Guild Wars 2

Granted there are exceptions such as signet of rage, but the vast majority of elites seem extremely situational and impotent. I’m really questioning the design philosophy behind many of the skills when classes such as warriors get trash skills like Juggernaut (short duration, doesn’t even boost damage significantly). Don’t get me started on the specialty elites such as artillery barrage with horrendously long cool downs and terrible damage.

Am I just spoiled by the creativity behind the elite skills in GW1 which actually seemed powerful?

Dunno. but the ele ones are absolute trash

tornado – become slow moving, dealing less damage, losing access to 20 skills for 3 bad ones, and you are totally vulnerable while doing it.

fiery greatsword – summon a weapon, again losing 20 skills for 5, only 3 of which are useful, and still not worth using over all your others.

Glyph of elementals – summon an elemental. Either it dies before it hits anything, or it does kitten poor damage and takes about 4 hits before going down.

They’re not even situational. They’re just bad. Glyph is the only one i’d ever consider using in a serious setting just because it doesnt actually hamper me like the others do (no seriously, if the entire point of the ele is having access to 20 skills, why do 2 of my elites remove the only aspect of me that’s A. unique and B. the only part of me not vastly underpowered? )

I think some elites need more oomph. I’d like to see Rampage for warriors shatter the warrior’s armor, beef them up, and turn their eyes red. Or even just change their armor to something more furious.

They are way too situational, I mostly use them by accident pressing 0 when I meant to press 9. I would rather have some normal utility skill that I would actually use instead of elite one.

Zale.9645:

I think some elites need more oomph. I’d like to see Rampage for warriors shatter the warrior’s armor, beef them up, and turn their eyes red. Or even just change their armor to something more furious.

Agreed. Perhaps it’s just a case of the tooltip description being deceptive, but I expected so much more from that particular skill when I chose it.

agreed when i use wrath tome and try to kill a veteran mob it goes away before it die and I’m like, did i miss something is this a elite skill?
the courage tome is slightly better at least you have enough time to push the full heal button if you don’t get knockdown. i still think it could last a bit longer.

I think the overall approach to Elites in this game was just bad. It’s not just that there are a lot of very weak ones, but the long cooldowns just takes away a lot of the fun. I’m not really sure what was wrong with the system in the first game and why Anet decided to mess with it the way that they did.

They’re too gimmicky. It’s cool to turn into a rampaging hulk, a walking plague or a tornado the first few times but then when you get into dungeons and SPvP you really realize how terrible a lot of them are.

I liked how GW1 gave you multiple elites for each attribute, so if you were a curses necro you could choice from close to a dozen elites and pick that one that worked in the situation you were in. In this game you only get 1 elite that fits your attribute at most, if you’re a glyph ele you get 1 elite glyph, if you’re a warbanner warrior you get 1 elite warbanner, the choice is clear from the beginning.

yep
i agree
also, explain to me which elite a guardian has for underwater and what it will actually achieve….
yep.
the one i rekon ive used most is the ce wolf ( warband benched )

In Guild Wars, elites were what you built your build around. Either you chose your skills to help deliver Elite damage, or used the Elite to accessorize skill use across your whole bar. It really changed the way you played more than anything else in the game.

In Guild Wars 2, most elites are… I don’t know. I don’t know what the intention was, other than “we should probably include this too, just because.” Most builds would be vastly improved if you could not bring an elite and just put another secondary skill in the slot. Elites in this game are balanced in very, very, very safe ways. A large portion of them are transformations of some kind that destroy your entire skillbar (to avoid having to deal with build synergizing entirely). When you use these, opponents never have “oh kitten my kitty kittens!” moments when you transform into a tornado, or a giant bear monster, or glow red and start awkwardly punching the air. They aren’t elites so much as they’re fairly worthless, extremely situational skills that exist mainly to pester people or impress new players.

I don’t think this is really going to change. Elites in GW2 will probably always be worthless or boring, and sometimes both. Personally, I think it’d be cool if when I used an elite, my character slowed to a halt, roared, became invincible during the transformation, then glowed like the sun until exploding into a gigantic lich monster that started flinging terrified enemies around in all directions, and remained invincible for about twenty seconds before returning to normal, for a five minute cooldown. But ANet always wonders, “But what if thirty players all did that at the same time? What would happen? I’m not sure… so we’d better make it worthless!” ANet knows players are smarter than they are, so their solution to most balancing problems is to not try.

I love the mesmers elite skills they feel like they are elite skills to me. As well as the guardians elite skills. Time Warp is my fav ulti in the whole game though

Indeed. Elite skills seem pretty weak.They should probably rename them Bonus Skills.

Too many of them are transforms which usually aren’t very powerful in their own right and because they lock you out of your regular abilities they can actually be disadvantageous, even dangerous, to use.

My Engineer has one Elite which is of use, the Supply Crate. It does help a bit in an emergency but it’s far from a game changer. My Norn Guardian has a really poor choice of Elites because they are nearly all transforms and most of them don’t work underwater (that’s a huge design fail right there). The tome with the big heal is situationally useful, as long as everyone hasn’t already died by the time it finishes casting.

I suspect they didn’t want to make the Elites too powerful for fear of them coming to dominate too much. But they seem to have achieved the opposite, the Elite skills are mostly a huge letdown and I rarely bother to use them.

It probably depends on the profession, my thief is pretty happy when her gang is around! (Thieve’s Guild elite) they really make a difference in a tough fight or against too many adds.

As a warrior – Banner is about the best elite imo (for tank/support wars anyway). Nothing can beat the ability to rez up players from a distance then grant massive buffs .

All elementalist ones are useless in WvW

As an Asura elementalist, i have 5 Pets including the Deluxe one.
None of them can move down walls or up.
All of the racial/game version ones are even more useless then the ones Ele have on their own.

A golem that lasts for 30 seconds..

The tornado doesnt make you damage immune, your also slow, so its worthless.

The fire greatsword doesnt have any range, and gl going into melee as an Ele in WvW

I miss GW1 style of elites. Not these long cooldown I win buttons or “I almost win” buttons.

Mesmer has no Mass Clone/Black Hole/Space Warp/Gravity/etc Elite.
And all time warp does is give quickness to allies.
At least have it give negative-quickness to enemies as well.

Most of the time on my ranger i completely forget about my elite skill. I think that say’s it all.

midsummer.8237:

I love the mesmers elite skills they feel like they are elite skills to me. As well as the guardians elite skills. Time Warp is my fav ulti in the whole game though

There’s a case to be made that Time Warp is the most powerful elite skill in the game. There is basically no situation where having quickness is bad.

RaoZaoku.5289:

Mesmer has no Mass Clone/Black Hole/Space Warp/Gravity/etc Elite.
And all time warp does is give quickness to allies.
At least have it give negative-quickness to enemies as well.

Lol what? The only time Time Warp doesn’t help a bunch is when you’re so kittened nothing but an act of god could save you.

Plague.5329:

Elites in this game are balanced in very, very, very safe ways.

This is possibly my biggest disappointment in the game. Not elites, but the design philosophy of playing it so safe. How most of the game is so extremely “balanced” it’s as if they just pre-nerfed all sorts of things into lackluster pointlessness.

Zenyatoo.4059:

Dunno. but the ele ones are absolute trash

tornado – become slow moving, dealing less damage, losing access to 20 skills for 3 bad ones, and you are totally vulnerable while doing it.

fiery greatsword – summon a weapon, again losing 20 skills for 5, only 3 of which are useful, and still not worth using over all your others.

Glyph of elementals – summon an elemental. Either it dies before it hits anything, or it does kitten poor damage and takes about 4 hits before going down.

They’re not even situational. They’re just bad. Glyph is the only one i’d ever consider using in a serious setting just because it doesnt actually hamper me like the others do (no seriously, if the entire point of the ele is having access to 20 skills, why do 2 of my elites remove the only aspect of me that’s A. unique and B. the only part of me not vastly underpowered? )

Level 80 elementalist here. I agree with everything you have said.

I only found Tornado elite useful in very niche events only in Wv3,
1) helping the team rush in the Stonemist castle Guild lord room,
2) repelling foes quickly outside fort/keep. Turn tornado inside the keep, go through the door and cause some chaos outside, and finally come back inside the keep – know the timing or you WILL die. Let your server clean up the mess . It is also useful for getting into a keep being hammered by enemies.

Other than those two uses, I found Tornado rather useless elsewhere.

Long cool-downs are definitely a bummer for Ele.

Plague.5329:

Most builds would be vastly improved if you could not bring an elite and just put another secondary skill in the slot.

That’s been my reaction. Fine, it’s another skill I can use, but with the cooldowns they have crossed with just how kitten situational many are, I wind up not using them much. If you’re going to give me a skill that’s only active for a few seconds every few minutes, can it at least feel like it’s worth the wait?

I hope to see these things buffed a bit. Admittedly, not every elite in GW1 was amazing (and a lot were even bad), but there was still more than enough to find something that made you feel like you had something special on your skill bar. The elites here make me feel like I’ve got something that, on balance, is maybe 5% stronger than my other skills if I manage to remember I have it at the precise moment that extra 5% of oomph is going to make a difference.

Time Warp is the one and only elite I bother to use – on any profession – any more.

I heard the argument early on that they didn’t want the old GW1 issue of having 50 elite skills, but only 3 or 4 viable choices.

Now we have 2 or 3 choices and ZERO viable choices – mesmers excluded. I really feel the lack on my elementalist, I really want an elite for each element. A raging maelstrom, A massive lightning bolt of doom, anything really.

As others have said, I would take an extra utility skill over one of these “elite” skills in a heartbeat if I could. They’re just disappointing in almost every way.

The weird thing is, most of the skills in the transform sets would be good elite skills on their own.

But throwing them all together for 20 seconds out of 3 minutes is significantly less useful, especially when you lose access to all the skills you’ve carefully built yourself around.

Take this skill for example: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Judgment

This would be fantastic as an elite just like that in the 0 slot, not as a stupid transform that gives access to it ONCE every three minutes.

Point is, less situational nonsense, and more skills that you can use to either round out or further specialize a build in every fight.

Yep only 0-1 elite skill per profession is actually useful or better than basic skills. Most times, I’d rather have a utility skill on the elite slot.

I would totally take another utility slot over 90% of the elite skills. =/

As a ranger (level 72), the only elite that I have found useful is the Hounds of Hell (or whatever it’s called) – although the 2 hounds are only with you for 30 seconds and the elite has a very long cooldown, the mutts can save your bacon in a crunch.

I’m a human ranger, and I’ve found the elites to be pretty useful, but definitely situational.

All 3 of the ranger elites are pretty good.

Rampage as one has a 120 second cool down and grants 33% movement speed, 20% critical chance, and stability for 20 seconds. Every time you attack your pet get gets 1 might, and every time your pet attacks you gain one might. When using quickening zypher in combination with this elite my pet often gets 25 might and I get 7 might, which when combined with its other effects, can be very powerful.

Entangle has a 150 second cool down, or 120 second cool down with a wilderness survival trait, and can be used as a very effective crowd control with decent damage. Everyone within a 600 range of you is wrapped in vines, immobilized, and takes normal damage and bleeds every second for 20 seconds. They can break out of these, but I find many monsters get stuck in the vine for the full 20 seconds.

Spirit of nature can be very strong in a group setting, but its 240 second cool down can make the other elites better. When placed it will heal anyone next to it which is nice, but what I find to be the best part about it is that when you use its ability after its placed, it will revive all players around it that are downed, and all friendly NPCs around it that are dead, as well as removing conditions on everyone around it.

Of the human skills, I only found 1 of their elite skills to be good.

Hounds of balthazar has a fairly long cooldown of 240 seconds, and the 2 hounds you summon can have trouble surviving against tougher guys, but with their AoE, decent normal attack damage, and burning that they apply, they can deal a decent amount of damage.

Avatar of melandru and reaper of grenth are pretty much junk, weaker than many utility skills and outclassed by the other elite skills.

But still, I miss the elite skill concept from GW1, and sometimes I’d rather have another utility skill than one of these “elite skills”.

Only ele elites that are worth using are Hounds of Balthazar and whirlwind in very few situations.

Necro elites

Flesh Golem: Plus: takes damage very well, hits fairly hard. Minus: only attacks the things I am attacking about 30-40% of the time; also, attacks things that I am not attacking about 30% of the time.

Plague: transform that locks out all my other abilities; mostly useful to apply conditions, does no other damage, but does have more health and is tougher than I am. This one is not bad.

Lich Form: Not sure about this one. Also a transform so trading 14 other skills for 5, 4 of which have longish cd’s, meaning that they will be available only 1-2 times during Lich Form’s duration. The auto-attack sometimes seems to do more damage than my weapon would, and sometimes not. Not as tanky as Plague.

In other professions and the racials, most everything else I’ve tried has either had problems working as described, or is completely underwhelming.

Probably the most useless I’ve tried was Avatar of Melandru. This was an awesome Elite in GW1, but here it transforms you into an Oakheart, with 5 skills. Only one does any damage (the auto-attack, which has pathetic damage and is slow). The stability would be useful if only I could do something effective besides just take damage while using it.

I would agree. Either the elite skills is too situational or it’s not really impressive. My main is a Mesmer and I guess it’s time warp that I use all the time. The rest is trash in comparison.

However, with the cd being 3.5 minutes I can only use it once a fight and with the current amount of hp/toughness on bosses it barely makes a dent.

In another thread I mentioned that most boss fights are just about that hp/toughness that just takes a long time to kill. This subject ties into that. The elites generally don’t have much of an effect.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that I wish I could equip non-elites in that skill slot because it would work much better for me that way. Many more skills that I have are simply more useful than the actual elites themselves.

The guardian can’t really use any elites underwater, so I don’t. It’s just an empty skill slot. The funny thing is, it doesn’t really matter either.

You do the math on that…

I agree that the elite skills aren’t all that impressive. Maybe we should have a contest where people think up new elite skills or redo old ones for the devs to look at and implement.

In general I fear that from their experience with GW1 they are erring on the safe side. It seems that all skill balancing, including the elite skill particularly is to ensure balance in PvP. I don’t really want to bring in a PvP vs PvE discussion but it does seem that they’ve balanced around PvP and then dumbed down the PvE encounters to match the skills.

Elite skills got the worst of that and cause them to feel inconsequential in PvE. I am sure that if elites got buffed, they would wreak havoc in PvP. And there we are again.

PvE skills anyone?

They took out dual classes because it was too difficult to balance. I don’t think it really helped. Elites are pre-nerfed to keep balance in PvP, but in PvE we are stuck with boss fights where all you need is your self heal and an auto attack, the rest is fluff it seems….

Yea quite a few elites out there are pretty horrible and leave me with; looking at them and thinking “what? this is an elite skill?” e.g. the guardians elite tomb that gives you 3 second invulnerability and recharges all your virtues.

Sure it looks okay in some sense, no damage and get your virtues back but…is that it? it doesn’t really give off that “When I click this skill, I will feel a surge of power and amazingness!” instead it’s like click “…” (you don’t feel anything).

Although I rarely play my guardian anymore, I had mained as a ranged, the ranger’s elite ‘Entangle’ skill is pretty awesome, because it entangles a lot of foes within your area. This is especially awesome when used in WvWvW during large fights when you simply immobilise a handful of their enemy, causing them to panic as your team pounds into them as they can’t run.

But ranger still has a crappy elite, the ‘Nature of Renewal’ only revives downed players. Quite useless as you can res them by yourself for probably the same amount of time as waiting for the spirit to cast it’s revive. Not to mention spirits die easily. Now if it revived DEFEATED players, maybe. But as it is now, it’s just rubbish.

I only thought about it today but wasn’t there meant to be a ranger elite that brought out 3 pets, I would have thought that would have been elite worthy but it’s no longer here. There is the PvE human balthazar dogs (wish I had picked that, I didn’t fully understand the choices at the time, so I am left with some other less flashy thing which I can’t even remember).

Groonz.7825:

e.g. the guardians elite tomb that gives you 3 second invulnerability and recharges all your virtues.

I wish my Engi had something like that. The only usable choice is supply chest → 3 turrets and a bunch of medpacks. Mortar is completely unusable.

And as Charr all my other choices are bad too.

i think a good band-aid would be to give us all a signet that covers all stats
a bit like the hero’s band.
and when used will resurrect an ally (sac buff for res til cd, sounds fair)

someone make this happen and im sure it will do for now.

btw the norn heal tome is awesome in dungeons

The elite skills functionality that we have right now are far from the claimed “game changers” that Anet stated once in a video clip.

Anet claimed that testers were afraid to use their elites in pvp because the activation of an elite meant it would have changed the battlefield. At the same time, once 1 elite is on cooldown, that means there are less elite skills on standby for one team. This supposedly created tension (or something along the lines of that).

Yeah, non of that exists on launch (at least, from my observations). Perhaps it will be in the future, but at the moment, nope, nothing.

DanteZero.3569:

The elite skills functionality that we have right now are far from the claimed “game changers” that Anet stated once in a video clip.

Anet claimed that testers were afraid to use their elites in pvp because the activation of an elite meant it would have changed the battlefield. At the same time, once 1 elite is on cooldown, that means there are less elite skills on standby for one team. This supposedly created tension (or something along the lines of that).

Yeah, non of that exists on launch (at least, from my observations). Perhaps it will be in the future, but at the moment, nope, nothing.

I remember that and often tell people in-game about it. They either don’t believe me or just laugh it off. Their testers must either be terrible players, or it was an extremely old build. In general, the problem with testing using your own developers is that the developers will play only in the way they expect to play. If they design the game for elites to be powerful, they’ll try to play and think that way, even if they’re completely wrong. It isn’t until the players get a hold of the game that they get actual useful feedback, because we’re not afraid to tell the guy in charge that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

How ANet errs on the safe side is, in general, what’s wrong with combat in this game. From the limited skill selections, some underwhelming traits and the terrible elites, or whatever other major contention point players have right now – it all stems from ANet being afraid to make things good, because something might happen. Will it? Probably not. Could it? Maybe. So, better make sure it’s not fun to use! And since it’s a dedicated slot, you can’t say the elites aren’t viable, because you have to use them.

GW1 was very well balanced, although ANet seemed to mistakenly believe that it was horribly out of balance, all the time. I guess their whole office is obsessive-compulsive, because the game was considered the most well balanced PvP across the genre, at the time. GW2 suffers. A lot of the things they said about the old game weren’t true at all, and just came from one or two upper tier GvG-focused guilds that had their mouth in ANet’s ear, at all times. Only five out of fifty elites were viable? That’s not true in the least. You only used a handful of skills? Maybe that’s true for a loud minority on a GWG subforum that gets all their information from the PvX site. I found most elites did have a use, even if you had to get specific with your build. Some were worthless, and the community was very vocal about how to change them. ANet just never tried, because they only listened to certain people, and seemed to believe only they knew what would be balanced and fun. There was nothing wrong with that system, other than ANet’s meddling. So most of their attempts to “learn from the mistakes of the last game” are really mistakes they were making from the prior game that the players were covering up.

They really, really need to get away from erring on the side of the system and being obsessed with creating perfect, balanced environments instead of erring on the side of the players. Fun first. Balance later. If it’s game breaking, change it. If it’s not, look at it. You know it’s bad when players all agree that all the skills are not fun. I’d rather come to the forums to see people complaining about my skill than people mocking it.

I don’t mind Signet of Rage on my Warrior. But in Dungeons I’d like to Replace it with another utility skill so I can have 3 healing shouts and Endure Pain

Ixal.7924:

Groonz.7825:

e.g. the guardians elite tomb that gives you 3 second invulnerability and recharges all your virtues.

I wish my Engi had something like that. The only usable choice is supply chest -> 3 turrets and a bunch of medpacks. Mortar is completely unusable.

I’ll trade you. It’s invulnerability, not blocks. It doesn’t make you immune to condition damage or attacks that place conditions on you. Chances are you’ll die from poison and burning in the middle of the animation. Your supply chest, on the other hand, gives me a bunch of wonderful med packs I desperately need as wel las some back up damage to draw the enemy’s attention while I heal up and try again.

It’s supposed to be a Wild Card, not an “I win” button.

Wow people seem so unimpressed with the elite skills… I don’t plan to use all the Elite simply because there’s a few really good ones I’ve found for each class.

My only complaint is that the selection of Elites for underwater use is too minimal. My thief for example, can only use Basilisk Venom. Yay I turned a mob to stone for 2 seconds? Just no… Elites are supposed to be awesome not like every other CC skill out there (and possibly weaker imo). Increase what we have available underwater because the selection there is pathetic.

Aside that there’s plenty of Elites that are just that, Elite. No one’s forcing you to use every skill in the game so stick with the good ones.

@ Aristio.
GW1 elites were the wild cards. GW2 elites are nothing like that.
And by no stretch of imagination are they win buttons.

The current elite’s are pretty strong and can be game-changing, but it seems like you all want a ’’godmode’’ skill.

Have you tried the thief’s dagger swirl or elementalist’s whirlpool abilities? Come back after you unlocked the 30 point skills.

I agree that a majority of the elite skills are lack luster – however, seeing has it’s only been a little over a month since the game’s release, I won’t be making a permenant stand until the six month mark.

But a bit of advice to ANet – Elite skills (as they are now) seem to be more of an “Oh kitten!” button rather than a “Your kitten is grass” skill. It needs to be the latter! When I see another player activate their Elite skills, my mind should be going, “This. Ain’t. Good.” Instead, I’m saying that as I’m forced to activate my Elite Skills, in the slim hope that it can distract the enemy long enough for me to slink away to safety.

DonRobeez.3560:

The current elite’s are pretty strong and can be game-changing, but it seems like you all want a ’’godmode’’ skill.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a “godmode” skill. All we want is just a skill that will properly give the enemy team an “Oh kitten” moment when activated and puts the enemy team temporarily on the defensive. Once those skills enter cooldown, it should put the defensive team with a slight advantage because that’s 1 less elite that can be immediately used.

In short, we want the elite skills with the power and psychological effect that Anet claimed they have when Anet introduced it in one of their video clips.

Mesmer’s Time Warp is pretty elite to me.

The elite skills they have right now are ok, but I would like to see more per profession in the future. At least it would increase options for everyone.

They should never become uber.

They should become more numerous and flavorful. Your elite skill should be the keystone of your individual character build.

I’m confident (and expectant) that more will be added in content expansions.