Useless Elites

I'm a cleave user, therefore I will defend it like it was my woman.

Like any other elite skill, it does depend on the build. Eviscerate is great if you want to do *just* damage dealer.

What makes cleave awesome is it makes the warrior not 100% rely on building up ald. Although he won't deal 120 damage right away, he doesn't have to spend precious seconds building up. Hell, he could just use "To the limit" when in a group and use cleave right away.

Because cleave has low ald, a miss with a cleave isn't as bad as a miss with eviscerate. Cleave is NOT good with combos, and should never be used with combos. While a combo can deal an insane amount of damage, it requires constant hits, something that is usually rare for a warrior (blind, snares, protection). If ever one part of the chain misses, all that time building up ald is lost, and you must repeat again.

The job of cleave is to provide you with an attack skill that deal decent damage (I get around 90s with 16 axe mastery). You can have a mix and match of eng-based and low ald skills.

I've used cleave before with my W/Mes using shouts like "Shields up", "To the limit" and "Watch yourself". Managed to go through 7 battles in HOH and ended up in the halls. Didn't win though.

That's not the reason they made signets without energy costs. It's because their recast timer is horrendous, hence the use of an all signet build with "signet-management" skills. You can't seriously think Signet of Weariness is weak; that's -9 energy for a large area (which is a lot now that they've nerfed the other energy draining skills), that you can recast quite quickly 3 times in succession! And what about Leech Signet? It's not only interrupting spells, but skills too, something other Mesmer Interrupt are not really able at doing. Bane Signet's not all that bad; it ignores armor. And Purge Signet, really! A signet build not having much to do with energy, the drawback is simply irrelevant!

Which is what I'm experimenting on right now. It's quite nice, so far!

ok lets go down this list and see what i come up with

Monk

healing hands- 2nd class monks like n/mo or mes/mo is a lovely skill. combine with healing seed and hands. this takes the long cast time of healing seed off your monk so he can do what he does best....spam. hands can provide a fast but not so noticable cast that can stave off attacks by itself and give time for monk to heal further.

unyeilding aura- good skill.....long recharge. great in 4v4 with quick res FTW. the biggest downfall this skill has is being an enchantment. with rend and lingering killing enchants not going far.

Elemental

Glyph of renewal- don't like glyphs at all any of them. glyph of sac has some uses but that's about it.

Mind Burn- don't like it

Mind Shock- love it. oh so nasty spike. you can do about 200 dmg with 1 ele. cast MS go staight to orb and so on and so on

Mind Freeze- with the new update this skill has been a real pain. caster can be shutdown and move 90% slower for the rest of the party to wail on him.

Thunder Clap- never used it couldn't say


Mesmer

Keystone Sig- My #1 pick of the game for worst elite!!! moving on

Necro

Aura of the Lich- this skill is all about the life sac. gotton cut down rather fast from some necros with aura, dark aura, and sac life shadow dmg.

Ranger

just want to comment on punishing shot here.

Punishing Shot- this skill in the right hands is hated. right hands being mine

Warrior

Cleave- this skill has alot of uses. its a team skill more than anything. 2-3 w/r 2 with eviscerate 1 with cleave. after the deep wound from eviscerate cleave can take over from there.

Flourish- have you ever noticed that most attack skills are energy cost. most of those skills are the ones you really like but just can't use b/c of warriors low energy regen. that is what flourish is for.

Warrior's Endurance- recently testing this with a w/mo smiter. not too shabby. combine with zealous weapon 4 en a hit. only thing bad is it takes up your stance slot.

all above mentioned elite skills have their uses and strengths.

Most ot the skills he listed are pretty usefull.

WTF? Aura of the Lich useless? What are you people smoking?

Half damage, half life, but FULL healing and a QUARTER of the sacrifice cost? Plus you have a recharge time that enables you to keep it up constantly AND it heals you for a substantial chunk when it goes down. This is, frankly, one of the best elites in the game! There's a reason you only get it in the last mission of the game...

Have you seen the kind of damage a necro with AoTL + Dark Pact + Dark Aura + Touch of Agony can put out?

Its better in a pve environment where you can have some degree of control over who is being hit. Even then its no guarentee as alot of late to end game critters pack some kind of enchant removal enmass.

Some kind of mo/n human bomb thing comes to mind with this, resurect, and vengence, but beyond that it ends up being a risk in pvp.
Only glyph for elementalists, while using elementalist skills, is glyph of energy for exhaustion management. This skill, like a few others, is best used on skills that are not elementalist based and have a long refresh time. Spending energy and wasting time on top of typically long cast times and slow reuse times are a rather poor combination for 1 shot use skills. Many of the glyphs are trumped by passive skills like enchantments and stances, allowing for more consistant use and less energy over time. Granted, glyphs do not require attribute points to use, but that only lends to them being useful as a secondary profession instead of a primary profession use.

This skill works better in theory than in practice. For more realistic use and practical application for caster disruption, you would need 2 or more people working on the same target, because any movement before spells like malestorm or chaos storm (and others) will cause enough space to occur to avoid the effect completely in addition to the spelll not comparing energy at spell casting versus completion after adding exhaustion making it difficult to land unless specifically designed for max energy capacity instead of regular use situations. Then there are simple things like hex breaker that will let the damage through but ignore the snare element completely and recycling fast enough to mitigate its use entirely. It also seems to be buggy as there have been instances where warriors have managed to not get snared/extra damage by it, while at near maximum energy capacity on a primary elementalist. Even so, the 1s opposed to the 2s iron mist casting time is attractive, if you can get the snare to stick. The damage inflicted is rather pathetic though for a 10e spell that has conditional secondary effects.
Cleave only looks attractive if its the only adrenalin skill being used. If others from the axe line are used, cleave just slows down the cycle between each use for every adrenalin skill on the bar. Simply stated, compared to most other axe skills, cleave just charges too fast for its own good and doesnt hit as hard for a spike.
Unfortunatly most attack skills that flourish works with, have a faster recharge time than flourish making the skill rather impractical to use and only useful if many energy based attack skills are brought at the same time. Considering the actual effects that most energy based attack skills have, there are not many that are worth the space on the skill bar in the first place to even warrent wasting an eliete position for flourish. Remeber, these are warriors using the skill, not rangers and the skill its self in many instances would be like using glyph of renewal to recharge a skill like fireball or lightning orb for sustained use.
This skill is a catch 22. Yes you can charge up your energy quickly using it and a zealous weapon, but in order to take advantage of it you must stop attacking to cast (hence your energy regen) in order to use the energy while wasting your stance position.

you know whats useless?

hundred blades...

Now that I think of it; the reason why Keystone Signet is elite might be because it combined with Mantra of Signets and Signet of Judgment would be overpowered.

First off, i haven't read the responses...

Necro Aura of the lich is awesome... Try this with a dark aura sacrifice build, and you'll pump out damage like no other, and be healed easier then hell.

Ranger punishing shot... more interruptions, who can disagree? Stack out your build with arcane ***(spell name is...?), and cause them to cast slower, and be interrupting non-stop.

This was funny during the beta. It's called illusionary weaponry, and hundred blades with fast attack... Ya, un-stopable. It was a build that was "more then" copied.

maybe you should look into a spinal shivers w/n. believe me its quite funny.

More amusing situation is a warrior trying to sprint, but happens to be snared. Its easy to pick your poison, but thunderclap hurts more compared to shivers. Even so, both are replicas of dwarven battle stance, without the stance and can be trumped by other means of disruption.