Guild Wars 2

Discuss…………..

Doesn’t affect ele in anyway, now instead of using ice storm you drop after deep freeze or maybe use in a large trash pack but I doubt that’s any better since the 3 target limit. Icebow pretty much useless on smaller targets now. 2nd ele probably unecessary now though. I linecasted alot but now I just won’t use icebow on small target.

It will have very little impact.

I actually am kind of irritated in general with how so much of a big of a deal people make ice bow out to be. Yes it was overpowered in its previous form, but it’s not like it was the sole reason 99% of bosses on this game can get cheesed so easily. It was debatable whether or not it was really worth using on many bosses anyways, since on extremely small hitboxes when only 4-6 hits land, it’s actually very little of an increase as opposed to just having a lava font ticking while autoattacking with staff… and as we all know, a lot of players on this game just open a fight with lightning storm and swap to water immediately to do ice storm.

Part of the biggest reason why everybody I’ve spoken to that suddenly thinks it’s doomsday for eles mentions the Tempest Defense trait. Reality is, this trait isn’t even that good. In fact, at that tier it’s the least-often used trait for me overall. This is of course kind of because I’m normally always low-manning content when I play, but people really need to understand that it didn’t actually add that much extra damage to an ice storm.

If you hypothetically hit 9000 each ice storm tick before the patch and had this trait in effect along with hitting a hypothetical 13 out of the 24 ticks on a boss, that’d be 0.2 * 9000 = 1800 extra damage per tick.

That’s an additional 23,400 damage. Sure, it’s great, but is it that much to freak out over? Eh, not really.

The general point that I’m trying to get across is that most players on ele I find are really close-minded, always hugging fire/air/water and always camping the same traits and always playing really lazily and doing the bare minimum, relying on ice bow.

If you actually bother to consider the fact that meteor shower actually dealt more damage than ice storm overall along with the fact that we have very high burst without ice bow, you’d realise this isn’t the end of the world.

Forgive me if this post sounds ranty, just felt the need to post my thoughts on it overall.

No, condi meta won’t be a thing in groups for dungeons and fractals. Raids? Maybe. I don’t know the answer to that as I haven’t played them yet.

I think the major bonus of the bow, other than the freeze, was not the increase to the ele’s already top DPS, but elevating guys like mesmer from the bottom to the top for a moment, thus peaking team burst.

Edit: To clarify,

I’m saying that old ele ice bow increasing the DPS of others actually made running less eles MORE viable. During old ice storm, non-eles had pseudo-ele DPS. Now we are back to the disparity such as ele damage vs mesmer damage, for example.

Edit2: Just thought of this,

Maybe that’s why we’re seeing little things like mesmer sword auto 10% damage boost? It won’t close the gap by any means, but it’s in the right direction. The mantra damage boon was nerfed for PvP reasons (IMO), but unwarranted in PvE so this may be a subtle balance in the opposite direction. Keep in mind many (most?) mesmers will drop Dueling and the 0-150 ferocity stacking sword boon trait for Chrono in a few weeks as well..

This thread isn’t about mesmers, but they seem a valid example.

I’m not a Mesmer expert but how sure are you that Domination is better DPS than Dueling? I’m not seeing that being so clear, especially when you think about having Feedback AND Well of Action on your bar. With only 2 Mantras its… not clear that I would prefer Domination?

NikeEU.7690:

I’m not a Mesmer expert but how sure are you that Domination is better DPS than Dueling? I’m not seeing that being so clear, especially when you think about having Feedback AND Well of Action on your bar. With only 2 Mantras its… not clear that I would prefer Domination?

I’m not an expert either but, you can do some cool stuff with power block. Signet trait is nice for various reasons. 15% more damage on illusions is never bad. Then with the new chrono playstyle the more damage on shatters won’t be bad. All 3 of the adept level seem like they could get some use (stun + duration means more breakbar action I think). All that plus an up to 12.5% damage buff.

It seems solid to me. Dueling gives you what? 150 ferocity, buffed up mantras that you likely won’t be using, and fury for phantasms and yourself, but again you’re going to be cycling your phantasms a bit.

NikeEU.7690:

I’m not a Mesmer expert but how sure are you that Domination is better DPS than Dueling? I’m not seeing that being so clear, especially when you think about having Feedback AND Well of Action on your bar. With only 2 Mantras its… not clear that I would prefer Domination?

I crunched the numbers (roughly) once when theorycrafting with the support chrono build on the forums right now. Even at 100% crit rate, the 10% extra crit damage on full zerk only amounts to 7% or so. It’s a lot less than what Fragility alone gives. Likewise, phantasmal fury gives less than Empowered Illusions.

The new chronomancer meta is going to be illusions/chaos/chrono to maximize the effectiveness of quickness and alacrity. Fay worked out that it is better to just buff the heck out of everyone than to try and manage mesmer’s inferior personal DPS and unpredictable phantasm DPS. You can read the thread, but be ready to trudge through a 200 post debate. Apparently the concept of buffing is hard for some reason.

NikeEU.7690:

I’m not a Mesmer expert but how sure are you that Domination is better DPS than Dueling? I’m not seeing that being so clear, especially when you think about having Feedback AND Well of Action on your bar. With only 2 Mantras its… not clear that I would prefer Domination?

Chrono going full wells to max on alacrity removes the purpose of HM and PF in Dueling (shatters are much more consistent) so Domination goes ahead with the third minor alone (was already the case, about 1-2% better than Fencer’s).

Won’t debate about Chaos vs Dom traitlines because we have no idea how raids will work (as in, is boon duration for quickness mandatory or is mesmer personnal damage more valuable when taking into account fight times).

All great posts, ty. Giving up my mantra spec is not an easy thing to do, but my team needs dat alac. Putting my warrior’s HB on a ~4.3s CD (from 6.5s traited) alone is probably a bigger party DPS increase than boosting my own DPS.

If we are indeed going for #AlacrityBot2016 and gutting DPS, the Ice Bow nerf is even more of a PvE mesmer DPS nerf.

Edit: Also “Chaotic Persistence +3% Boon duration per boon on you” vs “Illusionary Inspiration casting phantasm casts Signet of Inspiration (boon copy)” used well is worth debate, with or without the Signet cooldown trait in Dom.

You can do some impressive stuff with Chrono, Timewarp, Mimic, Signet of Inspiration x2, Illusionary inspiration… And all of that once more time post-Chrono. With or witout +50% boon duration off a Rev.

Soo much good stuff in Inspiration, I’ll just leave it at that.