desired stat (so plaguedoctor stats become great for them, they offer all they need: condition damage, vitality, healing power, concentration) as well as enabling some of the weird interactions of medical dispersion field (that trait sometimes just shares healing if the engineer is not at full health, a plaguedoctor would be able to fulfill that requirement all by themselves).

>

> Preparations could be varying devices that the plaguedoctor installs on the battlefield to spreads their fumes and chemicals, affecting allies (boons) and enemies (conditions) around.

>

> Their class mechanic is the fumigator. Th F5 skills becomes "activate/deactivate fumigator", activating it will change your other toolbelt skills (F1-F4) into other skills. One of these skills will allow the plaguedoctor to create a combo field that is moving with the plaguedoctor (spreading gas) and growing over time, up to a maximum range. To use this skill, you need to fill your "gas tank", you are doing so by applying conditions on enemies and boons on allies. The combo field and it's effects can get customised through 1 of 3 traits, making it either a poison, water or light combo field, so you can specialize in either dealing condition damage, healing or cleansing conditions.

I haven't played engineer yet but this is actually a really cool idea.

> @"skunkstank.6128" said:

> > @"Coeruleum.9164" said:

> > I think greatsword or axe for ele would be the best. Pretty much every class that's not engineer should be able to use sword, greatsword, dagger, and axe imo. Ele shield could also be really cool and give it skills that give you auras and reflect attacks causing conditions. Honestly eles could get pretty much as many weapons as warrior as long as their weapons leave fireballs and thunderbolts when they hit and it wouldn't be weird. Guns and bows for eles are kind of weird but there are enough mages in fiction that do things like shoot ice balls out of pistols or shoot lightningbolts out of bows it wouldn't be so weird it shouldn't be done.

>

> Personally i believe they won't be implementing any of the conjure weapons because they would not serve any purpose then (not that they do now) , unless they delete conjures and then implement any of the weapons. But then again an e-spec with the attunements switching weapons for the conjure weapons would be really interesting. The problem would be that then weapons would serve no purpose unless they put like focus main hand and then conjure those weapons with it.

The thing is greatsword or axe for ele wouldn't have to work the same as the conjure weapons at all. Just because the conjure weapons are made by eles doesn't mean ele weapons would have to work like them at all. Case in point: the magnetic shield already gives you five skills even though regular weapon shields only have two skills.

Honestly, the only niche eles really don't have filled at all right now is blocks (besides the magnetic shield and arcane shield skill and trait) so I'd say shield or hammer would probably be the next ele weapon. Dagger/dagger is pretty similar to greatswords on most classes that have both so even though ele greatsword would be really cool it wouldn't be giving them much they don't already have. Ele bow or guns would give some people a cool aesthetic but on ele it'd pretty much be doing the same thing as staff or scepter.

I like reaper more but they're both viable in both PvE and PvP content so just pick what appeals to you. Pick reaper if you want to run around with a sword hitting everything and pick deadeye if you want to hide in the shadows sniping with a rifle.

I think dagger is mostly fine. It could do with more cleave (3 targets instead of 2, not needing a target for chains) but that's about it. Dagger's base damage isn't anywhere near greatsword's but if you use the right traits or sigils it can get pretty high due to being a way faster weapon and the fact dagger 2 is a ranged attack with repeated hits. I also agree dagger/warhorn works better than axe/warhorn in general because warhorn 4 has such a short range. In general I would do axe/focus or dagger/warhorn, not axe/warhorn.

Yes, but I wish we could have a sort button in addition to a compact button.

While I think the current blood bank works well on really tanky builds, it'd be nice if you could also use it for extra defense on builds that aren't as tanky. I would support that as long as they don't ruin the current uses of blood bank.

> @"Paradoxoglanis.1904" said:

> Every class can be built as a glass cannon, or an unkillable tank, or a condi dps, or power dps, or hybrid, or support, etc... There are plenty of different elementalist builds across the 3 different gamemodes. The descriptions are really just for lore. They dont describe how classes are actually played.

Yeah, and that's why I think it's kind of misleading. I think the descriptions should describe how classes are actually played. I'm fine with all the squishy eles if that's what people want to do but it seems like there's such a preponderance of them because people don't know what all you can do with them. The squishy eles might be ease of playing because I don't see a lot of CC eles either even though air and earth have a lot of great CC abilities, but just implying eles have to be squishy seems like it might be adding to that trend.

I would make a Norn revenant, but if you want to be renegade then Charr seems like the natural choice. Honestly, you should just make whatever race you identify with the most for your revenant and don't be racist.

Well, rocks and ice are physical and it's not like the Guardian's defensive magic is any more physical. If anything, it's less physical because the guardian is all spiritual and angelic while the elementalist just moves a rock between them and their enemies so the spell hits it. Implying elementalists lack physical toughness is just encouraging people to play glass cannon fireball bomb mages and glass cannon hot springs mages. It doesn't even incline people to play agile characters that can dodge attacks by riding on wind and turning into lightning because being agile is very physical.

Well if you just want the worst ele build possible don't equip any weapons, armor, or trinkets, don't put any skills in your skill bar, and don't take any traits. That's probably too easy of an answer though.