Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone, Zelyhn asked me to post his behalf as he cannot create threads at this time.

I really appreciate that Anet understood that we need defensive capabilities in fire and air in order to invest in those trait lines. They have the right intentions.

One major problem remains to be addressed: the master tier traits in fire and air are not desirable at all. I have many suggestions to improve them but this is not the point of this thread.

Let’s look at how the changes to Blinding Ashes and Lightning Rod can affect our gameplay.

Blinding Ashes
This trait lacks synergy, in fact it has negative synergies. The most obvious is the fact that the fire trait line has a compulsory adept minor trait – Flame Barrier – that can prevent the player from controlling Blinding Ashes. For example, a ranger’s pet could trigger Flame Barrier, thereby getting burned and blinded, just before you use an important AoE burn attack. This “negative” synergy is completely unproductive. But it does not stop here: Burning Precision, fire fields, and Glyph of Elemental Power could also proc on non-priority targets and thereby nullify all strategic use of Burning Ashes. As such, this trait becomes way worse than getting vigor. It is therefore not even worth the adept level trait tier. A simple tweak to unrestrict it to multiple targets (like GoEP) would drastically increase its value. This trait needs to have synergies with other traits and spells so that it can proc usefully, and also outside of the fire attunement.

Lightning Rod
An interesting idea. The issue with this spell is that hard-controling targets prevents them from attacking. Therefore the usefulness of the weakness proc is reduced by the time the target is hard-controlled. The damage part of this spell is strong, though. Note that the devs showed us the best synergy this trait can have: with tornado nearby enemies will be heavily damaged and constantly controlled. Note that the trait works on a lot of controls, such as with Fear too. Thanks to its lack of ICD this trait can therefore be strong in teamfights, as opposed to Blinding Ashes. But will the number of controls on each weapon set and conjures be enough to make this trait desirable? I doubt we will know until the air master tier is addressed. In any way, this is a very good concept that can be built around and may give way to interesting new builds.

On a slightly less related note, Flame Barrier, Zephyr’s Speed, and Sunspot desperately need attention.

Many thanks!

Just remove flame barrier and a lot of people will be happier.
Just give us pretty much anything else.

Something i didn t understand …

What happens if i cast a flame wall (focus fire 4) with blinding ashes?
Players on the wall while cast will get blind but players walking into it won’t?

LordByron.8369:

Something i didn t understand …

What happens if i cast a flame wall (focus fire 4) with blinding ashes?
Players on the wall while cast will get blind but players walking into it won’t?

I wish they’d shown the trait itself, or the tooltips for the skills instead of just talking about it.

I don’t know if they simply added a blinding effect to our AoE burning skills that happens on cast, or if something happens on the skill’s ticks, or if the GCD is still in full effect…

LordByron.8369:

Something i didn t understand …

What happens if i cast a flame wall (focus fire 4) with blinding ashes?
Players on the wall while cast will get blind but players walking into it won’t?

My best guess would be that it would work the same way as some of thieves traps.
You cast it on top of a group of people, they will all be burnt at once and receive blind at the same time (according to the update preview)
But If you cast it in front of a group and they run through it one be one, only the first person will receive the blind and the trait will go in cool down.
One of the many reasons why thieves traps are weak.

BobbyT.7192:

LordByron.8369:

Something i didn t understand …

What happens if i cast a flame wall (focus fire 4) with blinding ashes?
Players on the wall while cast will get blind but players walking into it won’t?

My best guess would be that it would work the same way as some of thieves traps.
You cast it on top of a group of people, they will all be burnt at once and receive blind at the same time (according to the update preview)
But If you cast it in front of a group and they run through it one be one, only the first person will receive the blind and the trait will go in cool down.
One of the many reasons why thieves traps are weak.

that’s exactly how it works and that’s one of the main reasons why this trait is not even worth the adept tier. Mark my word

If those guys are Arenanet could just make blinding ashes per target and bam they got at least a couple of new builds for the elementalist. I guess it twas too much to ask to make blinding ashes not still terrible.

I wonder who thought it was a great idea to make it like the thieves trap, it seems the new blinding ashes will only be good with staff 3 since there is not enough time to dodge the obvious ground AOE.

silvermember.8941:

If those guys are Arenanet could just make blinding ashes per target and bam they got at least a couple of new builds for the elementalist. I guess it twas too much to ask to make blinding ashes not still terrible.

I wonder who thought it was a great idea to make it like the thieves trap, it seems the new blinding ashes will only be good with staff 3 since there is not enough time to dodge the obvious ground AOE.

Not I’m not really sure if it’s going to work like I said, I’m only guess, focus fire 4 would still be better to use then a thief trap because it range, making it easier to hit multilipy targets with it, and would still be good with anything that cause aoe burning in one shot.

BobbyT.7192:

silvermember.8941:

If those guys are Arenanet could just make blinding ashes per target and bam they got at least a couple of new builds for the elementalist. I guess it twas too much to ask to make blinding ashes not still terrible.

I wonder who thought it was a great idea to make it like the thieves trap, it seems the new blinding ashes will only be good with staff 3 since there is not enough time to dodge the obvious ground AOE.

Not I’m not really sure if it’s going to work like I said, I’m only guess, focus fire 4 would still be better to use then a thief trap because it range, making it easier to hit multilipy targets with it, and would still be good with anything that cause aoe burning in one shot.

But it would be infinite more better per target. I mean how many times do you get in a situation where you have everybody bunch up like that for aoe fire to hit them all at once? (spvp) WvW you got other issues to worry about.

Guys, just so you understand, Blinding is like http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Leg_Specialist to me. Those of you who play PvP will know that this trait works well for warriors because they can control it. We can’t. So Blinding ashes is worse than an adept trait.

I think Lightning Rod is still very weak for a GM trait – it’s essentially equivalent to Halting Strike, an adept mesmer trait.

The other big killer is that Ele has only 1 skill (2 on focus) per weapon that causes disable. This means this GM trait is about as damaging as Arcane wave, but on a longer cooldown, and (but for the weakness, woopedy-doo) is available as a mesmer adept trait.

scerevisiae.1972:

I think Lightning Rod is still very weak for a GM trait – it’s essentially equivalent to Halting Strike, an adept mesmer trait.

The other big killer is that Ele has only 1 skill (2 on focus) per weapon that causes disable. This means this GM trait is about as damaging as Arcane wave, but on a longer cooldown, and (but for the weakness, woopedy-doo) is available as a mesmer adept trait.

Infinite weakness is not meant to be is probably why.

Ele disables:

MH-Dagger: 1 (possibly two if you get the timing right)
Scepter: 0
OH-Dagger: 2
Focus: 2
Staff: 3
LH: 2 + 1 with combo
Shield: 2
Bow: possibly 1
Axe: 1 with combo
Greatsword: 0
Trident: 3 + 1 with combo
Tornado/whirlpool: perma
Glyph of elementals: air and water