47 replies to this topic

[HughPR]

Hi there I was wondering which professions are the best for aoe. I play ele and I think it's a great profession in the aoe department, although I appreciate that others may wish to differ.

I understand that all/most professions have some degree of aoe, but I was wondering which is the best for it. I've heard that Engineer grenade kit and Necro condition aoe are good and that Guardian/Warrior GS can be effective, are these true? Which other professions are similar to ele in their aoe style?

Thanks (And sorry for the overuse of the term 'aoe'!)

[Craywulf]

A staff Necromancer with utility of wells.

[Elysen]

Craywulf, on 02 January 2013 - 08:15 PM, said:

A staff Necromancer with utility of wells.

This has good AOE yes, but there's a surprising lack of combo fields with this AOE. They're all Dark/Poison IIRC (been a while since I played mine) with the Well of Blood being Light.

This is why I treat Elementalist as the profession with best AOE, as they have many more combo field types at their disposal.

[HughPR]

Xephenon, on 02 January 2013 - 09:46 PM, said:

This is why I treat Elementalist as the profession with best AOE, as they have many more combo field types at their disposal.

So what comes second to ele then?

[Straegen]

Best is a loaded question of sorts. Most damage, more variety? Hard to beat the ele but oddly a warrior should be considered for the best "general" AoE. The longbow has several solid distance AoEs and the up close AoE from the two-handers can be devastating which include heavy spike damage with the sword and control with the hammer. Even their base auto attack with a two-hander is AoE. On top of all that their support AoE skills are pretty decent. People tend to disregard because of the limited area of effect on the melee AoEs and the fact you have to close, but still for pure AoE they should be in the running.

A well built ranger also packs some great AoE punch including one of the best if not the best AoE heals, great AoE elite, barrage and their medium distance weapons all feature at least one AoE standard attack. They even get an AoE speed buff. Their traps offer a lot of flexibility in AoE choice including poison, chill, burning, cripple, etc. Lets not forget about the pet abilities which several have fantastic AoEs including party healing and condition removal.

Edited by Straegen, 02 January 2013 - 10:05 PM.

[Rocky Balmoa]

Mesmer...
Just kidding
Engineers used to be great with grenades, bombs and flamethrower, but they are currently quite underpowered. Eles have  a lot of AOE potential with nearly every weapon they use.

[NeoPomStar]

Guardian with greatsword is fantastic.

5th skill - gather up to 5 mobs and pull them to you so you can group them and lay waste all your aoe skills.
4th skill - aoe melee+midrange damage, gives retalation, and aoe debuff
3rd skill - aoe leap midrange attack that can also cause blind.
2nd skill - aoe damage that you can move around and tag all the mobs around you
1st skill - melee aoe and can give you might buff.

[matsif]

elementalist, every weapon and every attunement has at least 1 aoe ability.
hammer warrior has a bunch as well.

Rocky Balmoa, on 02 January 2013 - 10:08 PM, said:

Engineers used to be great with grenades, bombs and flamethrower, but they are currently quite underpowered. Eles have  a lot of AOE potential with nearly every weapon they use.

not true in the slightest, the 3 kits you listed are all aoe damage and do good enough damage when traited and geared similar to other damage builds that I hardly notice a difference.

[coglin]

Define best?

A lot of classes have great aloe options.

Engineer for example, engineer can aoe with pistol doing direct damage and bleeds in an aoe with no ground targeting, then swap to grenade for a 1500 ranged option, or bombs that aoe of of you while healing in an aoe and stacking vulnerability.

Depends on the type of aoe you want , and what defines them as the best.

[Andlát]

My vote definitely goes to necro - within the staff you have an AoE interrupt (fear), chill, posion, bleeding, regeneration, DD+condition removal. All of that within 1200 range and can be traited to double their radius from 120 to 240, which makes it absolutely huge. Their downside is that they do not affect downed players for some reason.

The wells are also wonderful skills, two of them deal direct dmg with a side effect, and if traited can be used at a maximum range of 900.

If you are a condition necromancer - you will love epidemic - it will spread the conditions from one foe to the others around him, allowing you to transfer your stacks from one target to the ones adjacent to it within 600 radius. The range of this skill is, again, 1200 and has only 15 seconds cd.

In my list, the elementalist comes really close second.

Edited by Andlát, 02 January 2013 - 11:44 PM.

[Nabuko Darayon]

Ele no doubt about it

[Straegen]

Andlát, on 02 January 2013 - 11:41 PM, said:

My vote definitely goes to necro

I hate to say this but the necro is so terribly weak at least in WvW. I have zero fear of them. They may have a nice variety of AoE but if it isn't particularly effective does it count? This goes for the engineer as well. I am not dogging the people who play those classes but the classes need a buff before they should be considered for best AoE.

[Khrushchev]

I find Necro and Elementalist on the top of my personal list. Necro edges it out slightly because the staff has 4 aoe marks, can utility three wells, which can be buffed by traits to siphon health (When running my full well build I can afford to use my healing well to give a bit of healing to other people, I steal enough from all the siphon ticks to stay alive). In addition, Necros can also spec into Condition damage based AoE. Currently I'm running a condition damage based build where I hit for 140-150 a tick of bleeding, and when my party stacks 25 stacks of bleeding on a single target, I epidemic that for 3500 dps onto surrounding enemies.

[Andlát]

Straegen, on 02 January 2013 - 11:50 PM, said:

I hate to say this but the necro is so terribly weak at least in WvW. I have zero fear of them. They may have a nice variety of AoE but if it isn't particularly effective does it count? This goes for the engineer as well. I am not dogging the people who play those classes but the classes need a buff before they should be considered for best AoE.

Guess you haven't come across a good one yet - there are quite a few videos of necromancer rocking the WvW - both in 1 v 1 battles with powermancer specs and in big fights with AoE specs.

My experience has been the same - if used correctly your skills as an individual necromancer player can make a significant difference in a battle. It is just not as straightforward a class as some others.

Speaking of having no fear of classes - I have no fear of warriors, thieves, mesmers or any glass cannon burst build, since because of my toughness + vitality based spec I can suck up a ton of dmg and yet melt their faces with my wells, so perhaps it is your spec that makes necromancers so helpless against you ? What spec are you usually running ?

EDIT: I have been focusing on necromancers ever since BWE1 so maybe they are a bit hard to get the hang of if you are not too experienced with them.

Edited by Andlát, 03 January 2013 - 12:10 AM.

[ZCKS]

Khrushchev, on 02 January 2013 - 11:57 PM, said:

I find Necro and Elementalist on the top of my personal list. Necro edges it out slightly because the staff has 4 aoe marks, can utility three wells, which can be buffed by traits to siphon health (When running my full well build I can afford to use my healing well to give a bit of healing to other people, I steal enough from all the siphon ticks to stay alive). In addition, Necros can also spec into Condition damage based AoE. Currently I'm running a condition damage based build where I hit for 140-150 a tick of bleeding, and when my party stacks 25 stacks of bleeding on a single target, I epidemic that for 3500 dps onto surrounding enemies.

This really.

The necro is awesome in terms of  AOE conditions. That being said if you want ranged AOE burst then the ele pulls ahead.

Of course if your willing to get up close & personal the warrior's AOE burst is hard to beat & it can be used much more often then most ranged burst can be.


All this being said you & your team can't guarantee wins by just stacking damage, so make sure you have the support & survivability you need to stay alive because dead men don't do damage.

[Fenice_86]

Ele... Staff and Scepter/Dagger setup for massive fireworks (not including stuff like Glyph of Storms and Tornado making u an AoE being)

[Enicces]

Necromancer.

The only class thatcan move every single type debuff in the game to 5 mobs in a 600 radius on a 15 sec cooldown (which often means along with 10-15 stacks of bleed) + Staff with an AoE fear (interrupt), instant removal of all conditons, aoe freeze and a heal. Then you have wells etc. The tradeoff is lack of burst, so no 10k numbers on your screen like with some other classes.

[CepaCepa]

Elementalist and grenadier engineers (condition specc), for all purposes 5+ mob AoE.

Specific Case One: For something like 3 mobs (I don't think that's "aoe", it's more just multi target cleaving) most melee weapons on any profession do just fine.

Specific Case Two: For burst aoe (things that die fast) in dungeons/fractal, shatter mesmer opening with iBerserker followed by 2 full illusion shatters (maybe even 3-4 if he's got the signet) and Sword #2, that's something like 30K-50K damage to each mob in 2-4 seconds.

Specific Case Three: For gigantic herd of mobs (or just bosses with huge hit boxes) ele has a clear advantage because several aoe skills (meteor shower, glyph of storm, frostbow #4) produce a rain of individual "projectile" that each acts as its own. Remember that each projectile can at most hit 5 mobs, so for a huge pack of mobs this is going to come into play.

Edit: Just checked, I originally put Necro up there with elementalist and grenadier, until I found out that epidemic affects only 5 targets (other than the original target). In that case, unless this Necro has a group setup that keeps 25 stacks of bleed + perma poison + perma burn on a mob, he simply cannot exceed the engineer's damage (who keeps 25 stacks of bleed + perma poison all by himself on 5 mobs anyways, ON TOP of dealing considerable direct damage with grenades every second) due to the 15 second CD --- Many stacks of bleed will likely drop off by 15th seconds. Alternatively, the engineer may hit up to 15 targets with 8-10 stacks of bleed each since every throw = 3 grenades, each hitting 5 targets maximum. As for elementalist, well. Have you SEEN the screen of a damage oriented staff elementalist on 10+ mobs aoe pulls?

Edited by CepaCepa, 08 January 2013 - 10:25 PM.

[Xunlai Agent]

Engineer or Elementalist would be my picks.

[Sokonawareta]

CepaCepa, on 08 January 2013 - 04:01 PM, said:

Elementalist and grenadier engineers (condition specc), for all purposes 5+ mob AoE.

Specific Case One: For something like 3 mobs (I don't think that's "aoe", it's more just multi target cleaving) most melee weapons on any profession do just fine.

Specific Case Two: For burst aoe (things that die fast) in dungeons/fractal, shatter mesmer opening with iBerserker followed by 2 full illusion shatters (maybe even 3-4 if he's got the signet) and Sword #2, that's something like 30K-50K damage to each mob in 2-4 seconds.

Specific Case Three: For gigantic herd of mobs (or just bosses with huge hit boxes) ele has a clear advantage because several aoe skills (meteor shower, glyph of storm, frostbow #4) produce a rain of individual "projectile" that each acts as its own. Remember that each projectile can at most hit 5 mobs, so for a huge pack of mobs this is going to come into play.

Edit: Just checked, I originally put Necro up there with elementalist and grenadier, until I found out that epidemic affects only 5 targets (other than the original target). In that case, unless this Necro has a group setup that keeps 25 stacks of bleed + perma poison + perma burn on a mob, he simply cannot exceed the engineer's damage (who keeps 25 stacks of bleed + perma poison all by himself on 5 mobs anyways, ON TOP of dealing considerable direct damage with grenades every second) due to the 15 second CD --- Many stacks of bleed will likely drop off by 15th seconds. Alternatively, the engineer may hit up to 15 targets with 8-10 stacks of bleed each since every throw = 3 grenades, each hitting 5 targets maximum. As for elementalist, well. Have you SEEN the screen of a damage oriented staff elementalist on 10+ mobs aoe pulls?

Hmm, The shatter reset signet cast is almost 2s, and shatter ability itself has a long CD even as 30 Illusion.

You get one (4 image) shatter and Blurred Frenzy in 4 sec, if not a hair longer.  18k would be critting most of the moves.
Certainly a higher spike than my staff ellie, but Meteor/Font/FB with Blasting Staff and Pyromancer stacks/Cannon gear is hard to beat sustained AoE by any class.

[CepaCepa]

Sokonawareta, on 14 January 2013 - 07:56 AM, said:

Hmm, The shatter reset signet cast is almost 2s, and shatter ability itself has a long CD even as 30 Illusion.

You get one (4 image) shatter and Blurred Frenzy in 4 sec, if not a hair longer.  18k would be critting most of the moves.
Certainly a higher spike than my staff ellie, but Meteor/Font/FB with Blasting Staff and Pyromancer stacks/Cannon gear is hard to beat sustained AoE by any class.

Hence why I said 2-4 seconds. With mirror image + clone on dodge + decoy, basically this combo: Mind stab + iBerserker followed by mirror blade followed by a dodge into them and F2 followed by another dodge + F1 = 3K + 5K + 4-6K (depending on bounce) + 20K + 5K = 38K assuming all crits. If you have Sword on your other weapons set you can immediately swap and #2 to get another 6K in there, and that's within 2-4 seconds. F1 has a CD of 10 seconds with shatter CD reduction, it's not bad even for sustained damage compared to other professions. But for burst (for example, bursting down novice in cliffside fractal) a mesmer does his job well.

Sustained AoE, of course ele rules supreme, that's what I said. Though for heavy armor mobs (rock dogs for example) grenadiers can surge ahead due to its reliance on condition damage.

[Angully]

Necro best aoe notthing tops it

[coglin]

Angully, on 15 January 2013 - 10:55 PM, said:

Necro best aoe notthing tops it

Having had all professions to 80 now for some time, I think you need to get out more. Sure appears to me that many here seem to be giving opinions based on limited experience, or with no experience at all with several classes, yet feel they can claim another class out does it. It is beyond me how some people can claim one clas is better then another, when they have not played the other professions.

[Atamaz]

Having played all 3 of them I'd say engi 'nades are good for every kind of aoe with nice debuff support(chill+blind+poison) but no combo field.
Ele: staff and scepter nice in static fight, not that great damage if enemies move a lot, D/D nice mobility but require a tanky build with less burst if you don't want to explode, very good combo field.
Necro his aoe is less bursty and more over time, after you apply the conditions and spread them with epidemic, you don't really care where enemy go, but can be cleanse with a condition removal(pvp), lots of debuff(cripple, blind, chill, weakness, poison), combo field limited to darkness and poison +1 light if using well of blood.

[coglin]

Atamaz, on 16 January 2013 - 07:41 AM, said:

Having played all 3 of them I'd say engi 'nades are good for every kind of aoe with nice debuff support(chill+blind+poison) but no combo field.

They make a recent change? Because the poison grenade has always made a poison combo field.

[Angully]

coglin, on 16 January 2013 - 02:07 AM, said:

Having had all professions to 80 now for some time, I think you need to get out more. Sure appears to me that many here seem to be giving opinions based on limited experience, or with no experience at all with several classes, yet feel they can claim another class out does it. It is beyond me how some people can claim one clas is better then another, when they have not played the other professions.

I have a 80 ranger 80 guardian a 80 necromancer a 60 engineer a 60 ele a 40 thief and all 3 80's. I would say hands down necromancer is the best AOE class there is no over class that can consistently spread 25 stacks from one foe to 5 others then switch to the other foe also they have the marks from the staff what have great control.

You "Apparently" have all classes to 80 and if you did you would know that epidemic is hands down the best AOE skill in the game also if co-ordinated with another necromancer can spread conditions constantly between groups doubling conditions every 7 seconds

-Angully

[CepaCepa]

Angully, on 17 January 2013 - 12:32 PM, said:

I have a 80 ranger 80 guardian a 80 necromancer a 60 engineer a 60 ele a 40 thief and all 3 80's. I would say hands down necromancer is the best AOE class there is no over class that can consistently spread 25 stacks from one foe to 5 others then switch to the other foe also they have the marks from the staff what have great control.

You "Apparently" have all classes to 80 and if you did you would know that epidemic is hands down the best AOE skill in the game also if co-ordinated with another necromancer can spread conditions constantly between groups doubling conditions every 7 seconds

-Angully

Potential Problems with Epidemic:
1. Limited to 5 targets
2. Relies on being able to keep up 25 stacks of bleed + poison on a single target every 15 second from the necro himself, which means going scepter for most of the fight, and hence does very little direct damage.
3. Epidemic is on a 15 sec CD, your 25 stack of bleed will drop to something like less than 10 stack by the end of that 15 second, hence it is not 25 stack of bleed constant on all 6 mobs.
4. You say that epidemic works well with another profession spreading condition, that just doesn't work outside of AoE situations. Taking 2 condition spec characters will significantly gimp your group's output due to capping, you'd have a much harder time at bosses, champions, etc. This is for dungeon/fractal of course.

Why is Grenade better than Epidemic:
1. 25 stacks of bleed + perma poison constantly on 5 targets, without ever dropping --- reapply like in the case of epidemic.
2. Just one grenadier engineer in a group can handle all the AoE conditions, you can spare the extra spot for a direct damage character that doesn't have problem with condition capping.
3. In addition to all those condition damage, grenades do decent AoE direct damage too even in condition spec/gear.
4. Has the maximum benefit of affecting 15 targets at once, although won't be at 25 stacks each.

Compared to ranger and guardian, yes Epidemic is ultra fine. But you're comparing against Grenadiers and Staff Elementalists here. If you're saying 2 Necros can down aoe groups fast (which they do), wait until your ele gets to 80 and see what 2 Staff elementalists going all out can do. It's scary.

[Rulerdragon]

I would say elementalist or grenadier eng depending on the tipe of aoe you want, necro epidemic is strong but is limited in comparison to ele and grenadier.
    Both staff ele and grenadier can kill more targets at once, they dont get the dps crippled if the target you are firing at for bleed stacks get killed before the epidemic. Also while marks are fine they dont realy do any particularly awsome direct dmg meaning you are pretty much locked in condition dmg, while eles and grenadiers can do either very well, ele in particulary also setting a horseload of possible diferent fields.

[coglin]

Angully, on 17 January 2013 - 12:32 PM, said:

I have a 80 ranger 80 guardian a 80 necromancer a 60 engineer a 60 ele a 40 thief and all 3 80's. I would say hands down necromancer is the best AOE class there is no over class that can consistently spread 25 stacks from one foe to 5 others then switch to the other foe also they have the marks from the staff what have great control.

You "Apparently" have all classes to 80 and if you did you would know that epidemic is hands down the best AOE skill in the game also if co-ordinated with another necromancer can spread conditions constantly between groups doubling conditions every 7 seconds

-Angully

An engineer can stack bleeds like that, stack poison in several stacks, stack 25 stacks of vulnerability, do solid direct damage, and proc burns. That is just with the grenade kit. Then can instantly swap to bomb kit for multiple combo fields, AoE blinds, confusion, fire, immobilize, and cripple. Use tool belt BoB for solid direct damage and AoE knock back. The swap to tool kit for bleeds and cripples.

All of which have no cool down on the weapons swap because they are kits.

With pistol skills alone you can stack bleeds on an infinite number per shot, because of the piercing factor combined with the explosion, you are not limited to 5 in the AoE.

The fact that there is not cool down to swap kits, makes the difference here in my opinion.

[Dralnu]

CepaCepa, on 17 January 2013 - 07:12 PM, said:

Potential Problems with Epidemic:
1. Limited to 5 targets

Epidemic transfers the conditiones to ALL targets in the area, not just to 5, at least in PvE (dunno on WvW since I don't do it).

Edited by Dralnu, 18 January 2013 - 04:04 AM.