Guild Wars 2

Carighan.6758:

Mbelch.9028:

So you and 30 others hunted down a team of 5 roamers. Feel successful? That’s not to mention how pointless WvW objectives are.. So you capped the map. What do you receive? Victory, glory and loot? No. Not a thing.

Well, what do you receive in sPvP? The map reloads to undo everything you’ve done, and every once in a while you get one of the worst type of achievements (the automatic ones, as per this Extra Credits episode).

I play WvW for the zerg PvP gameplay.
Just as you – hopefully – play sPvP for the smallscale PvP gameplay. If not, I got to wonder why you’d do it in the first place, since there’s no other return on time invested to either.

And yes, I like the large-group roaming and PvPing and capping castles and at times (that’s the part they really got to expand on) having some prolonged tidal siege defence or offence.
It’s specifically why I came to GW2, DAoC’s RvR is the most sensible implementation of “MMORPG PvP” I’ve seen so far. It actually feels a little (teensy) bit more like a fight in a RPG. Which, well, is what the genre would make you expect.

Do I feel good about running down 5 in a group of 30? Well, not specifically good. But I’d feel bad if I had fought them 5v5 instead, even if we won after a pitched battle. Why fight to lose? Why not fight to win? It’s nice that we won, was a good adrenaline rush, and yet tactically it was anything but a sound idea.

As you can probably guess though, I’m a strategy, RPG and puzzle player at heart. Not someone hailing from action games, eSports shooters or Starcraft-like RTS or even MOBAs.
I don’t play PvP for the exercise in personal reflexes, play ability or the adrenaline.
I play it to test my planning and to try outsmart the other side. Ideally every battle is inherently unfair for the others, despite them having in total the same amount of people we do. That’s when I did well.

This is all well and good. But that style of play — while allowed — is completely poor game implementation and poor strategy. (Hunting down small numbers with multiple people)

So you’re devoting way more resources to them than they are worth just for the satisfaction of saying you killed them, but in all reality, they won because they distracted you from larger objectives for that amount of time.

There should also be limits to how many people can run around (poor game implementation) and be faster than a single person. Consider history. How different would history be if an army of 50,000 was faster than a single scout? It shouldn’t be this way, and ANet really needs to take steps to making it more realistic.

I come from both worlds. I love competitive PvP where I am stressed for my reactions, killing more people than we have and proving my skill in combat. But I also love strategy. I love risk, civ, ect.

I just wish more people played the game to a better standard, not just to what is most efficient.

Conncept.7638:

Quit exaggerating.

It’s way more than 95%.

lol! too true.

i hardly ever use arcane/water
in my mind ele is the “mage” class of gw2,
squishy but capable of throwing down ridiculously high aoe damage from afar.
and that is how i’ve played it since release!

a fight goes 2 ways:
either i’m focused by the enemy group and die in several hits,
or every enemy on the point will be dead in seconds!
it’s the way ele should be imho, the epitome of a glass cannon!

(though occasionally i’ll play Stoneheart Conjure ele to go to to toe with warriors)

P Fun Daddy.1208:

…
Most importantly, this should be done in a way that does not increase PvE abilities, because everyone knows Ele damage is highest by now.

I don’t think that is important. At least it is much less important than the question how many buttons does an ele have to press compared to the other professions to get how much more damage than they do?

If an ele has to press twice as many buttons but only gets 10% more total damage out of it then we have a problem.

So how is the situation in that regard for the ele?

Too much of the survivability of the class is tied up in key traits (Elemental attunement, renewing stamina, and the cleanse/heal traits), while very little comes from actual weapon skills and utilities. Most ele builds need to survive long-enough for their highly telegraphed skills to actually land, and thus end up playing the attrition game. The only ele-build that doesn’t go heavily into water and arcana is Fresh Air, which relies on completely untelegraphed attacks. Further, the reason lightning flash is the best ele utility (by far) is b/c it adds some tricks to the telegraphed nature of the class.

You can’t play daggers or tanky staff without constant healing b/c all of its damage is too telegraphed.
You can’t play scepter without fresh air b/c the autoattacks are trash (outside air), shatterstone doesn’t actually exist, and dragon’s tooth is a hail mary.
You can’t play zerker staff b/c thief (and shatter mesmer, and probably power-ranger).

Further, there are some point-problems that need to be addressed as well:
Fire-line: There is nothing good at adept, really. The adept and master-level minor traits are terrible.
Air-line: The adept minor doesn’t exist, honestly. Compare this minor to the earth, water, and arcana minors and you have a strong incentive to stay out of air unless you really want something higher up (fresh air).

Kashrlyyk.5364:

P Fun Daddy.1208:

…
Most importantly, this should be done in a way that does not increase PvE abilities, because everyone knows Ele damage is highest by now.

I don’t think that is important. At least it is much less important than the question how many buttons does an ele have to press compared to the other professions to get how much more damage than they do?

If an ele has to press twice as many buttons but only gets 10% more total damage out of it then we have a problem.

So how is the situation in that regard for the ele?

It’s fire staff, so we’re pretty set in that regard too. At maximum effectiveness, literally all you do is spam 2 off cooldown and autoattack, and maybe a meteor shower situationally, and possibly use utilities.
So that’s maybe five or six total separate buttons pressed in order to achieve maximum power at any point in a dungeon.

P Fun Daddy.1208:

….
It’s fire staff, so we’re pretty set in that regard too. At maximum effectiveness, literally all you do is spam 2 off cooldown and autoattack, and maybe a meteor shower situationally, and possibly use utilities.
So that’s maybe five or six total separate buttons pressed in order to achieve maximum power at any point in a dungeon.

I think you misunderstood me. I was interested in knowing how many key presses an ele player has to do to deal the highest damage and then see that compared to how many key presses the other classes have to do to reach their highest damage. That includes the key presses required to reach “maximum effectiveness”. I was not interested in how many “separate buttons” are needed.

Basically a table with “Number of keys pressed” on one column and “Damage done with that number of keys pressed” in the second columen for all classes. As far as I know NOONE has ever done that on this forum.

Talking about balance without having necessary informations and data is just useless.

Kashrlyyk.5364:

P Fun Daddy.1208:

….
It’s fire staff, so we’re pretty set in that regard too. At maximum effectiveness, literally all you do is spam 2 off cooldown and autoattack, and maybe a meteor shower situationally, and possibly use utilities.
So that’s maybe five or six total separate buttons pressed in order to achieve maximum power at any point in a dungeon.

I think you misunderstood me. I was interested in knowing how many key presses an ele player has to do to deal the highest damage and then see that compared to how many key presses the other classes have to do to reach their highest damage. That includes the key presses required to reach “maximum effectiveness”. I was not interested in how many “separate buttons” are needed.

Basically a table with “Number of keys pressed” on one column and “Damage done with that number of keys pressed” in the second columen for all classes. As far as I know NOONE has ever done that on this forum.

Talking about balance without having necessary informations and data is just useless.

He understood, the best pve damage spec for an ele doesn’t require keyboard dancing at all, in fact you’re not even swapping attunements in combat. That said, running staff is doable only if there’s other eles to take care of fury/might/proj absorbtion, etc, and even if it’s the best on paper dps there’s a lot of situations where it doesn’t work like that, especially in the soon to die conjure meta. Other meta builds like D/F or S/F indeed requires a lot of action per minutes. The dps advantage of the ele isn’t tied to this though, they need that to compensate their squishiness, following the high risk high reward concept from Arenanet.

If they want to promote ele build diversity they need:

-to strongly BUFF ele skills (expecially reducing cooldowns)
-to NERF traits accordingly